This Is Why I Use FlashBlock

I wrote in detail about the sins of Flash in a previous post.

You can learn more about the FlashBlock extension here.

Today, I chanced upon the website for The Inn at False Creek hotel in Vancouver, BC.  Check out the three pics below.

The first is how the website appears with FlashBlock on, with seven instances of Flash (or other blocked items) showing.  Wow, that's a lot.  What sorts of nifty stuff could they be putting on this page?

The second is how it looks with the Flash items loaded.  Wow, that is nifty! Text! They are using it to load up styled text, with an overhead for loading and launching whatever technology seven times on the page.  They could have embedded graphics with alt text, or other mechanisms, but they chose this.

And for comparison the third image is how the page looks on an iPad.  Wow is that bad.  The only thing I really regret about Apple’s refusal to deal with Flash on the iPad is things like this which show lousy programming practices in action.

 

Movie Review — The Wild

When The Wild came out, I was right there at the head of the pack, saying that their tagline should be “Hey, we can do Madagascar, too!”  (That is, "Madagascar 2”, as though it were a sequel to a much more successful computer-animated “New York zoo animals escape to a wild jungle island” movie from about a year before this.)  In reality, I realize that it was probably in development well before Madagascar came out, perhaps even with completely separate influences.  (See the comics industry releasing X-Men and Doom Patrol or Swamp Thing and Man-Thing at basically the same time.  It’s a form of “convergent evolution”.)

I finally saw it (via Netflix), and my quip was both wrong and very right.

First, the character designs for the animals are some of the most realistic we’ve seen when it comes to a fully computer-animated film.  In comparison, the animals in Madagascar are roughed-out cartoons.

Second, the thrust of the plot is a bit more organic and adult-friendly, with the kid being upset at his father, running away and getting in over his head, and the father and friends setting out to rescue him.

But then we have the turtle curling match, and the animals steering the ship (sorry, but the penguin cell in Madagascar, while not any more believable, was at least funnier), and the breakdancing, and the dance choreography of the wildebeests.  Once you get into these facets, then the cartoony nature of the Madagascar animals becomes more warranted… or if you prefer, then the realistic character designs break hard against the non-realistic actions.  And since this occurs repeatedly throughout the film — it could be somewhat excusable only at the front and back as a framing sequence — the viewer is constantly shoved back and forth.

In the end, if you have to choose between realistic (ugly) choreographed wildebeests and cartoony (cute) choreographed lemurs, chose the cute ones.

(It’s also interesting to examine that movie poster, because it’s not very representative of the film.  It implies everything occurs in New York City, it paints the characters are more cartoony, it is missing two of the main characters, and it positions the dogs and alligator as much more significant than the three minutes of the film they actually appeared in.  Almost as if they were trying to paint the characters as more like those in Madagascar, but to distance the plot from being seen as similar.  The Wild only brought in about 15% of what Madagascar did; in fact, it only brought in half as much total as Madagascar did on its opening weekend.)
 

Adobe Reader Needs to Build Its Confidence

Poor Adobe Reader.  There, there.  It's okay.  Stand up straight and just try.  You can do it!  I know you can!
 

What Were They Thinking? — Pull My Finger

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This poster is outside a computer repair businesses on Davie St. in Vancouver, BC.  It has been there for years, as long as I can remember (and I’ve been up to Vancouver at least once a year for years and years).  Sidestepping the question of what typo the white patch is covering up (and why they haven’t fixed it in a decade), the image itself always seems bizarre to me.  What is she pointing at?  What does her smile mean?

• Is that what a computer looks like?
• Windows 95?  You’ve gotta be kidding me!
• If I stop smiling, I’ll cry because of all the viruses on this thing.
• God damn this old junker is heavy.
• Kittehs!
• What do you know, you can beat Minesweeper after all!
• I’m with stupid.
• Come on, little guy.  Reach higher.  Pull my finger!

What Were They Thinking? — I’m With the Band

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This ad was at a bus shelter in Taupo, New Zealand in February, 2010.

I guess they are trying to play on the second syllable of “broadband” with the stick figure playing guitar on stage, but wouldn’t it make more sense to indicate the value attached to the faster connection?

A broadband connection won’t really improve your playing, after all.  Not even in Rock Band or Guitar Hero.  Only practice can do that.
 

Baby, Is It Cold Outside?

Here’s what the Weather app on my iPhone was showing today at almost 1:00 pm in Seattle.  (An hour later, it has corrected the problem.)

 

What Were They Thinking? — Sales Resistance is Futile

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Here is one of the ad blocks from the Apple Store, pushing for Black Friday sales.

Is it just me, or does that thing made of lots of smaller pieces of tech all mashed together look less like a present and more like a Borg cube?

“Resistance is futile.  You will be a-sale-imated.”
 

What Were They Thinking? — I Before E, Except After Uruguay

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This screenshot comes from the BlackBerry developer site, where to download the simulator files to use for testing apps being developed for BlackBerry devices, you have to enter your contact info, including the country you are in.

Apparently the list once used “USA” instead of “United States”, but someone changed the name without updating the sort order.

As they say, “Broken gets fixed, but shoddy is forever.”
 

What Were They Thinking? — Mirror Mirror on the Mirror Mirror on the Mirror Mirror on the Phone

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Check out this screenshot from the music player on a not-yet-released phone.  (That’s a perk of my job, getting to test our software interactions with unreleased devices.  So no, I’m not going to tell you who the phone is by, but Verizon is their carrier.)

Apparently, it isn’t enough to just show the album art.  No, you have to make it way cooler than that:

1. You  put a border around it
2. Then you create a reflection of the art and border
3. Then you put a border around the art/border/reflection combo
4. Then you reflect that
5. And then you put a trendy fake reflection glare across the whole thing (which mostly serves to just obscure the art)

They could have saved processing resources and given the user bigger art if they just did art and maybe its reflection.  And no one would have ever wished for more.

