almost witty
Amusing anecdotes & random ramblings
Posts about the baby…
Feb 10th
can be found on geekfamily.co.uk – take a look for semi-regular updates from both of us!
Not that anybody particularly cares about British-Chinese racism…
Jan 11th
after all – where’s our parade? Our banner? Our anti-British-Chinese-racism organisation which gets plenty of funding and attention?
But if you’re thinking: “What? Racism towards the British-Chinese? In the arts scene? It doesn’t exist, surely?” – allow Elizabeth Chan to correct you in her Guardian article.
Why I hate December #3 – setting up Christmas decorations
Dec 14th
Amongst all the time-sucking hassles that December brings along is the need/desire to set up Christmas decorations.
Admittedly, only those with a true heart of rock-solid stone could fail to be impressed by blinking fairy lights and tinsel chasing away the dark December nights, but oy vey, the hassle of setting it all up.
First of all you have to get all the decorations, tinsel, lights and then the huge plastic tree from last year down from the attic or your storage arena. Or struggle to wrestle a new natural tree all the way home from the local dodgy pop-up market around the corner, covering yourself with thistles and thorns in the process.
Then you have to carve out a space in your living room area near the window just to put up the tree. Assuming you had any spare space to begin with. For bonus points, if you have a crawling baby, you have to put enough obstacles on the living room floor so that he can’t actually try to climb up – or more likely, eat – the tree.
Then out come the fairy lights out of the box. Which are all hopelessly tangled, so you have to spend a good 30 minutes untangling them to begin with – while also keeping an eye out on the baby to ensure he doesn’t try to chew the fairy lights. Once you’ve untangled them comes the joyful task of tangling them again around the tree. Before realising that it’s all too far from an electrical outlet so you’re forced to decide whether to move everything else out of the way so you can put the tree near the electrical outlet, or try dangling an extension cable in such a way that the baby won’t eat it.
Then you open the box of last year’s tree decorations, and hope to goodness none of them have been smashed. Then you realise you can’t use any of them anyway because the baby may just decide to try eating a glass globe.
Which is why, this year, my wife’s taken the initative and set up a unique Christmas ‘tree’ of our very own, incorporating books and a fez. Because fezzes are cool.
I still wish I had the time to set up some more fairy lights around the place, though.
Chinese theatre that isn’t about life in a takeaway or kung fu
Nov 1st
Over one week in November, three British-Chinese actresses are bringing you In The Mirror in Central London – telling British-Chinese stories of identity, politics, belonging (and not) and parenting. And given that I know at least two of the three performers involved (at least via blogging), I’m pretty confident that it’ll be free of the cliches that does tend to surround British-Chinese theatre.
I’d go, but I’ll be in Hong Kong, irony of ironies.
We hate it when our car rental companies become successful
Oct 25th
I’m lucky enough not to need my own car, partly because there’s a car rental company called Streetcar who let me hire a car at the end of the street, for a minimum of 30 minutes for just £3. Which is extremely efficient, useful, and has worked out very very well for me.
So inevitably, capitalism and globalisation had to come in and ruin it all for me. To whit, American company Zipcar went and bought Streetcar, which was doing perfectly well all by itself.
To begin with, they were doing very well. Zipcar went all American in the merger process, producing glossy websites and letters detailing the merger procedure and what would happen next, reassuring us all and giving us lots of glossy if useless information (so I can hire a car at two specific streets in Cleveland, USA if I want to. Great) before the switchover happened.
Then the switchover happened, and two rather annoying things transpired:
- I can no longer hire cars by the half-hour. The minimum rental period is now one hour, which makes hiring a car to collect a pizza a bit of an economical non-starter.
- The UK website at zipcar.co.uk keeps quoting the American contact number. And I can’t really call a 1-888 number from my British landline without incurring a significant cost.
- When I ask to hire a car, it shows me all the cars that are available across London. Not exactly handy if I don’t feel like traipsing all the way to South London to pick up a car.
Oh, and can I find a way of complaining about all these changes? Nope!
Can a TV Powerdown unit ruin your television?
Oct 20th
A TV Intelliplug
Unfortunately, when I applied it to my TV, it didn’t quite work. And ever since then (even with the unit removed), the TV has been slow to react from standby. It’ll try to flicker to life, but then give up – like a baby trying to sit himself up. It’ll try and try again, and finally manage to flicker to life properly a few minutes later. We’ve had to call a TV Repair man in.
Is it possible that such a unit could have done some damage to my LCD TV?
What the US version of Top Gear says about America…
Oct 18th
So the BBC are finally airing the US edition(s) of Top Gear, and watching it is quite instructive about the perceived difference between our two nations.
On the plus side, it’s definitely got higher production values, and the image looks better – and it’s not as if the UK version was done on a shoestring. This could be down to better camerawork and a higher budget – or simply because the sun shines for longer in the US.
On the minus side, Major Exposition is at home here. The presenters seem to have an incessant need to explain EVERYTHING. Right down to The Stig – when the whole point of The Stig is that he isn’t explained, he’s just there. A mystery wrapped in a drivers’ uniform. Explaining that he’s an enigma somewhat undermines the whole point of him being an enigma. They have to explain what the Big Star, Small Car segment is all about. And when the big stars are racing around the track, they include a helpful diagram of where the star is on the track for … what good reason?
To be fair, I’m comparing a mature TV show against another show on its debut episode. And on the plus side, there seem to be far more Chinese/Asian people in the audience in the US version than the UK one… Oh, and the Stig is animated in the US version. Which is kinda cool.
A website for the future that uses the past…
Oct 14th
I wonder what was going through these web designers when they were asked to create a support site for GCSE Computing Students.
Because they came up with a web design that would have been cutting-edge in 1999… It has animated spinning gifs, tiled backgrounds, thick buttons, thick headers and all-red text. They really should have thrown in flashing text and a scrolling banner to make it the ultimate homage.
New Portal 2 comic!
Sep 30th
So the news is out that Valve has released the third volume in their soundtrack to the best game of 2011, Portal 2.
But niftily, if you go to the music download page, there’s a hidden link there that takes you to a cool all-new comic set in the world of Aperture Laboratories…
Oh, and new levels to be released – for free – on Wednesday. *rubs hands in glee*