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... ;)