This morning on my way to work by electric pushbike, I was hit by a car in Worplesdon as it was pulling it of a drive. The drive itself is obscured by bushes and fence, and the house itself is based around a corner. It therefore somewhat difficult for cyclist/pedestrian using the dual cycle/pedestrian lane directly outside the drive to see what’s coming out of it. Therefore neither the driver or myself saw each other until the very last minute and I bounced off the bonnet and fell face first onto the grass verge (thank goodness for grass verges).

Was taken to hospital in an ambulance and prodded and probed for all manner of things – including ECGs, blood pressure, broken nose, blood in ears, concussion, etc. etc. As my left ankle was hurting like hell (and still is as I write this), they took me into X-Ray and got the foot scanned. The outcome was that they couldn’t see anything obvious, but will scrutinise the image more closely for any small fractures. No news thus far, but I am currently hobbling around on crutches.

My face is beaten up somewhat. I now sport a rather nasty gash on my upper lip which suggests that a scar may form – and that my top lip itself is swollen like somebody just having had Botox. Various gashes along my nose and forehead as well as my knees and elbow are other souvenirs of the accident.

Was cleaned up and given the crutches before being taken home (after my colleagues at Memset came to take the bike away – the front wheel is buckled considerably and the front forks scuffed) where I am now resting for a couple of days.

Many thanks to my friends and colleagues at Memset for helping me get back safely (and looking after the damaged bike) and the A&E and ambulance staff at the Royal Surrey Hospital in Guildford for everything they’ve done.

Well, my little alerting system has sprung into life again and found somebody from the BBC searching for Kick-Ass on LOVEFiLM:

132.185.144.124 – - [28/Jul/2010:18:48:05 +0100] “GET /2010/07/21/todays-amusement-universal-studios-uk-searching-google-kick
-ass-not-available-on-lovefilm/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 22289 “http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=kick+ass+on+lovefilm&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&
aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.19) Gecko/201
0031422 Firefox/3.0.19 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)”

And that IP is:

host1 [~]# host 132.185.144.124
124.144.185.132.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer webgw4.mh.bbc.co.uk.

Are they somebody just merely looking to find out why LOVEFiLM doesn’t carry Kick-Ass, or are they researching what’s going on between Universal and LOVEFiLM? I think the former, to be honest – but surely it is now quite well known that Universal hasn’t been supplying new titles to LOVEFiLM that one wouldn’t need to search for something like that.

Either way I like to say to Universal: For crying out loud – do the decent thing and just let LOVEFILM buy titles from you at a decent enough rate – ESPECIALLY Kick-Ass. People seem to want to be able to rent it. Those that will buy it will do so. And most people seem to be using LOVEFiLM. So don’t let MARV’s hard work on Kick-ass go to waste by denying them a potentially excellent place in the UK rental market as a consequence of wanting more money from rental sales. I’ve also never understood why you, Universal, disallowed all new rental sales to LOVEFiLM. Would you have really rather have received NO money from new rentals than some (but not as much as they’d like). In this financial climate, that’s bloody mad. It was a pain in the arse having to move to Blockbuster and set up a new list of titles. Don’t make my life as a consumer any more difficult than it ought to be. Thanks.

If I could be bothered I’d start a campaign to bring Kick-Ass to LOVEFiLM for rent.

The Bullshitter 1000 robot is intended to replace all of the highly paid mandarins at the UKFC with a single, mega-expensive system whose artificial intelligence unit will decide who is worthy of the money. Already, the BS 1000 has come up with a plan to issue a series of £200,000 film lottery tickets for anybody seeking finance. The lucky winner will receive the pot of money. The losers will be forced to finish financing the winner – or face bankruptcy. Funds currently allocated to the National Lottery film fund will just about cover the cost of running the Bullshitter (which is run by new biotech IT company, Semens – their motto: “We’ve got spunk!”). In addition to this, the new organisation will partly fund TV game shows in which filmmakers compete to win their budget for their film. This will involve lots of gunging and ritual humiliation as a team of 12 film directors, producers and writers take on tricky obstacle courses all the while pitching their ideas to the Bullshitter 1000. Those still alive at the end may win the grand prize of having their film made. In Canada.

