Wed, 12 Jul 2006

[16:11] I'm hired!
Earlier this week I heard back from the UK guys who offered me a job a couple of weeks back advising me that they would have to formally rescind their offer. I agreed and thanked them profusely for keeping it open for such a long time and kept my fingers crossed that I would get offered the other position I've been chasing...

Well, it's mostly official, although I've only got the electronic paperwork at this stage but it looks like I could have a good reason to be wearing this here shirt in the very near future (like I'd need a reason anyway):

Mon, 03 Jul 2006

[12:03] To brake or not to brake
I've been meaning to check/replace the brake pads on my bike for, well, quite some time now. My stopping distance has been getting gradually longer and longer and nearly ramming a taxi on the way home tonight reminded me that I needed to obtain some new ones. I stopped at Evans on the way home tonight and purchased two sets (front and back) of these. I'm not really a bike person ("knows enough to be dangerous" is the term I believe) so I dragged the bike into the shop to make sure I got the right ones and the look on the guys face when he saw my old pads said "I'm upset at the injustice being done to your rims and ex-brake pads" his vocal chords echoed the sentiment and chastised me as apparently I was long overdue for this.

I took them home and swapped them all over and once again I can stop almost instantly. I think the guy at the shop was right though, I don't think that brake pads are meant to be concave:

[09:32] Fearless - Rating 7/10
We went to see Fearless (aka Huo Yuan Jia) on the weekend for two reasons:
a) because it's a Jet Li movie
b) because I've been intrigued by the advertising on the buses recently stating that this was "Jet Li's last Martial Arts Movie"
I was wondering if somehow Jet Li had died and I'd managed to miss that, it seems not.

Fearless was an excellent movie on several levels:

• If you're a martial arts junkie then there are fight scenes aplenty. It had a fair chunk of wire-work, or what I assumed to be wirework, but it was pretty unobtrusive (I really hate the whole pseudo-flying/jumping that goes on in a lot of martial arts style movies these days) and there's a good mix of hand-to-hand as well as armed combat!
• If you like your movies to have a plot then, once again, you're in luck! The plot is easy enough to follow (although there are a couple of rather odd leaps through time right at the beginning) and doesn't seem to suffer from "translating the untranslatable" that impacts a lot of films with asiatic origins. The subtitles are easy to read except for a quick two-liner in the first five minutes. As an additional bonus the fight scenes are actually a an integral part of the plot rather than the plot being built as a vehicle for the fight scenes.
• It's real purty-like! The cinematography is excellent and both the action sequences and other scenes are beautifully shot and a pleasure to watch, with only one slightly cringe-worthy CGI moment, again right at the beginning.
• There's a moral to the story that you can take away at the end (although the movie doesn't end with a panning shot of everyone laughing at an inane joke).

Action and martial arts stories only use the form of martial arts. Kungfu represents a concept of time. You spend time practicing it, and you learn new skills. Martial arts are an overall concept, which also includes nurturing the soul.

Sun, 02 Jul 2006

[10:57] Transformers: The Movie
Hahahahaah! Get your drool ducts primed folks because a Transformers movie is coming!! OK, so it's coming next YEAR but it's still coming and the teaser is now out. You can check it out at www.transformersmovie.com.

I've done a little research and it seems that there're already a lot of annoyed fanboys out there so bear in mind that:
a) the footage from the teaser is NOT intended to be in the movie, nor is it meant to convey the plot of the movie.
b) this is a cinematic ADAPTION, not a remake of the cartoon.
I like the style and mood of the teaser and I'm hoping for the reasonably dark movie that this hints at....

[Posted at: 02/07/2006 18:57]

Sat, 01 Jul 2006

[13:58] A visit to the zoo Hamleys
We popped out to do a bit of shopping today. I purchased a beautiful "How to play Chess" book for Shona at the Embankment second-hand book market last week and I've been hanging out to get a chess set to start learning on and I've also been trying to locate a set of Ye Olde Styleie Jacks and Hamleys seemed to be the most likely place to locate such things so we boarded the number 3 and headed into London town!

The first hurdle of the day came when we found that our bus was not going to take us all the way in (as it normally does) because the EuroPride march had blockaded most of the city off and we were rather uncerimonisouly dumped by a somewhat shirty bus driver about 5 klicks down the road from our house and ended up walking over to the Westminster tube (which was a filthy skank-hole since the temperature was around 30 celcius). Anyway, we got into the city and managed to get a look at the parade which happened to be running down the road directly out the front of Hamleys anyway. As usual, Aussies had crashed the party (if you can find a good time going on in London guaranteed there'll be a bloke somewhere nearby with an Aussie flag and a beer) and in amongst the lady-boys and be-leathered gentlemen there was the rather incongruous flag: