Year: 2013

Of course. Shops can never compete with on-line retailers for either price or variety. I probably get 2/3 of my books on-line but still pick up random books in shops or supermarkets. Often they're books I would never have planned to buy and more often than not turn out to be at least reasonable.

Yeah – it depends where you can get them. The retail bookshops have two problems :

Not having the books I'm interested in on their shelves
Not keeping up with the online offers

Online is better at getting us the books for the prices we're willing to pay 🙂

I actually think books are really cheap. £5 for a book is pretty reasonable and most of mine are significantly less than that.

News over here is all about another retail giant getting into trouble …

Couldn’t really let that bit of news pass as HMV is probably the shop I spend most time in up at the Mall. What can I say, I find browsing in there to be quite relaxing.

Yes. I’m strange.

Why would that be I wonder ? I touched on one possible reason earlier. Bargains. There’s a Waterstones bookshop up at the Mall too but despite reading the occasional book, I don’t tend to spend much time in there. Why ? Books cost too much these days (I can remember books costing £2-£3 new in shops – I’m old) and the stock isn’t that great.

That’s a big reason why the high street shops are struggling now. It costs money to hold stock and takes lots of space to put that stock on the shelves. So when I go looking for that Edie Brickell album I don’t have yet or the Rachel Sermanni album I’m very curious about, I don’t find it in the shop.

Prices tend to be cheaper online too and you avoid being inflicted with customer disservice too. Just one problem with actual media coming from online places, you tend to have to deal with the post office. That’s why I don’t order much online, because getting to the post office (especially with the car park ban) is a bit of a pain.

I’m not a big fan of HMV though. There used to be 2 record/movie shops at the Mall, with a Virgin (later Zavvi) store there too. They kept each other honest with the pricing and the offers. I’d tend to browse HMV and then buy downstairs in Virgin where the same item would usually be cheaper. Zavvi was another casualty of Woolworths collapsing. After Zavvi disappeared, there was noone to keep HMV honest. Prices went up.

I have been buying more stuff as download, however while I’m happy to do that with games and music I don’t do that with movies. Movies take a lot of storage space and it’s far more difficult to pipe movies to the good AV kit than it is to just pop a dvd in the Xbox, a blu-ray in the player and just watch stuff. Computers can do it but not as easily or as high quality as it should be.

So I still browse the record shops. Or I do at the moment.

There’s some hope, as there’s still a couple of independents in town. One is ok, although they pass off ex-rental blu-rays as new (thought that was illegal ?). The other are a bunch of crooks.

With the car park ban, I can see myself going into the city centre more than the Mall. There’s more shops there and I already have the go anywhere bus ticket.

I’ll be a little sad to see HMV go, although that’s coloured by two things :

1 – I kinda wished they’d gone earlier instead of Virgin/Zavvi. I always preferred the other shop.
2 – Multimedia shopping going from high street to online seems inevitable.

I like having that browse ! I don’t often buy much in there but I seem to do more movie/music shopping on impulse than it being a calculated online buy.

And Amazon cheat on their taxes so I try and avoid them for that.

PS I have a second copy of Resident Evil Afterlife on bluray after the last trip. I know I know ! The Resident Evil films are a bit naff. But I enjoy watching them (spot the Milla Jovovich fan) and I thought it was the newer one. Anyone (local!) want it ?

Lol – maybe sitting on the floor in "treatment mode" will mean I read some more 🙂

If you're interested in all things military – which I know you are – I have lots of military related books coming up to review (and to read) – both fiction and non-fiction. If you like that sort of thing I'm sure that you'll find something to dive into.

I don't think I'd change much if I could wind the clock back, apart from maybe getting more attention to that shoulder before it froze up too much.

Was kinda hoping for snow 🙂 But alas, it has avoided Bristol again.

To be honest, snow this time around will be “interesting” … Why’s that ? No car allowed at work (except Friday’s) and my car is allegedly not keen on ice/snow.

