Sunday - Northward Bound

I'm going up North for a few days to see relatives and see the New Year in. Hope everyone has a good New Year and see you all on the 4th.

I thought I'd leave the last word to a boy and his tiger.

The Man From Nowhere

I've only seen a few Korean films, notably Oldboy, so I watched this the other night.

A secret agent in self-imposed exile after the death of his wife is embroiled in a battle between two gangsters and the police when one kidnaps a neighbour and her daughter.

It's not bad, if incredibly brutal and violent, but it's spoiled a little by the saccarine ending: if they'd cut it short by a few minutes it would have been better. Good pizza movie, for those with a strong stomach.

Friday - A Day in London

Today I took my Father for a walk in London, down through the City, across the Millenium Bridge and along the South Bank.


View Larger Map

We walked past Tower 42, the old Nat West building; St. Mary-le-Bow, of Bow Bells fame; and saw the now completed Shard.

You can also see how the skyline of the City is changing from the South Bank:

Thursday - The Hobbit, An Unexpected Journey in 3D

As a treat, I thought I'd take my Dad to his first (contemporary) 3D film. He said that he'd seen one, a horror film, back in the sixties when it was shot in green and red and you had to wear those funny coloured glasses. He's now got some modern ones and we went to see this:

Very good. It sticks to the story quite well, although I think it's been beefed up for the Lord of the Rings audience, rather than aimed at a Hobbit audience, if you see what I mean. Plus it's been stretched to three parts, so they've obviously had to add a fair amount to the original. Martin Freeman plays Bilbo Baggins and he's very good, such that you almost forget Ian Holm played the original. All the rest of the gang are back, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Sir Ian, plus you won't recognise Ken Stott and James Nesbitt under the dwarf makeup. There's lots of battle scenes and everything looks great in 3D.

All-in-all a brilliant film to end the year with.

Christmas Day - Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

For Christmas, I asked my Father for copy of this:

I was intrigued by the review of it on Boing Boing and it's about an IT worker who ends up working in a bookshop. The cover does indeed fluoresce!

There's also a book group reading guide available from the publishers web site.

P318:L1:W1	P225:L18:W6	P163:L11:W13	P60:L26:W9	P130:L2:W2
P26:L9:W13	P292:L9:W4	P152:L28:W4	P38:L9:W4	P332:L6:W8

Despicable Me

If you want to watch a great family film over Christmas, you could do a lot worse than this:

Grue (kudos on the Zork reference), a super villain, has competition from Vector in his latest plan to steal the moon, and uses some little girls from a local orphanage to help him.

Surprisingly awtic (something that makes you go "awww"), the minions are a stroke of genius and I'm surprised they're not franchised already. I'd love one!

... and the joke about the Fart Gun, "I ordered a Dart Gun!"

T'was the Night Before Christmas

The Black Library, publisher of all things Warhammer and W40K, have been running a short story advent calendar in the run-up to the big day.

Only 79p (apart from the audio books, which are £1.50), they're a steal and a good introduction to the genre.

I suppose it's because of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 17 Moon landing recently (the last time anybody went), but I keep whistling this.

Have a nice Christmas, everybody. Or whatever.

Mulan

No, not the Disney film but the Wuxia version made in 2009.

It's a sad story on the nature of war, loss and love. Mulan (played by Zhao Wei, who played the General's wife in Painted Skin) joins the army, in place of her father who is too ill, to defend her nation against marauding tribesmen. Gradually, one battle after another, she rises to the rank of General, but things get complicated when she falls for another officer.

Quite a good movie and the pace is kept up with some ferocious battle scenes.

Blondie at the Roundhouse in July

I subscribe to the Roundhouse e-mail newsletter and I saw that Blondie were playing there next summer. How good they are now I don't know, but they were a pretty good band back then:

A couple of years back, I gave my mate John a freebee CD off a magazine that had Debbie Harry on the front cover, this photo I think:

His lad was nearby and I said to him, "When we were your age, all the women looked like this". He didn't believe me.

Thursday - Subterranean End Of Term Blues

Well, it's the end of term for me at Bromley College. While I'm off over Christmas, aside from some course work due in at the start of term, I thought I'd have a look at Twitter Bootstrap to see how easy it is to get my web site to be responsive to different devices.

Anyway, I'll leave the last word to Bob Dylan:

Merry Christmas, everybody.

