The Fast and the Furious - Tokyo Drift
When the third part of the Fast & Furious franchise decided to go all Japanese, and move from American street racing to Japanese Drifting, there was some hope, however, it’s a story between schoolkids with mafia connections, and the (minimal) plot is only really there to serve the driving scenes.
Yes, if you’re a petrolhead, it’s spectacular (I can think of a couple of my work colleagues who’ll like it a lot) but it relies too much on the cars, and not enough on the actors. There is no real connection (apart from a fairly brief cameo) to either of the first two films, but even then, the films falls flat during the final race, you know from the start who’se going to win…
Predicatable and Dull, but some eye-candy for the petrolheads who like their Japanese motors…
Indian Outsourcing
Interesting article from The Register this week - a major UK energy company is looking to “re-shore” it’s customer contact center. This is excellent news, companies are starting to see the effect of the backlash from customers at having to deal with off-shore call centres.
So along with Natwest, who use their UK call center as a marketing point in their advertising, now we have Powergen reversing the trend.
On top of that, a major Indian outsourcing company is creating a call-center in Northern Ireland, so that companies can still outsource, but not send the work to India.
Hopefully this is the start of the reversal of the off-shoring trend, and seeing sense that customer satisfaction comes above the lowest cost base. There’s no point having a low cost base if your customers start leaving in droves because the quality of care isn’t there any more.
Quiet here, isn’t it?
I know things have been quiet here for a few days - I’ve got a week off work, and am making the best of the good weather…
United 93
Right, lets get this out of the way first, this is not an easy film to watch - reliving the events of 11th September 2001 will never be easy.
However this film focuses very tightly on the events surrounding UA93, which was the “fourth plane” the one that didn’t strike a major building, but came down in open countryside.
It’s a hard film to watch, it’s a emotive subject, and some say it has been made too early - I don’t believe that to be the case - it’s certainly to early for a film to focus on the events in New York - but this focuses on the events around that horrifc event, rather than the event itself.
It’s not a “fun” or “enjoyable” film, but it’s an important film, and one that is worth watching.
Lest we forget. Many many people lost their lives that day, and many millions will be touched forever.
I’m in a minority…
Apparently, 70% of the UK population are expected to watch “the big game” (I beleive it’s some kind of football match) - I will be one of 30% who won’t be watching.
Maybe I should have thought about this a bit more in advanced and gone somewhere which is normally very busy… like Alton Towers, in the hope that 70% of the people who would normally be at the park on a day like today, will in fact be watching said match.
Slow News
You can tell a “slow news day” a mile off - stories that wouldn’t normally attract any attention at all are jumped on by news websites to fill space…
like this one…
Apparently, the male Guppy fish treats his women badly enough that they’d rather swim with predators than with their own kind…
At least it’s still better than the endless coverage of Football and Big Brother…
Finally, some sense
Looks like the record industry is starting to see sense - that’s right, there’s no point in pursuing people who are copying songs for their own use (e.g. ripping a CD onto their iPod) - just those people who are distributing copies.
From the BBC
Recent Movies
