Audio described movies

Just wanted to share that I have seen two movies on DVD with audio description this last week. They were both rather good and I recommend them.

1: Garden State -- Andrew 'Large' Largeman is blamed by his father for the freak accident which left his mother a paraplegic. Leaving his hometown of New Jersey, Large isolates
himself from the world and drifts in Los Angeles. When he hears of his mother's death, however, he is forced to return to the 'Garden State' and reconsider
his own life. Oh and the girl he falls in love with has epilepsy and Andrew himself has manic depression, of sorts. Can't say too much here. A veritable disability flick tho innit.

2: Enduring Love -- Joe and Claire are enjoying a romantic picnic when they notice a hot air balloon in considerable distress. Together with a group of onlookers, Joe rushes
to its aid. A sudden gust of wind places the rescuers in danger however, and, as it is sent skywards, a man is left dangling from the balloon before plunging
to his death. While Joe is left physically unscathed, the damage to his psyche seems irreparable. Based on the novel by Ian McEwan. (what this review, nicked from Amazon, fails to tell is that it's largely about Joe being stalked by a bloke who loves him played by Rhys or Rees Iffans or Evans or whatever. Can I be arsed to look up the spelling? Do you think spellings somehow jump out at me from posters or newspapers and ozmose into my inner thoughts like sighties? Sheesh. I'm not doing the extra research just for a blog entry. If someone could post the correct spelling of this Welsh fella who was also in Notting Hill then, well, feel free if ya like).

Have just rented Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless thingy from Blockbuster not 15 minutes ago ... will watch it later. It has no audio description soundtrack so lets hope the natural dialogue is descriptive enough to carry me thru the narrrative from start to finish so as I don't make up my own little film in my head as often happens (though sometimes they are better, you should hear my version of Contact)

Crazy frog rools!

Am I the only person in Britain to be genuinely amused by the crazy frog thing?

When I say genuinely, I'm talking in an ironic way.

Tomorrow I'm going to get the ringtone and put it on my mobile. It will play out every time someone calls ... but with a sense of irony there.

However ... how many people will realise I'm being ironic? People in my office plus friends and family might get it (they know I have a brain and hate commercial shite) but will people on buses and trains understand? Or will they label me a loser as soon as they hear the tone?

Well I've worked out a plan to combat the latter. I'll get the tone tomorrow and if the phone rings in a place full of people I don't know, I'm going to do a little dance to highlight the irony.

BUYING YOUR WAY OUT OF LOSING

I want to listen to my Daft Punk CD.

I can't find my Daft Punk CD.

The idea that I will have to search high and low for my Daft Punk CD distresses me.

I may buy a new Daft Punk CD so I don't have to look for the old Daft Punk CD.

This is how Damon finds things that he loses.

Is this how all blind people deal with losing CDs?

Background: I have about 500 CDs in the house, it could be any one of them, I don't wish to start stuffing every CD into the player to hear what it is before discarding and playing the next. Did that make sense?

Until everything have a smart chip in it, the world will be invisible.

Flaky environmentalist

I really care about the environment. No really I do. I'm seriously worried about global warming, recycling, sea levels rising, lack of water, ice caps melting, etc. But I'm crap!

I recycle paper ... but I don't recycle as much as I should do. I claim access issues - half the time. I'm not sure I can claim my dishwasher is there because of a disability access issue though, that's lazyness and convenience, yes?

I'm always so impressed by environmental activists like the ones who fitted solar panels to deputy prime minister John Prescot's home the other day. How funny! How clever. Also extremely impressed with the McLibel duo, Dave and Helen, who fought McDonald's anti-earth practices for years in the British courts on several levels: health grounds, targeting children with advertising, animal cruelty and chopping down of rain forests. I didn't really engage with the huge anti-McDonald's campaign until recently ... and it is shocking where we've allowed them to get to as a multinational with a single aim to make profit at all costs with their appalling business model.

