2008 August » Stuff and Things

Louis the freelance editor

Aug 272008

I’ve just arrived home from a meeting with Media Circus. They are an advertising agency based in Leicester Square and they want to move into creating band promos. For this they need editors and that is what I hope to be.

I have been given a couple of tapes of live footage from a band called Cats and Criminals. I’m having a listen now and they aren’t exactly my thing but I’m sure I’ll be able to fling something exciting together. They have a cool logo that I’m thinking of taking advantage of.

This is (of course) unpaid for the moment but it could lead to a permanent position and I can at least add it to my show reel and put it on my CV.

Living with the JesusPhone

Apple No Responses »

Aug 202008

Hurrah and Huzzah. I am home at last… well, I have been home for about a week but I have neglected my blog in place of many important tasks such as seeing missed friends, searching for a job (my most hated of activities) and of course getting a hold of the iPhone 3G.

As you may have read back in July, my trusty K800i gave up after around 22 months of loyal service. Upon arriving home I quickly went about trying to acquire another phone. I was given two phones but each one was locked to a different carrier and, as I am new to Balham, I have no idea where I would go to get these things unlocked. This of course proved to me that an iPhone was meant to be and after much confusion and O2 generally being arses I managed to procure an 8GB GodPhone.

It arrived on Monday so I have had a while to play with it and come up with a few first impressions.

Firstly, it’s beautiful. But everyone knows that and everyone knows how fun the multi touch interface is. I haven’t had any of the problems that seem to be popping up on Mac and iPhone forums. My battery life is as expected – if I use Wi-Fi or 3G to surf the web and download apps from the app store or use the GPS to find my way I get about 13 hours of battery life. If I leave it in standby and only use the net every no and then, it’ll last for days. As I bought it because I liked the idea of always having internet access, I am happy to charge it every night.

My 3G signal is fine. Inside the house I get two bars which is still enough to comfortably surf websites. Outside I get full signal. In fact yesterday I had to go to Ealing Broadway and on the final part of the journey where the tube goes over ground I managed to read my e-mails to get an address and then use Google maps to search that address. All from a train carriage.

As you can see I have never had mobile internet so this is all rather exciting. It’s a long way from spending 5 minutes checking your e-mails and paying about £2 for the privilege.

Typhoon!

round the world, Travel No Responses »

Aug 072008

Our last few days have been spent holed up in our room as Hong Kong has just been narrowly missed by a typhoon. Typhoon signal 8 was in force which tends to close down most businesses for the day such as the stock market and urges people to stay indoors.

Of course we had not prepared for this and had no food. So we psyched ourselves up to get out into the pouring and went out… it was actually fairly pleasent. The rain wasn’t too bad and the wind was a huge relief after two weeks of above 30 degrees temperatures. It turned out that this was the tail end of the storm and we weren’t quite as brave as we thought. Later we saw on TV that the worst part was in the night and there had actually been quite a lot of damage caused.

The storm has left us with lots of rain which will certainly mean that our last few days in Hong Kong will be spent in the pub next to our guesthouse watching the Olympics on the big screen… oh well, sounds fun.

Big Buddha

round the world, Travel No Responses »

Aug 042008

Greetings all. Our holiday is nearing an end, we have less than one week until we fly back to the UK.

After my last post we had a break from sightseeing for a few days as Jordan felt really ill. After a couple of days we decided it might be a good idea to go to the hospital to get her checked out. This turned out to be a much easier than we expected. A lady from the guesthouse escorted us by taxi to the hospital. We registered quickly and were seen in less than 10 minutes. The doctor diagnosed the problem as an infection of the stomach or intestines and prescribed a cocktail of drugs. The total cost of this great service… 269HK$ (about 20 quid). She’s fine now.

As Jordan was feeling better we headed off to a couple of the outlying islands over the last few days. The island of Lamma is about 2km south of Hong Kong island and has no roads or cars (although I did spot a couple of cars so I reakon this is all a scam). The island has a huge coal fired power station that overlooks one of the beaches. It’s a very odd sight to behold as it is surrounded by lush green scenery and a small fishing villiage teeming with expats.

Today we visited Lantau island and caught a cable car up to the Buddhist Monastary close to the peak (around 900m up). This was a fairly… unnerving experience. In the words of Edward Hitler ‘On a scale of one to ten I think it’s bicycle clip time.’ You’ll have to look at the pictures and video on Flickr to see what I mean. At the monastary there is a rather large statue of Buddha and a very dissapointing vegetarian restaurant. You can tell these monks tend not to visit nearby Hong Kong island as their idea of vegetarian food is fairly pretty basic. We caught the cable car back down the mountain (even scarier than the way up) and headed back to the bright lights of Hong Kong.