My Rating: About my rating system Barney’s Version tell the story of Barney Panofsky, a balding, overweight American Jew who drinks too much, smokes too much, and yet manages to find beautiful women who agree to marry him. The movie plays out largely in flashback. We first learn that Barney has a … read more

My Rating:  About my rating system   Judi Dench and Cate Blanchet both received Oscar nominations for Notes on a Scandal - a psychological drama with themes such as loneliness, vulnerability and manipulation. Judi Dench plays Barbara Covett, a battle-axe teacher nearing retirement in a London … read more

I’ve decided to start writing some short movie reviews on here. I’ve got quite a large DVD collection, most of of which I’ve now copied on to my Apple TV set-up. In my geekness, I’ve got movies stored on a couple of external hard disks connected to my wireless router so that I can stream them … read more

It would be a boring world if we were all the same... [youtube www.youtube.com/watch read more

I don't understand why the UK Ministry of Defence has been making a big deal about 1) flying a 3000 mile round trip to bomb Libyan targets, and 2) aborting the mission when they got there due to finding civilians in the target area. How does it make sense to fly these missions out of Norfolk? If the … read more

The British Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has ruled that journalists are within their rights to quote tweets from Twitter because they are not private. The case centres around Department of Transport employee Sarah Bakersville's tweets that were quoted in two national newspapers without her … read more

The incredible growth of the Apple iTunes app store means there's a fantastic opportunity for anyone with a good idea to make a decent profit. It doesn't have to be confined to iPhone or iPad apps either. A good idea could lead to separate native apps for android, mac, windows, blackberry and all … read more

A number of Lonely Planet travel apps for iPhone are currently available free. These are for cities in the US and Canada including New York, LA, Las Vegas, Vancouver, and Seattle. Get them while you can as the offer runs out Friday 4th Feb (today). They did the same thing just before Christmas when … read more

It has been devastating watching the catastrophe unfold in the city that I've grown to love. I've said before that this is the first place where I've truly felt settled. It's the city we chose to live in when deciding to emigrate, and we've never once regretted it. Many parts of Brisbane are now a … read more

A few years ago on BBC2 in the UK there was a programme called Dave Gorman's Important Astrology Experiment. I don't know if you watched it but the concept behind the series was that Dave would follow exactly what was recommended for his star sign in a selection of horoscopes, and then see how that … read more

Looking down my blog at previous blog posts I've noticed that some of the images are no longer showing. I've done some investigation and this seems to be a problem caused by iPhoto. I use iPhoto on my Mac to store and manage all my photo's, and then publish them to Flickr using the built-in features … read more

As is customary this time of year, here's a list of some of my favourites films from 2010. There's no doubt going to be other great films that came out in 2010 which aren't listed here simply because I haven't seen them yet, but these are the ones I have seen and enjoyed the most: 1. The Social … read more

I feel sorry for the ship's company of HMS Illustrious. They're shortly going to be feeling very embarrassed to be serving on an aircraft carrier that doesn't have any, err, aircraft. I remember my time fondly on HMS Invincible, the now decommissioned sister ship to HMS Illustrious, but I also … read more

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to get an overseas work trip to carry out a PCI DSS audit of a client and their service provider in the US. My trip took in LA and Omaha, Nebraska of all places. I travelled with Brad again from the client's security team. The trip started on a high note. We were … read more

Last week I was lucky enough to go off on another overseas jolly (err, I mean arduous work trip). This time to Auckland, New Zealand. I've never been to NZ before so I was quite looking forward to this one, even if it is the middle of winter and I new it would be freezing. We left on Wednesday and … read more

I've recently returned from a short work trip that took in Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This was the PCI DSS auditing keeping me busy again. I travelled with Brad from my customer's security team who I went to Manila and India with. He's from Melbourne so he was quite happy to use the … read more

It's decision time. Millions of voters are now heading to the polls in the UK to cast their vote. Many of us expats have probably missed out on voting because the postal vote system doesn't allow enough time to register and then get our vote off from the other side of the world. It's been an … read more

It's now been just over a month since we moved into our new house, so yes, since the last post things did work out ok in the end. We managed to get the house in Alexandra Hills that we liked. Apparently there were 6 other applicants so we did quite well to get it. The effort we made to put in the … read more

We're moving out of our house on Thursday. The only problem is we haven't yet got a home to move to. Things were great with our current house to begin with. We're a short walk away from a park and our house backed on to woods so we could wake up to the sound of Kookaburras in the morning. Then a few … read more

There's been lots of reports in the news in the last couple of years of how UK police are using section 44 of the Terrorism Act to stop peaceful protests and anything else they don't like. The video below is a great example of how to deal with overzealous police. The bottom line is KNOW YOUR RIGHTS! … read more