Thursday, May 17. 2012Dark Shadows
Dark Shadows is film based, I suspect rather tightly, on a long-running US TV show that was several hundred 30 minute episodes long, giving it hundreds of hours of story to draw from. And therein lies its fatal flaw. The core story is certainly enough to hang a movie on (more demanding than Avengers Assemble say) and the setting lends itself to a fair number of jokes about someone from 1776 waking up in 1972 and failing to adjust to their new environment which have an added layer of fun because of course our environment has changed so in the last 40 years (it was particularly odd seeing someone using a phone in a box rather than a mobile for example) and the remainder of the story, once we're past that could be made to work as well.
But there were jokes slammed in basically without context. I suspect jokes that Tim Burton et al remembered from watching the show and thought "Oh, we've got to have that one!" You sometimes hear scriptwriters and the like talking about "earning X" - in this earning the joke - and I'd never really understood it but this film is an example of one that basically doesn't earn most of the joke and falls somewhat flat because of it: it made for odd pacing because instead of any build up to the joke or wind down, you'd see the joke like a slap in the face between a chunk of story on one side and a chunk of something that can only be described as OTT melodrama on the other. There were, equally, dramatic moments without foreshadowing and without follow-up. In the series I'm sure there were little clues, there were whole episodes dedicated to the new revelation and its impact. In the show there were too many "Bam! Look, we remembered this fan-favourite bit!" moments to allow for foreshadowing or the impact to be felt. Additionally most of them were unnecessary within the structure of the film so presumably present solely thanks to being in the series, which might work in the US but not so well with people like me that haven't seen the show at all. Ironically enough one of the jokes that they did earn fell flat with most of the audience I watched with. I guess they didn't catch the back reference to the rock-n-roll chick who's really a Carpenters' girl. I guess there are a lot of famous actors who enjoyed the show though - there seemed to be no shortage of big names taking part. It's rather a shame that, despite some very strong female roles, there's not a really sympathetic character in the lot. Michelle Pfeiffer's matriarch is rather old-school feudal nobility "so, they're only peasants, he's a Collins!" The doctor is a moody pill and alcohol addict with other character flaws. The daughter takes bratty teen rebellion to the n-th degree. The brother is venal beyond belief. Barnabus' love interest is insipid beyond belief and when they do give her some backstory it's too late and I didn't care any more. At least Eva Green as the witch isn't meant to be sympathetic although ironically she has moments when, as the spurned serving girl, she is the most accessible of the lot. Given the quality of the cast I can only assume it's the way it was intended to be. Thrown in among that quality cast was a performance by Alice Cooper which was fun, even if the songs he sang weren't released until after the film's supposed date. Oh well. Alice's performance, to my mind, was one of the all too few saving graces of the film. There's a lot of early 70's music in the background and that was fun. It's a shame really, there might not have been a great film there, but I'm pretty sure there was at least an OK one, just it was buried under too many homages to its past rather than being an adaptation brave enough to stand on its own. Tuesday, May 15. 2012Copyright and the internet (again)
About 10 days ago now a British court decided (quite legally and legitimately I'm sure but IANAL or course) that The Pirate Bay primarily hosts illegal content and all UK ISPs have to block access to that domain. Most of the ISPs agreed, one has asked for a further clarification of meaning.