It’s a particularly awesome car 🙂 Definitely the best I’ve had in all respects. However, one criticism I and others have is that the traction and stability control is very aggressive in cutting power when the wheels start to slip. And when you have a powerful electric motor driving the front wheels, that can mean that the car just doesn’t move. (Allegedly)

So I’ll be at the mercy of the buses if the bad weather does come. From one point of view, that’s not bad. You’re free to abandon a bus at any time if it gets stuck in traffic or bad conditions. Means a walk but hey, I’m not that badly damaged. (I do have leg issues but they actually like some work to free them up).

Where’s the snow ? I keep an eye on http://uksnowmap.com/#/ – the UK snowmap. It collects data from a twitter channel and collates it into a map. Just one problem, I see a bunch of isolated heavy snow reports on that map right now and I have a feeling that they’re not true. Yep, you get scumbags dragging down that good thing as well as most of the other good things we still cling on to.

Other stuff – I’ve been scattered again lately. Seems like this skin thing likes to recover a bit and then get worse again. Not sure what’s triggered it off again this time, although it could be jaffa cake related. Hope not, cos jaffa cakes are a Reason To Live. Looks like I have to avoid them for a while though.

Yep. Got sore again, although I’m hoping that copious amounts of moisturizer helps out there.

With the cricket, my ears have improved to the point I can wear a helmet again. (No helmet, no batting, no cricket). But my skin is in such bad shape that it’s getting damaged very easily and it’s not repairing at all quickly. The moisturizer does seem to be helping though.

What am I up to at the moment ?

Been back at work for 8 days now, settling into more responsibility. Similar role as before but more responsibility. It may not be for too long but I’ll get as much out of it as I can.

Still catching up on all the telly recorded over the Xmas break. I did record some, even if most of it was repeats of films and documentaries. At the moment it’s a few episodes of Soviet Storm, which tells the story of WW2 on the Russian Front. Rating ? It’s worth watching for a bunch of reasons :

It’s interesting (to a military scholar)
It’s paced pretty well, keeps that interest level going
It’s detailed (15 episodes !)
It appears balanced, although you always want to see multiple sources of “truth” to check balance

And there’s that old saying “If you ignore the lessons of the past then you are doomed to repeat the mistakes”. It goes something like that. I’ve seen/read a fair bit of WW2 history for the battles we were involved with but not much for Russian, except knowing that it was as brutal as war can get.

There’s a few more things recorded aside from Soviet Storm. I thought XXX2 was possibly better than XXX1, although I won’t rush to buy either. Full Metal Jousting was a curiosity but I don’t think I’d bother with a season 2 if it gets made.

I’ve also been gaming again 🙂 That’s a mixed thing. I can get hooked into certain games, looking for a win. For a game like Moo2, that doesn’t mean any old win. It means a high scoring win. So if it’s “just a win” but I’m beaten to certain score things, I’d abandon and start again. At the moment, it’s Borderlands 2 which I’m enjoying immensely. True, I’m playing as a Mechromancer which is somewhat overpowered. However, it’s a sizable improvement on the original in a lot of ways.

Pacing – the original was a lot like the older style Massive Multiplayer Online game, especially with the grind. The new game seems to be much more focused on telling its story.
Mechanics – I dunno, these seem just “better”. But I’d struggle to define “better”. Maybe I need to play through the original.

And I have a bunch of others that appeared in the sales to check out :-). Borderlands 2 first, after a couple more Soviet Storm episodes.

The best time is always now…….. Or the future, if you have a choice…. Unless it gets *really* bad then its back to now….. [grin]

I’ve been watching the Stargazing show tonight (after getting back in from a work run down south …)

It makes you think, watching shows about science fact and astronomical exploration. There’s a lot out there just begging to be looked at. Trouble is, that’s all we can do right now for what’s outside our Solar System. We can send probes to our local neighbourhood but for everything further out from that, we’re dependent upon what we can see.

And … because that light takes a finite and deterministic time to arrive, we’re seeing the objects out there as they used to be. The Andromeda galaxy at 2.5 million light years away will be different now to what it was when the light started its travel toward us. The Stargazing programme tells us that the star Betelgeuse is expected to go supernova “tomorrow” in astronomical terms.

(tomorrow translates to sometime in the next million years)

Betelgeuse is about 640 light years away, which means it could have gone Boom already, we just haven’t seen it yet.

