June 2003 Archives
Phil does an excellent job of summing up my feelings regarding companies forcing you to use a specific browser. This is a pet peeve of mine. Luckily my bank has not forced me into using IE - I do know of others that are not so lucky.
On the other hand, my own company is guilty of this. Every single corporate website I visit reminds me that I'm using a browser that is non-compliant with corporate standards and I should "upgrade" to IE.
Regardless of the fact that "upgrade to IE" is an oxymoron, I shouldn't be locked into using a browser just because the web developer couldn't be bothered to adhere to industry standards. Grr.
Like sheep we (well people here in the States anyway) all signed up on the National Do Not Call Registry last week so that we can beat those telemarketing bastards. Unfortunately if you actually dig into the Do Not Call FAQ you'll wonder why you even bothered because the registry doesn't apply to these:
long-distance phone companies; airlines; banks and credit unions; insurance companies; all political organizations; all charities; anyone conducting a surveySigh.
Laughed my arse off while watching Ellen Degeneres on HBO last night. Good stuff, I love that kind of humour :-)
Then it was all Jodie Foster, all the time. First off was Panic Room which was really good. Then by some fluke I got to watch one of my all time favorite movies Contact. Unfortunately it was on TNT so it was filled with bloody adverts and they managed to stretch it out to 3 sodding hours. I really should look into buying a Tivo.
Today was mostly homework (grrr) as I really couldn't be bothered to do it during the week. That's the problem with trying to go to school while actually having a job. If you have a long day at work the last thing you want to do is study. Needless to say last week was a little hectic so not much homework was done. Perhaps next week will be better.
I have to say that this Artificial Intelligence class is one of the most challenging things I've ever had to to. This week was spent trying to get my head around Bayes' Theorem and Probability Theory. Not exactly fun stuff :-)
It seems that 70's (and 80's) TV programmes are all the rage in Hollywood at the moment. Some of these I actually watched and liked (well I did when I was a kid anyway) and some of them I hated. It will be interesting to see them 're-done'.
Groan if you must, but Hollywood sees dollars in reviving the kitschy television of the 1970s, whose latest big-screen reincarnations include Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and the upcoming S.W.A.T. and Starsky and Hutch.In development are movie adaptations of the '70s TV hits Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart and The Six Million Dollar Man, which takes inflation into account with its big-screen title, The Six Billion Dollar Man.
Along with big-screen efforts, TV networks are resurrecting '70s shows. The Love Boat and Fantasy Island had brief reincarnations as series, while similar TV updates in the works include Kojak, Baretta, McCloud, CHiPs, Battlestar Galactica, The Bionic Woman and The Gong Show.
Me? I'm waiting for the A-Team and Knight Rider re-makes [0]. I used to LOVE those programmes when I was a wee lad :-)
[0] Not that I've read of any plans to actually remake those programmes, I just thought it might be interesting if they did.
I don't really want my naked rear end on display for all to see thanks :-)
EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J. - A scanner the government is testing for airport screening reveals much more than meets the eye to be comfortable for most passengers.Susan Hallowell, director of the Transportation Security Administration's security laboratory, sacrificed a large measure of her own modesty Wednesday to demonstrate the problem.
She stepped into a metal booth that bounced X-rays off her skin to produce a black-and-white image that revealed enough to produce a world-class blush.
Her dark skirt and blazer disappeared on the monitor, where she showed up naked — except for the gun and bomb she had hidden under her outfit.
"It does basically make you look fat and naked, but you see all this stuff," Hallowell said.
The agency hopes to modify the machines with an electronic fig leaf — programming that fuzzes out sensitive body parts or distorts the body so it does not appear so, well, graphic.
Woohoo, Luke has released a new version of SharpReader that runs on older versions of winders. So now I can use it on my corporate laptop. It runs like a charm and appears to be a little faster than RSS Bandit - NICE.
Sally and I watched VH1's The 100 Greatest Songs Of The Last 25 Years last night. Quite good. Didn't agree with a lot of the choices though and I wonder what criteria they used to determine that these songs were the best?
I strongly disagreed with their choice of #1, Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. In my opinion Nirvana are the most overrated band of the last 25 years - they should win an award for that instead :-) Don't get me wrong, I own all of the Nirvana albums - and I like them. It's just that "Best" or "Greatest" is not really something I associate with Nirvana. They're not the best band, they don't have the best song, they didn't have the best songwriter. Just average. No more, no less.
