So tonight I went out with a few of my friends to catch the midnight session of War of the Worlds. In the end, I can't really say I was disappointed. For starters, I never was a Spielberg die-hard fan. I mean, I respect him a lot, I don't actively dislike his films and I even digged a few of them. But somehow, in my book, he's never been in the same league as other directors. On the other hand, I walked in already not expecting much both from the little I saw in magazines and on previews and also by negative feedback from people I know who had already seen it. The cast is quite good, with Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Tim Robbins and, well, Morgan Freeman as a narrator (even if for only a couple of minutes during the beginning and the ending) is always a plus. The special effects also looked quite good to me but only in terms of eye-candy, not in terms of making me believe that was really happening.

And that's basically my gripe with the movie: I didn't find it believable and from some point on I just didn't care anymore. To hell with the fate of humanity, I mean, it just became a big yawn for me halfway into it. Not even the sudden appearance of my very favourite Tim Robbins could lighten it up for me. The plot is shallow and it has nothing to do whatsoever with Wells' 1898 novel except that, well, it's also aliens attacking the Earth and they happen to walk around in tripods aswell. But that's about it. For me, the main difference between the original and this screening is that the former is believable and creepy and the latter really isn't. Not the worst movie I've ever seen (far from it) but definitely not one of the best. This however got me curious to see the 1953 version of the film which judging from online reviewing at large seems to be a wee bit better.

On other news, spent some time tinkering with NFS, trying to turn one of the spare machines into an MP3 server for the house only to figure out that it doesn't really work very well over the wireless network. Whereas using plain old ethernet cabling, it works just fine. Which sucks, because everyone here who could possibly make use of the system is pretty much on wireless mode, myself included. And cables, well, they tend to be a thing of the past. I'll give it a try later on with SMB but I guess the problem doesn't lie in the network filesystem anyway.

The translation for FM2006 is going smoothly. Sports Interactive has broken things in different and periodic batches this time around so we've been calmly setting our own deadlines and things have been working out. Tomorrow I'll deliver my part of the third batch and the fourth (plus new match events) should be sitting in my inbox any minute now. Spoke to Woodg today and it seems he's taking my interest in helping to develop the new online translation system by testing it. According to him, testers will be paid for it, so I'm not complaining. The former system sucked so let's see what this new one brings us...

One final note for the quick face lift on this blog. I was kinda tired of the old one (ain't that the usual reason for changing things around?) so I just threw in another Blogger stock template. While I'm not hoping you actually like it, at least I hope it's easy on your eyes ;)