M25 Motorway Mayhem Revisited

Y'know that old chestnut about history repeating itself? Well, guess what? That's right! In exactly the same place as last time. Fortunately, I was travelling to Bromley and so wasn't affected. There was about five Fire Engines, a couple of Ambulances and the Police, all attending what looked like a stove-in articulated lorry, a car-shaped impact in it's front. No traffic at all was coming through the tunnel and when I got to the other side across the bridge, the barriers were closed and the tailback was all the way to Juntion 3, about five miles.

Oxfam Tuesday

Mark asked me to pull an afternoon shift on the upstairs till (yay!) so I got to listen to some tunes, including this one by The Vogues.

The Drew Carey Show version's really good.

Lee bought a swish record case off me on his way out, for £4!

Not bad! "All the chick's will see me walking down the street and think I'm a D.J.!", he said. We've also started selling these in the shop.

We've got loads of old 78's and someone's obviously buying them and turning them into vases. Pretty robust too, but then so are 78's.

M25 Motorway Mahem

Let's face it. I have been travelling between here and Bromley three times a week without much hassle so far, but I guess it had to end at some point and end it did tonight.

I was driving up to the junction to get onto the motorway, when I saw a sign that said that one of the tunnels at the Dartford Crossing (which go North) had been closed and that there was major tailbacks down the M25. I don't have anything as sophisticated as a sat-nav, so I made a guess and detoured through Orpington and Dartford.

View Larger Map

It took me from 4:30 to 8:30, FOUR HOURS!! Turns out they have actually closed the north-bound carriage way on Junction 30 as they have to resurface the road, most likely a diesel spill. It won't be ready until tomorrow morning.

Well, I'm pretty phlegmatic, as you know, so I just listened to some tunes and the radio. This included the Hisingen Blues album by Graveyard.

No point being in a rock band if you can't be hairy. Rock on!

On the radio, Mark Lawson was hosting Front Row, and it's been a while since I listened to it. He was interviewing David O. Russell, the director of the film Silver Linings Playbook, which sounds quite good.

Saturday - Singularity, Economics and Metaphysics

Today I attended two back-to-back lectures on the Singularity. For those scratching their heads, this is the proposed idea that, at some point in the future, the technology will be available to be able either to upload the human mind into a machine or that machines will be as intelligent as us, if not more.

The first lecture was by an American, Robin Hanson, examining the economic implications of "emulation", as he called it. He was doing quite well, discussing the idea that the uploaded would replace knowledge workers with copies of themselves. Then it went all a bit silly when he came up with the idea that because there would be a drive to think quicker and quicker amongst the uploaded, they would try to live in smaller and smaller bodies, eventually becoming microscopic. The obvious thing here is that uploaded minds wouldn't need bodies at all, and there's no reason they would want smaller bodies any more than larger ones. This was a shame, really, as he then went on to discuss legal implications of copying (the copies would be grouped into "clans" and held responsible for actions of the individuals) and, although he didn't realise it, talked about version control. Software, like Soylent Green, will become people, or the other way around.

Mind you, if this singularity does occur, economics may well go the way of theosophy. Theosophy might be more useful? If your mind lives in a virtual reality, you can be anything you want: a star ship captain; a courtesan at the time of Louis XIV; an elven warrior in Lord of the Rings; a P.I. in 1940's Los Angeles. You'd be a god, of a kind, and God doesn't need economics. More to the point, why would you ever want to come out of the simulation to be part of the real world? Why would you want to stop being a god?

The second lecture, by Jann Tallinn, was about the metaphysics of the singularity and talked about multiple worlds. It was a bit heavy going, probably as that kind of subject wasn't easily digested at the best of times, and less so after another heavy subject.

Return of C Test Part 2

... and I got 58.5 marks out of 61, 95%! Nice one!

For those interested, I managed to find some a unit test harness for C:

http://cunit.sourceforge.net

Careful with the spelling, chaps.

Pop quiz! Why does the following produce 47 rather than 144 (7 + 5)²? And what would you do to correct it?

#include <stdio.h>

#define FIRST_PART      7 
#define LAST_PART       5 
#define ALL_PARTS       FIRST_PART + LAST_PART 

int main() { 
    printf("The square of all the parts is %d\n", 
        ALL_PARTS * ALL_PARTS); 
    return (0);
}

Answers in the comments.

Painted Skin

Another Wuxia film, but this time, a bit spooky!

A heart-eating demon, a fox spirit, played with chilling grace and beauty by Zhou Xun, infiltrates the household of a general in charge of a frontier town. His rogue brother returns to help track down the demon and her chameleon assistant.

Not bad. It piles on the tension, and the demon is very effective (shades of The Mummy), but it does have the tendency to hold it's breath a little too long. They've made a sequel which looks pretty fantastic!

