leave it alone
For heavens sake Blatter, stop fiddling with football. Penalties may a ‘tradegy’ but after 120 minutes of 0-0, we all want it to end!
Welcome to Catch
a story of coffee, music and football
perfectly normal paranoia
I have two copies of Douglas Adam’s ‘The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy’, one is a book the other is a pdf (the dvd of the film doesn’t count). Each has their own unique advantage. The book I can read anywhere, the pdf I can use to search for random quotes whenever they pop into my head. Today’s quote describes a state of mind…
“You know,” said Arthur thoughtfully, “all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.”
“No,” said the old man, “that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”
Before you say anything, no I’m not starting to feel in tune with the universe and everything in it. This is much smaller, but never the less, just as irrelevant.
Have you ever had the feeling that you should be thinking about something, but you can’t for the life of you remember what that thing is? For roughly the last week I’ve been getting this feeling on and off. It appears to me that there is something I should be remembering, or some thing I need to do, an event I need to attend, or something important I need to tell someone, possibly something which I should, or shouldn’t be worrying about at that exact moment, were it not for the fact that I haven’t a clue what it is that I’m not doing but should be. It’s as if part of my subconscious (look, long words!) is stuck in the past (possibly somewhere in the middle of last month, a late Sunday afternoon perhaps) and is confusing the rest of my brain. There’s also the very real possibility that there is absolutely nothing I should be doing/thinking/worrying about etc, but as it’s very hard to prove that something definitely doesn’t exist, I might just be stuck with it.
So on the off chance that my brain is reading this, let it go and let’s get back to what 9/10 of my brain is really for, storing penguins.
ui harmony
Microsoft release official user interface guidelines for vista. Now if only people would actually start to use them.
science is fun #2
What with the news this week from both the BBC and my MD that science jobs are going to outstrip the number of scientists in the near future, I thought I’d revive the message that science is fun (and yes I am aware of the irony of that coming from someone with a degree in computers).
Today’s evidence comes firstly in the form of the image above, which is of the International Space Station taken from the space shuttle Atlantis. It’s good to know that for all the millions that get pumped into nasa, at least they can take good photos, more can be found on the nasa site. Space is still cool though right? Good, then on to story number 2, a bunch of Cambridge students who are trying to are trying to send a rocket into space (ok, to just about where space is called space) for less than £1000. (so there’s some money left to spend in the pub afterwards). They’ve just managed to send a digital camera up 32km by balloon and managed some nice photos themselves.
If space isn’t your thing, how about helping Intel with the transition from using wires to link electronic chips to using light, making digital projectors the size of sugar cubes, or simply stopping certain brands of laptop battery exploding for fun! Interested, nope, back to the media studies it is then…
design is
a wallpaper meme started by john hicks. This is my entry.
slow progress
Two wins in a row, two wins in a row, it’s not much but at least we’re heading in the right direction.
the sunshine underground
There’s an unwritten rule in our house, if any one of us buys a new cd and then leaves it lying around then it’s fair game for stealing for 10 minutes to add to your iTunes library. Obviously the act of copying music off the cd onto any computer is against the copyright in this country, but we’ll gloss over that. Anyway, as the chief music buyer in residence, it’s always my new cd’s that get borrowed, but now and again the tables are turned. Recent victims of this reverse trend have been Kubb, Captain and today’s accused, The Sunshine Underground.
It seems there are two ways to get popular in the music business these days, either you have a new sound, or you have a very similar sound to someone who is already popular. The merits of these two strategies are not up for discussion right now, but needless to say they both have their positives and negatives. I’m having trouble deciding which camp to put The Sunshine Underground in. The sound of their debut self titled album is the words of their own website bio, “indie-rock relocated to the heart of the dancefloor, without compromise on either side”. While there is something a little different in there, each track also has a little tag that shows it owes something to another band. At first listen I sensed a hint of both the Killers and We are Scientists, leading me to assume the band were American (wrong, they’re from Leeds). Subsequent listens reveal a number of bands who I can’t quite get my tongue to and who I’m not going to guess at this point for fear of being very wrong.
Either way, the album is an upbeat, toe tapping affair with happy tunes masking somewhat darker lyrics. Standout tracks for me being ‘Commercial Breakdown’ and ‘Borders’. Buy it because you either want something new, or if you need a little lift in these darkening late summer/early autumn days.
itunes 7 and back again
After the slightly underwhelming apple announcement on Tuesday and with one eye on the news of Microsoft’s Zune, today I was going to put on a different hat and say what I liked about the new iTunes 7 UI. I was impressed by the way your current and future (the store) media collection were all accessible from the updated tree like menu on the left. I was going to say how I might ‘borrow’ some inspiration from it for a product we’re developing at work. I was pleased to see that Coverflow (which an awful lot of people have been praising for a long while now) has been bought and incorporated into the new version, although I was less than pleased that my full screen mode has disappeared and that in it’s current state, it’s a bit unusable. I was going to say that the new iPod statistics screen, while mainly pointless, was quite nice to look at. I was going to shout about being able to listen to tracks with no gap between them. But then I was planning not to have to uninstall it.
