Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Playstation 3)

Electronic Arts should find the person responsible the design of the camera algorithm for this game, take them outside, and shoot them.

Or make them play their own game; the two actions engender more or less the same level of pain.

While they're at it, they might like to find the person responsible for the code which decides how best to place Ron and Hermione for maximum annoyance, and shot them too.

Lost: Special Hidden DVD Soundtrack

My better half and I have been preparing for the Lost season 4 opening by watching the previous three seasons. We've been running them pretty much back-to-back, which (if you can stand sitting in front of the telly for hours on end) is actually quite a good idea, since all the stories are fresh in our mind.

It struck me last night that everyone who's watching it by themselves is missing out. I think ABC should release the DVDs with a 'Mumbling Partner Soundtrack'. You'd select the gender of your partner, and the DVD would play additional dialogue out of the rear surround speakers.

"Why did Ben say that?"
"Jack would never do that!"
"God I f*#$ing hate Juliet."
"Oh look it's the hobbit again."
"NO WAY!" (shouted at top of voice at least twice per episode)
(Female partner: Sawyer comes out of the sea in his shorts) "Phwoar!"
(Male partner: Kate gets dressed in her tent) "Phwoar!"
"Oh SHUT UP Ben!" (replace "Ben" with anyone, really)
"No don't do that - you're not supposed to be with him!"
"Oh is that the evil baby? He's ugly."
(the video would pause randomly, then:) "Do you know what I've read, in season 4 they're gonna..."
"So, is Jacob the island? Is John the island? Is John really Jacob? Is Ben actually the island? Is John really Ben and Jacob AND they're the island? Is Carlton Cuse the island?"

Peace out, brother!

Semper America! or, I flew through Paris Charles de Gaulle and all I got was this stupid blog

There are certain elements in my circle of acquaintances who are of the opinion that I don't put things in this blog often enough. To them I say: consider quality not quantity! Here's another post about going on holiday. This time I threw caution to the winds and went to the good ol' US of A.

~

The timing of this trip was defined by my dear brother who chose August to get married in. I personally would have left it until one of the months in which, say, your clothes don't spontaneously combust; but he's his own man and a force to be reckoned with. I didn't complain.

So the first thing I messed up was leaving all the organisation horribly late. Our wedding block booking expired at the reception hotel and I was forced to book a room in the hotel next door. Air fares were going up on what looked like an exponential curve and Hertz just laughed at me down the phone.

I eventually managed to sell a kidney and book a round trip on Delta with an internal United flight down to Florida. Although I did wait four days from initial enquiry to final booking - a delay which cost me about $350 extra - moral: if you see a good price book it immediately! I got a Delta confirmation code. I got Delta E-ticket numbers.

I got an Air France departure.

I was a bit worried about this, given the historic hostility between France and-- well, and the rest of the world, really. I was half justified.

If you can possibly help it, try to follow this rule in life: Never, ever, and I really mean this: Never fly through Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.

It's not a good sign that when the Air France ticket agent at Stuttgart issued my boarding cards (and, thank God, a boarding card for the onward transatlantic leg from CDG) she put them in a helpful envelope entitled "Your Guide to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport" -- which should really have been called "Your Guide to Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell". The airport is an utter disaster. Navigating between the upper set of terminals and lower set is hell. Maps around the airport are variously down with north up and south up (gotcha!) and you have to be really on your toes not to accidentally leave the airport and get on a bus to, say, La Rochelle.

After you navigate the maze of twisty passages (Heaven help anyone caught in a fire at CDG) you (may) find yourself at least in the right terminal. Now you need to go through the correct security checkpoint or - you guessed it - you'll not be able to reach your gate. Go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect your visa waiver form!

Having taken the advice of a friend and not loitered on arrival, I checked through security and found my gate using a search-and-rescue quartering search of the terminal. There was a 747 at the gate, which was interesting because we were due out on an Airbus A340. Boarding time came and went, and still the 747 didn't move. A voice on the tannoy instructed us to go to gate 93 instead - a short hike down the terminal.

