Month: April 2004

I don’t get it. If you were a company selling bespoke computers on the grounds that they’re stunningly beautiful and feature fanatical attention to detail, you’d make sure the text on your website didn’t alias really badly, wouldn’t you?

Not much in the last few weeks has distressed me more than watching the Thunderbirds trailer. The art direction looks terrific, but oh dear heavens, there are children in it. And what’s with the Gladiator-pastiche music? Oh wait… it’s a Hans Zimmer soundtrack.

[sigh]

Is it just me, or does this forthcoming SciFi Channel show:

MONSTER SMASH: A reality series where actors are placed under heavy makeup to look like monsters, then they fight each other to see which “monster” wins. Stan Winston is one of the team developing the project

…sound like one of the worst formats ever?

One of the hidden secrets of the television industry is: you can never get decent TV reception inside a broadcaster. Our own aerials are always shot, so one must recourse to the ‘house ring,’ which is a company-local cable system. It carries, usually, the studio feeds (so you can watch what’s going on with, say, Countdown), tied-line link feeds (‘from our studio in Hull’) and off-air channels. If the company is also a broadcaster, there’s also usually a ‘transmission out’ feed. Which causes all the problems, because what goes up to, say, Emley Moor, arrives back about 200msec later. Which causes a right royal ghosting nightmare on any bog-standard domestic set hooked up to the system. In my present office, I actually get a better picture by unplugging the aerial cable from the wall outlet and dunking it in my tea. I must stand very still, about three feet in front of the telly, and then it’s not too bad.

At my current home-away-from-home, meanwhile, ‘TV’ is a 2″ handheld LCD thing with a telescopic aerial. It’s surprisingly good.

Quality viewing. Marvelous.

My comments today to customer services at O2.

1. Trying to register: click ‘register,’ enter mobile number, click ‘continue.’ SMS arrives telling me to visit www.02.co.uk and to ‘enter the verification code when requested.’ Where am I supposed to do this?

2. Why is this text entry box in the feedback form so tiny? I can see about eight words.

3. The page design does not make it clear if I’m in ‘Personal’ or ‘Business.’ One tab is highlighted – but is it the bright one or the dark one? (Answer: The bright one is the same colour as the menu bar. But it’s the dark one that counts).

4. I’m trying to find GPRS data tarifs. I’ve no idea where they are, nor how I might change the one I’m on. There is no ‘search’ feature.

5. I didn’t have any of these problems two months ago. The site looks the same now, only it doesn’t work.

The Queen speaks fluent French? Well, of course she does, I guess – language of diplomacy, and all that. But is her accent as bizarre in French as it is in English? Maybe I’ve lived outside London for too long, but it’s been a long time since I heard that scraping-glass sort of tone from anybody else.

Speaking of which: Daniel’s just offered to try to source me a ticket to Henley again, bless him. Fingers crossed, I’ll have another dose of elitist snobbery to look forward to in early July. Pip-pip.

[written last weekend, but strangely neglected in the intervening week, then spotted again today and updated with a couple of other linkbloggy spots]

Back in Glasgow, catching up with online stuff while I actually have some bandwidth. Time for some linkblog action:

SensitiveLight – beautiful pictures for your desktop, and a fine photoblog to boot.

Sometimes it’s useful to catch a glimpse of how others regard us, however disagreeable the view: Phil Greenspun on the Spanish elections and European attitudes to the ‘War on Terror.’ It’s a pity Greenspun reinforces preconceptions of American attitudes, but one does begin to appreciate how they got there. And I imply all meanings of that phrase.

Wikipedia keeps getting better and better. Added to my reading list: what looks (at first glance) like a decent explanation of what ‘NP-complete’ means. Something I’ve wanted to understand for a while.

I believe I am the primary UK market for blank white index cards, and yet I’ve still to play this game. Hopefully I shall soon.

I doubt I’ll ever truly understand why I find myself reading things like this critique of Technorati’s redesign. Then again, I know to what the ‘stealing sheep’ comment refers. Incidentally, my boss at work is handing around Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves; I’ve declined the offer, having no desire to read it again. It’s so badly set, for heaven’s sake!

Finally! Whoever’s directing the BBC’s coverage of the Boat Race has found the right part to play back. Yeach, that’s nasty. Heck, I’d be aggrieved if I was the Oxford cox, but it’s not yet clear if the incident wasn’t his fault anyway. There won’t be much comfort in the umpire’s comments, either. “It’s a pity,” he understates nicely.

Balls. I missed Jem’s Zero to Hero on C4. Merde. (last week’s was the first ep)

Continuing the national image/self-image thing: Bush jokes about WMD. This man isn’t just standing for President, he is the President. Sheesh.

See, if anatomy had been taught more like this, maybe I wouldn’t have found it so dull. [Warning: the first image is tremendously Icky, until you work out that it’s sponge cakes. Then it’s merely icky.]

Today, I watched Jem Stansfield’s latest escapade, Zero to Hero. It’s (yet) another Scrapheap-style ‘two teams build things’ show, this time with nutty punters strapping frighteningly explosive contraptions to themselves in the hopes of bending steel bars. All while dangling from a safety rope, but with nary a hint of eye protection.

Well, it’s quite good fun. It looks good, the setup is suitably barking, and the presentation competent. Certainly, it’s a damned sight better than Demolition Day, which for my money was one of the worst of these sorts of shows (so bad, in fact, it got pulled before completing its run, and there’s no longer any mention on Channel 4’s site).

So, anyway. Yeah, it’s fun, but… sorry, I doubt I’ll bother to watch any more. Lots of glossy production doesn’t hide the fact that the producers failed to work out how they were pitching the thing. So the on-screen presentation is fairly straight, but then the voice-over and graphics are campy as heck. Which is it, folks? Make your minds up. Oh no, too late – you made the show last year, didn’t you?

You’d think it’d be easy: just pick an idea and run with it. At heart, it is that easy, but it rarely seems it until you’re heavily into ‘in retrospect.’ As I sit in the office wrestling with the different directions my current project might go, I know this all too well. But what I find frustrating about Zero to Hero’s variation on the theme is that there’s a better idea in there somewhere, hidden just below the surface.

Helping the punters are not only Jem and another engineer (taking one team each), but a comic book artist and a seamstress. And those moments are hilarious and wonderful, but the dynamic is completely different to that between the punters and the engineers. Why? Any particular reason, or did nobody notice? Then there are the ‘helping friends’, who spend pretty much the entire show getting in the way of the close-ups… and not much else. And the basic problems of these shows aren’t addressed, either: nothing happens for the first half-hour or so, because (frankly), they’d all be better in a 45 or 50-minute slot than an hour. The challenge is so arbitrary, it has to be restated seven times through the show, and still there are random extra rules that surprise and irritate during the final scenes.

Blech. On my ToDo list following The Big Bang: write this screed up properly, and try to spot the ‘better idea.’ Though I suspect Scrappy Races was pretty much it.

Meanwhile: Jem: yes, you were pretty good, I thought. But would I have signed off on that risk assessment? Hell, no.