mrchom

Now before we move on I need to say something.  The title up there? Pronounced Dee-doh, it's Ukrainian for grandfather.  Also I know I don't post here often but I needed somewhere more fitting than Facebook or Twitter to post this.

This is about my Dido, Michael Chomyk.  He was born in Ukraine and moved over here after the war, he met and married my Babcha (Grandmother if you can't guess), and thus my family occured.

Recently Dido was diagnosed with Bowel and Stomach cancer.  He hadn't been well for a while, he was having trouble with solid food, and looked tired all the time.  Up until now (and he is in his 80s) he has been a largely active and strong man, always wanting to do things his way and under his own steam.  In the space of the three weeks since his diagnosis he has gone from walking with a stick, to unable to get out of bed, and now to being unable to recognise his family or really know where he is.  In my mind it's no longer him, the him that was lived until my last conversation with him about two weeks ago....since then all we've seen is an echo of who he was.  Brief flashes of words or recognition before settling back into his bed to sleep.

He was a kind man, he never had too little time for people, and for myself, Daniel, and Heidi (his grandchildren) he was always there.  In a way I think he wanted to be Dido to everyone, he was there when Babcha fostered troubled kids, and he always seemed to have a lot of time for children in general.  I think that goes to show what a special person he was....just how big his heart was.  He taught me how to play pool, he helped me learn to swim, how to play basketball, how to play chess, he let me sit and watch him as he mended broken clocks and watches which fascinated me.  He was always happy when you visited, even if you only spent five minutes with him, and he rarely asked for anything....all he needed was some beer or brandy, the evening newspaper, and a good western, some wrestling, or some football on the telly.

Why am I telling you this?  Because I love Dido, and I want everyone to know just how special a person he was. I want you to appreciate what I may not always have done.  I am happy for the 28 years I have known Dido even if right now it's causing pain, that's just part of life.  Today I'm going to visit him, I don't know if it will be the last time...I almost hope it is...as much as I love him I don't want to see him cling on and suffer more...but I also know he's not the kind of person to give up.  I don't know if there's anything more to say, so I'll just end it there.

What I want to say can't be said in a tweet...so I thought I'd use this place.

Most of you will never see Ypres, the Menin Gate, or Arras.  I have.  Stepping off a coach in the middle of fields in North Western Continental Europe and seeing nothing but white crosses in every direction is a very emotional moment.  You can't quite believe the scale until it lies before you in all its horrific detail.  Every single cross has a name....a story....a life behind it....and you can't quite believe the scale.  Walk through the silent fields and (on most of the grave sites) you will see a wall.....10-15 feet high....and from a distance it looks like a boundary wall.  As you get closer to the wall you see panel after panel after panel.......closer still and you find every panel has names.....countless names.  Each name is a soldier who died but had no recogniseable body to bury.  The Menin Gate itself has 55,000 of these names, Tyne Cot cemetary another 33,000.

This is why we remember.

We do not remember for honour, or glory.  We do not remember to torture ourselves and justify wasted life.  We remember the sacrifice of so many, so young, and most of all we remember so that this does not happen again.  Wear a red poppy, wear a white poppy, wear a black armband, wear nothing at all....but please...remember.  Think of countless lives lost...military and civilian in the countless conflicts over the years regardless of whether the wars were justified or not.

In a world that is increasingly selfish, hurried, and insensitive I think we need to take just two minutes out of our lives to remember these things.

Right now there's endless debates on the subject on the radio....what colour poppy you wear, why you observe the day, beliefs regarding the military.  I don't care about those things.  I have my own personal reasons for observing the two minute silence, and they were cemented one warm and breezy day in a field in Belgium, and I know other people may not share them...but I would still appeal to you to take those two minutes to think.

Even now there is armed conflict in the world....and we pore over it in grim detail as we look at the 231 British lives lost in Afghanistan since 2001.  Is it justified?  Is it worth it?  I'm not sure I can give you an answer, but I'm also sure none of those people went to Afghanistan to die, and I'm sure that each and every one left behind someone to mourn them.  Please, stop the debating, stop the ranting, and just for two minutes on November 11th at 11am respect Armistice Day.  If you're still reading then thank you for your time, and I hope this gave you something to think about.