Sadly for the people from the fruit company, many people like me are less than happy with the latest iTunes when it comes to using it to play music (and not just staring at it). Mine was fine when it was in the simply playing in the foreground. Try to do anything else and the performance slowly deteriorated, the sound would start to stutter and distort until you had no choice but to pause it for a few seconds or stop and choose a different track. Change the page you’re viewing in Firefox, bad. Have a friend sign in to messenger, bad. Try to navigate through your own play lists in iTunes, bad again. In one fell swoop, my pc (I’ve not tried it on the mac yet) was turned into an AM Radio, fine to listen to when it’s going, as long as you don’t touch it or move it. Sadly, it’s not really good enough. Luckily iTunes 6 was good enough, so quick as a flash (or as fast as a Windows System Restore can happen) I’m back to previous world of crystal blue scroll bars. Goodbye Coverflow, goodbye buying things from the music store? (I’m unsure as to whether you need the latest version to purchase at the moment) Until you can produce a version that works and uses less system resources than Firefox, I won’t be upgrading (again).
Sadly, I recon the new shuffle I’ve just ordered will demand it. Damn.
squad rotation
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a little piece about how I hadn’t changed any of my little electronic creature comforts (phone, iPod, pc) in a while and how this was generally against my nature. Well nature has been fighting back.
The iPod is still the same, while the currently model might have a 60% brighter screen and longer video playing battery life, neither is really much use because we can’t get films or for that matter tv episodes on iTunes in the UK yet, and don’t get me started on why I don’t want to play games on it. I’ll hold out for the widescreen, touch-screen iPod if it’s all the same, I’m in no hurry.
The camera is new. I bought a 1mp digital camera a few years ago and never really used it, chiefly because my aps film camera was smaller and took better photos. Times have moved on a bit since then and this Casio Ex-Z70 is not only easier to carry than my aps, but it takes 7.2mp pictures so is a little better than my previous digital purchase. Whether it’ll encourage me to take more photos or less I don’t know, time will tell.
The phone is also new. I’ve been resisting a new phone for a while on the basis that I don’t use it enough to spend money on it, plus the less I have to deal with the phone company’s and their over the phone and shop staff the better. But when the hinge on my old phone started to move a little more than it should, it was time to get something new. My new Sony Ericsson z550 is as close to my old z600 that I could get without buying an exact replacement, but it’s smaller and has a better screen and battery life and comes with a built in radio and mp3 player, which I will most likely never use. The sound quality and signal strength are also both dramatic improved, which can’t be bad.
So the new team takes to the field, hopefully the new kit will last as long as the stuff they replaced.
culture shock
Following the trend of doing as many slightly random new things as possible (it’s not a big trend, but it’s showing promise), last night I was in London’s Hyde Park (is it a park if all the grass is dead?) for the BBC Proms in the Park.
The park concert isn’t as serious as the last night at the Albert Hall. In the place of serious classical music with occasional commentary (for tv viewers) by Alan ‘I do more than gardening’ Tichmarsh, we were treated to the jovial anecdotes of Sir Terry Wogan and a musical programme that contained the themes from Superman and Pirates of the Caribbean as well as a number of more and less well known classical pieces sung by soloists that those in the know might have heard of. We were also treated to a version of Keane’s ‘Bedshaped’ sung in Italian to a full orchestra and what might be next years Romanian Eurovision entry.
The evening concluded with the traditional last night renditions of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Jerusalem’ which when sung in the company of 40,000 well oiled voices, was spine-tingling to say the least.
The first shock was the audience. While primarily advertised on Radio 2, this didn’t stop a huge range of ages, young and old, friends and families, attending while maintaining the friendly atmosphere you don’t get other events where the audience is more weighted towards the young.
The second shock was how easy it was to get to and from the event, there were never any problems with the tube and caffeine selling establishments were still open on Waterloo while we waited for the last train home just after midnight.
It’s great to be involved in such a big public event and to be patriotic without the constant security that you get at national sporting events. Hopefully next year I’ll be able to drag more people along and we’ll have a proper party.
You can listen to the concert for the next week using the BBC listen again feature.
not the favourites
If there’s one thing you could rely on it’s the random decisions of the Mercury judges. Sadly, no more. Arctic Monkeys, don’t let me get started…
the end of the summer
This week brought the last fireworks on the beach (and boy was it cold). People are going back to work, school or that strange combination of the two. The World Cup was a lifetime ago, the same for Wimbledon & the athletics. The football transfer window has closed. The nights are drawing in. There’s a chill in the air. It seems that summer has once again past over the horizon.
But fear not… Start preparing for the traditional early autumn warm spell. Get out the warm jumpers and duvets. Charge the digital camera for capturing the shades of orange, red and brown in the trees. Practice catching leaves. Practice catching colds. Look forward to bonfire night, birthdays, coal fires, mince pies and the third round of the fa cup. Then after that thing that happens just before the new year, look forward to next summer!