wee doors banging

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”. Well, something like that.

You can’t have escaped hearing the recent news from Japan, and perhaps like me you’re wondering how much of what you hear is true and what is media hype. Wonder no more, we have a man on the ground in Tokyo.

Twenty eight years. That’s how long I’ve been waiting for a sequel to Tron, but now, finally, and almost unbelievably, it has arrived in the form of Tron: Legacy. It’s been a long time, and the new film has a lot to live up to. For the most part it delivers.

The wrapping paper is in the bin, the final turkey remnants have been eaten, and the decorations are packed away in the attic. Christmas is almost over for another year. Only one thing remains to be taken care of, the (becoming traditional) Third Annual Wee Doors Christmas Card of the Year Awards (2010)

Now the new year is upon us, I’ve taken a look back at 2010 by way of some photos of the (personally) significant events of the year. It beats writing about it.

Georgina from poemtweet has written a little poem about me. Sadly, it’s all too true. Check it out.

In January this year I went along to a past pupil’s night at Grosvenor High School, an alma mater of mine, in Cameronian Drive, Belfast. The old school buildings were being pulled down and new buildings erected on a site in Marina Park just behind them. Yesterday we were all invited to go back to skool again and take a look around those brand new buildings.

Kick-Ass, if you’ve been living under a cinematic rock recently, is an action movie directed by Matthew Vaughan based on the graphic novel series of the same name created by Mark Millar. I’ve seen the movie and make no mistake, it boots bottom. It’s Superbad meets Batman Begins, with a generous sprinkling of Kill Bill. It’s enormously entertaining in an over the top comic book kind of way. Great performances from the young cast and old codger Nicolas Cage, perfect comic timing and a kick-ass soundtrack make it a fun way to spend two hours.

But Christopher Tookey of the Daily Mail disagrees. He thinks it’s child pornography.

Doctor Who returned to the nation’s screens recently for the fifth series of the modern (post 2005) era. A new lead actor, Matt Smith, plays the eleventh incarnation of The Doctor and the appropriately titled first episode, “Eleventh Hour”, has been well received by critics and the series’ many fans alike.

That’s all very nice, but the return of Who has left me wondering, where’s the grown up science fiction on UK television?

I like to keep abreast of new technology, and recently I came across some new research from a group of networking boffins based in Silicone Valley that outlined a relatively simple plan to enlarge the volume of data the internet can carry.

The computing pioneers of the 1940s could not have envisaged the recent surge of bandwidth heavy internet applications such as music and video streaming, online gaming, social networking and so on. The binary systems they invented, while adequate for the requirements of the past, are creaking at the seams under these modern workloads.

The new research describes a plan to break away from the outdated and limiting two-value binary principles, by adopting instead three valued trinary logic.