captain america

Captain America has never really been my thing.

It's obviously quite a jingo-istic thing - I mean, he's not Captain Humanity or Captain United Nations, is he?  He's Captain America.  And that's always made him very "truth, justice and the American way."

All of which of course works under the assumption that "the American way" is on the same level as truth and justice, and, indeed, that they're somehow synonymous: that truth and justice equal the American way.  I was never really convinced that was entirely the case and of course Cap represents those things.

Of course, being the first movie (well, excluding the other adaptation) this one tells Cap's origin story and that revolves around World War 2 and the Red Skull.  In this case it also involves HYDRA and a bit of Norse technology.  The later obviously ties it to the Thor franchise but the former is interesting.

In the comics HYDRA has always been a fascist organisation, but it never really originated in Nazi Germany.  Here it's basically the Red Skull's pet scientific organisation.  This works fine enough, especially as they ditch the silly bright costumes and properly retool them as Nazis.

In fact overall I have to say I quite enjoyed the film, despite my reservations.  It's just nuanced enough, particularly in regards the whole "representing America" thing that it works.  It actually manages to make something of a point in this regard and plays out how you might expect a Captain America to actually be used by the government.

The goodness comes through as being entirely down to him as a person, rather than any sort of jingo-istic thing.  However, there is a weird element to it in that it basically has the message that if you're a weakling you can't fight, which seems odd - anyone can be trained up.  Also, he seems smart enough, so could he not go into the engineering corps or something?

There is also a weird element that results from this aspect of the film.  Clearly they needed both a small version and a big version and it makes more sense that the guy they employ is bigger and they just use digital trickery and other effects to make him look smaller for the first part.  This works brilliantly - he really looks good.

What doesn't work is the voice.  A bigger person will generally have a deeper voice simply because of how the resonance works.  But they didn't adjust his voice at all when he's small, so you have this big deep, manly voice, coming from this little pip-squeak dude and I found it very disconcerting.

But apart from that I actually really enjoyed it.

getting what's due

I've obviously been blogging about my job hunt and its conclusion (staying where I am) so I thought I might give a little update.

The stuff I mentioned last week as to why I hadn't blogged is actually part of the same thing - the stuff I was working on is part of the new arrangement.

This new job (or tweaked job) actually started at the beginning of August but it was only really last week that I was able to start work on it.  It went okay for an initial stab, but it really emphasised to me how much there is to be done.

The other thing I wanted to briefly mention about it was that my salary took a big step up (though not as big as if I'd have moved, though as I mentioned there's the possibility of a big slice of cake later).  However, I did not receive all I was due when pay came around.

The issue seems to revolve around a part of my salary that's really intended for me to get a company car.  At the time we were discussing it I said I liked the idea but I've only just paid off my current car so I'd want a little time before getting a new one.  However, in the other job offer this was covered by having a car allowance that is given as part of salary or a car as I saw fit and then adjusted as the circumstances required.

My current company agreed to the same thing, though at a much lower value (but then the other job was in London so I would have had a fair old cost of travel); however, when my pay packet turned up it was short by this exact amount.  Now while we're not talking life-changing sums of money, it's not a lump of cash I would want to be without!

I've flagged the issue, but so far it's not been resolved.  I guess sometimes these things happen, but I did make it clear when we were in discussions that salary was a big concern, since I'd not had a pay rise in more than 5 years.

The whole thing of capitalism is we're supposed to get money in exchange for out labour.

crash, bang wallop

It was the Belgium grand prix this weekend, from the famous Spa Francorchamps circuit.

And it was an incident packed race.  I think a route of this was Friday, when it basically rained really hard all day.  However, the forecasts also said it was going to be dry for Saturday and Sunday.  This meant that the teams had no real motive for doing any running.

Using the Friday practice sessions for testing was basically pointless since they would tend not to get representative results, there was no point setting the car up for a wet race, the drivers weren't going to need any practice for wet driving and being wet meant there was a good chance they'd have an accident which would cause them real headaches.

All of this meant that they really only had the one hour practice session on Saturday morning to set their cars up.  This in turn meant that the qualifying session was a bit on the random side - most of the cars you'd expect to be up the front weren't.  For example, Vettel and Webber both finished ended up outside the top ten but Kamui Kobayashi in the Sauber was second on the grid.

Not to take anything away from anyone - this year with the stable rules that only really removed the blown diffuser has meant that everyone has been a lot closer - add in the difficult tyres and you have this championship.

The race itself was therefore set up for a lot of battles, since many cars were 'out of position' and Spa is somewhere you can overtake (and not just in the DRS zone).  However, unfortunately Romain Grosgean also caused a big accident on the trace down to the first corner.

He's actually a bit of a one for getting into accidents at the start.  I think he's actually said that he gets a bit too excited and tends to act a bit rashly.  Certainly he was clearly in error on Sunday, as he moved over so far that an accident was almost inevitable.

It was a particular pity on Sunday since he took several of the championship contenders out.  It was quite a scary accident actually, as Grosjean's car was lifted into the air (often a consequence of wheels clashing, as here) but because it was a rear wheel he was also spun in the air and of course the cars are a lot longer than they are wide.

You could actually see wheel marks on Alonso's car that were close to where his head is.  It's one of the difficulties of open cockpit racing, but then there are always issues over them getting trapped in the cockpit if it's covered - being a close-fitting cockpit, rather than an open space inside a car can cause problems.  Especially where fire is always a risk - that's how a lot of drivers used to die in the bad old days.

Anyway, race itself was good and I guess the up-side with Alonso being knocked out is that it closes the championship up a bit.

And we go again this next weekend - there are actually a lot of double-headers until the end of the year, which is going to play havoc with my schedule, but there you go.

all quiet on the blogging front

Well now, I've been rather silent for the last couple of days.

This wasn't intentional, as such.  And it wasn't because I was manically busy - in many senses the opposite.  I have been oddly tired, but nothing that would really have stopped me blogging.

It was more a sort of coming together of circumstances.

Firstly, last weekend was the Bank Holiday weekend and I'd initially thought I would have a go at pre-writing a few blog entries over the weekend, as it was going to be quite quiet.  That didn't really happen, due to a combination of tiredness (from the long day on Friday) and laziness.

The other thing was that I'd intended for these last few weeks to post a bunch of reviews I'd written but gotten behind with posting.  Well, I posted all of those... and then ran out... and didn't write any more.

So writing a few of those reviews would have been ideal for this last couple of days, except as I say I couldn't be bothered over the weekend and then, well, couldn't be bothered during the week either.

During this week, as mentioned, I wasn't busy in the sense that I usually am, with loads of stuff that I have to do with deadlines, etc.  However, I was busy with other stuff.  I've been tasked with coming up with some bits for work and this was really the first week I've had time to work on them properly, so I took the opportunity.

Now I've been quite enjoying putting them together and that's meant that they've absorbed my time, but as I say, not because I've had to, but more because I've wanted to.

So there you go - a bunch of excuses, basically.

This weekend the Formula 1 season gets back in gear with the Belgium Grand Prix from the iconic Spa Francorchamps.  It's usually a good race and the weather often makes its presence felt.

work, work and more work

So Friday was a bonkers work day.

As I mentioned last week it was my initial intention to come in on Saturday morning and finish off the upload for a bid we were doing.  Well, that post was written on Thursday and instead of that I thought I'd try and do it all on Friday.

Initially this meant coming in very early - I started at about 7AM.  The morning went okay, with me managing to upload most everything that we had already done, and taking me about 2.5 hours.

However, even if I'd wanted to (and had the time) some of wasn't finished, so wouldn't be available to upload until later.

In the meantime I worked on another bid.  That went okay, although it was more work than I'd initially anticipated.  It also didn't help that I was pretty tired.

Anyway, I sent that off at about 6PM and so then came my second attempt at the other bid.  In case I didn't explain it had to be uploaded via an online portal, which are never the simplest or easiest of things, but the added problem here was it was clear almost everybody had decided to uploaded on the Friday.

That meant that as the day wore on the system basically ground to a halt.  A single click of a "yes" button was taking several minutes to even register and start to update and uploading stuff was basically impossible.

I'd hoped that if I left it until early evening then a lot of people would be finished, but that didn't really seem to help matters as it was still crushingly slow at 6PM.

I therefore decided I would go and do other stuff (I bought some petrol, went shopping, had some dinner, went home, put the shopping away, changed clothes and sorted out a few domestic bits in preparation for the weekend) and then come back.  This meant I returned to work at about 9PM.

