Review of Life

It’s lunch time! And as such it’s time for me to enjoy a hot, tasty, flat Cornish pasty, brought to me by those beautiful (er, not really*) people at Ainsley’s who make pies, pasties, sandwiches and cakes. The smell is good, the packaging almost translucent with greasy goodness, so let’s dive in and taste the pasty goodness.

Mmmm! It’s all good, baby. Not to suggest that their Cornish meat filling includes baby, though for all I know it might. I have no real idea what goes into it and I don’t want to know. It could be haggis without the stomach for all I know and care. The spices are right, the heat is nice, the gravy – delectable. The only thing that occasionally lets it down is a “slip” of gristle. I say “slip” because that’s kind of what your teeth do when they try to chew it. Not pleasant.

Still, overall you’ve got to stand tall Ainsley’s – you guys know how to stuff crap into a pastry half-moon and cook it. Yum!

Tastiness: 9/10
Service (at store): 8/10
Presentation: 7/10

Overall Score: 8/10

My laptop’s broken. Its keyboard was accidentally subject to a pint of orange juice and after a drying and washing period, it turned out that half the keyboard didn’t want to work at all, whilst the other half worked a bit too well and duplicated keystrokes.

So, instead I’m having to put up with using an external USB keyboard which has its own issues. It’s OK, but the whole point of a laptop is that it’s portable and not clunky… right now I’m having to carry around a keyboard which doesn’t even fit in my laptop bag and juts out.

There’s not much to say really, using an external USB keyboard (this one happens to be a Dell by the way) is hardly the bane of my life, but it is a bit of a pig.

I’ll give the keyboard a pretty impressive 8/10 – it’s functional, the keys are nice and springy and the spacing of the letters is all good.

I’ll give the experience on the whole a dismal 3/10 – it’s a pain, I don’t like using an external USB keyboard.

Overall then: 5/10. Done!

Trainers made for walkin' - hence the blur on the right one, I guess.

I woke up this morning and had before me a choice that, to many men, is a conundrum not often faced: which shoes should I wear?

Perhaps I’m being all sexist there, all I know is that it’s the first time *I’ve* ever thought that question. But a choice I had, two pairs of footwear were staring at me:
My boots
My Converse trainers
Tricky. I’ve not worn my trainers for about a year, always instead going for the boots. But I wanted a change, for some reason or other, so I’ve set off today wearing my converse trainers. Wow, life IS exciting.

So now I’m reviewing them, I was reviewing them pretty much the second I put them on. “Hey, these still look great!” thought I whilst doing up the laces. They’re quite heavily scuffed and mucky but to me that adds to the charm. There’s something in the design that is just so classic. A bit like bowling shoes, but not. A bit like baseball boots, but not. 100% cool? No, probably not – but not far off!

And it totally reminds me of the almost pornographic nature of the first 10 minutes of the Will Smith vehicle: I, Robot – which is effectively a full-on advert for Converse trainers. There’s no pretension it’s anything but, it’s hilarious. I digress…

So, after having laced up, I then had the displeasure of having to walk in them. They are bloody uncomfortable, the sole is so thin! I’m used to wearing boots which have a fair amount of nice, soft padding; these have none. Luckily it’s not raining today or I’d also have to test out their waterproofness, which I suspect, being canvas trainers, they’re not.

I think I’m a fan of the trainer still, they’re beautiful, well made, and make me feel like I’m giving my feet a treat… whilst I’m sitting down. The moment I move I feel I’m punishing them. Oh well.

Style: 9/10
Comfort: 5/10
Practicality: 6/10
Value: 8/10

Overall I’d just them a neat 7/10

I’ve used this site a few times and think it’s worth reviewing. It’s a pretty impressive service; basically it’s a website that has lots of takeaway restaurants signed up to it from which you can order your food, pay online and fill your tum!

The way it works is you put your postcode in (this is in the UK) and it comes up with a list of all restaurants in your area, you click through on one you fancy (from Indian, Chinese, Italian usually) and you basically get their entire menu. Click the items you want, go through and pay online, and BINGO! You’re done, now you just wait for your friendly delivery person to give you your food. Fantastic.

It’s a well thought out and designed site, the interface is easy to use, uses AJAX pretty well to add items to your “basket”, it’s cool. Personally I hate phoning restaurants because, well, firstly I don’t really like using the phone, and secondly because these restaurants tend to be staffed by people who have very strong accents.

I’ve used another site that does a similar job called hungry house – that I was less impressed with. After you’ve paid, the restaurant has to accept your order: Just-eat gives you an indicator and you basically keep the page open till it responds. Hungry house on the other hand emails you. There is a “login” area where you can see the result of the status… but it’s a bit irritating not to have the instant response.

