Pending travels and a new friend

Thought I’d better say something after such a long absence from these pages (or some other bloggers might start to beat me up – you know who you are).

Looking forward to my trip to Chicago later this week. But, yikes, looks like its going to be damn cold….even colder than here. Temperatures down to -17C. Forecast predicting cloudy and sunny. So hopefully clear skies and no fog – one thing I hate is freezing fox. Rich, Karla’s other half, has been insisting that I just have to go visit the Natural HistoryMuseum. He probably wants me to have a date with “Sue” …. that’s T-Rex “Sue“. You see, Rich is such a “Ross”like dino-guru 🙂

Been filling up my Archos vid player with movies and TV shows just incase the inflight movies aren’t up to much. Lots of CSI episodes from Season 5, which I haven’t got round to watching at home yet, and a good helping of Simpsons episodes. On the movie front, A Simple Plan (such a good movie), Cars (been sitting in the shelf and not got round to watching it yet), Hidden (Heneke’s latest – no idea about this one) and The Wedding Crashers (just heard that this one was a hoot).

Recently made another really great friend 🙂 The Cable TV company have just released a new decoder with an inbuilt Personal Video Recorder. That means the box contains a 160GB hard drive which can be used for recording TV and claims to hold up to 80 hrs. The other really cool thing is being able to pause and rewind live TV. Even more cool is that the Cable TV operator seem to have made a bit of a screw up when they sent me the box. Included was a new smart card which appeared to unlock ALL TV channels.

Being the honest person that I am (and also not wanting to have to pay for it all) I called up to ask about the new card. It turns out that some kind of mistake had been made and my subscription details hadn’t been transferred properly to the new card. Anyway, I was told that it was now fixed and should reset the box ASAP. Thought I would see how long I could keep all the channels for. That was over a week ago and I’ve filling up the hard drive with lots of premium movie content 🙂 The box will be powered off whileI’m away, which mean that I’ll probably end up back with my normal channels after I get back.

Talking of movies, recently went and say Blood Diamond and Last King of Scotland. Forest Whitaker gives a power house performance in an amazing movie, but there was one excruciatingly gruesome scene in a very Man Called Horse sort of way. Blood Diamond was also pretty damn good, but let down by a lousy feel good ending.

Those two movies tooks my kinosonen membership up to the Hovedrolle level. Fat lot of good that appears to have done. Made a concerted effeort to get the required number of points and then……..nada. Oh well, its only been a week. Maybe somebody could let me know if I should expect any goodies in the near future.