Spent today at the British Motor Show at Excel, there hasn’t been a motor show in London since they decided to move the event to the NEC some time in the 80’s. I had a great time and I saw lots of new concept cars and dreams cars. Will update this post with photos and more detail at some point over the next couple of days.
Monthly Archive for July, 2006
Should have googled ‘hearing dogs’ last night. Any how they are for real. Dogs for the deaf, though I’m still having difficulty understanding how this works.
But then I also thought Helper Monkeys weren’t real either. But they are, me and Steve were talking about this today, so we decided to investigate what we have to do to get a monkey in the UK. It doesn’t look to hard however, they are not cheap. Sea Monkeys look like they are going to be the only monkies we can take home for the forseable future.
Was walking around Egham this evening before heading to the station to head back home. On my travels I spotted this, and I was confused.What the fuck is a Hearing Dog!
Answers on a post card please.
Whilst standing on the platform at Egham station I noticed the work they were doing on the other tracks has been completed. However some wise ass has left a brand new bit of track on the other side of the tracks, right in the middle. If for some reason anything hanging from the bottom of the train caught this loose peace I can imagine what might happen. Perhaps it is in a safe operations manual somewhere at Rail Track, but for some reason I really doubt it.
Well I went and got a new graphics card as planned, however I have just determined the problem is not the graphics card, but it the CPU since the protection is kicking in and everything else is powering up correctly. So it looks like I bought a new graphics card for no reason. I really can’t be asked with fixing this problem all I really need is a Mac Mini and loads of storage, it will free up space on the floor and make it cooler if I go to a more compact PC. At the moment my Powerbook is back in the driving seat, which also is showing its age, and I occasionally get some slow down. I don’t even want to think about how I shrink and re-encode video on a Mac right now.
Now that Mati is working at Sky TV, I think I’m going to drop cable and go to satelite or better still get a DVB-S card for the HTPC so I can record TV. Both of my Windows PCs are out of action, the linux fileserver is fine, as it the ThinkPad. Perhaps I will ebay the lot of them and get a new Power Mac when they come out.
Well finally Superman Returns was released in the cinemas. So I had to go and see this evening. Some friends started ringing me in the early evening asking if we could change the plan, and go and see it on saturday instead, to which I said NO. Trying to coax 9 people into going to the cinema on the same night is so hard. Plus I don’t see why I should change my plan if people can’t sort themselves out. Any how in the end 4 of us ended up at the Vue in Acton.
Well were do I start, this film has everything. People who are expecting a modern action version of Superman, just like how Golden Eye was to Bond. Will be disappointed, instead Singer has managed to recreate the feel of the first Superman film perfectly. I could tell from what people were saying coming out of the cinema, that they totally missed the point of this endeavour. Superman Returns!
I now also understand why the plot of the film was so closely guarded prior to the release of the film in the US. However it is in line with 3 of the story arches in the comics, though the surrounding events, timeline and order has been changed to make for a 3 hour film. Yes, the film is 6 minutes short of 3 hours. However I have to say I didn’t feel it. In my mind this is the big film of the year and Singer has done a great job. It is clear that Brandon Routh was chosen for his looks, but as it turns out he is an excellent Superman.
As for the rest of the cast, Kate Bosworth make an excellent Lois Lane. I have never been a fan, due mainly to the fact she shows up in poor romantic comedies. However it has to be said she looks hot as a brunette. Kevin Spacey plays Lex Luthor well, and makes this role his own, just what I would expect from him. I’m also glad that he doesn’t quite steel the show, which I hope is an intentional thing.
I was not expecting Kal Penn and Parker Posey in this film until I watched it, I think they did a good job of playing Luthor’s cohorts. It is obvious that there will be a sequel in a couple of years time, and I’m already looking forward to it. I will probably see this again in a couple of weeks time. I hope the DVD is out soon as well.
This is the must see film of the year, not much left in the summer release schedule to be honest, Pirates of Carribean 2 came out last week, and I will probably watch I’m not in a rush at the moment. Then Miami Vice is out in a couple of weeks and that is it for the summer films, If I’m not mistaken. There are a few big film to come this year, but they don’t hit till after september. Also watched the Spiderman 3 trailer, which I guess will be one of the big films of next year.
My desktop crapped out a couple of nights ago so I decided to investigate this evening. It looks like the graphics card has died. My room has been extra toasty the last couple of nights thanks to the heatwave we are having in London at the moment. So I guess that could have caused it. I figured out why it was making so much noise as well since it had a couple of millimetres of solid dust. So I will have to head to the computer fair on saturday to get a new card.