Purely in the interests of research of course, I started looking at TPB for content without downloading (which I think is still legal, certainly it fits my sense of still being moral) and within a few days my ISP blocked access as expected. Within minutes on DuckDuckGo I found an alternative site that provided access to the similar content and that wasn't blocked. Within a few hours there was a proxy of TPB on a different domain name that isn't blocked. You have to wonder why they bothered really - if you can circumvent the restrictions that easily (which isn't a surprise to me) what was the point of spending the time and effort to block the access in the first place? While musing over this post two lovely conspiracy theories occurred to me. First, it might be an effort to persuade the politicians that the law needs to be changed. "Look, the judge tried to do this reasonable and lawful act, but his powers were not great enough. New legislation to make it work is needed!" Second is a more insidious conspiracy. It struck me that the people bringing the case were from the music industry. There's a fair accumulation of evidence that those who pirate some music (and e-book) content tend to also have much larger than average collections of legal, paid-for content. If people behind the legal process believe (rightly or wrongly) there's some causality in their favour there, by taking this action they've just advertised a good site for accessing pirated content across all media. Anyone with half a brain could have told them this approach wouldn't succeed to actually block access to pirated content so I'm guessing they didn't expect it to work either - but if they think it will increase legal sales as well as pirated content then it's probably worthwhile in a world dominated by the sole driver of more profit. I'm unconvinced of the causality here - but I can see an argument that could be advanced for it, and imposing the injunction is probably cheaper than many advertising campaigns so it's probably not a big risk. While, inevitably, there will always be some who will break the law the fact that those that pirate some content tend to also buy much gives me hope that a better solution exists than any we've seen so far. People will pay for content that is accessible and attractive to them. Surely, therefore, the trick is to make high quality content and make it readily available at a good price? Not keep telling us how naughty we are for accessing content we want to see as we want to see it? As I've discussed before I believe the laws around copyright will have to be changed to cope with the reality of the internet and modern technology but it's still worth wondering if the large content providers should also be taking this as a wake-up call. Fast internet in every home is pretty clearly a disruptive technology for the media companies in a way that slow internet was for mail and medium speed internet was for book shopping, booking holidays and the like. Netflix, Hulu and HBO in the US are delivering content to a different model than the big US companies (in fact a model more like UK TV with shorter seasons is at least part of that) and ready, fast access to streamed content (it's not as immediate as iPlayer in the UK yet but is available for much longer). The music industry is starting to adapt to a streamed and downloaded world rather than an album buying world. TV companies in the US still seem tied in to counting live viewers at the time of transmission as the only worthwhile audience - presumably because they're the ones that earn advertising revenue. Adapt or die is an adage from many biological systems and warfare. It seems the big media companies don't believe in it though - they won't adapt, insisting the environment must be changed back to suit them despite the fact the technological genie is well and truly out of the bottle. This is despite poorer viewing figures, declining TV ownership, a massive rise in PVR numbers and delayed viewing and other indicators they're in trouble. In the UK, according to 1 estimate, 1 in 3 of us no longer watches "live TV" (that is TV at the broadcast time) as all our major channels have multiple ways to catch content later whether or not you record it. The UK is not finding this entirely comfortable - advertisers were already finding it hard to support all our commercial channels (ITV, Channel 4 and 5, the various Sky channels which operate on a more American cable channel model) and the move to delayed consumption has not helped with that (the BBC finds it comfortable and good though, although it has other problems). However, all the UK channels are seeking effective ways to change how they present their content, cooperatively as well as competitively. I'm willing to bet that although the landscape will change over the next 5-10 years, possibly beyond recognition, the UK market will be more recognisably an evolution, the US one more like the fall-out of a revolution. Thursday, May 10. 2012Avengers Assemble
Apologies to the small number of people who know I saw this last weekend and have been waiting to read this. Hopefully not with baited breath! Between a really bad migraine and trying to unpack some of the more arcane innards of MySQL database table names it's taken a while to finish this!
