turn it on again....

At some point on Monday evening, my broadband connection went down.

At first I wondered what had happened and if it was my fault: I had, after all, been moving cables and things around in my man room as I attempted a reorganisation that would enable my good stereo to be connected to my airport express to enable wireless access to my music through decent speakers. I'm sure you know what it's like, and I'll bet you have similar forests of cables behind your desks and TVs.....I've often wondered if I'll be able to remember how to put it all back together again if anything ever stops working and I have to risk unplugging stuff, and this was clearly my opportunity to find out.

After a lot of unplugging of cables and rebooting of various routers and modems, I decided - as my internal network still seemed to be working and I was able to connect to everything but the internet - that the fault probably lay with my broadband connection itself.

But how do you check when you can't access the internet?
How can you find out what phone number you're supposed to ring?

In the old days, you could probably rely on a neighbour having an unsecured wireless network. In these untrusting times, however, these seem to be few and far between (and those that exist have a frustratingly intermittent signal from inside my house, the inconsiderate sods....). I was forced to resort, in the end, to disabling the wifi on my phone and using the 3G / Edge network to connect to my provider.

Tsk.

A quick (relatively speaking) phonecall to a lovely man on the helpdesk in India showed that it probably was my cable modem, and an engineer visit was quickly booked... surely I could manage a measley 36 hours without an Internet connection at home?

You'd think, wouldn't you?

But how am I supposed to publish that blog I'd written? How am I supposed to find out the name of that bloke who was in that thing on the telly and what else he had been in? How am I supposed to put a post up onto Freecycle to tell people that someone has come to collect that futon and that they can all stop emailing me now? How am I supposed to look up the postcode of that place I'm supposed to be going to first thing in the morning to attend a course? How am I going to find out what that red button on the side of the scart block I bought is supposed to do?

Gah!

It all felt so 2004 to be without wireless and it felt positively 1998 to be without any kind of decent Internet connection at all. I was practically helpless.

It's pathetic, isn't it?

Still, all back online now so I can mainline the Internet to my heart's content now.

Honestly, what have we become?

computer love...

In January 2005, I took the plunge and freed myself forever from the tyranny of needing to be physically connected to the internet via a cable. Moving from dial-up to broadband a few years before had been a pretty big step, but wireless internet meant that I was no longer going to need to shut myself away in a room at the top of the house to access the internet. Oh no. Now I was going to be able to shut myself up in any room of the house and use the computer. Obviously, I was still going to be utterly oblivious to the demands and obligations of polite conversation, but at least I could now do it in the same room as C.

A little over four years and several thousand blog posts later, things started to go wrong. My PowerBook was still working, mostly, but it had now become so hard to actually connect the battery to the mains in such a way that it would actually charge, that I would frequently find myself crouched in front of the coffee table in the living room, trying to use the computer without upsetting the delicately balanced cable, and all too frequently suffering from the battery completely discharging and the system shutting down. I hoped that this was something to do with either the battery or the cable themselves, but after trying out replacements, it was clear that something more serious was wrong. It was the logic board, and as the Apple Care warranty only lasts for three years (naturally), a repair was going to cost me more than £700.

New computer then.

The PowerBook was top of the range when we bought it, with a G4 chip, 1GB RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Pretty soon after we'd bought it, Apple moved over to Intel chips and the launched the MacBook range, but my old, obsolete PowerBook never really caused me any problems and was still working pretty well as a workhorse internet browsing machine when it started to die. The 80Gb hard drive soon proved too small to cope with my ever growing iTunes library, but it wasn't really too much drama to move all of that onto a remote drive and run it from there. In fact, the couple of weeks I've just spent using my old desktop PC have served to remind me quite how useful my laptop still was.

The initial transfer from PC to Mac had been surprisingly painless, but four years later, I was a bit worried about moving things like the control of my wireless networks and stuff. The local Apple reseller offered to do the data transfer for me, for the princely sum of £30, but then told me that if I had a firewire cable, the new mac would pretty much take me through the whole thing when I first turned it on and it really wasn't any big deal. Thankfully, he was right.... it only took about 30 minutes to move across every single piece of data from old PowerBook to new MacBook Pro. It even took the picture I used on my desktop. Wireless controls were a cinch, and in the end I spent my time waiting for the 46gb of music on my remote drive to transfer back onto my new 320gb hard drive and hoping that the sync of my iPods and iPhone would prove troublefree. They were. So now everything is much the same as it was before, except my laptop has oodles more disk space, 4 times as much RAM and plenty more processing power. And it's all new and shiny too.

