Armand David’s personal weblog: technology, media, stuff and nonsense.
I’m not big on shopping myself, but if you are… check out the Visa Diaries. Kate Howe is examining how your shopping reflects your personality, in some sense — as she tells “tales of life and love” through Visa receipts ;).
Me? I hate shopping. Buy everything online that I can. Not sure what that says about me :P
My closest school friend, Roy, gets married this week, in a three stage ceremony, part two of which I had the privilege to attend at his family’s place in the country yesterday. Was a very moving affair — Roy’s sweeping passion for his Transylvanian bride, Cristina, and his moving speech — and the best man, Roy’s brother Nicholas, delivered a very funny, obviously passionate tribute. His parents were also clearly proud and the whole afternoon was extremely pleasant.
Also hilarious to catch up with Will, another old school friend, and to meet his lovely American wife for the first time. Also had the privilege to catch up with Peter Farquhar, our legendary english teacher from days gone by. All were on excellent, ebullient form - Will cracking jokes about vampires, garlic etc., and Peter engaging and reflecting with everyone with the genuine interest and sincerity that has helped him maintain close friendships with so many of his former students.
Slightly worrying that quite so many of my friends are tying the knot at this stage; but I’m adopting a ‘que sera, sera’ attitude to that aspect of my life…!
Just finished reading The Insider, [[Piers Morgan]]’s memoirs, after having it recommended by loads of people at work as an entertaining read (thanks to Dan A for lending me the book in the end…). It’s also been difficult to concentrate on any of my other ‘to-read’ books else in the recent heatwave.
I hate to say it, but it was extraordinarily entertaining.
Of course, Morgan comes out of it looking good — he claims to be trying to paint an honest picture and therefore his mistakes are highlighted in the book… but many of his observations, as he relates them, make him out to be ridiculously prescient. I suspect hindsight had something to do with those.
But the anecdotes about and around the newsroom were fascinating; the degree of influence and power The Mirror wielded under his stewardship is downright impressive. As is the ridiculous namedropping he performs on every page of the book — to the extent that there is a ‘cast of characters’ at the back — people, you would assume on picking up the book, that Morgan knew or interacted with in the time he is recounting in these memoirs (1994-2004). The fact that this cast includes ‘Adolf Hitler’ suggests to me that the publishers perhaps did not feel Mr Morgan had quite enough celebrity friends after all…
Whichever way you draw it, there’s some impressive achievements in there, and some good stories. A book worth reading.
I’m sorry, the temperatures in London have been absurd - it’s 33 degrees in the office today and not having air conditioning - either here or at home - has reduced the amount of time I’m physically able to be writing… anything.
Normal service will resume as soon as I work out a cure for this global warming thing that lasts slightly longer than the ice lollies our bosses have very kindly provided the last couple of days…
I’ve had enough of the Spam Lords. Chris pointed me to the auto-close comments wordpress plugin, which will mean that - automatically - any post over 3 weeks old will have discussion disabled.
Sorry - if you wanted old chat, it’s going to have to happen elsewhere. Although WP’s Akisment plugin brilliantly catches all my comment spam, I do get emailed about it and that’s been annoying - so now, spam no more.
Every now and then they remind you that they’re the parents and you’re the children. Today that happened with my Mum unexpectedly quoting Dickens at me, and my completely failing to get the reference.
Life is like a box of chocolates…
When I was about three or four years old, my Dad came back from a trip to the US with four Superman t-shirts for me. The were little white t-shirts with pictures from the comics on them, and a little red, polyester cape hanging off the back. Tacky as anything.
But I didn’t wear any other t-shirt for the next three years.
I have some idea why I’ve always empathised strongly with the character of Superman; isolated but much loved, wanting to save the world but frustrated by personal limitations, raised by a supportive family. Oh, and the powers of flight, invulnerability, super speed and heat and x-ray vision. Those would all have been good, too.
For whatever reason, the emotional attachment stuck. When I was 17, I rediscovered comic books and now have a couple of crates of graphic novels lying around my house. I have most of the Superhero movies on DVD - even the really, really bad ones. And so expectations for the new Superman movie - as they were for Batman Begins last year - were high.
And they were met. The new film is emotionally poignant, visually spectacular and, for me, pretty damn enjoyable. It’s not perfect - it doesn’t come close to matching the narrative pace of Batman Begins. But Bryan Singer’s eye for sweeping, glorious visual imagery is… artistic, all the set pieces work, the dialogue - whilst limited - conveys what it needs to about the characters. And even though I didn’t particularly like Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, the trials of their relationship… were engaging. And moving.
