The steep south face of Ben Nevis from Sgurr a' Mhà im (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It’s not often I’ll ask for cash, but I’m doing a sponsored walk up Ben Nevis on May 6th and I need to raise £90 before then. If anyone would be kind enough to sponsor me a few quid, please let me know and we’ll work out how to get the dosh to me.
Obviously, if you’re local then I can just get the cash. Anyone else can probably get it to me via bank transfer or *spit* PayPal. If you’re a UK taxpayer, make sure I get your postcode and house number as well so we can claw more back off the government!
Oh, the cause – it’s St Andrew’s Hospice. Not one I’ve been associated with in the past, but one that the school I currently work at raises a fair bit of money for.
Another gig for three sneaking in with two tickets – although I think most promoters (except perhaps TicketBastard) would think it pushing things a little too far to try and charge a foetus for entry. Tonight’s headliner is a party master and he brought with him a new band from down south somewhere:
I have memories of M*A*S*H when I see that name and I’d rather have been watching DVDs to be honest. They’re not bad and a couple of the songs got the foot tapping, but there was nothing memorable about them at all. Decent musicians, nice lads, some promise and a few cheers from the crowd… but overall just a filler before the main act.
Actually, according to the Wikipedia article (linked above), they supported Ginger Wildheart on his tour in December. I knew the name was familiar. Whether it’s the same band or not, I don’t know, but it could well be them. If it is, then they’ve definitely got better.
For the record, though, little SkullKrusher hid near mummy’s spine for their set. She wasn’t impressed.
Andrew W.K. sells himself as a party animal. A man with an ethos that’s summed up by the statement ” Every day you’re alive – you don’t need any other reason to party.” His Twitter feed is full of party tips, reasons to party, people he’s partied with… He exists purely to make sure that everyone else has a good time. And to keep white t-shirt and jeans manufacturers in business.
Imagine, if you will, a party hooter horn thing in human form and made of 100% pure awesome. This is Andrew W.K. If you’re not bouncing by the time the first chords of the first song are struck, then there’s a mortician outside who wants to know how you got out of the nice cold room they were keeping you in.
You may notice that the Flickr set has fewer photos than I normally take at gigs. This is partly due to AWK’s white clothing making him very hard to photograph without glowing, but mainly as I just had to ditch my camera with Gillian, get into the middle of the crowd and go ******* mental.
Touring on his first (and best) album I Get Wet, the whole thing was going to get an airing, and it did. You know how the crowd sings along to the intro to Iron Maiden’s “Fear of the Dark“? They did that through the entire set. It’s not often you’ll see a crowd enjoying a set as much as this one, bouncing around and singing along – not as much of the crowd as tonight. Barring the handful on the balcony and a few round the sides (including certain pregnant ones), I swear everyone was was going crazy.
Andrew W.K. (Photo credit: Iain Purdie)
This included SkullKrusher who very quickly moved to the front of mummy’s belly and started thrashing like a mad one. Our kid has taste already!
AWK himself is quite the musician, covering keyboards, vocals, guitar and drums (the last two briefly) during the set. He was joined by a motley crew who were as much into the fun as he was. I don’t think you could pick six musicians who looked any more different. Yes – six. Quite a crowded stage!
Drums, bass and three guitars were ably covered. In addition there was a remarkably hot woman in a leotard on backing vocals. Unlike the pretty young thing helping out at the Ginger gig back in December, this woman didn’t look out of place for a second. Giving it her all, singing well and very much a part of the act rather than being purely eye candy.
I did get a nice picture of her bum, though. Sorry.
The set lasted a solid ninety minutes with minimal “crowd chanting for the band to come back on stage” time. A couple of slower numbers did get the crowd to calm down a bit, but not for long. Towards the end we were treated to a new song, simply called “Head Bang”. Oh, yes. We did. An epic new number, much in the style of the first album and definitely a highlight of the set.
I once heard AWK’s music described – by someone criticising it – as a series of 2 minute long beer commercials. They’re right. It is. Short, sweet, hits you hard and leaves you laughing and wanting more. “Head Bang” continues that tradition and long may that tradition continue.
Checking his Wikipedia article, I was staggered to read that he’s only 32. That means he was only 22 when I saw him destroy Leeds Festival back when he toured supporting the album the first time. Now, I’ll be honest – I’m not a fan of his other material. It simply doesn’t match up to I Get Wet with the odd exception. However, with a live show this good, who cares?
A great night’s entertainment and all three of us headed home smiling. Well, I know two of us did – I’m pretty certain the third would have if she knew how.
