365 days ago I made a post about things I was looking forward to in 2005. How did they turn out?

Obviously, getting married and the subsequent honeymoon was fabulous beyond words. (If you haven’t seen them already Lettice has stuck a whole load of photos online.) Also on a personal front I moved house and got a new job, so a very good year.

Doctor Who was incredible. Listened to some of the commentaries on the DVD box set (and is that a wastfeul piece of pacakaging or what?) yesterday and was thrilled all over again by the passion and dedication of the people who brought the Doctor back.

The market share of Internet Explorer did continue to fall. On the SFSFW site it fell from 77% to 67%. This is also the year that Opera became totally free. I also finally got around to learning a bit of XSLT which I’ve been meaning to do for ages.

Serenity was the best film of the year for me (yes I have middle-brow sci-fi tastes, didn’t you know?) and well worth the wait. Can we have a sequel (or two or three or…) please? Batman Begins and The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse were also very good whilst The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Revenge of the Sith were better than expected (but as we expected total train wrecks that’s not actually saying much).

And finally, I was looking forward to the general election, but it turned out a bit dull. It did give us one last chance to be rude about Tim Collins before he vanished into well deserved oblivion. But for my political fix this year I’ve been watching the post-election leadership battles (Brown vs. Blair; Davies vs. Cameron; everyone vs. Kennedy) with much glee. Politicians spending so much time shafting each other means, we can but hope, that they have less time for shafting us.

Good things I didn’t predict at the start of last year included, Wales winning a Grand Slam; England winning the Ashes; London winning the Olympics; Judge Jones putting both boots into the Intelligent Design movement.

Via lonemagpie

Gimme some sugar baby.

Which B-Movie Badass Are You? brought to you by Quizilla

Stuff from all over, ‘cos my mind is a bit scatty at the moment.

New blog, (discovered via TMP) Olduvai George, dreadful paleontological pun but wonderful artwork of ancient mammals. And some les ancient ones, like weasels.

Ever since I started working on the VisitLondon.com web site I’ve been annoyed by how many of the pages display in Opera. The main content section of these pages consist of many visual boxes stacked one atop the other. Some of these boxes are div elements and some are table elements, depending on the nature of their contents (and yes I know the whole thing is wrapped up inside both a layout table and some div soup). In Opera the table elements were displaying two pixels wider than they should have been, breaking up the nice column of equal width boxes.

This week I had time to dig into the CSS I discovered the cause. The style rule table {text-align: left;} is the cause. Easy fix, move that text-align rule to the th and td elements. Anyway, the bug is now documented.

And you know what else? Opera 9, technical preview 1. Yep, bug is fixed already. (Also getting close to passing Acid 2, which would be good as it’s all been Mac and Linux browsers so far.)

Oh, and Firefox has a new version out as well.

A relative of a colleague is playing a Cyberman in the new Doctor Who. The same family also contains the man who played the Stormtrooper who banged his head in Star Wars.

And the rest was memes from sites that are down at the moment…

So, I’ve seen the ones in bold. Some notable gaps. Original list taken from John Scalzi’s The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
Akira
Alien
Aliens
Alphaville
Back to the Future
Blade Runner
Brazil
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Contact
The Damned
Destination Moon
The Day The Earth Stood Still
Delicatessen
Escape From New York
ET: The Extraterrestrial
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers serial
The Fly 1985 version
Forbidden Planet
Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Jurassic Park
Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
The Matrix
Metropolis
On the Beach
Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
Robocop
Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
The Stepford Wives - 1975 version
Superman
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
The Thing From Another World
Things To Come
Tron
12 Monkeys
28 Days Later
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2001: A Space Odyssey
La Voyage Dans la Lune
War of the Worlds (1953 version)

Just seen Serenity and it totally rocks. Proper review tomorrow (unless I bauy so many new toys at SELWG that I get distracted) but now I must cook dinner for my beloved and then go to a housewarming in Brixton Clapham, really honest, by one street.

Three way tie between Wash, Kaylee and River. (Decided by the dinosaurs of course). Hmm. Not sure about that - the Kaylee and River parts, but I am so totally Wash.