Before starting on the review proper, I feel I ought to remind you I'm not really a fan of super-hero movies. I have also not seen many of the prequels - not Captain America, neither of the Iron Man movies, not The Hulk, although I have seen Thor. As a child I never read Avengers comics either, so I'm pretty sure there's all kinds of geeky in references I haven't caught. In fact, I suspect if you're not familiar with the characters, Thor (despite being a rather poor movie) might be the only one you really need to see to understand some of the background to this. Or, save yourself a couple of hours and read the Wikipedia article. All that said this movie was fun. It's very lightweight - eye fluff rather than eye candy perhaps, candy would imply some substance to it - but in the tradition of some other fun romps (The Mummy, I'm looking at you) there's just enough story to keep it moving along and there are many nicely structured scenes with the characters interacting with each other, many of which I'm sure will make the hard-core fans squeal with joy (one I caught and smiled at was The Hulk being unable to pick up Mjolnir after Thor had thrown it). Loki was menacing and manipulative as an enemy - he had a much better script to work with than in Thor and revelled in being smart and bad. He was backed up by a CGI-heavy army, but they looked wonderfully menacing and dangerous and provided a plausible (well, plausible within the structure of the story) threat to cause the formation of the Avengers, hence the title and the lack of an exclamation mark - it's not an order, it's a description of the outcome. He also got away with calling The Black Widow a "mewling quim" - a phrase that I assume most American audiences don't understand although judging from the reaction in the auditorium a lot of British people still do. There has been an outcry that I've more recently become aware of stronger reaction about Joss Whedon being proud of being able to use this phrase. I assumed he wanted to archaically insult the female character - it fit with the comments about Thor and Loki talking like they're doing Shakespeare in the park for example - but I'm less sure now I know he's proud of it. Each of the characters in the ensemble gets their moment or five in the spotlight. It's certainly enough to let the casual watcher like me understand the character's powers, have some idea of their limits and motives as well. There are some nicely shot scenes of them interacting as well, both positively and negatively. Familial bickering seems like a good description - although I'm not sure you could really describe the scrap between Thor and Hulk as bickering as they would have done hundreds of millions of dollars damage if it was real. And that, to a large extent, is the secret of the success of this film. It's got a lot of core star characters (even if fewer big star actors, although quite a few of those supplemented by a number of rising stars) and they're given enough screen time and enough interest and interaction to interest you in them without it feeling forced, slow or uncomfortable. But then Joss Whedon spent a lot of time helming Buffy and dealing with large casts where character was important and time in each episode was even tighter so I guess we shouldn't be surprised he managed it here and managed it well. Overall definitely fun. An entertaining summer blockbuster movie, although coming out to frost warnings and a freezing night not really summer weather for it! If you're in the mood for a romp though, a couple of hours well worth investing unless the furore about antiquated swear words directed at female characters puts you off. Tuesday, May 1. 2012Well it made me laugh
The Thick Of It is a BBC satirical comedy that I never really warmed to. The amount of swearing may have had something to do with that - I\'m not opposed to swearing automatically but there is a LOT - sometimes entire sentences are swear words and almost every sentence from the star contains several. I think the reason I didn\'t particularly like it is that the satire element slipped by me - it was too much like a documentary to my mind to work well as satire.
But the thing that really made me laugh? BBC America have just started broadcasting it. According to The Independent, they\'re broadcasting a sort of Morse code version because they\'re bleeping out all the swearing! One has to suspect it won\'t be very popular in the US... you could argue that strongly accented swearing might not be too, but when you\'re trying to pick out the odd words among the beeps... nope. It made me laugh a lot more than the show ever managed. Monday, April 23. 2012Cabin in the Woods
Cabin In The Woods looks, from the trailer, rather like it's a return to that old stock horror classic where are group of young adults - students in this case - are out of touch in the woods and horrible things happen to them. If you're thinking of the various Jason and Friday the Thirteenth movies, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre etc. you're on the right track.
