Month: November 2004

Which do you think is funnier: this spoof about Hollywood movie studios suing Pixar for producing consistently good films, or the fact that in the middle of all this ‘being frantically unemployed,’ as I am, I’ve been called for Jury Service?

Update, ten minutes later: no, actually, this wins. They have to be kidding.

Not, I take it, the plan: picture sequence of lifting a car from a harbour. Via kottke.org.

“I’m working on being an illegible bachelor.”

Not, I regret to say, a line coined by myself. Thanks to Colin and Rosie for distracting me with peristaltic conversation, and to The Clockwork for extremely fine microbrew US-style red beer.

This morning I learned that The Big Bang will not be returning for a tenth series, on the mostly reasonable grounds that the ratings for the last series were poor. I’ve probably much more to say about this, but I’ll wait until I’ve stopped swearing before saying it, beyond this: to all the kids who watched and made things and laughed and loved it – I’m very sorry. I hope you’ll remember it fondly when you’re students.

Update: Does this count as evidence that Ω > 1 and the universe is therefore closed?

Pa Sanderson sends this. Taken in Leeds, this evening.

The following was being passed around in the office a while back – this morning I’ve rediscovered my copy:

“You have never seen inside a film studio before?”
“Only once. Years ago.”
“It will interest you, as a phenomenon. You see, the film studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women, there are incompetent favourites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is an insane extravagance, which is a sham; and horrible squalor behind the scenery. There are vast schemes, abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows and no-one speaks of. There are even one or two honest advisors. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, tear their hair privately and weep.”

Prater Violet. Christopher Isherwood, 1945.

Tip of the hat to Kevin for this one: sorryeverybody.com: 49% of America apologises. Also worth a look is the whole ‘America is purple’ concept; the standard map we see has an essentially Republican America surrounded by blue Democrat brackets. But this is first-past-the-post visualisation; better is to mix a shade of purple for each electoral county. I find the result reassuring. More such analysis here.

& I must say, it looks every bit as delicious as we’d expected. Barcode scanning is just peachy with my Sony DV camera, its annoying habit of going into standby notwithstanding – it’s fasy and accurate and so much fun, you’ll want to cough up the registration fee just to keep going after your allotted 25 additions. My first impressions of actually using the thing are also good. It’s very much a v1.0 release, and I’ve already filed a few bug/feature/behaviour reports, but… oh, just download it and see.

Delicious Monster’s site is here; Ars Technica, of all places, have an hilariously partisan review of the program here. For those who haven’t been paying attention, Delicious Library is a cataloguing application for your books, DVDs, CDs, and video games. Which sounds mundane; the application is anything but. For those who have been paying attention, yes, I started this post with an ampersand solely because I wanted to see what it looked like as a drop cap. So sue me.

One thing – it’s hard to emphasise just how much fun barcode scanning is practice. If you haven’t got an iSight or a suitable DV camera (or, indeed, a Mac), you’ll just have to believe me.

I’ve been thinking for a while that one of the problems with the iTunes Music Store is that there’s no analogue of the tabbed browser – you can’t skim down a list and say ‘that looks interesting… and that… and that’ without a lot of back-and-forth. Bookmarks are also a little clumsy; you can drag tracks to the Finder, but they’re those odd phobos.apple.whatever nonsense links. It works OK, but it’s not as elegant as one might like.

Tonight I had one of those ‘I wonder if you can… oh, they thought of that, and you can. Cool’ moments that are, let’s face it, the reason we like Apple stuff so much. It turns out that you can drag tracks/albums/etc to playlists. What you get is a link to the 30-second preview, but all the track information remains, so you can shortcut to iTMS results for the track, album, artist, etc. Buy the track and the link updates in some terribly cunning way that probably caused some sleepless nights for some poor coder, but was worth the toil since it’s exactly what you’d expect to happen.

So now I have a ‘Buy?’ playlist, which serves as a cache of bookmarks I might revisit when I’m feeling flush. Simple, really. I’m surprised it took me so long; oh, and this is where both my readers say ‘yeah, we know, we’ve been doing that for months.’ Tsk.

Meanwhile… what? you expected me to post about the US Presidential Election? No, sorry, I can’t bring myself to face it just yet.

In the interests of full disclosure amongst the gaming community of Glasgow, I should note that Wikipedia features an article on the Settlers of Catan, with links to notes about strategy. Should players choose not to read this weblog, well that’s their problem.