Monthly Archives: August 2006

Movies & TV

Star Trek: 40th Anniversary

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September 8th marks the 40th anniversary of the arrival of the original Star Trek. Whilst we’re enjoying the re-runs of the digitally re-mastered episodes on the Sci-Fi channel, following the demise of Enterprise, and with a new movie not due until 2008, there will be no grand celebration story this time around. Or so you would think.

The fact is that although Paramount may not be doing anything, a number of the actors certainly are. The project in question is called Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, and includes actors spanning the full range of the series, including Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig from the original series through to Garret Wang and Tim Russ from Voyager. Tim Russ also directs.

As to how it is being pulled together, it is thanks to one of a number of fan based teams who are putting together their own episodes. The team in question is those behind Star Trek: New Voyages. Unlike most of the other fan productions I have come across who base their adventures in the Star Trek universe, but with new characters, New Voyages is intended to be a continuation of the original series, but with new actors in the well known roles. Whilst some may question the wisdom of having other actors play Kirk, Spock and McCoy when they are so closely associated with other actors, this is precisely what is rumoured to be happening in the upcoming Star Trek XI.

So far there are two full episodes of Star Trek: New Voyages, which whilst pretty entertaining, and visually looking pretty much like the original series, do suffer a bit from being obvious fan pleasing plots with a multitude of references to different episodes that you need an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the series and books to spot. Indeed at one point there are multiple USS Enterprise’s turning up from different time zones. Having said that, things are slightly different for the third episode where thanks to the involvement of D.C. Fontana, responsible for numerous episodes over the years, and Walter Koenig reprising his role as Chekov there might not be quite so much referencing of old episodes of the series. The majority of the actors are fans, so if you’re looking for top class acting, this isn’t the place. However, what is impressive is the CGI. The credit for the person responsible is actually an alias, as the person responsible is actually in the business, and worked on the proper series themselves, indeed he was very nearly sacked when the company found out what he was working on in his spare time!

The trailer for Star Trek: Of Gods and Men is due out in time for the anniversary, as is the third episode of Star Trek: New Voyages. You can watch the existing episodes, plus trailers for the latest instalment over at the New Voyages site. This Wired article gives a lot more background to the project and how it started.

Movies & TV

Star Wars Let Down

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You may remember my excited post a couple of months ago on the news that George Lucas was finally allowing the original versions of the Star Wars movies.

However, now we have the technical details of the releases, it is not nearly such a good deal. The films are being released as ‘limited edition’ releases, and each DVD includes the special edition versions on the first DVD, pretty much as they were released most recently. The original theatrical release is included on a second DVD, but not in anything like the quality as the special edition. The films are presented in letterbox format on a 4:3 aspect frame, not anamorphic wide-screen. Sound wise, rather than the THX surround sound of the special edition versions, they are presented in two channel stereo. All in all it seems a decided rip-off. Had they been DVD quality releases, I’d probably have gone out and bought the trilogy again, but since they are such poor quality releases I really don’t think I’ll bother!

General

The Frustrations of Buying and Selling Houses

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So just under three weeks ago we put our house on the market, and the good news is that as of early last week, we’ve managed to find a buyer! Having said that we’re now onto the traditional merry-go-round of frustration trying to keep the buyer sweet, whilst finding somewhere to move too.

So far we’ve had two likely candidates that we offered on. The first was before we had a purchaser for this place, so the vendor accepted the offer but refused to remove the house from the market – needless to say they had an accepted another offer, frustratingly within a couple of days of us getting a seller for here. Not to worry though as there was another house close by, of a similar design that had just come up. With that one we had a buyer for this place, and put in an offer. However again we lost out. This time we had the highest offer, but they had another offer for less money, but from someone with nowhere to sell, so the vendor went for them.

At this point Beth has seen a lot of houses, and we know pretty well what we want, it’s just a question of finding it! Our criteria are slightly different from others is that we’re not worrying about schools, the main criteria being relatively close to the Church since we’re up there several times in an average week. Also high on the list is relatively good broadband coverage – a lot of Finchampstead being pretty poor in that respect. Dropping down to about a quarter of the current connection speeds, with little prospect of getting the higher performance connections that are coming along on some exchanges is certainly something I’m looking for, although it is perhaps not high on Beth’s list of priorities!

Thankfully this time we haven’t had to deal with an endless parade of time-wasting investment buyers. For those who aren’t aware of the way houses are bought and sold in England, the process is not legally binding until very late in the day. Essentially if somebody makes an offer on a property, they are entirely at liberty to withdraw it for no apparent reason. The problem we had with selling my old flat was that we saw a lot of investment buyers, looking to buy it to let out. Estate agents will always push these as being a good thing, as they have nothing to sell – although the suspicious side of me thinks that it’s also because they see the opportunity for earning some money renting out the same property – however we had four or five of these that would quickly put an offer in, and then withdraw it a week or so later.

The situation is very different in Scotland, here an offer is legally binding, which makes things a lot more clear cut. It also removes the problem of gazumping which is always a possibility when buying a house in England.

