Mike's Blog

This list isn't at all based on things I've done or thought recently at all. Honest.

• The Pet Shop Boys are a really underrated band.
• If you meet someone who looks very very similar to someone you fancy, it shouldn't make sense that you don't fancy the new person you meet. This is odd as the original (hypothetical) fancy was (theoretically) demonstrably attractive, and certainly the new (hypothetical) one is. Yet, (certainly in this hypothetical case which doesn't exist at all) the new (hypothetical one) isn't at all (hypothetically) fanciable. Why? Discuss.
• After the BIP FC débacle, I really should have learnt that taking responsibility for another football team might be a Really Bad Idea. But no.
• If you're a criminal using someone else's bank card, it's not wise to have an invoice for items you've purchased sent to the real card owners address.
• It's time Underworld played some concerts anywhere in the North West/Midlands.
• Someone should give the Daily Show's Jon Stewart a show without an audience full of baying idiots. It'd make the show so much more watchable.
• Despite its multiple similarities to Mac OS X, and the fact that the worst things about it still remain (dll hell, the registry etc), Windows Vista is a surprisingly credible OS. Dare I say it, the core assets of the interface are possibly more visually striking than OS X.
• Starting playing The Sims again was probably a Really Bad Idea.
• On a similar note, the upcoming Intel Mac native FM2007 might rank up there in the Really Bad Ideas camp, but we'll see on that front.
• I am becoming more and more convinced that I'll end up moving to Birmingham after my degree. This is both Good and Bad for varying reasons which I'm not discussing now.

Posted by Mike at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm not going to go into the depths of international politics here (not least because much of it I am still generally hazy about) but I wanted to just share one quick tale.

Since the early days of the internet, weak political discussions have been one of the most popular activities. Originally these were on early BBS systems, moving on to Usenet, and now typically on blogs (you can see a modern example of this on the Guardian's Comment is Free site) all of which follow the same general pattern. A biased (in the Guardian's case typically liberal) post is replied to by a right wing commenter, who then starts an argument over broader issues with the left wing Guardian readers.

This kind of discussion lead to the creation of Godwin's Law. Quoting from Wikipedia:

Godwin's Law (also Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is a mainstay of Internet culture, an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. It is particularly concerned with logical fallacies such as reductio ad Hitlerum, wherein an idea is unduly dismissed or rejected on ground of it being associated with persons generally considered "evil". The law states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

{…}

There is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress. This principle is itself frequently (though perhaps incorrectly) referred to as Godwin's Law.

So, I was somewhat amused to look at the BBC News website this evening and see the headline Bush compares Bin Laden to Hitler.

George, in the minds of much of the internet generation, you've now lost the "War on Terror". Congratulations.

Godwin's biggest scalp to date.

Posted by Mike at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Some of you are probably aware of my aversion to music lyrics, but as it's a useful prelude to what I'm about to launch into, I will recap.

It is my opinion that lyrics are simply an addition to music. They are simply an extra layer, they are not deep and meaningful, they do not define a generation, and they are simply something for someone to sing along to. Great music can be instrumental (be it contemporary or classical), great music can contain lyrics in a language you can't understand. Lyrics can, of course, occasionally be quite cool - I have always liked the line "The year 3000 may still come to pass, but the music shall last" from Sterling Void's classic house track It's Alright - but overall they could say pretty much anything.

In short, they're just an extra layer of music which as a rule shouldn't make or break a good piece of music.

But unfortunately, the key word here is should. I have a sad example of how lyrics can, and have, utterly changed a track. The track in question is one I've linked up to the right here for many months now - Changes by Scottish DJ/producer Chris Lake. It's a relatively simple track steeped in the traditional sounds of earlyish house music, capped off with a very simple yet incredibly effective house piano riff. I think it's a fantastic track. No lyrics, just a beat, some bass, a few effects, and the piano riff. Nothing more was needed.

Clearly someone disagreed. The result is, shall we say, nothing short of horrific. The lyrics have been layered on top with seemingly little thought as to how they will impact on the acoustics, and they are utterly meaningless drivel.

Listen if you dare.

Posted by Mike at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ever since I've been old enough to, I have always enjoyed losing myself in big cities. By default up to now, I've always done it alone, as I don't think anyone else shares quite my interest in this pastime, and certainly not in quite the way I do.

Since I first visited London in 2000, I have tried to visit at least once a year for this very purpose. Until this time last year though, I had largely left one area of Central London untouched - the City. Since then, it really has transformed into somewhere I love being.

The area now known as the City - affectionately known as the Square Mile - is the financial capital of London, the UK, and arguably Europe. It is unique in that outside of the rush hours, the streets in the City are almost deserted. Despite its location smack bang next to the West End, the permanent population of the City is only 9,000 with around 320,000 people flocking in to work there during the week. So outside of these hours, what you have is a massively impressive shell of a city with all the amenities needed, except a population. It is bizarre.

So when I went down to London on Saturday, my first stop was the City. Arriving there at around 1030, on exiting the tube I found a relatively quiet street, a handful of pedestrians, and on an absolutely perfect day, it was a perfect time to photograph the area.

As the site of the original settlement of London, the city has some absolutely remarkable architectural juxtapositions. For example on Coleman Street, one can find this church.

Walking a little further down the road you can see this:

And I am still to get over the absolutely spectacular Swiss Re Building, aka the Gherkin. Not only is it stunning, but it just reeks of modernity and coolness in its position:

I'm not going to go on for too much longer about this, because I'm getting boring and geeky, but I have a set of a few of the photos from Saturday on my on my Flickr page.

If you're ever in Central London and have an hour or two to spare with a camera and don't fancy slumming it with the masses at Buck Palace/Piccadilly Circus/Madame Tussauds, head to Bank station on the Central Line, Northern Line (Bank branch), District Line, Circle Line, Waterloo & City Line or DLR (there's enough ways to make it there) have a peek.

Posted by Mike at 12:34 AM | Permalink

If, for some reason, you have a life and don't remember MkI of this little story, it's here.

If, like me, you happen to walk into a room and instantly get your left foot tangled up in a strap on your rucksack, you will be presented with several options.

Under no circumstance should you choose to:

• Wobble extremely for a little while.
• Try and lean back to reach the wardrobe with your left hand, only to miss.
• Lean back forward, and swiftly flail your right leg towards your swivel chair in front of you.

If you do, you might well manage what I did, which was to make absolutely A1 contact between your little toe and the vertical part of your chairs' plastic armrest. After a short crunch, some urle stozzate, two hours with said toe (and foot) placed in a bowl of cold water, a night's sleep, and a day at work, you will end up with something similar to my right little toe at the moment.

If you can avoid this, I'd really recommend it. Unless I don't like you, in which case do as you please.

Posted by Mike at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As I mentioned, I started a summer job this week, and had to go to the agency that technically employs me after work today to sign some forms and associated detritus.

