The King’s Speech

The King’s Speech is an excellent film. The presentation of the time period of King George VI’s ascension to rule was very balanced; the film presented a believable perspective on the background events leading into the war, but also did not let that storyline overrule the main two aspects of the story which involve the personal relationship between the king and the therapist, and the king’s treatment. All lead actors were effective, and the minor cast provided enough depth to re-enforce the primary characters.

This is a character film, and as such the performance of the lead characters is paramount to the overall impact of the film, and pleasingly Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helen Bonham Carter are all excellent.

Score: Score 8.5 out of 10

Bad: The inclusion and portrayal of the archbishop and Winston Churchill was a little blunt. This is the only slightly negative thing I can think of to present as a “bad”, and it was basically non-existent.

Good:

· All leads were excellent.

· Period presentation was detailed and totally believable.

· as an Australian it was curious to see an American doing an Australian accent well, and a few Australians being altogether very British.

· I would happily see this film again in the future, and would consider buying it.

Edifier Soundbar Review

Out of the blue recently I was offered the opportunity to test a few portable sound devices, so like any true blood geek I jumped at the opportunity.

The first one is the Edifier MP 250 (a.k.a the Soundbar). It is a very simple and portable single unit speaker which improves the sound output of moble devices. It will work with anything that can plug to sdb (like a laptop), and also anything with a stereo plug (like amost every other audio device on the planet).

Here is a quick review.

The good stuff is:

• It is darn small, and reasonably light.
• No setup required (plug in, pause for recognition, then it worked straight away – fark!).
• Comes with a nice handy carry sleeve, so that it won’t get wrecked by your other gear.
• Far better sound quality than standard laptop speakers.
• It looks nice – all silver and smooth, not a fugly blob of black plastic.

The bad (only the obvious and the trivial):

• As it needs power from the USB, you’ll go through battery life in no time. Use it when plugged in to power and there is no issue.
• No tech solution can deliver high end sound, especially high end bass sound in a manner to replace a good multi-speaker setup. Do not have the illusion that the SoundBar will be a home stereo. Better, but not a holy grail.
• Carry case should be slightly bigger, so it can also hold the cables. You can squish them in, but it takes a few minutes.

Overall: It would make an excellent gift for a techie who works regularly with a laptop or ipod/iphone on the road, and for aus$60 its reaonsable. 

I didn’t want a Soundbar until I tested it, and now I am very glad to have it. It is already in my laptop bag.

From Death Knight to Hunter

After a little angst and wonder at the new Cataclysm expansion, I’ve decided that playing a Death Knight with basically no crowd control has only a small role in raids. As the guild is flush with Tanks, has plenty of melee, and I prefer DPS most of the time – a change was in order.

So I’ve started mucking about in a somewhat serious way with another character. I am pleased to introduce Agmundur, a recently morphed Worgen Hunter.

He's a little bit country, but then the choices of hair were dreadful.

Now he look harmless enough, and certainly well matched with all the heirloom gear and the Ironforge kit. But don’t be fooled as his real appearance is a tad more intimidating.

I'll huff and I'll...grrrr

Somehow I think Worgen were designed to appeal to the violent, strange, and somewhat feral side of human nature.

And I think the model designers got it pretty close to perfect. In fact they nailed it.ump shots, md, traps, feign, etc are all new to me.

The best DnD Cake

I’m staggered that such an incredible looking cake could be created, check this out.

Almost too good to eat...almost.

Found via Laughing Squid, who snaffled a link from Geeks Are Sexy (more pics here), the cake is created by a Redmond USA company called Mike’s Amazing Cakes. Darn Impressive.

A Gold Beggar Made Me Laugh

A few days ago a gold beggar made me laugh, but not because of what they did, but because of the circumstances around their efforts to spam folks.

We were happily wasting our time in game, when a guildie named Genowen piped up on vent that she was getting personal messages from a gold beggar; but what made these different is that they were in full sob story style. Almost propper RP style.

I chuckled and we kept playing. About 10 minutes later I get this:

I actually laughed out loud, Genowen would certainly ignore a beggar and it made the experience a little less like spam and more like a real story.

WoW Server Outage

Seems the servers are borked, meaning that folks like me had to find something else to do on a Sunday apart from play warcraft. I ironed some shirts, read a book, talked to my better half, and was generally pretty bored. Even the slurry of crying in the official forums was not entertaining after the 4th page, and when I last looked there were 101 pages and counting.

Some folk were demanding financial or playtime compensation from Blizzard, and I think there is no chance of that; it is just not within the bounds of probability. May as well ask for a pony, and if you do please hold your breath too.

It made me contemplate a different hobbie, one which was not so tech dependent; but then I’m a nerd and tech is something that just make so much sense.

AFK watching grass grow. Grumble.