You know, I think that to bore people more than I have already about my new baby would be to commit a crime against cool, and I've never done that before in my life, not once. I can even refer to myself in the third person, like, "M Dawggg wants a fawty," and retain my dignity. For M Dawggg to go on about his new found wireless networking capabilities, Intel Core Duo power, DVD Superdrive and Magsafe power cable would be wack, so he won't.
What I will say, though, is that this magic box I'm typing on now (really badly - stupid tiny keyboard) is, I reckon, built mostly for MySpace use. It has a little camera above the screen which seems to serve no purpose at all other than to pout at and take photos of yourself with, which is exactly what EVERYONE on MySpace does. Why, M Dawggg asks himself? How come everyone on MySpace has this overwhelming urge to grab a camera, hold it in front of them as far as they can reach, usually from above, and pout? Anyway, with this thing I can do that with both hands free, leaving me able to do other things, like enjoy a brew:
You'll note that I can add zany effects to my picture for that touch of class. I won that cup for being Angel of the Month at Office Angels, by the way, and like I said to a friend recently, when I drink out of it I know exactly what it must be like to drink champagne out of the FA Cup, sipping from the chalice of achievement.
Anyway, I didn't write this so I could pout into my iSight camera (see what they did there?) or to tell you about the tiny remote control I can operate it with, but to spread some sensational irony. I came here to self-indulgently lament self-indulgence on this blog because of the season in my life I'm about to go into, the season that prompted me to ditch desktop dallying and opt for mobile, er, movement. What I'm saying is that I'll shortly be doing far more by way of purposeful writing, leaving me with far less time to splatter the kind of inwardly-focussed verbal diarrhea I usually deposit on this page. As such there are two was my blog life could go:
1. It could die.
2. It could become a more purposeful and interesting pursuit, tied inextricably with the 'proper' writing I'm doing at any given time, making it more useful for me and more entertaining (hopefully) for you.
As always, a number two is more satisfying than a number one.
I need to be real, however, and stress that this could all be folly because I might turn out to be a bit rubbish when it comes to the crunch and find myself devoid of any meaningful journalistic nous. One thing I'm certain of is that come September I'll be busier, but whether I'll be able to bag some decent writing assignments is anyone's guess. There are some cool things on the horizon though, so I'll just have to play my cards right and see what happens. I need to learn how to use this keyboard properly for a start.
When I wrote the blog preceding this one I knew I'd need a laptop at some point before going back to university in September. I also knew I liked Macs, and now so do you, but I didn't think my dream would become a reality so imminently and be so glorious in splendor. But, shrewd financial wheeling and dealing in association with my friends at The Student Loan Company has afforded me the luxury of purchasing a shiny new Intel based 2.0GHz MacBook. And I'm excited. Very excited.
Instead of yacking now I'll wait until I pick it up then bore you with it properly. Watch this space.
In the meantime, look at the shiny picture an be happy for me. I think it has a flux capacitor.
So I think it's time to throw my cards on the table, or rather my hardware. I use a Mac and I love it. In fact, so desperate was I to get my hands on one that I bought a base level eMac at a price which would have afforded me a well-specced PC, one that would have lasted a good, oh, three months before becoming obsolete. And five before spyware rendered it totally unusable.
I love Macs because I'm a real person, by which I mean that I choose a personal computer in the same way I choose any other luxury item. Firstly, of course, I think, 'will it look good on me/near me?' Then I wonder, 'will it work?' And only then do I think, 'and can I afford it?' So, when I want to buy a car, the answer to the first two questions points me to a Lamborghini, but the safety net third question takes me straight to the used car lot at Reg Vardy. In our post-modern, material driven, celebrity-ridden age, true happiness is removal of the third question entirely, but sadly that's not the case for most of us.
I know very little about computers really, but when I came to buy one, Apple seemed to offer me a positive response to each of my three commodity questions, outworked as follows:
1. Do I prefer the shiny white, compact, sweet looking, fully integrated single unit Mac or the huge grey slab of noisy plastic accompanied by a mass of cables, a tiny monitor, twenty software discs and eight uselessly inaccessible USB ports ?