The - mostly American - group set off for gate 93. But due to an oversight by Air France, gate 93 was already occupied with 300 Koreans going to Seul; and had just started boarding. The ensuing melee was fantastic. There were Americans, English and French alike trying to board the wrong aircraft; Air France gate agents waving them through, then dashing down the jetway to drag them back. The tannoy burst into life again: "Would all passengers for Chicago O'Hare waiting at gate 93 please move to gate 94?".

This led to a mass exodus from gate 93 to gate 94. A second oversight by Air France then became obvious: gate 94 was for regional flights and only held about 20 people.

The crowd spilled out of the gate, back into gate 93, into the gangways, corridor and into the adjacent shops. Still no aircraft at gate 94. By this point, innocent passengers for Seul were getting confused and thought they were moving to gate 94 too, adding to the crush. Air France started frantically waving Seul passengers back into gate 93 and started getting Chicago passengers down the gate 94 jetway - which still had no aircraft. The gate agents were taking a quick look at passports and throwing visa waivers at us.

There was no aircraft at gate 94. Instead of shooting out of the jetway into space and suffering the ensuing broken legs, we were herded down the stairs at the end onto buses. After a 15 minute drive out onto some remote area of the airfield (actually I'm not sure we were still in France), the bus driver deposited us at the base of and A340 which was "going our way" and sped off, tyres a-squealin'. The condemned climbed the stairs.

When the boarding door closed, something miraculous and magical occurred. All the incompetence went away as though somehow evaporating. The air conditioning came on, the flight attendants did their choreographed safety drill and we were off. The in-flight entertainment on Air France A340's is really excellent. Okay, you can't call up the movie you want on the seat-back screen exactly when you want it (everything runs on a two-hour loop) but the movies were great, quality was very good, sound was excellent. In-flight goodies kit included an eye mask, ear plugs, mints to suck on the descent, and headphones with airline adapters you could actually keep (hah, take that, pay-for-headphones-airlines!) . The meal was great and the service was friendly and frequent. The landing at O'Hare was either done by the computer or was a 'butter-soft' pilot landing. Full points for air service, Air France! (Null points pour ground service though).

~

Hertz (whom I had finally managed to persuade to hire me a car -- with navigation system no less!) didn't have a car for me. The lady said I could take one without navigation (fat chance) or wait for one to come back in which had the equipment I actually booked. Since I had only gone for a bigger vehicle in order to guarantee navigation, I decided to wait. As it happened, I only had to wait 10 minutes.

I headed out north to Milwaukee on I-294, and after a few minutes my amazement at the American freeway system (overtaking is permitted in all lanes) turned to pure panic: "TOLL PLAZA AHEAD".

My money was in my wallet.

My wallet was in my rucksack.

My rucksack was in the trunk.

I then did possibly the stupidest and scariest thing I've ever done. I pulled over on the freeway.

Now, let me paint you a scene.

From an overhead helicopter shot, we see a busy freeway, the sort of scene we've all seen on American films. Three lanes of traffic with no lane discipline at all (overtaking in all lanes) are moving quite quickly. A car pulls over and stops. The driver's door opens a third of an inch, then suddenly slams shut again as a huge semi rattles past, horns blaring. There is a short pause while the driver grasps his chest and clenches his left fist a few times. Then, the passenger's door opens slowly and a man emerges. The man stares closely at the trunk, which has no method of opening it without the keys. The man edges very carefully to the driver's door and opens it a half inch. Another semi rattles past with attendant horns and various unchristian hand signals. The driver - now sweating visibly - presses himself against the contour of the vehicle and breathes in. He extends his arm inside the vehicle and the trunk pops open as his hand finds the release lever. He edges back around to the rear of the vehicle, fumbles inside a rucksack for a few moments, pockets his wallet and enters the vehicle again - via the passenger door. The vehicle revs up, builds speed down the hard shoulder and then merges into traffic by the simple expedient of waiting for a two-foot gap, then putting the nose of the vehicle into it. There is some more horn activity as our hero stabilises the vehicle into what could loosely be called "a straight line" and makes his way through the toll booth.