Gravity Light Project

I've just been over to Boing Boing and there's an article on a gravity powered LED light. Intrigued, I had a look:

It's a variation on the wind-up radio, but this time using a weight and gravity to do the work. I especially like the way the current can be tapped to charge up batteries and power other things. A good design!

...and I bet you didn't know that LED lights don't attract mosquitoes.

Return of C Test

Yep, folks, we've got another test this week on the C programming language. This time it's on arrays and strings (and pointers!!) so it's probably quite tricky. Wish me luck!

Oooo, a little test. Why won't this code compile properly?

#include <stdio.h>
char line[100];/* line of input data */
int  height;   /* the height of the triangle
int  width;    /* the width of the triangle */
int  area;     /* area of the triangle (computed) */

int main()
{
    printf("Enter width height? ");

    fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin);
    sscanf(line, "%d %d", &width, &height);

    area = (width * height) / 2;
    printf("The area is %d\n", area);
    return (0);
}

Cartoon Movement

Depite being a comics buff, I've never really given much thought to comics being a medium for journalism. This site is worth a look at though:

I think it's mainly because I'm used to the print medium, and that's mostly books (and that's mostly superheroes). Looks interesting, though.

Teach Your Kids to Game Week

DriveThruRPG, a download site for role playing game publishers, is promoting this:

There's lots of discounts and even free stuff, including FirstFable, a kind of D&D starter for 6-year olds.

Pariah

Some may know that I am something of a fan of Warhammer 40,000 books. Mostly this is Space Marines killing lots of aliens, all very enjoyable and juvenile (remember Sven Hassel, lads? Like that, but in space). However, there is a significant amount that isn't and this is where you'll find Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn/Ravenor series. The latest in the series, and the start of a new story arc, has been published this year and is called Pariah.

Rather than being told from the perspective of the inquisitors of the previous two volumes, the narrator is a Pariah of the title, a psychic "null" called Alizebeth Bequin who can neutralise others' psychic powers. Like all of Dan Abnett's books, it's very well written, in a slightly Dickensian style. The whole series can also be bought as a digital package for those who want to start from the beginning. G'won, it's Christmas!

The Natural

There are a few Robert Redford films that I like, mostly from the 1970's (All The President's Men, Three Days Of The Condor). This was made during the 1980's and is about that American obsession, baseball. Roy Hobbs mysteriously joins to a struggling baseball team after being shot and critically wounded by a murderous femme fatale many years before, cutting short a promising career before it even started.

Normally, this would be a sort of saccharine, feel-good movie that could just be dismissed. However, there's a labour-of-love feel about the film, both from Redford and Barry Levinson who directed, which comes across and makes the story believably optimistic and sincere. I don't know that much about baseball, other than that I'm the exact age of Barry Bonds who was a hitter for The San Fransisco Giants, but that doesn't seem to matter watching this film.

Fuel Efficiency

Over the past few weeks I've been measuring the fuel efficiency of the Fatmobile. The reason for this, apart from my usual scientific interest and mild obsession with statistics, is that I wanted to see if using the fuel additive Redex had any real effect.

I usually fuel up once a week when I do my shopping. Asda is about the cheapest, usually a few pence per litre cheaper than the next. I always replace, as best I can, the amount used, so I have a rough approximation of how much has been used and I record the number of miles since I last filled up. It's not a precise method, but not too bad.

Miles	Litres	m/g	l/100km
280	27.46	46.35	6.09
318	28.8	50.20	5.63
276	25.4	49.40	5.72
317	29.21	49.34	5.73
435	40.13	49.28	5.73
258	24.04	48.79	5.79
368	33.51	49.92	5.66
365	34.59	47.97	5.89
329	31.94	46.83	6.03

I've high-lighted the times I've used Redex in grey. I'm going to continue measuring to see what effect prolonged use has, but you can see that it does seem to have some effect.

Marrow, by Robert Reed

I'm nearly two thirds through Robert Reed's Marrow, first in a set of two books:

I've read a few of his over the years, starting with The Hormone Jungle, which was set in an Amazonian city a few hundred years into the future, and Black Milk, about genetically engineered boy with a photographic memory, which read a little like Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He's not been as popular as his contemporaries, say, Greg Bear, which I think is a great shame as his books are very accessible.

Marrow is a very ambitious work, exploring the many thousand year story of a great planet-sized ships' immortal crew as they explore the secret at it's vast heart.

Snow Delays

A few delays on the roads today as Britain, and specifically BasVegas, gets hit by the white stuff.