2. Which will I be more likely to have to pull apart under the instruction of a call centre worker in India at a cost of £1 per second because my files have disappeared? Again.
3. My last PC cost £1,000 plus anti-virus software, a firewall and call charges to Asia. That good looking white thing is £200 cheaper even after I buy Microsoft Office. Why am I even thinking about this?
So minutes after walking into John Lewis I was walking out with a Mac under my arm. Even the box looked cool.
The hilarious thing about the Mac vs. PC debate is that people bothered enough to argue about it always battle over specs, operating systems, processing speeds, software stability and games. Who cares? All I asked of my new purchase was that it let me print a letter and find out quickly when another hot celebrity buys a tiny dog, yet it's now in danger of becoming my actual best friend. My wife thinks it is already. My eMac has been discontinued now, yet to this day it allows me to do those things quickly and efficiently, plus I can edit a film, download a song, upload a photo, transfer anything into my PSP and record songs. All straight out of the box, all easily, and all with only one button on my mouse. Phew.
It seems to me that Apple know what most people want from a personal computer, the same way as they know what people want from a portable music player; something that looks good, is easy to use and works properly. Sadly, not many regular people know much about Macs yet, but hopefully Apple's marketing department will catch up with its design team shortly. Their latest ad campaign is a start, I suppose:
Yes, they're quite haughty, and yes, after you've watched a couple they get a bit annoying. But, they've ENRAGED the PC crowd, and that can only be a good thing, if only to provide some tech-tastic comedy spleen venting on the forums. Here's a brutal parody by someone who loves his graphics cards:
...And I'm gonna go play Burnout with a real person I can see who can't lie to me about their gender. LOL, as they say.
The thing is, most people don't really NEED a computer, do they? But computers can perform such amazing wizardry these days that we choose to spend our lives making them impress us ever more. I don't need to transfer my CD collection into iTunes, don't need to make short films about my band, don't need to write this blog, but I like to because it's all made easy for me. I'm sure that 95% of people who own computers, including me, couldn't give a monkeys how their computer actually does stuff. Most couldn't care less about their clock speed and MB of RAM, but if the magic box will allow them to knock together a comedy home movie one day and a slideshow of their cruise to Magaluf the next, they're satisfied. If it'll do that while taking up minimal space, being quiet, not crashing and, most importantly, looking cool, that's just dandy. My Mac does all that really well. My PC didn't.
Macs are computers for style-conscious computer-illiterate buffoons. And designers. They're for people like me, who cringe at the thought of knowing what a Java Applet is, whose only knowledge of HTML code is < br > and who think a CODEC is what your dad takes pictures with. People with games consoles. Argh.
See, before I bought my little bundle of joy I operated two PCs, my own and my dad's. Both sucked, and sucked badly. You already know that I had to take mine apart and phone a call centre, which is to know enough. And my dad's. Oh dear. It spat its dummy out within ten minutes of being first switched on and never picked it up again. I used it a couple of weeks ago and, I'm not kidding, it took about fifteen minutes to turn it on and open internet explorer. Fifteen minutes. I think he only persists with it to annoy me.
But I fear that I'm getting too close to all out PC-bashing territory now, which would land me in hot water because I wouldn't have a prayer in a spec war with a hardcore PC-upgrading Mac playa hater. I'm blissfully ignorant. Intel Shmintel, I say. If you're happy with your PC, hey, I ain't mad atcha, you just keep perpetratin' those right-click drive-bys on the Mac crew and I'm not going to argue. The point I'm trying to make here is that most people just want the coolest stuff they can get these days, and the coolest stuff right now is the stuff Steve Jobs and his posse are making. If the good looking thing happens to have a bit about it under the surface too, great. Why do you think Carol Vorderman is so popular?
