It’s been a while since I’ve done an update on here… since WrestleMania, in fact. But nothing much has really grabbed my eye, so rather than a long, badly thought out post about nothing, here’s a long, badly thought out post about a lot of little things!
- SmackDown just got moved to SyFy, with NXT going the way of the dodo (not a surprise, since creative gave up on that show, and that it was getting ECW-level ratings). The only dumb thing about this: they’re keeping SmackDown on Fridays! Remember when SmackDown used to do huge ratings on Thursday? Well, it seems that WWE just wants the same-old, same-old rating on Friday (maybe a little less, seeing how SyFy is in fewer homes than MyNetwork TV… but probably a lot more than it will be in once that station closes!)…
- The passing of Chris Kanyon over Easter weekend was a very unwelcome piece of news, and as several observers have put it, one of the more tragic deaths that wrestling fans have had to hear about lately. When you hear the stories about how Kanyon would sink into a depressed state for a long period of time, then come out as if nothing had happened, I only have to wonder why little was done. Yeah, you can’t “lock people up” if they’re threatening suicide (and indeed, while some people threaten it and do nothing, there’s also folks who say nothing then one day… but that’s a little close to home right now), but there’s always questions that’ll be left unanswered.
- The last two weekends have seen me (and my fiancee) do a fair amount of travelling – back up to see the folks in Durham over Easter, and then down to Exmouth (on the south-west coast of England) last weekend. After over 800 miles of travel (okay, my share being around 400), all I can say is the obvious: the British road system can be absolutely dire. Granted, most of the roadworks on the UK motorways were suspended, but you may as well have left those buggers on if you’re not disabling those annoying average-50-mph speed cameras (which are even more annoying when the cameras are working, but nobody in the roadworks is…). As far as the actual holiday in Exmouth, it was worlds apart from what I was expecting; if you hit perfect weather like we did, then a weekend break there is a refreshing breath of fresh (seaside) air. Shame the hotel’s chipboard-bed collapsed on us in the middle of the night (while we were sleeping, I stress!) led to a sleepless final night and a lot of aching muscles after a night on the floor.
- Microsoft’s latest adventure into hardware, aka “Project Pink”, is the Microsoft Kin Phone. Methinks the word ordering will change somewhat after this is released, with aggrieved consumers likely to shout “THAT ‘KIN MICROSOFT PHONE” at every crash…
- The Apple iPad came out last weekend. Yup, still not interested in an overgrown iPhone.
- However, the release of iPhone OS 4.0 is sort-of piquing my interest. Finally we get multi-tasking, wallpaper, spell-check, app folders, and the arrival of a digital zoom for the iPhone’s meagre camera. Yeah, these are all things that should have been part of the OS to begin with, but I’d be interested to see just how many of these things really deliver, and aren’t some half-baked answer to questions people weren’t really answering. Hopefully it doesn’t mean that the jailbreaking community gets killed off either – while I’ve never jailbroken my iPhone, it’s obvious that a lot of the things that community has done has eventually been absorbed officially into iPhone OS releases, and lord knows what Apple would be like without any external ideas to pick from!
- And finally, the real reason why updates here have been slow. The house-hunting that my fiancee and I have been doing has finally bourne some fruit, and we’re now into the thick of things with all the boring legal stuff (solicitors, mortgages, etc). When the dust finally settles, things will really be rocking, but until then it’s all go, go, go. I need sleep!
