Snowmageddon

Well, they say to be careful what you wish for ...

From a few flurries on Sunday afternoon, the snow soon built up into a steady down fall of big, floaty flakes leaving a large swath of fresh, crisp powder by the time I poked my nose out of the door at six o'clock on Monday morning. It was a magical morning walk, with satisfying crunching noises underfoot and an excited dog bounding through drifts deeper than his, admittedly rather stubbular, legs.

I didn't bother with the drive into Leeds, and just hooked up an extra 19" monitor to my laptop which along with the study pc gave me three screens on my desk for a nicely panoramic working space. I emailed my boss and then settled down with a nice vanilla latte with the snow falling outside whilst I worked. Lovely.

This morning was bright and clear, and apart from a bit of ice on the road, the drive in was as easy as a pastry based confection containing either fruit or meat. I was at my desk for half past eight, to find an email warning that the car park was a bit icy - slightly redundant after I had parked and then skated my way to the door carrying my laptop bag. One benefit (or drawback, depending how you look at it) was that the fridge was half full of sample pots of Gu (and there should be an umlaut on there) chocolate mousse. Nom nom nom.

In games news, the Operation Anchorage DLC for Fallout 3 proved to be a nice little addition to the game, giving another couple of hours of fairly linear shoot-em-up action, being somewhat reminiscent of the stealth ninja black ops bits of the original Half Life with a wintery feel. Slightly odd to be looking for health and ammo recharging stations rather than looting bodies though. Back to the wastelands again, and probably time to tackle some main story missions now.

In DVD news, we watched the Danny Boyle film 'Sunshine'. From the trailers I had been expecting a fairly cerebral bit of SF in the vein of Solaris or 2001, but it turned out to be an totally incoherent piece of tosh with a complete disregard for the laws of physics (Jim) and logic. Nice use of surround sound and some impressive visuals, but otherwise utter rubbish. Avoid.

Much more interesting was 'Being Human' where the concept of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a house sounds like the setup for a joke, but was actually pretty good apart from some bending of the genre rules. The vampire chap seems to have no problems with sunlight that aren't cured by wearing sunglasses and it wasn't really clear whether the ghost girl could leave the house or not, or who could see her exactly, and how solid she actually is. Good fun, if a bit histrionic and overblown in places. Much better than 'Demons' at any rate.

Also well worth watching was the David Attenborough documentary about Charles Darwin and the tree of life. This really should be compulsory viewing for the reported 50% of people for whom the majestic diversity of nature is insufficient and want to believe either that the universe was poofed into existence six thousand years ago on a particularly dull Tuesday afternoon, or that god or various gods have somehow used a spectacularly long winded and cruel process of evolution involving three billion years of death and at least six mass extinctions to evolve humans who have trouble walking upright without developing back ache. As Attenborough himself says, if you believe in a creator, then you believe in the sort of god that creates worms that are perfectly designed to grow in the eyeballs of African children. Lovely.