I never really spent much time reading newspapers, which is apparent if you ask me about world events, but now that I spend a vast amount of time online, I do stumble across the online versions of the dead tree counterparts more often. There are two media type offerings from The Guardian that I wanted to give a bit of a shout out too. In my quest to catch up …

There was more slapstick than I remember, the bit with the dog and falling overboard on the boat. There was also far more nudity than I remembered, but you couldn't get two prettier people to do so. I watched this first time round when I was still hard-hearted, hence the mushy comment up above. In reality, now I have mellowed, it's not mushy at all, it's got the perfect amount of family warmth alongside romantic drama with two great leads.

And thus we begin the second half of our story, and part six is here. The voting was down a little for the last section, but I am not surprised. It's not really a difficult choice between partying and studying, is it? Ah, it was closer than I suspected. Good stuff. However, it is party time in Monaco, and Mitch and Bruno are ready to hit the town. Please note …

Surprisingly, this was much better than I thought. It reminded my of that TV documentary about Enid Blyton. Slow and moving, emotional and telling the simple story of someone's life and how that translated into the work they produced. Still not a fan of Renée but this was good.

I was with it until the dogs all started barking at each other in some kind of secret underground dog network. The initial story about how they got together, how the puppies came to be, and how Cruella formed her plan was much more interesting than the end payoff. It's a bit corny, but well meaning, I guess.

We have reached Part 5 of our story, halfway through, and I still have no idea how it’s going to end. I’m starting to get a vague sense of direction though, which is always good. Fun, isn’t it? The voting picked up again for Part 4, which was lovely to see, and the winner was also quite an outright favourite from the start: It’s interesting that Mitch didn’t get to …

Just a couple of things to note: I gave Chrome a try, I did, honest. I set it as my default and I used it for a couple of days. I really like the transition when you drag a tab to become a new window. Beautiful. I missed the Copy Link as Text Firefox plug-in something chronic. And when I was doing some F1 Minute stuff, Chrome was copy/pasting in …

It's all quiet on the FKM front at the moment, but there was an update on his official website by the man himself at the beginning of the month. He talks about when he first started getting interested in driving, and how he feels behind the wheel. He even takes a moment to thank us, the stalkers! (via Google Translate) I am happy to have people who support me, encourage …

It's a good and fun film, although not a patch on anything Pixar. The nice thing about Wallace & Gromit style creations are that they have nice in jokes that relate to Britain, as opposed to the US Pixar. It does make them feel very homely and I feel better about the film having watched it this time.

Here we are with part four of our story, a day later than expected. Sorry about that, there was podcasting to be done. So, how did the vote go for part three? I was quite surprised with the result: I thought perhaps the voting would be more adventurous, this is fiction after all and anything can happen! It seems as though reality was more convincing though, and we all know …

Oh dear. If you ignore the bad acting, and the fact that Herbie is criminally underused in a film where he is supposed to be the title character, then you have a story so formulaic, you can almost predict the next line before it happens. I knew it would be bad but I wanted to give it a chance. I wish I hadn't.

The story is complete nonsense. It starts out well, a mystery about numbers and a psychic child from 50 years ago. Then it all goes a bit... weird. The CGI totally makes up for it though. For about a week after watching this, I kept saying to Mr C - Did you see that subway scene? Unreal, and totally worth the crazy alien thing.

The first episode of 2010 has a brand new look, and covers a wide range of topics that have caught my eye over the past month. It doesn't work like that anymore From the Apple iPad, to the Amazon Kindle and everything in between, MFC gets a fresh look for 2010. Topics in this show also include how to keep wiki sites in business, and what would happen if you …

Here we are with Part 3. The pattern seems to have evolved to a chapter being posted, voting for a day, and then a day-ish for writing. I hope you're enjoying the story so far, I've certainly been impressed with the voting. Speaking of which: I thought love was a bit of a long shot, but with Valentine's Day just around the corner, you never know. Anyway, rivalry it is, …

Hi, my name's Christine and I'm a blogaholic. My global dashboard in Wordpress is looking pretty scary right now. I started a brand new blog called Ten Step Stories [link defunct], and it's fiction. This is quite a big deal, although I don't know why. The basic premise is a story, told in ten separate parts, and at the end of each, you get to decide what happens next via …

Here are a selection of photos from tostie14 on Flickr. They are cute!

