Well, Chantelle is now officially purring like a well stroked pussycat. At last, I have finally given in to her constant 'nagging' about the fact that for the last couple of months we've only had access to SABC 2 at home, thereby depriving her of her major source of relaxation and leaving her forced to do all sorts of terrible things like cut my hair, put on the washing or do the dishes.So, agreeing to go halvies with her on the installation and monthly cost, number 45 Nagua Bay is now the proud owner of a not that shiny (fiberglass doesn't really polish that well) but brand spanking new DSTV satellite dish and decoder.
Strangely enough, getting a dish installed here along the coast seems far more expensive than say having it done in Bellville, and after a fair bit of phoning about our area for installation service providers, I finally settled on Antenna Doctor who quoted me R1800, pretty much the same price that everyone else was giving to me at the time.
I must admit however that had we known the so many hassles they were going to give us with trying to schedule an actual installation time, I would have looked elsewhere. First off, they couldn't seem to make up their minds as to whether or not we had booked an installation date for a Monday or a Tuesday. Then after finally solving that one out, they made Chantelle wait a full hour at home before finally rocking up, only to inform her that they couldn't finish the installation today because, oh, they had run out of decoders and would only be able to provide us with one the following day. Ah, and because they were late, they had to rush finish the satellite installation part, meaning that the wiring in my house looks a bit on the crappy side.
The next day they rocked up at the flat without informing Chantelle and she once again had to rush off to let them in (at least she didn't have to wait this time!) and they finished up installing the decoder and hooking us up with Multichoice. Then came the shocker. I had once again fallen for the old "we don't add VAT in our quotes over the telephone" scam, meaning that the final bill came to R2200, a good R400 more than what I was originally quoted! (You would think that I've learned my lesson by now, wouldn't you?)
However, all that said, I do grudgingly have to admit that they did a good job on setting the thing up. The image is crystal clear and Chantelle is as happy as a pig in the mud, meaning that I am now being subjected to an inordinate amount of Style Network and BBC Style viewings, more than any man should ever be tortured with.
(And nuts, because of the limited amount of inputs I can handle, Mr. PlayStation is now packed in the cupboard, only getting plugged in when I actually want to use him. Not sure what the Supernanny would have to say about that...)
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How embarrassing, the shame,oh the shame... So seeing as I am now officially back at the gym, both in the mornings before work and then again in the evenings on the way home, I am slowly but surely getting quite into the swing of things, doing both weight and cardiovascular work in an effort to kick start my weight loss and regain some of the muscle tone that I used to own... what seems an eternity ago, I know! ;)
Anyway, so last night I was happily puffing away at the free weights inclined bench press when towards the end of my weights session, I selected a weight that was obviously just that tad out of my reach at the moment. Now I don't currently have a training partner meaning that I don't have anyone to spot me, which is usually okay because I never push myself to a point where I'm completely helpless...
...apart from last night that is. So straddled along the inclined bench and only managing five reps of this last weight, I carefully maneuvered the weights above my head to replace them on the bars, when I gracefully managed to miss inserting the one end, resulting on the bar coming down across my chest and with me helplessly pinned underneath it thanks to the complete fatigue in my now rather tired arms.
Thankfully a youngster working on the peck deck in front of me saw my dilemma and came to the rescue, to which I humbly muttered my thanks, packed the weights away and went for a jog... on the complete other side of the building!
Shameful, but oh so funny, I know! :)
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For the good of all men, and the love of one woman, he fought to uphold justice by breaking the law.Ah, I'd forgotten just how much I love this movie. I'd gotten a nifty little gift voucher for Musica for Christmas and while my first purchase on the card was a definite (the original Ghost in the Shell movie if you must know), the second was a little harder - that was until I spotted Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves staring out at me from one of the shelves as part of Musica's 101 must see movies promotion.
Now I've always been a huge fan of English lore, stories like King Arthur and Robin Hood filled my childhood reading habits, and so it really is no wonder that I hold this particularly brilliant movie right up there amongst my favourites. Sure Kevin Costner doesn't give the greatest of performances, seemingly grinning through most of his lines and without a hint of a decent English accent, but the story and the rest of the cast are just so damn good that you really have to dislike this genre to not garner any sort of enjoyment from this epic tale of romance and high adventure.
Actually, in a nutshell just in case you haven't seen the movie before, Robin Locksley returns alive from the Crusades to England, accompanied by his Moor escape companion, Azeem. However, he learns that during his absence the Sheriff of Nottingham has slowly but surely seized control of the surrounding lands, even going so far as to murder Robin's father and release the lands of Locksley from their title. Robin goes into hiding in the forest of Sherwood, befriending a local gang of outlaws who he then heads up and turns into legend, the Merry Men of Robin Hood who rob from the rich and give to the poor. Naturally things come to a head and Robin is enticed into a final battle against the Sheriff over the lives of his men and the honour of his love-interest, the Maid Marian of Dubois.
