Five years ago..

July 8, 2010 – 10:50 pm

One of my earliest memories is from 1986, the disaster at Chernobyl. I was too young to know what had happened and its implications, but I remember the worried look on my mother’s face and having to keep windows closed.

15 years later the next big disaster happened, 9/11. I remember I had just come home from a friend’s house after school and was on the livingroom floor talking to the same friend and watching some music tv. Flicking through the channels during an ad break I came across the live news report minutes after the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center. I remember mentioning it to her on the phone with something like “oh, there’s been an accident in New York, a plane crashed”. Obviously it later turned out to be much more than that.

Four years later I had left school, moved to the UK and started working for a company in the South East. I remember the day when a supervisor told us what had happened early in the morning and I proceeded to call some friends and family in Germany who never quite understood that a town 20 miles from London isn’t in London. The day itself doesn’t carry many memories, apart from the public transport being delayed by many hours which really wasn’t that surprising.

What I do remember is the time I was at in my life at the time. It was a transitional period having just moved from the first place I had been properly settled in the UK due to finding something with a better location for commuting to work. I also remember changing departments at work and some friends finishing university. Most of all I remember how much my life changed in the last five years, the friends I’ve made, the things that I got interested in and what became important to me.

It’s interesting that it feels like such a long time ago yet at the same time like no time has passed at all.

By Cat | Posted in Life in general, Personal | Leave a Comment

About @SatScenes and why haven’t you taken part yet?

July 3, 2010 – 10:38 am

I have been taking part and tweeted about SatScenes since 2008 which is why I was surprised when @spritesbites told me she never really knew what it was about.

SatScenes is a collection of photographs taken by people on Twitter from all around the world every Saturday. Participation is optional and only involves sending a tweet to @satscenes with a link to the picture. There are no themes and the only rule is that the picture was taken within the 24 hours of that Saturday.

Every Wednesday all the collected SatScenes are then posted on the blog by @akaSylvia.

My first SatScenes picture was in November 2008:

Since then I’ve taken pictures in three countries and five towns. I’ll be making a full list of them at some point, but for now there are some collected here.

Take part!

By Cat | Posted in Photos, SatScenes | Leave a Comment

V

July 2, 2010 – 2:13 am

Even though I’ve known about V for a while I’ve only just started watching it properly now as Elizabeth Mitchell‘s presence confused me while Lost was still ongoing. And she is also one of the main reasons I’m watching it with one of the other ones being Morena Baccarin.

The general concept is intriguing with 30 alien ships hovering above the major cities of the world and, as shown halfway through the season, hundreds more on their way to Earth. It’s no doubt that the aliens have ulterior motives, but it’s not clear what they want as they could just take over Earth in an instant. Instead they choose to offer free advanced technology to have humanity depend on them for a later advantage in trades. They crack down on any resistance and have had people in many key positions acting as humans for at least a decade.

It’s the hopelessness that I like about it. There isn’t a clearly defined big bad and it’s entirely episodic with the characters mostly scrambling around trying to figure out what to do. Elizabeth Mitchell and Morena Baccarin are brilliant as their respective characters and I can’t wait for them to appear in some scenes together. In comparison the male supporting actors are a little bit disappointing with too little depth, but this will hopefully improve.

Is it as good as Lost? No, but it’s just about intriguing enough to replace it for now.

By Cat | Posted in Films and TV, Lost, TV Shows, V | Comments (4)

Another one to file under ‘I wish I hadn’t bought this’.

June 30, 2010 – 12:21 am

Full size

I’ve been watching 24 over the last few days which I’ve mentioned multiple times on Twitter. Like here and here and here and here. This isn’t the first time I’ve watched it, but despite being annoyed about many things [this list is in no way conclusive!] I’ve decided to rewatch some of it and watch the remaining seasons I’ve yet to watch.

I have season 1-4 of 24 as a DVD boxset and don’t have any real complaints with season 1-3 which feature slow menus, but are overall functional and, most importantly, have the option to play all the episodes on one disc back to back without the studio logos or piracy notices.

Season 4, however, is different. Every disc starts with the ‘Piracy is Crime’ video which is roughly one minute long and unskippable not to mention the awful music.

