Crackerwax

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

1. It’s a beautiful piece of design
2. The screen is a delight to use, high resolution and bright
3. It’s also covered in scratch proof glass
4. Everyone’s writing applications for it
5. It has built in GPS, fast GPS
6. 16GB of storage is great, enough for a couple of movies and a lot of music
7. It has a very well designed OS
8. Visual voicemail is superbly implemented
9. The mail client is very usable
10. MobileMe synchronisation is fantastic
11. The ringer is turned off by a physical switch

Cons

1. Battery life is terrible, three hours of full use is not enough
2. The camera only outputs 1600 x 1200
3. It has no flash
4. It doesn’t do video
5. The keyboard is plagued by lag
6. Safari crashes more often than a hypoglycaemic dieter
7. So do a lot of the other apps
8. The phone’s contact list takes forever to load
9. Sometimes calls don’t connect and all you get is crackle and noise (O²?)
10. The 3G signal quality varies wildly
11. Ringtones have to be created, you can’t just use an MP3
12. Sometimes it just locks up
13. The camera requires a screen touch to take a photo, making it very easy to drop
14. 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.

Get Carter was remade back in 2000 and I’ve been interested to see it since then, so when I saw it in my local Blockbuster for £1.99 I jumped at the chance of a purchase.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite so keen. It’s a mess of a movie, its heart’s in the right place but it’s not a patch on the original.

I was desperate for this to be good. I think Sylvester Stallone is a vastly underrated talent. One of the major reason the movie sucks though is down to its lack of consistency with the original. One minutes its scene for scene perfect, the next its taking the story off at wild, unheard of tangents, then the next thing you know it’s back to being a faithful adaptation.

That is of course until the end, when it goes very, very wrong.

Carter is supposed to die. That’s what makes the original so unique, it’s downbeat from start to end. Hollywood has its rules though and the primary rule is always have a happy ending. Damn shame.

It’s amazing the difference a large screen makes to a movie, the amount of extra detail I saw last night was astounding.

For example I didn’t know Roy Batty had tattoos, yet there they were all over his left shoulder plain as day! It wasn’t only the little things though, some of the big stuff was given a new lease of life as well.

The opening sequence in particular was very much enhanced by the feeling of scale afforded by the big screen, even the opening crawl felt more exciting!

All in all Blade Runner will always be a great movie, seeing it in a cinema just makes for a better experience.

Now all I have to do is save enough to get a 1080p projector!

I don’t really like watching Big Brother these days, it’s a great premise ruined by the production companies’ insistence on filling the house full of fame hungry idiots and the mentally ill. I’m sure if they put well balanced, ordinary run of the mill people in there it would be entertaining, as it is it just feels dirty.

Of course the annual ‘celebrity’ edition has had to be changed this year lest they put Eugene Terreblanche, Nick Griffin and the reanimated corpse of Adolf Hitler in the house with Miss J from America’s Next Top Model.

So their amazing new ‘twist’ on the tired old formula is that they put ordinary (see the first paragraph) members of the public in and let the ‘celebrities’ run it. ‘Mazin!

Anyway, whilst flicking up the channels tonight I happened upon E4 and have been mesmerised for the past fifteen minutes by the sight of this twat, hitting vegetables with an aluminium pole. Look at him.

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Just watching him standing there giggling and wheezing like some weird, asthmatic, ginger child makes me want to puke. As if it could be much worse, it is he’s actually Chairman of the Scottish Youth Parliament. What?! Really?! Yes! This is his ‘biog’ from Channel 4′s website.

John is the Chairman of the Scottish Youth Parliament and was the first teenager ever to be appointed to this position. Although he is only 20, he manages a team of staff, most of whom are in their 30s and 40s. John hopes to run for office next year and is studying for a Politics and Sociology degree. John says one of his main aims in life is to tackle child poverty in the UK. John says he’d like to see a revival and attitude change towards red-haired people in the world and he would also like to show the world that being intelligent and politically active doesn’t mean you have to be boring or geeky.

He manages a team of staff! The overweight, peching, knob who’s just spent the best part of fifteen minutes hitting things with a stick has staff? How!

Of course as it says he’s not just satisfied with tackling child poverty (though how exactly hitting food with a pole brings that about I’m not certain, but let’s just assume he has a plan), he wants a change in the public attitude towards red-haired people too? John if you’re reading I’ll let you into a secret, I don’t have a problem with red-haired people, I do however have a problem with overweight dickwads who rate hitting a tomato with a stick, worthy of ten points.

Here’s a tip, perhaps it’s not your red hair that people have a problem with, maybe, just maybe, it’s your personality?

Breaking news! He’s just made up a new rule! If you don’t make every shot you get squirted with chocolate sauce! What a prick.

More news! John gets a rash if he gets in the hot tub, although he can sit beside it. So to be clear, he gets a rash if he gets in the hot tub, so that’s why he doesn’t get in. It’s definitely not his tits, ok? Not his tits.

Halo 3 feels much more like the original Halo did, the sense of freedom you get from being able to rip up gun emplacements and carry them or deploy shields where you want is immense. Add to that the number of different ways to progress through each level and you end up with a thoroughly convincing world.

