The weekend before last, we saw the swingle singers who were, like, totally AWESOME. It was a fabulous, intimate gig with loads of special guests, including the very memorable Shlomo, human beatbox extraordinaire.

This weekend we saw Pan's Labyrinth - the second in a recent spate of top Spanish films in the cinema. This is an adult-intended kids fairytale - certainly not a film intended for the kids of the main character's age! Me he gustado mucho. Es una pelicular muy muy bien.

As you can see, I have finally decided to put the photos from my wonderful viaje in Spain up. Plus one from when I cut Haydens hair ages ago (don't worry, the side poofs are gone.. unfortunately).
So, there's the floods out the front of the apartment during the "days of rain", Jordi's fabulous attempt at karaoke (BIEN-VE-NI-DOS, oh god), boys on the beach ("mine's this big"), family Lopez-Perez (my Spanish family) at the dinner table, visiting fellow JMWOers Manolo and Elena in their town and enjoying the never-ending Spanish sun.

feast on that.

It's on.
Elysian is travelling the Colleges seducing the respectave student bodies. Either we'll have a rocky roll upwawrds, or die a slow, painful death - there's no turning back now. It might be a case of selling body parts to pay debts for what we're getting into, but since we own very little and still don't have our deposit back, there's not all that much to lose.

I still haven't come up with an ingenious name for our trio yet, and this morning I was toying with the whole name-merging thing which is quite fun but naff. Anyway, since we have Claire and Lydia, I came up with 'Clamydia trio' (m in the middle could stand for "me", I suppose). Well, I thought it was funny at 8am.

Reading through the Camel book (Programming Perl, 3rd Edition) and thought I'd mention this great quote in regard to the virtues of a perl programmer.

if you're determined to reinvent the wheel, at least try to invent a better one.
        -- Programming Perl

My final recital is on my birthday!!!!
I suppose I'll have reason to celebrate that night whatever the outcome.
And a week or two beyond that!

It couldn't have been any other way..

After god-knows-how-long we've finally launched the new Forbidden Planet web site. It's fantastic, go have a look.

Elisse is finally back tomorrow, having had a good time is Spain from what she's said. I've spent most of the weekend working on one thing or another. The Belle Maison web site is almost finished - main spell checking to go - and I've spent a fair bit of time writing an electronic proof tracking application for work. Well it's to be used for work, but I made it as much for fun as anything.

I think it's a really clever little application - although I'm probably biased - it keeps track of any changes that need to be made to a proof and also who's seen and signed off the proof. It manages this for multiple users and magazines on an issue by issue basis. It's all backed by a MySQL database so all the information is stored centrally. This means I'm back using MCPKit framework again, but this time I grabbed the one from CocoaMySQL which is a universal version, so my app will run natively on Intel or PPC Macs - nice idea Rob.

Anyway, off to make some food and tidy the living room up before Elisse gets back.

I've been reading through some of the Marvel Civil War comics and the one comic that I really enjoyed was the Young Avengers and Runaways comics - specifically the Runaways. So I looked up Runaways and I've read through the first series (#1-18) and the first 18 of the second series.

Now I'm pretty much hooked, what makes this worse is that I work for a comic book store so getting the next issues isn't going to be a problem. To make it worse, one of the mail order guys threatened to show me any more first issues that he thinks are worth reading - that's getting dangerously close to me having less money than I do now.

Maybe it's just because I love this quote so much:

And I reserve the word "evil" for very few things outside of fat-free ice cream and non-Mac computers.
      -- Gert (Runaways, True Believers chapter four)

I'm already finding it hard to motivate myself to cook for one. Oh well, I've already defrosted the chicken.

With Elisse away in Spain for about 10 days I'm ploughing through the Belle Maison database, trying to get all the items in there. Then it's just a few more additions to the web site and I'm pretty much done.

I've also been reading through some Civil War comics and got hooked on Runaways - so I downloaded the whole set so far (I think), and I'm reading through them too. I'm not sure I'd have the patience to read comics monthly, it comes under the same category as weekly TV shows. I can barely handle watching Battlestar Galactica that way - but unless Elisse and I want to wait until season 3 is finished and then watch it all at once I think we'll just have to cope.

It snapped cold last week, and while it's a little warmer today, it's still been close to jacket weather for me this whole last week (that's coat, scarf and possibly gloves weather to everyone else). Anyway, I'm off to get some fresh air, I don't think it's a good idea to spend the only days I get to see sunlight inside.

Evan has finished his final piece for his film and television course, a set of three advertisements for the end of year presentation for the course. They're up on YouTube:

[Rick's story] [Jane's story] [Reece's story]

Go on, email him and tell him they're great.