Television, it seems, is nothing but a tool to fill the hearts of the many with ambitions that only the few can achieve. The vast majority of us will never drive, let alone own, one of the cars that the guys on ‘Top Gear’ show off every week, an even smaller number of us will get to build our dream houses or jet off on the holidays and trips that moderate celebrities are sent on and charged to tell us all about.
I’m pleased to say that it’s not all like that. Last Year, the BBC filmed Billy Connolly on a journey around the UK as he told stories and swore to comedy audiences. In the episode on London, he was taken to the top of the Westminster clock tower to see Big Ben. Another celebrity perk you might have thought. Not so. A routine web surfing session last year led to the question of the date of the state opening of parliament, a link to how us general common folk can visit parliament led to some interesting information: you’re more than welcome to tour the clock tower if you know who to ask, your MP. How very proper.
So, an email was sent and the details received. As you had to book three weeks in advance, we couldn’t go at the time. On Tuesday we did.
The tour starts in Portcullis House, the parliamentary offices opposite the Palace of Westminster. From the outside an unsightly building dominated by it’s black roof, but something quite different once you’re passed the airport style security inside. The building has a fully covered internal courtyard, roofed in glass and featuring a restaurant and seating area surrounded by trees and with the faint smell of fresh coffee. In one corner a pair of escalators lead under the road to a dimly lit corridor which leads straight into the courtyard of the 1860’s palace.
Between us at the bottom and our goal, 334 cold stone spiral steps. Upwards we climbed until we reached the first level, the room containing the clock mechanism with it’s four shafts attached to the four clock faces. It felt quite weird, even though I was stood in front of a mass of slowly moving cogs, it had a personality. A few more steps and we were stood amongst the bells themselves high above the Thames and the people milling around below. At the strike of 3 as the hammer fell on the 13.5 tonne piece of metal I felt the whole structure reverberate with the sound. Imagine being used as a tuning fork and you get the picture. On the way down, the final part of the tour involved standing just behind the glass clock faces themselves before having to slowly descend the spiral staircase to solid ground.
I encourage any of you reading this to try and do this, I can only describe it as the most exclusive tourist tour in London (although I don’t imagine it is), makes that big wheel seem just a bit boring.
I’ve become convinced that my sense of rational thought can easily be turned off under certain conditions, namely when I think something so much that I become convinced that it’s true. Such as the following thought:
“Buying a wii would be cool because there’s no way that playing games with a wireless gyroscopic controller can’t be fun.”
Turns out that I was right but also wrong. Sure it is fun, for about 12 hours, but when you realise that playing tennis and boxing is incredibly easy, playing baseball is incredibly hard because I’m British and therefore can’t hit the ball, playing bowling is incredibly hard because my bowling action means the ball always spins to the left and playing golf is fine until you come to putt and discover that the controller can’t detect slight movements very well, you realise that it’s just not what it’s cracked up to be. So for a week it sat under my television getting dusty until I decided that I really wasn’t going to play it enough to warrant keeping it. Thankfully there are plenty of people who still want to buy the odd shaped white box so offloading it onto one of my brother’s friends was quite easy.
So, what have I learnt from this episode? Firstly, a wii is something better used at a friends house, where they have paid for it and where you won’t have enough time to get bored of it. Second, I don’t like the idea of paying £35 for a game when the equivalent pc title costs at least £10 less and will have far better graphics. Thirdly, I’ve far better things to waste my time on, such as snowboarding lessons, the football or shiny new cd’s from new musical bands.
I can’t remember how much I’ve said about this subject, and as I’m writing this offline I’m not in a position to check, so let’s recap:
Previously: Me and five friends have booked to go skiing in Saas Fee, Switzerland during the Easter holidays (as these things need to be done in the school hols). However as five of us (me included) had never been skiing before we decided that we’d all learn something new and go snowboarding instead. To make sure we were making the right decision, we booked a first lesson at the Warmwell ‘dry’ ski slope a couple of weeks back and loved it.
After our first lesson, where we were taught to slide down a hill in a controlled way both facing forwards and backwards, we were told that we had to come and practice before we could do any more lessons. Yesterday was our practice.
The weather wasn’t a great start. Rain fell almost continually from the sky to match the water coming up from the slope. As a result, my whole clobber got soaked (although the new waterproof coat did work a treat). The second hurdle to cross was learning how to use the ski lift up to the point on the hill where we were allowed to go. Hilarity followed as none of us could quite manage to hold on without falling off, it was lucky there wasn’t a film crew around.
