100TWC - Day 58: Heartfelt Apology

This is a hard one. Hard to write, almost certainly hard to read. Hard to even think about. Because there's an apology - a heartfelt apology - that I have needed to make for a long time, and I can never make it.

Do you think about it much? I bet you do. In those quiet moments, perhaps, before you go to sleep. Or if you're feeling down for any reason. Or sometimes does it hit you at the most surprising times, when everything is sunshine and warmth and happiness. And then you remember with a sudden jolt and a lump in the throat. I do.

But for me -- and I know this isn't about me, but this is how I still feel about it; the only way I can express it -- for me the worst times are whenever I see or hear stories of abandonment. Of children left behind. They always make me cry. I'm crying now, thinking about it. Writing about it. There are some scenes, in some movies, that I simply cannot watch.

Even now, with the perspective of all these years, it's still there. Like a stain on my soul. One that I can never scrub off no matter what I do to repair that old wound. It bears a scar, you see. I knew it would. I talked it over and over with people who had been through it. Talking about it like that was, partly, just a way of postponing the inevitable, but it was also a way of validating the hard decision. I needed to be certain that, of all the bad choices I could make, the one I ended up with was the least bad for the most number of people. Which is why it took me so long to go. Even though I knew for a long time I had to, I couldn't bring myself to do it for years. Because I would always, always rather hurt myself than hurt you.

In the end though, I knew there was nothing else for it. I had to do it. Because staying, in the long term, would have caused more hurt than going. I tried to explain, even though I knew I never would be able to. Even though I knew the message would be garbled, and infected with lies and half-truths by those more interested in serving their own agenda. You couldn't possibly have understood, back then. And knowing that you understand now, now that you're all grown up and out there, doing your own things and living your own lives and, no doubt, making your own mistakes the way all of us do. Stumbling around in the dark looking for the way forward. Now I know you understand, it helps. A little. But you didn't understand at the time. You were bewildered, frightened, angry, and lost.

And that's the hurt I can never mend, no matter how many times I apologise. I can't go back there and be there for you, help you through it the way I always had up to that point. The way I started to again, much later. So this isn't only an apology to you today, though you surely deserve one. It is also -- or even mainly, perhaps -- an apology to the 11-year-old you, and the 6-year-old you. The frightened, tearful girls I left behind who grew up, in spite of all the pain and loss, to be the most wonderful, talented, beautiful daughters a man could ever dream of. Love you.

Could that have been any easier?

Nikki's been talking for a few weeks about what a good idea it would be to take some of our films with us when we go away, just in case (unlikely I know *cough*) the in-flight movies suck. I've been procrastinating, because all our media - both DVDs and BluRays - are ripped to MKV format and this won't play natively on the iPad, but with the trip imminent the time for procrastination ran out yesterday and I started doing some research. It didn't take me more than a minute or so to find GoodPlayer.

With a "best video player for iPhone" recommendation from Lifehacker, many positive forum postings and a price tag of only £1.99 it wasn't a hard purchasing decision. Little did I realise that the traditional simplicity of getting my hands on an app from the App Store was only the start of this easy ride.

I launched GoodPlayer and it instantly found two media sources. Well actually it's the same source but GoodPlayer supports a variety of access formats, so it gave me the option to connect to our film collection via SAMBA/CIFS or UPnP/DLNA (apologies to those of you who don't speak geek).

Clicking on the first took me to the file share list and I navigated quickly down through the folders - multimedia / video / movies - to our list of 400+ movies. Choosing one at random, GoodPlayer asks if I want to stream it, or download it. I chose stream (for now), and the movie started playing.

Just like that.

The whole process from finding the app to watching the movie took less than five minutes. Sometimes, computers and related technology get in your way. Sometimes they can even make you tear your hair out. Other times they *just work* and this was one of those times. Brilliant. Vibrant colours, crisp almost-high-def stream (from a standard definition movie file) and no buffering or streaming problems at all now that our downstairs network has been boosted by the TPLink Powerline adaptors.

It took Nikki less than five seconds to declare she wanted a copy too, and half an hour later we both had a download queue of 4 of 5 films which our NAS was happily serving up to the iPads at 3MB/sec (download time for an average film about half an hour) as well as delivering a film to the TV. Should help the flights pass more enjoyably :o)

Random last-minute jobs

Most of the time, procrastination is my middle name. Just occasionally though, those little niggly jobs that I usually put off forever have to be done RIGHT NOW. Today was a day for jobs like that.

1. The keyhole cover.
After decorating the hall, I replaced the brass keyhole cover on the front door. Trouble is, I didn't get it *quite* right. I reckon it was somewhere around 5° off the vertical. Not much, and not enough to make it impossible to lock/unlock the door (or I'd have had to fix it right then), but just enough to require a bit of key jiggling and make opening the door harder than it should be. Reason for procrastination? Initially, annoyance at myself for getting it wrong in the first place. Subsequently, not being arsed.

I took it off and spun it those 5°.

2. The shower light.
Our bathroom has 10 spots. Eight covering the main area of the room, on one switch. Two above the shower cubicle, operated off a separate switch. One of those two blew a few weeks ago. Reason for procrastination? In the 4 years since the bathroom was reconstructed, I've not had to replace one of these bulbs, so I don't know the type and I've been constantly forgetting to (a) bring the stepladder upstairs and (b) pull one of the bulbs on a shopping day so we can be sure of having spares.

I pulled a bulb from the eight and swapped it with the blown dude, checked our extensive collection of random spares, found a match and replaced it.

Umm... that's it. Fish will need a 50% water change on Wednesday which will last them until we get back, at which point I'll do another 50% change. But other than that we're all set.

The rest of the morning was taken up with lawn mowing and a spot of digging, leaving the afternoon free to watch Glorious 39 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Handkerchief. I'd not seen Glorious 39 before. Definitely one for the eBay pile - we won't be wanting to watch it a second time!

