Just thinking – the feature that’s probably changed my web browsing habits the most is the “Live bookmark” feature of Firefox. Now instead of visiting the website directly, I flick open my live bookmark, and I can see what the latest articles are, and if I want to read them. Of course it depends on said website having an RSS feed, but as I’ve proved, that’s really not too hard to set up.

So now sites like BBC News and The Register get scanned for interesting stories without having the bother of going to their front-page! And similarly a site like DPReview I can check for an (interesting) update without having to actually go there. It’s grand!

Quite enjoyed Sith, although my ongoing cold didn’t enhance matters too greatly. I ended up spending nearly all day yesterday in bed, but am starting to feel a little bit better now…
I might hold off a review for a few days, but suffice to say I was annoyed at the apparant Jedi inability to finish the job. Despite a clear opportunity apiece for the Emperor and Vader to be bumped off, they both live to fight another day. Why Obi-wan didn’t finish off his fight particularly rankled.
I also got to wondering about why Obi-Wan calls Darth Vader “Darth” in episode IV? At the time I had assumed “Darth Vader” was his name, but rather “Darth” would seem to be the title of the Sith Lords; much like you would be a “Doctor” or “Sir”. Mind you “Strike me down, Sir, and I will become more powerful then you can possibly imagine.” would pass..

The most exciting news is that Ben has taken his first few steps. He walked 4 steps from Mummy to Daddy entirely unaided yesterday evening – most of the time it was a barely controlled fall, but once or twice he definitely walked the small gap. So I guess we give him a couple of weeks and he’ll be running us off our feet!!

Bit more website fiddling; turns out that my PHP is riddled with errors! Not of a particularly major variety, just testing the value of undefined variables, which does causes the error log file to fill up. I found them because I was having a problem with my Gallery installation, which was down to file permissions, but then I noticed there was actually errors coming up in my normal webpages. Anyway, all fixed now, which may also improve performance a bit?

On a different note, I feel dreadful today – stuffed up full of cold, really sore throat, and feels like I hardly slept at all last night (not helped by Ben, incidently.) Got those horrible cold/hot shivers (which A tells me are called rigors), and probably should have just stayed in bed. 🙁
… the reason I didn’t is because a group of us from work are going to see Revenge of the Sith this evening, and I really want to see it (and indeed have already brought my ticket). Probably a bad idea, but Star Wars is Star Wars, and it is the last film (in our time, if not Star Wars time). Expect a review in due course.

Decided to take the XHTML plunge, so am proud to annouce that my pages are (almost) valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The almost is because I want the Eutony logo on the top left to be a link to the front page, which means I’ve put an anchor tag around a <div>. This is apparantly naughty, but every browser I’ve tried understands what I mean!!! The transitional is because strict is far too strict.

The process was actually fairly painless – I’m a sufficient nerd that most of my open/closing of tags was correct – the painful thing was sorting out all the <br> (etc) tags into <br />, especially as this involved fiddling with the database.
The other option was to dynamically sort out these tags as the pages are served, but that would just slow everything down.

On a totally different note, Ben is soooo nearly walking. He can stand unsupported for several seconds now, but then he loses his courage and sinks to his knees again.

This is turning out to be a fab weekend – had a lovely time at Chris and Katy’s wedding yesterday; they got married in South Parade Baptist Church in Leeds, and then the reception was in Harewood house. I was doing the ushering thing which was great fun (nothing like legitimately bossing people around), although it meant I didn’t get any photos at the service itself. Still, more than made up for that at the reception (possibly a bit snap happy, but hey!)

Tommorow is the missus’ birthday, so we’re having a curry tonight to celebrate, and then I’m taking the day off work so we can do something nice – probably going swimming with Ben or something. I almost get more excited about her birthday than about my own, but then I love organising things and planning surprises.

I also playing my djembe at church this morning, which was fun. They don’t really have any percussion (we’re spending a few months at another church a the moment, just to experience how other people do things), so it was good to be able to provide a bit of beat.

The only mild downside was that I forgot to set the video for Dr Who – fortunately it’s repeated on BBC 3 tonight (phew!)

Hah – vindication is mine! I’m not a completely out of touch old fogey for liking Radio 2; apparantly just over 8 million of us like listening to Terry Wogan in the morning, which is more than one in ten of radio listeners. So there!

On a different note, the election is over for another few years, and I have to say it’s probably the best result. I didn’t vote for Labour, and don’t particularly support their policies, but they have done a reasonable job of running the country (and certainly a lot better than the Conservatives last effort), so I’m not unhappy they’ve got back in. The best part is their hugely reduced majority; this means Parliament will operate more accountably and hopefully gives the cabinet a wake-up call.

To be honest, I don’t think our electoral system works very well. Looking at the BBC website, Labour secured 36% of the vote, yet have 57% of the seats in parliament. Conversely the Conservatives have 33% of the vote, but 31% of the seats. The Liberal Democrats manage 22% of the vote, yet have only 9% of the seats. I can’t see how the make up of parliament reflects the votes here – just considering the two biggest parties, why should a 3% advantage in votes lead to a something like 25% advantage in seats of parliament, and hence power?

I’ve rediscovered radio recently – I went through a phase in my life of always having the radio on; then I got involved in student radio and lived in a radio station, but then I drifted away, and stopped listening to music so much, and when I did it tended to be my own albums.