Apologies to country artists Caitlin & Will who get caught up in this example.  (Then again, the duo broke up in late 2009 after releasing one single and having their album pulled.  Sigh.)  But here, go listen to some music from them.
 

CHASE: Considerably Hosed At Service End?

I bank with Chase.  Not by choice, but because they bought out Washington Mutual when it collapsed and thus they are both more convenient (in Seattle) than other banks and they still honor the minimal account fee agreements that WAMU had in place.  (But when they decide to starting adding fees back in, I might jump.)

Recently, they have been upgrading their ATMs to make them “deposit friendly”, which means that they can take checks in without an envelope, scan them, figure out the amount (if they can read the writing; they make you enter it if they can’t), present them for confirmation, and deposit right on the spot.  They can even take as many as 30 checks in a stack.  Pretty cool stuff.

So today, I had a check to deposit, but I needed to endorse it, so I went into the bank lobby.  (The pen at the desk by the ATM was busted.  Someone had pounded it point down and jammed the tip in.  Sigh.)  Since I was in the lobby, I took it to the teller.  (The one who sits behind four inches of bullet-proof plastic, in the downtown branch.)

You would think that if the ATM could process deposit checks this way, so could the teller.  Heck,you would think they would use the same technology: swipe my card, feed the check in, scan, display, confirm.  But nooooo!  The teller had to hand me a slip of paper and a pen, for me to fill out a deposit slip with my name, date, check info and amount, and account number (which I don’t have memorized, sorry, so I would then have to swipe my card and have the teller write the number for me).

Let’s review:

• Use ATM: takes about 30 seconds, no paper, no writing
• Use Teller: takes about 4 minutes, two people fill out 4-5 items on a piece of paper

Remember in the 1990s when the banks imposed teller fees, charging you to talk to a person so you would use the ATMs instead (and they could then lay off staff as no longer needed and thus cut a cost)?  They should have done it like this years ago!  Sure makes me want to avoid talking to a person.

Gay Phone (definition)

An iPhone.  Every gay boy in the bar has one.

(Android phone?  Please.  There might be 1 of them in the bar for every 25 iPhones.  A faux gay phone.  But I’ll accept that five years from now, some other phone will be the trendy everyon-has-one, everyone-cruises-on-one device.  Then that one can be the “gay phone”.  But today, it’s the iPhone.)
 

Further Thoughts on the iPad

By now, everyone and his brother has weighed in on the iPad.  Having been abvle to see and use one for a couple minutes, a few observations of my own come to mind:

It’s Apple, Stupid!

For all those people who complain about what the iPad doesn’t have:

• Multi-tasking: the iPhone doesn’t have it yet, why would you expect the iPad to?
• A memory card slot: the iPhone doesn’t have one, why would you expect the iPad to?
• A removable battery: the iPhone doesn’t have one, why would you expect the iPad to?
• A standard USB port: the iPhone doesn’t have one, why would you expect the iPad to?
• Get the picture?

Do you get the picture?  No one who thought about the iPad in context of other Apple mobile offerings for more than 10 seconds would expect any of this hardware stuff, nor would they expect any of the software pieces to appear on the iPad without it appearing on the iPhone at the same time.

Apple works hard to try and maintain the illusion of consistency in their hardware offerings.  No matter how much you might wish for these things on a general purpose tablet device, they aren’t the Apple way.  Bitching that they are missing from the iPad means you’re either an idiot, or you don’t do anything but complain, or you have a beef with Apple itself and couldn’t say something good about the product anyway.

Think About the Market for a Moment

When he introduced the iPad, Steve Jobs positioned it in between the iPhone (very small, very mobile device) and the MacBook (device with some mobility but intended for keyboard and mouse-intensive operations).

Which means that when a reviewer complains that he wouldn’t replace his laptop with an iPad, he is missing the point.  The iPad is not intended as a laptop replacement (although with the keyboard dock and iWork software, it can do some laptop activities acceptably).  If it was intended to replace a laptop, it would not have been described as sitting “between” the smart phone and the laptop.

So instead of bitching about how it doesn’t do what you want from a laptop — and I agree, it might be okay for text editing, but not for coding and not for editing Photoshop documents — how about thinking about what (and whom) it would be good for?

While those of us who make our livings from computers usually need the horsepower and keyboard and mouse, a whole lot of people (the majority of computer users, frankly!) don’t.  They need (want) Facebook.  They need a music and video player.  They need a web browser.  They need e-mail.  For these people, the keyboard and mouse are things they tolerate, pieces of the computer system that they use because that’s what computers have for inputting information and navgiating.  But no one needs a mouse to click (touch) a play button.  No one needs a hardware keyboard to enter a URL that they already have a bookmark for, nor to enter their credit card number for an online purchase.  And so on.

These are the people — and more, the uses — that the iPad is intended for.  Not you (most likely).  Them.  Think about them, and what they need, and how they might use the device.

Welcome to the Future

Who came up with the concept for the iPad?  Well, it wasn’t Apple!

Many geeks will claim it was Star Trek.  After all, the flip-top cell phone is pretty much directly from their Communicator,  and they have also had the PADD (Personal Access Display Device; never actually referred to that in the show) going all the way back to the original show.  I would submit, though, that those were PalmPilot and stylus-based tablet computer inspirations, typically vertical business/military applications rather than general purpose consumer/media devices (although such would surely have existed as well).