Once we’d managed to get ourselves partway up the slope and had sat down on the wet surface to attach our second feet to the board, things got a lot easier. Sure it took a few attempts to remember exactly how to control the damn thing and avoid the inevitable collapse at the bottom but I’m proud to say that by the end of the hour we were all happily recreating the skills we’d learnt in the lesson before and were actually getting quite comfortable with it.
Personally, even the aching arms and legs that I’m currently suffering with aren’t enough to say that it isn’t wasn’t tremendous fun, and I’m getting used to the falling over, after all it’s all part of the experience. Bring on the real snow!
I blinked first. Nearly 6 months ago, when my old pc started making the type of noises that no machine has ever made in a good way, I decided that I would put off buying a new machine until Microsoft got around to releasing their new operating system. Microsoft, to their credit, decided that I really shouldn’t have to spend that money any time soon so held back as long as they could.
But after Christmas when I saw the price of a retail copy of Vista (£220) I decided to replace the box then and worry about a new operating system later, after all there wasn’t anything wrong with xp.
So the new box was bought and my old copy of xp was transferred across. With the core 2 duo processor, a large handful of memory and the sata hard drive, it ran so quick it nearly put the mac’s startup/shutdown time to shame (nearly). The only problem was that xp didn’t come with a dvd decoder, but vlc (the solution to ANY problem with windows media player) sorted that out. Still, I didn’t want to go filling the machine with all my old software knowing that I’d only be doing it again in a month.
In the month that followed I decided to go for the cheats option of upgrading to vista, and ordered an oem copy. Perfectly legal on the basis that whoever opens the box has to support the end user. So if I have any problems, I have to ask myself to fix it. Still it was a darn sight cheaper at £70 and for that saving I’m more than happy to put up with any multiple personalities I may have to endure should I screw the thing up.
The nondescript box arrived before the Jan 30th release date and I decided to wait until both after the release date and until I had a full free evening to install the thing, because if there’s one thing everyone should realise it’s that it is never as easy as it’s meant to be. In the meantime I backed up the important files onto dvd’s.
So the day came, while people on the internet argued about the pros and cons, I wiped my hard disc (and with it my emails and address book, doh) and installed vista. While the install of the OS was painless, it still took a couple of extra hours to find the right drivers for my usb wireless network thing and get the machine back online.
So what’s it like? Well it all feels cluttered (perhaps I just need a bigger screen) the windows fading in and out at a rate of knots gets annoying at times and I’ve had to disable the UAC to stop me throwing the whole thing out of a window. Other than that it all seems to work pretty well. Not everything looks right running on it and some things outright don’t work (it’s screwed up my ipod shuffle for one), but that’s the price of being an early adopter. Time will tell whether it was the right decision.
I must admit that I’ve never had a games console (I know, I’ve led a sheltered life) and have gotten along quite happily playing games on the pc. I’ve never felt the need, partly because the games weren’t any different to those on the pc and partly because they were always more expensive.
However the wii was always a bit different. With it’s wireless remote controller and not up to the minute graphics. I quite fancied one, just not straight away (because you couldn’t find one for love nor money).
Then last week, one of the weekly emails from my favoured online retailers (ok, ebuyer) promised that they’d be releasing 40 wiis on each day that weekend. The game was on, not because I desperately wanted one but because of the thrill of the chase. Then on Saturday, halfway through the football on telly, I got a shout from my partner in crime to say that there were some online. Sadly they were being sold in a bundle with some additional games and accessories so the price was about £280, which was a little over the money for someone who didn’t want every controller type available. I passed up the offer, deciding that I simply wanted the machine for it’s basic price of £180 and that I could quite happily wait a few months.
I had a thought, ‘I wonder if there is a website which tells you where there are wiis in stock?’ I had a look and immediately found three, wiipreorder.co.uk, wiifind.co.uk and uk.nowinstock.net. The plan had changed, the chase was back on. I expected it to take weeks.
Chance #1 came on Monday just as I was leaving work, a quick check of my email and the above sites came up with one site selling the little white box. Deciding that I really wasn’t that desperate, I told myself that if they were still on sale when I got home then I’d buy one. They weren’t.
I spent Tuesday up in London so didn’t get near a pc and missed any that went on sale that day.
Wednesday was football transfer deadline day, which traditionally means keeping a browser window open on the latest news, just to keep an eye on goings on. So in the spirit of things I decided to open a couple of other browser windows just to see whether an wii appeared. When I got wind that Amazon had some, a couple of clicks later, one was in the post. Yesterday it came and…
…I so suck at baseball (oh and bowling)!
