Just Another Drive to Work

Today started much like any other. The evilly sequenced set of alarms clattered into life. Each leaving sufficient time for me to return back into a dreamy doze before blowing the whistle to urge me over the top.

The morning evolution begins. Hunched simian gives way to an upright and scratching Australopithecus. A large stretch reveals something more hominid in form before a final flurry of blinks and groans allows my final almost human shape to emerge; pale and hairy, like those bug-eyed nocturnal animals the beloved Mr. Attenborough chases about in the dark.

Into the bathroom and the radio goes on. Someone, somewhere is moaning about something. Again. Shower on and in. Gurgle, gurgle, sploosh and we're awake; or what passes for awake. Comatose with a smile - forced - weekday.

As in the days of yore, there is no charge in the electric toothbrush. As brushes go, they don't brush very well. I scrape and drag a bit. That'll do.

Pants, trousers, shirt, socks. Socks? Off black, dark black, scudding gray, formerly approximating to black, black with a stripe, black with a slightly thicker stripe, black with Homer Simpson, black with a ridge band a the top, black with a slightly wider ridged band at the top. That's close enough, the last two will do as a pair.

Shoes on and it's once a again an awful long way down to the laces. Cue that noise old men make when they get out a chair. Ergo, mmm... best not say it out loud.

The car keys are usually in one of 97 possible places. I find them in place 93. Which I take as a positive. The glass may only be 4 out of 97 parts full but some days that's enough.

In car and radio on. Some so-called expert is explaining why someone, somewhere who is moaning about something should stop moaning while someone from a so-called pressure group guffaws in contempt to the annoyance of the presenter. I sneer at them all. No one notices.

The drive out to the motorway is more stop than start. This would seem to defy a few laws of physics, but that's how it feels with the two left hand pedals getting more involved that the right hand side one. Lights, cameras and not much action. Weaving idiots and fat arsed cyclists before the open-road sanctuary of the motorway looms; the 10 seconds of accelerating joy ahead of the nose-to-tail trundle.

And we're off and there goes Mansell. There stops Mansell. A bus overtaking a truck. There endeth the fun. After a couple of miles I sneak past the sleepy-tacho-trucks and stick the MP3 player on to lighten my mood. Yes indeed, it is a Pleasant Valley Sunday, you're right, how rude of me not to notice. Pah.

But still, the road is quieter, I'm making progress and leaving more things behind me that there are in front of me. Actually, there is quite a lot, quite far behind me. I strain in the rear view mirror but it looks like everything has backed off behind me to quite a distance. I'm not going quickly but nothing is keeping pace. No idiots in BMW's careering up my rear, no leather-cased bloodbags on bikes hurtling to their next accident. Nothing for almost a mile at least. Odd. Anyway, on with the journey, turn up the music, all the better for me to have the road to myself.

And then I see them. Blue lights. One, then two, maybe more behind those. With the rest of the traffic still far behind a phalanx of traffic cars was making its way up towards me. I turned down the music and turned round to check what I thought the mirror was telling me.

It was only then I saw the hand appear against the rear windscreen...

If You Build It...

They might come? The world of Internet traffic generation has changed a lot since the days when I were thin. Used to be that you were worried about SEO, meta-tags blah-di-blah-di-page-rank-bobbins^tm and, while much of this is still relevant to some degree, there are many more fun ways than the painful wait for your site to appear on page 10 of Google.

Yesterday, I 'launched' The Photo Project, a charity photo book web site. I won't go on about it here (check the site to find out more) but suffice to say, in the old order of web traffic generation, I wouldn't fare very well against all the other photography related site searches that go on. And yet, on the very first day, there was a creditable 421 hits from 181 unique users.

Contrast this with my previous web dabblings. When I first put the LazyWebTools page refresher live it took a while to pick up search traffic and it wasn't until that it got a few forums mentions that it took off. Several years on it still maintains a very loyal following in the 100's of hits a day region.

Another website I did fared less well. I thought CheckMyRequest was the sort of daft thing that would be picked up virally eventually. It never did and I never really tried much (daft as it was).

The simple fact is that in one day, ThePhotoProject outshone all the traffic to CheckMyRequest gets in months. (ignoring the fact the CheckMyRequest is inane and ThePhotoProject has slightly more substance).

How? Twitter.

ThePhotoProject has a Twitter account (@thephotoproject) so I tweet that the site is live. I then retweet this from my account to my ~300 followers and hope to get retweeted from there. If you get lucky (or know some lovely people*) you can get retweeted by people with very big networks and the word can spread very quickly. Even with a relatively small number of retweets there were a decent number of hits, harking back to previous blathering on scale-free networks...

