|
|
|
 |
|
|
29th October On Thursday we finally got to go to the Disaster Recovery site in Warrington for some high quality recovering from disaster fun. If the omens of the previous few days had been bad then Thursday morning's were worse. Funny but worse. We gathered in reception at 9.30 (except one who was late). While we were waiting for the last of us it began to rain very heavily indeed. So much so that we let the burly chaps who were driving go out into the deluge and get cars while we waited behind and stayed dry. TheArtist pulled up outside the door and m'self and KFD went and got in. "Where's the map?" asked TheArtist. "You took it out of the highly professional document case and put it somewhere else" I replied. "Is it in your Ford Prefect style bag?" He looked in his Ford Prefect style bag. "Shit" and he went in to get it. A minute later he came back. "She won't let me in until I've moved the car." We have a receptionist who rules over her tiny empire in precisely the same way she would were she a character in a sit com we don't believe is realistic. So we drive down a hill and park the car. TheArtist goes up to get his map. A minute later he came back. "I forgot my pass" he said and went off with his photo ID card lest the receptionist pretends not to know who he was even though she'd seen him three times that morning and at least twice a day for the past four years. Two minutes later he came back. "It wasn't on my desk" he said. "Pass me my Ford Prefect style bag." He looked in his Ford Prefect style bag and took out a twice-folded piece of A4. "Found it." We got there about 10.30 and had fully tested the coffee machine before anything was available to look at. By 12 o'clock it was definitely lunch time and pub nosh on the company. TLC was her usual perky self but for some reason kept putting finger quotes around words which didn't need them. Her pink biro was for "breast cancer", someone looked "less than thirty" and I was the "vegetarian". She then explained that she'd been vegetarian until her mother tricked her into eating a sausage sandwich. The trick was to say "What do you want to eat?" and TLC replied "A sausage butty please". A mouthful into the greasy flesh fest she realised what she was eating. But - and this is the bit that confused me - she carried on eating it and stopped being a vegetarian. Vegetarianism isn't like virginity - it doesn't automatically end when you get a sausage inside you. The way she told the story you would think that the first time you falter or waver or bend your state you automatically lose membership of the club. It baffles me as much as the question so many people smugly put to vegetarians - "Why do you eat stuff that is meant to look and taste like meat? It doesn't make sense - why not just eat the meat if you like it so much?". Speaking for me I like faux-meat products because they (generally) taste nice. They are also made from mushrooms and not flesh hacked from the carcass of a slaughtered animal. It is the flesh I object to not the flavour. So it isn't the brilliantly clever point which wins the anti-vegetarian argument that they think it is. In the afternoon we finally got what we'd gone for - our beloved baby was up and running. Ok, so it didn't work well enough to put a tick in the "fit for purpose" box but it was nice to know the day hadn't entirely been about a dish of Mediterranean pasta. One finally run through of the coffee machine test bed and we went back to work to get the goss and check the no emails I got while we were away. The goss centred around which of our IT colleagues were being let go. From our selfish vantage point it was mostly good news - only one of our developers was on the list. Mostly it was the old, slightly strange, mainframe programmers who had been deselected. I didn't know any of them personally - not even by name in most cases - and so while I felt sorry for them being made redundant I was relieved that the people I know and work with are safe. Even if one of them was a bit of an arrogant dick on Friday afternoon. Changing the subject entirely, isn't it time we got rid of amber traffic lights? The Highway Code says
In reality that should read
I see it all the time now and it annoys me - especially at pedestrian crossings where you see mothers with small children waiting to cross and at least two assholes race through when they shouldn't. I believe America doesn't use amber lights - theirs just go from red to green and back to red. This would make sense here. The danger isn't people going through because they don't stop - it is that they see an amber light and actually speed up. It is the same with ambiguous crossings - where it isn't obvious who has right of way so the cars speed up when they see people about to cross and pedestrians walk faster when they see a car coming. By doing away with amber you force motorists to obey either a green or red light and do away with the amber-acceleration factor. Also, while I'm on the road improvement subject, why don't speed camera signs have to display the speed limit on them? Many is the time I see these camera signs and find myself wondering if it is a 30 or 40mph road I'm on. If speed cameras were genuinely to make the roads safer they should say how fast I should be going to avoid activating said camera. A much more sensible system than we have at present. But, alas, speed cameras are a cheap money making scheme wrapped up in a lot of sickening dishonesty. Like the secret chipping of wheely bins which they claim is to encourage recycling but if people don't know they've been chipped they aren't being encouraged to recycle - it is just a squalid money grubbing exercise. All of which is entirely off the subject of whatever it was I was talking about. Although mention of rubbish does give me the chance to mention that the fourth annual Brenty Four serial has begun to be written and will, hopefully, be finished rather sooner than previous years. Never again do I want to be writing and publishing on the same day. My little nervous system couldn't cope with that again.
