Month: June 2012

This is another from the Facebook status update collection …

“question – what do you call a film that everyone has but which no-one would call a classic ? Thinking of things like Avatar or Clash of the Titans (either) which most people will have but you’d never put them with classics like Fifth Element or Arnie’s Conan.”

The real question is : What films have you got that other people SIMPLY MUST OWN. Or which films are the ones where you’ll wear the dvd out given chance. However … they can’t be films everyone has, they have to be the rarer or unusual ones.

From my own collection (and I haven’t watched most of these enough), I’d offer :

The Dish. (all links will be IMDB) This is about the first Apollo moon landing and a collection of people in Australia who supported getting pictures and communications back from the lunar lander. Lots of quite strange but very charming characters and it’s been way too long since I watched it.

Galaxy Quest. Ok, maybe not so rare but it’s still a classic great film in a way things like Starship Troopers won’t be. ST is a classic cos it’s bad, Galaxy Quest is a classic cos it’s a great take on the Star Trek world. And was this really 1999 ? I thought I watched this in the cinema with the Crazies !

Outlander. Came out at a bad time but was a well realised scifi action thriller with an excellent monsta. Oh and it also had the good enough to eat Sophia Myles. (Unless that is you’re a monsta with bad taste)

Evolution. Ok, this could be seen as pretty dire with a phoned in performance by David Duchovny. But it was also great fun. And that’s what entertainment should be : fun.

Mars Attacks!. But only because it had me in stitches from the opening credits to the end of the movie.

Red Sonja. I’d rate this movie higher than the Arnie Conan. And the Arnie Conan is an all time classic.

Spirited Away. This is an anime movie from Hayao Miyazaki. Utterly charming, great story. And how the hell has the dvd managed to stay in its shrink wrapping ???!!!?

I’ll finish off with the Dark Crystal. Possibly the best thing to ever come out of the Jim Henson puppet factory.

There’s others in the collection that I’d regard as classics – they’re not here though cos … everyone’s got Fifth Element by now haven’t they ? lol 🙂

Anyone got any more to add ? First ask – how rare is this film ? My list of favourite films would include films like Ultraviolet, Blade, Red, Hanna, Battle: Los Angeles, Roland Emmerich movies and a bunch of others but … they miss this list because they will be too popular.

Last thought – the Galaxy Quest motto of “Never give up, Never surrender” is a great motto to live by.

PS After getting worried over the last couple of days, I might be back in the cricket earlier than I thought … Leg has improved nicely today 🙂 Still have my chest bugs though, so I couldn’t have played in tonight’s game even if the leg was ok.

Meh. Very meh. Been bugged today. I seemed to be ok yesterday (outside of having to yawn to clear my sinuses) but today I’ve been struggling.

It’s just manflu really and I can hyperactive my way through it but it does take its toll on my handkerchief supply, the patience of the people around me {sneeze!} and I don’t think as clearly when I have bugs. But as soon as I get into my Tunnel Vision by getting my teeth into something for work, I don’t notice. Hell, I sneeze so much anyway that I rarely notice coughing from actual illness.

However – the same bugs that are in my head, chest and nose seem to also be in my legs :-(.

I’ll happily ignore a cold but I can’t ignore the legs deteriorating again. Left leg (the bad one from last year) is fine, couple of bad bits but nothing to worry about. The right leg started leaking again, which is something I can’t ignore. Especially as the leaky bit overlaps where my knee protectors have to go.

So no cricket for a little while until it gets under control again. It’s actually not too bad (a couple of bad bits about the size of 5p coins) but I don’t want what happened last year to happen again – where the bad skin got as big as the palm of my hand. (Before you gasp too much, I have little hands)

I suspect the same bugs attacking my nose are also having a go at my legs. Perhaps I should be in a :

Because part of why it’s flared up is because I can’t leave it unscratched.

That’s enough about the leg (for now though)

Tennis players – before turning over to the cricket, I watched the close of the Murray vs Davydenko match at Wimbledon. It took me back to the Size & Shape post with the thought being – I don’t want to be the shape of a GP driver, I’ll be the shape of a tennis player. As in :

Huge leg speed and agility to get around the court
No excess weight to slow them down
And enough arm strength to sort out rusty nuts and jamjar lids.

