Following on from the trail of comments about Caramacs & Gold Bars (see below), I have just discovered something disturbing – the existence of the Banana Kit Kat! Sadly limited to Japan at the moment, we can but hope that it will make it to these shores.

Possibly even more worrying than the item itself is this review of it. For example, the following paragraph:

“The big downer relates to the delicate harmony Nestle have crafted between banana and chocolate tastes. My favourite way to eat a Kit Kat is to nibble off all chocolate from the outside, and then consume the inner wafer as God intended – naked as the day it was born. You cannot do this really with the Banana Kit Kat, as the yellow layered wafer is too strong on its own – too obviously chemical and slightly acrid. The chocolate is necessary to temper it. A shame, but not a tragedy as consumed whole they are delicious.”

And people think that *I* am a bit odd…

In many situations, it is felt that competition leads to a better product.  So, I was pondering on the phone to Dave last night, what would happen if the schedulers of BBC1 and BBC2 were in competition?  If there was a big pot of programmes and they had to negotiate (or fight to determine) which would be on each channel.

I picture it like this – a big table with the BBC1 scheduler at one end and the BBC2 scheduler at the other.  In the centre are all the programmes (written on bits of paper, nothing fancy – this is Licence Payers’ money!) and each scheduler has their schedule grid in front of them.  How will they sort it out?  Will they stick programmes with their natural home?  Will they take it in turns?  Will they fight to the death?

An interesting twist would be if, once the programmes are divied up, the schedulers then get to reveal what is going to be in their schedule in almost real time (giving “enough time” for the tapes to be lined up and their opposite to maybe schedule something in in competition).  This would add an additional Top Trumps style element to proceedings although I feel that constant countering of threats could lead to some very odd schedules (e.g. the BBC1 scheduler being left with 3 episodes of Newsround to play during half-time of an FA Cup game).

Any BBC employees fancy dropping it into the Ideas Box? ;-)

No, I’m just eating a Caramac bar. Where has this been all my life? It’s like some kind of odd combination of caramel flavouring and white chocolate. And oh so sweet. And yet it seems vaguely familiar, like it has been around for ages and I may have tried it in the past but have forgotten (cf. Tootie Fruities). Insane! Hmmm, I suppose it is made by Nestle but even so I may have to purchase another one at some point.

Oooh, my initial taste thoughts seem not far from the truth – check out this handy classification guide.

There has been quite a bit of discussion recently in our flat about the possibility of making a video server. This would basically be a box connected to our TV and cable box which we could remotely set (e.g. via remote control, terminal, web, irc, email) to record programmes which would then be stored on its hard disk. Oh and the whole pausing live TV thing too. So, yes, building our own Tivo but without the somewhat unnecessary monthly subscription.

There are solutions out there from ATi, nVidia, Matrox and Hauppauge but, having read about them on the web, I am not quite convinced that any of them have all the functionality that we want. For a start, using any of them would result in double-encoded video (since they would be re-encoding the decoded signal from the set-top-box). Then there’s the issue of software – it seems to be there but I’m not sure about the flexibility. As you would expect, there are many enthusiasts busily working on PVR projects for Linux, but I have yet so see one that has actually managed to integrate video capturing.

It seems to be a developing area so maybe things will improve; at the moment I would feel uncertain about parting with any cash until I have seen a comprehensive demo of all the functionality of one of these cards. I’m hoping that a trip to Stuff Live 2002 may let me experience such a demo…

I have no idea why, but this evening I have become increasingly more fascinated with droplets of water – are they a standard size when they form, how much volume do they have on average?  It occurs to me that if I knew the rate of a drip and the volume of the container that the drips were filling I would still be hard-pressed to work out even approximately how long it might take to fill.  When should I come back and empty the bucket?

Whew!  I seem to have spent more time updating the templates on this thing (yes I *know* they still look the same) than updating the content over the last couple of weeks.  And that’s mainly down to the plethora of blogs I have found belonging to my friends – everybody’s at it!  They’re all great, though I wish that Relly’s wouldn’t make my browser’s scrollbar go insane.