4K2K

Over the past ten years we've built up a fairly large DVD collection. 443 titles at the last count, although to be accurate approaching 100 of those are in the "eBay" pile. We like movies, there have been some irresistible deals during that time, and we actively enjoy watching well-loved films over. Something, incidentally, that my mother could never understand. To me, a good film is like a good piece of music. If you can listen to the one over and over again and enjoy it every time, why not watch the same film more than once? Fair enough if it's something - like Unbreakable or Sixth Sense - that pretty much relies on the shock value of a single scene for its impact, then subsequent viewings will not have the same impact. But the story is still there. The cinematography, the dialogue, the plot, etc. And for many of our favourites the emotional journey remains unabated after several repeats.

We were late onto the High Def, BluRay bandwagon. Having lived through the VHS/Betamax wars of last century I didn't want to be bitten again by backing the wrong technology, and it was pretty clear from early on that one of them would win, eventually. In the end I think that win was brought forward by the manufacturers' realisation that the uncertainty was causing most consumers - like us - to avoid purchasing at all until there was some clarity in the market.

Once BluRay won, we did start to buy the odd High Def version. Not exclusively - the picture quality from an upscaled SD disc is still perfectly acceptable - but for blockbusters where HD really makes the action pop; and for well-loved movies that had not yet been added to the collection and were available on a deal, then we would opt for BluRay.

But wait! What's this? I hear we may as well all abandon any attempts to replace our DVD collections with BluRay no matter how relaxed an approach we were taking to it. They're already obsolete. Or, if not quite "already" then soon. For here comes "4K2K" - the adopted handle of the next level of definition, offering 4096 x 2160 pixels (so an alternative nomenclature comparable to the current 1080p would be 2160p) on screens of increasingly ridiculous size.

So as well as allowing, for instance, Panasonic to develop a mind-boggling 152-inch plasma screen to exploit the new definition, it will allow crisper images on more prosaically-sized sets, although there is some debate about whether the difference will be noticeable on home-sized screens. More philosophically, the availability of the next technology curve always implies a reduction in price for the "old" technologies, so those who've waited for their HD 1080p screens may soon get their chance to pick one up much cheaper.

At the moment, and predictably, the format is not compatible with BluRay, and for us, with probably another 10 years life left in our 50-inch plasma, it's a technology leap too far. We will be watching interestedly from the sidelines though :o)

Saddle sore

Well I suppose I should get back to this blogging lark. Trouble is, over the past couple of weeks, there's been a decided shortage of blog fodder and, perhaps more important, enthusiasm. My urge to commit thoughts to the ether tends to come in waves, with an amplitude of about - well - two weeks. I can tune to a different frequency if there's a lot of material about, or if something spurs me to a rant, but otherwise I'll just let it drift.

My main sources of inspiration haven't been of much help during the most recent hiatus. The Large Decorating Project is at the preparation stage, and as it is... Large... this stage is taking a long time. And, being preparation, it doesn't lend itself to much in the way of excitement, visible progress, or anything much worth writing about. My small (but dedicated!) audience wouldn't thank me, I'm sure, for endless posts about sanding, filling, more sanding, priming, and the long and tedious task (which occupied several hours this last weekend) of cleaning the plaster, PVA, and primer splashes off the floor. A task which, with the current state of my knees, I can only attack in sessions of about two hours at a time.

The Main Writing Project is still stalled, waiting for one of my many queries to bear fruit. It's probably about time to send out a fresh crop, and also long past time to pick up another project, but distractions and displacement activities have had the upper hand for months and the notional "garret studio" is starting to look rather cobwebby and abandoned.

Such distractions as there have been, have proved very entertaining. With my birthday imminent, Nikki presented me with the Collector's Edition BluRay disk of Avatar yesterday, which we sat down all together to watch during the afternoon - all 170 extended minutes of it. Fabulous. Saturday night saw us in town (an extremely rare occurrence) to celebrate a friend's birthday in the beautifully salubrious setting of The English Lounge. A perfect choice for a relaxing few pints in the company of friends, some of whom we haven't seen for way too long, and catch up with news.

It's a slight overstatement to say that the past two weeks have been entirely devoid of bloggable stuff, and indeed notes have been taken for future posts which might be coming your way over the next few days, but in the main it is all sanding, filling and painting for the foreseeable, so if you were waiting for nuggets you'll have to wait a while longer I'm afraid. And what's more my enthusiasm for anything in particular is likely to take a hard knock tomorrow, when for the first time in I don't know how long I'll be taking the early road to Slough (a 5am start is traditional, to be sure of getting into the office by about 9) to help out with testing on our current project. I've been lucky this last year or so, to avoid travel. After several years of making the Slough journey up to 3 times a week, followed by a couple of years taking the train to Croydon, I've somehow managed to wangle an entire year of working at home. But as there's no remote access to the test rigs, and there are small pockets of the current system that only I know anything about, my presence has been demanded and I must answer the call. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

Movie Review: Paranormal Activity

Let's get one thing straight right from the start: this is not a film I would ordinarily have chosen to watch, for two reasons. Firstly it's a horror movie, and although I would class myself, generally, as a horror fan - I've watched dozens over the years - I have to say that recently (and we're talking the last ten years probably) there's hardly been a decent horror film made. At all. In my opinion. They're all either slick CGI'd gorefests, or sick CGI'd gorefests, or just plain boring. The only one I can think of right now, within that 10-year window, that I really enjoyed was Gothica, and I'm not even sure that counts as a horror movie. I just checked and What Lies Beneath just makes it into the ten years, having been made in 2000. So those two, then. Apart from that, no. I reckon the horror genre has lost its way bigtime.

Second reason: it's made in that Blair-Witch-Project, Cloverfield-esque way with the pretend hand-held home camcorder amateur video shtick which, frankly, doesn't work for me at all. If I wanted to watch home movies I could go to any one of a dozen friends' houses and watch their crap. And in many cases their "crap" would actually be way better than this stuff that only pretends to be hand made in some kind of false, arty way that is just irritating.

So I wasn't expecting much, as you've no doubt realised by now. So why did I go? Well, it's Halloween for one. It was a Chorlton Players fundraiser - their first movie night - for two, and I like to support their efforts. And it was a girls' weekend for three. I often feel like we don't "do" much, so when a convenient local opportunity arises to do something a little (only a little) out of the ordinary, I don't like to pass it up.