I got all lagged up and skidded and bouced off down the road in the Fatmobile as the temperature seemed to be that weird one where it either melts or freezes depending on circumstances rather than centigrade. Naturally, I thought of this:

One of the chaps in college, who hails from Austria, was scornfully amused by our inability to cope. His sister told him it was -5°C and the snow was about ½m deep.

Jim White

I'm a bit of a fan of Jim White, one of the few people I've seen live, and I've managed to dig up this video on Youtube.

It's very appropriate and I'd recommend any of his albums, especially Transnormal Skipperoo.

Dark Passage

This is a film noire from 1947 starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Vincent Parry (seriously!) escapes from St. Quentin prison to clear his name.

The film is unusual in that the first half-hour or so is shown in the first person from Bogart's perspective until he receives plastic surgery.

Monday Don't Mean Anything To Me

I was listening to the Alabama 3 on the way home from college today. I couldn't find a decent video for the one I was listening to (Amos Moses) so I thought this one would do instead, seeing as it's Monday:

I asked the mirror,
What do y' see,
It said, 'Keep y' shades on
When y' clean y' teeth.'

Murder, My Sweet

Lots of actors have played Raymond Chandler's world-weary protagonist Philip Marlowe. You'd expect my favourite would be Humphrey Bogart, but the best one for my money was Dick Powell in this 1944 adaption of Farewell, My Lovely, which is also one of the best Chandler books:

Marlowe is hired by "Moose" Malloy (played to perfection by Mike Mazurki) to find his old girlfriend Velma. It's full of great one-liners:

"She could take a drink. She had to knock it down to get to the bottle."

Helen Grayle: "I'm just going to powder my nose"
Marlowe: "It's already got powder on it"

Alt-J

The erudite and urbane Mr. Henry has put me onto a new (to me) and interesting band called Alt-J.

They can sing and play and seem distinctive enough to not surprise me that their debut album won the Mercury Prize this year.

Oh, the odd composition of the video? I think it alludes to this:

Raphael's School of Athens, a Renaissance masterpiece.

Suburban Post-modernist Search Engine

While looking through Boing Boing's postings this morning, I noticed that someone had developed a search engine specifically for Calivin and Hobbes cartoons. I searched for one of my favourites and came up with this:

Or howabout this, seeing as it's nearly Christmas:

The Killers

I've been watching The Killers, made in 1946. It's the first film starring Burt Lancaster. He plays Ole Andreson/Pete Lund, "The Swede", who is murdered in the first few minutes of the film in a place called Brentwood, which makes sense as there's not much else to do in Brentwood.

Well, you would, wouldn't you. The film is shown mostly in flashback as an insurance investigator tries to find out why Swede was murdered.

It's a classic film noire from it's heyday, and Lancaster and Ava Gardner, probably the epitome of the femme fatale, sizzle on the screen.

Harper

I've been watching one of my favourite films, Harper, starring Paul Newman:

It's a film noir, made in 1966, based on the novel The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald. Lew Harper is called in to find a missing millionaire who no one seems to care to be found.

A Testing Sister

I asked my sister to test a web page I was doing for college and she found a weird bug almost straight away. What should look like this:

Ends up looking like this:

The difference is IE. When I tested it in IE9 at home it rendered fine, but when I switched the rendering engine in Firefox to the IE one I got the same effect. This is set by default to render in IE7, thus the weird effect.

I did some digging and it turns out that you can tell the rendering engine to use the IE9 explicitly, or as good as it can, otherwise it will just use the default. To do this you put this tag in the head of your page:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9"/>

So if you want to make sure your code works, get your sister to test it.

Coda: To help her take screenshots, I found this little site which just gives you the instructions.

http://take-a-screenshot.org/

Skyfall - Bringing the House Down

Well, I had to go and see it.

Not bad. They clearly pulled out all the stops to make it work, plus they got Sam Mendes to direct and he's done a good job. There is a line in one of Le Carre's books where George Smiley says that espionage requires a certain gentleness, and that's what I think was missing from the previous two films, a lightness of touch. They have to be fun, and this one was. There were exotic locations (the Macao Casino scenes looked beautiful), plus Bond movies have a little surreality, as shown by using the abandoned island Hashima as the villians' lair.

There were also spectacular stunts which worked well, and a final showdown that showed that Mendes understands Bond movies.

There are criticisms, though. Any system administrator who allows a dodgy laptop to be attached to his network gets what he deserves and I wouldn't trust Q to work at PC World, much less MI6. The plot was a little obvious in that respect. Bérénice Lim Marlohe was good eye candy but under-used as the Femme Fatale/Bond Girl. Javier Bardem was good as the villain, but creepy rather than menacing, but I still think they need a really good henchman. Mark Strong would be good for that, or Arnold Vosloo. Yeah, Arnold would be great.

