Well now, who doesn't love a four-day weekend?
I most certainly do.
What would have been ideal is if I had absolutely no commitments for this Easter weekend. I could really do with some chill-out time.
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, although what is happening isn't exactly unpleasant. I'm going down to Devon to visit my dad. The specific reason is that me and my sister are going to be giving him his birthday present.
His birthday isn't actually until October, but we're getting him the presents now because they relate to our big trip in May.
I've not really mentioned the big trip in detail. Basically the family is going to the Monaco Grand Prix!
It should be really great, although it's costing me an absolute packet. It's costing my Dad even more as he's paying for the tickets and flights and stuff. It's kinda like a joint birthday present for me and my sister, I guess.
I'm also planning to surprise my sister and give her her gift as well this weekend.
The only nasty part this weekend might be the traffic, as it's coming warm and sunny now so many people may feel the desire to go for a bit of a trip down to Devon. Fingers crossed I don't get snarled up!
Anyway, I'll not be updating until after the weekend, so have a good one.
Thursday, 9 April 2009
Wednesday, 8 April 2009
Not more to do!
Work's gone a bit bonkers.
The main problem is actually that we lack staff - several important people are away on contract and rather than ease back on bidding stuff we've been ploughing ahead. This has resulted in us having several bids to get out in a very short period of time.
Add in to that it's Easter and you can see how it's gotten silly.
One of the most annoying things about bidding is that people often give you utterly ridiculous timescales. Or rather, they give you utterly ridiculous timescales, but give themselves way more time than they need.
Basically, we often get bids that pay no regard to things like holidays (such as Christmas and Easter). It's like they're fully expecting you to work your arse off over those holidays.
Also, they'll give you horribly short deadlines - a couple of weeks to do an entire ITT, which is no mean feat I can tell you.
But then they'll give themselves months to assess those ITTs. Plus, they'll pay absolutely no regard to the deadlines they set themselves, meaning they'll be late. But you can't be late - if you're late, then you're out on your ear.
The worst ones are when they're late and in order to claw back the time they maintain your deadlines. "Oh, we were a month late, but we're not extending your deadline. That's alright isn't it?"
It's like these people don't live in the real world.
There was one a while back where they were asking for a huge piece of work to be done. It was literally man-months of effort that would be required to do it.
Now my personal dodgyness radar was already flagged by the really tight timescales they'd given for the work, but we proceeded with the initial phase anyway. When we got the final requirement they'd given an indication of budget of... £5,000.
That's nothing - we could easily spend that in a week - and it was a massive underestimate of the task they were asking for.
It'd be funny if it wasn't so annoying.
The main problem is actually that we lack staff - several important people are away on contract and rather than ease back on bidding stuff we've been ploughing ahead. This has resulted in us having several bids to get out in a very short period of time.
Add in to that it's Easter and you can see how it's gotten silly.
One of the most annoying things about bidding is that people often give you utterly ridiculous timescales. Or rather, they give you utterly ridiculous timescales, but give themselves way more time than they need.
Basically, we often get bids that pay no regard to things like holidays (such as Christmas and Easter). It's like they're fully expecting you to work your arse off over those holidays.
Also, they'll give you horribly short deadlines - a couple of weeks to do an entire ITT, which is no mean feat I can tell you.
But then they'll give themselves months to assess those ITTs. Plus, they'll pay absolutely no regard to the deadlines they set themselves, meaning they'll be late. But you can't be late - if you're late, then you're out on your ear.
The worst ones are when they're late and in order to claw back the time they maintain your deadlines. "Oh, we were a month late, but we're not extending your deadline. That's alright isn't it?"
It's like these people don't live in the real world.
There was one a while back where they were asking for a huge piece of work to be done. It was literally man-months of effort that would be required to do it.
Now my personal dodgyness radar was already flagged by the really tight timescales they'd given for the work, but we proceeded with the initial phase anyway. When we got the final requirement they'd given an indication of budget of... £5,000.
That's nothing - we could easily spend that in a week - and it was a massive underestimate of the task they were asking for.
It'd be funny if it wasn't so annoying.
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
running out of stuff to do
I had a very weird mindset last night.
After the weekend where I got so much done I had this weird nagging sensation that I was going to run out of stuff to do. I mean this patently is just not the case - I've tonnes of stuff still to do. And besides, even if I was to finish doing those things, by the time I was finished a load of new stuff would come along to fill its place.
Still, I couldn't shake that nagging sensation - even when I looked over at the shelves groaning under the weight of unwatched DVDs and unread books.
Weird.
And speaking of weird stuff in my head I've been having a strange time with the old writing just recently. I've kinda ground to a halt with actually sitting down and typing, and yet my head is crammed full of ideas. I just keep coming up with new ideas, but for some reason I'm lackign the motivation to actually set them down on paper.
