Catching up

A few things to post about that I haven’t, or that I’ve started typing and had a system crash halfway through.

• I saw (most of) War of the Worlds with Tori yesterday at Chatswood Hoyts. I got annoyed with the “You wouldn’t steal a car […] Piracy is theft.” promotion at the beginning more out of habit than anything specific to the occasion (more on that some other time), but later there was a bit more of a reason to be agitated. Aliens walk around, zap people, act like mosquitos, cover earth in blood as fertiliser–and then the sound cuts out. There was probably about 15 minutes of the film to go, and I’m sure it wasn’t really that great, and they did give full refunds: but that wouldn’t have happened if we’d downloaded the film and watched it at home! Yeah, okay, things go wrong – but the system clearly had been showing some signs of problems for a while — even the ads before the feature had sound cutting in and out. Cinema advertisers take note: Cinema may be “Australia’s Fastest Growing National Advertising Medium” (with too many capitalised words), but it’s growing, ahem, rather silently. Anti-anti-piracy rant here.
• WordPress 1.5.1.3 has been released, and mere mortals should not try to upgrade using SVN: you’ll migrate to 1.6alpha. I know this because I did it yesterday, then, thanks to a recentish backup, successfully rolled back without any client-side downtime to speak of.

I could put in a massive anti-anti-piracy rant here (notably not a pro-piracy rant – and yes, there is a distinction) but I don’t think anyone ever actually reads those!