Noticed a quirk with my car over the 2 long runs this week and last. It’s a proper hybrid, so it can run on either its engine or its motor or both together. Above 45mph, the engine always has to be on because of speed limits on the motor. However … that doesn’t mean the engine has to be going quickly. Normally at 70, the engine will be spinning at 2000-3000rpm, higher revs if you’re going up hill or charging the battery. It’ll settle to a 2000rpm cruise which is extraordinarily low for a petrol engine.

Unless you’re on a downslope … Enough of a downslope will make it think “I don’t need my engine to help” and it’ll disengage the engine and set it to idle. It’s not quite as subtle with that as with its other Engine -> Motor -> Engine -> Both transitions … It was kinda “wtf is my car doing” disconcerting when I first noticed it. It’s a bit like dropping a manual gearbox car into neutral at 70mph with no throttle.

And of course, you know me – now I know there’s a funny quirk, I’m trying to reproduce it wherever possible.

Cricket – think I’ve jinxed one of my sides. In the first game for them this year, I paid twice cos of lack of change in a “it won’t matter after next week’s game”. Not played for them since …

Finally – gotta send a hug to someone I know is going through a rough time at the moment with depression. I’m teetering on a depressive cycle at the moment too, due to the bugs and the leg. I’d hoped the leg infection problem was behind me, so seeing it develop again over the past week is … meh. Very meh.

Everyone could do with a hug. I could do with a hug.

But for now I’ll settle for dinner … (guess who’s dinner bell is going nuts!)

I’ve been reading Tomshardware again.

“NOOOO!!!!” I hear you cry ? Well, it’s actually a sensible article about something that could give us back some of the potential that gets baked out of our computer bits.

Here’s the article – it’s about a curious development in cooler technology.

This Acer laptop has been pretty good in its 2.5 years. It’s stayed reliable, whereas the HP it replaced died in under a year (funnily enough – cause of death was cooler failure). It handles all I throw at it, which includes photo editing, iTunes streaming, web browsing, messenger, email and other stuff. It’s my main Office type PC. However … where it’s started to struggle is video playback.

BBC iPlayer – seems fine actually 🙂
Youtube up to 360p – is fine too
Youtube at 480p and above – works ok for a few minutes, then really struggles
(480p and other bigger numbers mean more pixels for a sharper image)
ITV and other streaming video – struggles

It’s a reasonable spec laptop – Athlon II X2 M300 that is supposed to run at 2GHz. However, for battery saving and apparently heat limits, it’ll cut itself back to 800MHz if it needs to. I’m not asking it to do much at the moment (Blogger’s editor is quite cpu hungry) so it’s not getting too warm.

Ok. So back to these revolutionary coolers.

Why Should We Care ?

The reason why this laptop struggles with higher res video is that it pushes the machine a bit too hard. More work for a PC means it gets hotter. My desktop runs cool but will go 25+ degrees C warmer when it’s pushed hard. The internet video pushes this laptop so hard that I believe it’s bouncing off its heat limits.

It slows itself down to avoid cooking itself. And the video playback goes choppy.

With the desktop, cooling isn’t a problem. There’s enough space in a desktop case to put a massive cooler in to keep it cool and quiet. I used the bigger version of this Zalman cooler at Novatech that just about fit in the box. You can’t use anything like that in a laptop. Space is very tight and it needs cleverness to package everything in.

So if you can get a cooler in there that’s way more efficient for its size, you can keep the machine cool enough to do what you want it to.

And that means we get our video playback as it was meant to be 🙂

PS I’m back to wondering if I’ll be playing cricket again this summer. Not cos of the weather – more the legs. My left leg was the bigger problem last year, that’s ok. It’s my right leg where the weak and leaky skin problem seems to be coming back. I suspect I need a Cone Of Shame !

Cheers 🙂

It's been easier since the cricket season started. It's been a "should I really still be doing this?" effort but it's shown that the weight loss has been worth it with me getting my speed back 🙂

weight loss is so difficult, especially if you do it sensibly and maintain it
bravo kid 🙂

I’m almost at that avatar change thing I’ve been mentioning as a diet target 🙂

The target was to not just dip under 13 stone when I’d starved myself for a day but to be under that mark consistently. And I’m there now 🙂 Pretty soon I’ll get that camera out and turn my “Feed Me” Pocket Dwagon into something I can use as an avatar.

