Archive for August, 2006
Derogatory
When I was a child we used to call people spastics as a derogatory term, causing the charity involved - The Spastics Society - to change their name to SCOPE. Wikpedia has the best entry ever about this, from which I learned the phrase “Spack Attack” (find that in Britannica). Apparently people have now started to use the term Scoper or Scopers instead, trying to subvert the name again so that in 20 years when our children go to school the charity will have to change their name again. Bringing society down one step at a time.
These people I have no time for.
Although it is funny.
Storage
I’ve been thinking a lot about Amazon’s S3, which stands for Simple Storage Service. One of the barriers to entry in creating imagebear.com, a domain I registered a long time ago, is bandwidth and disk space. While I’m sure I’m capable of producing a far nicer image browsing experience than Flickr, the cost has been far too prohibitive to try. It’s not like forums, where the disk and bandwidth usage is low because all you’re doing is transferring text, images take serious hits to both. With the Amazon service, I could actually do it, charging users just slightly above what it costs me and make a profit along the way.
But image sharing no longer has the same attraction to me as it did a few years ago (although I still have ideas I’d like to try), so I’ve been trying to think of other things it’s possible to do with this service. There must be really interesting projects that become available once bandwidth and disks no longer become commodities, even simple things like proper integration of image uploading within Chatbear or backup solutions for servers. The flowers of these thoughts will hopefully bloom eventually.
And don’t get me started on the Mechanical Turk (and no, that’s not a robot version of a Scrubs character).
Pimp
I was sent a link to Pimp That Snack, a site which encourages that you take your favourite sweets and make GIANT versions of them. Some of the results just look fantastic, although there’s a good chance that you’re going to suffer from sort of sugar induced aneurism should you attempt to eat any of them.
Certainly looks like a lot of fun and something I’ll have to find some time to attempt myself at some point.
Vroom
As promised, my Cars review is now up on whatentertainment. I told you I’d review it on there, and none of you believed me.
This one didn’t come quite so easily as the Superman one did, sometimes it’s just not as easy to find things to say about a film, especially when it’s not as iconic as the man of steel. But it’s great to get my first Tuesday deadline met, here’s to many more.
Distinctly
It’s WWDC day, or, Apple Worldwide Developer Conference Day for those not in the know. Unsurprisingly Apple announced the new Mac Pro to replace the Power Mac, with two Intel Xeon processors inside and a reasonably cheap price (in comparison to it’s competitors anyway), they’ve probably got a winner on their hands. But it’s the same case design (on the outside anyway) as before, so it seems like they’re really just releasing the product that the market dictates they should have, rather than releasing something distinctly different and exciting.
Steve (who really didn’t seem himself) also demoed the next version of OS X, Leopard. A lot of what was shown was incremental improvements more than anything else, but the kind of stuff that actually makes a difference to you on a day to day basis. Spaces looks like a good implementation of virtual desktops (a feature that I’ve never really taken to in any OS that has it), while Core Animation looks like it’ll give developers the opportunity to make their apps even flashier.
The really interesting feature was Time Machine, a backup solution with the craziest interface you’ve ever seen. Creating constant snapshots of your entire machine, when it comes time to retrieve something you’ve lost, the interface has your window flying through space (complete with swirling space dust and moving stars) until you find the file you’re looking for. Sure, it’s not like snapshots and backup software hasn’t been done before, but integrating into the OS in such a simple and entertaining way is what makes an idea truly shine, and is precisely what Apple are good at.
They promise that there are plenty of features they’re not ready to show, and it’s still seven or eight months away from release, but it looks promising, if not yet astonishing.
Relaunch
I originally wanted whatinterest to be called whatentertainment, but at the time, the domain wasn’t available. At least, I think that’s the case. I can’t think why I would have called it whatinterest for any other reason, especially since if you bang the word entertainment into a thesaurus, interest is one of the alternatives.