And why Paranormal Activity? Well there was a choice of movies on offer which was put to a web vote, and this one won. I'll come clean and add that it got my vote too, because it was pretty much the only one on the list I hadn't seen before (alongside such staples as Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and American Werewolf in London, all of which I've seen a thousand times), and I didn't know about the Cloverfield production thing at the time.

I called this a "movie review" and so far this post has all been set-up, so let's get to the review part. It was OK.

What, you wanted more? Oh, alright. For much of the first half I could hardly hear a word they were saying. I think that's another aspect of the faux-home made thing; that they deliberately muddy the sound and mess with the levels so it's sometimes too loud, sometimes too quiet. Or maybe I'm just going deaf. Anyway, that. And it took forever to get started. OK, OK, I get it: there's something weird going on in the house and you're going to try to get it on tape. Jeez, does it really take twenty minutes (or something) to get that message across? Yes, there's some spooky stuff that sets your head tingling a bit, but the hard core frighteners, such as they are, are all in the last quarter (of what is really a very short movie - 86 minutes). I guess it's an attempt to build up the tension, but it's a bit weak. So, on balance, a bit meh, slow and boring for most of the first half, approaching interesting for most of the second half, with some occasional high points.

But fair play, for a film that only cost $11,000 to make and was filmed over 10 days in the director's own house, not a bad first effort. Be interesting to see what this guy is making in ten years' time, when you think how Spielberg got started. At least he didn't go down the gorefest route. I think a slightly less predictable ending would have been better, but it wasn't all bad.

Bloody Region Codes!

We've had a PS3 for a while, you might remember. Aside from the fact that the copy of PS3 Monopoly I ordered from play.com went AWOL after New Year and never actually arrived, we've had a lot of fun as a family playing Buzz and Trivial Pursuit, the girls have enjoyed playing Avatar, Oblivion, etc, we've really appreciated being able to stream the upscaled BBC iPlayer on the plasma screen, and naturally the Bluray movies are awesome and even the upscaled SD movies are pretty good. All things considered we were pretty happy with it.

Until yesterday, when we tried to watch The General's Daughter and got nothing but a terse little "beep" and the message "this disc cannot be played as it has the wrong region code."

Not this bollocks again? I went through this with our old Samsung DVD player, having to hack it to play non-region 2 disks. We never had the problem with our chipped XBox, because the people who write XBMC have sense enough to ignore the corporate control-freak mentality of the whole region code crap. Must have just been a coincidence that in the months since we bought the PS3, we've never chosen to watch any of the DVDs we bought in Canada.

I jumped online to search for "PS3 multiregion hacks" - expecting it to be a simple matter of casting some kind of arcane spell through the remote control - and was amazed to discover that after three years, no such hack exists. The region encoding of the PS3 remains intact and, worse, no-one has really bothered to try and crack it because, as most forum-dwellers complain, Sony would simply annul the hack at the next (automatically downloaded) firmware release.

So it looks like around 20% of our DVD collection is unwatchable on the new system. At least, in its disk-based form. There are plenty of instructions online on how to rip DVDs to MP4, or AVI, or VOB format, any of which will play quite happily on the PS3. Which, if anything, makes me even more angry. It confirms the pointlessness of the regional encoding, but forces me to jump through hoops in order to watch a huge chunk of our collection that we BOUGHT LEGITIMATELY.

Is it any wonder the big media companies are losing money to pirates when they put this kind of barrier in the way of legitimate users?

The silver lining to this cloud is that it simply brings forward the day when we move our movie collection onto a media centre, where it can be accessible from anywhere in the house and not subject to these pathetic restrictions.

Movie Review: Avatar

I've tried to stay away from the hype surrounding this movie. In years gone by I would have been so excited by the concept I'd have barely been able to sit still through the adverts and trailer reels. With age, and with many experiences of excitement and expectation being dashed on the rocks of reality, I stilled myself. Hoping for the best and fearing for the worst. Having treated ourselves to the PS3 Avatar game and watched Nat playing it for a few minutes, the worst I expected was nearly three hours of video-game footage a la Transformers.

I needn't have worried.

Before the detail, here are the headlines. Avatar is outstanding. A team of creative giants at the peak of their craft, led by a man with a monumental vision, have created a world of beauty and wonder. What else is film-making about? If you haven't seen it, I would urge you to. If you're thinking of waiting for the BD/DVD release, I would politely suggest you go to a theatre to see it in its breathtaking 3D glory. Avatar will not only take you to another world for 162 minutes, it'll make you wish you could stay there.

"Pandora is a moon of the gas giant Polyphemus, which orbits Alpha Centauri A" says the Avatar wiki page, and you've grabbed me right there, from the off. Since the very first time I saw an "artist's impression" of the surface of a world with more than one moon in the sky I've been hooked on those images. Having a gas giant on the horizon just makes it that much more impressive. But this is just one of the jaw-dropping visuals with which you're assaulted in the opening minutes, and there's even better to come later on. Here is a world similar to those previously locked in the imaginations of the likes of Roger Dean and Rodney Matthews. Only it's real.

Undoubtedly using every cycle of processing power on the world's fastest graphics-rendering computers, and every nuance of programming subtlety developed over years to faithfully reproduce real-world physics and biology, Pandora looks real.

I've been impressed with CGI before - from Lord of the Rings to various Terminators - but there's always been something, some little thing, that jarred me out of my suspension of disbelief. That mental hiccup where you think oh yeah, it's just a drawing. Not here. In Avatar, CGI finally comes of age.

And at that point, the only limit is your imagination. From the gently floating seeds of Eywa through the bioluminescent forest pathways to the mighty Leonopteryx (Toruk), Pandora is the world you've only been able to read about up 'til now. Whether it's Hothouse or Hyperion, Halvmork or Helliconia, they've been more real in your head. Now they can be real in front of your eyes.

