I seem to have found an at least temporary quasi-career
Which is that for the moment at least I am in the custom PC building / PC tech support business. If anyone in London would like me to set up a wired or wireless network, or to build them a custom PC (Requests for interesting or unusual form factors, or strange hardware configurations, or high end gaming systems, or other things that one does not find in Dixons are welcomed by me, and indeed considered to be fun), or upgrade an existing one, or to repair a desktop PC that is not working, or even to solve complicated software problems, I can offer competitive rates.
(I can also provide advice and setup services with respect to home entertainment systems, including high and extremely high end ones. These may or may not include a PC of some sort, although I suspect that in future many of them will).
And I'm pretty good.
Friday, July 09, 2004
Redirection
I have a piece over at ubersportingpundit that was intended to be a preview of tomorrow's Natwest Trophy final between the West Indies and New Zealand, and ended up mainly being a serve at the England team (who are not playing in the final).
I have a piece over at ubersportingpundit that was intended to be a preview of tomorrow's Natwest Trophy final between the West Indies and New Zealand, and ended up mainly being a serve at the England team (who are not playing in the final).
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Monday, July 05, 2004
Redirection: I have a long piece on sporting rights on British television (which evolves into a history of British television in general) over at Samizdata.
Uh-huh
Those of my readers who regularly blog for Moveable Type blogs will know that MT has e-mail notification of comments. If someone leaves a comment on one of your posts, you are sent an e-mail informing you of this fact, and containing the comment. Unless a serious argument gets going in the comments section, most comments are received in the 24 hours or so after you make your post. Often you get a trickle of comments after that, but usually only a trickle.
Which I was surprised to turn on my computer this afternoon to discover that I had received four comments in half an hour on this Samizdata quote of the day I posted last week. One doesn't normally get many comments on quote postings anyway. My first thought was that the comments were spam, which is the usual explanation when once gets lots of comments all at once on old postings. But no, these were normal comments from people who had read the post. What would explain it?
Oh. This would explain it.
Those of my readers who regularly blog for Moveable Type blogs will know that MT has e-mail notification of comments. If someone leaves a comment on one of your posts, you are sent an e-mail informing you of this fact, and containing the comment. Unless a serious argument gets going in the comments section, most comments are received in the 24 hours or so after you make your post. Often you get a trickle of comments after that, but usually only a trickle.
Which I was surprised to turn on my computer this afternoon to discover that I had received four comments in half an hour on this Samizdata quote of the day I posted last week. One doesn't normally get many comments on quote postings anyway. My first thought was that the comments were spam, which is the usual explanation when once gets lots of comments all at once on old postings. But no, these were normal comments from people who had read the post. What would explain it?
Oh. This would explain it.
Sunday, July 04, 2004
Brief movie notes
I went to see Mean Girls. This doesn't come from the famous John Hughes school of High School movie (which evolved via the Scream movies into Dawson's Creek)but comes more from the slightly messy, class and pecking order conscious scool of teen movie invented by Cameron Crowe and Amy Heckerling with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and which then evolved through Heckerling's own Clueless (although Crowe's Say Anything... is genre wise a John Hughes movie, oddly enough, although it is a sublime John Hughes movie), through things like Never Been Kissed but which really came into its own on television via my My So Called Life, Freaks and Geeks and ultimately Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is far, far greater than anything on this list.
This film is smart, well acted, and the screenplay has a willingness to go unexpected places and give the characters shades of grey (although not to the extent that Buffy did, although you can only go so far in 90 minutes. It has the feel of being written by a writer who saw all those earlier films and TV series while growing up, and was influenced by them and felt the need to add to a genre she loved. And the film is full of scenes that (visually as much as anything) owe an obvious debt to all the above material. But this film does things with them which don't make this use look wrong somehow.
And the story is told by a possibly slightly unreliable narrator, which is a nice touch. We have had a few films over the last few years which have played with narrative structure to the extent that the whole film was about the narrative tricks - Memento and The Usual Suspects are the most extreme examples of this. People who had never seen anything like it perfore found it exciting but I found it rather tiresome. Which doesn't mean that playing with narrative structure is necessarily a bad thing. If it is subservient to the story and characters and the writer and director know what they are doing with it, it is a good thing. (Alternately, if you have the skill of Quentin Tarantino you can play with narrative structure all you like and everything will still work). And this film does this - not in a big way but just a little.