Plot-in-a-nutshell: Young man’s family go missing, but who’s to blame and who’s on his side trying to get them back?
See it if you like: Moderately low-budget Euro-thrillers
It’s always good to see Sigourney Weaver putting in an appearance and in this Spanish-set thriller she’s as much of a bitch as you’ve ever seen her. Alongside Bruce Willis, who’s in a hell of a number of films this summer, and new-ish star Henry Cavill (soon to don the blue, red and yellow of Superman) Â the group tear up Madrid in this conspiracy thriller.
Dragged to Spain on holiday with his parents while his company goes under, Will Shaw (Cavill) gets in a bit of a strop and wanders off. Upon his return, he finds his family missing and a mysterious man rather interested in taking him in, too.
It turns out papa (Willis) isn’t a harmless government office bod after all, but a CIA agent in charge of a briefcase that quite a few people are very much desperate to get hold of. Desperate enough to kidnap his family, in fact.
Things take a turn for the worse by the end of the first reel and we’re left wondering as much as Shaw who can be trusted and who can’t.
The action scenes are gritty and the acting good from all the leads, although there are a few “twists” which are about a surprising as finding a cornflake in a packet marked “Cornflakes”. It’s got that very typical European feel to it, with the car chase scenes being very twisty turny rather than full of enormous explosions.
If I had a problem with it, it was the sound. This could have been due to the print or the cinema, but it sounded as if I was listening through earmuffs and made some of the dialogue very hard to make out. It suspends reality a little too much in quite a few areas, too – the falls and gunshots are lovely and brutal but the characters simply shouldn’t be getting up and walking after some of them!
Overall, it’s not too bad. Short and snappy like a short story, a decent plot and some good acting. No classic, but well filmed and worth seeing if you’re between other films.
Battleship
Plot-in-a-nutshell: Aliens attack and this time it’s the navy’s turn to save the world.
See if it you like: Switching your brain to neutral and enjoying yourself. A lot.
I will say this now – Avengers Assemble has something to live up to. Battleship was so good that it’s already tainting my view of films I’ve not seen yet.
Remember that feeling you had when you first watched Armageddon or The Rock? Yeah, it’s like that. All the way through. Big, silly, overblown, funny, over the top, cheesy, exciting… it’s all of these and more.
Alex (Taylor Kitsch) and Stone Hopper (Alexander Skarsgard) are brothers, the former a waster and the latter an up-and-comer in the US Navy. After an amusing opening twenty minutes or so, Stone forces his brother to sign up in the navy and we skip forward an undetermined length of time to the present day.
Serving under Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson), the daughter of whom (played by Brooklyn Decker) Alex is dating, the pair are involved in an international naval manoeuvre when aliens respond to a signal we sent… by dropping some smegging huge missile-toting machines into the Pacific. Erecting a force field around the area, they cut a handful of ships and an island off from the rest of the world and start their plot to take over Earth. As aliens are wont to do.
Oh, they also blow **** up and sink ships and invade and stuff, too. All good fun.
The key story is split into two parts – the actions of Hopper Jr as he makes good on his wasted early life, and a small group on the island who take on the marauding aliens hand-to-hand. This group consists of Shane’s daughter, a mad scientist and a retired double amputee soldier played by Mick Canales – an actual retired double-amputee soldier. In fact, he’s not the only real veteran to play a part in the film. A sizeable group of retired sailors feature as well.
The board game of Battleships seems a weird film license, but they actually manage to shoehorn in the gameplay, believe it or not. They don’t, however, manage to get someone to utter the immortal phrase “You sank my battleship!” which is a shame. The thing is, it doesn’t matter.
Battleship is over two hours of hugely enjoyable explosions, one-liners, cheesy sequences, explosions, special effects, monsters, explosions… And some stuff blowing up.
It is completely silly and over the top, but it never makes any attempt to take itself seriously so all the nonsense is completely forgiveable. Even the complete disregard for the laws of physics. It falls very much into the Fast Five camp on that score.
I loved this film. I don’t know if it would bear a repeat viewing, but it’s definitely worth seeing on the big screen.
A second try at this review as WordPress somehow deleted the one I’d finished last night just as I was about to post it. Damn you WordPress.
After putting the chocolate-encrusted kids to bed we checked the cinema times and found one we could catch without too much of a rush. Hence heading out to see…
Plot-in-a-nutshell: Bad guys try to release their daddy, who will rip the universe a new one. Hero has to stop him.