I also wonder why certain songs by artists were placed higher than others. Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean' (#2) is better than 'Beat It' or 'Thriller'? I wouldn't have thought so. Van Halen's 'Jump' is better than 'Running With The Devil' or 'Ain't Taking 'bout Love'? Not in my book. Oh well.
Even though the programme was quite good I do have an overall gripe. I enjoy listening to the little interviews with various celebs who give their opinion on the song in question. But the song clips are only 30 seconds long and the celebs talk all over it. Keep the chit chat but please play the entire song afterwards :-)
I've noticed in my local Blockbuster that there are certainly more DVDs than VHS tapes, I wondered how long it would be before the tapes would be phased out.
Are VHS tapes about to join vinyl albums in the dustbin?In the latest sign of the rise of digital media, weekly DVD rentals exceeded videocassettes this month for the first time ever, according to the Video Software Dealers Association. The trade organization said an estimated 28.2 million DVDs were rented for the week ended June 15, outpacing 27.3 million VHS rentals.
The erosion of videocassettes has been a fait accompli since DVD players became the fastest-selling home electronic device in history. The popularity of DVDs has prompted rental chains, including Viacom Inc.'s Blockbuster, to phase out the tapes.
From the not particularly surprised department:
Barnes & Noble selling 80 books a second as 'Order of the Phoenix' captivates Potter fans.
I had every intention of taking one photo every month of the new Coyotes Arena as it was being built. Well, that didn't happen. Instead I've only managed to take 3 in a year. I took the third one today and you can see the progress they've made since the last photo I took back in December.
I'll get another chance to take plenty of photos when they start building the new Cardinals Stadium though.
Well, after 9 months of fighting with the insurance company I can now glady say that the roof is done and I love it. Takes a while to get used to though, you get so used to your roof being a certain color that it looks a little odd when it changes. We got our satellite dish repaired today as well, a nice little $100 that the roofing company will be paying for :-)
From the oh my god did THAT suck department:
Do yourself a favour and avoid About Schmidt. Like an idiot I watched the whole thing (2 hrs) hoping it would get better. It didn't :-(
So one of the asshat roofers decided it would be a good idea to drop my satellite dish on the ground. They had to remove it to lay the new shingles down. I noticed that they'd finished that part of the roof and had put the dish back on so I tried the TV (ya know, just in case).
No signal.
So I went outside to look at the dish and noticed it was sort of facing the wrong way. So I ask one the blokes (the one who spoke the most English anyway) about it and he said "oh yeh, it probably doesn't work because we dropped it".
I went up on the roof and sure enough there's a nice little gash in the LNB arm. So at this point I don't know if it's misaligned or broken or both. I called the roofing supervisor bloke and he drove out to take a look and said they would pay for it to be replaced.
To be honest, I'm not pissed off that the dish was dropped as I understand it was an accident. What I am pissed off about is that no-one had the guts to tell me about it.
Now this is quite amusing. Senator Hatch is the bright individual who, on Tuesday, suggested that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed. The irony? His own website is using unlicensed copyrighted software. Doh :-)
Even more amusing is the fact that his website had a link to a porn site. It's been changed now but Google has the cached copy. (WARNING: NOT WORK SAFE) See that graphic in the bottom right had corner that innocently says 'My Utah Search'...
Oh, and photos are somewhat working again (note new link on the top right corner above the weather). I finally had a spare second last night to finish up most of the code. There aren't many photos there at the moment as I've got to get around to finishing my 'image-resizing, thumbnail-generating, auto-uploading' program which will make uploading images less of a pain in the arse (Image::Magick absolutely rocks BTW!) :-)
Worked from home today. Woohoo. Loud moozik, no interruptions, loads-a-coding. NICE.
And to what did I owe the pleasure of WFH today? New roof that's what. Because of the hail damage we received last year, our insurance company has forked out the cash for a new roof. The roofing contractor was supposed to be starting it today and I wanted to be here in case there were any problems. Notice that I said supposed to be starting today. They were supposed to be here at 6:00am this morning. Then they were suppposed to be here at 2:00pm. At 3:00pm the boss showed up and said "my guys aren't here". I looked at him with a deadpan face and replied "er, yes I can see that mate".
