The Wire Season 3

Just finished another season of the Wire, Season 3 sees McNulty and the special investigations team back investigating big drug players in the area. When the Major of the Western district creates an unofficial and unsanctioned drug amnesty provided dealers stick to one of 3 areas, the ripples are felt across Baltimore.

Season 3 isn't as focused as the first 2 and lacks a solid single case at its heart which provided the intrigue in the other seasons. Having said that, the end does feel less disappointing and more wrapped up than in previous seasons.

Overall, great characters, some interesting plots, but could have done with a better driving force for the plot.

3.5/5

Liverpool

Not updated in a while and in a bid to stop this becoming a blog of tumbleweed again, I'm going to write some crap about my weekend. Rosie and I travelled down to Liverpool to visit Neil so at least there is something to write about.

I finally finished Deathnote on the train down, it's only taken 2 years!

Saturday we saw the sites of Liverpool (Photos) including a helicopter display from the Royal Navy! We had dinner in a nice place in Chinatown called Jumbo City, food was good and the portions were so large we didn't manage to eat it all (well I managed mine, Rosie struggled a bit with her noodles). After dinner we caught the new Chan-Wook Park movie Thirst at the cool FACT cinema (2 seater sofas for cinema chairs!). Movie is excellent btw.

Sunday morning we watched Young and Dangerous 4 and 5 and ate bacon rolls before catching our train back north. A quick stop in Preston where we met Hannah and Ross before catching another train back to Edinburgh. I finished the book I started on the way down on the way up as well (Foundation by Isaac Asimov).

So overall, a good weekend, but tiring

Pedals - Update II

Finally got round to going to pick up my new pedals from the Post Office. Have to say, Merlin dealt with the problem very well. They shipped the correct ones out as soon as they received my return and they were with me next day. Just need to fit them now.

Google Charts API

I was chatting with Neil today at work about displaying the data from the IMDb top 250 list in some sort of chart, was originally thinking of adding it into Munin which we use for server stats and just linking the image onto a page on my website.

We had a quick look at the Google Charts API to see what it could do. We've thought about using this at work for a while, but never got round to adding it into any of our projects.

Neil knocked up a quick chart for some film lists on his site and it seemed easy enough. This evening, I've stolen his chart and used it with my data to add a progress chart to the bottom of my film 2006-2009 pages (also 200 film which is pretty much just film 2005). It was a bit fiddly to get the chart exactly as I wanted, but once you begin to understand how the API works, it's not too bad.

I've just knocked up another page, Film Charts which overlays each of the 5 years on top of each other. A bit trickier than I thought at first. With 365 data points for each year and the image retreived from Google through a get request I quickly ran into the URI length limit imposed by the browser. So instead of plotting all 5 series on separate graphs, I've created 5 different graphs and using absolutely positioned divs and some transparency got them to render on top of each other.

A little bit of Javascript allows the user to turn different years on and off, so you can see how badly I'm doing this year :)

New Lens - Update 1

Big daisy like flower, originally uploaded by chored.

Yesterday we went for a bit of an exploration of Midlothian. First stop was the newly opened Springfield Mill wildlife park just outside of Loanhead. While we didn't see much "big" wildlife, I got some close-ups of flowers and insects.

The Tamron 17-50 seemed to handle everything pretty well. The maximum magnification is similar to the 70-200 but you can get a lot closer to the subject (27cm minimum focusing distance) which makes taking close-ups really easy.

After Springfield Mill we headed down the road to Roslin Glen to take some more shots. Pretty happy with the lens so far. Seems good even wide open. At 17mm, close-ups aren't that sharp, but I'm thinking, that maybe I should be shooting close-ups that wide :)

Still need to test it out on bigger subjects though.

The Wire Season 2

Season 2 of the Wire follows up where Season 1 left off. McNulty has been sent to work in the marine unit and the rest of the detail involved in trying to bring down Avon Barksdale are spread out the Baltimore police department.

When 13 dead girls turn up in a shipping container at the docks, Bunk and Freeman are tasked with clearing the case, but they soon realise they can pool their resources when Lt. Daniels is given a detail to investigate the head of the dockworkers union.

As they get deeper into the case, everyone involved begins to realise that things go further than they could have imagined and the usual management bullshit starts to hinder their investigation.

Season 2 starts of even better than the first season, the number of sub-plots and characters make for interesting viewing without getting overly complicated. It's a setup which wouldn't have worked without the first season laying the groundwork in terms of introduction of many of the characters.

The change of scenery from the streets of Baltimore to the docks keeps things fresh but still familiar.