Here's my vision of the future. The iPod Generation, or whatever you care to label them (I prefer 'neo-walkmanites'), will be buying computers for themselves soon. Obviously that's discounting all the older people who bought iPods and hooked them up to their PCs like plugging a guitar into a hi-fi. Once the younger ones get spending on their very own MySpace Facilitators, PCs will become the new Macs - a misunderstood minority group, except without the cachet and the backing of dancing pop stars.
Apple, on the other hand, will be stemming a tide of viruses instead of making software that works properly and ruing the day they put form ahead of function. How are you supposed to shoot aliens on your typewriter when your mouse has only got one button?
Meanwhile, Half-life will move exclusively to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's new console, the Pu, will aim squarely at the lucrative and untapped 65-90 age bracket with an innovative novelty control device shaped like a walking stick.
As Yoda allegedly said to Luke: Once Mac you go, never back you'll go.
So, having made a video promoting the new lineup, the band is once more thrown into that familiar languid chasm, four strings short of an ensemble. The bass player's provisory position came to an abruptly premature halt two days ago, rendering a nameless entity incomplete, a road eroded, a title superfluous.
Er...Steve's left the band. And now we've officially turned into Spinal Tap, except, fortunately for me, it's bass players we keep losing and, fortunately for them, none of the losses have involved bizarre gardening accidents or choking on someone else's vomit. Here's a little history:
Dan played bass for us first and introduced me to John and Dave, effectively forming the band. Then he left. And that's all I have to say about that.
Then Simeon came in, all Funkmeister Flex with his 5-string Warwick and baggy pants. Great musician too. Before that he'd played cello for us on a recording we started with Dan but never completed. He left to work in Sheffield.
Then Oli stepped up, another Funkmeister and very talented indeed. I suspected it wouldn't work out though, and it didn't. He does relief work in Asia these days, which while not as worthy a cause as being in a band, is still admirable. Just.
Then came a long break while we did other things. John amassed a collection of tools and DIY equipment matched only by Tim 'The Toolman' Taylor and began to build. Dave organised some sort of giant post-grad party, which I assume involved kegs, paper cups and plastic-covered furniture. They broke a projector. And I developed an addiction to The Happy World of Haribo. My doctor says the regular stinging sensation is because of the sour coating.
So, Steve. We love him for his personality and his playing, so he was an obvious choice. His personal circumstances meant he could only be a temporary solution for us, although we'd all have liked it to become permanent, but sadly Steve didn't quite click with the music. Euphemisms are rarely used literally, but there were actual musical differences, and because Steve was officially temporary it seemed futile for him to go through the time and expense of continuing to rehearse with us.
I understand Steve's plight because I've been there. The boys already know this, but when I first began to play with the band I didn't get it either, and I would drive home from practices wondering whether to stick with it or not. I think the friendships I was developing with John and Dave kept me there, and the fact that there was something interestingly unusual about the music that I couldn't quite put my finger on. It was this element I believed would make the band a success, and still do. Most importantly, the lads share my belief in God and the desire to communicate that belief through music. I love the music these days too - it's grown on me like a third nipple, a useful one that I want all my friends to see.
We still love Steve. He's a fine, fine bass player, but his 80s pop/rock roots presented a latent inevitability. He told me that he hoped to be jealous of our next bass player. In the nicest possible way, I hope so too, and the search is on.
Oh, the blog title. Quite simple really. As great as Steve is, he'll never eclipse his namesake, interestingly also called Steve, our band mascot. Steve is bright orange and thinks Kylie is 'just fabulous', but he's separated from Dale Winton by virtue of his percussion expertise. Booyakasha.
There are no chicks, but if there were they wouldn't know the name of my band because there isn't one. There's a band, well, three quarters of one, but no name. Ach, just watch the video:
Here's the story. John writes good songs and has done so for some time. Dave plays guitar in between all night LAN FPS sessions and lays down a riff almost as efficiently as he eliminates a headcrab. Together they made a demo using a drum machine which was good, but lacked punch. The producer of that demo mentioned that he knew a real drummer, one that would speed up, slow down, make mistakes and everything. So he introduced them to me. One 34 minute tribute to Mike Portnoy drum solo later, I was recruited. Dan the producer played bass and we set on course for small local venue domination using the name Heath.