So now they're supposed to be here at 6:00am tomorrow. Means I get to work from home tomorrow too - excellent :-)
Oh and tonight we broke the all time record for number of phone calls from wankers trying to sell us stuff. Don't know why they picked tonight but it was literally one after the other for about an hour and a half. Bastards.
My favorite TV programme has been extended for an extra season - woohoo.
HBO announced that it has agreed with producers of the award-winning mob drama for a sixth season. The cast currently is wrapping up production on the fifth season, which will begin in March 2004.
Well, I have to say that there's nothing quite like hearing the dog throw up to get you out of bed in the morning (4:59am). Perhaps I've stumbled across a great new idea for an alarm clock :-)
Er, then again maybe not. Still now I'm wide-a-friggin-wake and I'm off to see what I can have for breakfast...
The hottest property in publishing just got hotter. Days before the latest Harry Potter book is to go on sale, a raider drove off with a lorry-load of about 8,000 copies of the book in Merseyside.Police valued the stolen copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at about £130,000, but experts warned that the thief would have trouble selling them on. Tim Godfray, chief executive of the Booksellers Association said yesterday: "Perhaps he thought it would be an enormous quantity of cigarettes."
Harry Potter book is even hotter after thief drives off with 8,000 copies
Robin Cook & Claire Short both gave evidence today in the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry into the use of intelligence in the war.
Former Cabinet ministers Robin Cook and Clare Short said today they were both told by MI6 in the run–up to the war with Iraq that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction did not pose any immediate threat.Mr Cook and Ms Short, who both resigned over the conflict, said they had been briefed by MI6 – more properly known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – in the days before the war.
From one of The Guardian's Cricket World Cup 2003 - Over by Over reports.
Meanwhile, have you ever thought WHAT SORT OF LIFE IS THIS AND WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING BOARDING A TRAIN FOR MOORGATE AT 6.30 IN THE MORNING AND THEN STANDING AROUND FOR AGES WAITING FOR A TUBE WHILE STARING AT A SIGN TELLING YOU THAT IF YOU WAIT FOR FOUR MINUTES YOU CAN BOARD A TRAIN TO UXBRIDGE I'D RATHER WAIT FOUR HOURS FOR A JOURNEY WITH THE GRIM REAPER QUITE FRANKLY AND THEN YOU GET TO WORK AND THEN THERE'S THIS AND I KNOW THE CRICKET'S GOOD AND ALL THAT BUT I'VE GOT OUT OF THE WRONG SIDE OF BED THIS MORNING AND IN ANY CASE IT'S NOT AS IF I'LL WRITE A CRACKING MATCH REPORT AND THEN GET REWARDED BY BEING SENT ON A WONDERFUL ASSIGNMENT AROUND THE WORLD BECAUSE I'LL BE VERY SURPRISED IF ANY OF MY BOSSES WILL READ ANY OF THIS LET'S BE HONEST THEY WON'T ALTHOUGH ON THE OTHER HAND THAT'S PROBABLY JUST AS WELL HEY I WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO GET AWAY WITH TYPING THINGS LIKE THIS KIqL!UYS^%$DFLI ZSDSAFC SFE4O92 )(^(*^o"$ bBLKU E875O3 96*&^%o*"$ogb LOOK I'M SORRY THIS ISN'T EXACTLY THE SORT OF QUALITY EDITORIAL COPY YOU EXPECT FROM THE GUARDIAN BUT LOOK AT THE FACTS I'M ADRIFT IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF THE WORST CITIES IN THE WORLD SITTING IN FRONT OF THE SAME COMPUTER SCREEN I FACE DAY AFTER INTERMINABLE DAY HELL I COULD BE WAKING UP IN SAY THE MALDIVES OR SYDNEY OR COPENHAGEN OR A CROFTER'S COTTAGE IN SKYE AND GOING FOR A WALK IN THE CRISP MORNING AIR?
So we (we meaning the majority of our street) just had our entertainment for the night. Two cop cars & about 4 or 5 cops arresting some bloke at the end of our street. None of us know the exact details but there was a car sort of half-on half-off the pavement and they had the bloke in handcuffs and the cops had their guns drawn.