At this time it was actually working well - back to how it had been very early in the morning.  However, there was still a lot to upload, so it took me a further hour and a half or so to upload it all.  I actually read some manga while I was doing it, so it wasn't too bad.

However, it did mean all told that I didn't get home until well after 11PM - that's quite a work day by anyone's standards!

On top of that, part of the reason I moved my plan to Friday was because we were supposed to be switching to a new server over the Bank Holiday weekend... and it didn't work.  So I could have basically done it Saturday or even popped in on Monday!

Anyway, I'm going to try to take it a bit easier this week to compensate a bit for the huge week last week.

zip it

So I had a bit of an embarrassing situation on Tuesday at work.

Basically to skip to the punch line the zip on my trousers broke.  Now we're not talking about an explosion under duress or anything like that - this was that type of breaking where the teeth are undone even though you've zipped the zip.

I'm sure you know the sort of thing - a zip works by the teeth intermeshing, which you achieve by pulling the zipper up or down depending on if you want to close or open them.  Well what sometimes happens is that the teeth become un-meshed when the zipper is in the closed position.  Basically they become un-aligned and the zip no longer knits them together when it closes.

The way to fix this is to basically slide one set of teeth out of the zipper and re-align everything so that the zipper meshes them together.  However, this is only really possible on those zips that are designed to come completely apart (so the zips you have on the front of coats, rather than on the pockets of a coat.

Of course the zipper on my trousers (otherwise known as the "fly") is of the pocket closing type, so I was left with the embarrassing situation of not being able to close my trouser's fly area.  I ended up using a bull-dog clip on the inside to close them up.

Now actually this is the pair of trousers that's really slack and it's my intention once I get my new boosted pay packet to start to buy some new clothes.  Plus of course I have another pair of work trousers, so it's not a big deal really.

I'd actually gotten rather ahead of myself on that front, expecting my wage to come in during this week for some reason, but of course it will be next week as the end of the month is on Friday.

It's a Bank Holiday Monday next week, so I'll only be blogging Tuesday to Friday.  However, I will actually probably be working early Saturday morning, as there's some bits I need to do.  It's not that I'm super-mega busy; it's just that I can't see how the timing is going to work out any other way.

the faculty

I have to confess I found this rather disappointing.

I'd heard that it was quite good, but I actually found it really derivative and therefore rather unoriginal.  It was a bit like somebody had compiled together all the good alien movies they'd ever seen and thought that the melded together thing would therefore be good.

Trouble is that you just end up with a diluted version of those original films.  Also, generally, a lot of the good alien films are actually based on books.  The film tries to acknowledge this debt, but actually just ends up making it obvious how lacking this film is.

This referencing is achieved by having a character who is a science fiction nerd who is into all the classic science fiction films - in this case, alien films being of most reference (Body Snatcher's, Puppet Master's).  However, what this also means is you have a rather stereotypical character who lacks any real motivation or defining character, other than being a misfit SF nerd.

And this is the film's real problem - the characters are all basically horrible stereotypes.  You've got the wide-eyed new girl, the genius who, unchallenged by academia is a mischief maker, the jock who's misunderstood.  It's all just the wrong side of cliché.  A bit more exploration of these characters would really have helped.

The good side of the film is the slow takeover by the aliens, which, although very much in a bodysnatcher's vein is reasonably well done.  However, even here there are real problems - what are the aliens?  Why are they doing this?  How do they do it?

There's a vague hint that once taken over the people are happier, but the film also fails to really explore this.  And this is one of the most frustrating things about it - it manages to ditch the parts of these types of alien movies that make them quirky or interesting or that make you think.

The aliens basically just take over because that's what they do and they need beating.

The thing about the film that is amusing is seeing a lot of young actors that have gone on to bigger and better things.  You've got Josh Hartnett and Elijah Wood, for example.  And the performances are probably the highlight of the film.

gantz (movie)

Gantz was always going to be a tough thing to adapt.

Certainly adapting it into a live action film that would need to make a fair old bit of money to cover the types of effects it would need would probably been a tough thing to sell.  On the plus side it's a very popular series, but on the down-side it's not exactly family friendly material.

And if you made it family friendly you would stand a real risk of alienating that main fanbase.  But still, you need to make it possible that it might appeal to a wider audience.  Yet the key elements of gantz are horrible violence, aliens, killing, misogyny general inhumanity and a smidgen of rape on the side.  It is, to be frank, a veritable smorgasbord of misanthropy, which is probably something you could get away with better in the anime adaptation, since the audience is more focused in the same area as the manage and the budget concerns smaller.

Anyway, it's hardly fun for all the family!

I was, therefore, not really expecting much from the film adaptation.

I was, however, pleasantly surprised.

They have made changes.  The misanthropy is pretty much gone.  I mean, there are still a lot of the unpleasant characters, but they're not dwelt on as much.  Also, the main character who, in the manga, we get a lot of internal monologue stuff from and therefore we see he's not a particularly nice person, is tweaked to be more normal.

In the film it's more about him being scared about things, rather than not giving a shit, if you see what I mean.

However, this first film (there are two) is actually surprisingly close to the original manga, given the changes that have been made.  The second film looks like it diverges more, based on the trailer, but this first one takes the major parts of the manga and retains the majority of them.

I mean it does tweak stuff, obviously, but not as much as you may think.

The film also looks really good.  The effects are excellent - the aliens look very good and the suits, guns and gantz itself are all very well executed.  I think the fact it's almost all set at night (a lot of the less dramatic stuff front during daytime is what's gone) helps out here - FX are normally easier to execute during the night.

But obviously they've also benefitted from the leaps and bounds of digital FX that mean even low budget films can look very good nowadays

So overall, I'd say it's well worth checking out.

Well, if you like SF, action, aliens or the original manga it's worth checking out - if those aren't really your bag, it's not going to change your mind.

mini heat wave

So we seemed to have a mini heat wave while I was taking my long weekend.

It was nice that it didn't rain on me, but the heat made it a bit unpleasant.  It was actually another case of my classic comment on British weather that it comes with exclamation points.  I mean the change was so sudden that it was quite a shock.

I have to say I found the whole weather extremely nostalgic.

It was, to coin a phrase, just like the weather we seemed to have when I was a kid.  Well, no, actually, not when I was a kid proper, but when I was a teenager.  My recollection of my teenage years (around the GCSE and A-level kind of time) was that the weather during the summer was constantly like how it was this last weekend - hot and cloudless during the day and not really properly easing off during the night.

I don't know if that's really an accurate reflection of how the weather actually was, but it's how I remember it.  I remember days of going around friends' houses and having barbecues and lazing about and then smoking pot and getting drunk in the evening.

This weather was so reminiscent of that period, particularly as the smell of barbecue was filling the air when I went out for my walks around the estate.

As for other stuff I did it was all pretty unexciting.

I gave the car a thorough clean, including giving it a polish.  Usually when I do these mega cleans I find them quite tiring because I do everything and so it take hours, but I also end up using muscles I don't normally use much so I then have several days of aches and pains.

This time I didn't find the doing as tiring, but the after-ache was really bad.

I also decided to do a load of backing up.  In the end I did my hard-drive based back-up routine, but didn't get the time to also burn the DVDs I usually do as well.  I like to be thoroughly backed-up having had several bad experiences of drives crapping out and taking everything with them.

I'll probably look at burning the DVDs this next bank holiday weekend, though I am currently anticipating I will actually have to work part of the weekend.  This isn't so much because I have too much to do it's more because the timing of things other people are doing mean it just won't be finished in time for me to do anything prior to the weekend.

I decided to do the back-up because I actually had a bit of a worrying moment the other week when I plug one of my drives in and it came up as if it was a new disk and asked me to format it.  In the end I got around it, though the drive ran incredibly slowly.  However, I think looking back on it it was because I used a USB3.0 slot that the motherboard has and I never installed the proper drivers for those slots because I don't have any USB 3.0 peripherals, so it ran at the default USB 1.0 speed.

At least I hope it was that - if not, I've backed it up anyway.

fuck this shit

I'm in a really bad mood today.

I don't think it's lack of sleep, because I'm not really tired, as such.  I mean, I'm a little fatigued, having put in some hefty days at work recently (both time-wise and effort-wise), but I've been sleeping okay.

I think part of it is that people haven't really been doing what I've been asking them to.  It's been weird - I think we've agreed something or to do something in a certain way or by a certain time and then they just go and do something else.