This is in no way a great surprise to anyone. There are many great proponents of this art and it is one that will become increasingly important the more we rely on the "NOW!" and don't want the six week wait and painful SEO struggle.

The challenge now will be to maintain the same level of interest. The re-tweet game is ideal for an initial splurge but any more than that and it becomes inane spamming and has a negative effect.

So, I'd better keep it interesting...

* a big thankyou to those lovely people, @the_emecks, @Sheamus, @applemacbookpro, @AmyVernon, @davefitch, @jerryjamesstone, @ash_matadeen, @gamebittk @chrisnixon @alpower for the retweetage...

Blu-Ray Review : Hidden ( Caché )

Where do you start? Or, perhaps more importantly, where do you end? Let's get the obvious things out of way. The plot revolves around a TV presenter (Daniel Autueil) and his wife ( Juliette Binoche ) who are being sent VHS tapes (wrapped in alarming child-like drawings) of themselves being watched and their subsequent quest to find out who is doing it.

Also worth very quickly stating that while the Blu-Ray print is decent enough, this is not a film that is in any way enhanced by watching in Blu-Ray. This is lo-fi French cinema. There are a few shots that look quite sparkly but, on the whole, you'll lose nothing from watching this on DVD.

So, it seems to be quite a straightforward thriller plot. And, for the most part, it is. But you would be wrong to get drawn into the film on that basis alone. Fans of Michael Bay should stay well away. The pace is very slow, quite deliberately so. It's very stripped down and bleak. You get drawn in to the languid style so when the shocking moments come you really do get a shock and remain a little wary thereafter. And I did get a shock, I actually threw my hands up over my face like a Victorian woman on seeing a man's ankle.

*** Caution : slight risk of spoiler from here ***

What will make this film linger in the mind is the one thing that is the most irksome as you watch. We are used to a shape of cinema with a nicely defined beginning, middle and end. At the end of Taggart, we always know who did the murrrdurrr(sic) and we have fun trying to guess which of the low-grade Scottish actors it was. We are used to neat resolution. Even the most challenging and convoluted of Hollywood movies like The Usual Suspects does it's best to explain to the audience what has been going on so you can leave the cinema thinking "ooh, that was clever". Hidden doesn't do that. It makes no allowances for our stupidity. You don't get a resolution. You are left with clues and the desire to work the rest out for yourself. There is even evidence online that many people missed the big clue at the very end of the film completely.

What is revealed is that the film isn't about the central plot at all, it is about how the characters react to the plot. It's not that the plot dooesn't matter but it is simply the bones on which the messages of the film are hung. So, it's a good job that the acting performances are great. Autueil seems to do well at the guilt and retribution thing (albeit with nothing as colourful as carnations on show here).

Did I enjoy it? Yes. Did it annoy me? Yes. Was I more interested in the plot afterwards because of the lack of discrete ending. Most definitely. And I'm not the only one. A very quick trawl of the interweb found many discussions on what exactly was going on.

If you don't get irritated by the style and pace of French (or, more accurately in this case, German ) cinema and you don't mind being left with a challenge at the end, then I would definitely recommened this film. Although I'm almost certain that many people will get to the end with a simple "Eh? That was shite." type reaction.

Soundtrack of Your Life

If they made a film of your life what songs would you have in the soundtrack for which scenes? It was a sunny Friday drive to work today and the Shuffle Gods chose Mornington Crescent by Belle and Sebastian. It seemed to fit perfectly. Albeit the lyrics didn't quite work, I've not got a job for a Senegalese (nor, indeed, am I in nip). No matter. Had I been filming that scene for an autobiographical movie, that would have been the musical accompaniment.

So, today's Friday Fun meme is, think of a scene(s) from your life and what song would you'd play over the top. I'm thinking more stylistically rather than literally but you can walk round an Aston Martin garage listening to "I Want The One I Can't Have" by The Smiths if you're not feeling to imaginative.

My film would definitely have a scene where I'm driving in the dark listening to There There by Radiohead. I'm sure Long Snake Moan by PJ Harvey would appear at some point too. :-)

A Quiet Night On Twitter

An interesting night was had on Twitter last night.

@canongatebooks and @davesimps0n organised a "world's first" Twitter based interview with former band members of The Fall to promote Dave's book The Fallen. It started slowly but got into something of a swing. The idea was to use the hashtag #TheFallen to control the ebb and flow of questions. Great idea and should have been fairly simple. Unfortunately, it was somewhat let down by Twitter (and probably more specifically Twitter Search) as many of the tagged Tweets seemed not to appear (although I did see all of mine in the search).

