I voted for the first time yesterday. It wasn’t a very overwhelming experience. Nobody that I really wanted to vote for.

What’s the point in a democracy that does such a poor job of representing the people? As far as I can tell, no party fully represents a single person (other than the party themselves). The normal voters have to pick the closest fit; Everyone compromises and hopes for the best.

Of course, the best never comes. The various political parties don’t put their real agendas on the table. No sir, can’t have the people getting what they wanted.

Excuse the cynicism of this post, it just seems that our countries are far from what they could be.

Catch Me If You Can isn’t a bad film. It’s not a very good film either. Although there are some amusing moments throughout the film (Leonardo DiCaprio pretending to be James Bond, for one), the plot jumps around too much for it all too work. It seems like cleverly scripted set-pieces, held together with some under-done characterisation and weak plot devices.

From the outset, we’re never allowed to connect to Frank (the protagonist of the film): his genius and daring, although apparent from the outcomes that we’re allowed to see, are never truly portrayed. He goes from small-time cheque fraud, to having stolen several million dollars in the space of a few scenes, with no intervening growth really shown. We only really see his early failures, and his great escape scene later on. That’s it.

His pursuit is entertaining in places, but largely empty. Nothing really convincing. It’s about as half-hearted as this review.

I’ve not really posted much in the last day or two, and won’t for another day or two. This week is class test week: a whole lot of testing and not a whole lot of time for studying.

Other than working hard, I’ve started to prepare the next major overhaul of Finetto, the CMS I’ve been developing (and that runs this site). There’s a lot of stuff going in that I’ve wanted to do for ages (Comments, an event-based model for dealing with changes etc) and some new ideas (those can remain private until they’re implemented).

I’m surprised at the amount of redundancy I’m going to be able to remove: there’s lots of similar code in there just waiting to be made more generic, lots of tweaking waiting to be done.

Anyway, there will be a return to normal service on Thursday, if all goes well.

I’ve been messing around with RSS 2.0 feeds a bit lately. I thought it was about time I added one myself. So, I had a look at the feed Sam Ruby has and took what I needed.

Then I got to thinking: we have an XHTML body for content in the feed, so why not use it as we would in any other web page? After a little messing around, I added some CSS rules and now have a feed that’s smarter (looking) than your average feed.

I give you my RSS 2.0 feed.

The internet quiz: the most pointless waste of time we’ve come up with on the net. You know the sort I mean: “What kind of (blogger/thinker/zombie etc) are you?”. Answer 30 question and you’ll reveal everything about yourself. Or will you?

The problem with these quizzes is that they don’t tell you anything new; you only ever get what you want to hear out. Anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence can see the result answering a certain question will give you. For example, “Do you like listening to music: a) a lot, b) a little, or c) not at all?”. What a shocker it is when, after answering “a lot”, that you’re a musical person.

Now, whether we do it consciously or not, we always answer these questions the way we think of ourselves, rather than the way we actually are. This is the only insight into our own nature we get: that we’d rather live in our own private little fantasy than see ourselves for how we are (assuming a quiz could accurately profile a person in the first place).

What prompted this ? The BBC Thinker Quiz. Was I surprised when it profiled me as both a “logical-mathematical thinker” and “a musical thinker”? No. I do maths and computing, and I’m passionate about music. This is how I see myself. No great revelations, no big surprise, no wizard behind the curtain.

So, if you want an ego boost (“wow, I’m really as [insert quiz variable here] as I thought I was”), keep trying those quizzes. Me? I’m going back to the roots of quiset; literally “to question” – Question the point of these quizzes.