boreders

I have, as usual, started to read multiple books. January 2010 currently looks like a bumper month. Mind, I don’t appear to be reading anything off of my intended reading list for last year.

There’s “Ahistory” by Lance Parkin, which attempts to make some sense of the timeline of the Doctor Who universe. Also Who-related, I’m reading “The Face of the Enemy” by David McIntee, a Doctor Who novel without the Doctor, featuring instead those excellent chaps from UNIT and the Delgado Master.

Aside from Who, there’s the time hopping play “Arcadia” by Tom Stoppard, the various booklets of the new Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying game, and also “The Night Watch“, the first of the vampire triology by Sergei Lukyanenko.

Quite why I need to book hop so much, I’m uncertain. I’m not sure whether it detracts from my reading experience or somehow heightens it. Possibly, if left with only one book to read I would grow bored too quickly. On the other hand, perhaps I dilute the experience by trying to digest so diverse a set of materials.

Whatever the impact, I remain frustrated by my own inability to read at greater pace. I feel like a runner aiming for a goal, and yet I constantly fall short despite my best efforts. I try to speed read by take in only the first sentence of each paragraph and at best glancing at the rest, but almost certainly this has it’s own downside that I don’t actually read evrything. I could so easily miss something using that method that it only seems worthwhile where I read casually and the material involved is just a set of game rules.   

Just watched Defiance. The Jews suffered incredibly in their efforts to survive – I’m thankful not to have been around during that dark time. As a retelling of a true story, it made harrowing viewing. My wife seemed stunned that it was based on true events. I’m stunned that we live in a society that stones fire engine crews and rapes old women… the lessons of intolerance from events such as a the Second World War seem to have fallen on deaf ears and ignorant minds.

Despite the fact Slumdog Millionaire has an uplifting conclusion, I don’t think I could stomach two movies with such a weight of woe in one evening. My fragile personality already sits on a grey and depressing precipice at the moment.

I’ll record ‘Slumdog’ and watch it later in the week or something. Instead, I shall retire and get some much needed rest. I have a copy of Arcadia waiting for me to finish it. My wife considers reading plays before bedtime a little odd, but I have to read it somewhere and somehow the lavatory doesn’t seem to be appropriate. Are there certain works unsuitable for toilet reading? Do some books warrant more respect? Or more refinement, at least?

I seem to have spent a good part of the weekend snagged up in the seedy world of the Internet. No, I have not been knee deep in porn or wading through pixelated orcs in a raid. I have been participating in the honourable pursuit of “working out what the heck makes something tick”.

I now seem to have spent the last month trying to move my old web presence from a hosted package to a virtual server. One of the things this has involved is a learning curve rather like K2. When you have to slog so much, you appreciate a helping hand – so, I tried loading a piece of pre-installed software to run an image gallery. Alas, the accuracy of the automated install seemed to be rather poor. I ended up with something that, at best, didn’t fail completely, but that obviously wasn’t working properly either.

So, I set about working out what needed to happen to get it working. This was akin to someone giving me a paragraph of text in a foreign language and asking me to translate, accurately, merely using reference books. At first, I spent a while going through support forums and searching for likely causes of the error, then I tried resetting permissions and re-install elements of the setup. Finally, I decided to run through the whole configuration and installation procedure from scratch. Each error that arose was cross-referenced and fixed, a painful and gradual process of trial and error.

Finally, at 9.40pm yesterday evening, I completed the re-install and the gallery worked “perfectly” (within acceptable tolerances). My weekend had vanished, but the work had been done.

I ponder, was this weekend lost in translation, or did I gain something from the experience. Perhaps, my knowledge increased just a little along the way, though probably not by much.

I just saw the GoCompare.com advert with the opera signer. Apparently, the character, called Gio Compario, the creation of veteran husband-and-wife advertising team Chris Wilkins and Sian Vickers, is intended to reclaim market-share from Comparethemarket.com.

I wander whether 20 years can dull the senses enough to make someone in marketing believe they have come up with an idea? Personally, I cannot fail to make comparisons with The Laughing Man from the classic, and fabulous, ‘Absolutely‘. A stereo-typically rotund opera singer, loud and in-your-face in the most embarrassing way possible. Hmm…

Seriously… Lost is either an act of pure insanity or utter genius. However, I may not be in the position to make a final decision until this time next year.

