I don't generally play computer games these days. It eats time that I could be wasting in other ways. In the past I played loads of games on my BBC Micro and assorted Amigas. I used to work at a place where we could get away with playing network games at lunch time. We got through a few, including Doom and Duke Nukem. I actually played some Doom on my Amiga after they released the source code and it was ported. The last game I played extensively was Half-Life on my old PC. I enjoy the ability to explore a world that this sort of game offers.

For some reason I decided this week that I wanted to play one of these games again. I've tried a couple of Linux Doom ports. Legacy looks the best so far, but I have yet to get any sound working. I have a set of game CDs I bought to use with the Amiga that include Doom I and II. I may have to get into it again.

I know games have moved on a lot from Doom and even Half-Life, but my PC does not have a great graphics card, so I'm limited in what I can play. I've not even tried any of the many on-line virtual worlds. I'm not sure I want to commit myself to that sort of thing. I just want to blast things now and again.

This is a film I had been wanting to see for a while, but just got around to recording when it was on TV recently and watched last night. It's a real style exercise. Although set in the near future, the people look like they belong in the 1930s with hints of later decades. The cars are supposed to electric, but look like old models including P6 Rovers for the police. The architecture is minimalist and smoking is back in fashion.

In this future babies are designed to have flawless genes and anyone who does not meet those standard cannot get a decent job. Vincent (Ethan Hawke) is a flawed natural birth (an Invalid) who wants to go into space, but can only get work as a cleaner. He pays Jerome (Jude Law), a paraplegic Valid, to supply him with the genetic material he needs to bluff his way into a job at the Gattaca aerospace company. There are complications when a flight director is murdered and traces of Vincent are found on the scene. Uma Thurman plays the love interest Irene. She looks perfect enough, but didn't do much for me emotionally. Actually the film didn't move me that way generally apart from at the very end, but was interesting as a style piece and as a warning of what could happen. The whole film is tinted a bit green (like The Matrix) for some reason. The Michael Nyman score is good if you like minimal music.

Overall I'm glad I saw it, but don't feel the need to watch it again too soon, even though I feel I may have missed something in the plot.

Details as usual at IMDB.

In April last year I formed a team with some colleagues on the Grid.org project. I'd been running it for a few years myself. As of this week we have clocked up six years of processing and one million points. That's with a core of four or five people and a few others along the way. This is small beer for a project that clocks up well over 100 years each day, but it all helps in the quest to cure cancer and other diseases.

Other things I meant to blog: I saw one of the Virgin airline entertainment systems do a re-boot and spotted Tux at the start. You wouldn't know it was a Linux system when it's running, but then it doesn't look like Windows either. I wonder what sort of hardware they have on board. There must be a server with all the media. I guess there could be a little PC with no local storage built into the screen or a rack of them elsewhere. Anyone know?

Since I got back I've had time to watch a little TV. Family Guy and American Dad started runs on BBC2. A couple of adult cartoons that I will not be letting the kids watch. The Simpsons is generally OK or just goes over their heads, but these are both a bit too adult for them. Both funny though and I will be watching them again. Later is back. I've not watched so much of recent series, but last week's had some great music. I'll have to set it to record every week on my PVR, assuming it's always at the same time as my box is not too intelligent. Amazingly this series 26 (2 per year?)! Jools still asks the same old questions in his interviews.

Watched this on the way back from Miami. Not optimal due to the usual small screen, made worse by the person in front leaning back.

This is a darker (in both senses) Batman film. It explores how Bruce Wayne came to be a crime fighter. This involves some mystical training in China and a supply of gadgets from his company's labs. Christian Bale is a cool customer and backed up by some major actors (Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman and Liam Neeson). The baddies are really bad and not as comic as in the other films. The action is spectacular in what I could make out in the mostly night scenes.

Some of the city scenes were shot in the enormous Cardington hangers a few miles from where I live.

Details on IMDB and DVD at Amazon.

I've been using Ubuntu Linux for a few months now. Generally it just does what I need after a few little tweaks. This month the latest release (5.10 aka Breezy Badger) was released and I decided to try an upgrade. This is supposed to be a matter of running a couple of commands, but all did not go smoothly.

After letting it download a few hundred megabytes and install everything I re-booted and ended up with a command line rather than the usual graphical log-in screen. It proved impossible to get either KDE or Gnome to run.

Luckily I could use another PC (running Windows 98) to access the web and search for solutions. Eventually I managed to fix it with a combination of apt-get -f install (to fix dependencies) and installing xfonts-base. So now I had my GUI back, but still had a few issues with size of fonts and complaints from the update process about a few packages. Running apt-get -f install again fixed the latter.

So after the upgrade what has changed? Actually not a whole lot. I'm still using KDE, so maybe Gnome has changed more. At least I can get straight to the address book in Kmail. It took a further update to get GPG working on mail.

My next areas to explore are video editing (still not done any) and audio recording. I want to record myself playing the guitar for my own amusement. Audacity looks like a possible tool for this.

