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Of Quinto, (exaggerated) teenage debauchery and knitted bananas.

Hello everyone!  I say ‘everyone’ but I think only one person reads this thing so that’s probably an over-statement, but nonetheless hello

You might have realised if you’ve looked at the last post’s date that I haven’t properly posted a blog entry in a very long time and whilst tweeting with @TeganFawn earlier this afternoon, I decided that I wanted to get back into blogging on a semi-regular basis. I spend a lot of time using the social-blogging tool Tumblr but I don’t consider that a blog so abooth202.wordpress.com is the next best place I suppose. I’ve said before that in terms of free blogging platforms, a wordpress.com site isn’t ideal but it’s the best of the lot so I’ll stick with it.

So, I figured for my first post in ages I’d write a random post about several things which, I warn you now, will not flow coherently

Last night, I went to Tesco with the intention of buying the new Star-Trek movie to give me something to watch whilst pigging out on Skittles and Daim bars. Yes, I know, my Saturday night’s are absolutely thrilling aren’t they?

I ended up buying that along with the S1,2 & 3 boxset of Skins, which if you read this blog you’ll already know I absolutely love.

I wasn’t expecting too much of the Star Trek movie if I’m absolutely honest, I’ve never really watched any of the TV shows before and I suppose it has a bit of a cultish, nerdy reputation surrounding it. BUT….I figured if the genius that is JJ Abrams directed/produced it, it can’t be that bad. I’m so glad I was right. I really, really enjoyed it, so much so that I plan on watching it again either later on or tomorrow afternoon when I’ve finished uni for the day.

Quinto as Spock was amazing and whilst I obviously can’t make any comparisons to the past Star Trek story or it’s timeline (of which I hear this movie messes up in terms of continuity?) , it was an amazing story, the sets were fantastic, the cinematography was stunning and I just loved it. Go and buy it now if you haven’t already seen it

In terms of my other purchase, I’m looking forward to re-watching Skins from season 1. I only really joined the show at season 3 and caught up with previous one’s through 4OD so I can’t wait to watch them on a proper TV and more than likely knowing me, all in one sitting

So….bananas. Didn’t I say this post had no coherent flow?

The awesome Tegan sent me a knitted banana the other week I just wanted to let you all know, cos I love it

Hope you’re having/had a nice weekend.

Welcome Back

I haven’t blogged any substantial content for a very long time and whilst I was sat reading some favourite blogs of mine this afternoon, I thought to myself that I should probably fix that and write at least something.

I toyed with the idea of creating a new blog and starting afresh using a completely different platform but then decided against that considering the number of posts currently on this blog and I don’t really want to lose those.

This is only a free, WordPress.com blog and whilst I don’t particularly like using their blogging platform, it seems to be the best option out of the bunch of other less-than-efficient services available. So, tomorrow I’m going to write something. I don’t know what yet but I’ll try to make it something relatively interesting to read

What I’m Watching

I love TV. I watch way too much of it. I think I’m one of the few people in Britain that doesn’t really mind paying for his TV license. 2009 has brought some awesome shows to the small screen and here is a quick update as to what I’m watching at the minute.

Probably my favourite is 24. Currently in Season 7 – we see CTU disbanded, Tony alive and well and Chloe as gorgeous as ever I don’t think 24 can ever get old – I was skeptical about whether it would work without a central theme like CTU but it has, brilliantly.

Skins is back!!! I watched seasons 1&2 but never really got into them fully. Season 3 started last month and I adore the new characters (my favourite being Naomi ). Sure it’s unrealistic and over-the-top,  but it’s excellently written, acted and it makes great TV.

All Rights Reserved - Original Owner/Creator (I do not own this image)

BBC3 aren’t known for top-quality programming, but I reckon they’ve done well with Being Human. With a tagline like, “A Vampire, a Werewolf and a Ghost Share a Flat in Bristol”, BBC3 couldn’t really get it wrong Again, the series is excellently acted – especially by Russell Tovey who I think we’ll be seeing more of in the future. 

Whitechapel started last week. Airing on ITV1, I wasn’t expecting much but I was pleasantly suprised (as much as one an be when describing a murder series). A crime-drama about a modern-day Jack The Ripper, the series is very dark and gruesome. I’ll be watching to the end – ‘to see what happens’.