25th October It was rather more disaster than recovery. Today was supposed to be the day when we'd all go to Warrington to make sure the company's disaster recovery facility could cope with real people. It went very well... apart from
All of which is a rough approximation of the chaos of today. TheArtist took the brunt of it and with the IT peeps finding out tomorrow whether they will be made redundant I don't imagine anything will be better on the morrow. So basically everything has been a fiasco and I hope they don't sweep it under the carpet. Surely the point of a disaster recovery exercise is to see whether we could recover in the event of a disaster. "No" is the answer but it is a valid answer to the question posed. If we can't restore a selection of systems, one shared drive, one mainframe box and a couple of servers then what chance is there if the proverbial plane lands on the building and everything needs to be available? None at all. If they fudge this to make it go away then the whole thing has been a waste of time and money. If they can learn important and sobering lessons from it then maybe it won't be such a mess next time.
23rd October I only watched the first episode of Torchwood last
night - I was running a bit late because my FTP client kept crashing and
anyway I'll have to record it again on Tuesday because I found the BBC3
logo too annoying. I've obviously not watched anything with a DOG since
going widescreen and the way it sits a third of the way along and gets
in the way of everything is simply too Today was highlighted by the inane ramblings of a temp recently dubbed "The Honey Monster" by one of our colleagues. She witters away throughout those days when she doesn't go home ill with PMT or a headache or a bruised thumb. Today we were amused to hear her thoughts on the topic of "having a conversation".
I was going to avoid Pride "Real Deal" spoilers until my DVD arrives but I accidentally saw the words "Coleman invited them into the ring for a celebration" and I nearly banged my head on the desk so I had to find out immediately whether the biggest upset since Vietnam's victory over the United States had actually happened. It hadn't. Fedor remains the scariest man alive and Coleman's celebration was obviously that he survived Operation Emilianenko. Thank goodness there are still some certainties in this time of ancient gods, warlords and kings. When a land in turmoil cried out for a hero. Or was that Xena: Warrior Princess? I forget.
22nd October I was in HMV - looking at the Glenda Jackson "Elizabeth R" DVD - when a guy stood beside me and tried to start a conversation. I looked at him and he took this as an invitation to carry on. He was middle aged, had a beard, wore a Poppy on his jacket and it wasn't easy to tell whether he was a weirdo freaky lunatic tramp or just a guy. I moved to get away and he offered his hand and a cheery "You have a good day". I wouldn't have touched his hand even in the best of decades and this is far from the best of decades. After checking he wasn't a pick pocket I scampered away. There are many possible explanations for his actions - (a) he might've been drunk, (b) he might've been a drunken tramp, (c) he might've been religious and barmy, (d) he might just've read one of those "speak to strangers and the world will be a better place" books, (e) might've been making a hidden camera show about how freaked out people get if someone starts talking to them, (f) he might well have just been released from a mental institution, (g) he could've escaped from a mental institution, (h) he could have a contagious disease and be looking to spend his last days passing it on to anyone foolish enough to touch him, (i) he might've been a miscellaneous criminal, (j) he might've fancied me or (k) all of the above. Weirdo. I spent the afternoon playing with the little ones - little niece is now able to climb up using a table or chair and stand on her own. But then she doesn't know what to do next, her legs begin to wobble and she plonks down on her bottom and starts again. My little nephew on the other hand has caused his school to have to change the Laws of Football. They are no longer allowing penalty kicks because he has started diving every time he gets in the area. The things a boy picks up watching Stockport County. Tcha. Meanwhile, my sporting career took a detour on Friday. We were down to two - m'self and ShirtGuy - and traffic problems meant it was ten to by the time we arrived at the place. The girl on the counter said they were not letting people onto the course after twenty to as the nights are drawing in and things get damaged when people try to play in the dark. So we went to the Little Chef next door and drank coke and ate pancakes until the traffic outside had died down. I hope the other golfers don't discover that eating pancakes and drinking coke in the Little Chef is actually better than golf or the place will become packed.
