Perhaps it could be something to do with the fact that I know have four domains and sites/blogs to take care of, and two of those need building from scratch.
Yes it is fair to say that things are a little hectic right now, but in a good way.  I think.  Ask me in a few weeks time for an answer to that one.

The primary reason for my tardiness in blog post writing is that I have spent almost every spare moment I have over the last month or so trying to launch a new business.  Not that I thought it was going to turn into a fully fledged company.
Around eight years ago my Mum wrote a book and tried to get it published.  The book is the story of her life and the development of her gift as a spiritual medium, spanning a weighty 250ish pages of A4 sized text at present.
But despite their best efforts no publishers were interested at the time, and it has taken until now with the advent of self publishing through sites such as Lulu.com that the book has been resurrected and finished off.

Mum wrote the book, Dad edited and put it into book format and now I’m finishing the whole thing off and getting it “out there” at long last.
This has proved to be a much larger task then I had originally anticipated.  Sally read the book through and proofed it herself initially.  I made her corrections and then had to read through it again myself, and there were a lot of changes that had to be made.  Not so much with mistakes (these were few and far between, and the spelling and grammar checker in Word made short work of them) but more with formatting and general sentence structure.

Fortunately what at times seemed like a never ending task was completed on Monday this week, so we have finally entered the home stretch for getting the finished product out the (virtual) door.
The book is entitled Living With The Light, and will be made available as a DRM-free digital download from the official site (currently under construction), and as a physical book which will can be purchased online from Lulu and through Amazon.  A free sample PDF containing a couple of chapters will be coming soon to the site, as well as the possibility of an eBook via Lulu that can be read on the Amazon Kindle/Apple iPad, etc.
We also have enough material for probably another two books, so if this one proves to be popular there is plenty more where it came from!

This new venture has also meant that we have had to form a new company to deal with it, so in a rather surreal way I am now the director of Cullen IT Consultancy and the newly formed Lightbringer Enterprises.  Five years ago I wouldn’t have imagined I would run one company, let alone two!
For the last month I have been IT Consultant Man(TM) during the day, and Wanna Publishing Tycoon at night, which is a rather tiring double act to be playing.  My primary IT contract will be coming to an end in a weeks time, and then we are taking a couple of weeks off before heading onto the next venture.

I might even get a chance to watch some movies or play some games!

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I’ve performed yet another blog u-turn with this site.

I know I said it was going…again.  I wasn’t going to continue…again.  Haven’t got enough time to continue….blah blah de blah.  Sorry.  I’ll hang my head a little bit but hopefully my loyal readers (yes there are still several of you) will continue to stick with me.

I spent a bit of time recently thinking about what this site has given back to me over the years and it far outweights both the financial and time constrictions.  There have been lots of little things nudging me along, some new Freesat stuff, the offer of some more review Blu-rays and other factors.
My superb hosters Netmotivated have just migrated both this site and Cullen IT onto newer, probably shinier servers running PHP and MySQL 5.  I’ve noticed a performance increase already.  Not everything went according to plan, with the previous theme I was using here failing to work.

Long story short (and a better story would be why on Earth I have spent a large chunk of Christmas Eve getting this stuff working again) everything is working fine, and as you can see I now have a new theme.  It’s yet another Solostream premium theme which I actually purchased as a new skin for the business site.  But that site can wait until the new year for some changes.
Hopefully this new theme is pleasing on the eyes.  It’s very similar to the old one, but with a few extra bells and whistles added for good measure.

Time for me to sign off, I’ve been getting some slightly aggravated looks at the amount of time I’ve spent getting the site up and running again today.  Time to power down and enjoy the Christmas holiday.  I suggest you do the same.

Onwards and upwards into 2010, thanks for sticking with me.

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You can click that link, or the advertising banner above this very post if you wish.  That is the place where all computing talk will be written about.  This site will stay as the personal/gaming/HD hub, with Windows and other enterprise IT related musings on the business site.

The site itself is around 95% complete, there are a few imaging issues here and there and the text isn’t perfect on some of the pages but it is a start and I’m happy for it to be finally described as being live.

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Regular readers will be aware that I am in the midst of expanding my business, and I’m very pleased to say that everything is going well so far.  I’m busy every day, and money is coming in and you can’t ask for much more than that!
I have had two major projects on the go for the last few months, one to get the business web site fully operational (this is currently in a state of flux as I’ve been so busy with work that I haven’t been able to update it), and the other is redecorating and refitting the office at home.

