Day: September 30, 2017

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Kingsman: The Golden Circle

I spent a lovely Saturday afternoon on a slightly wobbly chair in Rochester cinema watching the latest Kingsman movie: The Golden Circle. The tide was about halfway. I’m not sure if it was coming in or leaving. This morning on my run it looked as though it was coming in. Have just used the UK Hyographic Office Tide Predictor.

Rochester Tide
Rochester Tide

That picture shows how little I know or perhaps I just can’t remember a lot about the state of the river when I see it! I’m not really sure when this whole tide-cinema thing started. I know I was attempting to indicate the time of day that I went to the cinema but I can’t remember why I wanted to be so obscure.

I also rated this film on IMDB, please read this communication about the ratings system. I then “share” my scoring with twitter and those who follow me there:

I should probably explain what I liked about the movie. Well, it’s a good action comedy romp around the world. I laughed and found the whole film an enjoyable experience. There’s a lot of blood and gory ways to die. But then there are great actors who all look like they are enjoying themselves.

I actually wrote some notes down at the end of the film as I was sure I’d forget some things. I usually try and hold on to my snarky comments as I drive home ready to type this, but there were some nice touches through the film that made me smile.

  • I liked the dogs’ eyes and how they looked modelled on Cylons and KITT.
  • Elton John was actually pretty awesome.
  • The graphic matches from scene to scene were lovely.
  • Above the Kingsman shop there was a Blue Plaque to a physicist.
  • Jeff Bridges’ character isms when smelling or tasting the whiskey were really funny while subtle.

Tomorrow I am heading into town and if I have time, I’m off to see the blue plaque.

Richard Bright blue plaque.jpg
By Gareth E Kegg – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

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If You Want Blood You’ve Got It [live] – AC/DC

Holy Shit!

This album has been with me throughout most of my life and I still rate it as one of the best albums I have ever heard. Blow Up Your Video came out in 1988 and the singles were released before then in the wonder-year of 1987. so, you love AC/DC and start looking up old albums. Then, the excitement that there are thirteen albums is palpable.

This is a best of the first few albums, and it fucking rocks. They hadn’t even released Highway To Hell yet and all the songs on here rock.

This album has healed me emotionally when I have felt broken. It has calmed me when I have been un-calm and it has restored me to who I am on many occasion. SR once told me to go and listen to “If You Want Blood”, it’ll make you happier. That was somewhere in the early 90s and I hadn’t realised its effect was so obvious.

I had to re-purchase this on music cassette because I had listened to my first version of this so many times the tape had stretched in places and it made the music sound wrong.

I’ve bought this on CD since. And then I ripped that to save onto an MP3 player. Then I used the CD to rip to a higher specification and it is now on the NAS Drive.

After you’ve listened to this a lot you can hear the smiles in the band, you recognise every note, you can imagine where they are on stage and what they are doing there.

For many years I had only seen the front of this album, the rear cover wasn’t part of the tape version I had. When I saw the back cover I wasn’t disappointed.

Front Cover
Front Cover
Back Cover
Back Cover

I dare you to find a song on this album that can be considered weak. I dare you.

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Setting Up

I have spent part of the last few days setting up my new mobile phone so that all the music is on it and that it works how I want it to work. Given that this is an Apple phone and most of my stuff is backed up to the cloud moving stuff to a new phone is remarkably simple.

In the old days you learnt how the new phone worked by entering all the contact details manually and playing around in the settings menu. Now all you do is enter your cloud details and wait. All the settings transfer over along with contacts and ringtones. While this is an improvement and people now have way too much data the requires transfer it is also a shame as it means most people don’t mess around in the settings menu.

When people ask me how to make a phone or device do a particular thing I often ask “Have you messed around in the settings menu?”. The reply is often “no”. People expect everything to work correctly out of the box and don’t understand how to tweak things or even that perhaps they should tweak things.

The main contents I needed to transfer to the new phone was music. Now, I suspect that within five years this won’t be necessary at all as I will stream all the music that I want. But that time is not yet so I keep “hard” versions of a lot of my music. I could use iTunes to transfer music. However, iTunes hates me. Or it hates my PC. Or it’s just shit. I’m not sure which it is but iTunes often freezes on the PC, fucks up the iPhone or just deletes the entire music content on the phone. I haven’t used iTunes to back up my phone for a few years now and I don’t use it to transfer music. I do use iTunes to import music onto the NAS and also create playlists and keep the folder contents organised to some degree. I have been frustrated with the way that iTunes hasn’t been consistent with the folder structure it uses and so I often delete the xml library file, move the folders around and then get iTunes to scan for new music.

A list of music that is contained within the iTunes folder is on this page: My Music. It isn’t a list of all music on the NAS because there’s also kids stuff, audiobooks, and stuff I rarely play.

I have used CopyTrans to move the music onto the new phone. It’s way more useful than iTunes and far more predictable.

I have used CopyTrans in the past to keep text messages and back those up but I rarely do that now, it’s not needed.

CopyTrans doesn’t hurt the PC in the same was iTunes does. It is a positive experience and well worth looking into if you find that iTunes is unpredictable and hard work on your PC. I have transferred around 7000 songs onto the new iPhone in a few hours. Job done. I’m a happy chap.

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