little bits of everything

We watched Back to the Future as a family at the weekend. It's one of my top ten films, so I was curious to see what the boys thought. They enjoyed it, and I enjoyed too another time, even though I know the plot well. Three things struck me: The mention of Libyan terrorists was strangely topical. George McFly - Marty's Dad - is a bit like the current Doctor Who. I don't know if Matt Smith has consciously acted like him. Doc Brown travelled 30 years into the future at the end of the film, that's 2015 - so not so far away.

Two vaguely related thoughts: In real life everything is dark until you add light. Photographers, whether still or motion picture, worry about light a lot because it makes such a difference to the picture(s) they are taking. With CGI making a pixel light or dark is just a number. Making light look like the real world is hard. It's easy to create a 3D image. It's hard to make the software light it well. Getting surface texture right is part of it, because part of the way you perceive texture is because the way light falls on parts of the surface that are only small distances apart. Toy Story worked well because the characters were mostly plastic toys which have a very predictable texture. Since the first film there have been a few films based on computer games, but they haven't been brilliant because of the uncanny valley effect. Despite the abundance of CGI cartoons are still popular, probably because they aren't realistic. However when I watch Storkhawks I can see...

Actually "rant" is probably a bit strong. I'm mildly annoyed by TV programmes that use a wide variety of small snippets of music throughout. I much prefer the music to be used over and over again as Grand Designs  and The Apprentice  do. Sometimes they use pieces they haven't before, but they very much fit into the pattern of the regular music. In particular, the music they play when the contestants are about to go into the boardroom must invoke a pavlovian response for regular viewers. I do appreciate that there must be people who spend a lot of time picking out the music for the programmes, but the two things in particular that annoy me are - I hear a good song, and I only get a bit of it - there's less of an identity to the programme, like a cheese and chocolate drop sandwich On a tangential note, the BBC have researched the fact that people often complain that the background music is too loud. Their conclusion  is "Reducing the music by just one poi...

I have eleven blog posts in draft waiting to be written. Here are the titles, what should I finish off and publish? Steampunk, Tron, Spring Timeshifted life rant on incidental music on tv How can people stop being at the mercy of discussion board hosters? Tell me the major stuff about science Songwriters - the unsung hero Perfection in the digital world What if children applied Health and Safety to their play? New words for fans Welsh Holiday Sometimes computers are too quick. Really? Yes.

You know you're old when they make a programme about your childhood. I watched Micro Men on BBC4 last night, about the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry as they developed their home computers. Our school got a ZX80 and then a ZX81 and we got a Spectrum at home (Sinclair's machines). We also got a BBC computer (made by Curry's Acorn company) at our school. So these machines were part of my childhood. I heard names I hadn't heard for a long time like Sinclair QL, Dragon, Oric and BBC Master. Towards the end they sit in a pub and speculate what it would have been like if they'd worked together, however I think the home computer market may still have dried up. Someone's probably done the analysis, but I guess consoles took over from these computers for games, and PCs for "serious" stuff. One of my sons got a T-shirt yesterday that said "retro gamer" with a picture of a cassette tape on it. The tape also said 2kB. One of them a...

Because Russel Davies doesn't have comments on his blog I'm encouraged (I'm not saying forced) to write a blog entry rather than post a comment. Here's an idea that's relevant to his post on a second screen , that I would have put on backstage.bbc.co.uk (RIP): When watching recorded TV you can't watch the twitter stream unless someone came up with a website that would "record" tweets related to a particular programme, and then replay them when you were watching it, so you can feel part of the virtual audience.

My dad got me into the habit of reading The Guardian newspaper as he subscribed when I was a child (though he's since moved to the Times). I've stopped reading it at lunchtimes these days so I've started listening to their podcasts. The Guardian is a bit like Sun used to be, before they were taken over by Oracle, in that they look at the way the internet is going and then start giving stuff away. They've released APIs for their content so people can do things like today's Guardian . Whilst all this free stuff is great (e.g. Spotify) my worry is that people might go out of business because they haven't figure out a way of getting it to pay and then you stop getting the service. I think it's a while before we see how things pan out in the newpaper and music businesses, but it's interesting to watch it unfold. Photo from iamthestig2 .