Author: Skevos Mavros

Brown Outs, Talk Back, and The BBC

Thanks to an extended brownout, Skevos has too much time to think.

I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s nearly four in the morning and ever since we got home (about seven hours ago) the house has been in one long brown out. Obviously I’ve seen brown outs before, they’re a fact of life in Brisbane and they’re part of the reason I bought a UPS unit to protect my PC data, but until tonight they’ve always been momentary events.
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Underworld

Surprisingly good horror-action film from a first-time director. 8.5 out of 10

Title: Underworld
Where: Balmoral Cinemas, Screen 7, Queensland, Australia
When: 26 January 2004 – 9:20pm

I went into this film with very low expectations. The seen-too-often trailers for Underworld, with their Matrix-style slow-motion acrobatic gun battles and cast members strutting around wearing black clothing of various tightness and glossiness, made the film seem so preposterously pompous and self-consciously cool that I was sure it was going to be a silly, silly film and a drag to watch.
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Fake Microsoft

Skevos discovers a new low in computer viruses.

Phew. There’s nothing like a fresh WindowsXP installation to make you realise how many people out there must have virus-riddled PCs – after all, my new installation of XP can’t be to blame, can it? I’ve been getting all the usual spam lately – Nigerian opportunities to lose all my money, pills to make me hallucinate that my breasts are larger, the chance to buy fake degrees to ruin my career prospects, etc etc. But I’ve started getting a lot more of those disguised emails that attempt to trick me into running their attachments. The days of simple emails that state “open the attachment for a fireworks animation!” are gone. These days they are disguised as all manner of innocent or important-sounding things, and I’ve learned to ignore them all. Yet the latest virus email to quietly slither into my inbox is almost a work of genius in its presentation.
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PFTC Slaves

For once the PFTC gets it right, and gets slammed for it.

Yeesh – it seems the PFTC is damned no matter what they do.

Today’s Courier Mail had a headline on page three that read “Movie body backs down on search for ‘slave labour’“. You can view the online version of the article here (note the online edition is now gone – it had a less sensationalist headline, but the body of the article appears the same as the print edition). After reading it a couple of times, it looks to me like the PFTC tried to do the right/smart/realistic thing on a slightly touchy subject, handled it a tiny bit clumsily, and got well-and-truly roasted for it.
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It Pays to be Paranoid

I’ve been getting a lot more dodgy emails sent from infected PCs lately (and I’m not the only one). So when all these emails containing dodgy attachments started appearing in my Mozilla email reader, my virus checker helpfully popped up and presented me with various ways of dealing with them. Like an idiot, I clicked “Wipe files”. The moment I clicked it I remembered that Mozilla stores all the emails for each folder as a single file. Which meant that my virus checker had just erased all of the emails in my inbox. All 1,627 of them.

Bugger.

But, thanks to my almost DAILY backups of about 8 Gigs worth of my data, I was able to restore them and only lose a handful of emails. So despite the raised eyebrows of those that think me nutty for backing up so often, it pays to be paranoid…

If you’re reading this and you sent me an email within 24 hours of this post, I may have lost it. On the other hand, if you’re one of the twenty people who are still waiting for a reply from me after sending me an email over three months ago… Um…. I have no excuse.

BIFF 2003 Screening

In which Skevos tries not to rant about BIFF 2003 since he only attended one screening.

Unlike last year, I’m not going to write a full rant about this year’s Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF). Due to work commitments I only went to one screening at BIFF this year, so I can hardly comment on the festival. The film I saw was the short film, Other People, produced by Vickie Gest and written and directed by Kieren Galvin. I helped out a bit with the sound on the film, and it was great to see it in front of an audience and on a 16mm film print. Remarkably, the print was taken directly from the PAL video edit and kine’d to a 16mm print, rather than going back to the original negative. I must say that the kine looked very good indeed, I found it very difficult to tell that it was a PAL video blow up and I’m usually pretty good at spotting that sort of thing (though the State Library doesn’t have a huge screen, and I’m sure being a black and white film hides a multitude of sins).
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Farewell Singapore

Skevos and Kareena say a fond farewell to Singapore.

Our ten day holiday in Singapore is ending, and it was really great – how people can visit Singapore for only two days and think they’ve seen even a fraction of what we’ve seen these last ten days is beyond us. What a great country – so much to see and do, especially for people like us who like to eat yummy food and wander through beautiful places. Speaking of food, I’m pretty sure that there are more vegetarian eating joints in Little India alone than there were meal times in our entire stay.
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Dead in 46 Years

I’m going to die in 46.4 years, according to this quiz, since it estimates I will only live to 81.4 years of age. I wonder if it takes into consideration the likely advances in medicine over the next forty years? Surely not.

Maybe I should lower my caloric intake in order to live longer. Hmmm, 46.4 years to go. Pshuh, I’ve got plenty of time to finish that sprinkler system I’ve been promising to build for Kareena. Plenty of time. No rush.

Cheaters

I’ve just watched my first, and hopefully last, full episode of Cheaters on Fox TV. I’d seen bits of the show before, ages ago, but never actually sat through a whole episode. Wow. I had my hand over my mouth through most of it, I was so shocked at how bad and yet how compelling it was. If there really are aliens out there tuning in to our television broadcasts to find out more about our species, Cheaters is one of those shows I pray they don’t see or else we’re doomed to be shunned by the rest of the cosmos.
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