Cyberclogs

OK, its been a bit of quiet spell for me just now, still unemployed and looking for a job and the Abigail's Party cast are taking a break from rehearsals for a few weeks so we will reconvene at the beginning of September, looking forward to that. On the job front I will at least be starting some workshop called Strive as part of the Lennox Partnership, it last 3 weeks so I start Monday, hopefully I can get something out of it by the end like a new job would be nice! I'm sure exactly what it entails other than a series of structured workshops so it remains to be seen what it will be like. We'll see how it wents.

On the TV front been recently enjoying a couple of things such as The Kevin Bishop Show which is in its second season now and its good fun, I like Kevin Bishop's fun pokes at other comedians, he's not necessarily the best impressionist but he does do some pretty good mimicing such as Gok Wan fashionist and David Mitchell of Peep Show ("Great Spunky Shitcastles!"). And any man who slates Chris Martin with a spoof Coldplay song called Cocks deserves credit. It also makes good fun of Hollywood movies (by doing alternate endings or realistic versions of Hollywood blockbusters) and the mess that is cable television in general. Also the fact that it includes the lovely Karen Gillan (to be the new companion next year in Doctor Who) in the show is a bonus too!

I've also recently in my spare time been getting into Battlestar Galactica, having watched the first 3 seasons I've been gripped by it nearly all the way, although I'm needing a break from it now so I'll probably come back to season 4 some other time. BSG is definitely really well done and amazingly well shot, the space battles are terrific, but most importantly it is a series that has some really rootable characters (and a few lesser ones) with Edward James Olmos as Admiral Adama at the centre of it all and Katee Sackhoff providing a different (and sexy) take on the Starbuck character (with Dirk Benedict) and James Callis as the cowardly Gaius Baltar who somehow manages to gell all the woman!!! The only thing the series is lacking in is humour, ok there are some moments of dry humour here and there (most probably provided by Starbuck and Gaius) but overall it is pretty dreary stuff. Nevertheless BSG is worth getting into although it has taken me ages to finally get into it!

And well on that note I haven't much else to say, but I'll think of something....

OK that's me now officially unemployed, my contract with Clydebank College has now ended so I'm now as they say "back on the job market". I have to say the College could not have picked a worse time to make me redundant given the credit crunch and current climate, but hopefully I will be able to find something pretty soon. I actually don't mind being employed for a bit as its good to have your own sense of freedom and not have to answer phones or do typing etc, but after a bit it becomes a bit impractical and you need to think of money. So I'll see what turns up....

On the bright side in regards to the Patter rehearsals for Abigail's Party they are coming along very nicely and its also been good to keep busy with the acting as I've become unemployed. So we've pretty much got Act 1 and 2 worked out for blocking and lines are pretty much all learnt, it just remains to polish things up and get use to working with props, get our costumes sorted out etc, and soon hopefully we will all be set.

OK if you are not a fan of tech stuff skip this bit, even better just don't read it if you are a technophobe:

On a different note I recently splurged some money (well from my last wages, and thankfully Pixmania did refund me at last!!) on a new LCD TV, I've been agonising over this for the last couple of months as I hastily purchased a Panasonic 32" LCD TV back at the end of May, and while it was a very good I was quite disappointed in its peformance with black levels, meaning the TV couldn't handle darkly lit scenes in movies or TV shows very well. LCDs cos they are backlit with such bright panels can have a tendency to bleed some colour out so in darker scenes you can be left with a tinge of greyness round the edges, and with the Panny it had wall to wall greyness in the dark scenes, when someone walked across the screen in a dark scene the picture would go from black to misty grey! OK this all makes me sound like a nerdy technophile and to extent that's true (I own up!!) most people wouldn't really care about such matters and neither should I, but all the same, I decided to hunt for something better. So after much hunting and scouring the net and shops, I opted for an LG (again), my previous TV was an LG so I figured why not go for them again, so I got a very nice 32" LG 32LH7000 set, which I'm happy to say has been great, the colours, detail and yes those dreaded blacks are all excellent, and its a very good all rounder for SD and HD sources. So I can sit and revel in Blu-ray and DVD heaven once again. (OK nerd mode off).

Anyway I'm off just now once again, time to watch some Hellboy II on Blu-ray.... :-)

Well, I've learnt a rather hard lesson over the past couple of weeks as I had ordered a new LCD TV from the online conglomerate that is Pixmania. To be honest when I received the TV I wasn't as happy with it picture quality wise as I'd hope to be so I decided to return the TV to the seller (Giant Buyer who sell on Pixmania's site) and try and get a refund. This has been almost 2 weeks ago, since then I have not been refunded, I have since phoned the seller Giant Buyer who claimed they have processed the refund and requested this to Pixmania last Friday there. However when I contacted Pixmania one of their costumer care (or care-less!) reps said that as Giant Buyer were the sellers that Pixmania could not take any responsibility for the refund or the order!! So I am naturally rather pissed about all this, I feel Pixmania who had taken the money from my account themselves, have totally swindled me here!! I have never come across an organisation such as this who can get away with daylight robbery, their behaviour in this matter has been utterly reprehensible. I am utterly disgusted and sickened by their conduct in regards to this problem.

