Caboose

[via MeFi]An interesting speech by an interesting woman.

As a result of a listings mixup I ended up going to see Dreamcatcher today. The quick verdict is: scary but a bit of a mess.

It certainly is a very scary film. It’s got quite a few of the blatant things jumping out and biting people scenes but it also manages to build up tension slowly and sustain it until you’re ready to drop dead from fright.

The CGI monsters are OK but nothing special and the plot seemed fairly disjointed. It’s apparently based on a Steven King story, but it gave the impression of being several different films hastily joined together.

There were the Stand By Me bits, Morgan Freeman must have found all the flying around in helicopters strangely reminiscent of Outbreak and the backstory about secret alien invasion attempts was straight out of The X Files.

So I’d say it’s worth going to see if you want a bit of a scare but don’t expect too much in the way of plot or characterisation.

The Rockbox project has released a new version of their open source firmware for the Archos Jukebox portable MP3 players. It’s pretty good, some extra features as well as being more stable than the original firmware.

I also installed EasyTAG to tidy up the filenames and ID3 tags of my MP3 files.

To make things even better Opera have release version 7.10 for Linux, so I can use the same browser at work and at home.

I’ve added a GeoURL to the front page of the site, which makes fun things like the World as a Blog work.

You can find people (geographically) close to me by clicking the button:

I spent the Easter long weekend through at my Grandparents’ house in Wroxham (see also here and here).

On Sunday Granny and I wandered down to the Broad, where the local yacht club seemed to have some races going on, lots of brightly coloured sails in the sunshine.

There was another reason for going through there, my motorbike has been sat in Grandpa’s garage since December. I’ve given it a bit of a clean and changed the oil so it’ll be ready for me picking it up in a few weeks time. Yippee!

[via MeFi]What type of brain do you have?

This features two tests to work out how good at empathising and systemising you are. I did each test twice, the first time I got an EQ of 19 and SQ of 40, the second time I got 30 and 37.

According to the results page this puts me either well in the (possibly autistic) extreme type S area or on the boundary of it.

Hmm, I know I’m not a hugely sociable person at times but I didn’t think I’m that bad.

I spent Monday and Tuesday across in Ireland for my friend Andy’s wedding. Several of us flew across on Monday morning, hired a car and drove up to Virginia in County Cavan.

Here are Andy and Thérèse outside the church after the service:

The service was good and the reception at Cabra Castle was great fun. I was even seen on the dance floor, although the dancing involved much more enthusiasm than skill.

Read the rest of this entry for some more pictures.
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I’m trying out another web browser on my PDA, to see if it actually works for sites I use.

I’ve added a list of recent films I’ve seen in the right-hand column on the main page, each one is linked to my entry about the film.

I’m hoping this will prompt me to start writing better film-related entries, all of them so far fall into the ‘could do better’ category . Do primary school teachers still give out bronze, silver and gold stars for work? I’d like to improve to at least silver star level :-)

[via Aprendizdetodo.com] An article about translating Asterix into English written by one of the translators.

I always thought a lot of the humour in Asterix was there because of the marvellous translation.