Something for the weekend

A nice two days down South. I slipped away for a drink on Saturday night only to finish up describing endless circles of the New Forest searching for a free camping spot, during the course of which I discovered that the ebaymobile is tolerably quick off the mark but appalling at going round corners. I keep forgetting to check if the front offside mudflap is still in place; I caught it and a goodly amount of surrounding floorpan area quite hard on a roundabout in Totton. Still not sure if I should keep the car, although everybody does seem to agree that it's "cool". I'd feel happier if it hadn't developed a worrying tappety noise on the way down from Manchester.

Anyway, the New Forest is, it transpires, totally booked for a radius of five miles in each direction, so we gave up and went to Southampton where I drank beer and played Project Gotham 2 until six in the morning. Sunday brought a bit more PGR2, a spot of Family Guy, and some impromptu cricket using a child's bat, a tennis ball, and an elaborate scoring system built around the fact we were playing in an extremely cluttered living room filled with empty beer cans and sports equipment. I hit three sixes, but had to stop before the neighbours complained.

Just another day in the office. I'd have waved if I'd known they were filming.

Gah, I'm bored now. Flatmate is away this weekend, so I'm sat surrounded by laptops processing gibberish and reading nonsense on the internet. Worryingly, the only twoactivities that appeal are risky without being exciting. I'm strongly tempted to go somewhere in my new, uninsured car around a bit so that I can revel in the fact that it's different from my old one. The tragedy comes from the fact that I believe it to be cool, and thus an inner voice is desperately attempting to convince the embittered majority of my soul that the cool will transfer itself to me.

It's not winning at present because frankly, the rest of my inner voices know damn well that a skinny bespectacled man is going to have to try a lot harder than sitting in a 20-year old, slightly piebald BMW with an engine that sounds like one of the pistons is trying to beat its way out. Perhaps this is the source of the other activity that for some reason strikes me as appealing: smoking.

Note to self: Less work. More life.



It's been a slow day. I'm currently benchmarking laptops for a group
test, which has proved to be foolish not only thanks to the amount of
time it will take up, but also for being on battery life. If my thought
processes had made those crucial few extra cycles then I wouldn't have
taken it on or would have done the bulk of it at work; now I'm at the
weekend before the deadline with eight of the fuckers slurping greedily
on my electricity bill. In a flat with 60's-era electrics and buzzing
plug sockets, I might add. Still, they're churning out numbers happily
enough, and there's nothing like five screens counting down minutes and
seconds to really focus the mind on doing something - anything -
different with my free time.

Double Negative

I was going to mention this anyway, given my ongoing fascination
with Bath Chronicle newsboards, but Richard has kindly supplied a photo:



This will, I hope, go some way towards explaining the fact that whenever my walk into work takes me past one of these boards, the theme music to the League of Gentlemen pops into my head.

Low Cost Cruse Missile
Man screwed by government, offers freelance weapons design. Fuck me. (Thanks to Richard for the link)

Coca Cola's Plan: Just Say No - To Drinking Tap Water

God, I hate capitalism. And reverse osmosis? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

Turbulence

The main entree (eggs) should be at the six o'clock position... the salt should be placed to the right of the pepper. Remember, kids, if you serve 7-up unsolicited then you might as well just help the terrorists into the cabin.

Points of Entry

Among the ideas tossed out were “When you don’t know who your baby’s daddy is” and “When you and your daughter are pregnant at the same time. Now that's a specialist magazine.

Smells like what, now?

I don't really remember being young, much. I remember events, obviously, but never any real sense of energy, potential, emotional turmoil or any of that stuff that's supposed to be such a stand-out. I don't know if it's because it never happened, or whether it was so unpleasant I chose to forget it. Either seems possible.

In other news, Nedroid is really rather charming.

Petite Prix

Christ, how many regional film festivals are there, now? I've just watched a movie trailer that spooled through five different cities within the same Cannes-ripoff logo.

Perhaps that's how exclusivity is maintained; any town with a name too long to comfortably fit in the logo can't have a film festival. Best stick with the groundhog, Punxsutawney.

Dangerous Structure

There are plenty of websites out there dedicated to derelict buildings - I can't be arsed to dredge through boingboing and find them, but rest assured that the internet is never going to want for creepy, abandoned cities that somehow everybody just managed to walk away from. Thing is, vast tracts of the internet are like that too - I keep drifting into what were once thriving communities, and now it's all dead links, expired domain names and only the haunting, robotic presence of Lycos popup windows (themselves facing extinction) and long-dead counter utilities waiting for viewers who never come any more. Weird that the whole edifice can just crumble like that. I wonder if there are still people clinging on to spam-infested mailiing lists and long-dead news sites somewhere, hoping it'll all spring back to life again. Probably would have made a nice story in 1998.

Misc. Sund.

Two points I wish to make, both firmly rooted in the WHYGODWHY area of my brain:

1. Driv3r (Xbox) is really, really bad. Atrocious, in fact. It combines the most infuriating aspects of the first game with a ham-fisted bodgery of GTA3, and offers quite the least fun I believe I've ever had from a driving game. God alone knows what the kiddies who've been sucking up all the hype will think.

2. Oh, just fuck off. Vehicles of this type should only rise from the garages of men with masculinity issues and far too much time on their hands. Mass-producing something so utterly, pointlessly, wasteful is so idiotic I get depressed just thinking about it.

That's all. I might get some sleep now, before getting tonight's work under way.

Primal Scream

He and a small circle of sound effects people, including myself and Richard Anderson, continue the crusade to keep Wilhelm alive. The Whilhelm Scream continues to be heard in new films every year.

Excellent. Now that I've read this I'm convinced I've noticed it before, but I suspect it's probably congnitive dissonance.

Crash Testing: MINI Cooper vs Ford F150




Let's see where your ability to block two parking spaces gets you now. Obvious but nevertheless noteworthy commentary on the rise of the SUV in the New Yorker article linked.

Homer, as referenced in the IMDB. Quality.

Postcards From The Gamer

Ahaha. I am funny.

1. Don't like this new Blogger template. Yet.
2. Links 2003 is way more entertaining than I ever would have expected.
3. EA and XBox Live. Woooo.
4. There is no finer way to build business relationships than getting deeply wasted in another country.
5. That conversation tonight was horrifying and wrong even before we unwittingly involved that poor bastard sat on the adjacent table, who had the terrible misfortune to turn round when he heard the word "circumcision". Readers shouldn't have this kind of power.

Dear World

For the love of God, please shut up about the iPod. It is indeed very pretty, very useful and a wonderful piece of consumer technology but it is also very expensive, largely devoid of real technological innovation, and everybody has got one. There are thousands of bloody digital music players in existence - there is absolutely no need to keep harping on about this one and the sheer weight of idiots giving Apple yet more slavish, witless and largely uninformed free advertising is starting to drive me insane. Yes, it's great, no, it's not exciting, and no I don't want see another bloody article that somehow didn't find room to mention the dozens of other devices on the market in between the exhaustive fellatio of Steve fucking Jobs. HE IS MERELY FLESH AND BLOOD and it is MERELY WHITE PLASTIC. Moses had a space on one of his stone slabs for this sort of behaviour, you know.

Trucker concocts superbug killing cream in his garage Brilliant.

Honesty in Advertising

"If I was a regular reader, I would want the ease of the ads being gone, and the archives in a nice little place right there," Kolb said. "And if they don't, fuck 'em."