As you can see from this photo, there is an awful lot of equipment crammed into a very confined space.  When it’s just me working on my own it isn’t too bad, but when I have equipment coming in for customers to be configured before going out again it is a little like being in a crowded lift and you can’t move until someone gets out.

Hardly ideal.  So a few weeks ago we made serious preparations for the rather massive task of getting the room sorted out.  Like many fellow geeks I have a lot of stuff.  An awful lot of stuff, and when the room is cleared out everything literally fills up the entire house.  There are cupboards and shelves crammed full of computer media, DVDs and games.  If it can be pressed onto a disc, chances are I have dozens, if not hundreds of them.

The key factor in reclaiming space that would mean I could actually work would be to get rid of one of the desks.  I’ve had the current ones for many years, but they are just too wide and bulky, and trying to squeeze in multiple PCs, a Mac and the games consoles has simply become unworkable.

We took a trip to Ikea and decided on a single, large desk that will be placed under the window.  This would be large enough to house the 2 24″ Samsung TFT monitors, and if we are really lucky the iMac as well.  If the Mac can’t be fitted in, it will be offered up for sale.  Where that sits in the pantheon of things at the moment is unknown.

The games consoles would then move to their own dedicated TV stand, separating the room for work and pleasure. I did toy with the idea of moving the consoles up into the loft with the retro kit, and having a couple of Velux windows installed up there.  As with all loft/attic spaces it gets unbelievably hot up there during the roughly five minutes of summer we get each year.  The failing with that plan was it would cost several hundred pounds to do this.  So that was an obvious no.
I wanted to create an environment that I would be happy to do both work and rest in.  At the moment the green walls feel like they are coming in on me, and I don’t feel at all happy or creative when I am in there.

We decided on Caramel Cream paint from Homebase, got the supplies in and ordered the furniture from Ikea.  This is due to be delivered next Wednesday, so it was time to leap, or perhaps gently saunter into action.

On Thursday evening we stripped the room entirely.  All told it took just under three hours, and by the time we were done the entire house was filled with clutter.  There was so much stuff that we couldn’t even sit down on a sofa.  The picture above is how the lounge looked halfway through.

By the end of the evening, Cullen IT was running off this lonely Sonicwall and Netgear wireless access point!  With only my laptop propped on the window ledge as I gave e-mail support to a customer with internet connectivity problems!

Fortunately by the time I got home from work on Friday afternoon, Sally being the gem that she is had already done all the prep work and cutting in.  All I had to do was bust out the paint roller and get cracking.  Thanks to it being such a warm day as soon as one wall was finished, it was already dry.  Good job as well because covering green with cream doesn’t work too well, even for a supposedly one coat paint.  But I had two coats of paint on the walls by five o’clock!  Then all that was left was for us both to cut in a second time and stop for dinner.

Then the really difficult task began.  The one of trying to fit everything back in, or at least some of it on a temporary basis.  Due to new furniture being delivered in under a weeks time, I needed a temporary “lash up” with at least one PC, the NAS box and a couple of screens.  Not being a massive fan is spending out a lot of money, Sally hit upon a brainwave for the entertainment unit, rather than buy a new one from Ikea we had one in the loft that was hardly ever used with all the old consoles on it.  It was bought for when we had a widescreen CRT TV (the bad old days – pre-HD!) but was perfect for what I wanted.  There is enough shelf space for the Denon amp, PS3 and Xbox 360 and it was sat a few feet above us.

Very wearily we dismantled the stand and brought it down, and did a temporary placement check to make sure everything worked.  This is the net result (this photo was taken the day after).  Everything works just fine, but my rear speaker cables weren’t long enough.
That was it for Friday, we collapsed in an exhausted heap at this point.

On Saturday morning we were up bright and early (well perhaps not so bright) and after bacon sandwiches, headed out to Boscombe and our nearest branch of Richer Sounds.  These guys are great, quality merchandise at great prices.  They can’t always beat the online pricing but if you need something AV related in a hurry they are always my go to guys.  Richer is also one of the busiest shops you will ever see.  At 10am when we walked in seconds after the shop opened they already had perhaps half a dozen customers, and the phone was ringing off the hook.

We swiftly exited with 25 metres of Cambridge Audio cable and I soon had the rear speakers sat on the floor, cabled up and tested just right.  Really we need new stands for the front and rear speakers, how that will play out this week I don’t quite know.  But for now they are sat here like this!

