Art/Empire/Industry

2006-08-21T12:13:00.000Z

Movin'

As promised I've move the blog to a new home. Please adjust your browser...normal service will resume as soon as possible. http://stufforama.wordpress.com

2006-06-15T14:47:00.000Z

Blog Smog... As part of my return to at least part time blogging, I'm thinking of moving the blog to an alternative Blog Site like Wordpress. For no other reason that I fancy a change...as in it's as good as rest. As I've already taken a rest from blogging this seems like the next best thing. I'll probably change the domain name too as tonycocks.com seems to get blocked by some profanity filters (dunno why) and as many of you know I'm the least profane person alive in Britain today. I might also blog about the Windows Mobile stuff a bit more as running mulltiple blogs is time consuming and frankly not much fun.

2006-05-30T09:21:00.000Z

Kingston, come in Kingston… Not sure if I mentioned it but we’ve moved house. After eleven years in our two bed Victorian terrace in sunny Barnes, about five weeks ago we crossed Richmond Park to equally sunny Kingston to a similar vintage Victorian three bed Villa. It's a 'Villa' apparently ‘cos the door is in the side of the house rather than the front which makes the building longer than normal. The location, remember the mantra, is spot on being half way between the aforementioned park (we’re now closer) and Kingston town centre, in fact we’re about 10 minutes from almost anywhere in this part of the world. Moving to a larger property has meant that the furniture we have fills about one room and we’ve had to buy some grown up stuff like a proper dinning table and my first ever lawnmower. OK it’s only a Flymo (a Vision Compact 350 if you’re interested) but a lawnmower for me is a sign that times are changing. Daft I know. More space has given me the opportunity to trade up to a flat panel TV and a Panasonic 42” PX60 now affords some serious Xbox 360 fun. Ghost Recon is still as hard as nails but at least it looks fantastic not to mention…big. The BMW ZM Coupe is now a long distant memory; I do miss its quirky, bonkers looks and warp speed acceleration but not the BMW dealer network which for normal paying punters (i.e. Not company car drivers) should be a million times better considering the wallet emptying expense involved. It’s been replaced by a Ford Mondeo Estate….I know I had the same reaction when it was proposed to me, but after a few minutes behind the wheel and the fact it was a fully loaded ST220 it was a steal. I even like the colour.

2006-05-28T07:24:00.000Z

We need more explosions Mr De Mille With Bryan Singer off remaking Superman and 20th Century Fox not having the patience to wait they gave the Directors chair for X-Men 3 to Brett Ratner. Who? You know the fella that made classics like Rush Hour 2 and The Family Man. Was there really no one else? Well credit where credit's due, Ratner makes a valliant effort to carry on where Singer left off. But rather like a fake Rolex, at first glance it looks like real 'McCoy' (no Beast related pun intended) however it's just ultimately not a quality product. Gone is the emotional connection with the characters, even Magneto's Brotherhood of Mutants, and it's replaced by explosions and a feeling that some studio exec wanted to cram in as many mutants as possible. In the hands of Singer the same script would have been more engaging, subtle and textured but also we'd have had the finale the franchise deserved.

2006-05-25T10:14:00.000Z

How they squeal when they're caught Some of the excuses are priceless... http://bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?link=waaahmbulance

2006-05-23T08:52:00.000Z

Leonardo wouldn't like it... And neither did I. Went to see The Da Vinci Code the other night and it's not good. Whereas the book is a veritable page turner, despite the ridiculous plot sign posting and feeble dialogue the movie is slow, leaden and just plain dull. Ron Howard was either having an off day or the script was hamstrung by what Dan Brown would allow the writers to do. A direct scene for scene translation of a book does not a good, or even passable move make.

2006-05-21T07:15:00.000Z

Hello Again... Don't suppose anyone has missed me.

