Review of the year

Andrew Crossley mafia stooge of shell firm acs:law

Film i liked the kings speech (my blog), as i was not into toys and comics or other stuff of Hollywood thinks is ‘good’ and that clears up new american cinema.  Ever observant of me i now declare the film version of World War Z to be a censored dud, and that’s future american cinema dealt with too

Banksy amused me in a documentary, and foreign films impressed with two noteworthy Japanese films see here.

Continuing on that theme – Thanks to Girish Kumar (of AiPlex Software in India my blog) helped acs:law to pack up business with its speculative invoice scheme that the mafia where very proud of Girish who is an Indian genius.  I am sure that carcass will picked over.   That story will run an run.

Pants

Theatre and as we forgive them (my blog) was a highlight at Arcola.  If anybody managed to book tickets for Shake spears Globe via there website this year then you did better then me being unusable.  Not that there was anything to write home about this year

In March the world pressed the chaos button on who leads it when that Tunisian fruit seller burnt himself to death, the things burnt fruit made is up for debate as to the merits of it,  it certainly made lurid headlines in the msm easy.  My favourite spammer Robert Soloway (my blog) was released.

Bin Laden also died, and its aftermath has resulted in some surreal press speculation which would seem to indicate that some think it should have been some sort  or set duel with manners and etiquette like ‘pass the brandy old boy please’ before the deed.

Book wise if you have not laughed at Jacqueline Howett then you do need to [trust me its worth it], and since all the books i read will never get mentioned by a certain tv snob it can be generally said that i have no culture, i read none of the booker prize shortlist books just to make my point here..

Details – In Non fiction  To miss with love , Packing for Mars,Felicia Pearson  and Braithwaite where interesting.  Jon Ronson’ psychopath test book was also.mind blowing.

Fiction wise a varied year with a fair amount of misses. World War Z,Charles Yu worth it with a fair amount of Japanese translations read this year some of it good and some not so.

Private Chris Gray

A good year for anime with age of eve, wondering son, and hanasaku-iroha is a thoughtfull look at running a hotel, the girl who leapt through time is definitely worth a view.

Television: Our War on bbc three was very well done, Wonder woman (wetham approved) wore the trousers and got cancelled for womens lib  issues (not wertham ok), and she also went exploited in comic form that also upset the wertham league.  Torchwood got lost extending its episode of meat in 15 extra  episodes of time.

I must mention boardwalk empire as an interesting.

Trailer trash was explored with kids behind bars, not sure what the management idiots at the bbc are doing with doctor who. Chelsea Ives and Howard Stringer amused me,  mind you Sony is amusing for too many reasons.

On the close to the zoo front – the selling of a car provided many blog posts, Fred Goodwin thinks work means sex with his underlings  I had a go at Mr Goodwins old Bank he failed (rbs) for being incompetent too.

More justification if it was ever needed that footballers and actors dont really need fame (or pr for there jobs and product) can be inferred by the number of gagging orders on things known and the newspapers cannot print.  Mind you the Rupert Murdoch newspapers ‘news’ with its means of spying on phone messages makes them both deserving of each other and both worth ignoring.

In July Rupert’s Failure to win the election for one single party in the UK did not help his mind control empire much and caused open season on him.  About time.

Vasco (a security company) got caught with its trousers down and groping a very nice Iranian of indeterminate sex screwed diginotar and Vasco.  At least Iranian cash is good which it seems all you need  to get an ssl certificate white-listed in the vasco/comodo thinking about ssl value.  Nice one Iran with the chickens coming home to roost comes to mind, just a few more to go and Vasco lost its battle as a trusted ssl vendor.

Dennis Richie passed away one of the more worthy of mentioning.

North Korea lost its only Elvis inpersonator, or elvis really did die, a sad day for the entertainment industry who with sopa prove idiots in democracies will take bribes.  Perhaps north korea is more democratic than the us is ? Speaking of Americans Corbyn Alvey was crowned with the honour of retard of the year, congrats on being so special.

I’m not quite sure what the gnome 3 developers are doing or taking and that is a sad thing. That just leaves Bob Parsons of godaddy who not only shot an elephant, but also supported sopa.  Clearly an genius but not as special as Mr Alvey.

Leave Godaddy today

Bob Parsons who shot an elephant in Zimbabwe

Today is leave godaddy day, due to them supporting sopa, shooting elephants and other stuff.   We don’t use Godaddy here at the zoo but if you do please consider moving since godaddy.com indicate they hate you as a client.

So if you care do something by transferring your domains and hosting to somebody else.  Dont do do it because of this as i am saying so.  I’m trying to look after your better interests who godaddy com or its resellers don’t unless your a huge copyright holder.

