I am twice as old as you were. When you are my age, our combined ages will be 126. How old are we?

Working on an exciting new project – not ready to write much about what it is just yet, but if you want you can read some stuff to do with it over on Judith’s blog – http://judithkingston.wordpress.com/

Something I feel I can safely say, confident that this government will never have the junk to make it happen.

It takes a lot to defy the great ol’ U S of 8, (Bob was a moron), and this country has never been particularly good at making that happen, but when it comes to poor old Gary you’d think someone, somewhere would have an ounce of compassion.

I guess everyone’s too busy holidaying and triple checking their claim forms.

Looking at the software I use regularly and wouldn’t like to be without, I see that most of them are free and that I heard about them by word of mouth, so I thought I’d share the love.

So…

10) Vixy Beta
Still beta software so not without it’s problems from time to time, but this is a very useful, desktop based piece of software which will convert online .flv files into .avi files that you can save to your hard drive. For the non-technical amongst us, this means you can point it at the web address of a youtube video, or similar embedded video online, and it will ‘copy’ that video and save it to your hard drive in a format that you can play. Pretty cool huh? Also very easy to use. http://vixy.net/

9) 7zip
A worthy successor to Winzip and Winrar and other file compression utilities, this will compress and unpack a wide variety of file formats and does so more efficiently than predecessors. http://www.7-zip.org/

Comodo Firewall.
Excellent free Firewall programme, easy to use and configure and offers good protection. All of you paying annual subscriptions to Norton or McCaffee are wasting your money. This, combined with Avast, will do the job better and for free. http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/index.html – NB I notice they have developed their product range to include antivirus protection and other products – I’ve only used the firewall, can’t vouch for the others.

7) Avast Antivirus.
This is a decent piece of free Antivirus software, guaranteed free for the lifetime of the product. Plays nice with Comodo. Go check it out – http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

6) Spybot S&D
By far the best spyware shield on the market, and free. Go get it. http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

5) Esword
Perhaps less useful if you have no interest in the bible, but I wouldn’t be without it. With plugins for just about every available bible translation in english, plus a ton of foreign languages, and a huge range of commentaries and other scholarly material, Esword is the premiere free bible study programme. Includes Greek and Hebrew texts, with and without Strongs numbers etc. If you ever wanted to study the bible in its original languages for free, look no further. http://www.e-sword.net/

4) Gimp.
Why buy photoshop when you can have this? Awesome image manipulation programme. Really does rival photoshop for functionality in my opinion. http://www.gimp.org/

3) Open Office
Similarly, why buy micro$haft office when you can have this? Does pretty much everything the commercial programme does, only better – plus a few things it doesn’t do like .pdf creation. Save yourself £150. Go check it out: http://www.openoffice.org/

2) Firefox
In my opinion, the king of internet browsers. STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER RIGHT NOW. Honestly, everything about this programme is better – even the name. Microsoft are so rubbish at naming things – if they made toilet paper it’d be called Microsoft Butt Wiper. Firefox is just such a cooler name and look at the logo! An enormous fox with its tail on fire! Attacking the earth!! Who would not want this programme?!? http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/
NB If I could, I’d block people from reading this blog in Internet Explorer. Who knows? Someday I might? Download Firefox now just in case!!

1) linux
Chances are your computer runs windows. Some of mine do, but some of mine run Linux as their primary operating system and it’s great. Honestly, there are so many good things I could say about it that I don’t know where to begin. Trouble is, most shop bought computers come with windows pre-loaded, and if you’re anything like me you feel a bit weird about erasing windows to replace it with linux – kindof like you’re throwing away money. If you build computers though, or have old computers you’d like to re-condition, then linux is definitely the way to go. Takes a bit more configuration than Windows, but if you use a well-supported flavour of Linux, like http://www.ubuntu.com/ then you’re less likely to have driver issues etc. What’s more, ubuntu lets you “try before you buy” by loading a DVD based version of the desktop from windows to try it out.

I’d recommend all of the above as decent software, but a word of warning – if you mess up your computer don’t come crying to me. Only install and use stuff if you’re sure you know what you’re doing.

… almost literally… almost…

A couple of weeks ago, I was on the verge of buying airline tickets to Los Angeles, turns out now that I’m not going after all, but it’s still an interesting story.

