Battleangel | Personal

Okey. Time flies. Can’t think of much to write about. Kind of single minded these days. I get to work, I get home, I watch sci-fi and walk in the woods. Rewind and repeat.

The hardware problems seem to be gone. After having switched NICs. Great. Have been maxing out BitTorrent for a couple of days now. The data is flowing like never before. It has even reached a point where I am having trouble finding new stuff to download. There are only so many movies and TV series out there.
Edit: What REALLY happened is that there was a glitch in the harddrive interface. Probably a cable or a socket that was damaged. I wiggled it a bit and it seems fine now. Damn, these ATA-100 cables are delicate. I should have known since it is not the first time this has happened.

Everything seems to be revolving around the European Football Championship these days. Kind of hard to avoid. It’s football, football, football … everywhere. As far as the eye can see. There are endless pages dedicated to the event with every newspaper and four hours in front of the TV every day for those that must follow the drama in real time.
I find sporting events a bit contradictory. On the one hand everyone is going on about sportsmanship and bridging nation borders but on the other hand it is obviously all about the triumph of the nation state and thus fueling nationalism. As innocent as it might seem, trivial events like these stand in the way of true globalization.

And about TV series. I have taken up Earth 2 and Earth Final Conflict. Two really good sci-fi series that have both been cancelled since some time. Prematurely or not is anyone’s opinion. In the case of Earth 2 after only one season. EFC went five full seasons before calling it quits.
I guess one should savour the moments and realize that some things are not meant to last forever and that there is no formula for TV series saying that the span of any one series should be 7 seasons or else it is no good. After all, there are many reasons as to why a series gets axed. Maybe the story is just going nowhere. Doesn’t mean that the entire venture has been pointless. Quite on the contrary.
Anyway, I’m hoping to be able to finish Earth Final Conflict this summer (just wrapping up season 2). It will be the TV project of the season. Just like Stargate SG-1 was last summer.

Nightwish is doing really well. “Once” is currently #1 in Germany, Finland, Norway and Greece. As well as being on the upper half of many of the European charts. Absolutely fabulous. It seems Nightwish has finally received their big mainstream break. With everything that it brings. And the question arises once more – is this truly good for a band? Will the fans stand for it? Isn’t it more “special” when a band is virtually unheard of?

Downloads and stuff:

• Coppermine 1.3.0 is out since a couple of days. Probably the best php image gallery in its class. No idea what is new but it seems from the support forum that it is a big step forwards.
• Mozilla Firefox 0.9 I have not been a big proponent for Mozilla, that I can admit. But this little piece of software has gotten quite good over the recent months. So good in fact that I’ve dumped Internet Explorer. Mostly because MS fails to provide feature updates and obviously since the scene dominance has created an armada of exploits.
• Unreal Tournament 2004 v3236 (second patch). Lots of fixes. This game is solid regardless.