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Awesome, I only topped up 10 Euros!
After the first round of the Pride Middleweight tournament (Total Elimination 2005) I wasn’t exactly buzzing about Pride Fighting Championships as that show was largely made up of long, boring and safe matches which no one took any risks in. After some good reviews of the second round (Critical Countdown 2005) I decided to go back and watch it and overall it was a very enjoyable show. Plenty of knockouts and submissions made it far more exciting to watch than last time and the semi-finals (Final Conflict 2005) should make for some excellent matches. For some reason Pride are calling the semi-finals the finals in all their promotion, maybe it’s a Japanese thing?
I also caught Friday’s Bushido 8 in light of the recent improvements which featured some great fights and funny moments. The British guy James Thompson looks tough as hell and is just a big wall of muscle with a ton of intensity, finally someone I can root for in Pride. Phil Baroni was playing a total heel and was very funny in the role but ultimately I think he is getting very lucky in his fights right now and is bound to be annihilated soon.
Minowa vs Kimo was made much better by the personalities involved. You could tell Minowa was crazy when in the pre fight interview he said, and I quote, “I will kill him in a moment”.
And they tell us there are no deaths in MMA these days.
I got my final year project confirmation through from University last week. It’s going to involve doing a lot of work on visualising large tree structures from XML files built off an existing open source Java project. I haven’t writen a single line of Java this year and when I tried any programming I was always concentrating on C++ (W32 and DirectX) and C# (.NET and Mono). So this week I have been doing a few warm up exercises to refresh my memory.
A couple of new things seem to have cropped up in my hiatus away from Java. A lot of people are using IBM’s Eclipse IDE as their core development environment and I can see why. It’s clean, fast and can be adapted to handle pretty much any language you throw at it.
Also I am seeing more applications using SWT rather than Swing as the interface library, Eclipse’s excellent compatibility with it helps massively. In the move over to SWT I do find myself writing less code than with Swing and not scratching my head to much. I remember having to draw out complex diagrams of containers and frames on paper for Swing but with SWT everything just clicks together nicely.
Java may have a future yet. My most used application is writen in Java with SWT - Azureus.
I watched the MSN virtual earth demo over on Channel 9 a few days ago and was wondering when google would implement a ‘hybrid’ map view (satalite images with over layed roads markings) similar to their service. Today seems to be the day and it certainly makes the satalite images much easier to follow. Here is a good overview of the main roads in London.
I am still waiting for someone to use the APIs to make it easier to view public transport journeys, it could be done by over laying train lines and bus routes and fetching times from an RSS feed. It’s possible and would be incredibly useful.
I wasn’t going to talk about it but Family Guy was far too good this week not to. Chris in the video for “Take on Me” by A-Ha just blew my mind, the Goonies in the sewers, Peter in the Neverending story(!), Quagmire’s theme song and loads more made it so darn good. This thing was just crammed so full of jokes it was splitting at the seams and so was I. Definately the highlight of the season so far for me.
Oh yes. Futurama will be returning in a straight to video movie according to Billy West. Look forward to copious amounts of Slurm drinking and more fun with Bender Bending Rodriguez. The popularity of the DVD medium is really pumping new life into these shows and I love it.
Morbo says, “Punny Earthlings get their cartoon back and it shall brainwash their stupid human minds again!”.
I have got to get kicks from something. That’s my bus stop that Jeremy Clarkson is driving past from last Sunday’s Top Gear. Woohoo…err…ahem.
Over at Engadget there is an column on the future of monitor and display based DRM in Windows Longhorn. From the article,
If OPM determines that your monitor falls below the security restrictions (i.e. isn’t DVI or HDMI w/HDCP), you could be greeted with a “polite message explaining that [your monitor] doesn’t meet security requirements.”
Ok this is getting ridiculous. Why are the studios suddenly crapping themselves over HD content and demanding this level of protection must be integrated into the OS? They shift tons of DVDs every day and it will be a drop in the ocean if a couple of people manage to pipe the HD output from their PC and record it onto another medium.
Whats that I hear? Oh yes, fair use is being flushed down the toilet.
Following up on last week’s post about Firefly here is the other show I discovered recently, of course since I wrote that it has been recommissioned by Fox, yay! Arrested Development is a cross between Malcolm in the Middle, The Office and Family Guy, taking the zany humour, shooting style and plentiful flashback scenes from each and creating something very different. Michael Bluth becomes the President of his family’s building company after his father is sent to prison following a federal investigation. The Bluth family, used to leeching from the company, must make it without the handouts now and most of the episodes focus around this central theme.
The first few episodes provide so many genuinely funny moments that it’s hard not to want more. Michael’s father producing his self help videos in prison, Jobe’s ridiculously over the top magic tricks and Tobias’ ‘no-nude’ condition dish out laugh after laugh. Once you get over the crazy ride of the first few episodes and are more accustomed to these insane characters the gag factor certainly goes down but it is kept fresh by interesting twists and unusual story lines.
It may have seemed strange for me to compare it to Family Guy but the similarity is there. Family Guy’s humour relies heavily on flashback sequences and most of the gags on that show come from these scenes. Arrested Development is quite unusual for a live action comedy in that is does these frequent flashback scenes. Whether it is archive footage, CCTV images or just a dream sequences, they are inserted without remorse and give each episode quite an unrivalled pace.
A few weeks ago it was all set and this excellent show was going to be another victim of the premature axing process that the execs at Fox seem to love so much. I don’t know what they pulled out of where but it has been recommissioned and it’s third season will begin this year. It has probably had success on DVD like so many these recently revived shows (Family Guy, Firefly, etc.) to the extent that ratings do not matter so much if they can make a profit from the box sets. The Bluth Company surviving another year intact seems to be another matter entirely.
The second season of Battlestar Galactica starts tomorrow and by now everyone is salivating at the prospect of another blistering year with Starbuck, Apollo and crew. The last season went so well and was just paced perfectly so it will be interesting to see if Ron Moore can continue his form this time around.
I watched the first season’s finale last week just to refresh my memory and it really is an astounding piece of television that was answering so many questons but at the same time throwing up a whole load more. Caprica Boomer is up the duff with a Human-Cylon hybrid and ready to deliver to Gyus, BSG Boomer just shot Adama, Apollo screwed his Dad and Starbuck has the arrow she was sent to pickup. Just a few things to start this season off with then 
![Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61THJCbOxwL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]")
![Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511PW90lDhL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]")
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