I loved this film — it has that indie aura surroun­ding it with the shtick and the spiel, but through its lack of weird­ness it has astoun­dingly bro­ken into the mains­tream and become a great hit. Kimya Daw­son, The Moldy Peaches and Antsy Pants also make for a ste­llar sound­track. A must see.

It’s been a short while since my last blog entry; I have been hurriedly coding my mons­trous hunk of a new web­site, Auc­tion Ear­ners. In bet­ween fran­tic key bashing I have also par­ta­ken in Christ­mas fes­ti­vi­ties, sett­led in at work (care­fully omit­ting key­words to pre­vent this being flag­ged in a Goo­gle Alert), tur­ned 23 and grown a little over­weight. Who’d have thought that typing was not suf­fi­cient daily exer­cise to keep one healthy? When it gets a little war­mer those calo­ries will be burnt off as I take to a regime of sun tan­ning and cycling.

Now, in taking a break from my still unready ad ser­vice, I feel that I need to rant about a cou­ple of things. Come New Year and my splen­did get-together come shin­dig in my flat – (with Tex-Mexican nice­ties (tacos, enchi­la­das, dips, chi­lli con carne) spread among 8), whilst purcha­sing the tasty treats I deci­ded to embark on a Free­view adven­ture. Back in Novem­ber I bought myself a Phi­lips Free­view box (a DTR220, digi­tal terres­trial recei­ver) for £35. Plug­ging it into the aerial atop of my flat lead to the dis­co­very of 40 chan­nels, with an almighty 3 of these being vie­wa­ble (bid up TV, sky three and a radio sta­tion), the rest degra­ding into some sort of glitch-ridden mad­ness. This didn’t bother me too much; I took the box back and grab­bed my refund from Curry’s, one hour after purchase. In late Decem­ber I pic­ked up my sig­nal boos­ter from Bris­tol, bought the same box again and hey presto – 40 vie­wa­ble channels.

It’s been a month or so since I got the box, and a num­ber of things have star­ted to annoy me. The main nig­gle is the cons­tant crashing of the firm­ware – I’ll be merrily flic­king through chan­nels and all of a sud­den it will turn itself off and on again, expe­rience a con­trol freeze up (the TV sig­nal shall con­ti­nue but all con­trol is remo­ved – for­cing me to switch the unit off and on at the switch) or sud­denly cease ren­de­ring the back­ground image ele­ments for the EPG and info bar – which again do not return until a reset. Tem­po­rary in-viewing pro­blems also inc­lude a perio­di­cal five to ten seconds of black and white, cross chan­nel inter­fe­rence (par­ti­cu­larly anno­ying if the inva­ding chan­nel has scro­lling text) and all on top of the ugly low sig­nal digi­tal pau­sing and image dis­tor­tion that occurs during bad weather. The remote con­trol inter­face is also enti­rely unin­tui­tive, although it is slick – if I had to give a posi­tive point to this pseudo review.

In conc­lu­sion, do not buy the Phi­lips DTR220, it is a hunk of junk with a brand name.

To con­ti­nue in the same vein, my tele­vi­sion comes equip­ped with a soli­tary SCART con­nec­tor. I regu­larly switch bet­ween my Xbox 360, Wii, PC out­put and Free­view box. This wouldn’t be a pro­blem if an affor­da­ble yet decent switch-able multi SCART adap­ter exis­ted. Fin­ding a manual switching device that doesn’t use auto­ma­tic sig­nals to change the dis­play is dif­fi­cult enough – given that my PC is on all the time this isn’t an option. Robert and Dyas do stock one, a 4 con­nec­tor with push but­ton switch – fan­tas­tic. Up until the point you plug it in and get hideous inter­fe­rence bet­ween all the SCART chan­nels and inces­sant screen flic­ke­ring. Pro­duct retur­ned and I’m still looking.

Ideally I would upgrade my 20 inch CRT to a flat screen LCD, but the TV isn’t that old and it does its job well enough – except when it comes to Xbox 360 gaming, but that isn’t its fault. Of the 4 games I have, only one has legi­ble on-screen text – the others all result in tiny blu­rred text that is impos­si­ble to read – ren­de­ring it use­less. This is enti­rely a design flaw – expec­ting all users to own an LCD is an outra­geous assump­tion that con­ti­nues to thwart me. Gah!

Ok, elec­tro­nics rant over, time to get back to fixing some ses­sion stuff.

Since I have been wor­king at Ocado, deve­lo­ping my own sites and from time to time pla­ying Halo 3 on Xbox live, I haven’t had time to finish off watching Twin Peaks sea­son 2 or the last two and a half sea­sons of The X-files. It doesn’t help the­re­fore that I have been subsc­ri­bing myself to even more tele­vi­sion that I simply don’t have the time for anymore.

Bos­ton Legal:

Cali­for­ni­ca­tion:

Batt­les­tar Galac­tica Razor

Then there were the films…

Super­bad (awesome)

Shoo­ter (meh)

The Bourne Ulti­ma­tum (awesome)

1408 (good)

Dis­tur­bia (much bet­ter than expec­ted) — Shia is someone to watch.

Shoot Em Up (a good laugh but nothing fabulous)

Last wee­kend we were reve­lling in it. England had knoc­ked out France in the Rugby World Cup final and they were on their way to a Satur­day show down in Paris with South Africa. Lewis Hamil­ton was top of the F1 Cham­pionship lea­der board with one race to go and the Scot­land and England foot­ball teams were minu­tes away from Euro 2008 qualification.

Come Sun­day eve­ning and we’ve got nothing.

England dra­ma­ti­cally lost 2–1 to Rus­sia away from home due to a poor penalty call and some shoddy goal-keeping and defen­ding. Put­ting qua­li­fi­ca­tion out of England’s con­trol, and rel­ying on a Rus­sian fal­ter against Israel. Scot­land meanwhile left them­sel­ves the task of nee­ding to beat Italy at home to qua­lify, after their torrid dis­play in Geor­gia, losing 2–0. This all hap­pe­ned on Wed­nes­day. Next up is Satur­day, and with thou­sands of English fans, the rugby team are in Paris for the World Cup Final. Whilst a gallant and brave per­for­mance, a demo­ra­li­sing disa­llo­wed try and some lack of dis­ci­pline and BAM, the final is lost. Now our nation’s hopes of a great vic­tory fall to the young roo­kie Lewis Hamil­ton, with a second place posi­tion on the star­ting grid in Bra­zil for the last race of the sea­son. Things quickly go wrong as Hamil­ton falls to the back of the pack with car pro­blems, finishing the race in 7th, resul­ting in a Raik­ko­nen race and cham­pionship win.

It seems I was lucky enough to have the plea­sant dis­trac­tion of going to Lei­ces­ter for the wee­kend for Samantha’s birth­day, dra­wing me away from such shat­te­ring rea­li­sa­tions. So whilst England lost — left, right and cen­tre, I merrily drank wine, ate Risotto and sam­pled fine Hotel Cho­co­lat delights. It seems I was lovingly spa­red this time around, gif­ted with a won­der­fully rela­xing long wee­kend. On this occa­sion I am thank­ful to have mis­sed out on all the spor­ting commotion.

“I always wan­ted to vio­late a scientologist”