Many moons ago I watched a youtube video about 4 bazillion times. It was the Russian Eurovision winner Serebro with their imaginatively titled Song #1, I think. Occasionally I like to relive those days and watch the video again, it is on a par with awesome, with just the right amount of foolishness.

Today, or about 4 minutes 45 seconds ago, I had the good fortune to happen upon the song again, this time in glorious Russian. This has the excellent advantage of not being able to understand the words and thus not start laughing at the silly lyrics and I get to just enjoy the music, the beat and dare I say it, the attractive ladies.

The biggest issue now, is that I assume because I’ve heard the English version so many times, the Russian words sound added on, or dubbed over the top, which is weird. Still girls in hats, doing wacko jacko dance moves.

Glorious Russian
… and I can’t find the English version although… this remixed version isn’t bad.

EDIT: The above has lead me on a journey through youtube and came across this which I think many will agree is lovely. Now searching for more… I loose so many nights in youtube…

With time on my hands I thought I would watch a film

Today’s cinematic treat was Outlander. A predominantly bog-standard hero kills monster affair with the slightly strange twist that I was not really rooting for the hero…

Strip away the sci-fi and the Vikings and our hero can easily be compared to an officer in the SS, merrily following orders and attempting to wipe out an entire race. And wouldn’t you believe the one that got away decides to go on a killing spree against those that would destroy it. Twist this round a little and I could easily imagine the film from the monster’s point of view… “He stands alone, his race wiped from the planet, his family killed before his eyes… His only thoughts now are of Vengeance.”

Still it was a mildly entertaining way of passing the time, so although I would not recommend going out of your way to watch this, if it is on and you have some beers and time to kill, by all means enjoy.

At work, my desktop machine refused to install the latest kernel which left me with a broken system for a while, awesome!

At home, the upgrade when smoothly however I had issues with ZFS-Fuse. The filesystem refused to mount correctly. I’ve eventually isolated this to a problem with the drive order however I had specified ‘by-path’ to eliminate that problem? Further investigation reveals that drives on a SATA card appear to be swapping since the upgrade to Lucid, very odd…. sorted this now by mounting via id instead.

sudo zpool export tank
sudo zpool import -d /dev/disk/by-id/ tank

Another issue seen is the lack of sleeping disk drives. The drives of the ZFS raid are supposed to pop into standby when idle for 15 mins… this then allows the machine to switch itself off at night when not in use. However for some reason that I have not yet identified they are not going sleepy-bye-byes.
I am able to manually put the western digital drive into slumber, but the samsung disks refuse and to make life interesting they give no reason why.

hdparm doesn’t appear to have changed? I am perplexed.

Haven’t dared to upgrade my vmware server box just yet, will give it another week or so

egrep -i "[,]? (p[ar]{0,1,2}t)?[ ]?[(]?[i0-9]+[)]?[ ]*$" file

1. Anything funny.
2. How attractive the young woman is.
3. Farting.
4. Psycho killers coming into the room while you are immobile.
5. Anything related to sex.

Triangle

First up was Triangle, a horror I suppose, although very little was horrifying. I was apprehensive going into this as I don’t like jumpy-out bits in films, I’m a wuss, however none of those ever came and I found myself watching carefully for signs of inconsistency.

So, basic premise: Some people on a yachting trip, hit sudden nasty weather, end up on ‘empty’ cruise ship… add to this the idea of a looping time line and the sudden and inexplicable realisation that killing everyone will save the day… then comes the twist at the end, we are shown that the story… or loop… actually lasts a bit longer and is all about our main lady saving her child, maybe.

So… I did vaguely like it. I love ‘time’ in films and TV, I love pulling the threads and making sure they come through properly, with no knots. Triangle has knots, quite a few knots.

