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28th July I've just finished reading perhaps the funniest book ever to have crossed my path. "The Timewaster Diaries" by Robert Popper (writing as Robin Cooper) is simply brilliant. It starts out being funny and you think "this is funny but it'll probably get boring after a while" and then it doesn't. It carries on being brilliant for all 350 pages. Few books ever make me laugh out loud while reading them but this has done several times. I read one little joke to TheArtist and he was creased up for a good few minutes. It is worth it just for the saga of his Swiss pen friend who is having terrible trouble with his mysterious "house handles". You can get it for seven pounds online and off - do so. You literally won't regret it. Unless you buy it and don't read it but that would be foolish. It's even worth the full RRP. Or twice the RRP. Or more than twice the RRP - it's that damned good. I didn't much like his previous "The Timewaster Letters" but here he has found exactly the right outlet for his style of comedy. You'll already know Robert Popper from "Look Around You". This book is better than Look Around You. This book is better than almost anything actually. It's rare to find a book of which this is true but if this book was twice as long, it would be twice as good.
I've started watching the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. The mini series was fantastically bleak - it was 9/11 to the Nth degree. The way they did the battle sequences was breathtaking - it was shot more like a news broadcast than a movie. It was gritty, it was dirty and it was all but The West Wing in space. In these early days it does seem to have just a little bit too much political correctness in it but apart from that it is stunning television. The original was derided as being a Star Wars clone - this new version is about as far from Star Wars as you could possibly imagine. While the latter got more childish as it moved into the 21st century, Battlestar Galactica has become adult drama. And the new Starbuck is more than acceptable. If only there were several of her in every town on the planet. The BBC have launched their new iPlayer - a piece of software which supposedly lets you download any BBC programme of the past seven days and watch it on your computer. There are DRM restrictions so you can't burn the shows to disc or keep them indefinitely but as a way of catching up on soemthing you missed I can see it being useful. Of course, the same service is more or less available on cable (though the rule is never to assume it will be because there is no logic to what is and isn't on Catch-Up) and there are plans to launch a version of the iPlayer on Virgin Media later this year. Getting the iPlayer is a bit of a pain - you have to register, be invited to download it, wait for an email, follow the instructions, enter your registration details again, download the software (only through Internet Explorer - Firefox is not supported), install it, download some plugins, sign in or register as a bbc.co.uk user and find something to download. The last point proved the hardest. All the others were just fiddly - finding something decent from the BBC this week was nigh on impossible. It doesn't have imports so you can't get Heroes. In the end I went for an episode of Doctor Who. It took ages to start the download but once it began I got the benefits of an allegedly superhuman broadband connection. Picture quality was good - even at full screen - and once you get used to it, the software is reasonably usable. It is still very much in its early stages (the launch was yesterday but everything still calls it a Beta) and it will be an enormous boon to a lot of people when it catches on. But I still prefer to catch up on things through cable - I can record them, watch them on a TV rather than a monitor and they begin straight away rather than having to be downloaded. You can join in the fun and topicality at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer Something that quite annoys me is the way footballers wages are talked about in the papers. John Terry has just signed a "£135,000 per week" contract. Where else do wages get reported in weekly amounts? It is a rather spiteful way the press has invented to make us hate top footballers - if they said John Terry was earning seven million pounds per year, they know that we can accept millions of pounds per year. The numbers are familiar to us and we don't get outraged. But break it down into a weekly wage and the numbers look obscene. People earning millions each year are glamorous and exciting. People earning hundreds of thousands each week are greedy and repulsive. The press like stir up feelings of bitterness and resentment towards certain categories of celebrities. It means we'll buy their papers when they destroy the rich and famous. With musicians and actors they can be relied upon to do something sensational by themselves with the aid of drink, drugs, sex and trips to the Big Brother house. But footballers generally live less tabloid friendly lives so they have to keep reminding us how much they earn every single week so the resentment will keep simmering. Then when they fall we'll all say they deserve it because they earned a hundred and thirty five thousand pounds each week for kicking a ball around. And this from a press which is partly responsible for turning football into the billion-pound circus it has become. The stock markets are falling. Now I'm a share owning capitalist this comes as something of a blow. I have a portfolio which is now worth 4.91% less than it was before. It's quite exciting really. More exciting than my cold anyway. This is quite an amusing anecdote about life in the far east.