Naturally I was dressed up in business attire, in a suit, and the woman who deals with myself and Kat - my colleague who started this week too - commented on our attire, and said to me "So are you on the lookout for any of the ladies there then?"

I couldn't think of an amusing enough or even a vaguely smart answer, which would express the following sentiments:

• Although most of the staff there are indeed female, most are old enough to be my mother.
• Of the few in their twenties with whom I've actually spoken, all are coupled.
• My general success rate on the women front is similar to that of the 1991 document by Mikhail Gorbachev, entitled "The Soviet Union - Long Term Planning for a Healthy Future".*

So can anyone come up with a good thing I could have said, as opposed to what I actually said, which was an abrupt "No"?

* NB: This document more than likely does not exist.

Posted by Mike at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Since my last entry about a fortnight ago, Mike has somehow found himself a job. To avoid being detected I'm not going to go into deep detail about exactly where it is, but suffice to say it's at a national banking centre for one of the world's biggest banks.

So while that's going on, two whole days of what promises to be a summer of joyful fun (and debts cleared) gives me time to contemplate things of huge importance in life. Such as which songs I'd like to see incorporated into the next Singstar game, which I'm tentatively calling "Singstar: Mike".

If you don't know what Singstar is and can't be bothered to click the link I just worked for all of four seconds to give you, it's a karaoke game for the Playstation 2.

A few songs that I would have included in my list have already been included in some of the previous five installments of the franchise, so unfortunately Singstar: Mike will be lacking the likes of Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears, and It's Tricky by Run DMC. It would, however include the following tracks (excuse the slight New Order bias):

Prince - Kiss

New Order - 1963

Sterling Void - It's Alright

Korgis - Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime

Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart

The Smiths - This Charming Man

Pet Shop Boys - West End Girls

New Order - True Faith

The Source (feat. Candi Staton) - You Got The Love

Maurice - This is Acid

Sinead O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2U

Prefab Sprout - The King of Rock'n'Roll (aka Hot Dog, Jumping Frog, Albuquerque)

Underworld - Born Slippy Nuxx (just imagine how much fun that would be… mayhem)

Caesars - Jerk it Out

New Order - Regret

Orbital - Belfast Massive Attack - Unfinished Sympathy

Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence

Gnarls Barkley - Crazy

U2 - Where the Streets Have No Name

Michael Jackson - Billie Jean

Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield - What have I done to deserve this?

Ray Parker Jr - Ghostbusters

Adamski - Killer (steadfastly not the later Seal re-release, which removed most of the spectacularly dated early 1990s synth effects which gave it so much quaint charm)

The Jam - Going Underground

Manic Street Preachers - Suicide is Painless (not the original, I know - so sue me…)

New Order - World in Motion (great song, with spectacular potential for the rap)

Sir Mix-A-Lot - Baby Got Back

Oasis - Wonderwall

Crystal Waters - Gypsy Woman

Happy Mondays - Step On

What does everyone think of my list, and which songs would make your dream Singstar playlist?

Posted by Mike at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On an initial incidental note - comments have been re-enabled on this blog.

Like most people who dislike poetry, I like good writing. And I'd like to document here two incidences of writing which I consider to be tremendously good.

Both document fantastically bizarre incidents, which some might describe as unsavoury, but the clear and understated method in which it is written hides this until you actually think about what they're saying. Which, in turn, makes them much more enjoyable to read and understand, and makes them even funnier.

The first is an extract from the Wikipedia entry about the KLF, a dance group from the early 1990s.

On 12th February 1992, The KLF and hardcore heavy metal group Extreme Noise Terror performed a live version of 3 a.m. Eternal at the Brit Awards, the British Phonographic Industry's annual awards show. Drummond and Cauty had planned to throw buckets of sheep's blood over the audience, but were prevented from doing so due to opposition from BBC lawyers and "hardcore vegetarian" Extreme Noise Terror. The performance was instead garnished by a limping, kilted, cigar-chomping Drummond firing blanks from an automatic weapon over the heads of the crowd. Later in the evening the band dumped a dead sheep with the message "I died for ewe - bon appetit [sic]" tied around its waist at the entrance to one of the post-ceremony parties.

Reactions were mixed.

And the second comes from the vastly overrated, but apparently seminal book Football Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper. It is from the section about Cameroonian football, and the extract discusses Italia 90 legend Roger Milla.

The general director agreed to an interview (for free) and the next day I found him in his office. It is basic and battered and located in the basement of the Omnisports stadium, just a few doors away from where he kept 120 pygmies from the Cameroonian rainforests locked up last year. Milla had invited the pygmies to play a few games at the Omnisports, to raise money for their health and education, but he imprisoned them there, issued them with guards (one of whom wore a Saddam Hussein T-shirt) and seldom fed them. A tournament spokesman explained to Reuters: "They play better if they don't eat too much." As for the imprisonment: "You don't know the pygmies. They are extremently difficult to keep in control." The Omnisports cook concurred: "These pygmies can eat at any time of day and night and never have enough." The little hunters themself were too frightened to comment.

Their tournament was a disaster. Team named included Bee-sting of Lomie and the aptly named Ants of Salaoumbe, but only 50 fans bought tickets, and most of these came strictly to shout abuse at the pygmies. On the last night of the tournament, Milla staged a charity concert for the pygmies, at which he sang himself (when France Football asked him "Can you sing?" he replied "Let's say, if they rectify my voice in the studio, then yes, I can sing.") Thousands attended the concert. A month later, with the pygmies safely back in their rainforests, Milla proposed a charity game between them and the Bushmen of South Africa. The pygmy reply is not recorded.

Perfection.

Posted by Mike at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Quick thought for the day.

Often when I've come home in the past, either from school or uni, I've sat down and read the newspaper.

When you've spent all day hearing the inside story of how it all got put together, actually reading the end result is almost completely undesirable.

Somewhat ironically, if you're interested in reading journalism, it would appear that being a journalist ruins your appreciation of it somewhat.

Oh well.

Posted by Mike at 9:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's been a little while since my last entry, one that really wasn't so much of an entry as a cut and paste job. I have had quite a few things going on since then, however, so I'll recap.

Around the time of my last entry, I was frantically working on finishing several piece of university work. As always seems to be the way, it seems logical at the time to so end up doing a huge proportion of the work at the last minute, at the end of which you vow to never do the same again. Only to do the exact same thing the very next time.

This, of course, is part of the inevitable cycle which comes with university, and something that the vast majority of students will understand, even though there is no rational sense to it. But, anyway, they got done to a pretty decent level, and I'm not too unhappy with how they ended up.

After this, I returned home for the Easter holiday in a relatively typical move. What is less typical, for me, is that I've spent the last week of it on work placement at the Express & Star in Brierley Hill (near Dudley for the uninitiated). For someone of my inept sleeping levels, waking at 0630 doesn't augur well, so it was something of a relief to have not failed spectacularly at my placement. It's always said that it's not what you know, it's who you know - and I've definitely made some good contacts this week.