It is, from the first shot, obvious this isn't going to be quite that typical movie. There are these two middle-aged guys in shirts and ties, one is bitching about his wife's pre-emptive baby-proofing when she's not even pregnant. The other is carrying his lunch hamper and getting coffee from the machine. It's clearly a work-place shot. Neither of them appears, at first, to fit into the movie. The film then puts up it's titles and moves to a scantily clad girl moving around and packing - one of the students packing for her weekend in the woods! It's kind of reassuring actually, because suddenly it's closer to expectations. The film continues moving, not entirely comfortably at first, between these two environments. The old classics of the remote cabin horror movie are trotted out. They're not exactly played for laughs (as they might be in the Scream franchise for example) but they are punctured in various ways, quite deliberately. Not too far into the film there are enough clues laid out that you can work out the central premise that ties these two stories together neatly and tidily into a coherent film. It is, perhaps, the first post-post-modern horror. It's abandoned the framework of the post-modern horror because it is almost impossible to imagine this movie being made if we hadn't had the post-modern horror of Scream and the like. While there is some gore, unless you're really weak-stomached it's not too much. In fact there are places where it's clear a decision was made to keep the gore down to... well I'm tempted to say tasteful levels, if you can have a tasteful horror movie with multiple deaths. It is, however, a clear departure from the gore/torture porn of movies like Saw (that I'll freely admit I've never seen and don't want to thanks). In the horror setting the story develops much as you'd expect. Something happens, horrible things start to appear, there is much screaming, some chasing around and the body count starts to rise. As you'd expect in a post-post-modern movie the standard tropes are played out but they aren't played out in isolation - there are not only comments about it there are explanations too. The penultimate scenes are kind of predictable if you stop to think about it. There is, basically, only one way this movie could sensibly play out and it doesn't try to wriggle out of it. There is, however, a little twist in the end. It, again, is inevitable perhaps that the story will resolve to this central question - albeit a question that is so loaded with spoilers I won't reveal it to you. Apparently, in an effort to keep everyone guessing, they filmed both endings - with that question resolved both ways. Very Aristotlean of them, an either-or resolution! I think they chose the more satisfying ending but your tastes may differ. Although this is a horror movie, and unashamedly so, it is a clever update on the old format and a fun movie as long as you're expecting a bit of fake blood to be splashed around and one or two other unpleasant bits. It's low on the jump shots, it's low on the gore, certainly on the fetishisation of the gore and it actually has a story that makes it interesting. It has a number of laugh-out-loud moments as they tip their hat to other movies and the tropes of the genre. Not everyone's cup of tea perhaps but if you like a bit of horror, not at all bad. Tuesday, March 27. 2012The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games is an adaptation of a book, part of a trilogy in fact, that I'm ashamed to say I haven't read (yet). In that way that good science fiction can, it satirises part of today's culture, in this case reality TV mainly, with wider pokes at the whole media industry. Despite being published earlier than the #occupy movement publicised the term, it's pretty hard to ignore some of the commentary about the 1-percenters although it doesn't use that term.
It portrays a world in which, to commemorate the devastation of a (presumably failed, certainly officially failed) rebellion some time ago, they instituted The Hunger Games - a young man and a young woman from each of the 12 districts (districts distinctly populated by the poor) are selected to take part in the games, trained for a few days and then dumped into apparent wilderness to kill or be killed until there is only one left. Everyone watches the 'brave sacrifice' of the 23 in intimate, obsessive detail. There is betting and the very wealthy can sponsor an individual and send small gifts, supplies to help them in their time of most need - chicken soup for example, or burn-treatment salve. Those from The Capitol (yes, you can hear the capital letters) are, rather clearly, the 1%. Where the other districts are dirty, poor and dressed in shades of grey, they're colourful (the host of the show that introduces the contestants wears a shimmering blue suit and has matching hair for example, the producer of the show has a perfectly trimmed and ridiculously ornate beard) and have the time and energy to worry about manners more than survival. It is also made fairly clear through the film that the 99% view this as a tool of continued oppression rather than anything brave, heroic or anything else and that the president views it even more cynically as a tool of his continued power. The film also poses, without really answering, some wider questions. The heroine is