According to YourMovies, GRINDHOUSE opens in this country on 31 May 2007! Five weeks after the US (where it opens April 6). I’ve been to the opening night of every QT flick in this country since Dogs, and I’m damned if I’m going to miss this one.
Who else wants to come to the opening in Melbourne? We’ll go out afterwards and record a review podcast.
And if you haven’t checked out the official site for the film, DO IT. Classic stuff.
After many years of research, I have finally cracked the secret to the ultimate hot chocolate.
I took the boys into the city today for “Wicked Sunday” – the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival’s celebration of coffee. And ’twas there, children, that I stumbled upon the magic ingredient – Chocolateriaâ„¢ San Churro. The secret, I have discovered, to the perfect, hot, thick, to-die-for spanish hot chocolate for “churos” is to use the very expensive powder from Chocolateriaâ„¢ San Churro, with milk, and be prepared to stir it on a low heat in a saucepan for about 15 minutes. But, oh! Children! You will not regret this discipline, I assure you. TO DIE FOR.
In other Sunday night news… I just discovered by accident that if I click the scroll wheel on my mouse, Vista shows all of the open windows evenly arrayed across my monitor. h00t!
I still can’t figure out how to get my Google Desktop searches to open in Firefox instead of IE. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling GD today but didn’t help. Goddamn IE!
In other Google frustrations, as my Gmail account is now 96% full, I tried to upgrade to Google Premium tonight, only to find that in order to do that I need to point my domain name MX record over to Google. Obviously cannot do that sir, as I am not the only citizen of TPN to be using it. So I’m scratching my head trying to figure out how I give the nice kids at Google my $50 for one of those 10Gb email accounts. If anyone knows the answer to my dilemma, please pass it on.
Despite Scott’s slagging of Vista today, I like it – especially now that I’ve got 2GB RAM. Don’t tell anyone. I’d hate for Jeff Putt to hear about it.
Okay so, as I said on the show the other night, it isn’t the major new paradigm that was promised over those long, long, Longhorn years. Remember quotes like these from BillG?
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And let’s forget about WinFS….
But as an operating system, it’s pretty “neat” (I can imagine BillG calling it that… isn’t he just the child of the 50s??).
Here’s my desktop at the moment:
What do I like?
1. It’s prettier than XP.
2. When folders open and close they do this little.. shrinky… thing. It’s… neat.
3. Ummm… having the sidebar pre-installed is nice but I’d been running Yahoo Konfabulator for a few years on and off so it’s not an entirely new experience. It is, however, packaged. The widgets I’ve got installed are currently:
4. The little clock thing in the taskbar allows multiple timezones!! Now I can see what time it is in Scotland and Washington when I’m hiding from Ewan and Scott on Skype. I can wait until I know they are asleep before I stop lurking.
5. Most nearly everything I need is running. All except my printer. I had trouble with the scanner but Photoshop figured out how to make it work.
6. The “snip” tool from Windows XP Tablet PC Edition ships with it and that is VERY handy.
7. It’s pretty (did I already say that?)
8. The new Win-TAB is old technology (I can’t remember what it was called but I used to have an app which did that years ago) but great to have in the OS.
9. The way the little previews of the windows you have open pop up when you hover your mouse over the taskbar.
10. ummm. it’s pretty?
The list of things I don’t like is shorter…
1. The integrated search is better but not, IMHO, as good as Google Desktop. Come on Microsoft. Catch up.
2. Hmmmm… no podcast support?
3. It doesn’t swallow?
4. Oh yeah. Google Desktop searches open in IE and not FF. I haven’t been able to figure out how to stop that. Anyone know the secret (no, not the stupid new agey documentary which says “whatever you conceive and believe you can achieve”, but just… the regular type secret)?
5. Oh yeah… I had to spend the first two days turning off the stupid security features. YES – I WANT TO RUN THIS FRAKKING APPLICATION! THAT’S WHY I CLICKED ON IT STUPID!!
I don’t know. I can’t pick much fault with it so far I guess. But then again I’ve only had it four days. Give me some more time.
Would I go out and pay real shells for it? No. The benefit over XP is really just cosmetic as far as I can tell. I really cannot for the life of me tell what’s truly new and innovative in Vista apart from the prettiness and I wouldn’t shell out $600 – $1000 for that.
However, if you are getting a new PC and you have Vista as an option – and you are well aware that some of your software and/or peripherals may not work – then go ahead and move to Vista. Mum – that means you.
Big shout outs tonight to my old buddy Shane Williamson for chucking some cash into the Shave thing. Thanks mate. Oh and thanks Jesus. Shane recently sold a copy of the infamous Microsoft Bob on ebay for the princely sum of $15.50. I’ve often thought about when the time will be right for me to auction off some of my Microsoft memorabilia so as to maximize the return on my investment. When they are finally acquired by Google perhaps?