The last thing we did on Saturday was to get the main desktop PC up and running once again.  I had to image my old SBS 2008 server which is being sold next week, do a little customer tech support and then find a home for all my stuff.  Fortunately we managed to clear 40% of the trouble right away, relocating a storage cupboard into the hallway so several hundred DVDs didn’t have to find a new home!

And this is where part 1 of the office story ends.  Next Wednesday we will take delivery of the new furniture and when everything is finished, I will report back.  There is also a set of Flickr photos available showing the whole nightmare in far more depth that is right and proper.

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So things aren’t quite as they should be at present.  I’m working through ironing out the kinks, I need a new title bar and to get the advertisements all set up (don’t worry, the advertisements will only be for my own company).
I also know that the formatting on some of the older posts is very messed up, especially the AV Setup 3.0 page, but as that is now extremely out of date I will be updating it at some point in the future with an all new one.

Please stand by.  Normal service will be resumed shortly.

UPDATE! Everything is nearly back to normal again now.  I need to sort the title bar out, but that is just minor window dressing.
The Featured article images are now a uniform size, making everything a little more pleasing on the eye.  I’ve also removed the old morphing banner advert for the company site which my nephew so kindly designed for me last year.  I feel the banner ad above each post is a far better way to go, it displays all the information that is needed and doesn’t assult your eyes when you view it.

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Dell FAIL Redux
Just recently I wrote a post berating Dell for shipping a Studio Hybrid machine to me with a faulty fan.  Unfortunately the story got worse before it got better!  I received word just before the Easter break that the fan and also the heatsink for the CPU had been replaced and it was on the way back to me.
It was delivered on Tuesday morning when I got back to work (in a laptop box that didn’t fit the machine no less), covered in scratches!

As I discovered machines don’t go back directly to Dell themselves, like many large firms they use a third party repair firm and I obviously got the heavy handed YTS trainee working on mine.  The blue plastic sleeve that the machine sits in looked like it had been dragged along a workbench top, and the actual machine wasn’t immune to a few marks and scrapes.
All very unimpressive for a brand new machine that was repaired when in reality is should have been replaced with a brand new one (and I should have politely requested this during my support call, that’s what you get for being affable perhaps ).

Fortunately Dell customer service and support is actually very good, and they sent me out a replacement sleeve and the machine is installed under the TV and working extremely well (there may well be a full review of it in the near future if I get time).

Twitter
I’ve created a second Twitter account for business and IT related tweets to keep work separate from personal stuff.  The account name is CullenIT if you would like to follow me.  If things come to fruition in the near future that feed should be integrated with the business site.  Speaking of which…

Business
I never blogged it here, but I made a plan a while ago to start building my business when we came back from our holiday.  When I started the business almost three years ago I always intended to go contracting for a few years, and then try to move into consultancy and work with a number of my own clients.

Incredibly the very first day I started to work towards that someone came along and I am very happy to be supporting a local web design firm, Forest Design.  Forest Design is a family run business looking after nearly 200 web sites for local businesses, so if you are in need of some quality web design done by a very nice group of people, tell them I sent you!
This is also pushing me on to getting the business web site finally up and running, although I am wondering whether I should just give up on Joomla and go back to WordPress for the time being.  I know WordPress and its quirks rather well after almost three years of blogging, and the prospect of spending a large amount of time getting Joomla to work the way I want it to doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm.  We shall see.

Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Surround
I picked up one of these sound cards from Creative this week.  I have been using the onboard sound from my standard Dell Inspiron desktop machine ever since I bought it (having sent my ultra l337 X-Fi Elite Pro card to my design genius Anto a few months ago) but stereo sound from a 5.1 speaker setup isn’t exactly great.

This is a USB SoundBlaster designed to add decent sound primarily to notebook PCs, but it works quite happily in my Vista x64 machine.  It contains the all important digital optical output and for £50 I’ve got a mini X-Fi card that sounds great.  I highly recommend it to anyone in need of something slightly better than onboard PC audio.

Buffy
And finally for today, after years of having various people pester me into watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I finally relented over the Easter weekend.  I couldn’t see what the fuss was all about after the first few episodes, but then something clicked and I can’t stop watching it.
We finished watching the first season last night, so only six more seasons and around 130 episodes to go then!

