Last Saturday (the 20th) an old family friend passed away and his cremation was on Monday. Lex Kelly was a family friend long before my first breath and I’m having a difficult time believing that he’s gone.

I’ve just found out that Michael Sheard has died of cancer. I met Michael several times (At various conventions) and he was always one of the nicest blokes you would ever meet.

I can easily say the same thing of Lex. It was always good to see him and he always had time to listen and talk.

Although I will miss Lex considerably more than Michael (I didn’t know him that well…) it’s unfortunate that there are two less damn fine people in the world right now.

BigAl

If you know me, you will know that I am not particularly discerning when it comes to films; I’m the eternal optimist, always seeking to find the positives in all films. I enjoyed all 3 Matrix films. I would even watch Episode 1 again if you asked.

Take it from me – don’t watch Alexander.

I was willing to give it a chance, but I couldn’t even finish it. It suffers from 2 fatal flaws:

1. It is dull. So dull. Even the large-scale battle scenes manage to be dull.
2. It is impossible to follow – the plot skips and jumps all over time and geography, meaning that you can’t really tell what sequence things happened in, and where they actually happened.

[edit]Oh, and don’t even ask about the accents. Most of Macedonia appears to be populated by the Irish, apart from Alexanders Mum, who is quite obviously Russian.[/edit]

Avoid like the plague. Go rent Gigli instead.

mrBen

I’m back in a writing “peak” at the moment, after a long time in a trough.

At the weekend I got a new pad from WH Smiths and I have a new story arc I’m rolling out. My confidence is a bit better right now and I’m actually enjoying the writing process for a change.

I reckon that part of that come from the joy of just getting the story on paper and to hell with the mistakes. Starting a story on the computer means I tend to get swamped with formatting and word counts and endless revising even before I finished a few hundred words.

As you might imaging that means that the passion for telling the story gets lost in the madness.

Working on paper may not seem sufficiently advanced for some but it’s good way to get ideas down in a raw, unchecked form. Revisions should always come later, preferably when the work is finished!

This is something I still wrestle with. At least I’m getting the ideas down right now. I’ll leave worrying if it’s any good until its finished.

BigAl

Well, it’s definatly broadband, but at 1 meg it’s hardly killer. Although saying that, it’s faster than what we had in the old flat.

We stumbled along at 512 and then had a brief jolt to 768 before we moved. At 1 meg we should be perfectly happy for a while. Especially as it’s 1 meg for £10 a month for the next year coutesy of those scallywags at NTL.

Their service isn’t exactly brilliant all of the time but it’s good enough for our purposes.

So the wee installation man will be at the flat on Thursday at some point I’ll away to get some kind of wireless router and a PC card for Ruth’s laptop.

Oh, fun with toys.

BigAl

Installed Ubuntu on a laptop that Ruth had brought home from her work.

Windows XP had died spectacularly and we decided that if we could get a simple installation of Linux that wasn’t crowded with loads of stuff that they would never use, that would be great. Bear in mind that the laptop will be used for general office stuff, so all they really need is office software, e-mail and a decent web browser. And that the person who will eventually use the machine has little to no PC experience.

And after the simplest install I’ve ever seen (more so than Win XP) the nice and shiny Ubuntu now sits happily on the laptop.

I’ll spend some time this week tinkering with it but it’s really nice to see a flavour of Linux that is perfectly good straight out of the box.

And if this is a success then we will move all her work laptops over to Linux.

I’ll see what joys the tinkering brings.

BigAl

Having bought some new stuff, I now have some old stuff to give away to a good home:

• 1 x 19″ CRT Monitor – weighs a tonne, and is decidedly dark of picture – fine for general use, particularly if you can get some gamma correction out of your gfx card drivers. (Nvidia settings under Linux worked fine for me).
• 1 x 15″ CRT Monitor. IBM G50. Works fine, but doesn’t have the highest resolution in the world
• 1 x Fridge – I think it’s a Hotpoint. I have the manual. No freezer compartment. Designed to be built in to a kitchen – I have all the fittings for attaching a cupboard door to it.

Mail me at mrben at jedimoose dot org, or post a comment if you’re interested. Pick up preferred, although I might deliver in exceptional circumstances

mrBen

We had an influx of cash last week, so on Saturday we went shopping

Heather got the laptop she has been asking for – a Toshiba Equium which is quite nice. It’s a bit light on memory, and it’s running XP Home and Office 2003, but other than that I almost like it myself

More importantly, I finally picked up a new monitor – a 19″ Iiyama reduced by £100 in PC World. I don’t normally shop there, but it was such a good deal and the 12ms response time is fine for gaming. Now all I need is a new graphics card to replace my faulty old one…. (and new mp3 player….)

mrBen

There’s nothing worse than seeing poor English in print media. Now, I recognise that the Metro is not the Daily Telegraph, but lets make one thing clear: a football player who plays for his country (say, for sake of argument, ‘Guinea’) is not , I repeat NOT a ‘Guinea internationalist. He is a ‘Guinean international’. Internationalist is just not right. At all. In any way. Don’t do it again.