21st July I finished Life on Mars as planned last night. I half want to write something proper about it so I'll just say the following SPOILERY bit after a photo of Doctor Alice so anyone who doesn't want to know how it all ends can stop their eyes moving. Join us again after the second photo of Doctor Alice.
The whole coma thing was always going to be the answer - there was never enough doubt of that. They did do a good swerve with "Sam Williams" and all that but Sam knew too much about the future for it to be anything other than a dream. But they had to tack on another ending in what felt like far too much of a hurry. Sam only spent a couple of minutes (of screen time) in 2006. He left a hospital, dictated something, had a chat with his mum and then went in a boring meeting where he cut himself with a paper knife. This was enough to make him jump off the same roof we saw in episode 1 (though the Stockport Pyramid was meant to be in shot this time). Having jumped off the roof he presumably ended up in critical condition, another coma and back to 1973 where he could live happily ever after with Annie. They could've paced it better - had the swerve in the penultimate episode, spent more time in 2006 and made Sam's choice mean something. They could even have added some blurring and greying around the edges by having Sam find evidence that Annie and Gene Hunt really did exist - if you're going to do ambiguity at least do good ambiguity. It was a very good series and the ending wasn't as bad as most of RTD's but it was still a little unsatisfying.
You will probably have noticed that the homepage of this footling website has been overhauled. I'd been wanting to change it for ages but could never quite decide what to do. I knew I needed to make better use of the "prime real estate" as it is called - the top part of the front page which appears without anyone having to scroll down their browser window - and I think it achieves that. The Google search engine seems to work ok, I've got rid of a lot of clutter and I hope it improves navigation. While at the same time I think it keeps the original look of the site (for better or worse) so it isn't either too radical or too generic. I'm sure I'll carry on tinkering with it now I've crossed the Rubicon but I think I've done enough now to go with it on the site. I was cross with Setanta a couple of weeks ago when it became clear that Sky customers were getting a discount that we VM users weren't. Well, I needn't have worried - they've officially announced that I'll be getting Setanta Sports for nothing. They didn't actually phrase it like that, mentioning me by name or anything, but people like me will get it for nothing. Although, if they're really like me they deserve a hell of a lot more compensation than two free football channels and an awful lot of golf. I've been watching Spaced since, oohhh, Friday now. I've realised what I used to know - that I'm happier when I watch something from beginning to end, over lots of nights and so never have to actually stop and think what to do next. By making a decision weeks in advance I can more or less come as close as I ever do to relaxing and enjoying something. Spaced is a series I've tried to get into lots of times before but never quite managed it. Being at present between seasons one and two I think it is good but not perhaps as good as Simon Pegg's recent movies. The style is there but not quite perfected yet. It had good lines, good performances, good production and good direction but it isn't quite the finished product. A couple of annoying things to close with - an alarm started going off at about a quarter to midnight last night. It finally stopped at around three this afternoon. Oddly, it didn't really stop me sleeping but it could've done and it was quite irritating. Secondly, I hate it when you're at 99% on a torrent (in this case a rare Wodehouse production from whatever Radio 4 was called in the late 1970s - probably "Radio 4") and it won't move any further. There are two peers who are at the same 99% and one seed who either isn't or won't help out with that final few megabytes. I always imagined P2P users hunched over their computers, playing at gods as they stop the downloads of anyone not sharing as many files as them. I don't think torrenters are as bad but I'm sure there are some who sit hunched over their computers checking the share ratio of anyone wanting their stuff. But by and large torrenting is a much happier world than P2P. Find the right tracker and the right community and you can come by all sorts of rare delights. Don't worry - I'm not going to do one of my long and vaguely contradictory downloading speeches. I'll spare you the pain and instead close with Doctor Alice looking scrumptiously intellectual.
