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Did anyone else think that episode of Torchwood last night (or on Sunday night, if you’ve got BBC3) was lame? Let me just run through it.

‘Fairies’ were the subject of the episode. So what do we know about them? Next to nothing, aside from the fact that they like to play ‘games’ with people (i.e. by teasing them and finally killing them). Where do they come from, where do they go? We don’t know. What can Captain Jack and Torchwood do about them? As it turns out, absolutely nothing… they might as well not have bothered turning up for work!

Why was the little girl the ‘chosen one’? Who knows. What does being a ‘chosen one’ mean? Don’t ask me! Why did they absolutely have her and no-one else? Because she was a ‘chosen one’ (duh!).

Why did they kill the old lady – she didn’t even know the ‘chosen one’?! Um… because … they’re fairies, and that’s what they do? Or perhaps they just really, really objected to her taking pictures of them (hmmm).

All in all, a very poor show, I’m afraid! One other smaller point of note is that — what with Torchwood being a spin-off of Doctor Who, I’m really not sure about Captain Jack. He just let that little girl go, claiming it was the only thing he could have done. The problem is, you just know that The Doctor could have done, would have done something about it…

In other news, I pre-ordered a copy of “Love” by The Beatles. It’s a new album of some Beatles songs which have been re-done by George Martin (their original producer, I think). They played through the whole album on Virgin Radio last night, although I didn’t listen to all of it I caught a few of the songs and it sounded a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the songs sounded almost exactly the same as the originals, and some were a bit different… I liked what they’d done with “Lady Madonna” and “Strawberry Fields”. I’m quite looking forward to giving it a proper listen, actually!

Anyway, that’s all from me for now…

I came across an absolutely fantastic website today. It’s a satirical website, with the premise that Microsoft have taken over Mozilla Firefox.

It contains such gems as a “Googling filter”. “What is a Googling filter?”, I hear you ask. Here is the answer from their FAQ:

Microsoft Firefox 2007 Professional offers dynamic security protection to help keep you safe online. Most users are unaware of how much personal, traceable data is transmitted with every click of the mouse while they are browsing Google and most online users are likely to have trouble discerning Google.com from a reliable and trustworthy site such as Microsoft.com.

A technique used by many malicious website operators such as Yahoo to gather personal information is known as Googling — masquerading online as a legitimate major entity person or business for the purpose of acquiring sensitive information (e.g., a credit card or social security numbers and photos). Developers of Googling and other malicious activities thrive in the head quarters of Google Inc. trying to plan their latest Googling scams.

To enable the Googling Filter, go to the Tools menu in the upper-right toolbar within Microsoft Firefox, and select Googling Filter.

Have a look at the site, some of it is brilliance 🙂

… sorry about the random headline, but it’s been one of those days. It feels like I’ve been interrupted once every five minutes, meaning that I haven’t actually managed to get any work done at all! Doh!

Anyway. What did we get up to this weekend? Well. On Friday we didn’t do much… on Saturday, we went down to London for my cousin’s wedding. It was a really good day – my parents drove us down, so it was good to chat to them on the way. The wedding service itself was pretty good, although they did have the old tune to “Love Divine” which I don’t like that much. Also the congregation didn’t seem to know the hymns – but then, perhaps that’s just par for the course at a wedding these days where a lot of people don’t really sing hymns anymore (shame!)

Afterwards we went to Sunningdale for the reception. It was held at a very nice place, and the food was absolutely delicious! I do quite like weddings, particularly the ones where you get to eat a nice meal 😉 Ahem. We stayed there until the evening, and then we caught the train down to Phil’s parents in Kent and stayed there overnight. On Sunday, they gave us a lift back home which was very nice of them! They wanted to see our new suite, and I think they liked it. Speaking of which, now we have our camera back from being repaired, I could probably post a picture of it up here… anyway.

I think that’s just about it for the time being!

I got around to thinking the other day… why is it that no-one seems to have time for anything anymore? I’m not talking about time, I’m talking about time. Let me explain by giving an example.

I work for quite a small company. We do a fair amount of bespoke development, i.e. software which people have specifically asked us to write (rather than a product, which is made by us and then marketed to whoever may want it). This is all well and good. The problem is, we have to churn them out at such a rate that I always feel under constant time pressure. It’s not as bad as it sounds, i.e. I’m not working to tight schedules all the time, but it does mean that we don’t really take the time to really understand something before we embark upon it. Everyone wants their application in as short a time as possible, and because of that shortcuts get taken. Now, I’m not totally against taking shortcuts, but — they should be the exception rather than the rule!