After my unexpected good fortune on my first day at the E&S in Wolverhampton back in January, I will return there again on Tuesday to once more ruin my reputation. To say that an 0800 start is bliss is somewhat unheard of for me, but that's what a week in The Real World does for you. This scares me somewhat.

Give it fourteen months and I'm going to be entering that real world properly, and will more than likely end up working for a small weekly or daily regional newspaper in a random part of the country. It's an interesting thought to say the least. But, nevertheless, one that perturbs me somewhat. So I'll stop thinking about it and talk about gadgets instead.

I am now the proud owner of a Mac mini. The teeny little things that are smaller than most external hard drives and about the size of six CD cases. These things:

It was, indeed, something of an interesting shopping day…

This thing is deadly cool. I've put it up to 512MB of memory, and it performs like a champ. Sure, it's no speed demon, being as it is a superseded budget Mac, but it does everything I want it to just as well as I need. It's incredibly quiet, it runs Mac OS X, it's tiny, and is generally wonderful. Connecting my unwieldy fishtank of a 17" CRT monitor to it is, admittedly, less than ideal, but that's a short term measure until I can afford a flat screen one (and more than likely an Intel mini/Intel iBook to connect to it) but that's not relevant for now.

The point is, I just got a full-featured Mac new, from Dixons, for under £200.

Now that's what I call value.

Posted by Mike at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's been a little while since my last entry, one that really wasn't so much of an entry as a cut and paste job. I have had quite a few things going on since then, however, so I'll recap.

Around the time of my last entry, I was frantically working on finishing several piece of university work. As always seems to be the way, it seems logical at the time to so end up doing a huge proportion of the work at the last minute, at the end of which you vow to never do the same again. Only to do the exact same thing the very next time.

This, of course, is part of the inevitable cycle which comes with university, and something that the vast majority of students will understand, even though there is no rational sense to it. But, anyway, they got done to a pretty decent level, and I'm not too unhappy with how they ended up.

After this, I returned home for the Easter holiday in a relatively typical move. What is less typical, for me, is that I've spent the last week of it on work placement at the Express & Star in Brierley Hill (near Dudley for the uninitiated). For someone of my inept sleeping levels, waking at 0630 doesn't augur well, so it was something of a relief to have not failed spectacularly at my placement. It's always said that it's not what you know, it's who you know - and I've definitely made some good contacts this week.

After my unexpected good fortune on my first day at the E&S in Wolverhampton back in January, I will return there again on Tuesday to once more ruin my reputation. To say that an 0800 start is bliss is somewhat unheard of for me, but that's what a week in The Real World does for you. This scares me somewhat.

Give it fourteen months and I'm going to be entering that real world properly, and will more than likely end up working for a small weekly or daily regional newspaper in a random part of the country. It's an interesting thought to say the least. But, nevertheless, one that perturbs me somewhat. So I'll stop thinking about it and talk about gadgets instead.

I am now the proud owner of a Mac mini. The teeny little things that are smaller than most external hard drives and about the size of six CD cases. These things:

It was, indeed, something of an interesting shopping day…

This thing is deadly cool. I've put it up to 512MB of memory, and it performs like a champ. Sure, it's no speed demon, being as it is a superseded budget Mac, but it does everything I want it to just as well as I need. It's incredibly quiet, it runs Mac OS X, it's tiny, and is generally wonderful. Connecting my unwieldy fishtank of a 17" CRT monitor to it is, admittedly, less than ideal, but that's a short term measure until I can afford a flat screen one (and more than likely an Intel mini/Intel iBook to connect to it) but that's not relevant for now.

The point is, I just got a full-featured Mac new, from Dixons, for under £200.

Now that's what I call value.

Posted by Mike at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The general lack of a real blog entry since 3 March is generally problematic. Especially when you really don't know what in the name of David Moyes you're going to write about. So, I'll write a few bullet points about Things That Have Happened Recently, And My Take On Them.

• There has recently been an election in Belarus. Their president, Alexandr Lukashenko, won a landslide victory in a poll criticised by most outside the country as being flawed. I feel sorry for the people of Belarus if this is in fact the case. I do, however, dislike the way the US and EU are trying to influence events in Belarus, by funding anti-Lukashenko groups, and even broadcasting a "Freedom" radio station into Belarus. I don't like what Lukashenko stands for, but the meddling into another country's affairs upon which it has absolutely no jurisdiction is something which I'm not entirely comfortable with. Western-backed politicians don't always live up to their reputation, as Ukrainians have found with Viktor Yushchenko. I would be more comfortable if an organisation to which Belarus belongs - like the CIS - said something, but sadly Russia's conduct in this affair is reprehensible.
• Aston Villa have been in a poor run of form, and many are calling for David O'Leary to be sacked. In my opinion this would be a poor move. O'Leary isn't doing so well at the moment, but I doubt whether anyone else actually would right now under the current board. The club is up for sale at the right price, and it would make sense to herald changes in the boardroom with a change of management of the first team. Until then, O'Leary should stay.
• Southern Tim and I have recently been playing a reasonable amount of Football Manager 2006 online. Tim has a penchant for purchasing players with strange names. I like strangely named footballers. Some of the classic signings made:

Clovis Konsodiani-Kanda
Norbert Hrncar
Climax Lawrence
Rasmus Bogh
Kevin Le Bigot
Paul Tortoishell
Sutee Suksomkit
Winston Feller
Pham Hung Dung
Jarrodd Suddick
Freek Toren
Louis-Georges Mongin
Ludwig Lombardi
Christophe Cum

That's about all for now. Enjoy.

Posted by Mike at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is a short entry to basically register my dissatisfaction with some of the coverage that's been made about the soon-to-be-vacant England manager's job. As you might have read a little while ago, I'm not opposed to the next man in charge being a foreigner, as long as it's one who is actually good enough for the job. A Guus Hiddinck or a Martin O'Neill - yes. A Dr Josef Venglos or a partnership of Attilio Lombardo and Tomas Brolin - no.

Last week, one of the three man committee who will choose the next manager, Dave Richards, went on record as saying that he believes the next manager should be British. Meaning, in short, that the next manager should be English, Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish. All of which have separate football federations, separate leagues, and separate national teams.

The argument for the next England manager to be English is a sound one that, while it doesn't have my complete agreement, is one I can respect. Someone who knows what the team means to England, and will have the passion that a foreigner might lack because they themselves will be passionate the team.

Mr Richards has said though that he wants either an Englishman or a foreigner from the British Isles to get the job. It makes no sense to me. This evening on Five Live, Steve Bruce was asked for his two penneth worth about the position, and he too opined that the next man should be British. The next two lines of the interview defy explanation.

