It’s my birthday today, I’m 29 years old. Well another year to cross of the wall. Not quite sure how I feel about it yet. Things have been going quite slowly this year, but at least things are still moving. Happy with work to some extent, can’t really see how things can be sped up. The rest of life hasn’t changed much I guess. Still haven’t done some of the things I had said I was going to do in the past year, there is alway next year.
Monthly Archive for October, 2005
Have been watching various spot about Night Watch, which was being hailed as the next big thing, crossing Matrix and Lord of the Rings. So I thgought this film defaintely needed checking out. Then a couple of weeks back in Empire I read the feature about it and was even more impressed.
So I just got back from watching it a couple of hours back, and it has to be said it does live up to the hipe. The film is made in Russia, so naturally it is in Russian, so I can see it not going down to well with some people. However people who watch lots of foreign films anyway will not be bothered. This is the first of three films, so it introduces all of the constructs and does a good jobs of setting up the storyline and charaters. So far so good, can’t wait for the next 2 parts. They have obviously rejig the soundtrack since in consists of a number of recent tracks which obviously have been put to make it seem more palatable to the west. The effects aren’t bad either.
It was the ex-APR bowling night yesterday, a big turn out compared to recent months due to holidays etc. Phoebe and Miles even brought Lucas, their bouncing baby boy who is just 5 weeks old. Amazingly he did manage to sleep through the evening. Got some snaps which I will post at some point.
Watched Into the Blue earlier this evening, a pretty good film for what it was. The highlight was of course Jessica Alba or more correctly her ass, talk about totally unecessary butt shots, don’t misunderstand me I’m not complaining. Paul Walker plays the male lead. The rest of cast is nothing spectacular, though some familar faces are present. Tyson Beckford sport a pretty freaky haircut, I couldn’t help but laugh when he turns up.
The plot is a little predictable, I think I got it pretty much straight away since the setup is pretty obvious. Worth watching because the underwater scenes are pretty good, and a couple of sharks make a guest appearance, culminating in some gore which I’m not going to spoil.
Finally finished building the new fileserver today, so now I have to move all of the data from the old computers onto the new one. Thank god for rsync, can just leave a bunch of scripts running so come tomorrow it should be al done. The case has turned out to be pretty quiet, though some of the disks can be heard whirring.
Well today was the first day of the Storage Expo at Olympia. The Expo was pretty lively and our stand was busy through the whole day. Some interesting things were being shown, but nothing revolutionary. All the big names were present, not many people were actually demonstrating their software, most of the hardware vendors were ofcourse showing of flashing lights and the like,
Spent this afternoon running around the computer fair assembling bits for my new file server, found a really cheap case with 6 drive bays, and a good silent 600W PSU which can drive such a beast. The only screw up I made was that the spare CPU I had will not work with the new mobo I have bought, but that does not bother me so much. Just means I have to shell out £40 on another CPU.
Will I think I just watched the best Science Fiction film in a very long time. Joss Whedon has out done himself. Serenity is stunning in every way, you can forget about Episode 3 and any Star Trek movie, my new benchmark for space Sci-Fi is Serenity.
I have always held Firefly in very high regard, and was greatly disappointed when the series got cancelled 13 episodes into the 1st season. So when it was announced some time ago that Whedon was working on film to conclude the story of the crew of Serentiy, I was in happy mode again. So for some time I had been building up my expectations, and they were set quite high. When I came out of the cinema in the early hours of today, I was amazed at how well Whedon had put together the film. My mate Jat who was down from Birmingham for a couple of days tagged along. He hadn’t seen the series, but was blown away by the film as well.
Can’t wait to see this again, might go mid next week or might hang on a few weeks providing it doesn’t drop of the schedules in that time.
Was walking past some TV show on the way home from the Expo yesterday when I caught a glimpse of a story on Sky News about a Python eating an Aligator, now I meant to look this up in the evening however other things came up so I just news.googled for it and this came up : BBC. Pretty cool eh!
Just got back from the LinuxExpo, the usual crowd were around, though it looks like I missed all the highlights
since I missed the first day. The Rackspace babes were out in force as usual, Novell and Sun also had significant
presence. Apple this year decided not to bother with a stand. Sort of caught up with some of the goings on.
This year there seems to be lots of interest from government agencies and companies looking to get government contracts.
Which is interesting. Also companies are starting to put together solutions targeting specific market segments, met some people who are going after accounting firm, which from experience I think is going to be a tough sell.
Well I have bitten the bullet this week and decided it is time to replace my aging file server with something with more juicy and with more storage capacity. Have opted to go for a set of 300GB drives, and will probably stick in a spare 160GB I have lying around and an old 40GB disk as a system disk. Need to spend a little time and decide on what other bits I need to get, and see what I can butcher from the other spare systems I have at the moment.
I think I was expecting too much from the father of zombie movies, George Romero. Romero has put out Land of the Dead the fourth piece in his series of zombie flicks.The movie wasn’t bad, I just wanted more. The gore elements and special effects were what I was expecting, the characters and storyline were fine though basic, thought there might be a little more substance, but then again it is a zombie horror film after all.
Worth watching if you are a horror fan, however don’t build up your expections like I did.
