Wonderful things - two in an occasional series

1) I give you Shhh cards.

2) I give you "the granddaddy of all quantum wierdness".

This is a stunning little video that's certain to make your head hurt, but is highly recommended viewing. I've just watched it twice! I found it via digg, which I've heard an awful lot about but haven't really paid very much attention to. Until now…

Thoughts on a potential redesign

I'm seriously thinking about giving the site a new look; I think I'm bored with this one…

I've created some potential banners here. If you read this and you have any thoughts on good ones, bad ones, or ideas please post a comment.

The voice of Lara

Team Xbox are reporting that Eidos have made an annoucement regarding Lara's new vocal chords. British (of course) actress Keeley Hawes (best known, by me at least, for her role in Spooks) will be on talky duties. Not a bad choice, although I still think Alex Kingston should have done it…

Dead Rising Screenshot

I was just flicking through the screenshots of Dead Rising on C+VG and was quietly entertained by them (the clown with twin chainsaws looks interesting). This particular one is a thing of wonder though:

Media Center problems

I hope this isn't a sign of things to come. My first night of properly using the Media PC, and I've hit a bit of a snag.

I set Wanted to "record series", and I noticed that the first episode was complaining that there wouldn't be enough space to record it. There quite clearly is - there's 100gb of space on the disk. While trying to investigate further, EShell (which is basically Media Center) crashed. "Fair enough", I thought, "these things happen. I'll try again".

I then set Supernatural to "record series". The same thing happened, and EShell crashed. I restarted Media Center again, and whilst navigating around the scheduled recordings page, EShell crashes. This happened fairly consistently. During all this I was recording the first episode of The Apprentice, and credit to Media Center, it has managed to record the whole program, with (by the looks of it) minimal hiccups.

I've also checked the event log, and there are large numbers of "Failure opening database connection" and "Exception opening connection to database" errors. An hours worth, in fact. Funnily enough, exactly the same amount of time that The Apprentice was recording for.

Back in a moment…

…Now that The Apprentice has finished recording, it appears that everything is working fine…how strange…

I will be keeping an eye on this one.

More upcoming cinema

I posted a list of upcoming UK cinema releases the other week, but I've been reliably informed that I missed a few. Here are the titles I missed, with release dates where possible (I missed them is because I used IMDB's crappy release dates page, and none of these are on there, so I've estimated a release date where required):

• Tamara (On general release in the US at the end of February, so we'll see when we get it)
• Silent Hill (Appears to reach Europe around the end of April, hopefully it will reach us too)
• Hard Candy (Some time after April)
• An American Haunting (7/4/06)
• Young Hannibal (No idea)
• Omen 666 (6/6/06 - how clever! )
• The Visiting (22/09/06)
• Snakes On A Plane (late August, early September)
• Grindhouse (Around the end of October by the looks of it)
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre : The Origin (Appears to be getting an October release in the US, and early November in Australia)
• Pan's Labyrinth (France are getting it in November, so maybe we will too)
• Skinwalkers (US release in December, I doubt we'll get this in 2006)