300. No more, no less. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s a feature length trailer of epic proportions by a director “with a machine gun for a dick”.

Saw this a couple of nights ago. Pretty hard to watch if you are a guy. I’ve heard people state that this stimulates all sorts of debates about paedophilia and vigilantism; personally it seems like this extreme setting is merely justification for a graphic torture film (so is the Lion’s gate way) involving some crazy bitch attacking some proposed kiddie-lover. The true menace to society would be illustrated in a sickening role reversal, honestly I believe this film achieves little more than some light (albeit gritty) entertainment. Plus I prefer soft gums.

I was meant to make this blog post last night but I ended up watching Scrubs instead. Then I couldn't make it this morning because I had an oh-so fun directed reading dissertation write-up to continue with and a painstakingly monotonous test procedure to carry out on some newly made sample blocks for my project. Yesterday the results made no sense, today the sensor broke halfway through.

However, I have written my 1800 words today and I am ready to take some time off. So, in-between work and more work I squeezed a little bit of MySQL PHP coding into a new site specifically for my movie collections. The site lists my owned movies and my rated movies (grabs my personal ratings from IMDB – all 400 of them), using the IMDB catalogue number it fetches data such as title, year, director, runtime, rating, plot and poster image automatically. I guess I am bringing the site out of beta by including the link here, check it out:

http://movies.trivialbeing.org/

It is here at last it seems. In fact it is perfectly clear that it has arrived – newspapers are filled with ads shouting about the PS3s that they have in stock – get them now! And, on perusing the shopping centres late on Saturday, I noticed that every electronics store outlet from Game-station to HMV and Curry's Digital had large protruding signs announcing "Playstation 3 in stock… hurry". Should I have had £500 to lay down on a system + game I could have bought one from anywhere. Though, if I wanted to buy myself a Wii I would be hard pressed to find one; HMV, Game, et al. had all sold out and many stores still had waiting lists. I'll take my £300 + Wii over a PS3 and Resistance Fall of Man any day, in fact, 4 months later I and my house-mates still avidly play Wii Sports. I do plan to purchase a PS3 (ICO 3, Little Big World), though not for a good 18 months. 

I seem to have failed to note to everyone perusing this site for its foobar-ness that all foobar related posts have now been moved to my new site, Fooblog2000. I'll no longer be posting updates to my configurations here, which are now up to version 0.6 with some very nice new features such as ratings panels and a singles SCPL mode.

With that said, the interim period for the site, i.e. its opening month, has come to an end with quite a razzle dazzle; v0.6 of my configuration made it to the front page of Digg and fooblog consequently succumbed to the effects of lots of visitors. Fooblog uses Dreamhost as its provider which offers 2Tb of bandwidth a month; I had plenty of preparation for such an attack, or at least I thought I did. What I was not prepared for was a catastrophic failure of Wordpress 2.1.2. To save the MySQL databases from too much stress I turned on the advanced WP caching system, however when 2000 people arrived in an hour or so something went wrong and all WP pages failed to load. Due to the stresses of such high traffic volumes I assumed the problem was caused by traffic alone and that it would rectify itself when things calmed down, I put up a temporary page and let it be. However several hours later it was still playing up, it took me a while to track down the problem but in the end deleting the cache fixed everything. It's a shame this happened because the down period of the site occurred during the period the site was on the front page of Digg. Oh well, I will know the fix for next time.