In terms of something that we recognize completely as an iPad-class device, though, consider these panels from the Legion of Super-Heroes showing consumer devices intended for reading, writing, and media consumption, dating back to 1984:

Rokk Krinn using a device as a story book, with pre-loaded content.  From Legends of the DC Universe 80-Page Giant #2 (2000).	A space shuttle passenger reading from a device, almost exactly iPad size and shape.  Possible pre-loaded content, possibly dynamic.  From Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #0 (1994).	R.J. Brande using a device as a sketchpad, with a stylus for pen-like actions.  From Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #0 (1994).
Colossal Boy with a newspaper-reading device.  The new content is loaded dynamically.  From Legion of Super-Heroes v3 #1 (1984).

Missing from these images, unfortunately (because I didn’t have an appropriate issue handy to scan from; I’ll get one eventually), is a version from the late-80s/early-90s version of the Legion.  In these stories, the McCauley Omnicom was ubiquitous: everyone had one, and everyone used them, for everything from portable computing to PDA tasks to online diaries to media consumption, pretty much exactly what the iPad is destined to be used for (especially a couple generations down the lilne).  In particular, this Legion series often featured diary pages and the like as background material, presented as displayed on an Omnicom.  And thus not just did Legion reader see the character interacting with the devices, they were directly shown an example of the device in actual use.  Needless to say, Legion readers from that era see an iPad and know exactly what the expected uses of it should be.

Did the Legion actually create the concept?  Oh, gods no.  You can be sure that diligent research would probably turn up science fiction stories dating back to the 1930s which reference hand-held newspaper readers and the like.  But what the Legion (and Star Trek) did do was to clearly visualize both the form factor and the uses of both stylus-based PDAs and multi-touch tablets well in advance of actual devices being viable.

Will I Buy an iPad?

Almost certainly.  I’m planning to for my birthday in late August, which will give time for a software update or two to come out, new app concepts to some out, and hardware add-ons to be released (such as the mysteriously absent video conferencing webcam).

You see, I travel quite a bit for pleasure or what I call “professional obligation” — not career-related trips, but ones where I have duties such a teaching dance workshops or being an organizational delegate.  On these trips, I want to stay connected to my e-mail and the web and social networking sites, and I want to consume media like music and video.  If I had the capability available, I would edit web pages and do graphic design work, but those are a tiny fraction of what I use a computer for while travelling.  (I did once create an event poster wholesale on a plane trip, but that was an exception.)

I used to have a Mac laptop I could use for this, both one from work (in a past job) and one of my own.  The latter one, I gave to my ex when we split, so that he would have a computer.  Lugging the laptop around was significant added weight on trips: laptop, charger, mouse (because I despise use trackpads for more than a couple minutes), and assorted cables.

After that, looking for other, lighter/better solutions, I bought a Nokia N800.  It was a nifty little device, but I found that I needed an external keyboard to use it efficiently, and the screen was just too small for most of my needs.  I could use it, but it wasn’t especially great.

I then bought an Asus Aspire One netbook.  Now I was back in laptop domain, with a large enough screen and a keyboard and such to run a browser and an e-mail program.  On the other hand, it is a Linux box, and you have to use arcane UNIX-style terminal commands to install any software at all.  I found some sites with step-by-step details to get me running Firefox and Thunderbird instead of the default apps, but I haven’t taken the time to relearn UNIX commands enough to generalize those steps to add other apps.  And I have had to completely reinstall the OS at least twice, meaning I’ve had to go back (find online again) through all those steps again and again.  It has all the joys of a hacker device, which is to say all sorts of pain for someone who just wants to be online and consuming media!

I’ve also got an iPhone.  This has the advantages of being an Apple device and thus both synching very well with my main system and having software which is familiar in how it works.  Make no mistake: these are massive plusses.  My e-mails, my calendars, my contacts: they are just there on both systems.  The screen isn’t very large, of course, and there’s no opportunity to do web page editing, document editing, or graphic design, and of course the lack of multi-tasking restricts some switching between mail and web, but the convenience of being able to do things like check my e-mail when in line at the grocery store are major things that just weren’t possible before with other devices.

So where will the iPad be viable for me?  Why, just where Steve Jobs said it would be.  I probably won’t use it waiting in line at the store, or to “Bump” my contacts to someone at the bar.  And I won’t use it to design an event poster.  But when I’m in a static location — the couch, the kitchen table, the hotel room or airplane seat — I’ll now be able to read mail and browse the web and watch video without needing to deal with a keyboard or needing to sit at my work desk, and without needing to squint at a tiny screen.  Basically, all the things that I can sort of do on the iPhone (or the N800), I can now do more effectively, and with a system I can manipulate in a familiar, comfortable, and easy manner (without the hardware getting in the way).  For 95% of what I need to do when I’m not at my work desk, the iPad will be a superb option.

(And you know, I probably won’t ever we able to do native Photoshop file edits like I can on a desktop keyboard/mouse system, but I’ll bet we’ll see WYSIWYG web page editing system that I can use for some of those tasks in a matter of months.)
 

Flash! Aaahh! Destroyer of the Universe!

I’m a big fan of tabbed browsing when using a web browser.  I tend to launch tabs for a dozen or more webpages at once — for a weekly calendar I do, currently more than 50 tabs at a shot.  This allows me to go through several pages in a row (I just close one tab and the next shows) without having to constantly pull up a new bookmark.

For a couple years, I used Firefox on Windows, but I increasingly had problems where my entire computer would grind almost to a halt.  Task Manager would show Firefox eating up 99% of the CPU, which would force me to kill it and relaunch.

I eventually switched to Safari on Windows, because I found that it would load a set of tabs sometimes as much as 25% faster.  But I ended up with the same CPU spiking problem.  Sometimes I could painstakingly go through each tab and close it until I cleared whatever the problem process was, but this could take a few minutes and only worked some of the time.

