Sunday, 11th June, 2006

On A Techy Note...

tech rss technorati tranniefesto

...I seem to be getting RSS-Spammed by Technorati

As narcissistic as I am, I obviously read my own Egorati Search — it's nice to know when people are talking about you, I feel. And of course I subscribe to the RSS feed for that page.

I want to know immediately when someone's talking about me

But recently, almost hourly new things pop up in my RSS Reader — seemingly random things, and the supposed 'link' doesn't link to me at all.

Either Technorati is (yet again) borked, or there's something weird and sinister going on. Theories and speculation welcome...

So THAT'S Where I Left It

doctorwho

Warning. Here be SPOILERS¹

Now, don't get me wrong, I thought that The Satan Pit was, indeed, fantastic. A remarkably wonderful plot, reinforced with production values worthy of (as a friend pointed out) Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

I mean, Big Nasty Monster Guy Who We Weren't Quite Sure Whether Or Not He Really Was Old Nick™ was one of the best bits of CGI ever seen on Doctor Who.

But still. I'm sure that someone else will no doubt craft a fluidly-lyrical review of it all, it just remains for me to nit-pick and moan...

"OMG everyone's going to die. Oh no! ... hello, what's this? Why, it's the TARDIS. How VERY fucking convenient"

And how did it get down there? What with all that destruction and stuff happening before the seal got opened?

Eh?

And doesn't the Doctor have a clever way of summoning the TARDIS using the key, like we saw in Father's Day

I apologise, I'm turning into Comic Book Guy

I was, truth be told, gripped through the whole of that. My only niggle is how late in the day everything got resolved. Sitting there on a sofa, watching with one eye on what looked undoubtedly like the end of Gallifrey's finest, the other eye on the clock, thinking "hold on, there's only five minutes left. How can they possibly resolve this in a non-ridiculous way?"

The end seemed a little cheesey — but then again, perhaps that's what Doctor Who is all about

¹ Although, honestly, we all knew that was what was going to happen. No?

I guess the same way the Beast got out into Toby before the seal opened... the earthquakes fractured the chamber

Ah, OK. Yep. That'll do

Tell you what though, I loved the little Tugboat Tardis at the end

Oh, The Irony

work dvd projection bork numpty

On Thursday night, I got a bit drunk ... actually, very drunk. So drunk in fact that I didn't manage to leave for work until midday.

Not as huge a problem as it would first appear — what with me not actually working on Fridays, and the only reason I was going in was to sort out a film screening that we were putting on with some of our Final Years' work.

I mean, it's not like I wasn't prepared or anything — I've been putting the films together in a sequence for at least a week. So I was pretty confident when I turned up at the cinema with a DVD that everything was fine.

But of course, it wasn't.

Firstly, I'd screwed up the audio on one of the tracks, and secondly, there was an issue with the DVD player not being able to switch from 4:3 to 16:9 properly.

So I trotted back to work and did it again.

Things were a little tight for time though — by now it was half past one, and we were starting at two o'clock. But yours truly — being the authoring superstar that I am — was out of the door faster than you can say "Your disk is ready", and, with laptop and all necessary cables in hand, was being taxied back to the cinema.

I plugged everything in, flipped quickly through a couple of the films, and happy in the knowledge that everything had audio, and running it through the laptop meant that it handled the jumps between anamorphic and normal just fine, settled down to watch.

It was only three films into the showreel — when the first colour film was on-screen — that I realised I'd really screwed up. Had it been a photograph of me, it would have looked like this:

There was no Red channel!

My mind raced in all sorts of directions, trying to work out what was wrong. I'd seen this happen before — with one of the iMacs that we use to project work from in the studio. Sometimes — for whatever reason — it would just drop the Red channel and things would look a little odd.

It was just as I was thinking about that iMac, that a realisation swept over me.

"OMG. I've used the lead from that iMac. It's the sodding LEAD"

So I had to sit there, cringing in my seat at the overly-bluey-green films that were playing in front of me, knowing full-well that even though the public might have thought it was all just 'arty', the students who had come to see their work would know.

The irony, of course, is that I've just spent six months drilling it into the Final Years' heads that whenever you show something in public, it's unbelieveably important to make sure that everything works, and to be totally prepared.

I guess the one thing I can salvage from it, is that I've just demonstrated to them what happens when you'r not

Currantly

photo currantly

Two Interesting Things About Conspiracy Theory

memory film

(1) Jerry buys a copy of Catcher In The Rye from the Barnes and Noble on East 17th Street in NYC. Which is where (a) I first went out dressed, and (b) I bought a copy of The Tranny Guide.

(2) When Jerry is trying to get away from the CIA in the cinema, and shouts "There's a bomb under my seat!", the film playing in the background is Ladyhawke — which always makes me cry.