~

The wedding, after some confusion with the formalwear provider about the colour of the ties and pocket squares, at least went smoothly, and was Very Nice. I flew with United (actually their regional carrier "Ted") down to Orlando, to spend a couple of days actually on vacation and not racing about the place to rehearsals, shopping etc. The weather was 85 and humid. I reacted in the way of all Englishmen since time immemorial - by getting badly sunburned. I'd like to take a moment to thank my hosts for what were a really great couple of days! Thanks guys!

~

Coming back was an 18-hour feat of endurance, including a four-hour stopover at Atlanta (which seems to be completely owned by Delta). Delta ground service is what Air France should aspire to - well organised, informative, fast and friendly.

Unfortunately, the air service didn't match. The aging 767-200ER must have been one of the first production versions. Entertainment was a communal TV. Meal choice was "meal" or "no meal", flight attendants were disengaged, although service was frequent.

About three-quarters the way through the flight, the video turned itself off, as did the radio channels (all of which - bar one - were in mono), just as I was finally dropping off to sleep. Then the reading lights all cut out, instead electing to flicker randomly as though something was arcing across the electrical bus. This worried me, so I told a flight attendant who told the purser who told the captain who (I guess) pulled a bunch of breakers until it stopped. Then the video and audio started up again from the beginning of the segment and we had to watch "Top Ten: Greece" again - all 55 minutes of it. Honestly, who does the programming on these flights? Rubbish.

Landing at Stuttgart was not a greaser - there was some float down the runway as the speed came off, finally the speed breaks deployed and the sudden loss of lift caused us to hit the deck roughly.

Well, they say any landing you walk away from is a good one!

Saturday Shopping or, welcome to hell.

And so, as my neighbours began their traditional Saturday persuits of hammering and drilling, I glanced at the clock and decided that 1pm was late enough to sleep in, and I'd better get my behind into gear and visit my own personal hell.

Saturday shopping is probably the only thing on God's green earth that makes we want to kill another human being. Or rather, a few hundred of them.

On Saturday (and especially on Saturday's occuring before bank holidays) the entire population of Boeblingen turns out to the Real supermarket (it's really called that; I guess to differentiate it from imaginary supermarkets) to do their shopping.

Let me spend a few moments relating this, ah, singular experience. Firstly, arriving at the car park, you'll find it absolutely jam-packed with vehicles. They'll be parked in every available space: all the bays will be packed; they'll be parked on corners, in trolley stands, even abandoned in the car wash with engines running. I fully expect to turn up one week and find them stacked on top of each other.

Once you've honked and pushed and sworn your way into a parking space (if you park on a slant, just leave it; if you try to tidy it up somebody'll nick the space) then you can begin the hike across the car park to one of the two entrances (only one actually leads into the store and you'll pick the wrong one), after detouring a couple of miles out of the way to pick up a trolley (you'll not have the right change - a Vietnamese 5000-Dong coin).

Once you're in, the Real (pun intended) fun begins. Firstly you won't be able to find anything because the layout is planned on some infernal scheme only Real are privy to. After a few months, you'll start to get the hang of it - battery acid is next to the baby food, soft drinks are adjacent to the doggy chews; that sort of thing.

As your blood pressure begins to rise, several factors will come into play to thwart your attempts to find what you want and get the hell out as fast as possible. The aisles are not multiples of one trolley width wide. A lot of the time they are slightly less than two trolley widths wide, and of course with the trolleys being wedge-shaped to start with, this can lead to some interesting logistical problems, usually solved by bracing one foot against a post and pulling hard.

But that's just the thin end of the wedge, so to speak.

Secondly. because Real don't believe in cleaning (the floors are absolutely filthy, there is abandoned food scattered all over the place, spilled liquid is left unheeded to congeal) you are left having to dodge round odd substances on the floor and wondering why your hand has idly alighted on, say, an abandoned block of lard (opened) instead of packet soup mix.

Thirdly, there's the human factor. What posesses people to bring their children with them? How can that ever be a good thing? They orbit the trolley, screaming and crying and wiping melted stuff everywhere, until their parents lose their cool and start shouting. Or as a precautionary measure they're made to feel important by being allowed to have one of those mini-trolleys. But adults can't see these because they're, well, mini; so we get bloody shins as we belt into them.