Hustle came back this year for a fifth season, which saw the return of Mickey Bricks and some new characters following the departure of Danny & Stacie. The new guys blended effortlessly and the series shows once again the brilliant mind of Tony Jordan. I believe it’s the last in the series next week – I’ll be sad to see it go.

One of the less-than-impressive shows of the year so far has been Demons. The series finished last weekend, and no matter how much I tried to love it – I couldn’t get my mind off how bad Philip Glenister’s accent was. Shame really, because both Holly Grainger (Ruby) and Christian Cooke (Luke) seem to be great actors. I’m not sure what let the series down, perhaps the bad story-lines or perhaps it was just a bad idea for a series. 

There is some top-quality programming on at the minute, with some more to come in the near future (Torchwood S3 anyone?).

Skins

You gotta love it…

Say what? No…seriously, what did you say?

I’ve never been a fan of public speaking/presentations, even if I’m only presenting to a small group of people. I generally don’t get nervous in the usual sense, it’s just that I have no concept of spontaneity. You see, a presentation is supposed to use a slideshow (be it computer based or OHP) as a basis for talking points only. If you’ve ever sat through a presentation where the speaker just reads off the slides then you’ll know why this is. Here is where I have a problem, I just don’t have the ability to talk about something without either learning a ’script’ off by heart or reading from other notes. So, to today’s story.

This morning I was part of an assessed ’workshop’ (nothing good has ever come of that word), in which I had to find a group (of people I don’t know, which always makes working as a team harder) of people to work with, research a topic and draw up a presentation all within the space of two hours. To make it worse we had to use OHP transparencies instead of Powerpoint. Because we only had two hours, I only managed to write a page or two of notes for the presentation – needless to say I froze in the middle of it. I was trying to read from my notes and from the ’slides’ at the same time and just totally confused myself. If the lecturer assessing us had an knowledge of what I was actually trying to say, I’d be very surprised. Like I said, it was an assessed piece of work, but luckily only counting 20% towards the final module mark, so hopefully I’ll do better in the exam come January.

Hard Candy

If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen some of my tweets relating to a movie I have rented called Hard Candy. Starring Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson, I loved this movie so much I felt I had to write about it. You can sum this blog post up in just a few words,

“YOU MUST SEE THIS MOVIE!”

Seriously, I’m not just typing this, I want everyone and anyone who reads this post to go out and buy, rent, steal or use some other means to get your hands on a copy of this movie. 

I really want to write a lot about how this movie made me feel, but just in case you do go out and buy it, I’ll try and avoid spoilers. 

 

The basic premise of the movie is that Hayley (Ellen Page) meets up with a guy she has been chatting with on the internet called Jeff (Patrick Wilson). At first, you get the impression that they are both consensual in their meeting and with their ‘attraction’ towards each other. Let me say at this point that Hayley is 14 years old, whilst Jeff is much older. Now considering the plot revolves around issues of pedophilia, I found myself at some points of the movie, being annoyed with myself at how I felt about the characters. A review I read said that I would be ‘pissed-off with myself” for feeling the way I do during the movie and I can honestly say I do. 
Jeff gets the tables turned on him in the movie, with Hayley getting her ‘own-back’ as it was. If your male and watching this film, be prepared for about 40 minutes worth of grimacing and squinting at the screen as it contains the most gruesome ‘castration’ torture scene ever.

 This movie is so subtle and yet so powerful, it’s left me thinking about it an hour after I’ve finished watching it. I’m not the best at writing movie reviews, so I’ll leave the final remark to the Director of the movie;

Roughly 50% of our audience love this film, around 25% come out of the theatre wondering what they thought and the other 25% hate us for making it.

You MUST watch this movie. You MUST!

 

Andrew.

American vs UK Apple Store Prices

I was a bit annoyed at how different the prices were in the UK Apple store compared to the prices of the US store (obviously, factoring in the exchange rate). I’ve drawn up a quick table below just to put the prices side by side.

As you may have guessed, MB = MacBook, MBA= MacBook Air and MBP = MacBook Pro. The models listed increase in specifications with MB(3) being the ‘old style’ MacBook.

I have taken the price from the US store for each product, converted to GBP using the current (15th October 22.30, 2008) exchange rate. Then listed the price given in the UK store and in the final column, calculated the difference. This final column is the one I am concerned about. 

