Double Whammy has some promising ingredients; a lead played by Denis Leary, and support from Steve Buscemi. There are also some very poor ingredients: Liz Hurley, “quirky” characters, a half-baked plot, and plot strands that don’t really go anywhere.

Although the preparation is well-done, the film seems to have gone flat somewhere in the middle. Rather than do something well, it tries to cater for everyone; which just doesn’t work. Those plot strands I mentioned earlier? Too many things going on that are only half done, some quite disconcerting in their lack of conclusion.

For example, a rival cop gets suspicious about a suspect’s credibility (he says as much). It’s obvious that he would do some investigation into the matter. Do we see it or hear anything about it again? No. Very annoying.

It didn’t have to be like this. Rather than slow bake everything haphazardly, one or two elements could have been done to perfection. It’s a true shame that the better bits didn’t get a chance to simmer through, because this could’ve been a great film.

Buffalo Soldiers begins a bit like a very dark version of Sergeant Bilko: soldiers bored in the army getting up to various scams behind the backs of the incompetent commander, until someone new arrives and tries to catch them. But with drugs, guns and industrial cleaner replacing the odd poker game.

It’s funny, and well-paced, with only a very discontinuities.

The biggest problem, as with many modern films, is the insistence on a happy ending. There’s a very clear, obvious and satisfying ending that gets stepped over to provide that Hollywood happiness that seems to be essential to film makers these days. The film suffers for it.

I apologise to everyone for this post: it is, as the title says, pointless. It’s for me to get a few things down now as a time marker. Feel free to read no further.

Today, I came closer than I’ve come before to getting fired. I didn’t do anything majorly wrong, just a few different small things working against me; mostly out of my control. Although, perhaps it was just unjustified worrying.

Either I’m spending more time online (summer holidays, after all) or people are updating far less (perhaps both), because I go through my rather substantial list of sites to visit every day now; it used to take a fortnight at least, with various sites being visited with varying frequency.

I’ve finally loaded my archive into Feedster. I don’t think it has been indexed yet though, since I can’t seem to find anything after using lines of text directly from old entries. Oh well.

Thunderbird is officially a great mail client. It is now my default.

I’m in the middle of redesigning my site and keep hitting walls. I’ve tried art deco style blocks of colour, shades of minty green, and a few other things. They all seem like great ideas in my head, but don’t pan out. Very frustrating.

Move over, Google! I’ve recently been looking at Feedster, and realised how insanely powerful it is. It has a bewildering array of options (thesauras, regex, soundex functions and more), and a highly up-to-date index.

While it’s ranking algorithm might not be as good as PageRank, it certainly makes up for it in the amount of things you can do with it. I hope the API documentation goes up soon, I’d seriously consider using it for my site search.

I’ll also soon be loading my entire archive into their system (via RSS), which will make an interesting off-site back-up.

Anyway, good work and good luck to those at Feedster.

Another reason why web standards should be promoted: a very nice looking CSS top menu, working in all but IE based browsers. The best part is how beautifully simple the HTML is for it. I can also see CSS3 seriously simplifying the CSS.

Definitely a great tech demo, if nothing else. Via mezzoblue.