The Daily Grind

…Aer Lingus gave to me:

• Six stags hung-over
• Five minutes’ delay
• Four bawling babes
• Three snoring gents
• Two mad women
• …and a flight attendant who could not smile

It’s a damned sight more pleasant than Ryanair, though.

What, did nobody behind this ghastly thing at Argos see The Godfather? It gets worse: it ships as a kit, with a plastic horse’s skull into which you stick pins ‘to give flesh depth’, then lay on modeling clay to sculpt muscles. There’s also a ‘skin-making jig, eyeballs, and ears.’

What were they thinking?

Via the magnificent Ben Craven: the officially-mandated cleaning regime for international standard platinum-iridium kilogram prototypes (2Mb PDF download). You have to read this in order to appreciate the subtlety of the process, which begins by scrubbing the thing with a finger wrapped in a solvent-soaked chamois. Genius.

(file alongside ‘ISO standard for making tea,’ which was, I think, the story that got Kevin Marks reading The Daily Grind. Gosh, fame. etc. Oh, and while you’re at it, take a look at Ben’s magnificent never-turning gear train. Double genius.)

Web 2.0 technology or Star Wars character? I scored 37/43, which would scare me silly if I had any clue which ones I got wrong.

One of the guilty secrets of the glossy world of broadcast TV is that, behind the scenes, it’s all far more shabby than viewers realise. We’re highly adept at designing, building, lighting and shooting everything so it looks glossy, and then somehow it all looks better on your TV at home anyway. Hence one of the running gags of TV: come the age of high-definition, we’re screwed, because you’re all going to notice that the glamorous world of TV is, in fact, scrappy as hell.

I’ve always thought of this as it related to studio sets and things like presenters’ fingernails in extreme close-ups, both of which will have to be prepared to a higher standard for HD (and, thus, would be prohibitively expensive). Reading a review of Miglia’s natty little TVMini HD off-air HD receiver, however, I stumble across an altogether more significant worry: Evangeline Lilly has laughter lines (scroll down for a particularly well-chosen frame).

Now, this is interesting. Suddenly, all those impossibly beautiful television personalities and actors are revealed to be exactly what they are: human. And, frankly, a whole lot less gorgeous in person than one expects. In many ways this isn’t a great shock, but some of the implications perhaps are:

Firstly, maintaining current levels of implausible perfection will require either cinema-grade make-up, lighting, and photography (prohibitively expensive), or a new generation of digital post-production make-up artists to almost literally paper over the cracks. Now, one hesitates to describe rotoscoping as ‘potentially cheaper’ than anything, but perhaps it can be. If so, one can envisage some celebs insisting on being post-produced only by their named artist, just as they currently insist on particular make-up and hair personnel. but this is still the high end of the market we’re talking about.

The only alternative I can see is that we’ll all come to realise just how ridiculous the whole situation is, and accept people more for what they are than for what crappy PAL/NTSC has previously presented them as. Which would, I think, be a Good Thing all round in terms of body self-image, and all that.

Finally, one wonders if the final refuge of true cinematographic glamour will be not high-definition at all. Working on the principle that it’s what you don’t show that counts, could it be that the home of the perceived-beautiful will become… YouTube?

Huh. Fancy that.

Fed up with .DS_Store crap appearing all over shared (Windows) drives? Think it’s a bit steep to cough up for BlueHarvest to fix something that arguably shouldn’t happen anyway?

Try this. It amounts to:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Seems to work for me.

(If this makes no sense to you, just ignore me).

Incidentally – and apropos of diddly-squat – the other week I found out what happens when Mac OS X runs out of hard disk space. Not, I hasten to add, on my machine, but on a colleague’s five year-old iBook running 10.3, on a 10Gb drive, bless.

The short answer is: not a lot. It refuses to save anything, obviously, and everything goes veeeery verrrry slooooooowwwwwwlyyyy, but it basically keeps running. Which surprised the hell out of me.

The owner was marginally less surprised, but then, she had been clicking ‘OK’ every morning on polite little dialogue boxes telling her that her startup disk was terribly terribly close to being full. For six months. In the end, we managed to reclaim 3Gb simply by shifting all her music off, backing up her Entourage mail database, then letting the poor iBook crunch away for three hours repairing and compacting said mail database, and finally putting all the music back on.

Yes, 30% of her drive was taken up by fragmentation in Entourage’s monolithic database. Nice as it is, I remember why I stopped using Em@iler all those years ago…

About 1/460th, apparently.

Lovely use here of a digital stills camera, a time-lapse controller, and a very slow-panning automated tripod head: ‘Lapses in Light‘ by Ollie Larkin.

£7,108.50? For an Aston Martin Vanguishtageguard? Driven by a guy who keeps writing them off and getting them machine-gunned, and thus has a positively negative no-claims bonus?

What, he’s getting a huge discount for keeping it garaged every night? He’s assumed to be parking it in the safest areas of town? They’re considering Q’s electrified handles as equivalent to a Thatcham Category LXXVII alarm? Or is ‘secret agent’ a perversely low insurance risk occupation, compared to, say, ‘television producer’?

I can see only two ways this makes sense:

1. Virgin insurance wanted a bit of free press, on reflection realised that a huge premium might not be the best story, and hence spun the figure down until it sounded vaguely plausible to them.
2. I’m getting stiffed for insurance on my 10,000-mile/year Smart parked in G41.

Both thoughts are likely correct.