If the children are bad, the adults are worse. Because of the sheer number of people crammed into this store (fire regulations be damned!), tempers are already flaring. What we don't need is people simply leaving their trolleys in the middle of the aisle while they go off to compare prices. Or allowing their family to block up the entire thoroughfare. As traffic begins to back up, with rows of abandoned trolleys and only one stream moving in either direction, you'll find yourself stuck behind some old lady who is already moving slowly and is beginning to slow down. Desparately, you begin to look for an overtaking opportunity but there isn't one; suddenly the old lady stops abruptly to look at the price of axle stands and the crash-crash-crash of jack-knifing trolleys behind you echoes throughout the store.

As if dirty floors, spilled produce, abandoned food, screaming children and inconsiderate adults wasn't enough, Real themselves actively go out of their way to make things difficult. They'll put the slowest cashier in the shop on the express till. You'll turn the corner into the cheese aisle and lo - a shop assistant will be shelf stacking with two huge steel bins blocking two thirds of the aisle. Why on earth they can't do this at night?

Having battled your way through the shop proper, and selected a suitably sexy checkout chick, you'll either find she's so slow that some of your shopping has in fact exceeded its Best Before date before you get to the till, or you'll get into some mad competition with her in which she'll try to scan things through faster than you can pack. Then, when she's given you the grand total and is sat examining her nails and waiting for cash, you'll be manhandling 4 carrier bags worth of shopping (having only bought 2 carrier bags), trying to fish out your money and holding closed a huge tear in one of the bags which is threatening to drop a glass jar of joghurt on the floor.

Once back in the carpark, having returned your trolley and getting your 5000-Dong coin back, you'll have to negotiate the mad rush of exiting vehicles before beginning a quartering search of the car park for your own car (whose exact location you will have forgotten: was it over by the car wash? or did I come on the bus?), and then elbow your way into the traffic and fight your way home through town.

And you get to do it all again next weekend.

And you'll have forgotten the milk.

North Yorkshire Notes or, I may have made an awful mistake.

Avid blog readers will remember (or can read 'Standards, No thanks!' below) my impending trip to the UK. Well, it's not impending any more, it's actually here. I'm actually on it.

The big news - Hertz gave me a car without needing an international license, so what a waste of time that was. I rewarded them by putting a thousand miles on it in 10 days. It's holding up well, though requires some coaxing up steep moorland inclines. Driving on the left for the first time was certainly an experience: kerbing the nearside tyre seems to be a favourite (well, I'm normally on that side of the car, aren't I?) and I had one violent disagreement with the GPS navigation when it put me in a multi-storey car-park at 70 mph, but that's another story.

The most interesting - and terrifying - experience was roundabouts. We only have the single-lane small tame ones in Germany, so arriving at the Birmingham Airport interchange was a heartstopping experience. I actually thought "Aha, so this is how I'm going to die. I see.", and considered parking the car up and going to study the damnable thing for half an hour to figure out how it works. I have adopted the strategy of approacing the things at high velocity, closing my eyes, and sorting out the resulting navigational mess after the fact.

The only other problem with driving around the moors is rounding a bend or a summit at high speed, and discovering a sheep looking at you from the middle of the road. I usually cope with this by frantic spinning of the steering wheel, and accompany the excursion into the heather with a strangled scream. I can hereby certify the Ford ABS system as Bloody Good.

Other than that, some serious relaxation has gone on. I've taken a lot of pictures. Unfortunately, a lot of these were on black and white film, which has to be specially developed and printed; apparently your high-street print shops just aren't equipped to develop this stuff. Well, it's understandable, them being staffed mostly with people who can only load the film into the machine and press 'go'.

Anyway, I still have a couple of days to go, so I'd better find myself a hotel for the night.

All the best from Whitby, North Yorkshire!

Adventures in Stereo or, there's this rattle, but you can only hear it at 180 m.p.h.

I just bought a Manfred Mann album because about 80% of the songs on it are classics of the 60's which I used to listen to on an ancient Decca record player. I don't have the records or the player any more, so I thought I'd grab this CD before the supermarket have another of their famous stock-control-problems (where all the popular stuff doesn't get reorderd, yet the vile inventory is replenished with alarming regularity) and it disappears for ever.

