A day in the life of Mr Vince Obermaan

<voiceoverman>As our normal correspondent is either drunk, in a hedge, drunk in a hedge, asleep or asleep in a hedge, I thought I would take a moment to tell you about myself, how I spend my days and why I do voiceovers for the idiot.</voiceoverman>

My name’s Vince, I used spend most of my day either enjoying a playboy lifestyle, or working out with my team of personal trainers and doing some charity work in the local community. I try to help out as much as I can with the less fortunate, which cunningly brings me to my work with Beersoft Interactive.

You know when your mums said don’t talk to strangers, well if anyone says to you “you look nice, want to see some sweeties?” don’t let your thought process go ‘he didn’t say “would you like to see some kittens” or “if you get in my car you can have this big bag of coke”’, the whole ‘show you sweeties’ thing is a Polaroid of pic-n-mix with “you’re my wife now, Dave” written on the back. It’s a classic trap, and if I had spent more time reading spy novels from my local library instead of the charity work I don’t like to talk about; I wouldn’t be in this situation.

But what a situation to be in; ‘the fearless leader’ isn’t an unkind overlord as they go. I get fresh shredded newspapers 3 times a week for the cage he keeps me in. It’s quite a nice cage, I will ask him why it says “hoffcage 2005” on the sign above it. He lets me sing show tunes at the children in the street on weekdays as long as I do the voice over work here.

Ohh bugger, I think he’s sobering up. I best get out of his dancing speedo’s and back into the cupboard, if anyone asks I wasn’t here and no one saw us.

Is this one time too many?

<voiceoverman> We find our valiant hero relaxing on the sofa, drinking beer and pondering the worlds problems, and working out how to solve them; Lots of deep thoughts. Enough of this background information, Lets get to the action</voiceoverman>

Out of all of the world’s problems, today I shall tackle three of the trickiest ones. Brace yourself it’s going to be a rollercoaster ride.

Problem 1: Shoelaces – I don’t know about you, but I find that ‘smart drinking shoes’ have 2 types of laces, really long ones (which are a pain to tie, need a double knot which makes you look like a 3 year old) or short, stiff wiry ones (which don’t stay tied)

Solution:  it may sound like a load of cobblers, but can the fine shoe making industry use laces that aren’t 3 miles long or made out of memory string

Problem 2: The 9 tones of free papers and useless leaflets posted through my door every day: yep, it’s a problem

Solution: As I don’t want to cause the under paid urchin that delivers my papers not to get the 4 pence a day delivery charge, I think I should get an industrial shredder and make a nest, so there may be a king sized bed for sale at some point

<voiceover man>In a moment of panic, our handsome hero meanders into the kitchen to find another beer, lets all have a quick singalong http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=291ET6Py6H8 </voiceoverman>

Errm, thanks to voiceoverman, I hope you have all refreshed your drinks, on with the show!

Problem 3: your voiceover man has a bizarre fetish for show tunes, and you are sure he’s been trying on your underwear when you’re at work

Solution: after consulting a psychologist, its best to have a calm sit down and a cup of tea with your voice over man, find out what is causing the odd behavior, talk through the problems. A trial separation isn’t out of the question

Problem 4: why are academic library websites so dreadful, complicated, about 7 years behind the rest of the world with the design, and have an uncontrollable urge to be different from the rest of the institution

Solution: I wish I knew, leave a comment if you know a way your local shambrarian can make the library world a better place.

<voiceoverman> As the loser who writes this twaddle, has really crappy grammar, spelling, punctuation, possible drinking problems, a really upsetting habit of dancing in sequined speedo’s and no taste in music. Well my mum said “if you cant say anything nice, shut your pie hole”, he does make a fine Sheppard pie, his cats awesome in an evil spotty cat way and his collection of crap 80’s films doesn’t even mention talking about. Until next time my sexy playthings</voiceoverman>

to be sectionedcontinued

Off tangent, out of control

In part 4 of my ongoing rant about things that annoy me we have more of that dreaded continuation and haribo fuelled ramblings

<voiceoverguy>As our intrepid hero managed to escape from the pile of beer cans left over at the end of our last episode we find him relaxing in his thinking thong, pondering what he should write about this time</voiceoverguy>

A few weeks ago, I read about another awesome product which is going to change the way something something’s and it got me thinking about what I should write about, then I had a random unrelated conversation about another company with my parents at the weekend which joined up many random thoughts I had which all came under the heading of “random control freakery in the living room”

Insane control freaks in my opinion run the targets for today’s grumblings. We have no prizes for guessing I’m talking about Sky and Apple.

I’ll deal with apples reality distortion field first, more specifically the appleTV. It could be an awesome little product, Apples clever user friendliness combined with an idea that I really like (the watching of crap off the internet on the telly). Now the first version was over priced, locked down and didn’t support any codecs that sane people used (until you hacked it to run XBMC), so when the new version was announced with the “one more hobby” thing. I was hoping for some fresh sexy hardware, tuner support and more codecs than I can shake a stick at. Good job I remembered it was an apple product, so you have the following things that are stupid

1)   no support for normal video (divx/xvid/mkv/msdvr/wtv)

2)   you have to use the evil that itunes (it’s a massive bag of shit)

3)   it has a rental model for the content

4)   it will eat bandwith

5)   it’s only 720p

now my dvd’s are ripped in a mixture of xvid and mkv’s so unless I want to kill a shitload of cpu time converting stuff into mov’s and storing them in itunes I’m SOL.

Itunes is crap, its crap on my windows machines, its crap on the macbookpro, the interface is crap and it wants my bank details to ease the drunken buying of 70’s disco

I fully understand the need to pay for the stuff I want to enjoy but 99p an episode, which you can only watch for 24 hours? You must be having a laugh (and don’t even start on the £5 for a flakey encoding of a movie). *answer to this coming up later

It will eat t’bandwith, for most people this will get expensive very quickly, using the beeb as my filesize example, your average hour of ‘hd’ telly is somewhere between 700 and 1500 megabytes, most cheap broadband packages have a nice ‘when you want to watch telly limit’ of 2000meg a month.

I know broadcast HD is only 720p, but if im paying a fiver for a film I want blu-ray quality.

What should the turtlenecked one have done I hear you ask; Well I shall give my opinion, so brace yourselves for another ordered list of stuff

1)   some tuner support, dvb s2 and t2

2)   with the tuner support, might as well throw in a videocrypt/NDS compatible CI/CAM for our sky card, because you love fox (and newscorp do own sky)

3)   break with tradition and follow some industry standards with some manly codec support and upnp/dlna server and client goodness

4)   sod the rentals, lets have a reasonably priced subscription model, I don’t know say £15 a month (like evil sky) but throw in some subscription music as well (a la zune)

5)   give me the features windows media center has but without the need to have a pc under the telly

So, apple tv isn’t great, its missing some big features and is stupidly locked down and all content is under control of saint steve, its not a huge shock really.

In other news, Sky are still evil, overpriced and can’t encode video very well but I can see the merits in the skyplayer project.

<voiceoverman>In our next episode, our handsome hero battles the huge pile of free newspapers delivered every week, tying his shoelaces, the best way to upset his cow orkers on the matter of websites, if anyone knows where his mittens are and how to keep his cat from sleeping on his laptop</voiceoverman>

to be continued…