Michelle and I are hooked on the US version of “The Office“. Usually when the yanks take a great show from another country and Americanize the humour to ensure ratings success they fail in transferring the subtleties that made the foreign show a success in the first place. But for once, they’ve done it right.
The pilot episode was basically ripped off straight from the British version and I must say that I cringed my way through it, thinking it was a shameless crappy ripoff. However I persevered and watched the next few episodes only to be surprised that I was laughing all the way through and enjoying a whole bevy of new jokes and plot lines.
Keeping Ricky Gervais on as an executive producer, I think definitely has helped keep this ship on course, and having a big budget with a team of writers ensures that each episode is clever and funny. The American counterparts to David Brent, Gareth, Tim and Dawn, are all superbly caricatured and offer unique personality splints to help you warm and/or repulse away from them.
I thought the British version was A+ quality and was glad it ended on a high note before developing into some trollop like Little Britain has, but I sure am glad that the American version has taken over and has the budget to ensure a quality laugh fest every time.
stickfly.com rating: 10/10
Casio EX1000 – This camera had a monster 10.1 Mega pixels and a 2.8 inch display. Amazing battery life, and super quick startup time. It was also the camera that was used for my initial stickfly videos. Sadly this camera was stolen in the stolen bag incident of August 2006.
Canon Ixus 800 – Needing a replacement, I decided to go back to Canon as I’ve always found their image quality to be superior. This baby cut down on the megapixels back to 6.0 and only has a 2.5″ screen, but the battery life is just as good and the images are superb. Not as nice to handle as the Casio but a quality camera with an image stabilizer which is handy for all the videos I take.
Macbook (Black) – In 2005 I bought our first Mac laptop and fell in love with it and later that year I bought a PC as I needed windows for doing some work stuff. But in April 2006, Apple announced that they were moving across to a new platform that allowed you to run windows on their machines. So I sold my PC and bought laptop number 2. Let’s just say this guy can’t be beat. Once you go Mac, you never go back.
Ipod Nano (8gb Black) – Another replacement from the stolen bag incident, a new ipod was ordered. As luck would have it, Apple released an improved version of the Nano the same week my bag was stolen so I got myself one of these new bubbas that sports an improved battery life, more storage and a kick ass design.
NAS Network drive – With two computers you start finding that you need a network to access shared files and with all the movies, and pictures we are accumulating we needed some serious storage space. That’s why we bought ourselves a Network Attached Storage (NAS) external hard drive. This means all our computers can connect to our external hdd wirelessly. Super sweet!
Hitachi 26″ LCD TV – Moving house at the end of the last year we found that our new place didn’t come with a tv. So being the resourceful person that I am, I jumped on to gumtree.com, a local trading website, and found myself a 1/2 price LCD tv that is just beautiful. It’s so nice to actually have enough detail now that we can tell between the different characters on Friends. Our 14″ CRT was a piece of crap.
Xbox 360 – I never thought I would have purchased this gadget, but after visiting a friend of mine who had one I was instantly hooked. Gaming has finally come around to appeal to the mass market. With online connectivity you can just fire up your game and play anyone of 10 million people who are online around the world. Great fun and super easy to use.
Sky+ – With the uk’s 5 free-to-air channels you get bugger-all choice as they just show crap, so at a minimum you need a digibox so you can get some more free-to-air channels, but if you want quality and variety then Sky is really the only choice. I love being able to record whole series of shows and watch them at our leisure.
This year we spent Xmas day with some fellow Aussie orphans in Chiswick.