Anyway, to salvage my conscience I've decided that I am going to donate money monthly from my wage packet using Give As You Earn to some kind of environmental cause. I don't yet know who I'm going to give it to. If anyone has any suggestions that'd be really useful ... the research starts now.

Goodbye planet

I was shocked by this story: Glacier goes under wraps.

A Swiss alps ski resort is covering its glacier with plastic to stop it melting as a result of generalized global warming.

"... In May, once the ski season is over, more than 3,000 square metres of the Gurschen glacier above the resort of Andermatt is to be covered with an insulating
PVC foam. This, it is hoped, will protect the snow layer from heat, ultraviolet rays and rain, halting the recession of the glacier. The foam costs £45,000,
but it can be stored during the winter and reused."

Oi, Bushy. Global warming is happening, bozo. Wake up. You and your mates may well have billions of dollars in their bank accounts thanks to oil and other excesses but what's the point having all that money if there's no planet and no society in which to have status and/or units of wealth. Grrrr.

Oh and I wish my council gave us bigger recycling bins. We get tiny boxes that fit about a day's worth of recycling in them. Everyone has to take this seriously NOW!!!

Future TV ... and access to it.

Back on the futurology path again.

Convergence is coming. Everyone has been talking about how media, communications and computers are all going to converge. You can really see that TV, as it is now, is going to die. You've seen Star Trek: The Next Generation? They don't stil watch TV in the 24th century. I'm not entirely sure we'll be still watching TV come 2015. Not in the way we know it.

Broadband connections are getting faster which means more can be delivered to your home, more quickly ... and down your phone line! Who'd have thought that little copper wire could be the solution? ADSL2+ looks as if it will be rolled out from the third quarter of this year by BT. Currently you might have a 576k, 1 or 2 meg broadband connection. Well with this new system, we're talking 16 megabytes per second! That's instant high quality TV and then some. IPTV they're dubbing it, or Broadband TV. IPTV is a protocol Microsoft are working on. And we mustn't forget your mobile. 3G is broadband for your mobile and will deliver TV and allsorts too, wherever you are.

The TV universe could be similar to the internet, though with a simplified Electronic Programme Guide. Life and everything could be documented and on sale through that box. So, in the evening, you might end up watching a live lecture about cubism on The Tate Modern Channel. Your next door neighbour may be watching a live REM concert from Madrid on her mobile whilst on the tube. And her neighbour could be watching an old episode of Tiswas from February 1981, on demand, that he found on someone else's favourites list, someone whose tastes matched his in a Favourites Search he had done. Who knows.

Satellite could become meaningless. Rumours abound that Murdoch is really anxious that he has put so much money into giving away lots of free hardware: all those Sky Digital dishes and set-top boxes. get this, you could be getting all your TV universe needs down your existing phone line. All the new freeview and Sky boxes have got USB ports in the back. You'd just connect your broadband up to the back of your telly as well as to your PC. No dishes or dish install companies necessary. Pop down Dixons and plug n'play.

We consider electricity a necessity these days. You're not a proper modern person if you dont' have electricity in your home. Bt say that broadband is going to have that same status in years to come. You can see it happening now, more this year than any other.

One of my fave websites at the moment is Digital Lifestyles. Sometimes it's a bit techie but other times not. It's the new technological innovations that are going to drive our new digital lives, though. Inform ITV is another good site about interactive TV.

I've not even mentioned Sky Plus or TiVo yet!

I'm pretty anxious, as a visually impaired person, that as convergence grows, I move further away from being able to access content that others are seeing as pretty standard more and more now. Hardware just isn't addressing the issue. I can't access onscreen menus on a set-top box. It would be relatively simple, we think, to add a speech synth in to boxes as standard, or some other way of giving audio navigation. Mobile phones, PVR, DVD, iPods, digital TV and ironically also radio is becoming less accessible.

