There’s a whole heirachy of supermarkets here in the UK, from the posh/expensive to the more standard super super markets, to the mini marts and corner stores.  The major ones (that I know of) in their apparent order of goodness are something like:

• Waitrose
• Marks and Spencer
• Sainsbury’s
• Tesco
• ASDA (Walmart)
• Morrisons
• Somerfield
• and a whole bunch of smaller chains and corner stores that either aren’t in my area
  

As you can probably imagine, the higher up the list a store is, the better it’s produce and fresh food is supposed to be, with the down side that it usually costs a percentage more than the equivalent items in the store below it.  In all honesty (from past purchases), this seems to be the case.  In fact I’ve often noticed if we pick up dinner from our local Waitrose (for lack of a cheaper alternative), what might be £10 at Tesco, is almost always £25, and picking up lunch from Marks and Spencers (roll/baguette, yoghurt/fruit and a juice)  usually totals about £7, when the equivalent lunch from the Sainsbury’s around the corner is usually half of that.

In the same way, I’ve often noticed doing a weeks shopping, when actually in the store is often cheaper (or we get a lot more for the same price) when shopping at ASDA instead of Tesco.  I’ve wondered a few times if there’s actuallya noticeable difference between the larger super markets (Sainsbury’s, Tesco & ASDA) prices, or the price is made up by impulse purchases around the store.  There’s no question the two super markets on the top of the list are significantly more expensive then the larger stores, and I’ve often felt the pain of a overpriced dinner, or mid week shop, but we seem to spend approximately the same amount each time we do a big shop regardless of store.

As we move into the new place we’ll no longer have access to a car to do a weekly or fortnightly shop so we’ll be relying heavily on internet shopping and home delivery, so I took the time last night do the same shop from ASDA, Tesco and Sainsbury’s using their online shopping portal.  I was surprised by the results.

I did the initial shop through ASDA, and completed a £75 shop which comprised of about a fortnights food, as well as a few items such as laundry detergents, razor blades, bleach that were runnig low at the time.  This is about on par with our previous grocery habits, as when we lived in a group of four it was almost always consistently £70-£100/wk.  Going from previous experience, this figure should probably stay about the same as we run out of different higher-priced items at various stages throughout the month.  I did exactly the same shop at both Tesco and then Sainsbury’s, and the totals came out at £75 and £70 respectively with savings made from one store on discounted/multi buy items and on other items at the different stores.  On a week to week basis, depending on what was on the shopping list, these figures would be subject to change as different stores had different and/or better specials.

I’ll do the same test the next time I do a shop, but I have to say Sainsbury’s is the clear winner in the online shopping stakes, due to cheaper delivery, and a much better online shopping experience than the other two.  ASDA’s online interface was nothing short of attrocious and must have been designed by monkeys.  Not only was it difficult to find products (even when using the search function), the actual design and layout of the pages seemed cheap and pre 2000 looking, which unfortunately was not reflected in the sale price.  The reward/loyalty program offered by Tesco’s Clubcard scheme seems to be the best one with 2-for-1 one offers and £5-10 discount vouchers given out on regular basis (depending on amount of shopping done).

I’m not a game by any means, and in any year I’d play only a handful of new titles.  Most of the time if I bother to sit down and play a game it’ll be an old favourite like Counterstrike Source or Quake III, but occasionally a game comes along that will hold my attention for many, many hours of joyful life-stealing pleasure.  To name a few:

• Civilisation 2
• Final Fantasy VII & VIII
• Transport Tycoon Deluxe and more recently OpenTTD
• All of the Grant Theft Auto series, but most recently GTA: San Andreas

On December 3rd, Grand Theft Auto IV came out for the PeeCee, and having refrained from trying it on the Playstation3 or Xbox 360 I gleefully got my hands on a copy and waited out the almost 40 minute install.  I should have known pre-install that there wasn’t a hope in hell it was going to play nicely on the laptop, especially not at a great quality/resolution.  After all, it more than meets the requirement for the minimum required system (from Rockstar Site), and meets most of the requirement for recommended system (the video card is the big let down here).

I can play at the amazing resolution of 800×600 with all higher graphic settings disabled due to low specification of system.  I have to wonder who came up with the idea of limiting the quality settings for lower spec cards, it should be the users choice to wind up the settings and make the game unplayable if they so wish.

