Grrrr
So we watched Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope last night from David's DVD set. I hate that Mr Lucas is messing with my childhood memories like this. I get that the way he's integrated the 'Special Edition' footage is very clever (mostly), but nothing is added to the story by adding a load of fussy extra details to the backgrounds.
And I'm shocked by how shoddy the packaging is considering the build-up it's had. I guess it's because they know full well that everyone is going to buy it anyway regardless of the crappy box, *diabolically* bad individual sleeve imagery, and comedy certification details ('contains mild sci-fi action'). (Yes I know that last one's a totally separate issue, but I had to get it in somewhere.)
Delivery Hell
In Dave's absence, it seems only right that I take up his mantle and bitch about the diabolical levels of service that so-called service companies offer. Right now I'm being held waiting for two fairly significant deliveries and not only do I not know when they'll be with me, I don't even know with any certainty where they are or who's going to be responsible for getting them to me.
One is from Amazon (I'll tell you what it is when it gets here), and it was apparently dispatched last week. David's similar package, ordered within ten minutes of mine and to be delivered to me on his behalf, dispatched the same day as mine, arrived on Monday. The fact that Amazon don't standardly include a Royal Mail or Parcelforce tracking reference in their dispatch confirmation pages doesn't help, as I had to complete their 'we'll aim to get back to you within 24 hours' mail to ask for one, as of course you can't just pick up the phone and talk to a human being at Amazon under any circumstances. I now have my tracking number, so it's over to Parcelforce, whose online tracking facility tells me that it's 'in progress', but not where it is or how I can get it. So I've had to fill in a form on their site to ask where my quite expensive item has got to. I await their (no-response-time-specified) answer with keen interest.
In the meantime, last week I had a letter saying that a credit card I'm awaiting had been delivered a week earlier, but it hadn't been possible to actually hand it over. Note that this card is coming to work, so it's not as if it's likely that an office which has people in it from before 7am 'til after 7pm every day was quite so unattended as they suggest. Redelivery was scheduled for yesterday, so I dutifully left my passport on Reception in case I wasn't available to sign for the thing myself, but in the event the question never arose, because they didn't deliver the damn' thing. When I called this morning, after battling through their automated redelivery system that wouldn't let me get to a human being for over ten minutes, I finally found that "for some reason it didn't go out yesterday", but will be with me today. You've got to admire a system that thinks "for some reason" is a reasonable response to an enquiry.
I hate these things. Hate hate hate.
The Born-Again Busted Fan
Look, no one's more amazed by this than I am. Nor horrified if it comes to that, but I've been introduced to the Busted oeuvre, and it's amazed me to discover that I rather like quite a bit of it. Several of the tracks on A Present for Everyone are in fact quite cracking. Crashed The Wedding is a laugh of course, but the ones I really like are Over Now and Loner In Love. Though Fake wins a prize for being the first pop song I've heard of that details the singer's worry about his penis being too small.
Seriously - it's a surprisingly good and consistent listen.
And Another Thing
My dearly-beloved pointed me in the direction of A9 last week, and I'm rather liking it. A new search from the makers of Amazon, it will search the web, images, the IMDB, and a whole lot more besides. It also has a (browser-dependent) Diary in which Internet Explorer users (for the time being) can store searches and comment them for future reference.
Not at all a bad new searching experience.
What Would You Do?
If you found a camera memory card that someone had apparently lost in a taxi, and it contained a year's worth of their photos, what would be your first and most natural course of action?
You'd start a blog with them, posting one a day and creating a fictional journal entry to go with each one? Yes, I thought that's what you'd do.
What's that? That wouldn't be your initial and automatic reaction? But surely that's what anyone would do.
Truthfully, I'm not sure I believe this - it smacks a bit of tailor-made for a book to me - but it's entertaining reading here and there nonetheless.
I’m So Spoiled
David and I got back last night from the weekend away that was his birthday present to me, and it was pretty damn near perfect. He treated me to two nights at The Crown and Castle Hotel in Orford, in Suffolk. It was a wonderfully relaxing weekend - we ate dinner at the hotel both nights, Friday because we planned to, Saturday because once we got back in the early evening we just didn't want to go back out again. Sleeping late, breakfast and papers in bed, leisurely drives around the Suffolk countryside, a quick trip into Aldeburgh where David's colleague Andy was taking part in a sailing race, and walks along shingle beaches all went together to make a really, really excellent weekend.
So thank you fiancé.
Rumour Has It
That my domain might actually come back to life this afternoon, so I'm going to post a 'Hello, I'm still alive, even if my domain hasn't been" message.
You've got to love the whole scamming industry that is domain name registration. Okay so I missed the emails reminding me that it was due for renewal, so that's my own fault, but having put through the renewal last week, I wasn't expecting to have to call and find out what was going on today, nor to have to pay an extra £50 because of some change that's happened in the period between my renewal and today.
Unreal.
Shaun
Saw Shaun of the Dead for the first time last night, courtesy of David's DVD. Very well done, with some brilliantly funny bits and a very well-selected cast. Simon Pegg does a great job of outgrowing Spaced, and seeing Penelope Wilton surrounded by zombies makes me drool at the thought of her appearing in new Doctor Who next year.
Really glad I got to see it at last.
Post-Wedding
Well, the bride looked radiant, the groom almost started snuffling during his speech (wuss), everything went off without a bigger hitch than some temporarily-misplaced flowers, and apparently my speech wasn't wholly terrible.
Bit weird after so much build-up to think that it's over with now.
The Final Countdown
Dave and Octavia's wedding is at 4.30 tomorrow afternoon, so we're into the last 24 hours. What last-minute hitches have hit the event? Well, the bride's custom-made wedding ring was wrong, so a day-before-the-wedding replacement has had to be made - that sounds pretty good as these things go, wouldn't you say?
Anyway - tonight it's the last night of Dave's singlehood, so food and drink will be had. Tomorrow morning the groom and I are going to be shaved and massaged, and then I guess we might have some lunch before thinking about getting into our smart clobber for the main event.
And at some point I have to give a speech. Better think about writing one I suppose.