Apple laptops certainly aren't cheap, but I have to say that once again the ease of setup and data transfer has been priceless and the whole thing - potentially a source of great stress - was really, really straightforward.

And what have I done with all this new processing power? Why, I spent almost all of Sunday playing Football Manager 2009, of course.

Badly.

And C is away all this week too, so there may be a few late nights ahead as I rekindle my dormant addiction now I have a fast enough computer to play the damn game again.

Passes the time, eh?

yackety yack...

I doubt I'm the first person to say this, but I'll almost certainly not be the last: I think that if Twitter hasn't already jumped the shark, then it has definitely got its leather jacket and its waterskis on and is approaching the ramp at speed to make that jump.

The company only started in late 2006, but although I've been using it for something like 2 years, I would certainly never claim to be an early adopter. In fact, I actively resisted @sarlitchin's encouragement to get signed up, and only joined on 23rd February 2007, with my first update at 12:39pm. And how did I choose to greet the world?

"digesting homemade pea and ham soup. Exactly who homemade it, I didn't dare ask. It was yellow. mmmm. *burp*."

Nice.

It really took off for me on our three week trip to Ecuador that March, when I found that the 140 character text message update was a good way of keeping a record of where I was and what I was doing, be that staring at erupting volcanoes, discovering the effects of altitude or celebrating my birthday at 4500m.

That was it. I was hooked. An addiction that really took off when I got an iPhone and discovered just how easy applications like Twitterific and TwitterPhon make updating from almost anywhere.

I think what I liked was the way that the 140 character limit brings out the creative side and entertaining side out in some people. It's actually probably more amazing how much you can say in that space, rather than how little. As someone who, as this post will testify, is prone to be a little verbose, I loved the freedom of expression it gave me. I gathered "friends" at a gentle pace. I've never been a Facebook user, so I didn't feel the urge to add people unless I wanted to read their updates in my stream. Of those I did add, most were people that I actually knew somehow, either in real life or from a blog or something. Others I picked up randomly or were friends of friends and had said something that caught my eye. It was all good.

This week - and it is very definitely in the last seven days - something has changed. Suddenly Twitter is everywhere. Even the Daily Mail felt the need to tell the world how boring and pointless it was on 3rd January this year, and when the Daily Mail knows and disapproves of something, then the writing really is on the wall.... (although interestingly, the Daily Mail has a Twitter presence, @mailonline.... which, I'm pleased to say, has about five times fewer followers than a Daily Mail Parody, @notdailymail_UK). The reason for this sudden flurry of interest in twitter? The growing presence and visibility of celebrity users.

Now, I've got nothing against this and obviously they have as much right to be there as anyone else. I follow the likes of @stephenfry, @wossy (Jonathan Ross), @neilhimself (Neil Gaiman). All are pretty entertaining and, as they obviously all do their own twittering and don't leave it to some PR flunky, it's somehow a little bit thrilling to be so involved and engaged with their day to day lives. As well as reading about their lives, you can interact with them by replying to their tweets or asking them a question, knowing that there's a chance, no matter how small, that they may just @ you back personally. Not surprisingly, most of the famous people on twitter have thousands of people following their streams: Stephen Fry has 45,055 and Ross has around 10,000 (I have 55), but the numbers of followers they have are growing exponentially. Neil Gaiman remarked this afternoon that a couple of days ago he had 500 followers, and now he has around 5000.... As these numbers grow, behaviours start to change: even the most entertaining streams become full of answers to other people's (invisible, unless you actively go looking for them) questions. Even the most sane people start to spend their time replying to celebrities in the same way that they might a 'real' friend. I keep catching myself doing it, and even though it was nice to receive a reply from @wossy, it was basically pointless.