2005-12-21T11:55:00.000Z

Don't let the bells end! It’s the shortest day in the year so it must be my birthday. The last few weeks since the beginning of the month have been interesting to say the least and I think I’ll start with the best bit. On Saturday I went to the Fasthost Christmas Party in Gloucester, not you might expect a unique event as it is almost Crimbo and companies on occasion have parties. This one however was quite different as we flew there by helicopter and the band was The Darkness. As expected they did indeed rock and Dan Hawkins and I shook hands not once but twice. Here’s hoping some of that rock magic dust has rubbed off on me. Mrs C suggested she’d found her new favourite way of getting about and I agree helicopters are brilliant; sadly they’re not on the car scheme. A big, very big, thanks to Matt Winwood for the invite, it’s going to be tough to top it I can tell ya! I’m settling into my new role as the Development Manager for MS Partners interesting in mobility. All the Partners I’ve met have been friendly, enthusiastic and I’ve seen some very clever things done with MS powered handhelds. Now Mobile 5 is here that will only get better. Speaking of handhelds my current favourite is the HTC Wizard, AKA the T-Mobile MDA, QTEK 9100, O2 XDA mini S. It sits rather neatly between a full size PDA and a Smartphone. Support for GPRS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and the slide out thumb board means I can use it as a portable data centric device buts it’s small enough to be as unobtrusive as this kind of device can be. Not sure if I mentioned it but my beloved M Coupe now has a new owner and I’ve been without wheels for about three weeks. It’s quiet liberating really and as I can spend most of my time in the London office, or the Barnes one if I want too, it’s not been a problem. I will have to get an alternative four wheeled vehicular convenience at some point so if anyone knows an Audi S6 Avant or a BMW 540 Touring going spare let me know. Karen passed the first year of her OU Psychology degree with flying colours, well done Mrs C! Any athletes looking for a Sports Psychologist for the 2012 Olympics should apply now. So dear readers have a great Christmas and see you in the new year

2005-11-18T18:44:00.000Z

The Office I installed Office 12 a few days ago, well Beta 1, and it's not bad. Not bad at all. The obvious things like the update UI look great, I think the ribbon bars are a top idea. Outlook which looked pretty good anyway has been tweaked and had a bunch usability shortcuts added. The LCS integration is already in place and when the WSS and SPS bits are finished it'll be very impressive. Yep...being beta it suffers from some of the usual undocumented features that litter beta software but I'm happy enough with it not to go back to Office 2003.

2005-11-14T14:45:00.000Z

Pebble smebble... Who was it who thought it was a good idea to render perfectly good looking Georgian houses with a mixture of cement and gravel? I hope the 1950 precusor to Sarah Beeny who dreamt this up has a red hot poker where the sun doesn't shine.

2005-11-12T09:01:00.000Z

Zens dead baby! Sadly my Creative Zen has died, well not died exactly, but has a terminal illness. Creative have had a few problems with the Zen Micro, specifically the 3mm headphone socket which can drop one of the stereo channels so it sounds like your listening underwater. It seems as if the Neeon has had this defect passed on. As I got it from a guy in Hong Kong via eBay I think I've paid the price of being an early adopter. C'est la vie! All is not lost though as the Zen has a standad Seagate 5Gb microdrive in it and that'll fit nicely in my camera. So....with what remains of my last Ebay sale I picked up a 1Gb mobiBLU DAH-1700. I know I'd never heard of mobiBLU either but they seem to make the world's smallest WMA/MP3 players. The 1700 is about half the size of a lipstick, has a tiny colour screen but...and this is the killer...it's OLED, so it uses about 25% of the juice of an LED screen and can be viewed in direct sunlight. Battery life is a consequence very impressive. It even comes with a video transcoder so will play MPEG4 vids and has a picture viewer too. OK so the screen is too small to watch Star Wars properly but it makes for great geekware.

2005-11-08T20:05:00.000Z

Xbox 360...it's rather good Had my first play with an Xbox 360 today and I was rather impressed. Played Call of Duty 2 and King Kong, both look stunning. The controller is a delight to use too. It's gonna be a monster especially with the updated Xbox Live.

2005-10-31T18:17:00.000Z

Hail Satan! If you haven't listened to the Tenacious D album, do so as you're in for a treat. Excellent stuff!

2005-10-27T14:14:00.000Z

Bring forth the devices... If like me you think carrying around a phone and a PDA is every so slightly silly a while ago I took procession of an Orange M1000, nice device which I swapped for my C500. When a colleague needed to borrow one I ended up letting them keep it as I had upgraded the OS on my C500 to Mobile 2005, mainly to try out push email. Lucky me then with my new role means that get my hands on all the latest devices, as apparently a new Orange M5000 is in the post. Based on the HTC Universal of which a variant is the upcoming O2 Xda Exec it’s packed with lovely gizmology. 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPRS etc etc. For me the big advantage is like my C500 it comes with Windows Mobile 5 but due to the larger screen and build in keyboard mobile mail and web browsing are a lot easier; load on the mobile version of MS Communicator and I’m done. Hey, it’s even a phone HTC who make these devices have a whole boatload of new designs in the pipe line and with people like Motorola and Samsung lining up a range of Windows Mobile phones we’ll be spoilt for choice.

2005-10-24T09:10:00.000Z

Lets go Mobile I start my new job at MS Towers at the end of November and Daz was right it does have to do with Windows Mobile. I’ll be looking after the mobile device world with Business Partners and will go by the grand moniker of Solution Channel Development Manager, so if you want to know anything about Smartphones, PDAs and other handhelds you know where to find me.