See it if you like: No-brainer effects-driven fantasy fests
It annoys me how Hollywood insists on making sequels to complete messes while ignoring decent fare which is crying out for a continuation of the story. For every Conan (siring a follow-up I believe), there’s a Percy Jackson or a Vampire’s Assistant cut off in its prime. While the original version of Clash of the Titans was a standalone masterpiece, the 2010 re-working was complete crap.
Wrath is actually a little better, perhaps helped by the fact that I had low expectations. The story is simple enough – Perseus (Sam Worthington) is back and doing the dirty work of his father Zeus (Liam Neeson) again. This time, there are only a few gods left as the humans have stopped praying to them. Along with Zeus are Ares (Édgar RamÃrez), Poseidon (Danny Huston) and Hades (Ralph Fiennes).
Hades hatches a plan to re-awaken their dad, Kronos, for reasons I forget but the upshot of which is that the humans will be punished by having their entire universe ripped apart. As you do if you’re a pissed-off deity who’s been shoved into captivity for a few millennia.
Helping Perseus are Agenor, the son of Poseidon (played by Toby Kebbell) and Andromeda (eye candy in the shapely form of Rosamund Pike). There’s also a wonderful turn from the ever-excellent Bill Nighy as Hephaestus, armourer to the gods.
My main problem with Clash wasn’t actually the poor acting and abysmal dialogue. It was the awful special effects which looked cartoony in places and simply didn’t work with the live-action footage into which they were embedded. They were about as realistic as Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry Mouse.
Wrath has had better luck in this area with particular credit due to the team who worked on the fire and lava effects. The major scenes at the start and end of the film are very well done with suitably huge missiles and explosions. I think even Michael Bay would nod in approval at the fireworks. Best of the monsters, in my opinion,  are the whirling conjoined nasties in the final sequence. Nice and evil and slashing about so quickly you can’t pick out any problems with them.
The plot isn’t up to much – gather three objects and combine them to form one big weapon with which to defeat the inevitable huge bad guy at the end – but it works. It’s all predictable enough, but what film isn’t these days? The characters are a decent collection, though Andromeda doesn’t add anything to the story other than a) the ability to gather an army what with being a warrior queen and b) something pretty to look at.
Don’t expect too much and you won’t be disappointed.
I buy quite a lot from Amazon. I like them. Cheap, convenient, easy to find anything you want… but like any company, their true colours only come to the fore when you try to get money back off them. As I am now discovering.
In January 2011 I bought an Acer Aspire 5742Z laptop. I’m using it right now – just. I like it, still do. Except for one problem. It’s taken to overheating somewhat rapidly and shutting down if I do too much on it. By “too much”, I can mean watching 6 YouTube videos in a row. Or recoding an mp4 video as avi. Or re-encoding a pile of mp3s. Or playing a game. Or opening Chrome with 12 tabs to restore.
Up until around February, this simply wasn’t an issue. I started to notice the machine resetting a bit for no adequate reason. Then I noticed the fan was going mental more than it used to. I did the obvious and checked it for obstructions, gave it a blast out with air, ensured it wasn’t blocked externally, elevated the machine a little more from the flat, hard surface it was being used on and so forth.
None of this helped. In fact, it gradually got worse. I bought an external fan which the machine is currently sat on top of, and installed some core temperature monitoring software (Core Temp v0.99.7, if  you’re interested). This revealed that, while idling (ie around 25-35% CPU tending to background tasks), my CPU was averaging around 70 degrees C. This was with the external fan. It used to idle nearer 40 – 50 degrees without the fan.
Try and run anything processor-intensive and it rises into the 80’s. If it hits 90 the machine shuts down as it is meant to.
This makes it impossible to perform tasks such as video conversion as it powers off before it’s managed to make it through one file.
Basically, it’s broken. There is a fault within the machine that was present when it was purchased which has taken until now to manifest itself, and it is getting progressively worse.
I contacted Acer who told me “Sorry, but it’s out of the 1 year manufacturer’s warranty. We may be able to fix it, but it’ll likely cost you.” Fair enough.
I then contacted Amazon who said “Sorry, but we only give a year’s warranty on electrical goods. Take it to the manufacturer.” This is bullshit.
There’s a little thing called the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (amended 1994) which states that goods should be:
Of a Satisfactory Quality, i.e. of a standard that a reasonable person would consider to be satisfactory – generally free from fault or defect, as well as being fit for their usual purpose, of a reasonable appearance and finish, safe and durable
Fit for the purpose – as well as being fit for the purpose for which they are generally sold, goods should also be fit for any specific or particular purpose made known at the time of the agreement
As described – goods should correspond with any description applied to them. This could be verbally, words or pictures on a sign, packaging or an advert.
