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October 28, 2005
the Avengers
coming to BBC four soon...
me excited - me excited!
by groc at 10:33 PM | Comments (2)
Lost - random link dump 2
(notice the swan / ga guan logo and the twin washer and driers (product placement) advert? Clever that.)
Hanso = swan in sanskrit.
by groc at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2005
Lost - random link dump 1
This is my personal link dump - and will almost ineviably contain spoilers and shit because I'm up to season two now. If you're following it on Channel 4 in the UK -Look away now. It probably won't make any sense to you yet anyway.
last warning.
OK then.
and here as a mov.
NB:
Remote viewing. How many of the survivors have had dreams and visions and prophetic incidences?
Electromagnetic disturbances (prob. might be why the planes got lost and crashed - their navigational systems getting screwed up, and why they can't get radio signals out into the wider world.)
B. F. Skinner and his theories of behaviour modification through operant conditioning. (A way of getting rats to push buttons for no very good reason - very useful. I'm sure it's a technique many call centres and data entry places make use of to this day.)
Life extension?
there's been a couple of people on the Island (Ethan and Desmond) that are very strong...
Oh look, there's polar bears in the clip too.
Look at the Hanso Active Projects list.
Mathematical Forecasting? That's numerology that is. that's the recurring set of numbers that is.
Juxtapositional Eugenics? Explains why they're so keen to kidnap Walt and Claire's baby.
All together telling me this is an Island where an awful lot, well, ALL of their experiments have gone terribly, terribly wrong. Or else maybe -terribly, terribly right.
Someone else's theories on the Hanso Foundation.
Isn't "Hanso" an anagram of "Noah's" -does that mean anything?
Who Is Alvar Hanso?
Some interesting various pictures.
by groc at 09:20 PM | Comments (1)
October 24, 2005
comments spam
Anyone here read Chinese or Japanese or whatever this is. Can you tell me what it says? My poor helpless and neglected gallery has recently been under attack from what I suspect are spam comments - or I could be wrong and they’re from someone who’s saying how nice they think my pikturs are. But I doubt it. If they are spam comments - sigh, look, there’s no bloody point - I haven’t let google or any other search engine bot near my site for years. That was back when I got freaked out and annoyed at the numbers of demented google porn hounds stomping all over the place. So no matter how many mentions of poker or whatever else - this blog gets crammed up with. Google or any other search engine isn’t going to know about it -ever. And even if it did I’m pretty sure all the main search sites have worked out to filter out those sorts of results long ago. And if they think the ten or so readers of my blog are the type of person that’s going to suckered into visiting any of these dubious sites. Well, think again. And did I mention - I seriously doubt I get that many chinese readers.
Spam comments are the most pointless useless way of spamming ever, just stop now. Save yourself the effort.
Anyway - since I’ve been using flickr to host my pictures for the past year and a half to host my pictures - and as I see that no one looks at the gallery anymore - except for these spam commenters… (sorry to whosoever it is if I’m wrong and it‘s a genuine comment, but as you can‘t write English - I’ve no way of knowing ) I’ll pulling it down in a couple of days time - I’m letting you know beforehand just to give whoever might be interested a chance for one last look - then it’s gone. OK.
by groc at 06:47 PM | Comments (4)
October 20, 2005
tHHGttG movie
Um Ok.
I've just finished watching it on rental.
What a disappointment. Really. I found it pretty awful actually.
Great SFX - great scenery and costumes. The flash-style animations for the book -fantastic.
But:
First off - the incidental music was really doing my head in all throughout the length of the movie - it was way over the top and far too intrusive.
The largely unknown cast where badly chosen, certainly not a single one of them had any charisma worth a light. As for making Ford an African-American? No. Wrong. Uh-uh. Bad idea.
Leading me to my next point - the whole thing was over-Americanised. Anyone left wondering why the new Wallace and Grommit film is such a massive success in the US? I’ll wager it has a lot to do with it having kept it’s British-ness 100%. It’s formula wasn’t tampered with in anyway, indeed the slightest attempt to have tampered with that would’ve killed it stone dead. (I was annoyed enough with ‘Chicken Run’ having Mel Gibson’s voice in it.) Yet Hollywood in the main still can’t bring it’s self to finance any film that doesn’t have American voices in it. It’s down to it’s own cowardness and it’s perennial insistence on insulting the intelligence of it’s audiences.