Thank you to everyone for all the encouraging feedback following Ten Step Stories’ debut. I haven’t really written fiction for a couple of years so it was a bit of a push to hit the publish button. I’m glad I did though. Thank you. The voting was close. On the first day, it looked as though Mitch would be heading over to beat the living daylights out of his rival, …

This was it. This was the moment John Mitchell had been waiting for. His heart was thumping, he could feel it in his temple, could hear his pulse echoing in his ears. A crackle of static interrupted the rhythm. “Don’t forget to breathe, Mitch,” came the raspy voice of his engineer. Mitch gripped the steering wheel tighter, his gloves hiding the white of his knuckles. From fourth on the grid, …

I've always been an iPod Nano person. I had the first gen Nano, a long, blocky, black thing, with a small and grainy screen, and enormous body. I skipped the second generation in preference for the third, although I was initially wary of the squat little thing. From a taller, more elegant solution, the third gen was a bit of a handful. It's no surprise to me that they returned …

Recently, I drove past one of those building sites with white boarding all the way round. It was early on in the building process, as there was no sign of any brickwork, and merely a crane or two ready to get going. On the white boarding were some advertising hoardings, preparing you for the new supermarket that will appear at some point in the future. The slogan read something like: …

One of my personal resolutions for 2010 was to try and eat five new foods. It sounds stupid, I know, but it's harder than you might imagine. I'm not all that adventurous when it comes to food. I don't mind trying new things, but it turns out I'm quite picky about what I eat. I either like something or I don't, there isn't really a middle ground, and I can …

Hi there, I am testing out the new Wordpress App for Android with a random post. To make it slightly worthwhile, here are some snippets of thought: Why is it people never ask what you did the previous evening or weekend when you actually have something worthwhile to say? What is the etiquette on retweeting someone who has their Twitter account protected? I really need to do a Media. Future. …

Yay for Groundhog Day! I didn't know I was particularly bothered about Groundhog Day before, but apparently it is something that makes me keep an eye on a Twitter search to see what Phil decides. I am ascribing this to the fact that over the past year or so, I discovered marmots were ridiculously cute, and of course, Groundhog Day was the first Film Watch movie I covered. So, now …

Note: I enjoyed writing my little Christmas thoughts post on the Archers, and thought I could turn this into a monthly thing. I have long been saying how I would love to keep a blog on the soap, but as I'm constantly running about a week behind, it doesn't seem worth trying to start one. However, I do like to discuss it, and I think it would be fun to …

At my first proper job, I was the youngest on the team, I was crazy shy and wouldn't go to the pub with them, plus I did double the work everyone else did. It is conceivable that they hated me. My one saving grace, though, was that being such a swot allowed my team a bit of leeway when it came to... well... messing about. As long as we got …

I'm currently listening to some old episodes of Net@Night, one of the TWiT stable of podcasts, and Leo Laporte was talking about feed readers. The episode is about a year old now, and even back then he was discussing the fact that everyone gets their news from Twitter, they choose a few key sites to visit every now and then, and that having a news reader is just too much …

It's a good film. As I mentioned at the start, I was anticipating a Full Monty style film and it is just like that, if a little harder to understand, and a lot more gritty. These people have real problems and dancing is a way out for the boy, rather than stripping being a temporary solution. Also, What's it like, like? is my new favourite saying.

Ooh, it's completely crazy, this one. Getting children to use their imaginations is good, and the anti-bullying message works as well. I'm not sure about the gratuitous emotional bit towards the end, but it's aimed at children and not me.

Wow, this film drags on a bit. It wasn't even that long and still the story was quite drawn out. What is essentially a bit of a battle managed to fill over two hours. I don't really understand why the children felt so compelled to get involved, really, it's not like they didn't have enough going on in their lives! Still, the snow looked good, and the ice palace was fun.

If you ignore the really bad reindeer flying graphics, then the film is actually alright. It's an interesting take on the Santa story, and it has enough real life stuff to counter the quite fantastical idea of a polar bear directing the traffic. You have to suspend your disbelief, but it does promote the nice message that Santa does indeed exist.

This is such a terrible film, with weird characters that make strange decisions. However, I do like some of the dialogue, and even though the hate-turned-love story is so clichéd, the insults are quite fun. I also really like Ross being in it.

