Year: 2011

I'm afraid I am not a Babylon 5 fan at all. While I think the overall story was quite strong there was far too much I didn't like about it. It took me years to get past season 1 as I found it too cheesey (mainly the Commanders' fault) and the acting was not great. However, I'm glad you enjoy it (along with several of my friends) When I got past season 1, it did get much better 🙂

Looks like an old problem could be back :

Sound issues …


The link is what I wrote about it before but the summary is that every few minutes (at worst), there’d be a blip of a second or less where the soundtrack on a dvd would go silent through the new kit.

Thought I’d cracked it by switching to a couple of good HDMI cables but it seems to be back. Ho hum. I suspect it’s me fixing another connectivity issue that’s resurrected this one, so I’ll be managing 2 evils :

1 – silent blips in soundtrack
2 – headscratching over how to get blu-ray player to talk to amp to talk to telly.

The combination will occasionally refuse to connect blu-ray player to amplifier and I suspect fixing that (amp getting confused over which inputs to use) has caused this one. I’ve done some tweakin’ with the software setups and I’m now doing the evaluation thing again, listening out for those silent blips. 1 Babylon 5 episode so far and no blips. Good sign.

Telly off air (except the Ashes !) has been very bare of stuff to watch lately, so I’ve fallen back on rewatching some old stuff. The 1990s saw some absolutely brilliant episodic sci-fi come to the telly, some of which was so good it got ripped off and retreaded into things like Star Trek. (Deep Space 9 continually ripped off Babylon 5 stories and arcs).

The current catch up is Babylon 5, which spanned 5 series and a heap of TV movies. There was an attempt at a spin off, called B5 Crusade which got killed off due to the networks being numpties. Too much interference and when they didn’t get their own way, B5 Crusade was killed off just as it was starting to ramp up.

Anyway … Babylon 5. It’s about a space station named after the series, which is a melting pot for all of the various races inhabiting the universe the series is set in. It’s blessed with a series of strong characters and there’s enough scope in the writing to inject snippets of humour into the interactions between those characters. It was made between 1994 and 1998 on a shoestring budget, so there wasn’t the ability to use Star Trek quality visuals in the programme. In the early days, it was a farm of Amiga computers generating all the images. Saying that though, what they do with the visuals is startlingly impressive.

Low tech can beat high tech if you know what you’re doing.

And they definitely knew what they were doing. B5 was the first sci fi series to have a Grand Plan covering what they intended to put on screen. It was originally scheduled to run 5 series (110 episodes), however the networks interfered and the main storyline got squished into 4.

Right – one of the better episodes of season 1 is ramping up so I’ll get back to “evaluating” 🙂 Babylon 5 : second best scifi series of the past few decades. I’d be watching the best (Farscape) if my sister didn’t have some of its dvds !

A couple of years ago, I tried one of the challenges that wings it’s way around the blogosphere. It was an A to Z on books challenge and a fairly tough one, looking for 52 books to read in a year. Here’s how I did.

I got about half way through both the A to Z on authors and A to Z on titles. Figured it would be fun to try again this year, although I’m going to make it easier by just going for 26 books, with the A to Z being titles and authors. One book every fortnight should be doable with the cricket and gaming providing big distractions 🙂

I’ll keep this post as a running tally, with the labels helping me keep track. I’m through 3 books already :

A – for (Dan) Abnett – First And Only (added Jan)
B – for (Jim) Butcher – Storm Front (added Feb)
C –
D – for (Aaron) Dembski-Bowden – Helsreach (added Feb)
E – for Exiles Trilogy by Ben Bova (added May)
F – for Feersum Endjinn by Iain M Banks (added Jan)
G – for Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett (added May)
H – for (Simon) Hughes – A Lot of Hard Yakka (added Jan)
I – for Inversions by Iain M Banks (added April)
J –
K –
L –
M –
N –
O –
P –
Q –
R – for Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (partial in Jan)
S – for Surface Detail by Iain M Banks (added June)
T – for Titanicus by Dan Abnett (added Jan)
U – for (HMS) Ulysses by Alistair MacLean (added May)
V –
W – for (Chris) Wraight, author of Battle of the Fang (added September)
X –
Y – for (Charles) Yu, author of How To Survive In A Science Fictional Universe (added August)
Z –

The Iain M Banks book was fairly tough to get through, mainly cos I didn’t really know when it was going to get good. It meandered badly through the early stages and finished itself off in an awful rush. Not his best. Hopefully Surface Detail will be better, I’ll be looking to pick that up when it comes out in paperback later in the year.

First And Only is from an omnibus book called The Founding by Dan Abnett. It’s set in the brutal Warhammer 40k universe and tells the story of an Imperial Guard regiment that just escaped when it’s world was taken by Chaos. I was impressed enough with this one that after finishing the first book inside, I’ve ordered a couple more from Amazon after being disappointed with the appallingly low stock at Waterstones.

(The high street retailers will certainly fail if they don’t stock what we want to buy)

I’ve been involved in the cricket world since I was about 13, so reading A Lot Of Hard Yakka by Simon Hughes was a very curious look into the world of professional cricket although the meat of it was from 10 years before I started playing. Fun to see the parallels between the professional world and the amateur world I played in, I have a feeling I played in better facilities than they occasionally did. I could definitely identify with the self doubts and the confidence issues expressed in the book. Every sportsman will suffer confidence crises and there’s a certain level of negative feedback implicit in that. Low confidence and doubts make your run up less sure or your reactions slower, which makes it far more difficult to land the ball on the spot or to whack it to the boundary.