The film has us following 1 iteration of the largest seen loop. Jess at home, then at harbour, then on sea, then on ship. Here there is a second loop within the first between them boarding the ship and all being killed. Jess gets ‘out’ when she falls overboard, but as this is a loop she should ALWAYS get out when falling overboard, in that exact way, we know this is ‘correct’ as she is involved in the falling from the other side in her iteration. However there is a another Jess we are never properly introduced to, for anyone thats seen it, she is the one that gets shot through the bag on her head by Jess #1. Jess #2, gets shot through bag on head and she kills weedy bloke with banana and stabs weedy bloke’s wife. But after that she vanishes and plays no further part… she may be involved in the 2nd jess/jess fight at the front of the ship. If so she would be the Jess in the jump suite that is actually killed by Jess, lets call her 3. This is witnessed by Jess #1, but Jess #2 and #3 do not interact with her directly at all. My long winded and probably hard to understand point is that for the loop to make real and proper sense, Jess #1 should be the only Jess…or and this is what I’m starting to think we are looking at just one iteration through the larger loop, however since Jess is aware of the loops they ARE different each time, but she’s never able to change the outcome. Of course this leads me to the other thing, she goes back and kills herself… meaning the ‘original’ Jess #0 the one we see in the home, in the dress at the start NEVER makes it to the yacht. So where the hell does Jess #1…etc come from in the first place?

I’m probably just spoiled by other TV and Film which have done loops, but I expect a clear point where xyz enters the loop. Realisation of the loop is almost optional, but if a loop break is accomplished, that too has a clear point.

Basically I think there are too many questions…. oh and what about Heather? Her character was completely pointless, there is actually NO reason for her to be in the film, none whatsoever, she offers nothing. a couple of lines of dialogue and poof she’s dead, or escapes the loop prior to it starting… who knows. I kept expecting her to show up, maybe living on the ship for years in her own loop or something, but nothing. Not even a oh look she survived the whole thing at the end. I really don’t get why she was put in.

So I would not recommend this film.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

This was really weird, very very weird.

The plot, I think, basically involves an old tale of man vs the devil in betting. By far the shiny star in this film is Lily Cole, very hot As for the rest of it, very unusual and difficult to understand.

I wouldn’t recommend this either.

(500) Days of Summer

Definitely my favourite of the evening. A very nice story with some witty lines and Zooey Deschanel. I particularly liked the voice-over, narration and the segments flitting here and there over the 500 days, very cool.

THIS, I recommend.

Much apologies for my lack of updates my laziness got the better of me.

The Big D suffered a bit over the holiday. I promised myself I wouldn’t let a diet ruin my ability to have a good time. So although I didn’t go too mad, I still went a little mad

..and the damage is tangible and squidgy!

But not as bad as I might have feared at the beginning of this week I was 3 lbs heavier than my current milestone (1 stone off)… so back to it this week, shed that 3lbs then into the Big D full steam!

I really really need to add some form of exercise to my schedule, but it’s way to cold for cycling and I just cannot justify the cost and boredom of a gym Thoughts? I’ve considered buying some random equipment for the house… but they would probably grow dusty and unused in a cupboard… grrr You win again Laziness!!

And… having met the leader of the V’s I have no doubt they have our best interests at heart, drool drool.

But the series… I’ll be honest I don’t remember a great deal from the original series, the biggest thing I remember about it is that my Dad let me stay up late to watch it Friday nights at 11pm, crikey!

Even with 4 episodes watched its still up in the air about which direction they will take it and what they will do with the characters.

Speaking of which we have 4ish main resistance peeps and 4 or so ‘bad’ guys! Really loving our ‘heroes’ but the eyes do focus somewhat on the bad guys… or gals… With mother and daughter V, hommana hommana!!

Pah, ‘ruined’ is a strong word, ‘back-peddled’ a bit, maybe.

Suffice it to say that I reached my current mini-goal of 1 stone off on Saturday morning, then went out for a very enjoyable birthday meal and find myself having gained a lb since last week this morning… eek. Oh well, life ain’t worth living if you don’t live it.

Went out to what was a lovely restaurant in Warrington, called “Mojo”. I wouldn’t recommend it any more

2 years ago it was the location of my proposal to my beautiful wife and the source of some lovely meals, including  small ocean’s worth of muscles for starter! Yum! However today it is a tapas place and although the food was ok, the service was shocking. Yes it busied up while we were there, but we had to go to the bar several times to order our own drinks a dessert was forgotten, all in all it screamed of a service in need of organising. A real shame since I loved the place for sentimental reasons. I shall keep my eye on it and try again if they change hands again.

Only one way to describe this film, sweet, so very very sweet.

Completely enjoyed this film. I know it’s a children’s film, but I really enjoyed the story and characters. Heartily recommended.