So I am now down over £500 on the deal, and have sent Pixmania a rather strong email requesting a refund or I will take the matter further. I probably won't get my money back though as I've seen from this forum page and others that Pixmania have got a history of robbing people of their money. Here is a link to one of them which shows many thoroughly cheesed off and abused buyers who didn't get their money back:

http://forum.pricerunner.co.uk/index.php?s=4f9b66e8787858b1480d04c831b7369c&showtopic=4844&st=0&p=16567&#entry16567

So if anyone reads this blog entry, please consider this a careful warning: DO NOT I repeat DO NOT use Pixmania, they are a bunch of money grubbing, backstabbing, untrustworthy bastards! Nuff said.

Its been a while since I posted up anything as quite alot has been going on so thought I'd post about it just now. Well we are a few weeks into rehearsals for Abigail's Party the Patter Merchants next venture and so far its going pretty well, the cast (which includes Susan (who plays Sue funnily enough) and Gill (who plays Beverly) from our last PM show and a couple of newcomers Tessa (as Angela) and Martin (as Tony) have all been excellent so far and we've been doing the usual bonding, warm ups, getting to know one another. We've also been lucky to get a very good director, Richard, who has a good understanding of the play and has already worked out some of the blocking. As I'm playing the character of Laurence, I've got a fair bit of dialogue to learn so its been a challenge but I'm getting there slowly. So there will be alotta work ahead over the forthcoming weeks before Abigail is ready for public consumption, which hopefully will be in September at the venue Stereo soon!

Anywayss onto other things my redudancy at Clydebank College is looming ever closer, to be honest I'll be glad to get out the place at the end of the month, as I need a change, although given the current climate, I don't think they chosen the best time to let me go!! So its difficult job hunting and trying find something when theres a hundred odd people applying for the same post, but that's the way it goes. It is a pain trying to find something though! It will be good to get a break but I'll need to find something fairly soon.

On a film review note I went and saw Public Enemies at the weekend there, to be honest I did enjoy it but I felt it was a bit overlong and lacking in places. Johnny Depp played the part of John Dillinger really well, and Michael Mann provides some excellent action scenes, but overall the film fell a bit flat at times. Hollywood licence no doubt would be taken with certain scenes (I can't imagine John Dillinger walking into the FBI headquarters in disguise while they were all looking for him!). Nevertheless it is an entertaining film and worth a watch.

On another review note I recently bought a Doctor Who DVD The War Games, which was Patrick Troughton's final story. This story is worth mention as for one it is an epic 10 part show, which does drag occassionally but overall holds the attention, but more importantly it is the first story that introduced the Doctor's own people, the Time Lords. The Doctor with his companions Jame and Zoe at the start end up in what appears to be the trenches during World War I but as it goes on they end up in different in wars from different time zones, such as the Roman times, the American Civil War, and others, pretty soon they discover they are part of a grand scheme controlled by aliens called War Lords, and one of the Doctor's own people, The War Chief. Despite its remarkable length (over 4 hours!) The War Games is a great send off for Patrick Troughton and he is great throughout the story. The introduction of the Time Lords is also really well done and the final episode has got to rank as one of the best, not to mention one of the most dark and downbeat endings for a Doctor (with the Doctor's trail resulting in his exile to Earth and being forced to regenerate, which leaves the Doctor spinning throughout space, helpless). The supporting cast are also really good too, with Fraser Hines and Wendy Padbury as fine as ever, and Edward Brayshaw providing some good panto villainary, and Philip Madoc providing some chilling underplayed Welsh villainary. Anyway its a good DVD so if you are a fan of the show, buy it!

And on that note that's enough for now.

OK in reverse order.... I might as well announce on this blog if not anywhere else that next month I'm going to be made redundant at Clydebank College. To quite honest it will be a relief to get out of the place as the management have took it upon themselves to do a restructure of the collge, which means cutting back on budget, which inevitably means jobs will be cut and the old redundancies rears their ugly heads. To be fair its not been a bad place to work, although there have been some days I definitely wished I was elsewhere and the odd member of staff that has made things rather annoying and difficult! (I won't say who!). So I'm now hunting for another job, its great fun of course, not! Applying for anything on the go really, especially in the Admin field, mainly cos I don't have much experience in any other work area (sadly!). But anyway hopefully I will get something, somehow.

Now onto Terminator Salvation, which I went and saw last night. I think it probably is fair to say it is the weakest film of the four but having said that, Salvation is far from a disaster. In fact TS is quite entertaining, my only real problem with it is that it takes itself way too seriously, and it sorely lacks the humour of the previous 3 films. Just imagine the start of T3 and the dreary voice over from Nick Stahl, well its kind of like that tone wise throughout. However the action scenes are actually really good and quite visceral, finally getting to see the human wasteland of the future fully visualised is something of a thrill. The terminator machines manage to keep their menace and are quite scary in places (watch for the "Arnie" cameo). Characters wise everyone is of course deadly serious but the supporting cast do well in their roles especially Anton Yelchin as the young teenage Kyle Reese who is helped by ex-inmate Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) and Moon Bloodgood (yep now there's a name!) is not bad as the spunky, saucy Blair. But I have to say Christian Bale as John Connor just didn't really work for me, he is the weak link in the cast, Christian just seems to have taken playing the part straight just a little too literally, he certainly doesn't have the humanity or vulnerability that Nick Stahl brought to the role. So I think Christian Bale to be honest was mis-cast, perhaps with the right actor in the role, TS could have been even better, but instead I was kind of waiting for some more explosions and action when he was on screen.