I then switched to Chrome on Windows.  It puts each of its tabs into its own process.  In theory, this allows one process to stall or crash without bringing down the entire browser.  (In practice, though, when Shockwave crashes, it crashes across the browser, on all tabs.  But on the up side, I can reload each of those tabs and it will relaunch.)  I still had the CPU spiking, and while I could then narrow it to a single tab’s process, I still couldn’t identify which tab that was or kill just the one tab; killing the tab from the task manager would kill the entire browser.  But on the plus side, Chrome will remember what tabs were open when you quit (or crashed) and will generally reopen them on next launch, so recovery was that much easier.

I’ve also had some of the same problems on my Macintosh, with Safari.  Not as bad and not as often, but still now and then.

By now, I knew what the problem child was: Adobe Flash.  For whatever reason, seemingly at random, a Flash process will go bonkers and eat up all my CPU.  I don’t know if it’s truly random or something I could predict if I knew more about Flash, but it doesn’t really matter.  The take-away is “Flash has problems.”

This is the core of why Flash is not enabled/permitted on the iPhone and the iPad.  It is simply known to cause problems.  Some reports say Flash issues cause like 75% of browser crashes.  I note that even without it, Mobile Safari on my iPhone crashes now and then (as often as a couple times a day, depending on usage), usually when I’m trying to close a page.  I can certainly picture adding Flash into that would increase the likelihood of those issues.

Fortunately, there is a solution!  Block Flash!

Well, no, preventing all Flash on your computer is a stupid solution, a scorched Earth method.  So much of the web has components in Flash that there are things you simply miss out on, as any iPhone user can tell you.  (But on the other hand, much of it is stuff you don’t really need.  One social networking site I’m on uses Flash to make a bit of text pulse when you’ve got a new message.  Talk about something that doesn’t need Flash!  Not to mention all those website intro pages!  And the flashing noisy ads!)

So instead of outright blocking Flash, we can put up a gate.  This prevents Flash from loading when you open a page, but it also gives you the opportunity to load selected Flash elements, such as to view an embedded video or to show the site’s navigation bar (grrrr).  You end up with a far less cluttered page view as a side effect.

On Chrome for Windows, I use FlashBlock.  Firefox users also have Flashblock.

On Safari for Mac, I use ClickToFlash.

My browser CPU spikes have all but gone away (and when they happen, it’s because I’ve disabled the extension!), and my browser crashes and needs to kill/relaunch the browser have dropped by 90%.  (I now have to relaunch a couple times a week, rather than several time a day.) That’s a massive improvement.

Highly, highly recommended!  Use Flash at your leisure, not at theirs.

FlashBlock is not a perfect solution, though.  I’ve found that some of the Apple movie trailer pages use an embedded Flash player (rather than QuickTime, why?) which won’t play when I click it, so I have to disable the extension, reload the page, and then re-enable the extension.  Similarly, YouTube recently made a change which presents a message falsely telling you to upgrade your version of Flash, but again, what you need to do is disable/reload/enable.  I’m hoping that either these sites or the FlashBlock extension maker will be able to repair these issues.  (I haven’t hit them with ClickToFlash, so maybe there’s hope.)

(With apologies to Queen.)

(Kudos to Daring Fireball for a lot of useful thought on this subject.)

---

Updated on March 22, 2010

Check out this Foxtrot strip.  Great gag!

Movie Review — Waking Life

Waking Life was an experimental animation film from 2001 that I thought I wanted to see.  Thanks to Netflix, I finally got it.  Unfortunately.  “Experimental” means “fucking weird”, of course.

A one-word review: “Queasy”.

The trailer makes it look interesting and implies a narrative much more cohesive than actually exists.  In reality, the plot can be summed up by “A guy is dreaming and slowly comes to realize that.  Along the way, he dreams about people expounding on philosophy.”

Yeah, it’s just about that exciting.  Frankly, any movie that references existentialism and quotes Kierkegaard and Thomas Mann — and not just uses their words but directly says stuff like “Thomas Mann wrote that <blah blah blah>” — is clearly not intended as either entertaining or educational.  Masturbatory, maybe.

There is a really narrow audience who gives a shit that you can quote Thomas Mann, but there’s a broader audience who would rather you present those ideas to us as ideas rather than as quotes, and as dialogue rather than as monologue.  Talk to us, don’t preach at us.

So to expand, this movie is a bunch of disconnected monologues about philosophy and dreaming and the meaning of life, where one character expounds on some deep matter to an ostensibly main character who mostly just sits there and nods.  (As opposed to me, who would have nodded off if I were just sitting and watching rather than ironing clothes as I watched.  That shit puts me right to sleep; maybe it’s a defense mechanism to prevent me from having to struggle to decipher what is being said.)  Each monologue is software animated by a different person, which results in some bizarre and sometimes jarring art styles.

For the first half of the movie, neither the viewer nor the main character has a grasp on what is going on.  (Well, the viewer has the title to go by, which leads you to get that it’s all a dream before the character does.)  Eventually the character understands that he is dreaming the whole thing, including the bits where he thinks he is waking up, and then then he starts to say what the viewer is thinking: “What the fuck is this?  What does this have to do with anything?”

(There is a truism in comics — where the writer often has much more control over the final product than is usually the case in film — that if the characters start to say that the story is stupid, then the writer agrees.  I felt that way with Waking Life.)

I’ll spoil the ending right now (highlight to read):

The lead character doesn’t wake up, and nothing is resolved.  Maybe he’s dead.

Now, in comics, sometimes a crap story can be saved by cool (good, innovative, intriguing) art.  Does that happen here?