Anyway, the upshot is that often the requirements don’t get specified sufficiently, meaning that we end up having to do quite a bit of work changing the application once it has been ‘completed’. So much so, in fact, that one particular application has taken a whole year’s worth of modification before our clients went live with it. Granted, that is the way some public sector organisations work in terms of red tape and getting it signed off in a production environment, but nevertheless that’s still an awful long time.

The subject was also on my mind recently when I was looking at the chapter of the Moore Course for this week. I basically went through it in an hour or so, not going into very much detail, but briefly thinking about the questions and reading the material. I could have spent a lot longer on it. This also applies to reading the Bible… I’m not sure what any of my blog readers do, but I tend to read it for ten or fifteen minutes every day, not really taking anything in. We have a “quick nuggets of wisdom” mentality whereby we want to read the Bible and get a little pearl of wisdom for the day, not to actually study it and gain something over a period of time which is much more valuable than a daily pearl of wisdom.

These days we have so much information aimed at our brains, like a firehose aimed at a teacup (to borrow an analogy from Dogbert). The only way we can cope is by getting more and more superficial… I was thinking, does this mentality pervade any other aspects of our lives? Relationships? With each other, with God? “Yes, God, you can have that five minutes of my time, but I can’t give you any more than that!” I wonder what Paul would have thought….

I am worried that the society and culture we live in is becoming all about image rather than substance. Speed is valued more than thoroughness. Short-term gain, long-term loss. If things continue the way they are, I’m not sure whether any of us will be able to claim that we have “lives” at all, we will be so busy trying to maintain our fake relationships and do things at work without really getting to grips with them…

Apologies for the mildly depressing nature of this post, but I thought it might be food for thought at least 🙂

Forgot to mention this in my last post — I read a rather humorous and uncomplimentary critique of Torchwood this morning. It’s written in a pseudo-“Torchwood Script” kind of style… sort of. Anyway, if you’ve seen Torchwood, have a read (it won’t make much sense otherwise!)

Oh dear, no posts last week! Well, here’s another “The Weekend” post anyway, I’ll try and post something different up this week…

On Friday evening, we didn’t do much (i.e., food shopping! Nothing exciting). On Saturday we spent some time in town. We bought some new clothes, and had a rather nice drink in Costa Coffee (they’re doing their Christmas specials in there at the moment – I can recommend the mint hot chocolate, it was lovely!). In the evening we went to the Albert to celebrate Sarah’s birthday. There were about twelve of us there. It was a really nice evening, good to see a few friends from uni again! As well as a couple of Sarah & Jon’s friends who we’ve met before.

On Sunday we went to Fordham in the morning, and then had lunch there (they had a lot of food left over from the previous evening’s bonfire night!) In the evening we also went to Fordham (well, technically Eight Ash Green) for the evening service.

And, that’s the weekend!

I do have one quick note / review though: Family Guy Season 5. A bit disappointing. The main problem I have with this season of Family Guy is that … well, they seem to have run out of ideas. They seem to be intentionally making it as controversial as possible, but in doing so make it a lot less humorous… they always did satire with a sledgehammer (as it were), but that’s just been taken to the extreme and — well, I don’t like it. If there’s another series of Family Guy, I probably won’t buy it on DVD unless I see a few episodes first and can confirm that it’s good!

Just a quick post about what I got up to this weekend! It wasn’t very much really, as will become apparent (how’s that for a teaser, eh?) On Friday night, we went to Ipswich to have dinner with my parents, and then load up a van they hired with our new suite. Some people we know from my parents’ church are moving to a smaller house, and they wouldn’t have room for the suite in their new house… so they gave it to us! Which was incredibly generous of them, especially given that it’s such a nice one.

Anyway. On Saturday morning my parents came over with the van and we unloaded the suite. Unfortunately they couldn’t stay long as the van had to be back before noon (maybe it was going to turn into a pumpkin or something after that… no, wait…) In the afternoon we went into town and did various things. I bought a new phone, which means that I have a new mobile number, which means that I shall be contacting people in the near future! On Saturday evening we had the evening in, as it had been a long week and we hadn’t had much of a chance to rest.

On Sunday I had a cold so didn’t really do much at all! In the evening, Alex came round and we had Lasagne, and then afterwards we went round to Alex’s to watch “Torchwood” (which was very good, by the way).

So there you have it! Now, before I finish, there is one thing I must rant about. I’ve just bought a new Family Guy DVD. I got home today to find that it had arrived! Which is good news. Unfortunately, a lot of new UK DVDs seem to have a thing from “FACT“. I don’t know if you’ve ever bought or watched any UK DVDs (or been to the cinema in the past year or two) but they’ve been showing a little short clip about how downloading movies is illegal (it’s stealing, the boldly proclaim).

