I wasn't too sure to begin with, but a few weeks into the first series and I'm begining to quite like
Hustle, the slick new drama (comedy?) from the
BBC that tracks the adventures of a group of con-artists.
They're masters of the long con, one that's planned & implemented over a period of time to achieve the greatest financial gain (see more con jargon here), which of course provides plenty of opportunities for mishap and entertainment. It's all essentially nonsense I'm sure, and about as far from reality as I am from a lottery win (10 quid in the work syndicate last week!), but it's fun nonsense, and very pleasing to watch.
The oddest thing is the cast, who all seem very familiar, but you can't quite put your finger on where you've seen then before, with the exception of the man from uncle. Unsung stars of the show for me though are the London skyline and city streets which are shot very stylishly and contribute heavily to the show's slick feel. I love working in London anyway, but seeing places you know, looking so good makes it all the more special.
Here in the UK we're awaiting episode 4 and I highly recommend taking a peek if you haven't already. Outside the UK watch out for Hustle being syndicated/re-broadcast, as I'm sure it will be. In the meantime, as always, the BBC website has loads of goodies to download, play with and read about.
Pose purports to be a film that isn't released yet, but after investigating the site I'm not so sure. Perhaps it's some kind of on-line invention. Sure, there's a
trailer, but the
amazon ad is just a, rather good it has to be said, mock-up, pretending to be from the UK amazon store, while the site domain name is from
Tokelau (.tk), and everything else is in Dutch. Still one thing is for certain the web site is a rather nice flash play thing and is good fun to investigate. The trailer also makes it look like it
would be a good film, so I'm going to keep an eye out to see if it really does get released.
Dynamism import and sell the very latest Japanese slimline notebooks, palmtops and other desirable gadgetry to the UK and USA. Even as I type I've reverted to my childhood, and I'm pouting whilst screaming "
I want" over and over again. Oh to have a spare couple of grand in the bank...
The
lowdown on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (currently in Beta). It sounds like one big security lockdown, which while great, I hope it's better implemented than on Windows 2003 Server, which I've been wrestling with over the last couple of weeks. Getting Win2003 back to a state where you can use it as a web server is a bit of a nightmare (especially if, like me, you've had no proper training on the thing). Hopefully XP SP2 is a bit more intuative.
Some nice ways to write your own message from
letterjames [
via daisy].
The domain name says it all really. A glorious celebration of
purple.
The javascript
train spotting sim - careful now, stop blinking, you may miss something [
via daisy].
The only
legit use of the greatly loathed <blink> tag. I'm afraid you have to be a HTML g33k for this one...you know who you are.
Because everything you read on the internet is true... Many of the "
unreliable facts" at
thebrainstrust will raise a titter or two. From a quick browse through one of my favourites was:
The last time anyone used the "Scroll Lock " key on a computer keyboard was on April 7th 1988, when Miguel Santinez, a Computer Science undergraduate at the Sorbonne, missed when aiming for the "Break" key whilst debugging a program in Pascal.
What is that key for? Come to mention it I don't remember using "SysRq" either.
Update: On second thoughts that really was an unreliable fact as I remember using the scroll lock key quite recently with a switch box (i.e. one keyboard & monitor, many actual PCs/Servers).
Playing
darts on-line might be addictive, but it doesn't have that true pub atmosphere - unless you're drinking a pint at the same time, have a urinal in the bathroom, and chuck yourself out at
11 [
found whilst supping a pint of best at the cheeky beaver].
