Category: Life

Don LaFontaine is the US voice-over artist that has put his talents to over 5000 movie trailers over the years. Sadly, on the 1st September he died aged 68.

He had been performing voice-over work for over 25 years and was, according to his own website..

A voice actor famous for recording nearly 5,000 movie trailers, and nearly 350,000 commercials, programs, files and other presentations. He is arguably the most successful Voice Actor of all time.

Here is a superb interview with him, which includes some of the trailers that he’s added his voice to over the years..

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I thought the announcement yesterday about insulation incentives was great – free or discounted insulation for the old and poor. Throwing money at them to pay for fuel bills each year doesn’t make sense – long term insulation to reduce those bills does.

So I find it more than a touch annoying when people don’t appreciate when they might be stepping over the line of what is acceptable behaviour in these situations. Let’s take BBC news yesterday morning. The government minster gave out a freephone number for those affected to contact where they could get advice on what they could claim and how to get it. Naturally the question from the BBC report was “but why should they have to contact you – what about those people who are too busy to do that”.

Too busy. Too busy. Well, may I humbly suggest that if you’re “too busy” to ring a FREEPHONE number and organise something then maybe.. maybe… you don’t deserve any assistance.

And this morning they were reading out an email from a disabled pensioner “incensed” about the free loft insulation because they won’t come around and clear his loft out first. And then what? Would he want them to put all the stuff neatly away in his drawers or take it away to the tip for him – he is a pensioner after all. Where does it end?

And this morning there’s a new story about a coastal village that’s DEMANDING that the government do something about the fact that their houses are slipping into the sea. Hold on… didn’t you buy these houses knowing they were closed to the sea? Were you never aware of coastal erosion (and even if you wasn’t, how is this fault of the government)? This is along a similar vein to those who buy houses next to airports and then complain about the noise.

You can’t demand everything in life from the governent to smooth things over and make everything perfect. We have to stand up to our mistakes and we can’t complain when people are trying to help – all of which are demonstrated here. As a society we have to stop demanding everything is laid in front of us, get off our arses and do something.

Here ends todays rant.

Let me start by telling you a story.

Merck KGaA (EMD Chemicals in the United States and Canada) is a German-based chemical and pharmaceutical company. Merck was founded in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1668. Following World War I, Merck lost possession of its foreign sites, including the Merck & Co. subsidiary in the United States. Today, the US company, Merck & Co. Inc., is a global company, with no links to their German origins.

Merck & Co. had (I believe this is no longer the case) links with Huntington Life Sciences, where animal research experiments take place. Not surprisingly, therefore, they attracted the attention of animal rights activists.

Now, if you were THAT passionate about something, you’d think that a modicum of research would be in order. Which leaves me baffled as to why the aforementioned animals rights people regularly (or they certainly did until recently) picket outside the UK offices of Merck KGaA with placards about Huntington. They even smashed the windows of one of their other offices.

Maybe I took this personally because my wife was working for Merck KGaA at the time and I regularly had to drive past them when dropping her off (and then hearing stories of intimidation they’d receive during the day).

I would, humbly, suggest that surely the basics such as this are the first steps to be taken seriously. Until then, you just seem like idiots.

My manager has returned from a trip to the US. As is obligatory he’s brought something back for us – a couple of bags of Hershey’s chocolate. And one of these has their own version of KitKat in it (licensed from Nestle).

If proof is ever needed that Americans don’t know how to make decent chocolate, this was the perfect example. It’s an abomination.

And Orio’s are devils biscuits too. Quite why Kraft ever thought they’d be popular in a country that knows a good biscuit…

I thought I’d check out my site stats to see how Google Chrome is doing (now that I know Google Analytics can track it separately) since it was launched on the 2nd.

The least techy of my sites is BMTG, which garners just 1.67% of users from Chrome. Next up, Copy+ is 3.55%. This site is 5.66%. Not fantastic, but not too shoddy.

Other things that came out in this that Firefox is the most popular browser for this site (it’s IE on the others), Chrome usually has similar percentages to Safari (considering Safari is available on both Windows and Mac, I guess that doesn’t look too good for Safari). Opera is usually languishing in 5th place.

So, Chrome isn’t doing too badly, considering it’s shortcomings. But it is fast and simple, which is what many people want. Having said that, the more tech the site is the more visitors appear to use it. Which in my mind doesn’t go – Chrome is a very un-tech browser.

I guess you just have to be geeky to try something else out and not stick with what you know – many of the visitors were probably doing what I did last week and was just giving the browser a test drive. Time will tell – I’ll try the same again in a few months and see if those percentages remain.