These rights are valid for 5 years (Scotland) or 6 years (England / Wales) from the date of purchase, and the responsible party is the retailer not the manufacturer. If an item has become faulty within 6 months of purchase, it’s a no-brainer. After that, it’s the duty of the customer to prove the fault was there at the time of purchase and isn’t the result of accidental damage, negligence, etc.
Of note is the fact that good should be expected to last for a reasonable length of time based on their value, branding and so forth. There is no hard and fast rule under law for that but (and I got this example from another website) a £600 TV should be expected to last more than 18 months, whereas a £12 kettle maybe not so much. I’ve got a £380 laptop that’s started to fail after 13 months and is now unusable for one of the purposes for which I purchased it after 15.
Also of interest is that if an item was bought using a credit card – even if part-purchased e.g. part cash/part credit – the credit card company is also liable. I paid with £60-ish worth of vouchers, but the balance on, ironically enough, an amazon.co.uk branded credit card. I’ll be talking to them tomorrow as well.
Now, I don’t expect a full swap out for a brand new item. I’d be happy with a replacement of the exact same machine. I’d also be fine if they repaired it and covered the costs – to which I am most definitely entitled. I will also insist that my rights are reserved in that should I accept the repair I do not waive my rights to future refunds should those repairs fail.
But in the meantime, I’m trying to talk to a brick wall at Amazon who stated that if I wanted to pursue the matter I would have to raise it via a solicitor.
A solicitor. For a failing laptop which is utterly, totally, in black and white their responsibility under publicly-available British law.
Amazon, you are seriously having a joke.
My jobs tomorrow:
1) Contact Amazon again as I don’t expect them to be back in touch though they said they would be
2) Contact Acer again to see if they’ll do an out of warranty repair – you never know. If they refuse to do it for free, then get a quote.
3) Contact the credit card company and inform them of the situation
4) Contact Citizen’s Advice and the Trading Standards offices
5) Get hold of some papers for Small Claims
… in that order.
So just a word of warning, folks. If you buy electrical goods via Amazon, don’t expect them to be aware of your consumer rights. In fact, expect them to lie outright to you down the phone and claim you don’t have any rights and that any attempts to utilise said rights will have to involve you paying for a solicitor.
Updates as they occur.
UPDATE
A lot of what I was going to mention was posted by Chris in the Comments. Amazon Europe is based in Luxembourg and therefore come under European Law. The Sale of Goods Act supercedes those regulations as it’s actually more restrictive and beneficial to the consumer, but should a retailer argue that they’re not within the UK (which is actually no argument at all) then they still fall within European legislation.
Amazon have already been “spoken to” by the Luxembourg government for being… well… **** as far as customer care is concerned. However, this seems to have had no affect, and the authorities don’t seem to have bothered exacting any of the punishments they legally could. As such, Amazon are continuing in their merry way, pissing on customers.
I wrote to Amazon and explained to them what I would do:
1) Check with Acer in case it was a known fault with the unit, in which case there was a chance they would repair it (outside of warranty) for free
2) Otherwise, check with a local repair shop as to the problem and any possible solution. Obtain a quote and expect it to be dealt with by Amazon as per my rights under the Distance Selling regulations
3) If no luck was forthcoming, take my quote to the Small Claims Court and just wait for them to sort it out
Amazon’s response was a strange one. They offered me £57 in Amazon vouchers or a £76 refund. I think, though this wasn’t made clear, that the refund option would involve me sending them my laptop. They claimed this was a good will gesture in recompense for a laptop that had been used for 16 months (the warranty is for 12), and in no way was them agreeing to my terms. They believed (my arse) that they had no responsibility within the laws mentioned to resolve any issues.
As it turned out, I could get the unit opened and fixed for around £65 (it was a fault with the unit, present as a result of manufacturing error), which I did and claimed the £57 in vouchers. I made it clear that I reserved the right to contact them again should further faults appear and that I was not accepting the vouchers in lieu of their responsibilities, but as payment for them as they were legally obliged to recompense me for the repair.
Amazon responded that they were mistaken with the original amounts and increased the vouchers to £76 which were credited to my account shortly thereafter.
I just don’t get this. They refuse to admit liability (although they are, in law, liable) and then give me more than I claimed as recompense.
Surely it would make more sense economically to give me the amount I claimed (cheaper for them) and from a business point of view to make a customer happy by saying “yes, of course” in the first place?
Like Chris, I am now wary about using Amazon for large purchases. A shame – for them – as I’ve never had such an issue before and, in fact, bought a lot such stuff from them in the past. Well done on being dicks and rattling a very loyal customer, Amazon. Seriously stupid.
