30 Dec

Moving – Part 1

Posted by mrshev in Uncategorized.

We’re grown ups now, so it’s a long time gone when we would rent a rusty Transit and bribe our friends with promises of delivery pizza and graft induced camaraderie at the end of a job well done. No, now we use removal companies or as they are now calling themselves; relocation facilitators (sorry, I made that last bit up…)

The best bit about using removals is that they provide packers who shove your useless crap into boxes, label it Useless Crap – Loft and then you can take out your useless crap in your new house and shove it in the loft ready for your next move.

Back in the days of Transits and mate-muscle – because you don’t have a HGV license – you end up renting a van which is only big enough for half your stuff so you try and stuff as much useless crap into one box so as to best utilise the Transit’s load space. Packers don’t care about filling boxes because they use trucks called Pantechnicons and they just want all the boxes to be the same size so they can stack it easier.

Anyway, we still have had to do some clearing as we really had a great deal of rubbish in our house. What this meant is that our normally quaint, stone cottage looked like it had been taken over by pikeys with a pile of rubbish outside ready for waste collection. I have no idea why I am cataloguing our rubbish, but I’m going to do it anyway:

  1. Ikea Sofa We bought this because it is a sofa bed. This was, in fact, a swedish myth as the only people who could sleep on it are children and midgets. It was also ugly and uncomfortable. Most worrying of all was the ease of which I dismantled it with a couple of Chuck Norris style kicks.
  2. Christmas Tree We had to get rid of this years Christmas Tree – much to our son’s distress. Scarier still was that we also had to get rid of last year’s christmas tree. It was – obviously – not still erect with tinsel and lights on it. That would have been tragic and a bit creepy.
  3. An old cot This had an air of airline disaster as every airline disaster has a child’s dolly on a charred bit of fuselage. We just didn’t need it anymore so it forlornly stood in our drive holding an old lampshade.
  4. DS’s old changing table This was not a changing table specifically designed for the purpose, but an old bit of dark wood furniture we bought at a second hand…furniture place. It was stupendously ugly but was the perfect height for changing nappies. It does, however, weigh the same as a Vauxhall Corsa – so it had to go. I tried some kicks on it but I was bit more Johnny Morris than Chuck Norris.
  5. Old White Rug x 2 We had a dream. We had a dream that our house could somehow, with a simple purchase of a fluffy white rug or two, transform into a quasi-Californian show home as we languidly draped ourselves on the rugs in front of a roaring fire. What actually happened is that the kids squashed raisins, ricecakes and playdoh into them and then we washed them and then they looked like the hair of an old tramp. Dream shattered.

That’s it really, apart from the bin bags. The packers have shoved everything into boxes and our flights are tomorrow. See you on the other side.

OHMYGOD.

24 Dec

Happy Christmas

Posted by mrshev in Uncategorized.

View from my office

A really short post to say happy Christmas to all my readers.*

Hope that you have a great day and thank you everyone for reading my blog and commenting. It has been a real pleasure to write and to be read and I will, of course, continue when I am in Switzerland.

I am going to redesign and change the title once we settle down and I have had my first fondue, sucked through an alpine horn, and twiddled my freshly grown mustache (I believe that you have to do all these things to get an internet connection).

* Ha! All 20 of them….

21 Dec

Switzerland

Posted by mrshev in Home, X-Factor, switzerland. Tagged: , , , , , , .

Between animating, designing, parenting and blogging I am also moving with my family to Switzerland. This is why I have missed out doing my normal X-Factor post as I have been hurtling around Geneva and the canton of Vaud looking for a place to live.

This has happened to us relatively quickly and so in the space of a couple of weeks, one job offer and a willingness to uproot have changed our lives completely. I feel a little bit like Joe McWhatshisname except that it’s DW who has the X-Factor (being the one that a large multi-national wants to ship halfway across europe…) so I am officially going ‘part-time’; I will still animate some projects, keeping my favourite clients; and will also become a house husband. It’s a life change for all of us, a real adventure, and we are all a bit giddy with excitement.

DW’s sister, husband and two children live there already and they performed the unenviable job of estate agents and chauffeurs to perfection as I gadded about Vaud looking for a new gaff. There is not much to rent in Switzerland mainly because it is a small, paranoid country and the swiss only like to let in a trickle of people; and the people they prefer to let in have oodles of dosh or an intense liking for cheese.