Pat Murphy: "But you say British Steve, do you mean British as opposed to English?"
Bruce: "Well, for me they're one and the same."

I don't really have a point to make here, but I just wanted to state, for the record, that while England is a constituent part of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, it is neither one nor the other. All of England is in Britain, but not all of Britain is in England. The sooner people (usually, it must be said, the English) learn this the better.

This isn't much of an entry I know, but it's really bugged me for the last few days.

Posted by Mike at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

It's sometimes easy to forget how much things in life generally are on a knife edge. Things can go either way, you either do something or you don't, and the results can end up being so different. The decisions you think are going to change your life often don't, and the ones that you think won't often do.

The latter observation is one that I think tenants in one of the parents' houses that they let out are going to be thinking for quite a while. After a party, either through forgetfulness or diversion, candles were left lit in the living room.

Every room is now in this state.

It's going to take around four months - if not more - hard work on our part to get this place habitable again, which obviously isn't a positive thing, especially as it resulted from such a small thing to forget. More importantly, however, this small thing almost led to the tenants paying for their mistake with their lives.

I implore anyone who reads this to never ever be complacent with anything which might cause fire. Check your smoke alarm. Make sure you're able to hear it from your bedroom, and if you can't, get another. If you're lying in bed and can't remember if the candles you lit that evening are still alight or not, get out of bed and check.

A couple of years back I almost destroyed my Paris flat with my own forgetfulness, and I'll leave you with my thoughts from back then.

Today I think I've scared myself in a way I've never experienced before. Physical fear. Shaking. Mild nausea.

If you're careless, you'll pay. I'm simply a nervous wreck right now, but I'll live. You may not be so lucky.

Posted by Mike at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I was born in 1982. I played my first computer game in abour 1985, and was, until about 2000, what you'd call a devout gamer. Since then, I had been somewhat disenchanted with the way games (and gamers) were going.

Way back into the very early 80s, home video gaming was very much the preserve of the über-geek. Games were generally programmed by one man in his bedroom in his spare time, and disseminated either via code in geek magazines, or via cassette tapes in Woolworths for £2.99 a pop. While the romance factor was high, and occasional hits such as "Skool Daze" and "Kick Off" showed off what this industry could create, the vast majority of games from this era were incredibly bad.

The late eighties saw the introduction of Japanese consoles from Nintendo and Sega into this country. Gaming became a commodity. £40 games with official endorsements from the likes of Mike Tyson, Batman, and the Simpsons were all the rage. Graphics and gameplay were basic, but the beginning of home consoles as a true industry started here.

The era that changed games most though was the mid to late 1990s, where a new entrant to the market sought to do something the Nintendo/Sega duopoly would never have hoped to achieve: Sony wanted to make gaming cool. It worked. But to what end? Debatable.

While the mass of games on the market for all of the "big three" manufacturers can only be a good thing for consumers, the depth of the industry makes it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you want, say, a racing game for the Xbox, there's probably about 100 to choose from, with few having any real standout features. The actual way that racing games work hasn't fundamentally changed since the very beginning of video games - all that has changed is the graphics.

Indeed, the very way in which games are played, and have been played for around the last decade has been flawed. In the era of super high quality 3D graphics, cinematic sound, and even HD quality video (in the case of the Xbox 360) why is it considered OK that the only way that the player can interact is via a not even slightly appropriate control pad shaped like a strange spacecraft from Star Wars?

This is where two things come into play. For reasons I'm about to explain, about two months ago, I purchased a Playstation 2. I was pleasantly surprised to see a few chinks of light coming from through the gloom of the gaming world, and these are the things that I think are really going to change the way gaming works.

Firstly, and importantly, is online play. It's slowly catching on, but actually getting on the internet and playing a real person who learns from their mistakes is infinitely better than playing some computer code, whose quirks and weaknesses are soon learnt. The football game - note that it's not a simulation, and it doesn't aim to be - that I'm spending far too much time playing, Pro Evolution Soccer 5, is an absolute dream to play online. It's a game which works perfectly on a handheld control pad, and is one of the pinnacles of today's gaming.

Another is a more controversial reason, but one that I think really has changed things. Remove the control pad from the equation, why not use these megaflops of computational power to actually provide an interactive experience? Currently, only Sony have done this (to my knowledge), with two of this Xmas' big games - namely Buzz, a quiz show game which ships with four handheld buzzers, and the one I've just purchased, Singstar 80's, a - believe it or not - karaoke game jam packed with tracks from the 1980s. These games are not revolutionising the video game world, but are simply not sticking to the conventions of video gaming of the past 20 years. This, in itself, is a step in the right direction. Computer games are not about graphics, they're about fun. Why it's taken 20 years to even get to this stage is a mystery to me.

But while Sony might be doing this in a small way today, the grandaddy of video games, Nintendo, have been beavering away in their labs to consider their next move in the market. While still the undisputed number one in the handheld gaming market (with the Game Boy Micro and Nintendo DS being big sellers this Xmas), their current home console, the Gamecube, has had the lowest worldwide sales of all of the three major consoles of the current generation. Exclusive games like the Mario games, Zelda, and the critically acclaimed Metroid Prime games have not been enough. Nintendo needed to do something radical.

This is exactly what they've been doing.

That, above (courtesy of IGN) is what the Nintendo Revolution (their next-gen console's codename) controller will look like.

There is a promotional video at IGN about the Revolution which, as a concept, makes it quite possibly the most stunning breakthrough in home console gaming since, well, ever.

The future is looking brighter.

Posted by Mike at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Well Mike is currently back home in Wolverhampton after a slightly odd week in which nobody really seems to know exactly what's going on.  That's an inauspiscious start, but it will potentially make sense once I start writing properly.

Last week, a uni colleague (conveniently also called Mike) went down with the mumps.  A bit of a frantic call home, and it transpires that I'm not actually vaccinated againt the mumps.  Given that we'd been in contact over the previous week, it seemed a good idea I think to basically drop everything and get that vaccination.  If I hadn't already contracted the virus, it might just protect me, and if I had, well hard cheddar.

Unfortunately things didn't quite go to plan.  I came back home to have it done on Thursday as I could get an appointment sooner here than back in Stoke, so I had the injection and hoped that might just be that.  Fat chance.

On Friday, a lump about the size of a pound coin appeared on the left side of my neck.  It seemed pretty clear - this is surely a symptom of mumps.  We went back up to Stoke on Sunday to get some clothes - as I only intended to be back home from Thursday to Saturday, I only had two days' worth of clothes.  (And to make matters worse, I'd forgotten to pack any spare underwear.  You don't want to imagine the pants situation, I promise you.)  I imagined it was to be a pretty miserable week of gland inflation, shivering, and general illness.  As of the moment, I have a slightly runny nose, a slightly sore throat, and a mildly throbbing swelling on the left side of my neck.  Barely anything has changed since Sunday, in fact.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining.  Mumps can be a genuinely nasty illness which can lead to some pretty serious stuff (meningitis and sterility being the main two) and can also be pretty damned painful (rearrange the words "testicles", "grapefruit-sized" and "swollen" to get an idea).  I'm currently worried though that I'm still in the early stages with the worst still to come, and if this is indeed the case, it's entirely conceivable that I'll be off uni for much longer than the planned week. 