The sheer amount of stuff you can do in this game is astonishing and rather unusually it doesn’t feel tacked on, it just adds to the atmosphere.

I know I said yesterday that the graphics weren’t really that much of a step up, well I was wrong. The further you get into the game the better they get. Not only that but the number of enemies on screen at once and the number of effects going on is fantastic, you really do get the sense that you’re in the middle of an invasion.

The Arbiter from Halo 2 is still present and thankfully from what I hear you never have to play as him. That was one of Halo 2′s major failings and Metal Gear Solid 2′s while I’m at it, I’ll never forgive Hideo Kojima for making me play as Raiden.

Fucking about with the players sense of identity is a big no-no in my book and so far I’ve felt very much that the fate of the world really is in my hands and that I am Master Chief. Little details abound to convince you of your status as the world’s saviour.

The character of Master Chief really is made to feel larger than life in every situation, marines talk about you in hushed reverential tones and the grunts shit themselves when they see you. It all adds up to a solid sense of immersion.

The Cortana part of the plot is interesting too, I’m looking forward to finding out where her part in the story is. At the minute I can only guess that 343 Guilty Spark will be involved somewhere down the line but for once I’m actually interested in a game’s plot!

I get the feeling too that once I’ve completed the campaign I’m going to get more than my money’s worth out of the online multi-player stuff. It’s a really good game, there’s no mistaking that, but only time will tell if its truly a classic.

From start to finish this movie is fun. X-Men is about super heroes that are rock hard and completely serious about saving the world, the Fantastic Four are more light hearted, and if I’m honest looking at their super powers that’s the way it should be.

In Rise Of The Silver Surfer we get to meet, well, the Silver Surfer and quite frankly he rocks too. Voiced by Laurence Fishburne, the Silver Surfer really shines as a character.

Galactus on the other hand has become smoke. How this happened I’m not quite sure but that’s the way it is. To be perfectly honest I don’t think the movie suffers any for it. Although the Andys of this world may disagree!

The whole movie rollocks along at a fairly brisk pace, never becoming serious and never digging into character any more than it really needs to. The product placement is a little overwhelming at times and could do with being toned down, but the underlying story is fun. Forget that Ben Grimm is a bit too rubbery looking, just watch cool stuff happen and enjoy an hour and forty minutes of silly fun that lets you switch your brain off.

The bottom line is that this is a popcorn movie, characters like Batman need a little bit of gravity. The difference being that they’ve got a decent human back story that allows for that. The Fantastic Four got zapped by cosmic radiation, yeah, cosmic radiation. Almost as bad as gamma rays.

If you’re at a loose end go and see it. Take a bit of booze with you and it’ll be even more fun!

Christ. Another year, another three months of attention hungry, vapid fuckwits parading their neurosis live on telly for the nation. Ace!

As much as I pretend that I can’t stand it, yet again here I am watching it. Bollocks.

In an amazing twist (not really, but I’ve got a quota to fulfill) it’s all women that have opened the show and what a bunch they are.
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Caught this on BBC Three the other night and it’s a fairly interesting concept. You take five relatively well to do people, strip them of everything they own and chuck them onto the streets of London. Boy did they choose some stunners.

The five volunteers are Clementine, Darren, Thomas, Charles and Ravi. All of them are worth a bob or two and have agreed to take part in the show to get a feel for what life is like on the other side of the coin. Very brave if you ask me, I don’t know if I could do it. Then again after watching the show I’m not sure they can.

The two people over seeing this experiment are Craig a homeless worker whose pretty sound and Rebecca, who’s sound too, and American and hard as nails. They’re proper boring though, so join me now for a journey through time and space in to the world of the filthy rich and homeless!
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Set fifty years in the future Sunshine is the story of eight brave astronauts attempts to restart the failing Sun. With a nuclear bomb. The size of Manhattan. In a big space ship.

Yawn.

Anyway, the plucky bunch set off for the sun in their flying space bomb and everything’s going great guns, we learn that a previous mission has failed, Icarus, and that we are now watching the crew of Icarus II, we also learn that no one knows why the original Icarus (let’s call it Icarus I) failed on their mission. Oooh, spooky.

As they jet through space we watch them do the usual futuristic space ship things, look at screens, check dials, eat space-food, bicker, you know the sort of things they do in sci-fi?

However this is where my first problem starts. This isn’t set in the sort of universe that Star Wars or Firefly is, it’s set in what is ostensibly the here and now. Anyone going into space on what was essentially a suicide mission would have been put through every psychological evaluation under the sun, they would have been screened and screened again, not one trace of susceptibility would have been allowed on that ship, or for that matter the Icarus I.
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First off: Oi! Lucas! Leave writing movies to people who can. (JK Rowling we’re watching you too).

Started this Clone War has. No Yoda let’s get this straight, included this Clone War was because George thought a ‘Clone War’ sounded hip, cool and oh so spacey in 1977. Alec Guinness hamming his way through two hours of sub standard fairy tale nonsense, calling John Gueilgud every evening and sobbing down the phone. You can almost hear him spinning like a Hotpoint in his grave as Ewan McGregor splutters out line after line of piss poor dialogue doing his best 1705s Ealing comedy Alec Guinness impression, while Hayden Christensen skulks in the background looking petulant.
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