This is followed by the animated studio logo, some menu intro video and finally no option to play all episodes back to back. It gets worse when selecting the individual episodes though as they show an image taken from the episode. Thanks to those I knew that Debbie was going to die and Tony kidnapped before it happened. Thanks for the spoilers, FoxTVDVD.

As for season 4 itself, it’s even more annoyingly unrealistic than the previous ones. We’re meant to believe that one person organised:

  • a kidnapping,
  • the spreading of a virus to cause nuclear reactor meltdowns with a handy override device,
  • the theft of a stealth plane,
  • the crash of the Air Force One,
  • the theft of the nuclear warhead codes and a warhead and, finally,
  • the launch of a nuclear warhead.

All whilst managing multiple terrorist cells and a large number of replaceable henchmen.

The meltdown of the nuclear reactors across the US would have been enough to not only thwart the further attempts, but also make them pointless as none of them would have had an impact then. If he was so convinced and organised he wouldn’t have made quite so many contingency plans.

By Cat | Posted in 24, Films and TV, TV Shows | Comments (9)

A picture can be worth a thousand words

June 29, 2010 – 4:19 am

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been organising my pictures folder. I actually been making progress with it though it’s mostly just that I spend a few minutes here and there on it.

Tumblr yesterday announced its new ‘mega-editor‘ which allows editing, tagging and deleting multiple posts at once. That way I’ve been able to delete tweets I had auto imported into tumblr back in 2008 and wanted to remove for a while, but without the effort of doing it one by one.

My tumblr includes a majority of the photos I take and share on the internet [which is roughly about 20% of the images I take] as I post most of them to TwitPic which auto posts them to tumblr.

These are the photos I’ve tagged so far on tumblr:

Having finally got a good tool to look through them is great as I don’t have some of them saved elsewhere and some are duplicates.

In addition to tumblr there are only three other places I have posted pictures to in the past which is this blog, another photoblog I never got around setting up properly and my imageshack.us account which has about 1000 images stored though I presume only 2% of them are actually photos I took. Again, there are probably many duplicates.

It also begs the question if I do want my photos to be in some central blog as my tumblr blog is pretty much just a scrapbook, but I don’t think I’d want something that isn’t automated as I tend to be quite forgetful.

As for the title of this blog post, well, it’s interesting to see how much history some of the pictures carry, even if they just contain everyday stuff. Creating a place that’s somewhere between a diary and a photoblog would also be an option.

By Cat | Posted in Photos, Project365, Tumblr | Leave a Comment

Customer support on Twitter, the @XboxSupport and @BTcare examples

June 28, 2010 – 6:35 am

So it seems that there’s a problem with an XBLA game. A problem that occurs for one person out of the 663 people I’m following on Twitter, many of them gamers. The person takes it to @XboxSupport, the official Twitter account for all things Xbox.

I don’t follow many companies on Twitter, as I’m fairly selective with the people I’m following. One of the few companies I do follow is @XboxSupport. I’ve contacted them several times in the past and some of the issues could not be resolved, just like when a friend once contacted them with a straightforward issue and they made him jump through several hoops. I have mentioned this to them directly in their feedback reports and via direct messages.

I have nothing but the highest respect for anyone working in customer support and appreciate the difficulty of only having 140 characters to help customers. Their customer service has improved vastly over time and I’m sure it’ll carry on to do so in the future.

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At the same time I also think that customer service should work and, where it can’t be dealt with on Twitter, should be taken to other communication methods. @BTcare do this exceptionally. This is a brief summary of my interactions with them over a four months period at the beginning of the year:

  1. I contacted the Twitter account to ask to be removed from the BT marketing lists. This involved me emailing my landline number and account holder name to their email address. The matter was dealt with in less than a day.
  2. I contacted the Twitter account as we didn’t appear to have any service, even though the bill was paid. Based on my Twitter account and the previous interaction they were able to look up my details and tell me that my housemate’s direct debit hadn’t gone through, even though he claimed he had. Matter was dealt with in an hour and one reply tweet.
  3. I contacted their Twitter account to get information about changing the account holder. I was linked to information within hours.

Their support works, because they have the database to back it up, something @XboxSupport are hopefully working on.

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Coming back to the game problem. It’s now 24 hours and 47 Tweets from the customer [over half of them soapboxing] later and the issue is finally resolved after standard troubleshooting methods to eliminate causes. Based on the tweets it could have been resolved after 21 tweets or even earlier, but it was dragged out to involve at least four other people over a few hours. Granted, I may be more or less responsible for it as I wouldn’t let it drop.