Since there is no great demand from the industry to change the rules – indeed parts of the industry are currently campaigning against the Home Information Packs that are a proposal to try and reduce the problem by providing the information usually obtained after the offer has been made before the process begins. Of course with scare stories about agents commonplace, (indeed one of our local agents made the national news for one particular wheeze) and no real effort to sort out the problems in the English housing market, it really seems that for the medium term anyone trying to buy a house in England will be stuck with it.

Politics

The Monarch Two

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After the news over the weekend that a Monarch flight back from Spain had kicked off two Asian passengers because some of the other passengers complained that they looked a bit like terrorists. Bear in mind that they had been cleared by airport security, and the complaints were that they looked a bit weird, were wearing heavy coats, and talking in Arabic. At the weekend we had the various passengers who complained, and over the past couple of days we’ve had the two passengers themselves putting their side of the story.

It transpires that the two passengers were a pair of students on a day trip to Malaga, and from the pictures on the TV probably could be described as a bit weird, but no more than many other people look or looked when they were students. With regards to the heavy coats, they had those on because it was chilly in Manchester when they set off. As to the speaking Arabic, they weren’t, it was Urdu.

The current situation is effectively that everybody is pointing towards the pilot as having made the final decision. Interestingly he apparently blamed the Spanish authorities when the two were removed from the plane saying that they wanted to check something, but the Spanish authorities just escorted them off the plane and did nothing else, saying that since they had twice cleared the security checks, and the complete sweep of all the luggage on the plane for explosives had come up clear they were happy. They were only escorting the two off the plane at the insistence of the pilot. Monarch, the airline involved are refusing to apologise.

I find it really reminiscent of the worrying vigilante attacks that occurred a few years ago on innocent people who were labelled as paedophiles, after elements of the media had whipped up fear. In exactly the same way, the current security alerts had whipped up the same level of fear and suspicion in airline travellers. The key problem was the way it was handled, where the people in charge pandered to the paranoia. What should have happened is that the crew should have assured the concerned passengers that the two students had cleared security, and given the complaining passengers the option to fly on a later flight if they were still concerned. What happened effectively set a precedent whereby passengers can set up a kangaroo court to boot off a flight anybody they donít like the look of without any actual evidence. Bear in mind when you consider this labelling of weird looking Asians as terrorist, that both Richard Reid the shoe bomber who was overpowered on a plane trying to blow it up was white, and apparently a number of the people involved in the current plot were also Muslim converts. When you look at the pictures of the various men involved in the London bombings last year, they also all looked like regular guys.

Having said that, the two students don’t seem exactly upset about it. Bear in mind that they were flown home the following day anyway. The airline itself isnít commenting, but I suspect that without any evidence they would have been treated the same as any other bumped passengers and been put up in an airport hotel overnight too. On top of that, easyJet, a rival airline have offered them free flights to Spain, which of course is making Monarch’s continuing refusal to even issue an apology look worse and worse.

Cars

Nutcase Features

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Sometimes you find a feature of something that you really can’t see a benefit for. I’m not talking about, for example an estate agent selling a house as having ‘good transport links’ when it is on a major road, something that you really just can’t understand. I have to say quite often you find such features in bits of software, and they just leave you scratching your head as to why the feature was included.

There is one such feature on the Golf, and a number of other VW cars too aparently, whereby if you hold the open button on the key fob down for three seconds or more, it opens all the electric windows in the car. Conversely if you hold the close button, it closes all the windows. Bear in mind that the car also has one-shot opening and closing of all the windows anyway, so it is a lot quicker just to use that rather than stand around holding the button down once you’ve got out.

What makes the feature even more bemusing is that it doesn’t work in tandem with the rest of the locking system. The remote central locking has a feature to cope with accidental unlocks. For example since it works by radio, my key fob will unlock the car from inside the house – so with my keys in my pocket it is possible to accidentally unlock the car. Having said that, if nothing else happens, like for example a door or the boot being opened, the car will then lock itself. However this doesn’t apply to the windows. If you squash the key for more than three seconds, the doors will unlock, and the windows will open, nothing else happens, and then the doors lock again, but the windows stay open.

Now I’ve done this once before. I was at work when the car was parked next to the building, and by chance level with my desk. Although I was on the second floor, I managed to open the windows remotely. I came out to the car after work in a rain storm to find the windows half open, and was totally bemused. However, having looked through the manual, I found details of the feature, and managed to replicate it from my desk the next day. After that I was always pretty careful.

However, last night I managed to do it again. I think I did it when I was lubricating a sticking door catch in the kitchen. In the process of bracing the door I think I must have managed to squash the key fob – so this morning I went out to find the windows of the car open – good job it’s a relatively safe area!

Anyway, apparently a Volkswagen dealer is able to disable the feature relatively easily – I can’t see a reason for the feature, so unless someone can come up with a persuasive argument, I think I’ll be getting my dealer to disable it just in case I manage to do it again!