The song you hear on the above video is taken from the one recording we did together, which sadly marked the beginning of the end for Heath. 'Musical differences' arose and the band decided to split up after trying a succession of ill-suited bass players, all ill players, but unsuitable nonetheless. About a year passed and I did a demo of my own involving both John and Dave, along with a bass player I have worked with for years, Steve, known and loved by literally handfuls of church congregations across the region.
For whatever reason, the timing seemed right to put the band together again recently, although that arguably proved untrue because it couldn't have come at a worse time for Dave, who is currently finishing his PHD and updating his blog. Despite that, John and I recruited Steve and began to practice a few weeks ago in preparation for Dave's ceremonious return. When he does, gigs will happen, and we hope big things thereafter. I'm confident, too.
I went to see Superman Returns last Saturday. It was too long.
Superman was a childhood hero of mine, so in many ways this film was fighting a losing battle from the start because I consider the 1978 original a classic and don't think a new film was necessarily needed. Watching the original the following day confirmed that fact, although Reeve's costume now appears slightly more camp as a result of the new darker one.
But I was never opposed to an update. In fact, I couldn't wait for the new film to come out from the moment I heard about it. Updates can be done well; a new Batman film wasn't really needed either, but Batman Begins did something completely different and it worked well. Sadly, Superman is for all intents and purposes a remake of the original because it shamelessly refers to the 1978 film at every possible opportunity. And there's definitely a stronger Jesus allegory this time around.
But imitation doesn't itself make this a bad film. In fact, it's a very good film, just not a classic. Brandon Routh plays both Superman and Clark Kent very well, managing to separate the characters enough to make them both believable, but never with as much flair as Christopher Reeve did. Kevin Spacey, on the other hand, is a pale shadow of Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor. All the bumbling comedic flair that Hackman added to the character is lost on Spacey who, although good, is too sinister in the role.
I'm certain that I'll like Superman Returns more the next time I see it, I might even come to love it, but for the moment I just can't get that enthused. Some of the scenes are amazing, the actors are well chosen, the directing and effects are great, and there's a controversial sub-plot that I'm surprised I didn't find out about beforehand. For me, though, it's missing that something special to drag it into the realms of the Spider-man films, which in my opinion are both outstanding comic book movie benchmarks.
That said, I'd certainly recommend it. Just buy large snacks, and don't leave your wallet on the counter when you do, as I did. It took me two days to realise too, yet I didn't get robbed. Incredible.
I received an email yesterday telling me that the new official Playstation 3 website has gone live. It's a typical Sony affair, heavy on marketing and very nicely designed, but light on all the things that I, and presumably most people, actually want to see - screenshots and video. I didn't spend too long there, but I don't think there's any game footage at all.
The specs are all in place, but they mean nothing to me whatsoever. I recall reading in Edge, the forerunner in pretentiously anal gaming journalism, that the PS3 will have 'one teraflop floating point performance'. What? Having been gaming faithfully with Sony for ten years now, with a few Nintendo flirtations on the side, none of which have satisfied or lasted very long, all I care about is one question: Will it trounce Microsoft?
The answer, of course, is yes. But I wish Sony would stop being all Japanese and just tell people that. (Note I haven't considered Nintendo's effort. Wii'll see how it does, but I think everyone knows what the outcome will be. Flush?) I've spent some time with an XBOX360 recently and the graphical capabilities are remarkable, but none of the games I've played so far have added anything to my PS2 experience but a few smoother lines. Granted, it's early days, and I expect that lack of innovation will be the thorn in the PS3's side too until developers fully grasp the capabilities of the machine's 'cell processor'.
By which time Nintendo will have announced their retirement from the hardware market altogether and Microsoft will be desperately trying to churn another Halo out, hoping to recapture the magic (of an over-rated PC-lite FPS).
Console wars? It's always been more a polite exchange of statistics, but hopefully soon one of them will punch the other one in the face, steal their trump cards then run away. Now that would be cool.