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After a prodding from Brian (and thanks also to Lee, DXEndar, Maceie and others) that the Day the Earth Stood Still review wasn’t displaying properly I have tracked the problem down to being with Internet Explorer.
I write mosts of posts in Word 2007 and paste them into the WordPress editor.  When the post is saved it creates a load of extra code at the top which I just delete and then publish.  Everything looks fine in Firefox (my browser of choice), but after checking the posts for RE5 and also the Ghosts of Mars review none of them display in good old IE.

It turns out there is also some extra extra, super secret hidden HTML code that the pasted Word document text puts in that prevents the post from displaying correctly (I enjoy the irony that two Microsoft products can’t work together happpily).  A quick edit of the raw HTML stripping everything that shouldn’t be there out and abrakebabra, they now display ok again.

Thanks to all of you who let me know about this, I’ll be sure to test the posts in various browsers before publishing them completely in future!  And as an aside, if there are any other posts on the site that do not display correctly in Internet Explorer then please let me know.

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the work/life balance and trying to leave the wonderful world of IT behind me of an evening and do something more productive.  Like watch TV.

So far I would have to say it has gone…fairly well.  As with starting any new project or plan, you do really well for the first couple of days and then gradually slip back into your old ways.  My plan was to continue working when getting home from work at three o’clock until around five and at that point the computers stay off until tomorrow.  Last week I did this pretty well, but the downside is that I don’t always come straight home after work.  Personal commitments and life in general dictate that stuff will happen and will need to be dealt with after work, which meant that after getting home I would spend some time working in the evening because I wasn’t able to do so that afternoon.

I also hadn’t planned for the fact that things don’t always go to plan with computers, and when the SBS 2003 server decided to keel over when I tried to reboot it last Friday night I was left with the unfortunate reality that I would have to go and sort it out.  So last Saturday morning came and we had to get up relatively early to drive over to the office and get that back up and running again.  Not really a problem as we were going to visit my folks anyway, but I could have done without waking up and jumping straight into the shower and heading out the door.  Silver lining?  I charge double at the weekend.

Then there was Windows 7.  I have already posted my thoughts on it here on the site, and have spent a lot of time this week getting to know it.  Then there’s the obligatory accountants work and continuing on with my plans to grow the business when we return from our holiday in the middle of March.
But this weekend is earmarked as “serious downtime”.  No computers, no Windows 7 and no business talk.  The rest of this evening belongs to Xbox Live and the next two days are for some sleep recovery and other general fun.

My final word for the week, something I heard on the radio yesterday morning.  It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.
Have great weekends everybody!

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Now that is how to start off your day.  Much better than the insanity I encountered a little bit earlier this morning.  I’m currently on “Christmas Lockdown”, which means I went out and about yesterday, put the world to rights delivering gifts to the elderly (ahem) and when I got home that was it.  The car was in the garage, and wouldn’t be moving again until Christmas morning.

I got up early this morning, Sally went off to work (ho ho ho) and I thought as it was so early I would head down to Tesco before it got busy and just grab a couple of things.  Nothing we actually needed, just the rather bizarre combination of bacon and chocolate (hmm, bacon flavoured chocolate…that could catch on).  But when I pulled into the car park at eight o’clock I found it was nearly three quarters full.  At eight o’clock in the morning!  Too much bacon and chocolate is bad for you said my brain, and I turned round and came straight back home.  Back on lockdown once again.  It’s not too bad though, the food’s good and there’s plenty of entertainment.

In web site news, I have now renewed the site for another twelve months and have also upgraded my package.  Since all of the Freesat posts went live my blog hits have gone a little crazy, and also because people decide it’s great to hotlink to my images which is great for sucking down my bandwith.

Every month towards the final week I get a “bandwith soon to be exceeded” warning from my hosters (the superb Netmotivated) but this month it came far earlier than usual.  Those will be a thing of the past now as the new package allows for quadruple the bandwith so it should be smooth sailing throughout 2009 on the good ship petecullen.net (please remember to keep all limbs inside the vehicle for the duration).

On the gaming front, Prince of Persia sucked me in and would not let go.  I never played any of the Sands of Time trilogy on the last generation of consoles, despite many people saying they are some of the finest games evahz!!!111, etc.  I may have to try Sands of Time, I’m sure I have it for the original Xbox somewhere.

But this new reboot of the franchise I found to be great to be able to game and relax at the same time (for the most part).  It also awoke the item collection whore within me, just like the Agility Orbs in Crackdown, the light seeds that are collected from each area in PoP kept me messing around in the beautiful environments for hours.

