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So… it’s been a while. What have I been up to? Well before I get into that, M. shared some insight with me last night. “People,” she said, “like pictures.” She’s posting on her blog every day at the moment and won’t consider posting unless she has a photo to go with it. So I thought I’d give it a go.

As I said it’s been a while and this is a brief overview of what I’ve been doing in the past few weeks. In October I had a few weeks off work and visited friends in Newcastle and Edinburgh.

As usual I’ve done some tinkering with my MythTV box. Since I’ve not done so so far I may as well have a couple of gratuitous screenshots. Here’s the main menu –

Here’s the TV Guide

Here’s watching a recording with on-screen display

One of the major things I’ve done is implement auto shutdown and wakeup so that it saves power. To ensure that it actually shuts down it now boots into the ‘welcome’ screen instead of the frontend proper:

Another was to setup once again MythWeb which is a web interface to MythTV, one which can actually be used externally if so set up.

It’s very useful for checking upcoming shows and scheduling recordings. Both things which can be done through the normal interface but which can be more convenient through the web.

As well as set this up again (something I’d done before but lost when re-installing after putting the new disk in) I tweaked it a little. I added the pre-defined search “Whats New”

as this is one that I use on the ordinary interface

See, every few days I add to my list of what I want to record by checking the New Titles and Movies lists. On the ordinary interface this means paging down several screens worth of stuff I’ve already seen. On MythWeb I can just scroll smoothly in a browser. Much easier. Except that there was no equivalent to New Titles. (There was one called “New Titles/Premieres” which was only brand new shows. I called mine “Whats New” to avoid confusion.)

Any way apart from MythTV, I’ve also been spending a lot of time writing. I’ve re-joined AFO and having posted a story and many reviews.

So that’s a brief overview with lots of pretty pictures.

To buy or not to buy a new harddrive?

Back in April when I bought the machine that would become my MythTV box I knew that 320Gb wasn’t huge (for Myth) but acceptable (and 3 times larger than the 100Gb across 2 disks I’d had up to then). But I always said I’d wait for a 750Gb drive to hit the £100 mark and buy one. The difference is I thought that would take until the end of the year but it’s here now. And my main drive is 9Gb (or 3-6 hours) off full. I say main drive because I’ve now got an external drive which holds my music, videos and archived recordings – i.e. older recordings which I’ve not yet watched but which have been pushed onto the slower external drive (they play fine, just take a second or two to start). In total I’ve got 500Gb used.

So 750Gb would only be a step up of 250Gb. I know, I know ‘only’ but in Myth terms it’s not huge. But it would allow me to bring my external drive stuff back on to an internal drive – which would make the whole thing run a little better (if I’m scrolling past a recording on the external drive it’s noticeably slower.) And it’d give me a little room for expansion.

So why not buy it? Well because I could wait and buy 1Tb in a few months for similar money (currently around £200) and because I’m still a little bit skint after buying the house and because it’s only a small step up in size. See if I bought a silly amount of disc – 5Tb say – then I could use Myth in a slightly different way – where you let it record all sorts of stuff, some based on generic rules (every new pilot, every film with a > 2.5 star rating etc) and then weed out what’s worth watching at your leisure. But ultimately, and especially since I’m not buying silly amounts of disc, if you record at a faster rate than you watch then you’re always going to run out of space eventually.

I’m taking a break from the Ship of Fools, a website I’ve visited almost every day for about the past four years. Why? The short answer is that I don’t get much positive from it except to kill time, which isn’t that positive, especially when a lot of the time ‘killed’ is time I should be working – and I’ve started to feel like there’s a downside. Lately I’ve come away feeling slightly sad, vaguely upset and a little bit weary.

Before I delve into the long answer let me talk about what’s good about the Ship. The best thing about the Ship is that you can question any part of Christianity and be taken seriously. There are almost no taboos. If all you want from a forum is good rigorous debate then it’s hard to beat. Also it was the place I met M. It was the place that provided me with something of a sense of connection with others when I didn’t have that in real life.