As good as any visuals are, they can always be lifted with the addition of a good sound track and here again Avatar does not disappoint. From the simplest forest sounds through the Na'vi native music to the soaring and uplifting strains that accompany the Ikran flights, Avatar is as much a joy to listen to as it is to watch. This must surely be the best work of James Horner's career.

Although Avatar pushes the envelope in so many technical ways, and achieves such heights of success with all of them, still it would be a hollow shell without a story to fill it and here, you may read, some critics have fallen short of rapture in their reviews, calling the plot predictable at best. Actually it had the opposite effect on me. The presence of the stereotypical characters - the grizzled military leader out for blood; the impatient businessman with his eyes so fixed on the money he doesn't see the real prize; the suspicious warrior leader; the beautiful native girl who steals the hero's heart; and on; and on - for me merely added a comfort factor. Knowing where the story was headed almost allowed me to relax and enjoy it MORE. There were still enough surprises to keep it interesting, even if the visual delights as each new part of the planet was revealed hadn't.

Scriptwise, some of the early exposition wanders close to the border with the Realms of Woodenness, but all things considered the backstory of how Pandora was found, why humans need masks to survive, why the Na'vi are revolting and what the military forces are really after, is all sorted out in pretty short order, arming the viewer with the necessary information and leaving him or her free to lap up the alien landscape as it unfolds.

Avatar as a whole, and the world of Pandora and the Na'vi in particular, have stayed with me in a way I cannot remember a film ever having done since I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at the age of 12. I saw it yesterday and I'd be delighted to go back and watch it again today. I don't think that has ever happened. Simply outstanding in every way. I read one critic's claim that it is the best film of the last thirty years. I couldn't disagree.

It's a Revelation!

This afternoon's family movie was this one. Revelation. For the first time ever, when it had finished, I took the disc out of the player, and threw it straight in the bin. It's not even worth putting on eBay. In fact I wondered, in the end, why we'd even bothered watching it through.

Later, leafing through the comments on IMDb, I discovered we weren't alone in our opinion.

I'm not going to attempt a review. It's not that it would be hard to write, I've just got way more important things to do with my time. Suffice to say this is one to steer clear of, unless you like to watch really atrocious movies so you can laugh at them. The kind with a plot that wanders aimlessly through time and space like a Time Lord with no map, dialogue that was apparently written by a five-year-old (a pompous five-year-old at that), and performances so wooden they would have been kicked out of Pogles' Wood.

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Took Natalie & Blythe to see this at the IMAX on Sunday. IMAX has somehow become our preferred venue for movie-going, probably on account of us being somewhat selective about what we see in the cinema and, having decided that something is worth watching on a big screen, it makes sense to go for the biggest screen around!

The first 12 minutes of HBP was presented in IMAX 3D. An entertaining and absorbing experience but ultimately I find it distracting. When I'm not trying to duck out of the way of the revolving Warner Brothers sign that's threatening to chop my head off, I'm thinking about how clever the effects are, and lifting the 3D glasses off to see what the film looks like without them (I've done this at every 3D presentation I've ever attended, going right back to Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone). So I was quite grateful when the little red heads flashed up to tell us it was time to remove the glasses and get on with the rest of the film.

And what a film it was. Easily the best of the Potters so far, screenwriter Steve Kloves did an admirable job of turning another overlong book into a watchable movie with many levels of interest. From what I've read opinion among HP fans is sharply divided. The ending was all wrong, too much was left out, scenes invented that weren't in the book yadda yadda yadda. I'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who's only read the book once. For me, the further you get through the HP series, the more long-winded and tedious the books become. I've long said that it's as if the publisher gave up any pretence of editing Rowling and decided the whole thing was just such an amazing money-generating machine they may as well roll over and publish whatever she came up with. As a result the books became ever more self-indulgent, flabby and overwritten.

That approach won't work for a movie. You only have so much time to play with. So what's important? To make an entertaining film that stands on its own merits, or one which is less entertaining for the masses, but ticks all the boxes for the few who like to steep themselves in Potter lore and know every nuance and motivation of every character backwards?

I know where I sit. HBP was entertaining from start to finish. Some great comic moments, many centred around the wonderful character of Luna Lovegood (played brilliantly by Evanna Lynch), some excellent character development, and overall a superbly fell and claustrophobic atmosphere pervading the entire 153 minutes. OK, maybe we could have spent a bit less time on the various teenage relationships, but for me this only added realism to the piece. With hormones raging, many teenagers DO think their relationships, real or imagined, are the most important things in the world, even when there's dark magic invading every corner of the world and threatening to destroy life as we know it.

One downside of the massive amount of story we had to get through in a (relatively) short time, was the number of characters effectively reduced to cameos. Hagrid, Professor McGonagall, most of the Weasley family, Tonks (more Natalia Tena please!), Lupin, Neville, Wormtail, even Crabbe and Goyle, have mere seconds on screen, although without exception they manage to make the most of their moments.

Conversely, those who enjoy the most screen time pull out performances that, each in their own way, are stronger than anything that's gone before. The three main characters get better with every outing, Michael Gambon's Dumbledore enjoys some of his best scenes ever, and Tom Felton finally has the chance to turn Draco Malfoy into more than a two-dimensional cipher of a baddie. He grabs that chance with both hands.

I guess the next instalment will be subtitled "the search for the Horcruxes" which will have a tightrope to walk to keep the interest up. Is there really enough material in the last book for two movies, or is it merely an excuse to wring every last drop of profit from the franchise? Time will tell.

Sometimes I even impress myself

Been working on an official movie site for my mate, hot shot movie writer/director/producer Colleen Patrick recently. Well, I say "official." It's official at the moment. With the film in pre-production they needed a web presence. Initially a quick-and-dirty web presence just so that anyone paying a visit to the official URL wouldn't get one of those impersonal hosting pages.

Once the film was in the can and slated to have its premier at the Seattle International Film Festival, "quick and dirty" needed to become a little more polished.

Once the film finds a distributor, they'll swing into action with their army of Flash/PHP/Java programmers and dump all over my work, but for now I'm the official webmaster. Go take a look. We're at http://www.thewholetruththemovie.com.

