Another film that made us laugh a significant amount! We were both in need of something simple and amusing, and this was both of those. I would say it doesn't have the multi-layer elements that make a kids film really something special, but if you just want to zone out in front of the TV for 90 minutes, it's perfect.

The BBC have a cute little clip of baby panda Po, introduced at Atlanta Zoo. A while back, I thought the Beeb were doing better at allowing videos for embeds, but it appears not, so I will have to settle for just linking and hoping for the best. I did take a cheeky screenshot though.

Following on from the better-than-expected Empty Child, we have the conclusion of the two-parter. Last we saw, the Doctor was trapped in a corner, surrounded by the worrying gas mask people. "GO TO YOUR ROOM!" And just like that, the tension is over and we can get on with the rest of the story. I love the terrible last words line though. As we're winding our way through the story, …

I find it very tricky to follow the build-up to Sebring, so I will just leave it to Autosport to tell you how it is: Only one of the latest generation Peugeots ran today, but the Franck Montagny/Stephane Sarrazin/Pedro Lamy car set the quickest time of the opening day in the morning session with a 1m47.678s. Having said that, I am attempting to fire up the Factbyte Factbox (our live …

Overall things are going well. I had a bit of a setback at the end of this "week" but I'll tell you more about that at the end of the post. I'm starting to ponder if I really do want to go all the way to 10k, or if I'd rather start looking at improving speed and fitness and all that stuff. I know I'm not ever going to be …

It's been quite hard to get the enthusiasm up to finish this series off. I'm desperate to get to David Tennant but finding time and motivation for these is hard. However, this two part is written by Steven Moffat, so already I'm convinced it's going to be an improvement on what we've seen so far. The story begins with The Doctor and Rose being bounced around the TARDIS. Rose is …

I had some leftover oats from the apple trifles I attempt, and suddenly realised that the ideal way to use them up was to make some flapjack. Mr C is keen on flapjack and making sweet treats always makes me popular in the household. After perusing some recipes, I became aware how amazingly easy flapjack is. Equal quantities of sugar and butter, some golden syrup, throw in the oats and …

I've been epically busy this week but Apple don't seem to care very much about that. First they released the latest version of their mobile software which meant a dozen gadgets needed updating. The very next day, just as I thought I was going to be getting something done, Garageband became available on the iPad. Productivity = out the window. For an entire evening, I was all about the music. …

It's been officially confirmed that Franck will be the driver behind the wheel of the #8 Peugeot when the 12 Hours of Sebring race gets underway. Sharing duties with Stephane Sarrazin (who will be qualifying it) and Pedro Lamy (who will also be there), Frank will kick things off on the 19th March, which is not this Saturday but the one after. Technical director Bruno Famin reiterated what Peugeot have …

Panda toast! Credit: Equilibriax/Flickr

Remember when I completed the Rubik's Cube? It's not my proudest moment, so I don't really want to bring it up again, but Steven left an interesting comment: I never managed to to get more than three side of the cube completed so well done. Now you need a new challenge you should try to find a Rubik clock. Mr C immediately piped up and said he had a Rubik's …

This made me laugh, a lot. At times I wasn't really sure what I was seeing - can it really be this crazy? But then it would come back to funny and the weirdness wouldn't really matter. I really did love the tuna vs lion bit.

In the midst of our studio sort-out, we uncovered this little gem. This is the G3 Lombard from 1999. This was the first gadget that I stole from Mr C, in the early days of our relationship. It was also the first Mac I ever used, and it was a good one. Lovely keyboard, beautiful curviness, and little flaps to cover up all the ports and holes. Plus I do …

I'm not quite sure how it happens, but we keep being given big bits of meat. It was a huge piece of gammon over Christmas, and now an actual chicken. A terrifying, giant, whole chicken. Looks pretty sneaky, doesn't it? I was definitely more concerned about the chicken than I was about the gammon. It just seems a million times more complicated, and there's always a big stigma attached with …

Ambridge is not so much doom and gloom anymore, but there is tension all around and little to be joyous about. Except that Camilla visit, which was so hyped up and generally not very interesting. The Lynda business was a bit silly, and bless Ian for not going on and on about HRH. At Lower Loxley, it's still tough. David keeps trying to escape but ends up doing more and …

Currently, Mr C and I are working through some redecorating, organising boxes of things that have been stored away, and generally trying to make our lives a bit simpler. Simplicity is always the goal. I stumbled across some old school books of mine. I didn't keep many of them, but I did keep my English books, presumably because deep down I always knew I wanted to be a writer and …

I really loved this book, despite finding it hard to place. The talk of the recession wasn't that interesting really, except for how very obvious it was to the checkout girls on the front line of the public and their spending. Seeing how people change their habits, how everyone is shocked when the register rings up the final amount, and how flippin' obnoxious some people can be was fascinating.

