April 2003 Archives

I've just got the email full of "Tommy Cooper" jokes for the (approximately) millionth time. They are great jokes and Tommy Cooper was a comedy genius, but unfortunately the jokes weren't written or performed by him.

They are actually written by another great British comic called Tim Vine. Whilst there are certain upsides in having your work confused with the work of someone like Cooper, I'm sure that Vine isn't very happy about the confusion. This is great material and now he can't perform it on stage as the majority of the audience will have seen the email and will think he's stolen Cooper's jokes.

It's not the first time this has happened either. Do you remember the quote about Pac-Man that was doing the rounds a couple of years ago? It went like this:

"If Pacman had affected us as kids we'd be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music."

Doing the whole Bowie completist thing means that you have to buy some pretty dodgy CDs. A prime example is the Labyrinth soundtrack that I picked up on Ebay last week.

I expected that I'd play it once to check that it was undamaged and then file it away forever, but I reckoned without the reaction of Sixteen Year Old Stepdaughter who was staying with us this weekend. Apparently the film (which came out the year before she was born) was a major part of her childhood. She loves the film and knows every song in the soundtrack.

So instead of filing the CD away in embarassment I'm now thinking that I should be buying the DVD too.

And did anyone else realise that it was a very young Jennifer Connelly playing Sarah? I certainly didn't.

There's an interesting article in today's Guardian about a group who are proposing a new music chart which would take account of internet downloads.

One throwaway line caught my attention. The author mentions that 7" vinyl is a thing of the past. I hadn't really thought about it before but that's probably true. You don't ever see 7" singles in shops any more. I wonder when they were stopped.

And more interestingly, I wonder what was the last 7" single I bought. I have about 500 singles, but they are in boxes in a cupboard and never get played. I can't remember when I last bought one. It's got to be over 10 years ago. I bet I didn't realise it was going to be my last one as I bought it.

I did the Belief-O-Matic test to work out what religion I should be (got the link from pne).

Quite surprising results. Non-thesist came in only 7th (with a 70% match). It was interesting to read about other "religions" who matched my beliefs closely. Most of my close matches (obviously) don't insist on a belief in a supreme being or any of that nonsense.

Full list of matches below.

I went to see Jeremy Hardy vs The Israeli Army. It's an incredibly moving film and well worth seeing. Unfortunately it's unlikely to get a general cinema release so if you weren't at the Bloomsbury Theatre over the last couple of days then you might not be able to.

Actually, in the Q&A afterwards it was mentioed that there may well be a video release. Keep watching the ISM London website for news of that.

One downside. The footage was filmed in 4:3, but the film was in 16:9. The transformation was achieved by stretching the image in a rather nasty fashion. Hopefully this will be addressed for the video release.

Abysmal UK tabloid The Daily Star ran a story today saying that "actress" and "singer" Holly Vallance will be taking over the part of Buffy from Sarah Michelle Gellar in the next season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It's unfortunately not on their web site, but their sister paper The Daily Record is running a very similar story.

See how many factual errors you can spot.

Update for the hard-of-understanding (as people seem to be picking up this entry from Google or something)

There is no truth in the story at all. The British tabloid press is well-known for making up stories when it suits them. I posted this as an example of those inventions. Please don't think that this has ever been a possibility. Buffy is finishing at the end of season seven. No more programmes will be made. No-one else will be playing Buffy.

I'm trying to complete my collection of David Bowie CDs. This isn't as simple as you might think.

In 1990/91 most of Bowie's albums (from Space Oddity to Tin Machine) were re-released with extra tracks. These are generally singles and B-sides which were released at the same time as the album in question and many of them are unavailable elsewhere. In the mid 1990s I decided to replace my Bowie vinyl collection with CDs so these were the versions that I was buying.

Unfortunately I dod'nt get through buying them all before this release was withdrawn. The albums were all released again in 1999 in 24-bit remastered versions but without these extra tracks. Being a little compulsive about these things it's really these 1990s versions that I want.

