Posts by Mark 133 13 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
> Went to watch Thomas Dolby play London's Scala
The more things change... Went to see Stephen O'Malley of apocalyptically loud drone-merchants Sunn O))) at Village Underground in Shoreditch the other week.
He was accompanied by a projected moody art film, which would have been even more atmospheric if the person whose laptop it was playing on had remembered to disable push notifications.
> VR made a false start in several films during the 1990s.
Don't forget Strange Days - perhaps not fully interactive VR, but the notion of shady geezers selling bootleg VR grot out of a van, and paying people to make it seemed far more plausible than the likes of Lawnmower Man, and presaged the internet porn industry pretty well to boot.
I was passing through Gatwick airport last week, and noticed the screens that show how to use the biometric passport machines were all also showing a cheeky Windows taskbar, with the ubiquitous "There are unused icons on your desktop" pop-up.
I was tempted to take a photo, but figured doing so while passing through customs in possession of a beard may be frowned upon by people with sub-machine guns.
Personally, as a driver and pedestrian, I used to get annoyed by cyclists riding on the pavements, particularly the one or two arseholes who either ran into me or rudely shouted to get out of the way.
But then I started looking at the roads they were having to cycle on in the mornings and evenings, and to be honest, if it's a choice between me sharing the pavement with a cyclist, or a greater risk of someone going under the wheels of a truck, then that's fine by me.
That said, cyclists who cycle on the pavement (and I'm including the idiots who thunder down the canal towpaths every evening) need to respect the fact that pedestrians have right of way on paths, and cycle carefully and courteously.
I would also like to see some sort of government sponsored training scheme for anyone who cycles in London, to demonstrate they understand how the rules of the road work, and also to teach them stuff like how trucks corner - i.e. that big space you're aiming for on the apex is going to get very small very quickly.
Covered most of the classic arcade genres, though I'd personally substitute Operation Wolf for Time Crisis, and Kung Fu Master or perhaps Shao-Lin's Road) for Shinobi.
I'd also like to namecheck Dragon Ninja and Golden Axe, both of which I played constantly (partly I suspect because they were a lot easier to progress on than most games), Ghosts & Goblins, just for being beautifully atmopheric and frustratingly tough, and Time Pilot for being different to everything else available at the time.
I read the ten best and worst in Metro (itself a fairly tragicomic publication) on the way to work this morning, and the former barely raised a smile, while I chuckled frequently at the latter.
And that Tim Vine joke sounds like it was borrowed from Bob Monkhouse (not that that's a bad thing).
Oh and @AC, re. Wooden Spoons - in many pubs in London (and presumably elsewhere), when you order food, you get given a wooden spoon - somes in an empty wine bottle - with your order number on, so if you turned up with your own spoon, you could nick someone else's meal.
And no, it wasn't funny if you did know what the conceit was either...
If I'm paying an extra fiddy pee a month to provide fast internet to the middle classes' holiday homes in the Cotswolds, they can bloody well come and sort out my sub-3 Meg broadband in a less-than-fashionable bit of Zone 2 London.
My parents live in a tiny village in Cambridgeshire, and they get twice the download speed I do!
As a recidivist mature student, this seems like a step in the right direction - an eBook won't become useful to me until I can easily annotate pages, which I would be able to with a decent keyboard. Of course it would also need to be able to offer me digital copies of some of the obscure and very heavy course books I occasionally require for it to become completely useful, and I suspect that won't be for a good while yet.
For the time being, I'll stick to Book 1.0 - it's nice to have at least *something* that doesn't require charging to be useable.
Hang on, I live in East London in essentially a bunker, I have to get both my telly and internet through the phone line, which is about as far away as it is possible to get from the exchange, and I can't get cable because they cabled up the area before my flat technically existed, so my line speed is atrocious (and I have to deal with bloody Tiscali)...
...and now I have to pay an extra fiddy pee a month to provide 2 Meg broadband to a people out in the sticks who have not expressed a collective desire for broadband in the first place?
The only words I have are two, and the second of them is 'off'.
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