Archive for November, 2005

Have a gander over at MetaCritic.com. Remind you of anything? How about Rotten Tomatoes. The whole giving stuff a rating based on what all the other critics have said. Seems a little familiar huh?

And in case your not aware, the proud owner of Rotten Tomatoes is IGN. One of the major gaming sites on the internet. And of course, one of CNet’s major properties is GameSpot, the other major gaming site on the internet.

In recent years, CNet have made a large bid to move into the entertainment arena, not just gaming. But whereas IGN have gone for channels, CNet just bought out other properties. They took MP3.com, TV Tome which they prompted turned into TV.com and also have Game FAQs.

CNet have already gone out for the best though. The amount of one word domains they own is scarey:

TV.com
Radio.com
MP3.com
Builder.com
Shopping.com
Help.com
Download.com
Downloads.com
Sharware.com
Freeware.com
Search.com
News.com
Com.com
Welcome.com

They probably have more too, I’ll post them as I think of them.

I got listening to LSRfm this morning. The Breakfast Show was on which was pretty good as they were talking about what was in the papers. Just tuned in now though and it’s all music so I’ve given it a miss for the moment. May have to check out some of the other stuff.

World Domination Soc seems to be going ok. I now have 21 of the 20 signatures I didn’t but Kev has lost his student card so he doesn’t know his student number and Olli was signed up by John so I need to check that with him before he counts. I have Oli (different guy, notice the spelling change ;)) almost interested in being the treasurer but I still need to find a secretary and have it approved by the union council so still a long way to go.

I went down to speak to John Schloss today about setting up World Domination Soc. He seemed to think it was some kind of polictical debate society as I don’t think I convayed the idea too well but I have a form to fill out so I really need to go overboard on the description and also brainstorm some more ideas to get into a real niche.

Hmm, I just booted up my laptop and I didn’t get the serious error message warning. Wierd. Last time I had it on, I spent all last night running a virus scan which uncovered two viruses and then I downloaded and installed Spybot: Search and Destroy which found tons of spyware on my system. I removed it all other than the Alexa stuff.

I don’t believe that all that stuff was actually spyware and viruses, I think these things are way over protective and as such create a lot of paranoia among novice users. After all, stuff like Alexa is on my system because I want it there.

Still I can see that one thing sending data out such as Alexa but that I didn’t actually need could be causing the error so while I still don’t believe I need a spyware checker most of the time, it did come in handy this time.

Presuming the problem is gone, I don’t like to proclaim that it has worked as I’m scared when I restart it will just come straight back again. But I’ll deal with that when it happens.

As I previously mentioned today (or technically yesterday) was Grant House’s formal dinner. It wasn’t a bad meal and afterwards everyone headed down to Bod Bar and then on to The Courtyard in town. That was pretty good although I never got round to the barbeque.

I had an urge to come back and listen to some Michelle Branch though so I headed off at 11:35 and after a quick stop at McDonalds, just over the road from the bus stop, I caught the bus back to Bod. At the moment I’m burning a disk image so that I can make some copies of the Random Questions to Random People DVD.

Went down to the union today to get some forms for my many societies. I asked at reception who sent me up to the arc who sent me down to someone else who I couldn’t be bothered to find so I’m probably going to wait until the forms are posted online. I don’t want to go talk to someone, they aren’t real societies :P.

Have another film making soc meeting tomorrow in which I am going to pitch my new idea that I mentioned last post and also premiere the video along with the other groups. If we don’t win the competition I will not happy. But then ours wasn’t great, I think it might have been better to leave some of the stuff that was funny rather than going it half funny half serious.

Finished putting together Deep Space Hardy on DVD last night, it has an extra interview, the choice to play all episodes or select one and a trailer. There were actually only five episodes ever made of it though. I wanted to do a commentary also sort of – I wanted it to be on there, I didn’t actually want to do it ;). In the end though I decided to skip it as I didn’t think it was worth it.

My laptop is currently being a bitch. I am just doing a system restore as I keep getting a critical error message as soon as it boots up which asks me to send an error report. It gets worse, as soon as I sent it, it comes back and asks me to send it again. You have to send it once or it will just stay on top of everything and it’s always sitting on the taskbar.

It’s been before, it normally occurs when I unplug my network but the network is in. I ran the network setup to try and fix it and now I think I have lost my network connection which if I have is just unbelievable. I think I might need to re-install Windows which I REALLY don’t want to do as I have everything. The error message is still there though, I hate Microsoft soooooo much.

I now have a list of 15-20 societies that I want to start up once the petition forms finally get posted on the LUU website. Well, I don’t really have a desire to start any of them, it would just be funny. I don’t think any of them are serious as the list includes Chris Soc, Another Film Society Soc and Random Soc.

Speaking of societies, I may turn up to the next LSTV meeting and see what that is about. I have a hot idea for a documentary which it might be good to pitch to them but I don’t want to defect from film making soc. I have a fms meeting on Wednesday in which Random Questions to Random People is going to be premiered. I need to burn some DVDs for that.

I also have a new movie I want to pitch to film making soc which is a kind of dark action movie like Max Payne or Payback (possibly Sin City also but despite my best efforts I have yet to see it). It’s a little ambiguous in that I am hoping the audience won’t be able to work out whether it’s serious or just a piss-take. The opening line is “they say you only eat two spoonfuls of beans in your life. Well I was about to eat three.”

I’m transfering all my movies onto DVD to make a giant library and stuff and am just burning the World Vision advert project I did for the first year of my media A-level. I tried encoding it though but I ran into some problems in that movies exported as avi from Flash so I had to take them into Premiere and re-encode them all before I could burn them to DVD.

The error message I got was:

no combination of filters could be found to render the stream

Not very helpful huh? I managed to get an explanation from Digital Digest.

Been out film making today (well technically yesterday). Went down to the union for a film making competition and the end result was a movie called Random Questions to Random People. It was awesome, I was directing it though we didn’t really stick to assigned roles, I even felt like a producer when I was rounding up interviewees (or victims as some would call them ;)). I’m putting the DVD together now.

It’s time I got my next movie started. I’m leaving my Sleepless script for the moment and see what the Film Making Society writers group can do with that. In the mean time I am working on a new script currently under the name of “Project Grant.”

It’s a horror movie an I am going to try and round some people up from my halls to get involved, it’s only a 2-3 person cast anyway so hopefully that shouldn’t be too hard to find. Once I get the movie out of the way I can get on with the important stuff – special feature documentaries, audio commentary and so on.