Continuing the frequent cinema-age that’s been going on recently, tonight we went to see The Village at the Skydome. The film seemed promising at first, with a few really good tension-filled scenes, but didn’t really seem to go anywhere after that. It may have been the irritation factor of the fifteen-year-old kid at the back of the cinema who wouldn’t shut up for more than ten minutes, but the film really just seemed to lose something after a while.

Although the cinematography was great, I thought they could have done a little more to make the ‘creatures’ appear slightly scarier and less reminscent of something out of Jeepers Creepers. It was also a shame that despite all the things going on throughout the film, it just didn’t really seem to go anywhere in the end.

It was worth seeing, if only to enlarge my list of scary-films-that-I’ve-seen, but didn’t quite live up to The Stepford Wives and 13 Going On 30 that we saw earlier this week. It also got me back out of bed again (having grabbed a couple of hours of sleep after getting home from work, in an attempt to make my acidic hangover go away. Note to self – bear in mind current lower-than-usual alcohol tolerance levels when drinking next time).

I spent the rest of tonight reading all the news sites and blogs I’ve been too busy to read recently. The Guardian have a Second Sight article looking at the disruptive effects of new media (i.e. blogs) on the mainstream media industry, which tied in nicely with some of the blog-related stuff I’ve been looking into recently. I also found a couple of articles on the continuing advance of open access publishing, which looks set to open up more and more research papers etc. to the masses. A good thing, I think.

In other news, Service Pack 2 has finally been realeased on the Windows Update site for XP, but sadly doesn’t fix all the security holes that are in XP. No surprises there, then.

Today’s been a real busy day. Was up at 7.45 (early for me) in time to make it into work for 9AM. It was hectic all day until five and I spent my lunch break trying to battle with a bunch of nasty virus infections on some guy’s PC. Straight after work I went down to play cricket with work people and was there until 8.30. I got back here, grabbed some food and went to see 13 Going On 3 with Matt, Cath and Sarah at the Skydome. I’ve been back in Cryfield for about an hour now, doing some analysis of the residential network performance (still not looking good) and sorting through the stupid number of photos I took on the walk I went on last night.

Here’s a field of sheep. I’m going to bed now.

Running is a lot like blogging. It’s really difficult to start up again once you begin to neglect it, but once you’re in the swing of doing it regularly it’s quite good. They’re also both good for thinking about stuff and generally clearing your mind. This means I should do more of both. Especially the running.

I did another 4-5 miles (I think) this evening on my new route out across the sports pitches and fields towards Kenilworth, up the old railway and then back past the Westwood church and Varsity. I need to measure it properly sometime, but I really can’t be bothered pissing about with my map and bits of cotton.

I managed it in 47 minutes, but I had to keep stopping to dodge huge big clumps of nettles and to give a woman directions to the Ramphal building. Which means I should be able to get it down to 45 minutes next time! I just have to try not to leave it 13 days before the next time…

Sorry, Stu, it had to be done…

Me and Dave went to see Thunderbirds tonight at the Skydome. It was pretty much as rubbish as I’d expected it to be, but for some reason I seem to find films like that funny. Sometimes after a long hot and sticky weekend you’re not really in the mood for watching a serious film, and Thunderbirds fitted the bill quite well there.

Lady Penelope was funny. The younger Tracy boys were quite nice indeed, and the desert island location for the first part of the movie seemed to provide the producers with ample opportunity to get the nearly-sixteen-year old Brady Corbet quite wet, on multiple occasions (slightly wrong, but still…).

The London scenes were a little strange. Seeing Thunderbird 2 land in Jubilee Gardens under the London Eye, where I’d been stood yesterday taking photos freaked me out a little. Seeing Mary’s old office in the background freaked me out even more.

The whole experience was a tad bizzare. There were only six of us in total in the film, not counting the ten year old kid who crept in behind our seats, made some funny noises and ran out again. No more bizzare than the film itself though, I guess (hacking into a communications system using someone’s braces being a prime example).

It was a good night, and a good end to a cool weekend. I missed going to Brighton and catching up with Stu, but I at least I made it to London. And unlike last week I also made it back on the Sunday, despite the best efforts of a hugely f**ked up public transport system.

Here’s an arty picture of the London Eye, sadly without Thunderbird 2. And here’s the rest of the photos from this weekend.

I moved Planet Afterlife over onto my project server, so I can now get it to rebuild every minute or so. I’d much rather have it on wabson.org, but as I can’t run cron jobs on the server to rebuild it, that’s pretty much a non-option at the moment. At least it works for now.

The new location is here.

Listening to: Roger Sanchez – Another Chance

Via the magic of RSS blog feeds and the Planet aggregator I got hold of today, I’ve put together an afterlife blog aggregation (or ‘planet’) of all the blogs belonging to afterlife authors, as well as a couple of others. Hope you all don’t mind!

There’s still a few issues with the system – currently it only updates a HTML file on my computer when blogs get updated, and doesn’t yet upload this file to the web until I do this myself. In other words, it should update itself when people add new blog entries but it doesn’t at the moment.

There’s also an issue with Movable Type not providing me with the full blog entry in the RSS file, which requires editing the template for index.rdf to fix for each blog. Change the MTEntryExcerpt tag to MTEntryBody in the ‘RSS 1.0 template’ file if you want to change this for your blog.

I’m interested to know what people think of this system? Is it worthwhile? Can it be made any better? Comments in the box, please 🙂

Still not managed to put any photos up, but at least now I have a pretty banner at the top of the page, after some people complained about the new layout… It still doesn’t work in IE 5.5 on my work machine, but I figure most people are on Firefox or IE6 these days anyway.

The banner image is from the contemplative walk I went on at sunrise after the end of term disco, taken near the new Heronbank blocks. I’ll get round to putting the rest of the photos up sometime…

As with everywhere else in the country it seems, we’ve had thunderstorms here tonight. I was impressed when I looked down at the little weather applet in my notification area while listening to the thunder, and discovered it even has a cute little icon for such weather. GNOME rocks.

My sleep patterns are just about getting back to normal now after the weekend, which I’m glad about. This is despite my hour long conversation with Rik until 3am last night about email clients, blogs and RSS feeds.

I’m off to attempt to cook dinner in my dirty horrible kitchen now. Then I’m gonna attempt to integrate some photos into the new blog if I get time when I’m done. Then I’ll probably go to bed.

Normal sleep patterns are actually quite boring!

…Are a few of the words that sum up the last few days in London. Or more specifically yesterday, after I finally managed to start properly enjoying myself and stop being so tired, disorientated and moody.

Mary helped me do some lunchtime shopping in Selfridges and H&M, before we left for Michael’s barbeque in Surrey. We sat in Vicoria station and saw Kiara. We spent an hour sat in the sun at the end of Platform 3 of East Croydon station, while we waited for Laurie to arrive. We turned up at the barbeque a bit late in the end and left a bit late too. I left at half past five this morning to come back up to Cov for work and as far as I know the others are still there.

Why do things like that only seem to happen in London?