Last night was a fairly eventful night. We started off by going to Southbank to see Iron Sky, which strangely enough, Des really wanted to see after hearing good things about it.

For the unaware, the premise is this: in 1945 Nazis went to the moon and set up a civilisation there to eventually come back and retake the Earth. It's a comedy, and whilst it dragged in portions, it was a very good laugh, but a lot of the jokes will probably only be understood by geek/nerd culture enthusiasts.

The special effects, including a pretty significant space battle, were fantastic for such a low-budget movie, which was apparently shot on the Gold Coast for the studio work. It's definitely worth a watch if you're into funny sci-fi.

Last week we also saw Dark Shadows, which is the latest Johnny Depp/Tim Burton film. Before I get to the movie, surely Tim Burton can cast other actors in a movie? Why always Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter? It really is getting quite tired. The movie itself though, was pretty enjoyable but did have it's shortcomings. I've never seen the TV series it was based off, so I really can't comment on how it related to that.

Depp was his usual weird and quirky role, no surprises there, same with Helena Bonham Carter. For me the stand-out performance was not Depp, but Eva Green. She portrayed her psychotically-lovestruck witch character flawlessly. The plot did have it's stops and starts, as well as some peculiar inclusions that seemed unnecessary, but in hindsight it might have been trying to satisfy some themes/devices in reference to the original material from the TV series.

Last night was also the final day of the English Premier League season. Arsenal got very lucky to finish in third and qualify for next season's Champions League. It was also one of the most exciting finishes at the top in over twenty years, with the oil money of Manchester City first throwing away the title, then just to score two goals in stoppage time to claim it back.

My thoughts on City (and also Chelsea) are well known in terms of them being cashed-up overnight from new billionaire owners. It's quite ridiculous and extraordinary that they've now won the Premier League after only being promoted to it in 2002, and before the Arab buyout never finishing higher than 8th in League and regularly being in the bottom half of the table. Money can buy trophies, and added to the unfairness is that City were gifted their newish stadium for nothing in 2003 after the Commonwealth Games were done in Manchester. In comparison, clubs like Arsenal have had to earn their success, and privately fund their own stadium constructions from solid real-world revenues, rather than being gifted them by governments and/or billionaire owners.

I think that's enough football ranting for today. Happy St. Totteringham's Day nevertheless!

On Friday night we went and saw probably the biggest movie of the year, Marvel's superhero conglomerate movie, The Avengers. From the sum of it's previously introduced parts, I had pretty high expecations for this movie and although it didn't fail to reach these expectations, it didn't exceed them either. That's not a bad thing though, it's not often that high expectations are actually met, and overall it was still a great movie.

The real accomplishment of this movie is not the special effects, the overarching storyline, or even really the all-star cast (all of which we really have seen before). The biggest feat and accomplishment is how Joss Whedon, in writing and directing this movie, has almost perfectly balanced the plot to give a fair exposure and attention to all the 'major' characters.

It's something you don't notice till after the movie has finished, but if you look at list of cast/characters it's phenomenal: Ironman/Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Loki (Tom Hiddleston), and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). Even for the more mundane and otherwise forgettable characters like Black Widow and Hawkeye, plot devices (which fit really well into the story) are introduced that give these lesser characters attention and significance.

The plot seems to centre more on, unsurprisingly Tony Stark/Ironman, but surprisingly also Banner/Hulk. However, as mentioned before, overall it's fantastically balanced with the other characters.

The only thing I didn't quite buy was the recasting of Mark Ruffalo as Banner, as apparently things were not well between Edward Norton and Marvel. The character has now seen three actors in as many movies, and really I haven't 'bought' any of them. Mark Ruffalo portrayed a bit of a 'nothing' character for Banner, but luckily The Hulk was the real star, and a lot of the best moments of the movie involved him in some way.

It's definitely worth a watch, and although the 3D was good, I wouldn't say it's a necessity for watching this movie in the cinemas.

It's been many a year since I last did a redesign of this site, and even then it was really only some minor-ish changes from when I first began this blog in 2004. As the web has moved forward in the past 8+ years, the layout and structure of this blog has largely remained the same.

Although (in my opinion), this site doesn't look 'bad', I wouldn't really say that it is that 'good' either. So i'm planning on bringing a whole new look to this site.

However, what I must first decide on is what to do with this blog. Since the beginning, as the basis i've used the 'Plugged-Out' Blog Script, which has been pretty much abandoned since 2007. It was quite good at the time, but as the years have gone on, new features which have become default inclusions in modern-day day blogging platforms i've either had to do without, or add them to the script manually myself. Things that are now taken for granted, either weren't priorities or even thought of in 2004 when the script was created.

Some features i've manually coded into this script include: pagination for long lists of entries in 2007, proper CAPTCHA code for entering comments in 2008, comment email notifications in 2009, and friendly URLs and page titles in 2010. While i've enjoyed doing these additions as challenges, often there are better 'best-practise' ways of doing things or other features that I would like to include that are impractical for me to incorporate into the script.

So before doing this site redesign i've got to decide whether to stick with this script or not.

