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2002-03-05 Entry: "Weekend Stuff - Gripping Viewing"

This weekend saw little diversion from my viewing habits.

Friday, I deigned to watch "Black Books" and actually found it funny - a first for me. Perhaps it was due to the ludicrous setup of Bill Bailey picking up a few notes of piano by listening to the radio.

Saturday, the day seemed to disappear. I'm not sure what I did. I do know that my PC gave up working when I tried to turn it on at about 9pm. It just sat there looking dead; no display; no nice beeping sounds. Resetting the Bios seems to have fixed it - I think the battery is low, but I thought they recharged so I'm not sure how that can be...

I did watch Earth 2, and the start of the 4th season of Charmed. Charmed seemed to have lost all continuity - they showed the last episode of season 3 beforehand and, due to the loss of Shannon Docherty, the next episode made absolutely no sense; it was as if they'd missed an episode.

Sunday saw a trip to Reading - I purchased two books and three DVDs. I was actually looking for four, but couldn't find the last at a price I was willing to pay. Basically they were the films I hadn't bothered ordering mail order (where I seem to just be ordering TV stuff) - Jurassic Park 3, A Knights Tale, and The Fast And The Furious. Then I messed around on the computer trying to get a csv file (output from Outlook Express address book) into an Access database. After much fiddling with visual basic to read the file in and count the address lines, I just resorted to importing into Excel, and then importing the spreadsheed (which it got right) into Access. However, Outlook managed to lose the preceeding 0 from quite a few of the phone numbers when creating the csv - which is a bit stupid when it knows it's a phone number!

Finally, I watched the first episodes of 24 and X-Files season 8. 24 was quite good - needs to pick up in later episodes to keep me gripped though. The X-Files was pretty terrible, but that was sort of expected.

To fill in the Saturday / Sunday blanks, now that I've remembered, was the start of the Formula 1 season. Australia meant that the race was on in the early hours of the morning, so rather than wait for the afternoon repeat and hear the result before hand (as I always seem to), I taped it and watched as soon as I got up. Qualifying was a wash out (literally), but the race was enlivened by the high attrition rate (mainly caused by the first corner crash), and a good showing by the smaller teams. Unfortunately, I'm away for the next race, and I'm not sure how easy it'll be to tape (what with my usual weekend taping schedule, fitting it all on 8 hours of tape could be tricky; especially as my video only lets me program six things in advance...).

Last night's Enterprise was terrible - "Fortunate Son" - about a cargo transport and some Nausicans. I'm sure this story hasn't been told worse by Voyager before... Dark Angel made up for it though (which is scary all by itself - Dark Angel had a terrible first season, but seems to have found its feet in the second). And I'm fairly sure Alec and Asha are set to be a couple...