Februari

Not quite sure why I'm this excited already, because it'll take ages to complete, but it's good news nonetheless:

Variety reported [..] that the rights for A Song of Ice and Fire have been sold to HBO with the intent of turning the novels into a television series. Written and executive produced by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the series is expected to cover one novel's worth of material per season. Martin plans to co-executive produce the series and is expected to write one episode per season. The series will be filmed in Europe or New Zealand.

As Mr. Martin states on his own website:

With twelve hours to devote to each of the novels, rather than the two to three that a feature film would allow, we should be able to present a faithful dramatization of the story that will please both my own readers, and HBO subscribers who have never read a fantasy novel in their lives.

Can't wait! Now, where can I speculate on casting?

Update: at the IMDb forum ofcourse!

We were planning on visiting Utrecht, to do some shopping. But shortly before heading off to the station, I found out there were difficulties with the trains. So we decided to go to the The Hague instead. We decided to skip the route we usually take, passing our favourite stores, in favour of a fresh view. We even passed Paleis Noordeinde, which is the Queen's working palace. All in all a nice day out, not many successful finds though. I've been looking for the perfect black trench coat for a while now, and found one in a small boutique. Unfortunately the sleeves turned out the be to short, so my quest continues.

I've wanted to see The Prestige (2006) ever since I first read about it. The combination Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale just appeals to me. ;-) Well, I finally had a chance to watch it on wednesday. As mentioned in The New York Times according to Metacritic:

Stuffed with hard-working actors, sleek effects and stagy period details, The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan, is an intricate and elaborate machine designed for the simple purpose of diversion.

I've also recently seen The Illusionist and like so many others initially compared the two, because of their subject matter. However that doesn't serve either, as both are completely different movies. So I won't. I will add a link to the Wikipedia entry for Nikola Tesla though, as he's so worth reading more about.

I've been reading up on OpenID recently, check out my findings on Del.icio.us.

OpenID—fundamentally—is a solution to the problem of having a million user accounts all over the place. Instead of getting hundreds of user names all over the place you go to a site that provides OpenIDs and choose one username and password. These sites then give you a pretty simple web address which is probably easiest to think about as a profile page for you. Then when you want to sign into any other site on the Internet with an OpenID all you do is type in the address of this profile page. The site you're on wanders over to that address, the other site asks you for your password, you tell it your password and then you're bounced back to the original site where you are logged in and can get on with your business unfussed. Sometimes the local site will ask you if you want a different user name. That's all there is to it.

I've finally given in to the boatloads of comment spam passing through my database every day. Though I initially thought of disabling comments all together, but decided against this for now. I've now implemented a random simple math question, and only on answering the question correctly will the comment be posted. Everything else will disappear into the black void. Hopefully this will keep the crap at bay. And if not, well, I still might disable the whole thing. We'll see.

Just finished watching El Laberinto Del Fauno, or Pan's Labyrinth as it's international release is entitled. It's a unique, richly-imagined gothic fairy tale set against the postwar repression of Franco's Spain. I've read quite a large number of very positive reviews, but did stumble upon a few viewers who criticized the movie for being communist propaganda. Hm, not sure where they got that from. Anyhow, this one is definitely well worth checking out.

Update: the movie has won Oscars for Cinematography, Makeup and Art Direction, and rightly so!