The Distant Sound of Thunder

Tired, but that's not unexpected.

Work has been frustrating, with a lot of time wasted trying to set up a citrix connection and a daisy chain of remote desktops to get onto a customer site to set something up, and then fiddling with endless settings on a web server to see if would trigger a request to yet another server.

We still hadn't resolved it by five o'clock, so I called it a day and then went and sat in a queue of traffic for an hour. There seem to have been a lot of shunts on the motorway recently - there was a Nissan Micra with its front end caved in on the other carriageway this morning and tonight I went past a lorry neatly parked in the central reservation with a couple of cars behind it.

Last night's film from Lovefilm was a goodie - Outlander. The high concept is a spaceship crashing in 8th century Norway leaving one space marine survivor to hunt an alien beastie that is eating its way through the local Viking population. It felt very like Lord of The Rings in places, with the shield hall and the Viking village being good substitutes for Rohan, the alien monster being a dead ringer for a flaming Balrog and of course the fjords and mountains looking very much like New Zealand. The battles and fights were satisfyingly gruesome, the monster sensibly hidden in darkness and shadows for most of the time and a surprisingly poignant backstory for Kainan the space marine. An excellent sci-fi actioner that I don't think managed a cinema release for some reason.