Category: Old and Uncategorised

Well, as I mentioned yesterday Simon Pegg is going to play Mr Scott in the next Star Trek movie. Bravo I say.

Of course there’s plenty of people who aren’t so happy. Numerous bulletin boards all over the internet are drowning in alternative casting suggestions and cries of “Why didn’t they cast someone Scottish?” (apparently forgetting that Jimmy Doohan was Canadian).

Anyway among the many suggested non-Simon-Peggs one in particular caught my eye. Someone (apparently seriously) suggested Dylan Moran. Dylan Moran!

Him!

Needless to say visions of the inevitable result were immediately dancing like sugarplums in my head, so I present them here in the form of a script…

DYLAN MORAN in STAR TREK 11

Scene – Deep space. The USS Enterprise is surrounded by three Klingon Birds of Prey, all firing their disruptors into its shields. The shields flicker under the onslaught.

Cut to the bridge. The camera shakes as the ship rocks from another impact. CAPTAIN KIRK hits the communicator button in the arm of his chair.

KIRK: Mr Scott! Warp factor eight!

Cut to the engine room. MR SCOTT lies back in his chair. His feet are up on an engineering console, and a rumpled newspaper covers his head. He appears to be deeply asleep – or possibly passed-out – but puffs of cigarette smoke emerge from beneath. He seems completely oblivious to both the attack and the communicator.

KIRK: Mr Scott!

The ship is rattled by a further impact. An empty wine bottle rolls off the console and smashes on the floor. Mr Scott starts up in shock, struggling to pull the newspaper off his face. He finally frees himself from its embrace and hurls it to the ground as the communicator squawks again.

KIRK: Mr Scott!!

Mr Scott glares at it with a mixture of rage and deep loathing.

MR SCOTT: Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh GOD!!

He mashes the communicator control.

MR SCOTT: WHAT?!

KIRK: Warp factor 8 Mr Scott!!

MR SCOTT (mockingly, as he punches viciously at various controls): Warp factor eight! Bloudy warp factor eight! (He hits one final button with a violent flourish) See how yuh like that yuh great pointy eared martian! (He sits back with a look of vile contentment on his face).

Cut to the Bridge. The main screen goes dead. All the lights go out.

KIRK: MR SCOTT!! WE’RE UNDER ATTACK BY THE KLINGONS!!!

Cut back to the engine room. Mr Scott is picking up and hopefully peering into various empty wine bottles.

MR SCOTT (not looking around): Yeah well they can fock off too.

Cut to exterior of Enterprise. The shields fail and the ship is blown to a million pieces.

FINIS

Now that’s a movie I’d pay to see 🙂

Well, Howard’s finally done it and called the election. About time frankly. He’s been holding off as long as possible in the hopes he can pull a rabbit out of his hat and reverse the polls – consistantly indicating a crushing defeat for the Coalition – which means we’ve already had to put up with three months or so of a phoney election campaign. Now we’ve got six weeks of an actual campaign to put up with, but at least there’s an end in sight. And with any luck an end of the Coalition as well.

On the railway front the works are finished, and everything’s back to normal. I gave up on the 98 bus on Thursday last week because two hours a day of sitting on a cramped bus was driving me spare (my daily commute is two hours a day anyway, but it involves trains, buses and walking, so I guess there’s more variety). I did my normal commute on Thurday and Friday, getting the rail replacement bus between the city and Subi, which wasn’t too bad. It was actually the trains that messed me up…

I’d had a particularly hard day at work on Thursday, and had a splitting headache when I caught the train at Perth. Thankfully I managed to get a seat, but then as we got underway some idiot a few seats down started loudly playing what I can only presume is some kind of viral video on their mobile phone. I have no idea of the visual content, but the audio was a parody of the ‘Hi-Ho’ song from Snow White, seemingly performed by someone impersonating the Chipmunks.

“Hi-ho! Ho-ho! It’s on the web we go! [something something] see some tits! Hi-ho! Hi-ho-hi-ho!”

This teeth grinding insanity went for a full three verses with a big piano finale. Bad enough you might think, but then the idiot played it again. And again. And again. My entire trip home was accompanied by the tinny shrill of chipmunk Disney music, to the point where if the train hadn’t been so crowded I would have walked over, grabbed the phone from their hands and stomped it to pieces.

Anyway that was Thursday. On Friday my attempts to get into work early were foiled by someone getting themselves killed by the Prospector just outside Bayswater station, resulting in the Midland line being shut down, and requiring more sitting on decrepit old rail replacement buses.

