Sleep

I managed to waste away most of today through sleep - about twelve hours of it which of course did the opposite of what sleep is supposed to do and made me feel really tired. This meant that for the rest of the day I was completely disoriented and particularly dopey although the upside to this is that it took me twice as long to do anything.

Thanks to Derren Brown, I discovered this audio delight on YouTube. It made me squirm whenever the sound appeared to come too close to my ears, much like the reaction you have when a fly flies too close and the buzzing sound sends a shiver down your spine, making you wave your hands around like a lunatic. Make sure you use headphones and shut your eyes for the full effect.



I spent the evening with catch-up TV, I don't really know how I coped without it because I rarely seem to watch programmes when they are broadcast any more. Dragons Den was the first one and sadly the last one in the series however, there will be a special programme next week showing the aftermath which is usually very interesting. The next show on my list was The Cube; I had been meaning to watch this from the off but never got round to it. It is refreshing to see a totally new type of game show as the last few attempts have been regurgitated oldies with a bit of a twist. The disappointing part however is that all of the 'tasks' the contestants have to complete are all based around red balls of varying size. This means that I would have very little chance of getting past even the first round as my ball skills are practically non-existent. It is funny however to see the - often rather cocky - contestants completely underestimate how difficult the task is going to be 'in the cube' which is the catchphrase of the show. For some reason 'the cube' makes all of these tasks much more difficult but I'm not sure that's entirely true because the tasks all seem pretty darn difficult even without 'the cube'. The other oddity is the Stig like character referred to as 'the body' who is seen to complete all of the tasks in the cube with little or no effort. I don't know how this is presented in the studio but I'm assuming that it is in the form of a video rather than a live demonstration in which case 'the body' has probably had several attempts in order to perfect it which sort of defeats the object. Also, I can;t see the same hype over the identity of said character as much as there is over the Stig but I guess only time will tell.

At least the ITV player is now vastly greater than its previous reincarnation, now using Microsoft's Silverlight technology to stream the video rather than flash. Their inital attempt at the service was hideously flawed and it usually took several attempts in Internet Explorer in order to watch the first few minutes before 'technical issues' occurred and you were kicked out. Channel five's on demand service has also improved and I managed to get 3/4 of the way through the Gadget Show before being kicked off when Outlook failed to complete a send/receive and kicked me out of full screen. It is the worst offering of the terrestrial players and uses flash which is is a little bit heavy on the CPU consumption ensuring that my laptop provides a nice loud fan based backing track to the programme. At least it did work however and in Firefox as well; which is a first as normally I have to switch to IE before it will even admit that the programme is there.