It’s all to do with the film. Under the banner of Polaris Media Productions, my little team and I put together a short (roughly 8 minute) film, as mentioned in previous posts, to enter into the 168 project film competition. We shot it digitally on a Canon XM2 which is the same lovely little camera that I’ve been using for the Lifetime memories project. I then edited it together using Premiere Pro, and we sent it off via overnight courier after a “no time left to get it all edited and finished and exported and all the documentation signed and sealed” 24 hour non-stop no sleep marathon.

Now this competition is no small thing. It’s American-based, and the final judges are some big-deal Hollywood types – for example one of the guys who produced the X-Men – people like that. So, Judith and I – who’ve been hankering after a trip to California for a while now – got to thinking that it would be pretty cool if we could go over there for the festival and maybe do some other things while we’re there like have a bit of a holiday and visit Bethel and so on and so forth. Sadly though, getting time off work for Judith is not the easiest thing in the world. FE colleges seem to have the worst of both worlds when it comes to holidays. Staff are only allowed to take holiday during the school holiday periods (most expensive time), but unlike school teachers, do not automatically get all school holiday periods as time off – instead they have holiday days like most other professions (around 30-40 I think), but unlike the rest of the work-a-day world cannot take them when they like, they can only take them during the school holidays.

So, the festival (3-4 of April) falls just outside Judith’s holiday period which means we can’t go together, and going on my own doesn’t seem quite so appealing somehow.  Added to that, I’m due to have my tonsils out on the 14th and I have a pre-op assesment on the 1st so I’d need to go between those two dates and leave enough slack so that I don’ t miss my op if flights are delayed. Then, on top of that, the festival organisers contacted me to say that they were having problems with the final cut of the film and that it wasn’t displaying properly, the eventual upshot of which being it’s now not eligible for any awards.

So I was nearly going to LA next week, but not quite. However the film is screening out there on the 3rd (the editing guy their end has done something with it to try and fix it), so it’s not all bad. We may not be winning any Oscars, but at least our stuff’s out there.

In other news I got a new car today.

Shiny.

Well, the filming is going well at least. It’s a cinema-verite-style documentary about how elderly relatives often get unintentionally frozen out of young families in our glorious western culture. I spent a couple of hours filming my mother the other day eating a lonely microwave dinner, all the time skirting around the issue that she does, quite commonly in fact, sit on her own and eat a lonely microwave dinner. I am the victim of my own insightful cinematography.

In other news I woke up this morning to find that I’d been given a parking ticket for parking outside my house. Apparantly I was parked next to a dropped curb or something. There’s £50 I won’t see again. It seems that Croydon council are getting desperate – just over two months till april and they need to pay the bills. Glad to be of service Croydon.

Will try and work out some way of posting the finished film to this blog when it’s, y’know, finished.

Well, it turns out I’m making a movie. There’s a short film competition that I’m entered in called the 168 Project – you make a movie in 168 hours (7 days).  So far all is going well – it’s a short documentary about neglecting the elderly – more later…

Well, It turns out that having an iphone hasn’t helped much in keeping this blog up to date after all. I blame the lack of a keyboard.

So what’s been happening lately? Well, the Americans have a new president, and a very nice chap he is too by all accounts. Shame about the swearing in fiasco, but it’s nice to have a bit of a laugh now and again. On this side of the pond things have been quite quiet. Christmas was good – busy but good. I’m currently knackered all the time but that’s more a medical thing than anything else (turns out my tonsils are choking me in the middle of the night and causing me to snore/waking me up quite a lot, so I have to have them out – more on that another time).

I’m currently researching the life of Vincent Van Gogh – someone I’ve been fascinated by for a long time.  I recently saw Jim Jarrett’s production of ‘Vincent’ (written by none other than Leonard Nimoy) and while I felt Jarrett’s performance was a bit mediocre for someone with all his experience and training (vocally he was frankly pretty rubbish) he did succeed in making me like the play a little better, and helped me to see more warmth in it than I thought was there.

For anyone who doesn’t know it, it’s not a text I would instantly recommend – Nimoy may be a great Vulcan, but he’s not a great writer – at least ‘Vincent’ is not a great piece of writing. On first reading it comes accross as pretty sterile, almost amateurish in places, and if it weren’t for the fact that Nimoy wrote it for himself and starred in it, I doubt it would ever have seen the light of day. But there’s not much out there about Vincent and frankly there ought to be.