I gote me one of those twitter things too....it's at: http://www.twitter.com/mrchom

Please, for the love of all that is holy STOP whining about downloadable content.  Yes, at the moment I am referring to Capcom's Resident Evil VS mode, and believe me you all need to shut up.

Firstly Capcom gave you a packed game full of extras, it got high reiew scores and ridiculous sales...people loved it.  They felt like they got their money's worth out of it...but then along came Capcom and said "Right, if you want multiplayer that releases a bit after launch and costs £3.40 because we had to spend extra time developing and testing it as a separate team, then we had to pay to have it certified by MS separately...we even had our own budget given to us by Capcom to make the mode"

£3.40 is not a back breaking amount considering gamers have payed up to £17 for maps...it's not even a mildly infuriating amount....it's less than the cost of a chicken chow mein!  But no, people are ANGRY because it's just an unlock code that uses assets on the disc to make something that should have been in the game, it makes them VERY VERY ANGRY....

Here's a piece of news....software companies have been doing this for years....giving you one set of content at one price and a second at another all on the same disc...they will still be doing it long after you stop playing so really stop giving us all this "WE OWN THE WHOLE DISK" rubbish because what you own is the disc itself NOT the right to every asset on there...if that was the case then you could copy it and sell it on without fear of prosecution.

People keep complaining about unlock codes for this and that....guess what...more often than not thos features would NEVER have seen the light of day without the knowledge that DLC would be an option.  It's true, talk to people from the games industry....if they can release a technically finished game and move on that's good...and they do....but now they have the opportunity to expand that game for people willing to front up a bit more cash...which costs them less, has less turnaround time, and is (get this), less risky than sinking 3-4 years into a new game.

If you don't want the content DON'T BUY IT....if you don't buy it sales figures are low and it's not worth providing new DLC.  It's not a hard equation, it's democracy in action, vote with your feet and buy a game that DOESN'T have DLC instead, buy a new car, buy an ice cream for all I care but please don't whine about an extra £3 for a mode not provided in previous games for free either.

Now, as most people will tell you I'm a big fan of James Bond films.  For my birthday I got the 42 disc edition on DVD, and have just started my BRD collection of them (oh yes, I have a Blu Ray player to go with my nice shiny 42" Toshiba TV now).

Over the past few months Chris and myself have been doing Bond movie doubles to try and watch the complete series....originally we were aiming to do it in time for the release of Quantum of Solace but that went for a Burton's about the time I started getting very busy at work and needed weekends for some rest.

Anyway, tonight will be the last night of the Bond Marathon with two films I've actually seen recently (Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace) so I thought I'd post my updated all-time rankings for Bond movies.

1. GoldenEye
2. Casino Royale
3. From Russia With Love
4. Goldfinger
5. You Only Live Twice
6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
7. The Living Daylights
8. Thunderball
9. The World Is Not Enough
10. Tomorrow Never Dies
11. For Your Eyes Only
12. The Spy Who Loved Me
13. Dr. No
14. Live And Let Die
15. A View To A Kill
16. Licence To Kill
17. The Man With The Golden Gun
18. Quantum of Solace
19. Octopussy
20. Moonraker
21. Die Another Day
22. Diamonds Are Forever

Now you may note the positioning of certain films......I certainly did....I remembered Diamonds are forever as being quite good....unfortunately apart from Plenty O'Toole it most certainly was not.  Die Another Day was just an unmitigated catastrophe as a film, diabolical in every way possible, and featuring only two good scenes that could do nothing to save it from the rampant madness elsewhere.

But what of Quantum of Solace?  Why is it so low?  18th out of 22?  Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad film.  I quite enjoyed its style, and its pace...what I didn't enjoy was the fact that it's not a Bond film.  I mean, seriously, it just has nothing my head can latch on to as being Bond...if you'd called it "Bourne Identity 5: Bourne regenerates and becomes British" it would actually have made more sense to my brain.  It has a villainous villain, yes, but one who does things subtly without the cackling evil of even LeChiffre.  It has chases and action sequences but they never really feel comfortable.  Whole swathes of plot are incomprehensible without Casino Royale to back them up. AND WHERE'S MY  Q SCENE, DAMMIT.  I know this is meant to be a more modern Bond without gadgets to back him up as much but part of the fun of a Bond movie is seeing that Q scene where all the fun bits and bobs come in.  Daniel Craig is fantastic as Bond, I think he's done a lot to regenerate the series, the Bond girls were.....well Gemma Arterton had very little screen time (BOOOOO) and Olga Kurylenko just meandered around trying to look mexican for an hour.  Dame Judi managed to pull off M once more....but for a very long time in this film....becoming almost a primary character at some points...  Oh yes, and what the hell was up with the CIA?  That was just WEIRD.....seriously.  I know it was meant to be political comment but it was all a bit hamfisted for my liking, nowhere near the satire of "Unlike the Americans we prefer not to get our news from CNN" from Goldeneye.

