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This weekend is the 117th LAAFF: Annual Atrocious Film Festival, and is being held in Cheltenham. The organisers are expecting better attendance than the previous 114 film festivals - which consisted of me slowly working my way through my DVD ollection.

I'm now expecting 8 friends from uni to arrive at my flat at some point today or tomorrow. This is sadly down from 10 as two had to drop out, but the up side is that 8 people are more likely to fit in my flat than 10. Especially as they will be sleeping on the floor.

I am now away to buy lots of food. Which will be fun - I don't know when the 8 people are arriving, so I have to buy enough food for 8, but not too much for 4. A challenge indeed, but one that I shall relish. Ooh, relish, there's an idea.

And just to clear up any confusion, the L in LAAFF has to stand for something different every time it's used. That is the law of absurd backronyms.

It has been 2 and a half weeks since LAAFF, so it must be time for a report! The Friday evening saw Tristan, Mark and Meri arrive, followed shortly after by Peter and Charlene, who brought Rock Band. I cooked pizzas and sausage rolls until everyone was full, then I cooked some more just in case. Rock band was played into the night, and resumed in the morning while Laura, Natalie and Simon arrived. We then ate more food, played Mario Kart, and watched the excellent "Ninja Dragon" (which clearly wasn't two unrelated films randomly spliced together) before going out for a curry at the finest Indian restaurant in town. We watched another film, played Soul Calibur, slept (there was room everyone, hurrah), and then played Mario Kart some more before the LAAFF shuttle service took people off to the station. I thought people would drift away gradually depending on how far away they lived, but within an hour of the first person leaving, the house was empty again. Sadness. But apparently everyone had a good time, which is excellent. Thank you to everyone who came, and I know some of you had particularly long journeys, but it was good to meet up again. To re-live the good times, or for the curious non-LAAFF-ers, Natalie has provided photographic proof of the event on flikr.

There has been much news in the past month, but also much activity. More posts shall follow!

I've spent a few hours playing with IE8 b2, and although there are a lot of improvements, they all just seem to fall a little bit short of my expectations:

• InPrivacy: like putting up a "Beware of the dog" sign on your gate, but not buying a dog. Took me less than half an hour to get my cookies to persist across an InPrivacy session. It was so easy I can't help thinking it was by design - after all, Microsoft's ads need to track people too.
• IE8 in IE7 mode is not IE7. It might be close enough for most purposes, but it is not the same. I have only noticed one difference so far - but where there's one there's usually more. (For reference, the flash in a tiny iframe problem is in IE7, but not IE8 in IE7 mode)
• Web developer toolbar: it has some very nice features, like the profiler tab (and js console, at last). It should give the Firefox plugins (Firebug and web developer) a run for their money - but it lacks a net tab. Fiddler is great, but as a separate proxy app, you lose a lot of useful capability and integration
• Accelerators: nice idea, but the first one I expected (but didn't find) was a 'go to selected url'
• Suggested sites: seems to completely ignore the page you are on - when I'm on slashdot.org, why do I get "5 websites that are similar to BBC - Homepage"? And when you do get the correct list, why are the suggestions so completely unrelated and irrelevant?
• Tabs improvements, address bar searching, slightly better standards adherence - it's all very nice, but it's all been done before.
• Where are the mouse gestures?

But despite all of this, I think I like it. I like it enough that when the final version comes out, I might actually consider swapping to it.

Ok, that's a lie - I'm too used to mouse gestures to give them up. But people have been pointing out that IE8 has little (if any) innovation as if it's a bad thing. I see that as a good thing - the IE dev team has been able to come along and hoover up the good ideas, the good aspects of the UI, and have left out the bad. All of the things I really hate about Firefox 3 just aren't there, and I no longer trust Mozilla when it comes to security (remember, I can steal your passwords), so literally the only reason I'd stay with Firefox are mouse gestures and the net tab - neither of which are core features.

There's no getting away from it - IE8 looks like it might be a good browser.