Author: Eric

Basically I have too many interests. I like to read, play PC games (ESO, wow and various builder / factory type games), watch movies, listen to music, and tweak PC's, browse the web and read news on X and hang out on twitch and discord. My dayjob is Software Engineer!

House – 5 to 9

A remarkable episode of House this week ! Like the Wilson episode, House isn’t the main point of view, but we got a day in the life of Lisa Cuddy. It made for a nice change of pace. And it showed that there is still plenty that can be done with the series, once they divert from the regular formula.

Only thing that sort of spoiled it for me is Lucas, the doofus boyfriend. First of all I don’t like the character at all, and second, I don’t see why Cuddy would hook up with someone like that. And why would House join him on a stake-out ? But the episode was enjoyable anyway.

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What it did show though, House’s antics bring some humor and comedy to Cuddy’s very busy day. He isn’t just a nuisance, although she pretends he is, but I think she really likes the break from all the regular business stuff she has to do.

The last 2 minutes of the show were a bit over the top. Everything fell into place, nothing went wrong, all was well… If only real life was like that !

Links:

Medical review

What’s Alan Watching

Lost – 6×03 What Kate Does

A Kate centric episode this time. Ironically enough, the parts without her were the most interesting ones. I really liked the scenes with Jack and the Japanese dude.

The scene with Sawyer on the docks lamenting the loss of Juliet was nice. Other than that the scenes with Kate only had me wishing they’d show Locke, Jacob or some of the other more interesting mysterious characters. Ethan as delivery doctor for Claire’s baby was interesting though. He even knew the boy’s name already :).

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Dogan, Japanese dude, was brought to the island. What exactly that means is not further explained as ‘we know what he means’. The medicine for Sayid turns out to be poison. Sayid is apparently possessed as a lot of Lost followers already thought. Once ‘the darkness’ (which made me think of the Smoke Monster) reaches his heart, he won’t be the same person again. I assume this is the disease that Rousseau was talking about, when we saw how she got onto the island. And we now know more about what happened to Claire. She got ‘claimed’ as well. She makes a surprise reappearance at the end !

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All in all a not so engaging episode. Especially regarding the fact that there is only about 14 left ? Would have loved to see more Locke who really shined in the premiere…

Lost – LA X part one and two

This blog post contains just some thoughts and questions after the first viewing. So many things happened in this long first episode of the final season, it’ll take a second viewing to get a better grasp on what’s going on !

LAX timeline

As it now seems, the a-bomb did explode ? Juliette claimed it did. It did something, we now have an alternative, or a what if the plane didn’t crash timeline. I wasn’t too keen on this at first to be honest. But it seems to be very well done. Also at first glance nothing weird appears to be going on, but Desmond was a weird appearance and he also vanished into thin air ? Charlie swallowing his drugs was odd. In his flashback way back, he seemed to flush his drugs ? And Jack’s fathers body disappearing is of course quite weird too. I really liked the Locke / Jack scene. Locke seemed to be more at peace, did he, or did he not go on the walkabout ? And there is now a link to Jack in this reality. Will Jack operate on Locke ?

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The Monster

A lot of weird stuff happens on the beach, with dead Locke’s body on the beach. I really liked the little scene with Ben and the Monster (no need to start calling names !).

He was weak, and pathetic and irreparably broken. But despite all that there was something admirable about him. He was the only one of them who didn’t want to leave. The only one who realized how pitiful the life he’d leave behind actually was.

– The Monster on John Locke

I want to go home ! is the monster’s theme. He apparently did have some unresolved issues with Richard (Oh it’s you), as he promptly knocks him out when they meet again. Then drags him on his shoulders and they depart the beach. Why was he very disappointed though ? Because they choose Jacob’s side ?

The Others

Sawyer is very angry (and understandably so) as Juliette dies. We finally get to see the group that had the children we saw in season 2 or thereabouts ? A Japanese person and a hippie like guy are running the show here. They seem to be very interested in Hurley. At least we finally know what is in the guitar case.

Resurrecting Sayid was really odd. For some reason the ritual has to run as long as the hourglass dictates. He appears to be dead but then wakes up later. I immediately thought, is that Jacob somehow coming back to life ?

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The others are getting ready for the attack by ‘them’ as Richard and the other people at the beach notice the flare in the sky…

Conclusion

As usual a lot of questions ;). I am sure not all will be answered, they’ll leave us hanging on some issues. But somehow the timelines will merge at a certain point and some sort of epic finale will come. Or maybe not ! A very enjoyable start of season six though.

