Went to a careers fair at Drake Beam Morin. Chatted with folks from Sun Microsystems, ADIC and Hewlett Packard.

Sun, it turns out, want people to write device drivers - of which I have no experience - but gave me a card with details of where to send my resume within Sun, for jobs I'd be suited to. ADIC are an all-Unix shop, and I have minimal Unix experience. HP were non-commital, but at least they took my resume.

It's all kinda depressing - going to a careers fair where the only tech companies are all doing stuff I'm not qualified for. I guess one can't be an expert at everything.

Finally got round to seeing Lord of the Rings. A total of seven people in the audience, and none of them felt the need to talk out loud whilst the movie was on, which was great. Hmmm.... now there's another rant that needs writing. Not now though.

I now see what the makers of the film meant when they said that they now have enough technology to do justice to the book. There were many scenes, with great armies of creatures - such as Orcs - which would have broken the budget if they'd not been able to computer generate the characters.

All the characters were well-cast and captivating in their performance. The hobbits were all very cute and loveable, and Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf was superb.

The lead character, Frodo, was played by the diminutive and bug-eyed Elijah Wood, who looked like the bastard son of a bizzare liaison between Dudley Moore and Marty Feldman. The lad did a good job though, and really looked the part. He did have one annoying habit though. He was forever falling over his own feet, just as some monster or baddie turned up. It was kinda reminiscent of Sarah Jane Smith. In other words it seemed like an unrealistic plot device to add tension.

It was very enjoyable, but boy was it long! Three hours to be precise. The only other criticism is that during some of the fight scenes, I think they employed some of the cameramen from NYPD Blue. I say this, because they filmed a lot of these (quite big and detailed) fight scenes in close up. Given that everyone on screen was wearing black, grey, blue and sludge colours, it was all a bit confusing. I almost found myself shouting, "pull back!" at the cameraman.

Anyway, one down, two to go.