My initial impressions of the Swiss and Switzerland can be summed up thus:

  1. The Alps Anyone who can afford it loves a good ski. The Swiss – a normally reserved and private bunch – use this as an excuse to wear waterproof fancydress and zip down snow covered mountains with the tantalising reward of warm wine and a plate of cheese. The Swiss Alps, however, have made an already expensive activity ferociously so. When the Swiss go to Andorra (as if) they forgo the skis and use Bentleys instead.
  2. Multitools No, I am not referring to JLS but to the Swiss Army Knife. I find Swiss Army Knives annoying because you always break a fingernail trying to get the normal knife out, only to discover that it’s the bloody file…again. The other thing is that I always loose the toothpick. Always.
  3. Toblerone There is an unspoken rule in our house: if you get on a plane, you have to buy a Toblerone. When you actually start to eat one you realise two things. Firstly, they are shaped to make you look like you are eating Lego and secondly it’s not very nice chocolate; like someone left some galaxy to melt in some cat litter.
  4. Cheese When you get your Permit B (which enables to work in Switzerland) you are also given a fondue set. This means that you are now a fully fledged Swiss citizen. All you have to do now is stop smiling and get obsessive about litter

I will update a bit more soon, but at the moment we are rushing around madly trying to get things organised. It’s crazy with a K.*

*Krazy

18 Dec

Crap Chrimbo Presents

Posted by mrshev in Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

I love Christmas.

I like tinsel, presents, fake snow, real snow, santa, christmas specials on TV, Brussels’s sprouts, mulled wine. I love it all. People who don’t, who give all this: it’s just one big corporate slapdown, capitalism’s way of dictating the buying habits of the proletariat want to spread their own misery and take away the pleasure of shopping off the chain.

I do, however, agree: companies use Christmas to sell more stuff. Oh-my-god! No! That’s terrible! Really? Yes, it’s true; Argos – without any real sign of corporate guilt – use the birth of baby Jesus to make money out of us poor, unthinking, susceptible punters. The rest of the year they gently market their wares to the discernable shopper in reasonable, neutral tones. Yeah, right…

So, the point of my post: another bloggerist has promised me a voucher if I’ll plug her competition and because I have absolutely no shame it is here: competition. The comp has some kind of link to Western Union, so click the link and start transferring money around the globe in a completely non-dodgy, non drug-dealery way.

The idea of the competition is to think of the worst Christmas present that you ever received. That led me to thinking that my own hall of fame is headed by a present bought by my brother (sorry bro’…): a dancing coke can. I was quite young at the time, so my brother can be forgiven for not trying too hard, but it’s still awful because I never knew what to do with it.

All it did was this: when music comes on – or another loud noise – it dances. What do you do with a dancing coke can? I like Coca-Cola and all, but I don’t need a dancing homage to the brand. I don’t dance around my bedroom like Ferris Beuller and I wouldn’t be more inclined if I had a faux tin-can dance partner. What is the point? Answers on a post card please….

11 Dec

Making stuff move

Posted by mrshev in 3d, Design, tech. Tagged: , , , , , .

Some of the beady eyed amongst you may have noticed that there isn’t much animation in my blog. So, I am going to (gradually) right that wrong and explain – for the uninitiated – what it is that I do (apart, it goes without saying, writing tracts of entertaining prose for you on my blog…).

I animate in both 2D and 3D. For those of you who don’t know the difference: cut out a picture of a brick and hit yourself over the head with it. That’s 2D. Next cut out six pictures of a brick taken from all six sides, stick them onto six sides of a cardboard box and hit yourself over the head with it. It may hurt a bit. That’s 3D. Now get a real brick and hit yourself over the head with it. That’s stupid. But would be loosely classed as stop motion. I don’t do stop motion.(Some examples of each discipline are: Snow White: 2D. Toy Story: 3D. Wallace and Gromit: Stop motion).

I will take you, then, through a short and simplified account of how 3D is made. This is neither the way it should be done or shouldn’t, it is just the way that I do it (before you 3D dweebs start scuttling out from under whatever rocks you skulk under – give me a break, okay?).