Kept on getting a Use of uninitialized value warning and for the life of me couldn't work out why. Then it suddenly hit me. Here's my Perl tip of the day, don't do this:
sub carrier {
my ($self, $carrier) = shift;
No wonder $carrier is undefined you dumfuck.
sub carrier {
my ($self, $carrier) = @_;
There, much better :-)
Watched Die Another Day this afternoon. Quite good actually. At his fourth attempt, I think I'm actually starting to like Pierce Brosnan as Bond. Better than Timothy Dalton but not quite as good as Roger Moore. I grew up in the Roger Moore 007 era so for me he will always be the REAL James Bond :-)
Well, my better half started off the day by fracturing her ankle. She took a rather nasty tumble on the pavement after twisting it and scratched her knees up pretty badly as well. Her ankle swelled up to twice the normal size and went a rather odd purple/blue color. I took her to the hospital and the doctor took one look at the x-rays and said 'yep, it's certainly fractured'. Instead of putting her ankle in a full plaster cast, they gave her a new kind of removable cast and (of course) crutches.
I felt like a total helpless wanker as I watched her fall. I was too far away to catch her and it was all over in the blink of an eye. She also felt quite embarrassed as I'm sure anyone would after taking a tumble in public.
Supermarkets crack me up. The first thing that never fails to amuse me is the clerk at the register when you are ready to pay. They always ask you 'would you like anything else?'. I wonder if anyone actually says yes?
CLERK: Would you like anything else?
CUSTOMER: Hmm, well, now that you mention it I think I'd also like a 12 pack of Budweiser, a can of mushroom soup, a newspaper, and some hairspray for my wife.
The second thing that cracks me up are the baggers. Baggers are typically teenagers whose sole role in life is to place your groceries in bags. They always ask if you'd like a hand taking your bags out to the car. They ask EVERYONE this question. Now I can understand asking 78 year olds with 17 bags of groceries if they'd like a hand but when it's you or me, I think they're just taking the piss. So tonight when I was asked this ridiculous question I just looked at the kid, then looked down at my ONE bag which contained a bottle of diet coke and some toothpaste, then looked at the kid again and grinned. I was SO tempted to say 'yes I would love a hand'. Next time I'm going to dammit :-)
I've now got this massive grin on my face as I just read that England beat New Zealand today. That is VERY impressive. To beat New Zealand *IN* New Zealand is even better as it doesn't happen very often. This also shows that England *CAN* win away from Twickenham.
England coach Clive Woodward hailed his brave England side after their hard-fought 15-13 win in rainswept Wellington.
Feel like getting something off your chest? Gav has whipped up a MT powered site where you can rant about stuff anonymously - bitchaboutstuff.com.
A little Trekkie/Perl humor that made me chuckle today - Acme::Redshirt - Write programs that die upon beaming down.
Every good captain is surrounded by a bunch of extras wearing red shirts, whose job it is to put themselves in the line of fire so the regulars can get on with the show. Now, this level of security is brought to Perl.
Place this in your code:
use Acme::Redshirt;
Your program will now die with a error message of 'He's dead, Jim.' Better yet, you can specify the means by which your red shirted program will die:
use Acme::Redshirt 'phaser';
Now dies with 'He got hit by a phaser. He's dead, Jim.'. Other methods for our red shirt to kick the bucket include mutant_plant, spear, lightning, insect_bite, transporter.
Interesting article by John Dean, former Associate Deputy Attorney General and Nixon lawyer. He mentions some of the troubles ahead for the Bush administration if WMD are not found.
So what are we now to conclude if Bush's statements are found, indeed, to be as grossly inaccurate as they currently appear to have been?After all, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and given Bush's statements, they should not have been very hard to find - for they existed in large quantities, "thousands of tons" of chemical weapons alone. Moreover, according to the statements, telltale facilities, groups of scientists who could testify, and production equipment also existed.
So where is all that? And how can we reconcile the White House's unequivocal statements with the fact that they may not exist?
There are two main possibilities. One that something is seriously wrong within the Bush White House's national security operations. That seems difficult to believe. The other is that the President has deliberately misled the nation, and the world.