Recently, to follow up the trailer on YouTube, Colleen and her fellow producers and tech crew have been releasing interviews from the EPK - the kind of thing that will eventually find its way onto the "extras" DVD. Now originally, The Whole Truth website featured just that one trailer, on its own page. About a week ago, Colleen emailed me asking if I could put up all the rest of the interviews.

Problem was, the website was conceived as a fixed space. The list of interviews from the EPK is already 14 long and increases by one a day. I have no idea where it will end. I needed a way of displaying YouTube videos in a kind of gallery, where you could pick from a list, and see the result in a "display area." A few minutes' research uncovered one way of doing this that YouTube themselves offer. A YouTube Custom Player. Associated with a playlist, this can be embedded in a site in exactly the same way as a single video file, but offers a selection panel containing all the videos on the playlist. It has the advantage that any additions to the playlist are immediately reflected in the custom player, so updating the site with each new day's interview would involve just a single operation on YouTube.

I tried it out, and it worked fine, but it wasn't exactly the image I wanted. What's more, the available colour schemes are quite limited and didn't match the livery of the site. I needed something more configurable.

As always when I'm stuck for a solution, I turned to Stu Nicholls' marvellous CSS Play site. Browsing through his list of inventive galleries, I came across this one, which was uncannily close to what I'd envisaged for the YouTube gallery. I downloaded the code and read through it quickly.

Obviously, the main difference between this and what I was trying to do is that Stu's gallery handles img tags, and the standard YouTube embedding code uses object tags. But the simple Javascript array handler seemed eminently editable to handle object instead of img, so I set about fiddling with it to see if I could make it work.

With remarkable ease, I proved the 80/20 rule. I got 80% of the way to what I wanted in the first half-hour. That last 20% proved a little more tricky. For a start, the left and right arrows, which remained as imgs, were not being picked up as part of the array. It looked certain this was screwing things up somewhere. If they weren't part of the list that could be "clicked" then they would remain dormant and there'd be no way to access videos beyond the visible elements of the list.

I reasoned that since images ARE objects of a sort (indeed the CSS/HTML standards body intended object to replace img, although most browsers still handle img tags better than objects and they have much wider currency) I could replace the left/right arrow img tags with object declarations. Immediately things started to work a little better. The main problem remaining at that point being that YouTube videos are considerably wider than Stu's original photos, which required some pixel-counting and adjustment of widths and array limits to get the main functionality working as intended.

It was then only a simple matter of positioning the whole gallery correctly on the page, and amending the text and background colours to match the site. In fact the hardest (well, most tedious) part of the whole exercise proved to be the creation of thumbnails for each of the 14 YouTube videos.

The final result can be seen here. And yes, as the title of this post implies, I impressed myself. You might think I'm easily impressed; I couldn't possibly comment.

The editing requirements for this version will be slightly more onerous than for the YouTube Custom Player, involving the creation of a new thumbnail for each new video, adding an entry to the array and adding a new item to the HTML list that forms the basis for the gallery. But that's all mechanical stuff. The gallery is unlimited in capacity and looks much more a part of the site than the nearest Custom Player livery - a rather dangerous looking cherry red.

It's true to say that if there were hundreds of entries it would become very tedious scrolling through them one at a time if you knew you wanted #93, for instance, but I doubt that will be a problem in this case and if it does turn out to be an issue I can always add extra left and right buttons to skip an entire section (8 entries) at a time.

Movie Review: Star Trek

First off, I should say that I think J.J. Abrams has a blimmin' cheek calling his film "Star Trek" as if it is the first one ever. OK, he - or more accurately writers Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman - pulls off a clever trick that means, in some respects, it could be considered to be the first one ever, but that's not the point. Neither do I agree with those who argue the franchise needed "rebooting" - whatever that means. OK Star Trek 10 (Nemesis) was a turkey, but there have been turkeys before. It made its money back. It needn't have ended there, even if none of the cast were up for another, and starting the story again at the beginning doesn't necessarily qualify as a reboot. A retelling, maybe, but even so I think it would have been more respectful to have a marginally longer title.

But I seem to have started off on a negative note which belies the enjoyment I derived from this movie, and its many good points. That aforementioned trick IS clever. It allows Abrams unprecedented freedom from canon, which for a 40+ year franchise is no bad thing. Having to bear in mind every little nuance that went before, from five TV series and ten movies, even if those events are all in the future and all you have to do is avoid doing anything which precludes them from happening, must be like wearing a creative straitjacket for the writers. Even with this freedom, the writers do a remarkable job of staying within the known Star Trek universe, and maintaining the characters as essentially the same people we grew to love all those years ago in TOS. And on top of that, they layer on credible new slants, excitement by the bucketload, and some memorable chunks of dialogue that will stay with me for many years (e.g Captain Pike to Kirk: "Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mother's. And yours. I dare you to do better."). The only thing they don't do, and for which the film suffers to some degree, is come up with a basic story that is anything near interesting. For once though, that lack does not wreck the film, which is saved by the humour, the action, the effects and the cast.

Yes, apart from a small handful of misses, the cast are uniformly good, and some are outstanding. Special mention has to go to Karl Urban as Doctor "Bones" McCoy, who for much of the movie acted as though he was channelling DeForest Kelly, so accurate was his mimicry of Bones' famous verbal ticks and body language. "My GOD man!", "Dammit Jim, I'm a Doctor, not a physicist," and "Are you out of your Vulcan mind?" tripped off his tongue as if he'd been saying them all his life, which of course Bones would have been. Nice touches with the origination of his nickname, and his early befriending of Kirk too. The other stand-out for me, and much has already been written about this so I won't dwell on it, was Zachary Quinto as Spock. Uncanny facial resemblance coupled with excellent writing, a more complete backstory than we've ever had before, and a compelling insight into his early life as a total genius made his probably the most powerful character in the entire movie.

Chris Pine has received much praise for his rendition of Kirk, and although it took me a while to warm to him in the role, and I wouldn't go so high and wide with the praise as some, he certainly did manage to bring something new to the role and make it more than a Shatner clone. The only one that didn't really work for me was Simon Pegg as Scotty. Comic relief is great, but I don't remember Scotty being *quite* so much of a loon, and I don't think it sat well. He can certainly say "I'm giving her all she's got, captain," well enough though.