20th October I've spent the last two and a half hours being sorely vexed. My Kaspersky Internet Security suite arrived today - a necessary upgrade as my year's licence to their antivirus and firewall is about to expire and it was cheaper to buy the new version of the whole thing rather than new licences for the two components I already had. Well, after the initial installation (a fraught process as it uninstalls the previous programs before it can install the new ones so one is apparently defenceless in this dangerous age) I ran the updates, restarted, ran more updates, restarted again and was finally in a position to do as a pop up window kept nagging me to - namely run a full scan. Well, the words of Alan Partridge, butter my arse. It was slower than a dead snail (a reference three of you will understand) with thirty seconds per file being the average (instead of dozens of files per second normally). I restarted again (just in case), ran the updater again (in case there was a speed patch), looked through the Kaspersky users forum, ran a Clam antivirus scan to make sure nothing was interfering with Kaspersky, stopped an automatic scan from running at the same time as my manual scan and nothing worked. I changed it from "all files" to "new and amended files only", disabled the resource-consuming scanned file notification, closed all non-essential applications, hunted through every setting, knob, valve and piston and STILL NOTHING WORKED. It has a little prediction of when the scan would be finished and this had now reached a fortnight from now (sans exaggeration). Eventually, on a remote backwater of a tab, I found a ticked box which said "Pause virus scans when CPU is busy with other applications". Removing the tick and restarting the scan was a success. I don't know why it thought my CPU was busy - it wasn't especially - probably a bug which renders it unable to distinguish between any activity and full capacity. Tcha - they obviously don't have the benefit of a highly skilled test team. But it is a Russian company and Russia is a deeply scary place filled with deeply scary people who do deeply scary things so I won't volunteer for that one.
18th October We had another Disaster Recovery meeting this morning. Aside from some moments of apparently genuine attack (mainly centred around a new box which only had DVD compatibility rather than tape and they needed to load something that wouldn't fit on a DVD) it was a swift moving mixture of swearing, three letter abbreviations, techno stuff which I'm sure they made up and assurances that people with nicknames (usually surname+y or surname+o) were going to do things. My being there was entirely pointless (which was fair enough as I hadn't been invited in the first place). We will be going off-site next week and there is a small problem. See if you can spot it - "You'll have to use pool cars." "How do we get those?" "You can't - there's only one and that's busy." "So we could drive there in our own cars." "No you can't - you're not insured for business travel. You'll have to hire a car." "How do we do that?" "You can't - there isn't a budget for it" And so on. In the event of a disaster will all essential staff have to stay at home until they've hired a car or got a cover note from their insurer to say they are able to travel elsewhere to work? Or will the lone pool car pick everyone up individually? I'm not getting involved because I wouldn't be driving there anyway. I'd get lost and miss all the fun so I'm snadging a lift from someone with all the correct papers. Shameless but efficient. Apparently less efficient is a new feature which I demonstrated for various interested parties this afternoon. It greys out optional elements until they are selected by the user. They said it was too grey. Grey text on a grey background was hard to read and they wouldn't know whether they needed to select each item until they'd selected it and it went black and white. This lead to far too much peering at different screens and checking code to make sure it wasn't an optical illusion. ITguy said they'll try and make it a bit more grey so it would stand out without looking active. Apparently when the demonstratees said it was too grey they technically meant not grey enough. In the words of Larry Grayson, what a grey day.