The odd accessible solution rears its head but visually impaired people are often a generation behind what everyone else is doing. For instance, there is no such thing as a truly accessible video recorder ... can you believe that???? And now, as we know, some electrical stores have decided not to sell VCRs any more because they're old technology. What happened there, then? How didn't a lasting integrated solution arise over the 25 years that video was king?

Integrated solutions have to be the way forward. Legislation should be passed, or something, to ensure that disabled people don't get left behind in the swooping new digital revolution. Currently the DDA doesn't cover products, though arguably some of these things are more like services and hence should be covered.

Rumour has it that Sky are concocting a fantastic new accessible digital set-top box, though. It's very hush hush. Confidentiality agreements have been signed. Everyone is very excited about it. But no public announcements until the middle of 2006. I need to know more. I've heard this from 3 sources now.

There's more:

• inaccessible iPods and music download sites could mean music will be inaccessible in the very near future as the industry stops manufacturing so many CDs and rely on their download sites. iTunes apparently has 1.5 million transactions per day! Julie Howell mentions this in the latest New Beacon [not available to link to online]. Blind people not being able to buy and listen to music, many would consider that an absurdity.

There's much more but I'll leave that for another occasion.

Ebay killed my childhood

I love TV nostalgia. Off the back of all this Doctor Who hype I decided to buy a copy of the old 70s sci fi series The Tomorrow People I used to love it! Really love it: Tim, John, Hsu Tai, Stephen, Andrew, the Galactic Trig, jaunting. Such good memories.

To cut a long story short: the DVD arrived from Amazon, I watched it, it was shit.

I've got some old Tomorrow People books from that era and thought to myself ... hey, maybe I could make a few bucks on Ebay like everyone else seems to be doing. It was a cult series, right? Sci fi? There are bound to be some obsessive collectors out there. They could be worth 10 or 20 quid?

To cut a long story short: went to Ebay. Found Tomorrow People books there already. They were going for 1 pence wit no bids. I am shit.

My old Swap Shop books were going for just 99p. I thought people liked that kind of stuff? I thought it meant something? But no one was interested.

My childhood was a sham.

Pope

Facts about The pope:

He used to be a footballer.
He may or may not have been hit on the head with a silver mallet at death yesterday.
And ... it's just two letters away from Popeye!

Aww, dunno how I feel about the death of the pope. He was some world leader. But sadly he was a bit anti gay and didn't seem to appreciate the importance of protecting against AIDS by promoting condoms. Oh no. There should be no sex out of wedlock, no samesex sex. End of the matter.

I wonder if a new pope wil be more liberal in such matters? It'll be interesting.

Having been born in 1970, I don't remember any other pope. I do have a vague memory of when JP2 was appointed in 1978 ... and when he came to the UK around 1981 ... but to me he's the pope, can't imagine anyone else being pope.

The other big thing for me is that, as I lost my sight in 1984, I know what JP2 looks like! But I won't know what a new pope looks like. No doubt as with George Bush, Tony Blair and any new person I meet, I'll make up an image for them completely subconsciously ... but JP2's passing means there's one more important world figure who I don't have a visual image of in my mind.

I wonder if my mental image of Tony Blair and George Bush are in any way accurate? It's funny, I have such a strong image of what I think they, and other famous people, look like ... that I sometimes find myself describing them "you know, the guy with the dark brown hair, slightly pointy nose, reddish cheeks, quite tall ..." even if I've actually not got a clue what they really look like.

Someone once told me Tony Blair looks a bit like a lizard. Sadly I think I may have incorporated a long flicky forked tongue into my current image of the man.

Pain

Ya know there's all these reports out about how TB is back in full force? Retro diseases coming to get you in the 21st century? Well, I'm still pretty much reeling from the idea that I have been diagnosed as having gout.

It sounds like one of those hideous old man diseases. When I think of it, I imagine rotten skin, open seeping ulcers and sores - but it's nothing like that. It's more akin to arthritis in a lot of ways, it makes your joints swell up badly, get very hot and red.