But it’s all over now, and the brand new underground station is open in the city. I’ll have to go and check it out this weekend, maybe take a trip down to the Esplanade station just for the heck of it (they’ve opened the line with only two stations actually operational, and those only a five minute walk apart. But hey! It’s an underground train! 🙂

Finally Simon Pegg has been cast as Mr Scott in the new Star Trek movie. A bit out of left field, but I can see him working quite well. Now all they have to do is get Gary Sinise to play Doctor McCoy and they’ll be set (c’mon, the resemblance is frightening!)

More on the Star Trek angle tomorrow! 🙂

Maybe I’ve fried my brain by listening to Temple of Love by the Sisters of Mercy (featuring Ofra Haza) too many times in a row, but am I the only one who thinks the news media is getting a touch over excited by the fact that you can reverse a Photoshop swirl effect by running an opposite swirl on top of it? I mean I’m glad they now have a chance to catch the sicko involved, but the way the papers and news bulletins have been going on about it you’d think it’s the forensic breakthrough of the century – as opposed to something known by anyone who plays around with Photoshop for more than five minutes. Give me one of those photos (appropriately cropped – I seriously don’t want to know what’s going on in there) and I could pull the guy’s face out of it in 60 seconds or less without even having to think about it.

There’s absolute public transport chaos at the moment. In order to plug the new Mandurah line into the rail network they’ve had to shut down the Fremantle line for a week. They’re running extra buses and such, but it’s still a major nightmare. I’ve given up on the trains entirely until it’s done and am catching the Circle Route bus to work. It takes an extra 15 minutes, but is a lot less inconvenient that catching a train, switching to a bus, then switching to another bus. Things should be back to normal by the start of next week – I just hope they’re going to keep running trains straight from Midland to Fremantle once it’s done, otherwise my daily commute is going to get a lot more annoying.

I’ve almost got my computer back up and running in the style I’m accustomed to. Just a few more programs to install and everything should be back to normal – if anything on my computer could be said to be normal 🙂

Picked up the promised DVD backup of my old desktop from the computer people yesterday and…

It’s got everything on it!

Huzzah!! Disaster averted! 😀

In other good news my 404 page is 404 of the week over at the 404 Research Lab, which explains why it’s suddenly the most visited page on Wyrmworld (something that gave me a nasty shock when I checked my stats – you usually don’t want to see hundreds of hits on your error page :). So it’s good news all round!

(Well apart from the pulp mill going ahead, and President Bush deciding that Republican funding from the tobacco industry some obtuse bit of philosophy about private health insurance is more important than medical care for children)

Well, I spoke to the computer people and they say…

1. All my data including the desktop stuff is definitely on my computer
2. Even if it’s not, they have a cloned copy of my original drive, and will happily burn it to DVD for me.

I’m not entirely convinced about 1), but 2) is definitely a good sign…

Just thought I’d post some crazy YouTube videos we did watch on Sunday…

Frank Zappa – Baby Snakes

Captain Beefheart – Ice Cream for Crow

The KLF – America, What Time is Love?

Led Zeppelin – Immigrant Song

Punch Rockgroin! Big McLargehuge! Steve!

The best song at Eurovision 2007

The worst song at Eurovision 2007

Arguably the most insane song at Eurovision 2007

Maybe – just maybe – I might get my computer back today. Maybe.

…Later…

Good news – I have my computer back

Bad News – Despite my telling them that there was a tonne of important stuff on the desktop, they didn’t bother to back it up. Meaning that I’ve lost about five years of work on various projects. Including…

• The Wild Southwest campaign setting
• Plying’ The Black (my Firefly card game in progress)
• The graphics for the new CD I’m making for Helen and Ali, which I was really happy with
• A bunch of other stuff I can’t remember right now, but that I’m sure going to miss as soon as I do

I’m going to phone them up tomorrow morning and see if they possibly have some kind of earlier backup lying around, but I’m not hopeful 🙁

Needless to say I am not taking my computer back to them the next time something goes wrong.

It’s the Queen’s birthday long weekend, and I’m at work.

This is completely voluntary. I simply can’t take another day sitting at home thinking of all the things I could do if I had my computer. It’s still not fixed (more problems with Windows, which I fully blame on the infamous Stealth Update back in August) and I’m just going nuts without it. So I figured I’d take my mind of things by coming into the office and catching up with some of the tasks on my extremely long work list. The fact that I’ll get some extra pay for doing so is merely a bonus 😀

The only major downside to this is that since it’s the Queen’s birthday long weekend the trains are packed with plebs heading off to the Royal Show. These are once-a-year commuters who only ever use the train to get to the Show, and have absolutely no idea of proper train etiquette. They crowd around the ticket machines in puzzlement like a Martian confronted with the Viking probe, randomly pressing buttons despite the clearly posted instructions. They harass the rail guard centre by pressing the “emergency” button and asking the operator how much a ticket to Claremont costs. They elbow their way straight through the doors as soon as they open, not giving anyone a chance to get off first, then let their multitudinous progeny run up and down the carriage screaming at the top of their lungs because “they’re excited about the show”. All of which is highly disrespectful to those of us who use the train network day in and day out.

