Category: domestic life

226 unread in my inbox as I write this…and worse still there would be another hundred emails I’ve flicked through and not responded to yet. I need a Homeland Security style alert bar/ boxes thing, and I’d go to high/ red alert!

On other things, I bought an webcam today…ok, so I already had one which I bought about 7 years ago which is in a box somewhere and was crap, but I bought a fairly decent new one…well, at least I thought it was fairly decent till I tried to record audio with it….bingbingbingbing..over and over again in the background, sort of like morse code, if anyone knows anything about V-Gear Webcams please leave a comment if you know how to get rid of the really, really annoying sound 🙂

The headline says it all: Kangaroo Sighted on Austrian Highway (via Fark), and that’s Austria, not Australia. OK, so the kangaroo’s hoping down the street is a bit of a cliche of Australia, after all, you don’t see them in most cities (oddly enough Canberra is an except), but you do where I live. She who must be obeyed nearly cleaned up a couple yesterday, and not very far from home either, like under a km away on her way home, the worst thing is you can’t do anything about them, the friggen things are everywhere. God help me if I’m driving the Echo and I hit one, I’d be lucky if I lived to tell the story..it’s also why the other car is a RAV4 with a very nice roo bar if I do say so myself 🙂

So I finally got my hands on a very nice, HD Dobly Surround Sound Copy of Jericho. As per Fridays post, no comment as to how 🙂

General thoughts. Not bad, not bad indeed. I can’t get she who must be obeyed to watch it though because the premise of the show is too dark for her….which conversely which is why I was drawn to watch it….after all, watching television shows is not something I do a lot of.

The first episode naturally introduces the characters and sets up the premise of the entire series, that somehow the entirety of the United States has been wiped off the map by nuclear warfare with the except of this small hick town in Kansas (somewhere over the rainbow??)…which the show notes suggest is done via terrorism, and although theoretically exploding a nuclear war head or two in various cities throughout the United States wouldn’t be overly challenging to a terrorist, destroying the whole country is a bit far fetched….but I digress, because this is pretty much it so far. TV and Radio is knocked off the air when the bombs go off, which makes sense, after all the electromagnetic forces of such an explosion would knock out such transmissions, but oddly the power goes out some time later….that part makes no sense at all. The towns folk try to contact the outside world…and cant contact anyone. Stupid really: surely satellites of some sort would still be working, but even if we take modern communications away, haven’t they ever heard of Short Wave? If no one else was out there at all, they wouldn’t be alive because the world as we know it would have ceased to exist.

We leave the first episode with the towns folk going home for the evening after fighting amongst each other for petrol (gas) and the local petrol station…which is again odd given modern bowsers rely on power for their pumping process…so how come they were working if the power was off?.

So will I watch next week. Yes.
Overall rating 6.5/10
Looks like a promising drama in the “what if” premise of other quality shows such as Sliders 🙂

Tags: Jericho, Channel Ten, CBS

All for funny money of course 🙂

Last night was the debut episode of Jericho, the new American series based around an end of the world sort of scenario…and a series that for once we haven’t got to wait 6-9 months to see after its debuted in the States..indeed we got to see it 12 hours after it’s US debut.

I’ve got no idea whether it’s good or not, but having held a long morbid fascination with end of the world tales since my youth, I wanted to check it out. But here’s the catch, I was out when it was on last night. But being the dutiful (ok, occasional) TV watcher that I am, I bought up the TV guide on my Windows XP MCE box and clicked on Jericho to record it before I left. So I get home late last night and think to myself…hmmm, I might start watching what I’ve recorded.

What do I get?

David bloody Tench.

Apparently at the last minute Channel Ten decided to dump Tench to 9:30pm and run Jericho at 8:30pm (a word to the wise, Channel 10 should just dump Tench altogether). Unfortunately because there still isn’t a legal, or official EPG available for MCE and Tivo style boxes here in Australia, my EPG provider didn’t get the update.

OK, I thought to myself, all is not lost, after all CBS is offering re-runs of shows on it’s site, I’ll go over there to watch it.

Click on the link, get some ads running….and running, maybe 3 minutes of ads…and then: buzzzzzzzzz. CBS won’t show the episode to people outside of the United States!

Channel 10 and CBS: you suck, and you wonder why people download shows from bittorrent. Oddly enough there were 4 different recordings of the Jericho first release on Torrentspy today…not that I’d download anything like that of course 😉

Tags: Jericho

XXXI.

Today is fathers day in Australia, and my thoughtful 4 year old gave me a gift I’m sure to get many hours of enjoyment out of, Absolute Power Series 1. Although it was made in 2003, the ABC has only recently showed the series here and I only managed to catch a few episodes, but what I saw was bloody brilliant stuff, and I’m looking forward to sitting down and watching the entire first series.

(if you’re in Australia you can get it from the ABC Shop here, it doesn’t seem to be available in the US, but you can get it from Amazon UK.)

Tags: Absolute Power, Stephen Fry

I was having a look around the Australian Media Centre Community Boards this evening and I found this: EPG Stream, a free, working, integrated MCE EPG for Australia…and when I say integrated I mean it, unlike some of the other half arsed efforts out their by people to deliver Australian program guides into MCE via command line and some other awful ways, you just install it and it works within MCE via remote control….and they even support WIN in Western Australia (which is particularly good as WIN here is actually bits from both Channel 9 and 10). No GWN unfortunately, but given the programming is 98% identical to 7 no problems at all. No support for ABC 2 either…but you can’t have everything, and missing 1 channel out of the 8 FTA Channels isn’t bad. After nearly 2 years of MCE computing I’ve finally got a working, 14 day EPG guide that updates itself and just works….suffice to say I’m very, very pleased. Now if only I could sort out the MCE Mame integration… 🙂

Tags: Windows XP MCE, Australian EPG

Just noticed this post over on Southern ByWays (a b5media blog) on a recipe for “sweet tea…southern style” which made me think: I don’t get cold tea. It seems to be a big American thing, and whilst you can still buy cans of “Lipton Ice” at supermarkets in Australia, they don’t sell a lot of it…and they don’t taste awfully nice either. Why drink tea cold when you can drink it properly? ie hot. But then again it could just be me, I buy my Twinings English Breakfast tea bags in the 100 bag box, and I’ve always got a sealed jar of Twinings English Breakfast tea leaf in the cupboard for when I’m not feeling lazy…and I’ve never acquired a taste for coffee 🙂

I think it’s probably raining to much for there to be a tornado today, but I’ve got the camera ready just in case…and certainly on my drive into town today the Preston and Collie Rivers looked like they were pretty close to bursting…so maybe I can get some flooding shots 🙂

SEVERE WEATHER WARNING
For people in the Lower West District as well as adjacent parts of the SouthWest District, including Perth, Mandurah and Bunbury.
Issued at 9:30 am on Tuesday 22 August 2006

A deep low pressure system near the southwest Capes is producing squally showers and thunderstorms over the southwest of the state. Locally damaging winds gusts to 100 kilometres per hour are possible and could result in damage to property. Conditions are expected to ease early this afternoon as the low moves southeast.

At 08:58 am a gust to 94 kilometres per hour was recorded at Rottnest Island. The FESA – State Emergency Service advises that people should secure loose items and stay indoors when strong winds develop. Boat owners should ensure that small craft are securely moored. Driving conditions will be hazardous.