Author: Rory

From a short review of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just won’t believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular – but that’s just peanuts to the Hitchhiker’s movie. Listen.

I’ll agree that it doesn’t sound promising. I’m certain that some of my favourite bits of the radio show will have been omitted. But does anyone think for a second that a review, even a review as bad as this one, has the slightest chance of keeping me away from that movie? Here’s the thing. No matter what they’ve changed/broken/added/removed in the movie, the books and radio plays are still as good as they ever were. So it doesn’t matter if the movie is bad. At the very least we can just run through the good bits of the other versions in our heads during the bad bits. But isn’t it worth €6.50 just to find out?

God would like to thank you for your belief and patronage. In order to
better serve your needs, He asks that you take a few moments to answer the
following questions.

Someone calling himself "adremeaux" (may or may not be a real name so I’ll play it safe withe inverted commas) posted quite a lengthy description of some interesting passing patterns on rec.juggling. I have to admit to not being the best club-passer in the world, but I like the look of some of those patterns. Check out the "Dallas Deal":

Can have as many people as you
want, and can be any count as well. Put X people in a circle, as so:

     A

B          C

   D    E

Each succesive beat, each person passes to the next person on their
right, and when they get to themselves they do a self. That is, if we
begin with D passing to B, next beat D will pass to A, then next to C,
then to E, then a self, and we are back to the beginning. You always
recieve from who you pass from. As long as you start corrent, the
pattern will work. One person needs to start with a self, and you work
outward from there: if A is the self, B and C pass, as to D and E.

I like the "as many people as you want" bit. I also like the fact that it has a very simple pattern but a very long period, since the period works out as the beat length (the number of throws between passes) multiplied by the number of people in the pattern. Five-person every-others (where every second right-handed throw is a pass) has period 20. I imagine it will always look like it’s changing and flowing. Even the three-person version could be interesting as a simplified triangle pattern. I’m going to need some volunteers.

Yesterday I decided to see if I could find any details about the rumour that Eircom was to increase bandwidth for its ADSL customers. I had had one friend tell me that he had heard that the basic home broadband package was going to be upped to 1Mb, while others dismissed it as just a rumour. Well this rumour isn’t going to be covered by Snopes any time soon so if I was going to rind anything out I was going to have to find it myself.

That or I could just ask Google, who helpfully gave me Eircom’s press release about the increase:

Following extensive trials in recent months eircom is set to transform the speed of Broadband in Ireland by increasing the entry level or standard speed from 512kbs to 1Mb for all wholesale and retail customers by 8 April, 2005.

Good timing, huh? Okay, I don’t actually know when the upgrade happened but I’d wager it was sometime around last Tuesday when I was briefly disconnected. The press release also says that the bandwidth for higher specification residential lines will increase to 2Mb. A quick Web-based bandwidth test last night clocked me at 1.6Mb.

I’m genuinely impressed by this move. It wasn’t so long ago that broadband just wasn’t an option for Irish residents. Now there are more than 100,000 of us using it. Given how quick I am to criticise Eircom’s bad moves I feel compelled to spread the good word on this one.

First the good news: Apparently there’s been talk of a live-action Transformers movie for some time now, though I hadn’t heard of it until today. The technology is certainly up to it; you’ve all seen the Citroën C4 ad [4.7MB MPEG]. Unfortunately the director may not be as good as you would hope. You see the bad news is that Michael Bay is being considered. In the words of Trey Parker, "why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?"

The even worse news is the sudden demise of Optimus Prime to prostate cancer. So Optimus, what I’m trying to say is Pearl Harbor sucked, and I miss you.

When I see something on the Web that I want to blog about I bookmark it in a folder which I named, in a fit of creative inspiration, “to blog”. As a means of keeping note of what I want to talk about this is both simple and inadequate (much like some current world leaders). I know most if not all widely-used blogging systems have the facility to save drafts. It’s only recently that I’ve started to think of that as a feature I’d use. My project’s deadline has been extended until next Wednesday; after that I’m going into Scatterbrain with a large axe to give it a reprogramming it’ll never forget.

I suffered quite a scare at the doctor’s office this morning. Thankfully it wasn’t of the "will I ever walk or play the piano anymore?" or the "how long have I got?" variety. It was more of the "I really wish I hadn’t seen that in print" variety. Stress and nervous tension are major social problems and it is in order that this situation should not in any way be exacerbated that the following fact will now be revealed in advance: everything worked out in the end and I will, to the best of my knowledge, live happily ever after.

I’m not a frequent patron of my local GP but I seem to recall that there’s rarely anything of interest to read in the waiting room. I’m usually stuck with a cover-less 1980s edition of Vogue, reading about the most popular shoulder pads and leg-warmers and the next season’s promised slap bracelets. You can understand my mini leap of glee when I spotted the trademark yellow border of a National Geographic in the far corner, part covered by a collection of Mr Mens. Walking over to pick it up I experienced a moment not dissimilar to discovering that the ship about to rescue you from the deadly ocean has just hoisted a jolly roger. The headline of the cover story read “Was Darwin Wrong?”

Blink. Uh, no. I couldn’t just let it slide, let a popular science-oriented magazine (one that my family subscribed to for nearly twenty years at that) print such a story. Were they giving in to the same journalistic principle of "balance" in the face of reason that plagues much of the popular press (and presumably the unpopular press, but I don’t read that)? After fumbling through the pages for longer than should be necessary—they don’t print page numbers on the advertising pages, nor do they count them when numbering the other pages, so I eventually found page two on around the fourtieth page—I found the beginning of the article. In my rage I didn’t even look at the accompanying photography. A two-page spread carried just the title of the article, “Was Darwin Wrong?”. "No!" I thought to myself again. I turned the page. The next page was taken up a single word printed in the largest type that would fit on the page:

No.

The article itself continued in the same style that that first word had established. It was really quite standard as that type of "face it; it’s a fact" article goes, but it really dragged me in with that big bold "No". The lesson, if one feels the need to draw a moral out of a blog post, is of course not to judge a magazine by its cover. Alternatively the lesson may be that it’s simpler and all-around less emotionally troublesome to stick to the Mr Men books.

Every time I play a The Simpsons DVD I’m first forced to sit through an ad telling me I’m probably a thief. There’s this long video of people stealing cars and CDs with captions indicating that stealing someone’s car is no different from downloading a video you didn’t pay for. I imagine they think this ad will be copied along with the DVD; that’s the only possible eplanation for forcing it on exactly the wrong group of people (ie. those of us who paid for the DVD). If I was interested only in the episodes and not the commentary tracks and other goodies I’d download the rest of the series as payment for my wasted time after being forced to sit through that shit. Next Fox movie I want, I’m getting it the cheap and easy way. They’ve lost my goodwill.

It seems the new Pope has been chosen. Get the whole story from Pope Matthew I.

Two brief notes:

• Slashdot’s tradition of reporting all of the April Fools jokes they can find leads to an interesting type of comment thread. All you see are people with user IDs in the high 700000s and above complaining about how all of the stories are fake. Anyone who’s been around for more than a year just ignores the site all day. Next year the low cutoff will be about 880000.

• I had hoped to mention a new project I started today, but considering its level of development so far I think it’s best to wait until I’ve put a tiny bit more development time into it before I announce it. I’ll just say that it’s simple in conception, straightforward enough in implementation, and so potentially useful that I’m afraid to look into the possibility that someone thought of it before me.