However lately I’ve been noticing that I don’t get much out of it any more. I don’t think I ever felt the sense of community some do (I’ve had about a dozen PMs in those 4 years) and the little I did has gone. The very diversity of thought that is its strength has made the Ship a difficult place for someone, me, who doesn’t quite know what he believes. I fully accept that that’s my problem but I need to focus a little, maybe look at the conflicting traditions one by one. Establish a core of what I think and believe.

The biggest problem though is the attitudes of some of the posters (please note I said ‘some’). There’s a continual stream of low-level digs at Evangelicalism, and occasionally Charismaticism. It’s not unique to those groups but those are the ones I tend to notice, and feel more. I can sort of shrug it off, no big deal, but it makes me just a little tired, sad and angry. Since I don’t want to be feeling that I’m not reading the Ship for a while.

So I joined Facebook last night and I…

No, wait, something else first. Something related. Introductory.

So I’d pretty much decided that this blog was going to be about reviews. Mostly movie reviews with some TV. Mostly bad movie reviews. Deliberate ambiguity there – they’d be mostly bad movies ‘cos most movies are bad a la Sturgeon’s Law (95% of anything is crap)[1] – but they’d probably be bad reviews too. A kind of a gimick.

I also thought maybe having a scoring system where the worse the movie the more words the review can have. A gimick too far? Perhaps.

So having decided the substance of my blog – Faith and Personal Stuff being ruled out because a) it’s gotta be about one thing and b) I’ve got hardly anything to say about Faith and far too much to say about Personal Stuff.

So I joined Facebook last night and I realised I had something to say about Faith.

So, that ending. The final episode of Heroes. I finished watching it early hours of Monday morning and last couple of nights I’ve been too tired to report back.

(Oh and NEW BLOG! but that’s probably another post)

Well, there are two questions to answer about the final episode, does it avoid my so-called “Lost trap”? and is it any good?

However, before I get to those, since the main place I advertise my blog is SoF, and since many there are still watching Heroes (it just started on the BBC), I’ll do the decent thing. Only click on the ‘more’ link if you either already know, or don’t mind finding out what happened.

Continue reading “That Ending”

So I’ve been watching Heroes. Having no life and an internet connection, I’ve watched nearly all of Heroes.

I just wanted to pause here (3 episodes to go) to post a couple of thoughts. Heroes is good, very good. It reminds me of first season Lost – lots of characters, plot-heavy, high production values. However much as I love Lost it is a shaggy dog story. Almost every time you get new information you get more questions than answers. Heroes appears to be going somewhere. I’ll know in a couple of hours or so, but I hope that Heroes resists the temptation to spin out the story.

So I finished it. At around 7pm last night. No I didn’t put it off that long, I started reading almost straight away after the last entry but M. rang me when I was nearly done. So we discussed where she was up to and favourite bits, possible theories about the end, though since I was nearly there that part of the ‘discussion’ consisted of M. asking me questions I wasn’t allowed to answer. After we’d talked I finished the book.

First thing to say is that the ‘slashdot guy’ was lying.

I said I wasn’t going to do this but… well you’ll see why I did.

I’m on page 512 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows which has taken me a little over 12 hours in total. I’m averaging 41 pages/hour but it’s a big hardback so the pages are bigger. I estimate I have about 2 1/4 hours of reading left. Despite what you may (or I would’ve) guessed I actually have been up since about 10:30 and I’m where I was in the book when I went to bed. I got up, messed around on the computer for a while, went out to the shop, came back, made lunch/breakfast and then decided, despite what I’d originally intended, to write my blog.

In other words I’m putting off reading the final 95 pages. The question is: why?

I said a few days ago that I’d read a lot less because of a ‘distraction’ and that I’d tell you what it was later. So later is now.

You may be surprised to learn that I was never a particularly big Harry Potter fan. I gave up a couple of times on the early books. I started reading them again earlier this year because M. is a huge fan and it gave us something to discuss. So back in May I decided to pre-order Deathly Hallows from Amazon because I could save money that way. I imagined at the time that I’d be quite happy to read it a few days or weeks after it came out – not being such a huge fan.