Fiend Without a Face is a 1958 British black-and-white science fiction film directed by Arthur Crabtree. It tells the story of mysterious deaths at the hands of an invisible life-form that steals human brains and spinal columns. The film was based upon Amelia Reynolds Long’s 1930 short story entitled “The Thought Monster” that was originally published in Weird Tales magazine.
Hey, how’s it going?
I think the last time you heard from me I was looking for another job. Well, it’s been that long that I’ve found another job, worked my notice period, and I’m now about 2 and a half weeks in to that job! It’s going really well. It’s a bit strange being the new guy all over again though. That’s why things have been quiet over the last 2 months or so. My routine has been well and truly shaken so this site has been pushed to the bottom of my list of priorities.
Despite the site being dormant for 2 months, last month saw record numbers of hits and this month is on course to do the same. Mental. I think you’re trying to tell me that you prefer it when I don’t post anything.
I’ll be getting back to the usual twice a day posting routine as soon as I can. I have a lot of films lined up as well as I’m hoping to get back in to Sci-Fi Sundays.
So, without further adieu…
I feel I should explain the lake of activity towards the end of last week. I’ve been trying to do two posts a day and I’ve been managing this just fine the last month or so. The reason why things went quiet was that I’d organised a conference for Software Testers last Wednesday which took up ALL of my time. It was a lot more work than I was expecting, but it went really well! I couldn’t be happier with the way it went and I’m excited that I got to meet a bunch of people that I talk to on Twitter. I’m doing a full write up for my other Blog soon.
I was the compare (I hope I’m using the right word) for the evening and gave a talk which seemed to go down fairly well. I’m hoping I can share that with you soon! I was pretty nervous about giving the talk as it was one I’d done before and I felt it tanked a bit. This one went brilliantly in my opinion!
I kind of wrote Thursday off as I was knackered from Wednesday night and Friday was a lazy day too. I basically got home on Thursday night and went straight to bed. I was out all day Saturday and the film I wanted to review for Sci-Fi Sunday didn’t arrive in time! We’re definitely back on for that this Sunday!
I think I’m back on track now so service should start to return back to normal in the next couple of days.
You may or may not have noticed that Sci-Fi Sunday keeps coming and going and isn’t very consistent. Some weeks I do one and some weeks I don’t. There’s a very simple reason for this: I don’t always get the time to sit down and watch films on Sundays. I’ve been up and down the country since the beginning of the month so I’ve not had a couple of hours to myself where I can watch a film. I do, however, have a stupid amount of free time in the week. I still really want to do it, it’s just fitting it in
So there are two options that I’d like to run past you, dear reader, regarding where I should take it.
a.) I either carry on as I am and post Sci-Fi Sundays on Sundays after watching a film on Sunday.
b.) I watch a couple of films in the week and post the write up on Sunday.
I’m leaning more towards option b at the minute. It means that I’ll be able to post EVERY Sunday, but it does mean that I am technically lying to you about watching that film that day. I don’t suppose it really matters as none of you will be sitting down with me and checking. Unless you’re planning on coming round and keeping me company 
Let me know. I’m thinking of doing option b starting this week and seeing how it goes.
I’m on holiday until Tuesday now! 5 day weekend! Woo hoo! It’s my birthday on Friday, so I’ve booked a couple of days off, and it’s my Brother’s birthday on Monday… so I have that off as well.
Should be a good weekend, but I’ll talk about that more on Friday.
New post on [ESC]ape Testing as well today! Go check that out!
The Incredible Shrinking Man is a 1957 science fiction film directed by Jack Arnold and adapted for the screen by Richard Matheson from his novel The Shrinking Man.
In 2009, it was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant and will be preserved for all time. continue reading »
WP to Twitter“The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress blog using either the Cli.gs or Bit.ly URL shortening services to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.”
This is a great Twitter plugin. I use this on all of my Blogs to automatically update Twitter whenever a new post is published. It’s very customisable and you have the option to only Tweet certain categories, or all posts and to fully customise what is sent to Twitter. For example, on this site, I use it to only Tweet Sci-Fi Sunday posts. On my other Blog, I use it to post everything and include hash tags at the end of the Tweet. Both of them use Bit.ly to shorten the URL to save space.
It’s quite easy to set up, however the new OAUTH settings can be a bit of a faff (which can’t be avoided unfortunately), but once this is done, you will never have to worry about it again.
Download here
Rating: 
“You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system.”
This is a great stats plugin. Shows top posts and pages, top referrers, Search engine terms, and allows you to view weekly, monthly and yearly stats should you have any.
It’s a bit of a faff to set up, and I’ll be honest, I’ve only ever got it working on one site..
One cool feature is that the stats work with the Blackberry WordPress app. So I can check my stats on the move! Another great feature is that it knows who you are and doesn’t count your own visits. You can browse your own blog all day long and it won’t count towards your stats. That way you can be sure that your hit count is genuine.
Download here.
Rating: 
“Youtuber lets you embed YouTube videos in your posts very easily, and offers a few benefits over simply copying in YouTube’s embed code.”
Great simple plugin for displaying YouTube videos on your site. I post a lot of videos, and one of the problems I was having was that every time I wanted to post a video, I would have to grab the embed code from YouTube. I would then need to know the sizes I needed as they were not available to select on YouTube and change the code. Quite painful when you do this regulary. But what happens when you change your design? That’s right, all he videos aren’t going to be displayed properly. This plugin lets you specify the width and height, and all you need to enter into your posts is a YouTube tag and the end part of the video URL. It will then add all the necessary code for you. If you change your design, you only need to change the setting in the plugin, and viola!
