1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2. Citizen Kane (1941)
3. Casablanca (1942)
4. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
5. Rocky (1976)
6. The Shining (1980)
7. Apocalypse Now (1979)
8. Alien (1979)
9. The Graduate (1967)
10. Jaws (1975)
11. Trainspotting (1996)
12. The Good, The Bad, The ugly. (1966)
13. The English Patient (1996)
14. Doctor Zhivago (1965)
15. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
16. Raging Bull (1980)
17. Taxi Driver (1976)
18. Withnail & I (1987)
19. Annie Hall (1977)
20. The Usual Suspects (1995)

If you can think of a any that should on this list, please leave your thoughts or the number of these films that you have in the comments. This list was created with the use of the times online’s Top 100 Films.

What is the reason for this? People complain that they don’t want to carry around lots of devices with them. How lazy are these people? Music players like the iPod Nano or creative zen series fit easily in a jacket pocket with a phone. It is not like anyone carries a brief case anymore, all most people have to carry these days, is phone,wallet and keys. You can’t carry a music player to? Personally, I have a Nokia phone, iPod touch and a Casio camera, which is how I like it. Each device is amazing what it does by itself, I can’t see how putting these devices together would give me any gain what so ever. But with all these devices coming together, the standalone devices may stop being sold. There is already talk about getting rid of the iPod Classic. Well I tell these device makers, I am not buying your toaster phone!

RJay45@thespacedmonkey Well I have written problems I’ve had at work and got technical help come back through before. Why are you still tweeting?

I can completely understand his point, if you had a simple idea to share or question to ask, it is a very useful tool. But I don’t think that is what twitter is. Many of the post I see on twitter are not useful one, for all twitter is good for, many of the post are personal updates, such as Kevin Rose‘s wonderful;

Pants status: off

I think that many people believe that twitter will be the next big thing, but I don’t think this will even happen. The difference between twitter and facebook is simple, you be on facebook, you don’t have to create any content. You don’t have to upload anything, you can be tagged in pictures by others and simple enjoy contacting friends. Also twitter has no BUILT-IN was of posting images, which I think is a gaint omission of any social network. Many of the people that do twitter, do not think about what they are saying, just post without thought about what they are doing.

To want to twitter, you want to be a blogger and as the interest has shown not everyone want to be a blogger. So why am I talking about twitter still? I have found some amazing links from it. At the moment, this is what I am doing on twitter.

So I have some questions for those reading this post.

1. What do you use twitter for?
2. What is the future of twitter?
3. Do you think that twitter will ever over take facebook?
   

It was only months later until I back into the service, because when watching Jonathan Ross show, Stephen Fry was a guest on the show and both of them were talking about having twitter accounts. I thought that if Stephen Fry was on the service, he might have something interesting to say, so I might as well give it a go. How wrong could I be, the other day, he posted before and after pictures of his haircut. I mean come on, how vain can a person be to post that. It turns out that they are a number of so call famous people on twitter. All of them seem to think that everyone is interesting is every little fact of they lives.

So back to the question in hand, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing is my answer. I think that is everything wrong with the internet, as it is short form content (as there is a limit of 140 characters) for those that have a very short attendation spans. It allows people to be extremely vain and talk about the stupid manusha of they lives. The worse example of twitter is the story of the man who twittered the results of a trail before the judge read out the judgement, which has caused a mistrial. The only use of have got from it has been a couple of links to interesting projects or videos. They are other services for this, such as delicious and Digg that are much better for social bookmarking.

If you interesting in following me, I am @thespacedmonkey. It automatically imports the posts for this blog and I do, from time to time post interesting links up there. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother..

