OK, so you want to know what I did today? I got client-side caching of the help content working, which is nice because that probably cuts the overall page sizes by anywhere between 30% and 80%.

Saw Return of the King last night. At Village in the CBD they have this thing they call the Screening Room, which (according to the mythology on the back of the menu) used to be set up for screening stuff for the local cheese platter and various visiting dignitaries. They try fairly hard to make it all seem sort of magical, but ultimately it's a bit hard to get excited about sitting in a chair that Keanu maybe possibly once sat in. The chairs are comfortable enough, the screen isn't terribly large but it's big enough, you're probably better off sitting in a real cinema, I guess I kind of got screwed but not unforgivably.

I thought the movie came across as a bit rushed. Nothing really seemed to take very long, and that seemed to undermine the narrative somewhat. There wasn't time for any suspense, and I remember the book almost seemed to drag a lot of the time which was what made it so effective. In th ebook, Sam and Frodo's trip through Mordor itself is a drawn-out nightmare of dust and rocks and the constant threat of capture; in the movie it's over in a minute or two. The siege of Minas Tirith actually feels like a siege in the book; in the movie they only have time for a sudden calamity. Same goes for the Paths of the Dead, and so on and so on. But I liked it on balance, chiefly for the spectacle.

New Year's Resolutions were to get to work on time, to exercise more and to spend more time drawing in the evenings. I'm inclined to resolve to spend two hours a week practising Japanese as well, but I'm far from confident that I have sufficient willpower to manage four; three resolutions is probably pushing it already. Anyway, in that spirit I'm going to go now and torment myself on that velodrome.