New stuff at Multiply

They added a whole load of stuff last night. I'm still assessing it.



One feature is a more WYSIWYG editor that makes it easier to add links, change the font and colours and include pictures. You can still play with the html if you like.



For the purists, you can get the emails in plain text now.

Starsky & Hutch

Rating:	★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Comedy

Yet another film remake of an old TV series. They play it for laughs, but it only got a couple of giggles from me. Ben Stiller does quite a good impression of Paul Michael Glaser, but Owen Wilson is no David Soul. As for Snoop Dogg as Huggy, I'm not sure at all.

The car at least looks right, but it seems they trashed a few during filming. The baddies were just incompetent.

Overall I was underwhelmed. Just setting a film in the seventies with all the wacky clothes and disco dancing isn't enough to make it funny.

I, Robot

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy

In my youth I read a lot of Sci-Fi, including the works of Isaac Asimov on which this is very loosely based. I remember his works as being more about intellectual puzzles, whereas this is an action film. I expect they bought the rights to the book to give the film some literary pretensions.

Will Smith is a cop in the near future who doesn't like the robots that are spreading through society as servants and labourers. Then the top scientist at the robot company apparently kills himself and Will investigates.

There follows lots of wild action and some great special effects. Smith is very efficient at this sort of thing whilst injecting some homour. He also gets to show off his well muscled body.

It's another fun film for an evening in. No great brain work required.

Another Asimov robot story that was filmed was The Bicentennial Man. I've not seen it all, but it looked a bit slushy and sentimental.

Added a feed from my blog

Although I update my Multiply site more often, my site at Bag of Spoons is still important to me. Luckily I can make them reflect each other using the wonders of RSS. This is what allows headlines from one site to appear on another. It's also the technology behind Bloglines which allows me to keep up with the latest from around 50 sites.

To make life easier someone produced RSS Digest that can produce a line of Javascript that will display a given feed in the format you require. I've used it to get the headlines from my blog on my Multiply front page. Works nicely apart from lacking dates and times. I'll look into that some time.

I also use RSS Digest to display my latest del.icio.us links and music listening over on my blog.

I need to look again at getting a feed from Multiply onto my blog. Apparently it's a bit non-standard and the links didn't work properly last time I tried.

BTW I've seen some people have managed to really change the look of their Multiply pages. Personally I'm not so into the eye candy. I'm more interested in getting the information across. I'd be interested if Multiply could handle adding more Semantic Web type details.

Yahoo joins the bandwagon

It looks like Yahoo have finally realised that people like social network sites, like Multiply. Their 360 site is coming on-line soon and seems to offer very similar facilities.

I have a soft spot for Yahoo. I used them for search in the days before Google and have had an email account there for many years. I still use their portal for news, weather, shares and cartoons. I also used their messenger before I got into more open technologies.

I'll stick with Multiply for now as I've built up a network and some content. Bagofspoons will remain my own bit of the net for techie stuff.

What was that yellow bird?

Yesterday we saw a new bird in our garden. It stood out because it was bright yellow. Due to our digital camera issues I couldn't easily get a picture of it. The camera on my Palm was too wide-angle to get a decent shot. Eventually I used the video camera to get some footage of it. See the attached picture.

Anyway, this bird was about sparrow-sized with a longer tail. Yellow apart from dark patches on top of head and wings. I looked in our wildlife book and at various sites including this one, but can't match it. The yellow wagtail and yellowhammer were close, but not quite right. Maybe it's escaped from someone's aviary.

The usual visitors to our garden include sparrow, robin, wren, blackbird, fieldfare, thrush, collared dove, blue-tit, chaffinch and, once, sparrow hawk. Our bird feeder has been very well attended this winter.

UPDATE: Opinion from one birdwatcher is that it's an escaped canary.

Big Fish

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Comedy

It's a Tim Burton film, so expect wierdness. It's the story of a tall tale teller, player by Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney. He lives an adventurous life in the southern US, encountering some strange people. It's a sort of fairy tale that reminder me a little of Forest Gump. There's a major father/son relationship theme running through it. Not Burton's best, but still fun.

Funny weather

There's been quite a lot of snow here this winter, but none has lasted. This morning we awoke to a light covering and was still snowing. Walked the kids up the road walking on nice, crisp snow and big flakes falling. Then it turned to rain and washed it all away.

Some schools in the area were closed, but not in Arlesey.

We don't seem to cope well in this country with even light snow. Maybe if it becomes more frequent we will learn. People in colder countries must just laugh at us when they have a metre of snow and -20C.