So don’t be stupid. Move it.

Death shopping.

Bananas in the Falklands hates both shopping and sport, but this strikes me as a new spectator sport for the west end of London.

Seydou Diarrassouba, from Mitcham, south-west London, was killed following a fight in a Foot Locker store on Monday afternoon.

Eleven people, all aged between 16 and 22, have been arrested and are being questioned by officers.

Wow.  OK i have discussed the chav and asbo nature of the west end here before but the spectacular nature on display requires a nature show like documentary with Sir david attenborough narrating it.  Not only did they manage to close the road (economic terrorism?) over a pair of sport shoes. But made a new sport.

Imagine a ring two chavs enter, only one leaves*, the prize a pair of chinese made sport shoes for them to then shoplift.  I have the best ideas don’t  I.

the nike air stab

I name this sport deathchav., perhaps nike could sponsor people.  Perfect for tv as well.  Rupert Murdoch should buy its tv rights.   If you can read this is a fun book it might be a bit tricky for chav’s though.

Cool eh ?

* think mad max

green people syndrone (not for the sporty types)

are you shrek ?

The boxing day show this year was a problem.  If fact the monkey house nearly opted for one of those classical music and cannon fire shows instead.* In the end we opted for wicked which is not a film, or an andrew lloyd webber with television talent show helping with the pimping of sales, who if understand correctly then don’t last the course and are never heard of again, not that we see the show for the ‘star’ to start with.

While starting to write this the bbc did inform me that those rather badly dressed sports fans might force the west end to close since there a bit dumb to enjoy enven dumbed down culture for two weeks.   Clearly Sport wlll wreck a lot of things in 2012 and beyond becuase of those sporty chavs making sure things are perceived as either closed or .a bad time to visit.

The show is VERY LOUD, and unless you have been tortured probably means nobody can sleep through it.  First half is a bit slow but it is ‘spicy’ with affairs with midgets, and people disabled from the waist down.

Its like panto.  Oh yes its not Baaa.

The second half after all that witch schooling the thing gets better, really.  Being a musical is does the business and puts a spin on the wizard of oz thing.  Dont ask me who was in it.

1/5 bananas

One cannot help but notice the many green people on offer this year , i can report that there was no mildew or moss in the theatre.and just had to see an orion slave lady** perform,

* a variation on yeolde worlde themes and quite funny. ** think star trek.  If you think is is funny then well done, otherwise leave a comment.

One Blood,John Heale

isbn: 9781847392817, jokingly is categorised as ‘current affairs’.  Its taken me three years to get this book from a library which i will detail at some point separately for it is an amusing tale in itself.

A short book of 260 pages this and it has faults despite being sort of relevant to Chelsea Ives.  Mr Heale whom hails as an Oxford University allum and tv worker (they go together like cheese and biscuits) seems to be of the opinion that everything was Mrs Thatchers fault despite um Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

The book has a go at the gang culture and he tries his best to minimise it as a problem. Should you speak out then the author perceives you as a threat and the racist problem is not discussed. Apparently gang culture has changed from robbing the local post office (once easy and now hard), to drugs and nightclub ‘security’* in postcode areas.  ‘Respectable’ people also get blamed

There is some sense to the book but the book forgets about economics and blames the usual suspect.   Interestingly attention from the media can also cause friction.  The reportage of gang violence would appear to indicate that the gangs want a quite life and the violence that is associated with it seems to be shifted to children wanting to be gang members not the gangs themselves – So are gangs a problem getting worse ?

The author would argue that its just the same as it ever was except for the updating of techniques and with different racial groupings who may or may not abuse others**,  the fact that your local gangster might also be the local anti racist organiser means the author defers judgement on this tricky point of left semantics.

3/5 bananas. * dealer security, ** another unmentionable in left circles

Utah retard of 2011 award goes to Corbyn Alvey

There very special in Utah, sco-x, and now Corbyn Alvey who part of this case (my blog) agreed that bad had happened to Novell (now departed) but decided to vote against.

Utah is home for the special, Corbyn Alvey do enjoy your award, you deserve it.  Utah keep it classy.

I hope you will raise a glass of something with me to celebrate Corbyn’s achievement.

Observations of an ‘independent’ bookshop

Christmas here at zoo means a lot of extra paper to recycle.  The monkey house latest object to recycle was for the independent book shop who failed to get me this, and i had to buy it from ireland instead. 24 pages of double sided a4 in fact of books all uncensored by tom cruise and his nice legal team.