I'm not sure it helps that some of them are of a... er... more salacious flavour shall we say?
I've been taking a look at "How to Read Death Note". It's kinda like a 'making of' for the Death Note series and is a bit hit and miss. The majority of the book is taken up with analysing the plot and stuff like that, which is pretty dull. But there also interviews with the writer and artist. Plus there's the pilot manga at the back - that should be interesting.
After the weekend where I got so much done I had this weird nagging sensation that I was going to run out of stuff to do. I mean this patently is just not the case - I've tonnes of stuff still to do. And besides, even if I was to finish doing those things, by the time I was finished a load of new stuff would come along to fill its place.
Still, I couldn't shake that nagging sensation - even when I looked over at the shelves groaning under the weight of unwatched DVDs and unread books.
Weird.
And speaking of weird stuff in my head I've been having a strange time with the old writing just recently. I've kinda ground to a halt with actually sitting down and typing, and yet my head is crammed full of ideas. I just keep coming up with new ideas, but for some reason I'm lackign the motivation to actually set them down on paper.
I'm not sure it helps that some of them are of a... er... more salacious flavour shall we say?
I've been taking a look at "How to Read Death Note". It's kinda like a 'making of' for the Death Note series and is a bit hit and miss. The majority of the book is taken up with analysing the plot and stuff like that, which is pretty dull. But there also interviews with the writer and artist. Plus there's the pilot manga at the back - that should be interesting.
Monday, 6 April 2009
and confusifying it was
Well it was indeed a very busy and confusing weekend.
I think I managed to do everything I had to do. I've burned all the anime series I can to DVD. That doesn't mean I've burned them all of course, because some are not finished, but those that are finished are all done. It's free up about half of the hard-drive I use.
I made some headway with all my recorded telly too. I now only have two things stacked up - a drama called Red Riding and the new episodes of Lewis. Everything else is cleared (I've decided to by the Wire on DVD, for example).
Plus, thankfully, the burden of new shows has lifted somewhat - according to my scheduling I've only about 12 hours or so of new shows due this week, where it was nearly double that last week.
I also scanned all of the regular magazines I had to, including the new megami. It'll be a few weeks before the other mags turn up so that's given me some breathing room there too.
I also took the opportunity to watch some of the last of the new anime shows from last season:
RideBack is awesome. I have to admit going in that it sounded a bit cheesy - ballerina (Rin) rides motorbike/robot thing :/ - but it's actually really good.
It helps that the animation is of a very high standard, I think. I'm guessing the robots have been done with CG, but if so it's some of the best blended CG I've ever seen. They'd look hand animated if not for a slight over-smoothness. But also the animation is generally anyway - very smooth and clear - with really great cinematography.
The story is also pretty well done. There's only one part I'm not sure about - there seems to be a war/revolution background to the world's setting that at the moment is quite divorced from the main story of Rin riding the robot-bike things. I guess it becomes more apparent later, but since I always only use fansubs to sample the first few eps it may be some time before I find out.
Viper's Creed is okay. Unfortunately, it feels a heck of a lot like Blassreiter meets Shirow. Now I'm sure that's just a coincidence (well, Blassreiter anyway). Anime takes years to develop and Blassreiter was only on recently, so it'll just be coincidental that they both featured mecha-bike riding teams.
The trouble is I love Shirow doing Shirow, but am not so keen on other people doing Shirow. And Blassreiter was distinctly 'okay' - it got better at the end, but was pretty generic at the start, and Viper's Creed seems to share the same problem at the front and my sample won't take me far enough to find out about the back end.
The only saving grace was that there was a nice focus on the characters at some points, so maybe there's hope for this too.
Genji Monogatari Sennenki - I only had one episode of this available to watch as that's all I could find fansub wise. I'm not particularly disappointed by that, though - it didn't really scream at me that it was my sort of show.
It seemed to basically be an overwrought romance for women. It certainly had the classic character design you get in those sorts of girls comics - weirdly proportioned men with enormous shoulders, tiny heads and scary-thin limbs, but vaguely androgynous too (think CLAMP).
Not that that's a criticism as such, more an observation that it seems to conform to type and it's not a type I am particularly bothered about; although I wouldn't say it was bad either. What I did find annoying is that half the screen always seemed to be shaded out to black. I've seen this done when they want to censor (cover over) things like gore, but there was no reason for it here. All it did was the pictures feel tiny.
Chrome Shelled Regios - er... whut?
I had almost no idea what the hell was going on in this series. My guess it that it's based on a Japanese RPG or something like that. Maybe one of those light novels they have in Japan. It certainly has the feel of something the audience is already supposed to be familiar with and doesn't really pay much regard to helping newbie's come along. It's like watching the second series of something having never even heard of the first.