  1. Storyboard / Script This is out of my hands most of the time as the script or storyboard has been already written / drawn beforehand and I have to follow it the best I can. There is obviously scope for me to say that certain things are not possible in the timeframe or may not work visually, but I have to crack on most of the time as I am on a daily rate and clients hear the clock ticking over all other ambient noise. I use this time to sit down and plan what I need to make, what order I need to do it in and how I’m going to do it. This sometimes involves panicking.
  2. Modelling Thankfully this is not when I whip my kit off and stand in front of 20 gormless art students (I was a gormless art student once…). No. This is when I make, in 3D space, an object. It’s complicated, and one day I’ll devote an entire post to it, but in essence it’s this: you make objects out of things called polygons (and before you 3D nerds raise your misshapen heads: I know, you can use Nurbs or triangles – but this is complicated enough). They have four sides, otherwise there’d be holes when you stick them all together and that’s no good. Try to think of them as square pieces of card that can only be stuck together at their edges to make an object. Like a cube would have 6 squares but a sphere would have 64 squares, say. When I make a character or a complicated object I may have thousands of these squares.
  3. Texturing & Materials Once I have finished my object I need to give it a colour. If I made a milk carton then I would need to make all the polygons white and then put a picture of a cow on it. This is called texturing. The way that you do it is to unwrap the object (like a flat pack) and then you can paint on the ‘flat pack’ in Photoshop and put your cow on it. This is called UV mapping. You can also make your object shiny, reflective or bumpy.
  4. Rigging After making my object I will want to make it move, to animate it – unless I am making an experimental Warholesque film about still objects. If it is just a ball, then I can just move it around in 3D space. But if it is a character then it’s obviously a bit more complicated. I can’t move every polygon, so I need to use some tools to move large groups of them. These tools are called deformers. A rig is an animation term used to describe a system of controls created by the animator to move the deformers. I don’t like rigging; it’s boring, a bit complicated and ever so slightly geeky.
  5. Animation This is the meat and potatoes of what I get paid for. The basic principle is that I tell the computer that an object is at coordinate A at 0.00 seconds and then at coordinate B at 5.00 seconds and the computer moves that object between the two coordinates over 5.00 seconds. Capiche? It sounds so simple when I write it down…
  6. Lighting Did I say I had to also be my own gaffer? But instead of having a big Arri truck parked outside my gaff every project I can ‘merely’ plop virtual lights down anywhere I want. Lighting is something that I find quite challenging. The problem with lighting in 3D is that you can have as many lights as you want so I end up literally painting with light…which cause problems with shadows and, ultimately, rendering times…which brings me to:
  7. Rendering Once I have made something, textured it, rigged it, lit it and animated it (yeah, I am the film crew) the computer needs to ‘paint’ each picture of the animation (every second, 25 images have to be made). Depending upon how complicated the animation is it can take ages. What 3D studios have is something called a render farm, which is a bunch of computers (know in the business as nodes) that are all linked together that render quicker. For example, if I made a sequence that takes 5mins to render each frame and my sequence is 10secs long then that will take nearly 21 hours (250 x 5mins / 60) but if you have a render farm with 250 nodes then it’s take 5mins…depending upon the speed of the computer. Render times have a massive impact upon my work. I want a render farm for Christmas. Really.

Having just read back on this, I understand that I am going to lose a large portion of my ‘readership’, but possibly gain an army of nerds with bad clothes and hygiene issues.

Oh, and in terms of kit (for anyone who is interested) I use an iMac Intel (maxed out GFX card and RAM), Maya 2008 Complete, Z-Brush 3 on XP in bootcamp and Photoshop CS3. That’s it.

8 Dec

Tidy-Up Time

Posted by mrshev in Home, kids. Tagged: , , .

When we went on ‘holiday’ recently to Cornwall* we tried to just let go and not do any tidying up. Just leave the toys where they fell and when the kids woke up let them pick up where they left off. But it doesn’t work like that. Kids will only find other tidy stuff and dismantle that instead – I honestly don’t know where they’d stop: plates? Brickwork? Each other?

It also began to drive us nuts.

