Unleashed

A "higher up" at work has decided to bring me along to a client meeting tomorrow. This is because he wanted a "tech" person in the meeting, which puts me under quite a bit of pressure to finally know what I'm talking about. I'm not quite sure what to expect, as I'm a bit nervous about finally dealing with "real" business people that aren't as immature as I am. All I can imagine is a load of large, mean looking people in pinstripe suits, smoking expensive cigars and all wearing monocles. Like 'Dragon's Den' or Fatcat from 'Rescue Rangers'.

Edit: I can't spell.

Football & Fun

If I was a betting man, I'd have put money on Holland making it to the final, and England going out in the quarters. Good thing I'm not a betting man.

We had a special suprise birthday party for Mum on saturday with lots of friends down at the Hare & Hounds. Earlier in the day was the Trooping of the Colour, which since it fell on my birthday, was a nice little touch. We watched the Bullseye marathon yesterday afternoon, and it's so much fun to see how amatuer it comes across now. It's fun to have a laugh with it, but I think it adds lots of character. The contestants all seemed like real people and due to the lack of any big budget sets and pyrotechnics, the show has a very warm feeling. As Mum pointed out, he says "if you all remember" whereas modern game show hosts speak to us as if we're one person, not an audience. Probably some sort of crowd psychology going on there.

Throwback

I just hooked up my N64 to the big screen television to see how badly it would look. With some major adjustments, the brightness mostly, I managed to get it working reasonably well. The whole reason I still hold on to my old CRT televisions is for old games and old tapes.

You can see why the old VHS tapes do not work as well on modern flat panel TVs. These modern sets are designed with the same philosophy as a computer monitor, which needs to get every pixel, and return it at the precise, right spot. Since old videos, old games, and poor quality television signals are not all high resolution feeds, the television needs to think about how it's going to stretch out the picture, and what it's going to use to fill in the gaps. Older televisions dealt almost exclusively with these lower resolution signals, and thus could blur the edges and it all falls together nicely.

All this thinking on the part of the new television takes time as well, causing a delay of several milliseconds when playing games. You maybe won't notice it at first, but if you're playing a game you know inside and out, you'll spot it instantly, and in the worst cases, it can render a game unplayable.

There, now you can't say I never taught you anything by coming to this blog!

Diamond Jubilee

If you're in England, you can't have missed that this has been the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. There was a Thames Boat Parade and a concert in front of Buckingham Palace. It was all very impressive despite the rain which, thankfully, stopped during the concert so everyone could hear just how badly Paul McCartney's has aged. Tom Jones seems to be doing fine, so maybe it's all the weird vegan food he enjoys.

I think, coverage wise, ITV completely outshone the BBC. Philip Schofield is in a different league to Huw Edwards, who always looks so out of place a nervous. Pip does it all so effortlessly, combining a relaxed atmosphere with old fashioned professionalism. Just as he was in 1985, he remains a joy to watch.