Hell no.  The entire film is rotoscoped, with underlying video used as the basis for the animation.  The computer software they use for this does interpolation, so they can (for example) draw the curve of a character’s face in two key frames and have the software map that curve through the intermediate frames.  This saves an immense amount of work, of course, and sometimes it produces great work (but too few frames interpolated and it becomes jumpy).  But they also tend to use interpolation for all the static elements in a scene, individually.  This wall, that wall, the floor, each table… all their own layers, interpolated.  (Compare to the minimalist work with static and even reused backgrounds don by Hanna-Barbera.)  And since the video is from hand-held cameras, the viewing point moves throughout the scenes, which means that the view of each static element changes a little all through.  The result is that each static item in the scene “floats”, moving independently of all the others.  Result to the views: nausea.

Now, any individual one of these monologue scenes — ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes — as a self-contained bit can be quite interesting.  But string them together, with art styles changing throughout and no graspable narrative from one to the next, and you end up with a jumbled mess that doesn’t build to a value greater than the parts.

Now, I’m sure some people would try to defend this entire process, saying that the art styles and the floating animated items and the minimal narrative work in concert with the dream nature of the plot, and I can’t really disagree on that front.  It is all very dreamlike.  (Although I’ve never in my life had lucidity in dreams sufficient to sustain several minutes of philosophy monologue.)  The problem with is that “experimental” goes fine for 10 or 20 minutes, maybe, but this film is 100 minutes long.  Intellectual curiosity fades into boredom quickly, and allows the nausea-inducing animation to rule.

Queasy.
 

New Zealand: Christchurch to Seattle (Monday, February 22)

Written at the international terminal at Los Angeles International Airport at 5:35 pm (Los Angeles time) on Monday, February 22; and in Seattle after returning home

Today, we went out to Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, a wildlife park on the outskirts of Christchurch.  All we really knew was that they had kiwi there.  It turned out that they are a three-part walk-through wildlife park/zoo.  One part for introduced wildlife — freshwater eels, wallabies, ostriches, lemurs, gibbons, capuchin monkeys, assorted birds.  Then a part for New Zealand farm life — chickens, cows, pigs, rabbits, and horses, many of them rare breeds only found in New Zealand.  And the third part was mostly native wildlife (although some introduced, mostly hundreds of years ago) — kiwi, tuatara, possums, ferrets, ducks, etc.

Willowbank has the most successful kiwi breeding program in New Zealand.  They have a nocturnal house, which allows the kiwi to be available for viewing during the day.  (If you can call it “viewing” when it’s very dark in there.  We were able to visually observe two kiwis in the house, though.)

While we were viewing the capuchin monkeys, Mom leaned her cane against the banister and >splash< into the water it fell.  The park staff was able to fish it out and hose it down for her, though.  To keep parity, I proceeded to drop my sunglasses into the eel pond (and recovered them).

We bought souvenirs at their gift shop — I got some paua shell stud earrings, a tocque with a Māori design on it, another Kiwi country CD (this one with older artists, I think), and a book on New Zealand foods (descriptions of foods, essays on New Zealand food producers, and some recipes, mostly for desserts).  We also had lunch there, and as beverage, we had Elderflower Sparkle sodas (one original and one with black currant); got to keep trying those local items!

We then got me to the airport for my return home.  Alas, I got to see absolutely nothing of downtown Christchurch in the process.

I bought a chocolate croissant at the airport with the rest of my New Zealand money, leaving me just a few coins.  I had also forgotten that I hadn’t finished the bottle of Southern Comfort I bought in Auckland, so it got tossed at security, as did the jar of Nutella-knockoff spread (which should have gone into the checked luggage, darn it).

Retracing the steps from 10 days ago, I flew Emirates Air back to Sydney and finished Julie & Julia.  Our plane was a Boeing 777; nothing special about the flight, but an ugly landing.  I swear the plane bounced twice.  Had a 3-hour layover in Sydney.  Pulled out my leftover Australian money and looked around for a small souvenir, something warranting the 6 hours total I spent in the Sydney airport, and bought a shot glass with kangaroo silhouettes on it.  That took just coins, so I have an AUS$10 bill left for some future conversion.

Then it was back on V Australia to Los Angeles.  finished an episode of Heroes I had brought with me (from December, we’re slowly catching up on it), and then watched The Hangover.  Sleep was difficult, and I have no idea how much I caught; probably just 3-4 hours, I think.  After waking up, I watched the recent version of Fame.

In Los Angeles, customs wasn’t too bad; in fact, the wait to get my suitcase was the longest part.  I found a table in the food court at the International Terminal and worked on the trip report, plus sent a few texts and a short phone call to my boyfriend.

I mentioned early in the trip report bringing an episode of Lost with me.  Well, I never got around to watching it until I was back in Los Angeles.  I thought about watching it on the Syndey-to-LA trip, but that would be just a bit too much tempting of fate.  (What, you forgot that the show started with a Syndey-to-Los Angeles plane crash?)

I read Bill Willingham’s Fables novel on the trip, Peter & Max.  A good light read, with a surprising and yet well preceded finale.  Completely in line with the comics, and hopefully with the upcoming television show.

I’ve also been reading the second omnibus volume of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (followers of previous trip reports know I read the previous volume on my trip to Europe last summer; I guess my next overseas trip will have to cover Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener, and Michael Tolliver Lives?), having finished Babycakes and almost done with Significant Others.

When I dug the book out, I discovered a picture from when I worked at Frame Technology, over 15 years ago, which must be when I last (first) read the books.  I only recognized about half the people, it’s been so long.  I’ll have to put that pic up on Facebook.  (Which also serves to remind me that my Facebook contacts are people I currently know and those from high school.  I need to look up folks from college, grad school, and when I lived in the Bay Area.  For all that it’s great for having some form of contact with people I’m otherwise lost on the wayside, there are huge chunks of my life not yet connected there.)