18th July Thanks to a link from a link I've downloaded a demo of a rather useful looking application. It is called "The Journal" and it is diary-keeping software. You may be wondering what is wrong with Word - I did at first - but once I tried it I saw there were lots of little features which make it so much better than Word. Not that I've kept a diary in Word for many years. I like how it has a countdown timer so you can set it for fifteen minutes, bash away for quarter of an hour and then stop. There is no excuse then for not doing it - it's only fifteen minutes. It is fully searchable too so you don't have to trawl back to look for things. The layout is good, the tools are good and there are plenty of other features I've not even looked at yet. Needless to say it is password protected. Actually, I say "needless to say" but maybe in this day and age it needs saying - blogs have become so common that the idea of hiding ones private thoughts seems almost alien. Equally, the freedom I felt not having to write with more than one eye on other people reading it was a revelation. I could use real names. I could be honest about things. I didn't have to waste time writing around events. I didn't even have to try to make it interesting. I fail on the latter count regularly but I do try (to a greater or lesser extent). Writing an actual diary for the first time in years meant I could jot down all those little things which the past is actually made of. I started keeping a diary in November 1993. It has nothing to do with the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who. I had a small 5-year diary (bought somewhere along the west coast of the United States of America during a vacation earlier in the year). Its cramped pages and - as a result - almost illegible writing were my companion for around four and a half years. I took it to university and noted all the little things. The big things wouldn't fit into the 80 or 100 words I could squeeze into the space. I've no idea why I never thought of getting something bigger. Maybe I liked it that way. The big stuff is either impossible to forget or impossible to convey or impossible ever to understand in the future. The little things are easily forgotten and far more evocative of the time. I started diarising on a computer in 1998 and I still have most of those files. There is a big gap where the computer crashed (in the spring of 1999) but aside from that I'm more or less complete until well into 2001. The only problem with those files is that there is one file per day and I used so many different passwords that I'm still nowhere near capturing all of them. Thank goodness I had a system. That way there is always a chance I might get it sorted one day. Regrettably, I now give you a précis of "today" according to the document titled 18th July.doc
The diary software is $40 - not quite as much as it sounds in this age of two dollars to one unit of proper currency - and I think I'll buy it. Not to record the big stuff - just to record fifteen minutes a day of little stuff. Speaking of diaries, I bought Alistair Campbell's diaries today from Tesco. I had a £5-off-£20 voucher which had to be used this week and the book was half price anyway. So it was only eight pounds and it might not be a dull as TheArtist said a documentary about it was.
15th July A lot of people are very annoyed that Prince's latest album is being given away by the Mail on Sunday. The music industry and HMV are moaning about it devaluing music and threatening to kill the industry. You know, just like audio cassettes did, Napster did and CD WOW's foreign imports did. Those criticising the giveaway argue that if people become used to getting albums for nothing (save the cost and embarrassment of buying the Mail) then they will stop buying CDs from shops. It is all just so much bottom chocolate. For one thing this is Prince we're talking about. He represents the wider music industry in the same way that Norman Lamont represents the young, black community. Prince exists at such a tangent that he does what he does precisely because it is an anathema to the music industry. He may even be hoping that this does indeed bring the whole edifice crashing down but he is one rather strange man and others are unlikely to follow in his footsteps. The claim that this "devalues music" ignores the idea that pumping out hundreds of templated pop banalities by cloned talent show contestants and reality TV bores devalues music. Copying successful and original bands and producing dozens of inferior clones who crash and burn and are left on the scrap heap devalues music. Aiming your entire output