As for Craig as Bond, to paraphrase what Morpheus says to Neo in The Matrix, "Don't try to be James Bond; Be James Bond!" and I think he might be getting there, but it will be a lot longer road than everyone says. Not yet. Not bad, though.

And I rather liked the yatch. Nice. It's called the Regina and it's a snip at $14,000,000.

Nah, I'll leave it for this year, what with Christmas coming up...

Saturday - People in the Golden Age of Technology

Today I went to another lecture hosted by the London Futurists that was an extension of the one given by Stephen Aguilar-Millan, which I blogged about a while back. This was given by a bearded, soft-spoken Australian, Nick Price.

The emphasis of the talk was on the values of future leaders of society and what their general outlook will be, based on the generational model of American history put forward by William Strauss and Neil Howe and combining this with Clare Graves (a man, not a woman) extension of Maslows hierarchy of needs and the Spiral Dynamics of Don Beck and Chris Cowan. The presentation concluded by saying that future leaders would be much more community oriented, "caring heroes of the 21^st century", interested in "personal and expressive" technologies.

It was a rather slow talk, streched in a way by the Q&A sessions to extend the talk out to two hours. One of the anecdotes was that in one city they found that there was a rise in public transport because technology had caused people to socialise more and that was preferable to travelling on their own by car. Another thing was that the model has problems in factoring in life extension: what happens if the Generation X-ers (me!!) instead of retiring gracefully, continue in middle-age?

There was also a question about the (lack of) success of Silicon Roundabout (Shoreditch/Old Street) in London, prompted by this article. The view is that Britain has a risk-averse culture which frowns on failure rather than accepting it as part of learning to do business, but the report referred to in the article ranks us 7^th, behind only the U.S cities, and top of the European cities.

Cyber Monday

This weekend is known as Black Friday weekend over in the States (it's when a lot of retailers who've been going slowly into the red all year start making money in the run up to Christmas and go into the black), which means they usually have sales on. This includes eBook publishers, notably InformIT(Pearsons), who publish the K and R Book (The C Programming Language) and Effective Java by Joshua Bloch:

http://www.informit.com/promotions/promotion.aspx?promo=139061

O'Reilly's, which do Microsoft as well (they're calling it "Cyber Monday"):

http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/cyber-monday.do

And Pragmatic:

http://pragprog.com/news/black-friday-cyber-monday-40-off-sale

And Apress also have a similar deal on Monday:

http://www.apress.com/

Bonds Coffee Shop

I wouldn't normally plug a business, but with all the stuff over Starbucks and the offshore tax thing, I thought I'd give a mention to the independant coffee shop Bonds in Chelmsford. It's located in Bond street (no kidding) not far from the river and jolly nice it is too. You even get a free biscuit with your coffee!

Seeing as it's Friday, here's some parkour.

Have a nice weekend.

Oxfam Tuesday

Not much doing at Oxfam today. I'd turned up on spec as Mark wasn't sure if Francis was turning up or not (she hadn't said one way or another). She did and I only spent a few hours there, departing before Mark could rope me into doing the dreaded Gift Aid. There was the usual banter between me, Mark and John. Mark was trying to find a book for a customer, "Thousand Splendid Suns", by Khalid Hosseini, and we kept coming up for things to say to the customer to make them buy something else.

"God wants you to buy this book! He told me in a vision last night"

"Your wife phoned us: she's changed her mind and she wants this one instead." ("But I'm not married")

"We have last years Booker Prize winner, if that's any good." (They wanted "Wolf Hall", by Hilary Mantel, when Mark couldn't find "Thousand Splendid Suns")

We were being very silly.

Big Bang Theory and Talisman

I've been watching the odd episode of Big Bang Theory as they are running repeats on E4 (it's either that or Hollyoaks: I'm waiting for the news). Tonight there was an episode called "The Spaghetti Catalyst" and the guys in the flat are playing Talisman! It's even second edition, which is at least ten years old.

Cool!

Son of C Test Redux

Yesterday, the tutor of the C course went through the questions with us, as they were a little harder than last time. One of them was really tricky (and I didn't get it!):

1 2 3 4 5

#define MAX_COUNT 20 int counter; for(counter = 0; counter < MAX_COUNT; counter++);   printf("The value of the counter is %d\n", counter);

What's the output? (Answer in the comments)

Saturday - The Wedding of the Year

Yesterday was the day Keith and Toni got married and became Mr and Mrs Glitz. It was in the form of a medieval Handfasting, which I was curious to know what it was going to be like. Rather interactive, as it it turned out. The congregation weren't just passive witnesses but active participants, wishing the bride and groom well individually, which was lovely.

