Finally got around to seeing Revenge of the Sith this evening. There was a bootleg going around I could have grabbed, but I wanted to see it, as with the other five, in the cinema proper.

Definately the best of the three prequels; in fact, I'd say Lucas should have made this in three parts rather than waste our time with the first two.

Spoilers after the jump.

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I mean - they didn't want to broadcast the pilot, which is fine. But is it some sort of insult to them if they're wrong? It's not like this is a one-off thing - I have some CDs by The Screaming Blue Messiahs who were on Warner's books at one point. They split up years ago after Warner dropped them but WB apparently won't sell the rights on to other people who would want to release them. And according to something I read, Fox routinely puts clauses in it's contracts that if they cancel your series, you can't take it elsewhere (though you can make movies, which is how Firefly got to be made into Serenity).

“"Whether the pilot was picked up or not, it is still the property of Warner Bros. Entertainment and we take the protection of all of our intellectual property seriously," said Craig Hoffman, a company spokesman. "While Warner Bros. Entertainment values feedback from consumers, copyright infringement is not a productive way to try to influence a corporate decision."

Hoffman added that the pilot's unauthorized distribution is "unacceptable and illegal ... no matter what the underlying motives" and said the company hasn't ruled out taking legal action "when it comes to stopping the illegal distribution of our copyright material."”

Wired News: Rejected TV Pilot Thrives on P2P

“Let's enter a parallel universe now. Would gun manufacturers be held liable for any crime committed with their products "regardless of the device's lawful uses"? In our universe, the money is with the gun lobby, so we know the answer to that one here.”

Grokster backlash begins

I'll not miss new episodes now... or when the new season starts. Pity you can't filter out The Strangerhood news though...

Red Vs Blue · News

I went to the launch of the series 3 DVD of Blake's 7 at the Film & Comic Con. As well as getting the DVD (with a free mini-model of the Liberator) signed by all the cast members there, there was a skit/play performed by the cast about doing the DVD commentaries and a Q&A session with them. Since there was a whole other convention going on, I also got signed pics from Glen A. Larson, Adam Baldwin, Sandra Dickinson and David Dixon and a few photos of KITT from Knight Rider.

I just want to be the first person to suggest that the previously named “Henman Hill”, with the early departure of Tim from Wimbledon, be renamed “Murray Mound” after the new bright hope of British tennis.

Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me was the first CD I bought too. Although technically I exchanged it for the double LP of the same album because I'd bought that a couple of days before I bought the CD player.

“Now I have to go dig through all my CDs (I never get rid of them, so I've accumulated about 10,000 since I bought Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me back in the 1990)”

WIL WHEATON dot NET: Where is my mind?: pink champagne and swimming pools

“Listening at home to his show on Kerrang 105.2, Hayley Shaw was outraged at her husband's flirting with the model and decided to hit him where it hurt by putting his £25,000 Lotus Esprit Turbo up for sale on eBay.

In one of the great acts of marital revenge she offered the black sports car for a price of 50p. "I need to get rid of this car immediately - ideally in the next 3-4 hours before my cheating arsehole husband gets home to find it gone and all his belongings in the street," read the posting on the internet auction site.”

Wife sells DJ's Lotus on eBay in revenge for his on-air flirting

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased books by Dave Sim often purchased books by Dan Simmons. For this reason you might like to know that Dan Simmons's newest book, Olympos, will be released on June 28, 2005

Here's a better shot of the one I posted earlier. Had to detour through Lewisham again because the Blackwall tunnel was blocked :/

“Coldplay's third album X&Y has rocketed to the top of the album chart and is on course to become one of the biggest sellers of all time.”

Coldplay X&Y to become best selling album ever

(actually, it was in Paint Shop Pro. Original is here)

I just watched the last episode in the current Doctor Who run. Spoilers follow.

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This restaurant (the one on the left, with the red facade) has an interesting name and font doesn't it...