But the celebrities are bringing people flooding onto Twitter, and even those of us already on twitter are flocking to the celebrities. Lists are being published showing the usernames of notable people, even in such apparently sensible places as the Guardian. Of course, this being the internet, countless numbers of people on Twitter are not exactly who they say they are. Luckily Jonathan Ross is on hand with his address book to ring up his mates and to tell us that Jeremy Clarkson is fake, Alan Sugar is fake, Alan Carr is real, Jimmy Carr is real but done by his assistant.... Russell Brand isn't on yet, but he's working on him.... There was a bit of confusion over David Mitchell, but we soon found out that @ADavidMitchell was a fake and that @RealDMitchell was the real deal. Actually, that last one was something of a shame, as the real David Mitchell apparently has absolutely nothing to say other than to confirm that he is the real David Mitchell. The other one was much more entertaining. I've also got a soft spot for @thefuckingpope - he's probably real, right?

There are countless applications that will tell you all about how influential a tweeter you are, whatever that means. Twitter Grader will tell you if you are in the so-called "Twitter Elite", or exactly how far off it you are. My Twitter Grade is 84 out of 100 (93,830 out of 955, 229)... although based on what criteria I don't know. I checked the list for Nottingham to see if there was anyone local that might be interesting to follow, and was a touch disappointed to see that the majority of the local "Twitter Elite" have streams that consist almost entirely of links to their own weblogs. What's interesting about that?

Jonathan Ross reappears back on our TV screens from his exile on 23rd January. One of the guests on his first show back is Stephen Fry, and it will be a miracle if they don't talk about Twitter at some point in their conversation, which will subsequently be broadcast on prime time TV on BBC1 on a Friday night..... priceless publicity, I'm sure, and both will presumably suddenly acquire a whole new batch of readers on Twitter, and an even greater percentage of the Twitter using public will be following the same handful of people than are now, shrinking the online ecosystem of just a little bit more diversity and creativity. Most of all, it will be robbed of a little bit more of that intimacy that once made it feel special.

Still, I suppose that Twitter is very much what you make of it, isn't it? Stephen Fry has never been anything less than entertaining on his twitstream, and nobody is forcing me to follow (or to @reply) to anyone else if I don't want to, famous or otherwise. I'm starting to feel like I'm reading "Heat" magazine, or "Hello" or something like that: I'm finding myself grubbily compelled to subscribe to these people, even though it makes me feel a bit dirty and is turning twitter into something I never intended it to be.

Perhaps I should just go cold turkey and see if I can kick the habit? I'm 1,833 tweets in. Is it too late for me?

[I've just read about @PiMPY3WASH - the washing machine modified to tell its owner when a washload is finished. Great idea. It's got 193 followers.....all bar one of whom I think need to look closely at their lives]

pocket full of kryptonite...

You know how I was saying the other day that Superman was an essentially very dull character because the sheer extent of his powers rendered him invulnerable? Well, I think I spoke too soon.

I've just read "Kingdom Come" by Mark Waid and Alex Ross, and it's knocked my socks off.

This probably won't be news to anyone with even a passing interest in comics, as it was initially published in 1996 and has won multiple awards....but it's brilliant. The most brilliant thing about it is that, at its heart, it has a concept that renders Superman powerless, without actually taking away a single one of his powers and without so much as a sniff of any kryptonite.

How? By taking the central guiding principle of his life - the sanctity of human life - and rendering it utterly redundant in the modern world. Another hero, Magog, outright kills the Joker in cold blood after he conducts a massacre at the Daily Planet that kills ninety-two men and one woman - Lois Lane. Superman immediately takes Magog into custody for his crime, but he is quickly acquitted by a society wondering why it hadn't happened sooner: after all, the Joker was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocents over a period of years. Surely the real question to be asked is not why Magog killed him now, but why Superman and Batman and their like did not do the same thing decades ago. At a stroke, Superman is rendered irrelevant by the society he has selflessly protected for the entirety of his adult life. He is powerless in spite of all his powers, and he disappears into a self-imposed exile, to be replaced by a new breed of hero. The story is mostly about Superman's reluctant, well-intentioned but still deeply-flawed second coming, but I won't ruin it by attempting to explain it - do yourself a favour and read it for yourself.



