Category: Uncategorized

What to think of the new Secret Intelligence Service (AKA MI6) website? Should we be impressed by the understated-yet-stylish design, or appreciative of the clean XHTML page code? Or – perhaps more to the point – should we be mildly surprised by the Russian language version of the site. Er… what? I suppose one can understand Arabic and maybe Chinese versions, but if Russian… then why Spanish and – gasp – French? Are they alert to potential skullduggery by the dastardly garlic-eaters? Surely not!

The other mildly bizarre blogworld thing to have happened last week goes like this; two-and-a-half years ago I posted a quote from Eddie Mair on PM which rather amused me. Six months later, I noted that a surprising number of visitors reach my blog via a Google search for ‘Eddie Mair,’ (still in the top 10!) and hypothesised that a Mair-stalking blog would be a sure-fire Google hit.

Well… Roland McLain-Smith has recently started exactly that blog: Eddie Mair Watch. I know this because he’s quoted my original story, linked to The Daily Grind, and left a polite comment informing me. Which is all well and good and perfectly reasonable and even rather amusing, but… but… actually, no, I suppose it isn’t stalking. Quite.

Still a bit weird, though. I wonder what Eddie thinks?

Oh, and if you’ve no idea who this Mair character is – Wikipedia can, as ever, fill you in.

In preparation for ditching my Demon dialup account (yes, I still have that), I recently yanked all the website rubbish that was there. Nothing had been touched in something like five years, and archive.org has its mitts on it anyway, so I figured it didn’t really matter.

Of course, the next day somebody got in touch asking where something had gone – specifically, the wonderful X-Ray image of a Newton MessagePad 2100 that Martin took, waaaay back in the day. I still had the originals of course, and happily the somebody – Grant Hutchinson, take a bow – has now posted the scan to Flickr. Not only that, but he’s improved on the original by annotating as many of the bits as he can make out.

Ah, Newton. Mine’s still in a state of torpor, since there’s data on it I don’t wish to lose (notes written during my US road trip), but I don’t think it’s ever going to boot again without being brain-wiped. Bit of a dilemma, that, and as a result I haven’t used it in two years. I miss it. Still the most elegant user interface designed.

I’ve suspected this has been going on for a while, but haven’t had a good example until now: Technorati search results don’t seem to be stable. If you run a search and hit ‘reload,’ I guess you get cached data, but if you wait a few minutes and search again, you get different results. You’d expect this if there have been new results… but you wouldn’t expect the older results to disappear, would you? They do.

Ten minutes ago I ran a search for sites linking to Gia’s Sunshine blog (see previous post), which found six inbound links in the last day. Now, it finds two inbound links in the last two days.

Technorati broken? Old news. But they’ve recently upgraded a bunch of stuff and I was hoping it was more stable. But either they’re still tweaking heavily (on a Sunday?) or there’s something deeply whacked-out going on in there.

Finally seeing the light of day (ho ho): the blog for the new Alex Garland/Danny Boyle film that may or may not be called ‘Sunshine.’ The blog’s being written by Gia (hurrah!), with video bits from Damien; watch this video to hear them… arguing about whether they can film spacesuits or not.

The IgNobel prizes for 2005 have been awarded. Go; read; laugh.

Scrap It! is out of studio. It’s finished. Out of time. Done. Dusted. Over. We have – to use the jargon – wrapped. Hoo-ruddy-rah.

It was rather good fun in the end. All a bit mad, but much better this week than last. There are parts which will make me wince when I see them back in the edit, but rather more that will make me laugh. I’ll be fascinated to see how it all goes together, and while some of it will doubtless be cringe-worthy, most’s really not at all bad. And nobody got too snappy, we all had something resembling fun, and we’re all still on speaking terms.

We didn’t quite get everything done that we hoped to, but that’s partly because we kept adding stuff. I’m confident there’s a series’-worth in the can, and if I’m wrong we still have a contingency plan. But I’m seriously looking forward to the edit next week. In the meantime, however, I feel a very significant sleep may be in the offing.

This week, I’m filming Scrap It!, and as usual one of the weird aspects of being in studio is that one doesn’t see daylight. Since about 3pm on Sunday, I’ve seen half-light early in the morning… and that’s it. I’ve been aware that it’s been raining – hard – since I’ve had to repeat takes to avoid particularly bad thrashing rain sounds seeping onto the audio tracks. But that’s been my closest connection to the real world.

When it’s all over, my list of desires runs something like:

1. Sleep for a full night.
2. Eat well. Specifically, eat lots of vegetables.
3. Stand in the weather, whatever it is.
4. Listen to the second half of the Today programme, rather than the first half or – if things have gone really badly – Farming Today.

Such forces have, one suspects, driven mankind since we first learned to walk upright.

The overnight figures for Mechannibals were, apparently, something like 1.5 million viewers, which is bang in that grey area between ‘sinking without trace’ (around 1 million) and ‘recommission this now!’ (around 2 million). However, it was up against Frost which evidently cleaned up, and the audience was skewed young, which is apparently causing some excitement since BBC2 engineering shows usually attract an older audience. Mind you, BBC2 engineering shows are usually fronted by Adam Hart-Davis, so…

The audience had dipped from 2 million watching Top Gear, but matched that of Bremner, Bird and Fortune over on Channel 4.

I’m not at all surprised the assorted forum and messageboard posts are so negative, incidentally (see comments to this post for links), in part since the average position of Points of View in particular has always been on the lambasting side of negative. And to be fair, I’m not sure the reviews are entirely wrong. I’ll be interested to see how the rest of the series turns out, since the Bognor shoot that went out first was unusual in being so emotionally divisive during shooting.

As I think I wrote months back, the assumption of the format as sold was that Wife Swap-style angst was vicariously enjoyable, but as the production developed it felt like it was turning more towards telling the stories of the machines. However, I don’t know how it panned out in the edit, which is where the series is really made – it could have gone in several different directions.

To be clear – I do believe the emotions on display last Sunday were an honest depiction of what happened. Building something like a shed-destroying machine, in two days, is an emotional journey, and a process that I think only Science Shack has tried to capture previously (maybe Now Get Out of That too, back in the 1980s). So there should always be moments of horror and struggle and disagreement. Equally, the families all wanted to win: some more than others, true, but they certainly weren’t duped into the show. Indeed, some were rather alarmingly up for ripping their houses apart, and certainly most did so with rather more readiness than we wanted – one needs a certain amount of reticence for the story to make sense!

I’m fascinated to see how the rest of the series pans out. I was there, but I’ve seen none of the other finished shows.

First post about Mechannibals I can find on the BBC messageboards:

The BBC’s attempt at ‘Scrap-Heap Challenge’ I presume.
What an absolute load of c**p!

Tee-hee.