Year: 2007

Yellow Lily 001

Over the summer I dug out my old Pentax K1000 SE and started taking pictures on 35mm film (specifically, Fujicolor Superia X-TRA 400). In part this was to help out a friend with her upcoming costume feature in AniCoz and in part it was a desire to go back to a camera where I had all the control. I’ve finally gotten around to scanning some of the photos I’ve been taking on film and have posted them online. Please take a look at my 35mm gallery and let me know what you think.

Like most Americans I’ve been a bit more glued to my TV this week than usual due to the return of fresh programming for the fall. Here are a few quick impressions of the shows I watched this week.

Monday

  • Chuck: The producers/advertisers of this show are obviously targeting something very close to my demographic with this show. The first episode was nothing special, butit did amuse me. I suppose if this show is playing while I want to watch TV, I’ll watch it but it is nothing I would go out of my way to see.
  • Heroes: What a disappointment. I really enjoyed last season, but bringing back both of the Petrelli brothers in the season premier when last season’s finale showed them getting nuked cheapened the show immensely. I had been looking forward to this, but now I doubt I’ll be watching it.
  • Journeyman: Meh, this looks like a weak remake of Quantum Leap only significantly less interesting. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood, but I gave up watching it 10 minutes in. It was just putting me to sleep.

Tuesday

  • NCIS: Yup, I’ll be watching this one all season long again. The season premier didn’t pull off any astounding changes to the show but did show off the writers’ ability to keep giving us what we want. Explosions, murder, mystery and action.
  • The Unit: First off whoever came up with the new intro clip to this show should be fired. It’s utterly horrible. That being said, like NCIS this show delivered. While the show is going a lot darker than before and looks like it will be spending this season mostly inside US borders; it looks good and was a solid hour of entertainment this event.

Wednesday

  • Bionic Woman: Surprisingly, I was impressed. I expected it to be considerably cheesier and crappier than it turned out to be. I didn’t much care for the main character but it was nice to see some actors from other shows I’ve liked.
  • Life: Heh, this was quite a bit of fun to watch this evening. Though the main character was excessively flakey for my taste and I’m not sure I’ll keep watching it given that it’s got the same timeslot as CSI: NY.

Thursday

  • Ugly Betty: This show is really more one I watch because my wife likes it and I fiddled around on my computer while it was on. What I caught of it was funny, but not enough to draw me back to the couch to watch it.
  • CSI: I had been looking forward to seeing this right up until it was on TV. I don’t know if I was just in a bad mood, but I just didn’t care if the CSI member was going to live through the episode or not. Perhaps I’m getting a bit burned out on all these CSI shows.

Friday

  • Moonlight: Cheesy, vampire, detective show. A bit funny, a bit dark and worth watching if you happen to be home on a Friday night.

So there’s my quick thoughts on the premieres I’ve seen so far. Did I miss anything good?

Today I was reading an article over at LifeHacker about XBMC. Basically, they recommended upgrading from the last, ancient stable version to the latest SVN build; which I did this evening and boy am I ever glad I did. As now, I can play Matroska video files. Wheee! True, I technically could before but they rendered so slowly it was an exercise in frustration to watch a video all the way through. Now MKV playback is much smoother and I’m much happier with XBMC. Thank you LifeHacker!

Also a quick shout out and thanks to Komainu for pointing out the wonders that are Radio Paradise. The work day goes so much quicker with a better DJ than iTunes’s random play function. 🙂