Here be spoilers.

I love the way at first you are horrified that the girls are being chased so relentlessly by Stuntman Mike and his “deathproof” car. But they survive, the feisty New Zealand girl seemingly completely unaffected by her lengthy and helpless near-death struggle, and then they become the predators. Their chase feels different, since you see the torment of Mike more clearly and frequently. When they finally catch him they take it far further than you feel comfortable, eventually killing him in a gang-like and brutal manner. At first you wanted them to chase him and make him pay for the way he tormented the girls and almost killed the Kiwi girl, but before long Tarantino has turned it around, the girls are evil, Mike just a playful moron. You can’t sympathise with any of them. In the end it was the “nice-girl” who delivered the fatal and gratuitous blow, making you wonder if anyone is ever really as nice as they seem on the surface. Nicely played Quentin.

Only Tarantino does this kind of film for me. Reams of interesting and unconventional dialog. Bags of cool, yet intelligent characters. Different motives. Different twists. Great cultural references.

Yet it’s not his best, and I was not especially wowed. I recommend it nonetheless

We went to see Blood Brothers on today at Charing Cross Road. It was absolutely brilliant :).

Perfectly paced, wonderful music, thrilling characters, wonderful character development. The music throughout was arranged so that the feelings the story evoked were emphasised and clarified - exactly as musicals should.

This is no namby, pamby Hollywood, or Andrew-Lloyd Weber crap. This is a thouroughly entertaining and moving story, where the music and singing improves the experience tremendously rather than serving to add same “razzle-dazzle”.

Go see it! Be prepared to cry ;).

The national rail online service is pretty good for getting train times and info. But it isn’t great.

• Worst is sessions time out. So if I leave the browser open at train info over night and come back, and then click “later trains” or some such, the site will tell me I have timed out and will need to enter all the train details again. This is a bit of juvenile web development.
• Second worst is speed. The site is slow to load, and slow to get results.
• It is covered in stupid bugs. Many times I have loaded the front page, gone for tea, come back and tried to submit a query, only for it to come back saying, sorry you can’t request information about trains in the past. This is a rather silly design decision. They could easily assume I wanted current trains.
• Insufficient information in the results. I want lots and lots of information. Not just 5 trains. 50 is better. But I’d settle for 20.
• Did I mention it was slow?
• I want to be able to get complete timetables. I can’t, or at least can’t figure out how.

Steph also mentioned the fact that the site looks ugly and amateur, which I have to agree is true, but I don’t care much for. But I’m sure other people judge the site accordingly. I hope they don’t rectify this in future by increasing the download size, and thus slowing the site more.

Otherwise I like the service, it’s good enough, and beats ignorance.

In summary, it’s quite fun, has amazing appeal to non-gamers, and has potential. But I prefer my Xbox 360.

SUSE made a new K-menu. They did usability research, and testing. They polished it a lot. It’s really good. It’s a true evolution of the start-menu concept.

I like the following best:

• No cascading menus so you lose the “misclick of death” feature that plagues cascading menus. Which is to say, when you misclick or move the mouse too far and you have 5 nested menus open, you have to start again. The SUSE menu changes what is shown when you open nested menus.
• When you are in a nested menu, a big back button the whole height of the menu shows on the left. This uses Fitts’ law too, so you just throw the mouse to the left side of the screen to go back. This feels so nice.
• All menu items have large extended selection regions, so you can’t miss them when moving the mouse quickly. They feel wonderful, the targets are huge.
• Moving the mouse to the bottom left of the screen opens the menu without a click being required
• Search is quick and omnipresent
• Menu items have the name in black, and the description in gray underneath

Other little things just ooze polish, like the “user username at domain” text having the username and domain in bold. This is slick.

Well done to SUSE.