I’m feeling quite ready to be home.  On Sunday, I found myself almost snapping at Mom at one point, due to one of her personal speaking quirk (explaining things way too much).  My neck is hurting, mostly because of working on the netbook in the car, bending my head down.  My $50 pair of headphones broke at the airport; I compressed them too hard when putting them in my bag and a plastic tab broke off, so one earpiece doesn’t stay on the bridge when they are stored.  (Still usable, just annoying to store and fish out again, becoming a jumble of cables.)  And on the plane, the waist button came off on my shorts; just a tiny thing, but still, one more thing.

Which brings me current.  Now to watch another episode of Desperate Housewives and call the trip good.

As with the trip to Europe, I’m several days behind in posting these updates, but I’ll just plod through them during the coming week, one or two a day (rather than churning them all out at once).  I’ll need to go back and do some second drafts on some pages, too.  And once they all get posted, I’ll revisit each page to correct place names and add a myriad of links.  And some day, I’ll edit together the photos and videos and get them posted to Flickr and YouTube, and then I’ll revamp the entire thing into its own set of web pages on my site, rather than a series of blog posts.

(Of course, I haven’t done the pics/video or web pages steps with either the OutGames or Dublin trip reports just yet.  Sigh.)

My boyfriend is picking me up at the airport.  I haven’t had sex with him in two weeks.  What do you think will happen tonight?  (Yeah, probably collapse into bed and sleep.)

---

Updated on May 14, 2010

Updated on June 15, 2010

Added links.
Added travel map.

What’s Up with Charge Cards at Lowe’s?

Every time I use my Lowe’s card, I swipe it through their little card scanner, and then I have to hand it to the clerk, who hand-enters the last four digits of the card into the system.

No other store I frequent seems to do this.  Some request my ID when I use a credit or debit card, but tha’s not what’s going on here.  Damned if I can figure out what is going on, though.

Sometimes they ask for my zip code, although that’s seemingly not related to the card usage but rather to track buying patterns and the like.  I’ll sometimes make up a zip code on the spot (like “49322”, which I see is in Mississippi), just to fuck with their data rather than feed them valid info.  (With something like 30,000 people in my zip code, that’s about the least interesting piece of “personal information” that they could ask for, so I give them fake ones just because I can, not to hide from them.)

I asked the clerk the last time I was there and he made some noise about the process being to verify that it was the right card.  Which would lead to the conclusion that the Lowe’s card scanning system so easy to spoof or so insecure that the store doesn’t trust it.

Another possibility is that the store serves a generally lower income (and more heavily black, although I don’t think racism is really a factor here) set of neighborhoods.  Some of the gas pumps in the area require entering the card holder’s zip code, presumably as a form of protection against stolen cards (if you don’t know the billing zip, it’s probably not your card), while the same company in more affluent or less urban areas (ones with perceived less incidence of crime) don’t require that.  So maybe this is a version of the same thing: they are checking that the card is actually intact, and maybe the clerk is even reading the name on the card while entering the digits, to do some base verification of card holder gender (when you can tell that from the name, of course).  Because any other fragment of needed info should be pulled off via the scanner.
 

Apple Tablet Predictions: After the Announcement

Okay, the Apple iPad has been announced. How did my predictions fare?

• Screen of 10–11" — big enough for reading or viewing video, but not any bigger than a regular sized magazine.
  — I hoped for a larger screen, more toward 10.5"
• Very minimal hardware interface, just an on button and a headphone jack.  No power jack, no USB ports, nothing much to mar the feel of it being an encapsulated item.  Definitely no battery access.
  — Nailed this, but it’s easy to nail: look at the iPhone and extrapolate.  I failed to note the volume buttons from the iPhone, but they were obvious as items to include.
• Bluetooth and WiFi.  Duh.
  — Duh, but correct.  3G is also an option, for extra cost and extra monthly fee.  Hmm, I wonder if the reason AT&T hasn’t yet turned on tethering is that it was aimed at this device, so you can create a mini-WiFi zone with your iPhone and use its 3G.  That would be cool.
• Runs a variant of iPhone OS that is geared for the larger screen but still works with the same UI mechanisms familiar to iPhone users.
  — Yup.
• Apps for the tablet can be obtained from a version of the AppStore.
  — Remains to be seen just how this will work.  I expect the iPad and the iPhone will each connect top the AppStore, and will only see content appropriate to their hardware.
• Existing iPhone apps will work on the tablet, in iPhone sized windows.
  — Yup.
• Has all the features of an iPhone: multi-touch, accelerometer, etc.
  — Yup.

And then some more interesting predictions:

• Induction charging and synching.  As I said, no power jack.
  — Darn.  But understandable: if the existing power/synch attachment hardware is working fine, no need to reinvent the wheel.
• A netbook-type base which provides the induction charger base and a MacBook keyboard, a la the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.  Tablet body can be inserted into the docking base in each of the four directions (but not backwards!).
  — Sort of yup, although I was expecting something quite a bit more like a laptop base than the keyboard dock they have announced.  But I note that the third-party company could provide exactly what I was anticipating, which would also serve as a protective cover.
• When docked, can switch from the iPhone-style UI to a Mac OS X-style UI.
  — Darn.  Partially defused due to the creation of iWork for the iPad, but there are certainly major things you won’t be able to do without a full OS.  In particular, no mouse (which is better than finger pointing for some things).
• The docking base has additional solid-state memory, plus the various ports and such.  Comes with iWork and iLife software pre-installed, and other apps are available via the cloud.
  — Nope for the additional memory, but that was tied into the OS X item above.  Yup on iWork, nope on iLife (although it will be interesting to see if a Brushes app makes its way into the next desktop version of either suite, targeting Adobe apps as well as Microsoft).
• Has two cameras: decent quality video/still camera on the back (a la iPhone 3GS) and webcam on the front.
  — Darn, and a major puzzling lapse.  Presumably some third-party will make a rotating camera that plugs in to the headphone jack to fill this niche.

