Ben tagged me on his blog so I thought I’d continue his ‘7 things’ meme.
However, I’ve changed it to 25 things instead as my wife tagged me on Facebook with a similar meme so I’m killing two birds with one stone!
- I moved to Guyana, South America for two years when I was 6 years old and was there when the Jonestown suicide took place. I lived across the road from Clive Lloyd the famous cricketer. Our house was once burgled by the very guard we paid to protect it.
- I went to an American school whilst in Guyana, it finished around 12.30 every day so my brother and I hung out in the pool every day. I learned to swim underwater and could hold my breath for over two minutes.
- I have a degree in Fine Art, a BA (Hons) Time Based Art from Dundee University to be specific.
- I have both an HNC and HND in Graphic Design too.
- I have been skateboarding since 1985, but I also rode BMX for a few years before that, I still own a BMX now and still ride it at the skatepark every so often. I can still bust out a miami hopper and many other old school BMX flatland tricks.
- I was Scottish Mini-ramp skateboard champion in the mid-90’s.
- My hair has been blue, orange and red over the years, also green but that wasn’t really on purpose.
- I don’t have much hair nowadays and shave my head frequently, but I bet I spend a lot less time getting ready in the morning than most people reading this!
- My Dad has lived overseas most of my life which has meant I was fortunate to spend a lot of holidays in my teenage years in Dubai in the UAE.
- I used to go running in the desert with a running club in Dubai and once ran a half-marathon at night and finished in the top five. Now those same places I ran in are literally fields of green grass having been made into one of Dubai’s several world class golf courses.
- I was a member of both the British Airways Junior Jet Club and British Caledonian Lion Club, and frequently visited the pilots in the cockpit to say hi.
- I have been to Australia four times, and have been swimming with manta rays there two times.
- I’ve been working for myself / running my own business since 1998. (www.wideopenspace.co.uk)
- I would love to fly as a passenger in some kind of fighter jet.
- I once went gliding in an old open cockpit World War 2 era glider in Wales which was awesome.
- I am an Apple Mac geek and have been since I first used one in 1989. I have some old Macs that I collect, in particular an Apple IIe and an SE30. I have a few more hiding in cupboards in my house.
- I once met the band Kajagoogoo in Gatwick airport and got their autographs.
- I’m not a fan of the 80’s and especially don’t like the recent 80’s pop fashion revival / nostalgia. It’s one of the main reasons I dislike the London 2012 Olympics branding.
- The first CDs I ever bought were by Stiff Little Fingers and The Fall.
- I like lot’s of different kinds of music but dislike ‘rock’ bands like Def Leppard, Europe etc, again, kind of a dislike of the 80’s!
- I’ve always preferred American punk music much more than British punk music.
- I’m 36 years old and have had a provisional driver’s licence since I was 17. I’ve also owned a car for over two years. Maybe this year I’ll get round to learning to drive.
- I don’t play any instruments although I did own a bass guitar once and attempted to learn. Sometimes I wish I could play something.
- Having graduated from Art College over 10 years ago I’m fortunate to be doing a creative job doing web / graphic design and development. However, I would still like to make some artwork and exhibit some work, in particular one video / sculptural installation idea I had 10 years ago. Current technology would make it so much easier to do now.
- In my home I am surrounded by three females, my wife Annie and my two awesome daughters; Natalie aged 6 and Gabriella aged 1. My wife would probably point out here that Gabriella’s name has nothing to do with High School Musical, even though Natalie loves those movies.
So, Macworld SF 2009 Keynote, where was the 
Anyone who is into skateboarding and owns a games console has no doubt played at least one of the many games in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series. This game defined the genre for several years and had no equal. In recent years EA’s Skate presented the first game to seriously challenge its place at the top. One of the things that set Skate apart from the Tony Hawk games was that there was a learning curve more closely resembling the real skate experience. Skate was also helped by the capabilities of next generation consoles like the Playstation 3 and the XBox 360 which offered amazing graphics.
Nintendo’s DS and Wii consoles represented a new approach to gaming. Instead of focusing on photo-realistic graphics like the PS3 and XBox 360 these consoles used a combination of unusual interfaces and input devices to create a unique and new gaming experience. The release of these consoles brought a slew of games making use of the DS’s two screen / stylus input and the Wii’s highly-physical Wiimote / accelerometer based controls. A follow-up title 
As I said before Apple really seemed to kind of just sneak in with the iPhone as a gaming platform, although many saw the potential of the iPhone as a platform for mobile applications I don’t think many realised just how capable the platform was especially in the area of graphics performance on such a small device.
Touchgrind (
The interface for Touchgrind is nice, you spin a skateboard wheel and choose from one of six sections on the wheel: Options, About, How To, Warm Up, Jam Session and Competition. Options lets you switch off sound effects and About gives you a link to the developer’s website. The next option gets you into the nitty gritty, How To is the first thing you need to check out when you first try out Touchgrind as it explains the concepts of how to maneuver the board and do tricks.
After working your way through the How To section and you’ve managed to get to grips with the basic controls then the next section to check out is the Warm Up. This section lets you just go and cruise around, there’s a few ramps and a rail that you can try and grind. There’s not that much to skate but the point is just to get familiar with skating around, trying out the various tricks on some real obstacles as well as in the large amount of empty space around the obstacles.
To help you know how near you are to obstacles there is also the ability to zoom out by clicking on the magnifying glass in the lower-right hand corner. The view then zooms out and you can see a larger area of the park, not the entire park but a larger section so you can get a better idea of what you’re trying to skate towards.
Competition is the final section and this gives you a 100 second time limit in which to skate around and build up as many points as possible. As you get higher scores new boards are unlocked which can be selected when starting the Competition or Warm Up sections. I’ve managed to get to over 400,000 points so far but still have a way to go to get over 1,500,000 points to get the highest board! I’ll need to practice a bit more :)
Finally people can stop complaining that the BBC only support Windows XP for its downloadable iPlayer application. Using a cross-platform application developed using 
At the time of writing this there’s not a lot of content available and I could only find one episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks that showed a download link. However, that’s simply because content needs to be specifically encoded for this version of the iPlayer so it will take time for content to be encoded and made available.