The chaos, the destruction, it’s too much. Maybe cavemen were slobs and tidiness is a modern construct borne of Edwardian values and social aspiration. But everywhere I go, no matter what country or culture, everyone tries to keep their gaff tidy. It just seems to make sense to know where your gear is so that when you next need it you don’t have to spend hours looking for it. It’s time management really. My kids don’t get that because they don’t get time yet, I guess.

We have tried – still trying – to instill tidy-up time into our children, but I don’t consider it helpful to have a die-cast Thomas the Tank Engine arcing across the living room towards a box that I am trying to fill with other die-cast Thomas’s (those die-cast thomas’s are like bits of shrapnel). Sometimes DS is really good and does help, in his own way, and we do the job together. But tidy-up-time is still predominantly an adult chore.

So, my list of ultimate, high impact, pain-in-the-arse things to clean up are:

  1. Rice Crispies (also rice)DD can’t say much as yet, but she can force herself to utter the word crispies before the word Daddy every morning. The problem with Rice Crisipies is that each bowl contains around 80,000 individual crisipies and in the hands of my DD are like claymores. Every morning I hunker under the table forlornly working with a dustpan and brush and cursing the Kelloggs employee who thought to bring in a packet of Uncle Ben’s and start experimenting with it.
  2. Poster Paint I’m a creative and I want my kids to paint, to express themselves, to – yes – get a bit messy. But, boy, does it create carnage. What amazes me is how little time it takes. In under two minutes our two little darlings recreate the set of a Saw film, with every inch of the dining table slathered in paint. But not pretty spots of red, yellow and blue; oh no, they like to mix it into a dysentry/chemical-spill colour that is part purple, part diarrhea and then when they have got bored of this studiously prepared and thought out activity they wander off around the house leaving little finger prints and smears of paint everywhere. Felt tips. For all you non parents reading this, repeat after me: felt tips, felt tips, felt tips…
  3. Technical Lego When did our favourite Danish toy company start making nano technology? This lego is so small that some bits are not visible to the naked eye. I got a set as a semi-ironic birthday present and never opened it but my son discovered it, ripped it open and the contents exploded out like he’d just popped a hoover bag. That was nearly 2 years ago and we are still finding bits. Just to be scientific, I tried to actually make something with this lego and it was impossible, it was like making computer circuits. What is wrong with bricks? What? Just tell me!
  4. Weetabix Weetabix is bad enough dry, creating a mini crumb mountain with the slightest tremor. But wet, Weetabix transforms into an altogether different material; an epoxy like material that I am sure could be put to better use…like re-pointing brickwork…or lining the Space Shuttle’s fuselage for re-entry. `There are sections of our wooden floor that are half Weetabix / half wood cyborg. Keeps me awake at night, it does.
  5. Vomit Under fives, I think, are more like pissed-up nineteen year olds than anything else. Slurred language, inane conversations, propensity to fall over a lot, liking of shit music and also the ability to casually chunder without any real warning. DW hates cleaning up vomit as it make her feel like vomiting…a bit like someone yawning in the same room…which is exactly like vomiting except for the macerated cheerios, rice cakes and apple juice, obviously.
  6. Poo When I hear the sentence: nappy off time, my blood runs cold. DD gets a little twinkle in her eye and before you can say where’s the pampers? I am pulling wet wipes out like a magician on speed. No matter what anyone says about baby poo being different or when it’s your own children’s poo it doesn’t matter, it does matter. Poo is poo. Think Weetabix but with one false move your kids could get a gastro-vomit bug thingy or you could get cholera. Maybe not, but you know what I mean.

* This is the last British holiday we will ever do. Sitting on a freezing beach, wearing a jacket, making sand castles that struggle to retain any structural integrity due to the force 9 gale bending the wind-break nearly 45˚as your freezing children peel their tongues off of the ice creams that have frozen to a hardness of metal is not my idea of a good time. As my wife pointed out, when you shop in a French supermarket you keep that holiday feeling, but Tescos in Padstow is just Tesco in another part of Britain.

6 Dec

X-Factor: Semi Final

Posted by mrshev in X-Factor. Tagged: , .