2005-10-23T08:28:00.000Z

A few days on the country I’m a bit of a fan of Boutique Hotels. Small, often one off establishments that offers great food, fabulous accommodation and fawning service. So to celebrate Karen finishing her OU exams, my new job and selling the house we spend a few nights at the Cotswold House in Chipping Campden, oh and we could take the Izzy. Having visited a few of these types of hotel and Karen having been in the travel business we do tend to set the standards rather high; and why not? They ain’t exactly cheap. Cotswold House has obviously had a huge amount of money spent on it and don’t get me wrong we had a great time, but when compared to some of the others we’ve been too it’s missing something. The devil as always is in the detail and this is the problem, the décor is a bit tired in places, nothing you’d normally notice but Karen spots this stuff straight away, fixtures needing a bit of TLC and some odd room layouts. And it’s probably over priced by about 25 to 30%. Again don’t get me wrong it’s not bad, it’s just not the best and at this price point it should be, but I suspect that the location alone sells it to most visitors.

2005-10-19T08:49:00.000Z

Music car house job Got hold of a Creative Neeon this week and I’m very impressed. It’s about the size of a matchbox and is all shiny and black. The battery life makes the iPod Mini look positively leaky in comparison and attached to a pair of Shure E2C headphones sounds excellent. I did look at a Nano but was warned off the 4Gb model but too may of them are either DOA or fall apart, the 2Gb version has a completely different set of guts and is pretty rock solid. The Neeon’s 5Gb drive means I can stick as many WMAs on as I’m ever likely to need and the built in FM radio and voice recorder means not having to fork out for add-ons. The Coupe is now up for sale and the hunt now starts for a replacement. Finding a Volvo V70R of a suitable vintage that hasn’t been to the moon and back is proving difficult, this is further compounded by someone asking why not replace the Coupe with another BMW? Well I asked, show me where I can find a BMW of a similar age for 10K and has enough room for two dogs. Well it seems it ain’t as difficult as it seems as E39 5 Series Tourings on a W plate are on or there abouts and this includes the monster 540. We’ve sold the house but can’t find anywhere to move too. It’s not a problem as the buyer doesn’t mind waiting. And as if that wasn’t enough I have gone and got another job at MS Towers, which reminds me that my chum Daz, who has multiple device syndrome, can easily be cured by a something like this.

2005-10-05T20:22:00.000Z

And it's Goodnight from... Sometimes when someone who you've never met dies your world subtly changes and will never be the same again; for me the sad death of Ronnie Barker is one such a occasion. I grew up watching The Two Ronnies, Porridge and Open All Hours, the man was comedy genuis and the world is a poorer, a much poorer place, without him.

2005-10-04T20:30:00.000Z

Die Spammers Die! There's a special place in hell for spammers, be they of the email variety or the newer blog kind. Until then there's 'Word Verification' as pointed by Mr Ports.

2005-09-28T11:56:00.000Z

Calamari That is one big Cephalopod.

2005-09-27T16:45:00.000Z

Style or function? Those chaps at Apple have gone and done it again and created a must have product with the iPod Nano. But I can't help feel that at some point they need to move the game on a bit, after all the Nano has no more functionality than it's larger brethren the Mini and the standard iPod, although they seem to have quietly dropped the Mini; well I can't find it on the Apple site anymore. Pity as I rather like the Mini but I suppose the Nano would only have gone and competed with the it, although I can't help thing the Shuffle is now redundant too. Although I never saw the point of it anyway! However Apple have got together with Motorola to create a phone music player hybrid, the Rokr, but it only has a 100 song capacity even if you add a bigger memory card so my Smartphone frankly makes it looks ike a waste of time. No expandable memory on a device like this? Do me a favour. Let's not forget that devices like the upcoming Samsung's SGH-i300 with it 3Gb HDD shows how far the game has moved on.

