Supergrunch

He did a BA (I think) in philosophy with maths, and given this was in the 70s, I doubt the pricing was anything like what it is now. And I think he got quite a lot of stuff, he definitely seemed happy. He's also done several creative writing modules more recently, which again he liked - apparently a year's course cost about £400.

Absolution is definitely my favourite Muse album.

My dad uses Open University a lot (he was one of the first people to get a degree from them) and would probably recommend it. I'm not sure of the quality of other distance-learning courses, but I'd guess it varies hugely.

It's cool, although I still haven't finished customising it and working out how everything works. So far I'm liking the screen resolution and contact syncing, and it's cool that everything's so customisable, although I've yet to look into themes (I want something steampunky ultimately). The camera (5MP) seems pretty great to me in natural light, although in artificial light and with flash the quality drops off quite a lot. For video, the frame rate seems reasonable if not amazing - I'd guess 15-20 fps, but am not sure. After quite a bit of troubleshooting I managed to configure the phone to recieve emails from my university webmail via IMAP and send them out also, which will undoubtedly be useful in the future. Texting works like a dream - the predictive text is pretty good and auto-saving new words to a dictionary which you can go to and edit is very nice. Other nice features are the ability to unlock the phone with a pattern, and the reduction in volume of the ringtone once movement is detected, although I'm not sure how common these features are on smartphones. I've yet to experiment much with calls or music, but so far my one problem is that it's a little too easy to accidentally call contacts by touching their name - I'll have to see whether I'll wish for a noise reduction system like on the nexus one. And everything is nice and fast, thanks to the 1GHz processor I imagine. Finally, internet browsing is good, with two-touch zooming, auto-text fitting, and good youtube, although that's probably too data intensive for me to use often. I hear some flash video like iplayer and 4od doesn't work on the current version of Android (2.2), but haven't tested it and probably wouldn't use these much either. All in all, it seems like a very nice phone to me (someone unfamiliar with smartphones), but I'd like to explore it more. Oh, and there's a pdf viewer. I will use that a lot to save on printing and/or lugging my laptop around. Edit: One other minor problem with the browser - unicode support is not perfect, but I wouldn't expect it to be. Plane 0 looks entirely supported, but I'd also like planes 1 and 2. Nobody except a linguist is going to use these though.

Well I have it now, and am somewhere between those two descriptions. And I enjoy it.

I agree - while there is some comedy, it's incidental to the point of the thing, rather than being it's ultimate goal. Burn After Reading is much the same, but I wouldn't say that stops it from being a comedy, albeit very black and dry. But it's the Coen brothers' subtle observations of natural language and its hilarities that makes them so awesome.

Agreed. But then it's oddly watchable, if only for Dan.

It's very unlikely this will happen. However, before too long all games will probably be bought entirely digitally, meaning that buying a secondhand game will be about as easy as buying a secondhand game on WiiWare, or secondhand ebook for Kindle. I'm not sure how this will affect piracy though.

Scott Pilgrim might have looked ok in 3D, but ulitmately it should be 2D as it's a film about two types of 2D media (comics and 8/16 bit video games).

Thanks guys. I spent a while looking at reviews and ended up going for the non-HD Desire - wouldn't get the HD one, and not really able to wait around for price drops as I have no phone currently. But yes, hopefully I'll like it...

Yeah, the last episode was great.

I saw them in Manchester earlier this month. Fun stuff.

It's possible that 3D could be used to genuinely amazing effect in a film, but it hasn't happened yet, and it's definitely not something to apply across the board - imagine watching A Serious Man in 3D! As it is, it makes things look a little prettier when it doesn't grate with the content (e.g. Toy Story 3, Up, and also Avatar, which is largely a test of the 3D format).

So I looked up your website, and it says you're restoring the St. Albans cinema. Zomgsplode, I've always wanted a cinema there, and these ones look awesome.

I'm gay for Wallace generally.

So today the screen of my phone (Samsung J700) decided to die horribly making it utterly unusable, and it was getting kind of old anyway, so I'm looking to get something new. Despite having only had simple and PAYG phones in the past, I'd quite like a smartphone, mainly for their internet access which I'd use a lot. I also send quite a lot of texts, but don't call all that much. Looking at the specs of things it seems I'd prefer Android for its speed and customisability, but have no idea which model to get. Nexus one seems cool, but are the HTC things better? I'd ideally like to balance price with awesomeness. Thanks people. Edit: Oh yeah, ideally I want to stay on Vodafone because it's the only network with decent reception both at home and at university.

Nose hairs make me feel old.

Yeah, I was aware he died, but I was never very keen on his art. By earlier I was mostly thinking just of the first few Rincewind books, but I guess the ones you mentioned also have a bit of the old Discworld feel. I like the seriousness, and also think it goes with the slightly darker turn the series takes, but also just find the Kirby covers kind of offputting. Most Discworld fans seem to disagree with me though.

I read volume 3. University of Carolina in the sky is amazing. And I still love Wallace.

I'm going to go ahead and add book covers to this thread, because I tend to moan about them a lot more. In particular, Discworld books are awful for this. Originally, all the covers were done by Josh Kirby, who has a very particular art style. While I think it fits with the mood of the first few books in the series, I personally dislike the cartoonish frenzied feel, and think it positively grates with later books. Here's a random example: For later books, Paul Kidby has been doing the artwork, which I like much more (especially the way he satirises famous paintings): Even more recently, however, early Discworld books are being republished with Harry Potter-esque "adult" covers, presumably because the publishers agree with me about the Kirby artwork. These are actually pretty cool and minimalist, but there's a major problem with one of them (I can only find the audio version but it's identical to the book):

I didn't have an oven for all 3 years of undergrad. Will do for postgrad though, yay.

My laptop is called Oscar. That is all.

I think Knives/Scott is definitely best for the film. I reserve judgement for the books - thanks to sleeping through the post, I now have to wait until Saturday to read the rest...

Happy birthday!