The trains back are even worse because the multitudinous progeny are now hepped up on sugar, and loaded down with bunches of balloons, giant teddy bears, and plastic “rat-tat-tat” guns from the GI Joe showbag. Giant teddy bears apparently ride free, which if you ask me is ridiculous – they easily take up as much room as an eight year old child and should be charged accordingly. I think I shall have to arm myself with a sturdy, pointed stick before leaving for home, and apply it where necessary.

I was also planning to come into work yesterday, but instead ended up at Ryan’s place hanging around with he and Fabian. We had an entertaining day of Munchkin, watching crazy Youtube videos, messing around with Linux, watching the end of Matrix Revolutions and using up most of Ryan’s Zome constructing a proof of concept go-go dancer’s cage. It was a good day, and much more fun than working.

Well, lunch is over so I suppose I’d better get back to work. At least I can listen to JJJ with no one else here 🙂

Still no computer 🙁

Every problem they fix seems to bring up another one at the moment – it’s not that they’re incompetent or anything, it’s just really stupid bad luck. But at the end of it (which at the moment is scheduled for tomorrow some time) I should have an almost completely new system. New motherboard, new RAM, new video card and possibly even a new processor if they can scare a spare one up. So it’ll all be worth it. I hope.

Five days without a computer (well, near as). It’s amazing I’m still alive.

It’s ironic – seemingly a blog a lot more when I don’t have a computer than when I do…

Well the latest update is that my motherboard is fairly well fried – which isn’t all that surprising considering the machine is getting on for five years old. They’re replacing it with a brand new, sparkling, clean one, so hopefully by the end of today normality will be restored and I can go back to not blogging again 😉

(Oh, and sure I could probably buy a new computer for not much more than it’s costing me to get it repaired, but as an Aspie change hurts my head and I just want things back the way they were. Yes that’s nuts, but that’s me. I’ll upgrade some other time, so just deal 🙂

In two other bits of important news Amazon has finally done what I’ve been waiting for someone to do for years – launch an online store where you can buy plain, ordinary MP3s unemcumbered with DRM. Since way back in the Napster age I’ve been saying that if someone got their act together and started running a store like that, I’d happily pay for large quantities of downloadable music, and it looks like it’s finally happening. I’ll wait a little while for the reviews to come in (just to make sure it’s as good as it seems) and then get updating my MP3 collection with all those songs I’ve always wanted to get but couldn’t be bothered buying entire albums (or labouriously tracking down singles) for. Yey Amazon!

The other bit of news is that Dresden Codak creator Aaron Diaz has declared December 8th as Pretend to be a Time Traveller Day. If I had the guts to behave like a lunatic in public, then this is something I would so be involved with. Alas, I don’t have the guts, so I’ll just encourage others to participate instead 🙂

My computer should be going in to the shop today, so hopefully I’ll have some idea of what’s wrong with it soon. And how much it’ll cost to fix it. New memory is fine – the real worry is that it might be the processor or motherboard. If those are gone, it’ll probably be cheaper to buy a whole new system. But I don’t want a whole new system! I want my old computer back dagnabit! (although a bit more grunt would be nice I suppose…)

On another subject it’s not often I read a book that I don’t want to end. That’s not to say that I don’t read a lot of excellent and enjoyable books – it’s just rare to find one so enjoyable that I get kind of sad when it’s finished. But I finished just such a book this week – Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog. It’s simply the best Time Travel / Romantic Comedy / Victorian Farce / Historical Architecture / Sci-Fi novel I’ve ever read. It’s enough to make me want to buy a bulldog, name him Cyril and go boating on the Thames!

Of course I expected it to be good for the simple reason that it’s set in the same universe as Fire Watch, which is one of the most memorable short stories I’ve ever read. And it won the Hugo back in 1999 and was nominated for the Nebula in 1998. But it’s more than just good,  it’s the most enjoyable read I’ve had in ages, and I heartily recommend it to everyone – or at least everyone who thinks they might enjoy a Time Travel / Romantic Comedy / Victorian Farce / Historical Architecture / Sci-Fi novel with numerous references to Three Men in a Boat 🙂

…as sand through the hourglass, such are the days of our lives… (by which we mean later…)

Well, just heard from the computer people, and it looks as if my CPU fan has got clogged with dust and generally died, leading to the CPU overheating, with various knock on effects, possibly including damage to the motherboard and RAM. They’re going to clean it all out and run extensive tests to find out what (if anything) needs replacing. The Hard Drive should be OK, but they’re going to test that too. It should all be done by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.

[zoidberg] Hooray! [/zoidberg]