An update

I've had a lazy weekend so far, been trying to keep it on the cheap until pay day next week.  Also taken a week off from golf practise as I didn't do so well last week and it's had me thinking if I still want to do it.  Had a bout of depression too since Monday to Thursday which I originally put down to returning to work after such a great week off, however, it may not have been depression at all as I seemed to feel better once I had some caffiene (I realised I hadn't had any caffiene since the Saturday prior).  Maybe I've just got some sort of addiction to the stuff... I wouldn't be suprised.  Since we got a water cooler at work, I've mostly been drinking either water or milkshakes rather than coke :)

Got Grave of the Fireflies DVD in the mail yesterday from the nice people at Play.com.  nonezumi warned me that it's not your normal happy anime film, and as it said on a review of the film, it's definitley not for kids.  I found it to be a very good film, while somewhat horrifing as to what happened.  It's nice to see a film from the Japanese side of things from the second world war, rather than films of the Americans celibrating their greatness in true Hollywood fashion.  A film with this bleak an ending would certainly never get made by anyone in Hollywood, that's for sure.  In related DVD news, my copy of Invader Zim vol. 2 has been dispatched by DVD Soon.  I expect I'll have that sometime next week.  Apparantly the third and final volume will be available in October.

Also went to see M. Night Shyamalan's latest effort, The Village. I've found Shyamalan's films to be a rather hit and miss affair and I found this one to be quite a disappointing miss. It features all the Shyamalan trademarks of being set in the real world, but with a twist and also the fact that it takes a while to get going and slowly builds up to a big climax. However in this instance, it's a bit of a let down. I noticed the occaisonal group of people leave the cinema as the film was obviously not what they were expecting and I stayed put, knowingly that it would be building up to a great ending... but yeah, what a let down :-/

I've got my eye on maybe getting an Xbox next month once the prices have dropped with the intentions of getting Burnout 3 and Outrun 2 for it.  I also plan to install a mod chip, maybe increase the hard drive size and use it as a media centre type thing so I don't have to have my noisy PC on to play MP3s/movies off it.  Well it's either do that or get me a new video card.  Been playing Far Cry and have to turn the detail down to medium and now Doom 3 where I just get by on medium but it's painfully obvious that my nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 can't hack it anymore.  Where the card is so overclocked, the graphics in Doom can get a bit corrupt at times which is never good.  I'm not overly bothered with Doom 3, however I do want to be able to enjoy Half Life 2 to it's full potential and that's due for release next month (well they did say that last year, let's hope it actually comes out when they say this time round).

Got two 3 day weekends coming up to look forward to.  The first is the August bank holiday which I've opted to take at the cost of a day of holiday allowance and the second is the Friday of the same week which I initially took off to visit the ECTS.  However, it would appear that this year's ECTS is going to be rubbish judging by the attendance list.  The only company worth seeing in the list is Nintendo.  It would seem that all the games publishers have moved to Game Stars Live, why I'm not too sure as it's a consumer based show rather than trade.  May go down to that instead, it's only £10 to get in.