Overall, good site, well designed, good inventory, yeah, a solid 8/10

I have to admit, this post is more of a secret experiment… well, not really that secret. And not that much of an experiment. But effectively I’m looking to challenge the world, its minions, and the greasy brown blob that sits on top of your work-bench during your attempt to re-create the first few seconds of evolution. Brown, blobby and greasy. Three favourites in one.

OK, OK, none of that *literally* makes sense, but some of it is still quite beautiful.

I’ve been thinking about moustaches, I do, admittedly, have a moustache but I don’t like to talk about it. I prefer my beard of bees – now THAT is a site to behold. In fact, why don’t get moustaches of bees? All it would take is a single smearing of jam on your upper-lip and Bingo! There’s your moustache of bees. Once you’ve got your bees in line, you could command your moustache to take flight at an enemy, smite them in whichever way they see fit (some kind of stinging, probably, knowing the unimaginative bee).

I wonder if this is where the phrase “bee-line” came from?

So, I’m going to score the moustache of bees a healthy 8/10. Go bees! And everyone else, don’t you wish you could command your moustache?

As a web developer I have to constantly be looking at new technologies, of course Google Chrome has been around for a fair while now but after the initial techy-geek pickup immediately after launch, I’m starting to see an increasing user base for this particular web browser and it’s about time I took the time out to look at it properly.

Speculation about Google releasing a web browser into the market had been around for years since it was confirmed and it was eventually released in September 2008. It launched with a pretty big “hoo-hah” and had zillions of downloads before the day was out. However, many skeptically (and probably rightly) suggested that a great number of these downloads would then sit as unused desktop items that your OS would kindly remind you should be tidied at regular intervals. There was, many said (and I was amongst them), no real room for a new browser in the market. Internet Explorer was going to be used by anyone who had no real reason to look elsewhere, whilst FireFox had the market of those who needed to look under the hood of websites. Safari had fairly recently been available to download for Windows users – and so what need was there for a new browser?

Chrome – the fast browser

In my use of Chrome one of the best things I can say about it is: Whoa! This thing’s fast. I don’t just mean at loading itself, although that is fairly nippy, but the actual rendering of web pages is very impressive. True, I must temper this with the confession that I have a silly number of “add ons” plugged into FireFox at any one time, but nonetheless I’ve never seen a browser render a page quicker. And it makes a difference you know, I never really thought about it but it makes the internet feel a heck of a lot slicker. I spend a decent amount of time in my job working out how to make the back-end behind websites process quicker, whilst at the same time ensuring that the front-end developers around me are also producing slick code and well optimised imagery. But all this work is heavily diminished if the browser itself is sluggish, and Chrome has pointed out (hopefully) to the big-boys exactly how it’s done. Yeah, I’ll call Mozilla’s FireFox browser a big-boy because it really is now.

Another feature of Chrome that I’m really impressed with is that each browser tab or window is (apparently) a separately running application, meaning that if one tab crashes, the rest doesn’t go with it. This might sound stupid but I’m sick of losing the dozen or so tabs I’ve got open with IE or FireFox, even if FireFox does offer to open them up again next time… and crash for the same reason

Speaking of tabs, I LOVE the way you can drag a tab outside the tab-line and it turns into a new window. That’s magic, that’s exactly what I wanted from FireFox, especially when you’ve got 2 monitors. The ability to create a new window from an existing tab is such a simple one but something I’ve genuinely missed having!

Chrome – the ‘meh’ browser

However, when trying to think of other positives, I’m kinda struggling. It’s not that Chrome’s doing much wrong, it’s just that I get everything it does, more or less, from either FireFox or IE. With IE I know I’m going to find the website I’m looking at (probably) looking as it was designed 1, with FireFox I know I’m going to be able to get the functionality expanded, that everything I already use it for works really well, and I can rely on its rendering engine to displays things exactly as programmed.

In terms of what it’s actually missing, there’s not a great deal, I’d suggest. The only thing I have noticed is a lack of internal RSS reader – a bit weird when you open up an RSS/XML file and have it load in the page like an HTML file (ie. tags invisible, content spewed).

Overall, I mean, I like Chrome. I’d give it a home, maybe in the garage, but I suspect there’ll be others who’d give it the couch, maybe even offer it a beer. But I just don’t care enough. Y’know?

Score: 7/10. It’s not its fault, it’s just a bit meh.

I fell in love with good old “Artoo” when I was a nipper. Star Wars was released in ‘77, sadly two years before my time so I wasn’t able to see it at the cinema until it was released for the Special Edition in… er… 95 I think it was, with all the gooey CGI “updates” that weren’t needed. But that’s all history, point is I grew up as a child of the ’80s and as such Star Wars was all a kid could need. Along with He-Man. And Knight Rider and all that.