I feel as if I have been watching X-Factor for ever; my own personal purgatory – even the Talk Talk billboards seem to be the same. If I hear that Talk Talk tune one more time, or see people arsing around with glowsticks, I swear I will descend into madness – whatever song it is it has been ruined forever. I had the same with Replublica’s Ready to Go when I worked on an promo with this track as backing and I cannot listen to the tune ever again without facial twitches and uttering slight yelps.

Michael Jackson week this week. I have mixed feelings, as I am sure everybody does, about Michael Jackson. On the one hand I think he was one of the greatest pop icons – a genius even – and Thriller still remains an amazing piece of work, a classic. On the other hand he was as mad as an arsonist in a fireworks factory living a life so completely barmy that only his celebrity status and big, fat chequebook protected him from being sectioned. Oh, and anyone stupid enough to send their kids round his ‘house’ needs a social services S.W.A.T team rappelling in through their front window tout sweet. Enough said.

So our four remaining Neverland-owning wannabees duked it out singing Jackson songs and then a choice of their own:

Olly meets his hero...

Olly Murs

Olly went totally large this week, necked 12 j2os and picked the tightest, whitest pair of pants and he could squeeze his gorilla-like frame into – you could practically tell what religion he follows. I thought he was just okay. I still think he has more to give than he has already – he has got a great voice and he has got great moves but he just comes across as a bit retro. I think his natural format is soul and R&B and he obviously has an affinity with Stevie Wonder (which is a good thing) but in the final he is going to have to sing some crappy MOR dirge from Simon’s hit factory and he is going to crash…and…burn.

Joe thinks of Michael...

Joe Mc…what’s his name.

Joe stuck to his strengths and sang his way to the final.

I hate the Michael Jackson song he picked, but I can tell it’s a hard song to sing and he totally nailed it. The thing is – and this is just a theory – I think that Joe’s arrival at the final has been engineered completely by Simon Cowell. None of the other acts can carry the kind of insipid, mindless pop that makes his production company – and thus Simon – oodles of dosh. So Simon and the other judges have, I think, made it their mission to get Joe to the final. Job done.

She's just a normal girl at heart...

Our Stace’

Bless her, she went all raunchy for her King of Pop turn and she just about pulled it off (in a manner of speaking).

She sang alright, but she compensated for that by having legs up to her eyeballs and walking about on chairs from a Café Rouge. My first thought, unfortunately, was Allo Allo; the utterly dreadful ‘comedy’ from the eighties about French Resistance fighters, rather than Madame Jo Jos. The illusion was doubly broken when she opened her mouth and sounded like a checkout girl from Leighton.

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Danyl: is this Janet or Michael?

Danyl Johnson

I think that the biggest problem that Danyl had was that he just couldn’t not muck about with a song. No matter how good the song, or how well known, Danyl would feel the urge to get all Ne-Yo on it and start doing the R&B version of yodelling. He did it with Elton John and he did it with Michael Jackson. The problem is that the audience want to judge him on how well he sings a song, but if he just goes off on one and ‘interprets’ it then I think that they think: well I could interpret a song, any mug could… The only plane of reference they have is the bloody song and he goes off piste…and that comes across as slightly arrogant. The maths is thus: messes with song I know + arrogant + no votey = back home in an Addison Lee cab, thanks for playing.

3 Dec

Dish Ownership

Posted by mrshev in Food, kids. Tagged: , .

I love a good dinner party, me. Slap up meal, lots of wine, people to listen to my incoherent rants, no washing up – all good. But everyone – me included – cannot cook any of the kids favourite meals for a dinner party because…they are kids meals and parents cannot ever cook them ever again for anyone who has children, ever.

So, us parents have to leaf through our tired collection of cookbooks trying to cook something interesting when all we want is:

  1. Spag Bol Delia [throws dart at Delia photo stapled to the wall] tells us that a true bolognese is fashioned from a mixture of pork and beef mince, some chicken livers, bacon lardons and fresh plum tomatoes slow cooked for eighteen hours in a pizza oven; occasionally stirred with a spoon fashioned from dried basil by a tuscan monk called Jerome…but we all know that she’s talking out of her marinated arse. Spag Bol - really - is made with half a kilo of mince meat, a couple of cans of chopped tomatoes and an onion. If we want to go posh we glug in a bit of Chianti, some fresh basil and thin slices of garlic like they did on Goodfellas. Everyone loves Spag Bol and those that don’t are exiled, by the Government, to live on the Isle of Wight, like Escape From New York. The problem is is that kids aren’t stupid and many class Spag Bol as their favourite, so it’s off the menu. That’s a bit annoying, because everyone loves Spag Bol. Even vegetarians (okay, maybe not…).
  2. Cottage Pie No matter what way you spin it, cottage pie is Spag Bol with mashed potato on top. Our kids love it because it is both Spag Bol and mashed potato a.k.a edible modelling clay. There’s no way to posh this up apart from sticking it in small baking dishes and mixing some garlic in with the mash…or maybe creaming the potatoes. I hate restaurant food descriptions: creamed potatoes = mash…jus = gravy…bruschetta = toast…pan fried = fried.
  3. Fish Fingers I really like fish fingers. They don’t have bones in them, you can put them in butties and you always eat them with peas. DW hates fish and I’m a bit meh about it. DW was emotionally scared by kedgeree (quite rightly) and I think I just got sick of looking at fish on a plate, it’s beady little eye focused on me like an old oil painted portrait, as I picked bone #2037 out of my mouth. Could you serve fish fingers at a dinner party? Never. Even if you hand-made them. Even if everyone secretly loved them.
  4. Homemade Pizza Poeple who don’t like pizza are dysfunctional; any food that enables you to eat meat products as long as you sprinkle mozzarella on top is okay with me. We recently acquired a breadmaker; he lives in the cellar and survives off what he can scrape off of the oven tins at the end of the day. The breadmaker makes perfect pizza dough and just to make it seem as if you had a hand in this scrumptuous meal, you can make your own tomato sauce (see Spag Bol without the mince). The only problem is that when you grow up you’re only allowed pizza if you go to a Pizza Express with the kids or have just moved house.
  5. Cheerios It would be quite a coup to serve Cheerios at a dinner party, and it would certainly save on the washing up. Plus it would be like soup, mains and desert all in one. Result. You sometimes get a toy with it as well. You don’t get toys with Special K…or chicken kiev. Sometimes we do have to resort to breakfast cereals when all else fails. I know it’s bad, but we’re just trying to get some calories into our kids.

I would love to turn up to a dinner party and be given Cottage Pie. Maybe I could push it and ask if I could eat in front of the tv or I’ll start lobbing mash. Oh, and I’ll only eat my dinner if I can wear my Spiderman outfit, okay?

30 Nov

Bing

Posted by mrshev in internet, tech. Tagged: , , , , , .

If, like me, you are finding the over-arching reach of ubër-corporation Google to be too invasive then maybe it’s time to try out another over-arching ubër corporation’s search engine: bing. Microsoft have dabbled with searches before via the MSN site, but like Windows Vista or Internet Explorer, it’s ugly and annoying (please insert your celebrity comparison now).

So, Microsoft decided that enough is enough and chucked lots and lots of gold coins at the ‘problem’ and have come up with a new search engine. The PR initiative from Microsoft has been insidious and the coup of getting Newscorp involved shouldn’t be ignored – after all, they are up against Google which is probably worth more than…I dunno, Luxembourg – so telling people that there really is another search engine out there is the first hurdle and persuading them that there is something better than Google is the second. A tough ask.

  1. Home page Google does the whole doing ‘fun’ things with the logos bollocks that I find a bit old fashioned (think Channel 4 logo circa 1985) and deeply patronising. I can imagine the brass at Google saying: ‘yeah, it’s branding and it’s funny and cool. We’re clever, huh?” Yeah, right. What Bing have done is use one huge picture as the home page and have little rollovers on it that reveal extra information about it. It’s great, quite fresh and the images are usually superb. My only criticisms are that I wish the image would be header to footer and sidebar to sidebar rather than a wee window in the middle. Also, Bing’s logo is a bit of a minger. What is it with Microsoft? Do they employ blind designers, or what?
  2. Web Search After using Google for so long Bing seems really clean. No ads, no sidebar gubbins; none of that promoting web results crap that no one uses or understands…but no wonderwheel or timeline either. Related searches are on the left which is quite handy but it seems to use a different algorithm or something, because sometimes it finds things Google can’t and sometimes it seems to not find things very well at all. However, when it does find things it gives a quick preview of it via a little rollover…which is nice.
  3. Image Search I have found Bing to be invaluable for image searches and have ditched Google in favour of it. Really. The main reason is that you get loads of images really, really fast in one hit. It is just easier, faster and cleaner than Google. The filtering options are much better as well.

