I’d almost forgotten that I’d gone to see this, so I’ll keep it brief. American Pie 3: The Wedding (or one of the other various names I’ve seen it called – some too vulgar for a family publication) isn’t great. That would’ve been obvious to anyone who has seen either of the first two.

The thing is, it’s also not absolutely terrible. Even those most hardened against gross out comedies will be pressed not to laugh at least once.

Sure, some of the characters were entirely unnecessary with a handful of lines during the whole film, others had been changed to more suit the mob perception of them. It was, however, still funny in places.

Go see it? Maybe. There’s no rush to do so, but it is a slow week for cinema… So why not?

Have you ever been really great at something, anything? I don’t mean ok, or better than average, I mean really good. It’s a great feeling. Every bit of practice, all the blood and sweat that went into getting that good, is worth it in the end. You feel vindicated by having a new skill.

Have you then, for whatever reason, stopped doing this thing you were great at (notice the past tense there, it’s lucidly foreboding)? You just haven’t done it in a few years. Maybe you were bored with it, had other commitments, or a vital piece of equipment was no longer available. These things happen, and moving on is the right thing to do.

So, after your “away” spell, you come back to your skill because the situation is now like it was when you started it; your stars in alignment, your interest peaked, whatever. And then the inevitable part: you can’t do it anymore. The years of practice forgotton, the sweat gone, and the clumsiness aparrent for all to see.

It’s depressing, and embarassing. You know you could do it, you have evidence to prove it, but you can’t do it now. In time, you could get it back. But after the initial shock, do you really want to go back through the rigour of training again? That’s up to you, and I can offer no advice either way.

Thanks to the last entry being rushed (I was leaving minutes after I wrote it), the zombie simulator link was pointing to the wrong place. It’s been fixed now.

It would make sense to add some sanity checks to links in entries: prompt the user if they link to the same place twice in one entry. Not a big idea, but one that would stop things like this happening again.

Anyway, the zombie simulator is a lot of fun. Go play now!

It’s Thursday. It’s 2pm, and it’s time for more random links:

• Fight The Spammers – Over at the Feedster blog, there is a dicussion about fighting Spammers at the bandwidth level. Not a bad idea, but costly at the allied end.
• Neural Nets in PHP – Someone has created a neural net class in PHP. Astounding stuff, I can’t wait to see what people do with this.
• Gender Determination – An algorithm that determines whether someone is male or female by a sample of their writing. It worked on every test I tried, bar one. Of course, that one person was myself. Yes, I write like a girl.
• Zombie Simulator – FIXED LINK. Easily the coolest link of the day. A java applet that simulates zombies overrunning a city. Lots of emergent behaviour is apparent, and lots of switches to play with. I will be playing with the code for this very soon.

Some big news coming soon… But probably not for another day or two.

As much as I expected it to be a big budget wash out, Pirates Of The Caribbean is actually reasonably entertaining. Johnny Depp leads with his usual balance of excellent timing and quirky delivery, Keira Knightley plays her part adequately, and Orlando Bloom… He showed up.

Yes, the plot is predictable, some of the lines are horribly overwritten, but there are enough mildly amusing bits to make it a worthwhile watch. Certainly a lot better than that hideous dog shit I watched later the same day.