It's also a type of fantasy that doesn't really appeal to me and features the classic (tedious) anime tropes of people shouting out their next special move. And that brings me to the battles - they're okay in and of themselves, but the problem I had with them was that they were backed up by this pounding dance/electronic soundtrack that's so aggressive it kinda browbeats you.
The only saving grace is that when it's not getting up to all those things it has some reasonably interesting character relationships. So if it wasn't for all that guff I'd probably like it more, but as it is it's not really for me.
That really only leaves a couple of shows unwatched, only one of which is fansubs. I do still need to watch Strike Witches and then there are a couple of things that were made available on Crunchyroll which I need to at least sample. Plus there's a couple of films I should watch.
Oh, and I also finished Death Note - it had a good couple of last chapters, but they should definitely have happened 6 volumes ago.
I think I managed to do everything I had to do. I've burned all the anime series I can to DVD. That doesn't mean I've burned them all of course, because some are not finished, but those that are finished are all done. It's free up about half of the hard-drive I use.
I made some headway with all my recorded telly too. I now only have two things stacked up - a drama called Red Riding and the new episodes of Lewis. Everything else is cleared (I've decided to by the Wire on DVD, for example).
Plus, thankfully, the burden of new shows has lifted somewhat - according to my scheduling I've only about 12 hours or so of new shows due this week, where it was nearly double that last week.
I also scanned all of the regular magazines I had to, including the new megami. It'll be a few weeks before the other mags turn up so that's given me some breathing room there too.
I also took the opportunity to watch some of the last of the new anime shows from last season:
RideBack is awesome. I have to admit going in that it sounded a bit cheesy - ballerina (Rin) rides motorbike/robot thing :/ - but it's actually really good.
It helps that the animation is of a very high standard, I think. I'm guessing the robots have been done with CG, but if so it's some of the best blended CG I've ever seen. They'd look hand animated if not for a slight over-smoothness. But also the animation is generally anyway - very smooth and clear - with really great cinematography.
The story is also pretty well done. There's only one part I'm not sure about - there seems to be a war/revolution background to the world's setting that at the moment is quite divorced from the main story of Rin riding the robot-bike things. I guess it becomes more apparent later, but since I always only use fansubs to sample the first few eps it may be some time before I find out.
Viper's Creed is okay. Unfortunately, it feels a heck of a lot like Blassreiter meets Shirow. Now I'm sure that's just a coincidence (well, Blassreiter anyway). Anime takes years to develop and Blassreiter was only on recently, so it'll just be coincidental that they both featured mecha-bike riding teams.
The trouble is I love Shirow doing Shirow, but am not so keen on other people doing Shirow. And Blassreiter was distinctly 'okay' - it got better at the end, but was pretty generic at the start, and Viper's Creed seems to share the same problem at the front and my sample won't take me far enough to find out about the back end.
The only saving grace was that there was a nice focus on the characters at some points, so maybe there's hope for this too.
Genji Monogatari Sennenki - I only had one episode of this available to watch as that's all I could find fansub wise. I'm not particularly disappointed by that, though - it didn't really scream at me that it was my sort of show.
It seemed to basically be an overwrought romance for women. It certainly had the classic character design you get in those sorts of girls comics - weirdly proportioned men with enormous shoulders, tiny heads and scary-thin limbs, but vaguely androgynous too (think CLAMP).
Not that that's a criticism as such, more an observation that it seems to conform to type and it's not a type I am particularly bothered about; although I wouldn't say it was bad either. What I did find annoying is that half the screen always seemed to be shaded out to black. I've seen this done when they want to censor (cover over) things like gore, but there was no reason for it here. All it did was the pictures feel tiny.
Chrome Shelled Regios - er... whut?
I had almost no idea what the hell was going on in this series. My guess it that it's based on a Japanese RPG or something like that. Maybe one of those light novels they have in Japan. It certainly has the feel of something the audience is already supposed to be familiar with and doesn't really pay much regard to helping newbie's come along. It's like watching the second series of something having never even heard of the first.
It's also a type of fantasy that doesn't really appeal to me and features the classic (tedious) anime tropes of people shouting out their next special move. And that brings me to the battles - they're okay in and of themselves, but the problem I had with them was that they were backed up by this pounding dance/electronic soundtrack that's so aggressive it kinda browbeats you.
The only saving grace is that when it's not getting up to all those things it has some reasonably interesting character relationships. So if it wasn't for all that guff I'd probably like it more, but as it is it's not really for me.
That really only leaves a couple of shows unwatched, only one of which is fansubs. I do still need to watch Strike Witches and then there are a couple of things that were made available on Crunchyroll which I need to at least sample. Plus there's a couple of films I should watch.
Oh, and I also finished Death Note - it had a good couple of last chapters, but they should definitely have happened 6 volumes ago.
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