Anyway, whatentertainment.com is now available, so I renamed the site today, changed all the graphics, registered and pointed the domain etc. This is more like it. This is also the official relaunch, with a promise that new content will now be posted three times a week, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. As time goes by hopefully I can get a good selection of articles on there and I’ll be looking into supplementing my content management system with new features to make browsing even more pleasurable. And yes, RSS feed is coming “real soon now”.
Tell your friends. Tell your neighbours. Tell the people you hate. Tell the milkman, the doorman and the fireman. Unless your house is on fire. In which case you’d be better pointing him towards the heat instead. Somehow I want to promote this site to the hilt.
Phoenix
This is hardly going to win any prizes for good cinema, but you know, this is still better than Miami Vice. I’m talking about Flight of the Phoenix. The remake that is, with Dennis Quaid (who’ll never top Innerspace), Miranda Otto, Giovani Ribisi (with the most ridiculous accent you’ve ever heard) and Hugh Laurie.
I knew it would be pretty crappy, but it was cheap, so I bought it on DVD anyway, and my preconceptions weren’t altered. If you want the definition of a 2.5 movie on whatinterest, this would be it, an average, middle of the road, centre of the field movie that you might find yourself watching on a rainy Sunday afternoon if it came on TV and there was nothing else on.
Vice
Man, did this movie suck. Miami Vice that is. Dull, slow, sometimes confusing, weirdly shot, this is one review I’m looking forward to writing simply because disgust is often easier to write than delight.
Stay away from this one if you can, there’s much more entertaining things you can go see at the cinema instead. And if you’ve seen them all, why not consider staring at the nearest spot of peeling paint for two and a bit hours instead.
Gallery
I’ve taken three days off work, so today I used them wisely by visting Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum with Andrea and Jennifer. It was a fun day out, and a bit of uncharacteristic culture for me, having been a few years since I entered any museums or galleries. The place has just undergone a £35 million refurbishment, and although it’s a grand place with lots of interesting things to see, there was very little that truly blew me away. It’s a big place, with 8000 exhibits, so it’s a nice leisurely stroll around the place as you try and take it all in. I particularly liked a lot of the paintings upstairs, as well as the ancient Egyptian stuff and thoroughly old rocks downstairs.
It’s been so long since I was there last that I can’t remember what it was like before all the cleanup and upgrade was done, but for it to have cost so much it must have been in a hell of a state. Where all the money has gone honestly wasn’t immediately apparent to me.
Promotion
The pilot episode for Aaron Sorkin and NBC’s new show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip appeared over on YouTube, in surely what was a deliberate promotion attempt from the studio. The pilot is also all over the P2P networks in high quality DVD rip version, which again, probably isn’t a coincidence.
I’ve been expecting great things from this show, it’s almost the perfect combination of cast and writer for me, and having now watched it, I wasn’t disappointed. It’s not a pilot episode of West Wing quality, but it’s still enough to make you want to see the show once it starts for real. I’ll do a proper review over on whatinterest (yea, right, where have you heard that before).
Ribbon
Normally when Microsoft releases a new version of Office, most of the world collectively yawns. Businesses across the world still use versions as far back as Office 95 because later versions have added so little to the mix. So it’s a bit of a surprise just how much I like what they’ve added in Office 2007, especially after my experience with Vista was anything but inspiring.
The new interface, which eschews a menu bar in favour of a set of tabs they call the ribbon, really does make it a lot easier to use. Each tab bar offers up a selection of all the common features as big buttons, and selecting some text and hovering over these options gives an instant preview of what you’re going to get, from column layouts to font changes. When you select any text in your document the basic formatting palette fades in next to your cursor, containing bold, italics, etc, and as you move the mouse further away from your highlighted area this palette fades out as you go. Then there’s the font rendering, which just seems so nice, and the black window design which I’d like all my apps to look like. Even something as simple as having a constantly updated word count in the bottom left of the status bar is a welcome addition. This is the first version of Office in ten years where you actually get the impression they sat down and studied what they had, before making a giant list of everything they could do better, and then did it.
It’s freely available from MS so you can try it out yourself.