Twitter is a public platform and often has people that want to further their own agenda and, well, complain about anything. Tonight is just yet another example of someone starting with a support question which ended up getting out of hand with insults and sarcasm.

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What are the differences between the support accounts? There is no need to follow either of them as questions can be answered without it, but the @XboxSupport account actively encourages people to follow it by tweeting about game news and sweepstakes. Moving that to another account, such as @XboxOfficial or something similar would reduce that. This would also reduce the amount of people that see long and public conversation and would overall reduce the internet drama at least some.

I love that companies provide customer service on Twitter and hope that more will continue to do so, even if the DailyMail paints it as something bad whilst completely missing the point as usual!

By Cat | Posted in Twitter, Xbox, Xbox360 | Comments (3)

The Hobbit

June 25, 2010 – 3:41 pm

I’m currently listening to ‘The Hobbit’ written by J. R. R. Tolkien and read by Rob Inglis. It’s this version.

Over the years I’ve always insisted that I don’t like audiobooks much and have only ever listened to a few which includes Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter, several Patricia Cornwell ones, Stephen Hawking, and the ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ which was also read by Rob Inglis. I would include the BBC production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but that’s more of a play than an audiobook though by no means any less enjoyable.

I do still like reading a lot, but I find it very incompatible with my life. So much time of my day is spent reading or focussing my eyes on something that often I don’t feel too tired or overstimulated to read something. I don’t commute any more and have to actually set time aside to read which clashes with times when I’m knitting or doing other craft projects. Audiobooks are ideal for those situations and seeing there are several things to be knitted for various upcoming birthdays I predict I’ll be listening to a lot more audio books!

Rob Inglis is an amazing narrator. Originally I thought that I would consider no one to be as good as Stephen Fry, but Rob Inglis isn’t just better, he is on a completely different level. He sings the songs, often as set by Tolkien, does the voices and his tone is just right for describing Middle Earth*. I recommend this to anyone, even if they’ve already read the books.

Whilst I never finished listening to the ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ as the entire trilogy spans just over 50 hours and I have read the books multiple times before, I’ve never read ‘The Hobbit’ and it’s a mere 11 hours long. I look forward listening to Bilbo’s grand adventure which so far has taken him past the same trolls that Frodo also runs into.

*The entirety appears to be uploaded on Youtube, but the quality is quite bad overall. Still, it’s good to get an idea what it’s like.

By Cat | Posted in Audiobooks, Books, Films and TV, Harry Potter, Knitting, Lord of the Rings, Patricia Cornwell | Comments (2)

Yes, I still write letters!

June 22, 2010 – 6:00 pm

Back in the day [oh how I hate that phrase!] I used to write and receive a lot of letters, especially when I went to school in England for a year and later moved back here. It was pretty much the only way to stay in contact with my friends and gave me something to do and I wish I had kept copies of the letters as they are about times I don’t really remember much. It all stopped about five years ago when increased commitments, the inevitable drifting away from friends back home and my inability to use German made it difficult to write them. These days it’s very rare to receive any letters at all, although I do receive more postcards as I’ve made a habit out of ‘forcing’ people to send me one every time they go away!

Pretty much the only person I write letters to these days is a friend from Germany who moved to India a year ago and doesn’t have the internet there. We write to each other in English, even though we’re both native German speakers and have lived a majority of our lives there.

I’ve discussed my problems with both English and German on twice before, strangely enough both posts were related to NaNoWriMo! In the first one I lamented the fact that I can’t write creatively in English and can no longer do anything with German and in the shorter second one I realised a large part of my past NaNoWriMo failures was due to my inability to write dialogue which, admittedly, I always had problems with in German, too.

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Overall I consider both my written and spoken English to be very good. I can form coherent sentences, can play around with words and, most importantly, people understand me. I have made an increased effort in the past months to keep up to date with German which is writing more in German and speaking it on the phone, but it’s difficult. It frustrates me that I can’t use either language to my own satisfaction which, I guess, is where the, normally well hidden, perfectionist in me comes through.