So I did a stock-take over the weekend and found that I'm only missing a small number of these versions on CD. There are also a number of early 90s Bowie albums that seem to have vanished from the shops completely - Tin Machine II, Oy Vey Baby (the live Tin Machine album) and Black Tie, White Noise.

So this is my mission for the next few months. Pick up as many as possible of these albums from places like Ebay. I've alredy made a start, with bids on seven albums. They all seem reasonable cheap so far - with the exception of a copy of Oy Vey Baby which went to £23 before I backed out. I know it's rare, but it's really not very good.

Oh, and on the way I've discovered the Illustrated David Bowie Discography which is a great site.

We bought a new widescreen TV. It's a Panasonic TX28DK1 if anyone's interested in such details.

There's one feature that I'm very impressed by. That's its intelligent picture resizing algorithm. By looking at the amount of of black screen around the picture it calculates whether the transmission is in 16:9, 14:9 or 4:3 and adjusts the picture size appropriately. It can even handle the difference between 16:9 anamorphic broadcasts and the kind of "widescreen" tranmissions that you used to see on analogue channels where they just put large black bands at the top and bottom of the picture.

Only one small problem. For 4:3 broadcasts it lets you choose between a real 4:3 picture with black bands down the left and right or a nasty progessive distortion mode where the edges of the picture are stretched out to fill the screen leaving the central section untouched. For some reason this horrible distortion was the factory default, but it only took a couple of button presses to educate it to understand how sane people watch TV.

Don't get me wrong, I've no objections at all to a four-day weekend.

I just wish we could give it some label doesn't link it with 2000 year old superstitions.

Whilst I'm a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I've never really been a fan of Sarah Michelle Gellar. She's not the strongest actor in the cast and I've read interviews with her where she says stuff that I really can't agree with. She often comes across as a bit of a bimbo.

And now her name is apparently being mentioned as the potential star of a film that is being planned of the Jessica Lynch story. Anyone who can be involved with such blatant propaganda loses whatever credibility that they might once have had.

Mind you, I'm quite capable of double standards on issues like this. I'm still a fan of Alyson Hannigan, despite her continued involvement in the absymal American Pie series of films.

The most excellent comic and political writer Jeremy Hardy has made a film about his "adventures" in Palestine last year. There's a good article about the film in today's Guardian.

The film is on at the Bloomsbury Theatre on the 23rd and 24th April. Tickets £6.50.

Just got my copy of Ben Hammersley's Content Syndication with RSS. Haven't looked at it in any detail yet but from the brief glance I've had, it seems really good.

He seems really... er... diplomatic about the whole Dave Winer RSS 1.0/2.0 "issue".

I'm getting a bit worried about the number of recruitment agents who just ignore me when I send them my CV[1] to apply for jobs. Part of it is probably the fact that in the current job market they get 50 CVs for every advert, but I'm also starting to suspect that I should do some work on my CV. I've had the CV in it's current format for many years now and I just add new jobs to the top if the list - so it's getting a bit long. And probably very unfocussed.

So I've ordered a CV assessment from these people. It's only £15 and if it helps me pin down my next job then that will be money well spent.

[1] That's "resumé" for our American readers.

If you knock the head of the statue of a deposed ruthless dictator in Iraq then that's cause for massive celebrations.

If you do the same thing in the UK then you get three months in prison.

My book, Data Munging with Perl has been out for over two years, but the Programmer's Bookshelf column in Dr Dobbs Journal has finally got round to mentioning it. And they like it. A lot. For example,

However the book is not really about Perl. Instead it is about data, and paterns that occur repeatedly when you are processing data. I write Python differently having read this book, and expect that the average Java or C# programmer would learn a lot from it as well. It is well written, informative, thought provoking, and will be as relevant five years from now as it is today. In short, what are you waiting for? Go and buy a copy.

Snowing? In April?