Yes, the game looks absolutely stunning.  Each area in the world starts off as being corrupted, you traverse the environment with your AI buddy Elika (possibly the most likeable companion in a videogame I have ever played), defeat a boss and then heal the land.  Healed lands leave 45 of the light seeds to collect.  Some of which you can’t get to on your first attempt.  Unlock enough seeds you gain more powers, more powers mean access to new areas and more light seeds.

It’s a real collect-a-thon, but it never felt like a chore.  It is best to play the game in small chunks, which is what I did for the most part until I played a monster six hours of it on Sunday and a good three to four yesterday.  By that stage I just wanted to complete the game and see the ending, and it does start to get very repetitive.  The combat is essentially a mess of QTE combos chained together that do feel fun and fluid to begin with, that tend to get a little monotonous towards the end.

That said, you get plenty of game for your money, especially as here in the UK Play.com are selling it for £17.99 and in the US it is $40.  There is an achievement if you complete the game in under 12 hours.  I didn’t get it, I took my time and reckon in total I probably played around 15 hours.

My only criticism is that when the game is complete (and it does a great job of carrying on after the credits roll) that is it, you can’t go back to the healed lands and try to ace your light seed count.  If I had known that I would have created a save game before the final confrontation.  But that is only a minor quibble.  I bought the game by chance and am extremely glad I did, I highly recommend it.

Another game I chance purchased was Fable II which I started last night.  My initial impressions weren’t good, the whole cockney villagers voiceover at the beginning really started to grate after a while.  But once what is essentially the tutorial quest when you are a child is over I found myself really getting into it.  It’s definitely an RPG for people who don’t usually like RPGs.

I’ve done a few quests, picked up some powers and played fetch with my dog.  With the added bonus that unlike having a real dog, this one doesn’t relieve itself in the street.

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My own product placement dislikes aside, yes the long delayed social networking/shoppers paradise/sexual predator hangout does finally go live later on today.  I have been playing…hold on that isn’t really the right word is it?  I’m loathed to use the new catch all videogame buzz-word “experience”, but needs must.  I have been experiencing (somewhere an angel just lost its wings) the joys of Home for the last couple of weeks since being sent a beta invite.

In it’s unfinished public beta (or server stress test as I like to think of it) form the service has held up pretty well, with the added bonus that large amounts of the product placement and branding opportunities have been nowhere to be seen.  Walk around the shopping mall and there are plenty of “coming soon” type hoardings over the windows.
It its most crude form, Home is still very entertaining.  You begin by creating your avatar, which can look disturbingly lifelike.  Make a choice from a rather limited selection of clothing (don’t worry, you can soon buy some Diesel products with real money for your fake person!) and begin a tutorial, starting off in your own Home appartment.  This overlooks a Monaco style riviera, and graphically it looks extremely attractive.

From here you can get the lift down to the Home Square, wander round, look at some advertisements for PlayStation properties, watch one of the video walls dotted around and then find some real folks and sit down for a game of checkers.  Head into the bowling alley, play some pool or bowling once again with other people, perhaps even hop on to an arcade cabinet and play one of the games there.

All joking aside about all this branding and marketing, if you ignore all of that stuff, Home is an entertaining place to spend some time.  I can’t really see myself wanting to get parties together and play games and all that jazz but that is predonimantly because most of my friends are on Xbox Live.  What I’m really interested in is to see how the service develops and what benefits it gives to PS3 owners.

Also on the subject of consumerism, there was an usual Tweet from Major Nelson a couple of days ago to an NPR article talking to Martin Lindstron, the author of a book entitled “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy”.  The book details how companies are marketing their products direct to our subconscious and our own responses to them.  The radio shows segment is available online and lasts for about half an hour.  It makes for interesting listening, and can be found HERE.

I’m very interested in this kind of thing, I try and avoid the trappings of rampant consumerism, but having just worked out that I have spent over £400 in the last two months alone on videogames I’m clearly not as immune as I thought.  It would appear a games rental service will be the answer for me in the new year.

Finally for today, at this time of year I always get the urge to start playing Animal Crossing again on the Gamecube.  I don’t know why, but Christmas just seems like the right fit for Nintendo’s charming (but never sickly) game.  I remember saying on Red Rant (RIP) a long time back that I would buy another Wii when the new Animal Crossing was released.  Sadly as the new version is essentially the same game again, but with the option to visit the city, I’ll stick with the original thanks.

