Batman Begins

On the way home I paid a rare trip to the cinema to see Batman Begins.

I’m kind of picky about the films that I go to the cinema to watch as my town doesn’t have a multi-screen cinema, not even a single screen cinema come to that. But being a fan of the first two, Tim Burton directed, Batman films and being a fan of the director of the new one, Christopher Nolan, I had to make the trip.

Now, maybe it’s just me but I didn’t think that it was the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, just a good movie. Just a nice way to while away a few hours. It definitely had an all star cast - Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Rutger Hauer and a new improved batmobile.

I knew before hand that practically all the stunts were done on the set and not CGI’d in later, which was a good sign. The sight of Batman stood on the edge of a skyscraper while the camera flies around him is an image that stays in the memory longer when you realise that it was a real person and not a bunch of pixels.

I saw Spiderman 2 a few months ago now on DVD and didn’t like it at all. You do just seem to see the same CGI effects over and over again. The sound was good but that was about it.

What has happened to Gary Oldman recently? After staring in Dracula, Leon, Immortal Beloved, The Fifth Element back in the nineties he has done nothing of any great note since his part in Hannibal in 2001. He does just seem to be doing films like the Harry Potter films and Batman Begins to pay the bills.

Possibly Batman Begins is a film that I’ll like more after repeated viewing on DVD when it comes out. It’s worth seeing at the cinema and should be a must buy if it’s released as a two disc DVD.

Suspension Show

I watched footage of the bands that appeared at the Download Festival 2005 on television this weekend. I have more than a passing interest in this genre of music so I recorded the shows. I was particularly impressed with the antics of Matt Zane the singer in Society 1. I’d read in the past that he had done ‘Suspension Shows’ in the States. For those who don’t know, and why should you, this involves Matt having six hooks pushed through his skin, across his shoulder blades, the hooks are then threaded with rope and he is suspended above the stage.

I had seen this been done before in a video that I purchased a few years ago now called Physical Graffiti. The video was narrated by Jim Rose and contained extreme sport footage, body modification, piercing, tattooing, implants, DIY stitching and 2 men doing, what I thought at the time was a Sun Dance. With the traditional North American Indian version the skin on the chest is pierced and will, eventually, rip clean through. In the modern version the skin on the back is obviously punctured, but isn’t allowed to rip. The men in the video said that the act of suspension induced altered states of mind and feelings of great calm, similar to meditation.

According an article on the Download 2005 web-site Matt broke the record for the longest suspension in front of the largest number of people after playing the entire half hour set suspended. The chaps in the video just hung from hooks on someone’s porch in the sun. Afterwards they seemed very relaxed and quite sleepy. Matt on the other hand had a member of the road-crew standing at the side of the drum kit pushing him out, more or less out over the audience and generally swinging him around. That’s gotta hurt somewhere.

I really like Gordon Ramsay. Anyone who uses industrial strength expletives so liberally is okay in my book.

I watched Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares yesterday, that’s the one with the Soul Food cook Momma Cherri, and it was easily the best one that I’ve seen. Hell, Gordon actually ate everything on his plate.

I bought his book, Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy, and I was flicking through it this morning looking for something to cook for tea and I came across this great line.

“First, put the lobsters in the freezer for about 30 minutes to make them sleepy.”

The recipe is for lobster thermidor and top of the ingredients list is ‘3 live medium lobsters’. Funnily enough not the dish I shall be preparing this evening.

Yes, there is going to be an Apple store in Manchester’s Trafford Centre by Christmas. It’s just a 20 minute drive from work and will be open until at least 10pm.

I had an audio iChat with Zoe and she has expressed an interest in going when it opens. Although I think she would express an interest in going to the Trafford Centre at any time not just to check out all the goodies in the Apple Store.