A conversation about skiing over on Sidepodcast got me thinking. I have only ever tried skiing once, on a dry ski slope and it was during a school trip. My school had this Activity Week thing, where you forked over a lot of money to go on nice trips abroad, and if you couldn't afford to do that, you stayed in school and did something like chess club for a …

A video for you today, from a couple of years ago:

Here's a video that my dad found mentioned in one of those computer magazines. It's always difficult to listen to someone moan about the trials and tribulations of being famous, but if it's got to be done, you'd want it done this way. I have to say, if I saw Biff and summoned the nerve to speak, I'm pretty sure my first question wouldn't be: Was it real manure? I'm …

This time Franck is actually on stage, no ice cubes in sight! Also, love the "just woke up" hair.

Franck gets a mention at Autosport. Shame he is not in the video itself, but I love Allan calling him Monsieur Montagny.

In preparation for watching The Incredibles 2, I realised I had to watch this one again. I had zero recollection of what had happened in the first movie, and as my initial summary says, this wasn't a Pixar movie that I felt had rewatchable qualities. I still think that. To be honest, I just don't know what all the fuss is about. It's good, and entertaining enough, and Edna is still one of the best things in it. The concept is intriguing, but is the world of superheroes one we need more of at the moment?

Eight Songs The song choices are by far the hardest part. My mother left her choices on the previous post, and told me that it took her the best part of an hour to narrow it down to eight. I'm not sure how long I've spent thinking about this as I chose them over a period of several days, by writing one, then going away to ponder and picking it …

Ah, hmm, well, this is quite embarrassing. I quite recently wrote a post about swearing off Twitter, and naturally, after making such a fuss about it... well... I'm back on Twitter. So, moving on. It appears that my old installation of Smarter Than... was hacked and the feed essentially ruined (thanks to John for alerting me to the fact). Something weird was happening with the site a while ago as …

Today, Autosport and Castrol announced they were teaming up to produce driver rankings, on a weekly basis. There is a secret formula that works out whether a driver should move up or down the rankings, presumably based on his performance, although it's hard to tell. They were released today, but already have a year's worth of data in them - and get this, Franck started 2009 in 20th position, but …

A while ago, they finally debuted Desert Island Discs as a podcast via the BBC. It took a while to sort out due to rights restrictions both with the music played, and with the original format owners, but it's there, available to download, hosted by Kirsty Young. I only listen to the people I'm interested in, such as the recent David Tennant episode, but it's good to have the option. …

I've left it a while to write about the last David Tennant episode of Doctor Who because I was trying to convince myself that it hadn't actually finished, and that he was still floating around in his TARDIS somewhere. I have plenty of questions about the story itself, including why Time Lords would want time to end, who the Time Lord woman is and how she got through when no …

The storyline with Pip wanting to leave college is really annoying me. I can understand David and Ruth's reluctance for their daughter to make a rash decision, and the compromise of giving it another go for one more term is a good one. But they are so dead set against her leaving, praying that she'll have changed her mind before another term is up, it makes me cringe. I did …

A few weeks ago, I left Twitter. I was a sporadic Twitterer anyway, but I did like reading the updates from everyone and keeping up with people I otherwise probably would not. I gave it up for many reasons, but mostly because all the changes that have been made recently take away functionality for the way I use Twitter. They are obviously focusing on the general public now, and that …

It's Franck's birthday today and our favourite Frenchman is 32 years old. Happy birthday!! Let's hope for some good racing this year to be the best present ever.

A news item I have been catching up with on Buzz Out Loud recently has me a little bit stunned. In Chicago, a young woman was at a birthday party where they rented out an entire cinema for the duration of a screening of New Moon. She was filming some video of the party-goers and managed to get about three minutes of the film on camera as well. This is …

Rumour has it that Amanda Holden is going to present a new game show based on the Crystal Maze. I can't tell you how many parts of that sentence are just so. very. wrong. It's not just that she is completely the wrong person to continue the tradition of Mazing. It's that there are reportedly celebrities being lined up to play. And why is it "based on" the game? What …

I don't know how I would have got on with the story if I didn't already have characters and faces in my head though, as I didn't find them particularly strong. Emma is an unlikely heroine, and even Mr Knightley doesn't come across in the book quite as well as you would hope a dashing costume drama gentleman would do. (This may also have to do with how crushable Jonny Lee Miller was.)

Apologies to Mr C, but I was really not a fan of this. The idea behind the story is good but it wasn't until I got halfway through the film that I really understood what was going on. The mood lighting and smoke machines got annoying after a while, and most of the time I was worried for poor J.F.

This was definitely a surprise. I was sure I wasn't going to like it, as I mentioned above, but in the end, it was really good. It was too long, obviously, and some of it was a bit too scenery based, but bits of it were funny and that helps a film no end.