/me has spoken.

mrBen

I was listening to the most recent episode of LUGRadio on the way home from work (the guys have gone on their summer break and withdrawal is beginning to set in), and they were having a discussion about podcasting, and whether it was useful, and things like that.

Podcasting, for those of you who don’t know, is a delivery method for MP3 files. You embed them within an RSS feed; what this essentially means is that people who listen to regular shows (like LUGRadio) have a little program that periodically checks the feed for new files, and when the new files appear it automatically downloads them. This is great, as it means that people can listen to a lot of shows, and the latest show is already ready for their MP3 player.

Anyway – enough of the background. If you haven’t heard of it, just Google it!

I had a brainwave. And it went something like this. The following points became clear in my mind:

• Blogs were the big thing recently (and still are)
• Blogs were helped by the adoption of RSS feeds (theres one for Jedimoose…..)
• People who read lots of blogs also use “Planet” sites, which collect similar blogs together (like the ScotLUG planet
• Internet radio was previously dominated by streaming media
• Podcasting is becoming the new way of delivering audio content

So here’s the brainwave: Why not develop a little application, probably an adaption of an exisiting podcast collector, which can be set to download not just the MP3s, but also a playlist, with times. Then, you create a planet-type site that grabs radio content together, and produces an amalgamated RSS feed, including a playlist, which is then downloaded by the software. In this way you combine a stream with RSS feeds. The idea would be that the application would download chunks of playlist and Mp3 in advance, and the cache the next set at an appropriate time. It would then store or delete as requested by the user. The idea is that you have, essentially, an ongoing radio stream, but without the overheads of having to run a stream. People could then ‘tune in’ to the stream, but what they are actually getting is asynchronous downloads of ‘podcasts’. (I had to get the ‘A’ word in there – Ajax is so popular these days.)

Anybody with me?

mrBen

MrLithic has kindly put up some photos of the party last night….. see them here. More to follow if I can find them.

Which, with any luck, will be tomorrow.

As the big 30 approaches with dazzling speed I’m planning to do the only thing that will help me cope. Get pished.

So the plan is as follows…

1. Nip out to buy some new books. You have to find something to do before the pubs open.
2. Get pished. Edgy and Marc may be joining Ruthy and myself in the pub at some point. Which is always good.
3. Head around to the BBQ @ The Thorps. And drink more. So much more…
4. Drink more. Because when you start a plan it’s very important that you carry it out until the bitter end. Or something.

There may be some kind of hideous sobering up experience happening on Sunday but I’m not letting that stop me. Hell no. If I’m still alive I’ll probably keep drinking all Sunday.

Aye right. On Sunday morning (afternoon?) I’ll be crying like a child for his mother.

BigAl

I’ve been thinking a bit about laptops recently, not least because mrsBen wants to buy one. I have previously ranted about how people often choose something thats wrong just because it seems ‘cool’ or because they think that buying something that does something that they _might_ do means that they _will_ do it. But I made a new revelation recently.

People have often asked me what type of laptop I would recommend. My stock answer up to now is that I would recommend IBM if you can afford a Thinkpad (I very much like the T41 that they give me for my work ), or Toshiba if you can’t. And I always (always) recommend that people go for a 3 year warranty, preferably onsite.

Obviously, when people are asking the question, they are really meaning 2 things:

1. What would I buy if I was buying a laptop, and
2. What would I recommend that they buy.

And I’ve realised that there could well be 2 answers. When it comes down to it, the laptop I buy for myself is likely to be one from a company, such as NovaTech, that sells laptops that do not come preinstalled with Windows. I don’t want Windows, and I don’t want to pay for it. NovaTech gives me that option. Admittedly, some of the bigger vendors have marketted laptops with Linux preinstalled (HP, Dell and IBM all have at various times), but generally they are either single-spec, or only sold in the US.

The laptop I would recommend is still, as previously mentioned, likely to not be a laptop at all, unless the user can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will be used in either a ‘truly’ mobile manner, or at very least in a multi-location way. In which case my answer may swing between my previous 2 answers. I would still, in all cases, recommend that people spend money on the hardware, rather than looking at ridiculous software packages while skimping on the important stuff. OpenOffice.org is still my office suite of choice, and I don’t see the point in spending extra on MS Office, when a huge percentage of users don’t really use any of the things that it has that OO.o doesn’t.

It does grate considerably when I discover that 1 of the wife’s specifications for her laptop is that it will run MS Word; but then, she can probably get away with it because I love her. It’s a shame that she will be abandoning her Ubuntu desktop after such a short time, but there’s not a lot I can say, really.

mrBen

Well – 10 days on and our flat is gradually becoming a home. We’ve moved bedrooms (already!) to take better advantage of the space. We’ve got ourselves a big-ass fridge, and this will soon be joined by a huge BBQ. The dishwasher was plumbed in this morning, and I had an email from PlusNet today confirming that the ADSL should be active, so tonight I should get everything sorted out computer-wise tonight.