Gears of War For PC

Don’t miss understand me from the title of this post, I own Gears of War for the XBOX 360 and it was amazing. Gears of War on the Xbox 360 is one of te best games that I have ever played. That is why I was so disappointed when trying to play it the other day on a friend’s laptop.  I have already completed the game on the Xbox 360 and was in no real need to complete the game again, as I have better things to do with my time. A good friend of mine had got himself an extremely beefy new laptop and decided to buy the game to play on it. It had some problem installing it so I came over and got it working. As I had got it working, I was allowed the first “go” on it. A login my gamertag, Spacedmonkeyj, which took like a living age, much longer than normal. It took about 10 minutes to login, which already a bad sign. After it finally signed in, the menu was painfully slow and then tried to start the game. It took another 10 minutes to get into the game. When the game loaded, it was a very impressive slideshow but little else. Each frame was displayed second by second with little movement being showed. So I manage to exit the game and return to Windows desktop. Where I turned everything running in the background that might have taken processor speed including firewall. Then restarted the game, this time it only took 5 minutes to load. The game was choppy and horrible, the screen refreshed so slowly the bad guys could easy appear on the screen without me seeing them and kill me. The game was so unattractive and I couldn’t get it to do a reload correctly. It took over 45 minutes of playing, blind luck and shooting a few seconds before the bad appears on the screen to finish a level that should only take a matter of minutes to complete. Then the game appears to crash the desktop is displayed in 800×600. After a few second the game reappears and takes a few more minutes to load the video. So mad at this point, I wait until the next level loads and exited the game.

It was horrible, truly amazing, surpirising, stupidly slow and horrible. I should explain. Gears of War was orignally designed for the XBOX 360 as basically the flagship title for the console, indeed my XBOX shipped with it in the box. So Microsoft decided to port the extremely popular game to their new platform Games for Windows. GFW is a really nice idea to make it easier to develop games for Windows and have one login/username for all multiplayer games. It also adds much of feeling of playing on XBOX 360, adding the Live Guide function and the much loved achivements points through games that support Games for Windows live. Using it on my friend’s laptop, a Acer Aspire 6920G which is a Intel Dual Core 2GHz 64bit proccessor with 4GB of Ram and a NVIDIA GeForce 9500M GS graphics card. This is a nice computer, bought new and it couldn’t manage to work this game. It is shocking to me that a brand new 2008 gaming laptop like this simple couldn’t cut it with the flagship game compared to the 3 year old XBOX 360. It was the most disappointed I have been with a game in my life. If games like this keep being made, you may well put the final nail in the coffin of PC gaming. I have to say, do not buy!

Well of course, I have had university work to do; I am working on my second year of my degree at the moment so I have had lots to do there. I created a couple of pieces of work that I was extremely proud of. For one of modules, I had to write a Java program which was a massive undertaking. The Java program was a simple piece of network mapping software. It worked out amazing; I can’t say I have been more proud of anything, work wise, than this. Check out a screenshot of it in action on my Flickr account.

Now that I do not have as much work to do, I think it is time to kick back and getting to having some fun. Of course, there are lots of things I can now do like to see films out, going drinking and the like I can now do. I have been enjoying talking to friends and really finding out what people have been up to, that has been amazing. The thing that really is getting to me, is that now that I have got used to working really hard on my university work, I it find it really hard to unwire and just chill out. It is funny that the first thing I wanted to do when all my work was over was to get back on my computer and start playing around with Spacedmonkey.

I think instead of just chilling out, for the next couple of weeks I am going to end up arm deep in writing for my many web sites. I have already added Live search to Spacedmonkey this blog. Try it out today, it really is cool. I also have lots of other plans. So watch this space for updates as I go and first looks at the cool stuff I am doing.

The thing that interested me the most is the very small amount of numbers that I both recieve and send texts to. I had tonnes of numbers on my phone, friends of old and random people I didn’t really know. From all this, I worked out that I only really needed four numbers.

• Mother(of course)
• Girlfriend
• Best friend on Course
• Sholder to cry on

But being without a phone most useful tool that I have used instead of having a phone is the social networking web site Facebook. With Facebook I have the ablity to have a portal to my community of friends and family where I am. To me at least, it has nearly replaced my phone as the way I interact with my friends. Now I have a new phone, I really need Facebook everywhere I go. A while back I installed the Mobile app. It sends me SMS messages when I get a wall post or message meaning I have both the phone to make calls, texts and now facebook in one device.