I mean, on most of the things I don't mind that they've done it differently or at a different time or whatever, but why agree to what we had agreed if you're going to do something else?  Why not just say what you've got in mind?

I just let out a big sign then.

Roll on my long weekend!

dead snow

You know I really wanted to enjoy this more than I did.

Zombie nazis killing a bunch of kids in a remote, snow-bound cabin?  What's not to love?

The problem is it doesn't really make a lot of sense.  I know - it's a daft criticism, isn't it?  I mean, it's a film about nazi zombies, right?  It coudln't possibly make any sense.

Well, no, but there's such a thing as internal logic.  Okay, there's no such thing as zombies, but if you're goign to have zombies you need to be consistent about what they are, what they do, how they behave, etc.  But there isn't here - most of the zombies seem pretty mindless, but one fo them is made out to be a leader of sorts - well, why is he still vaguely clever and the others aren't?

And if he is meant to be vaguely clever, why is his only motivation to do with some small amount of gold?  Gold that it's not clear how it got to be anywhere other than where the zombies left it.

There are loads of other problems too.  One f the main ones is a random old bloke who turns up basically in order to tell the youngsters the plot.  Quite why he randomly seems to have walked dozens of miles (his tent, which is in the middle of nowhere, even though it's implied he's a local, is shown to be the best part of half a day's snow mobile ride away) just to scare the piss out of these kids with a weird story is never at all clear.

Especially sicne he then gets bumped off in a way that's utterly inconsistent with what we're supposed to believe is the motivation for the zombies.

The effects are generally quite good.  There's a hell of a lot of killing and blood and severed body parts.

There's also some nice stabs at humour in an evil dead sort of veign.

But there are problems here too - everythign is derivative or unorigianl.  IT's like there's a bit where a guy chops his own arm off... like a cross between Evil Dead (chainsaws and arms) and Braindead (infected arm cut off).  Except it's utterly daft that he seems to think this will work.  Plus, it's not like it's quick - it takes ages.  And all through it the zombies apparantly stand aroudn watching him.

You see what I mean?  It's lack of any sense is so blatent that it ruins what should be the bits that make up for the stupid plot.  And it's so derivative that you just feel leik you've seen it all before.

Shame, it coudl have been so much better with little to no changes.

There were quite a lot of extras - some of which were quite entertaining.  In particular the fact the crew seems to rise up in a proto-communist, trade union kind of thing was quite amusing.

how to loose friends and alienate people

Well, this was poor.

Loose friends was actually somethign I listened to as an audiobook and enjoyed quite a lot.  It was an odd sort of enjoyment, though.

See, the thing about it was that the person described in the book - Toby Young - was a bit of a prat.  But here's the thing - the book was written with sufficient hindsight and self knowledge (by Toby Young himself) that it made it enjoyable.

Young portrays himself during that period as a prat, fully acknowledging his prattishness and making fun of himself.  It's not entirely a self piss-take, but there's a definite air of "what the hell was I playing at?" to it that means it's enjoyable.

And it's difficult to see how the book would work without that, because it's also central to the reason he failed in New York.  Well, actually, central to both the reason he got the opportunity and then failed was that he wasn't really willing to play the game proper.

He starts off attacking what he loves because he loves it, but then when that thing tries to brign him onboard instead of flipping and playign the game, he does the opposite.  But he thinks that bu doing so he will have even more success, where in reality he creates his own failure.

Guess what happens in the film?

Well, for starters, a lot of it is toned down - the attack isn't really there, as such.  But also the point of the book is flipped on its head - he flips aroudn and plays the game and has success.  But in the film (this isn't really a spoiler, as it's predictably hollywood) he then realises his mistake and gives it all up for love.

It's almost the complete opposite fo what the book was about and therefore it renders the title pointles.  They could easily have made this film, called it somethign else and not been sued.

The other problem si that a lot fo the humour descends into the toilet.  Now don't get me wrong there's some rudeness and crudeness int he original, but it's liek those are the only bits they wanted to keep.  Also, without a lot of the more complicated and interesting things they loose some of their point, so they're just vomit, transvestism and cock & ball jokes.

To be honest, though, it's difficult to see how they would have made a film of the book as it was.  At least, it's difficult to see how a reasonable budget Hollywood film would have gotten made without drastic revisions.  A small, indipendent film maybe, but a film with the need to get quite a lot of bums in seats to pay for itself?  A tough sell.

scrappy

It was a bit of a scrappy weekend.

My landlord has gone on yet another of his holidays.  Actually, holiday is probably not the right word - can you take a holiday if you're retired?  "Break" is probably more apt.

During the winter they often jet off to some exotic part of the world, but in summer they tend to go caravanning.  I'm not sure where they're off to this time, but I've a feeling it won't be for as long as they've planned.

This week it's meant to rain and drizzle a bit and they're not very tolerant of bad weather (I know - why do they go caravanning then?) so I'm guessing they'll probably be back by mid-week.

Now I'd actually thought they were going on Monday but they went on Sunday, so I decided I would make use of their going this weekend and the nice weather we were having and clean the car.

As I say there's a fair chance it will be poor weather, so while it was nice I thought it best to give it a clean.  Unfortunately I had a bit of a problem with one of the things I did and actually made it dirtier than it was already, so I'll have to buy a better cleaner and try and do it this next weekend (as I say, assuming it doesn't rain) - or maybe we'll get a reasonable evening at some point.

I was also rather fatigued on Sunday as Saturday had taken quite a lot out of me.  The thing is, though, I'm not 100% why.  I've a feeling it was actually more a case of work draining me during the week and then Saturday just sapping the last of my energy.  With it being hot and quite muggy I found my afternoon walk particularly hard work, for example.

But also everything I did seemed to take longer and/or be more difficult than I'd anticipated.  So, for example, I did a huge pile of ironing, but it took a lot longer than I was expecting.

So yeah, bit of a scrappy weekend.

This week I am taking Friday off.  I'd originally planned to take both Friday and Monday, but with the days I took looking for a new job I have ended up with all Friday and half of Monday off.  Either way it means fewer posts for the next few weeks (the week after is also the bank holiday).  I'll probably us the opportunity to post a bunch of film reviews and get myself somewhat caught up there too.

other pics

I'd actually pre-written the post below and was intending to post it yesterday, but Thursday was absolutely manic so I didn't get the chance.

I mentioned some time back that I figured out how to get photos off my phone, so I thought I'd post the couple of random shots I took with the intention of blogging about. They're now quite old so a bit out of context. Firstly we've got some pictures I took back when the lovely summer of rain was just getting going and we were all surprised at the volume. I think we've become used to it by now.

 
I should explain this is a bit of road that goes down to an industrial estate and it's not an area that's prone to flooding, but as you can see it's like a small lake. It must have been a good 6 inches deep at least and was essentially the consequence of huge downpours over several days that caused all the drains and rivers to just stop clearing the water. Obviously it's the Queen's Jubilee year and we got the long bank holiday weekend, so by way of "celebration" I decided to make some fairy cakes.


As you can see I made up some red white and blue icing. However, in all honesty the icing wasn't very nice as the icing sugar was quite old so it tasted a little funny.


So if we're celebrating Britain then this must be me celebrating Britain's "multi-culturalism" and not simply because I made 6 cupcakes from the recipe and had three left over and some random bits of dark and white chocolate in the cupboard. These were a lot nicer than the iced ones, obviously as chocolate doesn't go funny if left. On these you can also see that some of the fairy cakes sunk a bit as they had a bit much batter in and when the others were finished these weren't quite set. Still it made a nice sink for me to put more chocolate in!

the mechanic

I've generally enjoyed most of the Jason Statham films I've seen.

They're not generally anything more than fairly basic action films, with Statham kicking ass and taking names.  He's generally very good at the action stuff and they excel in the fighting and violence, rather than plot.

I have to say, though, that I found the mechanic to be quite poor.

Apparently it's a remake of a Michael Winner film, but I've never seen that so I can't really comment on that side of it.  What I would say is that the problem really is the main character, played by Statham.

See, he's not very likeable, which is okay, but he's also most definitely not a proper anti-hero.  I mean, his "job" is as an assassin, so he kills people, and it's sort of hinted that he only kills bad people, but this is never clearly stated.  So he's a killer, but a killer of bad people.

So that makes him a "good guy", except he's not that either.  Being an assassin it's fairly obvious that the plot involves him being used to kill somebody that he shouldn't have or that didn't need to die (it's a wonder assassins don't see this coming).  But this really cuts to the heart of the problem.

