I just love porridge at the moment! No, not the Ronnie Barker prison sitcom. I mean the nummy combination of rolled oats and milk.

I started making porridge a couple of weeks ago and have had it for breakfast on week-days almost every day since then! I think its the cold mornings and walk to work, and porridge is very satisfying, both to eat and have a lovely warm and full tum, but also to make in the mornings. There’s something about stirring a hot pan on a hob first thing in the morning that is quite soothing… and it only takes a couple of minutes, so even I can fit it into my morning routine. (As an added bonus I always make enough for B as well, as she doesn’t ‘do’ breakfast otherwise.)

So, here’s to porridge! Hooray!

Ok, I have to admit, I’ve really gotten into the Top Gear over the last year. It started by catching some repeats on ‘Dave’ and has now snowballed into watching all that I can find and generally getting a bit excited as it gets closer to 8pm on a Sunday.

Really, that should not be a shock – I do like my cars. But I’m not a huge Jeremy Clarkson fan and wrote of most of the early series as blatant ego stoking by old Clark-o. After finally giving it a chance, though, it is actually not really about cars at all, and mercifully not that much about Clarkson’s ego. I really like James May, his ‘slow’ co-presenter who likes sheds, motorcycle maintenance, science and is generally a geek. Hooray! So yeah, I’ve gotten into it quite a lot.

Anyhoo – the shocker on last night’s show was that Kevin McCloud did rather well in the “Star in the Reasonably Priced Car” slot. I’m a big fan of the Kevin, he is passionate about design, efficiency and beauty, house building and interiors, all really good, interesting stuff. But it turns out he’s actually good at driving cars quite fast!

If you missed it, catch up at the wonderful BBC iPlayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00fys1m. (Only if you’re in the UK and probably only until 8th December 2008 I expect)

(Also, kudos to the beeb for having a flash-based video catch up that actually works reliably on the Mac. It’s the only one I’ve found – ITV try, but it doesn’t work, and Channel 4/Sky only work on Windows. Grr.)

Yeah I’m a bit rubbish at this blogging lark really! I think the main problem is that I haven’t found a good time in the day to do it. So instead of just periodically posting some links, I will actually do some proper blogging and everything.

So for the next month at least – maybe longer – I will try to post a blog a day! That should improve my writing somewhat and also put something of interest (possibly) on this site.

Let’s see how it goes.

Yep it’s time to start looking – I found a rather amusing bit from the BBC’s David Tennant interview:

The huge question is – who would you like to replace you?
Well I’ve always been a big supporter of Wee Jimmy Krankie. So the campaign starts here to get Wee Jimmy Krankie in the Tardis and big Ian Krankie as the companion. I think that works.

Somebody, please Photoshop that!

I’m glad to see in comments on the beeb website people are mentioning Bill Nighy and Philip Glennister. Also at least some people are saying no to Nesbit!

I had a sudden worrying thought just now that The Moff might go with an actor he’s worked with before. Like Jack Davenport… actually maybe that wouldn’t be that bad; he was good in Ultraviolet.

Personally I’d like to just see someone who can act doing the role – Both Chris and David are ultimately pretty good actors. That’s why I’d like to see Bill Nighy, and why I really do not want to see James Bloody Nesbit doing it!

I can’t help but notice watching some factual TV shows recently that some people really are taking the “5 second attention span” thing too far and about a quarter of the show is taken up with either recapping what has gone before or telling you what is going to happen later in the show – a practice I shall now dub ‘pre-capping’.

In particular is it most noticeable when watching a run of shows that have been Sky+ed up for watching all in one go. I’ve now taken to fast forwarding those bits, as I do the ads, but really – what’s up with that? Do we really need to take up so much of the show basically repeating itself? Is this the new slow-motion, to pad shows out further?

Either way, it’s bloody annoying and I really wish TV would stop doing it. Stop treating your audience like idiots, please!

Particularly bad shows for this were: “I own Britain’s Best Home” – also home to the most annoying fawning female presenter of recent memory, “Behind Closed Doors” and “Ty’s Great British Adventure”. Yeah, I watch a lot of TV shows about homes. That’s what owning(*) a home does to you I guess.

(*) ok so technically I own about 5% of it. But I’m working on the rest…

Yes, the job hunt didn’t take long, fortunately. On Monday I’ll be joining Black Rock Studio who, funnily enough, used to be owned by Climax, who I used to work for. So some of the people I know from then. Others there I know from working with them at Criterion Games / EA, and I’m sure when I get there I’ll discover yet more people I know from other jobs. That, I have discovered, is one of the benefits of doing a job for a decade. You get to know quite a few people in ‘the industry’ and thus bump into them quite a bit.

I must admit, I am actually super excited about it – I was very impressed at the interview, and Disney themselves are actually pretty cool these days. Don’t forget they have merged with Pixar now and some very smart people on board. Exciting stuff!

As a helpful extra bonus in time, they are also based in the center of Brighton. I must admit I hadn’t realised that before, I for some reason thought they were simply near, not actually in Brighton itself. So that is a big time saver for me and I know that B is very happy to see more of me as well. Plus you can’t beat actually being able to go out to the pub / cinema / etc with your workmates rather than having to get a long and dull train back home.

The only downside? Apparently I just missed a free showing of Wall-E at the local cinema. Nuts! Well I’ll have to get it on Blu-Ray when it comes out.