27 February 2005

Fantastic, "Episode III - A Lost Hope"

Check out Episode III - A Lost Hope from Sequential Pictures, a hilarious low budget star wars spoof. A little help with the crazy Star Wars backdrops from scifi3d.theforce.net. Amazing really since it only took about 3 months to put together.
This is defiantly a site worth checking out: SEQUENTIAL Pictures. Also worth a lookin is "A Glitch in The Matrix". I don't know how much time and money these guys invested in making these movies, but for low budget Internet download spoof/piss takes they are pretty amazing. I remember a while back a friend of mine showed me a Star Wars piss-take "Beer Wars". It was quite funny with Budweiser as the baddies invading calgary and Big Rock playing the part of the rebel alliance.. check it out here.

England Crash Out against Ireland


The pressure mounts
England move step closer to winning the wooden spoon after losing 19-13 to Ireland this afternoon, in Dublin. The side got off to a fantastic start with and early try from Martin Corry, but it was not the shape of things to come and the team suffer another loss.

26 February 2005

Walk toward the light...


On the way for a dish of pasta..

A Scanner Darkly

This seams to have been a long time comming, but here is a trailer for Richard Linklater's new adaption of the Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel.
The plot seams like a strange one: "Set in a future world where America has lost the war on drugs, undercover cop Fred (Keanu Reeves) is one of many agents hooked on the popular drug Substance D, which causes its users to develop split personalities. Fred, for instance, is also Bob, a notorious drug dealer. Along with his superior officers, Fred sets up an elaborate scheme to catch Bob and tear down his operation".
I have been meaning to get round to reading some P.K.D, but I think I have enough on the go at the moment, Dan Brown:The Da vinci Code, Donna Tartt:The Secret History, Mark Haddon:The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night Time and Iain M. Banks:The Algebraist.

Star-Blinz & New Camera

Just seen the last episode of Stargate SG-1 and frankly it sucks a big one. Very disappointing story and end to season 8. To make things worse I was supposed to go and see Scotland v Italy in Murryfield but the tickets never came in the post. So now I will set out around the City and take a few snaps with my new Cannon camera. It is a little beauty, I only hope that those bastards at ebuyer get back to me about returning my old Fuji finepix that no longer works... Might post some pictures from around Dundee later.

22 February 2005

Another Cool Ad


Sweet... one way to generate PR. Good load of comments at the SvN blog where i found this little item..

Free Mojtaba and Aresh Day


Apparently today is "Free Mojtaba and Arech Day" - I expect in a few days time all the search engines will catch up with the new posts. BBC news is covering the story, not so much the plight of Mojtaba and Aresh, it focuses on whatThe Committee to Protect Bloggers' has been up to in the month since its conception. You can read more of what has happened to two Iranians here.

16 February 2005

The Aviator - Howard Hughes


Hughes infront of the Northrop
Gamma Monoplane
Fantastic film - quite long, but I totally enjoyed it. Howard Hughes (1905-1976) must have been an amazing person. The film covers some events in his life, including some aspects his troubling mental disease. The making of Hells Angels (1930): a film about WW1 fighter bi-planes, it took 3 years to finish and was converted half way through from a silent film to include a soundtrack. It cost him $3.8million in 1930 which would be about $177million today. He then went on to film Scarface (1932) and The Outlaw (1941) both of which caused controversy at the time and were initially censored. The Aviator also covers his love of Aviation, as the title suggests. After gaining his pilots licence during the filming of Hells Angels Howard went on to Design/head up the production of many Planes including the Hercules; A massive boat plane, 5 stories high with a wing span of more than a city block [Images 1|2]. The plane only ever flew once after the military contact was canceled due to the war being over. Howard controled TWA and pioneered the companies expansion to international destinations. A move which lead him to clash with the giant Pan Am Airways. The Aviator is a moving film and finishes leaving the viewer wondering more about the man that was Howard Hughes. The way a man of his sort can have such an impact on so many others. In this instance, as is often the case, his genius came with a touch of madness. Some info from the HandBook of Texas Online

13 February 2005

England can only hope for the wooden spoon now..


Another 3 Points for France
The worst Rugby game ever.. and the worst drive ever.. made it from Lancashire to Dundee in 4hrs but had to listen to England crumble in the 2nd half of their Six Nations match against France... They kicked and missed all their penalties. From a solid 17-6 lead in the 1st half - to lose by 1 point. Gutted...

07 February 2005

Cool Ad,

Just browsing some blogs and came across this post on rootburn Check out this crazy ad for areva. It makes you feel good about plundering up the Earth's resources and polluting the atmosphere.. (ps must load the ad with microsoft IE - wont work in Firefox!!)

Just forget about Doom2

It is a dark day, after trying long and hard to fix my flatmates laptop I have to admit defeat. Trying to install an OS on a computer with no working floppy drive or CD drive is not easy. I was encouraged by the Boot to LAN - with PXE option the 3Com LAN card gave on start up. But after many hrs of trying to set my PC up as a DHCP/TFTP linux server to remote install the OS, I realised;

Budapest is a cool place
I know nothing about programming, I should have never bothered messing around with Linux, I was only guessing that the hard disk wasnt completely fried and it is probably time for a new laptop anyway. I realise that all this open source stuff must be a great idea but the amount of time and effort required, for someone who has only ever used MS-DOS and Windows, is kinda inhibitory. I was bored last week and printed off this great article that I have slowly been reading, its entertaining stuff..
"In The Beginning There Was The Command Line" read it here
originally written by Neal Stephenson but more recently updated by a code-monkey named garrett who gives its a bit of a fresh perspective..

03 February 2005

T.F.I.F.T.


a dusty evening view of cars and trees
Thank f*ck its Friday tomorrow and then onto the weekend. Check out this amazing review of Firefox at Computerworld best of all are the comments to the piece - scathing doesn't even cover it. I like using firefox and think that everyone should download it. Notes for next week: think about valentines stuff... Buy new digital camera: toss up between Canon or Pentax to replace my less that satisfactory Fuji Film brutto gigante.