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At the beginning of the year, I had about 180 unwatched DVDs. I now have a mere 12 unwatched, despite buying 159 more so far this year. That’s pretty much a title/day despite the fact that an ever-growing percentage of my collection is comprised of multi-disc TV sets. It’s a sad fact that I watch more TV-on-DVD than TV-on-TV.

I’ve got copies of GTA San Andreas, Doom III, Quake IV and Civilisation IV all waiting for me to finish my backlog of DVDs. If I started a multi-week game of Civilisation before finishing my unwatched DVD pile, it’d probably double in size…

Just finished watching Alias Season 4. Another ‘reboot’, but a show like Alias needs that every now and then. Enjoyable stuff, although the season finale cliffhanger was telegraphed in big letters to me – important information, told by the driver of a moving car, whilst looking at his passenger, not the road…bah

The credits opening credits got changed too. Instead of seeing a small parts of a grainy home video through the lettering, they now feature a rapid intercutting of all of Jennifer Garner’s disguises from Seasons 1-3, together with a soundtrack that goes ‘ooh’ at the appropriate moments. It’s certainly got my vote, but I’m not sure how the rest of the cast feel now that no-one bothers reading their names anymore…

The improved credits

Just finished Scrubs: Season 2. Funny, funny show. Season 2 had the added bonus of a few episodes featuring Heather Locklear, who looks amazing for someone her age (44). Sarah Chalke received a mini-makeover for S2 as well, moving from “dork” to “cute dork”. Both good moves by the producers IMO.

Heather Locklear

Sarah Chalke

I’ve now watched the complete seasons 1-4, and have the following comments.

I actually preferred the theme before it got jazzed up for season 3.

I like the mirror-universe Ensign Sato. It’s amazing what a small make-up and costume change will do…

The final episode sucked. The penultimate episode on the other hand would have made a perfect series finale – it had a poignant storyline, placed the crew at the centre of a historical event etc.

Lots of storylines were left frustratingly open by various episodes – what happened to the former Vulcan Adminstrator? Did Archer command another ship, or accept promotion? Why were the Xindi never heard from again?

The most frustrating thing though is the price Paramount put on all Star Trek DVDs. RRPs of £85-£90 are just too high. Even though play.com discounts to £55-£60, they are still ridiculously expensive. grr.

Predictable and mind-numbing, but a fairly enjoyable 90 mins nonetheless. And so much better than Jingle All The Way

Just finished watching this.

Good points

1. Much better than S3
2. Nice to see some old faces return in unexpected ways – especially Mia Kirshner (below)

Bad points

1. No Elisha Cuthbert (also below)
2. You can’t ‘enhance/zoom-in to’ a out-of-focus, in the distance picture into something clear enough to read a license plate.

I also hope that in real life, the US doesn’t have 104 nuclear reactors connected to the internet so that people can hack into them…

Mia Kirshner

Elisha Cuthbert

So after much procrastination, I’ve finally released DVDFolks 0.8. Versions 0.1-0.7 took roughly a month between them (i.e. a new version every 4/5 days). 0.7-0.8 has taken 3 months. hmm..

The extended release time has meant that the code base has had an overhaul, and lots of testing has taken place. The result – I feel confident enough to remove the ‘beta’ label.

I’ve just looked at my site stats for the first time this month – DVDFolks 0.7 now has over a thousand downloads – I get the feeling that transcribing the credits directly from the movie, just isn’t something most people want to do…

I’ve just seen the uber-cool trailer for Serenity.

My sitting-unwatched-on-the-shelf-since-I-bought-them-a-year-ago Firefly DVDs are now calling to me with a strong sense of urgency…

The resource centre is 1 month old today (31 days). Since launch, I’ve added more programs on an irregular basis (e.g. Crew2Profiler), and updated a few pages (e.g contribution guidelines).

The thing I find most amazing is that in the 30 days it’s been up and running – it’s clocked up an astounding 2119 visits!

It’s also dawned on me what the problem with the per-program stats was (I was using DVDFolks to test the stats with, and since the download links still pointed to the OLD location, expecting to see some downloads from the new location was expecting a bit much )

That was a stupendously funny episode I’ve just watched. Great stuff.

My favourite online DVD retailer for R1 discs, is pretty much going to close down. DV-Depot have been brilliant to shop with – cheap courier shipping, customs-friendly packaging (no tax paid on what must be about £3000 worth of DVDs), excellent customer service – and an amazingly powerful shopping cart. Now I’ve got to find a comparable retailer (reasonably priced discs, cheap shipping, no taxes). Bugger.

To All Our Valued Depot Customers

It comes with sincere sadness to have to announce that the main Depot site will be restructuring starting today for an indefinite period of time.

This decision has become necessary due to a steady decline in business and corresponding profit levels over the past 18 months. Our main business is no longer financially viable. Our motto from day one was always about customer service – to offer the things that no other DVD retailer did. The drop in profits has forced us to slowly reduce our performance, to a level that we are no longer satisfied with.