Link courtesy of Wozz
It might very well just be me but I can't help thinking that the new Hulk movie looks a bit crap. The CGI Hulk just doesn't look, well, right. I also don't remember The Hulk being able to jump over the Grand Canyon. Mind you I grew up in the Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk era of the 80's so my opinion of what The Hulk should be is based entirely on that. Perhaps this new CGI Hulk is more faithful to the comic book version and uber Hulk geeks will be entirely satisfied.
Just doesn't look/act like The Hulk I remember that's all.
You know it's time to take a wee break when you've been debugging the same code for the last 3 hours and still haven't found what's wrong. Sigh, time to stretch the ol' legs I think.
I'm doing the great RSS aggregator shuffle. At home I'm using the new version of SharpReader which was released yesterday. Way cool by the way. Can't use it at work unfortunately because I've got such a dinosaur of an OS so I'm giving RSS Bandit a try. Not as nice as SharpReader but it's the best I can do at work unfortunately :-(
From the top quality wiring department:
While outside playing with the dogs tonight I noticed something odd. My next door neighbour's A/C makes the street light at our end of the road go out. I thought it must be coincidence but it happened 3 times in a row. Bit scary don't you think?
I was listening to NPR's The Books of Summer 2003 on my way back from lunch today. I was absolutely gobsmacked to learn how many copies of the Harry Potter series have been sold to date.
In the USA ALONE, 86 million copies have been sold. 86 bloody million! So if you take into account the WORLDWIDE sales, the movie rights and any related merchandising it's easy to see how JK Rowling is the richest woman in Britain. It won't stop there of course. The newest installment in the Potter series is predicted to break sales records and there there are still 3 more movies. That's an INSANE amount of money.
Hmm, I sense a career change coming on. Maybe I should write some childrens books :-)
I must admit I'm a little late to the party when it comes to new music. Not that Coldplay is a new band mind you, they've been around for a few years now. If I hadn't heard 'Clocks' on MTV the other week I probably would have never heard of them though. So I bought A Rush Of Blood To The Head on Friday and so far I think it's really quite good.
We have two new additions to the Spencer menagerie. You know, you can never have too many cats :-)
Yep, we got another 2 kittens yesterday bringing our grand total to 7 cats and 2 dogs. Yup, quite the houseful really. The two kittens are 2 month old siamese mixes from the same litter. Their names are Caesar and Bella.
It's funny how you can start the day out with one expectation and it turns out completely differently. That's how yesterday turned out as I had absolutely no intention of letting Sally talk me into getting any more additions to our zoo :-)
We stopped at Petsmart en route to our favorite aquarium shop and they happened to have loads of kittens. Sally got that look in her eye and a big grin on her face. I said 'no way' we don't need anymore. We left and went out to do our shopping. As we were driving home I was thinking to myself that it gets to the point where you have a certain number of cats that adding 2 more really doesn't make any difference.
I turned to Sally and asked her if she wanted to go and see if the kittens she liked were still there. Her grin said it all. Luckily the 2 kittens she liked were still there and came home with us.
I must need my head examined or something :-)
I've often made fun of the fact that there's a bloody Walgreens everywhere you turn. Tonight that turned out to be rather handy in fact. Sally was feeling rather sick so seeing as we've got a 24 hour Walgreens about a minute from our house I just jumped in the car and off I went. Just got back actually and was only gone for about 5 minutes.
Walgreens, I will make fun of thee no longer :-)
Some days I get completely in the coding zone and my fingers just fly across the keyboard. Today was one of those days and I got a lot accomplished. I love it when that happens :-)
I was listening to NPR on my way home from work yesterday and listened to the hammering that Tony Blair received in the commons. The topic was whether the government had misled the country about the threat Saddam posed to the world with his "ready to launch in 45 minutes" weapons of mass destruction. There's going to be an official inquiry about it.
BBC News is inviting people to "Have Your Say" on their Were we misled over WMD? comments page. It seems the vast majority of people think that we WERE misled by the government.
I woke up at the crack of dawn this morning so I thought I'd take that opportunity to get the weather working on this site again (which it now is thankfully).
