Month: June 2004

BBC Charter Renewal

BBC published it’s future proposals today. The pdf and interesting quote can be found here – BBC affirms Creative Archive in Charter Renewal plans. From DG Mark Thompson…

We want to builld a digital world based on universal access, open standards and unencryption. Encryption, subscription and other forms of digital exclusion lead to widespread welfare losses. They may have a role within the total broadcasting ecology, but the idea that they can successfully replace free-to-air public service broadcasting flies in the face both of economic theory and real-world experience.

The online creative archive sounds amazing but would surely grow to a huge undertaking even for a public broadcaster like the BBC?

The best team won

Cracking game of football last night, and like any team who loses on penalties England were very unlucky. However Portugal deserved the win. They played good attacking football and had the most possession. England seemed content to sit back and soak it up – they really should have chased the game and tried to kill it. As for Campbell’s goal that was chalked off, Terry did have an arm on the goalie and everyone now knows the protection a goalkeeper gets. If had been the other way round with Portugal scoring a late goal and the referee allowing it we wouldn’t hear the end of it from English fans saying they were cheated. Nae luck.

As for Beckhams penalty…I’m still laughing much like the Portuguese supporter last night. Priceless.

I’ve got GMail

I finally managed to blag an invite into the GMail Beta. First impressions are good. It’s claim to fame is the 1Gb storage available altough I struggle to see how I could fill 1Gb. Since Google announced this, others have been quick to catch up or overtake. Hotmail now makes available 250Mb instead of the measly 10Mb and Yahoo has gone to 2Gb for it’s broadband users. Yikes – lots of mail.

A nice feature is the way the mail is held as ‘conversations’ so that the mails read like a forum posting rather than discreet entities within your inbox. Also, there is no concept of folders. Instead you tag your mail with labels (can be done automatically via filters) and the inbox is then split accordingly – the mail can have more than one label. Searching the mail is also easy and quick, although if it was anything else you’d be pretty shocked. All in all, very nice and certainly better then Hotmail. If you want to mail me, try the mail link bottom right and if your interested in getting an invite then let me know and when I get one I’ll be sure to pass it on. The next test is to see if it’s been blocked by the company firewall yet.

Swinney Goes

John Swinney, SNP leader has finally stepped down. Really was about time – the SNP have had no better opportunity against Labour than in the last year, yet their share of the vote has still dropped. Swinney had no charisma or leadership qualities but did stike me as an honest and hard working guy. With any luck they’ll get a leader with a bit more drive, but looking at the list of candidates it’s hard to see where from unless Alex Salmond stands again which is unlikely. And I can’t see the nippy sweetie getting elected and heaven help them if the Star Trek geek becomes their leader.

Graham’s Stag

Our team actually overtaking someoneYesterday was Graham’s Stag. A 2 hour endurance kart race follwed by some food and beers. Was a really good day. There was nine of us so we split into two teams. Team 1 consisted of the bishopbriggs boys who eventually came second in the race. Team 2, including me, didn’t fair so well coming in 12th. Oh dear.

But the day passed safely. I had a massive shunt in which I left the seat and thought i wasn’t going to stop – gravity kicked in though. Roy also had a near miss when he went through the barriers when someone just wouldn’t give up their place. Very funny. Pictures can be found here. And at least this time I managed to drive home safely after the karting (I skelped someone’s bumper a few years ago after a karting session). So 10 days to the wedding – finally we’ll see Graham a married man. No more mature, but married none the less. And I’ve just realised I didn’t put a post up about this either – I’m the best man. Oh dear. With great power comes great responsibility. The stories I could tell, especially what I found out on Saturday night. Shocker 🙂

 

Charity Challenge – the results

QuizThursday saw us trying our best at the work charity challenge. 28 teams took part with 6 in each team. Lets cut to the chase – we didn’t win. Thankfully we didn’t come last either :-). In the true tradition of work based events we don’t know where we came as they only had time to announce last and first place. Highlight of the night had to be the bingo that nobody could win. After trying 5 times to get a winner, they were left with 2 players (it was Irish bingo so everyone stands and if a number is read out on your card you sit down). As they read out numbers both players sat down on the same numbers – after this happened 3 times they checked the cards and realised that they had the same cards. So they tossed a coin. A winner was found. He then decided he didn’t want the DVD player so it was handed back to charity. Class.

‘Rock on Tommy‘ was very funny too. You need to see the other photo’s to figure it out. Let’s just say the question master was less than impressed.

 

The worlds most intelligent community is…

Glasgow. How bizarre. Especially when you compare this news to the list of the most deprived areas in Scotland. The top ten are all in….Glasgow. Definetly looks like an us and them attitude – pretty poor that the council spokesman gets all excited about some crap broadband award but fails to speak on the poverty issue.

As an aside, the website detailing the poorest places (called the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD)) is actually very impressive. Requires a plugin but well worth the 2 meg download, although I can think of far better ways of spending the exec’s money.

Summer Of Sport

Its begun – the best summer of sport in a long time. Euro 2004 kicked off yesterday with a couple of entertaining matches. Don’t know about the silver ball though. Looking forward to the rest of the matches though, especially the France – England game tonight. Come on France ;-). BBC has a really nice way of viewing match highlights – the Virtual Replay. Choose a match, choose an incident and then watch it from any angle. Lovely.

Next week Wimbledon begins (Martina in the singles), we’ve got the rest of the F1 season (Button’s first win tonight?) and it will all be rounded off with the Olympics in August. Can’t wait.