On screen the film looks every penny of the $150m it cost (and which it virtually made back in the first two weekends at the box office, in the US alone). This will definitely be one to buy on Blu-ray. I don't have any time for those who ask why the technology looks so much more advance than it did in TOS. The answer is simple, and has a lot to do with why the final TV series - Enterprise - failed for me. Making a modern show with technology that looks faux-clunky doesn't work. We loved TOS with its clunky hardware because we knew it was the best they could do at the time. Now film makers can do better, so why wouldn't they?

All-in-all then, another Star Trek movie to love, without a doubt one for the collection, and now that it's proved a huge box office hit I'll be amazed if they don't make another. All I would ask is: please, please next time, give us a good story. Remember Wrath of Khan and make it so.

Watchmen

So much has been written about this - both the book and the film already, even though it's only been out a week - that I almost hesitate to go into print with my own view. Is there anything new I can say? Does that even matter?

I read the book over Christmas, at Blythe's suggestion, and wasn't overly impressed. Even though I devoured comic books as a teen, the graphic novel has never interested me. The story was good, and the art work uniformly excellent but nothing more than I'd come to expect from that kind of work. I didn't see much to rave over.

I'd read so many reviews of the film, with such widely varying reactions, that the only conclusion worth coming to was that I should approach the film with no expectations at all. Good or bad. And it was in that frame of mind that I took my seat along with both daughters in the middle of the first row of "premier seating" for today's first showing of Watchmen at the Manchester IMAX.

It's no exaggeration to say that, from the very first frame, I was blown away. I have never seen a film with such incredible... texture. I don't know how else to describe it. The cinematography was an order of magnitude better than anything I have ever seen. The images leapt out of the screen, fabulous close-ups with a wealth of detail, wonderful composition and imagery (the raindrops on the polished coffin lid is an image that keeps coming back to me, but there were dozens of others - gnarled faces with each hoary whisker almost deliberately positioned; rain-drenched streets; faultless costumes) and stunning iconography.

If you've seen 300 or Sin City or any of the other graphic novels that have been brought to the screen before this, you'll be familiar with the usual kind of "comic" images that a director plays with. What made Watchmen so incredible, so compelling, was that these images were uniformly made of real people. No silhouettes, no extreme contrast, no apparent visual trickery of any kind. It was the comic, made flesh. Made real. Incredible. And the sound stage? Awesome. A great sound track, crisp foley work, none of the muddy dialogue that plagues so many modern movies. Sharp from beginning to end, and - unlike some reviewers - for me none of the music grated.

So much for the technical aspects. What of the story? As I've said, I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool fanboy of the novel, and I think this helped. Much of what irritated me about the book had been pared away. This was the central story of Watchmen. That is complex and detailed enough, without any of the frippery. Nor did I come to the theatre expecting a run-of-the-mill, all-action "superhero" flick. Many commenters have said Watchmen is "boring" or "slow." Come on - they have 30 years of backstory to get through, as well as a whole bag of complex interpersonal emotions to pack in to what never felt like two-and-a-half hours. All I can say is, it held my interest from start to finish. I never felt any itchiness at the pace (like I *definitely* did halfway through The Dark Knight, where I actually fell asleep at one point it was soooo sloooow). There was always something to hold my interest, be it action, dialogue, imagery, music, whatever.

The set pieces - fight scenes; Mars; Ozymandias' palace; the bombs - were note-perfect, and several of the scenes gave an understated but poignant reminder that this was an alternate reality, and set in 1985. So the irony of having a huge hole blown in the middle of New York, while in the background you can still see the Twin Towers, was very powerful. Being a graphic novel, some of the violence is *very* graphic. I know both my daughters had to turn away at some point, but that comes back to what I said about it being a comic made real. Snyder didn't flinch from representing faithfully what was on the page, even though when it's being enacted by real people the impact is increased a thousandfold. It makes for a totally visceral cinema experience and puts Watchmen very firmly in my top ten movies of all time.

Just don't ask me what has to drop out to make room for it.

Movie Review: The Dark Knight

Took the girls to Manchester's IMAX theatre today to see this. Apparently there are six (or so) scenes shot in IMAX 3D.

This is the first time I've been to a 3D show where you didn't have to wear special glasses to get the effect. OK, OK, that shows (a) my age and (b) that I don't go to the cinema much any more. What can I say? When you have a 50-inch plasma TV and a Dolby5.1 surround-sound home cinema system, you don't need to go to the cinema much.

Except to see IMAX. God. It was awesome. And I mean that in its original sense, not in the vacuous American high school "ah-summmmm" sense. Those 3D scenes - the ones shot from high above the Gotham city skyline looking down, especially the night-time one where Batman leaps from a tall building, extends his bat-wings and flies (glides) around the skyscrapers for a bit - were simply breathtaking.

Special effects apart, and not wishing to spoil the plot for anyone, the rest of the movie was good. Much has been written about how dark it is, and it is. Both literally in places, and figuratively. But in this case that's a good thing. It's quite clever too - the symbolism of starting the film with mainly sunny scenes and daytime aerial shots, and moving it to night scenes as the story gets darker. Very graphic.

Much has also been written about Heath Ledger's monumental performance as the Joker. I suspect most of that is right too. No, he didn't "steal" the film. He was a very significant, but integral, part of it. But his acting? You can't really call it acting. He INHABITED the character. He was the Joker, pure and simple, and for once, and rightly so, there was nothing funny about the Joke. I'd put Heath's Joker in the top five performances I've seen in a film, ever. He'll be a hard act to follow, and presumably (OK, small spoiler coming up), since the Joker survived he will at some stage be followed.

Criticisms? If pushed I'd say the movie is about 30 minutes too long. Indeed at one point somewhere between 1:50 and 2:15 (and since our showing started at noon, those are both times-into-the-movie and actual clock times) things got so slow and tedious that I fell asleep, only to be woken up with a HUGE jump by a set of exploding windows. That'll teach me. And those interminable fight scenes. Why do directors think we want to see long sequences of thwapthwapthwapthwap when you can't really tell what's going on? Yawn. Very clever, seen it before, get on with the plot, thank you.