Now, that's a much more interesting premise, isn't it?

The story is absolutely shot through with references to ancient mythology, the Book of Revelations and to armageddon: the end of the world. Does the world need heroes, or have heroes rendered humanity unable to take the responsibility for their own actions?

Cheerful it is not, but then, who says that comic books are just for kids?

I wouldn't want to stretch the point too far, but dare I accuse the authors of this brightly coloured disposable nonsense of ...literature? Perhaps I'm dreaming, but I got the distinct impression when I was reading this that it wasn't really just about people with super powers in tight and often revealing costumes at all, and that in fact - and slap me if I'm going too far here - there might even be some kind of message being conveyed behind the story?

It might even be.... an allegory?

Nah. Come on.... after all, it's only a comic, innit.

monster mash....

I spent much of my Sunday sat quietly in front of an open fire working my way through the "Planet Hulk" and "World War Hulk" comics. The Hulk was one of Stan Lee's very first comic book creations, making his debut in 1962, six months after the Fantastic Four's first appearance in 1961, but fully six months before Spider-Man's arrival. Apparently he's been voted the 19th greatest comic character of all time (by Wizard magazine in 2008), but unlike Spider-Man, Daredevil, Wolverine, Batman and the like, I've never really been able to warm to him and have only really come across him in passing in the Marvel Universe.

Sure, I watched the tv show as a child (oops, with that haunting theme tune, there goes another earworm), and I loyally trooped off to the cinema to watch the first "Hulk" film (although not the second one - I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice). Ultimately, I just did not find the character very interesting.

The premise is fine: the Hulk is Jekyll and Hyde for the nuclear generation, and there is plenty of scope for both drama and melodrama in the constant struggle between man (Bruce Banner) and monster (the Hulk). Unfortunately, the heroes that I find the most interesting are also the most conflicted (Batman, Spider-Man, Wolverine, to name three); these are heroes who do not live in a world of black and white, and they face dilemmas with every decision they make and in the blurring of their private and professional identities. Although there is conflict at the very centre of the Hulk's existence, an internal conflict for supremacy between man and monster, the Hulk himself is ultimately very simple. His motives may be terribly misunderstood by the world in general, but essentially he gets angry and smashes stuff up. "Hulk smash".



After working my way through the "Marvel Civil War" comics a little while ago, my interest was piqued in the "Planet Hulk" series when a number of other Marvel characters (Iron Man, Black Bolt, Dr.Strange and Reed Richards) trick the Hulk and blast him into outer space to take such an unpredictable creature entirely out of the conflict. Their intention was to send him to an idyllic world with no intelligent life, somewhere the Hulk could finally be alone with himself, which was all he ever said he wanted. Of course, something goes wrong, and the Hulk ends up on a violent planet where he is forced to become a gladiator, fighting first for his own survival and then for his own freedom and the freedom of the whole planet.

Yes, it does sound ridiculous when the plot's set out like that, but it's a comic for heaven's sake... Sheesh.

So when I was in town on Saturday, I popped into Page 45 and picked up copies of both "Planet Hulk" and the follow-up "World War Hulk", where the Hulk returns to Earth to wreak his revenge upon those who sent him into space. They're both pretty hefty volumes, but what are Sunday afternoons for if not browsing through a little light reading in front of the fire?

Hmm.

