They’re making a Bill Hicks biopic! Seemingly Russell Crowe is in the frame to play him. Seems an odd choice to me.
Author Archive for Crackerwax
After having spent about twelve seconds lying in the sun yesterday, I awoke this morning to find that, seemingly, in the night I had caught fire.
My body was the colour of molten rock, the sheets had my outline charred onto them and judging by the amount of pain I was in, I’d had a layer of skin removed.
After spending a few moments considering my options, I gingerly got out of bed and crackled my way to the bathroom.
What greeted me was not pretty (not that it is normally but you know what I mean).
There is a moral to this story. That moral is wear sunscreen. Lots of sunscreen.
Ladies and gentlemen I present the photos from Andy’s stag do.
It was very good of Andy to let it go ahead.
For those not in the know a Segway can be best described as being the horse-less carriage version of the chariots they round around in, in Ben Hur. It sounds freaky but it’s great fun, I suggest you try one at the first opportunity.
Sadly I didn’t manage to get a picture of myself on one, scooting around Bermuda on our Segway tour but let me tell you I want one.
Just thought you’d like to know.
Being onboard a cruise ship doesn’t make posting to one’s blog very easy. Normal service will be resumed from New York.
I don’t have sea legs, this has been exhaustively established by my inability to eat, stand up or in fact function in any manner at all whilst on this ship.
Hopefully this situation will improve as I munch my way through a bunch of antiemetics but right now I feel like shit.
Bleeurgh.
So we’ve made it onto our cruise ship and it’s full of fat people and stupid people. Still it’s a break from the norm and who knows I might even get a tan.
I’ve been reminded by a couple of things today, that in the event of an emergency it won’t be any of my actions that will cause me to die, it’ll be other people. I’ll tell you for why.
At 16:30 today we had the mandatory ship evacuation drill. There were three rules.
- Keep right at all times.
- Go to the muster station printed on your life jacket.
- Don’t put your life jacket on
Fairly straight forward, no?
Still, what did about 50% of these chunky, brain dead bastards manage to do?
That’s right, scramble about the corridors in any old fashion headed for the first muster station they saw, with their life jackets on.
For fuck’s sake people it’s not difficult, just follow the instructions, they were clear enough.
I fear for my safety in the event of a proper evacuation, everyone of these bloody idiots will panic and start waving their flabby arms around and the whole system will fall apart.
God help us all.
Back in 2002 I went to Asda with Kate, Shaggy and Finola.
I’d just bought a Nokia 7650, the first ever camera phone, so was hyper keen to use it. All the time.
Here are the results.
My life was that interesting.
This man is getting married.
So, much against his will, he had a stag do.
The pictures will appear here soon.
I may have tweeted about this a couple of times but people, especially young women, seem to have some kind of affliction that leads them to use like way too much in regular conversation.
It was heartening then, when I saw this amazing poster linked in Digg.
So it is an epidemic!
Having been reminded of Yakety Sax (as made famous on the Benny Hill show) by a recent tweet, I decided to do a quick Google to see if it was available for download anywhere.
In the time it would take to slap a small bald man on the head a few times, I had discovered this gem on YouTube.
How’s that for a slice of fried gold?
Three weeks ago today I queued up outside Carphone Warehouse at a ridiculous time in the morning, coffee in hand, to collect my shiny new 16GB iPhone 3G.
The doors opened at 08:02 and we all filed in to dutifully hand over our £159 to pick up our iPhones. If only it were that easy.
The queue outside was tolerable, good natured chatter and coffee make things tolerable, it was when I got inside that the pain began. O2’s systems crashed almost immediately leaving me unable to have either a credit check or a proof of address check.
All of this lead to me standing in the shop for over three hours while they repeatedly tried to verify that I lived where I said I did and that I’d be able to pay the bills.
I got it though, obviously, and I’ve been using it for the past three weeks. I have a number of observations about it.
I’d never really fancied the first iPhone, I don’t like to be an early adopter of consumer electronics they’re normally bug ridden or prototypes in need of refinement (Nintendo DS?). So I generally wait for version 2.0 or 3.0 wherever possible, that’s what I did here.
There are lots of pros and cons to owning an iPhone though.
Pros
- It’s a beautiful piece of design
- The screen is a delight to use, high resolution and bright
- It’s also covered in scratch proof glass
- Everyone’s writing applications for it
- It has built in GPS, fast GPS
- 16GB of storage is great, enough for a couple of movies and a lot of music
- It has a very well designed OS
- Visual voicemail is superbly implemented
- The mail client is very usable
- MobileMe synchronisation is fantastic
- The ringer is turned off by a physical switch
Cons
- Battery life is terrible, three hours of full use is not enough
- The camera only outputs 1600 x 1200
- It has no flash
- It doesn’t do video
- The keyboard is plagued by lag
- Safari crashes more often than a hypoglycaemic dieter
- So do a lot of the other apps
- The phone’s contact list takes forever to load
- Sometimes calls don’t connect and all you get is crackle and noise (O2?)
- The 3G signal quality varies wildly
- Ringtones have to be created, you can’t just use an MP3
- Sometimes it just locks up
- The camera requires a screen touch to take a photo, making it very easy to drop
- No cut and paste
That’s a lot of negative points but I still think it’s the best phone I’ve ever owned. Aside perhaps from the battery life none of the points raised are particularly unfixable and I’m certain that they will be fixed at some point in a firmware update.
The battery life is the biggest stickler though, it’s just too poor to be acceptable. If I watch a movie on my way to work (a journey of twenty five minutes) I’m down to about 70% battery life by the time I get to work. If I make a couple of phone calls during the day, maybe browse a few websites and send some tweets, by three o’clock I’m out of juice.
That really is unacceptable.
My old Nokia 6021 last about two weeks on standby admittedly they’re very different beasts but I still expect more than three hours talk time or a days standby from a phone.
All in all though I standby my love for the iPhone, it is an amazing piece of technology that ten years ago would have been impossible. I can just about overlook the battery life issues with careful placement of chargers and all the really cool stuff it does makes up for it.
Roll on firmware 2.1. That will be the true test of Apple’s commitment to the cell phone market.
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