One for the DVD collection though, definitely. There is so much going on in the film that it will certainly stand another watch. Might even be the one that convinces me to buy a Blu-ray player.

Rain stops work

After yesterday's DIY success, today's scheduled task was decidedly more mundane: applying woodstain to the patio doors to complete the ambient patio-and-conservatory look of burnished mahogany.

The Lords of the Cumulonimbus had other ideas though, and as I stepped out onto the patio in my painting duds with stirrer in hand, a few drops fell splashily onto my ever-baldening pate. I stepped back inside sharpish. Never let it be said that I'm a determined and weather-defying wielder of a well-loaded brush. No, the slightest excuse is enough for me, and even though the rain passed over in a few minutes the sun that followed it was sufficiently strong for me to declare the task void for the day.

I busied myself instead with a few more chapters of Rebecca - the book club book for June - and followed this up with chopping the chicken and veg for Nikki as she prepared a chilli chicken dinner for the four of us. And then, as it was Father's Day today, I indulged myself with the director's cut of Blade Runner, which neither of the girls had seen before as far as I could tell.

This has long been at the top of my list of favourite films, but for some reason I watched it today with a more critical eye than usual. The story is set in 2019 and the closer we come to that date, the more far-fetched the image of "futuristic Los Angeles" becomes. I've written before on the dangers of predicting the future. I guess when Blade Runner was made (1982), 2019 sounded sufficiently far into the future to be credible. Now it's not much more than ten years away, flying street cars and genetic designers creating snakes and owls (not to mention humans) from scratch seems laughable. We're only just on the verge of creating the very first lifeform from man-made DNA, but it'll be a bacterium of some sort, not an owl. And off-world colonies? We were closer to that in the 1970s than we are now. Note to self: if I ever write any hard science fiction, make sure it's set at least a hundred years in the future. At least I'll be dead by the time it's proven wrong.

The old film still manages to move me at the end though, with Rutger Hauer's impeccably-delivered line: "I've ... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like ... tears ... in the rain. Time to die." It's worth watching just for that.

Quiet Christmas Eve

Nikki had to work today, just for the morning, so I dropped her off at 8.20 and returned home to finish the wrapping. Incidentally I spotted another cool number plate on the way home: WH05 NXT (who's next). I wonder what he meant? Something rude I suspect, but the car it was on wasn't that much of a babe magnet lol.

On the plan, this morning was for wrapping Nikki's presents, but I'd managed to get that done lunchtimes on Thursday and Friday. I just had a couple to do for the girls and a rather large and unwieldy present for Annie. That was, until the postman called. With impeccable timing he brought the last of Blythe's presents, which I'd given up on. One more for the wrapping pile, and an increase in the success rate for online shopping. I've done well over 90% of my Christmas shopping online this year, and everything has arrived except one of Nikki's. I'm quite disappointed about that, because it was a "big" present, but it's the only one so I don't think I've done bad, and for this missing one I've printed off a picture so I can wrap that ;o)

While wrapping I took the chance to catch up on some TV we'd recorded that Nikki wasn't bothered about watching, namely: Frankenstein, a 2-hour updated dramatisation that had been on ITV in October. A good idea to try and bring the story into the 21st century - they'd created the monster through stem cell research instead of stitching body parts together - but really I had to admit it was a bit crap. I cleansed my audio-visual palate afterward by watching High Plains Drifter; something else I knew Nikki didn't really want to see.

She called at 12:45 to say they were finishing at 1, so I drove over and picked her up and we settled down for an afternoon of Christmas TV watching - there were more seasonal films and programmes being broadcast than you could shake a stick at, the highlight of which was Patrick Stewart in a TV adaptation of A Christmas Carol. There was a considerable amount of Thornton's troffing as well. How decadent!

You don't get that long for murder

Forty years ago today, as a cheeky ten-year-old, I spent the day horsing around and generally making a pest of myself at my cousin's wedding. This is the cousin with whom, of all my family apart from parents and my own children, I've maintained the closest links over the years, enjoyed the company of the most, and who came to my rescue in my darkest hour and offered me a place to live when I thought I had nowhere.

With the invite to her Ruby Wedding anniversary celebrations today came a strict instruction: no presents. "It's not about presents," she said firmly. "It's about getting together (something we do all too infrequently) and having a drink and a chat, and generally enjoying the company."

Well, I've never been one for doing as I'm told, but it was clear that Trish wouldn't appreciate having a lot of money spent. The solution was obvious, and something I've been thinking of doing for quite some time.

A couple of years ago my Mum asked me if it was possible to have Super-8 cine film transferred to video tape. She had hundreds of feet of film that her and my Dad had shot over many years. Family holidays, summer days in the garden, and...the weddings of my two cousins. As a young teenager I'd been the one to do all the editing and splicing of these home movies, combining the individual 50-foot reels into 400-feet chunks - six of which had spent the last 35 years in a box under the bed. Mum wanted to see them again, not least because its almost 14 years since my Dad died and this was her main photographic record of him.

After a brief web search I chose the VT group to perform the conversion. Their website tells a convincing tale of professionalism, top quality equipment, attention to detail and personal care of your memories. For once, their service proved as good as their marketing, and pretty soon the movie reels were back, accompanied by a VHS tape for Mum and a two DVDs for us.

We'd opted for a straight transfer, so the DVDs still contained all the "flashes" between shots where the old Super-8 camera overexposed the film as it sped up at the beginning of the shot and slowed down at the end, all the interminable panoramas from holiday where my Mum had taken the advice of panning slowly a little too much to heart, and so on. So I knew some radical editing was required and added it to my growing to do list. But there were two specific areas I knew I wanted to concentrate on.

One was the holiday footage from the 1960s when our family would holiday in Mablethorpe with my Mum's best friend Eileen, her husband and their daughter Julie. Julie is now grown up (of course!) with family of her own, and her Mum & Dad have since died. She probably hasn't seen this footage in forty years or more and I thought it would be nice to cut a DVD just of the shots where they are included so she can see them again.

