Need a translation?? It means that for the first time ever I paid to watch a movie on my PlayStation 3 streamed over the Internet. I mentioned a few weeks back that Sony had opened a movie rental service on their PlayStation store and at the weekend I finally got around to testing it. As it was daytime, and in an attempt to keep Poppy quiet for a few minutes, I opted to rent Disney-Pixar’s Cars in Standard Definition (no HD version available) – rental of this movie was only £2.49. The process was very easy, just select the movie, choose to rent or buy (£11.99 to buy???? too much money in my opinion) then click the download button. After a couple of minutes I got the option to ‘play while downloading’. I left it about 20 minutes to download 15% before I started to play it, just to make sure, but in all honesty I could have clicked play straight away with no issues. Download time on my 3Mbps broadband connection was estimated at 105 minutes, and the film itself was just short of 2 hours long. Poppy’s attention span lasted 45 minutes so it was all irrelevant anyway.
In other news with thanks to my dad for his assistance, I also managed to put the Christmas lights up outside the house which wasn’t as straight forward as I had first intended. Due to various cable slicing incidents this involved a fair amount of re-soldering wires.. but they are up at last. Last night we met Santa as well. He made his annual trip around the village in the back of a pick-up while being followed by every resident capable of walking, and some who weren’t in their electric mobility scooters. Afterwards there were mince pies, mulled wine, and a photo opportunity with Santa (pictures to follow at a later date…).
And in the final news of this blog post, I received the result from my latest Open University course (the hellish exam I took in October) and I passed with a better score than expected giving me (just) a pretty decent overall result for the course. Now… in theory, this means that I am eligible for graduation with a BSc Open degree, but I’m plowing on with one more year of courses (including the two that I’m taking at the moment which finish in a couple of weeks) to gain the final 60 points required to get a BSc (Hons) Open degree. Nearly there then, only almost 10 years after most of my peers!
No, it isn’t child cruelty, although in years to come she may think it is. She had a great time dressing up as different nativity characters yesterday and we just happened to film it at the same time! Okay, so it was slightly co-ordinated and storyboarded but why not! Anyway, the video is up on Facebook for all those who are friends of us Shinglers and I’ve also decided to put it up on YouTube so as I can show it here too. Enjoy!
Yesterday we took Poppy to her first ever pantomime: Aladdin at the Porthcawl Grand Pavilion Theatre. She was most looking forward to seeing ‘Pwiss from Doodle-Do’ (aka Chris Corcoran from CBeebies) and had been practising her “Oh no it isn’t” and “He’s behind you” for many many weeks. It was very good, if a little haphazard due to it being their very first performance and Chris (Wishee Washee) held it together. My only regret was buying Poppy one of those multi-coloured seizure-inducing flashy wands… she nearly took the heads off surrounding theatre-goers a number of times and the flashing really hurts your eyes after a couple of hours.
