[off topic] Bizzare Vampire Film Review

James Beradinelli is one of my favourite film critics (ReelViews).

I'm looking for a film to watch tonight and notice that "Cronos" is on tv. I've never heard of it before so I head on over to Reel Views to see if James has reviewed it - which he had.

The review starts with the line: "Reprinted with permission from The Vampire Gazette, Volume 348, Issue 5, May 1994". I didn't think much about it as I skimmed over the review... until I realised that the entire article is written from the perspective of being a vampire: it appears that the magazine is aimed at people who think they vampires or something (those idiots who file their teeth into fangs?).

It's pretty cool to find an "easter egg" such as after reading his reviews for many years now, but it's also a disturbing peek into mind of these weirdos:-

There's one really frightening moment near the beginning of the movie, where a vampire is shown with a stake through his chest. This scene gave me the shivers and I felt myself reflexively patting my own left breast for reassurance. Other than that, there were no unnerving images in Cronos. There's a lot of blood and gore -- but that's rather routine.

After sitting through countless re-tellings of the Dracula story, it's refreshing to finally see something that gets close to reality.

Oooookay then!

Kicking Off 2008

Carsonified: Boo!
A little bit of Bad News to start off with: Carsonified decided to retract their desk-sharing offer. Ryan said it was because they rejigged their space and wanted a meeting room, but I've a suspicion they didn't get much of a take up on it. Oh well.

Busy Start
In Good News, three clients contacted me in the first week back to line up some work - can't ask for a much better start than that! I'm in the middle of two-weeks "off" whilst I set some business-side things up and prepare for the MySQL exams on the 18th; after that it looks like I'm going to be busy busy busy.

PHP Conference 2008
As a member of PHPLondon I volunteered to help out on the day of the UK PHP Conference.

Paul Morgan (organiser) and I had previously discussed an idea for a talk on "frameworks" - with a couple of evangelists from different frameworks pitching their case followed up by a rountable discussion / debate / QA. It turns out Paul's managed to find some great speakers to make this happen - and has asked me to chair/co-ordinate the talk.

I'm excited and nervous - I've never spoken in front of a crowd before. It's something I'd like to get into and I think this will be a nice, gentle introduction (no pressure on getting asked tricky questions and relatively short stints in the limelight!).

New Branding
My friends, Craig and Martin, from Sugarcane Studio are taking care of my new company's identity/branding. So far I've had a couple of phone conversations with Craig which have really helped to extract the essence of what I want to do / what Pluggable will be offering.

It's a little daunting when you get asked some "hard" questions about why someone would buy from you instead of hundreds of potential competitors - but ultimately a great exercise; It's made me re-think certain aspects and helped to define specifically what I'll be doing.


All in all, a cracking start to 2008 and my first year "going solo" [again!].