And why change the story around so much? More importantly the biggest most unforgivable sin of the whole enterprise was taking all the philosophical-related humour out of it. The whole of the HH Guide simply doesn't work when it's dumbed down. It was never an action-adventure romp sort of thing. It’s humour and brilliance lay in the vast array of madcap ideas it rattled through at breakneck speed. Too many of them were stripped out and left a yawning vacuum at the centre of the film.
In short the BBC TV series -despite being done on a shoe-string was vastly superior. It was far better acted and much funnier.
I honestly think Douglas Adams would’ve felt quite insulted by this film.
by groc at 07:27 PM | Comments (2)
October 19, 2005
w00t.
Oregon RIAA victim fights back and counter sues.
If there's any justice in the world - she'll win outright and the RIAA will have to slope home with it's tail between it's legs. But as it's common knowledge how corrupt the whole US legal system is...
by groc at 08:24 AM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2005
Torchwood
Captain Jack gets his own show!
(shrieks with excitement.
by groc at 08:13 PM | Comments (3)
October 14, 2005
Is it just me
- or is anyone else getting bemused -if not a little freaked out by how all the big guns on the internets all want to be the same.
I mean everyone, meaning Google, Yahoo, MSN have their own search, web mail, groups, photo albums, blog spaces, news feeds, (only google hasn’t a music shop -yet) instant messaging/voice over internet programs and they’re all clamouring for us to use their own versions of ‘your’ own ‘personalised’ (utterly dreary) start/home page (we used to call them ‘portals’ they were all the rage once - I’ve always hated portals - which why I guess I still avoid using them even now. I don't even have a start/home page - I hate them too. Does that make me a bad person? I also resent how they try to tie you in so they can track your browsing behaviour (with cookies and various `web beacons') so they can sell on that information to advertising companies so they in turn can bombard us with their inane `targeted’ commericals. I use adblock and I use it like crazy.)
So as they’re gradually all becoming clones of one another - basically trying to be a one-stop shop for all your internet needs - what’s the point exactly? I’ll wager they don’t even know themselves - they’re just doing it because they see everyone else doing it. It's as if they all want to be AOL or something. *Shudders.*
by groc at 11:45 AM | Comments (4)
the fuuuuutuuuuure
The secret life of Mr Muji a flickr photoset.
Free archive films of yesterday's visions of today - (well, the 40s and 50s General Motor's vision of the 60s/future - and we've still got a lot of catching up to do. Why can't we ring home to set the video recorder or the oven -etc.)
by groc at 08:43 AM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2005
free teeny movies
free downloadable highly compressed barely watchable teeny-tiny movies. They're supposed to be for the zvue - a handheld mp4 video player, but you can watch them on your peecee.
by groc at 12:26 PM | Comments (3)
now company directors are starting to dislike ID cards
Although it's taken a good two years for them to wake up to the fact ID cards aren't a good idea. It still shows how too many of them are really quite ignorant - it should be 0% believing ID cards will help prevent terrorist attacks - because that's more like the real figure. Madrid has ID cards - it didn't stop them being bombed, on the day of the 7/7 London bombings the Police were saying openly in TV interviews an ID card would have done nothing to stop it.
by groc at 03:05 AM | Comments (1)
vid-ipod
the video iPod - I'm wondering what deals they'll forge with media companies in the UK.
by groc at 02:58 AM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2005
free paper with your DVD?
Well I've done this a few times now - bought a vile right-wing paper, whose primitive political views and archaic attitudes along with it's infantile obsession with 'celebrities' lives, and of such woefully low journalistic standards -all put together to make a newspaper so bad that I could just puke - just to get a free CD or DVD.
You can tell by that last sentence that any hope of gaining me as regular reader was doomed from the start can't you?
Although the Guardian's smug self-satisfied middle-classness -especially apparent on the Saturday edition -really annoys me too.
Why do newspapers have to have class distinctions anyway?
by groc at 01:12 PM | Comments (2)
October 10, 2005
MmmmmmTeeeeeee
Oh yeah, MT have finally done something I actually complained to them about three years ago and have now totally overhauled their documentation. All I got from them back then was a short snarky, somewhat arrogant reply. Hum. If only they hadn't had that 'tude back then... still, better late then never I guess.
the manual now a lot more 'chattier' whether the techy stuff has been made any easier to understand - I'll reserve judgement until I've had more of a read through.