In my opinion, the most interesting superheroes are the ones that, as well as being conflicted, are the most vulnerable. For me, Superman is amongst the dullest heroes ever created simply because of the sheer extent of his powers. A character like Wolverine will always be a more interesting character simply because his powers are so much more limited and this forces the writers to be much more imaginative and makes battles with more powerful villains all the more interesting. Where "Planet Hulk" really works is in removing the Hulk entirely from the confines of Earth and placing him in a completely different environment. This frees the character up from so many of the constraints he usually labours under, and gives the writers freedom to explore. It is, however, a story that is fundamentally flawed by the sheer extent of the Hulk's power. It's reasonably well established that the Hulk's strength is proportional to the extent of his rage - it is, after all, anger that triggers Bruce banners transformation in the first place. In "Planet Hulk", the Hulk's rage is so immense that he ends up being able to swim in magma and walk in space without needing oxygen or a suit. Not only that, but throughout the entire story, he only transforms into Bruce Banner for brief moments, and never in a situation where it might be interesting or to put him in any real danger. In short, he is invulnerable. This is dull. The story is okay, but as there's never really any threat to our hero, I didn't find all that much to get excited about. The return to Earth and the Hulk's vengeance in "World War Hulk" are also rushed and confused, with a constant flow of characters from the wider Marvel Universe and a hurried and unsatisfying conclusion. The moral ambiguities here could have been interesting: were the illuminati right to act as they did? Were their actions really in service of the greater good? These are the kinds of issues that were dealt with extensively in the "Civil War" comics, which uses the comic medium to explore some of the issues raised by the real-life "War on Terror", but here they don't feel properly explored, and are buried beneath the rubble caused by the Hulk smashing up New York.

"Hulk smash". Again.



Perhaps it's been done to death in the past, but for me the Hulk will only be really interesting when they explore his vulnerabilities, not his strengths. Bruce Banner should not be subsumed within the Hulk, he should be at the very centre of the story, just as he was in the original TV series, forever unable to form meaningful bonds with people because of the monster inside him that he is unable to control. Even the Hulk himself should be about more than just smashing stuff up. He's complex and vulnerable too: a simple soul who is cruelly provoked and misunderstood by the world who only see him as a monster.

That theme tune is still playing in your head, isn't it?

"Planet Hulk" lacks these nuances, and, as a result, I found it ultimately unsatisfying. Hulk smashing just doesn't do it for me, I'm afraid.

... and with that, I'm going to flounce back to Anne Brontë and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall".

Well, straight after reading "Ultimate Marvel Team Up", anyway.....

like a monkey with a minature cymbal...

Want to know what I learned this weekend? Well let me tell you: I learned that I've got precisely 10,171 songs on my iPod.

This number is now burned indelibly onto the back of my brain after spending most of the weekend attempting to reconstruct my iTunes library and watching the slow tick-tick-tick of each track being processed in repeated library consolidations and reloads. After a while, I realised that it processed the songs in the same order: the order I ripped them. So I watched the long sequence of files from "Candy Says" by the Velvet Underground through to "Kicked in the Teeth" by AC/DC. Again and again and again over the whole weekend.

Why?

Well it's ultimately not a very interesting story, so if this is likely to bore you, I suggest you look away now. Seriously. There were times over the last couple of days when I just could have skipped to the end too.

Anyone still here?

OK, well.... this whole sorry story began when, at some point on Friday night, I realised there was a disconnection between iTunes and the music files on my external hard drive. I synced my iPod and watched as my library turned into a sea of exclamation marks as iTunes tried to tell me that it couldn't locate the tracks.

Obviously, when you've spent literally weeks and weeks of your life over the last four years ripping CDs and acquiring MP3s, and when your iPod is an increasingly central part of your day-to-day life, this is probably the last thing that you want to see. The immediate fear is that the underlying tracks themselves have somehow gone and that you'll have to start all over again. Can you imagine that? Ripping all those CDs? And what about all that other stuff you've somehow got your hands on over the years? What about that? I held my breath and did a quick search in my time capsule drive. Hmm. The source music files all still seem to be there (and anyway, I had only done a full backup onto a completely separate hard drive last weekend, so it wouldn't have been a total catastrophe if they had all gone, as I would be literally one song and 79p poorer. "Handlebars" by Flobots, actually).

Knowing my source material was intact was some comfort, but there then followed hours and hours and hours of fiddling about, trying to work out why the hell iTunes was so confused in the first place and then trying to fix it. iTunes is really a fairly simple beast: you tell it where the music is kept, and it builds a music library based upon that location, but without touching the music files at all. As long as you keep it in the know where your library is stored, then everything should be okay. When I had originally moved my library off my laptop and onto the networked external, wirelessly accessible hard drive, I had been careful to delete all of the residual music on my laptop so that my library was only ever in one place. This was the first thing that I checked, and I was a little troubled to see that a big pile of my library, as well as still being sat on my external drive, appeared to have magically moved back onto the laptop. The tracks that iTunes could actually see were the ones residing in here. No wonder iTunes was confused.