A couple of interesting web-based things I've discovered recently:

Ampache: builds a nice frontend and streams your music to you over the intarweb. Needs Apache, PHP and MySQL.



Cacti: a very nice system monitoring app - including remote stuff via SNMP - that produces nice little graphs of whatever you're monitoring. Needs Apache, PHP, MySQL and RRDTools.

I upgraded the Linux box to Fedora Core 4 today. It was a fairly painless upgrade, though I lost Amarok in the process as it's not yet available in the KDE repository and you can't compile it because FC4 comes with gcc 4.0.0, and 4.0.0 is blacklisted from compiling KDE applications due to a bug...

Someone rang my mobile claiming to be from my provider, and got my name and address “confirmed” before I got suspicious. I called up T-Mobile and they said they hadn't called, so someone's up to something. Hopefully it's just selling my details on rather than anything evil.

'I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund' - PledgeBank - Tell the world "I'll do it, but only if you'll help"

For “The Pioneers”, via Fimoculous again.

Holy crap. Never thought I'd see this. Really hoping I get tickets now.

“Roger Waters will be reunited with band-members Dave Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright for the show.”

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Pink Floyd to play Live 8 show

Just finished watching season 1 of Knight Rider on DVD.

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I just picked up M83's Before the Dawn Heals Us. Still listening to it for the first time, but I notice that the sixth track is called '*' - that is shift-8, the star/asterisk character and wild-card character in most operating systems. I'll have to be careful if I decide to delete it

I don't normally go for reality shows: the allure of Big Brother's cavacade of freaks and mutants left me cold and as for Celebrity Love Island, well, there's something for the truth in advertising people to look into (is it even on an island?). Meanwhile, US TV station The WB is not know for its interesting shows, relying on the kind of pablum so effectively skewered by Penny Arcade. As for Ashton Kucher... actually, he quite surprised me in The Butterfly Effect, so I'm not going to assume anything.

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The phone rings.
Me, answering: “Hi.”
Caller: “Hello, we're doing a survey in your area with only one question.”
Me: “Ah... no thanks.”
Caller: “Don't you even want to know what it's about?”
Me: “No.”
Caller: “Well, that's rude.”
Me: “Yes, it is.”
Caller: “Well... go away.”

I think that went pretty well.

Says “X&Y”. Yay for secret messages.

“So if you look at the front cover u can work out it says 'X&Y' and the one on the inside of the back cover of the album sleeve says 'MAKE TRADE FAIR'”

FranzFerdinand.org :: View topic - X&Y.. What do you think?

Beans has, in the past, mentioned “The L Word” - a show which, even though it was on Showtime - the pay channel which hates the rest of the world - I assumed was a sensitive and respectful portrayal of lesbian life in LA (albeit with all the limitations of a TV serial - ie, no-one looks like fficial&sa=N&tab=wi">Andrea Dworkin).

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...that I've not seen the headline “Let he who is without sin cast the first phone”.

“Russell Crowe was arrested and charged Monday for allegedly throwing a telephone at an employee of the Manhattan hotel where he was staying.”

Russell Crowe Charged for Throwing Phone - Yahoo! News

In memorium then, four of my favourite 6x7 tracks:

Brilliantly Cute (from The Things We Make)
Flypaper For Freaks (from The Way I Feel Today)
Speed Is In, Speed Is Out (from The Way I Feel Today)
Just Get It Down (from Artists, Cannibals, Poets, Thieves)

Six by Seven done split up...

“After 8 years of being in Six.By Seven, Chris, James and Chris have decided to stop touring and effectively end the group for the foreseable future. We would like to thank our fans for all of their support over the years. The end of Six.By Seven is not a sad one, as we are proud of our achievments and critical success over the release of 5 fine studio albums. It has been a difficult journey of late and we now realise that we have achieved what we set out to do and the 3 remaining members wish to move on and make music without the lagacy of Six.By Seven hanging over them.”