at the top 40 and the casual Tesco shopper with twelve year old children devalues music. Giving away a free CD won't even devalue music if it is no good. It will be listened to maybe once and binned. No one is going to hurl the CD away in dramatic fashion and swear on Cliff Richard's grave never to buy another album again. Worst case scenario - it will be largely ignored. Best case scenario - it will make people want to buy more Prince CDs which will get them into HMV or along to Amazon where they can be shown similar works and their baskets will swell like a mother. Giving something away for free doesn't make it valueless. For seventy years we have been pumping out television for free (subscriptions and licence fees aside - you are paying for the service not the specific content). No one considers "Doctor Who", "Life on Mars", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or "The Sopranos" to be worthless simply because you can sit down and enjoy them for nothing. Indeed, people go out and buy boxed set after boxed set because they saw it and liked it. Free exposure is the best way to get people interested in your product - that's why popular music has been a staple of the radio waves for fifty years now. You don't hear music executives, fresh from fellating some one high up in Radio 1, complaining because radio stations are giving away their assets for nothing. Some have even been known to pay radio stations to air their wretched songs. If this CD is any good - and I have no interest what so ever in hearing it or even knowing whether it is liked or disliked - people will be talking about it tomorrow. Only, tomorrow will be too late. The Mail on Sunday will have gone to the newspaper graveyard in the sky and anyone wanting a copy will either get it by illegal means or will go out and buy it. It's a freebie for one day - one day out of a lifespan of many years - and through that freebie it will be heard by millions. For Prince it is a master stroke of publicity on the eve of his tour. For the Mail it is an expensive gambit but one which will have boosted their sales and exposed many more people to their loathsome agenda. For the record companies it is an irritating blip - a one-off which they can ensure never happens again because they control everyone else. For HMV it is a massive irrelevance which will only damage them if they carry out their threat to remove Prince's other albums from their shelves just as there exists the possibility of revived interest in the scrawny nutter. I would however be massive opposed to the Mail's request for this giveaway to be included in the official charts. If freebies are counted alongside genuinely bought CDs then you might as well not bother keeping a chart. The system as it is is massively abused by a cartel of sellers and producers and this would tip it over the edge. Once the precedent is set, you would only have to tape a worthless single from a five minute "star" onto the cover of the Sun to get to number one and have it forever recorded as a "hit" despite not actually selling a single copy. Something I saw on TV for nothing and which devalued the whole idea of buying satire so much that I bought the DVD the day it came out was "The Thick of It". It's taken me a while to watch it but now I have - spurred on by the recent special which I can only watch once I've seen the first series because I'm like that - and I thought it was superb. It doesn't perhaps stand shoulder to shoulder with "Yes Minister" (still the finest sit com ever produced in my opinion) but a masterpiece of writing, editing and performing nevertheless. The only niggle in the ointment is the thorny question of whether it is right to enjoy watching someone who has fallen so nastily from grace. Chris Langham may not have killed anyone (unlike Chris Benoit whose matches are the subject of much debate these days in circles I seldom visit - I know I don't want to see him for a very long time) but he's currently on trial for various sexual offences against a minor and it doesn't make for present reading. Not that any of the claims are conclusive - if preferring shaved girls is proof of paedophilia then most makers and buyers of mainstream pornography are paedophiles. But watching him in "The Thick of It" did remind me every time of the allegations against him and it took something away each time. Malcolm would probably shout at me for being a fucking sentimental sack of shit who can't keep their fucking eyes on the right fucking page without letting irrelevant bollocks get the fuck in the shitting way you cunt. He's probably right. I certainly wouldn't tell him otherwise.