One final thing: Terry O’Quinn did a wonderful job, playing angry guy in Locke’s body and the Locke guy on the plane.

Links:

Ryan and Jen Review

Jay and Jack – More goodies on their site, like an interview with Jorge Garcia !

What’s Alan Watching ?

Top 10 SF Movies of the decade

There is an interesting top 10 posted on bscreview.com. I am ashamed to say that I wasn’t familiar with all of them, I’ll definately check them out soon. Including the surprising no. 1, Children of Men !

But looking at the list I am afraid the previous decade wasn’t the hottest for SF movies. My personal favorite would be serenity, which indeed might arguably be a 2hr special episode of Firefly ;).

BscReview top 10 SF movies of the decade.

House – The Down Low

The first episode after the Christmas break was a very enjoyable one. House pretending to be gay in order to screw with Wilson’s dating the cute neighbor plan was very amusing. Especially the scene in the restaurant was excellent.

The episode before the break was very nice as well. Showing Wilson’s point of view on the House team. At least this was also somewhat different from the usual formula. House did get the regular insight into the medical problem at around the 38min mark, but this time it wasn’t enough to save the patient, who sadly died.

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The ending was well done, showing the crackdown on the drug dealers while the undercover cop died. Even thirteen wasn’t annoying, the chasing scene was fun where she did get caught running a red light.

House medical review

House – Broken

Wow what an excellent double length start of the House season. A clear showcase for Hugh Laurie’s acting talents ! Especially the first hour or so was excellent. Showing House realizing that he does indeed have a problem coping with things happening in his life.

In the latter half of the show though, things took a spiral downwards as some very unlikely and cheesy events took place. Alvin wanted to get better after seeing House leave, and then started taking his medicine. And the cello player lady all of a sudden could pull off a very difficult piece after not having played for 10 years (I am not even going to mention the music box). I think in real life your fingers would drop off playing like that without practice.

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What was so interesting about this episode was that it was just Hugh Laurie and an excellent support cast, that didn’t have any of the regular characters. Except for a brief appearance by Wilson. This once and again confirmed it’s all about House, and the others like Thirteen, Cutner etc are disposable add-ons. The highlights of most episodes to me are his moments with Wilson though, so I must say I kind of missed those.

спални комплектиIt will be interesting to see where the writers will go from here. Back to the same (now somewhat) old format of a medical mystery and some personal drama, or will they come up with some thing more original ?

Polite Dissents’s review of this episode

The king of pop has left the building

Late last thursday night the news came out, that MJ suffered a cardiac arrest and supposedly died. Not a real surprise, he didn’t exactly look healthy the past few years.

At the time I didn’t really care for his music, I listened to other stuff in the ’80s and ’90s, but looking back now, some songs, like Man in the mirror, Dirty Diana and the earlier Jackson 5 stuff are very well done. Regardless what I think, he was one of the biggest entertainers, the world has ever seen for almost 3 decades (not really counting the 2000era, let’s forget about those).

He was a stage persona, and wasn’t very happy off-stage, which lead to all sorts of antics. A kid trapped in a man’s body, very naive and not understanding the world around him very well. May he rest in peace !

Two Legends
Two Legends

Upgrade to WordPress 2.8 and Lightbox

Very fast affair through the admin interface ! Unfortunately it broke my lightbox jQuery implementation. I did manage to get it working again by using this lightbox 0.5 version and adding

jQuery("a[rel*='lightbox']").lightBox(); // Select all links that contains lightbox in the attribute rel

to my js init script. I might take another look at it soon, to get the other one working again as that was a bit better with grouping support…

Not quite sure what’s better about 2.8, I hope the mysterious WEBSTAT iframe injections will be gone, as that was a PITA with 2.7.1.

UPDATE: Managed to get this plugin to work. Edit the mainplugin php a bit as it’s no longer needed to de_queue the default jquery script. WP 2.8 comes out of the box with jQuery 1.3.2.

So this is what it looks like:

wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
wp_enqueue_script('jquery-lightbox', $path.'jquery.lightbox.min.js', array('jquery'), '1.3.2');
wp_enqueue_script('jquery-lightbox-plugin', $path.'jquery.lightbox.plugin.min.js', array('jquery', 'jquery-lightbox'), '1.0');optical amplifier