What I did do this weekend

Despite the aborted dressing-up attempt, I did have a fairly productive weekend. I...

Watched some of the Stephen Fry Weekend on BBC4
Stephen Fry has been a personal hero since my teens. It's kind of annoying to find out he's so many other people's hero too.


Wrote wedding invitations
Well, watched Jane writing wedding invitations, her handwriting is better than mine. I also realised that my memory for names really doesn't stretch much further than next of kin, so now I've got a long list of unknown cousin's wives to attempt to fill in the blanks on. People apparently don't like getting invitations addressed to "Steve and that Northern bint he married".


Bought a Camcorder
For the wedding, and for the honeymoon, and for general pissing about with. I've managed to keep a lid on my Gadget Hunger for about eighteen months, but I was really starting to get the itch for something small and shiny that goes "ping" to play with. I'm quite impressed that I lasted this long.

After extensive research (sitting in Costa with a video magazine and a couple of catalogs), we decided to go for a Sony Mini-DV Handycam. DV might be on the way out as far as technology goes, but as an established (and therefore cheap) format, it offers the most bang for your buck. Hard drive based camcorders look nice, and are definitely the In Thing, but apparently they don't match the quality of DV yet. And I can't see the point, personally, of DVD camcorders when you've got a PC that's perfectly capable of burning your video to DVD when you're ready.


Played with iLife '08
The latest version of Apple's suite of "lifestyle" software. I like the minor but useful improvements to iPhoto, and iDVD is fantastic for knocking together home-made video and slideshow DVDs.

iMovie is also great, although according to some online reviewers not as great as iMovie '06 (which I never used). Still, it does everything I want it for: chucking clips together and adding sound and titles, in a very elegant way, so I'm not complaining. If I wanted more I'd invest in a more meaty video editor, which I think is what some of the iMovie '08 detractors need to do.

GarageBand (why don't they call it something to fit the "i" theme? "iTunes", maybe?) is pretty groovy, I just have the musical talent of a stoned hedgehog so I'm not going to get much use out of it.

And I've not touched iWeb, but then again, does anybody?


Window-shopped for clothes
Has anyone else noticed the recent and distinct improvement in high-street fashion? The large geometric patterns and lurid floral prints that have dominated the racks of Next and Top Shop forever seem at last to be on the way out. Which is great because I they make me (and anyone else bigger than a size 10) look like a 1970's caravan that's been turned inside-out.

In their place I'm seeing a lot more punky stuff in black with funky details and slogans. In short, Becky's kinda clothes. So on Sunday we...


Went clothes shopping in Next
Who, it turned out, are still desperately trying to flog the Seventies-caravan-curtains-ware, despite the apparent fashion sea-change. So I bought a pair of linen trousers and a linen shirt. Which was nice.