7th July I've been watching the Pink Panther films this week. The boxed set - for a while too cheap to refuse - arrived on Monday and I resolved to watch the entire canon (some say anthology) over successive nights. I was hoping it would be a rollercoaster of non-stop hilarity to raise me, momentarily, from my current malaise. Quick thoughts are as follows - The Pink Panther I remembered it as a disappointing film which concentrated far too much on David Niven's bog-standard adventures and not enough on Peter Sellers' performance. Watching it again I now see it as a splendid film with Niven's undoubted charisma and plot strand as an essential structure in which Sellers' subtle Clouseau could shine. For Clouseau was subtle in the early days. It's hard to believe but it is true. A Shot in the Dark The usual answer to the "Best film in the series" question and rightly so. Clouseau is centre stage this time but still goes for a multitude of small laughs rather than the "big" laughs he would later strive for. As a pastiche of Agatha Christie and her ilk it works as a film and as a story. So far so good. Return of the Pink Panther Oh dear. Brought back after many years (and originally intended to be a TV series rather than a movie revival) Clouseau has a bigger budget, a thicker accent and a total abandonment of the idea that he is the idiot surrounded by people playing it (more or less) straight. Yes, there are still laughs to be had but the joy of the earlier films - where Sellers could be in a perfectly ordinary hotel room and get laughs making a mess of perfectly ordinary things - has been replaced by too many set pieces and too much absurdity. The Pink Panther Strikes Again It was literally in the last minute of the movie that I realised what had happened. They (presumably Blake Edwards) decided to make the Pink Panther movies into James Bond spoofs. That does go some way to excusing the needless extravagance of the films but it doesn't excuse the set pieces getting in the way of the comedy. There are some very funny parts - Clouseau's entire stint in the Professor's English home is a treat (especially his performance on the parallel bars) - but it is too reminiscent of the 70s sit com movies where they forget everything that made the characters work in favour of making "a film". Revenge of the Pink Panther Completing the trilogy of expensive looking 1970s Panther movies, this is another Bond pastiche and follows the same pattern of some very good Sellers moments, some rather boring non-Sellers scenes, a plot we really don't care about and far too much repetition of things which work once or twice but become tired after a while. With all three it is the little moments with Clouseau which bear repeated viewings - perhaps it would've been better had they made a TV series instead as cheaper, smaller productions would've given greater emphasis to what used to be a great comic character. Trail of the Pink Panther Shamelessly exploitative? Almost certainly but the footage of Peter Sellers in this movie is from scenes cut out of earlier films. The joy of this is that it is precisely the sort of scenes I've been praising which got the chop - the big budget set pieces were kept in at the expense of simple, low budget comedy such as his trying on noses at M. Balls' store or setting his office on fire while trying to smoke a pipe. There isn't much of Sellers in the film and once he's gone (quite literally) it becomes uncomfortable. Had it been made as a TV tribute to him it might have a better reputation but as a cinematic release it just looks greedy and Edwards was rightly sued by Sellers' appalled widow. Overall, I laughed at all the films in places but the last four were a bit of a chore to get through. Never quite bad enough to make me stop watching them but it will be many a year before I'm tempted to watch any of them (save perhaps "A Shot in the Dark") again. Changing the subject entirely, I bought a Bluetooth USB dongle yesterday. I don't really know why - it seemed like a good idea at the time - as I've no idea what Bluetooth actually is or does. I know my phone is Bluetooth enabled but, having activated the Bluetooth on the PC and on the phone and with both acknowledging each others existence, I genuinely have no idea what Bluetooth will actually do. I'm not even having one of my increasingly frequent mental blockages (such as me becoming totally lost for a few seconds leaving Tesco last week) - I've never known precisely what Bluetooth is or how it will make my life better. I wouldn't have this damned curiosity had the makers of my phone not greedily disabled the WiFi functionality to force users to pay for internet time. I love my SmartPhone but the lack of wifi does irritate me. It would make it perfect. I know there are plenty of wifi enabled devices out there but I don't want another device - I want my phone to do everything. Dammit. Another thing which baffles me is the Carlos Tevez affair. No one knows exactly what is going on - who owns who, what will be paid to what, how much is involved et al - but one thing seems fairly simple to me. If United pay the transfer fee or loan payment to the sinister consortium which "owns" Carlos Tevez then it means West Ham lied to the Premiership a second time and their punishment should be increased significantly from the fine which was imposed after the