Reason for gout? - too much urea in the bloodstream. Often caused by over-indulging. Previously considered a rich man's disease, the disease of someone who drinks port. Ick, port.

I got an attack of it (again) Friday morning when I woke. It totally floors you. It gets me in the foot or knee. For two whole days I just couldn't walk! I started using my new office chair as a wheelchair round the house which was interesting but it did rather ruck the carpets up.

Gout = excrutiating agony. if anyone ever tells you they've got it, don't laugh and call them a premature pensioner, just hand over any codine or painkillers you might have immediately.

Totally screwed my weekend. What a flipping waste. I've been asleep half the time because of the codine and anti-inflamatories. I've woken this morning and am a little more mobile.

Who on earth would want to read this blog entry? I've stopped.

Frozen Banana

Wow! Great tip here.

Fancy some ice cream? Frightened of the calorific hell and guilt? Well here's my big tip ... (like you've not already seen the title of this entry)

Freeze a banana. Eat it. It's nature's own Ben and Jerry's. Rather delicious and very very similar to ice cream. Sadly it comes in just one flavour.

Tip: don't freeze it in it's skin, unzip it, stick it in a freezer bag or tub ... then come back to it two hours later. Skin doesn't ruin it, it's just you've got to wait for it to thaw out a little (hence allowing your ICB to get warmer) before you can unzip and schnarf.

Oh, ICB = Ice Cream Banana. IB may be better as there's no craem involved here at all.

What an invention!

The City Below ...

Dark tunnels, secret societies, clandestine meetings, railways, war rooms, bomb shelters, political movements, ghost tube stations ... I just love reading stories about what lies beneath cities in the vast underground networks many of them seem to have.

Could it be that the city below the city is more interesting?

When you hear that a secret underground cinema was discovered in Paris last year, then, yes, perhaps what lies beneath is sometimes that bit more fascinating!?

The police, initially wary that it may have been a terrorist squad or dark and perverted cult, gave it the bill of health - though were mystified as to who set it up. A follow-up article in The Guardian revealed that it was an underground art group called La Mexicaine de la Perforation, keen to free-up unused city spaces for free expression. (follow the links, read them, they're fascinating!)

It puts me in mind of London Below in the book Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman - the fiefdoms, rat speakers and metaphoric invisible homeless people of the novel that created its own lore based on London landmarks and mythology. The Angel Islington was a chillingly evil serene looking luminescent being. Old Bailey lived atop buildings and, if I remember rightly, cooked Crow Stew. Knight's Bridge was a feared route where the beautifully named character Anaesthesia disappeared assumed dead ... and you found yourself in a real Court held by a Baron, or was it an Earl, moving through the tube system in a capital that has hyperlinked rooms! Amazing stuff. Puts Chislehurst Caves to shame really.

The drugs don't work ...

Do you think that aspirin or paracetamol actually work? Do they kill that headache? I'm not sure that they do. (Paracetamol are Tylanol in other parts of the world)

I think of them in the same way I think of alternative therapy: I'm pleased that I've taken a painkiller, I've done something proactive, but if the pain does go away I never attribute this to the drug. And even if it does work, I wonder what percentage of an average headache it manages to slice away? Do they gather these results? How do they measure them?

Scientist: So, it's been 30 minutes since you took the painkiller. How do you feel?

Patient: Well the headache isn't so bad but that could be because I just had a nice cup of tea and a bit of a relax ...

I'm trying to draw a parallel, in my head, with weather forecasts. I don't take those seriously either. If it does end up being sunny like the forecasters say (though often it's a different prediction on each tv or radio channel) then, again, I never think: "oh well done, you got it right". In fact the weather forecasters don't even get factored in. Likewise paracetamol and over-the-counter painkillers simply don't work.

I've often thought that we should have alternative therapy based nuclear weapons. that way, if we hear there has been a strike on our country we should all just stand in the streets, wait, wait some more, keep on waiting and see which person starts to get affected first. "Ooh, I think I can feel something! Wow these weapons really do work". And then they'll probably get their own cable show for being victims of an aggressive homeopathic attack on their unusually sensitive constitutions.