Back to the game, as you’d probably guess, the performance on my system leaves a lot to be desired but is still playable, and even explosions don’t seem to slow it down too far, but I’m always left wanting more, especially seeing some of the screenshots of people running it at 1920×1200 on monster machines.

I’m left wondering though, is it worth me spending +£1000 on a desktop machine that can play this correctly or giving up and going back to minesweeper.  I’m not sure i could warrant the price given that this is probably the one title I’ll acutally play this year (as well as in 2009), but considering I got months and months of play out of GTA:SA who knows.  It’s an investment in time I guess, and heck, I’d have spent a lot more having fun on booze in the process.

The game itself is fantastic though, I can forsee in the next few years having a map of London (or New York, or perhaps Tehran) with every building, feature, person manipulatable , almost like a GTA in that corny old VR world of the 80’s that everyone was dreaming about.  I could get coffee in the store I go to every morning at work and then go to work on the office front door with a baseball bat, just for the point of it…

Then I’d escape down the tube to my batcave, or home maybe.

I’m not sure what happened to me in the last six weeks, I got back from Greece and apart from a brief post a few weeks ago, I’d all but forgotten about HD911.  I seem to have been floating in some kind of bubble for the past 4-6 weeks and have forgotten all but a few responsibilities and I’m starting to go stir crazy in my own head at the boredom that i’ve created, in my head… Or something like that.

I figured I’d pick up where I left off, and give an after thought on the book I was about to read at the time called Playing for Pizza by John Grisham, and after reading the blurb on its cover, I sniggered and panned it like an arrogant film critic pans a Rob Schneider flick.  Well, shame on me for doing so, and I hate to be cliche’d, but there must be some truth in that saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover…”

Quite frankly if there’s one author who can turn a short story about a failed NFL footballer who gets shipped off to Italy to play in their (minor) league and gets friends, a girl, a love for pizza and a championship trophy into a good story, even in my short experience in reading, I’d have to say it’d be John Grisham.

I’d love to say it’s taken me all this time to read and was a really complex story, it wasn’t, but I was interested from start to finish, and I liked not having to thnk about what I was reading.  So kudos to you, and shame on me for my quick judgement and poor form.

I’m almost 800 pages into the 1,000 page mammoth that is Shantaram Gregory David Roberts, which has kept me right on the edge of my seat since I first picked it up, until last Thursday, when I left it at the pub, moments before stumbling on to the last train home, only to pass out and wake up one stop from Windsor (yes, the place with the castle) in the lovely town of Datchet, to finally get home an hour later cost of £50 as a result of a late night cab ride from the outskirts.  But that’s a story for another day.

John Grisham does In a League of Their Own crossed with The Wiggles

I finished my latest book the other day (Andy Mcnab’s - Crisis Four), which ended dissappointingly I’m sad to say, but we’ll get back to that later, and my housemate handed me a book by the famous author, John Grisham. Not that I’ve read any of his wares, apart from about an hour spent trying to get into The Firm, but a world famous author with such titles (and Hollywood movies) as The Pelican Brief, The Rain Maker, The Firm and The Innocent Man I was expecting a top notch crime thriller.

The books title is Playing for Pizza, and this is it’s blurb:

“Rick Dockery was a quarterback for one of America’s most famous football teams when he gave arguably the worst performance in his league’s history.  Overnight Rich became a laughing stock and unemployable in his own country.

But somehow RIck’s agent finds him a job.  He is guaranteed a starting position and a salary.  The only problem is that the team that wants him is in Parma, Italy.  The American footabll league in Italy is tiny and unlike RIck, the Italian players only get paid in free meals.

Rick has never been to Italy, so it’s no surprise that the country has a few surprises for him.  What follows is a delightful, heart-warming storay of an innocent abroad.”

Now, I’m not one to judge.  I’m not a critic, and my experience with reading books for pleasure only goes back about 9 months, but could you think of a more boring (nor ridculous sounding) synopsis for a book?  It’s like every 80’s American sports movie (… You know the ones, underdogs fight hard to win all season, then drama, then the team wins in overtime), crossed with the likes of Home and Away (an Australian soap opera).  

I honestly thought I was being had, and the cover was indeed a satircal ploy to get you sucked into a book with all kinds of death and debauchery, but on inspection, its a real book, by a real author, and a good autor at that.  The top of the book even claims it to be, “The International Number One Bestseller”, though I’ll garuntee that has nothing to do with this particular title.

