Just got in from seeing the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie, and I have to say, I liked it.

This is not to say that any of the criticism you read may not have elements of truth in it, but if you're a h2g2 fan, at the very, very least, you will love this waaaaay more than the bbc tv production.

Sure some of the jokes have been truncated, and what were they thinking with the intro (big band crooner style) song 'so long and thanks for all the fish', but in essence it keeps the sense of fun that was so prevalent in the books and radio series.

I'll even forgive that horrible initial song because they did actually include the terrific theme song that anyone familiar with the series will know, only a bit later in the proceedings.
My favourite part of the movie I have to say is the design, they have really outdone themselves. This point alone brings to story more to life for me, the bbc version, well everything just looked so fake.

In this production you can see the pains they have gone to to show that simple things like a pen or a gun, have been designed by aliens.
The animation for the book itself are brilliant, along the same ideas as the tv series, but with a 21st-century-flash-animation-graphics-design edge.

I did feel that they tried to make some of the ideas a bit too obvious, Deep Thought for instance is represented by a giant stylized desktop computer crossed with Rodin's 'The Thinker'. Yeh Yeh, we get it. Still an improvement on no design at all.

The Vogons were done wonderfully, in a kind of pink floyd's The Wall meets Yellow Submarine / Monty Python way.

All in all, a big [electronic] thumbs up.
yeh yeh i know. bad joke.
Later.

Ford Arthur & Zaphod

Stayed at home today with a cold.
Better than dragging myself to work with a head full of Codrals and breathing over everyone else. I'm feeling better now, should be fine for 2moro. I'd like to thank some sunshine and Sean of the Dead for that. Good movie, I love British comedy. Other than that, i took it pretty easy, learnt some more asp.net, surfed the web. I bought a cheap ($20) usb keyobard for an old Gateway Neo i inherited from work. Not sure what the plans are for that yet, I'd like to give it to Lisa as a basic backup machine if he ibook carks it. She's finished full-time work and is not spending 3 days a week there for 2 weeks as part of the handover. After that she's spending about 6 months on her writing. Best of luck to her. I think we've got the same cold atm. We ring each other up and sniffle to each other.

Work is going well, slowly picking up speed and knowledge. I really can't wait to be more proficient tho. I don't like leveraging so much on the knowledge of others, I guess it's part of the trasition, and pretty natural considering I was a lead tek with 2 years of experience in my old job. A bit of a shock to the system/ego.

Later. Tonight is going to be an early night.

Netscape pioneers Mike Homer and Marc Andreessen are back on the start-up scene, launching a TiVo-like online network for distributing and viewing public TV, radio and grassroots media.

The free service, called the Open Media Network, is aimed initially at letting traditional public broadcasters and independent filmmakers distribute their work on the Net. But it will also allow ordinary computer users to publish their files.

Part TiVo, part BitTorrent file swapping, the network puts publishers' content into a peer-to-peer distribution network that could help lower bandwidth costs substantially. The service then creates a TV-like program directory that potential viewers can use to find and subscribe to automatic downloads of individual shows.

from the eggshellent http://canceledflight.com/

Blog-in-blog, just because I can... ;)

My Long Weekend:

Friday night we saw '3 dollars' at the Orpheum.



Saturday morning...

...We walked across the bridge :

...we saw a contortionist

...looked up at the centrepoint tower

...and ate sushi at a sushi train

Saturday night, we saw Cat Empire at the Enmore Theatre

(...one of the few pics I managed to take before being told to not take any more)

...aah the joys of a cameraphone.

Hammer and Tongs are directing the new H2G2 movie. I command you immediately to visit their too-kool site : http://www.tongsville.com/

Hammer & Tongs are Nick Goldsmith, Garth Jennings & Dominic Leung. Having graduated from Central St. Martins Graphic Design course in 1996, the trio went on to direct over 50 videos through Red Star films, until eventually opening up their own company in 1999. At their new offices in Soho, each of the Tongs started taking on specific roles: Garth went on to direct videos for bands like Blur and Supergrass. Meanwhile Dominic who edits all of the Hammer & Tongs work started directing videos himself, working with the likes of Moloko and Travis, adding another visual angle to the Hammer & Tongs brand. Nick now focuses on producing and expanding the Hammer & Tongs empire: the Hammer & Tongs book, DVD, website and merchandising, and of course feature film production. (Garth currently has two scripts in development.)

Lisa came over for dinner on Thursday night.. I cooked a nice spaghetti bolognaise and we watched many episodes of 'Lost'. We've been downloading them from the united states and so have up to episode 20, here in Australia I believe we're only up to episode 7 or 8 on television.

I went around to her place again on Firday night as my father, who I haven't seen in about 18 months has come up to Sydney to see my sister's baby (naturally his grandchild) for the first time. So Lisa and I make a really good vegetable frittata and drove out to Minto (takes just over an hour) to see them.

While in the supermarket on Friday night, we found strange ginger:

The gang - minus Brenda (who took the photo)

It was really good to see them all again... It doesn't seem anything like 18 months since last time.

My dad and his gf Brenda

me explaining camera phones to my dad...



todays "What the..." is:

Srini came over for dinner tonight.. Austraaalian dinner (whatever that means...) We had garlic bread (with a special entree of a couple of fish fingers [hey! c'mon, he's never tried them before]), then Chicken Fettucini Bosciola for main, followed by a dessert of peaches with vanilla cream yogurt.

Simple yet delish.

Lisa has a meeting tonight with some guys from Uni who might be interested in starting a production company. I hope things went well.

I received my Nokia 6630 yesterday... still loving it.

Presenting.. the iLog

Nokia 6630

My Nokia 6630 arrived today! swoon. This pic shows a brief history of phones I've had, interestingly, the phones I choose are getting larger. In this age of miniturisation, I'm heading back to the brick phone it seems. I think my phone before these was a nokia 3310, although I'm not quite sure. Before that I had a Black Motorola thing that looked like a beetle, and had matching user interface usability.

Cities the focus of bleak future

Some time this year a person will be born whose arrival will mark a tipping point in the history of human life on Earth.

"It may be in London. It may be in Lagos. But for the first time, more people will live in cities than live in rural regions," says Lord May of Oxford, the Australian physicist turned biologist who was Britain's chief scientist for five years from 1995 and is now president of the world's oldest scientific academy, the Royal Society.

As the world's population grows from today's 6.3 billion to the 9 billion predicted by 2050, almost all these extra people will dwell in urban areas. But rather than cities being industrial focuses for spreading prosperity, as in the past, many will become "dumping grounds" for unskilled and unprotected workers.

"We live in the best of times and the worst of times. And we have to ask ourselves what kind of tomorrow we want to create," said Lord May, who will give a free public talk, "Hard Questions about Tomorrow's World", at the University of NSW this evening.

brilliant canna's in the botanic gardens, Sydney.

300 private islands shaped like world map, near Dubai

A developer near Dubai is building a supervillain lair straight out of the funnybooks -- a collection of private islands arranged to look like a map of the world, with African game preserves, luxury hotels, McMansions, condos, etc etc etc. Also, a fleet of (heavily armed?) water-borne private coppers patrolling the islands for crooks, and, I'm guessing, hidden missile silos, or possibly a laboratory for breeding a race of superbeings.

The World will consist of between 250 to 300 smaller private artifical islands divided into four categories - private homes, estate homes, dream resorts, and community islands. Each island will range from 250,000 to 900,000 square feet in size, with 50 to 100 metres of water between each island. The development is to cover an area of 9 kilometers in length and 6 kilometers in width, surrounded by an oval shaped breakwater. The only means of transportation between the islands will be by marine transport.

Link from BoingBoing