Top, top gear...

I hope you saw Top Gear tonight - Billie Piper was the "star in a reasonably priced car". Now I haven't seen her interviewed before, so I was more than pleasantly surprised. Not only did she come across beautifully (so well spoken, and so far removed from the vowel-mangling character she portrayed in Doctor Who), she seemed intelligent, funny and engaging. Top gear? Top girl!

Blood moon and enlightenment

Did anyone else see the lunar eclipse last night? Please say it wasn't just me standing outside freezing my proverbials off to watch the Moon turn red. In case you're wondering what causes this phenomenon, the picture to the left kind of explains it - the Moon falls into the Earth's shadow, and is only lit by the frequencies of light that can skip through the edge of the Earth's atmosphere. Those frequencies are at the red end of the spectrum, so the Moon takes on a reddish-orange hue, as can be seen in the photo to the right. Well I think that's right - it sounds plausible anyway. It might not have quite the wow factor of a solar eclipse but it was pretty impressive nonetheless, and certainly worth standing out in the cold for. Some of the people I was stood watching with remarked that you could quite understand why people in days gone by worshipped moons and stars, and how they would view this as a sign of an angry god. How they chuckled at this, and patted themselves on the back for being so enlightened. Sure, worshipping celestial bodies is patently ridiculous... but no-one thought to ask why it is any more ridiculous than worshipping an omnipotent, omnipresent being who apparently created the world and everything in it in six days? Who's enlightened now?

More on Saturn 3...

Just a couple of days ago, I rambled for a bit about the relative merits of Saturn 3, a British science fiction film made in 1980, starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel. I even went so far as to speculate that if it were remade with modern effects and a more appropriate cast it would be a huge hit, rather than the flop it turned out to be all those years ago.

Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that a remake actually is being discussed, with director James Cameron at the helm. There's even talk of the Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, providing the voice of Hector, the robot with more than a few screws loose. This is all quite promising - I enjoyed Cameron's Aliens (though I preferred the Ridley Scott-directed original) and I like all three Terminator films for wildly different reasons (before you write in, I know Cameron only directed the first two). I worry though that the dark themes at the heart of the original Saturn 3 - insecure and unrequited love, getting old, mental illness, loss and isolation - will not be preserved. All the more reason to seek out the original before it gets buried beneath the Hollywood behemoth - you can find it here.

Saturn 3

Saturn 3 was a British science fiction film made in 1980 in a flagrant attempt to jump on the Star Wars/Alien bandwagon. Despite its Britishness (low budget, poor effects) it boasted three bona-fide Hollywood stars in the shape of Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel. Here are some other facts you might not know about Saturn 3:

• At the time it was the only place you could get a glimpse of Farrah Fawcett naked, even if only for a second (this was long before career desperation brought about ill-advised Playboy shoots).
• The film's screenplay was written by a certain Martin Amis, later to find fame as a serious novelist and author of The Rachel Papers, London Fields and more. Whether Steve Gallacher, author of the film tie-in book of Saturn 3, is a nom de plume of Mr Amis, who knows?
• Inexplicably, Harvey Keitel's dialogue is dubbed by someone called Roy Dotrice.

So why am I writing about such an obscure film? Because it belongs to a select band of science fiction films that have been criminally overlooked (see also Logan's Run, Westworld, Capricorn One, Silent Running and, more recently, Event Horizon). Just because a "sci-fi" film has bad special effects (and occasionally laughable dialogue, in the case of Saturn 3) doesn't mean it's a bad film. Imagine "3" being reshot, let's say by a somehow-resurrected Stanley Kubrick, with decent CGI effects instead of wobbly models made out of leftover Airfix. Now let's cast Pierce Brosnan as our ageing hero, Keira Knightley as his much younger love interest and, let's say, Clive Owen as the menacing interloper with a psychotic giant cyborg for a friend. Find some decent dialogue from somewhere instead of the Amis corn, submit to the inevitable tie-in PlayStation game and you've got a blockbuster... but none of that is going to happen, so instead look at the late-night listings of the more obscure satellite and Freeview channels, or in the bargain bins of your friendly neighbourhood DVD store. If you stumble across Saturn 3 in either of those places, watch it, you're in for 88 minutes or so of interesting film.

And even if you don't like it, you get to see a young Farrah Fawcett with her top off...

The danger of whim

There's an old saying: act in haste, repent at leisure. As you might have guessed from the fact that it has become an "old saying" there is a lot of truth in those simple words. Because, my friend, whims can be dangerous, oh yes.

You see, it doesn't matter how good an idea seemed at the time, or how good your intentions were, or how much you saw things going differently in your head. The tragedy is that, more often that not, actions carried out on a whim, particularly when that whim occurs late at night and after way too many beers, by which time the moral compass is utterly demagnetised and the foot has come off your mental brake, it's those actions that you later desperately wish you could undo. Of course you cannot and, like me, you are left with no choice but to face up to the consequences, however unpleasant.

Those of you who have read this blog before might be remembering some posts from this time last year and hypothesising that this "whims are bad" rant is somehow related to Valentine's day. Well you might think that - I couldn't possibly comment.

The trouble with ID cards

Be afraid, be very afraid... for identity cards are coming to a United Kingdom near you!

Yes, unless something quite dramatic happens in the corridors of power, like Labour losing the next election, it seems that ID cards for every individual in this "great" nation of ours are inevitable... indeed, the first cards are due to be issued in 2008, although being a government-led, IT-based project the actual implementation date will almost certainly be somewhat later. Whatever the timescale, I have a problem with ID cards; it's not the civil liberties argument concerning Orwellian powers monitoring us and knowing our every deed (although if you want to find out more about the impact of an ID card on you I can recommend no2id.net). It's just that I'm concerned about the practical application of the scheme, how secure it might be (or not) and how much the whole thing is going to cost.