The obvious alternative is to move towards a WordPress-based blog. The WordPress platform has moved forward in leaps and bounds since I started this blog in 2004. Back then it wasn't even a year old, I remember I wasn't too impressed with it for what I wanted to do. Since then, it has pretty much become the de-facto basic blogging and CMS platform. Things that would take me weeks to implement in this script I could do with one of the many quality plug-ins that others have already created.

It is what I am leaning towards, as it will also allow me to use pre-made themes which I can quickly customise, so I won't have to design one from scratch for this blog, which is ashamedly based on a very ugly table-based layout in contrast to the lovely stuff people are doing with HTML5 and CSS3 these days.

The biggest challenge would be migrating across all my content to WordPress. As this script wasn't very widely used, there is no standard importer for bringing the content into WordPress. I've gone to great lengths to keep all my historical content throughout all the changes i've done to the script (mostly for my own benefit as a record of what i've done), so bringing it into WordPress and keeping everything working will be difficult, but hopefully not impossible.

I'm still not sold on it, but I might download WordPress and give it a go.

As fate would have it, there are two loosely related things to blog about today.

Firstly, in the past week NBN Co. has announced it's schedule for stage one of the wide-scale rollout of connecting areas. I was of course clamouring to see whether I could expect fibre-based internet within the foreseeable future. Luckily for us, our area is included in this three-year plan, and is due to "commence work in your area from Jun 2014 in phases with last work scheduled to commence in Jun 2015".

The news could be better (Ipswich and north-eastern Brisbane start getting it within a year), but it's a whole lot better than areas that haven't even been announced. Whether this timetable is something that NBN Co. can keep up with remains to be seen, and the other big question is what the current Opposition will to do with this schedule if they are elected into government next year.

The slightly related other topic is that I have installed DD-WRT onto my router at home. Late last year I bought a new router: the Netgear WNDR3800. I mainly bought it to replace my aging D-Link DIR-655, however I was interested in the current line of Netgear routers mainly because Netgear has opened them up and encouraged people to develop 3rd party firmware for them.

It took quite a while, but recently there was finally a BrainSlayer-developed (i.e. mostly stable and reputable) version of the popular DD-WRT firmware.

One of the biggest things that irritated me about the default Netgear firmware for the router is that they are starting to change the LEDs on their routers to be solidly lit when there is a device connected, rather than the traditional behaviour of the LEDs flashing on network activity. I can understand the trend towards this, as many 'normal' home users don't pay attention to, and are irritated by the flashing lights on a router.

However, for someone like myself, the flashing lights on a network device are an invaluable troubleshooting and general information tool. There are plenty of others who share my opinion, if the Netgear forums are any indicator.

It's astounding that Netgear doesn't simply provide an option in the firmware to enable the LEDs to flash on activity. Surely it doesn't require that much more development to enable this and make everyone happy.

Anywho, by putting DD-WRT on the router I have gotten my precious flashing LEDs back, and without sounding too geeky, it's awesome .

However, there were a few teething issues that were quite difficult to solve. Most notably there was the issue where the DHCP reservations form accepted characters in the reservation name that crashed DHCP and DNS on the router; but the thing that threw me off was that it only started to affect the router on it's next reboot. So a few hours after entering the reservations I did the first reboot, and that's when the issues started. It took many more hours and a few resets to figure out what exactly was going on.

Other than that it's been very stable, and i've been quite happy with it overall.

I've just finished playing through Mass Effect 3, and I really enjoyed 90% of it. But like almost of the entire internet, the ending was just abysmal. Abysmal writing, abysmal plot, abysmal closure. The ending was such an epic disappointment, and like many others have mentioned, it's mostly counter to what the 2.9 games leading up to it were all about. I'll attempt to write this entry devoid of any big spoilers to the ME3 endings, but no promises if you are spoiler allergic!

I belatedly got into Mass Effect at the start of last year. At the time I was a little bored gaming-wise, and Mass Effect 2 was cleaning out all of the 'Game of the Year' awards for the previous year.

After playing through the first two games back-to-back, I was hooked. I wondered how I managed to not to play them earlier, as generally being a sci-fi geek it was right up my alley. I loved the universe, the plot, the characters, and also very importantly the choice. What the player chose had ramifications for all the plot and characters after it.

I unwillingly let Wrex get killed in the first game, and it's haunted me and my character for all the subsequent games, and also damaged my relationships with all the Krogan race since.

That's what ME3 was continuing so well up until the last 10 minutes, when it was all thrown out the window. If you want specifics on what was disappointing about the ending: this video sums it all up perfectly: 10 Reasons We Hate Mass Effect 3's Ending (spoilers). Almost all my issues with the ending(s) are there in that video.

The bewildering thing about Mass Effect 3 is that, minus a few cliche overtones and forced multiplayer gameplay for single-player reward, it was an absolutely fantastic experience leading up to the last ten minutes. In ten minutes at the end, it almost ruined 5 years, 3 games, and 100+ hours of gameplay.

There is hope though: the Bioware CEO has acknowledged the endings and all the negative reactions, and that they are "planning to directly address it". More info will apparently be available in April.

The cynic in me suspects that this was all part of an evil Bioware/EA plan to upset fans of the series, as a way to make us buy extra DLC following the game's release in order to get a satisfactory ending...