Category: Comment

The new Mac propaganda featuring the over-rated Mitchell & Webb (as over rated as Little Britain, at any rate), seem to have hit a raw nerve with Charlie Brooker.

It’s standard Apple faire, the advertising; touting the PC as dull and boring, while the Mac is fun and creative. Aside from the fact you can run similar applications on each, and you can actually upgrade a PC without it costing a fortune, or being locked to a sole manufacturer who can turn around and tell you they don’t support that model any longer.

Mac users seem to think that advocating PC’s is giving unconditional love to MicroSoft, which is far from the case. But then, they also seem to think that PC’s crash all the time and you cant do anything creative on them. I guess it takes a certain type of mind to buy into the Apple propaganda so completely. By that logic I can imagine that Apple will persist with the misinformation until they’ve assimilated everyone susceptible to that form of marketing.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; If you have focus on the faults of another product to market your own product then I’m going to assume that yours doesn’t have much going for it.

Well, after looking at what was available off the shelf, I decided to replace the site that I’ve honed over the last seven years with one powered by WordPress.

The deciding factor was that I could import all of my old content, by way of writing an export script to extract and format the content in a form that WordPress could consume. Once that was done, the perks of having a full blown content management and publishing system behind the scenes made it an easy choice to make.

I’m still working on the theme for the site – that and integrating all my old content properly. Hopefully I’ll have everything working the way I like it soon enough.

Viva la revolution!

I didn’t think I’d manage it this long into 2007, but here we are 18 days in and I haven’t managed to hear Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. For someone who channel hops on the car radio every time an advert comes on, that’s a damn impressive streak.

I’ve heard the over rated piece of crap so many bloody times since Freddie Mercury joined the choir unseen that I’m sure I could avoid it for five years and I’d still feel saturated by it. I am actually planning a two year Bohemian Rhapsody hiatus, but knowing that at any given moment, somewhere in the world, that fucking song is playing means that avoiding it for a month, let alone a year, is a major challenge.

What really pisses me off about Bohemian Rhapsody is the avoidance by association of other Queen songs, some of which I’m quite fond of. A Kind of Magic, One Vision, I Want It All, and the oft played I Want to Break Free are all far more worthy of my listening time than that wretched operatic train wreck that even a cranial enema couldn’t now flush from my head.

I’m going to be strict about it, too, and count anything longer than four seconds as a listen. So, should I hear any more than, say, “Mamaaaaa, just kill…” then that counts. If I accidentally hear one of the operatic parts then I’m cutting the limit to three seconds, because my reflexes should really be fast enough to switch off much beyond a single “scaramouch” or “fandango”.

However, “Any way the wind blows…” does not count as a listen – hearing that counts as a triumph because it means I fortuitously managed to avoid the five minutes and forty five seconds of nausea that preceed it.

Game on.