At very short notice I had to fly out to Miami again for work. For a change I flew Virgin and was lucky to get upgraded to their Upper Class. This is similar to the BA business class that I have also experienced. Both have similar levels of service and quality of food, but the Virgin planes seem to be better equipped. The seat was very comfortable, but I didn't try the full bed option. It has a huge table and a great entertainment system. You have access to about 30 films and lots of TV shows as well as their radio shows and a choice of CDs. Unlike most systems you have full control so you can watch when you like and pause as necessary. I think there's a few aspects of how the menus work that could be better, but overall I was impressed. As I was stuck there for over 8 hours I watched the following films:

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 3/5

I've heard the radio show, read the books, played the games etc so I know the plot pretty well. This version diverges a bit from the others, but it's all supposed to be Douglas Adams' vision. Some scenes were identical to the old ones, but there were significant changes and additions. Martin Freeman was a more assertive Arthur and Mos Def a more panicky Ford. The others were pretty much as before. Obviously the effects are better this time, but I don't know if they need to be that fancy. It was fun, but I was slightly disappointed. Maybe I just have it too fixed in my mind how it should be.

Details on IMDB and you can buy it at Amazon or get the old TV version

Sin City 4/5

I knew this was based on a series of comic books, but I've not read them. It really captures the look and feel of a comic. It's mostly black and white with accents of colour and beautifully put together. It's basically three interlinked film noir type stories about different men fighting injustice in brutal ways. It really is very violent, but not in a totally realistic way. Some characters seem almost indestructable, especially Mickey Rourke's big hunk of muscle. On the whole the men are tough and the women are gorgeous, but also get to fight back. I was impressed.

Details on IMDB and DVD on Amazon.

Unleashed 3/5

This is a mix of violent British gangster film, martial arts extravaganza and touching human drama. Danny, Jet Li, is an incredible fighter who is treated like an attack dog by debt collector Bob Hoskins. Danny is taken in by blind piano tuner Morgan Freeman who teaches him to be human. As you would expect, his past catches up with him and there is the inevitable big fight at the end. Although I watch a fair few violent films I get sickened by those who appear to enjoy inflicting pain on others. There is a lot of that in this film, but this is balanced by the good people. Jet Li is very good at fighting, if not a great actor. He has plenty of the former to keep him busy. Part of one fight takes place in the 'smallest room' of a Glasgow flat. The film was written by Luc Besson whose films I generally enjoy. This is not his best, but good for it's genre in my limited experience.

Details on IMDB. The DVD will be out in time for Xmas.

Buying through the Amazon links will benefit my daughter's school. Alternative suppliers can be found at Buy.at.

Many years ago when I opened my Yahoo email account I wanted something short as a name that didn't have numbers, e.g. steve19976, so I ended up with steevc. steev was already taken and seems to be widely used these days. I've since used that namein lots of places so that now a Google on steevc returns just about all stuff relating to me on the first five pages. I admit I'm a sucker for registering on various services.

So you can easily find me at:

• BookCrossing - for those who like to give away their books. I've not used it lately.
• Reader2 - as mentioned recently.
• Multiply - my preferred social network site
• Del.icio.us - my link store
• Last.fm - logs my music listening
• Wikipedia - the updateable encyclopedia of everything
• Bloglines - still the best on-line news reader I've found. Google Reader just doesn't do it for me
• Slashdot - still a great geek news site, even though the comments can get out of control

There's a load of other uses on various forums. As well as Yahoo mail you can reach me on that name at Gmail and on the Jabber messaging network. One day I would like to run my own Jabber server so that I can use my normal email address as an identifier, but for now it's hosted by their server.

I can't guarantee that every steevc out there is me, but it looks like most of them are. Other people have more imaginative on-line names, but I'm happy with this one.

After I blogged about Reader2 I found another site with similar aims called Library Thing. This has some nice features too. The look-up system for adding books is very good and can use various library catalogues. It also has tags, but so does everyone else these days.

There's a few things I would like to see there. It has an option to produce a box featuring selected books to display on your site, but doesn't have RSS feeds. There's no standard way to indicate books that you are currently reading, but you could use a tag for this. It allows for linking to books with an Amazon associate ID, but I think this is only for the US site.

I noticed today that I had a message in my guest book from the owner of Library Thing, Tim, in response to the previous entry asking if I had seen his site. We exchanged a few emails where I told him what I think. He intends to take some of my suggestions on board. He's charging a small fee for those with large book collections, but will probably not get rich from it. I told him that I really appreciate the efforts of people like him in providing such services. The next time I have some spare cash I intend to make a few donations to the sites whose services and products I regularly use.

As Tilly is learning about the ancient Egyptians at school we decided to take a trip to the British Museum on Saturday. It's probably about 25 years since I was last there. From what I could remember it looked like most of the displays had been updated. The biggest change is the rebuilt Great Court with it's amazing glass roof. We had lunch in the lofty restaurant there that had good food, but is not a cheap option, even with the on-line booking discount.

We had a great day. We used a couple of kids' trail books that they were giving away. These encouraged the kids to explore, although Dylan found some of it a bit boring He's just a bit young for this sort of thing. Those of you on my contacts list can see some pictures on Multiply. Of course we had to get a few things from the shop. I couldn't resist a little croaking frog like these to start my percussion collection.

On Sunday I was at the Secret Bass drum circle again. A different selection of people this time. We worked on some of the patterns I tried last week and did some more singing. I really need to get a drum so I can practice. It's a month until the next session, so I will probably forget it all. I did get to play my frog there.

Just had a call on my mobile from 08004584727. It was someone trying to get me to change contracts. I could barely hear her in the cafe at work. Anyway, I told her I did not buy anything from people who phone me up.

If I had told her how much I spend on mobile calls she would probably have given up. My average bill is probably less than £2/month. I've been with Virgin for a couple of years and have no real issues with them.

Other people have been annoyed by them too, as I found when I Googled the number.