new phone

I got a new phone recently.

I've never really been one for mobile phones. To me they're a tool with a specific job - making calls when you're away from a landline - so all the gizmos like cameras and web access and all that crap has always been of little interest to me.

I'm also rather of the opinion that phones are a classic case of the companies generating the requirement where none really exists. Or to put it another way, they push the consumers down certain routes, encouraging them to get all these whizz-bang gizmos that obviously push up the price.

They've created the situation where people feel they need the latest phone, even though there was nothing at all wrong with their old one. And of course the phone companies can get away with charging a fortune for the privilege.

Anyway, point is my contract came up for renewal and as per usual they called me up asking me if I wanted to renew. Because I've had my current contract so long she said something about not really doing contracts any more (didn't get this) but it meant I had very limited options - I could either get loads more free minutes and texts or a new phone.

I don't use anything like the number of minutes and texts I currently have and to be fair the battery was starting to get a bit flaky in my old phone so I said to replace the phone. However, because of the aforementioned feature-creep, I couldn't just get a simple phone, I had to get one with some extra stuff, including a camera and web access.

Oh, I'm sure you can get bog-standard, basic phones - probably by getting a pay-as-you-go from a supermarket or something - but not as a package with a contract like I need. TO be frank I did also used to quite like the stunned looks my ancient, old fashioned phone used get whenever I whipped it out.

The new one is quite nice, though. I mean, it's not a smart phone or anything, but it looks fairly modern. Something I am surprised about is that it's actually slightly heavier than my old phone. I dunno if this is a deliberate thing and it could be lighter, or just a reflection of the increased gubbins, but it was a surprise.

I have to confess I've only taken two photos with it and haven't even looked at the web or the other stuff. I haven't even bothered to see what, if any, games it's got on it. Maybe I'll be converted, but as I say, I'm pretty sure they're just fundamentally of no interest to me.

Plans for the weekend are mainly to get stuff finished off. There seems to have been a useful decline in telly shows I'm interested in, which should give me the chance to watch things I have recorded.

I've also been trying to get the old e-baying going again after the terrible winter put a rather definitive brake on. I think I've pretty much decided that I'm going to sell everything.

No, that's not quite true. I've decided that once I've paid off my hire-purchase (A.K.A. loan) on my car next year I want to see about moving and it would a lot easier if I had a lot less stuff. And that means a combination of e-bay, the tip and 'using up' all the stuff I've bought and haven't watched/read/played.

a little disappointing

If I'm honest, this weekend's weigh in was a little disappointing.

I've mentioned before how I tend to struggle with understanding why I lost what I did and this last week was a classic example.

In the previous few weeks I've been going a bit off-plan, culminating in a week where I ate loads of crap and I spent several posts last week discussing how I think I was self-sabotaging/comfort eating. Well, this last week I really tried to put into practice my conclusions.

Or, to put it another way, on both Wednesday and Friday I bought salad stuff and had salad by way of adding something different to my diet. I was also okay last week with walking, as I didn't have any excuses in terms of walking at lunch and doing long walks at the weekend. Indeed, this last couple of weekends the weather has looked distinctly perky - this last Sunday I could almost have broken out the shorts.

And the result was... just a 1 pound loss. Which was disappointing.

Now, to be totally fair I did actually slip with the diet. On the Thursday I bought some really naughty chocolate chip cookies.

But that was literally it - otherwise there wasn't a single foot wrongly placed and I can't believe that all the exercise I did and the lower number of calories of my general diet was cancelled out by a few cookies.

I should be pleased, of course, and I am pleased that it represents a continuation of the downward trend, it's just I was expecting more. It honestly felt through the week like I was back on track. I even felt that my current work trousers were feeling a little bit slacker than when I first started wearing them a few weeks back, though I could easily have been kidding myself.

I dunno.

I haven't lost heart and I wouldn't be surprised if I loose a more normal amount next week as I've so far been sticking to my diet again this week. I'm more frustrated at the lack of predictability to it all. It's like I keep feeling the hint of some patterns in there somewhere, but whenever I think I've got it all worked out, I get a week like this week and suddenly I realise how random it all seems.

giant killing

No rental DVD this last weekend and as mentioned the other day I had a rather crammed weekend, so I doubt I'd have been able to watch it anyway. I therefore thought I'd make good on something I've been threatening to do and post the first proper review of the streaming anime I've watched today.

I've written a few of these ready to post, but one of the down sides of me catching up with the scanning and also pushing myself to watch anime DVDs when I can as well as the streaming stuff is that I'm getting a huge backlog of things to review.

Association Football, more commonly known in some parts of the world as simply Football or by the abbreviated form soccer is a game I have something of a spotty relationship.

Fundamentally, as a game, I don't really have any problem with it. I can see that it's a game that involves a fair old bit of skill and talent, and those are things I can respect.

As a game it's got a pretty simple set of rules, which is never a bad thing. Games last for a reasonable 90 minutes and have plenty of opportunity to entertain and both the league and cup structures provide long-term interest and tension.

But I've never been a fan of the culture that surrounds football. I don't like it's tribal-ness. The moneys involved are grotesque, the players often appearing more like spoilt children than grown men. I also don't like it's ubiquity. I don't like the fact that whenever you get to the 'sports' bit in the news, actually it's 90% football and 10% everything else (if that).

Giant Killing, if you couldn't tell, is about football - a giant killing being a phrase often used to describe a small team defeating a giant one.

Well, no, I'm not entirely sure that's correct. You see, while Giant Killing is set in the world of football, the actual sport itself is depicted more like a giant game of chess. The amount of thinking the players do and the effectiveness of the long-term tactics they use is not like any game of football I've ever seen.