Again, this, I would so buy.  Will buy.  It will make a nice birthday present to myself in seven months, don’t you think?  Especially after reviews are in and maybe some OS patches are done to correct early problems.

I’m pleasantly surprised by the pricing structure.  Some will still complain that it’s too expensive, but they are mostly serial complainers ("free" would probably still be too expensive) or Apple haters (anything Apple producers is over-priced because Steve Jobs is a money-grubbing bastard).
 

Apple Tablet Predictions

Assuming that an tablet-like thing is actually announced on January 27, of course.  (And what would the reaction be if one were not?  Apple would need to be announcing some other fantabulous game-changing device instead, just to distract people from what they didn’t announce.)

So given the idea of something tablet-y being announced, what will it be like?

I think people are putting a lot more stock in the idea of it being a Kindle competitor than it’s worth.  I think that eBooks will be a secondary focus, but not a top tier one.  (Think of the iPhone announcement, where they touted Phone, Web, and iPod as the top items.  Stuff like texting and calendar and e-mail were second tier, important and even the things that really interested some people, but not the primary focus.

I think a lot of people are fascinated by the form factor idea of the walk-around tablet without much consideration of how that will actually be used.  If you’ve got an iPhone and you’ve got a desktop or laptop system, do you need a tablet?  The answer is “No… except when you do need one.”  This is what people are missing, in my opinion: when do you need a tablet (vs. those other devices) and what do you do with it when you don’t need it.

So here are some predictions, none of them surprising:

• Screen of 10–11" — big enough for reading or viewing video, but not any bigger than a regular sized magazine.
• Very minimal hardware interface, just an on button and a headphone jack.  No power jack, no USB ports, nothing much to mar the feel of it being an encapsulated item.  Definitely no battery access.
• Bluetooth and WiFi.  Duh
• Runs a variant of iPhone OS that is geared for the larger screen but still works with the same UI mechanisms familiar to iPhone users.
• Apps for the tablet can be obtained from a version of the AppStore.
• Existing iPhone apps will work on the tablet, in iPhone sized windows.
• Has all the features of an iPhone: multi-touch, accelerometer, etc.
• OLED screen

And then some more interesting predictions:

• Induction charging and synching.  As I said, no power jack.
• A netbook-type base which provides the induction charger base and a MacBook keyboard, a la the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.  Tablet body can be inserted into the docking base in each of the four directions (but not backwards!).
• When docked, can switch from the iPhone-style UI to a Mac OS X-style UI.
• The docking base has additional solid-state memory, plus the various ports and such.  Comes with iWork and iLife software pre-installed, and other apps are available via the cloud.
• Has two cameras: decent quality video/still camera on the back (a la iPhone 3GS) and webcam on the front.

In other words, two questions answered:

• When do you need it?  When the walk-around nature of the iPhone isn’t enough.  For reading, for browsing the web better, for watching video larger, for apps that haven’t been invented yet which take advantage of the tablet nature.
• What do you do with it when you you don’t need a tablet?  You turn it into something you do need (if you need one), a netbook/laptop.  Something that you can write on, edit photos with, do web designs with, etc. — all the things that the iPhone isn’t really geared for.

This, I would so buy.

---

Updated on January 19, 2010

Updated on March 1, 2010
 

Movie Review — Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes was better than I expected it to be.  And I suspect that is at the heart of most of the reasonably positive reviews the movies has received.  Because frankly (at least until the reviews started breaking), I was expecting something along the lines of Van Helsing — vaguely period trappings, but reeking of anachronism, and filled with quick cut editing, too clean sets, and perverted steampunk gadgets.

This one… well…

• It did feel a little anchronisticly self-aware, but not so much that loads of modern quips fell from the characters’ lips.  (And thankfully, neither did much in the way of “Bloody fair cop, guv’nor, wot?”, that shite that brands something as trying too hard to show it is Victorian low-class London, like Eliza Doolittle on a bad day.)
• The quick cut editing that I so expected was refreshingly suppressed.  Oh, it was there, but there was also obvious real fight choreography, where the action lasts more than 1/2 second per shot.  And probably the previsioning of fights that Holmes did in a couple places helped to make the quick cut editing attached to those bits more acceptable, more able to be followed.
• The CGI setpieces used in distance shots were too clean for my tastes — London didn’t feel dirty enough — but the real or closer sets felt much better.
• The steampunk gadgetry was kept to both a minimum and had a level of realism.  When I want unreal steampunk (and I do!), I read Girl Genius.

A couple other thoughts:

• I was moderately surprised that, in the midst of the threat against Parliament, there was no threat against Queen Victoria.  How restrained!
• Also restrained: nary a mention of Leather Apron.  (Unless that was behind the comment about other women having also been killed by Lord Blackwood.  And in fact, Blackwood’s victims number does match that of the “canonical five”.)
• Curious that they didn’t try to blow up Parliament.  Oh, wait, that was Guy Fawkes, not Guy Ritchie!  Wrong movie.
• I forgot about the comment that Holmes and Watson had been partners only 7 months, so I didn’t expect that the hidden villain reveal would be who it was.
• Of course, having read way too much Alan Moore reimagining of turn-of-the-century Britain fictionality, I had the fact that the villain was so totally hidden that all we ever saw were his gloves (not even his hands) pegged as being Hawley Griffin.  And thus that Griffin, derobed, was behind the final defeat of Blackwood.  (Of course, that’s still a possibility, no?)

I am definitely looking forward to Iron Man 2, though, so we can see Robert Downey Jr. continue playing this same character into another film.
 

