Film: The Piano Teacher directed by Michael Haneke

A dark and powerful film about a repressed middle aged female piano teacher. She has not quite made concert grade pianist but is still a strict and severe teacher of piano. A pupil arrives who is self confident and has an eye for her. Initially she rejects him, but then lets him into her warped world and repressed/dominating personality.

Certainly not an easy film to watch, and has some very controversial themes.

Film: Code Unknown directed by Michael Haneke

This is a rather intractable film that is really a sequence of scenes stitched loosely together. The main theme of the film is consequences of our seemingly meaningless actions. A pasty thrown into the hands of a beggar in Paris links the central characters. There is no strong story line or plot, just observational scenes. An interesting film but you have to work hard to understand any of it.

Personalised Search

A lot of coverage of Google changing their privacy policy and sharing information about users across their services.

Personalised search, although seemingly an obvious thing to offer I think misses the point. Ideally when you search for something, typically you want the same results any other person would get (if only so you can easily say "search on this"). Personalising kind of robs you of that. What I think is missing is some sort of context input to your search, allowing results to be filtered by that. That has the benefit of being interchangeable between people as well as allowing fine tuning on what is being searched for.

Rasberry Pi Launch

Great news the long awaited Raspberry Pi board is now taking orders. I imagine it will be a while before you can actually get on with the huge demand, and is sounds like a couple of big distributors have been bought in to be able to ship the expected demand

So its an important day for two reasons, it is a leap year and this really cool project starts shipping.

Can't wait to get one.

Pearce England Manager

At least for a friendly tomorrow against the Dutch. Redknapp's stock maybe falling a little, with the thrashing of Tottenham 5-2 by Arsenal at the weekend.

That probably will not stop the FA from appointing him, but it will be interesting to see how Pearce does - he has been on the international scene for a while, and probably knows the environment better.

Film: Crimson Tide Directed by Tony Scott

A tense submarine thriller about a old school sub captain played by Gene Hackman and his XO played by Denzil Washington.

They are sent on patrol in a Trident nuclear submarine, with the backdrop being Russian rebels gaining control of nuclear weapons.

The film centres around the tension between the captain and XO, this boils over when a message is received for launch, a subsequent message is corrupted that may cancel the order. The captains wants to see things through (a little improbable!), and the XO wants to acquire the news message.

Not a bad film, a lot of poetic license and stretching of authenticity. It is no surprise they end up with a Russian sub trailing them with the amount of noise that was happening on board. Also the sonar displays are not authentic, they are portrayed as radar scopes - presumably what the viewer would relate to more easily.

But the main plot of the film is sound, the moral decision of whether to see through the order or seek confirmation.

Portsmouth in Administration

Not overly surprising, they have gone into administration to get access to their finances after the HMRC winding up order.

Suppliers have been withdrawing services, players not getting paid, 10 points now docked in the league. It feels more serious than last time as there does not seem to be any buyer waiting in the wings. HMRC are unlikely to yield on their unpaid tax demands.

Still I predicted the end last time this happened, so I hope I am wrong this time.