It’s not a diary of match results, you can get that from Wisden. It’s a very interesting look into the mindset and life of professional sportsmen and written far more intelligently than what people lured into getting the average footballer’s life story (ages 18 to 23 with the speed they come out nowadays) will get.

Next on the list is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. I read this one a few years ago but I’m stubbornly reading it again. I’ll probably only read the first of the trilogy as this is by far the best. And there’s a fair bit of planetary and astronautic engineering in there that always gets me interested.

I’ll add in more books as I go (and probably move a few around too!). Hoping to hit 26 this year 🙂

Was pleasantly surprised by the change in landscape yesterday that happened while I was buried in pooter game …

Before starting – dark & grey. After finishing – all white.

I like the brightness that the snow provides. I loathe the grey drizzle!

Happy New Year – I'm hoping for good things for you!

Happy New Year Pete…..

A whole new year of possibilities…… [grin]

Another year gone, kinda surprised I’ve not posted for a fortnight. One excuse is that I was away for Xmas …

Rumours of travel problems over here have been fairly exaggerated, although I wouldn’t have been saying that had I travelled a day before I did. I went up to my parents place for a few days over Xmas, travelling up on the Thursday and coming back on the Monday. I think I got away with it, as the roads were clear with minimal hold ups. If I’d gone the day before, I’d have run into the aftermath of heavy snowfall that morning which would have got me stuck within an hour’s driving.

So much for the snow … On the roads at least. On the way up, it was cold enough that the washer jets on the car weren’t working which got to be a problem after about an hour’s driving … Which gets me off the motorway and into Birmingham services. It was like a different world – going from a clear motorway to what can only be described as a disaster area was quite jarring. Queues to get into the car park suggested what was ahead, snow was still in all the parking bays, the access routes hadn’t been gritted and people were just looping through the car park to go elsewhere. That’s what I did, although I did jump out to scrub the windscreen so I could see.

I think I benefitted 🙂 I stopped at the next services (where the car park had been cleared) and got caught by the Starbucks … One pizza (small one) sized giant cookie and a massive hot chocolate later and I’m ready to hit the road again.

Felt strange driving listening to cd’s again. I’ve gotten used to iPodFM over the past few years, where I just set the little box to shuffle and let it go. I’d forgotten the whole management of cd’s thing and quickly remembered that they should be put somewhere they can’t slide. Oh yes – even before getting to the motorway, I’d had a cd frisbie incident. I’d gone to cd’s because I was listening out for traffic info which I can’t get via iPodFM.

Traffic was slow, going there and coming back but I still did the 180 mile trip in under 4 hours each way. Which ain’t bad. I’m ok with slow traffic, I just switch into a “cruise” mindset which is much less stressful than the alternate which would have me eagle eyed for the passing opportunities. On most roads, those chances aren’t there and in a long line of traffic just lead to shuffling the order a bit with no time gained.

(I still hate slow people but I’ve learned the futility of looking for gaps that won’t gain you anything except high risk)

Xmas was a little different this year, not much present buying going on around me this year. Which isn’t as terrible as it sounds, because I also avoided all the “what do they really want ?” rushing around the shops when everyone else is doing the same thing. And if there’s one thing that unsettles me more than Slow People it’s Too Many People. I like being around people but if my awareness level is being hopped up by there being too many around to do a threat evaluation (pickpockets & the like) then it’ll be wearing.

We had a smaller Crazie Gathering this year, which was effectively a housewarming for the Bionic Dwarf. Cosy, relaxed evening with pizza and 3 good movies. 1 of those was mine (Alice in Wonderland), 1 of which will be bought soon (How to Train Your Dragon) and 1 which I won’t buy but enjoyed anyway (Son of Rambow)

Not done much shopping over the break, although I’ll hopefully hit the shops some time next week to find any of those interesting bargains. Already got a couple on the list like a third Kasabian album and How To Train Your Dragon but I’ll have an open mind for more like Up In The Air, which got watched today. I’ll only buy films that I’ve already checked out and a movie channel sub is a decent way of trying before buying. There’s hits and misses, like Up In The Air is a hit while Megafault was a waste of 90 minutes.

I had been thinking of upgrading my desktop PC over the holiday but have shelved that because prices haven’t budged lately. My sister did the upgrading thing instead 🙂 Her laptop’s in for repairs and because of the delay, a netbook appeared. Pre-buy misgivings were that the netbook wouldn’t get used after the proper laptop came back but I have a feeling that the laptop will be the one gathering dust.

Other stuff – back to work at either the end of this week or the 10th. iTunes library has had the playcount zeroed so I get a fresh listen to everything in it. Snow was here and has all gone, melted away by persistent drizzle (I prefer the brightness of light reflected off snow and ice). Gaming is seeing heavy Warcraft and Settlers IV activity with none of the Steam offers proving sufficiently tempting. The offers are good but the games are not.

2010 was an interesting year, with me plowing head first into a different job in the same project. It saw me go back on the cricket field (the shoulder is mostly back to normal). I had a few upgrades appear with the toys collection but still noone to share them with.

2010 wasn’t bad but I’m hoping for better from 2011 🙂