From the Orient

Merry Christmas Everyone

Paul Personal

I’m slowly working my way through the 4 DVD extended edition of “The Fellowship of the Rings”. I’m half way through the extended version of the movie, and hope to get it finished before I see “The Two Towers” on Sunday. It is the Appendices that really grabbed my attention.

They clearly show how hard it is to make a movie like “The Fellowship of the Rings”. Getting the actors to say their words in the right order and with the right intonation and what not seems to be the easiest part (especially if you work with the right actors and actresses).

The sheer hard work that went into every aspect of film, be it the score, the script or the digital effects. The merging of digital images with the marvelous miniatures and the New Zealand landscape (now top of the list of places to emigrate to), and adding in the fact that the Hobbits had to be shorter that the humans, elves and wizards. It is hard work just thinking about how they did it. Made me look forward to “The Two Towers” that much more.

Paul Personal

This is my last day in the office before the Christmas holidays. I’m back 6th January. Woo hoo.

This Christmas is the first one I’ve really looked forward to for many a year. I think the magic of Christmas left me at some point between 11 and 15. Certainly, I remember one Christmas where I certainly didn’t want to do the family thing, and read a new book (Eddings, IIRC) from cover to cover, not interacting with family once. The magic had certainly gone then.

This year is the first my eldest child is aware of Christmas and is excited by it. It is her third, but she was only three months old at her first and didn’t quite understand what was going on last year. Although she enjoyed opening her presents last year, she opened them one by one, playing with them as she went, without that Christmas excitement that causes you to rid off the paper, look at a present for a number of seconds before diving into the next present. Whilst you may not appreciate the present at the time, I really liked going through my collection later in the day, savouring all the presents one by one.

This year, my eldest is excited by Christmas, yet she doesn’t quite know what is going to happen Christmas day, but she loves the Christmas tree and the decorations. She’s seen Santa on a few occasions and not been scared of him as in the past. We’ve had to hide the presents, so she doesn’t open them, so no pile of presents under the tree.

It will be interesting what her reaction will be Christmas morning.

Paul Personal

I’ve wondered if it is ever worth using the cite attribute of blockquote, but Adrian Holovarty has been playing with CSS to automatically label blockquotes with their source URL. It looks pretty neat, but you can’t do anything with it, it is just a label. Then Paul Hammond explained that you can create a link using javascript and DOM and created a good proof of concept showing it working.

Paul Web Coding and Design

Just got the following from Radio Time TV Schedule Mailing list

“BBC2 late-night schedule changes
12:55am Buffy the Vampire Slayer – ten minutes longer than billed”

I guess they are putting back in the 10 minutes they cut out last night

Paul Buffy

Hmm, every entry in From the Orient has been given a pingback from “From the Orient”. Moreover, as there is no automatic pingback client, and I forgot to pingback Hixie’s Buffy entry[1]. And yet, there is a pingback entry for From the Orient on that page.

What is weirder is that the entry is just for http://www.dellah.com/orient/ not the full permalink. Shouldn’t this have failed?

Is this a kind of pingback spam? I dunno what has happened, as Stuart hacked pingback into MT, and its a pretty rough hack into the perl code (not that I know what the perl code is doing as Perl remains unKnown to me).

So, if someone else receives a pingback from me that is unnatural, I apologise but I don’t know what might have caused it.

[1] Not strictly true as I didn’t feel my entry warrented a link.

UPDATE: It wasn’t every entry, just the entries on my front page at the time it happened.

UPDATE UPDATE: Mystery solved, as Ian had been testing a new pingback client producing some odd effects.

Paul Blogging