(Btw – if anyone’s looking to get me presents, my birthday’s in November and I still have lots of space for Pocket Dwagons. Just sayin’)

What everyone needs to have is an idea of what size and shape they want and need to be. From that, follows what kind of diet they need to be following and what exercise they need to do. Doing the diet and/or the exercise “because that’s what everyone else does” is a Really Bad Idea. It has to be based on things like :

What can I eat ? Ethics/Health considerations come in there
What exercise can I do ? I break if I train too much
What exercise is the right kind ? It may not suit your target
What am I trying to do ? Being too active will cause physical hell later
Am I trying to fight my body’s natural shape ? The “starved” look is so unattractive

When I made the choice to start the diet, I’d just gone to a puffy 14 stone 2-3lbs and I had 2 target weights.
13 stone – would see me super fit with stronger arms joining my power legs. Note – that’s not “popeye” arms or the butch look that rugby players have because gaining too much muscle would lose me speed and quickness.
11-12 stone – would hopefully see my upper body and face get a lot tighter and less fat/puffy. But without losing any power in my legs. Still got a way to go there.

Incidentally, that hated Body Mass Index calc reckons my 13 stone is 26.88 (Normal-Overweight boundary is 25) and 12 stone would be 24.8. Perhaps 12 stone should be my sensible target considering the speed I want to retain in my legs.

I’m getting sidetracked aren’t I ? This post really comes from looking at other people and thinking : “Is that the shape I want to be ?” and the person that really started me thinking was a young chap sitting outside KFC longingly peeking at my fillet burger. He must have been 6 feet plus and obviously worked out. At least occasionally because he had that soft “bigger than he needs to be” that differentiates athletes from those who go to the gym to fit in.

He was bigger than he needed to be. His whole reason for going to the gym would have been to fit in with what the norm appears to be. He wouldn’t have had a target for what he needed or wanted to look like. He might be technically fitter than me but if he walked onto a cricket field, he’d be the uncoordinated unskilled mess while I’d be running rings around him.

From my own past, I can think of 3 series of conventional and unconventional training :
Unconventional – paper round. This had me bursting round the block pounding away walking with a bag full of papers. Out of that I gained aerobic fitness plus power legs. I’ve still got the power legs … and the weak knees that were damaged by that excess power.
Unconventional – biking to uni. This gave me stomach muscles 🙂 I’d never had those before and when it came to net practice for the next season, I couldn’t bowl. Yeah, I had muscle … but totally uncoordinated and uncontrolled muscle. Took a while to figure out how to manage them and when I did, I broke the shoulder (unconnected incident).
Conventional – weekly circuits. These were aimed at gaining endurance but all they achieved was to train away my speed while gaining me no endurance.

Sometimes unconventional training is what works. For my part now, I can’t do much normal training (cos I break) but I aim to avoid taking lazy ways out. That means taking stairs instead of the elevator or the lift.

I was looking again at people’s sizes during the Grand Prix coverage earlier. GP drivers look quite weedy. There’s not much to them. I bet they weight maybe 11 stone if that. Yet they run triathlon for fun outside of controlling a car at 200mph for 2 hours withstanding upwards of 5g. They’re superfit and aim for a specific shape that lets them be superfit while not being too heavy. Lightness is an advantage.

Similar with the cricket (England v W Indies T20 on telly at the moment) – there’s all sizes and shapes in cricket. Little lads are better in the field, big lads whack the ball further. Fast bowling needs height and good arms, spin bowling – not so much.

I’m aiming for the GP driver + legs look 🙂 But to do that, I’d need to do considerably more training than I do now to sort out my upper body. However, I’m much happier with my look than that lad at the Mall who’s locking himself into an “Eat Lots, Exercise Lots, Struggle Lots later” cycle.

For other people ?

Be how you are most comfortable. Don’t let yourself be bumped out of your comfort zone by people who think everyone should be unhealthy stick insects. The most attractive people are the confident people, the people who are comfortable with who and how they are. And that goes for Tall People (being stretched can make them elegant), Little People (they make up for height with personality), Wide People (more of ’em to hug). But it’s really what’s inside that’s so important. What shape someone is outside has little to do with what they’re like as a person. I tend to look straight past the outside and see people as they really are.

