design:bias

Is Channel4 trying to rig Big Brother? It certainly feels this way in regards to latest housemate, Sam Pepper. Much as he may be the most annoying housemate since Grace many years ago, this being the last BB ever on Channel 4, it feels as though they are trying to make as much money as possible from what must be the most eagerly anticipated eviction of this year.

While not a forgone conclusion, Pepper has annoyed enough of his housemates that his nomination seems guaranteed by his fellow housemates, Big Brother has put restrictions on who can nominate Pepper.

In the past, the general rule of thumb in regards to discussing nominations in the house has been to deny said rule-breaker from nominating at all. However in the last few days, (and yes, I understand that Big Brother can punish at their own discretion and choose the nature of the punishment) it has been Big Brother’s choice to prevent Sam Pepper from being nominated by some of his fellow housemates.

In my opinion, the execs at Channel 4 are MORE than aware of how unpopular Pepper is and the best way to get even more people voting in the Friday night eviction is to deny them what they want. Prolong the amount of time Pepper is in the house almost guarantees more votes for when he is finally up for eviction.

This feels underhand, though this is all of course complete supposition; it is simply how it looks from both my wife’s and my perspective. Much as I certainly wanted to actually vote for Pepper to be evicted (I rarely vote it should be noted) it now seems a complete farce. Yes, some of the money goes to charity from the cost of the viewers’ calls but if even 10% more of the public have voted, this could be an extra 15 pence times almost 200,000. (Based on viewing figures for this season, available here: http://www.insidebigbrother.net/ratings.ibb) this would amount to almost £30,000! Whilst perhaps not a huge amount of money to the machine that is Channel 4, I feel this is an extremely dishonest way of making money; exploitation of the public.

Perhaps they could donate the extra money to the charity they already donate to…

Rant over.

We have now experienced a most annoying bug with Apple’s Jesus phone. Apparently updating apps over the wifi on the phone itself is not a good plan, and you should go through iTunes. This is a fairly fatal bug in our opinion, because it means the phone MUST be plugged in to update. Pretty poor when it has the ability to update without it, but the resulting problems in backing up the phone in iTunes is ridiculous. It took over 10 hours for a full backup to complete. 10 hours!!!

We have since factory reset the phone and gone back to the beginning. All we can say, is thank goodness for contacts being synced with Outlook. It could have been a whole different story otherwise. Sigh.

Our cows have stopped working for the summer. They tell us that the best grass is available at this time of year, and no amount of persuading them is going to change their minds. I suppose they deserve a holiday…

In the meantime, substitute cows are being drafted in from Australia. It is Winter over there, so they will prefer it in sunny England anyway.

On another note, we find it obscene that not all trains have air conditioning. At this time of year, it is just plain wrong. We are glad however, that we don’t use the Tube. We have read the horror stories, and reckon our methane tank probably smells better.

Right, off to watch the Lost finale.

Here we are in June and nothing much is happening with the weather. The cows are complaining that their grass is not right, and this has led to slight slow down. Fear not, we are still doing things, in fact, many things. New brands, new logos, new lots of things, and it is all very exciting.

Things we are looking forward to today: Lost and Modern Family.

Watch it, watch it now. Best new show on the TV, and has the most kicking theme tune. Even the cows like it.

In other news, it is Friday and the Grand National tomorrow. Happy days, and maybe even the weather will be nice. Here is hoping that we win some money…

We are going back to work on site with our previous employers for a top secret project. It’s so secret, even we don’t know anything about it. How exciting!

It is the bank holiday, and therefore a long weekend, and therefore time for some bacon and eggs. Hurrah!

We shall try and be better about blogging in the future…for some reason Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising and Team Fortress 2 seem to have been taking up valuable working time…

Maya. We forgot how much we detest its user interface. Seriously. When is there going to be a program which was written with artists in mind? SO MUCH FRUSTRATION! The cows actually left the room at one point, they were that worried. THE COWS!!!

All in a good cause, and we shall be blogging about it when it has finally been released.

Yes…today we have decided that Room 101 needs a new member. That new member is the word ‘Chill-ax’. This is by far the most offensive use of the English language, and clearly needs locking up and should never see the light of day again.

Worse, is it’s use in an advert currently on TV to advertise some form of gossip magazine, and worse still, is the fact that it is used in a jingle. The agency responsible for this advert should probably also be placed in Room 101, but it is possible that the client deliberately asked for it. We may amend our terms and conditions that this word may never be used in any piece of work that we produce. Money IS money, but pride is perhaps more important.

In more exciting news, today a radio station in America is using our A-Team remix trailer as their video of the day! Total result! Link to come later when they have woken up on that side of the Atlantic.

UPDATE: It’s up!! See the link here:

So…we have projects that are ready to start, we just need dates to start lining up. Watch this space. In the mean time, we have been doing some DIY around the office. The cows were not very happy about this (we can’t say what they said, this is family friendly blog afterall).

We also finally saw Avatar at the weekend. Disappointing is the word.

We had a spare morning, so thought that this might be fun…