watch tHe skies

Jenny was going stir crazy last night and needed to get out of the house. Ben was stocked up on carrot so our local babysitter (Jen’s Mum) looked after the bairn whilst we headed over to the cinema to catch a movie.

The Devil Wears Prada wasn’t my first choice, however The Departed and World Trade Center were both considered a little heavy for a wednesday night, and Jen fancied a chick flick so off we went.

To my surprise, it wasn’t a chick flick at all. It looked like it was going to be one, but it turned out to be a smart, funny look at the modern challenge of maintaining a healthy work \ life balance, and the stereotypical nightmare boss, whilst neatly avoiding all of the cliches of chick flick type movies. The overarching “will you sell your soul to the devil for a good career” theme was great and very relevant, whilst the performances from all of the main characters made the film very watchable. Scene stealer was of course Meryl Streep, whose modern day cross between Gordon Gekko and Cruella DeVille is an absolute pleasure to watch.

Finally, worth a mention is the photography and design. those of you who know me know that I am no sartorial expert, however some of the photography and sets, combined with the high-end fashion, worked brilliantly, particularly when the story moved to Paris, I got this deja-vu feeling that I was watching an Audrey Hepburn movie.

Overall a very good film with something to enjoy for most. Great soundtrack too.

Well I guess it was inevitable. Few have fought the gadget monster and lived to tell the tale, and I barely escaped with my life, only the swanky MDA Vario II from t-mobile appeased the beast and forced it to retreat to its cave, sated. For the time being. (more…)

I recently watched a DVD from Paul Scheele entitled “Genius Mind”. The DVD is a film of a talk he gave, presumably to his photoreading students. It covers similar ground to some of his “Natural Brilliance” book, and is centred around explaining the amazing capacity of the human mind to do, well, some really clever stuff.

It turns out that the mind is a complicated thing. No brainer for some, but to paraphrase the great Douglas Adams, the mind is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to the mind. And for all but the thickest of the thick, it’s a mechanism so complicated that it makes setting the video recorder seem like, well, blinking.

And the funny thing is, we all, have the same brain, the same mechanism for clever thought as Enstein, Newton, Bergkamp, name a genius and your brain is roughly the same as theirs. In essence we all have the same Porsche brain. It’s just that some of us don’t realise that this sexy sportscar of a processor has more than one gear. (more…)

So following the clearout of the DAB radio and a few other bits and bobs on ebay, the gadget monster retreated in to his cave and fell in to a deep sleep. Leaving me to work through my cheapo Photoreading course bought from the ‘bay for a fraction of the $600 plus taxes that it costs to import it from the US of A.

Until one of the Engineers at work showed me her latest phone. She nearly bumped in to me in the corridor at work as she was busy typing on her phone.

“What are you up to?” I asked.

“Ahh you see I’m talking to my friend on messenger.” She said.

I was puzzled - messenger has been banned at work, as has personal email and blogs, leaving me completely isolated from the rest of the world between 9am and 4.30 pm on workdays. Sure I should be busy working but if they expected me to work solidly all day then they would have to pay me more. A lot more.

“Messenger? You can get messenger on a phone?”

“Yes, and with this lovely T-Mobile PDA and their ‘Web N Walk’ package, I’m online all the time and it doesn’t cost me any more a month.”

“Oh”, I said. “I wished you hadn’t showed me that, for it is the equivalent of waving a bottle of black label Smirnoff at a recovering alcoholic”.

With that she laughed and walked off down the corridor, deep in textual conversation with someone out in the ether, leaving me wishing that I hadn’t left my office to get a coffee.

The MDA Vario II is a thing of beauty. Slide-out keyboard, Pocket PC, word, excel, email, websurfing, wifi, video calling and instant messenger all in one wondrously compact chassis.

All for a relatively inexpensive £27 a month.

And so I wake at night in cold sweats, the hunger has returned and I’m not sure how much longer I can fight it. The thought of being constantly online, able to blog, email and message wherever I am, for a fixed monthly fee, is almost too much to resist.

And I’m not sure how long I will last, but I will fight it with every ounce of effort that I can muster, trying to ignore that evil inner voice that even now, as I type, taunts me from deep inside my mind.

“Gaaaaaadget”

“Gaaaaaaaaadget”

For there is no killing of the gadget monster. He is an invincible spawn of primal ID that exists in all gadget freaks, often dormant for months at a time, yet awoken by the slightest sniff of novelty and completely uninterested in financial viability. When the gadget monster is hungry, he must be fed, less he begin to deactivate basic human functionality until all that remains is the basic reflex of breathing and being able to punch in your PIN code at Currys.

Is anyone else enjoying the new tune from Beakfreakz? Superfreak is the combination of (I would imagine) a few old tunes, most notably that of the classic MC Hammer tune “U Can’t Touch This”. In addition to a superbly addictive tune (can’t get it out of my head for love nor money), there is an excellent video that is a spooky mix of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the aforementioned MC Hammer dancing.

Superfreakz previously released the similarly excellent “Somebody’s Watching Me”, featuring Michael Jackson samples, and I suspect this one will do even better. Question is, when will I get an MC Hammer tune out of my head, because it surely isn’t healthy to be humming it any more…

Check out Beatfreakz website here…