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Harry Potter Day approaches

My google gadget on the side of my desktop tells me I’ve only 59 Days, 11 hours, 1 minute and 8secs… 7 secs… 6 secs… until the release of the new, but last, book.

Two months left and I’ve just reserved my copy. I’ve ordered it from Borders and I’ll be picking it up from there. (I decided to be nice to the post man this time!) Not decided what time I’ll be picking it up though… 12:01am or a more reasonable 9.01am??

Borders in Oxford are putting on a owl show at midnight and I imagine everyone will be dressed up too, might be kind of cool to do that…

My predictions for the book:

  • Harry will return to Hogwarts but only to find the horcruxes which Voldermort hid there when he had access to the cupboard when he worked in Berkin and Botts…
  • It will be discovered that the Avada Kedevra curse doesn’t kill but actually extracts a soul and hides it in a wand… to be retrieved at a later date…
  • Time travel will see Harry Meeting his parents, if ever so briefly.
  • Hogwarts itself will be a Hurcrux with Peeves being the manifestation of this.
  • Fawkes will save Harry’s life.
  • Neither Harry, Ron, , Harmione or Jinny will die but Ron will get bitten by a werewolf.
  • The Weasley twins will make a stand but not make it through.
  • Percy will sacrifice himself to save his mothers life.

Lots more but I won’t bore you with them! Also, don’t forget the movies out first!

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Spiderman 3

Watched the third film in the Spiderman series on Wednesday.

I really enjoyed it, the action was great and it was really funny in places, the plot didn’t always make sense but who’s going to let that get in the way of a good story!

I’d recommend it to anyone who liked the second one as its pretty much as good as that one. Also, its quite simple to understand what’s going in even if you haven’t seen the others – it stands up well as a seperate movie in itself, although it may actually be worth seeing the first film!

Was a rather heart breaking end to the film though..

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Webshots and UltraMon

I’ve been using webshots for ages now, its great as a desktop image changer and screensaver as they have a huge database of some of the best photos around.

However, for some reason they’ve chosen to not get their program working on multiple monitors.

Luckily, its quite easy to get the screensaver working with UltraMon, just find where Webshots is installed, then copy the screensaver, (look for a “scr” extension) then copy it to your Windows directory (usually here: C:\WINDOWS\), it needs to be here for UltraMon to pick it up. Just NOTE: That once you move it you won’t be able to change the settings, so make sure you set it up before you move it.

Now just open up UltraMon and select screensavers, it should now appear in the list and you can set it to appear on all of you monitors.

Software here:
http://www.webshots.com
http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

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UltraMon – Dual Moniter software

This is a really nice piece of software for anyone with a dual (or more) monitor setup.

The really nice “killer” app is the ability to extend the task bar across all you monitors. This is really useful and improves your productivity, and its really cool too!

It also has some nice other features too. Unfortunately it is Shareware so you’ll have to eventually buy it, but you can get a free 30 day demo before you take the leap, here:
http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

Just remember this: your going to really miss it once the 30 days is up!

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Work equipment

I’ve finally got it all set up.

Bought a brand new computer, but the really interesting news is the beautiful dual screen setup. Two 19 Inch LCD monitors, how I’ve been surviving with two huge CRT monitors I don’t know! No more headaches for me!

I went for two of these:
http://www.dealtime.co.uk/xPF-Philips-190S7FS-Silver

And would certainly recommend them. I have one with a VGA cable and one with a DVI-D cable – but actually, the picture quality is almost identical between the two, that’s how good these monitors are.

I didn’t go for widescreen monitors as the two together give plenty of width, but widescreen wouldn’t give much height, and you need that for comfortable on screen reading.

And believe me, it is worth it. Any self respecting programmed NEEDS dual!

Of course, it your really extravagant you could always splash out on three, four or even eight monitors…: (http://digitaltigers.com/zenview.shtml?gclid=CK3fsN77iowCFQvtlAodbHIg3g)

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Earth II? Or would you prefer "GLIESE 581 C"?

A planet which is suspected to be the closet resemblance to Earth has been seen, and its a neighbour.

Just 20 light years away (almost in touching distance) around the star Gliese 581 is a planet not much bigger than Earth (1.5x). It orbits much closer to its star than the Earth does to the Sun, and takes only 13 “Earth” days to orbit. However, the star Gliese is much smaller and weaker than the Sun so a planet orbiting that close would actually have temperatures very similair to Earth, in fact within the temperature limit that would allow liquid water to exist on the surface.

All this has been estimated from the slight wobble of the star seen from Earth, which is created when a something large orbits around, although the effect is very small.