The film doesn't make me as wholesale angry as Die Another Day, like I said, I quite enjoyed it....but it's no Bond film, it's more of a side project some cooked up in their free time.

Well, the first week of the job is over and I am PUMPED.  I love my job.  No, seriously.  It's IT based, and it's stuff I at least SORT of know, at least I know enough to be able to fix basic problems, and know what I need to refer to other people.  It's working in schools, so there's very little comeback for downtime, and a huge feeling of success when you can get something done.  And you know what?  I love it, I really do.

Monday was shadowing Anton (Pretty much my immediate superior) round two schools with wholly disparate problems.  Biggest surprise of the day had to be the moment where they told me I was having a work laptop and phone, that really got me.  But anyway, I did feel a little out of my depth here, I'll be honest.  There was a lot of stuff about SmartBoards, projectors, and cloning that it was very hard to understand without getting my hands into it.  I'm still not fully up on the notion of Sysprep and Pre-Sysprep images but I expect I'll get there over October half term.....if not sooner.

Tuesday was more of the same, except I got to go to East Park Infants (one of "my" schools).  Now, it's a nice school, very simple layout, and some very nice staff, but they look like they've been a bit beleaguered by some bad IT from a previous technician (Active Directory is poorly setup, the server password security is AWFUL, some of the machines simply won't work) but all in all they have a functional little system there.

Wednesday was more of the same school, and the first time I was left on my own with jobs to do.  It was VERY scary (if I'm honest), but probably good for me because too much hand-holding is a bad thing.  Moved a wireless point from one part of the school to another and got it setup, also replaced a projector lamp (which was scary as FUCK because I'd never dealt with projectors before)...simple enough in the end, but looking like you know what you're doing in front of a class of 5 year olds is a strange experience.

Thursday was spent with me going back to base after a mixup with where I was going, and from there on to Elston Hall, and another school I forget....but it's all good experience.  I'm slowly starting to get some idea of what is and isn't expected by school people at this point.

Today, the morning was back at East Park Infants....which is sort of my home at this point.  I helped out with a broken projector again, diagnosed a dead box, scheduled a reboot for the server, and also put on an admin account for me so I have no fear someone will unlock my machine and play silly buggers with the servers.  I also "Fixed" the wireless access point I had installed on Wednesday that there was NO PROBLEM with....it was more a problem with the fact the teacher's laptop was going off to next door's wireless instead of his own.  Lunch was to be had in the Merry Boys pub in Bilston.  It's cheap and cheerful, massive props to Anton for buying me lunch , got to be introduced to Mike, and reintroduced to Mike.  Yes, it's going to be a running joke.  We have Mike Chui, Mike Smith, and Mike Chomyk...we're all on the same team....oh that's fun for the phonebooks and PDAs of the world.

Overall....I've been busy, I've been tired, and I've been poor (the jobcentre has delayed my last payment, and I have ZERO money till work pays me)...but I love my job.  I could have gone for a higher paid job in the MOD.....but that was phone tech support...and you know what...I like people...meeting them, advising them, helping them.  That's why I love it, I'm not stuck in one office all day every day....I'm always BUSY...it's something I need.  I've actually got a reason to get out of bed in the morning and drive on out....I LOVE having a purpose.

If nothing else it's giving me a good knowledge of the Wolverhampton ring road and the m54!

Now, those of you out there in the wonderful land of Oz might be wondering what's happened to me since JULY 29TH and my "I have a job" post.