The movie was released in 1991 and directed by Kevin Reynolds (who went on and directed... well not much else really) and starred Kevin Costner as Robin of Locksley (Robin Hood), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Maid Marian, Morgan Freeman as Azeem, Christian Slater as Will Scarlet and Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham (in perhaps the best dark humorous villainous roles ever!).
Michael Kamen composed, orchestrated and conducted the absolutely stellar music score which singlehandedly raises the entire profile of the movie itself. Oh, and it also birthed one of Bryan Adams' biggest hits, (Everything I Do) I do it For You, which was half buried in the actual movie itself, thanks to Kamen not actually liking what Bryan had done with the idea. Guess he still kicks himself over that one then.
And on a side note, Sean Connery garnered in $250 000 for two days of work (which in his defense he did pass on to charity) - he only appeared in the movie for literally a minute or two, and that was right at the end of it all!
So yes, it was oh so good to watch this absolute classic again. It contains a lot of dark humour, a lot of fantastic sword-swinging and bow-notching action and it captures the feel of the legend to perfection in my opinion. If you for some or other reason have never actually gotten around to seeing this legendary movie before, do yourself a favour and watch it. It really has stood the test of time!
Note: I have however established that Chantelle does indeed not share my love for this grand epic, considering the fact that she gracefully snored through at least two thirds of it. Not even prodding her with a cat's tail could get her to bat an eyelid I'm ashamed to say.
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So in our ever snowballing, wedding arrangement hunt, Friday evening saw Chantelle and myself prep Mr. TomTom and head out towards Muizenberg, Fogeys Railway House Restaurant to be more precise. And while our Internet-gleaned address for the restaurant proved incorrect, the infallible POI listing on Mr. TomTom was more than capable to fix our human error and before long we found ourselves parked next to the beautifully crafted, antique railway house building and entering what can only be described as one of the most beautiful, quaint little eateries that I have yet to lay eyes on.For a start, the decor in Fogeys is beautifully matched to the building itself, with the main inside eating area coming across as incredibly warm and cozy and the atmosphere as a whole simply intimate and welcoming all rolled into one. Add to that some exceptionally good service and a simply delicious selection of mouth-watering food (their chips are to die for by the way) and you have a simply fantastic package that I MUST visit again!
(Admittedly their food does lean slightly towards the more expensive side, but that said, the quality certainly comes across as top notch so I guess this makes up for that then.)
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Chantelle is quite keen on having some live music playing for our guests as they wait while we are away for the photo taking session, and a chance encounter with one of her guests at the guesthouse lead to her finding out about Crimson, a local cover band that specializes in acoustic rock and are by Whammy's admission, simply fantastic on guitar - something which actually says quite a lot mind you!
Crimson is made up of Darren Oelofse (lead vocals, rhythm guitar) and Nathan Giloi (lead guitar), with the two of them making extensive use of backing tracks, which for example utilize drums and bass, to round off the sound and in so-doing create that fullness of aural experience that one would expect from tracks whose original artists includes the likes of The Eagles, Eric Clapton, Dire Straights, Van Morrison, Creedence Cleerwater Revival, Cat Stevens, Chubby Checker, and UB40, right the way through to the more contemporary likes of 3 Doors Down, REM, Counting Crows, John Mayer, Matchbox 20, James Blunt, NickelBack, and The Script.
As I mentioned above, I was absolutely blown away by the skillful guitar display put on by Nathan and Darren (Nathan having been the guest who alerted Chantelle to Crimson's existence in the first place!) as well as Darren's exceptionally pleasing on the ear and extremely versatile voice, all of which came together to provide a rather phenomenal musical experience as a whole.
They put on a fairly long, almost three hour set (though they did take a rather longish 45 minute break in between, which I thought was a little bit too lengthy to be honest. However, based on the small nature of the crowd, I guess this was okay, so no big gripes from my side then) and thoroughly entertained myself and Chantelle with absolutely all the classics and the majority of the evening was spent simply singing along to all the tracks we knew and recognised (which was basically 99% by the way)
So anyway, my mind is made up (actually, it was made up in literally the first 15 seconds of them playing!) and the email has been sent off and hopefully, just hopefully, our guests will be lucky enough to also experience the crafted pleasure delivered by Crimson, truly one of those soon to be much vaunted up and coming Cape Town bands!
Keep up the good work lads!