And what exactly was all that stuff about snow the other week? It didn't snow in London - well barely - but heavy snow was forecast for 2 weeks!

conspiracy theory alert: could it be possible that the small number of TV and radio weathermen and weatherwomen got together and deliberately went overboard on snow predictions so that the councils made an effort to bring their road gritters out in order that the weather people could get in to work for the breakfast shift?

I like the mayor of Moscow's approach: fine weather forecasters if they get it wrong.

But at least weather is tangible, that's not quite the same for everyday pain relief: I'm talking about niggly headaches here not chronic pain.

... I'm boring myself now. What's more I don't really care. And I prefer cold weather to hot mostly anyway. And I hate drugs, I'd much rather there were really good 'alternative' therapies for everything. Hey ho. I blame it on my headache and the fact there are no paracetamol in the house, even though they clearly don't work anyway. Going now.

The American Office

I hear that the US version of hit British comedy The Office [UK] aired last night on NBC. I read some of the reviews yesterday and it seems most of the journalists hated it. It'll be interesting to see what the viewing figures are.

I did a bit of a Technorati search and discovered a few peple talking about it already. The majority talking about it had already seen the British version, so, in that classic 'it's not as good as the original' way, most were at best ambiguous. But I quite liked this review from fyzixphrog that I found.

In a geek TV kind of way I was interested in what she was saying about never watching a channel below number 60 on the EPG. The UK networks still have some pretty good and much talked about programmes (especially Channel 4) but it's so clear that these channels are moving further and further towards junk, heavily signposted, easy to follow even if you're not listening to the dialogue type shows. Especially ITV and BBC1. But, here I am, eagerly anticipating the new version of Doctor Who about to air on BBC1 ... so it's not always true. The networks, though, seem to have less and less that interests me.

I NEED SKY PLUS! (that's like TiVo if you're not British). Someone bring me Sky Plus! Please won't someone bring me ...

Sci Fi Saturday

I think I over-focus. I'm thinking about Doctor Who night tonight on BBC Two and I don't appear to be able to do anything else. I watched the excellent 'Unification' double episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation earlier so it has become a bit of a sci fi kind of day. Also watched an episode of Voyager and have bought series 6 of The Tomorrow People on DVD from Amazon about 10 minutes ago.

Saturdays are the new Sundays. Lazy slobbing around watching TV days. The first full free day after the working week and to me it's all about resting. In olden days, before the Sunday trading laws were loosened up, we all had to get up on Saturday morning and use Saturday to its fullest, going shopping, getting out, because Sunday was utterly dead. Sundays back then meant that pubs were open for two hours at lunchtime and, well, church and the odd DIY shop were also options.

Orange Sunday

I've got an issue. If I come across a fruit that is spherical, orange in colour, bobbly pitted waxy skin, citrussy smelling and tastes (I think this is the important part) of ORANGE ... well, I call it an orange! Apparently though, I am wrong.

It seems there are ways of distinguishing these things that look exactly the same and taste exactly the same.

Words like: manderin, satsuma, clementine and tangerine are used. But what is the difference between all these? They're orange, they taste of oranges, they have orange style wrappers (do we call it peel?) I don't get it.

I'm told they taste uniquely different but I'm oblivious to it.

On a quick Google search I just did, I came across another orange that is called a Wilkings? I'd never heard of one of these before. Clearly though I am not a fruitologist like everyone else appears to be these days.

mercury rev in Hammersmith, London.

Just a quick one. Went to see Mercury Rev last night at the Hammersmith Apollo. They were fantastic. And as fans always say, yes, like a religious experience in a way. Something about their music makes you feel as if your soul is being probed and lifted as they play. This makes me sound like a sappy freak but trust me I'm one of the world's biggest cynics.

