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.