Actually, I was having an interesting discussion with my friend Dan the other day about the purpose of a weblog, what various people wrote in their blogs and so on.  He wondered if it was a replacement for conversation; I don’t think so but perhaps it answers some of those unimportant questions that you wouldn’t bother phoning just to enquire about but, nonetheless, you could be quite interested in.  This is only really applicable to the “normal” diary-style weblog.  I mean, I couldn’t imagine anyone phoning me to see if I was planning to re-enact 80s computer game Elite in my flatmate’s car – that is true – but then people probably aren’t interested in that either.

So I wondered if I should re-affirm what antigeek.net is about?  After all, there’s no content here yet (although I’m contemplating making a plan of what maybe, one day, there will be so that’s, um, progress).  I suppose it’s about ideas and plans and, well, creativity.  Yes, there isn’t anything there yet but there will be.  And this blog type thing, well if you’re still reading then I guess you find some kind of purpose in it.  A few months on, and I wonder if we’re any closer to establishing what “antigeek” is?  Maybe.

Blimey – I really couldn’t think of anything interesting to write about today, eh? ;-)

…our flat would be more like this: http://www.drivemeinsane.com/. You can already see the temperature of the flats CPU, and see who’s been calling our phone, but if I could be bothered to build my own serial<->GPI box I’d definitly include door bell rings and stuff. Maybe one day we’ll get a webcam to watch us watching telly. I was talking with pauly about having something to sense our TV remote control so our webpage can track what station we watch. That one might actually happen.

Just had a great idea vaguely tied into my ideas about what to do for the Big Whoops next year. What if Dave and I drove around the UK re-enacting cult computer game Elite, but being in a car instead of a spaceship? We would have to trade local commodities between towns as well as solving crimes in order to make extra money – this money would then be used to upgrade Dave’s car and possibly pay for some repairs.

Or I suppose I could just put on a blonde wig and we could re-enact OutRun, as long as we could find a series of long straight roads with forks at the end.

Phew – it’s been a busy old week but I wanted to say a couple of things about The Big Whoop awards that we “did” at the weekend. Firstly, all kinds of photos, clips and so on can be found here. There are some great photos and from those it appears that people had a good time :) It was great to see so many of our friends there – it was actually a very odd feeling giving a Powerpoint presentation to a load of mates but, well, it seemed to work. If you couldn’t make it then ask us and we’ll show you our clipboards!

Surprisingly the net result of the whole weekend was that I felt happy and quite relaxed, even though Friday consisted of video editing all day, Saturday was a scramble to get things ready and then a late night of partying and Sunday was spent tidying up and feeling tired! I put my feelings of peace down to the visit of Relly on Monday with whom I went for a long lunch and then a shopping spree.

So – the question seems to be asked – will we do the Big Whoops again next year? Dave doesn’t think we could pull it off again and to an extent I agree with him. I think a lot of the enjoyment came from the surprise – of the effort we had put in, of the categories that came up – and it would be hard to recapture it. Still, it would be nice to have an annual flat “re-warming” and, hey, we’ll have to do something to entice people to come… My personal thoughts are that we will do something and it may be awards-based. Perhaps, as with all the “best” sequels, we should change the theme but not the content (The Big Whoop Awards Beach Party 2003? The Big Whoop Awards Hall of Mirrors and Holograms 2003? The Big Whoop Awards With Everyone Dressed as a Character From Mary Poppins 2003?)

Actually, I have just had the germ of an idea which involves a DV camera and plenty of driving. Dave, if you’re reading this then be afraid!

Hmm, just realised that it’s been a week of over-doseing on US Talk-shows. I’m on night-shifts this week, which I may have already mentioned. Well, being in work at this time has meant that I’m exposed to the following:

Dave Letterman – which is on ITV2 right now.

Jay Lenno – coming in to us to be fed on somewhere else.

Connan whassisname – appears on the end of the Lenno feed for a while (and boy do I hate him – sorry Connan, but you are increadably annoying….I won’t start ranting now though).

On top of this, I usually try to remember to watch Larry Sanders on PlayUK at 02:30. Yes, I know that’s not a real talk show. And then to top it off, I’ve been watching a fair bit of Cartoon Networks Space Ghost as well in the evenings before going to work – which is again, made up to be in the talk-show style.

Anyway, one thing I have noticed from watching the monologues of the three actual talk shows is…..they all seam pretty excited about possibility of the US gonig to war. Really very excited. And that, I think, is almost more scarey than the thought of war itself.