Went into Newcastle yesterday for a couple of things and was struck by - a) the abundance of small shops with ironic names, and b) the rate of urban renewal taking place just about everywhere.
Exhibit A. The imprint of an old building juxtaposed against a modern horror.
New buildings are springing up all over the place, mainly being of the expensive penthouse variety. Meanwhile the Starbucks/Subway/O’Brien’s of this world are moving in on their prey to conquer the high-street (N.B. if anyone knows could you tell me what actually delineates an Irish sandwich from any other sandwich?). It’s a sad state of affairs really.
Exhibit B. Happy Travel - supporting “European Car Free Day”!
There is still room for the local retailer but week-by-week, day-by-day they slowly disappear and are replaced by generics (my new phrase for American-owned chains). I guess if we took it to extremes there would no longer be any need to ever visit different cities etc because they’d all be the same!
Exhibit C. Space. Lots of it.
I guess Newcastle wasn’t ready for the likes of ‘Space’, a rather swish interior design outlet. To my mind the name was a self-fulfilling prophesy as today thats all it is! Perhaps they should have re-located to the new “Baltic Quay” development just down the road, purpose built for trendy young people with too much money. The literature on their web-site cracks me up, e.g.:
“With a trend toward people wanting to live and socialise in the same area, Baltic Quay provides a cosmopolitan approach to 24-7 living with a residential complex complemented by an exclusive mix of bars, cafes, restaurants and a late night multi entertainment venue all within one space.”
Do these people ever sleep? I watched some program on TV a while back where they predicted in the future we won’t have to sleep because we’ll be able to take some pill which does pretty much the same thing. I can’t think of anything worse.
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
ShareThis
What happens when you take a bunch of hardcore Trek fans and too much spare time? You go and recreate the original series, only with worse acting and some questionable special effects - obvious really! Fans never fail to amaze me with their devotion to a particular film/tv series. For a production studio a cult following is the best they can ever hope for as we’ve seen with the likes of Star Wars, The Matrix, The X Files and so on. Fan films are rife on the net - most are unfortunately pretty terrible but therein lies their entertainment value. Hit the pic below if you feel so inclined!
At heart I’m a bit of a gadget freak. I love cool stuff which looks good and does something useful - my Apple PowerBook G4 12 would be a perfect example of this - how do they manage to pack so much functionality into such a small form factor? When it comes to mobile phones mine is now a little dated (its a Samsung A300) but it still does the basic job it was designed for although it suffered a nasty bang last summer and has a crack down the front screen. I was having a little look at new ones yesterday and am very tempted by the Sony-Ericsson T630 - its got a nice 65,536 colors TFT screen, a camera and bluetooth wireless capabilities (handy for talking to the PB).
Maybe I’m a sucker for expensive consumer electronics but the thought of being able to blog on-the-go as it were is appealing? If you’ve had any experience of using this phone please comment! If you’re into gadgets then you may like to check out gizmodo.com.
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
ShareThis
Its been a fairly quiet day - I got up late this morning and did a bit of work on my project till mid afternoon then went for a short walk over to the other side of Durham.
I got a couple of nice photos overlooking the city though the sun was in a bit of an awkward position so it was difficult to avoid lens flair.
Time for a quick rant - what is it with the current trend for extremely tacky looking England flags hanging off the side of peoples cars right now?? I understand the whole Euro 2004 business but a) we’re in England and hence its fairly safe to assume that the majority of people will be supporting England so what are you trying to prove with them? b) the old ‘patiotism’ argument just doesn’t wash any more because there isn’t much left to be patriotic about (especially not as far as football and it’s supporters are concerned). It all stinks of Chav scum to me! (If you have no idea what a ‘Chav’ is then click the link). If I’m wrong then tell me!
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
ShareThis
With the publication of the yearly module pass lists this morning I was preparing myself for the worst, especially when it came to logic/formal grammars. Somehow though I’ve managed to pass! I went back three times to the list just to check that it was true but even now it still hasn’t really sunk in but I’m hugely relieved. Now I don’t have to get stressed this summer and can just get on with work - I’ll be in the Information Systems dept. at Archant again which should be fun.
Just time for a stupid little quiz… which MegaTokyo character are you?
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
ShareThis
Having predicted only yesterday that we would soon see a release candidate of Slackware 10 today I was vindicated with just that! As ever the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle has been maintained and it’s a top grade distribution.
Also out today is a new kernel - 2.6.7. A while back I found a cool little shell script called ketchup which automates the process of patching from one version of the Linux kernel to another. It caches the various patches, only downloading what’s required to get you to the version you specify and more importantly saves you a lot of time and hassle! If you’re interested take a look at this article here which explains how to use it.
Having returned to my house in Durham today I was pleased to see that the rose I thought I had killed by over-zealous pruning had blossomed - its a nice addition to all the weeds!
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
ShareThis
Recent Comments