So I’ve really been liking the BBC’s SciFi shows the last few years and this weekend was a Doctor Who related weekend. I’ve never liked Doctor Who until the last few years (I’ll lean more towards I disliked it).
Here’s my Doctor Who related activities this weekend:
So it was a good weekend of entertainment. And I got lot’s of non-Doctor Who stuff done too… Continue reading
Posted in reviews
Tagged BBC, BBC SciFi, books, Doctor Who, Dr. Who, DVD, Sarah Jane, scifi, television, The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood
Just got back from a preview of Iron Man, it was excellent. It was a long movie but it did not feel like it at all, had to be close to two hours. Wonderful visual effects!! I couldn’t tell where Tony Stark ended and the CGI began. I was highly entertained and not disappointed at all! I had really high hopes and saw a million different previews and I thought it might spoil it, but that wasn’t the case at all.
If you’ve got kids who want to see it: it’s got lots of violence but less than the average violent show (or video game) and the sexual references/scenes are way less than the average soap opera (which is probably too much).
Jon Favreau (who you might remember as the Ultimate Fighting Champion wannabe from Friends) was the director/producer and also played Happy Hogan. The movie adaption book was written by Peter David who always writes good stuff (IMHO) so I’ll be checking that out. And of course, a humorous scene with Stan Lee….
Where did our preview tickets come from? We have no idea, they showed up in a Mark’s mailbox with no indication of how the were won or distributed. We asked a few people in the theatre where they got their’s but it turned out they all “knew someone” or got them from “an aunt/grandmother” and didn’t know the original source.
Possible Minor Spoiler below: Continue reading
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Tagged iron man, Iron Man theme song, movies, Stan Lee, theme song, Tony Stark, tv theme song
So I’m using some Costa Rica photos to test the new free on-line edition of PhotoShop. It’s very cool, does more than what most desktop packages do, but while limited, I don’t need much more. They give you 2 GB of free storage. It’s got cool slideshows (full-scren if you like) but I’m sure it breaks some browsers…
Looks like you can even download your photos in their original size. They’re still in beta so who knows what they’ll charge for more storage (or features?).
They do give you a way to put thumbnails and links to photos with having to use their viewer. Although it seems to be a 2 step process (thumbnail then link) for each photo. But it’s cheap, high-res and the flash interface is great.
If you love PhotoShop, I’m sure you’ll hate it. It’s pretty as spplications, but since I don’t use any features past version 1, it’s very nice and easy to use. Here’s a link to the palette with all the main options on it. It’s even easier to use than I need it to be (and it has more features to use too). It e-mails a really nice graphical html link to your friends too.
Posted in reviews
Tagged Costa Rica, introduction, Montezuma, photoshop, PhotoShop Express, web sites
Alison Sudol was excellent last night. A very small venue at The Shelter, the cancert was sold out but I’d guess there were only about 300 people there, lots of room. No one was back farther than about the equivalent of about 10 rows (no seats, general admission standing only with just a few tables). I’ve seen A Fine Frenzy before and it was a smaller venue so it was great having the small crowd and as a bonus it was a non-smoking show.
She’s has such a lovely voice and writes her own songs. She’s got this voice that’s kind of a Sarah McLachlan / Tori Amos voice and she’s just incredible. She so beautiful and has this sunning red head, and while it might not be naturally that red, she’s got that anemic porcelain look that so many red heads do, I’m assuming she’s actually a redhead. My camera in my phone takes pretty crappy pictures, but I tried to take a few.