15th October People may be wondering about today's update. The idea is that it's a retro update - a batch of new editions of the features which launched the website three years ago. The site began as a home for the episode guide and the adventures of Dennis Brent. Thankfully it got a lot bigger and better than that but it seemed a good idea at the time to bring some old things back. Normal service will be resumed later in the week. Now for other bits and pieces... I went to Borders on Thursday. The shop was in a state of chaos and didn't have what I wanted but I still managed to find a book that looked quite good. It was £3 off but the till didn't recognise it. The assistant said, and I quote, "Good job you spotted that I suppose". I suppose? For three days I've been trying to work out why she added "I suppose" to what was a perfectly functional sentence. Friday was more golf~! I think the golf~! boat may already have sailed. It wasn't as enjoyable as the first couple of weeks. I think the pain has something to do with it - the driving range woke my bad shoulder up and the whole swinging thing isn't great as a result. But it might also be the closing in of the nights. Or that everyone takes it more seriously than I do. I think the winter break is coming at the right time. We'll see in the spring whether it is something I want to do more of or if I should stick to pizza. The highlight was AngryDave living up to his name. Not only did he throw his ball in the air and whack it into a field with his putter, baseball style, but after a particularly bad drive he hurled his club a full fifty yards. It flew past his ball and, were he able to chip it onto the green, could've given him a shot at par. Saturday was babysitting. Looking after my six year old nephew from eleven am until his parents had finished sorting out their attic. We played a Scooby Doo game, he punched me quite a lot, I gave him goujons for lunch and told him they were fish fingers, and he played football on his Playstation while I watched the proper football on Sky Sports. He decided to play United vs Wigan as well and it was rather confusing as his speeded-up computer game kept predicting what actually happened in the real match. Except Roy Keane and Ruud van Nistelrooy didn't score the goals. Then he punched me some more, ran around for a bit, tried to teach me how to play football on a Playstation, punched me for a while and he went home. Oww.
11th October In no particular order... The first episode of the new Robin Hood was nearly good. There was certainly a lot to like in it and they didn't fall into some of the more obvious traps (such as feeling compelled to make Marion as strong if not stronger than Robin, straight from the off, to overcome the traditional limitations of the character). My main complaint is that it was too much like the first episode of Xena - battle hardened warrior returns home with the intention of giving up violence only to realise their skills are needed in the cause of good (etc). The thing it lacked were the killer moments which made Xena brilliant from the first night. I forget what they were but they were moments which made me sure it was a series to be reckoned with. Robin Hood didn't have those but it showed enough to make me tune in next week. Death of a President premiered on Monday night and was an interesting if ultimately disappointing film. I can't deny a guilty pleasure in seeing George Bush gunned down as he is, at the end of the day, a war criminal who deserves to hang. But what the film had in technical wizardry and atmosphere (the first half was so absorbing that the news reports of Bush's death were almost believable) it lacked in storytelling. Firstly, the biggest news story in the history of the planet would be so well known in every detail that a documentary made a few years afterwards wouldn't require the protagonists to hand-hold the audience through it. A factual time-line narration would've been more appropriate for filling us in on the details. Secondly, I don't doubt that the message of the film is that America will, under pressure, take revenge on Muslims whenever possible. The fact that a true blood American actually did the shooting and the convicted Muslim remains in jail despite being proved innocent was hammered home. Unfortunately, they chose to have that Muslim be someone who attended a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Yes - a man with proven links to terrorism (albeit apparently accidental) happened to be in the right building at the exact time Bush was shot. Scanter evidence wrapped up in American deception would've fitted the film better. A case of mistaken identity or a deliberate forgery and we have an innocent man set up by a government desperate to use the assassination as a political weapon. But the "innocent" wasn't innocent enough and it isn't so outrageous that they would keep him in jail. After all, we only had his wife's word that he went to the terror camp under false pretences. So it was impressive to look at, perversely enjoyable to watch and extremely atmospheric but once Bush was dead and the film makers realised they had the second half of a film to fill they lost their way somewhat. Watching "tragedy" in Death of a President made me