watch tHe skies

So last night saw the return to British TV of cult show Lost for its second season. Thankfully Channel Four didn’t make us wait until september and so we pick up where we left off with a 2 part opener showing the guys heading down through the hatch, and what happened to the intrepid sailors and their raft.

We also get introduced to a slightly barmy scottish bloke who lives in a little bunker and types lottery numbers in to a very old fashioned computer. Confused? You should be. Overall it was an excellent, exciting start to the new season despite asking more questions than it answered, and leaving us on a major ciffhanger as it looks like Mike, Jin and Sawyer are about to die.

My only complaint is the damn adverts on Channel Four. Is there really a need for the first string of adverts to start after the first two minutes of the show? Absolutely ridiculous.

This is of course no surprise, as Channel Four are already under investigation for their excessive advertising.

That groan aside, it looks like tuesday nights are going to be stay-ins for the forseeable future. They had better not shift Lost around when the inevitable Big Brother starts…

Well today our baby is due, according to the hospital. Jenny calculated the 4th May (tomorrow). So far no signs of imminent arrival though.

Incidentally if it was born tomorrow at 2 minutes and 3 seconds past 1am, it would be born on 1:2:3 4/5/6. Cool eh?

Caught Charlize Theron’s Æon Flux this weekend. Set sometime in the future, it centres around the last city on Earth following a disease that wiped out nearly the human race. The city is run by Chairman Goodchild, under threat from a resistance group, who have sent their top assassin, Aeon Flux to assassinate him. But when given the opportunity, Goodchild recognises her and something in her sparks a prior memory, and she misses her chance.

This sparks a desperate chase to uncover the truth behind this supposedly ideal society kept safe from the desolate wasteland outside of its protective walls.

Starring the slinky Charlize Theron, Marton Csokas and Jonny Lee Millar, it is a bit of a mixed bag the truth be told. Despite some really nice production design and neat CGI, the film suffers from not letting the audience in on what is going on for the first half of the movie. The society they live in is quite different to ours and we aren’t really given the opportunity to understand it well enough. Bits of technology come and go with no explanation as to their significance or point. However as the pieces start to fall in to place it does get more entertaining, but I expect that some will lose interest before this point in the movie.

The second half ups the action and plot explanation, and the movie comes to a neat completion with a smart finale. One aspect that is a disappointment, is the choreography of the fight scenes, more often than not you get zoomed cut shots of fists and feet that interfere with the flow of the fight. This also happens at the ending, where the shots are chopped, presumably to save money, but the end result is rather cheap looking at times. Add to this some gaping plot holes and you are left with a somewhat frustrating movie, full of smart visuals and ideas, but somewhat lacking in coherence. Hire before buying.

So there I was, thoroughly enjoying Chelsea paste a sorry Manchester United, when suddenly Wayne Rooney is tackled and as he flopped to the floor in agony, I knew that our chances of lifting that “cup” (not really a cup now is it? I mean a cup can hold liquid) had been dealt a serious blow.

But hang on a sec, win the world cup? Sure, we have some excellent, nay, great players, but good enough to win the World Cup? We are hanging our hopes on one person here, which doesn’t say much about the team, does it? No we may have the players that could win the World Cup, but I have yet to see them play as a team to the levels that we can expect to see from Brazil, Italy and France.

We aren’t the only nation to lose our great players before a major competition, but we will be the only ones blaming misfortune for it. You make your own luck and although losing Rooney is a blow, it surely can’t be the reason for failure.

Oh and I hear that following Scolari’s change of heart, that Steve McClaren is now top of the list to succeed Sven “Shagger” Ericksson. Well if McClaren is top of the list then I can’t be far behind him, because I’ve also won bugger all as a manager. Still, at least he is actually English.

Geeks are happy this weekend with the leaking on to the interweb of the rough trailer to 007’s next outing, Casino Royale, starring Daniel Craig.

Trailer (which can be found here until it’s taken down) starts in black and white, and then jumps in to colour with the appearance of the Bond “barrel”. Whilst I still remain a big fan of Pierce Brosnan and resent him being replaced, the trailer does look good, and I must say that it makes me want to go and see it. I must reread the book (which was the first Bond novel by Ian Fleming), as I’ve heard that the movie does to some extent follow the plot of the book.

The boys over at Engadget are predicting the imminent announcement of the iPod Nano Video. Probably available in 4gb and 8gb incarnations, this would match Nano and big daddy iPod functionality.

Cool?

Hmm probably not. I have to say that the Nano screen is so small, even cover art is hard to see, so I just don’t see the point of adding video, it’s just not practical to watch for any length of time. To be fair I think that the big daddy iPod screen is too small to watch movies, let alone the Nano. The big daddy is ok for music videos and showing comedy adverts and the like to mates in the pub, but that’s all.

I am of course slightly biased by the fact that the PSP kicks the iPod’s ass in this respect. Having had one for a few months now, I can say that the PSP screen is beautifully sharp and watching a movie on it on the train is quite comfortable, with the added plus that you can have a couple of spare batteries in your pocket for long journeys. Some might say that the MS Pro Duo is the limiting factor, but you can get a 2gb card for £60 from ebay, which will easily hold 2 movies.

Obviously we still have to wait for dream gadget that does both music and video at a decent size. Personally I am holding out for a PSP PDF reader, which would make the device a must-have; ebooks on the move. There is a homemade program that supposedly reads PDFs for the PSP but I can’t get it to work on mine. There may be a long wait for the Sony firmware update to include it, as Sony are releasing the Sony Reader, a handheld ebook reader. Around the size of a small paperback, the print quality looks excellent, and I presume that it will be accompanied by a decent ebook store absolutley brimming with DRM through an expanded Sony Connect store. So will this be the next iPod? Maybe, but size is a problem, and personally I am moving more towards audiobooks on my iPod than print on a computer screen. I don’t think that there will be a big enough market for ebook readers. What would be cool, however, is a PDF to ebook converter, good enough to bring all of the subtleties of the spoken word from a PDF, but we may be some way from seeing such a device on the shelf.

Found this neat cartoon that reinforces my blog from earlier.

Found this over at Life Coaches’ Blog, nip over and take a look, lots of interesting info about NLP, life coaching etc.

In my mission for transcendence, I am currently reading Brian Tracy’s “Goals! - How to Get Everything You Want — Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible”. It’s all about setting yourself and being aware of targets in your personal and professional life. What interests me is how people become limited by their own beliefs, programmed in to them by society, friends, family etc.

Also of interest is the way that we restrain our achievements by thinking in the negative. That’s not to say that we consciously think negatively, it’s just that most of us (me included) think about what we don’t want to happen, not what we do want to happen.

For example, many people spend their work lives trying not to make mistakes, the view being that failing to make mistakes will result in a secure job. This eventually programs them to be risk averse and stifles their productivity and creativity, whilst the people who embrace new ideas and aren’t afraid to make mistakes will learn quicker and ultimately prove more successful because they aren’t actively avoiding mistake making. This point is reinforced in several books by Management guru Tom Peters who suggests that the most powerful people in an organisation are those that don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t try something different, rather than those who try and play by the book. That’s not to say that these people are rule breakers, it’s just that they take opportunities to try things that aren’t covered by job descriptions and procedures. (more…)