Pete's Eats

I took my son to see the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie tonight.

It’s a brave attempt all right, but to be honest it was shite…

The good things? Marvin, The Heart of Gold, the Vogons, Trillian, Slarti. That’s about it really.

The bad things? Arthur, Ford, Zaphod, the Book and well, just about everything else.

Arthur, played by Martin Freeman, was just like a character from the BBC’s ‘The Office’. I was sorely disappointed with this as I really imagined that he would fit right into it. You might say that Arthur’s character is supposed to be a middle-class white collar type of person that you’d find in ‘The Office’ and maybe you’re right but seeing Mr Freeman in that role was a little bit too close for comfort for me.

Zaphod was simply awful. Ford was totally wrong but being such a departure from the original could have really shone. The Book – well, I had seriously high hopes for the Book being narrated by Stephen Fry but in the end, it hardly made an appearance during the whole film. The Book’s graphics were a few hundred £’s worth of basic Flash work albeit prepared by the world famous, multi-award winning Shynola – thereby probably costing a much higher number of £’s instead…

The script that *was* true to the original was missing most of it’s context and very often it’s punchline. Very scrappy.

I could go on, but I think you get the gist of what I think. It’s very hard being such a HHGTTG purist and divorcing my thoughts, knowledge and expectations from the film’s offering but I genuinely feel that even if I could I would be desperately confused as to what it all meant. For the purist it’s just all wrong and for someone who doesn’t know the work previously it’s disjointed and confusing.

It could have been so much better…

Separated at birth?

And, just in case you were thinking about it, no this is not anti-catholic or anything like it – it’s just a funny thing I was thinking about at the pub… Any commenters who think otherwise – well, you should be ashamed of yourself…

So, after the events of two weeks ago, we’re still teetering on the edge of ‘will she, won’t she’ but it has given us some time to really appreciate our position and actually think about all of this – life can be too fast sometimes…

Anyway, we had some time to take some photo’s today and I proudly present Nete and Kate (Kate’s the one hiding inside)

Google Maps makes it to the UK

Seems to work *very* well so far, although I haven’t yet worked out if there are any satellite images like the US version as yet…

Someone’s stealing my letters!

Joi blogs about the start of the Prix Ars Electronica jury meetings today.

It’s been a couple of years since I last took part in a jury there. In fact, my last time was in 2002 when the Net Vision/Net Excellence categories were still in place and that was where I actually first met with Joi. I remember* he was one of two PC users in a room of Mac’s… I hope that I’ll be invited back at some stage – Linz is a great place, and the people of ORF are brilliant hosts…

The Prix Ars Electronica is arguably one of the finest Arts Festivals in the world. Strangely, there is very little coverage of it here in the UK and most people have never heard of it – people who really should have in fact. Even when you take the time to explain and evangelise the event to talented designers & artists they seem to dismiss it without much consideration – it’s very bizarre.

Anyway, here is a Flickr album of that jury session…

* – Actually, that isn’t the only reason I specifically remember him from there but I’d better not mention that particular adventure here…

#104052 +(6208)- [X]

<NES> lol

<NES> I download something from Napster

<NES> And the same guy I downloaded it from starts downloading it from me when I’m done

<NES> I message him and say “What are you doing? I just got that from you”

<NES> “getting my song back fucker”

#25464 +(6026)- [X]

<kow`> “There are 10 types of people in the world… those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

<SpaceRain> That’s only 2 types of people, kow.