Well, let's see....I qualified for the World of Warcraft National Championships, and am just a hair off qualifying for the World Championships (which would put me amongst the top 20-30 in Britain) on an automatic place.  It's all cool, but due to various reasons the nationals weekend is going to be a MASSIVE pain in the arse.

Next up, I went to Amecon...and it was awesome.  Got to have a good old "taunt the Goran" session, and ensure his friends from Basingstoke were told the tales of Goran the Adventurer, The Van Headbutt, and many many more, some of them were in tears of laughter and almost begged me to stop when I got to the bit about serious brain injuries.  I also spent WAAAAAY to much money, but got a lot of stuff I wanted, including the whole of Chevalier d'Eon for £40, not bad.  Oh, and the whole of Gundam Seed for £90!  There were also rumours of Slayers getting a UK release, so I say it was one of the more awesome conventions I've been to.  Roll on Ayacon 2009.

Finally, the job.  How have I been doing?  Is it going well?  Dunno, haven't started yet.  Seriously, haven't started.  I wish I had, I mean it's been a month now.  Turns out the guy who hired me has been on holiday....and so unable to deal with me (d'oh), but he emailed me today to say I could start Monday....WOOOOOOOO!!!!  Now for the bit where I curl up over the terror of being in the workplace, and recoil in fear over social interaction....oh wait....working with other nerds.....shouldn't be too bad then.  If I can't find another gaming, anime, or TCG nerd to deal with then you can call me Julia, and kick me up the arse.

Right, that's all for now, stuff to do etc.

Ciao

Now, guys, I don't ask a lot, I don't need a lot, but I have a small request for any of you with any kind of liking of history, computing, cryptography, engineering etc.  Bletchley Park was an area of Britain where during WW2 coded messages of the axis powers were sent to be cracked.  It is here that the first computers of the modern era were born, and it is here that it is alleged the war was won for the allies.

After the war Bletchley was left almost derelict, lost and alone, but renovation took place to save this important British monument.  Sadly the money to save Bletchley has almost run out, and without support it will fail, and go back to the disrepair of its former lost days.  There is a petition to try and save it, it takes seconds to sign, and I'd very grateful if one or two of you could put down your names to save something that should be a monument to the world, and how sometimes "Military Intelligence" is not a contradiction in terms.

I realise it's not helping starving children, or rebuilding the education system, but it is still a token gesture in keeping one of the greatest historical sites of the modern era from becoming just another set of rotten, and decayed buildings in the countryside.

Bletchley has burned and been abandoned once...please, don't let it happen again.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/BletchleyPark/

....boys and girls, children of all ages...I have an announcement.  Not one of those rubbish announcements either like Wii Motionplus, no, no, no.  A proper announcement, one with vim, vigour, and vitality.  Something new and fresh and blah blah blah.  I've got the gift of the gab, what can I say, but that stuff is boring me to tears as well.

I have a job.

There, I said it.  It still sounds awesome.  After a year of bumming around, trying to get help training, looking for things to do I got a job...and one that matched the criteria I set out when I began my search.  I am a newly minted ICT Support Assitant as part of the E-Services Team of Wolverhampton City Council.  That means I get to go round fixing computers, installing them, giving help and advice, rolling out new technologies, everything you can think of that schools need.  As a bonus I get my ego stroked, I'm not working for a company, I'm working for schools, I'm working to help people, and that's what I want to do in life.  Yeah, sure, go on, have a good laugh, but I'm serious.  I think there's a lot of respect for public service that has been lost by people down the years...now I admit that this isn't me becoming a fireman, policeman, soldier etc. but it is me helping the world to be a better place in any way that I can.  I actually feel sliiiiightly ridiculous saying that, but there it is.

Anyway, the interview must have gone well, although one of the questions made it very clear to me that I need to brush up on the data protection act (got caught short there) and find some way of tracking new IT developments for schools as one of the ideas I suggested as coming "in the next few years" was actually a programme they've been rolling out across Wolverhampton for the last 12 months.

Still, I have a job.

And it was no thanks to the jobcentre.

I feel fully vindicated in complaining now because it was me getting off my own ass and putting the hours in that got me this job.  It was me giving up 60 hours of my life to training ON TOP of what the jobcentre wanted me to do (even taking sick days from their programmes to do it) that got me this job.  For six months they denied me access to training for no reason other than they "don't offer training before six months of unemployment".  What kind of screwed up system is that?  Someone is unemployed, wants to retrain, you give them that opportunity, you don't just make them sit on their ass for six months doing naff all.  I was given no information on how to get funding for training, where to train, nothing.  The assumption was simply made that I wanted to stay at home for six months plotting how I'd work the system.