I did discover, however, that you should take Hex Enduction Hour to a desert island as the vinyl was very thick and would therefore make a good paddle.

It's a shame when something new like this is let down by some pretty basic failings. I hope people aren't put off from trying this kind of thing again. Praise goes to Dave and Canongate Books for having go.

One other aspect that this attempt showed was that it is difficult for people to maintain focus on including the hashtag with the ebb and flow of replies and retweets. I suspect there is a feature in there somewhere for a Twitter client to allow the user to 'lock' themselves into a conversation and automatically add the necessary hashtag. This would help keep all the conversation visible. At the very least, when replying to a tweet that contains a hashtag automatically adding the tag in the reply would help a lot.

Interestingly, during the interview another mini-Twitter event broke out with @csteinle tweeting live from a siege incident in Edinburgh using hashtag #DalrySiege.

So, there I was, watching an interview with The Fall and a live siege from a couple of miles away. All on the same platform. Shows how diverse a vehicle Twitter can be. But evidence suggests it still needs to work a little better.

HTC Touch HD - A Slight Annoyance

Ok, so you're all gonna say, "should have got an iPhone". Maybe so, but I couldn't be arsed changing provider and, for the most part, my HTC Touch HD is a very capable phone.

It does everything I need. I'm used to Windows Mobile so the messaging, emailing is good, web browsing is really nice and the camera is great. OK, so I can't download a spirit level app, but hey, you can't have everything.

I have one fairly major gripe about it though. It relates to the way the TouchFLO^TM 3D has been integrated with Windows Mobile.

My desk at work suffers from some pretty poor signal. It's not a huge issue but it drops out on occasion. The HTC Touch HD TouchFLO interface has a rather nice SMS overlay over the standard Windows Mobile messaging. You can flick through the messages on the touch screen with a pleasing animation.

So, a message arrives and appears in the TouchFLO interface. You click reply, compose send. You return to the TouchFLO interface. Job done. Nay not so. The problem is, if your signal has dropped out and the message doesn't get sent you are in trouble.

Why? Well, Windows Mobile knows it hasn't sent the message. It even pops up a very informative "Text message cannot be sent" modal dialogue. Unfortunately, this is under the TouchFLO interface so you don't see it. It gets worse. Because the error is a modal dialogue, it is waiting for you to click OK and therefore you don't get notified of the arrival of any more messages until you click through the TouchFLO interface and clear the dialogue.

This is some pretty dumbass design.

So, I've had a few instances of "did you get my text?". "No, oh hang on..."

I'm aware of it now so it doesn't catch me out as often but in the heat of battle I still click send and forget to check.

If you have an HTC Touch HD, beware...

Half Year Review

A little late, but here's how I'm doing against the goals of the year so far.

1. Throw Some Stuff Out
Strike one! Having a skip in the drive for ages helped but I did throw out a lot of stuff. The garage has still to be reclaimed but progress has been made.

2. A Great Photo
Hard to judge this one but this year's Sucata Split offered up some great photo ops. I am particularly pleased with this shot of Bruges. Mainly because it was exactly what I set out to get. Doesn't happen often enough!




3. A Complete First Draft
This won't happen this year. I'm starting to get the itch to get writing again. The story won't go away.

4. Sell Film Rights for The Beatle Man
Ha-ha.

5. Spend Less Money
Well, we now have a converted loft, so that worked. Ok, so there is much decoration left to do but, based on the stated aims, this one has worked. Although, it has, paradoxically, involved spending a lot of money. Such is the way of progress.

6. Lose Weight
Failed, failing, fat and forty hear I come.

7. Time Division Multiplexing
This has almost worked. It has, unfortunately, given me a way of doing nothing too. Which wasn't really the idea.

8. No Alarms
No alarms so far and some really good news too. Long may that continue.

AOB?
Well, a few things I need to add in:

9. The Photo Project
Something that I started this year, I need to get the website live and get cracking very soon. This is the number 1 on the project list for now. I have been procrastinating like a bad one... there is actually very little left to do. Maybe get the decorating done first. Feel free to help by repeated "Is it done yet?" quips...

10. More Writing
There are two other projects on the go, one fairly far on, the other at the very beginning. These will happen before the next book. I also need to think about a submission to Stu.

The most remarkable thing about this year is that it's August. Whoosh, wallop, boing, gone.