On Wednesday we figured we'd take advantage of the weather (not too hot for me, not too cold for Jeremy) to go to the beach. We headed for Noordhoek Beach, since it was one we were told allowed dogs. We got a bit lost around Kommetjie, and headed to what seems to be Bokram Beach instead. There were plenty of dogs around for Dante to play with, and he seemed to enjoy the sea (even if we found it rather freezing).

One of the great things about living where I do, is that there are wine farms less than two kilometres away, including Groot Constantia, the oldest wine farm in the country. On late Tuesday afternoon we headed off to have a picnic there.

As components, Alexander is an excellent movie. The acting is great, the backdrops are inspiring, the story is enticing. Each scene is well-polished (although the battles were occasionally a bit too jerky). But the composition leaves something lacking to me, in terms of what's been left out and the hopping back in time to show something that didn't need to be placed out of order.

In my mind, Riddick had a lot of potential after his introduction in Pitch Black. He's an anti-hero, and with that label, the capacity, if not the inclination, to do the right thing for mostly right reasons. Chronicles of Riddick solidifies Riddick in a way that I'm unhappy to see him go. [Spoilers]

Controversially, I think I, Robot is an excellent film. Whether it's what an Asimov fan would think Asimov would like, taken objectively, the film manages to cover a number of interesting concepts related to artificial intelligence, have mass appeal, and yet not go overboard on the sort of gung-ho "funny" action a la Independence Day.

On a bit of a whim, I chose Kaena from the DVD rental store, and I certainly don't regret it. The plot is a bit derivative, with insufficient background information to build a context to understand the movie. But one can't fault the imagery or the sound.

Not being ones to celebrate a religious holiday in this time period, I managed to convince Jeremy that we visit Cape Point on the 25th. We walked up to the old lighthouse, and them around to the new lighthouse. Rather a lot of people were about, many of them foreign tourists. 3x zoom was a little limiting, but the picturesque surroundings almost guarantee a nice picture or two.

Another reason I've been away for the past two weeks is that Jeremy bought me Tales of Symphonia, which has gulped a lot of my free time. It has a useful game-time feature, that counts only the time that's gone into the saved games, meaning failures and backtracking time is dropped. This claim I've been playing over seven hours now. That means I'm less than 10% of the way through the 80 hours of gameplay available (and on top of that I usually play slowly). So far, I can't fault the game except for not having a way to skip over scenes you've seen before (although you can speed them up), and the placing of long scenes before someplace you're surely going to die a few times. The graphics is beautiful, the music and sound can't be faulted, and the gameplay is speedily-paced. I'll have more once I get further.

Episode four was, as expected, even better produced than the previous episodes - "tighter" is the best way I can describe it. Fellow geeks Barry (talking about security) and Heather (about ccSA) came across well, although I think they could've asked better questions to Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig - he could tackle what I think they thought were more complex topics with ease, giving a better idea of what Creative Commons is about philosophically. But the logistics and results of Creative Commons was well-represented. Great show.

On last week's go_open, the Freedom League was officially launched. The Freedom League is an exercise in identifying and rewarding the community who not only convince people to try Open Source, but help out installing it. People earn the status of Geek after 10 installs, and get a hamper of branded goodies and more CDs to continue installing. (Only downside is that they seemingly haven't updated the scores for a month, or maybe the given date is a bug.)