Well, that may be the case, but … why on earth are they making is sit through this freaking sutff on DVDs WHICH WE HAVE LEGALLY BOUGHT?!!! It’s crazy. Yes, I have just purchased legally a DVD which I want to sit down and watch, without waiting for all this stupid “downloading is illegal” rubbish to finish first. The ironic thing is, people who pirate DVDs will probably remove the copyright warning at the beginning, meaning that buying an illegal DVD in this case would actually prove beneficial.

I think I’m going to start ripping DVDs to my computer and burning them to CD as DivX without any of this superfluous rubbish on them — slightly lower quality, but at least I wouldn’t have to wait ages in order to start watching. Grrrrr.

And, that’s all folks!

Just a quick note to let you know that (if you haven’t heard through other channels), Firefox Version 2.0 has been released! Some of the new features include spellchecking, phishing protection, web feeds etc.

If you’re a Firefox user, upgrade today! If you’re not a Firefox user, feel free to ignore this message (unless you’ve never checked out Firefox before, in which case you would do well to have a look at it, especially the add-ons…)

Incidentally, Matthew has written a couple of reviews / comparisons of IE7 and Firefox over on his blog, which you can read here and here!

I’ve only been using Internet Explorer 7 for a day or so and I’ve already found a bug.

As you can see, the button is positioned nicely over the select box. The reason? The select box is empty on page load, but there is a JavaScript function which calls a remote method that populates the box when the page has loaded. Obviously, Internet Explorer just ‘forgets’ to reposition the button once it has changed.

How they could have missed something like that I don’t know; needless to say it works fine in Firefox. Of course, I also don’t like the default rendering in IE, I think the default rendering in Firefox looks much better (the difference is quite noticeable using fieldsets — IE doesn’t really give much padding by default, which I think looks rubbish; it’s also quite uneven – Firefox has a nice, even amount of padding).

Ah well, looks like designers will have their work cut out to work around IE7’s new bugs for the time being!

Bit of a random post, this, but nonetheless it does class as a “The Weekend” post so I shall begin by talking about what we got up to this weekend 🙂

On Friday evening, we went to see “The History Boys” at the cinema. More on that later.

On Saturday, we spent most of the day in town. At Fordham, they are doing a “Christmas Box” sort of scheme which basically means that people can take a shoe box and fill it with gifts for a child. These get sent out to various countries to children who wouldn’t otherwise get any Christmas gifts. We think it’s a really good idea, and we’ve both enjoyed shopping for things which might be exciting for children who don’t usually get presents. So that was one of the things we needed to do in town!

Anyway. In the evening we had the Fordham 20s and 30s group meeting. Four of us met for a meal at Fai’s restaurant. I had sweet & sour pork, it was delicious (and quite filling!). Afterwards we went to the Purple Dog (formerly the Clarence), which is a very nice pub and not too busy. Simon joined us as well, which was nice!

Yesterday, we went to Fordham in the morning, followed by a student lunch. Although we aren’t students any more, we went to the lunch as representatives of the church (and also to help out!)… it was good to meet a few of the new students in the CU this year, as well as a few people I’ve met before. They seem to be a nice bunch! Afterwards, we went back to Ipswich to see my parents for the evening.

Aaaaanyway. As you can see, it was a relatively busy weekend! There are a couple of other things I want to mention briefly…

1. “The History Boys”. This is a really good film. It was very thought-provoking in places, and I think both of us agreed with a lot of the points they made about universities / exams etc. It was also very witty in places as well! The only thing is, there was a whole kind of “gay” sub-plot going on which we weren’t too sure about – I’m not sure exactly what it was there for! I think one could be forgiven for going away from the film believing that all pupils and teachers at an all-boys school were gay. (?!) If you can get away from that, good film though!

2. Christmas. This isn’t really about Christmas per se, but more about the commercialism surrounding it these days. When we went into town a week or two ago, the shops already had Christmas merchandise out. Some shops (I’m looking at you, Boots) already had Christmas decorations out. Now, Christmas is traditionally retail outlets’ golden period: most shops (if not all of them, certainly the big chain stores) factor Christmas into their budget. People can go crazy at Christmas with spending money. But the last few years, I’ve heard on the news that things haven’t been quite as rosy. People haven’t been spending so much. I was wondering whether shops starting to stock Christmas merchandise a full two months before Christmas was some kind of last-ditch attempt to redefine the Christmas period in order to say that they made a big profit for it…

… then it occurred to me that perhaps the reason why people weren’t buying so much was because they were totally and utterly fed up of the commercialims surrounding Christmas. I mean, for goodness’ sake, summer is a fairly recent memory! I don’t want to be thinking about buying Christmas stuff now! *sigh* … I’m just wondering how long this silliness will last. They could start putting out Christmas merchandise up in July, at the height of the summer — whether people will stand for that, I don’t know!

That’s all from me for now. This concludes my rather long blog post…