If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend Transformers. Very entertaining.

And here's a hilarious blast from a slightly more graphic past.

• The Rude Awakening of Optimus Prime
• Heavy Metal Fight
• SOS Wheeljack

Pure "gold bug".

http://www.explosm.net/comics/940/

When is Episode 2 of IMPS coming out? It's been ages....

I have to admit, the AT-ST bending down to get through the doorway in the first episode was pretty damn cool.

IM clients

It's interesting that other IM clients such as Pidgin haven't yet implemented some sort of contact card with RSS feeds similar to Live Messenger's. I mean, it would seem an easy thing to do, and they could let the user specify any feed they want, hell, it doesn't even have to be their own web site. Mercury and all other clients could also implement it.

Operating systems

A view on Vista. With 5 years development, you really would've thought something better would've come out. You really have to question a product where the marketing people feel that "Flip 3D" is a major feature. Does anyone actually use it for work? It's slower than using plain old Alt-Tab...

I grabbed the ISO for Kubuntu 7.04 a while ago, and played around with it. I certainly think I'd be happy using it, if it could play games. Oh C&C 3, how many people have you kept on Windows?

I have to say however, I'm in no hurry to move from XP to anything else at this point. Nothing seems like a grand enough improvement.

Live spaces

The main reason I use spaces is for the single login and integration with Messenger. Pretty much everyone I associate with gets notified via gleam () when I update something - easy. Generally I find it an easy platform to blog to and configure, particularly using Live Writer, however there are 2 glaring problems which need to be fixed in order for Live Spaces to be a reasonable platform.

Problem 1: Photo gallery

The Live Spaces photo gallery has been pretty abysmal since it was introduced. Small, low quality images tacked onto a confusing to use and badly laid out gallery system. This is in dire need of work.

1. An option to store higher quality images is essential. Perhaps make the small image a link to the higher quality one.
2. Being able to tag images would also be good.
3. Placing the image captions either above or below the image rather than up on the right-hand side. Screen real estate issues caused the move to the right, but there is plenty of room above the image itself.

Problem 2: Speed

Anyone who's used it, and that's you reading this. Live Spaces has generally poor performance compared to other platforms. Although it is improving with each update, it is still slow. However, I have hopes that this is only temporary - anyone who used early Live Hotmail Betas knows the improvement in performance that was had their over time.

Improvements

It is improving considerably with every release so I'm sure my gripes will all disappear eventually. At the moment, apart from the above two issues, the following are my requests for spaces:

• Be able to add images to the Title module, or add HTML to give each space a little more pizzazz.
• More layout options, or the ability to resize modules based on %'s. I realise the problem with this is the gadgets are designed for certain widths only.
• The spaces home page needs to show the latest guest book posts as well as latest comments on both the blog and gallery. I'm sure this is coming, the guest book was only released in the last update. Basically, any user activity on your space should be listed there.
• Obviously I would like more customisation options, up to the point of including your own CSS would be great, however, I don't want to see Live Spaces go down the My Space path and become near unusable. So I am happy to leave it as it is now - it's not bad.

Really that's about all I can think of at the moment, everything else I want is already implemented in some way or in development.

Well, the real betas of Live Mail, Live Messenger and Live Writer have been released and they seem pretty good. More information about each product via the links in the previous sentence.

Direct downloads

• Windows Live 8.5 Beta download
• Windows Live Messenger 8.5 Beta homepage
• Windows Live Mail beta homepage
• Windows Live Mail beta download 
• Windows Live Writer beta download