I’ve never had a problem with Microsoft. I’m a mac-head but I still prefer the Office suite over Numbers and Keynote and all the other Mickey Mouse programs that Apple makes. I use Windows XP in bootcamp and find it to be stable, efficient and quite user friendly. The Xbox 360 and Xbox Live are awesome. So giving Bing a go feels fair given Microsoft’s heritage.

I still think, however, that Bing feels like a beta. The web searching feels particularly hit and miss…but I love the homepage, so much so that I like to visit to see what image they have each day. The photo today, for instance, is awesome. The image searching is amazing and I have found it to be much more effective than Google. But, Google is going to remain my primary information gatherer and in that respect I think Bing has a mountain to climb.

29 Nov

X-Factor: Part Six

Posted by mrshev in Uncategorized.

Take That and Elton John week – it could be worse. Oh, it was, we had George Michael week last time…

Firstly, the judges must have had a ruck beforehand because Cheryl’s dress looked like she had to cobble it together from some Celebrations wrappers found in the footwells of Simon’s Rolls; and Danni must have caught a left hook off of Louie because she was reet grumpy (as Cheryl would say) and had a face like a wet weekend most of the show.

I normally do a theme, but I cannot for life of me think of one. Take That and Elton John? It just seems so gay and I don’t feel comfortable wheeling out a bunch of tired, sterotypical, borderline homophobic (if I was Jimmy Carr, though, I would class it as irony…) parrallels so I am just going to play it straight (to pardon the pun):

Yet another new hairstyle for Danyl...

Danyl Johnson

I thought that Danyl’s Take That cover was excellent (as excellent as any Take That cover can be…); he danced about and moved – that’s what Take That were all about. X Factor obviously had a job lot of gold foil left over from Cheryl’s dress, so the dancers got to look like Crunchie bars as well. I thought his Elton John number was bloomin’ awful though. It wasn’t the best song in the world to begin with, but giving it the Danyl treatment turned it into roadkill. He might not make the final three because he is still a bit narcissistic.

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Lloyd, confused: I'm a giraffe?

Lloyd Daniels

I think that Lloyd tries to sing every song – no matter what it is – like Ne-Yo and so sounds bloody awful. He utterly murdered the Take That song, mooching around the stage like it was Friday night in Swansea. I also thought it was impossible to look like you weren’t playing the saxaphone but the lass on stage managed it on his Elton John number. Lloyd was awful and showed that he has about as much natural rhythm as some buckets under a leaky roof. He’s so gone.

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Is Our Stace' destined for The Bill as well?

Stacey Solomon

I cannot believe that she is as gormless as she appears, mainly because my brain won’t accept the terrible truth that she may well be. I thought her Take That number was great and her Elton number was okay – but once Simon planted the seed that she sounded like a wedding singer then her survival is assured. Everyone is going to vote for her now because she’ll be the underdog and she is the last lass left in the competition. She’ll be in the final three and maybe finally reveal her true identity: St Pauls, Gap year in Peru and King’s College drop out…

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I'm not gay, either...

Joe…what’s his name?

I am still trying to figure out what all the fuss is about with Joe. I thought his Take That song was awful, with no movement or pizazz. I thought the arrangement was terrible too with the dancers starting off like Guernica or Matisse’s tahiti pictures  - what’s that all about? Go for the target audience… His Elton John number was good, but he sounds so generic. He might get the old Spanish Elbow…hopefully.

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Vote for me or you'll be picking your teeth off the carpet, you slag.

Olly Murs

Everytime I see Olly I always think: he’s quite a chunky monkey! He was alright, but wondering round the stage like a lounge singer doesn’t seem to be his style. The Elton art direction was a tres fromage with only a tenuous link to the song and it was all very contrived. He needs better songs, the next size up in clothes and better art direction but I still reckon he’ll make the final three. Just.

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