He's supposed to be this super-efficient, sees everything coming guy, but he just takes the assassination contracts at face value.  It's horribly contradictory.

He also weirdly ends up taking an apprentice out of... well, I'm not sure, guilt?  It's not entirely clear - the apprentice didn't really want to become an assassin, he just sort of goes along with it.

It's all very random.

But what makes it worse is that where the poor plot would usually be compensated for by lots of action and fight scenes, the film doesn't really have that many.  And Statham is only in a handful of them.  Also, they're not particularly interesting - either super-efficient, bang you're dead, or horribly messy.

It was all very disappointing.

farnborough airshow pics 2

More from farnborough. The red arrows, obviously. They put on a full display, which was really good to see. It's been ages since I've seen the red arrows do a full display. The arrows were parked up opposite the Breitling display team who also did a cool display. It obviously wasn't all military planes there - I like this bulbous nosed guardian. very weird looking. So here we have the F-15 and F-16. Very recognisable US jets. The jet nozzles from the F16. If you were stood here with it fired up you'd get a rather heavy tan, rather quickly! Parked next to them was the F18 Super Hornet. A Super Hornet actually did a display as well - it was impressive, both in terms of volume and manoeuvrability. Right, unfortunately I've run out of the photos I was able to take with my proper camera. As mentioned, it ran out of juice as it had claimed to be fully charged, but really wasn't. So these remaining photos are all from my phone. Here's the Chinook from the front - I took this on the way back, having walked all the way up the display. The Osprey. The rotors are enormous. It's like having two big Chinook rotors stuck on the end of two stubby wings. A bonkers thing. Another of those civilian aircraft. A close up of its big old jet engine intake. The Vulcan. Apparently it costs so much to fly it and it's in need of some serious upgrades, so it's a strong possibility this was the last time it will fly at Farnborough. The Vulcan was at the very end of the displays, but it actually turned out that where they have all the "chalets" (which are only open on the industry days) there were a few aircraft on display too, including this F35.

chillax

It was a pretty quit weekend.

Which, to be honest, suited me down to the ground.

Over the last couple of weeks work has been pretty horrible, as we've been bidding a big framework.  I have to say I'm not sure why we're bidding this framework, but bidding it we are and I have ended up with most of the actual effort to do it.

And it's been bloody hard work.  Hard work not helped by the fact I've had this horrible cold for the last few weeks.  It's finally starting to clear up, although it's still not gone and it's been more than two and a half weeks since I caught it.  But then it took several days before it really kicked in, so maybe it's not surprising that it's taken weeks to clear?

The main problem is that it seemed to get into my sinuses, which has made me feel bunged up and left me mouth breathing which then gives me a headache.  And as I say, I've been maxed out at work on top so I entered the weekend feeling drained.

In fact I entered Friday feeling drained and made several clear errors.  I struggled through and did a bit, but if we worked flexi I would have taken off quite early, I think.

So this weekend I chillaxed.

Well, I say that.  I spent Saturday morning cleaning and went on some very long walks that meant by evening on both days I was fit to drop.  But that was nice - it was nice to feel tired because of those sorts of things, rather than fatigued because of ill health and work stress.

I also started to attack some of the stuff I've recorded.  As I mentioned on Friday I recorded very little in the week, so I was into the recorded stuff quite quickly.

As it happened what I attacked wasn't really the TV shows I've recorded, but the Beethoven "Symphony cycle" that was played at the proms a little while back.  It was basically all 9 of Beethoven's symphony and was mostly radio stuff, rather than TV programmes.  I'm a bit of a fan of Beethoven.

Being radio I also managed to catch up on a bit of reading.  I've gotten behind with a few of the articles and blogs I read and while I'm not fully caught up it was nice to bring some of them up to date.

Chillax is among one of those words that I know quite a lot people hate.  I'm fine with them myself - one of the things I love about the English language is its fluid nature and how it absorbs words.  I could easily have been an Etymologist as I find it endlessly fascinating.

One I'm slightly more puzzled by is "amazeballs".  I think its origin is ironic, but how it's come to be used I'm not sure, particularly as it's actually slightly more complicated to say that amazing.

thank crunchy it's friday

So I've really felt the impact of the Olympics this last week.

Every week I set up all the programs I want to watch on my PVR and this week it was really quite apparent that actually all the stuff I'm setting up is on the radio.  There's maybe been only 2 programs I've recorded this week.  Well, I say that, there's Mythbusters on Quest every day, but it's basically all been radio stuff.

This is the first weekend of the four week hiatus for the Grand Prix and after the double header it's now a chance for me to clean the flat.  I usually give it a clean every two weeks and at the end of that it's usually clear it really needs it.

When I have to leave it three weeks for the doubleheaders the place is proper filthy.  I've tried cleaning anyway when there's a Grand Prix, but it really doesn't work - all the stuff I have to do on top of spending some 10 hours on all the Grand Prix stuff just makes it impractical and a little tiring.

It also kills off any possibility of me doing anything else and means I tend to end up with a full list of other stuff to watch on my PVR.  It's better to just leave the cleaning for a week.

Also, the flip-side is that the nature of the double headers usually means that I end up double-cleaning and it's nice to clean when it doesn't really need it.

I'm hoping for some good weather, but it appears to be more of the same rainy, cloudy and not warm but not cold stuff for the weekend.  While I had the cold I wasn't really up for doing much walking and I'm afraid I did a fair bit of comfort eating.

My diet has pretty much ground to a halt.

I've not really put anything on, but I've not really lost much either - I'm sort of bimbling along around a constant just under 20 stones weight.  It's a lot better than I used to be, but still means I'm obese and my target was to get under the line for simply being fat.

I'd need to lose about 4 stones to get down there, which is less than I've already lost.  Trouble is I've sort of slipped back into eating too many bad things.  To lose weight I need to go back to the more strict diet I had before.

In theory I could up my exercise too, but there's not a lot more I could do in the time available I have.  Certainly the exercise I do is balancing out the extra eating, so cut out that extra and I will start dropping again.

Part of the problem, to be honest, is that I really need some new clothes.  The clothes I have are all at the stage of hanging off me.  Obviously if I get some more clothes now and lose weight, then those clothes will need replacing, but of course if I stick with my current clothes then it's just going to be even worse.

Thankfully the new pay for my job should relieve my financial situation somewhat and I should be able to afford to buy some new stuff.

farnborough pics 1

So I processed the photos from Farnborough and thought I'd upload a few of them. This is a UAV (Unmanned Air Vehicle). the weird gold thing on the front is (essentially) a radar. This thing is a boom for refuelling - it unfurls and is like a basket that the plane that wants to refuel sticks a boom into. This is a C295, which is a transport type plane. As you can see, it's quite big, but if we look at the next shot... What this is is the C295 again, which is next to the new Airbus A380, which is the enormous new passenger plane. The C295 actual has a Chinook helicopter in front of it and both together are not as long as the A380. So this is a cleaner shot of the A380 and you can clearly see it's a double decker. And mentioning the Chinook, here's a cool shot down the rotor blade. This beasty is the A400M which I think I'm right in saying is about the biggest cargo plane used by the military. It is a monster (but still smaller than the A380!). Back end of the A400 and a bit of an arty shot. And this is a zoom to show the cargo deck of the A400. When carrying troops they actually put two rows of seats (so there are effectively 4 rows of seats down the length of it). The Virgin Galactic is the space plane that's meant to be so regular people can experience going into space. Think I'll leave it there for today.

infestation

Big bugs is one of those staples of horror films.

I guess it's obvious why - bugs are not on many people's lists of favourite beasties and the bigger they are the more icky they tend to be.  So making them really big is an easy way to create a good "bad guy" and of course splatting them is always fun.

Fun is the real order of the day here - infestation is definitely a low-budget horror, but it's the great sense of fun that really carries the film.  I mean, there's not much here that's really original, but it keeps up enough of a sense of what it is that you're happy to go along for the ride.

Saying that there are a few interesting things in there.  In particular the film starts very normally and the switch to the big bug stuff is very quickly and cleverly done.  It also gives rise to a situation where our hero is very much a hero by accident.  I mean, he rises to the occasion in the end, but it's just random chance that puts him into the situation he finds himself in.

The characters are just on the right side of cliché.  You've mostly seen them before and you know what they're about, but you get enough of a flavour that they're proper characters to engage with them.  It has a feel of being what you'd expect to actually happen if an apocalypse happened.