The main site has been turned off for a few days – we are taking a full inventory and when complete, the main site will reopen. If you have checked out an order, these will be completed and shipped. For the forseeable future, we will not be bringing in any more new releases or catalog product.

If you have prepaid a disc, you can either refund the title yourself and the money will go into your Depot account. Should you wish a refund back to your credit card, please open a support ticket and this will be done.

We still have lots of stock in all genres – every title including rare out of print titles will be put on sale – details will be announced when we reopen in a few days..

We recently streamlined the Adult Depot operation and this will continue to remain open as it currently is. The Adult site will grow over time as profits allow.

The decision to restructure our main site was a tough one – but we are doing it today so that we can do this with our heads held high – so that no employee, supplier or customer will lose any money – and we can end this phase of the Depot with a sense of accomplishment by all the employees..

All indications point to a continuing drop in business – I am though, cautiously optimistic that once high definition DVD comes that we’ll see a resurgence in DVD sales – when it comes, we’ll reassess things and decide whether to relaunch our main site with a fresh start.

Please stay in touch via our forums..

All of us here want to *thank- you very much* for your business, your loyal support, and becoming our friends – it’s been one hellova great ride…

- John, Shaun, Christian and the rest of the Depot staff.

I’ve just finished watching season 1 of Las Vegas on DVD. It was a blind-buy purchase, but one I’m definately glad I made. Decadant, eye-candy filled fun (it’s from writer of The Fast and the Furious…), but not completely without talent (it’s got James Caan, and the girls can actually act).

Definately one I recommend.

The feedback to this has been amazing – I’ve had offers of web space, guideline suggestions as well as numerous suggestions of various tools.

I’ve just uploaded a bunch of new stuff, and will add more as I get time.

The individual statistics will be available as soon as I figure out what isn’t working with them – in the meantime, the main page stats do contain this information.

…is just an amazing film. 11/10

Splitting into tokens, regular expressions, arrays of arrays, matching combined tokens, whilst excluding those you matched before….

There has got to be a better way….

for (var n = (fullNameSplit[j].length - lastName[j].split(/s/g).length); n > firstName[j].split(/s/g).length; n--) {
	for (var o = 0; o < lastNamePrefixes.length; o++) {
		if ((fullNameSplit[j][n-2] + " " + fullNameSplit[j][n-1]) == lastNamePrefixes[o]) {
			lastName[j] = fullNameSplit[j][n-2] + " " + fullNameSplit[j][n-1] + " " + lastName[j];
			break;
			}
		else if (fullNameSplit[j][n-1] == lastNamePrefixes[o]) {
			lastName[j] = fullNameSplit[j][n-1] + " " + lastName[j];
			break;
			}
	}
}

In no particular order – covers the past month or so

• Layer Cake – OK
• Shark Tale – less funny than The Fresh Price of Bel Air
• Exorcist: The Beginning – Pretty good actually, although I’ve not seen the original…
• Resident Evil:Apocalypse – see ‘The Exorcist’
• Wimbledon – I was very surprised by this. It’s actually one of the best films I’ve seen this year
• Sky Captain… – passable enough
• AvP – Needed more gore. Apparently the DVD will be a Director’s Cut
• I Robot – not exactly an Asimov novel, but good anyway
• Saved! – anything that treats fundamentalist Christians as comedy is good in my book
• New York Minute – It’s a film aimed at teenage girls. And I enjoyed it….kill me now
• Harvard Man – Just plain bad
• Wild Things:Unrated – Good, (not-so) clean fun
• The In Crowd – see Wild Things
• The Shawshank Redemption – I’ve seen it 4 or 5 times now, and can’t help feeling it could have been better. It’s still one of my favourite films though
• Monster – Charlize Theron can act. The Italian Job is forgiven!
• I (Still) Know What You Did Last Summer – now I’ve seen the original versions of the Scary Movie scenes. Scary Movie did them better IMO
• Love Actually – Fell flat in places, but made up for it completely with the ass-kicking PM
• Bend It Like Beckham – Right up there with Wimbledon. I’m fairly sure the sporty theme is just a coincidence.

Having recently (yesterday/today) watched the original trilogy on DVD, I am amazed by the restoration work that went into them. These are films over 20 years old, yet on DVD they look better than some recent blockbusters – no scratches, no grain, pinsharp.

The revamped effects are very well done and sorely needed for all of the 1997 CG additions.

But Lucas could have left the original bits alone…

Absolutely brutal.
Absolutely an emotional journey to a Christian.
Absolutely a two hour waste of my time.

Just got down to 100! This sounds like a lot (alright – it is a lot) but it was pushing 200 a couple of months ago, and I have been buying more since then.

Jumanji [imdb.com] – just how cute was Kirsten Dunst?

Got this yesterday – and I’m nearly half-way through watching it. Even better than seasons 1 and 2. Lot’s of twists and turns in the plot which make for excellent viewing!