And, of course, there's also the small matter of my sister's wedding ten days from today.  Unless things don't go to plan (or I miraculously find another sibling from somewhere) then this is a genuine once in a lifetime thing which as much as I might protest, I actually genuinely don't want to miss.  If I'm properly infected with mumps though, then I simply wouldn't be able to go.

So while being ill yet not does indeed have its advantages, circumstances dictate that I'd actually rather be ill at this point.

Posted by Mike at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Nine days. You can fit a lot of living into nine days. Unfortunately, I didn't manage a blog entry in this time, which is frankly pathetic. I extend apologies to my reader.

My life is currently displaying dangerous tendencies of normalising itself, which is something of a first. A brief foray into vocal trance music aside (something I really shouldn't like, but currently can't resist), the sceptre of employment might just be approaching, with an interview at Dixons in approximately 14 hours time.

Employment is something I don't universally agree with. Arguably the only winners of a capitalist system are the rich people at the top who treat the rest of the world as lap dogs. It distresses me that the best life most people can hope for is forty or so years hard work for an employer, two weeks to call your own each calendar year, and retirement when you've lost many of your faculties. I can't help but feel that this system is exploitative of the masses. At the same time, however, I can understand that employment in itself can be a rewarding activity, for the worker as well as the employer.

Take the role of a shop assistant at Dixons, which I'm currently in contention for. Too many shop assistants in shops like Dixons - where high technology is made accessible to the common man - in my opinion don't do their job properly.

It's their job to be an expert in the field they're working in, and to do anything less damages the good reputation of their employer. If employed there, I feel I could, should, and would do my part in informing the public honestly, and if telling them that if the computer/printer/digital camera/television they are considering is overkill for their modest needs and that a cheaper model would be more than adequate, it's my role as a middleman between the corporation and the customer to tell them so. The customer is always right, of course, and even if they make a wrong decision against my advice, at least I've told them my honest opinion as an employee. I've not made a bad recommendation, and if real life proves it to be overkill, it's not going to reflect badly on me or on my employer. Indeed, one could argue that it would only reflect well on both of us - this is where consumer loyalty comes into play. I will always be more inclined to repeat my custom at a shop where I've been given honest and good advice, as opposed to one where they just direct me to the most expensive item and start trying to sell it to me.

(I'd do well to repeat some of that in my interview tomorrow. Scribbling on hand now.)

But, normality, or at least the perceived advances towards it. This week, I've been posing inane questions at housemates, one of which was:

Choose people from the following categories who would comprise the guests at a table of ten (nine plus yourself) at a fantasy dinner party. You have a wildcard choice of one dead person to represent your choice in one category only. (For the purposes of the party, that person would be brought back to life. A corpse might lost its appeal quite quickly.

My choices were as follows, and almost instantly remove many pretensions of normality that I've just claimed for myself:

Myself - Mike Serieys.
Entrepreneur - Alan Sugar (Steve Jobs loses out for being vegan).
Lecturer - Paul Gubbins, journalism tutor, linguist, internationally known Esperantist, and former parliamentary candidate for the short lived SDP.
Television Personality - Valérie Perez, a thoroughly mediocre French sports presenter, who has the attraction of being rather easy on the eye (Valérie, la blonde, à gauche [Valérie, the blonde, on the left]).
Fictional Character - Homer Simpson.
Politician - Wildcard time - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. I'd end up sitting there and just staring at him, just because he's Lenin. The whole language issue might be a problem, however…
Actor - Famke Janssen. Female, Dutch, brunette, pretty. Four boxes ticked, invitation sent.
Musician - Peter Hook. The world's coolest person old enough to be my father.
Sportsman - Steve Redgrave. Great sportsman, great role model, nice bloke. Can't get much better than that.
Comedian - As tempted as I was to go for Karl Karl from Die Clatterschenkenfietermaus, it's going to have to be Jasper Carrott. Yes, he supports the Small Heath Alliance, but he makes me laugh (just like the Small Heath Alliance) so all's good.

Fun fun. Anyone else want to add their lists?

Posted by Mike at 1:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

It's not very often that I win things (as any former BIP FC player/observer will testify) so I'm milking this for all it's worth.

It's not a game I would have bought, but for free I look forward to having a play with it. And I won it. So woo.

Posted by Mike at 7:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Whoever invented the name Swarfega deserves the Nobel Prize for Physics. Such a stupid name deserves a completely unrelated award.

This site quire clearly needs a new entry, and as of the moment I'm struggling for one. I've not been doing too much due to a bizarre bug which isn't really affecting how I feel, but is mostly making me cough and sneeze a lot, which in turn make me feel rubbish. Sounding like a bizarre hybrid of Mariella Frostrup and Professor Stephen Hawking also doesn't help the old self esteem, and has so far ruled out making any serious social steps - meeting people is alarmingly difficult when you can't speak properly.

An unnecessary (and unexciting) item swap at Argos was the highlight of yesterday, which says a lot about the Liverpool vs Chelsea game. Our Binatone "Digital" cordless phone for the house was buzzing like a swarm of angry hornets on holiday in Arizona, and we'd naturally assumed that it was to do with the phone, as it was the cheapest digital cordless one in Argos. So we replaced it with a Philips, which is exactly the same. Further investigation proves the line itself is the source of the hornets, and ntl are going to phone me to arrange a time for an engineer to come around. Apparently. I'll believe it when I hear it. However, having a lack of voice was a great way of enunciating the problem over the phone - when the guy asked what the problem was, my croaky warble said "I think you can hear what the problem is".

Anyway. I'll write again when there's something genuinely interesting to post. Probably will be music based.

Posted by Mike at 12:19 AM | Permalink

If you didn't laugh at this cover, you aren't human.

Yesterday completed my first week in my new home of Stoke. It's been a week of feet finding, and the minimal time needed at uni over the week for registration provided ample leisure time, and has also allowed us to arrange everything we need in our house. After much delay and deliberation, our house is almost completely set for the next year, except for the lack of a jointly owned/landlord provided television, which we're still procrastinating about. Other than that though, the washing up has been kept on top of, the place is keeping pretty tidy, and we're all respecting each others' property. It's only the first week but omens are good.

On a personal note, living with other people hasn't been anywhere near as horrendous as I'd feared it might be. There's been almost no disagreement on anything - a first for me - absolutely no petty arguments - again somewhat unique - and no disputes whatsoever. Chances of further social integration over this weekend have subsided after being laid low by a horrible head cold over the last 24 hours or so, and I'm hoping I'm not going to be forced to stay away from my first lecture tomorrow - 0900 is never a friendly time when you are blowing your nose a lot and mostly sans voice.

