The first random links post of the year, plentiful in size and usefulness:

• Plink – Just what FOAF needed, a pretty looking parser and search service. Nice.
• Speech Reversal – An article on reversing speech in songs, and human perception thereof.
• Smarty For Beginners – A fairly straight forward tutorial on the Smarty templating language.
• Live Comment Previews – Very cool use of javascript to provide a live preview of comments as they are entered. Could get quite complex, dependent on text processing, but great nonetheless.
• Shrook Intervals – A misbehaving RSS reader? Maybe it should be more polite.
• Banished Words – A list of words banished for 2004. None will be missed.
• Gawsh – Google results displayed by host. Could be useful to someone.
• GoogleSynth – A program that pulls 2 random images from Google and blends them together. Mostly crap, but some interesting results.
• CSS vault – A stronghold of CSS tips. Bookmark it.
• Escher For Real – People creating the impossible designs of Escher for real. Absolutely bizarre.
• Google Spellchecker – Using Google to check if a word is spelled correctly. Simple, but very smart.
• Accept Headers Broken – Almost no browsers do Accept headers correctly. Not surprising.

• **[Quick Guide to C#](http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/quickcsharp.asp?target=Quick

  C#)** – Learn C# quickly, if yo already know Java.

And we’re done.

Happy New Year! The Christmas design is gone and it is time to get on with the best things in 2003 post. No reasons or commentary, just the picks.

Best Albums:

1. “Deloused In The Comatorium” – The Mars Volta.
2. “The Neon Handshake” – Hell Is For Heroes.
3. “Once Like A Spark” – JetPlane Landing.

Best Films (starting from the summer):

1. Kill Bill, volume 1.
2. Buffalo Soliders.
3. Igby Goes Down.

Best code:

1. Textile.
2. Magnetic Poetry.
3. Safe HTML Checker.

And that’s all for last year. This year my intentions are to finish at least one of the projects I’ve got in my head (one in particular is hooking me a lot right now, so I need to do it), as well as a major redesign (it’s sketched on paper somewhere, but it’ll take a while to actually do it) and a huge bit of course work for university.

Note: There are spoilers in this review, so look away if you haven’t seen it already.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, Return Of The King is poor, at best. Sure, the giant battles are impressive as always, but even they seem weak compared to the battle at Helm’s Deep. And the way the battle ended at Minis Tirith? Awful! (“Oh, and then a bunch of ghosts saved the day.”)

The acting was atrociously bad. The hobbits, in particular, were painful to listen to.

The ending was also tediously drawn out. I didn’t think anything would be more dull than the endless walking of Fellowship Of The Ring, but the endless ending of Return beat it.

I’m sure that if you like formulaic Hollywood epics then you’ll love this. I didn’t.

It should be plain that Will Ferrell is a comic genius. It’s a shame that his genius was wasted on Elf.

It’s a decent enough film (although it is a kids film), but Ferrell doesn’t shine as he usually does; hampered by an exceptionally stupid character.

There are some great moments, but it could’ve been a good deal better.

I got a strange email from a company in Kuwait recently asking for a quote on stationary and mobile metal analysis devices. At first I thought it might have been some kind of bizarre spam, but the lack of trying to sell me something I didn’t want suggested otherwise. I put it to one side and forgot about it.

An hour or two later, I checked my referrer log and noticed someone had arrived a day or two earlier from a Google search on “metal analyser”. Performing the same Google search, I figured out what had happened.

The company had seen the Generic Nu Metal Analyser in the archives, translated the page badly and thought I was selling metal anaylsers. Whoops, a text analyser was probably not what they had in mind.