I went to see this film with two of the guys from work last night, and we all had high hopes for this film.

What can  I say, we were all VERY disappointed, the script sucked big style.  It was nice to see Karen Allen making another appearance, but the Shia LaBoef character “Mutt” was weak at best and a real down point for me.

Yes, there were lots of action scenes which were entertaining, but nothing that really stands out, and the CGI was not really up to scratch.

Most amusing part was Indy surviving a nuclear blast in a fridge that was blown a considerable distance through the air, then climbing out of the fridge as though nothing much had happened, despite his senior years.

A high point for me was seeing Neil Flynn (the Janitor in scrubs) playing an FBI agent :oD

The low point was basically that the mythical City of Gold was a place that Aliens were worshipped as gods.  I guess thats no less plausible than the Ark of the Covenant in when you think about it, but the whole alien thing just didn’t do it for me I’m afraid.

My view is don’t waste your money on seeing this at the cinema or your internet bandwidth downloading a dodgy copy.  Its not worth it.

Second worst film I’ve seen this year, Cloverfield still being number one.

Today, I thought that as the weather forecast was good that I’d take a trip to Noar Hill (SU 742 319) to see if I could find an photograph the Musk Orchid.

Immediately after entering the reserve gate, I was greeted by a marvellous Pyramidal Orchid in full flower and a short walk up the hill revealed what I initially thought was a stand of the Musk Orchids.  However, a closer inspection revealed them to be common Twayblades, but a closer inspection revealed the tiny Musk Orchids growing in amongst the Twayblades.

I given the small size of the Musk Orchid & its greenish yellow colouration, I was expecting to be searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack, but the sheer size of the colony at Noar Hill makes these diminutive orchids relatively easy to find, though you really need to keep to the worn paths to avoid tepping on them.

Not far from the Musk Orchids was a beautiful example of a Bee Orchid, which was an added bonus & later on I found an Albino Fragrant Orchid.

Despite the fact that I was tempted to search the beech hanger for the Greater Butterfly Orchid, I resisted & returned to the car to make a short journey to The Warren (SU 729 284).

The Warren is famous for being one of only three sites in the UK where the Red Helleborine (Cephalanthera rubra) can be found.  Unfortunately time was at a premium and prevented me from exploring the reserve fully so the Red Helleborine eluded me this time, but I did find some nice examples of Greater Butterfly Orchid (Platanthera chlorantha).

Despite not finding the Red Helleborine, a plant that I have wanted to see since first seeing a photograph in my youth, I was very pleased with my outing & headed home for lunch.

I’ve recently taken delivery of a new XPS M1530 notebook that I’ve lusted after for ages.  I decided to opt for one of the XPS models as Dell are offering the M1330 with Ubuntu 7.04, and the M1530 uses largely the same components, so I figured that I’d be able to install Ubuntu easily enough.

Well, after making sure that I’d backed up everything on Vista, I resized the partition using Acronis Disk Director to create some unformatted free space & put in the Ubuntu CD.

Everything went well, though I had to opt for the manual partitioning option as I wanted a separate /usr partition.

On starting the machine up, the first problem was the well documented touchpad issue (my unit shipped with revision A08 of the BIOS), but that was simply remedied by adding the following to the lines pointing to the Linux kernel in the grub menu.lst file.

i8042.nomux=1

Rebooting again revealed a fixed touchpad :o)

Next issue was installing a bluetooth mouse, the instructions for which were easily found using Google.

Finally I needed to configure the internal microphone as although it is installed, its not turned on by default.

I’ve now got a functioning laptop (I’m not too bothered that there are problems with the fingerprint reader & multimedia keys as I seldom use the latter & I’m sure that there will soon be fixes for the biometric sensor.

So far everything has been stable, it boots in half the time that it takes Vista & even with all of the graphical bells & whistles of Compiz installed, it still runs much better than Vista.

I’m by no means a Linux afficionado, but if I can manage to get a laptop configured with a minimum of hassle, then I have high hopes for the rise of Ubuntu & the fall of the MS Windows Bloatware.