think how our generation has seen a fair few rolling disasters - from 9/11 to Diana to the London Bombings to the Tsunami and so on - but there hasn't been a rolling triumph. When do we get our moon landing? When will there be a generation-defining news story that will unite damn near everyone and fill endless hours with goodness instead of horror? Most of us won't see a landing on Mars. We may not even see another moon landing. But there has to be something positive for the 24 hour news generation. The fall of the Berlin Wall came close but that just opened our eyes to the squalor of eastern Europe. It may have been a historic event but the fall of communism created a vacuum in the eastern block which we'll all be suffering the consequences of for decades to come. So come on humanity - do something great. Go on - you know you want to. Or failing that, when do the Vulcans get here? Not of course that we need aliens to land for there to be moments of wonder. My little ten month old niece has discovered that the secret to happiness is to be found with a wooden spoon. Preferably with a pan to bang it on. Give her two wooden spoons and she waves them around for a bit and then starts to make an awful lot of noise. And she does it with such glee. Paul Temple and the Sullivan Affair also brings out copious amounts of glee but this time in me. I won't spoil it just in case you rush in an buy it from one of the cheaper online stores but after seven and a half weeks of people going to extraordinary lengths to get their naughty fingers on a perfectly ordinary pair of spectacles we finally found out why. And it is a pip and a dandy. Francis Durbridge may have had his moments of predictability and repetition but he had a fantastic imagination too and the explanation was as incredibly simple and incredibly clever as it gets. Just a fantastic serial and well worth getting. Something else well worth getting was Alias thanks to an Amazon bargain which saw four seasons in a box for £36. I don't need to tell most of you that this is £9 per series. I'd bought the first season once before but ended up selling it (not sure why). I found it to be good and well worth investigating. And at this price I couldn't resist it. They still have it at that price if you fancy a punt. Now all I need is to watch them all. Ha ha ha. I'm in spoiler avoidance mode once more. Last night was Shamrock-Ortiz III but we won't see it until Saturday night. So no visiting favourite websites (they have been removed from their usual spot on the links bar just in case) and no sneaky peaking. Obviously I know Ortiz won because Shamrock had no chance in hell but I don't know that - I only know it must've happened because it couldn't happen any other way. Like knowing the Doctor will survive the Dalek attack. It is going to happen but the fun is in the details. I got a lot of details when one of our IT dudes gave me an unscheduled tour of the various virtual desktops, server settings, IIS screens and all manner of other dealybobs. He kept telling me that he (and his colleagues) do a lot more than people realise - they don't just write code, they keep the whole show on the rails. It was weird - he can't actually have thought I had any stroke at all in the upcoming selection process. There wasn't anyone about who would have stroke and who might've overheard. And if he was just showing off, why has he waited two years to do it? And if by some miracle I did have stroke (which I don't and never will) I'd say good things anyway because he's be far the best bug fixer they've got and I'd place him above even ITguy as the most important person on our project. Big ideas are all fine and large but visionary strategy won't fix PHP bugs in a hurry. I doubt anything will fix England in a hurry either. After a miserable 0-0 at the weekend and an equally miserable 0-2 this evening they are back to their best. The problem isn't one of formations, tactics or injuries to key players. It is that the players don't really care. They are half arsing it and we know it. They are like actors and musicians who do little sketches for Children in Need - it isn't their real job, it's just a bit of fun in a good cause. Players play for England when they can't get a minor knock signed off by a doctor as a serious injury. They mumble the national anthem and get down to the serious business of trying to hide the twin facts that they don't give a toss and that they hate most of their team mates because they play for rival clubs. And it all happens under the glare of a media which magnifies everything into glorious victory or humiliating defeat. When in fact even the most important international falls way down the players' list of priorities. Somewhere between a book signing and a haircut I'd guess. Tomorrow is the site's third birthday. Whodathunk it would've lasted so long? My big plan to mark the event never got off the drawing board but there should be some larks either tomorrow evening or over the weekend. Depending on how long larks take these days. I'm not what I used to be.
8th October Conversation heard between colleagues - AngryDave: I've been
really tired so I tried going to bed earlier but I couldn't get to
sleep. So I scrapped that last night and saved two hours of my life.