I stalled a bit when I got to the book inside the book. I'm all for books having a message and this kind of dystopian novel is clearly trying to give the author's view on what the future could be like, but he was doing a perfectly fine job within the confines of the story. The book within a book sort of bored me a little, and then I felt guilty for feeling bored, and then I just wanted to get to the end.

So, I reckon this could be the best header I've ever made. The idea came to me while I was in the middle of quite a lengthy drive, which was more than frustrating, but by the time I got my hands on Pixelmator, I was ready for the challenge. I found some creative commons photos, via vladdythephotogeek and used a tiny portion of this comic style tutorial. The font is …

Although John Simpson starts the book by claiming this is no ordinary autobiography, it is more a collection of stories, it certainly starts out with the biography feel. We have to sit through the indulgent childhood memoirs before we get to the good stuff. However, when the real stories begin, pretty much as soon as Simpson joins the BBC, it really kicks off. Somehow, John has managed to be the foreign correspondent whenever anything major has been happening for several decades.

A while back, I think perhaps over the Christmas break, Mr C and I discovered these crazy-cheap albums - 101 Running Songs and 101 Running Songs Lap 2. See what they did there? For less than a tenner, you're getting 100 songs which is complete madness. You're not going to like all of them, but who can argue with a price like that? On the sequel album, there's five continuous …

A couple of recent updates from ZooBorns.com have covered the world of baby pandas exceptionally well. Firstly, a baby panda at Zoo Atlanta has been sponsored by Dreamworks! Kinda weird, but they're funding some conservation projects in exchange for calling the panda Po, which is apparently from the Kung Fu Panda film. It sort of doesn't sit right, but at the same time, I'm sure the extra funding is very …

My cooking adventures continue and I've had mixed results recently. Firstly, I'm going to have to find a better website than BBC Good Food. It worked fine for one day, but every other time I have tried to get into the kitchen and read a recipe off my iPad, it has failed loading. The site has been terribly slow, and just generally bad news. I even had to print out …

I remember watching some Back to the Future extra features where a guy was going around the set finding answers to viewer questions. The final question was from a little kid who went: "Is there ever going to be a Back to the Future 4?" And the guy said no, but Back to the Future would live on in the ride at Universal studios. I was always very disappointed at …

In the ongoing quest to turn everything digital, there are still some cases where a paper and pencil just works. I'm the first to admit that every time I try an online or digital to-do list, I always end up right back with my notepad and pen. This is an interesting idea, then, the closest technology has come to being paper so far, I'd say - the NoteSlate. I can't …

As briefly mentioned in my Film Watch post of Red, John Malkovich's character Marvin is a bit paranoid about the world around him and he has a bunker. Rather than having a hatch like in LOST, or a big door highlighting where his bunker is, he is so paranoid that he's hidden the entrance as well. It's marvellous. Here's a clip of Malkovich's first scenes in the movie, and more …

Woo, another great film to banish the bad mood that Expendables left me in. Great cast of characters, all very likeable and most amusing. Interesting story, although it took a while to become clear. The Morgan Freeman bit was not quite done right, left me feeling a bit weird, but that's the only bit I would fix. Otherwise, it was fabulous.

"Your wish is my command, just be careful what you wish for." This is the episode where Rose tries to change history, and finds out she can't, even though that is what the Doctor does... quite a lot. After building her up to be something super special in the last episode, the Doctor is reduced to calling Rose "another stupid ape" after she messes up the space time continuum. I …

Had a bit of trouble with this "week", thanks to a pretty awful January. Week 2, Day 1 Run 4 min/walk 1 min. Repeat x 5. First half was all good, the second half was really hard. Just ran out of energy, I think. (Note: You can almost hear the dramatic music here. "Just ran out of energy. Dun-dun-duuuuuuh." Because then I came down with the flu and well, you …

I really liked this. It was a bit too Bourne in the end, which is why I've knocked a point off, but there wasn't anything to grumble about it really. The story was complex enough that midway through Mr C was contemplating watching it twice, but then it all started to unravel and everything became clear. Pretty much. I was impressed with Angelina, although it's fair to say there were more stunts than any serious acting going on. I approve.

I've cooked lasagne for years but as I have got busier and spent less time in the kitchen, my version of lasagne has become lazy. Gradually, I swapped out all the separate ingredients for an easy version: a few veg, jar of red sauce, jar of white sauce, mince, pasta, go. There's nothing wrong with that at all, I am a big fan of easy cooking, but now I have …

When the iPlayer stats first started appearing, they were a one-page document with just a few bits and bobs to take note of. Now, it's a 20-page pdf full of fascinating figures and statistics. There were a few pages of January's statistics that I found more interesting than others. Firstly, the average minutes consumed by users per week. That's just over six months of data and it doesn't seem to …

A couple of weekends ago, Premier League football had one of it's best weekends. Record-breaking numbers of goals were scored, matches with eight goals altogether, penalties, men sent off, that kind of thing. Mr C and I figured that although our taste for football is still vague, we didn't want to miss the highlights of an epic day. So, we sat and we watched Match of the Day, and it …

Perfect film to recover from The Expendables. Just brilliant. It was funny pretty much the entire time, and even though some of it was slapstick, some of it wasn't clever, the way it was constructed was excellent and the verbal back and forths were brilliant. The only thing I can find wrong with it is that there were far too many characters to keep track of, and then just as I was getting the hang of it they added some more.