We got our internet connection sorted yesterday, but I'm a bit concerned that our 3 megabit connection is performing more like a 1.5 megabit one. It's possibly just heavy use in our mostly studenty area - the obvious flaw in a cable connection vis à vis ADSL - but nevertheless I have a feeling I might end up giving them a buzz about this, especially as we're paying almost three times the price of a 1 megabit connection for a connection which is currently performing to about 50% of its stated capacity. Let's hope nt(hel)l aren't as useless as their reputation (and nickname) suggest.

Posted by Mike at 5:52 PM | Permalink

Late summer is the best time of the year. I've never understood the interest in horrendously hot and sweaty months like June, July and early August. Early to mid September is quite assuredly the way forward, and the quintessential time to go on holiday.

For many, I entirely understand that the height of summer is the only real possibility for holidaying - children off school being the main reason - but it's become something of a cultural myth that September is A Bad Month, and heralds the start of autumn. It doesn't. Last night it was still light at about 2015, up until this time the sun was out, there was a light breeze, and the temperature was a comfortably nice 23º C or so. That's here in Wolverhampton, of course, so on various continental tourism hotspots it'd certainly be warmer - places like Lanzarote and Tenerife would probably be somewhere around 30º, maybe 35º. Surely warm enough to enjoy the time there, and without the horrendous crowds that characterise the summer peak times in July and August.

Of course, if you're planning on going to a city as opposed to a coastal resort, going at the height of summer is pure idiocy if you have an option to go at another time. It's a great time of year to be in London, Paris, Madrid, Prague etc. Still warm, decidedly t-shirt friendly, but probably not so grotesque as to leave you needing to sit down and drink water every half hour of your tourism time (and at Parisian café prices, this is Something To Avoid.

So Mike's advice for the day is this - if you don't have children, holiday in September. Smaller crowds, cheaper prices, more enjoyment.

_{Note: Mike has never holidayed in September, and has not holidayed at all since 2002.}

Posted by Mike at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's approaching a year ago that I first started this blog. It started as a lazy method of adding all the stuff I wanted to write about the upcoming Apple Expo in Paris. I initially had no interest in making it the front end of the site, but it soon became incredibly clear that this was The Way Forward for my homepage.

Blogs are a peculiar thing. Characteristically, a blog is typically someone's open diary, telling all that they have done, what they think of what they've done, and their future aspirations in love, live, employment, etc. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionary of American English (as built into Mac OS X Tiger) gives a blog this uncomplimentary description:

It's a bit harsh, and not 100% true - there's quite a few bloggers who aren't American, and most of the horrendous blogs out there on Blogger, Livejournal etc are by teenagers - but correctly points out the stigma attached to them.

I'd never really liked the idea of these things. By default, a personal blog is only going to be of interest to someone who already knows you, and to that end, telling them what they already know really isn't of interest. This format clearly wouldn't work for me. Even if I thought it was a good idea, frankly I'm not interesting (or, indeed interested) enough to maintain such a thing.

I've tried in general to convey my thoughts about things in my posts. Be they theories, ideas, or just reaction to something that's happened in the world. The idea is to be able to offer persuasive and provocative prose, which can both keep me interested in maintaining the blog, and keep the reader interested in coming back. I am sure that quite frequently I miss the target on the latter aim - I'm not sure any of my six readers actually care about the implications of moving the Mac to Intel, or the architectural folly of the Soviets in Kaliningrad - and this is disappointing to me.

I would like to know what I could write about that would interest both me as well as current and future readers, and I'm at a loss. It would be nice to be able to write something on here and receive a few more comments as feedback, but if the reader isn't interested in what was written, it's never surprising that the near ubiquitous 'Comments (0)' stays beneath so many of the posts.

It's my intention over the next twelve months to try and keep the original ethos of this weblog intact, but at the same time put more effort into writing solid, clear, and interesting entries for my readers. If what I'm writing is uninteresting, chichéd, or just downright irrelevant, tell me. Post a comment, say that reading that post has just wasted two minutes of your life that you'll never get back*. And if you have any ideas you would like to see me give my take on, please tell me.

The Comments link is there for a reason. If you have something to say, use it.

_{* - You do not have permission to make that comment about this post, however.}

Posted by Mike at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I hate broken promises. Not, you understand, something which has been suggested as a future possibility but does not come to fruition - they are just Life Happening. But actual proper promises, as in 'I will do this for you by Wednesday' or 'If you do this I will pay you £20' - it is seriously annoying when these do not happen.

My ISP Pipex broke a promise over the last 24 hours. They had promised over the summer months to upgrade the speed of all their broadband customers for no extra charge. I was on the 512kbps downstream (which oddly connected at 576kbps) and 256kbps upstream (which oddly connected at 288kbps) plan, and at some point after June, they said that it would be upgraded to 1 megabit downstream. This weekend the upgrade has come. And they broke their promise.

Instead of moving from 588kbps to around 1024kbps, it's moved from 588kbps to 2272kbps, or - in laymans terms - a little over 2 megabits.

Mike is happy.

Posted by Mike at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Each era seems to have its own seminal moment which will be remembered in history lessons for what seems like eternity. In the 1950s and 1960s it seems that many of these moments were to do with space exploration - names like Yuri Gagarin, Leica the dog and Neil Armstrong still resonate to this day.

At some point, a member of my generation (those born in the early 1980s) is going to achieve something of similar stature. George Bush has stated that he wants to see an American on Mars by 2020 - and the first person could well be of my generation, given that they would be in their late 30s by then - but the current worries over the NASA space programme makes this unlikely. Other than this, I'm strapped for ideas as to what else could be done. It doesn't seem that anything will match up to space exploration, and it'd be a real shame if my generation doesn't have anything to on this front.

What does my reader think? Other than space exploration, how should my generation leave its mark on the world?

Posted by Mike at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This widget rules.

Television is seen as an indictment of a lot that's wrong in the modern world. If you believe everything that's written, it's to blame for obesity levels, failng schools, teenage pregnancy rates, and the poor levels of literacy. Give it fifteen years, and the New Thing To Blame For Everything will be the internet. (This will gradually escalate from 2008 onwards, when Prime Minister Mandelson explains his reasons for invading Guatemala in txt spk, verbally spelling each world out loud to make him seem hip.)

Yet it's interesting sometimes to think what you've learnt from television. I, for one, believe that I've learnt one hell of a lot from it during my formative years, and have a lot to be thankful for.