And despite this not coming from the John Hughes line of high school movies, Lindsay Lohan clearly is the heir to Molly Ringwald. She has that appealling, nice but not too nice, pretty but not too pretty quality of attainability that works for teen starts but doesn't always help them evolve into adult stars. (At least it didn't with Ringwald). Maybe it will in Lohan's case. We will see.
I went to see Mean Girls. This doesn't come from the famous John Hughes school of High School movie (which evolved via the Scream movies into Dawson's Creek)but comes more from the slightly messy, class and pecking order conscious scool of teen movie invented by Cameron Crowe and Amy Heckerling with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and which then evolved through Heckerling's own Clueless (although Crowe's Say Anything... is genre wise a John Hughes movie, oddly enough, although it is a sublime John Hughes movie), through things like Never Been Kissed but which really came into its own on television via my My So Called Life, Freaks and Geeks and ultimately Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is far, far greater than anything on this list.
This film is smart, well acted, and the screenplay has a willingness to go unexpected places and give the characters shades of grey (although not to the extent that Buffy did, although you can only go so far in 90 minutes. It has the feel of being written by a writer who saw all those earlier films and TV series while growing up, and was influenced by them and felt the need to add to a genre she loved. And the film is full of scenes that (visually as much as anything) owe an obvious debt to all the above material. But this film does things with them which don't make this use look wrong somehow.
And the story is told by a possibly slightly unreliable narrator, which is a nice touch. We have had a few films over the last few years which have played with narrative structure to the extent that the whole film was about the narrative tricks - Memento and The Usual Suspects are the most extreme examples of this. People who had never seen anything like it perfore found it exciting but I found it rather tiresome. Which doesn't mean that playing with narrative structure is necessarily a bad thing. If it is subservient to the story and characters and the writer and director know what they are doing with it, it is a good thing. (Alternately, if you have the skill of Quentin Tarantino you can play with narrative structure all you like and everything will still work). And this film does this - not in a big way but just a little.
And despite this not coming from the John Hughes line of high school movies, Lindsay Lohan clearly is the heir to Molly Ringwald. She has that appealling, nice but not too nice, pretty but not too pretty quality of attainability that works for teen starts but doesn't always help them evolve into adult stars. (At least it didn't with Ringwald). Maybe it will in Lohan's case. We will see.
Saturday, July 03, 2004
Apology
I appear to be having a few problems with blogger at the moment. There appears to be a substantial delay before new posts and changes to old posts are actually visible on the website. Therefore please bear with me if I do not appear to be posting new stuff and/or stuff which obviously neads correcting remains current on the blog. I am working on it.
I appear to be having a few problems with blogger at the moment. There appears to be a substantial delay before new posts and changes to old posts are actually visible on the website. Therefore please bear with me if I do not appear to be posting new stuff and/or stuff which obviously neads correcting remains current on the blog. I am working on it.
Redirection: I have a piece on how the names of the various divisions and leagues in English football are getting even sillier.
I've noticed this too
In this hugely entertaining piece in which he laments the decline of pubs as venues for the men of Middle England to enjoy themselves, Digby Anderson does indeed identify one of the key problems of English pubs today.
Yes, there are indeed far too many people consuming silly drinks out of pink bottles. Beer (either real ale or imported from Belgium, Germany or the Czech republic), fine wine, and single malt whisky are acceptable alcoholic drinks. Everything else is for wimps. Silly drinks in pink bottles are beneath contempt.
In this hugely entertaining piece in which he laments the decline of pubs as venues for the men of Middle England to enjoy themselves, Digby Anderson does indeed identify one of the key problems of English pubs today.
Yes, there are indeed far too many people consuming silly drinks out of pink bottles. Beer (either real ale or imported from Belgium, Germany or the Czech republic), fine wine, and single malt whisky are acceptable alcoholic drinks. Everything else is for wimps. Silly drinks in pink bottles are beneath contempt.
Thursday, July 01, 2004
Wednesday evening song lyrics (even though it is Thursday and I haven't done any song lyrics for three weeks).
-- As I Lay Me Down, from Sophie B Hawkins' 1994 Album Whaler.
