September 3rd, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Technology
It has been a long time since I have been sorely tempted by a new gadget, which is a bit of a relief for the wallet but makes life more boring. I used to be able to spend hours browsing Comet or PC World wanting every other thing in there but I have sort of reached the point where I have everything I want. The best the world can offer is a slightly bigger or better version of something I already have and am happy with.
Well that has changed and there are now there toys I quite fancy, even though only two of them actually exist. [Read more →]
Tags: Books·Gadgets
September 2nd, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life, Technology
I do have some sympathy with Virgin Media about the advertising of broadband speeds. With their fibre optic network they can deliver much higher bandwidth to homes and do it so that end users will actually get that speed – and then companies providing broadband across ADSL come along and advertise services that, once contention rates are factored in, deliver half the speed but can be quoted with a speed of “up to” the same level.
Having said that, I wish they would spend less time moaning about it and a bit more on expanding their fibre optic network to places like Maidenbower and Horsham. If Virgin don’t have cable in your street, then there really is no competition – all the different providers are going to be using the same infrastructure to provide broadband.
When so much of Crawley is cabled up and can get 50MB broadband it is very frustrating that the next town across has to rely on BT’s copper, and even the Maidenbower estate within Crawley isn’t all fibred up. I
Tags: Virgin Media
September 2nd, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life
With all these stories about William Hague floating around I keep getting confused by headlines, but that is mainly because the term SPAD keeps getting used. Due to the six years I spent working for London Underground the term SPAD will always mean a train going through a red light (signal passed at danger). This means that I have a mental association that makes me automatically think a SPAD is an unequivocally bad thing.
Maybe not so confused after all.
Tags: Language
September 1st, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life
One of our home-made lighting gantries at New Barn House
I have been putting off going through my photos for a while because it was a bit daunting, but now I have started and it turns out to be a much better way to pass an evening than watching TV and I have already scanned in some of my favourites from two albums which cover my last year at school and the year or so immediately afterwards. [Read more →]
Tags: Nostalgia·Photos
August 31st, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life
Me, aged about 18.
I have been quite busy over the last few weeks. We have been doing a bit of decorating to make it more likely we will be able to move – and so that it is more pleasant to live if we stay here. Before that I had to fill in the holes in the wall made by putting up shelves, but before that I had to take down the shelves and that meant emptying them of their bounty of books. Quite a task really.
I have also been clearing out the loft and sorting the stuff into three categories – keep, take to the tip, and sell or give away. I have been a bit of a hoarder over the last decade or two, and found stuff in the loft that must have been moved there direct from my old loft ten years ago. I have had to tell myself that if it has been up there for years without me missing it, then I probably don’t need it.
The exception might be photographs. [Read more →]
Tags: Photos
August 24th, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life
This evening I watched the 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson that I recorded off the TV a couple of days ago. I had been on at some stupid time like 3am and turned out to be the deaf version – with a bloke in the corner of the screen signing. I thought this might be a problem as one of the pleasures of this film is the brilliant scenery, but the signer only popped up when there was dialogue and there is very little dialogue in the film.
More of a problem was that the aspect ratio was a little bit wrong and the picture was a little stretched out. Despite all that it was still very watchable. As I have commented before, films in the 1970s were a lot more leisurely than they are now. I’m not sure that a mainstream film could get away with it now.
The film is based on a book called Crow Killer, which is sort of a real-life story and sounds fascinating. The person on whom Robert Redfords’s Jeremiah Johnson character is based was called Jack Johnson AKA Liver-Eating Johnson. The liver-eating was dropped for the movie.
He had a bit of a vendetta against the Crow tribe. In the book (and real life?) he was hunting them and eating their livers, but in the film they were hunting him. Even in the 70s the American film industry didn’t like its flawed heroes to be that flawed I guess.
Whatever the exact details of Johnson’s life, it was a hell of a lifestyle out in the Rocky mountains in the 1830s.
Tags: Films
August 24th, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life
I recently finished reading Union Atlantic, a debut novel by Adam Haslett – another book from Amazon’s Vine programme. I was a bit underwhelmed by it. [Read more →]
Tags: Books·Economics·Reviews·Vine
August 24th, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life
I had a bit of a result with the Amazon Vine programme this month. When I got the list of products to choose from, there was a kettle on there. I had recently noticed that our kettle was dribbling a bit, which annoyed me somewhat, but not enough to go out and get a new one. The kettle on offer was the Breville VKJ137, and here is what I thought about it. [Read more →]
Tags: Gadgets·Reviews·Vine
August 23rd, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life
When I saw the headline that started with “Archaos returns…’” I got all excited, and then read the rest: “…as exhibition celebrates revolutionary chainsaw wielding-circus“.
I remember when Archaos came to London. It was a very punk rock circus (musical accompaniment was provided by the band Chihuahua) and very French. Not in the Stella Artois advert sense, but in the Mano Negra sense, with the artists really living for their work.
They pitched up on Clapham Common, to much tabloid hysteria, and I went along to see them with a new girlfriend who was genuinely upset/offended by the show to the extent that she left at the interval, so I had to follow. I still wish I had stayed until the end because it really was a fantastic show which was not recorded or documented to the extent it should have been.
I would love to se a DVD of the Archaos show – although I’m sure it would be tame compared to the real thing with all the noise and petrol fumes. Other shows use smoke machines, but Archaos used to just set light to things to get smoke.
Tags: Circus
August 23rd, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life
President Ahmadinejad has unveiled Iran’s new weapon: a UAV which can carry 500 pounds of bomb and drop it 620 miles away.
He says that ‘the key message is friendship’. So its a friendly 500-pound bomb? He also said:
This jet is a messenger of honour and human generosity and a saviour of mankind, before being a messenger of death for enemies of mankind.
Todays trivia question: How far is Jerusalem from the border of Iran? According to Google Maps’ brilliant distance measuring tool you can be just inside Iran and be 614 miles from the Knesset.
Just saying.
Tags: Iran·WTF