The sort of people you'd encounter would end up being pretty random - especially with how this works out.  The hero essentially revives people and of course if you were in town on any particular day the sort of people around you could be anybody.

The effects are quite good.  It's low budget, but nowadays they can do great things with both prosthetics and computer graphics even on tiny budgets so it really doesn't look bad at all.

One thing I would say is that the ending is a little frustrating.  It's clear it was set up as being for a sequel, but it's very open ended.  It's not quite clear what that sequel would be and the ending is therefore a little frustrating.  Particularly in light of the fact there isn't a sequel.

You know I don't really have a lot else to say about the film, other than that it's well worth checking out if you fancy a bit of big bug action.

olympics opening ceremony

So I watched the Olympics opening ceremony.

Well, I actually recorded it and then watched it the next day.  The original ceremony lasted something like 3 and a half or four hours, but I only spent about an hour watching it.  The reason for that was that I skipped through a lot of it and also had a lot of it on fast forward.

The bits I skipped entirely were the parade of nations and the speeches.  The first seemed to take hours, which isn't surprising, I guess, since there are something like 200 and odd nations taking part.  The speeches I just didn't really care, but it also felt like a great big comma in the whole thing.

I have to confess I also fast forwarded a lot of the first segment.  It all seemed to take a bit too long for me and also there was a lot of dancing in what I felt was a sort of Andrew Lloyd Webber musical style.  I think this stuff was probably a lot better if you were there.

One of the good things about watching on TV is that you can get close ups.  If you're there you might not see things that close up (unless you have binoculars or a camera with a zoom lense).  However, the down-side is that you have to look at what they show you.  When you're there you can focus on the bits that interest you.

The very first section was a big "pastoral idle" that was then transformed into a kind of industrial landscape.  The idea of the whole ceremony was to present a lot of British cultural stuff, so obviously the theme there was the industrial revolution.  But I had a couple of problems with it.

Firstly I think the impression was supposed to be how nice the pastoral stuff was and how grimy and oppressive the industrial stuff was.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the industrial revolution was a barrel of laughs but the country life pre-industrial revolution wasn't exactly a happy fun-time.

Also, this whole section lasted far too long for me.  However, the end of it, which was a clever introduction of the rings and a very striking image of the rings showering sparks was good.  It also kicked off some stuff I enjoyed a bit more.

As I say, the whole thing was about presenting Britain and British culture and on that front I don't know how a lot of the stuff would have been understood outside of Britain.  A lot of it was quite subtle and specific.  For example, I don't know how well known the Eastenders splash screen is - would people from China know what the hell that was referencing?

However, I don't want to give the impression I thought it was bad.  There was a lot of stuff I really liked, especially the use of music.  There was also a great segment where it was about children's literature, which was really clever.  Also the NHS was a nice thing to pay tribute to - the whole idea of the welfare state is a truly great British idea.

There was also a good amount of humour with Rowan Atkinson and the whole Bond thing being obvious highlights.

So overall I'd say it was good, although I'm glad I recorded it and watched it later.  Danny Boyle did a really good job.

hungarian gp

This cold seems to be hanging around longer than normal.

I don't feel bad, as such, but I still have a snotty nose and a bit of a cough.  It gets a bit better every day, but it's gotten to the point of just being annoying now.

It was the Hungarian Grand Prix this weekend.

It wasn't very exciting.

I mean, Lewis won and the Lotus's look particularly strong, with both finishing in the top three, but in terms of the actual race, very little really happened.

Apparently it's quite a fun circuit to drive and the spectators get quite a good view, but the circuit has a tendency to produce dull races.  On paper it does have some things to it that should make it enjoyable - it's quite short and there are quite a few sharp bends, including a couple of hairpins, for example.  But the trouble is for these to be effective overtaking spots you really need a good long straight beforehand for the cars to build up speed on.  This is particularly true where there are big bends that follow technical bits where drivers may make mistakes.

The main outcome of the race is probably to make the championship a bit closer.  Alonso is still quite a way ahead, but there's now a clutch of 4 drivers who could all potentially catch him.  However, it would probably take a spate of unreliability or lack of performance for Alonso for that to be likely.

There's also a very good chance, given the way the season has so far tended to play out that those drivers will actually all squabble over sins and second places, effectively taking points off each other.  That happened in the last couple of seasons and was a big part of why Vettel won.

It's now the big august break, when the teams are required to have two weeks where they close the factories and everyone takes a break.  It generally results in more than two weeks without races, though.

While it's good for me as it'll give me a chance to catch up, I have to say this year it would probably be better if they didn't have it.  The races will stretch out until November this year, and it's a bit silly if I'm honest.  Particularly as we'll probably start up again in March.

proof were it needed

So there's a thing.

Yesterday I wrote two blog entries - one to post on Thursday itself and one to post today.

Only it turns out that I've posted both yesterday.  I guess that proves just how confused and dazed I was!

And it's not improved a whole lot today as I woke up in the middle of the night sweating like a pig.  It was really hot and sticky and I had to turn the aircon on again, which is impossible to sleep through, so I've basically been up since about 3AM.

Quite why it was too hot to sleep last night but not earlier in the week, I'm not sure, but I'd guess it's something to do with the fact they're forecasting a dip in temperatures and a return of the rain today.

hungry for hungary (sport-bonkers)

I think I said I was going to do a post with some photos in it from Farnborough.  I'd hoped to put the photos together over the weekend, but with the cold it basically didn't happen, although I did figure out how to get the photos off my phone.  There are some other photos on there that I had planned to blog about so I've got them off too.

It really is sport bonkers this summer.

For those who are general spots fans we've had the Six Nations, Euro 2012, bloody Wimbledon, the Open, one of the best f1 seasons ever and The Olympics have started... before the opening ceremony.  I thought false starts were illegal?  Ho ho ho.

The sport that's kicked off is football and it's fair enough because there are so many teams involved (both lady's and men's) it seems like they basically wouldn't fit into the two weeks that the Olympics basically last.

I've mentioned before that I'm not really into the Olympics, but there are some sorts in it that I could get interested in, I think.  Particularly things like Archery and the Shooting.

I'm not sure I'll watch any of it, though.  I might watch the opening ceremony, which is on this Friday evening.  It's apparently quite surreal.

The BBC has - as you might expect - gone a bit sports bonkers, in that several of their channels (including the channels used for the red button stuff) are basically going to be dedicated to showing Olympics events.

What I'm hoping all this really means is that I'll get a chance to catch up on telly I've either missed or recorded with the aim of watching during the Olympics.  I may even watch some DVDs and anime.

Indeed I'm hoping this applies for the whole of august, since this weekend is the Hungarian Grand Prix and marks the start of the mid-season break, so there's no Grand Prix at all in August.

Hungary is apparently a good one for spectators at the circuit but I think it tends to be a mixed bag for race quality - some good, some bad.

confused and dazed

I'm absolutely shattered.

I started this week with a stinking cold and so much sleep that my body seemed to get bored of it.

It's now Thursday and I feel like it's a Friday after having worked for 2 weeks straight.  In fact, as I write this it's early Thursday morning, so there's actually 40% of the working week left.

I'm also sat in the middle of the classic British weather with exclamation points.  Not a week ago it was rainy and I was still regularly flirting with the idea of wearing a jumper to work.

Now I'm sat in the office with both my fans on full blast all day and my air conditioner going full blast in the evenings.

Apparently things will cool off next week a bit, so that should give me some relief.  Bloody jet stream - make up your mind!

I've also had a headache since... ooh, Sunday?

I think it's a combination of the cold and the weather, but also I know that the fans and my aircon tend to give me dry eyes which then tend to give me a headache or at least make any headache worse.

Hopefully next week I'll be back to feeling a bit more normal.

But on top of that I'm totally and utterly skint.  I've made a bit of a mess of my finances this month, having forgotten about a payment I needed to make and essentially spent that money.

I also got my maths wrong on one of my credit cards and it went over its limit.  I corrected it right away, but it means I was using this month's money where I thought I'd been clever and made enough space using last month's money.

It also appears I'm about to run out of electricity.

Just recently I've been letting the amount of money on there run down, since I was expecting to take a new job and therefore be moving - I didn't want to leave it with loads on there so I was just topping it up by little bits.  Trouble is it's now a month where I've run out of money so I can't top it up and it's getting very low.