The odd thing about it is that, in the true style of late 60's recordings, most of the stereo images have the vocalist panned hard over to the right, and the entire rest of the band panned hard over to the left.

The net effect, driving home, is that the band appear to be playing somewhere near the battery in the engine compartment, while the vocalist himself is located in the nearside wheel-well.

Highly strange.

Standards? No thanks! or, take a ticket!

I'm trying to book some holiday. The plan - such as it is - is to fly to the UK, obtain a vehicle from a hire company, and proceed to make my way about the countryside visiting friends and just generally not doing much of anything for a couple of weeks.

I called Hertz up to check my German driver's license would be valid. I considered this a formality as it's one of the new photocard European licenses, which replace the A0-size fold-out paper ones. The license is supposedly valid in every EU country.

Hertz told me that although it was valid to drive on, they wouldn't accept it for hiring a car since it was in German. Even though the UK has had photocard licenses for quite a while now (apparently they still aren't valid without their paper cousin anyway, good old Islanders) and all the fields are the same, in the same locations and with the same restrictions. I explained this to Hertz but they weren't having any of it. I asked the agent what I needed to do, and was told to obtain an International Driver's License.

So this morning I trogged down to the Driver's License Office at the borough council offices at the ungodly hour of 8am (this being a German office they actually open at 7am and close at 3pm with a two-hour break for lunch). The place was almost completely empty. I made the dire mistake of approaching one of the eleven counters without taking a ticket! A mistake I shall not make again. The women all glared at me with a well-practiced stare clearly designed to convey, with as little effort as possible, that I was a lower form of life than the amoeba and should just jolly well get myself back to the entrance and take a ticket from the machine and wait my turn!. I wonder, under what circumstances one would be permitted to approach without obtaining a ticket?

"Excuse me, could you tell me where the toilet is?"
"Take a ticket."

"I just need to get form D-1459 revision A (blue copy)..."
"Take a ticket."
"Look, I can see a stack of them on your desk, if I could just reach over the counter and--"
"Take a ticket!"

"Are you aware that an out-of-control juggernaut is at this very moment crashing through the shrubbery and will in a few short seconds reduce your precious counter to beige rubble and you to a pulpy mess?"
"Take a ticket."

I took a ticket.

I sat down on a hard orange molded plastic chair.

The women stared at me.

Time passed in silence.

The women examined their nails and brushed imaginary specks of dust off their counters.

A tumbleweed blew through the empty office. In the distance, a lonely church bell rang out once into the pre-dawn.

At last, through some concensus derived between them without speaking, they decided I had waited long enough, and the lady at counter eleven reached under her desk and pushed a hidden button. An electronic buzzer sounded and my number flipped over (in the style of Groundhog Day) on the board.

At this point I'd like to say the woman was officious and bureaucratic but unfortunately that would be something of a lie. I did have to pay 16 Euro into a machine that looked like one of those machines you get in car-parks to pay for your stay; (the 16 Euro is to pay for wear and tear on the orange plastic chairs), but other than that I was dealt with quickly and courteously - a fact which did gratify me but which doesn't make good essay material. So lets imagine that I battled heroically for hours against a bureaucratic system designed to sap the very life-force from my body, and put out of our minds nice Mrs Moeller who issued the license without any fuss.

I'm going to try it on with Hertz, because I believe a European license is a European license. But I'll have my international license in my back pocket. Just in case.

Edit: This post no longer applies to me as I've not been a bachelor since September 2005 :-) The wonderful Becky keeps me sane, laughs at my awful jokes and is the most loving, supportive partner I could have imagined. So enjoy the post but remember I'm now on the other side of it. -J



Supermarket Laws or, how to remain calm whilst buying frozen lasagne

Henceforth, it shall be an offence to shop as a couple. Billing and cooing will from now on no longer be tollerated. Kissing over the fresh vegetables, cuddling in the dairy products and any sort of affection at all in the frozen section are verboten.

In fact, I'll go one further and say that couples are banned from the frozen section completely.

For that is the realm of the bachelor.

The penalty for offences of this nature is the maximum permissable under the law: the offenders shall clean my kitchen.

You have been warned.