They got right to the end without playing Goddess on a Highway. Happily it was the third of their 4 encore tracks. What a band. What a gig. I have a blindspot for the names of Mercury Rev tracks so I can only say they played that fantastic feelgood etherial awesome track from their last album to end ... and they ended on a massive wall of sound holding the last note for 30 seconds.

In the middle the lead singer, Jonathan Donahue, started preaching to the audience. I can't quite remember what it was about but it had something to do with being happy in life and not bowing to the music industry. The vast majority of the audience were doting on every word but one or two people heckled him. Jonathan retorted by saying "it seems like we've got some people in this evening who are part of the industry". I wouldn't quote me on this but it's approaching what he said ... and the audience were on his side.

great gig ... the supporting band Duke Spirit was rather fabulous too.

China Week

I've been watching bits of the BBC's China Week and generally reading lots about China on their site and around the web. I am really interested in Chinese politics and culture and how that part of the world appears to be growing.

This morning I watched the special edition of Question Time from China. It seems to have been heralded as a major success, the first time that a foregn news organisation has come to the country to talk openly about Chinese politics. As people keep saying, this would never have happened 15 or even perhaps 5 years ago. The show has been broadcast on BBC ONE, the internet and on the global channel BBC World.

So, after reading all the uptalk about it, I was a bit disappointed to read an entry earlier today from the Berkley China Digital News blog with the headline China censors BBC World, again. Basically it seems that a good few of the China Week programmes are being blocked by the Chinese cable broadcast system. "For example, a report on restive Muslim Uighur ethnic group in China's far west was cut off after just seconds of starting to air. According to international
media reports, the screen went black after a BBC correspondent said, " But the Uighur people have little affection for their Chinese masters.”

Heard a particularly interesting item this morning on Radio 5 Live's Julian Warwicker programme talking about how Chinese people are a hidden minority in Britain which also interested me: lots of Chinese people around but no umbrella force through which to try to make their collective mark on British society like other ethnic minorities. Don't know enough about this but got me thinking because it does seem that this is the case.

There is more on the site: Five Live in China. Also just seen that Julian has his own blog which I'll take a look at in a bit.

It's late

Did I really only just get in from work? Did I then really just call up a chinese takeaway and have them deliver me a mushroom ommlette and chips at 11:30pm? Hey kidz, I'm living the London life.

I was supposed to go out with Sara tonight. She was working in the next door building, doing some training, and met up with me at 5:15. She sat by my desk for about an hour or so but sadly I still had lots to do. So, she offered to go home, I passed up my night in the pub with her and stayed at my desk finishing off loose ends. Shame. Living the London life.

I met up with the daughter of my former English teacher Max Hollis today. I never knew her at the time. Sadly her dad, my former teacher, died a year and a half ago. She now works at the same place as me (everyone ends up there eventually, I swear) and we had a bit of lunch. Revised: we had a coffee and a flapjack which Damon believes is a good part of a balanced diet that will help him lose a bit of weight. It's true, if you eat nothing else, it works.

We had a bit of a chat about jobs, design work, about that school and about web accessibility. She was really nice. Did I say she bought the lunch?

Interesting stuff happened at work today. Bit of a crisis with a project. All happened extremely fast, in an extremely impromptu manner and wiped my whole afternoon away. I'm kind of disappointed about it all but I think we came up with a good solution between us which was positive. Always challenging when you have to think on your feet like that. Had one of those realisation moments afterwards. One that says: hey, actually, your job's quite cool and you get to play with several interests that you've got: writing, disability culture and techie. I'm so lucky really. One of my new year's resolutions was to 'count my blessings' so, here I am, counting them. Can you hear me Pollyanna? (so unlike me, what's happening?)

I keep meaning to talk about oranges. I must talk about oranges soon.

Media futurology

At the end of our day at work we had a meeting about the future of broadcasting and media. It was really fascinating and delivered by a really interesting bloke called Tom Loosemore. I was actually quite gripped by what he had to say and what interested him personally.

