"Honey - where's my super suit?"
"Why do you need to know"


...my favourite lines from The Incredibles, which I saw at the cinema last night. Very taken by Syndrome's gorgeous henchwoman 'Mirage' (left). Outstanding animation, but the film is over long at 120 minutes; cinematic experience ruined by having to sit through 20 minutes of adverts and the sound being out of sync. Will probably buy on DVD.

One of the UK's most senior lawyers has quit his job in protest over the Blair Government's draconian internment law. Recently ruled as 'unlawful' by the House of Lords, Ian MacDonald QC described the detention without trial of foreigners suspected (but not necessarily proven) to be terrorists as a "blot on the legal landscape".

BBC NEWS | UK | Lawyer resigns over terror laws

Installing PERL on my home server last night and ran into the old 'Error 500' problem which can basically mean all sorts of things. In this instance, after an hour's fiddling, I found it was down to the shebang line in my script only pointing to the folder perl.exe was in and not to the program itself. Once I'd changed it to:

#!C:/Appserv/PERL/bin/perl.exe

...the script worked.

The Longer Range Impact of November 2nd Vote

With the Blue States in hand, the Democrats have firm control of 80% of the world's fresh water, over 90% of our pineapple and lettuce, 93% of the artichoke production, 95% of America's export quality wines, 90% of all cheese production, most of the US low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Stanford, CalTech and MIT. We can live simply but well.

The Red States, on the other hand, now have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans (and their projected health care cost spike), 92% of all US mosquitoes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, 100% of all Televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

A high price to pay for controlling the presidency. Unattributed.

The UK is not going to be able to meet its own targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - 20% of 1990 levels by 2010 - but will probably match its Kyoto commitment. But at least we're doing something: the US government still thinks the whole global warming problem doesn't exist, stating today that its based on 'bad science'. Perhaps when Florida disappears under the ocean they'll start to listen - by which time it will probably be too late.

BBC NEWS | Politics | UK 'failing on greenhouse gases'

That's not to say the British government shouldn't do more. Car engine sizes are getting bigger and more powerful and yet nothing has been done to try to limit this, or a least further penalise drivers who choose to purchase these vehicles.

Apple are in trouble with the European Commission for charging us Brits too much for single music downloads. We cough up 79p but the French and Germans only have to pay the equivalent of 68p. In the USA its a mere 51p a track. I guess its in line with the rip off prices were are expected to pay for music CDs (not that I buy many of those these days).

BBC NEWS | Business | Apple iTunes 'overcharging in UK'

Considerable 'aaah' factor in this evening's BBC TV program 'Bears: Spy in the Woods' which featured a mother spectacled bear careing ever-so-gently for her young cub. Bet there'll be more teddy bears sold this Christmas as a result!

Blasted HP PSC 2510 playing up again. Its been turned off since late last night. Switch it on again this evening and its refusing to see the network. When it was working, I gave it a static IP plus set the router to issue that IP to the printer's MAC address. But now I've got the same problem as before: the port light on the hub is on, the LED next to the ethernet socket on the printer is on, but the big blue light on the top of the printer just won't come on. And in that state you can't even print out a network settings page. What a pain-in-the-backside this thing has been since day one - a complete waste of time and money.

This just caught my eye. "Generations of directors and stars learned their craft in advertisements" it says. Is this an explaination of where 'reality TV' programme makers come from I wonder...?
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Archive saves film and TV adverts

Visited Dirt Bike Rider Expo at Stoneleigh just south of Coventry today. Not being a biker, I wasn't that interested in the trade show side of things, but they did have some demonstrations of stunt bike riding. Full gallery here.

Saw (admittedly only part of) the trailer for the upcoming film version of The Magic Roundabout. CGI sacrilege. For the nostalgic amongst us, here's a nice page about the original.

I do have to question the decision made today by high street retail chain Dixons to stop selling VCRs by this Christmas. Whilst they are correct that DVDs have taken off due to their superior image quality, etc. how many of us actually have the ability to record TV programs onto DVD? Not many, I suspect. OK, so VHS itself is pretty long-in-the-tooth, but this appears to a cynical attempt to drive consumers away from a still 'adequate' technology.


BBC NEWS | Business | Death of video recorder in sight

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy hits the nail on the head in his response to Home Secretary Blunket's latest 'big idea' for tackling 'terrorism', that being jury-less trials. Blunket, now further right wing than yer average Tory, continues his 'climate of fear'; the introduction of ID cards by force and his continuing erosion of our civil liberties. Sounds to me like he's been paying too much attention to George Bush.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Kennedy attacks 'climate of fear'

Yesterday's foul weather didn't put me off attending a new (to me) motocross event in Northamptonshire. Pity the riders' 'other halves' having to clean their kit afterwards.

Not at all happy at the idiot who decided that Friday night was a good time to hold a Northampton Town home match. Took me 35 minutes to get half way across Milton Keynes. Never even saw the motorway, but glad I gave up before I got to it as it was solid traffic both ways at the Northampton junction. 14 quid down the drain. Thanks.

The Cobblers managed a 1-1 draw against visitors Chester even though they were down to ten men for most of the match. Not good enough - can't see us getting promoted this season either after performances like that.

Finally got around to scanning some black and while shots of the group Soul Fever I took a little while back. I was using my Canon EOS 1D digital camera at 1600 for colour stuff and had a roll of black and white film in my backup EOS 1n.



The film is Kodak's somewhat specialised very high speed T-Max P3200 and was printed by Ilford using one of their pre-pay mailing envelopes. The HP PSC 2510 did a reasonable job of the scanning but I don't think the quailty is as good as you'd get from a 'proper' (stand alone) scanner. This film is incredible, though. I had used a roll of Ilford's Delta 3200 a few years back, but it was much grainier than this stuff. Film emulsions have gotten so good now that if you actually want grain, you have to go to extremes.

I've now switched both home and work machines to have FireFox as the default web browser. Its faster than IE for almost everything (in fact the only thing I have found to be slower with are pages with immense tables). It takes a little while to fire up but once launched, its quicker and the tab browsing saves screen space.

Suspect cab fare dodger bites police dog. Well, it was America...

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Man bites dog (and a policeman)

Massive relief this morning as the blue network LED on my new HP PSC 2510 printer decides to come on, for almost no apparent reason. I'd plugged a phone into the same socket as the fax connection, then turned the printer and one of my computers on and was calling HP's UK technical support line when suddenly the light came on. Put the phone down in a hurry to avoid wasting anyone's time and it stayed on. In fact it has stayed on all day, even after disconnecting the fax/phone completely.

So far I've managed to scan some photos and print a contact sheet off a Compact Flash card, which is a nice feature. Had to disable the fax cos it answered the phone for me at one point.

Looks like its a keeper.

My experiences with my new HP PSC 2510 multifunction inkjet printer so far have been less than stunning. The thing completely refuses to see my network - the little blue LED on the top remains stubbornly off regardless of what its plugged into or what cable I use. And I cannot print the 'network status' page until it can see the network. I have no idea if its getting an IP address, I don't know what its MAC address is and I don't know what the address of its in-built webserver is. Searches for help on Google have been a waste of time because the results consist almost entirely of shops selling the thing. I can see no solution save what will no doubt turn out a costly and fruitless phone call to HP's telephone support. Should have bought the Canon instead.