One curious idea is that if we ever invent Faster Than Light travel, we could Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun (spot the Pink Floyd reference) and effectively watch that Boom happen as we travel towards the star. Or, you find a star that’s recently gone supernova and travel away from it to catch the older light.

I.e. – if you can travel faster than light,
Going towards – winds the clock forward
Going away – winds the clock back

That’s beside the point though. You watch stuff like the astronomical programmes and it’s like seeing all these marvels that you can look at but never, ever touch. We don’t have the technology yet (almost certainly not in the next 100 years either) to get to other stars. Interplanetary travel sure, interstellar is a whole new ball game.

I read books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, or Ben Bova’s Mars or countless other space scifi books and I think – I’d fit right in there. My brain coupled with engineering skills and technical instinct would fit right in with a permanent colonisation or just research colony expedition. And I’d have the interest to be along for the ride.

I play the games now but given the choice between gaming and reading all the nitty gritty technical bits to do with a spaceship ? Hold me back before I burn my eyes out on the manuals. But we’re not there yet, which makes me think like I’ve been born a generation or two too early.

What are the choices though ? Let’s have a look :

Present is easiest. I’ve lived through the dawn of the Technological Age and got in there really early. The tech we have available has exploded in terms of advancement over the last 100 years. We had no manned flight 150 years ago, yet this world would not work without it now. That technology fits and drives my natural aptitude.

Past is curious. I’d have been drawn to crafting and would have ended up as a blacksmith or leatherworker. Something that lets me work with tools. I don’t think I’d have lasted long though. Leaving aside the issue of my eyes (I need strong glasses to correct astygmatism), I think I’d have been tagged as one of those smart people who are too dangerous to leave alive. And my natural naive state wouldn’t have seen the axe falling.

So yeah – either burned at the stake for being a heretic or eliminated for being too smart. I don’t think much to what my prospects may have been in Medieval times.

The future is where you start looking into that crystal ball. There’s two possibilities as I see it :

Bad future – we don’t escape this planet and therefore come to an unavoidable certainty of exhausting the resources available. That’s a very dark future which will begin with wars over resources (we’ve seen that already with Iraq) with those wars descending into a stalemate. One of very few good Tom Clancy books is Red Storm Rising, which has an unwinnable East vs West war initiated by Russia needing to secure new fossil fuel reserves.

If we can’t spread past the Earth, then I can’t see the future being anything but dark. Getting out to our local solar system will buy us time, there’s huge amounts of resources out there waiting to be tapped. It’s just to difficult to get to them at the moment.

Good future – interplanetary and interstellar travel become a routine reality. This planet is too crowded already. The UK is definitely overcrowded. Interplanetary and interstellar travel will provide an escape valve to give a bit of breathing space. Trouble is, it wouldn’t be an even distribution of people leaving, it would be the best and brightest. Which leaves behind the dregs to inhabit the Earth. Heinlein used that as a minor theme in his Lazarus Long books, where the situation on Earth got worse and worse as more people left.

So that good future could actually be a dystopia. Looks good on the surface, would be good for a few but for the many it would be a nightmare.

There’s a lot of good books out there about near future Earth societies and they ask a lot of questions about the nature of humanity. What are we prepared to do to ourselves. How we behave as a group and how we like to be treated as individuals. Many of those books have small groups of powerful people behaving very poorly and large groups of individuals breaking their society through the sense of entitlement that we see coming into today’s society.

I’ll leave it there. I’m hopeful of that Good Future coming about, I just feel a little sad that I’ve been born a generation or two too early to experience it. The present has lots of technological toys but that’s what they are, just toys.

PS Living now does have its compensations, I have the pleasure to know and work with some wonderful people. Today’s work trip had the unexpected pleasure to involve the Pretty Contractor Lady. The meeting was discussing a bit of kit we’re having fitted, with the meeting discussing what will be needed to fully satisfy what we’re aiming for. Pretty Contractor Lady’s part was to establish what she’d need to present in terms of accepting that it’s done right. I’ll get something thoroughly done when the time comes 🙂
PS2 Wild Thing (someone from a few years ago!) made an appearance too the other day and said I hadn’t changed a bit. Wasn’t quite sure what to make of that 🙂