Hmm.

I checked the library settings in iTunes. It had changed back, apparently of its own accord to point at the laptop, and at that point must have copied back a big chunk of the library. I changed the setting, kicked off the magic consolidation process in iTunes that is supposed to make sure that all music files are sat in your specified library location, and I waited as it processed. This took several hours, and I watched as 10,171 files slowly processed. When that consolidation finished, I deleted all of the music remaining on the laptop. My intention was clear: to have only one place that iTunes should look to find my music library... my external drive. Sadly, upon deletion, the songs in iTunes that didn't have exclamation marks against them suddenly now did. All my songs were in one place, and one place only, but iTunes was trying to tell me that it didn't know where any of them were.

Bugger.

All my music was still safe, but how could I sleep until I worked out what was wrong?

By 2am, and several consolidations later (and several more happy hours watching 10,171 files process over and over again), things were no better. I wondered if having the music library in a folder called "My iTunes Music1" was somehow making a difference, and copied the whole lot into "My iTunes Music" on the same drive instead, and then sat and watched as it consolidated the whole lot again. 10,171 files.

No improvement.

At some point on Saturday morning, I managed to do something that duplicated the tracks - at least within iTunes - and I now had the missing tracks, together with all the playcounts and things, and a new set of tracks entirely, all freshly added today and with no playcounts or anything. I still only had the one set of music on the hard drive, which was comforting to some extent, but now iTunes was beginning to really piss me off.

In the end, I took the iTunes library xml file from my laptop and moved it somewhere safe. I reopened iTunes, and because it now had no concept of my library, it was completely (and mercifully) blank. This was definitely an improvement. Through the file menu in iTunes, I then reimported the library xml file, and then left the computer for most of the rest of the day as it processed through all 10,171 files. Again.

When it had finished, there was a message on the screen saying that it hadn't been able to import some files because it couldn't find them.... but as I looked through the library, I could have wept for joy when I saw that there were only 10,171 files present and not a single damn exclamation mark.

I'd done it.

Of course, every playlist and playcount that referenced one of the files that iTunes hadn't been able to find was now gone. I therefore spent most of Sunday afternoon reconstructing the most useful playlists from my iPod and telling myself I didn't care about the playcounts. Finally though, it was the moment of truth: I synced my iPods. My 6gb nano took a couple of hours, so it was no surprise that my 60gb iPod with everything on it took a little longer. So I watched as all 10,171 files transferred slowly -- again -- over the course of the next 12 hours or so.

Well, I didn't sit and watch it all. I read "Snuff" by Chuck Palahniuk too.

All of it.

So curious to know what I did this weekend? Well, for massive chunks of it, I watched a computer processing 10,171 media files over and over and over and over again because a piece of software was a touch confused about where to find them, even though throughout the whole damn process all 10,171 of them had never moved from where they started the weekend in the first place: on my external hard drive.

Wait.

Now I think of it, I actually started this process with 10,169 music files.

Where the hell did the other two come from?

[shrugs]

Stupid computers.

I trust your weekends were more relaxing?

no jacket required....

Whilst I was researching the best type of fedora to get and the best place to get one, I stumbled across a group of people who really couldn't have existed in the world before the internet. We're all familiar, of course, with the stereotypical image of the nerdy geeks who populate the world wide web.

Do you like Star Wars or Star Trek or the X-files? Are you into gaming or virtual worlds? Do you wash irregularly and wear t-shirts with pictures of dragons on them? Do you have a blog? Do you consider yourself friends with someone you have never met? If you answered 'yes' to any of them, then the chances are that lots of people would say that you're a either a geek or a nerd (or both). People like this have existed for centuries, of course, it's just that in the old days they used to do things like write down the numbers of the trains that came through their local station or they collected stamps. Mostly they will have done these things on their own, or at most they would be members of a small, locally based club. What the internet has done is that it has provided the most fantastic mechanism for bringing people together and helping them to share their hobbies. If you're a fan of something - Star Wars, say - you are now only a few clicks away from the most incredibly detailed resource that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know, and much, much more. You will also have access to like-minded people. I always liked the Star Wars films, but it wasn't really until I was at University and I met other people who loved the films that my interest deepened and they stopped being merely films and started being something else.... we egged each other on and we made each other worse, and at some point down the track, you realise that you are no longer quite like other people who see them as just harmless fluff to be enjoyed on the telly, and you see that you now have strong opinions on Ewoks and Gamorrean guards. But by the time you see this, it's too late to go back: you have become a geek.