Part of the trouble is I have no idea when I'll get paid.  Most companies have fixed days they pay you on, but mine it's basically just towards the end of the month and could be any day - I might not even get paid until next Tuesday as that is the end of the month.

You can now kinda see one of the motivators for me having wanted to get a new job - a need for cash.  Unfortunately my new salary doesn't kick in until next month (end of the month) so I'm also likely to have a "hangover" effect from cock-ups this month to deal with.

2001 nights (TO)

Well this was something a bit different.

2001 nights actually turned out to be more along the lines of hard science fiction than I was expecting.  I think what I was expecting was something a bit more action-heavy.  Which isn't to say that what I actually got was bad, it was just not what I was expecting.

The original novels that TO was adapted from appear to cover a very large period of time.  They're essentially about interstellar travel, but as the stories progress different technologies are invented that change how things are done.

The stories are therefore separate for the most part, although they also follow along in the sense that they're about the same things, as I understand it.  For this adaptation they've taken two of the stories which are separated by a chunk of time so the plot of the first revolves around one level of technology, but the plot of the second half revolves around a much higher level of technology.

I won't go into too much detail on that front, since as I say it's hard sci-fi and the technologies and what they are are integral to the actual stories.  What I will say is that I also wasn't expecting this two-story portmanteau sort of a thing.

I generally like a good portmanteau, but here I'm not entirely sure it works.  I'm also not 100% that I'm fully representing it properly - it's not really a portmanteau because the two stories were released separately in Japan as OAVs.  However, here they're really presented as one complete package and expectation leads you to expect they will follow-on directly, but that's not what you get.

What you get are two hard sci-fi stories that are both completely different and loosely connected.

Now I hope you get the feeling that I quite liked that side of things.  I quite enjoyed that they were interesting stories.  I also quite enjoyed that they were fairly gently told (deftly told might be a better phrase - they're not slow as such, but are certainly told at a moderated pace).  And I definitely enjoyed the fact they were hard sci-fi.

However, what I didn't enjoy was the user of CGI animation.

For me it would have worked much better if they were real actors - even real actors plopped on only relatively good green-screen backgrounds.  If it had looked like Babylon 5 and had real actors I think it would have worked.

However, it looks like a game FMV sequence and I have to say this ruins the effect.

I mean, we're talking high-grade FMV sequences, but it just didn't work for me.  As with all good sci-fi fundamentally these come back to human stories and they needed human actors in them, not CGI ones.

If I'm honest the first story is better than the second.  The second suffers from being a bit too predictable and a climax that doesn't quite make proper sense, but I'd say it's well worth giving both a go.

new job... same as the old job

Well, the whole job thing has resolved itself.

Basically I'm staying exactly where I've always been.

As expected there was a counter-offer from my current employers and I fully expected that they would not be able to meet the offer I had received.  There was a caveat to this in that the offer was for London so that adds more to cost of living, etc.  In other words, to be a comparable offer it didn't need to be the same, but even with that I didn't think they'd match it.

And they didn't.  Not in terms of the pure offer, anyway.  However, there was a "cake later" part to the offer (the majority of both offers being "cake now") and it could, in theory, be a significant slice of cake.

When I started on this road my main drivers were that I didn't feel like my "career" was going anywhere.  In other words it felt like I'd hit a kind of ceiling and being a small company I couldn't go anywhere.

A big part of this was because the person who owns and runs the business would need to retire for anything like that to happen.  Well the cake later relates to the fact that the boss is retiring.

However, the down side to this whole thing is that we're talking about something that will happen in 4 or 5 years and this is the build-up to it.  In other words, by staying, I'm committing to that period of time or I get no cake whatsoever.

How big a slice of cake is the gamble - the risk is that it turns out to be a tiny bit of cake so I'd really have been better off leaving.  This seems unlikely, particularly for me.  I'm the longest serving member of staff outside of the boss and therefore in theory my slice of cake is bigger than anybody else's just be default.  This is counter-acting a bit by the fact I'm technically middle-management, but it's a pretty flat management structure, tbh.

Details of cake small or large are pending, so for now I have simply accepted the counter-offer.  It's a good offer and puts me in the right ball-park of jobs similar to mine.

I've also gotten them to agree to send me on some courses and also to put in place some of the tools and processes we need.  These were basically conditional on me accepting.

Now I just need to come up with a plan for it all!

german grand prix

I have struck down with a disease.

By which I mean I have a cold.  I am pretty sure I picked it from a meeting I went to last Wednesday.  I developed a bit of a headache in the days after the meeting, but then the cold only really hit on Saturday.

I had therefore wondered if maybe that wasn't the source, but I've encountered no other diseased people (someone at the meeting had a cold) and my work colleague who also went to the meeting has gotten a cold.

Anyway, impact of this was not particularly bad on Saturday, I could just feel it coming on, but then Saturday night was terrible and I got next to no sleep.  Sunday I was therefore zonked all day as the cold really hit me and I was horribly tired.

I basically stayed in bed all day watching TV and even then I went to bed super early and ended up getting something like 12 hours sleep.  Today I therefore feel like the worst of it is over, though I still have a runny nose and clagged up throat.

So my TV watching included the German Grand Prix.  I think it was an okay one.  Lewis unfortunately had a puncture very early on and it destroyed his race, though both cars looked quick in practice and Jenson qualified sixth and ended up second after Vettel had a penalty applied after the race.

It's difficult to tell if the upswing in form is genuine though - the bit I don't like about this season is that the tyres just seem to produce too much random-ness.  For example, Webber won in Silverstone but finished 8th in Germany.

I also have to confess with the cold and feeling tired I didn't really quite get into the race as much as normal.

Farnborough Air Show

Last weekend I went to the Farnborough Air Show.

I was actually hoping to have put together some pics but I just haven't had time (more on that next week).

Having lived and worked in and around this area for around 13 years I've never been to Farnborough.  Well, I've been to Farnborough, but I've never been to the air show.  In my defence a while back it did become bi-annual.  However, with my imminent switch of profession I figured I should go.

It was really rather good, if long and tiring.  It was pretty good value overall, though - the tickets were expensive (£40 on the door) but you got good value.

I have to say I wasn't expecting it to be so... big.  I've been to air shows before - Biggin Hill in particular - and the focus is pretty squarely on the air displays.  There are usually two types - ones where they basically just fly about and the others where they do proper displays.

Okay, both are proper displays and are planned out in detail, but what I mean is that in the former they run the aircraft through a few things it can do, but in the aerobatic displays they do tricks and put on a deliberately complex "show".  I'm sure you get what I mean.  And of course some of the fighters are able to do clever things, so it's not really a hard and fast line.

There was a nice blend of the two.  In particular there was a focus some of the more unusual and distinctive aircraft for the basic displays and then they had really good aerobatics.  They key was that there was a nice mix of the two.

Particular highlights included the Osprey, which is the new tilt-rotor.  It's really big, which I wasn't expecting and looks weird in either "mode".  When the rotors are up it looks like a Chinook they accidentally built sideways and when they're down it looks like a plane where they forgot to put the wings on.  The rotors are enormous - each blade is more than 30 feet long.

Another highlight was the A380, which is just bonkers huge.  You almost can't believe it will get into the air, but it actually took off in quite a short distance.  It also did a really slow pass where it just seems to defy gravity.

They also had a "functional" display for the Tornado where they pretended to blow stuff up on the runway, but the bangs were really loud and made everyone jump a few times.

The F18 Super Hornet was also quite impressive - I didn't really know much about it before, but it's a really agile aircraft.  And of course there were the Red Arrows who did a full display and were very impressive.  It's been a while since I've seen them do a full display.

But I mentioned it being big - there were a huge number (something like 80-odd) aircraft on display.  I got there pretty early and went around and saw most of them.  This was where I discovered my first cock-up.

When I'd packed my bag I'd done my favourite trick of packing too much so it was heavy.  I therefore dumped a few things and one of these was my spare camera battery.  I'd recharged (or so I thought) them the night before and figured one battery would last.

Trouble was as soon as I started using it the battery reported being almost empty.  As such it had run out and wouldn't take any more pictures by the time I got half way through.

Luckily I had my phone so I used the camera on that to take a few pics, but I therefore didn't bother at all during the air displays.

The other cock-up was wearing shorts and dumping the jumper I'd packed.  It was surprisingly chilly for the most part although, weirdly, I got sunburnt!  I guess the sun was strong when it was out (plus we've not really seen the sun for me to build up any sort of resistance) but it wasn't actually warm.