Like Season 1, Season 2 is well shot, written and has some great perfomances from the lead actors (of which there are now a fair few). My only critiscm is that like Season 1, the end is a little bit disappointing, setting itself up for Season 3 without bringing about a satisfying conclusion to all the events of Season 2.

I've already got the Season 3 DVDs ready to watch, so hopefully 3 is as good as the first two.

4.5/5

I-Ching Chinese Takeaway

Nearly two weeks since our last Chinese takeaway and being a Friday night, who can be bothered cooking? We went with the I-Ching on Slateford road, literally a couple of hundred meters at the most from Taste Good. It's somewhere we have ordered from in the past, so thought we'd try it again in our quest to taste them all.

Our order consisted off duck spring rolls, spare ribs (we've not been feeling the love for the chicken and sweetcorn soup recently), crispy shredded beef and boiled rice. Total cost just over £16. No freebies.

The food arrived very quickly and we tucked into the duck spring rolls. They were pretty good, although not as good as Taste Good. A pot of sweet and sour sauce was provided for dippage, again the Hoi-sin from Taste Good is better, but the spring rolls and sauce were still tasty.

The spare ribs came coated in BBQ sauce and there were a lot of them, possibly meant as a main rather than a starter. The were tasty as well, although very messy to eat.

The crispy shredded beef was ok, not amazing, it wasn't really to my taste (could have done with being a bit sweeter). Also, there wasn't quite enough sauce and the rice seemed a little soggy.

Overall, good starters, ok main, nice enough but not the best we've had.

Score: 3/5

I-Ching: 83 Slateford Rd, Edinburgh, EH11‎ : 0131 337 9898‎

Pedals - Update

Merlin said if I send back the pedals, they'll send the right ones out and refund my postage. So far so good ...

DMR V8 Pedals

The DMR V8 pedals are great, I've had them on my bike since I bought it back in May and they're big and chunky, ride smoothly and are very grippy. The only downsides are that the paint doesn't seem to last long and if you get one in the shin, it's gonna leave a scar (trust me, I know) [and some people don't like my garish purple ones on my red bike].

Also, they don't have any reflectors, so technically aren't legal for riding at night. So, being the safety conscious fellow I am, I ordered a pair of these from Merlin cycles, look like the DMRs, but with reflectors and half the price. Sorted, or so I thought.

Just picked my package up from the post office (Obviously I'm using the royal I which means Rosie) and to my surprise, Merlin have sent me a pair of DMR V8s instead. £24 worth of pedals for £12, which would be good if I didn't already own a pair of V8s which I want to replace due to the lack of reflector situation!

They always say a true test of a company is how they handle problems [By they, I mean Gav and me but I'm sure others say it too], so we'll soon find out if Merlin are just good prices and fast delivery or if there's someone nice in the customer support department to back that up.

I guess, if their customer support is shit, I'm still £12 up and can replace the garish purple with the nice black ones.

Site update

Added cute little Social Networking icons from komodomedia.com, seen on Chris' blog (steelskin.net).

I've also added proper RSS integration into the reviews page, so that it shows up in the browser rather than being hidden away on a need to know basis.

Twitter

Everyone loves Twitter, so I now announce movie reviews via twitter. 140 characters is more than enough to critique any film, so if you don't have time to read a full-length film review, why not read my Twitter Movie Reviews

Website - Redesign

Well, I've been meaning to do it for a while, but I finally got round to redesigning wilkiewideweb.com. I've gone for simple and clean, and hopefully the slightly smaller font means I can get more information onto the page. I've only tested in Firefox 3.5 and IE 8, so I hope it works in other browsers.

All my code is now in subversion, so I can develop locally and then update the live site easily once I've committed, so it should give me the motivation to update more often.

Website - New pages

I've just updated my site with a couple of new pages, the pages have been there for a while, but only just added them to the menu :) EIFF shows a list of all the films I've seen at the Edinburgh Internation Film Festival since 2004 including links to my reviews. IMDb Top 250 shows the top 250 movies from IMDb with those I've seen/reviewed highlighted. I'm up at 128 out of 250 at the moment (99 reviewed) hopefully, there's a bit of overlap with the 1001 movies you must see before you die list.

New Lens

My new lens arrives, originally uploaded by chored.

So I gave in and bought the Tamron A16 (17-50mm f/2.8) on Thursday, so that Amazon could ship it and it would come today (I love Amazon Prime), turned up this morning. (I'm even feeling little animosity towards City Link today).

I took some photos of the lens to compare it to my other Tamron and a couple of test shots and everything looks pretty decent. Need to try it in real life now rather than taking photos of crap in my flat. Hopefully will get some good shots in Berlin at the end of the month.