With new devices like the Iphone coming out, it is funny to think that I am never happier than with a really old crap phone in my pocket. It means that when I lose this one I don’t really care because it costs me nothing. It also shows how much I really care about new features in phones. I couldn’t give a crap if there is a the best camera in the world in my phone now, as long as I can make calls I am happy. So stick that in your pile and smoke it O2!

I have been known to do a bit of rereporting but I don’t think that is the real focus of this site. The point of this site is that is doesn’t really have a point. I can write what I feel interests me and share that with the rest of the world. But reading this blog you get a chance to look in my head and see the kinds of things that interest me. It makes this blog very personal to and you get insight into my mindset by reading it. Having said that it is very personal, I don’t really write about my life. There are lots about blogs out there about people’s lives, their girlfriends and parents that are getting on people nurves. For the most part, all of these are rubbish and are completely boring to read. I find it hard to believe that anyone but the people who these blogs are write about would find Joe Blogs and his cats at all interesting. I try and write about accessable topics that interest the world at large. What the problem lots of us weblogger have is, how do you keep the quality level to a high standard. The question you have to got ask yourself before sitting down in front of your computer is this, “Why I am blogging this?”. If it is for a good reason, to write something of use, that would help the world, like a blog about you dealing with a problem, then fine. But if I have to read another blog post about the Iphone, I think I am going to go mad.

When I write, I only try and write things that I know and that interest me. I don’t go off on rants (tell a lie, I do) or try bring people to the way I think about stuff. I just try and write what I think and let you guys judge. This means that I don’t always get the traffic I should. If I talked about recent events or news stories, I would get more people coming in from search engines suchs as google. Personally, I don’t think writting blogs should be about how many people see the site. That really is not important to me, I write because I enjoy getting my thoughts down and not because I want lots of hits. I don’t have adverts on this site so I really am not making any money out of this. I like the idea of someone just finding my site by mistake and taking a look. It doesn’t matter as long as someone might find it useful.

It will be interesting to look back on this site in 10 years. Lots of stuff in my life and I will be able to look back on it as a kind of time Time capsule.

Facebook

This is the second part of series of posts about life at university and my thought on my first year. The first post in the series just had some general thoughts I had coming straight back from Portsmouth. This post is entitled “faceboking“.

As a student at university, prepare yourself to spend hours of your life on this web site. I have heard facebook discribed as, “Like crack”. If you walk around a computer room in any university campus, you will see many screen with this site on it. I know that I personally have spend hours, tagging myself in photos, search for friends and reading other people walls. But many do not understand this phenomenon. Why is facebook so good?

The site seems to understand that people want to know what their friends are doing and share information easily. The site was orignally designed for students and even now when it is open, it still has that at it’s core. It understand that MySpace is different market, that facebook users don’t care about what look of their profile and that not everyone in the world should be able to see your profile. So other people on your network can see your profile. Your network can be a workplace, region, high school or college. For example, I am member of London and Uni. Portsmouth ’10. Only people that live in london or are currently going to Portsmouth. This is very useful and cuts down on spam friendship requests.

It is truly amazing how useful this site can be, but it can also make problems. For example, if you make a complete fool of yourself one night and say something not very nice. If someone takes a picture of you and tags, people that you would normally very see again maybe be able to find you. Also as everyone can see your relationship status, lots of people as you why have you not changed your profile to in a relationship. This is called making your relationship, “Facebook Official“.

Personally, even through there are bad things about facebook, I still love the site and will use it as long as everyone I know does. It really shows real people, you can really tell how popular someone is by the number of pictures they have been tagged in. This article on the BBC news site, seems to prove that people on facebook are more truthful and real.

If I was a new student to uni, I would get used to the site before going off to university so you can be a good facebooker. Learn that things written on the internet can be taken lots of ways. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t say to someone face. Understand that things write on people profile are public. Happy facebooking.