Artoo was my favourite, never before has a word-less beeper ever said so much in a single whistle to make you feel like, “Yeah, I’d totally be friends with him and rip the living p*ss out of Threepio all the time.” The way his little head swivelled. The way he’d let down his middle leg to set off on a trundle that’s clearly going to make him run into the side of the corridor (good camera cutting, Lucas!). The way he fell over when the Jawas zapped him with their little electricity gun. Good times.

You know, no other robot without any real means of mechanical expression can raise their eyebrow or roll their eyes in quite the same way Artoo could whenever “dweeb” Luke was talking to him (yunno, before Luke got all cool and had a robot hand and stuff).

So I say “Thank you!” Artoo. Thank you Kenny Baker (the mini-man inside the bot), thank you Ben Burtt (who did the whistles and beeps) and thank you to everyone who made Artoo the true star he is. Oh yeah, thanks George Lucas – I guess you did OK too.

My first TV review – wowsers – such an opportunity to tell you how much I loathe the thing… but no, I love TV, it’s ace, the best thing invented since, er, radio, I guess. I love it so much, I get really depressed by adverts. No, really, it actually depresses me when adverts come on, I feel it echo in my chest like a really upsetting thing, I feel lower, my heart rate goes up as I try, fervently, to find some alternative entertainment whilst I’m sitting there bemoaning my ad-ridden fate…

… and then I relax a bit and forget the EPG and settle down to watch and listen to the most appalling attempts to part me from my money. Good God what on earth is going on when a good god would allow these kinds of things to work their way into our receptive, jelly-like brains. I don’t want L’oreal hair-dye… but on the other hand, *I really do*. It’s not fair. Maybe I should be reviewing hair dye, or maybe even L’oreal (is that right, it looks wrong…).

I want, instead to very, very briefly review adverts for insurance: home, personal, car – it really doesn’t matter. It’s all a lot of really irritating, totally impersonal and quite aggressive posturing for my money. Apparently I’m quite stupid for thinking of going with anyone else for my insurance… and frankly, I’d be a moron not to be impressed with what they’re offering me. Yunno, it kinda takes the shine off things when REALLY what they should be doing is reminding me why I bloody need insurance, and why, actually, they’re any good at what they do. I don’t want a free bleeping phone keyring, I don’t really need a nodding dog. I have no need for an aggressive overweight semi-moustachiod man telling me that he’d totally be my best friend if he could represent me next time I trip up on a paving slab.

Ugh! Adverts, bane of my life because I love TV so much. Stop torturing me, telly, give me good programmes instead! PLEASE!!!

Adverts: 4/10
Adverts for insurance: 0/10

Shocking, just shocking.

I’m having a bad asthma day for no reason whatsoever and it’s getting me down. It stings my chest and makes me very wary of walking anywhere. Hopefully it’ll subside at some point – my reliever inhaler (this week I are been mostly using Turbutaline by Bricanyl) is working but it’s struggling. I wonder if I’m due a slight cold or chest infection. I say slight because there’s no other real indication of what it might be.

So, asthma is bloody awful. I see a nurse about it every 3 to 6 months and my condition goes up and down so much that my medication changes incessantly as well. My fault, I must admit, I’m not particularly “into” taking medicine and taking something long-term and daily leaves me very cold indeed. I know this is a pathetic excuse, there are people with far worse things going on in their lives that have to take medication many times daily for their well-being. All I should have to do is take a single preventative inhaler once a day and I can’t even manage that.

So what exactly am I reviewing here? I suppose I should rate Asthma a 3/10 – it’d be selfish to suggest anything lower than that, it’s not crippling, it’s not making me bleed out of my eyes… but to those who just think it’s an excuse for people to get out of sports at school – it really is quite horribly painful and scary.

How many people die from asthma?

Each year around 1500 a year in the UK and 5000 a year in the US die from asthma, usually after very severe asthma attacks to long existing sufferers but sometimes quite out of the blue to people who have never before exhibited symptoms. Quite scary. But, if it’s well managed (and mine should be) then you should be very happy and healthy, barring the overeating of burgers and voles.

It’s now nearly 8.30 in the morning which means I’m a little less drowsy and irritable than I was just 2 hours ago when I had to get up. Forgive me for sounding like a miserable git but frankly, 6.30 in the morning is just not a fair time. I feel like I’ve been kicked in the eyes and the chest, stamped on the head and told that coffee is just an illusion. That’s pretty awful.

6.30AM is for mugs. I look forward to any day when I can leisurely rise between, ooh, say 2 to 3 in the afternoon. That’s about right, nice and warm under a duvet – sounds perfect to me.