I'm quite tired now so, as per last night's post, I'm just going to jot a few things down and work them up into bigger blog entries some other time. I'm sure I will.

There was a fair bit that I knew about already, technologies I'd already heard about. But I learnt a few buzzphrases that I'd never come across before ... and he had developed a few concepts that I only had half a grasp on.

Let me try and put some brief notes down.

* Network Media -- this was the term he kept using for the new media age we are in. Not a standard broadcast system any longer, not 1-to-1 broadcasting from studio to one person's living room direct. Network media, richer media, media that is contributed to by many. From many to many as opposed to 1-to-1. Multicasting I think is a term that fitted into this model too.

* Collaborative Broadcasting -- also known as social broadcasting. This was interested. The way he explained it all was thru a logical progression that I'm not sure I have the energy to repeat right now (checks time: 10:25pm). He started off by talking about TiVo and Sky Plus. The fact that we timeshift programmes. Storage is much cheaper now and he told us that for 3.5k they had manufactured a TiVo type technology that would be able to record and store 9 days of output from all of the BBC's 8 channels.

Every 18 months, storage media halves in price, I think he said. Hard disks are able to hold more and are much smaller and cost less, essentially. It could well be that soon we will just be able to record absolutely everything ever broadcast and we'd be able to dip into it. But then, the EPG and the way we sort out what we want and what we choose to watch will become all the more complicated.

EPGs will have to change to accomodate this. But how are we going to find stuff we like?

The answer is Collaborative Broadcasting.

it works like this. Lets take an iPod / music model to base the example on: Using iTunes download playlist, or sharing of your Microsoft Media Playlist, the Collaborative Media system would find other peoples playlists that have the same tunes on it. It would then share the other tunes on the new person's playlist with you so that you would find new content via other people who like similar content to you. It would be like a virtual recommendations list, my words not Tom's. So you'd be drawing on like-minded people on the network for further media consumption ideas and content.

You can see how this might also be adapted to a TV model or other media.

Tom Loosemore also talked about: taking new tv shows off the net using things like Bit Torrent. He said that he used a website called UK Nova (something like that) to watch a TV show. Later he realised that he didn't even know what channel it had come from. It was BBC4 but, despite the Digital Onscreen Graphic branding, in his head he had taken it from UK Nova. He made a great observation when saying "Peple often say they found something on Google. Actually Google doesn't have any content on it." He was talking specifically about the BBC and how, in the future, the licence fee payer could be disconnected from the BBC and their individual financial input (licence fee money) which could cause interesting dilemmas.

He mentioned the Sony Star Wars Galaxy game and the fact that communities have sprung up within this online game. They meet at designated times in one of the Cantina bars and put on shows, dances etc. He showed us a chumbawumba video put together by dancing from this. I'd explain further but I'm loosing consciousness.

Things wot I have done

It's like I've done quite a few things this last week. Last Tuesday I went to the Science Museum's Dana Centre with Sara and listened to a presentation all about Nanotechnology. It was OK but rather waffly and not very enlightening. Someone else was talking about the nanotechnology evening on their blog the other day.

On Saturday I watched Bridget Jones 2: Edge of reason.

On Sunday I went to Fifteen restaurant. You know, the Jamie Oliver one where he took delinquents off the streets and turned them into chefs or something. Tasty food but I came away not all that full ... and a deal poorer in terms of money, that is. Watched The Truman Show on Sunday evening too.

Tonight I saw The Village on DVD. Interesting film by that fellow M Knight Shangalang or however it's spelt. No idea. Audio described movies don't spell out the name of the director ... though I suspect his name looks more Asian than Bay City Rollers.

I'm writing all this down in a hurry in case I don't get an opportunity to write more about what I've done this last week. Though the blog is bound to be full of deep and meaningful insights into my life ... I guess at some stage it might be quite nice to look over it, when I'm older, and remember what I was doing.

I had things to say about oranges too ... but there's no time.