June 2008 Archives

What a rip-roaring start to the new series. Wow! Utterly non-PC, tons of fun. lots of fabulous cars, silliness and did I mention cars? Something for young and old to enjoy apart from the Sunday Night Project dicks.

The boys are back in town and this opening was a corker. It started with a whirlwind tour of what we are going to see in the coming weeks. Incredible cars, fantastic scenery, lots of action.

The guys then decided to address the issue of fuel efficiency by racing a Ferrari, Aston Martin, McLaren Mercedes, Lamborghini and Audi R8 on one gallon of fuel. The Ferrari died after a shocking 1.7 miles! The best of the bunch was the R8 on 5 mpg. They then addressed the same issue for the average punter by racing a Prius against an M3. It turns out the M3 is more fuel efficient on the track. Oh I love these guys!

Highlight for my kids was the Austin Allegro raced backwards up a ramp to jump over a pile of cars to break the world record. The distance was pretty pathetic until it was pointed out that no record exists and therefore they now hold it!

The news segment was as funny as always with the ultra-cheap Tata causing much merriment. The only blot on the episode was the presence of the two unfunniest men in Britain doing a "star" in a reasonably priced car. It appears they are as good at driving as they are at entertaining.

Clarkson in the Scuderia was impressive. The Stig in the Scuderia was amazing. I have never seen a car on the show that stable on the track.

Roll on next week.

Whew, after a couple of ropey episodes, we are back to ultra-high-quality Doctor material. It's this kind of "big" story that always gets me going. Next week will be huge!

This is all about choices and consequences. The Doctor and Donna are in a "Chinese" market on some planet. Donna is convinced to have her palm read by a dodgy looking lady (aside: did she really have to give that naff look as Donna entered? Pure B movie stuff).

The fortune teller starts probing her and gets her focused on the day she decided to take one job instead of another. That one decision resulted in her meeting the Doctor and her whole history since then. If she had taken a different job, everything would change.

Meanwhile a spooky creature is climbing up her back. One of my kids predicted scorpion, the other predicted beetle. Donna is effectively hypnotised and told to turn the other way at a particular road junction in her history. We are then sent back to that moment as she argues with her mother and eventually goes the other way, takes the other job and never meets the doctor.

Every adventure she had with the Doctor on Earth is replayed, but each time with the wrong outcome and it actually begins with the Doctor being "killed". Bit by bit the earth is falling apart and Donna is unaware that it all revolves around her. She keeps running into Rose who appears and disappears and warns her.

Finally, after the UK has basically become a Nazi state (lazy lazy Russell) and the stars begin disappearing in the sky, Donna joins Rose and Unit and is brought to a warehouse containing the Tardis.

They use some "we've run out of CGI budget" technology to show her that in fact she does have a giant beetle on her back and it is feeding off changes in history. They tell her she needs to go back in time and change the junction decision to put everything back the way it was.

Unfortunately for this version of Donna, she runs out of time and the only thing she can think of to change back history is to throw herself in front of a truck, cause a massive tailback and force the "other" Donna to go the other way on the road. She "dies" but everything is put back the way it was.

The Doctor is back, the beetle analysed and Donna tries to describe the woman she met. The woman had whispered something to her as Donna2 died and it was "Bad Wolf". Suddenly that phrase is printed everywhere around them and they race to the Tardis.

"What is it Doctor?" she asks. "It's the end of the universe".......Wah-oooooooh, wahhhhh-oooooh, da da da da da da da.

Whilst the trailer for next week's episode looks truly awesome, one aspect was predictable and I hope they are not being lazy. The last shot shows a Dalek.

This small basic motherboard was the perfect inexpensive replacement for an older dead one. Got it plus AMD Sempron LE-1150 plus 1GB of memory for approx €100.

We recently had an old Athlon motherboard die on us. It was a toss up between buying a dirt-cheap Vostro desktop from Dell or reusing all the existing components whilst replacing the core MB+CPU.

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I used dabs.com in the UK and bought the cheapest decent MB I could find. This Gigabyte really is a complete bargain if you have non-gfx intensive business needs. A summary of its features are as follows:

• AMD Sempron, Athlon 64 and AM2+ CPU Support
• Up to DDR2-800 Ram (2x Slots)
  
• SATA up to 3Gbs (2x connectors)
• 1x IDE
• 1x Floppy
  
• 10/100 LAN built-in
• NVidia NForce 405 Chipset
• NVidia GeForce 6100 graphics built-in
• Realtek built-in audio
  
• 1 PCI-E Slot for add-on graphics card
• 2x PCI slot
  
• 6x USB 2.0 (with add-on cable/backplate)

What was particularly useful about the motherboard was that I just pulled out the old one from the PC, replaced it with the new one, rebooted Windows 5 or 6 times as it installed driver support for the new hardware and then we were back in business on the PC as if nothing had changed (apart from a speed increase with the new CPU).