Another big shout out to my homies from Tassie – Bruce “The” Moyle and Q-Dog – from the Cool Shite crew. They were in Melbourne today for some event and we caught up for a quick bite afterwards. Always good to geek out with Bruce about movies and TV and as this was the first time I’ve met Q-Dog in person I was surprised to learn he isn’t gay after all. They have a real score on their show this week – an interview with Edgar Wright director of HOT FUZZ, the new Simon Pegg – Nick Frost comedy (the guys behind SHAUN OF THE DEAD). When I asked how they managed to get Edgar on the show they cockily informed me that HE contacted THEM. Bastards. Complete bastards.
The last good boss I had at Microsoft, Christophe DuMonet, left there just before I did (causing me all sorts of political problems but, in retrospect, I’m glad he did) and spent a few years as General Manager of a software division of Sydney-based software company Unique Software. He’s now taken a new position as Managing Director of the Australian office of French software company Esker, “the world’s leading document process automation solutions provider”. Hopefully this means he now has the budget to do engage a good podcast consultant. 🙂
I’m trying to think of what I learned from my time working for CD. He’s certainly a snappy dresser. And he’s this mad triathlete. Neither of those rubbed off on me. He tried to convince me I should play the political game at Microsoft, but I never really could get my ego out of the way. I’d rather say what I think and get condemned for it than pander to morons. It’s a low self-esteem issue I guess. People with healthier self-esteems are prepared to play the game to get what they want. I struggle.
We certainly had some good times though. I remember when we discovered we had some leftover marketing budget which needed to be spent before the end of the financial year and I came up with the idea of getting our top CIO clients and taking them out to the Flower Drum, one of the world’s best Chinese restaurants, for a monthly confab. That was a big hit. I figured we’d get more value out of letting our top customers eat and drink well and chat to each other about the Microsoft-related projects they were doing than trying to SELL them. They sold each other. Halfway into the third bottle of merlot, they would be inviting each other over to their offices to check out the cool stuff they were building using our tools.
Then there was the time we took one of our best customers, let’s call him Tony, and we hired a stretch limo and spent the day driving around Melbourne’s wine district, visiting wineries, eating, drinking, and sharing war stories. Great bonding stuff. How else do you get 8 hours with a CIO? Tony ended up one of our most loyal and valuable clients and a good friend.
But they were all my ideas. What did Christophe do? He backed me up. He gave me support to get the job done. Isn’t that the most important role of a good manager? Creating an environment where their people can do what they need to do without the rest of the company getting in their way?
His final act as my manager was to fight to get approval for me to spend a couple of weeks in New York at Cornell University’s supercomputing lab. At the time I had this vision for Microsoft in Australia to work with Universities to build out massively-parallel supercomputers using Windows Server 64-bit running on blades. We had training budget to spend and I said I wanted to go to Cornell to find out how they were doing it. Our boss didn’t want it to happen (mainly because he hated my guts) but CD made it happen. And although I left Microsoft not long afterwards and never had the chance to realize the vision, the trip to Cornell was a great experience and I’m sure I will use what I learned there at some stage in the future. And it wouldn’t have happened without Christophe’s support.
So for that Christophe – thanks mate. And congrats on the new job.
Jodie asked me to post up the spec of my new PC (which hasn’t arrived yet).
It’s basically a Lenovo A55 with the Core 2 Duo E6300 1.8 GHz processor, 1 GB DDR2 RAM (not sure this is going to be enough but I’ll buy another stick later if it needs it). Comes with a 250GB drive and I’ve got another TB of external drives that I’ll slam into it from the old machine. Here’s a link to the machine on Lenovo’s site.
It comes pre-loaded with Vista which I’m nervous about for a variety of reasons:
My key hope for the machine is that it will be QUIET. For the last few years I’ve had to turn my desktop off when I record and work on the laptop because the desktop sounded like a Boeing. The idea is that this one will be quieter because of the dual core processor and it’s got multiple smaller fans in it rather than a couple of the huge ones. Fingers crossed this does the trick.
I was originally going to get the smaller Lenovo desktop unit but it doesn’t have many expansion slots and when you’re doing a lot of audio and video editing, you never know what cards you might need. The integrated audio and video on the mobo usually aren’t enough for high-end processing.
By the way, my ‘dealer’ is my next-door neighbour David Jackson who has a company called Bespoke Solutions (soon to be re-branded Hexworks). If anyone in Melbourne is looking for a boutique IT solutions company, I can highly recommend David’s services. He’s a Christian but I can overlook that.