Afterwards, there was a slap-up feed, a banquet, with Keith and Toni as King and Queen, dressed royally for the occasion: 

There was even a court jester to sing songs and tell bad jokes:

Unfortunately, I got a migraine half-way through the ceremony and managed to hang on through the meal, but had to retire early, leaving the happy couple to dance the night away.

Son of C Test Part 2 - Caught By The Fuzz

I got a message from the tutor last night asking us to turn up early for the test this morning. The police and college security were going to do an airport-style security check and there might be a few delays as a result. It was all efficiently handled by the local (Metropolitan) Police. There was a stabbing at the college a few years back and the check is done every year. Looking for drugs as well, which they may have had more success with, by all accounts.

Coincidentally, we get to vote for the PCC today, as I blogged earlier, all of which gives me the excuse to show this:

Sorted!

The test itself was tougher than last time and I guessed at one question: How do you read in two variables using one scanf statement? Afterwards, I asked one of the other guys, Richard, who had the same answer and just tried it out on the compiler, and we got it right!

Update: I got 39... out of 45, 87%! Nice one!

Oxfam Tuesday - Zep and Arabesque

It was a quiet day at the shop, with only a few sales in music, but one of them was for £80 and another for £60 so not bad taken all round.

I listened to some Led Zeppelin. This month, probably timed to coincide with Christmas, the video of the concert they did at O2 a few years back has been released.

Yeah, 'suppose. Just looks a bit silly. Sabs have matured better, I think. Here's what Zep were like in the beginning.

Not a bad little rock and blues band.

I also had a listen to Arabianights (all one word), kind of an Arabesque dance album. One of the tracks was this:

Lebanese, apparently, but, like most club music, it just seems like you're listening to the same track over and over. Still, a change is as good as a rest, and, of course, the picture on the front cover had no influence on me at all.

Down tiger!

House of Flying Daggers

Most people go with Hero or Crouching Tiger, but I go with this as my favourite Wuxia film. Two policemen (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Andy Lau), are tasked with destroying the rebel House of Flying Daggers, using a blind dancer (the gorgeous Zhang Ziyi), but things do not go according to plan.

It's got everything: doomed romance, great photography and fantastic fight scenes. Brilliant.

Son of C Test

Yes, folks, I've got another C Test on Thursday this week, so brown trousers at the ready.

As a test for all you C/C++/C#/Java people, what's the output of the following:

int i = 12;

if (i = 13){
  printf("Does this happen or not??");
}

(Yes, I know it's a mistake, but does it still work and what happens?)

Sunday - A Trip Out

I decided today to take advantage of the excellent sunlight and took a trip down to the seashore at Shoeburyness.

As you can see, a nice bright day with not many people about, just dog walkers and the occasional jogger. One or two people were at Remembrance Day ceremonies and I could hear the strains of a brass band playing "For Those In Peril Upon The Sea", a reminder that we pride ourselves on being a maritime nation.

Another reminder was all the boats ashore in preparation for the Winter storms:

There are some rather nice apartments along the sea front, looking fashionably sun-bleached:

But you can't escape sea gulls!

I had a nice walk for an hour or so and the sea air cleared my head a little.

The Empress and The Warriors

Another day, another Wuxia film. This one's about the conflict between love and duty.

Princess Fei'er inherits the crown of Yan after her father is killed in battle. Vowing to become a warrior worthy of her father, she is wounded and goes missing after an ambush and ends up being looked after by a doctor and former warrior.

A nice film, if a little tiresome in places, and the hot-air balloon was a bit ridiculous, but Kelly Chen is beautiful (but no Maggie Cheung) and the battle scenes are impressive. There is a rather unintentionally funny bit where a General, trying to restore order, shouts "No fighting in the Sword Room!" (a bit like Dr. Strangelove). You'll have someone's eye out with that!

Run, Lola, Run

A film which relates the role of chance in life, Lola, played by Franke Potente, has to find 100,000 marks (the film was made in pre-Euro days) before mid-day. The story is told three times, a minor change happening each time resulting in a different outcome.

An original plot, plus good acting, add up to a decent film for Friday eveing viewing.

Seven Swords

I've been watching another martial arts film on LoveFilm Instants. A bit like Hero, it's in a Chinese fictional genre known as "Wuxia".

