So my wife goes away for the week leaving me with 3 days off work in which I intend to work on my websites and play games with my new graphics card. So what happens? Both my computers start having problems preventing me from getting anything done.

My work laptop, which I tend to use to do my website stuff sat on the couch has started giving me the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (TM), and I can't reimage the HD until Tuesday when I'm back at work. Strike one.

Meanwhile, my desktop PC has come down with a virus, which (probably coincidentally) happened around the time I installed Internet Explorer 7. The virus started off just closing internet windows but now it's stopping all internet access and limiting my access to admin features. I'm in the middle of backing up my media and documents from it, and will be reinstalling it soon after 4 different antivirus programs failed to clean the infection. You'd think these days that if the software can detect a virus it could clean it, but all of them kept saying it couldn't be cleaned! AARRRGHHHHHHH....

Having just upgraded my graphics, I was looking for a cheap game that was a bit of a change from all the (admittedly excellent) first-person shooters on the PC. While browsing for bargain games, I came across Path of Neo. While I haven't played it much yet, I was surprised to find it rekindling memories of how awesome I used to think The Matrix was.

The two (progressively worse) sequels tainted the memory of it, but the first film is still probably one of my top 10 films of all time - it's pretty much a perfect action film. I also remember how excited I was when I saw the trailers for Matrix Reloaded and how disappointed I was when it finally came out. Reloaded and Revolutions were so bad that it dampened mine, and everyone else's enthusiasm for the franchise. What could have been timeless and even maybe the next Star Wars is instead a joke.

I received this book from my place of work, where our boss was so impressed by it he bought everybody in our company a copy. It's an entertaining and informative read, but I probably wasn't as impressed as him with it.

It's a fairly balanced look at the pros and cons of Wal-Mart's enormous size and the power that that gives them. It tells us both about the suppliers who make lots of money by doing business with Wal-Mart and also of the workers whose jobs were moved overseas due to massive pressure from Wal-Mart to cut costs.

Some great statistics and facts are in here, but I got the impression that the author probably wanted to criticise the company more - a lot of the book read to me as thinly veiled criticism, but may have not wanted to be counted among the many "Anti-Walmart" critics. Or maybe it's just that the negative stuff stands out more than the positive stories.

Finally saw it today, and was pleasantly surprised. Not because I didn't think it would be good, but because I had seen so many bad reviews that I had a nagging doubt that it was going to be an absolute disaster. But, flawed as it is, it's a very entertaining summer action film with some brilliant action set-pieces.

2 or 3 sequences really stand out, a sea-monster attack on a ship is great, a running 3-way sword fight is handled with more panache and ingenuity than maybe even the 2-on-1 duel in The Phantom Menace. The third, and probably best action scene in the film involves Will and some prisoners trapped in a cage using teamwork to run, jump and roll the spherical cage in a rollicking chase sequence while Jack simultaneous engages in a similar escape while still tied to a 10 foot pole. While being outlandish in the extreme, it really is something we haven't seen before which is rare these days.

One of these days I'm going to stop watching horror films altogether. I used to love horror films, back when they actually had a hint of plot and interesting characters or situations. Horror films these days are just an hour of random killings followed by a last half hour of somebody trying to escape. The last victim either escapes or is killed horrifically. And that's it, there are no surprises in the story and in these days of CGI and spectacular effects there are very few horrific things we haven't seen onscreen, so there are no surprises in the violence either.

The Hills Have Eyes. So do you.

Inside Man is a refreshing change from the recent crop of far-fetched tales of ridiculousness that seem to pass for "thrillers" these days. 2 recent examples: Flightplan and Firewall both had completely ridiculous plots with no internal logic and characters who appear to be braindead. While not having as much action or humour as these films, Inside Man really works as both a heist movie and a thriller.

The movie tells the story of "the perfect bank robbery" - which for once is actually a plan that you think might work. It's not spoiling the film to say that the plan is simply to rob the bank and leave without the police ever having any clue who the robbers were.

After yet another friend recommended World of Warcraft to me this weekend, I was about to cave and pay for the full game to try it out. Luckily, the same buddy told me about a free 10-day trial that is available.

Some things to note that aren't immediately clear from the trial offer:

Technically, it's only for the European servers and it does require a credit card (but that can be a US one and the subscription is not automatically charged after the trial period).

Other drawbacks are a huge download (3Gb+ with all the patches/updates), which could take a long time depending on your connection speed.

The story of one of the handful of internet companies to survive the dotcom crash and become a massively successful legitimate company. Taking the story from founder Jeff Bezos pitching his idea of selling books online to his boss, breaking away on his own to do it, and eventually becoming one of the richest men in the world.

It's a great story about somebody who had a clearcut belief in his idea and stuck with it until it succeeded. It also showed to me that the myth of "penniless entrepeneurs" becoming massive juggernauts is normally not true, Bezos was in a 7 figure salary job before he started Amazon, and though I am sure it was a struggle - he knew what he was doing.

Some sequels continue the story in a new direction. Some sequels put the same characters in a new and interesting situation. Horror sequels, on the other hand, tend to take the same plot and basically remake it, with new characters getting into the same predicament as in the original.

Final Destination 3 is definitely in the latter category: Someone has a premonition about a bad accident and manages to prevent it happening. The people that would have died in the accident are then killed in spectacular ways in the order they were "supposed to die". In Final Destination it was a plane crash, in 2 it was a car pile-up and in 3 it is a runaway rollercoaster accident. The problem is that now we've seen 2 films with the exact same plot we know the rules and we know exactly what is going to happen: The deaths will be amusingly clever and spectacularly gory, and nobody will survive. There are no unexpected twists, no cunning additions to the Final Destination mythology, it all just treads along as expected and then ends.

Wow. People use this as a cliche, but I literally could not put this book down. It's the first book since William Shatner's Star Trek Movie Memories that I have read cover to cover in one sitting.

This is the story of Chris Moneymaker, the guy who won the World Series of Poker at his first try. Not only was it his first try at the World Series, it was the first sit-down tournament he had ever been in!

It's a classic underdog tale, which tells the story of each of the five days the competition lasted, interspersed with Chris's life up to this point. It's a fascinating tale, taking him from a childhood betting on sports and dice games, through a college fascination with sports betting that saw him lose $60,000 in one night, and onto the start of his online poker career.