now-suspect assurances were made. This is not Manchester United's problem. The Premiership shouldn't "scupper" (as the press have put it) the move - they should allow it if it is legal (regardless of where the money goes) and punish West Ham if the money goes somewhere other than Upton Park. There is a lot of fine print to go through before the deal can be made but the only dodgy part about it seems to be West Ham's rather dubious and/or desperate regard for the truth. The car parking situation seems to have been resolved, at least for now. A press release came round saying that all proper members of staff who've been there since March will get a parking pass. It will be first come, first served for spaces. Which is fair enough - it's been that way for months (ever since the people who wrote the press release cocked things up in the first place) and everyone is more or less resigned to it. The situation should be eased slightly now that temps, some newbies and people from nearby offices won't be able to nab spaces. They are still talking to the council, still looking for ways to add a few more spaces without needing planning permission and still encouraging "green" commuting and they say they will review it in September but hopefully the September date will be quietly forgotten and we can stop the worrying. This debacle has cost the company tens of thousands of pounds in lost (wo)man hours and, while they have striven not to look as if they are backing down on their original plans, common sense seems to have prevailed. Speaking of cars, I've decided I want a GPS device. I know I never go anywhere but that is because I don't know how to get anywhere. Whether I would go anywhere if I had a GPS to guide me I don't know but while I was off last month I wimped out of at least one trip to somewhere new because I didn't believe I'd be able to follow my researched directions. My thoughts so far - there seems to be an awfully big price range for GPS units without there being any obvious difference between them, the ones I want always end up out of stock before I can convince myself to buy them and that they all sound too good to be true. Much like the Goodmans PVR I mentioned a few weeks ago which, now that I've got one, is proving to be a disappointment in many ways. Speaking of disappointing in many ways, I am faintly appalled by Setanta Sports. The sons of bitches have just revised their pricing structure in readiness for the new season (including, for the first time, Premiership football). See if you can spot the reason for my appalledness.
Even they realise they're bastards.
1st July I'm sometimes accused of being a shill for Virgin Media. It's true that some of their recent developments have been positive, it's true that we need a strong competitor to Sky and it's true that I'm one of those who think that Richard Branson is firmly in the Good Guys camp. But they've been promising a free upgrade from 10mbs to 20mbs for all their XL broadband customers and this was supposed to happen for us by the end of June. Well, it sort of has because my upload speed has almost doubled but - being the artists formerly known as ntl: - they've cocked something right the hell up. Instead of the download speed doubling, speedtest.net instead lists it as having fallen to one twentieth of what it used to be. So from 10 meg to half a meg as part of their upgrade. It isn't just me - lots of people are reporting on message boards that the upgrade has all but crippled their connection. So well done to Virgin Media for pressing ahead with a rolling upgrade which they had a pretty good idea would make everything significantly worse. Though they aren't the only one suffering from release woes. We were in work this morning to give the latest upgrade the sleep-deprived once over and, although everything seemed fine, this has been the most badly managed release we've had in the past two and a bit years. The change-set should not be released for the first time after user acceptance testing has finished. There shouldn't be three project managers involved, none of whom know that either of the others is involved. Someone really ought to explain to the test team what changes are going in and what they mean. People shouldn't be pulling code at the last minute (code which no one knew was there) and then not checking whether it affected anything else. Developers shouldn't be bypassing the change management team and going straight to Twat and asking him to do stuff (partly because he's a twat but mainly because he's a lazy twat). And to top it all, it was very late on Friday that someone realised "Shit - no one has signed this off yet" so he had to hurtle round the building getting signatures. Actually, the best bit is probably that no one will be able to use the new functionality anyway because - and we only found this out by chance, at the end of the test cycle - the actuaries haven't approved it. So it's pretty much been a coach load of chaos for nothing. Marvellous. That was worth losing a bunch of sleep over. Speaking of sleep, I dreamed last night that I had a fight with Ronnie Corbett. He was a surprisingly tough little scrapper. The only way I could calm him down was to play this record to him. It was, as Mr Baker points out, probably the only truly political record Ronnie Corbett ever did.
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