Prehistoric Park on ITV is more than just a bit silly. Remember how Walking with Dinosaurs presented itself as a nature documentary that woulda, coulda, shoulda been made if only we had a time machine? But the only human intrusion into the CGI was Kenneth Branagh’s voice over. Then as the franchise continued Nigel Marven took over from Ken and started appearing alongside the dinosaurs.

Well, Nigel and the CGI team have jumped channels and, quelle surprise, the human and prehistoric worlds have intermingled completely. The mission is the bring prehistoric creatures back to a special safari park. Haven’t these guys watched Jurassic Park? (The audience have, it was on immediately beforehand.) Or for handy tips, read How to Keep Dinosaurs (a very good book).

This week’s opener took them back to the days before the KT boundary meteor impact event. And much was made of the race against time to rescue specimans before the big rock hit. Um, you have a time machine, you can go back months or years before impact, so why pick mere days?

The one up side of this approach is that give a good idea of the scale of the beasts when you see them alongside humans, jeeps, etc. Other than that it’s just pretty CGI dinos and mindless “bring ‘em back alive” boys own adventures.

Very True Mood:  cheerful

Amazon Miniatures have joined my favourite bandwagon and started a range of Prehistoric Animals.

Three items are out now with at least five more coming soon.

• ANP01 Raptor (2) 3.25
• ANP02 Diatryma Giganticus (2) £3.00
• ANP03 Raptor and dinosaur eggs £2.50
• ANP04 Yangchanosaurus £7.50
• ANP05 Feathered Raptor (2) £3.25
• ANP06 Leaping Smilodon (Sabre tooth lion) £2.25
• ANP07 Short-faced bear standing £2.25
• ANP21 Neanderthal Warrior with bone club and spear

The plain raptors look like they would fit in well with the Jeff Valent or Ral Partha/Iron Wind Metals versions, and it’s very good to see someone tackling feathered raptors in this scale at last.

Amazon, being the kind of people who “think outside the box” (sorry, really, really sorry) are also stocking bags of plastic toy dinos for wargamers too embarrassed to step foot inside Early Learning Centres.

Anyway, I know where one of my first stops at this year’s Salute will be.

Very True Mood:  cheerful

Four posts in one day and it’s only two o’clock - can you tell that I don’t have a lot to do at work today? Mostly because I don’t really dare touch anything until the java boys (like java man but less hairy) have stopped beating the database with large sticks.

Anyway, want to see one of my favourite web sites? Dino Directory at the NHM is a very neat little site. A database of dinosaurs with a nice web front end that allows users to search and sort the data by a wide range of criteria - the large graphics lead novice users into a simple search by body shape function, whilst more advanced functions such as grouping by geographic and chronological proximity are readily available for more adventurous users. And then the results link through to the NHM’s picture library which is another hidden gem in itself.

It’s a shame that the front end coding isn’t as nice as the information architecture. Looking at the code it seems that the header and footer were created by someone who knows what they’re doing - CSS layout, accessible, etc. Whilst the actual Dino Directory code in the middle is tables based and full of errors. Shame.

There’s also an RSS feed to keep user up to date with the latest dinos to be added. This week saw the addition of the very cute sounding Wannanosaurus. Oddly, this seems to be the only RSS feed on the whole NHM site.

Anyway, here’s a lovely site based on a great idea and well implemented (just needs a little work to make it standards compliant and accessible), but… it’s very Web 1.0 isn’t it? How could one jazz this up to make it Web 2.0? Define a dinosaur microformat and provide an API to allow dino data to be reused on other sites? Allow users to drag and drop dinosaurs into a personal folder and then play top trumps with other users? Or, if it ain’t broken, don’t try to make it buzzword compliant?

Very True Mood:  contemplative

I’ve just updated my 25/28mm Dinosaurs and other prehistoric miniatures (not snappy enough?) page with some lovely looking cavemen and ice age beasties from Fenryll.

Via the Cavewars group.

Very True Mood:  chipper

The oldest Tyrannosauroid is in the news and it’s an odd one - feathered and crested and only 3m long.

Meanwhile a thread on TMP has led to QRF posting photos of some of their 15mm Try-to-survive-asaurus dinos and mammal like reptiles and Stormwalker (another Steve) showing us great work with the QRF Coelophysis and HLBS Co Compsagnathus.

What other prehistorics are available in 15mm? Irregular have some cavemen at least (what else comes in the 15mm Tusk scenario packs?) and some of the old Ral Partha figs seem closer to 15mm than anything else. Any others?

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…

What’s up with the BBC and Walking with Monsters?

This program is a prequel to Walking with Dinosaurs covering the period before the Dinosaurs. The DVD and book have been available for a while but the BBC web site is very quiet about the show. A press release from July says that it will air in this autumn. Um?

[Update] - Ah. Thursday 8th December, 8pm, BBC 1. Good.

As tagged by Littlebun here are ten things that make me happy.

1. Lettice
2. Being right about stuff
3. Wales winning the Six Nations
4. Learning new stuff
5. Miniatures, especially dinosaurs and spaceships
6. The Dalek Song
7. Cats
8. Drinking beer and talking rubbish with my friends
9. Good books
10. The sort of television that makes me jump and down with joy because it’s so funny and exciting and clever - for example Doctor Who, Firefly, Farscape

New stuff from Dragonblood Miniatures. Very, very nice. I hope this (and the mount from their earlier Hunter sculpt) do become available au naturel.

Old stuff from Archive Miniatures available until the end of the month from Discount Hobby.

TMP has set up a discussion board for Prehistoric gaming. One interesting titbit I picked up there is that the rights to DZ Miniatures mammals have been acquired by Stratagem who are/will be making them in resin. Which would be great if Stratagem weren’t one of the most disorganised and uncommunicative outfits around.

Did anyone else see the recent BBC programmes on dinosaurs? The Truth About Kill Dinosaurs from last month was so-so. I have serious doubts about the validity of some of their “scientific” tests. The materials used to create the artificial dinosaurs looked like they had very different properties to actual bone and muscle. The second programme was more interesting as it covered Velociraptors and Ankylosaurs rather than the tired out T. Rex vs Triceratops duel of the first programme. Much more entertaining was the very silly T-Rex: A Dinosaur in Hollywood show on Wednesday.

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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