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It’s cool dads next must have accessory. The ‘Star Wars Darth Vader Sprinkler‘. They come up with the strangest promotional products over at the Star Wars shop, but this is about as tenuous as it gets.

I watched Derren Brown’s trick of the mind show on Friday. Up to this point, I’d really liked the new stuff (Though I wasn’t really into the Russian Roulette thing he did a while back). I feel I should write about a trick on the show he did this week where he worked with a software designer and created a ‘zombie arcade game’ which was filled with lots of flashing lights and imagery that could possibly put someone into a catatonic trance. They then stuck this game in a pub with cameras all around and waited for some unsuspecting punter to come and play it.

After a while someone came along and actually played the game. After some time and a few well placed flashes n sounds later the guy slumped into the game and looked asleep. Brown came out and stuck this guy on a stretcher and then wheeled him of to a studio close by that was set up to look exactly the same as the environment the character he was playing in the game was in, they also had actors to play the games character parts. They gave this guy the same gun he had when playing the game and then went of to a control room and woke the guy up.

To say he was freaked out was an understatement. He looked absolutely terrified with all these made up zombies coming towards him. After shouting and screaming he finally started using his gun (all be it of the paint-ball variety) and tried his hardest to get out of there. All this time Brown and some of the guys friends *nice friends* watched from the control room. There came a point where the zombies were overpowering the guy and at that point Brown stepped in and ended it by putting the guy back under and wheeling him back to the pub and putting him back next to the game and waking him up. He was then shown the film etc and program ended.

I actually found this whole trick completely wrong and quite sickening. I don’t actually believe that the whole incident is completely erased from that guys mind, and the trauma in must have coursed is immense. The poor guy did not asked to be involved in this trick he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I have since read that scenes where cut from this show because the guy was screaming so much. I got no enjoyment from watching someone be physically terrified on air. Shame on you Mr Brown for tarnishing what is an already entertaining program.

Well, I lasted a day before I had to go out and get Apple’s latest offering. After reading endless articles I had to see it for myself, and I must say, first impressions are good. You can’t necessarily see the quoted 200 new features but the most talked up ones I’m finding useful. I actually think the nicest thing, and something I didn’t expect was that my Powerbook is now running faster, I actually expected the opposite.

Spotlight is really very nice. I used quicksilver before and didn’t really use it to it’s full capabilities. All I really use it for was to search for files (duh, really) and to open apps without having to hunt them down. Spotlight allows me to do this.

Dashboard I love. I have been playing with this a lot and hope to have a few widgets up and running soon. I guess I like this so much because the way widgets are constructed is using the kind of web based structures I have to deal with on a day to day basis. Not to say that they can’t go a lot further than that, but for me it means I can see something working straight away.

I am yet to try Automator but I’m sure there are many things it will be able to do that will make life easier. I was thinking things like creating thumbnails, resizing images in batches, automated backups of specific stuff (maybe zipping up important data and emailing it to my Gmail account for safe storage), the list is endless.

In fact the only thing I wasn’t into is the new icons in Mail. Too small and fidelity. I’m sure someone will come up with an alternative soon.

So in short Tiger is proving great. I no doubt will write more about it as I find it out from playing around and hearing things from friends. In the mean time I can only advise Apple users to go get it now.