Saturday will be our flat warming BBQ/party – invites duly extended to the whole of the Moose family of sites; most of you probably already know, but Guy Incognito and California Trouser Snake(!) may not have heard on the grapevine yet.

There’s still a few bits and pieces to be done in the old flat – it’s a bit weird going back in. In many ways it was our first proper home; renting a flat always seems a little bit temporary, but we owned Haldane Street for 3 years, and even without anything in it, it still feels a little bit like home. I will certainly miss it, much as I love the new flat. But I’m sure the 2Mb ADSL and good quality digital reception will ease the pain

mrBen

Is it just me, or is the whole fuss about airguns completely overblown? Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s awful that this little boy was shot and killed with an air rifle. But does that really justify the time and money that would be spent trying to ban something that, in the big scale of things, isn’t that dangerous? I live in the country that has the worst knife-crime record in Europe, the worst record of heart disease in Europe; people binge-drink and smoke themselves into early graves, children get obese through eating too much fatty food and lose their teeth from drinking too many sugary drinks – airguns are the least of our worries.

We have become a knee-jerk society that cries loudly for short-sighted legislation based on unique circumstances, while turning a blind eye to the long-term issues that will kill a huge percentage of our children.

mrBen

It seems that not only is the film similar in part to Michael Marshall Smith’s novel Spares, it is almost a direct copy of Clonus, an old low budget sci-fi classic.

Here is a story that The Seattle Times ran, with some choice words from it’s director, Robert S Fiveson.

This kind of stuff makes me sick. Michael Bay is a hack. Boycott this film.

BigAl

I saw this recently at the Imax in Glasgow with Ruth, Ruth’s friend Lorna and SuperGingerMan.

I can’t really review it fairly as my potential enjoyment was hampered by Lorna talking incessantly through most of the film. Grrr.

What parts of the film I did enjoy (and was able to see through my blinding anger) was all the oompa loompa musical sequences and any bits with Christopher Lee. I found Johnny Depp intensely irritating as Willy Wonka, especially relating to the ending.

As for the ending… it was weak and a touch on the forced side.

I dare say that I’ll see it again (waiting for it’s arrival in the video shop first…) to see if my original opinions were correct. You’ll get a proper review then.

Big Al

Well – we did it! We’ve now moved into our new flat. There were relatively few problems – we needed a plumber for the boiler, one of our boxes is missing, and the flat number is 0/2 not 0/1 (as on the title deeds) which will make for a fun few weeks with post…..

The other major headache is the fact that the BT line isn’t working yet, so no phone and no internet, which makes me sad The engineer will be out on Friday to fix it, and hopefully the ADSL will be active by then too. I’ve gone, in the end, with PlusNet, who have good rates on their 2MB service. Maybe not the fastest out there, but it’s a reasonable price, and I’ve heard good things about the service. More on that later….

The other thing that happened was that on Thursday I broke my mobile phone So I went out on Saturday and replaced it with a Motorola V220 – not the most flashy of phones, but I think its cool Plus I have now downloaded the Mr Benn Theme onto it. Hurrah!

mrBen

It’s been well over a month since I’ve had access to the beloved broadband and although I miss it for the idle surfing (which can be sneakily achieved at work…) it’s freed me up for other things like spending time with the wife and catching up with my reading.

Two things that I do occasionaly miss are,

• regular access to my e-mail
• easy downloading of demos, trailers, software and anything else that comes to mind.

Eventually we’ll get broadband in the flat, but I’m in no rush.

Yet.

BigAl

I’m rapidly approaching the end of my third decade on this ball of rock, and I’ve already begun the inevitable (and occasionally tedious) review of what’s gone before.

Thirty years have passed and I’m fighting the urge to say “Have I actually acheived anything?” and “Was it all a huge waste of my time?” and “Was any of this worth it?”, but then that would be the depression that always lurks around by birthday talking.

In reality some things have worked out quite well (and others not so well, but such is life).

On one hand I’m a university dropout with a string of dead-end jobs behind me, a novel which is going nowhere (and has been for most of my life) and a wife with whom I do nothing but bicker and fight.

On the other hand I have a steady job which I don’t hate and pays reasonably well, I have some of the best friends that money can buy (don’t worry Edgy, this month’s cheque is in the post), I have an imagination that throws ideas out faster than I can get them on paper, I have a really rather pleasing comic collection (which is getting more out of control all the time) and I’m married to a beautiful woman who I’ve been deeply in love with for years.

So when it all balances up, I’m more than happy with the way things have turned out.

Would I have done things differently?

Of course. But just small things. Mistakes that it would have been better not to make, but were fun making at the time…

So with a third of my life coming to an end (I have every intention to make it to 90, where I can be crotchety and unpleasant and stinking of pee) I’m looking forward to whatever happens next.

But with at least 60 years left, do I have enough time to fit everything in?

BigAl