Out with the old

Well, here is my all singing and all dancing new and improved blog. Okay, there's possibly a touch of sarcasm there because i've run a blog for close to four years and all of the features i plan to make use of with this one were present there too, but this is a bit of a break from that; previously it was all handled by my own scripts that, whilst relatively efficient, were starting to show their age somewhat since they were some of the first pieces of PHP i produced... i've toyed with rewriting the entire thing on several occasions but simply haven't had the time to sit down, decide on a system that carried over the existing content and made it easy to manage (changing of months required manual modification of a couple of pages on the server!) It also seemed like a good idea to "retire" the old news page, since it was rarely updated and was making the site look like it was stagnant... okay, so the site was stangnant but i didn't want it to look that way! i plan to continue where i left off in 2007, with an eclectic, erratic mix of whatever crap crosses my mind at the time of posting - so chances are that only the Boss and a few of my more masochistic friends'll be reading the thing as usual.

So 2008 got off to a wobbly start, with power failures rebooting the server unexpectedly when i was out last week and a longer outage knocking out a large area for a couple of hours the other day and, just to add a little icing on the cake, our dish washer appears to have gone mad and trips the breaker whenever it's plugged in. That might not seem like an issue to some, but we're not exactly a massive data centre here with UPS, the web server sits in a small cubby hole in the kitchen! If one of the appliances loses the plot and outs the power, everything shuts down!

What happened over Chrimble then...? Well, we survived and that's always a good start but there wasn't a fat lot of telly to be had really; obviously, the highlight for me was the Doctor Who Christmas special, Voyage of the Damned, which was probably the best seasonal story to date and saw cameos from some legends of British telly and cinema, Geoffrey Palmer as the captain of the Titanic, Clive Swift as an "expert" on Earth customs and my particular favourite (despite being a tiny cameo but, judging from the trailer at the end, he'll be reprising the role) had to be Bernard Cribbins as the newspaper vendor. Tennant was his usual, impressive self (there were a few moments where things went a little overboard but that's the norm now for the snow-festooned single parter it would seem, the scene with the two hosts and the Doctor in flight bugged me just a tiny bit) and Kylie Minogue was really good as Astrid. The ending was a little bittersweet and again that seems to have, ironically, become the norm at Christmas and an "everybody lives" moment wouldn't go amiss next year (he writes on the off chance someone at the Beeb is actually reading) but the story and special effects did the whole Poseidon Adventure genre proud.

i've just seen Hot Fuzz for the first time as well and enjoyed it hugely; i would've been surprised if i didn't to be honest since Shaun Of The Dead and Spaced are still regular background footage when i'm working, but somehow they've managed a film that almost feels like an American blockbuster and wedged it into sleepy rural England. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are... well, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, their real-life friendship shows and the two characters they play, who obviously start off on opposite sides of the fence since this has a few "buddy cop" moments throughout, are likeable and it's easy to be sympathetic. Similarly, the rest of the cast are nothing short of amazing, ranging from Kevin Eldon of League Of Gentlemen fame (speaking of which, i saw LOG's Apocalypse over Chrimble and really enjoyed it a lot despite having had doubts previously), Edward Woodward, Jim Broadbent (who has only ever done one thing i didn't like and that was a couple of minutes as the Doctor for a Comic Relief skit), Timothy Dalton (who i didn't realise until Loony Toons Back In Action was so flexible as an actor)... the list goes on. The two disc edition is packed with extras, my favourite of which simply has to be Edgar Wright's first go at the cop/serial killer genre, an amateur (well, very amateur but not ugly for it, surprisingly) production called Dead Right, starring assorted friends and families and made on a shoestring budget with VHS camcorders and some absolutely appalling puns and breakages of the fourth wall.

Well, that'll do for starters, i've got to write the integration stuff to get the blog over to my site yet... fingers crossed having the thing more accessible will lead to it being updated a bit more frequently as well but i don't like to make promises i'm not totally sure of keeping if i can avoid it!