Even though I learned the basics of English at school growing up, it wasn’t until visiting England several times as a teen and later spending a year at school here that I actually learned it by being completely immersed into the language and culture equally. Whilst learning the language at school helped me develop a sense for the grammar, actually living here made me develop my gut feeling of something sounding right or wrong which is what my English is based on these days. It is incredibly frustrating when I chose to ignore my gut feeling as I end up doubting myself just to realise later that I was right in the first place.

Some recent examples that I’ve taken to Twitter:

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English question: Is it possible to use the word ‘verbatim’ when referring to copy someone, like mirroring someone’s gestures? #

The Latin origin of the word is ‘word for word’ so the general consensus was that it should be to mimic instead. I ended up using to mirror as that fit the context better.

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The info differs from/to what X said? #

This actually led to some discussion. Some preferred ‘from’, others ‘to’ and ‘different than’ was thrown into the mix, as well as these two snippets:

strayjohno: If it helps: “similar to, different from” is what I always remember. As in X is similar to Y, or X is different from Y. #

talldavek: To is more British. From is universal and more logical. So use whichever you like. Than is seldom used these days. #

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Obligatory thanks to these awesome people who put up with my English questions on Twitter [though I've probably forgotten some]: cory_grimes, BladedExpert, jamesbmarshall, JoeGizzle, noirem, PCurd, sparc, strayjohno, sulz and talldavek.

Also, I’m shocked by the amount of people that replied to me on Twitter about writing letters. Surely some people still send them?

By Cat | Posted in Crowdsourcing, English, Life in general, NaNoWriMo, Twitter | Comments (3)

Films I watched when I was a teenager

June 20, 2010 – 1:51 am

I’m not sure if it was the soundtrack or the film itself, but watching ‘Cruel Intentions’ earlier brought back a lot of memories about films that I used to watch as a teen.

Talking to @Vinjii on Twitter made me wonder what other films I remember fondly from my teenage years, before I grew up and later became a geek and turned to TV shows. The following is in no particular order and by no means complete:

  • Cruel Intentions
  • 10 things I hate about you
  • Clueless
  • Empire Records
  • She’s the One
  • Addicted to love
  • When a man loves a woman
  • Sleepless in Seattle
  • You’ve got mail
  • Notting Hill
  • The Mexican
  • Die Hard 1-3
  • The Rock
  • Under Siege
  • Indiana Jones 1-3
  • Bad Boys 1-2
  • Tin Cup
  • Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
  • Silverado
  • Moll Flanders
  • Chocolat
  • Cool Runnings

The question is now, what did I miss?

By Cat | Posted in Films and TV, Indiana Jones | Comments (5)

Cat(s) rule(s)

June 18, 2010 – 11:30 pm

In my continued efforts at procrastination instead of sorting pictures [yes, I know that post is from April and I haven't done much since then, shush!] I’ve decided to tackle the much smaller amount of documents, letters, pdf’s and random notepad notes instead. Only a few hundred uncategorised ones there!

Among random started blogposts, some of which might even see the light of day after all, there were many phone numbers, links, appointments from a year ago, hints for games and this. Now I don’t know who wrote this or where I got it from. By all means I could have written it at some point!

  • Best way to catch a fly is to sit on the floor meowing at it. It is obviously far more effective than any other method.
  • Just because a cat enjoys being stroked in some place, for example the belly, one day doesn’t mean that will be the case the next one.
  • Cats look cutest when they’ve just woken up.
  • Tickling a sleeping cat with its own tail will incur the wrath of said cat and it will continue stare until stroked long enough.
  • The fight for the sofa or anything else comfortable is destined to be lost by humanity. This also ties in with:
  • Whenever any human, particularly owners discover something new, it automatically becomes the most wanted thing for any cat.
  • If a cat wants to have attention it is to have attention from the moment it desires.

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It’s been just over a month since Arthur arrived. Having him here has been interesting and full of conflict which isn’t his fault, but more his reason for being here and the obligations that come with it. And his problem with me sleeping isn’t helping either as I generally only get four hours before he either has to sleep somewhere close to my head, play with something loudly or meow.

At the same time he is incredibly affectionate and loving which is something that he’s never done before at his previous house where I’ve known him for years. This is somehow causing additional issues with his owners who are more than a little put off by his behaviour change.

All of the above applies to him perfectly!

By Cat | Posted in Funny Stuff, Life in general, My cats, Random | Leave a Comment