Categories
Film

Bad Santa… worse film

Bad Santa. I seem to recall this got reasonable reviews last year. Maybe it was the Christmas spirit that skewed critics’ judgements. I like poking fun at tradition as much as anybody, but I found it dull (and Marita fell asleep — nuff said?). The Joke got a few laughs early on, but wore thin  ... [More]

Categories
Home life

Happy birthday Isaac

Isaac turned 10 today. Ten. The big one-zero. It’s hard to express how I feel, how happy I am that he (and his brother) have turned out to be so happy, healthy, smart and considerate. The time since he was born has flown by, really — it seems so recently that he was just a  ... [More]

Categories
Geek

Vital statistics

Computers I have bought – 1995 vs 2000 vs 2005 (the one I bought yesterday).   May 1995 June 2000 May 2005 Processor 60 Mhz 650 Mhz11 times faster than 1995 3 Ghz5 times faster then 200050 times faster than 1995(Actually it’s not really valid to compare raw clock speeds) Memory 8 Mb 256 Mb32  ... [More]

Categories
Film

Quick review: Huckabees

I ♥ Huckabees: Quite funny, strange plot. The concept of the existential detectives reminded me Dirk Gently, but I haven’t read it in about a decade, and don’t really recall how similar it is. Very enjoyable.

Categories
Film transport

The truth about Connex

This picture taken inside Flinders Street Station yesterday reveals what we train users should have guessed all along… That Connex is aligned with the Dark Side.

Categories
Consumerism Home life

Winter

I might be losing weight since the weather got cold, what with freezing my arse off every morning. Welcome to winter. Since my evil scheme to get us out of this cold house by the onset of winter hasn’t come off, yesterday I went and bought an extra heater, to prevent the family freezing to  ... [More]

Categories
Melbourne

Conversations overheard

A bunch of Year 12 boys from my old school on the train yesterday morning, jabbering away loudly like teenage boys do. “Yeah I got all sorts of weird shit with the co-efficients. Did you put c squared over x?” Then more talk of mathematical terms I couldn’t fathom. Ah, not the usual talk of  ... [More]

Categories
Film

Don’t panic

I was watching something on TV early on Saturday night when an advert for Grease — The Musical came on. And I pondered to myself that Grease was a fine idea for a movie, but really, was there the need to ram it into the ground by endless adaptions into other formats, such as musicals?  ... [More]

Categories
Geek Net

Turn on your feeds

Dear Blogger users, I’m increasingly reading blogs through an aggregator. This is a software tool that grabs text from lots of different web pages and puts it in one place for me. It saves me time, and allows me to read more blogs in less time. More people are using them all the time. To  ... [More]

Categories
Film

Star Wars episode 3 rated M

I can see trouble brewing. They’re not saying so in the adverts yet, but Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith has gained an M rating from the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Unlike MA, this is not a legal restriction on kids under 15 seeing it, just a recommendation. But it may cause ripples  ... [More]

Categories
Politics and activism PTUA transport

Environmentally unfriendly state budget

If you were listening to the radio on Tuesday afternoon after the state budget was announced, you may have noticed that it wasn’t me doing the media for PTUA… I’ve bowed out as my real work is getting too busy to be able to do media effectively. Chris did the budget comment, and did a  ... [More]

Categories
Video games

The virtual deer hunter

I hadn’t noticed this before: you can now get a deerhunting game for the XBox. Obviously there have been 1st person shooter (FPS to those in the know) games for quite a while now, usually despatching alien monsters or WW2 German guards into the afterlife, but this is the first time I recall seeing a  ... [More]