You scored as Hoban ‘Wash’ Washburne. The Pilot. You are a leaf on the wind, see how you soar. You have a good job, and a stunning wife who loves you (and can kill people). Life is good, which is why you can’t help smiling. Now if you can just get people to actually listen to your opinion things would be perfect.

Kaylee Frye		75%
River Tam		75%
Hoban 'Wash' Washburne		75%
Zoe Alleyne Washburne		69%
The Operative		69%
Capt. Mal Reynolds		56%
Inara Serra		56%
Simon Tam		44%
Shepherd Derrial Book		38%
Jayne Cobb		25%

Which Serenity character are you?
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Just played back the first episode of the new series of Nip/Tuck. Serious gore factor, maybe I shouldn’t have watched it whilst eating supper. Still, it has to be watched to see what will be happening next year in The Bill – womaniser attends one sexaholics anonymous meeting, pulls, has one night stand, gets contacted later by now pregnant sexaholic. Hmm, Christian Troy or Phil Hunter?

And if Nip/Tuck is Six Feet Under with live people is House, CSI with live people? (I bet I’m not the first person to say that.) And what’s all this I’ve been reading about people on the States not realising that Hugh Laurie is doing an accent? I’ve heard people from most parts of the US and I’ve never heard anyone who speaks like that (but it’s still better than Nicola Bryant’s accent). Still it looks promising.

And yesterday pink_weasel and I went to see The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse. Insane, totally insane. And brilliant, totally brilliant. I don’t think I’ve been so open mouthed for so much of a film since, um, since ever really. If you’ve ever seen any of the TV series go and see it; if you haven’t then watch the TV series and then go and see the film.

So, bank holiday weekend (which two weeks into proper job suddenly takes on some importance once again) and the weather wasn’t bad.

pink_weasel and I went down to Dorking on Saturday and got overcharged by an Oxfam bookshop! So Lettice only saved 75% of the cost she would have paid on eBay rather than 90%. Then lunch with my parents and grilling over the wedding arrangements, then home in time for Dalek, which I’ve already written about.

Sunday didn’t quite go according to plan. The aim was to go to Morden Hall Park (sounds like a Hollywoord actor) and visit the craft fair, but a peek from the outside didn’t make it seem like it would be worth the admittance charge. So we got the tram to Croydon and went to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy instead.

I enjoyed the film but with a few reservations. The cast was excellent (Stephen Fry is so good as The Book, I can’t think of anyone else who could match Peter Jones), I loved the look of the film, the Heart of Gold in particular, but I think the only time I really laughed out loud was the “So long and thanks for all the fish” song.

And the ending seemed to strike a bit of a wrong note – going off into space rather than staying on the new Earth was a very un-Arthur thing to do (okay, it was a very un-HHGTTG Arthur thing to do, I know that’s more or less what he did do in SLATFATF). But Zooey Deschanel is very, very cute and I’m sure lots of people would follow her into space.

On the way home I rented DVDs of a couple films I’d missed out on last year, and generally I don’t think I missed much.

King Arthur is, of course, no where near as historically accurate as it claims to be, but when compared with almost every other Arthur film it does come closer. Clive Owen was okay as a Romano-British Arthur but Ioan Gruffudd made a very bland Lancelot and when the great list of warrior women is drawn up (any volunteers?) Keira Knightley’s Guinevere won’t be on it.

Alien vs Predator was better, in fact it was actually rather good. (Or had I just drank too many beers by then?) Sanaa Lathan’s Alexa Woods was a good Ripley substitute (or more accurately a Machiko substitute, go read the comics) and will be on that list. A couple of things annoyed the geek in me – we’d previously been led to believe that the Predators liked things hot but here they are running around Antarctica with no extra clothing; and secondly, isn’t the alien queen a hell of a lot bigger here than in Aliens?

Monday I spent taking all my miniatures out of the display case, dusting and rearranging. The case with the unpainted miniatures is now too heavy to lift. Oh dear.

Trailer for Serenity. Can’t wait.

… is probably the only good line in Chronicles of Riddick. But it’s very nearly good enough on its own. And Alexa Davalos (a) is hot, (b) kicks ass, and (c) is much better in this than she was in Angel.

Yes, I’m recovering from my lousy week by drinking beer and watching crap SciFi movies. Next up Hellboy.