Archive for November, 2004

New solar energy hopes

Wednesday, November 24th, 2004

I’m a fan of the possibilities of solar power so this article gave me a bit more optimism about the future…

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Capsule Movie Review #7: Bride and Prejudice

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004

Bride and Prejudice is a cheesy Bollywood-esque retelling of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice by Gurinder Chadha, director of “Bend It Like Beckham”.

For those who haven’t come across this tale previously: girl meets boy, girl hates boy, girl meets cad, cad seduces girl, girl finds out more about boy, dumps cad, falls in love with boy and they get married. The frankly beautiful Aishwarya Rai plays Lalita (girl) to Martin Henderson’s arrogant rich American Mr Darcy (boy), with help from Daniel Gillies as Mr Wickham (cad).

The movie has a lot of life and energy, with bright colours and a fairly fast-moving plot, but unfortunately the Bollywood aspects didn’t appeal – I actually winced when the first musical number unconvincingly cranked into life. The movie suffers from its attempt to be cross-genre as it tries to hit all the targets but never quite manages to get anything in the right place.

So if you’re a fan of Indian/British films, or a lover of musicals with slightly dodgy acting but a lot of heart, you might want to give this a go – otherwise I can’t really recommend it.

(for more reviews and ratings see the reviews page)

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Firefox and RSS

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

Everybody should be using Firefox, rather than other dodgy browsers.

Why? Well, there’s a couple of decent reasons:

  • Better security – gets rid of popups and avoids spyware
  • Faster – a lean browsing experience
  • Standards Compliant – because these things really do matter

Apart from all of that is the good support for RSS: this is a mechanism for keeping up to date with web pages that update their content regularly. It’s easy for RSS software to determine if there’s any new exciting content for you to browse, and you can easily glance through what’s available to see if it interests you.

In the case of Firefox there is a built-in RSS tool – simply click on the icon in the bottom-right of the window and select the “Add RSS feed” option, and you’ll get a special bookmark folder that contains links to all the new articles.

Alternatively, you can get a Firefox extension called “Sage” which allows you to collect lots of RSS feeds and check all of them to see what’s got new stuff to look at.

As a final bonus you’ll find that this page itself has an RSS feed so you’ll never have to come here only to be disappointed – you can just check to see if there’s anything new!

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Climbing Photos

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

img_3736.jpg

img_3754.jpg

Taken at Craggy Island near Guildford.

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Coolest Car Commercial

Tuesday, November 16th, 2004

At least since the Honda “Cog” advert – see the amazing dancing transformer car thing!

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Voting and receipts

Wednesday, November 10th, 2004

Following the recent US elections, lots of noise has been made (and a good thing too) about the way in which electronic votes either

a) screwed up, or
b) seemed to behave oddly but didn’t have any way of verifying the count

Lots of people think a paper trail is mandatory, and Wired have come up with this fantastic mock-up of one.

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My thoughts on the US Election

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004

Bugger.

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Simplified Cave

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004

This is a version of this photo which has been played around with using the Buzz Simplifier again. I really like the look of the results – what do you think?

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