Anyway, my phone has an FM receiver on it, so I’ll fairly often plug in the headphones on the way to/from work, and bop away on the train (or something). Pains me to admit it, but I actually quite like listening to Radio 2, especially Terry Wogan (and team) who are actually really quite funny and play reasonable music. So this morning for a change I switched to Real Radio, and I was surprised at how much Real seem to compress their audio feed – I bet if you had a VU meter on it it would dead flat at “5”. This is what a lot of commercial radio stations do (Capital certainly used to), but R2 doesn’t seem to! Limiting the dynamic range covers a multitude of sins to do with poor mixing, balance, microphone technique, and limited broadcast bandwidth, and automatically gives the DJ a bit more “presence” compared to the music, and in that sense I guess it sounds “better” – but I found I prefer the sound of R2. Horses for courses, I suppose.

Still, our car radio doesn’t work at the moment, as when it was last serviced they disconnected the battery, which reset and locked the radio, but we don’t have the code. Options are to take the unit out and look at the serial number, and try out one of these ‘cracking’ programs that gets the code from the serial number, or take it into a Fiat dealership and ask nicely (and almost certainly pay through the nose). Trip to Cornwall in the summer though, and a car radio makes these long drives so much better…

Supersize me was on the telly last night – very interesting documentary, although its impact was diminished by my reasonable familiarity with the script.

On one level, if you’re only going to eat McDs for a month, what do you expect, but on another level the impact of only a month is extraordinary – it took him 2 months to get his various blood levels back to normal, and then something like a year to lose all the weight he gained. Scary.

Had a lovely webpade pointed out to be yesterday – Thinking Chess, where you play against the computer and you can see it thinking through its moves. They see it as art; I just like it. 🙂

I never did get around to saying what the other toys I want to save up for are! I should probably add that at the rate I am able to save the timescale is probably years, but I can still dream.

So, got my eye on the Garmin Etrex range, either the Legend (~140 squid) or the Venture (~115 squid), the former having 8Mb mapping, the latter just 1MB Points Of Interest capability. For an extra 25 pounds it seems silly not to have the extra mapping stuff…

Also wondering about updating my PDA. Having now thoroughly abandoned my filofax, I depend on my Palm for everything. It’s a very old Palm III, and I picked up for 20 quid or something – but it would be nice to have a PDA that was a bit faster, had a brighter (colour) display, non-volatile memory (so I don’t lose everything if the battery drains), and better connectivity options (i.e. bluetooth and WiFi, with a web browser and e-mail client to boot). The Tungsten E2 seems to nicely fit this bill (and does MP3) – it doesn’t do WiFi, although you can buy an SDIO card to fix that. Trouble is that these too are around 140 pounds – add the WiFi card are we’re talking 200. Another 20 quid for a bluetooth dongle for the PC, and we’re well into the year 2008… I presume it’s possible to get an ssh client for Palm?

The last toy is a new lens for my camera – specifically the “bigma” (aka Sigma 50-500mm F4-6.3 EX APO RF HSM), which I would be the first to admit is just plain barking (especially at 600 pounds or so), but I’m a bit of a zoom freak and just want to get closer and closer. Combine with my camera’s 1.6x effective focal length, and we’re talking a 850mm lens, and that’s before the 2x teleconverter! The lens is hopelessly impractical – it’s big, heavy, and slow… but a lens with this range is hugely flexible, and I’ve seen some awesome photos taken with it… Still, well and truly in the realms of retirement presents now, but I can dream… 🙂

Constantine is a mildly difficult film to classify. On the one hand it’s not just another Keanu Reeves action-y flick, but on the other hand it’s not as intelligent as it thinks it is (if that makes sense).
Basic premise is that our Keanu is the titular Constantine, a physic who can see angels and demons. Well, actually it’s not so simple – angels and demons cannot “cross over to our plain”, so instead there are “half breeds”, who are not allowed to directly interfere with humans, but are allowed to influence them in an attempt to further their side’s aims. However, half breed demons – being the slippery characters that they are – often break these rules, and when they do Constantine tracks ’em down and “deports” them back to hello, using a variety of tricks, but mainly by blowinng them away with a crucifix shotgun.
Anyway, police officer’s twin sister commits suicide; police officier believes demonic activity was involved, and so tries to get Constantine to help her get to the bottom of it, and nefarious plot is uncovered, involving the end of the world.
The plot was actually quite engaging – not really enough to make it worth the effort trying to second guess what was going to happen, but watchable enough. The CGI was very good quality (especially the scenes from hell), and pleasingly understated, just like special effects should be. The film was wonderfully ambiguous too – there were no plain and simple “good guys”; even the half-breed angel (called Gabriel, although apparantly a female) has an appearance of all sweetness and light, but actually bristled with energy that was somewhere between sadistic and sexual, and at one point tells Constantine: “basically you’re f*cked”.
I think Gabriel comes very close to the show-stealing performance actually. I can’t quite name the actress, although I just know I’ll kick myself when I find out! Probably tieing with her is the main female lead, who again I know perfectly well but can’t quite put a name too (and no Internet!). Keanu was less convincing – for me he didn’t really capture the character he was meant to be playing, but as I said watchable enough.
I guess the fact that I had enough time to wonder about the use of language and symbols in the occult (as I’ve written about in LfL) might show that I wasn’t 100% captivated – but there were some very nice ideas in there, and a reasonable yarn. Worth watching on the telly – probably even worth getting out from the video shop, but not one to buy.
Seen at Vue, Edinburgh