Archive | 2011

My Thoughts On The 2011 Oscars

As you’d know if you read this blog regularly, I love movies – I watch movies religiously…I watch 1-2 movies almost every night of the week. And after the Oscars, if I haven’t seen ALL of the nominations (not just the winners) I try and watch them.

I did pretty well with the 2010 nominations even managing to watch some of the the foreign entries like Un Prophète and White Ribbon.

This time around though, I’ve been pretty slack..with the house buying, renovation, bit of travel, lot of work and moving I’ve not even watched half of the Best Picture nominations. I’ll just cover my thoughts on the main categories.

Best Picture

Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham-Carter – how can King’s Speech not win? I was under no illusions The Social Network would win, and with the Oscars crowd Inception didn’t stand much of a chance either.

And well a lot of 2010 nominations haven’t been released here yet or are only hitting the screen now in the 2nd month of 2011. The top three I want to watch that I haven’t yet has to be Black Swan, The Fighter and True Grit.

Best Actor

Mr Darcy ftw! Haven’t seen the others yet except for Jesse so I can’t comment.

Best Actress

Hot Grits! Natalie Portman, I totally endorse the win and LOVE everything she’s been in way back since Leon: The Professional. She’s got 3 more big movies coming out in 2011 so I think it’s going to be a great year for her.

Best Director

Poor old Christopher Nolan has been left out in the cold when it comes to Best Director, he didn’t even get nominated. But it tends to be that way, sci-fi directors or directors of movies with heavy special effects often get snubbed. Just like it took years for the Oscars chaps to accept Steven Spielberg.

It’s won by Tom Hooper – who personally I’ve never heard of. But he’s the director of King’s Speech which won Best Picture…so there you go. Looking at his history he started off directing Byker Grove and Eastenders so I would have never expected him to get an Oscar!

Those are the categories that matter to me anyway, let me know what are your thoughts on the 2011 Oscars – any movies that you saw and loved that you think were passed over. And conversely of course if you’ve seen any of the nominations/winners and hated them.

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Happy Chinese New Year! HUAT AR!

Happy Chinese New Year 2011!

Happy Chinese New Year 2011!

Wishing you all a glorious, healthy, prosperous and happy year of the Rabbit!

HUAT AR!

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I should…

There’s a lot of things I should be doing, and a lot of things I am doing – meaning I have to neglect some of the things I should be doing…like blogging!

As usual it’s not a case of bloggers block as I have PLENTY of things to write about, I’ve just not had the time nor energy to put finger to keyboard and get them done.

Part of the problem being I had no computer for quite some time, and previous to that my PC was in the old apartment but I was in the new house..so all I had was my phone. I did try blogging from that a couple of times but it didn’t work out particularly well.

I’ve got my office in the new place set-up now though, got the desk up, chair is cleaned and in, got one of those plastic Ikea mat things to protect the floor, cleaned the shit out of my PC and changed all 5 case fans cos they were noisy, dusty and basically nasty.

I also got myself a Gigabit switch and the whole house is running on Gigabit now! Well at least from my study to the TV as that’s all that matters (for both the Unifi Hypp.TV and the HTPC I’ve got sitting there). I’ve got 3 things running on Gigabit which is enough (the DNS-323 NAS, my desktop the downloading beast and the XBMC box plugged into the TV).

My blog has moved over to the new hosting – so it should be faster and more stable now. It’s on an IPServerOne Green Server (more about that later).

This is actually my first post since last year, and my first post using Unifi – My Unifi Installation Experience here. I’ll talk more about the using Unifi experience soon (the line speed, latency, the TV offerings and quality and the phone line).

And we’ve officially moved into the new house now, got our bed up last Friday, completely cleared out the old place on Wednesday & Thursday night (until 5am..), the whole day Friday and Saturday morning. Then Saturday afternoon we got the cleaners in and Saturday night handed the keys back to the landlord – so we are actually officially out of there now!

It was indeed pretty stressful and wow….6 years of crap sure is a lot of junk. We had to be brutal in what we wanted to keep, sell, throw away or take with us. We ended up giving most of the big items to charity as the shop concept only really worked well for small items. And there were a lot of people who FFKed.

Anyway super busy at work now too and my mom is coming towards the end of this week…so even less likely I’ll be blogging. But I will try anyhow.

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Continue Reading · 6 Comments · General Nonsense