So for six months I tried to find opportunities to train, and got one, I've done 3/4 of my MCSA content, and 1/4 of the exams.  No thanks to the Jobcentre.  Then at six months they sent me for "Retraining".  I was sent to a building in Walsall with other long-term uneployed for two weeks.  We were given access to First Aid and Health and Safety courses.....that weren't ever done.  The rest of our training was more than somewhat pointless....now I need to step in here and say that Lee and Steff who did the teaching were very nice people, and did their best to teach what they were told to, but you can't polish a turd.  Lessons on bullying in the workplace?  Equal Opportunities?  I mean come on.  People were asking about how to get qualifications for building, security guarding, whatever and we were told "oh, sorry, we don't offer things like that".  This is why the new deal is a sham.  Pointless hours of killing people's ambitions until they say they want to work in retail and get shuffled off to bar work.  All so someone can quote statistics saying that there has been a marked improvement in the unemployment figures through retraining.

But hold on, we're not done yet.  After the two week course we had "intensive jobsearch" which means going to a medium sized, oven-like room 2 days a week, for 4 hours each.  What did we do here?  Well, most people sat and watched youtube, read the paper, had a coffee, then went home.  I'd have gone stir-crazy, I applied for every job I could find because it was just wasting my time otherwise.  The TARGET, ladies and gentlemen, for this place was 2 jobs written for a week, and 2 phoned for.  That's 4 jobs a week you had to apply for in 8 HOURS sat at a PC.  I was applying for in excess of 20 per session.  Other people I saw applied for none, ever.  Another case of an outside company being paid to deliver mediocrity by the bucketload.

We're still not done, though, no.  After 8 weeks of this pointless endeavour I was signed up for a move. a 6 month full time course in Office Admin with another outside company.  Again, offering none of the training I needed (MCSA/ITIL...heck....Cisco would have been nice), and instead offering a general programme to get me "back into the office environment".  They would do this by doing things like sending me on unpaid sojourns into local companies for a couple of weeks to work as an "office assistant" and using that experience to build my confidence.

And this is why I laugh when David Cameron suggests we make the unemployed 1. work for their dole money at the six month stage, and 2. Involve outside companies.  The unemployed ARE already forced to work for their dole money, often in very unpleasant circumstances, and the unemployed are already failed by outside companies.  I've seen the unemployed, ladies and gentlemen, yes there are genuine dole dossers who just want to stay on the dole and feed the wife and their 12 million kids in their council house.  I feel justified in saying that because in my 12 weeks with Biscom I saw them, about 1 in 4 people fitted that description.  All of them useless layabouts who rightly SHOULD be cut off by the state because they leech on the hard work of others.  Then there were those who are too old or too young to get a job.  The old have had a career, are in their mid fifties and have seen their industry whipped from under them, and that REALLY scares me...it's not just their job that is gone but their entire way of living.  Too old to retrain and still find a job, but not old enough to retire, stuck in this meaningless futile wasteland of unemployment for anything up to a decade.  Then there's the young...who have no experience, and cannot get it because everywhere NEEDS experience, or training, or both!

The sad fact is that anyone in employment, and under the illusion that something would be done to help them if they lost their job is wrong.  Thousands of people who could do useful work are denied training and assessment every day, and the companies the government trusts to do this are wasting money, PUBLIC money on failing schemes to put them back to work.  Every day hundreds of people sign off the dole for no reason other than they can't take the relentless "retraining" of these companies, and spend 13 weeks of their life below the poverty line before they are allowed to sign on again.  This is the price we pay for using private companies and the "lowest bidder" philosophy.  We are a rich nation and we allow some to go hungry, while others do nothing and are given all the benefits in the book.  Tell me that's fair, or right.

I know this started off as a happy post about me getting a job and ended up as some boring rant about the benefit system, but it's something that people NEED TO HEAR, because frankly before I was sent to these places I thought the new deal with its promises of retraining sounded like something great....and instead it turned out to be full of people whose only hope is that someone somewhere recognises just what a waste it is.