2005-09-22T10:49:00.000Z

Losing the plot… Football I’ve written a few words about Premiership football in the past, in large part about the knife edge it walks between being a sport/entertainment and a business so it’s interesting, for me anyway, to see how this particular season has highlighted how bad things have become. Even a certain Mr Wenger, who strangely has a christian name almost the same as the club he manages, has commented that fans coughing up £50, £60, £70 or more should at least expect to be entertained, but his counterpart Jose Mourinho doesn’t agree saying it’s all about focus and winning. And you can see his point; the Premiership now embodies free market economics so who cares if the fans get value for money as long as you keep winning and bringing in money. One thing that Jose forgets however is that without fans there is no football, they are in business terms ‘the customer’, and are the most important part of this sport/business. So how dull has this season been? Well in the first month of this Premiership season fewer goals were scored than in the previous ten. Of Man Utd and Liverpool’s 0-0 draw both Ferguson and Benítez admitted it provided nothing for the fans but at least the players showed ‘good spirit and attitude’. As Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian noted here was a bunch of footballers, some paid up to £5m a year, and fans are expected to except their good attitude as a bonus. Oh and Liverpool’s manager is a pleased as punch that his team has yet to concede a goal but how many have they scored? Er…hint it’s between 0 and 2. At least I suppose the players themselves offer some level of entertainment as most put in Oscar winning performances when tackled and Wayne Rooney just can’t help losing his temper with referees. However help is at hand and it was staring footy fans in the face. The Champions League. More goals, lots more as it happens, variety and best of all you haven’t a clue who’s going to win. So abandon the over paid, whinging, IQ just scraping in double digit, Cadillac Escalade driving, look I’ve married a Spice Girl underachievers and rediscover why you liked football in the first place. Lost I was warned the JJ Abram had a tendency to start something without having a clue of where he was going and it looks like they were right. Lost started brilliantly and I for one was hooked but the slow realisation that it’s not going anywhere, and I don’t mean just ‘cos they are stuck on an island, has dawned on me. Too much characterisation, not enough plot and some breaking of the immutable laws of script writing have left me feeling JJ doesn’t know what he’s doing. Yes it’s great that the characters are being fleshed out but hey some weird stuff has happened on the island and it barely gets a mention. In the second episode someone shoots a polar bear, not strange you might think but as they are on a tropical island it should at least raise a eyebrow or two however it’s never mentioned again. Oh...perlease!

2005-09-22T10:19:00.000Z

My favorite American Is Gore Vidal and the great man in 80 is a few weeks. But I write this now as I just saw this amusing quote. Q. Are you aware that people think you have a relentless superiority complex? A. It's because I speak in complete sentences. That's considered un-American.

2005-09-20T20:23:00.000Z

The Wheels of Justice... ...turn very slowly. Two days on jury service, all of which has been spend sitting around waiting. On a related note last time I looked snorting lines of Columbian Marching Powder was illegal, so why hasn't a certain Ms Moss been arrested? And is anyone surprised she uses drugs? She's a wafer thin fashion model going out with a wasted drug dependant rock star. Go figure!

2005-09-17T09:38:00.000Z

Update Not been near blogland for a bit as we’ve been busy putting the house straight so we could put it on the market. What I don’t know about wooden floors and varnish has yet to be discovered. Anyway after only a week we’ve had an offer a close to the asking price so we’re now officially ‘under offer’ which considering how slow the UK housing market is supposed to be at the moment is reassuring, we just now have the difficult task of finding a new place in the same area. We’ve been looking but not found anything that says, “I’m your new home.” We maybe on to one but its early days and the English system of buying and selling property means nothing is certain until the creaky legal system gets involved, even then you might as well depend on the Magic 8 Ball as a method of predicting how things will turn out. Recently got hold of a Line6 Guitar Port which allows you to download lessons, effects and all kinds of guitar riffage on to the PC to help improve your playing, and some might say for me that’s a good thing! It’s an excellent little bit of kit and for a beginner like me is a great practice aid. It’s nice when you get approached by people at work asking you to join their team as they hear you’re not a bad sort. I’ve had a couple of roles suggested to me, one is the Product Manager for Sharepoint which with v3, Office 12 and Exchange 12 less than 12 months away sounds very interesting and the other is a Channel Development Manager in Business Partner looking after Mobile devices, a gadget fest if ever I’ve heard one. They are a small but significant step away from what I’ve done in recent years but it’s time for a change and a challenge. The judicial system has finally caught up with me and from Monday I’m on Jury service. I hope it’s over quickly as I understand there’s a lot sitting around twiddling your thumbs; the advice I’ve been give is take a good book. I notice Choddo Hayden is at long last going to get rid of his badge engineered Shanghai Automotive 75. But again Rob’s usual impeccable taste of all things vehicular have abandoned him as he opts for the aspirational choice of today’s young executive who should know better. The new BMW 3 Series is ugly enough in a Mitsubishi Carisma clone sort of way but in estate version it sinks to a new low, it even makes the scaled up 5 Series alternative look less of the Lovecraft inspired abomination it is. This a car even the chaps at Top Gear couldn’t be bother to add the The Cool Wall as it was so dull and let us not forget the Chodmeister once drove a Honda Integra Type R which had been hand build by naked Japanese super models, or something! Please mate don’t do it!!!