Bank Holiday - rain no shine

After a frenetic Friday getting some finance figures done, I've had 4 days all my own. It's consisted of :

Watching England pull off a surprise win in the Test Match - Yey !
Marathon World of Warcraft sessions
Seeing the satellite pic break up due to storm interference
And catching Tin Man

I'm just past a third of the way through Tin Man, it's one of the new collection of mini-series that have been hitting Sci-Fi channel recently. They'll take a story that's been done before, like Dune, Earthsea and now Wizard of Oz and redo (I'm wary about the made up buzz word re-imagine) it. The producers take advantage of more up to date production techniques, better effects and apparently bigger budgets and apply them to telling the old stories.

Now it's the turn of Wizard of Oz, this time around switched around a little. The title is Tin Man and we meet him pretty early on in the shape of Neal McDonough who had the lead role in Medical Investigation as well as playing the part of 1st Lt Buck Compton in Band of Brothers. He's a good actor who I keep an eye out for. Back to Tin Man - the old favourites are all there, in slightly different forms. Lol - Glitch, taking the part of Scarecrow, just expressed a fear of scarecrows. That's the pattern for the new productions, they take the same basic story but add something new to it. I like 'em.

Back to Tin Man, I'm midway through the second episode of three and it's looking good for something to be added to the dvd wish list later on today. I'm going to try and avoid playing Warcraft today, as I've been doing what could only be described as "Benders" on it over the weekend. The stage my new main character is at the moment involves hitting an area called Stranglethorn Vale in a big way. It's a sizable area that keep a character happy for quite some time. Which is something everyone knows, so you get higher level characters coming in to bully the people who are just trying to level. Unless you start at midnight and go on until 6am. Plays hell with the sleeping patterns but it lets you plow thorugh without too much molestation :-)

I'm not quite sure what I think of doing the mammoth WoW sessions. It's still the best game I've played and it happily runs on my main PC. Eve runs well but it's a drop dead boring game to play, plus its servers can't cope with the fleet battles. The new kid on the block, Age of Conan, looks promising but early reports suggest it should still be in beta testing. Plus it has insane hardware requirements.

I suspect my graphics card would probably melt if I threw AoC at it, I get the feeling it's suffered a fan failure which will be the second fan failure I've had. The hardware monitoring is telling me that it idles at 70 degrees C and has been hitting 105-110 C when pushed. Which is rather too hot for any electronic gubbins and it about 30 degrees above what it was when I got the card. It still happily runs WoW, Settlers IV and Moo2 though, so I'm not quite switching it for my older spare just yet.

Back to work tomorrow and to see how the cyclone is going with that finance stuff. We've been talking about what will happen when the dust settles, so we're in the period when all that dust is up in the air. I have a plan for tomorrow's Wordless Wednesday pic - inspired by all the cricketers who got hit on the helmets in the 2 Tests that have been going on. Looks like no lasting problems for 3 of the 4 but I'm concerned about the New Zealander Daniel Flynn. He got hit full on the grill of his helmet, which deformed under the impact allowing the ball to hit him in the mouth. He's lost a couple of teeth and didn't take any further part in the match. He needs to get back on the horse as soon he possibly can, because those psychological effects can be devastating if you back away too much. I hope he makes it.