mkjones

I’m shocked but also appalled that one of my all time favourite video games is being made into a movie/tv mini-series.

XIII is an upcoming 2009 TV Mini-series based on the XIII comic book series by Jean Van Hamme and William Vance, revolving around an amnesiac protagonist who seeks to discover his concealed past. The series is directed by Duane Clark and will star Val Kilmer and Stephen Dorff, filmed in Hamilton, Ontario.

Shocked

So why am I shocked? For a start, the game bombed. It was a financial failure. This is why I have spent the past 5 years waiting for a sequel that will never come.

Appalled

And what appalled me about this news is the wishy washy way in which the film appears to have been made. First was a full blown blockbuster movie with a top cast and large budget. Now its a TV mini series that sounds like a bad episode of 24!

Also, Stephen Dorf? What was wrong with giving the lead part to David Duchovny who did an excellent job voicing the character in the game?

I think what pisses me off most of all however is the fact that they bothered at all.

Most of the XIII plot has already been done in 2 previous movies, The Borne Identity and The Manchurian Candidate.

There simply is no need for the movie to ever be made.

The game however should have had at least a couple of sequels funded. The cell shading effect could really flourish on next-gen machines.

If anyone missed C4’s ‘The Inbetweeners’ here is a rather hilarious taste:

It turns out ars technica published an excellent article on the transitions Microsoft experienced during XP to Vista and Apple when the ditched OS9 for OSX.

Titled: From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user’s conversion to Mac OS X it comes off as a quite misleading almost fanboy-esq bitch fest at times but has some excellent history lessons and is a wonderful insight into a disillusioned Windows developers life.

XP was released in 2001. And that was basically it from Microsoft for the next five and a half years. Until Vista, Microsoft didn’t bother putting out a single new client OS. Meanwhile, Apple released Mac OS X 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4. It continued to tidy up legacy features (deprecating QuickDraw, for example). It added new APIs like Core Audio and Core Image. It made sure that these APIs were of high quality—Core Audio offers extremely low latency, for example, and Core Image provides high performance accelerated image processing—and it consistently ate its own dog food. This produced high-quality, best-of-breed applications such as Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and even Aperture (after an admittedly lackluster initial release) that leveraged these new technologies.

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

Facebook really is a terrible site. A truly epic waste of time, energy and bandwidth. I signed up about a year ago in order to protect my online identity (I did the same thing with MySpace) and ever since then I have received annoying emails from past acquaintance’s, old college ‘friends’ and messages from other mutual friends who suddenly decide I would like to see some photos of them drunk in the Algarve.

Little did I know that recently the insects over at Facebook made it impressively simple to deactivate your account:

So its all over. No more emails, no more friend requests, no more creepy messages. Just peace and quiet.

Now I should really get back to improving this site to better nourish my online requirements.

Dear Microsoft, what is this?

<div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:84E294D0-71C9-4bd0-A0FE-95764E0368D9:fb5388d4-99b6-4774-96d4-25f9beb95e61" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline; float: none; width: 380px;">

and this??

<div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFC-DD9C333F4C5D:bd85f4c1-83db-468b-9cba-7139b593d10e" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline;">

It seems Windows Live Writer for all its ‘clean and lean’ interface is still full of crap.

For a long time I have worked out I need to try and blog a little more. One of the problems is that Wordpress (as great as it is) can be a pain to log in, upload photos, add links spell check, proof etc….

Well, help is at hand with Windows Live Writer. An application from Microsoft which uses a simple WISIWIG application (like Word on slimfast) to help speed up the writing process.

So what’s it like? Well it seems rather good. Writing in an application like this is a lot more comfortable than using the standard Wordpress post page.

You can upload images:

…. which is shockingly easy.

You can link to maps:

…. which is no problem at all.

You can do video:

… YouTube, Soapbox etc are all supported, which seems to work well.

And best of all you get your text spell-checked and formatted in a way which is useful and familiar.

Oh crap.

Time to pre-order one of those new-fangled electric cars.

Rick Stein’s Jack Russell ‘Chalky’ has died at the grand old age of 17 (via BBC News)

I always watched Rick Stein’s shows, not mostly for the cooking but almost certainly to see Chalky in action.

He always reminded me of my own dog Patch (pictured left) who, coincidentally (and quite sadly), died 2 years ago this week (January 4th 2006).

Turns out him and Chalky were about the same age.

For more photos of Patch see my Picasa Public Photo Stream.

I tried, oh I did,

I tried not to blog for a month. I almost did it.

You see, recently I find my postings to be erratic, with no real overlying genera or values.

Sometimes its football, sometimes technology, sometimes politics, media, television, music or whatever… Its just a mess.

I had an idea I would re-structure, re-design and re-invigorate my blog around after this ‘month off’, just in time for the new year. But I just can’t see it happening.

Problem is, I’m busy. I have design projects taking up all of my free time and as I move more and more towards promoting my work as a company and less as an individual my blog inevitably gets left behind.

I wanted to write more about my design work, more about what interests me and less about what annoys and entertains me. But I can’t see the point. There are 100s of other web design blogs out there maintained by far more competent writers than me.

So, now I ask myself. Is it worth having a blog which gets updated once a month?

Should I chase an audience or give up on the idea of readership and simply blog for myself?

At the moment, I don’t know. Lets see what 2008 brings.

In a ’shock’ move Martin Jol was finally sacked/quit sometime last night.

I have nothing to say on this matter other than I once met Martin in a bar while in Germany last year for the world cup and he seemed like a very nice chap.

What I say “met” of course what I really mean is he was in the same bar as me during one of the matches. And I didn’t actually talk to him, or even really get within a decent distance of him.

Anyway, he seemed OK. He was on the phone a lot actually. I guess that’s part of the job he used to have.

For the Spurs fans out there, I hope this cheers you up:

If not. Shame on you. (Keep reading)