But as well as the aircraft on display, which took me all morning to go around they had an "innovation zone" and a "space zone".  I paid these brief visits.  The space one was a bit rubbish, but the innovation one looked good, although I realised there just wasn't going to be the time to go around.

Quite how people find the time on the trade days when all the big halls are opened too I don't know.

the humax you fix with cotton buds

I mentioned before about how my PVR, which is a Humax 9200T, had developed an odd and annoying fault.

To briefly recap the clock would "fail" when it went into standby, which meant that it would then not wake up in order to record programs.  This meant I had to leave the box on all the time.

Doing some digging around I eventually found a forum where lots of other people with this PVR were having the same problem.  Initially there were a few different ideas as to what was happening but eventually one of them had worked out that (in essence) contamination on the surface of the printed circuit board was causing the thing to short.

The solution was therefore to disconnect it and take it out of the machine and clean it.  Cleaning could be achieved using ethanol alcohol, which was most easily found in a reasonably pure form in surgical spirit and cotton buds (the ones you put in your ear but are told not to) were ideal for the actual cleaning.

As such, Saturday morning, after having returned from doing my washing I set about my PVR with a screwdriver and released the PCB.

It was quite a job, actually, as the cables connecting it to the main machine was difficult to get at and disconnect.  There were also a lot more screws than I was expecting.

Having liberated it I set about it with the cotton buds and surgical spirit.  This was quite tedious if I'm honest.  There was one particularly area of the board that the instructions said were key, so I focused there, but I gave the whole board a wipe over too.

A lot of gunk came off, but the instructions also indicated that it wasn't really dirt that was the problem as such.  Also I think a lot of what looked like dirt was actually felt tip pen marks.  I'm assuming these felt tip pen marks were put on when they were wiring and soldering the board up.

I gave the key area several goings over.  In the forum thread a few people had said they'd needed to do it a couple of times before it had worked and I figured better to overdo it than have to take the thing apart again.

I left it to dry a bit (alcohol evaporates at room temperature, so it wasn't really very "wet" and then re-assembled.  I left it for a while again and then switched on.  Initial success was achieved in that nothing blew up and everything worked in terms of showing TV channels and playing back recordings.

And then - the moment of truth.  I put it into standby and... It worked.  The standby clock came on and stayed on.  I switched it on and off a few times.  I left it in standby for a good while.  I set up some recordings, put it in standby and it turned on.

Indeed it has been working like there was never any problem in the first place.

So we have success!

And what's particularly pleasing is that Humax would have charged £30 for the PCB replacement.  This only cost me about £7.00 and that was mainly because all the local boots had was a big bottle of surgical spirit.

green lantern

Wow, this was terrible.

I'd heard it was bad, of course.  But then I've watched plenty of stuff that's supposed to be bad and enjoyed it.  And of course sometimes when things are properly bad you can watch them and enjoy them on that level.

There are obviously some things that you find so terrible you can't enjoy them on that level - I find bad singing / karaoke to be so horrible I can't stand it even though I know other people roll around laughing.  Well, this isn't that.  It's just bad.

Of course part of the problem here is I'm not really a fan of the green lantern comics.  Indeed, I'm not really that big a fan of DC in general.  I dunno, I've always found their stuff a bit dorky - I was always more of a Marvel kind of guy.

I mean even batman - he works, basically, but they managed to give him such a rubbish costume.  I mean, every film adaptation, the first thing they've done is re-do the costume, right?  And he usually ends up some form of black, right?  Because black's cool and grey and navy aren't.

The other part of the problem is that I find the green lantern thing particularly silly.  I mean, let's get to it - it's called the green lantern, yet they wear a ring.  And yes I know they recharge the ring from the lantern, it's just it's that kind of stupid "just because" that marks out bad comic books for me.  Well, it marks out bad story telling full stop, but it just crops up a lot in comic books.

So what's wrong with the film itself?

Well, to start with the hero is not particularly likeable.  He's a good-looking jock and behaves like a bit of a prat.  There's an attempt to make him likeable by giving him a relationship with his nephew, but this just comes across as being forced in to make him likeable.

The film also dumps you right into the mythos of the comics without any real explanation as to what's what.  Well, it has a crack at explaining it, but tbh it's all a bit naff and clichéd.  It's also confusing and a bit messy and relies on narrators and all powerful weirdy beards.  Weirdy beards who, by the way, who seem to be stand-offish and meddling all at the same time.

It was also way too long.

It looked quite pretty, though.

job offer

Well, start at the beginning as they say.

Early last week I received a job offer.  There were 3 jobs still in the pipeline where I'd had one or more interviews and were still waiting to know.  Well, technically there were 4 but one went totally silent on me a while back.

Having received the offer from one (and it is a bloody good offer) I felt confident in pushing the others about where I stood - was I going to get an offer or did they want to see me again or what?  I also said I'd received an offer to help chivvy things along (which can be risky in case they think you're trying to play hard-ball or bullshitting).

Anyway, both of the others came back as a no.

If I'm totally honest I would have put the one that made me an offer at the bottom of the list of the three, but then the two above it didn't want me.

I also needed to think long and hard about this offer.  Not the offer itself, which as I say is very generous, but whether I wanted to go in that direction with my career and how I saw things going.  In particular the job description is a bit different from what I'd originally envisaged when I started looking for a new job.

Also, unfortunately something happened that made the whole situation a bit more complicated.

since I don't want to say who the company is it's very difficult for me to explain this, but it did give me pause for thought, shall we say.

However, having considered everything I have decided to accept the offer.  They've sent me a whole bunch of forms to fill out and they want to vet me so I don't technically have the job yet.

However, I have given them a tentative verbal yes.

My next scary thing to do is tell my boss.  It's a little tricky since I obviously don't have a start date and there's a bit of a chicken and egg situation.

They won't discuss start date until I get the vetting, but I can't give proper notice without a date.  I also don't want to give notice in case I somehow fail the vetting - I'd be out of a job entirely!  However, I need to tell my boss I'm off because part of the vetting is taking up references from my current employer!

What I've therefore decided to do is talk to my boss and explain it all - can't give a firm leave date as they need to vet me before discussing that, and as part of that they will be taking up references so expect a call.

This way it also maximises the preparation time they have for when I leave.  I guess also they may want to make a counter offer, but I'd be amazed if they can afford to better it.

official cereal bar

Well it's been an eventful couple of days, but in order to give me a chance to find some space I thougth I'd post the one I missed last week.

There's three words that tell you everything that's wrong with the modern world.

Nature Valley Cereal Bars are the official Cereal Bar Supplier to the London 2012 Olympics.

Now don't get me wrong here - I'm sure Nature Valley makes a lovely cereal bar.  And if the sports in the Olympics are your bag then I'm sure it's a lovely thing.  If you've got tickets and you're going along to an event then I hope you have a great time.

But why does the Olympics need an official cereal bar supplier?

When the Greeks were wrestling each other, naked and slathered in oil, on top of some mountain somewhere, do you honestly think that the proposition of having an official cereal bar supplier would have made them realise that that's where they'd been going wrong all these years - no official supplier of cereal bars!

Side stepping the issues of the fact the Greeks probably didn't know what a cereal bar was, let alone care, why does the Olympics need an official anything?  Why is the Olympics a brand?  Why does it need marketing?  If it needs those things to pay for it why is it costing us taxpayers a small fortune?

The British Grand Prix doesn't have an official supplier of cereal bars (though I don't doubt Bernie has spent many a misty-eyed moment dreaming of all the extra cash he could rake in if he could just pursued everybody else that what F1 really needs is a bunch of official suppliers of stuff that's irrelevant to the successful undertaking of the sport).  Wimbledon doesn't have an official supplier of cereal bars.

Heck, I don't think even football - the veritable flagship of just how much rampant capitalism can fuck up good things - has an official supplier of cereal bars.  I mean, I'm pretty sure it has sponsors and I would guess it has official suppliers of things like footballs and I know the team's kit is supplied by a sportswear supplier.

But that's my point - sponsorship has an air of "normality" to it (even if it can leave a bad taste in the mouth) and supplying stuff the sport needs makes sense (even if, again, it's a bit capitalist of my personal taste) but having an "official supplier" of something that plainly isn't essential is just not right.

This rant was brought to you by Reebok - the official supplier of trainers to the transperambulation blog.

put the cotton bud where?

