JamesX

Well I’m pleased to report that after leaving work early to fit in with the “We’ll be there between 12 and 5,” the Foxtel man turned up at 4.15 pm to replace my Foxtel IQ box. The thing was starting to make grinding noises and generally rebooting whenever it felt like it so it was time for a new one. When I spoke to them on the phone the guy wasn’t really all that concerned about the problem and simply said, “we’ll swap it over,” so I’m assuming it’s happening a lot. Let’s hope all my problems are solved!

You can tell a production is on when everyone seems to go under the radar for a while and that’s certainly the case with me right now. There’s so much going on with work, and my other work, that there really isn’t time for too much else. Seeing as though it’s been about two weeks since my last update, I thought it best to make some semblance of an entry before things get even more busy!

Last week was my brother’s birthday. He turned 19 this year and I think he might actually be showing signs of growing up! I suppose as the older brother I might be slightly biased in that regard, but it’s good that he’s doing well and we had a nice family dinner to celebrate the occasion.

Last weekend I also made it up to Bright again. I seem to be getting up there more and more often lately and that’s because it’s the only place I can really be where I’m not being interrupted by everyone and, can actually, truly relax. I’m still not quite at the point where the people in the town don’t look you over and think “city boy” every time you walk down the street, but I’m working on it! My bogan acting skills still need some tuning…

What else, what else? Last night was the finale for Big Brother 2007. I know most of you are probably saying “thank god that’s over,” but I think that the show did reasonably well this year. That is of course if you don’t look at how absolutely terrible last night’s show was. It was a true example of how not to do live television - although ironically, that was what made it all the more intriguing. Even so, taking 4 hours to reveal the winner when you could get your act together and do it in 4 minutes still has me a little bewildered. How a computer “needs time to count the votes,” to quote Gretel, is well beyond me. It’s obviously beyond Beyond too and perhaps next year they might do it a little differently. I can’t help but think that something very fishy went on behind the scenes last night but I guess we’ll never know!

And finally, as always, I’ll shamelessly plug the upcoming production of the musical, FAME. It’s happening in mid-August and if you’re free you should come along. Seeing as though every man and his dog (literally, although cat in my case) are on Facebook nowadays, naturally you can get all the info on there. It’s shaping up to be a great show.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Time to go tend the animals. (If you’re as obsessed as me, that might even be funny!)

Today I’ve been playing with TVersity. To be honest, I think I’ve been hiding under a rock because I’m usually all over these things the second they are out. Anyway, after reading Chris Davies’ post about it, I had to give it a try. I have to say, I’m blown away by how good it is. It’s the only thing I’ve seen that is able to offer seamless, real-time transcoding of almost every format to WMV. Why is this important? Well if you have an Xbox 360, then you’ll know that playing DivX (and any other format that’s not Microsofty) is a pain, if not impossible!

That said, it wasn’t all smooth sailing into the lush waters of transcoding harbour. Naturally, before it’ll convert anything, you need to have the codecs for it to work with. I was doing this on my Vista machine (because I like punishment) and that, it seems, has it’s own set of issues to deal with. Getting TVersity installed took all of 15 seconds, and ffdshow gave me 90% of the codecs I needed. The problem was, I have all the content stored either on my NAS server or the Media Centre PC in the living room. After hours of mucking around, it turns out that unless you have the TVersity Windows service set to login with a username and password, and also have that same username and password available on every other network device you want to stream media from, it just wont work. The problem was so poorly documented that I spent most of the afternoon stumbling my own way through and wham, there it was on my Xbox. Only problem now was that it was transcoding upside down!

Luckily, this problem was known and it had an easy fix - update to the nightly build of ffdshow. I have no idea why the nightly build works and the release doesn’t, and frankly, I don’t really care. Now I can watch my downloaded TV episodes on any device in the house, including my Xbox, removing the need for having my old laptop connected to my TV! You really should check it out!

It’s been a huge week this past week. I haven’t really had time to think with all the Inheritance stuff going on. But after a long wait, last night was the opening night, and I have to say it went reaonably well. The main mistake being caused by Stewart himself, so he really doesn’t have anyone he can blame for that (he sent the mower on early). But, you know, it’s all fun in the end. I really don’t have much to do in this production, which is both good and bad. I guess I’m the “OMG what do we do now” guy that people run to when they can’t find the missing prop, or the cast skip 40 pages (yeah, it’s been done before). I did a quick calculation by updating the list, and this is my 44th production - very scary. Anyway, Fame promises to be huge, so I’ll end up having a big involvement in that one. It’s night number two tonight, and it should be even better than last night.

In other news this week, I finished my fourth Flash assignment for uni. They aren’t really getting harder, just introducing an extra concept each time. I’d say it takes me about 1-2 hours per assignment so it’s pretty quick in the scheme of things. This week my animation was entitled “Caterpillars” and had a couple of caterpillars climing a mound of dirt with clouds flying overhead. Nothing really exciting, but it demonstrates all the concepts learnt up to this point.

Yesterday was also Oscar’s 4th birthday. Not that we did anything special (he already eats better than all of us), and I wasn’t even home. But he got an extra cuddle from everyone at some point. I think he was enjoying the extra attention!

Yes it is that time of year again, for it’s seventh year running, Big Brother is returning this Sunday. As obsessed as I am with the show, this year will hopefully be different from previous years. I say hopefully because every year they promise that it will be different, and it never is, but the claims that the house will be “environmentally friendly” have been backed up by most mainstraim media, so it seems plausible that there could be some interesting twists. The most unusual, and perhaps quite bizarre, is the two buckets of water per person, per week rule that is set to promote fair spirit among the drought afflicted times of Stage 5 water restrictions in Queensland (although their Stage 5 seems more lenient than our Stage 3!).

It’s always too hard to predict, but good or bad, I always end up watching. The Big Brother website is set to be more entertaining this year (finally) now that Channel Ten have their new online content thingy where all their TV shows have dynamic sites with video content etc. Hopefully it lives up to expectations… there’s already a skeleton site up and running so you can go and sign up and take a look at the rumours - some of which are so obviously not true.

Oh and don’t forget to check out BBBA (Behind Big Brother Australia), the site with all the unofficial news surrounding the show. It’s pretty much the place to be if you want to know what’s actually going on - especially when there’s scandal in the air!

It’s been a normal weekend so far really, despite the fact that it’s Easter and the weekend spans four days. It’s good not having to go to work for a little while and I’ve been using the extra time to catch up with everyone. Thursday night after work I caught up with the boys and we went out for dinner at The Sandbelt. We even managed to drag Malcolm and Justin along for the ride which was good. Everyone’s going well and after dinner, some of us went back to Penelope’s “super house” for pool and quiet conversation.

Yesterday was another fun-filled (eventually) day at Penelope’s. This time with the other half of the friends, plus the odd new one - Hi Tilly! I managed to fit in another 15 or so games of pool, and I think I won about 60% of the time, which was quite good. Obviously Stu wasn’t in the zone, and Richie was blaming the table.

Today looks set to be a quiet one - which is probably a good thing. I think I might end up catching up on a few TV shows while I have the opportunity. I’m dreading the last episode of Prison Break; I just know something stupid is going to happen to the storyline and I’ll be left wondering about it for the next six months. 24 should finish airing in a month or so, ready for my Day 6 marathon. I should start planning who’s coming over to watch it. The last one was a success, we even had Ed interested in the show by about the 16th hour and that’s saying something.