Hoke’s Ramblings

moar funny pictures

Hulk (the incredible one) kick’d asz! Then I saw Iron Man, it kick’d moar asz!!1

For Iron Man, make sure you stay till after the credits.

And if you haven’t seen either, see Iron Man first.

Right *dusts off cobwebs* let’s see if I remember how to use this here bloggy website…

It’s been ages since a post, but finally some news worth mentioning…it seems after decades of speculation, Robotech will finally be coming to the big screen. And it seems we have Tobey Maguire (and probably Transformers) to thank for that.

Just do a search for “maguire robotech” and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m fearful that it’ll be a sorry case of Notstalgia, but I’m prepared to give it a look

Quinn has already let the cat out the bag regarding my online collection of books. I wasn’t going to say anything until I had the whole lot in there, but since that will only be in several weeks when I have the energy and equipment to do so, you may as well take a gander now. I’ll do another blog entry once my our (95% of the books in the house are Lina’s) library is up to speed. (Quinn’s library is here.)

In a similar vein, I took the RSS feed of my ‘DVD’ category of ‘My Movies’ over at IMDb and stuck them into my blog using this fabulous WordPress plugin, inlineRSS. So take a peek and let me know if you want to borrow any, taste permitting. I’m hoping LibraryThing will do something similar soon, so I can integrate all my collections into one website.

I made a wonderful discovery last night. If you’re thoroughly parched and feel like you could drink up a small lake, Mugg & Bean has BOTTOMLESS lemonade for R8.90!

A couple of days back, Quinn showed me this page on IMDb, for a movie called ‘Half-Life‘. Unfortunately, it’s not the one we want to see, but this got me thinking: who would make a good Gordon Freeman?

My vote goes to Edward Norton. What do you think?

EDIT: There’s a pretty well made page of potential talent for a Half-Life movie here, but I suspect it may blow the budget!!

So, after almost a year away from the salty oceans, I got to join a bunch of workmates for a week of super-relaxed leisure diving at Sodwana Bay.

One of our crowd, Heidi, was doing her advanced course, and we all joined her on her deep dive. I must say, that’s the most relaxing time I’ve ever had underwater - it was magnificent! Perhaps there was a bit of narcedness involved, but I’m not complaining.

The only complaint is that at those depths, after fifteen minutes or so your dive computer starts spouting dire warnings of impending doom, so we had to cut it short.

A real pity, but the dive was definately worth it - warm, calm, and all the usual oddities you see at those depths, including an organic feather duster like the one I saw on my last deep dive in Sodwana, and now I have a witness, too! Pity Ed didn’t see it swimming, though.

We also had two stints on quad bikes, which was just as much fun as I remember having last time, if not more so. We did a one-hour tour the first day, and two days later, after recovering from the first ride, took a three hour, 50 km tour up to Lake Sibaya. What an awesome way to see such a beautiful location (if not the most eco-friendly).

On a techie note, Picasa2.5 supports geotagging via Google Earth. Click here for a KMZ file for Google Earth showing the location of some of our adventures, with included pics (about 200kB). For general pictures from the trip, look over here.

Wow. I was going back through Ye Olde Hoke’s Ramblinges Archyves and came across a post from 28 November 2005 stating that news of my (then) recent Mozambican dive trip was imminent. Hmmm.

In honour of this momentous occassion, I dug up this video taken by some Hungarian tourism scouts who happened to be on our snorkelling trip, where we came across a feeding frenzy of countless mantas and whale sharks - definately the highlight of the trip!

Here’s Ed finning like there’s no tomorrow trying to keep up with one of these magnificent beasts…

Maybe I won’t be so shoddy posting about my upcoming trip to Sodwana in early December. But you never know.

It seems to me Kalahari understands the true spirit of Christmas shopping…
And on that note, I’m feeling like a bit of an e-commerce junkie, with three orders pending at three different stores.

Warning: sever techno-babble follows…

I found via Google Earth Blog that there’s a network link that will show you episode-by-episode break-downs of what’s been happening to the Fox-River fugitives each week.

As an exercise in on-the-fly unpacking and re-packing of zip files (because that’s all KMZ files are, really) - I decided to take that file, unpack it, go through the KML code and insert the appropriate timestamps so that you can use Google Earth’s funky new time-slider gizmo to scroll through the episodes and only show the placemarks for a particular time.

I won’t mention the usual cliches of too much time etc, and I’ll hear none of it from y’alls, either!

PS - major spoiler alerts, obviously, if you’re not current with the US/Canadian episode schedule.

Get the timestamped network link here

Note: if you just get some meaningless text, instead of launching GE, try pressing F5 or Ctrl-F5. Otherwise just get the direct link here (will not update automatically)