As I said though, who am I to judge?!? The quagmire of life experiences undertaken in the story surely leave my solid reading history of crime thrillers for dead, and put the reader at a new level of enlightenment.  At least I hope this is the case.  I’ll read it though, it sounds interesting enough, and I’m intrigued to find out if there’s something I’m missing like the short for a movie that tells you nothing at all about the movie in general.

Time for me to get started, and report back as soon as possible.

What a movie!

The Growing List

Since I started reading again I’ve notched up fair few titles on the literaty bed post, whatever that means, and I’m loving it so far.  I’ll be looking at branching out a bit and trying some new genre’s too.  Any suggestions?

The list so far, in the last 12 months:

• I Hope They Server Beer In Hell - Tucker Max
• The Alphabet of Manliness - Maddox
• Gun’s Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond

• Playing for Pizza - John Grisham (I’m looking forward to it now!)
• Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts (Sitting here waiting to be read)
• Freakonomics - Steven Levitt
• Digital Fortress - Dan Brown
• The rest of the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child
• The rest of the Nick Stone series by Andy McNab
• The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll
• Kite Runner
• One of Peter Hamilton’s Trilogies
• More Harlen Coben
• Try John Grisham’s more serious titles
• One of Len Deighton’s Non Fiction books (a recommendation)

I’m always open to suggestion though, so post any replies, please!  I’m turned off by girlie stories (Danielle Steel), middle earth Scifi (like Lord of the Rings, I’m not sure why) and Mills and Boon (If I wanted porno, i’d download it).

Afterthoughts

I said at the top of this post that I’d get back to why I found the end of Crisis Four (the third book in Andy McNab’s Nick Stone series), and it won’t mean much without having read the book, but I just thought it was too transparent.  I could see the outcome of the story after about the first 15 - 20% of the book, and it just ended so abruptly.  

I’d say this is a really good reason to space out these series I’ve been reading as I guess like anything else thats done repeatedly you get to know the author, and how his/her writing works, and can quickly weed out plot lines if they’re similar to previous titles.  Not only this, I found a dissapointing book a bit of a kick in the guts from what is so far such an awesome series, I’d imagine its better to space out the pleasure of the other books as long as possible.

It’s not quite as catchy a title as Enter the Dragon, nor does it pack the one-inch-punch shown off by Bruce Lee, as shown in the movie, but my new toy can take a fantastic looking picture.

It’s my new Nikon D40, an entry-level Digital SLR camera that’s small, light and packs a load of features that I couldn’t list, nor describe off the top of my head.  I’ve had what you might call a keen interest in hobby photography for a while now without good equipment or any real knowledge of what I should actually be doing.  Basically this has meant keeping my phone or our Sony Point&Shoot camera in my pocket and pointing it at anything (everything).

Nikon D40 - My new baby

I’ve had my eyes opened though, not just with the quality of the photos or beauty of the camera (yes, its awesome looking), but I’ve very quickly started to understand all the photographic terms and tools in a way that I’ve never been able to before.  Having full control (SLR helps.. a lot) over manual settings and seeing the result has helped to immediately see some of the places I’m going wrong and how to improve on these.

I can remember from a very young age my father (an avid photographer hobbyist from way back) explaining in super technical terms what exposure, aperture, ISO speed and shutter speed were, or what a light meter, polarising filter or macro lens does.  I felt I knew the basics, but it didn’t really help to understand when to use a high aperture, or change ISO speeds (an old Canon Powershot I own allowed manual controls over such things).

I’ve had a whirlwind introduction to the basics and I’m starting to understand how differing ISO speeds affect the shot in different situations (low light, speed/motion blur, etc), and how changing the aperture or f number (ooooh techy!) can give a different depth of field.  The main thing is though, just how good the photos come out as a finished product.  WIthout any post editing (though most still need it, I’m in no way perfect) or cropping here are some examples of a few shots:

Temple at top of Acropolis, Athens

Late Afternoon in Santorini

Dusk in Paros

The main thing I’ve noticed is the colour and clarity, (I know, I sound like a diamond salesman), in the photos, like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  The detail that comes out from a closeup portrait is nothing less than amazing, and this is all from the basic entry level Digital SLR with the standard kit lens (18-55mm) taking 6.1 megapixel photos.  And crazy enough, the resulting JPEG image is smaller than our previous camera, the lower resolution and MUCH, MUCH lower quality Sony Cybershot.

