January 2007

I’ve seen a few Catherine Tate sketches over the past few years but I’ve never really seen an entire episode.

For Christmas, Debbie thoughtfully gave me the series 1 and series 2 box-set. Some of it is a little hit and miss but overall it’s surprisingly deep and very funny. Catherine seems to go for more classic character and situation based comedy in 8 minute scenes as opposed to the Little Britain style of outrageous characters in two minute sketches. She really fleshes out her characters and she virtually disappears into the role.

One of my favourite creations is her pitch-perfect characterization of an old gran. A cantankerous foul-mouthed bully of an old lady who enjoys a good rant at the expense of her grandson.

Series 1 concludes with one of the best comedy sketches I’ve seen in a long time which has fortunately been captured on YouTube.

If the “f” word offends, then I wouldn’t click here to watch the clip.

I got this via Josh and I think it’s pretty cool.

One of our customers, TelevisionWithoutPity.com was recently mentioned in a My Name is Earl episode.

Television Without Pity has been lucky enough to have its fair share of “shout-outs” and references from TV shows but the one on this week’s My Name is Earl really takes the cake.

The writing staff really planned ahead on this one. The TWoP user “whojackie” — who has been a member on the TWoP forums since 2005 — appeared as a character on the show and made a reference to the posters on the TWoP forums. That alone would be cool enough but that’s not the whole story here.

Read the full story here.

It’s been one heck of a month and I haven’t found the time to blog regularly, so here’s a round-up of 2007 so far.

Work

IP.Dynamic and IP.Nexus are in extremely heavy development. We’re entering a new phase of development that will see some nice tweaks to both applications. Although we’ve not mentioned these applications publicly since mid-December I can promise that both Josh and I have been working daily on these products. An ‘official’ update will be made soon enough.

Remco (W1lz0r or Wizzy to his friends) is leading the way with some nice SQL engine changes to reduce the number of ‘cache’ files for each SQL driver and adding in transaction support for engines that support it. He’s also been working hard on a PostGreSQL driver. This is in limited testing at the moment but it seems to be performing well.

Personal

We have a brand new nephew! Callum was born on 18th January at 4:07am weighing in at 7lb 5oz. He’s absolutely gorgeous and very tiny. I must admit that I’m getting a little broody and at 30, I’m not getting any younger.

Other

If you live in the UK then you can’t fail to have heard about the Jade Goody / Celebrity Big Brother rumpus.

If you don’t live in the UK then allow me to explain in under 200 words.

Celebrity Big Brother is an annual event where several so-called “z-list” celebrities are invited to share the ignominy of desperately clutching onto fame by living out their boring existences in-front of an indifferent nation.
This year ex-Big Brother ’star’ Jade Goody (who has made a multi-million pound fortune from her appearance five years ago) was put back into the house. She’s a bit of a thick-o and made a right old pigs ear of it by picking fights with a female Indian Bollywood star (who the UK had never heard of). The UK has now been swept up in a storm of controversy with racist overtones while Channel 4 continues to cash in on the increasing viewing figures.

Frankly I fail to be moved. It’s supposed to be reality television and this nation should not be shocked to learn that the reality is that there are idiotic bigots who allow their lack of education to colour their views on different cultures.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Jade was being racist. She was just being a bitch. Unfortunately, her vocabulary doesn’t extend to witty one-liners and amusing repartee so she fell back to the trusty cliches and put downs of in-bred stereotyping.

I do find it ironic that her perfume range ‘Shh…’ seems to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

Well, it’s the first day back after Christmas. I’m still trying to retrain my stiff fingers in speed typing after around 10 days away from the keyboard and filing away thousands of spam emails.

I plan on beating my body back into shape after serial food abuse and a week away from exercise. I’m actually looking forward to that in a masochistic kind of way.

I hope your Christmas was as jolly as mine. Highlights include a Nintento Wii (thanks Debbie!) which is pretty nifty and just as much fun as expected. The controller system is genius and ‘Red Steel’ is great fun to play.

I also got CoD 3 for the xbox360 which I’m working my way through. It’s graphically more impressive than CoD 2 but I’m not so sold on the over-the-top gung-ho structure and cheesy cliche dialogue. Still, those textures. Pretty.