I've officially given up on weather.interceptvector.com as I suspect most people have by now. So I installed gav's MT-WeatherUnderground plugin. Didn't work. I should point out that there's absolutely nothing wrong with the plugin, Weather::Underground doesn't want to work as advertised unfortunately. To demonstrate, here's my sample code:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Data::Dumper;
use Weather::Underground;
use strict;
my $weather = Weather::Underground->new(place => 'Phoenix, AZ');
my $data = $weather->getweather;
print Dumper $data;
Which results in the following:
$VAR1 = [
{
'celsius' => undef,
'conditions' => 'Clear',
'fahrenheit' => undef,
'humidity' => '24',
'place' => 'Phoenix, AZ'
}
];
All rather yucky, those temperatures shouldn't be undef - bugger. It appears that Weather::Underground's HTML parsing is a little fragile as the temperatures are quite clearly there when you view the HTML it retrieves from the site itself.
At this point I was getting a little ticked off and after 20 mins of hacking up my own copy of W::U that correctly parses the HTML I thought sod that and went off to the CPAN to see what other Weather hackery could be found. Glad I did as I stumbled across the rather spiffy Geo::WeatherNWS. That module rocks!
After getting some sample code working I began hacking a quick MT plugin. While taking a quick break to eat some breakfast (well, a bloke's gotta eat) I noticed that someone else had already beaten me to it. Ashley already wrote a MT plugin that uses Geo::WeatherNWS. Well, at least it saved me a job. So after installation I had about 10 seconds of template tweakage and voila - we have weather again.
With the news that there's a Battlestar Galactica remake in the works comes the announcement that another 80's scifi classic might be remade also.
V creator Kenneth Johnson told the Ilana's V Page fan Web site that a new version of the 1980s alien-invasion miniseries is in development for NBC. "TV Guide will break the story about the project being in development in their June 14 issue," Johnson told the site. "But ... there is absolutely no shooting date planned at this time."
I'm a huge Indiana Jones fan. In fact Raiders Of The Lost Ark is one of my all time favorite movies. I can't wait for the new movie to come out in 2005.
Harrison Ford told SCI FI Wire that Frank Darabont has completed his script for a proposed fourth Indiana Jones movie. "Steven [Spielberg]'s quite happy with it," Ford said in an interview. "I'm expecting to see it in a couple of weeks."
Oh yes, SharpReader is VERY nice indeed. Only downside is that I'm still stuck in the dark ages at work and only have a Win98 laptop (I know, I know but waddayagonnado?) and SharpReader doesn't work on Win98 - bugger. The other box in my cubie is my primary development box and it runs Linux so no joy there either :-) Oh well, at least I can use it at home on my WinXP box.
I've been playing with some RSS aggregators for the past couple of weeks [0]. I toyed with the idea of writing my own but I really don't have the time unfortunately. First up was the completely spiffy AmphetaDesk which I like a lot. Then by accident I stumbled across Syndirella. Unlike AmphetaDesk, Syndirella is not browswer based and looks extremely similar to a GUI email application. Quite simply, it rocks! I love the look & feel of it. It looks like your email inbox - all the unread posts are bolded and become unbolded as soon as you've read the post - I like that.
The downside? Well, for one it only runs on winders and you have to install the MS .NET framework. It's also memory hungry, (currently at 40mb on my corporate winders laptop). If you can look past those shortcomings I thoroughly recommend it.
Blimey, what with Zempt and now Syndirella, my whole blogging experience is conducted without a browser :-)
[0] Yes up until this point I was actually visiting everyone's blogs with my browser. Who the hell does THAT anymore? That's so 2002 :-)
Ugh, you'd think I'd learn. I'm starting to suffer slightly. My face is a rather amusing shade of red at the moment. Why oh why did I mow the bloody lawn in the sun today? That's what I want to know :-)
Today I broke my own #1 rule of movie-going. Never go to see a movie on its opening weekend.
Well, Sally wanted to see Finding Nemo and I had promised to take her so we decided to go this afternoon. The cinema was PACKED. As soon as we walked up to the ticket counter I remembered WHY I don't like seeing movies on the opening weekend :-)
We wanted to see the 1:45 showing and got there in plenty of time. Of course the 1:45 and the 2:25 were sold out so we bought tickets for the 3:05 showing and the bloke told us not to leave as we'd have to start queuing right away if we wanted good seats. He wasn't joking.
The movie itself was actually quite good and I don't mind saying that it was worth the wait. Some bits were really quite funny and it had me cracking up thanks to Ellen DeGeneres as the voice of Dory.