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Like I said, this is terrible. Two days to go and it's June and this is only my second blog of the month. I have been busy, honest! As far as recommendations go I guess it will have to be Park Wars: The Little Menace, which apparently has been welcomed by both George Lucas and Matt Stone & Trey Parker. You see, it's a spoof of Star Wars with the South Park characters taking the parts.

Oh yes, and the United Devices cancer research project (see my archives, April 5) works fine in the background on my machine. Do download it.
posted by Graham Gurrin at 8:51 PM

Well - this is terrible. More than half way through the month and this is my first blog. But then I have been busy. Was going to recommend Audio Galaxy - which is still pretty neat, and both faster than Napster (RIP) and better for finding more obscure music. But then I read all about spyware and adware - programs downloaded on to your PC which monitor your Web usage and send off information about you for advertisers to make use off. And Audio Galaxy is apparently a culprit. Anyway, here are a couple of places where you can find out more about spyware -- a geeknews article and a ZDNet article. And here are a couple of sites where you can check whether you are affected -- Lavasoft, where you can download Ad-aware, a freeware spyware detector, database and removal tool, and Spychecker, where you can type in a program's name and find out if it is known spyware.
posted by Graham Gurrin at 12:54 PM

The Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History has a wonderfully nostalgic online exhibition devoted to Painting by Numbers. For true fans of the genre, Le Salon de Paint-by-Numbers is also well worth a visit. Here you will find a history, articles and a gallery guaranteed to bring a lump to the throat and a whiff of turps to the nostrils.
posted by Graham Gurrin at 8:35 PM

John Diamond, who wrote a weekly column for the Times newspaper in which he chronicled his experiences since being diagnosed with cancer in 1997 until shortly before he died on March 2, had an engaging approach to his work - that the right place for it once it had been read was at the bottom of the cat litter tray. Fortunately that did not stop him making the archives of his column available through the Fleet Street Forum site.
posted by Graham Gurrin at 10:51 AM

And another week flies by. On Tuesday I met my friend Richard for a drink in town and at his suggestion we went to see Don't Look Now at the cinema. There was someone rustling a bag of crisps at the big of the audience all the way through the opening scenes which was a trifle annoying, but it was a beautifully clean print, the film was just as brilliant as I remembered it being, and as an added highlight, a woman across the aisle from us screamed both as the piece of scaffolding fell in the church, and in spectacularly blood-curdling fashion as the red-hooded dwarf turned round... Amazing.

But I have to report that I can find very little on Nic Roeg on the Web. The Internet Movie Database obviously has plenty of info. There is a Finnish website which has a section on Roeg along with many other directors. It has a link to a site, The Films of Nicolas Roeg which says it is under construction yet whose web counter reports 1,295 hits!
posted by Graham Gurrin at 8:35 PM

Good grief -- another eon has passed without so much as a whisper here. Well, eleven days anyway.

I am inclined to urge anyone who reads this to go to United Devices and download the software to enable them to join in its latest agent for the Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Project. Similar to the seti@home project, of which you may have heard, it allows the National Foundation for Cancer Research Centre for Drug Discovery in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford to utilise unused processing power in your PC to help in the search for cancer fighting drugs. There's no need to stay on line while it's working. Let's hope they have more luck than the extra-terrestrial seekers.

I say "I am inclined to" because I haven't downloaded it myself yet -- but as soon as I have time!!!
posted by Graham Gurrin at 7:10 PM

Just been looking at the amazing Shockwave presentation of "All your base are belong to us" at Planet Starsiege.
posted by Graham Gurrin at 5:16 AM