Brian


Han shoots first!

This started out life as a comment to Ian’s post about the Star Wars DVDs but as it got longer and more bilious I decided to make it a post.

I’m not happy about the Star Wars DVDs. Not even nearly. They’ve been surrounded by a shitstorm of rumours recently. It’s generally accepted now that we will never get to see these movies in their original form again. Lucas has even gone as far as preventing a film festival from showing a print of the original version of Star Wars. The DVDs will almost certainly be the Special Editions. But it doesn’t stop there. There have been rumours (since Clones was in production) that Lucas is making even more changes to the movies and is even going as far as trying to get the AFI to credit him as co-director on Empire and Return. These extra special editions may actually be a second set of DVDs to be released after the third prequel is out on disk. I know I’ll end up buying them as well bringing the total number of times that I’ve bought these movies to 4 (THX remaster of the original movies on VHS, Special Editions on VHS, Special Editions on DVD and extra mucked around with version on DVD). After Lucas has finished taking all my money the only place where I’ll get to see Han shoot first is on my oldest, crummiest VHS version.


Why exactly are we fighting?

Season 2 of Red vs Blue is set to premier sometime this weekend. The makers aren’t saying exactly when they will post the episode. I assume this is an attempt to get people to repeatedly vist the site and tempt them into buying the sesaon 1 DVD (it worked on me). Season 1 (Blood Gulch Chronicles) took best film and best writing at the 2003 Machinima Festival.


Rainbow SiXXX

The game Rainbow Six 3 (based on the Tom Clancey novel) contains porn links. A web address on a poster in the game leads to a porn ad site. What happend was that someone playing the game saw the address and and found it wasn’t registered. He promptly registered the site himself and filled it with porno.

I should point out that the above link goes to the story at CNN and not the porn.


Object of desire

Back during the birth of Team Spinneyhead Ian said that I’d be providing ‘cool tech reports’. Today I thought I’d actually get round to writing one. I didn’t far past Apple’s new iPod mini. Basically a smaller, sexier iPod that only holds 4GB (about 1000 tracks). This first section of the report would have finished with me saying that I’d already ordered one. Only I can’t. Apple won’t sell me one. I figured that importing an iPod mini and the travel adaptor kit (so I can plug it in here) would be way cheaper than ordering from Apple UK as they seem to think the exchange rate is between $1.20 and $1.30 to a pound (rather than over $1.80). Also I’d get it pretty soon rather than April (given the usual slippage that would be May or June in reality). Neither Apple or any major reseller will ship an Apple product outside of the US. Here I am trying to inject money into the US economy and they’re turning me away.


Don't mention the news

I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it.

Once again the UK press has really lost it’s head over a royal story. One newspaper has reported a name but most other sources have run the story with no name. However they all tell you which paper is running the story. This kind of double standard really annoys me and you’ll never see it here.

Oops!


101 continued

Following Ian’s example here’s six of the worst from me:

Scooters

I don’t have a problem with motorbikes or bicycles (as long as they remember that the highway code actually applies to them) but scooter riders are the most unpredictable on the road. They’re worse than taxis. Plus they make a noise like an angry bee in a biscuit tin.

George Lucas

I spend way too much on Star Wars crap. I once joked that I might as well set up a monthly direct debit to George Lucas as it would save time and effort. With the release of Galaxies (the on-line Star Wars game) that has actually happened. He needs to be banished for my own good. That and his refusal to release the trilogy on DVD in its original form. See, I’m trying to give him money again!

Snooker as a spectator sport

It’s boring to watch. Even worse than cricket. Also the controllers of BBC2 seem to think it’s important enough to drop Buffy from the schedules which is utterly unforgivable.

The Atkins Diet

If I have to hear one more bad breathed fad dieter evangelise about Atkins I’m going to knock them to the ground and force feed them a kilo bag of sugar. If they’d shut up about it and eat the occasional breath mint (probably too much carb) it wouldn’t be so bad. Just eat less crap and get some exercise you fat f**ks!

Looking busy

I currently have 5 active projects (plus tech support) at work. However, if for a brief moment I don’t look busy I’ll get another project dumped on me. One day I hope to work for someone who acknowledges that I have a variable workload and it’s okay for me not to look busy at all times.

Happy People

Not all happy people, just the ones who insist on trying to cheer me up when I’m feeling depressed and/or stressed. It’s a bit like someone repeatedly telling you that it’s wrong to feel the way you do. It really doesn’t help.


Number theory

I found this over at the Inquirer:

According to top mathematicians, the best-known example of a pure sinatra number is 14,991,338,361,953,636,352, although partial sinatra numbers are known to exist too. Sinatra numbers are one of Single Mother Nature�s wonders, having special and unusual properties that make them unlike non-sinatra numbers. To investigate these properties, you need to display the sinatra number in hexadecimal format. Like the Windows calculator can.


Gazillion piece puzzle

A computer program has been written to solve the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle, 16,000 sacks of shredded Stasi documents. The East German security agency shredded all it’s documents when the Berlin Wall came down but couldn’t arrange the trucks to take the scaks away to be burned. In theory it will take 5 years to complete the task as opposed to 400 years with the current manual method.