I’m much more comfortable with the way I am now compared to this time last year. And that’s measurable too by my trouser waist size being back to what it used to be, plus a new jacket being a size smaller too. But I’m still either not there yet or cameras are lying to me. I’ve been trying for ages to see if I can get a decent picture of me – no joy yet.

What I’ll close on though is we tend to be our own worst judge with our weight. We’ll lie to ourselves and say we’re too fat when we’ve got skinny or thin enough when we’re still carrying excess. That’s where we need to find people we trust to tell us what we need to hear 😉

I was being amused today …

The people at our main office know I’m a bit strange but because I don’t get out enough, the contractor people miss out on the strangeness.

Can’t have that !

So the people at our main contractor office were giving me lots of weird looks when I was putting the hat back on in prep for making the dash from canteen to office with a big thing of coffee. (What’s the best word for those cardboard coffee holders ? They’re not cups or mugs …)

Question – is it a strange looks because they think it’s unusual or because they’re actually going “why didn’t I think of using a hat ?”

Normal people use umbrellas or raincoats. I don’t hold with that. It’s another example where people follow what everyone else does without thinking : Does this actually work ?

Lol 🙂

Umbrella – wind like this, small people with umbrellas are going for flying lessons. And it better be a strong brolly too or it’ll be an inside out brolly.
Raincoats ? People with raincoats always seem to end up wetter than those without them. It was certainly true for the Snowdon trip, with the people with (admittedly cheap looking) raincoats looking extremely bedraggled by the summit with one needing to borrow my gloves due to circulation trouble in her fingers. I was fine in t-shirt plus hat but then again, I do generate too much heat when I’m active.

I go for a hat to keep off the rain. I learn from wise people who are also : Gonna Buy A Hat (youtube link for Chris Rea song)

I learned early with cricket that baseball caps do nothing to keep your glasses dry when it rains. The rain just comes in from the side. Similar with the sun – if you’re looking into the sun, a cap is fine. If the sun is to the side, you need a hat to shade it. Same with rain. Hats are awesome. Need a Fez. Fezzes are cool. (Yes, I am channelling 11th Doctor there)

I actually have more hats and caps in the house than I have shoes :

Rain hat – this one’s green and properly waterproof 🙂
Main cricket hat – white and floppy and airy
Lords cricket hat – sadly just the wrong size and tweaks my depth perception
Old purple hat – reminding me to respect the ball
Rotherham playoff cap – from the Wembley playoff final in 2010.
Pink Cricket Cap 🙂
Work project cap – this must be >10 years old now 🙂 Still got it
Grumpy cap – may have to wear this in a game some time for the larfs

Wonder if I have more that I’ve forgotten about. In contrast, I only have 4 active pairs of shoes that I wear until they break or wear out :
Work shoes
Running trainers – need some new ones as they’re giving up on me
Old running trainers – retired from active service but still good for slipping on to head to local shop/pizza/chinese
Cricket spikes

Anyway yeah – been a busy week this one all told, I’ve been putting so many hours in lately that I have a whole 2 days worth of flexi working hours credit. Just can’t get rid of it. It was topped off today by a visit to the local contractor office :-).

People move on but I still have lots of friends over there who always grin and say hello when they spot me coming over. I try to keep a sense of humour in all my dealings with other people. It can get a little strained but hopefully the contractor people see me as someone who works hard to figure out the best way around a problem while still keeping a sense of humour about it.

A lot of people totally lose their sense of perspective about problems, either focusing on the wrong problem or winding people up the wrong way and losing their cooperation.

Where was I ?

Yeah – reinforcing that idea that I’m just that little bit different from everyone else 🙂

Although I am going to be conventional this weekend and boringly sensible. Plan A was to head off to the parents for the weekend for a delayed Father’s Day meet up. However, my sister will be marshalling a swimming event (actually equestrian but with this weather ? pack the waterwings) so we’re holding off a bit. Instead I’ll be catching up on stuff while there’s not much sport on this weekend.

Unless someone has a better idea that is 🙂 Says the coffee fiend who’d love the excuse to escape the house for a bit.