So much to learn, but I’ve found the main thing I’ll have to master first is how to compose each shot, as I found from almost 900 photos taken over the week in Greece at least 90% of them are either completely wrong (out of focus, wiped out exposure), or are just taken incorrectly with the wrong amount of information in (or out) of the photo.  Learning exactly what to photograph in a way that actually looks good is the first hurdle.

It’s going to be an expensive hobby though, as upgrading the lens (to a much higher zoom such as the 18-200mm) costs almost three times as much as the camera did to start with!

Check out Ken Rockwells site for some D40 lovin: http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d40.htm

I was reading my book on the train on the way to work today, Remote Control by the British author (and ex-SAS soldier) Andy McNab, and came across a line that made me laugh.  It wasn’t just any laugh though, but a sudden outburst, the kind that makes you look like the special autistic child or some kind of greasy pervert, the kind that directs eyes toward you.  Hundred’s of the beady little f$%kers.

I should prefix this with a bit of background, after about thirty or forty pages of the authors build up to an action scene, the main character, Nick Stone,  describes in detail how stealth is the key to any subtle operation.  He describes in full the surveillance required in the stake out, and how each part of the target (IRA headquarters) was broken into without extreme force.  This goes on, and on, and as you’d expect thing’s eventually go hay wire as Stone is discovered and is seconds away from death via handgun down his throat after being taken out by a fire extinguisher to the back of the head.

By this point, I’m engrossed, the build up was enormous, and I’m literally hanging off the end of my seat wondering what on Earth is going to happen next.  There’s a small scuffle and Stone jams the gun, temporarily disabling it and a scuffle breaks out eventually resulting in the enemy being shot in the head.

This was followed by:

“He was going to die soon.

Tough Shit.”

It’s a pillow, what a horrible prank!

In hindsight it doesn’t seem anywhere near as funny, but it blew me away at the time.  After such an enourmous build up with everything and every moment described in such precious detail, the climax was abrupt, like a kick in the guts.  I have to liken this to getting amazing sex, mind blowing passion with the ultimate build up:

"mmmm...."

"ah..."

"MMMMmmmmm yea!"

"Oh.  Job's done"

"Yea, would you like a cup of tea?"

I’d half expected another ten pages describing the blood as it made its passage from the chest driven by the last few beats of the heart, up the arteries, and out the convinient new escape vent in the head.  But no.. He was dead, and that was it.

Bloody good book though, both Andy McNab books I’ve read so far have been an excellent read, which makes them incredibly hard to put down.

Here I am, the summer-seasoned Australian wishing it was Winter again, because the English summer may have got the better of me.  I’ve been away from Perth for a while now, but I can feel I’ve got a relatively good memory of what the 40o+ celsius days were like, and even going to work in those temparatures for weeks on end didn’t seem as bad as this last week has been in London.

I still feel like a nance, especially as I keep seeing others wearing long sleeves, and even layers (one thing I will never understand about English people, their ability to layer clothes is second to none), but I can’t wait for the winter to come back again.  It was nice being able to walk to work without sweating, and sit at the office without sweating, though that is partly due to the terrible quality air conditioner we’ve got in our basement Nike factory, despite the fact its in most expensive area for office/business rent in all of the European Union.  Perhaps that’s the reason the air conditioner doesn’t work.

Here comes the worst part, it was only 28 degrees today, which is only just bordering on acceptable swimming weather in Australia, but I’d have happily taken a swim in the Thames to cool down.  Yesterday was a little hotter again, at 31 celsius, but its a different kind of heat, and there’s a whole lot less air conditioning.

What have I become? My sweetest friend…

Johnny Cash - Hurt

Johnny Cash - Hurt (Nine Inch Nails Original)

I seem to be suffering from one of the most debilitating illness’s, which can be described only by the term, The Mental Blog.  The issue is, I don’t feel like I’ve got anything much to post to HD911 these past few days, and even when I attempt to think of something, I seem to be hitting a wall.

It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, there’s a billion thoughts swimming around in my head, but s….

Shit, hit the wall again!

Not since seeing Juno about a year ago have I seen a movie quite like The Happening, and that is in no way a good thing.  But I’m being unnessecarily negative toward Juno, it wasn’t terrible, but given the hype it received both pre and post release, and its subsequent Oscar award surprised me greatly.  It just really wasn’t that good.  So I’m going to reword the first line of this post again, much more accurately this time.