I was somewhat dismayed when the BBC announced in 2002 that Tomorrow's World was to be axed. The show had lost a lot of its spark since the 1980s, but it proved once and for all that science and technology weren't just the preserve of those with degrees in physics and chemistry - it proved to me, for one, that while I couldn't always get my head around the complexities of academic science, a vague understanding of How Things Work is within almost anybody's grasp. If nice Howard Stableford could manage it, I was damn sure I could.

But the philophical bit over, I decided I'd like to augment my collection of television themes with a few from Tomorrow's World. Nothing like the internet to feed nostalgia. And my God. It is utterly ridiculous just how many websites there are to do with British television nostalgia. If you're ever wanting a not too obscure television theme tune, just Google it, and it's more than likely you'll be able to download it in fewer than ten clicks from there.

And, after about three years of wanting it, I finally sourced the TW theme tune circa 1995, which for whatever reason I always thought was the absolute nuts. Sure, it's a Chariots of Fire wannabe, and hasn't aged as well as it might have, but it's a moment in time. I'm not a believer in normal music reminding someone of events, as the link is incredibly tenuous - if I was listening to Alright by Supergrass when I found out that someone I knew was murdered, would that happy and fun summer song remind me of murder? No. But television themes actually have a proper and untenuous link. You only heard that song when the show was on, and if you have fond memories of the show, it can take you right back.

As far as I know, the only place on the net to get this theme is from archive.org of all places.

Posted by Mike at 11:19 PM | Permalink

Well Mike is back on his iBook. The whole DiskWarrior thing didn't quite work out to plan, as I ended up cancelling it, mutilating much of the data on the drive, damaging my backup, but keeping some of the other files I didn't want to keep. On the downside, I've lost a lot of stuff I wanted to keep, like my Adium logs for the previous 18 months, random funny pictures I'd found, and apps whose name I can't remember that came in useful from time to time. On the upside, having 20GB more free space on my laptop can only be considered A Good Thing. Quite what was taking up all that space I really don't know.

I don't live there, but as accuweather.com doesn't see fit to include Wolverhampton in its list, I have my future home city in there instead.

Summer has officially arrived in the Midlands, with the arrival of some sun leading to the entire media looking for spurious reports of Britain being hotter than the Caribbean and other such things. All that matters is that it's warm, but also grotesquely humid. It's beyond the 'this is quite pleasant' level of warmness, and has hit the 'this is so oppressive I can't do anything' stage.

Of course, this isn't the only issue. I'm a bit of an anti-summer person as it stands - I have horrendously pale skin and light eyes - and I find the sun generally problematic as regards both vision and the interference of UV rays in turning my skin into a flaky red mess. This itself gives issues, so I already prefer sitting in the shade rather than in the sun. That isn't so bad.

What is bad is hayfever. Endless nose blowing, the itching of eyes, and incessant sneezing. I've not had it too bad in the last year, as having spent the entire summer in Paris meant that that the atmosphere was relatively pollen free. Here though, it's really hit. Despite being only two miles from the Wolverhampton city centre, around here it's very very green - there are trees absolutely everywhere. It's visually appealing, and certainly nicer than the urban sprawl of other parts of town, but it plays havoc with my sinuses.

Here's what I use to try and control it. Sodium Cromoglicate eye drops, to be applied whenever needed. Fluticasone propionate nasal spray, to be applied once or twice daily, with one spray up each nostril. And Neoclarityn tablets, one a day. Yet they rarely work to any effect.

In truth, I hate the summer. The best time of the year for most things - holidays included - is September. It's warm without being too hot and humid (most of the time). The kids are back at school early in the month, so the place has quietened down, and flights etc are cheaper.

Roll on September.

Posted by Mike at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A traditional Google image search again did the trick.

Today I was caught up in rain, and it was quite amusing. It reminded me of a couple of posts I'd made on my now dead Forum. So to save writing a lot more, I'm instead pasting it into here. Fun.

"I came out of the métro this evening after going out, and it was absolutely pelting down with rain. This is the first time I've seen any rain since I've been back in Paris, and that's nearly a month, I believe.

I don't know why, but I absolutely adore being inadvertently caught up in the rain. I've bizarrely got a few fantastic memories of such incidents. The main one though would have been in the spring to summer of 1997. It was a Friday afternoon and I'd hung around with Qasim after school talking about rubbish, as we tended to do in those days. 1630 came, and we went our own ways at the Merridale/corner gate. I crossed the road, and walked up towards Larches Lane. Just as I was about to turn into Larches Lane, the heavens utterly opened. The streets immediately flooded, cars came to a standstill. My hair was in one of its "too long to care about" phases, so this got wet quite quickly. Oh yeah, and I had left my blazer in my locker, had no jumper, and was wearing only my white shirt on my top half.

I got to the bus stop on the Tettenhall Road, in a cross between mirth and anger with the weather. This soon changed though. The bunch at the bus stop just saw me, I saw them, and we just all stood and laughed. It was one of those great moments. I had little to do with most of them, in truth, being the uncommunicative sod that I was back then. But we were all so completely unprepared for this deluge, and this was a great leveller.

As is always in these situations, the bus didn't come for absolutely ages, we must have been waiting for half an hour. In this time, another moment of hilarity happened. Some bloke cycled by, who was the target of our humour. He was wearing some kind of mustard yellow waterproof top and trousers, that made him look about four feeet wide. He was also on a small folding bicycle. If he were a phrase, he'd have been oxymoronic. As he was a person, he was a gimp, and a funny one at that.

That was a random story, but the point still stands:

Rain rules."

And a little more.

"Things which frankly rule about the rain:

• My hair looks frankly cool.
• It makes me laugh a lot.
• It's a great leveller.
• I take my glasses off as vision with them on becomes impossible. This leads to my not knowing where I am going, and it makes everything an adventure.
• It spurs me into having a shower.
• It focuses my mind like no other thing does. In that walk, I did as much abstract thought as I'd normally manage in a normal three hours.
• Putting my glasses back on when I get in is the biggest relief possible.
• It makes me want to randomly phone people. Indeed, I let Sheep's phone ring six times before I looked at the watch. 0204 French time, 0104 BST."

Posted by Mike at 8:03 PM | Permalink

This was the first Google image result for "blancmange".

Greetings.

A week has passed since my last entry, which is generally bad. However it's all been working up to Big Exams this week. Three NCTJ exams in two days - Wednesday noon saw a fun two hours of "Public Affairs of Local Government", with Thursday having "Law 1 - Court Reporting" at noon and "Law 2 - Contempt and Defamation" at three.

Wednesday was pretty uneventful. The exam was middling - certainly not as friendly as last year's which we had done as the internal assessment - and my confidence is middling as regards its result. That's by the by. Today (Thursday) was more eventful for all the wrong reasons.

I have pretty set exam rituals which I try and replicate wherever possible. These are as follows:

• Arrive at school/uni about an hour before.
• Mingle.
• With about fifteen minutes to go before the exam, we are generally allowed to enter the room. The invigilators are in, but talking is happening as is last minute revision. So that's my time. Get iPod, put Tin There - edit by Underworld on loudly, and get into "the zone".
• Do the exam.