Anyway regardless of all that, Terminator Salvation is definitely entertaining, yeah sure its deadly serious but its got non stop action and its action is great and that's enough to reward its place in the Terminator series.

Guess what? Yep, I have the cold again! Well it is the summer (well just about) so guess I was bound to get it at some point, my immune system hasn't had much luck of late over the past couple of months, but I am at least starting to get over (although I am still a bit blocked up) it. So its been sneezing, runny nose, achey limbs, the usual cold joys. But I'm on the mend anyways, so enough of my health worries...

Thought I would blog on the the last two episodes of the Apprentice since I haven't done so since they've been on. A quick recap of episode 11 saw the remaining 5 candidates go through the usual tough interviews stage, most of the candidates faired well except for James who got all flustered in the interview especially with Claude. Claude also read out some crass comments from James's CV one which was a classic said "I put a leash on people who spunk their money up the wall!". It just makes you wonder what kind of idiot puts this sort of thing in a CV and how they could think it would make a good impression! Anyways however the other candidates were not without flaws either, Yasmina was pulled by Claude for not knowing what the term "turnover" actually meant and she didn't know the difference between net and gross profit. Kate was also pulled up for her alleged robotic and efficient manner as well as griping about working within teams comprised totally of women since they she felt they bitch and moan alot (not to sounds sexist or anything but I totally know what she means!). Anyways in the boardroom Sir Alan made his decision and he finally fired James, which to be honest he should have done weeks ago, as James's presence in the show up to Week 11 was a miracle if nothing else, or mainly just cause he made for good TV. Then followed Lorraine and Debra, leaving Yasmina and Kate in the finale, at least Sir Alan got it right in the end.

For the final episode the two finalists Kate and Yasmina had to come up with an idea for a brand new box of chocolates to sell to a certain market and pitch them in front of industry experts. Kate and Yasmina both did very well at this task in different areas although Kate over priced her chocolates while Yasmina's chocolates tasted poor (Strawberry and Basil choccie anyone?! No I didn't think so!). But in the end in the boardroom after much deliberation and cogitation Sir Alan chose Yasmina as his winner and I think once again he chose the right person. To be fair I think it was a real tough call between the two of them but overall I think Yasmina had the right amount of friendly personality, get-up and go, ambition and determination to be the winner. So that's another Apprentice over and done with, and I'll look forward to next year's when we have another 12 weeks of fun again.

Didn't get a chance to write up on ep 9 of the Apprentice so a quick recap, it was selling baby products at a baby show, to which saw the end of the arrogant and cocky Ben, to be fair he did struggle in this episode and he did let go of some of his attitude somewhat. Seems a shame and in fact I'm surprised James who PM'd this task and failed it didn't GET fired for it, he really is the cat of this series, how many more lives can he have! Anyway....

Just been watching episode 10 of the Apprentice, and I really enjoyed it as its the usual QVC one, where the remaining candidates have to pitch products live on TV and yep its great fun to watch them make a tit of it!

To be fair I think both teams did very well in these tasks and it was a very close call on the decision. The ever efficient and excellent Yasmina managed Empire whilst the ever efficient and also excellent Howard lead Ignite. For Empire's team James and Yasmina pitched together and not surprisingly James made a bit of a tit of himself (forgive him for being nervous of course) as he stumbled to begin with. But Debra did a very good job presenting live and in the secured alot of sales. On the Ignite team Howard and Lorraine presented together and they also did a good job and chose more expensive products (as Empire chose cheaper products) while Kate did an OK presentation of some pretty poor products (an air guitar "head!" and some cat pin thing!).

In the boardroom though it was decided that Empire were the winners as they sold the most, with Debra selling the bulk of their sales with over £900 out of about £1500. This came as a real shock as I thought Ignite would definitely win with their choice of products being more expensive, such as the deep fat frier which would be a dead cert surely. However in the boardroom Sir Alan had to make a decision and regretfully he chose to fire Howard, which I felt was a mistake, as Howard is definitely one of the strongest candidates in the entire show, even Margaret felt Sir Alan was wrong. But Sir Alan felt he didn't take enough risks, a point which the clairvoyant Lorraine raised early on in the episode, and sadly Howard didn't listen to Lorraine on taking a risk on one of the choice of products, pity, another one underestimates Lorraine! So that means James has escaped the firing line once again and he is the only remaining man in the competition! (a real surprise considering!).

So I'm really looking to next week's episode which features the interviews, where the remaining contestants get shredded in the interview process by some of Sir Alan's toughest interviewer experts (so bring on the bulldogs Claude, possilby Paul, and the ever shrewd Borden if that's his name).