So as everybody, no doubt, knows I'm a huge fan of Batman Media....not necessarilly the comics (I do have some that I like, but I'm not the biggest fan) but all the movies and series that are made.  Batman: The Animated Series remains one of my favourite cartoons of all time, I love the richly stylised 1920s-1950s vibe it has....anyway, getting off topic here.  It was with this that I set out to watch the Dark Knight yesterday, and after hearing so much good I was anticipating a real corker.  After watching it I watched Batman Begins again just to compare how things worked.

Now bear in mind this is PROBABLY going to be a big bundle of spoilers so please don't complain at me later.

So, I'll begin by saying....it's no Batman Begins.  Controversial, yes?  But true.  It simply isn't up to the standard Christopher Nolan created with his first film.  Now the performances in the film are quite good....with the exception of Christian Bale who comes off as flat, and whose batsuit is increasingly making him look chubby round the face.  I don't know what it is, he just came off as 1-dimensional and without nuance, and the voice filtering for his Batman voice was edging on incomprehensible at times.  Aaron Eckhart was absolutely spectacular as Two-Face, just really amazing; he did a great job of turning fanatacism for justice into plain old fanatacism, absolutely the best part of the movie for me, no exceptions.  My no exceptions policy extends to Heath Ledger, yes, he was an interesting Joker, and he played it very well, right down to a broken rag-doll kind of walk when he leaves the hospital.  Do I think it was oscar-worthy?  No.  Do I think he's the best Joker?  No.  He's good, I'll give him that, but he's bringing a lot of acting skill to a part that's not necessarilly as well written as it could be.

Moving on to the writing...it's one of the three downfalls of the film along with cinematography, and editing.  The plot at some points required HUGE leaps of faith, and there's a section that actually remains completely incomprehensible to me.  Here's a spoiler by the way, so you took a brick from a wall, shot some bullets into other bricks, compared them, scanned the brick to get a fingerprint that lead to a police apartment with a timer on a blind intended so you'd get shot instead of Gordon who, presumably, planned to fake his own death at that point.  What kind of FUCKED UP writing is that?  It's barely coherent or believable.  For cinematography, some of the action scenes are damaged by shaky cameras giving almost no clear shot of what's going on and where.  The "Lower Fifth" chase, for example...I have no idea what's going on there, there's no "spatial" sense of where things are for you to get a handle on.  As for editing...the film is too long.  It's 20 minutes longer than Batman Begins, and has multiple climaxes.  Here's the thing.....It either needed to be two movies, or a heavilly cut down one.  Either give Gordon's squad time to grow and get to know them, or dump the traitor angle entirely, either make the scene with the boats a major pinnacle of the film, or slice it, and either have one villain and the introduction of another or just one villain.  It's the same problem Spider-Man 3 had.  There's so much STUFF in there that film feels like a real bum-numbing 3 hours instead of feeling like a zippy 2 hours and 10.  Let's not forget the poor treatment Rachel Dawes gets.  Having just seen Jim Gordon shot, have an emotional wrap-up, and then be unceremoniously resurrected we see Rachel die inside the next 10 minutes and you can't have any kind of emotion for her because you don't know if the film-makers are fucking with you again.

Oh, and yes, what had happened to Gotham?  Begins had it as a fantastic dark version of a huge Chicago, complete with a Hong-Kong style slum-island to top it off.  That vision of the city was just fantastic....but where did it go?  Why all the bright sunlight?  Why is it just a mish-mash of chicago and NY now?  Where did that wonderful, unique look GO?  Why no rebuilt Wayne Manor?  Why no dark, forbidding bat-cave?  Has the transit system been demolished since Begins (Seriously, didn't anyone else notice that aside from the sequence where the Lambo gets trashed it was missing)?  I admit, some of the locations were re-used, yes, but it just felt... un-Gotham-y.

Having said all this, having all these complaints it's STILL an enjoyable film, it is still worth £5 to go and see it, and I STILL want to see it again.  All my concerns do is turn an excellent film into one that's merely "quite good", a 3/5 movie rather than the 4/5 Begins managed to rack up.  Yes, I still want a sequel, and yes, I am happy.......I just know it could have been better.