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Great pop tune from the UK – Sexy in Latin by Little Man Tate. I love the lyrics and Mark will no doubt appreciate the chick in the video.

Available on iTunes if you are so inclined. I know I was.

You can’t beat the big window shopping experience that is Fry’s but it’s also dangerous. Take tonight: I went just to look around, enjoy the ambience etc and find they are selling a 250Gb external hard drive for $60 after rebate. Now I don’t really need one, but it’s $60. For 250Gb. Yeah, $60. So I bought it.

Got two complaints about the iPod:

1. When I say play all songs by artist X, I want all the songs involving said artist not just the ones in which artist X is solo. For instance the Robbie Williams Swing When You’re Winning album is largely duets but if I choose Artists then Robbie then that album I only get the solo songs. Not what I want.
2. I want the new Search feature from the latest iPod models. I am not going to shell out more $$$ on a new model just to get that feature. Perhaps if I could get more adept at getting the “fast forward” feature up when scrolling through the albums/artists list it wouldn’t be so bad but I don’t seem to do it right and end up getting a sore finger when trying to get to Working Week.

The Plot Turn of the century magicians take rivalry and revenge a bit too far.

Stars Hugh Jackman; Christian Bale; Michael Caine; Scarlett Johansson. David Bowie was in it and I didn’t even notice it was him!

Mini Review I hadn’t heard of this film, buying it for its highly thought-of Blu-ray transfer, but I am glad I did. I was a little confused at the beginning, not being able to get straight which magician was which (maybe a little less wine next time) but the story unfolds steadily building up to a classic twist ending. If you liked Memento, you’ll love this one too. Indeed, about 30 minutes after the movie was over I had a couple of “of course” moments as I realised the significance of things I had overlooked. Scarlett Johansson provides ample eye candy, Michael “my name is Michael Caine” is always perfect as the refined English gent, and the two stars do a great job as the scheming illusionists.

Picture This is the fourth Blu-ray movie I’ve watched. I’m not watching on 1080p, only lowly 720p, so am maybe missing out but the picture was crystal clear and some of the vistas in Italy were outstanding, as was the cinematography when in London. I read that this is one of the best high-def pictures out there and I have no problem believing it.

Audio I made a mistake and did not choose the uncompressed 5.1 PCM soundtrack, but the regular Dolby Digital 5.1 was fine. Its not a movie with amazing sound effects, rather the soundtrack is unobtrusive. At times we could not understand some spoken conversations but this happens with other movies when the sound is only from the front centre speaker.

Rating A definite 5 out of 5.

Two of my least favourite people on the telly but funny to watch. I’m tempted to say the whole thing was scripted, though.

On March 19th I blogged that my citizenship application was under way. Yesterday my application was returned to me due to insufficient postage coupled with a note that “the receiver declined to pay the additional postage”. With all the money thats been spent with them on my behalf, its a bit cheap of the INS not to pony up the 33c!

Of course, it could have been worse – the letter could have been returned by faceless goons in the middle of the night and stamped “return to sender” on me. I know you’ll all be relieved to hear that I am still in the country and the paperwork has been returned with more stamps.

Go to this link at BestBuy.com and order 4 $15 iTunes gift cards, and only pay for three of them. Better still, shipping is free and (in CA at least) no tax to pay!

Too bad I don’t know anyone who just bought a new iPod and has a birthday coming up.

“Get yourself another tasty helping, as long as you are in possession of the requisite spondulicks.” Salman Rushdie; The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Picador Books; 2000.

This word just came out yesterday at work, or rather it’s shorter form sponds did. I don’t think I’ve used the word in years but it seemed appropriate at the time. Of course one reason for not using it is a general shortage of spondulicks, hard to talk about what you don’t have.

Ok, if you’re really too lazy to go google yourself…. it’s a (popular?) British slang for money, cash, moola, etc…

Well, not quite, but last week version 1.6 of the PS3 firmware trickled out to users and contained the infamous Folding@home application. If you’ve not heard of it, basically it adds your machine to a huge network of computers each running a piece of a simulation that in some way it is hoped will contribute to cures for diseases. The simulations are so huge that it could never be done with just one machine, or even one institution, but perhaps with millions around the world…

Anyway, if you have a PS3 you can enable it to run some folding of its own during its idle moments and therefore feel good about yourself. The interesting thing is the power of the beast as these figures show:

Now, many of the Windows machines are probably old pieces of junk but the difference between PS3 and Windows performance is huge. Its also beating out the Macs pretty good, too.