« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Meow. (Warning: Nerdy)
(Um, this post is a little stream-of-consciousness-y)
Aside from taking about 23 million years to index my hard drive for the "requires no indexing!" Spotlight search function, I'm up and running with Tiger.
So far, I'm underwhelmed. The niggling details are driving me mad. There are about 18 new, random highlighting colors used in the Finder & Mail, none of which respect user preference settings. You want a graphite system with orange highlighting? Too bad, you're getting shades of blue. Why bothering even OFFERING a choice if applications made by Apple aren't even going to pay attention to them?
I seriously feel like the Finder team at Apple has lost the plot--using command-option to navigate up through the file system from a Finder window's name menu is borked for no reason whatsoever; command-clicking a selection in a Find window doesn't unselect the selection (breaking every convention in the OS--plus, hell, that Find window is borked in about a hundred other ways, starting with how it reverts to the stupid "Grouped, show only five items per folder" mode every time you use it, no matter how you many times you tell it to use a normal list view); Spotlight is slow as hell on my brand new, top of the line PowerBook, and trying to select an item while it's still chugging away sends it into spasms; Item selection, highlighting & renaming on the Desktop or in Finder windows still operate differently and look cheap, like they were drawn with rounded-corner-boxes from PageMaker. kung-foo.tv has a Tiger report where you can see some of the weird highlighting issues--draggable list items have light blue "pills" around them with dark blue borders; when selected they turn dark blue with a highlight rectangle around them. Why? The application selection popup in a dialog box is light blue, and has a darker blue rectangle around when selected. Why?
<"http://daringfireball.net/misc/2005/04/tiger_details">Daring Fireball's constantly updated Tiger report has more bugs and info. The .app extension bug that he noticed pretty quickly is a stupid regression & a lame "feature"; it better be fixed in 10.4.1.
It stuns me that while Dave Hyatt (and, possibly, his underlings--if he has underlings) is (or, um, are) so unbelievably focused on detail in Safari, whoever is in charge of the Finder (which is undeniably the most used & most frequently seen application on the whole computer) appears to be doing random crap all day with no oversight.
(disclaimer: I still heart my Mac and nothing in this entry should be used as fodder to keep mattymatt from switching to the light side)
Posted at 12:50 PM | Comments (8)
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Volare? Seriously?
When they tell you you will someday turn into your grandparents, I didn't think they meant LITERALLY. I just had to call the cops because one of my neighbors was blasting some Time Life Introduction to the Great American Songbook compilation at two AM. Damn kids these days, with their jazz music and loose morals!
OK, OK, I waited until "Something Stupid" finished playing. I kind of like that one, if only because of the completely sick father/daughter duet aspect. And I heard a really great, slow version of "Lullabye of Broadway" that I will probably try to find on iTunes tomorrow morning.
But aside from those two choons, I am annoyed! I shake my fist at you, bad neighbor with mediocre taste in standards!
Posted at 02:39 AM | Comments (2)
Monday, April 18, 2005
She's dead, Harry. Wrapped in plastic.
Whoa. According to Nervous Breakdown, this week is the 15th anniversary of the debut of Twin Peaks. I watched the show on Japanese laser disc for the first time in the fall of '94, thanks to an insane college RA whose name I can't even remember. It had Japanese substitles that couldn't be turned off, but no-one minded. We watched the whole series over the course of the year, and I think he even had marathon viewing parties that would take almost 24 hours in one stretch.
I finally managed to find the pilot online a few days ago, thanks to a kind soul with BitTorrent. I watched it alone after the download finished, and as the climax drew near I suddenly realized that I wasn't sure if it was the "ordinary" US cut or the freaky, extended European version. I had to skip ahead and peek really quickly, since I can barely bring myself to watch the end of the Euro cut: BOB, the one armed man, fire walk with me, all that crazy shit in the basement. It's too much, too much!
Sure, the characters went a bit off the rails towards the end, but Twin Peaks was still amazing well into the second season. It's a crime that most of it isn't even available on DVD in the US. Just about every show I've liked since then has owed something to David Lynch and this groundbreaking series--Buffy's combination of the macabre and the humorous, the twisted examinations of suburbia in Strangers with Candy or even Desperate Housewives (heck, wasn't Laura Palmer herself, Sheryl Lee, the original choice for Mary Alice, the show's dead narrator?).
According to that EW piece, even Lost is modeled on Twin Peaks. Does that mean Boone is coming back in a funny wig and giant red glasses next season? Because that would really revive my flagging interest in the castaways.
Posted at 07:03 PM | Comments (5)
Monday, April 04, 2005
On Sin City
A funny thing about Sin City for me is that Alexis "Rory Gilmore" Bledel plays a sweet teenage prostitute in the middle section, which took me out of the film a bit, but mostly because I've never seen her play anything other than Rory. Her character kept talking about having to call her mother, which only made me think "oh man, Lorelai is going to be sooooo pissed!"
My initial reaction to seeing Alexis Bledel in Sin City was "wow, she's a teenage prostitute in lots of leather". Strangely, she still acts like Rory Gilmore and calls her mom on her cell phone. The rest of the film is visually stunning, but made me feel dirty.
Yeah, I pretty much felt the same way. But mostly I was disappointed that Dwight was naked in the comics during the scene in Shelley's apartment, but Clive Owen had pants on in the movie. What's up with that? Last ditch attempt at not getting an NC17? Meh.
