My Little Eye

While plotting my escape from the funny-farm that is work I've been watching the Office: An American Workplace. I dismissed the first season as an Americanised carbon copy of the UK but watching Season 2 late on ITV4 it becomes clear the show gets a life of it's own once all the UK scripts have been used up. The characters are different, Michael Scott (Brent) is a lot more tragic. Brent always came across as sleazy and self-serving, while Michael is naive and relatively alturistic, if a twit. Dwight (Gareth) is not in the army, as it would be unthinkable for Americans to poke fun at their armed forces. He's a volunteer sheriff deputy, a sci-fi geek and has a love-interest in the form of the uptight christian chick in the office.

I've watched all the way to the latest Season 3 episode (written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Steve Marchent, though I wouldn't have guessed to be honest) and overall its a lot more zany and silly that the UK one, but it's a good laugh. After watching Season 3 in one evening I went to work and when the inevitable craziness occurred I was looking for a camera to stare at akwardly.

Which links to my next point - I have a webcam now finally. This means people on MSN can now see my ugly mug and apartment. It also means the number of people on MSN has dropped. It also shows my hands as being very, very big when held up to the camera, but never ever do the Numa Numa, record it, overwrite another video file you were going to show and... well you get the picture.

I even set it up as a motion detector with FTP access to upload pictures to my web account at work if anyone comes in the apartment while I'm away - useful for watching the workmen who've had to replace all the wood in my bathroom as it's been slowly flooding for the past 6 months and no-one noticed. Finally I might even bring it into work but that would just be too entertaining...

Finally caught Casino Royale this week, which was actually quite good. Very gritty, less cartoony and in places downright nasty. This week's Adventures of Much, Also Featuring a Hobbit Called Hood was pretty good if you can get past the silliness of the Sherriff making Much a lord rather than just quietly killing him and not telling anyone to avoid making him a martyr. This show should count Much as the star, he has far more charisma than Robin and seems to carry the show when the Sheriff and Gisbourne aren't around.