I think people put way too much expectation into sequels, and as a result they tend to be overly-critical when the movies actually arrive. I've heard a lot of grousing on both of these movies, more so Matrix than X2.

Since this is so long after the release (relatively-speaking), I'm not going to actually bother with reviewing either film. You may or may not have seen them at this point, but my reviews or opinions aren't likely to change your mind.

Rather, I'll share this observation I made in conversation with a friend in Colorado. She liked X2 considerably more than Matrix. She didn't so much dislike Matrix, of course. But she felt that X2 was a better sequel. I thought about it for a bit, and then later that day I called her back. It strikes me that people tended to find the first X-Men somewhat weak in a lot of ways (usually top of the list is the regrettable dialog Halle Berry was saddled with). In contrast, most were simply wowed by the first Matrix film. So, I suspect that people come out of X2, having seen a pretty good film, and when they view it in the perspective of the first film it looks really fantastic. But when they come out of Matrix Reloaded, they're comparing it to an original that was much more highly-regarded than the first X-Men was. So they hold it to that, and as a result many see it as a weaker film than X2.

Personally, I thought they both kicked the asses of men. I've seen Reloaded twice, and will see X2 again soon, probably after seeing Finding Nemo.

It did cause LJ to spew up the last 15 or so entries. Thank goodness I tuned the configuration of stories down for the RSS feed, or there would be 40 of 'em. Err... sorry.

I still have one more feature I plan to integrate into the new version of rjray.org, but for now it is clean and purty enough to re-roll-out.

The most significant differences should be pretty much all under the hood; Rael's release-candidate version of blosxom 2.0 was the main goal of the upgrade effort. To this, I have added a host of plug-ins, including a better archive-calendar (low on the right-hand column) and, most importantly, proper Etag and Last-Modified headers. Not only on the web page proper, but also on the RSS feeds.

Which brings up the next change: I have made the default RSS feed a v1.0 feed, and made the older (0.91) feed accessible via a different URL (index.rss91). I hope this improves the overall quality of the syndication at the LiveJournal feed for my journal, rjray_rss.

And lastly, one of the changes I've made is a subtle-but-significant overhaul of how the permanent links are crafted, as well as the location of about 7 of my journal entries. The logic goes a little like this:

First, I had been using a hack in the earlier version of blosxom to make the "permalink" stay the same whether you were reading the story from the main page or from a sub-category. The newer blosxom has a better way to track this, so I'm using that. In addition to that consideration, the XHTML spec disallows the "/" character in an anchor's (that's the <a>) "name" attribute. I use the permalink there as well, for cross-references and in the feeds, etc. So I use a plug-in to translate all the "/" into "_" to keep XHTML validators happy.

But that also exposed a problem in that I name my entries with numbers. That way, I don't have to worry whether the nifty title I just thought of is already the file-name for an entry two months ago. But the 7 or so entries at my top-level ended up with identifiers that were just plain numbers, which also annoyed the XHTML validator. So, I merged them into the "misc" category, for lack of anywhere better to put them.

I am going to assume that all of this sudden change will almost certainly make LiveJournal's syndicator very confused and probably display the last 15 or so stories again. For this, I apologize in advance. I hope that I don't make any more changes on this scale again anytime soon.