Stewart Priest

Review: She’s Out of My League

// May 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // Film, Reviews

From time to time, I get the chance to preview films before the general viewing public. So, when I got the opportunity to go see She’s Out of My League, of course I took it.

Kirk (Jay Baruchel) is a pretty average guy with a pretty average job and pretty average friends. A high school graduate with no other qualifications, he works in an airport as a TSA agent and dreams of one day becoming a pilot, but is content in the knowledge that he’ll never really amount to much. Until Molly (Alice Eve) walks through his metal detector.

Let’s face it. Molly is a hard 10. Kirk is a soft 6. There’s no way she’d look twice at him, right? Well normally, no. However, a girl this hot as gotten the attention of every single guy in the place. Especially Kirk’s sleazy workmates, and more importantly, his extra-sleazy boss. When Kirk pisses off his boss to defend Molly’s honour, she sees him for what he is. A nice guy. A hard 10 in the nice guy stakes.

Once past airport security and onto her flight, she realises she has lost her iPhone. Her phone is her life; she’s a party planner and losing it would be the end of the world to her, so she borrows her friend’s phone to call it, and who answers? Kirk. When he agrees to return the phone in person the next night, he seals his fate. A hard 10 is into a soft 6. In other words, Molly likes Kirk.

No-one believes it. Not Molly’s friends, not Kirk’s friends, not Kirk. Why does Molly like Kirk? What does Kirk do to impress Molly? I’m not going to tell you. You’ll have to find out for yourself.

I thought it was hilarious. The non-gay pube-shaving by another-straight-man scene is particularly funny. If only for childish reasons.

She’s Out of My League is out on June 4.

New House, New Project

// May 9th, 2010 // No Comments » // DIY, Tech, Windows 7

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed may already be aware of this, but for those of you who don’t, Jen and I have bought a house. It’s all very exciting, for a number of reasons. One of which is that I’ve been allowed to put all the tech I want into it! I suspect that Michelle will be very jealous.

I’ve been a fan of home automation for a long time, and whilst still living at home with the parents, I’ve been able to experiment with X10 with great success. Thankfully, the house is all on one level, with loft access. So far, it’s been decided that I’ll be running Cat5 cable to every room – maybe not the bathroom, but there’s still potential for that if I can justify it – along with speaker cable and possibly two or three HDMI cables.

I’ll have an automation server running Homeseer as a backend to the house, which will pull together pretty much all the tech in the house. My main media server will run Windows Home Server, serving up audio and video to Windows 7 PCs which run Windows Media Center.

Broadcast media will arrive in the house in a variety of different ways: 2 Virgin Media boxes will provide cable TV to either the TVs directly, or to the Windows 7 boxes to be played out via WMC; at least one Freesat box (there’s already a satellite dish feeding into the house); and regular old council telly – Freeview.

My studio equipment will live in its own room, herein referred to as my studio. The studio PC will live in the loft along with the servers so I can reduce the equipment noise in the studio itself. Monitor and keyboard/mouse will arrive in the room via an Adder standalone KVM box.

I’m sure there will be all kinds of pitfalls along the way, but with the help of the folks over at Automated Home, I’m sure things will go pretty well! Stay tuned for more news on the tech house. I can’t wait!

Off-Roading at Knockhill

// May 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Reviews, Services, birthday

I visited the picturesque kingdom of Fife yesterday. More specifically, Knockhill Racing Circuit. You may have noticed in this post that I turned 28 last weekend. Well, my trip to Knockhill was for LAST year’s birthday. I was working on the theory that good things come to those who wait. Boy, was I right! I had a whale of a time!

I was booked on the 4×4 Off-Road driving course. Its taken me a while from booking the course to actually being able to attend – it was cancelled due to the bad snow the last time I was supposed to go, but when I found out how bad it really was, I didn’t relish the thought of trying to get there.

So yesterday rolled around and it was time to go. I had to be there at 9:15 for a 9:30 start. This meant being out the door at 8:00, and out of my bed at 7:00. On a Sunday. Hmph! Thankfully I didn’t have to do the driving. Jen got that pleasure. An hour and 7 minutes later (according to TomTom), and we arrived. It was cold. We were something like 800-85o feet above sea level though.

I was greeted by instructors Bill and Eric, and a long with the other people on the course, we got our safety briefing and instructions on how to operate the cars – Jeep Cherokees to be specific:

I was with Eric. Eric seemed to be a bit more easy-going than Bill, but still mindful of our safety. I was right. We got talking about all sorts of things: cars, how girlfriends and wives spend all your money, the bad snow, to name but a few. Not only were we getting a top 4×4 training course, we were getting to shoot the breeze with the instructor too! This course could have easily been a very dry one, with nothing other than “foot off the gas”, “careful on this turn”, but thanks to Eric the whole experience was great.

We all got 2 goes around the course. The first time around, you do the ‘easy’ part which gets you used to the car and how to control it. The second time around, you get to do the ‘hard’ bits. When I say hard, I mean hard. Going down steep hills where you can’t see the bottom from the top, going up steep hills with loose rocks which create wheel spin and driving through a river. Not across the river, through it.

The whole experience takes around 2 hours, and when you’re done, you get a certificate to say you’re a great 4×4 driver. I thought I was going to be terrified the entire way around the course, but with Eric next to me giving me all the tips I needed, I was fine. I highly recommend this particular driving experience as a fun day out. Head on over to the Knockhill site and book it!