TV: Invasion - Channel 4

Now that series one of Lost has finished on UK Television, there is a bit of a void in decent tv. If like me, you would rather burn off your retinas with a zippo lighter than watch BBC1 and ITV1 watershed crapola, you may be feeling a little dejected at the thought of waiting for god knows how long for Lost series two.

Fear not! Once again Channel 4 buy up another high calibre US show and ease it nicely into place where Lost laid before it… (errm) Anyway, that show is called Invasion *cough*

Now I know that some will cringe at the title. It conjures instant thoughts of cynical red heads that amazingly still do not believe in aliens after 40 episodes of little green men waving their winkles around in front of her face (god how I hated the X-Files post series one). Thankfully, it is foke all like X-files and much more like Lost with aliens (yay!)

The series is based around huge marsh land America (ala Gentle Ben) where a huge hurricane is coming to wreak havoc. As the storm starts to brew, various people see bright glowing lights falling to earth and landing in the marshy waters. Post hurricane, many of the town folk go missing for days and are then found washed up on the shore completely unscathed and naked with no recollection of what has happened to them. These people seem somehow different to their relatives although no one can put their finger on why.

The Church starts to host meetings for these people, many of whom feel completely reborn from the experience and strange happenings crop up all over the town.

Like Lost, I have been fortunate enough to watch the US airings so I am now up to Episode 12. Unlike Lost, the pace is faster and it has become very engrossing.

Even if you do not usually like Alien programmes I would say that if you liked Lost, you would like this.
Check it out every Sunday on Channel 4 at 9pm.

Hardware: Apple Macbook Pro - Update?

Following on from my previous Apple post. Another story suggests that the Macbook could run Windows XP as long as it contains a Compatibility Support Module like the Intel 945 Laptops that are already in production.

I guess we won't know until it appears so I will say no more on the subject.

Read the full story here.

TV: Celebrity Big Brother - Goodbye Jodie Marsh

Tonight saw the eviction of model Jodie Marsh from the Big Brother house. I don’t think I am alone in believing it was pretty inevitable from day two. Although I can see why the other celebrities found her annoying, I do however sympathise with her.

Jodie is a very good example of how hard life in the public eye must be. With the constant scrutiny and attention one must receive from the press, it must be hard not to develop security issues when less than kind words are printed about you. It is easy to say that it comes with territory, but I suspect that Jodie is a sensitive girl.

Michael Barrymore made a comment about her leaving the country. Along with the other housemates I do think they were a bit harsh on her, but she did have me wincing at times I must admit.

I know one thing for certain, love her or hate her, the next three weeks of CBB are going to be far less interesting now that she has left.

TV: Lost Series Two - Update

A while ago I posted my initial thoughts on Lost Series Two. For some reason America has not aired many episodes since then and we have been waiting for around four weeks for episode ten.

Finally Wednesday it was broadcast. Was the wait worth it? Well, sort of. Very little seems to happen from episode to episode but there was at least one rather good bit this week.

The UK have just seen the finale of series one and I can tell from the hits to my site that there is a lot of interest in series two. For the benefit of UK readers I can safely say that it’s worth watching (from what I have seen of it so far). Many questions are answered, many more are not. My main gripe is the amount of things half explained and then not mentioned for three or so episodes at a time. Of course revealing everything at once would ruin things but if you now add up the total number of episodes (35) you would think we would have known a little more.

Maybe that is the point and I am just impatient, who knows. With a bit of luck Channel Four will start showing series two fairly soon. In the meantime, Invasion is shaping up rather well.

Praise for Mozilla - Athlon 64 X2 w Thunderbird

I suspect that I am one in millions of developers and regular internet surfers that have found Mozillas Firefox an indispensable (and Internet Explorer replacing) application. The reasons are countless and too long to display here.

Mozilla also make the very capable Email and Rss newsreader application Thunderbird which I have been using as an Outlook replacement for sometime now. Today I upgraded to version 1.5 which, to my horror seemed very buggy. I kept getting server timeouts and could not connect to my email server. My colleague also reported the same errors. We both re-installed 1.0.7 and that worked fine.

Suspecting a problem with our Athlon Processors I posted the find on Mozillas community forums. The response was amazing. After only a few hours I had found a solution along with some other users. This find was then posted in the knowledge base for everyone with the same problem to view.

If only all companies had this kind of response and support. Bugs would be a thing of the past...

Hardware: Apple Macbook Pro - No Windows XP

Regardless of your preference, a laptop that can run OSX and Windows, looks amazing and has a decent x86 dual core processor in it must be high up most geeks lust list. I know that I at least was salivating all over the desk when the Macbook Pro appeared on Apples site.

Apart from a really lame name, the machine is really rather cool. Such a shame then that (currently at least) Windows won't run on it. Boooo. This is due to Apple replacing the Bios with EFI. All is not lost though, Vista will at least run on it when it eventually comes out. Until then I will pray that MS brings out a patch to support EFI in Windows XP.

Full Story here.