Not bad, and some incredible sword fights, but it's a little over-long at two hours plus. For the connoisseur only, I think.

2001 - Blue Danube

Waiting in the queue for the Dartford Tunnel this afternoon, I listened to The Blue Danube on the radio and it put me in mind of this:

Classic!

DIY Cola

When I was at the Maker Faire in Brighton a while back, there were some people selling Cola concentrate in small bottles:

The brand is called Cube Cola and is open source under the GPL, just like Linux or MySQL. I made some syrup with it at the weekend and the resulting drink is not bad. You can smell the lavender oil when you drink it, which is a bit unusual, but not unpleasant.

Conan The Destroyer

Occasionally, Oxfam gets some donations which we can't sell. Most go in the bin, "recycled", but DVD's that you get free with magazines we put into a shoebox and they're available to the staff. I picked out this old Schwarzenegger movie:

Yeah, it's a bit crap compared to the previous one, but it's a bit of a giggle none the less. I found this classic clip from the first movie. "Conan, What is best in life?":

Most of the original short stories and books you can download free, apparently.

Oxfam Tuesday

Went into the shop today to do an afternoon shift. Another part of Francis's anatomy had failed (nothing serious I hope: it was her knee last time), so Mark asked me to locum. Not much trade, a couple of LP's, but I got to listen to some rather nice Soul and The Flaming Lips:

Oh, and last week we made an awsome £950 on fiction, in no small part due to the comics bonanza and the window I set up. I asked John if he wanted to classify the comics as Literature to boost his figures. I said that comics needed the "gravitas" that Literature provided, but he said that Literature needed all the gravitas it could muster and none could be spared.

Hitman

I got this as part of my LoveFilm subscription. It's a movie made from the video game of the same name.

A surprisingly good pizza movie, Timothy Oliphant, who plays Marshal Raylan Givens in the TV series Justified, is Agent 47, a trained assassin working for The Organisation. Chasing him is an Interpol agent, played by Dougray Scott. Betrayed, he hooks up with an ex-girlfriend of one of his targets, played by Olga Kurylenko, who was the Bond Girl in Quantum of Solace.

The plot is not exactly taxing, and everyone takes the film in their stride, but the fight scenes, especially the one between four assassins in the railway repair shop, is pretty fantastic. The only really obvious flaw in the film is that a bald assassin going around with a barcode tattooed to the back of his head would be a bit conspicuous...

Robin Hood, Ironclad and Raging Phoenix

Over the weekend I managed to watch two films exploring the socio-political dynamics of late 12th - early 13th Century England and a Thai martial arts film. First up, Robin Hood:

A nice twist on the legend, and Crowe does a pretty good job, making the hero a bit grittier than previously. Mark Strong plays the villain with relish and Cate Blanchett does well as Lady Marion, although wearing a suit of armour was a bit ridiculous. Have you ever worn a chain mail shirt? It's heavy stuff!

Ironclad I've blogged about before. It's a good pizza movie, with, as expected, a lot of fettlin'. Purefoy is good and Giamatti really enjoys himself as King John, but I don't think a Templar would have given up his vows so easily. Religion was a serious thing back then. Still, although practically everyone gets killed, he gets a decent girlfriend out of it.

Raging Phoenix is a good, old fashioned, chop-socky Thai martial arts film.

Girl meets Boy; Girl helps Boy rescue long lost love from hands of criminal gang; Girl loses Boy at hands of serious martial arts villain; Girl beats living crap out of said villain (and it's a girl fight). What's not to love? The only thing that put me off a bit was the heroine's incredibly squeaky voice, but the fights are pretty good. Buy it for your Mum for Christmas!

Better Thinking Through Chemistry

Today, I went along to see Andrew Vladimirov give a talk called Hacking your Wetware, as part of the London Futurist meetup group. This was about studies into enhancing your brain using pharmaceuticals and electromagnetic fields.

It looks a bit weird and groovy, but it was all about neurochemistry and was fascinating, if a bit involved for someone with O-level Chemistry and who didn't do Biology because he didn't like the idea of cutting up frogs.

The first part of the talk concerned how the brain works and what was required to improve it. Most people know that the brain is composed of neurons, brain cells. These cells are connected together and it's these connections that form memories. The more connections, the easier they form and the quicker the electrical impulses travel down those connections, the smarter you are because the more you can remember and the quicker you can remember (and recall) it.

