We watched Matrix Reloaded the first weekend of it showing here and I liked it, but I do think they’ve turned it into too much of an action movie and a lot less philosophical one. The first movie had the balance just right I believe. Despite all the great pains they took to make the computerized fight scenes look realistic, they still ended up looking slightly like something out of a computer game. To their credit, though, they almost pulled it off and this technique will now be copied a bazillion times and will become common place. Then someone else will improve it and take the next leap forward, and everyone will copy that too. Ad infinitum.

We also went to the Adnan Sami concert last weekend, and I liked some of the songs, not all of them. My wife and our friend Richo enjoyed it tremendously.

As for this weekend we wanted to relax, so we just got on the tube without deciding where to get off Well, sort of. We ended up at Embankment pier, I bought an old copy of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, and we ended up doing some shopping as usual.

Weather is a bit sucky today, it’s raining all over the place. Well, at least it’s a Friday and we’re all looking forward to the weekend, not that we’ll be doing much. My wife has her PLAB 2 exams on Monday so we’ll be home, I’ll be reading something or hacking on something or running or cooking or whatever. I try to do most of the cooking on the weekends since Sadia is has to study, and it’s all fun.

I just finished reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson last night. It’s a science fiction novel about a virtual reality world called the Metaverse, a hacker who always goes around carrying two samurai swords, and a virus known as Snow Crash. Very deeply thought out novel, and most of Stephenson’s work always is Cryptonomicon was very good as well, although it got a bit long sometimes.

Once you get broadband installed it slowly starts to dawn on you just how much more you can do now. I just realized that I can now simply download a lot of linux distributions, in reasonably short amounts of time. Just last Friday we needed to replace StarOffice with OpenOffice which I had been putting off buying for several months now. I simply just downloaded it instead, in less than 20 mins and had it installed and working in 30! Also, using ssh for shell-based accounts on webhosts feels indistinguishable from a local machine
I need to update my InterceptVector parser a bit, because the IV site is having problems all the time and sometimes (i.e. today it’s sending complete junk as a result of which my whole site got disabled! I need to check the whole XML file for validity as well now. Oh well, I shouldn’t complain. It’s really nice of him to provide the service, cuz a lot of people want real money for it.

So I’ve finally found some time to update the weblog after so many days. We’ve been really busy in the office and I’ve been working late some days of the week. We finally got the ADSL line working, but haven’t had time to configure the network yet. Apart from that, the project is coming along.

It’s a bank holiday weekend here and we’re going out shopping in a while to Central London, we might watch X-Men 2 while we’re there as well Our TV is not working at all at the moment, we think the tube has expired. So we need to find either a used or new TV at a reasonable price. The dang used TV shop near our house had to be closed today! It will be a bit boring without a TV for a few days, I suppose I’ve got several books to read anyway