Internet hassles

For the past couple days, images have been disappearing on me. Not my images, just certain images on websites. Random people's profile pictures on social media sites are replaced by "image missing" jpegs, and the same goes for random actor headshots or movie posters on imdb.

And then today the internet has decided to go a step further.

Apparently Firefox has been a bit problematic today while I was at work, and can't make up its mind whether to load fancy websites like Facebook or Hotmail.

I got home, tried Chrome, and had similar problems.

Looking up imdb while watching a movie, this is what I get onscreen.

Funnily enough, Google-owned sites like Google+, Blogger, and the Google search engine are all working perfectly. And for some reason, so is the IKEA website.

But not Amazon, for example...

This was my screen for several minutes...

Once Chrome decided to finally load the Amazon page, images and links were all over the place, as if someone out in internet-land decided that images and margins and things like that weren't all that necessary.

And this is what I see when I try to log in to Facebook.

Text-based HTML? The 90s called, they want their internet back.

Albums of 2009

The following are the albums of 2009 that made me hit the play button once the last song finished.

Albums of 2008

The following are the albums of 2008 that made me hit the play button once the last song finished.

Albums of 2006

The following are the albums of 2006 that made me hit the play button once the last song finished.

Albums of 2007

The following are the albums of 2007 that made me hit the play button once the last song finished.

Albums of 2010

The following are the albums from 2010 that made me hit the play button once the last song finished.

Action - 80s style

The 1980s were a great decade for over-the-top action. Big explosions, big guns, fast vehicles, and big (and often muscle-bound) stars. Arnie, Sly, JCVD and Chuck Norris each average about a film a year over the decade.

This list features:

• 3 starring Arnold Schwarzenegger
• 2 directed by John McTiernan
• 2 directed by James Cameron
• 3 with police officers as main characters
• 5 with soldiers/pilots/marines as main characters
• 2 featuring deadly aliens

Bond... James Bond

Some thoughts on the latest Bond movies, starring Daniel Craig as the world's most famous cinema secret agent. We re-watched the first two before going to see Skyfall late last year.

Playlist of the day

Happy 'straya Day, everyone.

Revised Viper

When I got home from work, I sat down to watch the Torchwood season 2 final (we're working our way back and forth through Doctor Who and Torchwood in broadcast order), and made a few modifications to the Viper I made last night.

The main changes are:

• The blunt nose is now flush with the side panels, and is all white.
• The gaps either side of the cockpit are filled in.
• An improved undercarriage.
• Angled roof panels on the wings to hide more of the gap between the wings and the body.

And the only piece not from the original set remains the aeroplane tail.

The finished (again) Viper.

Viper Mark II

For my birthday last year my in-laws got me some Star Wars Lego... the X-wing. I put it together in December when my mother-in-law was here, and it's stayed intact till tonight.

I took it apart, intending to re-assemble it. For me, some of the fun of Lego comes from assembling the sets. Some of the fun comes from dismantling it completely, then building it all over again. My parents do jigsaw puzzles, I assemble Lego. The difference is, I can make my jigsaw pieces make more than just the one picture... which is where the other great fun thing about Lego comes in - my imagination's the limit.

So I decided to build something else instead - a Colonial Viper Mk II from "Battlestar Galactica".

The finished Viper. The aeroplane tail is the only non-X-wing piece I needed to use.

Top 10 science fiction films of the 00s

Here are my favourite science fiction films of the previous decade, 2000-2009.

All the following is my own personal opinion, of course.

Top albums of 2012

Yet again, another subjective album list. My criteria is simple: it has to make me hit the play button once the last song is finished.

My standout tracks are pretty much picked the same way - the songs (not necessarily singles) that I play over and over.

Top 10 Science Fiction Films of the decade so far...

Top 10s. They're everywhere, I know, but I am going to put some of mine on this blog. Any such list is of course going to be highly subjective - I welcome comments.

The hardest thing about this list was figuring what order to put these films in. So without further ado, here are the science fiction films of the last three years that I have enjoyed the most. (* = saw it at the cinema)