Andrew went through the various drug types (called Nootropics) and discussed their effectiveness, before covering genetics. He didn't get time to discuss the use of electromagnetic fields and will be discussing that in some detail in a further lecture. He also uses the drugs on himself, notably Piracetam, which he found to be quite effective, but he emphasised that the brain gets smarter by learning the way that muscles get bigger by exercising. The drugs and other techniques only make it easier to do so.

All in all, it was a very good lecture, leavened with some dry humour (he discussed the effect of amphetamines on rats, saying that it did not seem to improve their intelligence, but made them highly active, agitated and nervous. No kidding!).

Get Knotted!

I have a small pendant, which I always wear, made of Goldstone.

This is neither gold nor stone but vitrified copper dust, but I liked the colour and picked it up in a shop in Bluewater. The cord has been slowly wearing away, so I got some from Hobbycraft to replace it. The next problem was how to tie the cord.

I found this nice little web site called Animated Knots, which shows you, step-by-step, how to tie knots for almost anything. I've used a Blood Knot (which turned out to be very awkward to tie) to join the ends together,

an Alpine Butterfly to put a loop in the cord,

and a Cow Hitch to attach the pendant to the loop, as you can see in the first picture.

The Truth About Dishonesty

My subscription to the RSA stream on Youtube just popped this one through the post:

Understanding Comics

If you want to really understand comics and graphic novels, as an art form, a good book to read is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud:

It's become something of a classic and I came across this edition while sorting through the books in the shop. It takes you through a very thorough analysis of the art form. For example,

why is it easier to relate to this:

rather than this?:

(Ugleeeee!) It's because we don't really have a good image of what we look like in our heads, just a rough sketch, as we only look at ourselves once or twice a day, whereas we are always looking at other people.

Scott McCloud also wrote a comic for Google as a guide to the Chrome browser.

I also found a complete set of Paul Chadwick's Concrete:

It's a good story drawn in a brilliant style and highly recommended especially for those new to the genre.

Oxfam Wednesday

I offered to do a shift on Wednesday and I did a long one, 11AM - 4PM. As I walked into the shop, I noticed that some of the graphic novels, notably Stray Bullets and the Walking Dead, had already sold!

Being Halloween, I was wearing something fitting to the occasion:

I was upstairs for the duration and had a decent number of customers, given the miserable weather:

As you can see, we've got a fair amount of vinyl, which is how the music side of the shop makes it's money. Notice also the more prominent signs telling people to watch out for the step. It didn't prevent someone stumbling over it, although nothing happened other than a little embarrassment.

I also got to play some Woodpigeon:

A Soft Cell Moment

I was walking around the supermarket and heard a certain tune over the P.A. system. The tune was Soft Cell's Tainted Love (which was, in turn, an old Northern Soul favourite), but the song over the top of it was more recent. What it was I don't know, but I kept singing the original all the way home. These guys have done it to ukulele's and it's not bad! (Amazing what you find on Youtube)



This is actually how it sounds when I sing it rather than the original version in my head.

And this takes my breath away!



Rock on!

Bond Deathmatch!

I've just spotted this on Youtube (via Boing Boing):



Connery beats Craig! Yeah, sounds about right.

Ooooo, extra points for the movies (not counting the Lazenby one). For answers see the comments.

Orlando

I got the book, by Virginia Woolf, from the shop a while back, and I got the film using my subscription to LoveFilm.



Although the film is beautiful to look at, it seems to be unable to express what it's about. There's no real plot, as such. Orlando falls in love twice, once as a feckless nobleman to a Russian diplomat's daughter, and then again as a Victorian woman to an American man. The film doesn't seem to be a romance, though. Tilda Swinton acts well enough, but doesn't quite persuade as a man, although she was perfect to play the Archangel Gabriel in Constantine a few years later.



I suppose it's one of these films you see just to say you've seen it, but I think it's worth taking into account the context of the story. It was written in the late 1920's. Women had only recently been enfranchised and just the idea of someone who can live forever and change sex at will must have seemed incredible and exotic.

Steampunk Video

I saw this rather nice Steampunk-style video for a song by Lovett:



Looks a bit like Dean Motter's Mr. X:

Oxfam Monday - Window Dressing

Due to it being half-term (Bromley, despite running University of Greenwich courses, is still a local college and runs to school schedules), Mark asked me to sort out one of the shop windows as we had a large donation of comics and trade paperback graphic novels:

Being Halloween this week, I've put Hellboy, the Walking Dead and Buffy's Tales of the Vampires (great Mignola cover) in the front. There's also Stray Bullets and Sin City at the top left and Queen and Country at the top right. Not a bad job. Mark also asked me to take one of the whole shop, to update the Oxfam web site. Fame at last!