I went for my first run post-flu today and it did not go at all well. I'll save the story for another post, because what it did inspire me to do was to decide how I'm going to blog this next phase of my running journey. As you can see, I have created a rather whimsical banner to highlight the running posts, and I intend to blog each "week" of …

It's done! And yes, I totally cheated. My dad found this book in his attic, and it is the very same book that I used as a child. As I mentioned before, this is the book that we had sitting around the house and even with that in front of me, as a little kid I still couldn't get the cube to work properly. I don't know what planet I …

LibriVox is an organisation with a simple goal - to make all public domain works accessible in audiobook form. I've been involved for a long while now, part of an enormous group of volunteers who record chapters, poems and entire books to attempt to reach this goal. The third book in the Grace Harlowe series follows the girls as they face off against another enemy, only this time they create …

So, I don't know if it was because neither of us were feeling 100% or if the film really was that bad but we switched off after an hour. I wanted to like it, I really did, but it made no sense. They were a weird gang to begin with, the story was strange, I couldn't understand half of what they were mumbling and in the end, I just wanted it to stop.

It wasn't at all as bad as I thought it was going to, but as you can imagine the story was even more far-fetched than the original. Partly because it had to be something big to get all the people back together again, and to even rival the first movie in any sense at all. It was good, but nothing special.

What a strange film. Completely depressing throughout, and no real uplift towards the end, despite the fact that you're always waiting for something to come along and turn his life around. I quite often felt like I wasn't really getting it, but I still liked it, so I can't figure out how I feel about it.

Franck!!! Taking part in a Peugeot press conference. And by taking part, I mean sitting looking a bit bored. Although he did get to speak for about ten seconds, so he was a bit less bored then. ♥

So far, 2011 hasn't shaped up all that well. I started the year feeling a bit peaky, and I blogged it, thinking to myself - well, it's been a while since I had a proper cold, perhaps I should mark the occasion so I can look back in three years when I next get one and remember it better. Silly girl. I even made the mistake of saying: I don’t …

Naturally, this month has been dominated by the repercussions from Nigel's death - both in Ambridge, and in real life as well. The outpouring of indignation from Archers listeners is quite incredible, with some even going so far as to demand a rewrite for Nigel to be reinstated. I can understand some of the anger - previous Ambridge deaths have coincided with real-life, with the death of the actor playing …

Mr C spotted the tutorial for this over on the Pixelmator site, and I was keen to give it a go. It certainly looked like a challenge, and it came right about the time we were talking all things space, and that programme was on the BBC and everything. I didn't really like the clock bit in the middle, so I just replaced it with another planet. It kinda makes …

Sincere apologies for the delay in getting this final part up, I wasn't trying to drag out the ending in a reality show results style, honest. Here's how the last voting of this series went: Sometimes we like to play it safe, sometimes we like to take a risk. Mitch watched as both the cars in front of him peeled off the racing line. In his mirrors, he saw Bruno …

Can't quite believe this is the penultimate part already. Time flies. As Ian mentioned in the comments, I am still chasing that second unanimous vote but it was not to be this time. Here's a bumper edition to see us into the final part nicely. "Come on," Pierre said, pushing Mitch back towards the car. "Do you want to give Mason more reason to consider Diaz?" "What?" "Get back out …

As with most of my Life List items, if you'd told me I would be doing them a year ago, I would have thought you were crazy. On Saturday evening, I found myself in a stadium with more than 37,000 other people, cheering on Aston Villa as they scored the winning goal. Well, they might not all have been cheering for Villa, but you get what I'm saying. A football …

I was secretly hoping for a repeat of the unanimous vote achievement, but this one was not quite so straight forward. A couple of people are concerned for Mitch's welfare, but most want to see him back behind the wheel. "I'm in!" Mitch yelled, bursting back into the motorhome with glee. He stopped abruptly, when he realised a group of fans were being shown around. Melissa hurried over to him, …

Twitter is a strange beast, isn't it? Everyone uses it differently. For some, it is a means of promoting their work. For others, it is a place to follow comedians and laugh at jokes. Some use it as a replacement RSS feed, following those streams that are simple "new blog post" updates. Others use it as a way of keeping in touch with the family. A handful of people follow …

Here we go then. My attempt to get back into running. I've picked up the 10k app because I want to continue moving forward with help from the training app, not necessarily because I'm intending to run a 10k. I think my main aim is to complete a 5k in a better time than before. Previously, I have used the My Tracks app from Google, but the Runkeeper Pro app …