Last night Channel 4 showed the latest of their ‘100 Greatest’ series, unsurprisingly fronted by Jimmy Carr, the 100 Greatest Cartoons. It should perhaps have been titled something more akin to the 100 Greatest Animations since it’s debatable whether 3D animation and more mature animation like Akira and Fritz The Cat (using “mature” in the loosest possible sense of the word in that case), but the results were interesting.

The Simpsons was an obvious choice for number one and I don’t think anyone expected anything else to win, but I really didn’t expect the public to vote the likes of Family Guy, Spirited Away, The Iron Giant, Akira, Ren & Stimpy, and Princess Mononoke to get such relatively high positions. Shrek didn’t deserve its high placing (watch it in ten years and see how badly it’s dated thanks to the overdone pop culture references) and I’d question whether The Incredibles would place so high if it wasn’t fresh in the mind, but I was definitely impressed with how we represented our taste in animation. Tally ho!

The recent announcement that Microsoft were recalling 14.1 million Xbox power cables because of a slight risk of setting alight and destroying everything you own was met with mirth by some. One of my Xboxes was affected but I wasn’t too worried considering that cable had been plugged in for the best part of three years and had powered two Xboxes without once killing anyone, but I sent off for the replacement anyway. Better to be safe than sorry, right?

On Saturday I got home from work around lunchtime to find a package had arrived with “Xbox Protection Cable” slapped on the side – no great surprise that it was the new Xbox cable. I was faily impressed with what was in the box – a cable with it’s own dedicated surge protector and buttons to test and reset it. For all their elaborate new cables though, Microsoft apparently couldn’t tell which plug the UK used. Some idiot sent me one with a European plug.

I could have understood the blunder had the package come from wage slaves in the Far East, but this had been packaged, labelled, and sent by someone within the UK to a UK address with a non-UK plug. How exactly does someone not notice this when it’s sent out? I called Microsoft and was informed, from a French call centre no less (I thought the point of outsourcing call centres was to send them to places where people would work for nothing), that I was one of many calling in with the same problem and that I’d now have to wait 4-6 weeks for a replacement to make its way to me.

Just when they thought having to put that a falling Xbox could kill small children in the manual wasn’t embarrassing enough, we find out that they can burn you alive. Then they taunt you with the fact that you’re powerless against your Xbox’s malignity by giving you a weapon that is useless to fight it.

My tinfoil hat tells me that it’s all part of Microsoft’s plan to enslave the people of world under the mastery of their home appliances. You may already know too much…

“BT is increasing the speed of all our packages, for both new and existing customers, at no extra charge.”

YEAH!!

My current 512k connection is OK but I’m certainly not going to complain at a free upgrade to 2Mb. It’s about time that they got with the times over here and dropped the 512k connections considering most other countries with prevalent broadband use have been at a minimum of 1Mb download for a while now. I can’t wait!

You may have noticed the overhaul of this site, by far the biggest since I set it up over two years ago. Apart from the obvious cosmetic change, the backend has been completely changed from the grossly inefficient, hand-coded HTML system to a new PHP and database system running under WordPress. Not only should the look be cleaner, but it will make updating the site infinitely easier and more frequent.

The old content will be ported when I get around to it, but the site will shift focus to become more of a blog on what I’m getting up to as an aspiring games journalist as I study for my journalism degree, and maybe some more surprises. Stay tuned.

There will be more changes on the way as I finish setting up the theme, but I welcome feedback.