Well I finally got to Control, the film of my all time favourite band and singer.  I never dreamt I'd see it in sunny Sydney.  A cold, bleak, English, late Autumn day, wth the final leaves dropping from the trees would have been far more appropriate.  Anyway, it is fucking superb.  The best we hoped for really.  There's no point in doing a review becuase there are loads of them already out there.  Ian Curtis still remains an enigma, but that is how is should be, no-one will ever really know what went through his mind on 18th May.  Sam Riley is amazing.  I was waiting to see how he handled Ian Curtis's spasticated, epileptic dancing.  It would easily be comic, but he captures the intensity and downright unsettling weirdness of Curtis's stage persona brilliantly.  It's a hard film to watch, but it is beautiful.  Thank-you Anton Corjbin.

Well Sydney is a great city.  But moving here is alot tougher than I thought it would be and my emotions are on a bit of a roller coaster, mainly because I'm missing England and my friends so much.  Job hunting is going pretty well, though no offers yet.  By this time next week I will have met most of Sydney's major companies. It is a very small place compared to London

The giant Airbus finally makes its maiden flight today from Singapore to Sydney.  I've been following it's chequered history, partly becuase a friend of mine worked on it.  I'm almost tempted to go up and see it land in but that would be a bit geeky.  It's been a fascinating engineering and business story, with Boeing still sticking to developing it's smaller point to point Dreamliner, in marked contrast to Airbus's gamble on airlines wanting to fly high volumes of customers hub to hub.  It's amazing to think that the 747 has been around for almost 40 years, which I think gives a sense of why today is such a milestone in aviation history.   Time will tell if it's a success, but I can't wait to fly on it.  It will be superb for European jobs and engineering if it flys metaphorically as well as aeronautically.

Sydney, where I'm currently living, has been besieged by a plague of moths.  The little blighters are everywhere. 

 

Yesterday, as I trundled around the central business district, plying my skills to prospective employers, I saw millions and millions of them.  Plastered on the side of skyscrapers, catching rides on the sides of buses, flying around en masse inside buildings. 

 

Stopping for lunch outside the Museum of Sydney, I glanced at the crevice in the wall, right next to me.  It was stuffed full of Moths.  Later when I opened my jacket to pay the bill, a moth flew out.  I know I've been accused of being tight in the past but come on.  When I opened my briefcase at the offices of Michael Page, another bleedin' critter made its escape.  Even in the evening at the ballet, no prizes for guessing what was sharing the spotlights with the perfomers. 

 

This being Australia of course, home of bush tucker, the Aussies have their own unique way of dealing with this temporary infestation, details of which made it on to the UK's Guardian page.  See the Guardian vid below -

 

I spent the weekend downloading or updating various products and services on my new laptop.  Some good, some bad

 

Windows Live Search.  The latest release seems to have improved relevancy, and the layout is better.  But I don't understand the difference between the two customised versions - i.e. the personalised logged in version of Live.com vs home.live.com.  Unless the latter is just the beta for the former.  Anyway, it's good to have a competitor to Google, but would I be using it if I was not interested in the Search industry?  Probably not.  Not enough differentiation yet.

 

Windows Live Toolbar.  This is good.  I really like the ability to add customised buttons. You can even make your own buttons in a pretty straight forward process - well it would be if it actually worked.  Sadly, after investing time in designing and filling in the "Create your own button" form, the service informs you that that service is not available at the moment.  Tried three times now with the same error message.  Grrrr.

 

Windows Live Skydrive.  Cool. At bloody last we can store documents straight up onto the internet with a Windows Live ID, without the faff of storing important docs by emailing them to your own Hotmail account.  The new 1gb storage is good, but really would like at least 5gb for photos, music and video.  Skydrive - like that product name.

 

MSN UK Homepage.  Blimey, what's been going on here then?  Massively cluttered and there seems to have been a head on car crash between MSN content and Windows Live services.  Yes, there needs to be integration, but this is not the answer.  Some of the channels are looking good tho, especially Cars

 

Windows Live Messenger.  I've not logged into Messenger much recently, as my sister uses Skype.  However, I've realised that Skype is actually quite flaky.  Yes, it's easy to use, and the process for buying Skype Out credit works well, especially for PayPal users, but the sound quality is often ropey.  Interestingly, in last weeks Economist there was a good article on how Skype has been neglected by Ebay, and how product quality has slipped.  Anyway, at this rate I may give Messenger another try

 

I've recently bought two new laptops, one for my mum, and one for me. Shopping around, it's impressive how PC design has come on in recent years. Sony continue to make very good looking laptops in their Vaio branding.  When I was in Tokyo earlier this year I went to the Sony building and marvelled at the latest pre release range of laptops, many of which were incredibly light, small and stylish, and powerful.  Most of these models are now in the shops but are a bit pricey.  I opted for HP in the end, mainly because you can get more bang for your money.  The Pavillion range is well specced, includes a good range of standard features including integral web cam (great for Skype users) and fingerprint recognition etc.  The Imprint finish looks superb too

 

No wonder that PC shipments have increased by 15-20% in the last year (The Economist) as more users either upgrade their old desktops for laptops, or trade up their old notebooks for the newer stylish models.   That increase is well ahead of the forecasts from a couple of years back.  One other factor is how integral laptops can be in your life.  Not having a home for over a year now, the PC is my mobile entertainment system, telephone, DVD player, photo manager, newspaper, recruitment consultant, and with Broadband everywhere, I can listen to my beloved Radio 4 pretty much whenever I want to.

 

Across both PC's I've installed mutiple hardware on Vista.  I have to say that Vista so far is very underwhelming compared to XP, though that is partly becuase XP was such a strong Windows release. Having lived through four years of Longhorn build up, I was expecting a bit more, even though it was well known that many innovative features were going to get the chop.   Driver support in particular is woeful.  With any major new platform release, it takes a while for the driver releases to catch up.  But Vista does not even have HP printer driver support, and HP are one of the companies biggest partners.  Start up time too is tiresome and seems as slow as XP. Annoying for when you are in Starbucks and you want to boot up from scratch and get your email.  The user interface is an improvement but not radically so.  and reliability too seems a bit suspect - I had multiple hang ups and crashes already. 

 

Fingers crossed that SP1 turns an OK release into a great one.

..especially if you are en route to Sydney. The Aussies were their usual cocky selves in the lead up which makes the victory all the sweeter.

 

Shame the Kiwis lost though.