New Speakers!!!

Hurrah - spent my Christmas money already on a pair of Mission M2S bookshelf speakers. £60 from Richer Sounds - and to make it even more Christmassy it was snowing as I walked back to the car!

A Brief History of my Audio Equipment:
Up untill about a year ago I used to think spending money on audio equipment was a complete waste of money, I would get pretty much the cheapest stuff I could get my hands on - "it can't affect the sound that much". Then I got an iPod which came with iPod headphones - not fantastic but a whole lot better than my £3 Argos headphones. I was pretty much floored by the difference in sound quality.

At that time I only had a Mini hi-fi system that I'd bought nearly 10 years previously from Argos, cost me £90 back than. I decided I wanted to put my iPod through my speakers, I looked around and decided to get a seperate amplifier, ditch my old mini system but keep the old speakers. Being tight-fisted I plumped for an "Acoustic Solutions" amp from the hub of audio entertainment....Argos.

So prior to today I had my music coming through cheap 10-year-old Alba speakers - now I don't! My new ones sound really good, the amp probably lets them down a bit and I could have spent a bit more on them but I don't think the difference would have been that noticable.

They're well small though - so much so they don't fit in my wall brackets. Grrrr.....

Christmas and Work

Last week was my work's Christmas party - nothing special just everyone sitting around talking, doing karaoke and most of them getting drunk, some getting very drunk. I was driving so didn't drink at all. Everyone was having fun and it was great to see all my work friends out of work, it got to the end of the party and people were saying their goodbyes. I was sat in group of others when this guy, drunk, went round giving people (mainly girls) a friendly kiss on the cheek (ahhh!). He came to me, "where's my kiss?" I say in a joking way. Another guy comes out with the fantastic line "go for the lips"....he does....and I didn't get away fast enough.

Sooo embarrassed. Everybody's talking about it. The guy doesn't even remember, but I did get an apology from him when he was told the following day. Fortunately everybody's seen the funny side so it hasn't been too bad though - I guess I did bring it on myself.

On another note there was only one fight and one arrest after the party.

With a couple of weeks off college for Christmas I took on a few extra shifts to get some money and I ended up working Christmas Eve, Boxing Day, 27th and tomorrow the 28th too. It's all been quite fun to be honest, everybody was really happy on Christmas and I got to wear reindeer antlers all day long. That was good until one little girl laughed at me.

Oh and then there was the customer who brought back the Thermos flask to me because it's lid was missing. All very well except the opened the carrier bag to reveal the flask covered in bubbly washing up water - "ooo yeh sorry about the suds." I mean really, how do you get yourself in situation where you're halfway through washing something that you decide to stop and bring it back without even rinsing it! How?!

Christmas was pretty good fun, got together with family and stuff which was good. Ate too much, slept too little. The usual really.

Look at him now, disappearing the cow...

I bought myself an early Christmas present - a book called Street Magic by Paul Zenon. You can probably guess but it's an introduction in how to do up-close magic tricks, being able to do street magic struck me as an insanely cool thing to learn. So this book arrived today and I've spent most of the time reading through different tricks and practicing a few things.

A lot of them seemed quite simple, self-working, card tricks. You simply learn what to say and your audience is astounded. So I ran through a couple and then tried them on my mum. I was well gutted when as soon as I'd finished she told me how I'd done it. Feeling pretty dejected as my visions of becoming Magical Mike vanished (ironically) before my eyes.

There's some more advanced tricks in the book that require some skill, maybe with practice, I'll be able to do them well enough and will have better luck fooling people. I was in Asda earlier and was casually turning a 10p into a 50p, my Mum saw the effect but not how it was done and seemed somewhat impressed. She asked me to do it again, I of course point-blankly refused...that was the first time it had worked all day.

Hopefully I'll stick at it, there's some good sleights and stuff to learn, but knowing me I'll look back on this in a few months and think what a stupid idea it was.

Kong!

Went and saw the new King Kong film last night. I'd never seen any version of Kong before so had no idea what it was about - all I knew was he climbed the Empire State Building. It was pretty damn good throughout to be honest, Naomi Watts was looking mighty fine and the film kept me interested which is also damn impressive as I have the attention span of a orange-finned-water-dwelling creature.

One bit I found hilariously funny, but nobody else in the cinema appeared to, was not long after they'd headed off into the island. They get chased by a load of giant dinosaurs through a rocky gorge, nothing funny about that, except one of the dinosaurs falls over and the others all go rolling over the top of him and there's a big dinosaur pile-up! Well, it cracked me up.

Only criticism was in the middle when they were on the island the running-away-from-creatures bit went on too long - I took this opportunity to releive myself of the ridiculously expensive Diet Coke I'd drunk during the first half. That said, the special effects and stuff were done well - I wasn't scared, no, not at all.