Download here
Rating:
“Smart invisible captcha for wordpress comments. Visitors of your website don’t need to enter letters and numbers. This small plugin automatically 100% protects your website from spam in comments.”
Don’t ask me how this works. Before I installed this, I was getting spammed mercilessly by spambots. I was probably getting about 20 comments a day that were complete garbage. After installing this I haven’t had a single dodgy message and no one has had any problems posting comments. I use this on all my sites.
Download here.
Rating:
“Star Rating for Reviews is a simple WordPress plugin that inserts pretty rating stars based on the score you assign using intuitive, inline [rating:] tags. It can also calculate and output overall ratings for you based on all previous scores you have assigned, useful for reviews that have multiple categories or an album review where each track is assigned a score.”
I have used this plugin multiple times in this post. Before I had this plugin, I had to manually insert pictures of stars into my post! With this one I just add a tag into my post and it displays the specified rating
Download here.
Rating:
“Strictly AutoTags is a plugin that scans a post for words that could be used as tags and then orders them so that the most relevant words get added to the post. Just because a word appears in a post that is already in your list of tags does not mean that it should automatically be added against the article. Therefore the plugin orders all matching tags in descending order and picks only those that occur the most.”
I’m very lazy. This is a fact. I’m so lazy that I never ever tag my posts. About 3 months ago, I thought it would be a good idea to start tagging my posts, but it soon got tiresome. This plugin automatically tags your post using keywords from the post content.
There is also a feature that allows you to automatically tag older posts!
Download here.
Rating:
Sup?
Thought I’d give you an update as to the progress I’m making with the preparations for when I go on Holiday. Im on holiday from Friday 15th and coming back on November 1st. I’ve written about a weeks worth of posts so far. Instead of doing my usual Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, I’m thinking of going all out and doing Monday – Friday posts. Sci-Fi Sundays will take a break as well. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, it’s just that I’d sooner enjoys the films for a while and not write about them afterwards
I’ve written a couple of posts for [ESC]ape Testing as well, but I’m still having problems with the post scheduler. Damn thing!
That’s what’s going on with those…
I need to get my arse in gear and head back to the gym at some point. I’m hoping to go this week. I’ve been comfort eating a lot recently and I’ve filled out a little. So I need to knock that on the head as soon as!
Hi everyone.
First off, let my start by saying:
Yep! Big vertical smiley face to you all!
I’ve been adding old Bananalogic.net posts to the site over the weekend. I promised myself that I was going to move on and start fresh, but this weekend I’ve been feeling really nostalgic and thought that it’d be a shame for them to rot on my external hard drive. I’ll be adding them over the next couple of weeks.
You can see all the posts I’ve added so far, here.
I reformatted my laptop over the weekend. It’s running better than it has been in a long while! I’d almost gotten used to how rubbish it was! The painful thing now is installing all the Windows updates and getting all the software I regularly use back on to it. My job for this weekend is setting up iTunes. I just know it’s going to be painful. Every time Apple do an update it take about 3 hours for it to update its library, so I just know that it’s going to take about 6 or 7 hours to import everything. Damn you Apple!
How’s everyone’s Monday been?
What do people reckon to the weekly Friday pictures thing I’ve started doing? I quite like it. It’s basically what I used to do on all of my old sites. So it’s not a case of me remembering to do it, it’ll be a case of how quickly I settle back into my old routine. I quite like having “Things”. Like Sci-Fi Sundays are now my thing. I think it’s something this site has lacked since I relaunched it. It’s basically been a “Stuff and things” site and it’s never been about anything in particular. That’s kinda where I’d like this site to go. I’d like it to either be about something, or be about lots of specific things. Make sense? No it doesn’t to me either.
I couldn’t be happier with the response I got from the article I wrote for my Software Testing Blog on Friday. It’s great when people you know and who’s work inspire you to do what you do give you such positive feedback and agree with your views. I took me the best part of the week to write and it’d gone through so many re-writes I was planning on ditching it! But it’s great that people seem to really like it!
Click on the picture above, or click here to go and read that article.
Had a really great weekend this weekend. I went out for a run with my Brother around Wollaton Park. We’d planned out a mile route around the lake, which started off on concrete, but then turned into off road, almost muddy surface. I managed to do it in a better time than I’ve done it before. The fastest I’d run a mile in is 13m20s, and managed to do it in around 12m30s, which I was really pleased about. It turns out though that we did about 1.1 miles! So it makes that time even better!
Quite a healthy day, right? Yeah it would have been if we hadn’t have stopped off at the pub and the chippy afterwards
I need to get back into the Gym again. I haven’t been in around a month. Although I still managed to do a mile, I could definitely tell I wasn’t as fit as I have been recently. I’m going to try and go this week at some point.
Ooo… and don’t forget to send me your suggestions for Sci-Fi Sundays!
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this at all, but I’m planning on doing a weekly thing called “Sci-Fi Sundays”. It’s pretty self explanatory. Every Sunday, I’ll watch a Sci-Fi film and give it a quick review.
Please feel free to send me suggestions on films to watch next.
To kick start Sci-Fi Sundays, I thought I’d watch Forbidden Planet. This has to be one of the most influential and ground breaking films in this genre. continue reading »
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