Six By Seven News

“"What we've got to do is persuade the British public to get out of the car a bit, use public transport, cycle and walk more often," campaigner Tony Bosworth told Sky News.”

Government mulls "pay-as-you-drive" charge - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

Here's the problem with trying to force people onto public transport - it sucks.

When I lived in Billericay I used to take the train to work. I had a fifteen minute walk to the station. The journey, because lines only lead in or out of London, took 30-45 minutes to get to Liverpool St where I'd have to change to get the train up to Tottenham Hale (another 15-20 minute ride). Generally, including waiting for trains, it was at least a 90 minute journey - sometimes two hours. A monthly season ticket for all this was £285 - £3400 a year.

I bought a car for £1400. Petrol ran to about £30 a week, £1500 a year, for a grand total of £2900. And the journey time was 45 minutes.

When I moved to the new flat, I barely even bothered checking the train times. But a quick look suggests the pure journey time from here to Liverpool Street is a mere 30 minutes, giving a complete journey time of 45 minutes. Course, that doesn't take into account one change from train to underground, another change to a different underground line and the fact you're on the underground which no-one would use by choice during rush hour.

Pure journey time in the car meanwhile is about 30 mins. On a normal day, with the congestion, it's 45 mins. On a bad day it has been an hour.

I don't know how far they'd have to raise prices to force people to use an already overloaded public transport system - but I think we'd have a revolution before they reached it.

Besides... what is a tax on fuel other than “pay-as-you-drive”?

Keerist, but it's tight in National League East. I was just looking at the standings to see where the Mets are and they're down in second-last - but only one game behind. The Phillies are only half a game further back in last. In all the other divisions last place is in double-figures behind the leader. In the NL Central, four of the six teams are 10 games or more behind.

They should just scrap the World Series and make whoever wins NL East champions - at least they've been in a competition.

“Jillette, 50, and his wife Emily, 39, welcomed Moxie CrimeFighter Jillette on Friday, according to publicist Glenn Schwartz.”

Jillette Names Daughter Moxie CrimeFighter - Yahoo! News

I liked British Sea Power's first album, but when I heard the second streaming at NME.com I wasn't too sure. The recently released single , Please Stand Up, sounds better than I remember though.

(also found this older Cooper Temple Clause video of Promises, Promises on iFilm)

5. any feedback/error report by an English speaker featuring txtspk or atrocious spelling.
4. people who assume everything is a vast conspiracy to get money our of their wallets without doing any work.
3. people who report an error and what it was or where it happened but not both.
2. Americans who think there's some vast gulf in customer service between Europe and the US: “Maybe your performance is acceptable in Europe, but in the U.S. it is not.”
1. people who say “I had an error” and nothing else.

Oi vey, what a long day yesterday was.

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Ahead of me on the sliproad the other day a couple of cars had a little contretemps. The sliproad starts out with two lanes then “removes” one with some white lines. One or other of a blue miniwan and a gold sportish looking car tried to pull in or wouldn't let the other in at that point. Evidently the driver of the gold car felt he was the aggrieved party since, when they'd both made it onto the A2, he overtook and then cut across in front of the minivan and stopped, forcing the minivan to stop or otherwise drive into him. Then he got out and stalked towards the other car. The rest of us had to pull over into the other lane to get past.

I don't think anything untoward happend, but what kind of idiot thinks stopping on a dual carriageway is somehow a good idea...

Celine Dion is Bad (Quicktime; via Fimoculous who also have a link to the new White Stripes video)

“"Driving by women leads to evil," Munir al-Shahrani wrote in a letter to the Al-Watan daily. "Can you imagine what it would be like if her car broke down? She would have to seek help from men."”

Saudi Arabia Mulls Ban on Women Drivers - Yahoo! News

TINYINT for the win!

“Score in teamplay mode no longer wraps back to zero 0 when it goes past 127”

Steam News