wee doors banging

Take a pinch of The Good Life, a classic 70′s BBC sitcom starring Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal and placed 9th on a Britain’s Greatest Sitcom poll. Add one fan of the show with a rapidly approaching birthday, in the form of a Mr. Hood who’s retired and spends a lot of time in the garden growing his own fruit and vegetables. Mix with one software engineer with a rudimentary grasp of Adobe Illustrator and send the results to a photo printing website. What do you get?

The Coca-Cola Company, worldwide purveyor of refreshing cola based beverages, are running an interesting marketing campaign at the moment that’s a little bit different to the usual and has something for the retrogamer. They’ve commissioned German artists eBoy to produce posters of a number of Irish cites in their “Pixorama” style, highly reminiscent of the isometric arcade adventures of old such as Head Over Heels and Get Dexter!

I had a hard time choosing the title of this post. I was toying with “My Brother: Triple Awesome Comedy Genius” in recognition of the tale of magnificent lolmastery it describes.

I started a new lap of Sol today, and to mark this special occasion one of my three brothers sent me a birthday card. An unremarkable event you might think, but this was no ordinary card. Oh no, this was a card with a jest-quotient the likes of which you’ve never seen before and are unlikely to see again in your or your grandchildren’s lifetime.

There has been much media and online 2.0 hysteria about the recent outbreak of the dangerous H1N1 strain of Swine Influenza, a.k.a. “Mexican Swine Flu”. It’s important though that we all sty calm. H1N1 swine ‘flu is still just a snoutbreak, a minor hamergency the health services can contain for now.

Googling myself is something I do from time to time and, from time to time, it turns up a surprise. This time, the surprise turned up was that one of the search results was a link to a Times Online article that mentions my earlier post, “25 Random Things About Me”.

This weekend saw the return of the highest rated comedy show in BBC history. Space based cult sitcom Red Dwarf returned to UK screens after a nine year hiatus, not on the BBC as before, but on satellite channel Dave which has resurrected the show for a three part special, Red Dwarf: Back To Earth.

When we last saw the Boys From The ‘Dwarf back in 1999, they were in trouble. Red Dwarf itself was being consumed by metal eating space bacteria and on the verge of breaking apart. The crew had abandoned ship, our heroes Lister, Cat, Kryten and Kochanski had fled to a mirror universe leaving Rimmer trapped on the burning mothership with the Grim Reaper and a vending machine with a bad attitude.

How did they get out of that one?

Battlestar Galactica, the much praised “re-imagining” of Glen A. Larson’s classic 1970′s science fiction series of the same name, came to and end this week. I was hooked on the new show since 2003′s astounding mini series that introduced us to the new cast of characters, including advanced Centurions, Cylons that looked like humans and a female Starbuck. These are my thoughts and rantings on the three hour series finale, “Daybreak”.

Spoilers ahead!

The Playpower Foundation is using “the world’s most inexpensive home computer” as a platform for learning games in order to improve educational access for millions of children around the world. Motivated by the availability of this radically affordable platform, their goal is to design and discover high-quality 8-bit learning games and make computer-aided learning affordable for people everywhere. Playpower are looking for volunteers to design and develop all aspects of educational software (including games) for their system. Think you can help?

There’s a meme on Facebook at the moment where you write 25 random things about yourself that your friends may not realise, then send it to your friends and get them to do the same. Normally I don’t bother with these “do this zany fun thing then spam your friends” requests that seem to infest Facebook, but this one intrigued me. What 25 random things would I write about myself and could I successfuly transplant the idea to blog land?

Inspired by Destroy All Onions’ own “Christmas Card of the Year”, I have now analysed, cogitated, deliberated and digested upon my own haul of festive greetings slips and come up with my top 3 cards of the year, 2008.