Here are some quotes that should concern you if you live in the UK:

"I give it six months before someone replicates it perfectly. Everything you need to clone an identity is in one place." Frank Abagnale, former identity thief and subject of the film Catch Me If You Can, on the UK ID card scheme.

"It would not be realistic to rigorously test everything before the scheme goes live." The Home Office, in a report on ID cards.

So what do these quotes suggest? Well, on their own, not too much, I admit. But if you factor in the fact that the planned use of iris recognition biometrics in the cards has been scrapped because of cost and technical uncertainties (more), it starts to look, to me at least, like a scheme that is not as secure or robust as it could be, and that further corners might be cut as project costs spiral, to the extent that the cards themselves could end up little more than a fraudster's dream. And of course, government IT projects are notoriously poorly managed, with phenomenal cost and time over-runs, the regional fire service control system project being the latest in a long line of such disastrous undertakings (more).

Now let's leave the security and cost concerns aside for a second - I know that's not easy, it's like trying to ignore a couple of elephants in the corner of your living room - but why do we even need such a card? Proof of identity, maybe? Err, my passport and/or driving licence seem to tick those boxes, thank you. Unique person-identifying reference number? Well I already have one of those too - my National Insurance number.

The more I think of it (and it's not like I lay awake at night pondering identity cards, I promise), the more this just seems like someone had an idea which, without being thought through or properly costed, got so far through the machinery of government that it cannot now be discarded without bLiar and others losing face. I can almost hear the words "it seemed a good idea at the time." And for all phoney Tony's protestations that there will no Big Brother-style "super database" containing everything the government knows about everybody (more), what else is going to underpin an ID card system if not a huge database?

So we don't need it, it's not going to be secure, it's going to cost British taxpayers (you and me!) an arm and a leg, it has Orwellian overtones and it'll be yet another card to cram in our already-overstuffed wallets (between your Tesco Clubcard and that cheaply-laminated sports club membership one). If the great and the good thought the public deserved a referendum on the subject, I would urge you to vote against it. As it is, just be prepared to grin and bear it... and don't say I didn't warn you.

There's no accounting for taste

Whilst trawling the web to identify a decent RAM upgrade, I happened across a blog written by a guy who, it transpires, has the same laptop as me. As is common, I found this serendipitously stumbled-upon website to be a much more interesting read than many of the sites I had deliberately gone looking for. Unusually for a blog it was consistently amusing and (gasp) showed at least several instances of semi-original thought. Blimey, I thought, this is maybe good enough to warrant a recommendation in my humble blog. Except then I read his précis of the gigs he'd been to in the last year, in which he described Rancid as "incredible" and Morrissey as "awful"...

I guess there's simply no accounting for taste. I do commend his choice of laptops though...

Why are there no beautiful women in IT?

Okay, so it's hardly the riddle of the Sphinx, I know, but it's a valid question. Why are there no beautiful women working in the field of IT? Or are there? Certainly they are few and far between. In a computing career now in its thirteenth year, I can honestly say that I can count the number of women working in IT that I have found genuinely attractive on the fingers of one hand, and that's only by using the broadest definition of IT... of those five, one was a saleswoman, two were more data management than IT per sé, one was the IT department's secretary, and the fifth was pretty rather than beautiful but is included, to make up the numbers, on the basis that she had a nice personality, doe-like brown eyes and a spectacular pair of, ahem, routers...

So where are the beauties in IT? The law of averages suggests that there must be at least some. Naturally I seem to have eluded all but five of them. If anyone would like to suggest themselves, or a colleague, as a computing fox, the missing honey in the IS/IT world, then please do use comments to send a nomination... but I suspect I won't get many candidates. There are, of course, two reasons for this: firstly, there are no beautiful women in IT; secondly, no-one reads this 'blog.

The year of regret

As the end of the year draws near, thoughts inevitably take a reflective turn as the world and his wife look back on the last twelve months. And what a year it has been, undoubtedly, for some. Not me though. Suffice to say that 2006 has been Mister P's year of regret.

Actually, that's not entirely true. January was okay. This feeling even crept in February, for the first week or so... but since then it has been an unbroken chain of regret. Regret that I did not seize a chance of some happiness, when it was dangling right there in front of me. Regret that, despite missing the chance of happiness, I still haven't bitten the bullet and put and end to the cause of unhappiness, because I don't have the guts to hurt someone's feelings. Regret that my personal life, though never a giddy social whirl, has changed from generally happy and fulfilling to something you might find embedded in the ice at the back of an old freezer. Regret that I live so far (not actually that far but far enough, if you know what I mean) from friends and family. Regret that things have gotten so bad that the highlight of my week, by an enormous margin, is a weekly game of casual five-a-side football with some work colleagues. Regret...

Life is hard.

Genuine Klass... so why this?

Myleene Klass shot to fame as a result of Pop Stars, one of the first reality TV shows in the UK to be really popular, and was a member of the "end product" group, the unfortunately monickered Hear'Say (don't forget the all-important apostrophe). After their demise, she took some time out to do a degree in Astronomy, before returning to the limelight with an album of classical music (she is a classically trained pianist) and an increasing amount of television presenting work. She's clearly intelligent, multi-talented and, dare I say it, beautiful too... so what on earth is she doing on the current series of reality TV dross, I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! Is it some sort of vicious televisual circle? Come on Myleene (insert your own Dexy's Midnight Runners joke here), you can do better than this!

Of course, she is very fit (and not just in the cardio-vascular sense) and viewers have already seen Miss Klass showering under a waterfall in a tiny white bikini, so maybe I should just stop complaining...