All was well early on. I left home at about 1000, aiming for the 1010 bus getting me to the train station well in time for the 1040 train. Arriving at the station by 1030 left me time to buy the tickets and get to the platform. Did that.

So, the 1040 train. Things get a bit hazy here.

I was listening to music as per the norm, but not with my usual earphones which I lost on Wednesday. The lost ones are the type that go right into the ear canal, so block out external noise. The ones I used today weren't, so external noise was audible. Including platform announcements. So how I failed to notice the train coming and going is a mystery. I'm not even sure if it did. It's difficult to explain really the nothingness that is in my memory over those few minutes. One minute the train was soon due in, the next it had disappeared off the departure board, seemingly been and gone. But still, a train was coming at 1107 which would have got me in by 1138, just in time for the 1145 meet, a bit of Tin There, and exam.

There's a twist here.

• 1107 became 1115. I dealt with that.
• 1115 became 1135. I dealt with that less well, as this meant I was going to be ten or so late.
• 1135 fell behind the 1138 train after it. Which became 1140.
• I boarded at around 1140.
• It got to Stone (small town in Staffordshire about five by train from Stoke) on schedule at about 1210.
• About a mile from Stoke, the train slowed down considerably, probably going at about 10mph.
• The Train Manager announced a failure of an emergency system on the train, and that the train (due to go on to Manchester) would terminate at Stoke.
• It crawled into Stoke at just before 1230.
• I arrived in the room out of breath (I ran, and am unfit) just over half an hour after the exam officially started.

Suffice to say, it's pretty certain I failed it. It was a bit of a disaster, as I had little time to think about my answers. Had I had chance to read them back, I'm pretty certain I'd have been shocked at what crap I'd actually put down.

I was generally crestfallen after that exam, so it's something of a shock that I found the second one to be on the right side of sympathetic.

Now all that is left is shorthand exams. Internal assessments at 90 and 100 words a minute (I've passed 40, 50, 60, 70, and 80 so far) come up on Tuesday, resits of any I fail [ie 90 and 100] on Wednesday, then the biggie. NCTJ shorthand. 80 words a minute, four minutes of dictation split into two by a thirty second pause. It may not sound like a lot, but trust me, it is. Still not convinced? Well we're allowed eight errors, otherwise we fail.

Perhaps I'll stick to blogging…

Posted by Mike at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today we had to submit a series of assessments for our module called "Theory and Practice". There were four parts to the assessment:

• A 500 word interview based feature
• A 500 word topical profile of a person or event
• Two 150 word profiles of heroes, with a 100 word rationale for each
• Two 250 word articles based on press releases

I have a feeling I may have unnerved my lecturer slightly with my choices. Not, you understand, for the interview, which I did with the esteemed Tim Barton, who proved a good interviewee. But more a slight trend within the other features.

For the topical profile of a person or event, I chose the recent revolution in former Soviet outpost Kyrgyzstan.

For the heroes, I chose former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and former Soviet football coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi.

And for the press releases? One was obvious - Mac OS X Tiger - but the other? No, nothing Soviet this time. But you remember that horrendous song LSTNDTX? Well I found a press release for the compilation it's from. Wonderfully titled International Deejay Gigolos CD7.

Dr Gubbins (real name) will be scared, I am sure of it.

Posted by Mike at 1:54 PM | Permalink

For absolutely years now, I've had this little idea of something that, if I were in charge of things, I'd add to examinations in schools and universities across England. (Under me, of course, the UK would no longer exist).

Basically, before the exam, everybody chooses a song. And, randomly throughout the exam, these songs go on. I think it'd be a genuinely good idea. Think about it. It'd be quite a good distraction for the points when you get bored and daydream for a bit, plus you'd get to play the "Who in the name of Garnett Emmanuel Brown chose that?" game.

Then, of course, comes the question: what song would I choose? Obviously the first ones to spring to mind are the inspirationally magnificent ones such as Belfast, or the adrenalin-pumping Tin There. But the potential for distracting others is oh so tempting. Imagine sitting there minding your own business during your GCSE in English Lit, when suddenly the stereo started playing Satisfaction? Or even worse - maybe Boom Boom or even LSTNDTX? Nobody would guess it was me. Unless they knew me. Which does tend to ruin the disguise a little. But anyway.

What would you have played, and why?

Posted by Mike at 1:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yay, essay is finished. 1452 words isn't too bad. Got to hand it in now, but it's not quite as diastrous as I initially thought it was going to be.

In other news, I have Firefox running off my USB memory card thing here on the uni computers, which is something of a blessed relief I must admit. If you have one of these little gizmos and want to do something similar to get to use Firefox on your uni/work computer, then download Portable Firefox here.

I'll talk more later. Essay to hand in now.

Posted by Mike at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ah, holiday is here. Two whole weeks without many trains, without any lectures, and with a lot of work to be done. I have three NCTJ exams coming up in the middle of May, which may seem a long time away but they really aren't. Also have a Local Press essay I've not even considered thinking about, which could prove problematic given the need for extensive use of sources, and the distance between myself and the library (it's in Stoke; I'm not). Hrmph.

It's getting to the business end of the year which was never too much fun when in Paris. It was only by early May that I usually realised that I'd learnt about three things all year, and serious crammage was needed. That coupled with the ludicrous deadlines (if I recall correctly, I had two essays in last year in the week directly preceding exam week) didn't help things at all. The sweltering heat in the exam rooms there was an issue of significant worry to many, which won't, I presume, be an issue in Stoke, where the more modern buildings are air conditioned. This said, my main issue with exams isn't going to be in the slightest bit fixed - my godawful handwriting. It's getting to the stage where I'm actually worried that it's not just me being bad at it, but some kind of genuine issue - at times I just can't get the pen to move as I want it to.

I'll also try and make some proper entries to this blog in the next few days. I've neglected it for a bit due to inexplicable fatigue and the fact that I seem to have a headache almost all the time right now. Not sure why, but it's getting to the point where it's an obstacle to productivity.

Anyway, guten Abend, Herr Schweinsteiger.

Posted by Mike at 9:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Right, enough with Football Manager, here's a proper entry. I'll fill in a few recent happenings to make it look as if I've done more with the last week than play FM and go to uni.

• I passed the NCTJ Public Affairs exam with a good mark of 62%. This proves that I understand national political and administrative issues well.
• I failed the Law exam with a poor mark of approximately 30% lower. Although I feel I have a decent understanding of publishing laws, this plainly didn't come through in the exam.
• I am writing an article about golf for an English language sports monthly in Spain.
• Skype is working again, so if anyone wants a chat, Skype me.
• I am beginning to wonder what jobs to apply for over the summer.
• I have nothing more to say.