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I've finally gotten around to poking about and fixing the hanging shutdown and missing sounds error on my Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex installation and thought it best to share the solution with the rest of you.First off, identify that you are experiencing the same problem that I was by logging out of your desktop and then shutting the machine down from the login screen. If the computer hangs on the 'Shutting down ALSA' command then bingo, we have a winner.
To solve this annoying little bug, follow these two relatively simple steps:
Step 1, go to the Synaptic Package Manager (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager) and enter your password to access the package manager application. Once in, do a search for 'alsa-utils' using the Quick Search functionality at the top of the window, and then check which version you currently have installed. Should your current version be less than 1.0.17-0ubuntu3 then you need to right-click on the checkbox next to the alsa-utils label and select 'Mark for Upgrade'. Next, click on the 'Apply' button at the top and the system should then automatically update this problematic package to its latest version.
Step 2, open up a new terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and enter 'sudo gedit /etc/hosts', supplying your administrative password when prompted. Check the first couple of lines of your hosts file and should there be a line reading ::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback then you have a problem. To fix, simply remove this incorrect line and replace with ::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback (look carefully, there is a subtle change between these two lines!)
And that's it. Saving your updated hosts file and upgrading the alsa-utils package should now have nipped this annoying little problem right in the bud.
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Saturday evening and for the first time in absolute ages, Karl-Heinz, Terrance, Ryan and myself got together for an unadulterated evening of PS2 FIFA football action at Karl's newly renovated flat.For the first time in history, we could actually comfortably sit on TWO sofas while playing games on his big screen, that in itself making the entire evening worthwhile right there!
(Naturally the snacks and drink was plentiful, though Dr. Storbeck did renege on the agreement and failed to provide his portion of the chips, meaning that by the end of the evening we did indeed run out of snacks, but I guess I'll have to forgive him because at least this time we had TWO couches for a change! ;P)
Surprisingly enough, I actually managed to locate his new flat first time around (and without the help of Mr. TomTom) and after a whirlwind tour of Karl and Pat's new domain, the four of us settled down on the TWO sofas (Ryan however opted for the ground for some strange reason) and got straight down to business.
Teams for the evening was Ryan and Karl versus the venerable Terrance and myself and the matches started off with T and me taking most of the early victories. However, Ryan was not to be outdone and with a lot of whip swishing, shouted verbal cues and just general constructive cursing, he set about molding Karl into a 'proper' FIFA player and soon they were catching up to us in terms of gameplay and even goal scoring. As the evening progressed the games got tighter and tighter, the winning margins smaller and smaller and in general the games became just that much of a higher level.
We even managed to pull out some draws for a change, something pretty unusual when considering our general historical team ups. (Naturally the resulting penalty shootouts were a bit of a joke, with the majority of the boys failing to ever shoot the ball in a direction other than straight at the keeper!)
So I'd say we ended off a solid four hours of FIFA on a pretty even keel and it pretty much looks like we've now at last found the team up that works the best for the four of us combination. There are still plenty of shouts and curses of 'button memory', 'oops' or 'oh crap', but I'd say that we are definitely improving as a bunch of decent FIFA sharks. (It is good however to note that the best way to distract Karl and score an easy goal remains to start play just as his hand enters the chip packet - it would seem that in that position he is as completely helpless as a little toddler stuck in a broken walking ring.)
So anyway, after the PS2 inexplicably shut itself down during our last match for the evening (it was getting pretty late, Karl needed to wake up early for his bike ride on Sunday, and I still needed to drive through back to Gordon's Bay anyway), we called it a night, stole the last of the drink and then headed off home, bringing to a close a rather successful, first for 2009, footy foursome.
Awesome, I know! :P
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If you are using CorelDraw X3 and find that every time you click on the color palette to change the selected color the applications just hangs or crashes completely, chances are pretty good that you are suffering from a corrupted color palette. The simplest way to fix this problem is to do an F8 restart of CorelDraw. Close down the application, hold down the F8 key and keep it pressed down while you restart CorelDraw. As it starts up, you should get a dialog offering you the opportunity to reset CorelDraw to its factory defaults. Select yes and your corrupted palette should now be a thing of history.
(Oh, and if you notice that all of a sudden I'm using Americanized spelling in my blog entries, don't worry, it isn't your eyes that are deceiving you. Simply put, in order to maximize my search engine hits on the more generic posts like this one, going that route makes far more sense than sticking with my old patriotic South African English spelling.)
