There’s not a lot to be said about Tears Of The Sun. The action is weak qualitatively and quantitively, with little plot and less acting to back them up. Waving such flags as “soldier does the right thing”, and “do the mission, whatever it takes”, it does a poor job of actually making you care. When people die, you shrug and go back to sleep.

Dull, mediocre (at best), superficial junk. Don’t see.

Based (in part) on advice from the insanely smart Jacques Distler, I made a list of 7 things to do that would improve my commenting system. I had intended on doing at least 6 of them yesterday (the last one being quite difficult, taking at least a day on its own). As should have been expected, I got a little sidetracked. Damn you, Knights Of The Old Republic!

I did, however, get 2 of those features done. First up is comment counts, making it easier to see if someone has commented on an entry on the front page (chances are they haven’t, but hey, that’s life).

Secondly is much better error handling. Rather than outright reject a comment if it doesn’t resolve as valid XHTML, I now redisplay the form with all the fields as they were, with helpful advice on what is invalid.

The other features will probably appear more slowly over the course of the next fortnight as university starts back and I’ve got a backlog of work to do.

Just over a week ago, I experienced some phone woe. While I won’t bore you with all the details (basically Trium people wanted me to send my phone off to get fixed without telling me how much it would cost, which I didn’t like the sounds of), I bought a new phone. A spangly Motorola C350.

This post was originally going to be called “More Phone Woe” because the synchronisation software provided with the USB software is pretty terrible. This afternoon, however, it just decided that synchronising my contacts was no longer reason to crash. Hooray! Now, just need to get SMS messages synched and I can start building a software RSS aggregator for my phone (the plans are done).

I’ve got a back log of links that I want rid of, so I’ll dump them here. They all do exactly what they say on the tin:

• Group Typography – Creating a font based on multiple users ideas of what letters should look like,
• Worst Jobs In Science,
• XSLT Questions And Answers,
• PEAR Primer,
• Mind World Map – Users decide what the world map should look like. It’s starting to take real shape, if only more detail was allowed.

Don’t know how many of them are worth reading.

It be International Talk Like A Pirate Day (via Kryogenix! So be grabbing some grog, ye scurvy bilge rats, while I do a jaunty jig.