And somewhere from a deviant recess in my mind comes :

“should have been wrapping my hands around something hard, woody, pink, 11 inches long and covered in rubber tonight. But I ended up getting a cold shower instead”

Perfectly innocent explanation officer … honest 🙂

Here we go :

Small confession – last night I did have my hands wrapped around something pink, hard and wooden … We were scheduled to have another game tonight, which fell victim to the weather extremely early … But I did a little bit of prep work for it last night.

One of the ways cricketers customise their gear is to put extra grips on their bats. More grips on top of others makes the handle a different size. I prefer having 2 and a half grips, with my preferred bat already having a handle shape that makes that half a grip.

I had been using the same orange grip as countless seasons before but my batting has been rubbish this year. That kinda called for a sacrifice. Enter the pink bat grip. I’m already using the Pink Cap for fielding :

But I had no pink stuff for batting in. Hence a minor switch in gear in search of a change of luck.

No joy with the weather though. The “cold shower” from the Facebook update was what I got walking between the office and where I’d parked the car. Absolute, horrid, torrential rain. Tonight’s game was cancelled early this morning, considering it was due to be played on an artificial wicket shows how heavy the rain has been.

Bit of cricket info – to get those bat grips on needs special or not so special tools.

What you do is roll them up into a donut/torus shape and then roll the donut down the handle of the bat. Trouble is, the donut likes to squish down really small. The one I took off the bat has a hole in the middle that’s barely big enough to put my finger in. However, you need to get the rolled up grip over a handle that’s an inch in diameter.

Hence the tool in the first picture. It’s a “proper” bat gripping tool, in other words it’s a conical bit of wood that fits over the handle. Roll up the grip on the tool, fit the tool over the bat handle, roll the grip on to the bat. Jobs’a good’un.

Or you can just use a similarly tapering fitting from a vacuum cleaner. (Vacuum cleaner pipes are roughly the same size as a cricket bat handle – Spooky.)

As long as you don’t do that when your mum is looking …

PS Talking of pink stuff – CQ’s Race For Life is still hungry for donations and our Thumper‘s going for the San Fran Avon Walk soon.

Or what’s actually the object of the advertising.

I’m listening to The Game Station podcast at the moment, or at least the Video On Demand youtube video of the one last week. One of the main topics so far has been E3, which is an entertainment expo. It’s supposed to be a trade show where the industry people take their bits and pieces and show them off to journalists and trade people in the hope of getting interest.

The journo’s have gotten very cynical about how useful it is. The presentations tend to be canned footage of what are supposed to be games. It’s an interactive art form, or at least it’s supposed to be. What it really should be is something you can play with. It doesn’t have to be complete, sometimes doesn’t have to be stable. But it needs to give at least some confidence that there’s a game hiding in there somewhere.

I’ve got quite cynical over the years about games as well. Too often we get shovelled incomplete garbage that’s broken.

The main ways of selling games tends to be :

Tits & Arse – yeah, I’m interested – I’m a normal red blooded male. But not in a game. Some stuff is for real life, some stuff is for pixels. Tits & Arse are far better in real life than in pixels. Keep your booth babes, keep the softcore porn adverts, it doesn’t add anything to the game.

Canned video – keep it. It doesn’t tell me anything about stability (the most frustrating thing in gaming is when it crashes out) or gameplay. One of my criticisms of Skyrim is that the quest system railroads you into doing things you don’t want to do. The only way to avoid becoming a cannibal is to ignore the quest.

Still screenshots allegedly from the games – come on ! It’s photoshopped. If the game looks great, put it up on a big screen driven by a live demo.

There was an exception from E3. The Totalbiscuit coverage of Planetside2 has convinced me that it’s a game to be very interested in. It ignored the T&A and Canned Video presentation routes and went for live gameplay. Ok, over a limited area but :

Live servers
Many players
Claimed “alpha” state but beta level feature level

It passed the tests of “looks great”, “gameplay is something I’d be interested in”, “will deliver the promises”. Canned videos like XCom don’t give that, actual demos do in a “You say this works : PROVE IT” way.

How is that relevant outside the games world ?