As well as the lottery co-ordinator, the Bullshitter has the additional feature of being able to to write it’s own screenplays (and thus becomes the first machine and perhaps most importantly, the first ever board member of the new Government organisation to become a member of the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain) and allocate crew based on audience figures from popular US films taken from leading cinema chains. It’s already formulated a plot which features Russell Brand as a singing poodle at a US high school supported by Michael Cain as vigilante dressed as Batman while attempting to win the top prize of Who Wants to Get in Debt with A Streedancer?. It’s allocated Mike Leigh to direct the film. Due to a floating point calculation error, and having allocated the entire UK’s broadband bandwidth to organisation’s accountants, the budget of this film will be precisely 2p.

Or we can just go and privately finance our own films. Seems simpler.

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DVD to incorporate 50 minutes of outakes of actor mispronouncing “Meh”.

I can’t remember many films that came through MPC during the time I spent working there. The vast majority of the films were financed by the big film studios or were truly independently financed. There were one or two, I’m sure, but nonetheless there weren’t that many UKFC films.

And from what I hear, the UKFC certainly helped develop emerging talent – but strictly under their rules. Don’t like what they wanted – you could be told to take a hike. We lost out developing the Red Dwarf movie in this country because the UKFC turned down Rob Grant’s proposal. Who cares if Red Dwarf has made pots of money, is still popular across many countries, etc. No – the UKFC didn’t want to know.

On the positive side, we have seen some bloody good films. Slumdog Millionaire and Harry Brown are but two I can think of right now. But as I’ve said: for every Slumdog there is a Battlefield Earth or Plan 9 from Outer Space that’s been financed by the UKFC. And when you’re playing with public money, mistakes are even more costly than studio financed films.

Update: Apparently, according to this Writer’s Guild of Great Britain’s tweet, none of the current board members of the UK Film Council writers. Talk about diversity!

Now, if the Government were to ever touch the BFI: British Film Institute, I’d be up in arms. Hands off Mr. Hunt!

Mmm Mmm MMmmmmmm.

Update: Vinnie (for that is his name) responds via Twitter:
@VinnieSays (to) @mbdrake Only a no-good dirty schmuck would twist my words like that. Jeez – I’m an upstanding member of the community for god’s sake.

Recently, however, this started happening:

It happened almost every time I went into Google Docs via the link within Gmail. However, it did start behaving itself for a while. Then it returned. I should mention that I added a Gmail account to my Google Account (mbdrake1976@gmail.com) which became necessary back in January 2010 when Google gave me the Nexus One in order to be able to use certain services on the phone. That was fine – not too much of an inconvenience (until the phone’s touchscreen went mad and delayed SMSes and soft ringtones caused me to give the phone away – just couldn’t live with those glitches).

Having uploaded a spreadsheet and tried to open it, I now get this every single bloody time:

It’s referencing the Google Account rather than Google Apps account. I know this because I deleted the associated Gmail account with my Google Account (mbdrake1976@gmail.com – this address would have been shown in any and all Google Account services such as Google Reader, Feedburner, etc.).

So now I can’t access any Google Docs docs without having to make it public – and that’s absolutely not what I want. I’m going to request help on the Google Help forums in the hope one of the TCs/PPs will escalate this to Google. Let’s see how long it takes – will it prove my point about how long it takes Google to respond to Google Apps Standard Edition users based on system generated errors.

Update: The apparent solution is to create a new document with Private sharing settings. Save the document. Re-open it. I could then open the problematic uploaded spreadsheet just fine. Fingers crossed this has now fixed the issue. But what a royal pain in the arse this is.

Update (25th July 2010): Bugger it! The issue seems to be session based because when I tried to access Google Apps Docs this morning I got the “choose your account” prompt followed by the “You’ve not got permission” error message again. I can’t access my docs until I either make them public or create a new document. I’m about to clear my cookies and cache to see if this helps.

Ah, yes – clearing all data from Chrome has helped but I wonder if this is a temporary or permanent fix. Time will tell.

Update (26th July 2010): Bah. Despite clearing cookies and cache in Chrome, I was prompted for which account (Account or Apps) this morning. That said, no permission denied. Also noted that my other Google Apps account was missing from the list. The question is: how does one tell Google Docs to always use my martyn@drake.org.uk Google Apps account? I can’t see how this can be done.

Update: This thread on T-Mobile’s own forums makes for an interesting read..

So I ask those reading this blog to donate something – anything – to Jennifer’s walk and help raise money for this very worthwhile charity.