The film naturally finishes with Kong climbing a certain tall building in New York, I spent the end contemplating the morality of Ape-Woman love and how the top of the Empire State building appeared to have been made with the re-entry module from Apollo 13.

Good film - go see.

The Origins of Xmas

I was speaking to someone this week who said something I hadn't heard before - Xmas had no religious connotations. X being the mathematical symbol for an unknown, anything, anyone. Xmas can be anybodies holiday. Ye wha?

Personally I don't buy into this theory but it got me thinking about why we put a seemingly random X in place of Christ. That idea though seems to embody the fears of many Christians - the common usage of Xmas is removing Christ from Xmas!!! I'm not trying to remove Christ....I'm just too lazy to write it all out!

Ironically, using Xmas to stay within the 160 character limit phone companies insist on forcing upon us is remarkably close to why Xmas probably came about in the first place. X is the Greek letter Chi, which is the first letter of the Greek word Christos - you get the idea. I read that Inge Milfull at the Oxford English Dictionaries has found references to XPmas in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle dated 1021. P, I presume, is the Greek letter Ro - the second letter of Christos?

Xmas probably came into common usage for the very same reasons we use it now, not to save space in text messages or shop signs, but to save parchment. If X was used a symbol for Christ you could save quite a bit of room on quite expensive parchment when you were writing your biblical papers etc. where you'd have written Christ quite often.

Well there you go, a very brief, very disjointed (and probably wrong) introduction to the origins of Xmas.

For some reason my proposal of calling it Giftmas didn't go down too well.

...more Coldplay

Fresh back from the stunning evening that was Coldplay at Earl's Court. I could just about make out Chris Martin from my seat in the back corner but nonetheless it was fantastic. Not much can quite beat the sound of the entire audience singing, on their own, the chorus of The Scientist.

Thousands of fans, a great band, great songs and a load of giant yellow balloons - how can you go wrong?

Coldplay baby!

Wooo - many months of waiting have come to an end. Tomorrow a friend and I are off to see Coldplay at Earl's Court in London, despite the fact we have seated, rear corner, restricted view tickets I'm really really excited!

Of Coins and Coke

How many times have you gone up to a vending machine to buy a can of Coke only to have your coin fall straight through the machine? Needless to say, you retreive your perfectly legal coin and put it in again - only to be greeted by the sound of it landing back in the coin return, again and again and again.

Exasperated you do what you always have done in this situation, and by the marks on the machine many others have done before you. You rub the coin on the side of the machine for a few seconds, put it back in again and as if by magic it's accepted. Now being scientifically minded I'm not generally one to fall for stupid superstitions but today I began to think. I tried to insert this one coin 5 or 6 times before rubbing it, afterwards it was accepted first time. Seems a little too coincidental in my mind - maybe there's something in this trick...

So I began to look into how rubbing it on the side could have any effect. At first, the only thing I could think of was that the temperature of the coin rose ever so slightly, causing it to expand an even smaller amount and machine was happier to accept the slightly larger coin. But surely, just a couple of seconds couldn't heat up the coin enough to have any sort of effect. That idea went the same way as my now empty can...in the bin.

So I Googled it. Great help it was too. Next to nothing addressing this phenomenon except one tiny reference to static electricity. Could it be that a statically charged coin could cause the sensors to reject it? Sounds very plausible and rubbing the coin on the machine would act as a grounding thus removing the charge from the coin. Simple. But hold on, somethings not quite right. I'd already tried the coin in the machine, it had already rolled down metal chutes and into metal hatches multiple times. Surely that would have the same grounding affect as rubbing it on the side?

The mystery continues, I've searched the web to no avail, I've asked friends who now all think I'm mad. Where do I turn next?

Dirty Dancing

I bought a bottle of Diet Coke (well Coca-Cola Light to be accurate) in Italy which had the follwing label stuck on it for the Turin 2006 Winter Olympics. Call me immature but Mr and Mrs Polar Bear appear to be having way too much fun.


Now Coca-Cola are one of the main sponsers on the Turin Olympics, quite ironically Turin's councillors recently voted in favour of banning Coke products from vending machines in city-owned buildings. Spearheaded by two members of the Communist Party they called for the boycott following allegations that Coke mistreated employees at their Colombian bottling factory. Just to note, the vote was non-binding so hasn't really had any practical effect. Reuters Source.

Then today I stumbled across another related story - students at the University of Sussex have voted to stop selling Coke at their union bars. Same reasons, same allegations. I may have to look into this more. BBC Source. I did note the bars and shops would probably replace it with Virgin Cola. Lucky students - I wonder how long it will be until they want Coke back?

Final bit of Coke related news - Vanilla Coke is going to be dropped in the UK!