I don't mean the people involved don't actually think, it's more that the action often tends to flip into slow motion, yet the players are still thinking at normal speed. Also there's a weird way in which the coach never really tells people stuff, but instead kind of sets them up so that they have to realise they answer themselves.

And of course, they often manage to realise just in the nick of time, which adds drama, sure, but can you imagine someone like Alex Fergusson behaving like that?

Overall I did enjoy Giant Killing, but this it's-football-but-not-quite-football feel to it may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Also, obviously being about a football team across an entire season presented the makes with some problems. To start with, the anime is quite in-depth, but around half way through it starts skipping multiple games. This is entirely understandable, but means the pacing shifts quite dramatically.

And while the start of the season suggests some pretty clear goals (as it were), the anime finishes a long way before those are even close, let alone concluded. My guess is the hope was that they'd get a second season, but I'm not sure if they will, so it could be one of those shows without a proper end.

australian gp

As mentioned last Friday, it was the Australian Grand Prix this last weekend.

I actually found the whole weekend kinda... I dunno, stressful feels like the wrong word, but basically I seemed to have so much to do anyway and then adding in watching all of the practice and qualifying and the race itself meant the weekend was fit to bursting. Plus of course I lost an hour, as mentioned yesterday.

A big part of the problem is that I seem to have found myself with the weekends where I clean my flat aligned with the F1 Grand Prix weekends. I'm pretty sure that last year it was the other way around - the non-flat cleaning weekends were aligned with the F1 GP weekends.

This also has other knock on effects in terms of timing. On flat cleaning weekends I do my food shop on the Friday evening after work, but I hadn't really planned it through properly and did quite a big shop. Usually I'll just get the few essential bits and then use a self-service checkout so it's quick, but this time it wasn't so it was quit elate before I got back.

That then meant that I didn't have the time to watch both Friday practices in the evening, and there was a bit of cascade effect - stuff got pushed back and then other stuff got pushed back. It was all a bit of a mess really.

Anyway, the race itself was okay.

Australia can be a bit hit and miss - sometimes you'll get a great race with all sorts happening, and other times it can be a bit processional. I'd say the race this last weekend was somewhere in between. A few things happened, but it wasn't up there as one of the best ever.

I think also there were hints that these new ideas they've had about the adjustable rear wing (or DRS) and brining KERS back could be a bit of a bust. It's too early to completely write them off, but the anticipation that suddenly they would be overtaking all the time was proven to be something of a false hope.

I dunno - I think the problem is that both are relatively subtle effects and so the impact they have is difficult to notice. In the American Indycar series I understand they have a proper "push-to-pass" button that is a lot clearer and they can press it a limited number of times per race and it's obvious to spectators.

Both KERS and the DRS have graphical displays when you're in car, but it's not like a big light flashes on the car itself. Also, clearly this last weekend even the combo of KERS and DRS isn't that huge an effect. Certainly it seemed to help on a few occasions, but the tussle between Massa and Button showed it's probably not as clear cut as all that.

What seems like it might have the biggest impact is the new tyres - the Sauba cars both managed to go quite a long way on their tyres compared to the front runners, but the fewer pit stops they needed meant they were up in the points.

I'd say if we're going to introduce Mickey Mouse "fixes" instead of addressing the real issue of the car's huge reliance on wing-generated downforce then it should be much clearer and have a more significant impact than the DRS and KERS, like the tyres.

clocks

Sunday morning was clock moving day.

Well, you're free to move your clock any day of the week, but Sunday morning was when we adopt what I believe the American's call Daylight Saving's Time. This is a remarkably succinct summary of its purpose and typically we have a slightly less meaningful name for it - British Summer Time (or BST).

The "time" part in particular makes it sound like an official proclamation that now summer has begun, whereas actually it's the same sort of time as in Greenwich Mean Time.

Which is all a round about way of saying that the clocks went forwards by one hour to take us onto BST, rather than GMT. The basic idea is that it means the evenings are lighter later.

It's always fascinated me how daily life is kinda skewed towards evening, even though mid-day 12:00 GMT is set at the exact moment where the sun hits its peak. So there are an equal number of hours of light before twelve as there are afterwards, yet by common consensus life is skewed into the evening.

The average working day is a perfect example - it starts at 9am, three hours before mid-day, but it doesn't end three hours after mid-day, instead it ends 5 or 6 hours after mid-day. We don't all get up hours before we go to work, but we do all go to bed hours after we finish work.

This of course is behaviour that's been enabled in part by technology, but even before that I'm sure it was also the case - probably since people learned to make fire.

Anyway, I'm blathering - the point is that the move to BST ensures that it's lighter later during the summer, thereby allowing people to be more productive later in the evening. Also, as an interesting side effect, it actually reduces electricity demand, as people don't need to switch their light son until later.

This is partly what's behind calls to take us permanently an hour forward. The idea is that we would go forward, but then never go back.

This is appealing in some respects, but it does cause me concern, as light in the evenings is something that makes it difficult for me to get to sleep. For example, where I currently live I have white curtains and there tends to be quite poor at blocking light. This means I've ended up pinning black bin bags to the curtains to block out the light.

When we get closer to the solstice I'll really be struggling - it'll be too light for me. So while the idea of moving to BST permanently would probably be okay, if it still came with a daylight savings shift, it would be something of a disaster for me.

In other words, if we still put the clocks forward even after the shift (so, in other words, we moved to GMT+2) I'd really have a lot of problems getting to sleep.