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...

The World Wide Web. Good, isn't it?

I haven't felt too inspired to write much of late, undoubtedly to the relief of anyone who has ever read this blog before. I have spent a lot of time on the Internet though, and have stumbled across some sites that I would like to refer you to. These are they:

• ChromeWaves.net - Frank lives near Toronto and works as a web developer. So far, so un-noteworthy. However, he is also passionate about music and writes this site to demonstrate that passion, reviewing new releases and gigs, and sharing his thoughts on all things guitar-based indie-shaped. Best of all is his "MP3 of the Week" page, which features an artist covering another artist. As an example of Frank's fine taste, just the other week he was offering Billy Bragg covering Bob Dylan in downloadable form. I'm not sure of the legality of this page, but Frank cheerily offers to take down any MP3 that offends the copyright holder, which is nice. Anyway, Frank has good musical taste, in my view, and his site can only enrich your musical life. Go and visit it.... now! Well, after you've finished reading this, at least...
• AskOxford.com's FAQ - Oxford are world-renowned for their dictionaries, many of which are very expensive... so it's nice of them to publish these FAQ free to all and sundry. Uncertain on the use of apostrophe-S? Not sure when to use "fewer" or "less"? Want to know what comes after once, twice, thrice? All these questions and more are answered in clear, yet detailed, fashion. Seeing how the English language is increasingly distorted and misused all around us, this linguistic reference makes salient and informative reading. As the Reader's Digest says, "it pays to enrich your word power."
• PeopleSketch - poor old Talk Talk. Their recent "free broadband for ever" promo has backfired spectacularly, as they simply cannot meet the demand. Forget that then, and remember instead their TV advertisements that showed aerial shots of people making shapes by standing in patterns. You know, phones, smiley faces, that kind of thing. Well now you can do it for yourself, courtesy of PeopleSketch - you simply doodle a line drawing of whatever you like (try to keep it clean, people) and then watch as scurrying people fly on to your screen and map out your artwork in human form. I can't explain it any better than that, so just take a look for yourself if you want to know more. No, it's not going to change the world. But it is a clever site... and an excellent way of killing time during your lunch-break.
• The Telegraph PM - fancy a free daily newspaper? And a quality one at that? Every day at 4pm (UK time), the Daily Telegraph makes a ten page version of itself available for download as a PDF file, for reading on-screen or printing off and reading on the way home from work. News, sport, business, TV listings, puzzles... all you need is PDF-reading software like Adobe Acrobat Reader or Foxit. Highly recommended.

As seen on TV the street!



Childhood memories of watching Scooby Doo came flooding back to me recently when I stumbled upon The Mystery Machine, parked, would you believe, outside my local Volkswagen dealership. After a quick check to make sure Old Man Withers wasn't loitering amongst the used Golfs and Passats, ready to mistake me for a meddling kid at the drop of a hat, I had a closer look and secured photographic evidence (left). Sadly, there was no sign of Daphne either though... maybe she was off exploring an abandoned funfair or haunted mine somewhere...

But really, who would have thought that Scooby, Shaggy, Daphne, Velma and Fred did all their crime-fighting, ghost-busting and scooby-snack consumption in a VW Transporter Trendline? Yikes indeed.

News of the world

I live in a quiet cul-de-sac, in a small village, in an isolated county that is basically on the road to nowhere. In fact, it's so insular around here that a local MP even suggested the locals are in-bred (I should add that I'm an interloper, not a local). There aren't many advantages to being so far off the beaten track... but one of them is the idiosyncrasies of the local media. I wrote last month about the, ahem, unique stories you find in the local press, so this time around I'll just mention regional television. Specifically, I'd like to draw attention to the all-round brilliance of the little honey that is Julie Reinger, weather girl on my evening regional news programme. I knew there must be some compensation for living in such a barren outpost; turns out to be that the rest of the nation doesn't get to see her every day.

Whilst we're on the subject of news, this was reported by the BBC today. Man marries goat? Really, you couldn't make it up...