Truth In Advertising or, somebody at Argos is asleep at the wheel?

There's just been an advert on TV for Argos. All well and good except the music they chose is two instrumental sections from Barenaked Ladies's "It's All Been Done".

It's All Been Done

Now, pardon my skepticism, but isn't "It's all been done" rather a bad connotation be attached to a catalogue shop which is supposed to be 'innovative'? I mean, "Argos - don't bother, it's all been done before"? Sure, it's a nice piece of music - but I mean, who picks these things?

And now, if you'll excuse me, the smoke detector is going off, which is a sure sign my pizza's done.

Compression Sucks or, are all cable TV operators deaf?

Do you run a cable or satelite TV network? If the answer to that question is 'yes', then read on!

STOP COMPRESSING THE ADVERTS!

The program comes on. It's uncompressed. It has full dynamic range. The quiets are quiet and the louds are loud. Our ears adjust and all is wonderful.

Then the adverts come on. They've had the living crap compressed out of them and are uniformly loud to make them stand 'louder and prouder' of the show. The net effect is you're reaching for the remote to turn the volume down before the plaster comes off the ceiling, then the show comes back on and it's too damn quiet.

Stop the compression insanity!

In Heat or, the price of warm tootsies

Well there were at least 28 days in the month last month, so according to Building Regulation number 938251, paragraph 59, section 'Q' ('Minimum Number Of Invasions of Privacy For Tennants'), we had to have our heat and water meters read. Lo and behold, up went the notice. "Please Note: By order of your building maintenance company, we will be popping round on 12th December to read your meters. Please be at home between the hours of 8am and 5pm. If you cannot be at home, we will be happy to return, at your cost, to read your meters on some other occasion."

So I'm expected to be in all bloody day. This might be possible if I could arrange with my Other Half to be around to let them in. But the fatal flaw in that plan is obvious: no Other Half. Not so much as an eighth. So I arranged with my employer to work from home until they've been and gone, then go in later if it's worthwhile (i.e. not 5pm).

The water meters are just these little guages that whiz round at a speed that defies the General Theory of Relativity, but the heat meters are interesting little buggers. They're these little vials of coloured liquid, superglued to the radiators. As far as I can make out, the liquid evaporates at a known rate and the meter-reader-guy simply reads the level off the scale and enters it on his little card.

Well the Meter Reader Operative (union title) actually arrived at 9am and started to read the heat meters.

After two readings, he started to scratch his head and mutter to himself. He read the first two meters again. He held the vials up to the light. He looked puzzlingly at his booklet ('Meter Reading For Dummies'). He took out his calculator and started totting up large numbers, sucking air in through his teeth in that 'Oooh, it's gonna cost ya' manner so beloved of car mechanics prior to quoting you a price that would comfortably re-furnish your entire home and leave cash left over for a slap-up cruise to the Bahamas.

He made me sign the readings card, with a warning that the bill was on the way and I might like to sell a kidney in preparation.

I generated a little extra heat by burning my copy of the readings card.

Fog Lights or, my eyes! My eyes!

Why do people insist on driving around with their fog lights on? There's just no reason for it. What do they hope to achieve by being able to illuminate the next town? Those lights are to mark the vehicle if the visibility drops below a certain level. And by 'certain level' I mean 'about a foot and a half'.

Full beam is more than enough, and even then they should be dipped when traffic comes the other way. But I suspect these idiots have their baseball caps pulled down so low they can't actually see the road ahead. No; they're driving by feel and the hysteria level of their passengers.

It's most disconcerting to round a corner and be presented with enough halogen lighting to put Wembley Stadium to shame. I mean, what am I supposed to do in this situation? In the theory course, we were taught to keep our eyes to the right of the road; the better to see hapless pedestrians stepping out onto the carriageway. But of course, according to the principle of 'You Automatically Steer Where You're Looking', I end up mounting the kerb, bouncing over the ditch and into the scenery, possibly by way of a stylish forward flip accompanied by acapella screaming.

And as the oncoming traffic barrels past, bass-bins a-blastin', I'm left blinking in the darkness, trying to remember if the next curve is to the right or the left and wondering desparately if my health insurance is up to date.