Avada Kedavra

Yes, I saw the new Harry Potter film (the goblet of fire) and quite frankly I thought it sucked.
The book was quite long, especially compared to the first 3, and the director obviously struggled to fit the contents into the length of a film. Most of the events are there, but they are barely a moment in the film. Some bits were extended in the film (even made up) but did little to increase interest of the event.

Wait for it to reach TV (or at least DVD rental).

I spent almost half the day at work today trying to find my way past a very annoying RedHat specific bug with perl (I realy wish debian was a commercially approved distribution, as I would have never had this problem with it). Eventually I found someone who knew of the problem and helped me fix it in about 30 seconds.
If the solution had come earlier then I would not have wasted so much time today. Although the time spent playing with Lego Mindstorms was hardly wasted. Tomorrow will be even better, as we are having a meeting to play with Lego!

Shogun will be sorting out an rss feed for me, so I will be putting up a feed of his posts, but I would like to draw your attention to his most recent post, as it does look interesting.

I am not bothering to add nice images, I’ll leave that to Shogun
He is commenting on the new Channel4 reality tv series Space Cadets. He believes that the contestants will figure out the show, and that it devalues science. I believe that if you choose gullible enough people you can convince them that they are actually in space even though there is gravity (they are using a low orbit argument). In fact, if they are using space suits, all you need is a large tank and put them in water (though the water on the suit when they get back in might confuse them quite a bit, but I am sure you could figure out a decontamination argument to throw them off).

It certianly devalues science, but may give some interesting insights into psychology, especially suggestive reasoning (tell someone something enough times and they will start believing it). I would be quite keen to see it, though probably only a few short clips if I know channel4.

The money could undoubtedly be spent on something far more interesting though.