I've encountered a lot of Austrailians recently, more than usual, maybe there's been a sudden influx of Aussies into southern England? I dunno, not that I have anything against Aussies, I just seem to have met more than I usually do...the things I pick up on eh?
What else over the past week then? Oh yeah, I'm unemployed again. Damn. Finished at Ricochet on Friday, so currently looking for some more work, been applying for a few things via Production Base, but nothing's come back yet (they don't know what they're missing out on). So fingers crossed I get something before I run out of cash eh?
2nd review added to my film review blog, thinking of bigger things for it, but we'll see how that goes ;)
Please do, check out and subscribe to my new blog The Matte Reviews (mattereviews.blogspot.com).
Basically, I've set it up to post little reviews of the various films that I watch, as I watch a fair few and always have some sort of opinion on them ;)
Well, it had to happen at some point, my final day at Ricochet.
Not a bad stint, a little over 7 months, will I be back? I guess that's up to the powers that be within Ricochet. I've enjoyed working here, it's in a good location for me, and hey, it's pretty much what I want to be doing!
What am I going onto next? God knows!! I haven't got a job lined up, have been applying for stuff but nothing's materialised yet, so a whole load of CV sending, phone calls n stuff is coming up. I'm doing a workshop/course, run by DFG London tomorrow, should be good and another string to the bow (I hate that phrase) as it were.
So a final day of going through the papers of a morning, something which you discover many things. Not nessecarily the things you'd expect, for instance; Lots of journalists are stupid.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are many intelligent journalists (and proof readers, see example) out there, but there are also plenty of real stupid ones.
The example from today's (damn didn't note it down..who's stupid now eh!!)
Written by Stephen Castle (in Belgium), the headline "Pole held for 'MP3 murder' that shocked Belgium". Basically a guy was mugged then stabbed around 15 times I think it was "after refusing to give up his MP3 at Central Station in Brussels".
Which MP3 was it? Toxic by Britney Spears? or the latest Ricky Gervais podcast perhaps? Maybe the mugger forgot his flashdrive or didn't have bluetooth to transfer the file and got frustrated? Apologies to those of you who are a little upset at this piss take of a tragic situation, but I hope you see my point. Journalism is supposed to report the facts (i won't get started on that rather heavy issue), schoolboy mistakes like this make it sound like it was written by a senile pensioner (no offence to senile pensioners), with no grasp of modern technology.
Either that or the guy was being mugged for an MP3 :/
And as a very special Easter gift, a couple more videos have been added to the Extreme Retail Video Archive on YouTube!!!
The Star Wars Short has been added as has Spider AARRGH!
I'm going thru the other vids that I've got to see what else I can upload. Unfortunatly the recent Extreme Retail : Season 2 Episode 3 cut that I did, seems to have vanished into the ether, so I'm gonna have to re-cut that (in Windows Movie Maker..joy :/ ) and try again. That will be the last official episode of Extreme Retail.
I have to say, I'm starting to warm to the idea of running Win XP and OS X on the same machine, which is wrong!
Initially I was like, no way! Being able to dual-boot a mac, sure it's cool, but I'd rather have a seperate PC to run Windows on, but I'm gradually being swayed. I'm currently eyeing a 20" iMac as my next computer purchase and being able to ditch my ageing 750MHz K6 PC in favour of having one computer is pretty cheers.
Plus I REALLY want Age of Empires III, which; a)isn't available for mac, and b)would cripple my PC.
I think the thing that would really swing it for me and I think could make a cool addition to Leopard would be to integrate the whole Boot Camp thing into fast user switching, THAT would be cool! w00t!
I know most people want virtualisation, which would also be pretty cool, it all depends on what u want to run. For running Windows apps that aren't available on OS X, or in a situation like at the moment, where there isn't yet a universal binary for Photoshop (et al), virtualization is fine, but full on games, if they're Windows only, it'd be easier (and probably better performace wise) to boot into Windows for them, if you can do that without completely re-booting the machine CHEERS!
Well well well, after getting on for nine years now, I have finally got back behind the wheel of a car, in this case an AA driving school Ford Focus.
Finally getting back into driving lessons (just booked a block of 10) and hopefully getting rid of the career frustrating thorn that is the lack of "Full, clean driving licence" on my CV.
I took to it surprisingly well, it is like riding a bike, you never forget (that basics at least), sure I'm not 100% comfortable in it yet, but it's a simple case of getting used to the responsiveness of the brake & gas and being comfortable again with powering this bloody great hunk of metal up and down Britain's roads.
The instructor was impressed anyway. Thinks that it shouldn't take much to get me up to the right standard again, and next week's lesson will be taking a nice drive out of town.
Let's hope I pass the bloody test this time!!!
Don't u just hate it when toilets back up and flood the bathroom, causing sever water damage to the celing of the flat below?
Yeah, me too :/
Still an eventful few days, think I've missed several phone calls which may have been possible work..damn. Had my overdraft increased to £2,250, which is just wrong! And bought a whole assortment of cool stuff, cheers :)
Right, I'm off to check the lottery numbers, I could be a millionaire and not realise!! (uhuh)
I've been working in tv since last May, and at long last I have had my first broadcast credit.
Last night, Channel 4, Selling Houses Abroad, I got my Junior Researcher credit as promised (unlike the other Selling Houses!), twas quite a good programme as well ;) followed up by Grand Designs (I didn't work on this one), which as far as I'm concerned is the don of property programmes!
After recently browsing the Open Source Weblog, (randomly as I was checking out some of the links from the TAUW) I came across a post of theirs about a Firefox extension called Foxspose.
Simply put, cheers! Mac users out there will know the wonders of Expose in OSX, it's basically the same thing but for Firefox. At the click of a button, which I had trouble finding at first as it's down on the bottom left on the status bar instead of on the toolbar where I thought it'd be :/, it allows you to see all the open tabs in FF, handy if you've got loads and loads of tabs open, which I have done whilst researching on various things.
Basically I'm well impressed with this little (8k) extension, definitly worth getting for all Firefox users.
After spending a few weeks on development, I'm getting a much broader knowledge of what's going on in the world and it seems to me that:-
Life gives you cancer
There are a stupid number of things that are said to give you cancer (I'm wondering if there's a definitive list) and I'm wondering how this all came about, may look into the history of cancer as it's quite an intregueing subject.
Also I'm tempted to spend £1m on this lovely little town in CA, USA that's up for auction on ebay! Cheers.
What an offer! macZot! are offering, what appears to be a top notch little app (the afformentioned AppZapper), and something that I personally think OS X desperately needs, for FREE, well it will be when they get 259 blogs to link to their site.
So A) I'm giving them a link and B)I'll be angling for a copy! ;)
One of the (few) things that has bugged me since I started using OS X over a year ago now, is the lack of any sort of uninstallation (which unfortunatly Windoze has, albeit not 100% reliable, it's more than OSX has got!). Sure if you know where to look you can delete everything an app leaves behind, the same as you can with any OS, but personally I'd like an easier way! ;)
Anyway, check em out and if you have a blog, give em a link!