7th October Let's take a step or two backwards and cover off all those things I'd been meaning to mention but other things got in the way and the moment passed like a wanker's booming and glowing twat-mobile at midnight when everyone is trying to get to sleep and has no interest in the dance music of which the wanker is so proud. Friday last The second round of golf~! was notable only for the closing few holes when the evening went a bit bonkers. From the tee one would look straight ahead an see a gorgeous sunset - all oranges and pinks and reds sinking majestically behind silhouetted trees. But turn to your left and there was a cold half moon lighting up a silver sky as a mist grew out of the field itself and began slowly to engulf everything as far as the eye could see. All that was missing were some zombie sheep to complete the effect. I came last again. Monday At 10am we had an "invitation" to a briefing from our head of department. Not in the coffee area, not in the restaurant but in a little office somewhere. The briefing was at 11 and private briefings seldom bring good news. At about 10.45 one of our chums in IT comes over and says that a quarter of them are being made redundant and will be gone by mid December. Not great news. I can understand why it is happening - IT have higher salaries than everywhere else and a lower attrition rate - but it still sucks. All those affected will be developers because, by a remarkable coincidence, they already have the exact number of managers needed to run the department in the future. I know who I definitely want them to keep but that doesn't presuppose there are any I would be happy to see fired. There is a core of guys we've worked with for the past two years and any of them leaving would be a pain in the arse. On the plus side, those who do go will take valuable skills into the market place and will I'm sure have no difficulty finding jobs. I hope so at least. Monday evening Spooks was rather disappointing. Certainly the weakest of the series so far. It just didn't seem to make an awful lot of sense. Add to that the idea that only the British secret service would be operating at such a gathering and you're left with a computer game where you pick a 2-player but you're on your own - you win but only because the other controller isn't actually in play. Then there was the trailer for next week and I had to watch it. I've never done the "Turn over and see next week's edition" thing before as skipping a week would throw me out and I'd forget to come back to it, but this time I had to. I won't spoil it for BBC1 viewers but it won't be the same show anymore and I was unhappy when it was over. A cracking episode. Tuesday Traffic from hell. The single worst place for a tiny roadworks-with-traffic-lights meant the jam started at the end of m'road and continued all the way to the bypass. I had a 9.15 but wasn't going to make it so I called TheArtist to let him know. I have broken the law. I really ought to go and hand myself in. My 9.15 was reschedule for 10.15 (or I swapped placed with TheArtist and he went first, which sounds less high powered) and the monthly 1-2-1 with SharksFan. He told us the good news that we are definitely going to get a replacement for AussieGuy and implied that we would have a say in who was appointed. We know who we want - KFD - and we're fairly hopeful of getting him. I saw him at lunchtime and told him the good news. "I'll kill anyone else who applies" he said. "I've heard Twat is interested" I replied on the off chance it wasn't just a figure of speech. We were also told about the annual disaster recovery programme and how we would be, in some small way, very much in charge of coordinating it. It basically boils down to picking a bunch of people and getting them to a site on an industrial estate where they will see whether, in a disaster, they could recover from it. I wonder where people would go if the disaster recovery turned into a disaster? Last year I'm told they went to Ikea. So I don't think we're following in footsteps steeped in glory. Thursday More golf~! but the rain had been pouring for two solid days so we went to the driving range instead. Not as good as the real thing - it got boring after the first dozen balls and the only excitement came when the ball kept bouncing off the roof whenever I tried the big wooden club. My distance records were 150 yards in front and three yards behind. Friday We went out for a post-project meal on the company. It was AngryDave's Big Project and had been occupying him ever since his new job saved him from Complaints back in November of last year. There were only a dozen people there in the end out of the two dozen invited and I only went because it was a familiar pizzeria. It wasn't as good as one of our regular pizza nights as much of the focus was pulled by four drunken IT developers and a Scotch bird who were being increasingly raucous (a splendid word if delivered in a Rowan Atkinson/Thin Blue Line type way) at the other end of the table. I couldn't make out a word they said - I've been on the verge of a cold all week and my ears always go peculiar when I've got a cold. Either that or I've got something probably serious, definitely fascinating and almost certainly incurable. Paul Temple and the Sullivan Mystery has continued to be brilliant all week. God knows what an unsuspecting person would make of eight weeks of mayhem and intrigue centred round a pair of spectacles but I'm still loving it. It's the final part tonight and I'll be sorry to see it go. Hopefully they'll make more - tie Crawford Logan up to a long term contract and don't let him out of the studio until every Temple script has been done.