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Hmm, just watched Jim Carrey's latest movie Yes Man, thoroughly enjoyed it, and realised that I had been completely unfair to Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst's latest outing, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People in my earlier 'quick review' post.As much as I enjoyed that movie as a comedy, I slated it a fair bit for handling the romantic aspects of the movie pretty clumsily and thereby destroying any true romantic comedy (or rom-com as this genre is sometimes called) aspirations of the movie. However, seeing Yes Man fail at the same aspects that I felt How to Lose Friends struggled with, I suddenly realised just how high my romantic comedy expectations has become, thanks to the string of pretty damn emotionally impressive rom-com movies Chantelle has made me sit through. Terrible, I know ;)
Which made me think a little more. These two above-mentioned films star bona fide comedians, right? Which then stands to reason that the comedy aspect of the movie is the actual goal that the director is aspiring too, forcing me to revise my previous review for How to Lose Friends and instead declare that it was indeed a thoroughly enjoyable comedy romance (or com-rom) flick - as is Yes Man just by the way.
Whew, I feel all better now.
Oh, and re-establish my masculinity just that little, next up on my movie hit list has got to be Transporter 3. The trailer looks absolutely bloody awesome and Jason Statham looks ready to kick some serious ass as always!
All of which means that I really, really can't wait for the release of the upcoming Crank 2: High Voltage, sequel to one of the funniest, craziest and most hardcore comedy action movies you will ever witness! One day, one day, Mr. Willis' throne will belong to Statham. Just you wait and see! :P
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Cosplay Sundae time again, and this time we journey to the land of fighting games with this lovely young lass dressed up as May (complete with giant ship's anchor) from the Guilty Gear fighting game series.
May's biography reads as such: A young, cute, and spunky member of the Jellyfish air pirates who is utterly dedicated to Johnny (the leader of the pirates as well as the man who raised her after her parents died). Japanese-born May's first tournament appearance was in order to bail Johnny out of prison and subsequently each and every one of her appearances has been for the benefit of this pirate leader.
She also has an irrational fear of bald people and can sense them from a distance.
So balding middle-age perverts take heed - no chance of sneaking up on this cosplay fanatic then! ;)
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So following up on all the visits by Wayne, Candice, Karl-Heinz and Patricia, next up on the list was Terrance and Ryan who showed up at my door yesterday morning, fully equipped and ready for some court action.The morning actually sped by pretty quickly, with the usual game/movie/tv related banter and it wasn't too long before we decided on an impromptu shopping trip, a) because I needed to pick up light bulbs that weren't available from my local Pick 'n Pay and b) because Terrance was quite keen on scoping out the new Somerset West branch of our beloved BT Games franchise.
So off we drove with Ryan complaining bitterly about the traffic and the fact that our open windows were effecting his petrol consumption and without too many incidents we reached our target successfully. Terrance was suitably impressed with BT Games, I got my light bulbs and KFC served as lunch - a pity because we had just sat down and started eating our food when an SMS came in from Chantelle, letting me know that she was preparing the leftover New Year's pita breads for lunch for the three of us. Oh well, the KFC was pretty damn good in its defence.
Back home it was time for the big guns to come out and off we trotted to discover an already occupied tennis court, meaning that first things first, a refreshing dip in the pool was in order. However, having enough of that (I could see the gleam in Ryan's eye as he was approaching me, undoubtedly eager to wrestle me... again) and I quickly shooed the people biting into our booking time off the court and on we stepped...
...where Mr. Brown promptly smashed the ball over the back fence, narrowly missing a taxi and ending up on the island in the middle of a fairly busy Faure Marine Drive. Needless to say, we should have known that this first strike was pretty much a good indication as to how the rest of our 'tennis' session was going to go.
So as you may have guessed, the players on the ATP tour have nothing to fear from the three of us - heck, even the ball boys would do a better job than us! Most of the session was spent picking up balls, hitting it into the net, picking up balls, hitting it so wide that seagulls needed to beware, picking up balls, missing the shot completely - sigh, we're going to need a lot more practice I'm afraid! What happened to youthful energy and ability I ask you!?! :)
Eventually we gave way to another group waiting on the court and went home to drown our sorrows in Pita bread, Tab and a fun, little bit naughty and ever so ridiculous anime show called Kamen no Maid Guy, a show that one needs to see for themselves before anyone tries to explain it to them!
Also on the cards for the day was a little bit of PS2 show-and-tell as I hauled out my latest batch of titles like Red Dead Revolver, Rogue Trooper and God Hand to show-off to the other two. Needless to say these new next-gen console gamers probably could have seen better!
Seeing as Chantelle and I had plans for the evening, Terrance's opportunity for a Sin City viewing were unfortunately dashed, so I can only hope that the tennis session kind of made up for it! So out I shooed them, set up Ryan's TomTom to play John Cleese's voice and waved goodbye, another successful visit to our C&C Nagua Bay stronghold!
(Oh, and then there were the unexplained pink panties incident. And seeing as the details surrounding their origins remain a mystery, I think I'll leave it unexplained then.)
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