wibble

:: how jedi are you? ::

An old term still being used….
A current advert that struck me, Star Wars - Revenge Of The Sith - The Video Game. How old a term is ‘Video Game’? It must date back to when games first came out. Funny how 20 years later it is still being used - albeit not very often. Usually computing terms come and go very quickly, so it’s odd how one term can stay around for ages.

Just added a new ‘toy’ to my website - a guestmap. Kind of funky, and I still need to tweak it a bit, but feel free to give it a go! Removed - too limited.

Eurovision is over for another year, with Greece being the leader from about half way through. To me, it’s a usual type of Eurovision song, but there were some better songs. I fancied Switzerland, and they were leading for some of the early stages of the voting, but then they faded to end up about 8th.

And on to the UK entry… To me, the song sounded a lot like the winner from last year, with loads of drums, so I wasn’t too sure whether it would be enough to win. However, listening to many of the songs last night a lot of the songs had the big drums in them. So considering there were a lot of songs that were similar, why did UK end up third last???

The voting is still a joke, with all the buddy votes, and sticking together - eg Greece and Cyprus giving each other 12 points year in, year out. Are the votes being rigged?? You can’t tell me that every year, the Greeks think the Cypriot song is the best and vice versa.

I can think of two ways to ’streamline’ or ‘improve’ the voting
1. you can’t vote for a country you border - this should hopefully reduce the buddy voting (although this doesn’t help the Greece/Cyprus voting as Cyprus is an island!!)
2. get rid of the current voting system…. this takes just as long as the singing itself. One other way could be just to tally the total number of votes for each song and add them all up for the result. (Although there will be some outcry about the sizes of the countries and the number of votes, I don’t think this is too relevant - not everyone votes for a particular country - only those die-hard Eurovision fans!)

Terry Wogan made an intereting comment last night - ‘the bottom 4 countries are those that contribute the most to the running of Eurovision each year - the songs seem to have moved away from the Western songs’ Maybe it’s time to reconsider the financing of the show. With 39 countries in the competition, there should be enough money raised, rather than just having some main contributing countries.

Since I got moaned at for not posting as often as some blogs…

While off work this week, I managed to watch The Rutles. It’s basically a parody of the pop career of the Beatles, the Rutles being known as the Pre-fab Four. It closely follows the release of the Beatles songs, albums and their films, but obviously puts a humurous twist on them - eg Let It Rot, Tragical History Tour. Of course as it was made in the late 70’s, many of the stars look very young - eg Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd! While it was funny in parts, I don’t think it was one of the best by half of the Python team (Eric Idle, Michael Palin). Also this week, Forza Motorsport is out for the XBox, so if I don’t post for a while, you know what I’m doing . With over 200 cars to unlock and race, it’s gonna take forever. After an afternoon of playing, I’ve only done 3% of one part of the game.

It’s all over, with no change at the top. Labour weren’t really expected to lose, although it was expected that it would be close. Next time things may be different. Speaking of next time, I don’t think politicians can count properly… They’re supposed to be there for 5 years, but the past few elections have been in 1997, 2001 and now 2005. I make that 4 years :). Maybe Blair is trying to be more like America than he thinks, and have elections every four years!

And why do Conservative think they have to get rid of leaders all the time? In some ways it does them no good, giving the impression that if something goes wrong they just change who’s at the top. I suppose it’s like normal businesses - if something’s wrong in the company, sack the directors. Mind you, with a catchphrase from a cartoon about global domination - you knew that was not going to help much Yes, I’m talking about Pinky And The Brain. (I think Bananas in Pyjamas was also alluded to during the campaign, but as I’ve not seen that programme I can’t vouch for them).

I’ve been messing about with the blog, and think I have it the way I want it. Only time will tell when I start getting spam comments. The layout will probably stay as it is as well. Lesson: no messing or else you break it!