It felt like spring time on this February morning
In the courtyard birds were singing your praise
I'm still recalling things you said to make me feel
Alright I carried them with me today now
As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy
I wonder why
I feel so high though I am not above the sorrow
Heavy hearted 'till you call my name
And it sounds like church bells or the whistle of a train
On a summer evening I'll run to meet you barefoot
Barely breathing
As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy (oh darling)
As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy
It's not too near for me
Like a flower I need the rain
Though it's not clear to me
Every season has its change
And I will see you
When the sun comes out again
As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy (oh oh...)
As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy
I wonder why (hmmm)
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again (oooh)
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again (hmmm)
(comes out comes out oooh)
And I will wake up happy
So I pray
-- As I Lay Me Down, from Sophie B Hawkins' 1994 Album Whaler.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
A development.
Something I have seen in a few music shops lately is combined packages consisting of the DVD of a movie and the soundtrack CD in one box (and for one price).
This is quite an interesting development. Traditionally, music companies have fleeced people who like to buy soundtrack CDs even more than they have fleeced people who like to buy other CDs. Soundtracks were seen as a specialist taste, and we were (and to some extent are) still being charged as much as £15 for soundtracks, while the cost of most other CDs plunged downwards through the £10 mark some time ago and is still dropping.
The logic behind this is impeccable. Obviously the people most likely to buy a CD soundtrack are the same people who are most likely to buy the DVD of the same movie. And the DVD market has been growing so fast that it makes sense for the rapidly declining music industry to attempt to bolster its own revenues by latching on to this. But they can only be making a couple of pounds per CD, which is a bit of a come down.
And of course, one reason some people like soundtracks is that many of them are a sort of mix tape: an opportunity for the film-makers to devise a set of songs that naturally fit, possibly for unexpected reasons. For a time, they were about the only kind of officially sanctioned mix tape in existence. These days of course they are not: producing your own mix CDs or your own playlist on your MP3 player has been a growth industry for the last few years, and programs like iTunes have made it easier than ever. And now you can of course buy lots of other people's playlists through the iTunes Music Store and similar.
I have no idea whether these appeal to film soundtrack afficonados, bus I suspect that they might.
Something I have seen in a few music shops lately is combined packages consisting of the DVD of a movie and the soundtrack CD in one box (and for one price).
This is quite an interesting development. Traditionally, music companies have fleeced people who like to buy soundtrack CDs even more than they have fleeced people who like to buy other CDs. Soundtracks were seen as a specialist taste, and we were (and to some extent are) still being charged as much as £15 for soundtracks, while the cost of most other CDs plunged downwards through the £10 mark some time ago and is still dropping.
The logic behind this is impeccable. Obviously the people most likely to buy a CD soundtrack are the same people who are most likely to buy the DVD of the same movie. And the DVD market has been growing so fast that it makes sense for the rapidly declining music industry to attempt to bolster its own revenues by latching on to this. But they can only be making a couple of pounds per CD, which is a bit of a come down.
And of course, one reason some people like soundtracks is that many of them are a sort of mix tape: an opportunity for the film-makers to devise a set of songs that naturally fit, possibly for unexpected reasons. For a time, they were about the only kind of officially sanctioned mix tape in existence. These days of course they are not: producing your own mix CDs or your own playlist on your MP3 player has been a growth industry for the last few years, and programs like iTunes have made it easier than ever. And now you can of course buy lots of other people's playlists through the iTunes Music Store and similar.
I have no idea whether these appeal to film soundtrack afficonados, bus I suspect that they might.
Redirection: I have a piece on Wimbledon (mainly about Tim Henman and Roger Federer) over at ubersportingpundit.
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Leben Sie transparent...
Whenever things look bad, one can reassure oneself by acknowledging that things were once much worse.
(Link via Blognor Regis).
Whenever things look bad, one can reassure oneself by acknowledging that things were once much worse.
(Link via Blognor Regis).
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Redirection
I have a piece on England's loss to Australia in rugby on Saturday, a discussion about how England's recent performanes compare with other World Cup winners in various sports, and thoughts about what this means.
I have a piece on England's loss to Australia in rugby on Saturday, a discussion about how England's recent performanes compare with other World Cup winners in various sports, and thoughts about what this means.