Not since seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a week ago have I seen a movie quite as bad as The Happening.  In fact, I didn’t see another movie in between the time I saw these two, and thats not giving me any confidence in the quality of new releases in 2008.  Usually, I can appreciate a low budget movie, when executed well these movies are just as good as any other, Clerks, Napolean Dynamite and even The Blair Witch Project come to mind here.

The happening just felt, looked, smelt, no stank of an extremely low budget film, but at $57 million, it must have either been made in Zimbabwe, or someone knows how to do a very tacky (relatively) high budget film in a completely low budget way.

The Story

The movie starts off with a suspected terrorist attack in Central Park in New York which mysteriously causes people to speak in tongues, walk backwards, and then find the quickest way of killing themselves, all whilst under a trance.  Within a few hours, the citizens of the North Eastern states are hurredly evacuating all the major cities, only to get knocked down like flies to this killer toxin.  Naturally, as the movie goes on, the main character discovers it’s plants who are emitting the toxin, and large packs of human beings were somehow setting off the plants.

People die, in fact pretty much everyone dies within about 5 states of New York (I’m going to estimate a quarter of the population of the U.S), but the main character, his disfunctional girlfriend, and their newly acquired daughter (due to loss of her parents) survive by talking nicely to plants, eating hotdogs, lieing low in a house with a crazy woman and making a final daring dash into the wilderness that had already taken so many.

I highlighted the silent killer in the paragraph above, just in case you missed it, that’s right, the killer was plants, and apart from some rather gruesome death scenes the film involved some rather B-grade actors walking through North American bushland.

The Actor

There was something I didn’t mention before, and it could explain the rather high budget for this bottom of the barrel film.  That is the main actor in The Happening is Mark Wahlberg, whom apart from his 14-inch penis in Boogie Nights and some solid performances in The Departed and The Big Hit, is a horrible excuse for a “holywood” actor.  I’m sure someone else could have played the part far more convincingly at about half the cost as well.

Worst of all, the film is written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, whom I know nothing about, and don’t know any of his/her past work either, but from what others have said this film was definitely not Shyamalan’s best.

I don’t know what else to say, and I don’t usually bother commenting on movies, what could I possibly say that someone else hasn’t said before?  But when its this bad, it has to be spoken of.  The Happening, really was this bad!

Update:

I’ve just received a reply from another poster who has a blog, The Not Happening at http://thenothappening.blogspot.com/. I can’t believe just how much of a negatively following this movie has, staged walkouts.  Who knows, it may even go down as a cult classic.  Kudos!

Remember the days of Winamp, that funky, light (~v2 anyway) little MP3 player? It was the ultimate accessory on every geeks tools belt, along with ICQ, mIRC, Netscape and possibly Eudora (though I never cared for it).  I remember it, very fondly, it was in my opinion responsible for bringing MP3 music to the masses, or at least to those geeky enough to have gone out looking for it.  It did, what every good music player should, and what many of todays media players faily miserably at (especially a certain Media Player that’s at ver 11).  Simplicity is what it did well, and at the time it worked fantastically.

Winamp v2 - Basic, like a crappy car stereo

Sonique media player was a funky upstart that was in development about the same time, which had a completely different approach to to the MP3 and media playing application.  It went outside the box, of what a normal application looked like with funky designs and skins that didn’t fit into the shape of a normal window, and if I remember correctly came standard with a host of plugins, visualisation and other addons.

Sonqiue’s interesting style

Now, to the point of my post!

I was talking to one of the guys at the office the other day, and it turns out he was one of the lead developers on the Sonique application and some of the plugins that came with it to produce oh so clear crystal sound.  He spoke of the hype surrounding the application, and the chance at millions when bought out by Lycos (I think??!), and subsequent downfall as the other competitors tried different/more successful things.

This proves basically nothing except that once again, the world is a tiny place, but oh well, I still think Winamp was the better player!

Off topic, but I still happen to have the original set of MP3’s I first managed to download all those years ago (digitally copied many times of course), but the tracks have managed to stay (embarrisingly) in the collection all these years and have kept their original script kiddie style filenames.  These include such greats as:

• John Denver’s, Thank God, I’m a country boy (aptly name Denv-ThankGod.mp3)
• various Smashing Pumpkins songs
• Paul Simon, You can call me Al
• Pink Floyd
• Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin

and many more! Random!