1st October I listened to the first part of "Paul Temple and the Sullivan Mystery" last night. It is the recent Radio 4 production of the lost 1949 original and it was wonderful. No effort seemed to have been made to modernise it or jazz it up or do anything to ruin its faux-authenticity. They even used what sounded like a more crackly version of the theme tune than is on the remastered CDs of episodes from the 1950s. And - as if everything being fabulous wasn't enough - the cliff hanger was beautifully awful. Better than The Lawrence Affair's "Paul - I've lost my hand bag" or The Conrad Case's "Dear Madam, you're coat - the blue coat - will be ready on Friday the 18th at 4 o'clock". Old Lady: "Would you like a lozenge, my dear?" Steve: "No thank you, Miss Fraser." Old Lady: "No? They're peppermints..." (cue theme music and voice over credits) All I can add to that is Radio 4 should work night and day and around the clock to remake all the missing serials. Good lord, I can't wait to find out if Steve relents and has one of Miss Fraser's peppermints. I listened to it on my new iPod. Another thing of wonder and a joy forever. For the first time ever I have an MP3 player which I cannot immediately fill. My first was a mere 6Gb and - for the scant months it lasted - I was forever chopping and changing. My first iPod was 20Gb and, although better, was permanently full with as much again in the waiting room. Now I have breathing space. Not for long as I've an awful lot of stuff I could put on there but for now I have my entire 55Gb iTunes library on there and almost 20GB free. The best new thing about it is video playback. I'd been sceptical about video on something as small as an iPod - how on earth can you watch something on that tiny screen, and what sort of quality could you reasonably expect? I'm happy to say the answer to both questions is Yes. I put a short Yes Minister clip on there - having found how to create MP4 files - and it was extremely clear and entirely watchable. A word at this point about MP4 - it is a remarkable format, capable of very high quality and much smaller file sizes than its MPEG predecessor. I then copied all my music videos on there to see how they looked (as things I'd seen many times in their natural habitat). They looked if anything better on the iPod than they did on the PC. And today I went one further and watched the entire first episode of "Flash Gordon - Space Soldiers" on there to see if it would make a worthy successor to Undersea Kingdom. It was both easy to watch on the small screen and splendidly campy so a double success there I think. One thing not a success is the ongoing row between the US and the EU about America's demands for swathes of information to be provided on everyone travelling to the USA. The idea is that the US is demanding all manner of personal information be sent to them for "security reasons". This includes such obvious indicators of terrorism as credit card numbers, telephone numbers and whether you ordered a special meal on the plane (though those requirements made on religious grounds are excluded so it is simply a way of identifying the dangerous liberal vegetarians on board). These demands have been ruled illegal by the European Commission because they are gross breaches of data protection laws. The US is threatening to prevent European airlines flying into American airports. All of which makes the cynic in my think that the security angle is, as it so often is when the US government invokes it, nothing more than an emotive smokescreen. A handy device so that, if challenged, they can wave a little flag, point to pictures of dying firemen and have you excommunicated. What if the American government, seeing how badly its airlines were doing of late, decided to make demands of their European rivals which they knew to be illegal? Worst case scenario they'd get millions of new records for their Big Brother computer systems, best case scenario they would have recourse to punish non-US airlines and give a shot in the arm to their own beleaguered companies. But fear not - this threat does not affect Britain. The special relationship has held firm. The Americans have recognised that, as their oldest ally, we stand side by side with them during these dark and terrifying times. Only the British are deemed a trusted race and are not caught up in this squalid little row. They look upon us as brothers and sisters and being entitled to carry the Queen's passport is enough for them to... What? Oh right - apparently we gave in ages ago and put our own laws in place to give the Americans absolutely everything they could ever want about everyone. Ha! You didn't expect that did you Washington? Your cunning corporate scam has failed because the British government has the foresight to lube up before you butt-rape it. |
 
|
