Pat’s Point of View

Various things that are a pain in my butt. None worthy of their own post, but annoying none the less.

• The fire alarm in my apartment building which keeps going off. You never know if you should evacuate.
• The Harvey Norman website sucks arse. Not only do they not have any other other departments but they don’t even list all products for the Computer and Communications department.
• The number of ads Channel 7 inserts into each episode of Lost.
• (After looking up the link for that last one, I can now add the navigation on Yahoo7 to my list; in Firefox you can’t select anything from the flyout menu!)
• No matter what I do, DVD Player in Mac OS X always opens when I insert a DVD movie.
• The Verbatim DVD-R DL disc I have won’t burn in any of my dual layer drives (Matsushita and NEC).
• My old Mac Mini has only 2 USB ports, the new one has 4.
• The mouse scroll wheel doesn’t work in Framemaker 6.
• When eating I have to leave a bit of food that I like until last, in case I need it to ‘override’ the taste of other bits that I didn’t like. Freak!.
• Sydney bus travel planners….in fact any public transport route finder things. Although the TfL one isn’t bad, none of them piece it all toghether in a user friendly way.
• Triple M radio….they call themselves a rock station? Ashlee Simpson is not rock. And endlessly playing the same songs isn’t good either. If I have to sit through Green Day’s bloody long ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ I’m going to throw the radio out the window!

OK that’s enough of a whinge for now :)

I should be on that show Grumpy Old Men.

Evidently the local cinema in The Entrance (a small town north of Sydney) has banned The Da Vinci Code movie. I’m sure Sony are destitute in their disappointment.

I’m Catholic too but I think the cinema owner’s attitude is wrong. It’s not going to do anything but make people more curious. Did the owners of the cinema watch the film themselves, or read the book? If they did, why not let others watch it and come to their own opinions? If you suddenly lose your faith after hearing about the whole Merovingian bloodline story, then you probably would have abandoned the church anyway. Because at the end of the day the whole thing comes down to who you believe, there’s hardly conclusive proof either way.

But by trying to stamp out questions and challenges, the church and others who take such action, are only reinforcing people’s attitude of suspicion, deceit and conspiracy. I guess it’s going to look bad either way since the story is rather self-fulfilling. If the church denies covering up the ‘true’ role of Mary Magdalene for millennia then they just prove the conspiracy theory. If they were admit it then they’re bad—it’s a lose-lose situation. It’s so ‘Area 51′.

At the very least, think of the money they’ll lose by not screening a major new release—especially such a controversial one.

See what people are blogging about: da vinci code

Shoreditch TV is an experimental TV channel made up of live CCTV footage from the streets of London. They call it “fighting crime from the sofa”.

Mesh computing has nothing on this – you can have a whole bunch of grannies with eyes peeled to the TV and fingers poised over the telephone, ready to report any shenanigans of the local AVO kids.

Closer to home, recent plans to increase the amount of surveillance cameras around Sydney landmarks has copped some criticism because there will be nobody to watch the surveillance. We should beam it out to some grumpy old buggers, they’ll warn us of any terrorist threats quick smart.

See what people are blogging about: CCTV, crime, neighbourhood watch

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted my most played artists data from iTunes, so here we go:

1. Aretha Franklin
2. Diana Ross & The Supremes
3. Craig David
4. Destiny’s Child
5. Elvis Presley

Quite different from last time! But since then my library has been rebuilt several times, moved from PC to Mac, my iPod has been reformatted twice and my wife got a Shuffle…..her stats are skewing my data :)