Friday, June 25, 2004
Overreach
As happens these days, my laptop computer has been getting steadily clogged up with programs generating popup ads, spyware, and all kinds of other crap over the six months that I have had it. (I have been fortunate enough or well enough defended that I have avoided getting any worms and viruses). I have largely just put up with this. However, a week or two ago, one of the programs that has been showing me popup ads decided to start showing occasional pictures that were essentially hard core pornography, in the hope that I would click on the link and buy more hard core pornography.
This was enough for me, and I have gone through a thorough spyware and irritate-ware removal process, something I should have done a while back. Spybot Search and Destroy informed me that there were over 120 separate pieces of anti-social software of one kind or another installed on my system. Ugh.
Well, they are now gone.
Although I have not myself had a worm or virus infection, several people I know have, and I have been helping out in cleaning these up. One friend of mine received an infection from a variant of the Gabot worm, and this managed to mess things up pretty thoroughly before we managed to kill it.
Update: That wretched porn came back. Either the both Spybot S&D and Ad-aware both missed it, or I visited the site that was responsible for installing it in the first place again and it got reinstalled. (And no, I didn't attempt to rip the new Beastie Boys CD). Now running the software again, but I am very pissed off. I might be about to abandon Internet Explorer and start using Firefox exclusively, too.
As happens these days, my laptop computer has been getting steadily clogged up with programs generating popup ads, spyware, and all kinds of other crap over the six months that I have had it. (I have been fortunate enough or well enough defended that I have avoided getting any worms and viruses). I have largely just put up with this. However, a week or two ago, one of the programs that has been showing me popup ads decided to start showing occasional pictures that were essentially hard core pornography, in the hope that I would click on the link and buy more hard core pornography.
This was enough for me, and I have gone through a thorough spyware and irritate-ware removal process, something I should have done a while back. Spybot Search and Destroy informed me that there were over 120 separate pieces of anti-social software of one kind or another installed on my system. Ugh.
Well, they are now gone.
Although I have not myself had a worm or virus infection, several people I know have, and I have been helping out in cleaning these up. One friend of mine received an infection from a variant of the Gabot worm, and this managed to mess things up pretty thoroughly before we managed to kill it.
Update: That wretched porn came back. Either the both Spybot S&D and Ad-aware both missed it, or I visited the site that was responsible for installing it in the first place again and it got reinstalled. (And no, I didn't attempt to rip the new Beastie Boys CD). Now running the software again, but I am very pissed off. I might be about to abandon Internet Explorer and start using Firefox exclusively, too.
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Doing a little hacking
Okay, I am in the process of installing Wine on my Linux box. This is a reverse engineered implementation of the Windows APIs that runs under Linux and other Unix like systems that run on x386 processors, and theoretically allows them to run Windows applications. Ideally I would like to use it to run iTunes under Linux. There isn't really anything else in terms of Windows applications that I feel I have to have. Firefox is a substantially better browser than is Internet Explorer, and while I haven't used it in a big way, OpenOffice seems adequate for most of my purposes. And while there is an open source jukebox program that was part of the SuSE Linux distribution, I really do want iTunes.
Okay, I am in the process of installing Wine on my Linux box. This is a reverse engineered implementation of the Windows APIs that runs under Linux and other Unix like systems that run on x386 processors, and theoretically allows them to run Windows applications. Ideally I would like to use it to run iTunes under Linux. There isn't really anything else in terms of Windows applications that I feel I have to have. Firefox is a substantially better browser than is Internet Explorer, and while I haven't used it in a big way, OpenOffice seems adequate for most of my purposes. And while there is an open source jukebox program that was part of the SuSE Linux distribution, I really do want iTunes.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Non updated websites
A reader has gently chided me and asked whether I am a "slow reader", due to the fact that (he claims) I have had the same three books listed in the "What I'm reading" section in the sidebar on the left for the entire time he has been reading the blog.
That is not entirely true. Over the 18 months or so the list has been there, quite a lot of books have appeared and then vanished. These are some of the books that I have actually read in that time. (I do read a substantial number of books). However, there is something of a problem. When I started the list I had eight to ten books sitting on a table next to my bed, and these were the ones I put on the initial list. I had at least started all of them - in some cases just having read a page or two. Since then, most of the books on the original list have vanished as I have read them, but the remaining three have stubbornly refused to be read. Mostly this is just that I haven't got round to reading them, but they haven't really grabbed me either. "Gangs of New York" seems quite good, and I will no doubt get to it at some point. "Tea From an Empty Cup" is by Pat Cadigan, and Cadigan writes intense and dense books that require a lot of concentration. To be properly appreciated her books need to be read within one sitting or within a couple of days at the most, and I haven't really managed to sit down for such a sitting. "The Seduction of Place" is the one really problematical one. It's a book about architecture containing lots of interesting information about how certain cities got the way they are, but it is rather tiresomely ideological, and ideology in urban development and urban design usually leads to bad places. (It is also a rather rare thing - a book I read because it had a really good title - summarising the buzz I get out of seeing and visiting new places - something I practically find necessary for survival).
