Exceptionally Uncaught

I couple of months ago I decided to no longer play the game of watching TV only when strange people in suits who I'd never met "decided" I could. Armed with a combination of my TiVo, the Internet and a region-free DVD player, I swore to never watch live TV again.

Admittedly, this wasn't too much of a stretch considering how little TV I watch now days, but I was angry and lashing out (mostly at Channel Nine).

So anyway, here's some of the stuff I've been watching lately.

Rome - the straw that broke the camel's back. After waiting 12 months for Channel Nine to finally get around to showing this series, I was all ready to set aside an hour of my week. It was to be my first (and probably only) "regular viewing" of the year. But after the first week, They decided that this excellent series was actually responsible for their ratings troubles throughout the year, and canceled it.
Since the DVDs haven't been released in Australia, my lovely wife surprised me by ordering them from Amazon. And as further proof of how totally wonderful she is (as if I needed it!), she even agreed to watch the series with me, and put up with me pointing out all the little facts I know.

Battlestar Galactica - I wasn't instantly grabbed by the mini-series a few years ago, and so never really got into the show. Until the TiVo started recording episodes about halfway through the second season. Despite missing a bit chunk of the story, I got hooked. Then Channel 10 decided that it would use that timeslot for all the episodes of Joker Poker they had to do something with. But guess what, the DVDs of the first two seasons are pretty cheap, and now I don't even have to worry about fast forwarding the ads.




Heroes - Channel Seven has the rights to this show, but I'm not even going to bother. I'd been hearing rumours of this show online for a little while, and finally figured I should find out a bit more. It's basically "X-Men but not" - a bunch of people who are the "next stage of evolution" running around with super powers. Lots of fun. The episodes are available online, and I've got no problems watching TV on my PC.

This morning when I got to work and fired up BlogBridge, I noticed that there was a new post from Ian. Which I was pretty excited about, since it's been almost 12 months since Ian last posted something.

Turns out, he hadn't posted anything new. For some reason one of his old posts had marked itself as 'changed'.

It was a post about the movie Downfall. I'd been interested in seeing it when it came out last year, and so when I originally read the post and Ian said "perhaps don't read on if you want to see it and don't want any 'spoilers'", I stopped reading with the intention of finishing it after I'd seen the movie.

Time passes. Somewhere between then and now I did see Downfall (possibly on a plane, but I'm not sure), but I totally forgot about Ian's post.

Until today.

So yay for random RSS glitches, and get back to blogging Ian!

Around the beginning of high school, I spent a few years painting miniatures. I never went in for the full "war gaming" experience, but I did buy a few different little lead people (mostly Lord of the Rings characters) and make them look pretty. Eventually I got over it, packed my paints and figures away and forgot all about it.

For the last few months, for some reason I've been getting this feeling that I want to give it all another go. And I'’m not sure why - I've got so many good reasons to not bother:

1. I don'’t have time to do all the fun stuff I already do (or want to do). Why add something new to the mix?
2. Anything I paint is only going to sit on a shelf forever - I'm really not interested in trying to learn Warhammer or its ilk, let along trying to find people to play against.
3. It'’s a chunk of money - money that could go to all sorts of other stuff I want
4. I have a fair idea of my current painting skills. And they aren't much.
5. It'’s pretty stupid.

And yet, I still find myself thinking about sitting down at the table with a set of paints and seeing what I can turn a random lead person (with a chainsaw!) into.

Since it worked so well last time I asked, does anyone have any advice?

About an hour after my post yesterday, I had a comment posted by one of the Blog Bridge guys. His first suggestion (using the latest weekly build rather then the current release build) worked a treat. So now I'm in an email conversation about what (very minor) initial things have bugged me about Blog Bridge. Things like the fact that I can't do a bulk-add of new feeds to a guide, or that I can't modify the URL of a feed once it's established, or that since I'm a bit slow I kept double-pasting URLs into new feeds.

After using it for all of one day, I have to say I'm very impressed with Blog Bridge. The fact that someone involved with the project has taken the time to try and help out a random blogger goes a long way to making me love the product - I think I'd forgive a lot of faults for something like that. Of course it helps that so far it seems to be doing pretty much everything I wanted it to do.

I'll write a proper review in a month or so.

My desktop at work melted last week. It's far from the first time it's decided to become an expensive paperweight, but it looks like it may be the last time. It's not the total disaster it could have been, since my primary workstation has become my new Vaio. But there was a hell of a lot of non-critical stuff that's now gone (probably) forever.

One of the (many) things I've lost is the most up to date version of my OPML file - all my RSS feeds. Even worse, I'd finally managed to get them all organised in a nice way (as a pose to a big mess).

So as I try and rebuild my world, I'm faced with re-organising my feeds, and trying to remember which ones I'm still missing (like Richard's!). Trying to do it in SharpReader is causing a violent reaction in me - it's ugly and a bit clunky. So I'm looking around for a replacement. I love the idea of something that keeps my OPML online (protecting me from another meltdown and keeping my world in sync), but I hate the idea of a browser plugin. So far I've tried:

• SharpReader - I'm finding I can't really look at it any more. Ugh.
• OnFolio - tears my soul to shreds.
• BlogBridge - looks perfect, but it won't work through the proxy at work (at least not that I've managed)
• BlogLines - feels "clunky". I can' only have one level of folders. Seems like a lot of wasted space.

So, does anyone have any suggestions?

Pretty huh? There are exactly 200 pansies there. I know because I planted every single one of them by hand, back when they were but tiny seedlings.

When we first moved in, we this garden bed was full of crazy half-dead bushes. Slow I ripped them all out, dug up the bed, build up a retaining wall and leveled it all off.

I started planting the pansies one Saturday afternoon. I had four punnets of seedlings, and figured it would only take me an hour or so. It kept getting darker and darker until eventually it was night time and I was using the porch light to see.

In the end I had to give up and do the last punnet the next morning - my hands were far to frozen and the neighbours were giving me strange(r) looks.

I also scattered various bulbs throughout the garden. And then totally forgot they were there. So it was quite a nice surprise when some tulips started to appear.

It was definitely a worth while project, and something I'm definitely going to do again next year.