Almost as expected, watching the finale ended with cries of anguish as the screen went white and the logo appeared. I daresay we ended with yet more unanswered questions… Like who the survivors of the most recent plane really are, what Richard is, and why was Jacob ‘tagging’ people to come to the island. Also, what is so special about Hurley, who only seemed to get tagged to get him to return to the island?

Lock acquires a new layer of sinister significance, too – like he wasn’t a puzzle within a puzzle already! Is he some aspect of the island now – like Christian and Clare have become? Or is he just some weird vessel of that guy trapped on the island with Jacob in the past – and what exactly is the loophole he found?

Is (was) Jacob the Devil?

I’m sitting in the garden right now writing this blog entry, having already twittered, Boo’d and updated my Facebook status.

Despite approaching social networking with uncertainty from the outset, I now embrace Facebook, Twitter and similar outpourings like old friends. In many respects they are just that. I chat with more old school friends and ex-work colleagues than ever before. Yes, some of those “friends” are tenuous, but I do know them from Adam (something Facebook members with thousands of friends certainly can’t say!).

The business of social networking induces me to chat regularly, if only with myself. I should write more and I should write regularly… and this may be a reasonable route in to achieving that. A dozen Tweets in a day is more than I have likely set down to paper in the last week on any creative projects. It shouldn’t be that way, but small steps might make all the difference.

I now Tweet as @boreders, Facebook as myself, and Boo too! Boo is basically audio twittering or blogging, which allows for a little more spontaneous content generation. I allow my mouth to do all the talking (funnily enough).

I’d like to find any angle on this outpouring now to make more of it… So, if anyone has any clever ideas they’d care to share, I’d love to hear from you!

I’ve just been watching a new episode of Bones, and realized it isn’t very good. Oh, I like the concept well enough, the characters within the ensemble, the witty banter, and more than one of the actresses. However, I find the stories deeply unsatisfying.

If I watch a detective series, I want to stand a cat-in-hell’s chance of solving the crime myself, with or before the characters. I have found, of late, that too many episodes have murderers who were at best extras with a fleeting influence on the story or hinge on evidence so flimsy as to be laughable. In a recent episode where a guy died in a safari reserve, it turned out the killer was a nurse at the victim’s hospital we heard in passing 10 minutes into the story and then not again until the conclusion. I might need to review the content of the episode, but I’m sure there was nothing that would have allowed you to pin the crime on her from facts gleaned in the story. Really, I could be wrong, but if I’m not feeling satisfied, then it isn’t really working as planned. In the last episode, they listed dozens of substances that might have left a false positive on a forensic test, then latched onto pond scum – which linked the crime to one of three characters… Despite the fact one of the other substances being cleaning fluid. Daft!

I may just stick to reading the books… They seem to make more sense.

Watched ‘Lost’ on Sunday (22nd) and by the end I was shouting at the screen. It wasn’t quite disbelief… It might have been relief at the inevitable happening and just wondering where they’re planning on taking it.

I mean, if you came face to face with your nemesis in a situation where you had all the cards, would you – could you – take the advantage? And of that’s what happens here, will they fall foul of the Grandfather Paradox!?

After a period of lackluster storytelling, I’m thoroughly hooked again.

I have seen the advert for Elbow’s award winning album ‘Seldom Seen Boy’ a good dozen times now, and the news that they’d claimed Mercury and Brit Awards seemed promising. So, having acquired the album over the weekend, I was devastated that I hated it. Only the two ‘crowd pleaser’ tracks, featured in the advert, went anywhere close to likeable. The rest of the album I can best sum up with a single word – dirge.

I have various degrees of albums appreciation. I occasionally find a whole album that I love, while any that offer up a 70% hit rate normally sit comfortably in my ‘regular play’ section. Some I have to grow into, delivering only 40-50% hit rate on first listen, but seeping into my veins over time until I can manage without them. Elbow falls into the big disappointment category, getting a less than 40% hit rate… Heck, it got a less than 15% hit rate. I might benefit from a guided tour by one of the judges that piled awards on the album, because I may well be missing something.

In the meantime, I’m giving this album the elbow (titter)…

Rupert Galvin… Philip Glenister… Demons… American accent… WHY???

Seriously, Philip has a perfectly decent accent all of his own. I don’t mean DCI Hunt’s gruff tones, I means his own accent. So, why make him speak with a faux American accent, likely to put me off watching the series?