<SpaceRain> STUPID

You can read the rest of them here. Absolutely hilarious

(Seen on Mamamusings)

Adobe acquires Macromedia – ouch, never thought I would see *that* particular move…

Note: What follows is a summary of my initial thoughts only. This is a huge shift for a great number of people obviously, and they impact will be felt in many, many ways. The bits below are just my initial ramblings…

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From a consumer’s point of view I think this is a questionable turn of events. In some respects (but not all, obviously) the two company’s product ranges have offered competing lines for many years. In my opinion it’s this that drives continual (and speedy) product improvement cycles which we have seen, particularly from Macromedia, a lot of in the past 5 years say. These two companies merging their offering will provide a much lesser requirement for them to continue that…

This is aside from lots of other questions about Macromedia’s (excellent) practise of engaging the community on so many levels. It’s my experience that Adobe, whilst reaching out to specific people at specific times, is much more formal when it comes to consumer relationships. I guess we’ll have to wait for the specifics to emerge properly to call this type of thing, but it’s just one concern I have out of many.

I count a lot of Macromedia staff as good friends – both here in the UK/Europe and in the States and I hope this all goes well for them. Personally, I think that on the whole, they’ve done an excellent job over the years and I hope that Adobe recognise that too…

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From a mobile point of view however, I think this could be excellent news. Recent announcements about partnerships with companies like Nokia have strengthened their position over the (in my opinion) extremely mishandled rollout of Flash-Lite and the Adobe situation has the potential to take it all to the next step. Adobe have embraced mobile markup languages in GoLive to a level that Dreamweaver hasn’t yet matched and they’ve taken huge leaps to promote the use of SVG on mobiles too. Tying this all in with Flash-Lite has got the hallmarks of a killer development environment leading to killer end-user apps I think.

Of course, this is the ideal situation, but maybe the beancounters will have a different idea… I hope not. More commentary on the mobile situation to come as I gather my thoughts…

—-

So, also, this will probably be the end of Fireworks (about time!) and I can’t see Freehand survive much longer now either… Flash is fairly safe I would hope (speaking from a product line-up point of view only) and who knows, maybe we’ll see a revival of Director?

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See? The impact of this is huge…

There are a few people blogging about this new Comic Life software I know, but having played with it a bit I’m totally hooked…

This was my first attempt:

Sorry about that…

So, I’m sitting here thinking how to write the sound you’d make when pulling your own hair out – the title of this post is the closest I can get I think. It’s a pathetic attempt I know – but there isn’t a great deal of scope to pull my own hair out so I’m having to guess…

The past 8 days have been pretty full-on. Last Monday, Nete started to have contraction pains at 4am so we trotted off to the hospital in a fairly urgent manner. It being 4am in Brighton we managed the journey in a fairly quick time thankfully because when we arrived at the maternity unit they declared that Nete was in the early stages of labour… At 33 weeks it’s a bit of a deal that – not a big deal mind you, not really these days, but still. They promptly produced some tablets that are supposed to slow down the contractions. They needed to do this so that they could administer two sets of injections, 24 hours apart, of steroids that would develop baby-Kate’s lungs prior to birth. The tablets worked and the course of steroids was successfully completed…

Two days later the contractions were still coming at an alarming rate/intensity but nothing else was happening. Nete kept telling the midwives that she felt like she needed to ‘have a big fart’ and they in turn kept looking at her with a raised eyebrow. It turns out that this wasn’t because it’s perhaps a bit odd to share this kind of information with a complete stranger but rather because this is a tell-tale sign of impending birth…

Three days later the contractions are still the same. Nete has stopped telling the midwives about her ‘needs’ because she began to fear the eyebrow.

Four days later and still everything is as it was on day one but Nete’s not saying anything now because she just wants to come home.

Five days later and she manages to convince the doctor that all is well – but the midwife is on to her… Thankfully, she empathises enough with Nete to keep the dirty secret and the doctor finally signs her out after a further two hours of monitoring – without the contraction monitor attached thanks to the friendly midwife…

So, the upshot is that Nete is now home and walking around rubbing her ever expanding tum whilst grabbing things randomly and breathing through her ‘tightenings’ (we don’t mention the ‘C’ word now) and I look on with ever increasing levels of panic.

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Tomorrow I shall catch up on emails and the like – assuming nothing happens between now and then.