Last year, when I was looking at cars, I wrote something about looking around the Bristol Motor Show. (Here’s the link). There was a bit of variance in how the car people went about things :

Lexus – come see ! Have a seat, let us tell you how awesome we think our car is
Ford – good cars, open to look at but not much interest from the staff
Alfa – some good, some bad – but still open for checking out
VW & Audi – locked cars with no one in attendance

Are they scared of people checking out their stuff ? That’s the only explanation for that disinterest. It didn’t give me any cause for visiting the Audi garage for sure. Can’t remember seeing Honda there but they fell down with the interest level at their garage. It was basically zero interest in selling a sporty hybrid coupe to a young professional male.

I’m the target audience for the CR-Z ! Why no interest from the sales people !

And there’s me in danger of ranting again.

It’s a more cautious world these days. We don’t have as much money available as we used to. We have less disposable free time. There’s more quality competition. If you’re wanting to sell something to us, make us think that you believe that our time is valuable.

Still rambling today. I’m pretty bashed feeling after yesterday. But what made me think “wow, I’d like to write more like that” is reading one from 3 years ago (someone randomly found it and I got curious). It’s me writing nice things about someone very special. Sadly I didn’t hear from her again – but I can remember how I felt when I wrote it.

Think head over heels. I’ve had possibility of that feeling a couple of times over the past year or so but not lately. But I’d love to have it back again. It’s that feeling that someone matters more than life … and that they might feel the same about you. Not had that feeling for a while.

There’s a distance between “possibility” where you might have the head over heels feeling and where you realise that the other party might be completely oblivious. I didn’t believe that the BYT / Miss AB who left us 3 years ago was oblivious (woulda loved to hear from her again) but I’ve had that from others.

Maybe they’ve been waiting for something 🙂

I’m waiting for something – this episode of NCIS to finish and then I’ll be in the shower washing out some of yesterday’s tiredness.

PS Another thing that cheered me up today – Finance Angel K spotting me walk by with teacake -> Smile + “Hello Pete!”, which led to a cascade of “Morning” “morning”, “Allo”, “mornin’“, “Wotcha” and so on and so on as that smiling Hello Pete ended up in me saying hello to half the office. Next step – I need to learn their names … 🙂

Various Facebook updates from today, while I was attempting to ration the batteries on the phone …

Smart phones are great – but they really need to be doubled up on battery capacity. It used to be that I could be lazy with charging up the phone. Maybe charge it every few days. Smartphones though, need to be on charge every night and even then it can be doubtful that they’ll make it through the day.

Very long day today. Up and out the door at 6.15am and off up the road to a team mate’s house to pick him up (spookily close to where Craziequeen lives).

Next is 2.5 hours down the road to London where we make the switch to the Underground. London has an excellent mass transit system. It’s far more efficient to use the Underground than it is to drive into the centre. Just park on the outskirts and ride the tube in. It not only lets you avoid traffic carnage, it can be cheaper too, with outskirts car park + tube tickets being cheaper than an all day city centre car park ticket.

And then it’s Lords. Home of cricket. And the finest cricket stadium in the world.

Here’s the view from the Pavilion :

I took a couple more which have appeared on Facebook but they’re not so good. That’s the media centre at the far end, with us on the top tier of the Lords Pavilion. Great view but the atmosphere was better in that stand you’ll see over to the left.

RN were up against the Army first, didn’t see much of this one but it ended up as a super tight game. A bit of sloppy fielding right at the end allowed the scores to finish tied. RN won on countback.

Next was Army vs RAF, with the RAF taking a heap of early wickets leading to a very low score by the Army. They got battered, setting up a RN vs RAF showdown.

Talking point from the last game was a superb catch on the boundary, where a RAFman took a catch diving forward. Most of the crowd thought he let it bounce … Cue FB update of “Silly RAFman. He has incurred Wrath Of Crowd.” And we got on his back for the rest of the game 🙂

RAF took the honours in the end, with their opening bowler smashing the ball around with the bat. It’s a shame when that happens really, cricket is supposed to be a team game but one player so far ahead of his team got them the win.

Home and tired now and I think I’ve caught the sun 🙂 Have to see how that ends up tomorrow morning.

PS The event was the Interservices Twenty 20 tournament, which is an annual thing. Third time for me today 🙂