I did actually write a blog post yesterday, but I was so busy I forgot to post it.  It was quite generic, so I'll save it for next week.

So I have a bit of an update on the PVR front.

It's a bit weird, though.

Apparently, the losing the time when going into standby is actually quite a common problem with the 9200 Humax box.  Indeed, it's commonly called the --:-- problem as that's what the display shows instead of the time while in standby.

There is also a solution.  But it's a bit weird.

Basically, the front panel isn't just a display, it also houses the clock components that show the time and, more importantly, wake the machine from standby when it needs to record.  These components consist (excluding the display itself and among other minor bits) of a chip, a large capacitor and an oscillator.

What has been diagnosed as happening is that the components are, very roughly speaking shorting due to impurity build up on the surface of the actual Printed Circuit Board (PCB) these are all attached too.  It's a little more complicated than that, from what I can make out, but the solution is, in essence, to clean the circuit board.

Now it's not really dirt that's the problem, but it's easier to think in those terms.  And being a PCB you can't just stick it in the washing and give it a scrub.  To clean it (and I'm going to give it a go) you have to use cotton buds and surgical spirit (basically meths without the minerals).

The reason I'm going to give it a go is that the official solution is to phone Humax and get them to send me a replacement board, which costs about £30.  I can't honestly believe the board costs anything like £30 - the main components I mentioned are purchasable online for less than £2.00.  Hence why I'm going to give it a go this weekend.

By the way - it also potentially does relate to the power cut.  A couple of people on the forum I looked this up on reported it happening after power cuts.  And given the point of the capacitor is to keep the clock going during power outages (it's obviously powered normally when plugged in) I suspect that the brown outs caused some sort of problem that's led to this issue.

There's a lot more detail with instructions on this forum - http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1274989 (just in case someone has stumbled across this blog entry via a google search or similar).

thor

I was very pleasantly surprised by Thor.

I can't say I was ever a fan of him in comic book form.  Norse mythology is quite interesting, but the particular interpretation used in the comic books never particularly interested me.

I also wasn't a particular fan of his costume and the use of a sort of formal, upper class English with a bit of middle-ages English thrown in for good measure always struck me as a bit weird.  He's a Norse god, not a Shakespearean character.

I also always found it a bit daft that he ever had any problems at all - I mean, he's a God, right?  Okay a lot of the adventures revolved around Loki and he's from a polytheistic faith so perhaps isn't all-powerful (though I think his dad, Odin, was supposed to be) but still - dude's a God, and there's that thing in fiction where if anything is possible, nothing is interesting.

There's also the thing where all faiths seem to exist and be correct in the Marvel Universe, which again, always struck me as a bit weird.

Anyway, the film generally worked quite well.  If I was to criticise one element of it, that would be that Asgard seemed a bit weird.  I mean, it was quite comic-booky, but perhaps a bit too much?  It just felt very artificial, even factoring the point that it's fictional, if you see what I mean.

The plot was pretty much what I basically understood the origin of Thor to be - being headstrong and ending up getting kicked out of Asgard and then redeeming himself.  One thing I did find interesting was Loki - they did quite a good job of portraying him as one of the good guys up to a point where he turned.

Knowing the character in the comics where he's always the trickster and causing mischief, it was quite difficult to set that aside, but it was done convincingly here.

What also worked very well were the humanising / humbling of Thor himself.  You genuinely felt he had a character ark, which could have been quite difficult to achieve, given he starts of as a heroically good God, but it was a bit more subtle than that (if, ultimately, obvious in story terms).

The film also had lots of funny stuff in it and looked great.  In particular the costumes were well done to preserve the basic design points, but didn't look daft.  I think it was a particularly wise choice to ditch Thor's helmet for the majority of the film, for example.

So yeah, one of the better Marvel adaptations, I think.  We'll just have to see if the second one suffers for not having Kenneth Branagh at the helm.

don't use London

While I was "enjoying" my mammoth driving day last Thursday I saw a sign that said:

"During the Olympics avoid driving in central London"

This amused me quite a lot.  I wonder if the advice applies to everyone that lives and works in central London as well?

The Olympics are only a couple of weeks away.  I'm already saving things up to watch on my PVR as I'm anticipating a bit of a dearth of watchable stuff for me.

Don't get me wrong - I've nothing really against the Olympics as a sporting event.  Indeed, I think they're good things from the sporting point of view, it's just they are, on the whole, a collection of sports that I just don't care about.

And I guess, to be honest, I don't mind that they'll probably absorb all the TV hours that there are - it will give me an opportunity to do other stuff.

And mentioning that, my PVR it's still not working right.

The problem is a bit of a weird one.  Basically, when I put it in standby what should happen is that the clock stays lit showing the time.  This is an outward manifestation of the PVR tracking the time so that it can switch itself on when a recorded program comes up.

It now doesn't do this.  If I put it in standby it just shows a dash-dash-colon-dash-dash patter you will be familiar with from new appliances which have a clock that you haven't programmed.

As such, it's not tracking the time and so when a recording time roles around it just sits there and does nothing.

However, where it gets weird is that if I put it in standby while it's recorded a pre-recorded program, then it holds the time like it should, even after the program stops recording.  And the key there is it's a pre-set recording.  If I just set it to record and then put it in standby it doesn't hold the time either.

However, the above is all quite erratic - occasionally it will hold the time even if it's not recording a pre-scheduled program.  And it will always do pre-recorded programs if you leave it on, which means sometimes I've had to leave it on all night and all day to record stuff that's on late or on in the day.

It reminds me quite a lot of what happens when a CMOS battery fails, and really the PVR is just a computer in a VCR style box with appropriate connectors and a specially designed operating system.

In those cases when you switch the computer on after the power has been off it will ask you to set the time.  But then if you turn it off without turning the power fully off it will hold that time.  IT's only when you turn the power off that it would use the CMOS battery to help it store the time.

The difference is I'm not turning the PVR off, just putting it in standby.

There has actually recently been an announcement that a new on-demand TV thing will be rolling out quite soon and of course my current box doesn't have HD at all, so I'm actually tempted to buy a new box with these other features.  However, in the meantime I've bought some cables that should allow me to connect the PVR to my computer and then do something roughly equivalent to a bios update in the hopes that what's actually happened is software related.

If not and it's something in the hardware it may essentially make the decision of buying a new box for me.

british grand prix

My dad and sister went to the British grand prix.

I didn't.  I couldn't really afford it, both in terms of finances and time.  Finances because I'm hopeless at managing them and time because even when the idea was proposed I was planning to look for a new job and new I'd need the days leave for that.

As it turns out I think I was somewhat fortunate.  The weather has been particularly dreadful and on Saturday (Qualifying day) they were turning people away from the parking as the hard-standing areas were already full and they wanted to give the soft-standing areas time to dry out a bit.

Silverstone is quite an exposed track.  Like many of the UK's racing circuits it's an old airfield and as you'd imagine, you generally want to put airfields in nice open areas so there's nothing for the pilots to crash into.

There are stands, of course, and they can be good for keeping you out of the wind and rain, although this can depend quite heavily on direction.  I recall one year sitting in the stand and still getting wet and cold because the rain was driving into the front of the stand.

Anyway - the race itself.

It was a really good one.  The British Grand Prix can occasionally produce a duffer.  The problem is that it's pretty high speed, and overtaking normally only tends to be associated with technical sections (people make mistakes) and high speed straight into slow-speed corner.

Anyway, this was a good one and part of it came from my old theory about how, if you want to produce good races a good way to achieve it is to randomise the field (a draw like in football cups, for example).  If there was a lottery-style draw you end up with lots of fast cars out of position so you tend to get overtaking.

F1 is a trickier case for this idea as some circuits overtaking is extremely difficult (Monaco and other street circuits) and the cars are heavily dependent on down force, which makes getting close to the guy in front difficult, since you drive into his turbulent air and your own down force is less effective.

Nowadays of course we've had some counters to that - you've got DRS and KERS to help with overtaking and the rules changed so little since last year that it's made everything closer.

This is another element for F1 - they bugger about with the rules a lot.  But then this is swings and roundabouts - they bugger about with them because people find ways to exploit them and these often need ruling out.

But yes, we ended up with a cracking race, although the McLarens didn't do much - it comes across like they've been struggling to really push the car forward.  They started out with the best car at the start, but failed to capitalise it, partly due to a few too many human errors.  Now everyone else seems to have developed the car so they're at the same level if not a bit quicker, where the McLaren seems to have stagnated.