Personal stuff

Favourite TV Programmes & Movies:

• Babylon 5
  It's now some time since the series finished its fifth and final year. There was a short-lived spinoff series called "Crusade", which was to have had a less rigorous 5-year storyline, but owing to various difficulties only 13 episodes were produced. Here's more information about all the episodes of babylon 5, and the various made for TV movies and the spinoff.

  Babylon 5 is really one of the best series ever to appear on TV, and the definitely the best SF series even though some of the effects are a bit dated compared to the latest CGI. It can still beat a lot of series in one important area - the quality of the scripts (yes, I'm talking about you, most modern TV!). Here's a page of stuff from "Wolf 359" - the StarTrek/Babylon5 convention which was held in Blackpool 7-10 June 1996.

  Here's a couple of alternative pics of me - as I usually appear in the Dept... :-)

  Here's some information on how to appear as an alien from Babylon 5.

  Here's a few pictures of Ed Wasser, taken at the Wolf359 convention in Manchester in 1995.

• Star Trek: The Next Generation
  The series finished on TV in the US after 7 years (it seems so long ago!), and has been to a cinema screen near you in the UK in the form of "Star Trek: Generations", "StarTrek: First Contact", "Star Trek: Insurrection" and "Star Trek: Nemesis" (though maybe we oughtn't to mention the latter, and just remember the good times...).

  Old News! Details of a possible new spin off series appeared in the Guardian some time ago (though not in a galaxy far away, funnily enough). :-)

Macintosh Related Stuff:

• Macintouch Home Page
  Described as "Information and services for productive Mac computing", this set of pages has up to the date news on all sorts of Mac hardware and software. You'll quite often find information about upcoming systems etc. before they're mentioned anywhere else. It's produced by a guy called Ric Ford. It's one of the few pages that I consult virtually every day.
• Apple Support and Information
  This site contains all sorts of stuff that could be of use to the Macintosh owner/user. Not that I want to start any religous wars or anything, but I happen to think that the Mac is the best computer system ever developed (if you're reading this Apple, just send me a 12 core Mac Pro - thanks!).

   

LaserDisc & DVD Stuff

(DVD stuff coming soon - I hope!)

• Europe LD Information Service
  Ah, Laserdiscs. Them were the days. When I were a lad you could get half an hour of a movie on one side of a 12-inch disk. None of your fancy Blu-ray shenanigans with 5 hours per side of a 5cm disk back then. Well, things have moved on. LaserDiscs did provide excellent quality images and sound, though these days they have been superseded by the phenomenon that is DVD (and latterly Blu-ray). Laserdiscs never achieved the popularity of DVD in the UK (PAL format), though there are a large number of old discs available from the US in American television format (NTSC) which most of the players which were produced in the latter years of Laserdisc popularity will play on most modern TV sets. At the height of their popularity, many special editions of movies were available only on LaserDisc, with what is now standard extras like stills, script materials, interviews, "the making of..." documentaries etc. Discs varied greatly in price, but most were little more than twice that of a comparable VHS video-tape release (anyone remember video tapes?). The player I used to have was a Pioneer 2950, which could play both NTSC and PAL disks and it was a dual-side player which meant that you didn't have to turn the disks over to play the second side (laserdiscs can hold a maximum of one hour of video on one side of the disk, so most movies had material on both sides, and some very long movies were supplied on multiple disks. Movies specially encoded to allow extra quality only managed half and hour per side). My laserdiscs long since went into the loft, and my player stopped playing too. For purely historical reasons, here's a list of my LaserDisc collection.

WWW Stuff

• About time I updated this. Keep watching the skies! (But don't hold your breath).

nothing much else here yet - sorry!

Manually updated at 17 August 2011 12:00