Jeronimo’s Weblog

I am always saying that I am going to write a letter of complaint when I feel I’ve received poor service, or feel a reason to complain, but I never do. We went to Budgens this afternoon, originally to buy some biscuits and lemons, as Cat is feeling a bit sick. Anyway I went over to the ginger nuts, and happened to look at the best before date. I showed it to Cat because it said May 2009. So they were a month old, which wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Then I looked at another packet to try and find a newer one. They all had a best before of November 2008!!

We decided to leave the biscuits and just bought the lemons. What we discovered afterwards is the same thing we’ve found the past few times – we’d been overcharged.

Enough is enough, so I’ve written about these things to the owners of the Budgens franchise, Musgrave, outlining my concerns. All of the Budgens stores are privately owned by independent retailers, but I’m hope that Musgrave will be keen to investigate.

Cat and I came up from MK to spend the weekend in Derby at my parents. This evening, my uncle and aunt came round with my two cousins, as well as Scott and Steph. We all had a huge dinner together, and afterwards because it is such a nice day we eventually ended up outside. My dad, uncle and cousin were playing a game where they tried to get my Aerobie disc to land on top of a football, about 10 feet away from where they were sitting.

It ended up with almost all of us sat outside, with about 15 balls or other objects trying to land the ring onto each of them! We spent most of the time laughing our heads off, as well as naming the various balls. So we had Mars, Earth, Venus, Mercury and even the Sky Lab to aim for!

It was huge fun – the fact that we were playing this non-stop for four hours testifies to this fact! We are even thinking of marketing the idea!

It’s been impossible to avoid the hype from Slumdog Millionaire. Originally heading towards a straight to DVD release, it ended up amassing 8 Oscars at this year’s awards including best motion picture. The story is fairly straightforward. A young man playing “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” on Indian television gets all the way to the final question and is accused of cheating. He then begins to explain to the police office interrogating him, how he came to each conclusion.

The idea is basically a rags to riches plot, from slums to millionaire, one good brother, one bad, with a dark storyline for the latter thrown in for good measure. I wasn’t over awed by what I was watching, neither did I feel the need to turn it off. It rumbled along smoothly enough, with one or two look away scenes (originally aimed at the 12A rating, it ended up being a 15).

I couldn’t help but feel as I was watching, how this film compared to City of God; another story of two young boys from the slums, albeit Brazil in this case. And of the two, I much preferred City of God, as you can see from my review. For me, Slumdog Millionaire is a good film, but it fails to live up to the expectations it has built up – something few films manage to do.

Rating: 6/10
Summary: A love story not worth a million, but certainly the price of a DVD rental
Memorable moment: [1:48:45] – Jamal answers the final question
Top 100 position: 62
IMDb: Slumdog Millionaire
Buy it from: Amazon

It’s been a very long time since I last reviewed a film for my IMDb Top 100 film challenge (I actually watched this a long, long time ago). Shame it was this film, which was simply unbearable. I had to really force myself to sit and watch it. Sadly the high reviews it acquires mystifies me beyond belief. Do yourself a favour and give this film a miss (unless you have trouble sleeping)!

Rating: 0/10
Summary: Dire, dire film, clearly loved by people who must be troubled
Memorable moment: None!
Top 100 position: 93
IMDb: Det sjunde inseglet
Buy it from: Amazon
Films remaining: 77

I’ve always felt that I had a developer in me wanting to get out. I can read code reasonably well, but I never seem to have invested much time actually writing it. I’ve dabbled in a little PHP, and wrote some basic Java apps when I was at uni, but I’ve never sat down and written an application from scratch.

After being inspired by Adam’s recent posts, I’ve decided to try my hand at writing a piece of homebrew for the Wii. I’ve not decided on a set goal, because I am new to programming, and first want to find my way around the C language that is used. Fortunately Adam tells me it is much like PHP and fairly straight forward.

I’ll be installing the dev kit on to my laptop at some point, and writing the usual “Hello world!” application. After a few more basic programs, I’ll hopefully decide on a project and code in my spare time. It won’t be anything near as good as some of the homebrew all ready out there, but it will be something useful nevertheless.