The only downsides really are having 2 PCI slots, one IDE and no Gigabit Ethernet but we don't actually need more slots and this particular PC is on a wireless LAN connection. The single IDE is a pain however since the main HDD is IDE (secondary is SATA) and we need one for the DVD burner too. However I had a PCI expansion card with both IDE and SATA on it which I got on eBay for a few Euro and that worked perfectly.

If you need a new business motherboard or a speedboost on an aging machine, you won't go wrong with this selection.

Top Chef has easily become my favourite cooking show of all time. I don't know what it is about its combination of reality tv, food, famous chefs and excitement, but nothing comes close. The season 4 finale was a cliffhanger.

Usual warnings apply, there is a season spoiler in this review so please don't read any further if you don't want to know who won.

The Top Chef formula is pretty simple. Get a collection of pretty talented chefs together for the series. Every episode has a Quick Fire Challenge which either gives immunity for the next challenge or some advantage. This is followed by the Elimination Challenge and one person leaves at the end of each episode.

Pretty standard stuff but it's the way they do it that makes it compelling TV. The head judge is Tom Colicchio, one of the best chefs in America. Each week they have guest judges who themselves are usually incredibly famous too. The challenges are always interesting and often fun. They have had a few running themes over the four series (restaurant wars etc).

The general standard of the chefs is good rising to amazing. Of the three previous seasons only the winner of season 2 was a clunker. To this day I do not understand why someone of such limited range was made Top Chef. From what I can see, the runner-up that year is already doing better than him in the real world.

So on to this Season's finale. All predictions were that a woman had to win and it seemed like at times they allowed weaker female contestants through each stage. In fact they tried to go for the double-brownie-points by having three lesbians on the show. Luckily the most talented of the three beat the others but I still believe (like many viewers) that she simply didn't belong in the final and it was affirmative-action gone wrong.

Two people shone through from the very first episode; Richard and Stephanie. He is one of the molecular gastronomy guys and did some incredibly detailed things throughout the series. However he also showed he had the required core skills which strangely seems to be missing in a lot of people in that niche. Stephanie is a much more traditional chef but she just kept surprising the judges. Little genius touches here and there which were delightful.

As with most finales, the pressure got to them all and they made mistakes. Each of them had a famous chef as a sous-chef on day 1 which was great fun as always. The dishes themselves varied from failures like Richard's pork-belly or Stephanie's pound cake to some fabulous successes. Despite my negative comments above, Lisa presented some really great food.

And then it came to the decision. It was clearly down to Richard and Stephanie with the dour scowling crossed-armed grump coming a not-too-distant third. My gut said Stephanie, not because she is a woman, but because she delivered well on the day and consistently brilliantly through the series. And so it turned out. A fully deserved win for a great chef.

Next week has a reunion show and then I don't know how long I'm going to have to wait for Season 5. Hurry up and make another one already!

Another wonderful documentary series from RTE set in a hospital. This is what real reality TV is all about. Hope, joy, fear and sadness in every moment. The successes of the operations balanced against the broken health system.

Each week the focus on a different speciality. The first week was transplant surgery and it was wonderful to see two people who were terminally ill be cured by liver and lung transplants respectively. The interviews with both the patients and the consultants were genuinely educational and emotional. Whilst we may complain about the way the consultant system works in Ireland, the dedication and love of the craft that these men show was refreshing.

The second week was brain surgery which is even more freak-me-out. They followed three people. One was a mentally handicapped girl with chronic epilepsy. She was given an implant (Vagus Nerve Stimulator) which would hopefully help it. Whilst they did see an improvement it wasn't major sadly.

The second person had a type of localised epilepsy which has been shown to be reduced by the removal of the hippocampus. This was the real "oh my god" part of the programme. The woman's life was so destroyed by the seizures that she was willing to have a chunk of her brain removed to deal with it. Unofrtunately again in her case, the result was not as successful as she had hoped.

Finally a woman with slipping vertebrae in her upper spine was in terrible pain and could even end up paralysed if it progressed. The surgeons amazingly put two scews in to bind the vertebra together. 4mm screws going into 5mm of bone. One tiny slip......

The quotes from the consultants are interesting too. One takes total joy in providing a permanent fix for something through a "simple" operation. Another is enraged at the HSE and thinks they are clearly incompetent. All obviously care deeply about their patients and their profession.

I've loved hospital/medical documentary series since I was a kid. Two have stuck in my head for decades: Chris Searle when he learned to be a mortician and the kid from South America with elephantitis. Whislt this show is not in that league, it is very high quality television. If it makes you shed a tear, learn something, empathise or makes you angry over the useless HSE then it has achieved something.