The second area was the coverage of both my cousins' weddings. Here, we'd gone to town a little bit. Not surprising as they were both big family events. As well as their own camera M&D borrowed a second, so we had two sets of film from each wedding. This had been spliced together sequentially, with the result that we have always watched guests arriving at the wedding, followed by the photos outside the church, followed by a second set of arrivals and a second set of photos. Finally I had the chance to slice and dice the shots so they followed a natural sequence, as well as doing all the cleaning up of the film. Now with Trisha's impending anniversary I not only had a chance; I had a deadline.

It was lucky I was on holiday this week, with some time to spare between ferrying Neil from papers to bookies to pub, because the whole process took several days. Cleaning the shots, editing them into order, adding wipes between the significant chunks and new digital titles to complement the filmed titles that my Mum, Dad and I had painstakingly shot in the days after the weddings using a variety of home-grown techniques and stop motion video. Then there was all the DVD mastering to get to grips with, as well as taking screen grabs for the cover, and designing the rest of the cover and the sticker for the disc, always using a red theme. It was, after all, a ruby wedding present.

The burning process was a little frustrating. The first two attempts refused to play at all, but the third attempt seemed fine and played through OK on our XBox and on my computer.

DVDs wrapped and bowed (I'd made a second copy for Jacqueline and Paul), we set of this afternoon for the do. It was a low-key affair with only the "young" family attending - our respective parents, those that remain alive, are too old to travel long distances now especially for short periods of time and where a return journey the same day is required - but that only added to the party atmosphere. It was great to catch up with all the news, meet my "third cousin" Thomas for the first time (is that the right relationship? I always get confused with cousinhood. He's my cousin's grandson, so I reckon that makes him my third cousin. Gawd knows how many times "removed" he is. Two probably. Who knows. He's a cracker anyway. Says "hello" a lot and always seems to have a cheery smile except when he's trying to steal your cake.) and partake of Trisha's excellent hospitality once more.

The DVDs proved welcome gifts, and for exactly the same reason as I wanted to make them - everyone was tired of seeing two of everything! Unfortunately the public viewing didn't go all that well. On their player, while the first wedding played through OK, the second one started sticking, jumping, pixellating and eventually stopped altogether in freeze-frame. Robin blamed the player but I suspect the burning software isn't correctly compensating for the extra speed of rotation as the head gets farther from the centre. I'll have to try again when I can find a moment.

We left around 7pm. Blythe had homework to finish and Nat had lab reports to write up, and we had at least 90 minutes travelling, so we made our excuses and left. We'd had a lovely relaxing conversational afternoon and evening and a perfect end to our week's holiday, but I will admit to a small twinge of jealousy that Paul is now retired, whereas I have to return to work tomorrow!

Good Morning Voldemort!

Listening to Radio 2 this afternoon while painting the study (what else? I'm on the last window! Yippee!) and Elaine Page's show came on. I say that rather glibly but the truth is I never listen to Radio 2 on a Sunday afternoon, so I wasn't aware until today that she had a show. Well, she does. Has done for three years apparently! She plays, not surprisingly, hits from the Broadway and West End musicals, and also from the big musical movies.

Concentrating on my painting, I wasn't really listening to her intros and as we all know, strange things happen to me when I'm not paying attention to sounds in my vicinity. It was with some surprise that I suddenly became aware of a woman's voice belting out the chorus to her number: "Good Morning Voldemort!" she shouted.

"Blimey!" I thought in utter amazement, "that was quick! I didn't even realise they'd written a Harry Potter musical. They've only just got round to doing Lord of the Rings!"

Then reality caught up with me and I started to engage my brain. This can't be a Harry Potter musical - I must have misheard. Sure enough the chorus came around for a second time...

"Good Morning Baltimore!"

(From the movie Hairspray, apparently).

Birthday relaxation for a special person

Nikki's birthday today and we were planning a day out in the Lakes. Some of the Chorlton Players had decided to spend a few hours wombling around Haweswater and we also have a much-delayed appointment at Jennings brewery in Cockermouth to return the empty barrel from our housewarming party, so it seemed like a good idea to combine the two and meet up with the Players just in time for them to hit the pub.

In the event the forecast was for inclement weather so we cried off. I wouldn't say I jumped at the excuse not to go - I would have been perfectly happy either way - but as it's Nikki's special day it was only fair for her to have the final say. She opted for an afternoon/evening in front of the TV with a plate full of comfort food and a double bill of her favourite movies on DVD, preceded by one which was new to both of us, but which could well become a favourite: The Devil Wears Prada.

I was all set to hate it. On the face of it, there's very little to recommend it apart from Meryl Streep. It was a bonus to discover Stanley Tucci also stars - I've been a fan of his since watching Murder One many moons ago - but the subject matter? Haut couture in the offices of a New York fashion magazine? Didn't sound like my kind of thing at all.

Was I ever wrong. With consummate writing in general and razor-sharp dialogue in particular; with beautifully nuanced performances from just about every cast member; this is an absolute gem of a movie that had me laughing out loud many times over. And while it was having a great laugh poking fun at the vacuous fashion industry it was also driving home a carefully crafted message about being true to yourself and your core values, and demonstrating how hard this is when you get sucked in by something as superficially big and glossy and important as a job with a major magazine. How something that presents itself as the opportunity of a lifetime, a must-have can't-miss drop-dead life changing chance can indeed change your life and not for the better. You may find yourself chasing a dream that was never yours to begin with. Turned around and chewed up and spat out until you are not only unrecognisable to your friends and family but you don't know who you are any more either.

Fortunately for the main character (wonderfully played by Anne Hathaway), not only did she recognise this was happening before it was too late and walk away (literally), she also enjoyed the beneficence of an employer who, although cold and demanding on the outside, had a heart hidden deep beneath her crusty exterior and recognised the worth of her deputy assistant to the point where she was prepared to give her a good reference. Outside of the Hollywood version of high fashion and even higher corporate power broking, this would be highly unlikely. Made for a happy ending though!