Despite all the usual bravado one would expect from the Proctor and Gamble lot, the Gilette M3 Power Nitro (one assumes marketing came up with a name that bad) is surprisingly good. I’m not one to gush about razors (this is a first for me), but it really does make a difference in the number of strokes, which I’m reliably informed means less irritation.

It’s different from it’s big brother, the Mach 3, in that it has a vibrating motor inside. The outcome of using this is that it just glides through the hair. Now previously, it took me a good while to slice through the hair (particularly when trimming my goatee a bit). The downside? Shaving with a brand new blade can be dangerous at the best of times because it tends to be, as one would expect, razor-sharp. With additional vibrations, it tends to go a bit awry. Worth a go, though.

In an extremely tenuous link to the last post, I recently managed to get a hold of an album, “Megaton Shotblast”, by Texan outfit De Facto. Why am I mentioning this? Because they are the band who were more influential in forming prog-rock supremos The Mars Volta than their prior band, At The Drive-In.

Formed as a side project while At The Drive-In were still going strong (that split causing the well-documented Mars Volta/Sparta divide), De Facto make an interesting sound: mixing up dub influences, with jazz, salsa, electronica and the tiniest smattering of prog. The album is the obvious pre-cursor to the long instrumental sections found on both Mars Volta albums (as well as their live shows, where 20 minutes is not too long for a solo), as the vocals are near non-existent.

If you’re a Mars Volta fan, it’s well worth it, but not necessarily if you’re just an At The Drive-In fan; this is self-indulgence at it’s most powerful and worst, if you don’t like lengthy solos.

After hearing two other stories about this and having done it myself before that, it seems like there is a de facto standard for testing hi-fi and home entertainment systems. It’s rather simple:

1. Turn up your equipment as loud as you can, and ramp up the bass.
2. Whack in a copy of the film Swordfish.
3. Enjoy the madness that is the opening “human claymore” scene.

If the ball bearings don’t feel like they’re going past your head and the floor doesn’t rumble enough to upset the neighbours when the car lands, your equipment isn’t good enough.

To children and novice programmers:

When writing various kinds of applications or APIs, it is often the case that you will have functions of the form is<em>Object</em>Valid() (or a similar kind of check that begins with “is”), where Object is some variable or object. This is fine: checking data and providing methods to do so is a Good Thing, in that it is considerate and generally fulfills a use case.

Something you should never do is write a function like isObject<em>In</em>valid(). Putting negation into this kind of check is a lot like a double-negative in English, it makes life more difficult for everyone else because they have to spend more time straightening out the negations. This mistake is compounded by the fact it is almost always used in conjunction with the language negation to give: !isObjectInvalid(). Argh!

Next person to do this gets hurt.

We are sequel-rife this month, with three of the four films having a predecessor. More pertinently, it’s a good month for cinema.

Ghost In The Shell 2 is the sequel to the excellent look at the nature of human existence and consciousness, viewed from a future where the human body is no longer a necessary part of our lives. This time around Batou has become the main character, picking up an investigation into why a new line of cyborgs are murdering people and then trying to kill themselves. While this film is still quite insightful and asks a lot of questions of the viewer, it does it a lot more overtly than its predecessor, going directly to the issues rather than presenting scenarios in which they are explored. The reappearance of several old characters (one in particular) also just seems like pandering to the fans, and detracts from what is, on balance, a reasonable film.

Let me say now that I hated Saw. I wanted to like it, but the woeful acting (Cary Elwes, what happened?), blip cuts to ruin tension, and unshocking finale (I had seen Audition not long before-hand) were too much. It was with some surprise that I found Saw 2 to be quite enjoyable. Sure, it’s a cheesey horror film, with some annoying looks at the Jigsaw killer’s motivations, but I found it unpleasant to watch in all the right places, squirming at some of the more fiendish plans that had been dreamt up. The ending was unexpectedly clever (well, part of it was, the other part was a non-event). Shame the tension was let out again by those bloody blipcuts.

I’m not the biggest fan of the Rolling Stones so I didn’t know anything about the back story of Stoned; a film about the downfall of Brian Jones, a founding member of the band. It’s quite an interesting tale (which I won’t ruin for you, if you are in the same position as I was), but quite depressing, seeming like rock star cliche all over the place. There are no shocks in this film, no great stand-out moments, but nothing particularly bad either. Fairly average.

If you’ve seen the first Transporter, you’ll be wondering why I went to see the sequel, Transporter 2. I was thinking the same. I have to say that, like Saw 2, it’s a sequel that in some ways overcame a poor predecessor. The choreography is outstanding, outlandish and over the top, just as all good fight scenes should be. Sure, Jason Statham is an atrocious actor, the plot is paper-thin and some of the lines are hilariously bad, but I enjoyed it as a light-hearted action film.

This month is very hard to pick a winner, but I’m going to go with Saw 2, largely because it beat expectations by a long way.