Pink Floyd's Pulse DVD is truly awesome but you do need a decent 5.1 surround sound to appreciate it properly. Watching it really brought back memories of seeing them at Wembly Stadium in 1987 - 9/10.

Hostel - This is a pretty gruesome little affair where three back packer blokes are enticed to a Hostel in deepest Slovakia by promises of tasty lasses who let it all hang out. On the surface the hostel looks pretty appealing to the three lads but they soon get more than they bargained for. The victims soon get worked on with a wide range of power tools and other DIY stuff you might normally find in B&Q - 7/10.

Basic Instinct 2 - Another pretty gruesome affair but for all the wrong reasons. If it hadn't been for the UK location and British acting cast - David Morrissey, David Thewlis, Charlotte Rampling an Stan Collymore (isn't he meant to play footy?) - then the DVD woulda been back in the case within 30 mins of watching. Utter cobblers - 3/10

I can't say I'm a huge fan of recent Hollywood attempts at bringing graphic novels and comics to the big screen. They usually turn into insipid heartless vehicles for whatever American eye candy they pay millions of dollars to turn up and generally act badly.

V for Vendetta on the other hand is a nice surprise. I read the graphic novel a while back and absolutely loved it. When I heard that the novel had been earmarked for the silver screen I had that horrible sinking feeling about the compromised crap that Hollywood would no doubt churn out.

However I was wrong. The film doesn't exactly stick to Alan Moore's original creation and there's plenty of artistic license taken by the director of the film but the end result is 2 hours of highly enjoyable viewing. The cast is excellent as well (not sure about Natalie Portman's made up English accent though) - John Hurt, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Fry and Stephen Rea amongst others. One of the nice things about the film, and it really surprised me because the producers are the Wachowski brothers, is that it's the script and the acting that keeps your attention instead of high-tech special effects. Also at no point in the film did you get that feeling of "get on with it" either. All in all 8/10.

Scheduled for Q3 this year - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/servicing/sp1_vs05/default.aspx

Looking forward to seeing what they've fixed/tweaked as I've got a short list (in my head and should probably write down) of wierdness they'll hopefully have ironed out. But overall it's a nice tool. Makes VS03 feel yesteryear already.

I finally got round to reading the last book in Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. If you haven't heard of these before then I do thoroughly recommend them. I don't have the time to summarise in a paragraph what the story is about, suffice to say we've got parallel universes, armoured bears, witches, zeppelins, quantum physics, daemons, angels, hair bombs and an good old fashioned battle between good and evil. 9/10. This site does a way better job than I can do of summarising the books.

The other book I finished this week is Paranoia by Joseph Finder which I picked up on recommendation by my mate Spence. This is a really good page turner about Adam Cassidy, a hi-tech product marketing bod and professional corporate waster who is blackmailed into stealing corporate secrets from his company's competitor. I read it in a day it was so good. 8/10.

A year ago I picked up Six Days by journalist Jeremy Bowen which is an account of the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and Syria, Egypt and Jordan. I'd been dipping in and out of it for the last three months and stone me this week Israel is at it again! Anyway, it's highly topical and explains, amongst other things, the background and reasons for territorial anomalies such as the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and other Israeli landgrabs over the past 60 years.

The Legacy has been treated to a shiney new set of Oz Super Leggera 17" Alloys wrapped in Toyo Proxes T1S 215/40ZR17 rubber. The car sticks to the road in high speed corners now and there's not even a hint of understeer like my old Mondeo. The Mondeo had the worst understeer of any modern car I've ever driven, even with decent tyres...trully appauling and trouser soiling.

I also fitted four new high performance vented, grooved and drilled brake discs and carbon fibre pads which makes the car stop on a sixpence.

Any go here http://blog.zygonia.net/content/binary/DSCF0249-s.jpg and ogle at my shineys.