Since I was out bowling with the ex-APR crew this evening I thought I would try other routes home late at night, in the end I couldn’t be asked from changing to get to Paddington from Oxford Street so I stayed on the Central line, not bad 35 minutes from Finsbury Park to Ealing Broadway.
Whilst on the bus from Ealing to Brentford I noticed that some either creative genius or lazy b’stard decided to simply call Pirates of the Carribean : Dead Man’s Chest, just Pirates 2. I guess that most people would get what that means, so it is quite creative. I’m guessing Disney (or whoever made the film) didn’t think about how much space or how many letters that is for old style cinema signage.
Superman Returns is out friday I can’t wait!
Couldn’t find a sensible thing to put the CPU form the Media Center in whilst I shipped the motherboard back to the supplier so I used an anti-static bag and a fag packet. Picture of which I thought I would try the new phone out with at the same time.
Just got back from watching the World Cup Final, Italy won on penalties. I wanted France to win however all credit to Italy on their victory with all the corruption issues taking place in Serie A I think this means a lot in restoring some pride back in the profession.
Zidane managed to get himself sent of after being provoked by Materazzi, It is not clear what exactly was said to cause Zidane to head butt him in the chest like he did, but I’m guessing it had to be serious. The match was Zidane’s last game and I hope people don’t remember him for this incident, since he is a great footballer. He is such a big hero in France, I hope that the French press don’t give him too hard a time.
The other big final of course was the men’s final at Wimbledon, Federer obviously won as everyone predicted. He only conceeded 1 set in the whole tournament and that was today against Nadal. I think Nadal is going to be the one to watch in the coming years. I which I had Court 1 tickets last wednesday it would have been great to seem him actually play.
After having tried to deal with Asus support I gave up and contacted Aria to RMA the board. On the basis that I will have to get an alternative motherboard to put into the media center. Until today Aria had said that the board had been discontinued, but today over the phone both me and the support guy realised that the board has not been discontinued, some smart alec has just changed the product code. This even worried the guy on the phone so much that he asked why it had changed. Guess what, those europe packaging guidelines that came into effect on July 1st have resulted in many manufactures switching packaging, which has resulted in a product code changes for certain lines. So I will have a replacement in a few days. Yipee!
Jat managed to get his name pulled out of the draw for tickets, so we spent the day hanging out at center court. The first match was Federer vs Ancic, which was going to be interesting since Ancic is the only person to have beaten Federer. The bad weather ensured that there was a late start, which is good since we didn’t get there till around 2pm. They started the match at 1pm, but came off after a few games. The weather ekpt changing so we saw the covers at least 3 times during the course of the afternoon. The match didn’t finish till at least 5pm. In the end Federer one in straight sets. The second match was Hewitt vs Baghdatis. Haven’t seen Baghdatis play before, so it was good to see him play, however Hewitt did not seem up to scratch. Was hoping that Hewitt would beat Baghdatis, but it was meant to be.
As for the other games Bjorkman beat Stepanek, and the Nadal vs Nieminen match was pushed out till the morning. Haven’t worked out the drawing for the semis except that Federer is playing Bjorkman. Whatever happens Federer is going to win without a doubt.
Well I realised on saturday that it was upgrade time for my phone, was not going to bother but the Nokia had been playing up for a number of weeks. So I thought I would try to kill two birds with one stone by getting the new Sony Walkman phone, the w810i. So I can make calls and listen to music on the move until the new iPod show up.
Although I liked the 6880 I was not really using the phone to the fullest. On top of that the menus were not the fastest and it had a tendency to crash a lot. Plus after realising how much 3G data calls were costing me just for e-mail I thought it was time to get a Blackberry as I did a few months ago. So going back to a 2.5G phone was not going to be a problem. Plus I was missing the fact I couldn’t us Bluephone Elite on Mac like I was with my old T610 and V3.
The w810i showed up this morning so far I have just synced it (Apple just updated Mac OS X, which contains an isync update that enables communication with w810i, so that hack on the net does hack to be employed to make sync work.). So far the only issue I can see is getting playlists out of iTunes. At the moment I’m just copying the files to the phone over USB. The playlists are not picked up, so I have to make the manually on the phone which is a bit of a plane. I don’t really want to use the Windows software provided since all of the iTunes data is on the Mac.