My town is currently under a large amount of snow, fairly lights adorn the trees and I have waded through everyone saying “Where have you been for the last 11 months? We were really concerned”.  It may be a host of scripted routines, but there is something just so appealing about this game that I can’t stop playing it.  Even though I have Fable II, Resistance 2, Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider Underworld sat unplayed on the shelf.  At least Nintendo saved me some money so I don’t have to buy another Wii.

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Just like Odyssey, I’m going back to my roots.  What does that mean for you, gentle reader?  It means that the in-depth Blu-ray and game reviews are going, and personal blog posts are making a comeback.  While I am, of course, extremely grateful to the fine SPHE PR department for sending me review discs of their latest titles, they take up a very large amount of my time and generate a fairly small amount of traffic.  Reviewing a disc takes several hours to watch (especially if it is a marquee release with a large amount of bonus content) and in some cases just as long to actually write the review itself.

From now on if I talk about a game or a movie it will have been purchased with my own ill-gotten cash and I will keep it simple and to the point.  Much like the Microreviews that I have been writing of late, a brief overview of the movie and how it looks and sounds.  That’s what most people want, from what I can gather.

12 of 12 stays, provided Chad wants to keep it going.  Chad is in quite a bad way at present and the last thing on his mind is keeping this going, but I’ll be continuing with it.  The world needs to see pictures of my dinner dag nabbit!  But seriously, big love and support is going out to Chad from me and all of my fellow 12′ers.  Hope you pull through buddy.

The business blog WILL BE COMING too, I promise thee!  By the end of the month if all goes well.
If I can brighten just one persons day with this news then it will be worth it.  I can think of someone who will be pleased, and it’s not just my hosters.

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Which brings me to the future of this particular site.  As of December 31st, PeteCullen.net will also be going offline.  There are many reasons for this, but the primary ones are time, money and reward.  For the last year I have been struggling to keep the site updated with content on a regular basis and to be perfectly honest with you, gentle reader, my heart just isn’t in it any more.

Why December 31st?  That’s when my annual hosting package expires with Netmotivated, and I won’t be spending the £100 I need to keep the site running.
But it’s not all doom and gloom.  I still intend to get my company web site up and running, which will contain a blog that will be more focussed towards the IT industry as opposed to the entertainment one.  I’m looking at creating an archive of this site on that domain, so that all of the content that is currently here will be available there.

Until then, watch some HDTV, play some videogames, phone a friend and go and do something nice for a loved one.

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Unfortunately I’ve had a cold bug brewing for the last few days which has now unleashed itself so I’m spending a very quiet weekend doing as little as possible. Three cheers for Day and Night Nurse is all I can say.

TV
Getting down to the important business of digital entertainment, it’s officially “on” with the new TV seasons pretty much in full swing (although I’m jonesing for 30 Rock to return at the end of October), and I’m cutting out a few shows that are past their prime and taking a look at some new ones.

My Name Is Earl has been ditched from the PVR, I watched the first episode of the fourth series and I just don’t find it funny anymore.
Shockingly after at least two sub-par series I really enjoyed the first episode of the new series of Desperate Housewives. Shifting the story several years into the future and filling in the gaps with flashbacks is a good way to re-energise a show that has really been pretty turgid since the first season.

Pushing Daisies was back this week, one for Sally but not for me. The whole cutesie fairlytale thing seems to have gotten a little bit stale after only one (reduced) season.
J.J. Abrams Fringe is getting rave reviews and rightly so, this is the closest thing to a spiritual successor to the X-Files I have seen in years. This week’s fourth episode was a little dull but I’m sure it is going to be some sort of scene setter to introduce recurring characters and charge the rest of the season which continues in two weeks time. Long time X-Files fans should also welcome the inclusion of Darin Morgan as a producer on the show. Many of the other XF alumni are now working on Supernatural and David Nutter is trying to sprinkle his magic onto CBS’ new show The Mentalist. It’s another crime drama show that is a little by the numbers but it’s an enjoyable way to pass 43 minutes.

Rounding out TV, Heroes…the first episode really, REALLY bored me. I haven’t seen episodes two or three yet. On the plus side you can now watch it on BBC HD, and it looks really nice. I’ll still stick with it though, it can’t be any duller than series 2…can it?!?!
And finally, Chuck was back this week. Along with Bones it’s probably my favourite thing to watch right now, just a bit of light hearted fun. And I’m sure we could all do with that during these uncertain times.