Its a very consumer (for the people who don’t read books except on holiday or when the bbc tells them to) guide to the things publishers wish to flog being popular comedians , the odd arty book and portraits of the queen with the celebration of chav tv with an abbey in a slum.   I notice no mention of  Bryson so lets assume some standards for the independent rather than waterstones chain operation.

Further in you get names like franzen, and didion, along with the trusted cookery books and history and real peoples biography for sport things with a HUGE dollop of humour books and places hard to reach conclude the section before the book tokens advert.

Then a page of selected best sellers suggest titles, the first being a poet and children’s author first.  Along with others the looking them up makes me not want to read them, this is one of them (skippy dies) The rest of the pages is children’s books which appear to be colourful.

These are ‘suggested’ books but with the nature of many of them being light hearted it does seem a little depressing.  There are many books and although these be crowd pleaser’s they dont inspire the average person to read more or buy.

It makes me glad i have a library, not for being cheap but the range of books they have.  The moral of the blog entry is perhaps that while i whine about my library i have read some fascinating stuff most weeks.

I also guess some of you also got the same mailing, which puts a new slant on independent.

I hope if you do buy books as gifts they are what people like rather than tv comedians writing for the sake of it.  I say no more.

Jquery/html5 and css after implementing some thoughts.

Bananas managed to do some websites with the ‘modern’ stuff of 2011.  Overall i was impressed and if your html fits nicely in-between the divs things should go without too much bother and doing xhtml strict is worth the pain in the past. However….

Jquery plugins move too fast, depreciating, or have no documents for them (jqgrid) without a licence which makes using jqgrid a bit of guesswork thing, (that’s probably in dojo now).  Otherwise the plugin traps the of using some html feature you want excluded by your existing code.  Plugins are a bit hit and miss, more fail than aid.

Debugging jquery ui is not fun, jquery does not like stylesheets being reloaded so some php / perl stuff had to have the css removed.  A consistent ajax interface is one the great things about jquery which does need some work for more than one form per page with a specific instruction.

Something that seems undocumented in jquery is that once loaded (a), and you can load new code file (b) into that ‘framework’ means you don’t need to define jquery in (b), but if you load (b) outside of (a) the code will not run.  That was interesting to observe and deal with after testing and into use.

Server side not much changed, i used some new json and some php  for serving and liked the result.

Validating as html 5 [or what we think it will be] with all this ajax stuff was interesting, Css styling is certainly less of a skill and i needed less of it than in the past with themes.

The disabled lobby seem by accident to be a bit more accommodating with some better tools (yes there still crippled) for those of us with eyes.ears and nerve endings rather than having to hear the bitching about how hard horrid the web is to that community without examples and tools without hiring millions of midget testers without specific limbs and buying tools of dubious value.  I prefer it the other way and only found these tools by accident at the last minute so with html 5 and all this other stuff its a low priority not that we sell disabled products to only disabled clients.

I am sure one of will be incompatible with the other at some stage.

Since html5 is a long way off, meta data handling is a bit weird, and with apple patenting bits of the spec, and the usual squabbles of css standards (ogg or mp3 patent rows) i seem to have reached a point where the page looks ‘samish’ and does not crash a browser used by people.  Probably a good point to say i win and call it day until the next design refresh.

Back to the “DOES HE HAVE SUGAR IN HIS TEA” people it seems that much of divs and themes seem to challenge the community with issues but i am not going to bother with that since i will end up with a webpage from the era of 1995.

Some of jquery stuff still seems a little pointless – progressbar, and dynamic updates unless you know a lot about cached/connection speeds/things to load then it seems a little vague to use now.

That leaves the mobile site which despite being ok standards wise is not ok for the phones of the current.  So not everything is well but time and jquery mobile might fix.  It seems we are all stuck with mutliple sites even in 2012.

A storm of swords, part1, g r r martin.

Book 3, of the Game of thrones eventually ended up in my reading queue (isbn: 9780006479901, and is a two parter because the publishers refuse to go over 600 pages for a book these days. Anyhow 600 pages is not that hard to get through, and so what if the publishers wish to confuse with a book in two parts (book 3 and book 4) is really book 3.

So the book does not impress me, and i would accuse the author of diluting, few characters impress and it feels like a bad Russian epic novel.  Whether you can blame bob in accounting at the publishers for the about 600 pages is fine of going nowhere is up for debate.

0/5 bananas filler

Annabel, Kathleen Winter

isbn: 9780224091275  is a book that i wanted to read prior to any booklist competition,  that however got it ordered and enabled me to read it via something called a library.

Annabel is the tale of a hermaphrodite, set in Canada it i suppose is similar to this but with a bit more science and maths indicating a choice, and the results of that  rather than the surprise should you have read the book i refer to.

Conservative 3/5 bananas.