Some would suggest that I should remove the books from the list if I have gone so long without finishing them, but that would be an admission of defeat somehow: an acknowledgement that I never will read them. And I think somehow that I should read them. The longer they stay up the more I feel so.
The trouble with this though is that the list then doesn't summarise my taste in books very well. Stuff I find hard going stays up, and stuff that I enjoy and read in one sitting stays up for a much shorter time, if it even gets up at all. (Also, there is a feeling that if I put a book on the list I have an obligation to then read it quickly, and that is perhaps not fun). In recent months I have been reading books, but I have not updated the list.
So the overall rule is the more I enjoy a book the shorter the time it spends on the list. Oops.
Perhaps it is the way the list is structured: I update the blogger template. This takes longer than just making a blog post, and doesn't keep a proper historical record.
Or perhaps I have just grown lazy.
But I am not going to delete the feature for now. I think I will try to update the list properly, and I may make a rule that all books stay up for at least a week, even if I have already finished reading them by the time I put them up. In fact I think I shall put up some more books that I am either reading or I have just read right now.
Or I could switch to actually writing reviews of the books I read. But that sounds like work.
But the three books are staying up until I have actually read them.
A reader has gently chided me and asked whether I am a "slow reader", due to the fact that (he claims) I have had the same three books listed in the "What I'm reading" section in the sidebar on the left for the entire time he has been reading the blog.
That is not entirely true. Over the 18 months or so the list has been there, quite a lot of books have appeared and then vanished. These are some of the books that I have actually read in that time. (I do read a substantial number of books). However, there is something of a problem. When I started the list I had eight to ten books sitting on a table next to my bed, and these were the ones I put on the initial list. I had at least started all of them - in some cases just having read a page or two. Since then, most of the books on the original list have vanished as I have read them, but the remaining three have stubbornly refused to be read. Mostly this is just that I haven't got round to reading them, but they haven't really grabbed me either. "Gangs of New York" seems quite good, and I will no doubt get to it at some point. "Tea From an Empty Cup" is by Pat Cadigan, and Cadigan writes intense and dense books that require a lot of concentration. To be properly appreciated her books need to be read within one sitting or within a couple of days at the most, and I haven't really managed to sit down for such a sitting. "The Seduction of Place" is the one really problematical one. It's a book about architecture containing lots of interesting information about how certain cities got the way they are, but it is rather tiresomely ideological, and ideology in urban development and urban design usually leads to bad places. (It is also a rather rare thing - a book I read because it had a really good title - summarising the buzz I get out of seeing and visiting new places - something I practically find necessary for survival).
Some would suggest that I should remove the books from the list if I have gone so long without finishing them, but that would be an admission of defeat somehow: an acknowledgement that I never will read them. And I think somehow that I should read them. The longer they stay up the more I feel so.
The trouble with this though is that the list then doesn't summarise my taste in books very well. Stuff I find hard going stays up, and stuff that I enjoy and read in one sitting stays up for a much shorter time, if it even gets up at all. (Also, there is a feeling that if I put a book on the list I have an obligation to then read it quickly, and that is perhaps not fun). In recent months I have been reading books, but I have not updated the list.
So the overall rule is the more I enjoy a book the shorter the time it spends on the list. Oops.
Perhaps it is the way the list is structured: I update the blogger template. This takes longer than just making a blog post, and doesn't keep a proper historical record.
Or perhaps I have just grown lazy.
But I am not going to delete the feature for now. I think I will try to update the list properly, and I may make a rule that all books stay up for at least a week, even if I have already finished reading them by the time I put them up. In fact I think I shall put up some more books that I am either reading or I have just read right now.
Or I could switch to actually writing reviews of the books I read. But that sounds like work.
But the three books are staying up until I have actually read them.
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