%Δ of each product is as listed (roughly);

• MB (1) = 25%
• MB (2) = 23%
• MB (3) = 23%
• MBA (1) = 24%
• MBA (2) = 23%
• MBP (1) = 20%
• MBP (2) = 20%

So, as you can see, the average Δ% is around 22.5%. The question now is, where did Apple get this figure from. Why did they decide that the UK’s prices should be, on average, 22.5% higher than those in the US? Well, being the economist I am, I’m embarrased to admit that I haven’t a clue.

Obviously the Dollar is very weak at the moment (nigh on 2$ to £1) but this doesn’t really factor for the 22.5% difference in pricing. Again, it has always been the case that Britain’s are generally charged more for things because of our ‘once healthy’ economy. It’s like me (a Northerner) going to London and finding things much more expensive than I’m used to where I live, to use a better example look at the difference in property prices between northern cities and the capital – now, take this example and expand on it globally.

 

Like I said, I’m only suggesting some ideas but none can fully explain the extent to which Apple is charging it’s UK customers more. I encourage you to leave a comment should you know the answer to this, or even if you just have our own theories, because I’d really love to know.

Anyway. Rant Over. Signing Off

Of Doodles, HHGTTG and the Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster

A couple of months ago, I bought two new Moleskine notebooks. They’re quite expensive compared to most notebooks, and I always feel a bit stupid buying them, but they just feel better to write in. I can’t explain it. I generally take one with me wherever I go, I’m no artist or poet or anything fancy like that, just for the mundane stuff like writing down dates, places etc. Whilst sat in a Research Methods lecture yesterday, I found a new use for my Moleskine, filling it with my random doodles. 

 

On an entirely different note, I’ve always been a fan of the movie – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy (the one with Zooey Deschanel and Martin Freeman). Recently, I downloaded the original radio series’ of the same name, from the 1970s I think, and been listening to an episode each night before I go to bed. I love them, they’re so ridiculous and quirky and weird. This is just a small example of genius from the mind of Douglas Adams;

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.

Andrew

What’s a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster?

The best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster The effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick

MobileMe, What It’s Cracked Up To Be?

Maybe.

I could leave my review at that to be honest. The beauty of Apple products to me is that I can rarely fault them, they work seamlessly and I feel that my money has been well spent. With MobileMe I CAN fault it, it DOESN’T work seamlessly and I DON’T feel that my money has been well spent (I’m on a trial, but I’ll talk about this in a bit).

First off, I’ll talk a bit about why I went for MobileMe. The main selling point for me was the ‘push’ features, and when they’re working, they’re great. I get an email, my iPhone ‘pongs’ delightfully within seconds and lets me keep up to date. I also thought the WebApps would be great for when I’m at uni, working on Uni PCs (which I do quite regularly).

I was so certain that MobileMe was the right service for me, and on that note I began transfering my whole Internet life over to my new @me.com email address from gmail (which I could never fault), it took forever! The first snag came when MobileMe was down for about two days after launch and getting my email became a very stressful process. Since then, the service has been working mainly fine until two days ago when I couldn’t reach my email for about 4 hours. This really bugged me because I was waiting on a very important email from someone who I had sold to on eBay the day before. I had ALWAYS been able to get my gMail, and for an email service to go down like this is just pure unacceptable. Even now, Apple says that 1% of users may be having problems getting their mail, it’s been almost a week since that message was posted – Apple, get yourself sorted out because you’re losing customers here!!!

I’ve found that Web Galleries and iDisk are features that I will rarely use and I’m now asking myself the question, Is it worth paying almost £50 per year for push email? I really like the push email, I REALLY do, but I find it totally unacceptable for my email to be unreachable. One thing is for certain, If I experience anymore email downtime for the remainder of my trial (which Apple have had no choice but to extend by two month because of the numerous problems), I won’t be paying for the service and I’ll have no other option that to sign up with another ‘push’ provider like Yahoo, or just wait until Google implement ‘push’ in gMail.

I really hate to say it, but MobileMe has disappointed me and I’m certain that the service isn’t worth £50 per year. It’s just a matter of whether Apple get their act together in time for the end of my trial as to whether I fork out some more money to ol’ Jobs for a ridiculously priced product.

On a final note, what the hell were Apple designers thinking……

Andrew Booth