The most comprehensive resource that I found on the internet about fedoras by a country mile was an Indiana Jones fansite. Fair enough, I thought. After all, Indiana Jones is probably one of the most famous hat wearers in the world. It only took me a couple of minutes of browsing, though, to realise that I had actually stumbled upon a thriving community of people who spend their spare time trying to dress themselves like Indiana Jones... and I don't mean they wanted to dress approximately like Indiana Jones either; they wanted to dress themselves EXACTLY like Indiana Jones. I quickly found a set of useful consumer reviews of different types of fedora and where to get them. Thanks to the opinions in the forums, I was able to steer away from a wool felt hat and towards a fur felt hat, together with a good idea of the best places to get hold of one. That was all I had originally come to the site for, but now I was mesmerised.

How much can there be to discuss about a hat? Did you know that the fedoras used in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" came from Herbert Johnson in London, were made of italian fur felt and that you can no longer get the exact same style? (quite tall crowned, narrow-brimmed and very much in the 1930s style). Perhaps you did. Did you know that the hats used in the three films are very distinct in terms of style? That the "bash" of the hat used in "Raiders..." has an unusually tight and everso slightly lopsided "pinch" at the front, that the one in "Temple of Doom" is the slackest and that the one in "Last Crusade" is a hybrid of the two? No? Can you spot the differences in the hats used between scenes? Can you tell whether a fedora someone has bought has slightly the wrong ribbon bow and tapers too much at the back? No? Well these guys (and they are almost all guys) can. They debate at great length where to get their hats and how to bash them. They put up photographs and compare notes. I was both horrified and fascinated, and completely unable to look away.

As well as absurd level of discussion on the hat, there were other sections dedicated to the leather jacket, the whip, the pistol, the canvas satchel, the shirt, the trousers, the shoes, the grail diary and to every other possible prop used in any of the films. God help me, but I started looking at the forum on the jacket - it's a pretty cool jacket, after all. I quickly discovered that it was possible to get a very reasonable custom measured jacket from the small outlet in Kent that supplied the original jackets for "Raiders..." for a little over £150. That's quite a small price to pay for a fitted jacket, I thought, and read on.

Oh. My. God.

As well as sensible discussions around what kind of leather you can get (lamb, goat, horsehide, nuovapelle, cow hide...), there were endless discussions on how the pockets should look (the scalloping on the flap has to be just so), what kind of sliders should be on the straps (rectangular and not d-ring), whether or not there should be a storm flap (yes, but it should be a narrow one) and if it should be secured at the top and bottom (no for a raiders look, yes for crusade look, apparently). No detail too trivial in the pursuit of screen accuracy, and every post was accompanied by a photo of a member wearing their jacket and asking for advice on how best to get the distressed look or how to treat it. My head quickly started to spin. God knows what the poor guy in Kent who tries to make jackets to these ridiculous specifications to send out to people from all corners of the globe feels about the whole thing...even if it probably is the cornerstone of his business as many of the members clearly have several jackets apiece.

It's a harmless enough hobby, I suppose. I couldn't help but smile when I saw that two of the members of these forums had set up their own hat company a few years ago. It was presumably the natural end to their quest for perfection. Good for them, and good for their fellow members who can now order the perfect hat made to their own perfect specifications in the perfect Raiders bash.... as long as they're prepared for the 12 month wait as their hat is made up for them. Brilliantly, these guys were discovered by Steven Spielberg and were asked to provide the hats for the new film. Every hat that you see Harrison Ford wearing in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was made by these obsessive fans. Their quest for the perfect Indiana Jones hat has led to them to be making the actual hats themselves. Even if you're not a geek yourself, surely you can imagine how thrilling a feeling that must be.

The internet is a strange, brilliant and appalling place.