Although the Spielberg-esque happy ending was faintly tedious (”Hello, beastie” is a much better way to set up a sequel ;)) and did drag on for about 20 minutes longer than it had to, I left the cinema - very moved. It played on the myth without being too derivative, and whilst daring to try new things.
And wouldn’t it be cool to fly?
I’m loving YouTube at the moment. Here’s the trailer, for the uninitiated. Go see… now.
Tom pointed out to me last night that a few people have been comparing Pirates II to ‘Empire Strikes Back’ - apparently it has exactly the same story structure - which, on initial discussions and reading, I can see. Mackenzie Crook and his parter in crime as R2 D2 and C3PO, I suspect the Black Pearl was the Millennium Falcon, Jack Sparrow as Hans, Norrington as Lando Calrissian etc… Makes a weird kind of sense.
Three things I wanted to say about it, though…
(1) I did not think ‘Why has the rum always gone’ was the best line. I thought ‘Hello, beastie’, was the funniest line in the film. Don’t ask me why, I probably couldn’t explain it.
(2) I maintain that it was a good film, in spite of everyone’s naysaying - didn’t mind the fact that it was long, loved the ridiculous and fantastic action sequences, coped with the convoluted plot.
(3) Am I the only one to see the massive parallels between these films and the brilliant Monkey Island games? [[Guybrush Threepwood]] and the dread pirate [[LeChuck]] had almost exactly the same counterpoint that Jack Sparrow and Barbossa have (the third film will be great).
Here’s a reminder for you, courtesy of YouTube.
…thank, erm, heavens for the rain! For those of you elsewhere in the world (and who care about the weather), London has roasting for the last week or so and today has brought some much needed rain. *Phew*.
Where’ve I been? It’s been a bit of a busy social one - Gareth took us to the Blue Man Group show, which was wonderful, surreal, hysterical, energetic and fun in every way — recommended to anyone. Also a couple of drinks parties and general summer goodness.
This afternoon I’ve been fiddling about writing music and recording, with some help from Pob - he’s got a gig happening in two weeks, which I’ll be at - do come along if you’re keen on great live music! Over the next week or so, though, I’ll probably get around to actually laying down the tracks of this song and we’ll see how it sounds… if its not completely rubbish I’ll think about uploading it.
Tonight: off to celebrate Chris‘ new job in far-east London. Should be fun - expect me to finally deliver on the promise of catching up on a few blog topics of more substance and power tomorrow.
I thought I’d avoided the ‘5 favourite social media’ meme, but Danny kindly tagged me, so I’ll give it ago. The reason for avoidance? Erm, I’m not sure there’s anything particularly clever or interesting about my favourite five (I don’t rip, script, furl OR curl anything at all)… but here we go.
I love Wordpress. Unsurprisingly. It powers this blog, and allows integration with all sorts of other cool things - including del.icio.us, Flickr, Last.fm, Amazon and more, thanks to some cool plugins.
I love Wikipedia. I’m one of those people who likes to know a little about a lot of things, most of the time, and occasionally a lot about a few, and the articles on Wikipedia invariably provide a useful starting point.
I love RSS. I love my RSS readers slightly less: Feedreader is good and is my desktop client of choice. What I really want is something that syncs with an online service so that threads I’ve marked as read on one are marked as read on the other, and so that I don’t have to subscribe to the same feed more than once. Does Newsgator do this? I’ll look into it at some point. Oh, my online RSS reader of choice is Bloglines, and I do like the way that public blogrolls can be shared on there. I should get into all this OPML stuff too…
I like del.icio.us a lot — currently more for my own edification than its social nature (I only have two people in my network) — but as someone who’s (1) never bothered to use bookmarks and (2) who likes to blog one-liners, it gives me good scope to find links I want to again and be pithy about amusing websites. The linklog on the right, btw, is powered by del.icio.us.
And for number 5? I guess Skype might win that one; admittedly it’s a long way from perfect, and arguable to what extent it constitutes ‘media’ as its output isn’t necessarily public… but its a great bit of social software, and there’s potential there (I read some good tips on Simon’s blog on how to record Skype conversations - something which may come in handy…!).
So there you have it. Tags? Don’t think Chris, Tom, Gareth, Ben or, erm, Neil Gaiman have done this (why not ask?). Share and enjoy, folks, share and enjoy.
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