Games
Take a look at the release schedule for the rest of the year. Just like each and every year it’s going to be an expensive couple of months for gaming fans. I’ve got Resistance 2, Gears 2, Fallout 3, LittleBigPlanet and Dead Space currently on my preorder list, and I’m sure that is only going to get larger.

Right now I’m playing Wipeout HD and Pure on the PS3. Pure may be a cynical copy of SSX and Motorstorm by Disney, but it’s great fun and considering we haven’t seen an SSX game (perhaps that should be, a DECENT SSX game) for quite some time this fills in the void nicely. The music is terrible though, unlike Wipeout HD which is as sublime as ever.

I played a large chunk of Mercenaries 2 but then ground to an abrupt halt and realised I’m never going to play that game again. The same goes for Viva Pinata, so those games will be going up for sale in the next few days. I’ve got to try and fund the rest of the years releases somehow!

Silent Hill Homecoming was released in the USA this week, but the Euro release isn’t until November so I have ordered it from Movietyme. Three cheers to Sony for making all PS3 games region free. £32 for a new release isn’t to be sniffed at either.

Movies
Movietyme continue to really impress me with shipping out movies before the street date. Getting Iron Man two weeks early put an extremely large smile on my face, and they have done it again as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull arrived on Blu-ray this morning.

I still stand by what I said about the movie at the time of its theatrical release, it may be fashionable to bash it into the ground but I still enjoyed it for what it is. This BD looks and sounds great and has a ton of special features that are pretty much all in HD. For more information you can check out HD Digest’s full review. Sadly, I don’t have the time to write one at present.

That’s enough waffling for one blog post. Thanks for sticking with me, I’ll try and keep this up this time!

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It’s a fair amount to cram into under 24 hours, but look at what Jack Bauer can achieve with the same amount of time.  I do wish we were staying an extra night actually, I really want to check out the Doctor Who Exhibition.  We’ll have to save that for next time.

But I’m going up there almost techno free, no laptop and not even my iPod.  I’ll have my phone for Twitter updates and a digital camera for snaps and that’s it.

Finally to round up this quick update today, I’m now completely addicted to Uncharted again and stand at 82% complete with just over seven hours of gameplay.  I want to hammer through this by the end of the weekend and get back to some Metal Gear.
I also received an e-mail yesterday from Solostream who designed the very theme that skins this site.  They have a new, super shiny theme with extra bells and whistles that is likely to become the foundation for the business blog.

All being well, I’m hoping to at least have the blog framework for that running by the end of next week.

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Regular readers may have noticed the blog turn into some kind of product shill over the weekend.  “But how would we notice the difference” you cry?

Everything is back up and running once again. The problem? Err, I didn’t pay the bill! My domain expired in the early hours of Sunday morning, and it took around 36 hours for it to reactivate and then populate the DNS servers around the world.

Needless to say, I’ve put an annual reminder in my Outlook calendar to renew!

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Never heard of IFA?  Neither had I, but in 2006 the show (which is open to both press and the general public) received 212,000 visitors and was attended by 1,049 exhibitors.
What’s on display?  TVs, home cinema, high performance audio, cameras, computers, videogames, networking equipment, mobile phones, pretty much all the things that I am passionate about.

Naturally most of my attention will be focussed on the home cinema equipment, expect a whole host of HD coverage from the show itself, and the Sony event that Dave and I will be attending.

It’s a dirty job, but someones got to do it

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It was purely based around the new series and a few things were added over time (we went back later in the year after the series had finished and the exhibition was about to pack up).  I’ve uploaded the photos to my Flickr site, and have some more to follow.  You can find them by clicking the link on the sidebar, or just clicking right HERE.

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I’m having a few teething troubles with the theme right now. Mad, insane props to Cornell for helping me out with a formatting issue with the images. There was a problem earlier with the comments page not having the Submit button showing in the right place (thanks for the heads-up on that one Bush) which was caused by a corrupt PNG file of all things!

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I received some new Blu-ray movies yesterday, and have a couple of others on order, so watch out for reviews of…

Silent Hill (BD)
Serenity (HD-DVD)
F&F:Tokyo Drift (HD-DVD)
Identity (BD)
Gothika (BD)
Secret Window (BD)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (BD)
The Complete Matrix Trilogy (HD-DVD)

In the meantime, why not sign up for the Red Rant forums, and while you’re at it, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes (it helps us with subscriber numbers).

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