The weather has gone really weird.

We've been talking about getting a big wine rack for... well probably years. And yesterday we finally got round to buying one. Like just about any piece of storage that you buy these days it arrived in a flat pack.

So being the alpha-male type (hah!) I decide that I'll put it together last night.

I so wish I hadn't said that.

On opening the box I find about a million pieces of wood and metal that need to be joined together in the right order like some giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. I worked on it for over an our before stopping for the night. It currently looks a bit like an oversized hedgehog. I expect I'll finish it tonight. There's a lot of hammering to be done and I like hammering.

Shame I don't drink wine tho' :)

Just in case you were thinking that I was only interested in the propaganda that it coming out of the US and UK war machine, here's something from the Iraqi information minister.

There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!

They tried to bring a small number of tanks and personnel carriers in through al-Durah but they were surrounded and most of their infidels had their throats cut. We made them drink poison last night [Sunday] and Saddam Hussein's soldiers and his great forces gave the Americans a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly.

Ho For Hoggwarts!

(via Ben Hammersley)

So Sixteen Year Old Step-Daughter comes to stay for the weekend. Bringing with her Boy Who I'm Just Good Friends With. "Oh, of course you are" we agree, tongues dripping with heavy sarcasm.

But it seems that she's right. They are just good friends. The only person who doesn't seem to know this is BWIJGFW who is obviously besotted with her and has read too much into her inviting him to London. This leads to small amounts of friction by the end of the weekend.

I'm reminded (painfully) of my teenage years when I found it very easy to become Just Good Friends with girls. Ah memories :)

Please pardon a sad fanboy moment...

One of the (many) things that I really like about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the way the internal continuity is carefully maintained. Characters often refer to things that happened in earlier series.

I was therefore very disappointing to see a major continuity error in the episode I watched last night (Potential from season 7). I'll only talk in general terms to avoid spoilers for people who haven't seen season 7 yet.

There is always supposed to be exactly one Vampire Slayer. When one Slayer dies another is called. Buffy died at the end of season 1 and Kendra was called. Fortunately, tho', whilst she was technically dead for a minute, Buffy was revived leaving the world with two Slayers. Kendra (and later Faith who was called when Kendra died) is the "real" Slayer. Buffy is just some freak occurance[1]. When Buffy died (again!) at the end of season 5, no new Slayer was called.

These rules were all thrown away in Potential. Twice people mentioned that Buffy's death would activate a new Slayer. It's probably the only way that the current storyline would work but, even so, it's extremely frustrating that the writers thought the viewers wouldn't notice the discrepancy.

[1] Although, actually it's lucky that she's around as Faith is currently in jail and therefore wouldn't be much use as a Slayer.

Don't tell anyone, but the Central Line is working through the centre of London again. It's been out of action for 68 days - since the derailment on January 25th.

I was a bit worried as it was apparently going to be a cutdown service this morning so I was expecting the trains to be more overcrowded than usual. I shouldn't have worried tho'. It seems that no-one knows it's open again. In my carriage I was one of three people.

It would be great if it could stay that way.

On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private AJ said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."

To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over my head," he said.

According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What percentage of America's armed forces believe these fabrications is anybody's guess.

Arundhati Roy

They say that "the devil has all the best tunes" but that's just not true. A lot of spiritual music is very good too.

As an example, the song currently stuck in my head is Down To The River To Pray from the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? It's a fabulous piece of music. It's enough to make me realise the error of my ways and become a christian.

Well, no. No piece of music is powerful enough to make me take leave of my senses :) Religion is still ridiculous. But Down To The River To Pray is a mighty fine piece of music.

From the "sad geeks who should get out more" department.

The BBC are reporting that geeks have produced a set of patches for the game Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball. These patches take the (already scantily clad) women from the game and show them completely naked.

Unsurprisingly, this hasn't gone down well with the games creators.

Actually, thinking about it, this might well be the BBC's April Fools Day joke.