Blue screen of death
It's been getting increasingly unstable for the past month or so giving me random blue screens of death. Sometimes I get a driver reference that caused the problem (and they are different drivers each time) and sometimes I don't. Yesterday it managed to crash while trying to display the
Star Trek XI announced
article on a wrestling site.
Apparently the new movie will be directed and produced by J.J. Abrams, a guy famous for Lost, Alias and Mission Impossible: III and is scheduled for a 2008 release. In a risky move the story will apparently focus on Kirk and Spock’s first meeting at the accademy during the early days of the Federation. How they do that with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as old as they are is a beyond me, unless they use new actors which is an immensely bad idea.
Oh and they’re apparently not involving
One year anniversary
Free broadband from TalkTalk
Total cost (for 18 months): £407.81, about £22.66 a month.
Seems like a good deal...
* Calls must last less than 70 minutes.
** To a list of 28 countries including America, Australia and most of Europe.]]>
Silly company
Silly company.
No Bret Hart at Wrestlemania
Bret Hart was not at
Putting dating in context
Filed under: Computers, Entertainment, Games, Google, Life, Personal, Technology
The first thing I have to point out about Google is be very careful around April 1st. They have launched a number of genuine services on April 1st (including Gmail) that turned out to be real. None the less I'm fairly sure Google Romance is less than sincere…
And another thing, GameFAQs have decided it’s bad to cheat.
Another interview
Filed under: PHP, Personal, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
Within three hours of the end of the interview I got an email offering me the job :D
It gets better: the following morning (less than 24 hours later) the original place call me and offer me that job too :D
I took the second one.
More Michel Thomas
My opinion of learning a language with the Michel Thomas CDs has improved - as well as the "Complete Course" 8 hour sets you can get the "Advanced Course", an additional 5 hours designed for people who have done the first 8. Although I think he only does it for French and German...
13 hours of material. Considering the density this begins to rival Pimsleur's 50 hours (only available for Spanish and German).
He also seems to have lead an amazing life, albeit slightly less amazing than he claimed. But still. Go read about him on Wikipedia.
Michel Thomas rocks – maybe more than Pimsleur
Firstly in Pimsleur I'm guessing they use voice actors reading out a script for both the English and foreign speech. In this Michel himself talks. Also this is not scripted word for word at all. I'm assuming he has notes of some sort to keep him on track and there may be judicious editing that we don't hear, but basically everything is presented as is.
This is an important factor considering exactly how the lessons are presented - as a private lesson with Michel and two students new to the language. The benefits of this are you hear the sorts of mistakes people make (ranging from slight pronunciation problems to missing out a word to saying something completely different or nonsensical). It also makes it quite funny since (in the German at least) one student is clearly doing better than the other).
It loses out in ease of use though. Pimsleur comes with built in pauses, with Michel you have to pause it yourself. It does mean though that 8 hours of Michel is denser than 8 hours of Pimsleur.
One final not is he has a slightly unorthodox order of teaching but one that makes sense in some ways. For example the (almost) first thing he teaches is "Do you want..." ("Wollen Sie") which is normally left until quite far along because of the complication of modal verbs and their effect on word order. There are at least two advantages to this: first it gets the students used to the whole verb-at-the-end-of-a-sentence idea and secondly he focuses on words that are similar in English and German, and most modal verbs are (muss - must; kann - can).
Overall it's cheaper than Pimsleur, £70 in bookshops. Another glaring advantage is that I have actually seen it in bookshops, even W. H. Smiths. My usually suggestion applies hear though, get it from a library. Most libraries will order books from other libraries for a nominal fee (my local library charges £2.50 but they had it in themselves anyway).
The final drawback is it is only available in four languages: German, Spanish, Italian and French. Although I wouldn't be surprised if versions starting from something other than English are available (French -> Spanish for instance).