But as it is I've been debating with myself as whether to move over to Blogger/Blogspot, especially now it also hosts picturs. (It used to annoy me that it didn't.) MT is way overkill for me. I have issues with my Host too - everytime I've uploaded a picture using MT - I then can't delete it. I'm locked out - I can't change permissions on the file -or anything. It's weird, I've had to get tech support to delete it manually at their end. All of which is less than ideal. Oh, and as my Host charges extra for MySQL I've now got trillions of MT-generated htm pages everywhere - all which is eating up my webspace and makes things hard to manage and stuff. So with that - I'm right off MT and I could do with a new hosting service, one that's a lot more generous with it's web space too.
So all in all I've been thinking all this isn't worth the grief for the 5 or 10 visitors a day I get here...
Mmmmm. (Goes away to think some more.)
by groc at 03:09 PM | Comments (0)
photo search
This is one of the things that still annoys me about computers -that we're still many years off the sort of AI needed to make them really properly useful yet. Computers can search for numbers and individual words and -that's it. No sounds, no pictures, no colours, no photos -nope. Just words. So now a lot of webby folk have been trying to push 'tags' and labels as being the way forward. Feh. It just means more bloody typing. Pathetic. They're effectively trying to make everyone into voluntary data-entry clerks.
by groc at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)
queek duck
by groc at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)
that work of fiction
Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible.
Just a few decades -or maybe hundreds of years late - but it's a step in the right direction. Now if we can address this issue about an invisible skygod that only ever talks to a very few select certain people...
by groc at 09:50 AM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2005
flashy flash drives
mmmm. Interesting article.
"...he invented Migo, software that lets removable storage devices such as USB drives and iPods essentially function as portable computers.Plug a Migo-enabled device into a computer and enter your password, and a secure session launches in which you can send and receive e-mail and work on documents, with the background desktop and icons from your own PC rather than the ones on the host computer."
by groc at 01:17 PM | Comments (1)
October 08, 2005
tony the newsagent
by groc at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)
just ducky
Flickr is an odd place. I personally like this pic of a duck I took. I like how she's twisted back 180 degrees and is looking directly at me. But (at the time writing) it's only had eight hits. Um.
by groc at 10:16 AM | Comments (1)
October 07, 2005
Bryan Fuller
Note to self:
I was just watching an old episode of Voyager (Retrospect) - when I noticed Bryan Fuller's name on the writing credits, (I'm not hardcore geeky enough to usually take notice of these sorts of things, despite having watched them hundreds of times before) on very Seven-centric storyline . Of course I know Bryan Fuller's name from being a 'Wonderfalls' and 'Dead Like Me'. So it would appear Bryan specialises in writing highly intelligent, very sassy, independent -slightly stroppy female characters. Cool. It so turns out he's written a lot of my favourite Voyager episodes too.
OK. I'm a fan. Mark it as offical.
Apparently he's making an animated film due for release next year. 'the Amazing Screwtop Head'.
Oh and I might have already put this interview link in before, but here it is again.
by groc at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2005
id
by groc at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)
innocence in the age of P2P
"Hundreds of people are being wrongly sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for illegally trading music online, legal experts say."
What's always got me is where the music industry gets it's figures from to sue people. How can they justify claiming a million dollars in damages from any one individual - when there's no money changing hands at any point, and if each single file trader has done that much financial damage in terms of lost sales - then why hasn't the whole entertainment industry completely collapsed by now? They must be billions if not trillions of dollars out of pocket -surely. Odd isn't it -that they're not. Very odd indeed.
It couldn't be all lies and bullying isn't it? No, couldn't possibly be.
I wish I could pick a whole lot of people totally out at random and claim they owed me millions of pounds in lost earnings, without any proof ever needed at any point to back my claims - and have the whole judicial system bending over backwards to support me. Good scam isn't it?
by groc at 02:52 AM | Comments (0)
October 02, 2005
everyday things that bug me -1
OK. October is named October because Octo is the latin word for eight, simply because once upon a time back in the days of the Roman Empire -it did indeed used to be the eighth month. Likewise September is named after the latin word for seven (septimus), November after nine (novem), December after (decem) -ten. When they're plainly not anymore.
Apparently the Romans used to start the year as beginning from March. So it used to make prefect sense. Now why keep the same names but not the counting from March? Even as a kid I could never understand why they counted the beginning of the year being after Christmas in the middle of horrible, horrible winter... instead of in spring.
I bet some dumb old Christians were behind it, or else some stupid monarch.
by groc at 12:13 PM | Comments (1)