For a long time now I’ve had the desire to write something myself on the subject, but I don’t want to launch half-assed into it and balls it up. That’s what Vulcans are for. The story is too rich and somehow too important to do a crappy job on, and I’ve kept putting the idea off until I’m a bit older and wiser, but it’s been nagging at me again recently and I think I should at least move things on a bit. Vincent was, after all, 27 when he started painting so I’ve got a couple of years on him now.

What really captivates me about his story is his faith. Vincent grew up in the radical wing of the dutch reformed church. His father was a minister, and there was a period in his early 20s when he was determined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Being an all-or-nothing kindof guy Vincent took Jesus’ teachings at face value. He went to live in an impoverished mining community in Belgium, gave away nearly all his possessions and went to live among the people. He poured himself out for that community in every way possible and they loved him for it. He preached and taught, but he also shared himself with them unreservedly, ate with them, worked alongside them, wept with them. This was too much for his denomination – they decided to shut him down for being too radical. They sent another guy in to replace him, and basically kicked  him out. It totally destroyed him. After that he was at a loss – didn’t know what to do with his life. It took a couple of years of bumming around feeling sorry for himself before he decided to try his hand at painting, the legacy of which we know all too well, but it was never his first love. Weird huh?

Anyway, that side of the story is rarely told, but Nimoy’s “Vincent” makes quite a bit of it. After seeing Jarrett’s production I’m convinced enough by the text to try a production of my own, and in a shocking bombshell move I think I’m going to cast myself in it. I’m still exploring the feasibility at the moment, so it may not happen, but if it does you can expect to see me playing one of the most famous and talented gingers the world has ever known at a theatre near… well… me probably because I hate touring.

Lots of work to do before then though, including memorising  50-odd pages of Vulcan prose… joy!

Well, I never thought I would, but I’ve finally succombed and got an iphone. The good news here is that it’s a fab little piece of kit that does everything I want it to do and some, including allowing me to update this blog on the move, the bad news is I feel dirty. I feel like I’ve cheated on my beloved, if somewhat dowdy pc with a beautiful, very sexy, but overwhelmingly shallow piece of appleware.

I shall save further ruminations on why this may be so until I have a proper keyboard beneath my fingers. For now, expect more frequent (if shorter) updates, at least until the novelty wears off…

Well, the race is coming to a close and the democrats seem to be getting themselves into a sweat, bizarrely, about possibly loosing to McCain.

I say bizarrely because it seems impossible, from this side of the pond, for McCain to do anything but lose. This is, of course, a point of view unaffected  by the news storm surrounding the VPs and the Obama campaign’s unwillingness to bare it’s teeth,  but nevertheless, the American people in general and the democratic party in particular seem to have forgotten that John McCain is running on the heels of one of the most unpopular presidents in history, at the head of one of the most disastrous administrations in history. How can Obama possibly lose?

No, my fear has been that Obama stands more of a risk of being assassinated than he does of losing the election. For once, the comparisons with JFK seem justified, and some of his rhetoric has surely upset some very powerful shady people.

But then I found this list, which amused and reassured me in somewhat equal measure. Maybe with the name Obama he’s safe after all…

Lincoln – Kennedy Coincidences
1) Lincoln was elected in 1860, Kennedy in 1960, 100 years apart.

2) Both men were deeply involved in civil rights for African Americans.

3) Both men were assassinated on a Friday, in the presence of their wives.

4) Each wife had lost a child while living at the White House.

5) Both men were killed by a bullet that entered the head from behind.

6) Lincoln was killed in Ford’s Theater. Kennedy met his death while riding in a Lincoln convertible made by the Ford Motor Company.

7) Both men were succeeded by vice-presidents named Johnson who were Southern Democrats and former senators.

Andrew Johnson was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908, exactly one hundred years later.

9) The first name of Lincoln’s private secretary was John; the last name of Kennedy’s private secretary was Lincoln.

10) John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839 [according to some sources]; Lee Harvey Oswald was born in 1939, one hundred years later.

11) Both assassins were Southerners who held extremist views.

12) Both assassins were murdered before they could be brought to trial.

13) Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and fled to a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theater.

14) LlNCOLN and KENNEDY each have 7 letters.

15) ANDREW JOHNSON and LYNDON JOHNSON each have 13 letters.

16) JOHN WlLKES BOOTH and LEE HARVEY OSWALD each has 15 letters.

17) A Licoln staffer Miss Kennedy told him not to go to the Theater. A Kennedy staffer, Miss Lincoln, told him not to go to Dallas.

Spooky eh? Looking at the list, I’m sure there are more. It’s a bit like playing ‘where’s wally’…