I just noticed that I did not write anything here for a long time. So here's a brief update on how things are going, if anyone cares...
First of all, for everybody who doesn't know it yet:
Stargate SG-1: The Ark Of Truth 1 is out!!
Stunning story and lots of effects and images lots more like a movie made for the cinemas, in comparison to the usual series of the seasons. And finally the programming language in which the replicators basecode is written was revealed: JavaScript!
Next: today it snowed in cologne. Given, I'm not living here very long yet, but it's the first time here it snowes and the snow didn't melt away immediately, at least until 2:30pm:
| www.flickr.com |
Project flat is progressing slightly behind schedule, I've bought some new items for my kitchen and if everything works out a friend helps me switch my living room with my sleeping room somewhen this week, which will be a big step towards finishing up finally. I still miss some small wardrobes or bureaus, but it's getting better day by day.
Work is also fine, we've finished the first prototype of the application we want to migrate, and the preliminary performance figures we took look promising. In the next weeks the QA guy will take a look and run some more performance tests on a separate environment, and we're eager to see his figures in comparison to the PHP application, and whether they reflect our own figures or not.
Besides this, Tradingbird is finally in the closed beta, inviting more and more preregistered users every day. I myself haven't had the time to check in there lately, but my colleages tell me it's running smoothly. So if you're interested in financial markets check it out and preregister for your own Tradingbird account.
Recently I visited a quite interesting talk by Dr. Neil Gafter, developer of Google Calendar, who is right now proposing a language change to the Java Programming Language which includes nice features like closures and control abstraction. You might find more about this, and 2 cents from me, here.
Good night, and good luck.
So everybody reading this might now what The IT Crowd is: a pretty cool nerd/geek TV series about Roy and Moss, two "Standard Nerds", their new boss Jen, and their adventures in and outside their basement office.
Now we take a look what my friend Oliver just sent me. Sat1, a german TV broadcaster, is doing a (more or less) exact remake of the show, using german actors, and called iTeam. Wouldn't be that bad, now, would it? If they would get the jokes right. Even Graham Lineham, the maker of the original show in UK thinks they yet missed the very first gag simply because they got the wrong camera angle. The blog entry starts "Oh, dear God, what have I done?". Some other opinions can be found in the Sat1 Forum on iTeam, which seems to be moderated in a way. Somewhere in the blogosphere, wherever that might be, there's a good comparison of the characters and storyline of the first episode The IT Crowd vs. iTeam.
In my opinion the adaption is pretty much a bunch of crap. They basically just replay the english episodes, try to add a joke here, leave out a sentence and a half there, that's it. Of course not all jokes are adapted badly, and others can't be as they won't work here in germany. Some of the most important issues here are that they left out a lot of geek jokes like the first support call Moss is answering in the first episode:
You see the drive hooks a function by patching the system call table so it's not safe to unload it unless another thread is about to jump in there and do its stuff. And you don't want to end up in the middle of invalid memory.Next thing is the basement office: I'm not so disturbed by the soviet theme of the office as in the comparison I liked above, but more by the gadgets: there are a lot of robots and stuff but not that much cool old hardware as in the original show.
The actors or adapted characters are another topic. Sky DuMont itself is simply too soft to be the hard company boss welcoming new employees with a long, hard stare. Don't get me wrong, I liked him in other movies, and I think he's a good actor, but he's wrong for this part.
For the other three: Stefan Puntigam as Gabriel is absolutely no geek for me. Geeks don't compare phonebooks. That's bullshit! Sandy played by Britta Horn has not the disarming charisma of Katherine Parkinson as Jen. Sebastian Münster playing Tom is the least worst of all. What doesn't mean he's good at it.
So much for that, I guess I'll just skip this show, not that I watch much TV at all. The only reason to watch it would be to slag iTeam off, but that's unhealty, isn't it?
Fortune or not, at least they seem to have licensed the scripts to adapt the show, or they would have to face the consequences:
I'm still unsure whether I'd like that or not...