Archive for June, 2009

Bought new pots and pans today from John Lewis after spending months trying to pick ones I liked. I’d spent ages looking for pans that were oven proof. It didn’t say they were on the top but on Saturday I discovered that along with exactly the same information that was on the top of the packaging there was just one extra important technical information – Oven proof to Gas Mark 4!

Thats not what made me go eh? though. The pans just had the information on the top. The frying pans had a photograph to brighten them up. If you were looking for a picture to make a frying pan more attractive you might choose one of bacon or sausages or maybe a couple of golden fried eggs. Not whoever designed this packaging. No they design the packaging for frying pans and they think: sliced carrots.

Maybe they should have tied the wallabies down as well as the Kangaroos because it sounds like they’re high as kites.

I rebuilt the Vue Links Directory from one database to another yesterday as part of finishing off a complete rebuild of the impworks site into WordPress. There were 268 links to migrate and while the basic move was handled easily I then had to work my way through and do some data cleaning to improve the quality of the directory on the new site. I’ve been working at it on and off for a couple of months now and its getting closer and closer to being done. One last push in the next few weeks and it’ll be done and I’ll be able to get on with adding stuff to it more easily.

I’m not really a twitter user, I’ve got an account but while I’ll post a certain level of boring mundanity here I’m not into the recording the minute up to the minute stuff. I just don’t think it or I’m interesting enough and while blogging is probably a bit weird tweeting just goes over the line. Odds are I’ll get into it about the time something new takes over in microblogging: in the same way I bought a PDA when they were about to start the slide to obscurity as netbooks took off.

Anyway today I’ve been doing some work on Twitter at work to get a live feed of tweets onto a site during a streamed video from a conference. It would have been absolutely straightforward had I not run into something a bit obscure to do with hash codes. Our friends at the vinspired wanted a hash code #generationdigital. Fair enough everythings up and running to pick it up and display it on the site. Except it just wasn’t showing up. After some messing around we worked out that the presence of digital in the hash code for some reason stopped it being picked up by searches. #digital exists and works. #digitalXXX seems to be OK too. #XXXdigital or #XXXdigitalXXX is right out. #XXX-digital or #XXX_digital also work but just feel a bit clumsy. No idea why digital runs into a brick wall or if other words can do to. Anyway, since the hash code hadn’t been publicised in advance we decided to just use a different hash code.

One odd little discovery along the way though was a hashcode in German that left us a bit puzzled. Our, admitedly school boy quality translation, was that the hash code would have been #nocheesecakeprincess_digital. The mind boggles.

Discovered Radio 7 is doing a series of readings of abridged versions of Heinlein short stories. Forget the endless discussion of his politics which too often ignore a lot of the “meaning” in the stories in favour of having an easy bash at something the analyst doesn’t like (and sometime miss that Heinlein made it sound bad which may have been his intention). its short stories like Ordeal in Space and next Sunday’s The Green Hills of Earth along with his juveniles that got me into Heinlein’s writing.

I owe the creators of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire a big thank you. A couple of months back I wrote a script for a 30 minute radio sit com more by accident than intention. I had an idea one morning and seven hours later I had 6,700 words written set in a generic fantasy world. I’d been struggling to work out what wasn’t right with it. Having watched the first episode of Krod Mandoon I’ve now got some pretty good ideas about what not to do.

First Terry Pratchett has produced so much comedy fantasy since 1983 that you’ve got to work hard at it. Its not like Pratchett, with 55 million books sold worldwide, is some sort of secret, niche author that a good chunk of your audience won’t have read. So a wizard who can’t do spells needs something to make them special if they won’t be unfavourably compared to Rincewind. The same goes for pretty much any cliche character you decide to use.

Anachronisms in fantasy settings also need to be clever – be it a character’s with 20th century attitudes or one suggesting going for counselling. Stoppard did it far better in that little known film Shakespeare in Love (Worldwide Gross $279,500,000).

And if you’re going to have a narrator that everyone in the scene can hear you’re going to have to push the boat out a bit and take a real run at the third wall and go way past Up Pompeii or Hustle to make it be funny – its been done before.

Which left humorous names, which tend to wear thin pretty fast (except some of the ones the Python team pulled off), the silly jokes – in the style of airplane (which made me laugh to be fair) – and the below the belt jokes – which I have no objection to but I prefer them to be funny. Still its a fantasy show so dressing your attractive female lead in leather, make their character just a little promiscuous, say Xena Warrior Princess a hundred times, and hope it will save your ratings (and make sure your male star will go down well with the ladies too).

So I’m going to be taking a red pen to my script and cutting or reworking anything that’s like that and a whole line of jokes about an ass I was thinking of adding are not getting anywhere near the script either.

Maybe it didn’t help that several review I read compared KM to Red Dwarf which builds an expectation. Red Dwarf wasn’t highly polished but it was funny. KM on the other hand was very polished but, at least as far as I was concerned, wasn’t very funny. However I’ll be fair to them the one hour format and it being the first episode might mean it wasn’t their best work. I’ll watch at least another couple of episodes of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire. At worst they’ll give me some more pointers on what not to write.