Mona Switcher

I was at work uploading ASP files to the website, connecting to our server in Dublin, downloading, extracting and making changes to files when the connection dropped and the terminal window disappeared. I wasn’t in the best of moods anyway so I decided to test the bouncing capability of my Microshite® mouse by throwing at my screen. Unfortunately I made my long-suffering colleague jump out of her skin. She obviously saw the air-bourne projectile heading in her general direction without realising that I was aiming it at the screen and that it was securely tethered to my laptop by the mouse cable. Of course I had to apologise for startling her so early in the working week. Luckily Microshite® do seem to make very sturdy mice. I remember slamming one of the old white ones repeatedly into a mouse mat from a height of about 2 foot above the desk with no ill affects at all. Maybe they should stick to just making mice instead of… I guess you could see that remark coming.

Back to the thing that cheered me up… the Steve Jobs Dress-up Contest. I didn’t really spend too much of the working day seeing how Uncle Steve would look in the various outfits, basically because I was too busy laughing.

I’d never really looked at the Geek Culture web-site before but after seeing the Mona Switcher I think it is safe to say that I’m hooked. As soon as I arrived home I ordered a copy of the Mona Switcher painting to put on the wall above my iMac. Here’s the Joy of Tech comic that the original Mona Switcher came from.

Apple iMac
Second Generation

I’ve owned and used many computers in my time. But I’ve just parted with my favourite one.

I started with a Sinclair ZX81 that I received one Christmas, after 1981 obviously. It had 1k RAM on board and an extra 16k RAM in the expansion box that you plugged in the back. All saving and loading of programs was done using a tape recorder and blank tapes. The next was a Dragon 32 with, surprisingly, 32k of RAM on board. It had a full sized keyboard, colour graphics, sound and a slot in the side for cartridges. Not that I had enough money to purchase these cartridges I just made do with buying games on tape.

Many years passed before I purchased a Dell Inspiron laptop. I was playing the stock market at the time and needed something that was more powerful than my Psion 3a. Also I had the idea that I could learn Microshite® Access which would improve my job prospects, it didn’t. To it’s credit it is still going today and I do use it occasionally boot it up to check how web pages look in Internet Explorer and to update my Philips Pronto. I bought a printer to go with it, added more memory and upgraded it to Microshite® ME.

I can’t quite recall why I wanted to buy another computer. All I ever used the laptop for was to surf the ‘net to buy CD’s and book’s and to send and receive e-mails. Back then I had only just switched from paying my internet time by the minute to paying a monthly subscription and surfing for as long as I wanted.

May 9th 2002, at approximately 4:49pm, I purchased my first Apple Mac from John Lewis. This was after checking around on the internet to see if I could buy one cheaper online. Of course I had previously bought a huge desk to put it, and the now ageing laptop, on. Also I had bought David Pogue’s book on Mac OS X so I wasn’t completely clueless when I came to power it up.

I was really impressed with the build quality and the design of it. Even the power cable had been designed for the machine and wasn’t just a basic kettle lead that you get with PC’s.

It did all seem a little strange at first after having used Microshite® software since Windoze 3.1. Even then I didn’t use it for much except e-mail and internet. Then I started to rip some of my CD’s to listen to whilst surfing. I copied all my documents, pictures and the few mp3’s that I had on the laptop using a 16mb disgo USB storage key. I had trouble with my ISP at the time as they didn’t support the Mac platform. The dial-up connection would drop or I couldn’t connect at all. Then I decided that this new fangled way of connecting to the internet called broadband could be the way forward, I haven’t looked back since.

Over the last 3 years I’ve upgraded from Puma to Jaguar, done a complete format and reinstall when Panther came out and upgraded to Tiger last month. The only modification that I had made to the machine was to install an extra 512mb of RAM when the first version of GarageBand came out. I’ve scanned in all my photo negatives, touched up photos and manipulated images, learnt AppleScript, more HTML and CSS, watched all the WWDC Keynote speeches and possibly bought thousands of pounds worth of books, CD’s, video’s, video games, DVD’s and of course my new iMac on the internet.

So it was quite a sad day when I handed it over to Zoe.

I’ve given her strict instructions on keeping it clean and dust free and of course I have arranged visitation rights.

I don’t really think that she will appreciate the whole Apple concept. When you buy a Mac you’re buying into quite a select club. You have a Mac because you want something that is brilliantly designed and is easy to use, something that just works and does what you want. Maybe I’ve suffered so much over the years fighting to keep PC’s working that owning a Mac was just a breath of fresh air.