Movie Review — Avatar

We saw Avatar yesterday at the huge-screen Cinerama theater in Seattle.  Unfortunately, not in 3D; I missed that MovieFone lists the 3D version as a separate film, so I wasn’t aware that I was only looking at 2D entries.  (And in fact, one of the theaters showing it in 3D is apparently also showing it in 2D!  Talk about confusing!)

SOME SPOILERS BELOW

As everyone else in the world has said, the effects are fantastic.  I noticed one of the “helicopter” shots early in the film where I could tell it was CGI rather than real, but the rest of the film was pretty darn flawless in that regard (and I really tend to notice these things).  Some of the Na’vi characters were a bit stiff in their movements, but that was (a) mostly the avatars and (b) an alien race, so it falls easily in the realm of “Willing Suspension of Disbelief”.

I’m not sure whether I missed the 3D.  Since I wear glasses as it is, any additional eyewear is a bit troublesome anyway, and tends to fail at the peripheral vision edges.  As I recall from seeing Coraline last year, some aspects of the 3D process were more bothersome for me than useful as a result.  In particular, I had a couple nauseau bits with the overhead and falling camera shots seeing it just in 2D, which I think might have been worse in 3D.  But I could also tell that some of the “depth of field” shots — the landing helicopters, the Hallelujah Mountains, the flying dragons — probably would have been that much more “wow” with 3D.  I’ll probably have to see it again, in 3D, just to be sure.

The story?  Eh, yeah, you’ve heard the complaints.  It’s not that the story is weak, just that it’s standard, by the book: human (or white man) is assigned to research/spy on aliens (or natives), human falls in love with their lifestyle and the chief’s daughter, human fights back against his own kind’s intent to destroy the natives.  The first step on that plot trail leads inexorably to the last step.  With two possible endings: pure heart of the natives beats back the humans/white men, or technological superiority destroys the natives.  (The first is what happens in fictional stories, the second is what happens in historical dramas.)  But in the middle of watching the movie, you really don’t notice that too much.

Now that the Hometree is destroyed, the Na’vi clan will have to move elsewhere (although still close to the Tree of Souls).  Despite shipping the humans back offworld (which really means just back into orbit), there is absolutely nothing that’s going to prevent them from coming back down to mine the unobtanium.  It might take a while to get the needed confirmation from Corporate on whether to nuke it from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure) in revenge or to just go in again, but the odds of the Company just writing this whole thing off as a loss is remote.  Best option will be for Jake to work to broker a mining deal, but even then, we know those agreements are made to be broken, and other lesser deposits will be found and exploited, and there’s basically no way for the Na’vi to win this and not end up on reservations or outright exterminated.  As noted, the humans have nothing the Na’vi want, so there’s nothing that will prompt diplomacy and nothing to stop the eradication of the People.  (And the Company may want to exact specific revenge on their employee, Jake, for destroying Company equipment and absconding with Company property, his Avatar body.)

Speaking of dragons… I thought this after the travesty of Eragon and I really think this now: someone needs to be producing Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonriders of Pern” novels now!  The dragon effects are so ready for this.  It’s a two- or three-picture deal just waiting to be made, with the option of additional films out the back (the Harper Hall trilogy, Moreta’s Ride, Dragonsdawn,…).  I want to see Thread!  (Mind you, they absolutely have to use Michael Whelan’s dragon designs!  Those whirling eyes!)

Odd thoughts:

• The wolf-niche creatures reminded me a lot of the alleged chupacabras which have been filmed or killed recently.
• The idea that the Company in this is the same one as in the Alien films (especially Aliens, since that was also directed by James Cameron) gives rise to questioning whether Sigourney Weaver’s character here is related to the one in Alien.  It could work easily enough if you apply the cloning concept from the Heartbreakers comics — where one base person is cloned with genetic tweaks to create scientist clones, warrior clones, and so on.  (I recall that was even a continuity burp between the 3rd and 4th Aliens films which this could explain, something with Weaver’s character dying in one and being back in the next.  Never saw them myself.)
• The idea that the Hometree is so huge precisely because it is on top of the unobtanium deposit is never broached.
• A book?  They still print stuff on paper-like materials?  The amount of fuel required to transport that weight of paper is cost prohibitive.
• After making The Bond with the horse and the dragon and the tree, why didn’t we see those fiber-optic tentacles making the bond between Jake and his Na’vi princess?  Surely that would be the most intense intimacy possible.  (Oh god, I’ve just opened the door for gay Na’vi fanfic stories!)
• Wasn't Norman in the portable link station when the colonel started smashing it up to disconnect Jake?  He had forcibly come out of the link when his Avatar body was shot, but then what happened to him?  (I think we saw in in-Avatar again when the Company folks were being escorted off planet.)
• When Jake first got in his body and ran out of the medical bay, there were a dozen other Avatars with people linked into them.  What happened to them?  All loyal to the company?  All killed by the colonel?  All just conveniently forgotten?

---

Updated on December 29, 2009

Updated on February 26, 2010

After having seen a bunch of other movies on my February 2010 trip to New Zealand, I came back to thinking about Avatar’s story, combined with the Best Picture nomination the film has received.

Avatar does not deserve the Best Picture award.  While technically brilliant, the simplistic plot is a fatal flaw.  15 minutes into the film, you know exactly how the story will resolve: damaged man joins native tribe, man falls in love with native girl, man becomes the best native ever, man fights his own people to save the natives, natives win.  There is no particular subtlety and no notable deviation from the standard plotline.  The movie is on a bobsled track: unless it jumps the track (which then kills everyone involved — like nuking the entire planet), it&rsquos going to go right to the end, with the only question being how fast.  (I figured a luge reference there would be tacky.  Oops.)

In comparison, the other heavily animated film nominated for Best Picture — Up, pretty much designed for kids — has more layers to the plot and several possible endings, each with their own poignant value.  Avatar is a big FAIL in comparison.