God help me but I've sort of been looking for a zip-up leather jacket. Maybe I've been staring at the screen for too long, but I'm starting to think that I do actually want one of those jackets. I doubt anyone will believe me, but I have little or no desire to look like a fictional archaeologist (I did a history degree, after all. We historians frown upon archaeologists as they are prone to make sweeping assumptions about thousands of years of history based upon a single find...). I know it looks bad, but I really am just getting a fedora because I want a(nother) proper hat and I really do just like the jacket. I will not be looking to get a whip any time soon. Well, not that kind of a whip, anyway. Not one that I'll use to accessorise a costume. Well, not that kind of costume.... Perhaps I'll just stop talking.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got forum posts to catch up on and pictures to look at....my own custom jacket* won't spec itself you know.....

Or maybe I should just STEP AWAY FROM THE INTERNET NOW.

[* custom only in the sense that I may ask for it to be a touch longer in the sleeve so that it actually fits me, unlike every other jacket I have ever owned, not custom in the sense of an obsession with screen accuracy. I couldn't give a monkey's if the zip is slightly too large or if it's got a storm flap with fasteners, to be honest. Fair play to those that do, but I just don't]

evil minds that plot destruction....

Look at the bloody time!

Bad Guitar Hero.

Bad.

(but I think I nailed "War Pigs", and I think pulling the rock face helped)

tonight we're going to rock you tonight....

Having already displayed my geekish tendencies by spending much of last week playing Spider-Man II, I'm maybe a little reluctant to tell you about this....

Oh, go on then.

I spent several hours yesterday evening pretending that I am a rock god.



Sad, yes... but in my defence, it wasn't just me.



Sarah turned out to be an absolute natural.



...and Lord B kept being asked by the crowd to play encores (even if he had never heard "Tonight We're Going To Rock You Tonight" before. I really must sit him down in front of Spinal Tap)



Hen instinctively understood the crucial role of the "rock face" as the solo reaches its climax.



...whilst C. preferred a more "classical" style.

Guitar Hero is a very, very silly game indeed (do you think anyone under the age of 30 actually buys this?).

And as a direct and somewhat unfortunate consequence of the game soundtrack, I am now also earworming some of the most ridiculous heavy metal: "Strutter" by Kiss. "Carry On Wayward Son" by Kansas. "Woman" by Wolfmother. "Them Bones" by Alice In Chains....
Excellent!

What's not to like?

Photos taken by Hen and Sarah and available here and here. An excellent evening.

action is his reward....

I've just spent much of the afternoon swinging around New York, climbing skyscrapers and fighting crime.... all the while juggling the demands of my studies, my part-time jobs at a pizza parlour and as a photographer for the local paper and dealing with my heartache over my apparently unrequited crush on the girl next door.

I'm 33 years old. That's not too old to be playing Spider-Man 2 on my Playstation is it?

Is it?



Is it really?

Is it so bad I got a bit excited when I saw that in the new game you get to wear the black costume?


.....Bugger.

Shame the film is a bag of shit though, eh?

call me, call me any anytime....

After spending a ridiculous amount of time umming and ahhing about it, I popped into town on Saturday morning to pick up a new mobile phone. I've had a mobile phone contract now for going on ten years, changing the handset every year as my network tries to sweet talk me into another year. I'm sure it never used to be this hard to choose a phone. In the early days, pretty much all a phone did was make phone calls. I don't think I even sent a text message until I'd had my first phone for nearly 12 months. These days it's all bluetooth, cameras, GPRS, 3G and all that kind of jazz. Phones were big in the old days; bloody massive bricks with aerials and stuff like that. Then they got all small. Now they look like they're getting bigger again as they try to cram in all this extra gubbins.

It's all very confusing.

In the end, and after some consultation with this man and this chap, I opted for this little beauty. It's a ripper. A little bit of tinkering this afternoon and I am all set up and connected to my wireless network and thanks to a nifty bit of software provided free by Fring, I am fully signed up with Skype and able to make and receive internet phonecalls. How cool is that?

I've also(inevitably) taken a tentative look at Blogger Mobile and sent out a Twitter update across the web through my phone.

As if I don't spend enough time here as it is.

Hmmm.