She’s so into when she plays, and every so often she looks at the audience, I feel likes she’s forgotten us and that her manager told her she has to make eye contact every so often and that’s why she looks up. I always think of ‘gracious’ when thinking about her personality, that’s just how I feel when she’s talking to us and that’s how I feel when she talks to you personally. I did get to get to say ‘hi” and get her autograph on a promo poster after the concert. She’s just so nice, even with just a 30-second conversation… Continue reading
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Tagged A Fine Frenzy, AFF, Alison Sudol, Chicago, concert, Costa Rica, Detroit, Michigan, music, Sarah McLachlan, Tori Amos
If this isn’t the cutest review of episode 4 that you’ve ever seen…
I’m sure a few parts were re-shot, but it’s adorable…
Here’s another cute kid video…
So this week’s episode of Torchwood is called “Meat”. It’s written by Catherine Tregenna, I bring that up right away because it’s a great episode. Low action but lots of story. Rhys is at the scene of an accident and who shows up? Gwen, with the Mystery Machine and the rest of the gang. So this becomes a big part the story-line (this all happens in the first few seconds and in last week’s preview, don’t worry I won’t give anything else away) and I really enjoyed the episode. Lots of great scenes of Cardiff too!
The first thing I did after watching it was to look up Catherine Tregenna and what did I find? A few other great episodes: “Captain Jack Harkness” (when Tosh and Jack get trapped in the 1940’s) and “Out of Time” when a plane from the 1950’s comes through the rift. As a bonus, she writes “Adam”, next week’s episode! It looks like she’s written two other upcoming Torchwood episodes: Day In The Death Of (episode 8) and “From Out of the Rain” (episode 10) but I only saw that info mentioned at one place on-line (geos) and it didn’t mention the “Adam” episode (so maybe an episode title changed?). All the other shows she’s written for are other BBC(?) shows that I’ve never seen (I’ve only heard of East Enders). She’s written some plays and been an actress too. Continue reading
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Tagged Adam, BBC, Cardiff, Catherine Tregenna, Meat, television, Torchwood
I waited so long for WordPress For Dummies, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and it was well worth the wait. I had been wanting to learn WordPress and had been a fan of Lisa’s blog so it was just what I needed as a motivator.
It’s a “Dummies” book so it’s got that easy to use format. And it’s a reference book so most of it is not meant to be read linearly. If you’ve always wanted to set up a blog or switch to WordPress this is the way to go. It explains it from the basics up to the advanced. It’s step by step and it’ll get you running on your own host or at WordPress.com with ease.
It covers Migrating to WP, 10 Great Free Themes, Ten Great Plugins, Using WP as a Content Management System, Understanding Templates and Plug-ins. It covers pretty much everything you need to know but those are the chapters I’ve read the most and use for reference. If you don’t know anything about PHP you’ll painlessly learn the bits that you do need to know for modifying templates (this is optional) and you’ll have picked up enough for when you want to use PHP for other “web stuff”.
As I’m writing this post, I’m flipping through the book seeing if there is anything I’ve missed mentioning. There are so many areas of WP that I haven’t explored yet, I’ve read about them in the book and I can’t wait to try out some of the other features! Continue reading
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Tagged blogging, books, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, WordPress, WordPress for Dummies
So the second season of Torchwood has started up. In case you haven’t seen it, it’s a semi-secret organization with the job of finding (and removing) aliens and acquiring their technology to better protect Earth.
“Torchwood: outside the government, beyond the police. Tracking down alien life on Earth, arming the human race against the future. The twenty-first century is when everything changes. And you gotta be ready. ”
It’s actually a spin-off of the new Doctor Who series (2005), but it generally doesn’t have much to do with the Doctor, although the title does, here’s your anagram trivia for the day: Torchwood is actually Doctor Who rearranged.
Back to Torchwood, the first season was not your normal Sci-Fi show, lots of sexual innuendo, lots of sex implied. I think all of the main characters hooked up with one of the other team members, an alien, someone of the same sex (or all three) at some point in season one (the show was created by Russell T. Davies who created Queer As Folk). Wait, I did say it was SciFi didn’t I? There are generally aliens, generally doing bad “take over the world” kinds of things and they usually stop them generally (but not always) saving lives in the process. When I first watched the show I didn’t realize it was a Doctor Who spin-off, I actually thought it was some kind of supernatural British cop show, but this was better… Continue reading
Posted in reviews
Tagged BBC, BBC Two, Doctor Who, eve myles, John Barrowman, sci-fi, scifi, television, Torchwood
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