This would make an ideal candidate for the upcoming planet hunting space telescopes, designed to image planets around stars – unfortunately, we still have to wait several decades for this to be achieved…

More info here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6589157.stm
http://obswww.unige.ch/Instruments/harps/Welcome.html (The discovers)

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Serenity showing for Charity

Well I can’t believe my luck…

I’ve become, almost overnight, a browncoat. (No, not a tramp…)

Browncoats are what fans of Firefly/Serenity call themselves, and in the last few weeks when I started watching the show I’m definately one of them. Even now when I’ve got a pile full of Open university work to get through, I’m surfing the web for info on the show…

…and I’m glad I have because I came upon something I think is an amazing coincidence. Apparently, there’s going to be a charitable showing of Serenity AND the firefox pilot just 20 minutes up the road from where I live! This is a global event happening across 51 cities throught out the world.

Here’s the website with the full listing:
http://www.cantstoptheserenity.com/index.html

But the one I’m interested in, in oxford at the the “Ultimate Picture Palace”:
http://www.spiritofwash.com/2/SNEN/Home.html

And as a bonus, all proceeds will be going to the charity “Equality Now”:
http://www.equalitynow.org

I must say, I can’t wait! (And of course, my girlfriend is sure to want to come too…)

UPDATE: Also, as your already no doubt a fan of Firefly, go here and vote:
http://richlabonte.net/tvvote/index.html Come on, we can beat those Xena pushovers… (!)

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My week off

I finally decided that it was time to take a week off work so that’s what I did.

I was lucky enough to get an offer of accomodation in the centre of Vienna, Austria, so I spent a long weekend going around Vienna with some friends. I highly recommend a visit to Vienna as it was such a great city, don’t forget to visit the palace.

Here’s some photos and videos of my visit:

Image hosted by Webshots.com

Vienna

Also, Sharon and I made our way to Bath, England and went around the Roman Baths there. The place is also impressive, and I’d recommend the audio tour around the place. There’s some photos and videos here:

Image hosted by Webshots.com

Roman Baths

Make sure you check out the video, where you can see the steam coming from the waters. (Oh, and just so you now, in roman times the water was crystal clear. (It’s green now because sunlight encourages algea to grow in it, 2000 years ago the bath was originally undercover)

A couple of days later we visited, Longleat, which is a large stately house in a huge grounds, which includes many attractions like a whole safarii and a massive hedge maze. The safarii you drive through also has many monkeys that climb on and pull apart your car! Check out the pictures and videos here:

Image hosted by Webshots.com

Longleat

Enjoy.

Incidentally, all these photos and videos where taken on my Nokia N93, for a review on the picture quality just follow the links above. EDIT: I’ve just realised the movies have been reduced in quality by webshots so I’ll try to copy the originals to my own website. Dammit.

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A memorial to FireFly Serenity


In a recent magazine poll on what is the best science fiction film of all time there was a big shock.
Star Wars was knocked off the top spot and the film Serenity was crowned “greatest”.
http://www.sfx.co.uk/page/sfx?entry=lord_of_the_fireflies

To be honest, I suspected it was a group of fans who got together to push it to the top, but I still really wanted to see what it was like. I was thinking about seeing the film when it was on at the cinema but the trailer made me think it wasn’t worth seeing it (neither did it give any idea of what the film was about) this was a great shame.

I went out to hire it and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Although, I would have to say I didn’t think it was the “Greatest” by a long way and my suspicious, I thought, were correct… BUT…

After talking to a friend at work, he told me he had the original series that the film continued from, but which had been cancelled after only 11 episodes. it was called FireFly. He graciously let me borrow them and I was curious to see the story unfold.

I’m glad I did because they were brilliant! I was very surprised, but I really thought they were great. I can now, with a hundred percent certainty, say that the people who voted for Serenity did because THEY DO think its the greatest – they were just talking about the film AND the series.

I’m hoping it all comes back… but until then, I’ll have to be buying my own DVD Collection! (And on a side note to this, Amazon have said that after this poll came out, serenity / firefly suddenly shot towards the top seller marks! http://www.sfx.co.uk/page/sfx?entry=sfx_poll_result_sends_serenity)

More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_%28film%29
Buy it:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Firefly-Complete-Nathan-Fillion/dp/B0001B3YTM/ref=pd_ts_d_h__80/026-7294440-7094841?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

FireFly – May you once again rise from the fire.

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Morning Tune

Almost every morning I wake up with a song or tune in my head – I’ve yet to figure out why that is (I guess my brains doing something)

But anyway, today I woke up and starting whistling a theme tune of a cartoon I’d watch twenty years ago, so I just had to look it up on the internet and find the real one… A few seconds googling and… Relive one of those great 80’s cartoons here:
http://www.muskehounds.com/

Click on “The Theme Tune” on the left.

This has got to be one of my favourite cartoons…

Enjoy.