willing, more than willing, to kill everyone between her and the end - at least she talks a good fight - and volunteered to protect her little sister to whom she also wishes to return. Does that make her brave and heroic or psychotic? Her later actions portray her as more compassionate than that although with a ruthless streak too. But the seed of the question is still posed. Many of the children in the film are ciphers - extras who in Star Trek terms wear red shirts and die depressingly quickly. Really there are only three who are at all developed and fleshed out. But the adults are much more interesting. Very, very much painted in shades of grey, with some good parts and some bad, despite the colourful nature of their clothes. Only a couple of them escape this in this film - one seems completely good, the other completely evil. So it could be said that not only is this science fiction, it is also a fairy story. In the same way as Little Red Riding Hood warns children about some adults and so on, the shades of grey could be seen as a warning about grown-up life. Teen books, young adult books, are not always good for a wider audience. Twilight, for example, despite it's massive teen market appeals to rather few adults. This film leads me to hope that the books will appeal to a wider audience too. It is layered, not always intricate but always nicely done and engaging and fun as well painting all those shades of grey and sending up reality TV and our cultural obsession with it. What is there not to applaud? Add in good acting from basically everyone, young and old alike, and an already good story lifts off the screen as you watch. And as with all good satire, the cringe moments are the moments when you suddenly think "OMG, I do that!" - thankfully with not one for the casting, acting or story. There's a good chance this be overlooked come Oscar time but that will be an indictment of the system that doesn't let great movies that don't appeal to old, male media moguls get nominated. It may not be top of my list come the end of the year but almost certainly deserves to be nominated if not winning a little golden statue in 10 months time. Wednesday, March 21. 2012Hunters 2 review
Hunters 2 is an iOS game that is due to be hitting the App Store any day soon. I'm in the lucky position to be able to review it now because I beta-tested it - in fact at one point there was a special branch of the game just for me while they tried to fix the memory patch that made my installation crash. Happily they managed!
Hunters 2, as you might guess, is a follow-up from Hunters, Chapter One. If you like small unit tactical turn-by-turn games you should like this one.  Although there are a number of distinct changes from the first game in the series, it is recognisably the descendant as you can see from the picture here of the game in action. The idea of the "water-cooler" daily missions remains - there are five new ones released daily to everyone playing the game. If you and a friend both play you can discuss your tactics for a specific mission. The game play on the balance between action points (more is better) and armour amount (more is better but means fewer action points!) still, and has a variety of weapons to help you do your job. Some heavy weapons still take more than one AP to fire although there's a bit more diversity here now.We see the first difference here though - the SMG has vanished, replaced by the more interesting Plasma Rifle - although shot guns, assault rifles, flame throwers, rockets, and snipers rifles remain. The Auto-Gun heavy weapon has been added too - each time it fires there is a 50% chance you can sustain fire and keep firing - occasionally reaching extreme damage values.  Weapons and armour are no longer level limited - there is a colour code for quality but if you get an orange item (top quality) at level 1, you can use it and keep it throughout your career. You can see I've got a pretty hard hunter team already - but I've played a lot during beta testing 60h at this point according to the helpful timer.There are still nine "specialisation points" available as your hunters go up levels. In the original Hunters these were split between 3 "equipment" slots and 6 "tactics" slots. In the new game, there are just 9 points to spend as you choose. That might be 8 points between two tactics trees and one point in a special weapon say (I have 2 hunters who have done this), or 3 points in a tactic tree and 6 points in improved equipment, healing and stim packs. In addition, each hunter is limited to two tactic trees from the beginning. You can't choose the trees for your starting team, but when you buy a new hunter (if you do, I always have) you can see what trees they have available. There is a green "survival" tree that offers more HP, a turn of invulnerability, self-healing armour and the like; a red "combat" tree that offers crippling wounds (steal AP from enemies), extra AP after killing a foe and the like; an orange "vengeance" tree that helps you do more damage after being damaged yourself; a purple "support" tree that is basically about standing guard - including free shots while on guard duty - and a yellow "scouting" tree that offers extra action points in the first two turns, a chance of free movement of a square and ultimately a permanent extra action point. You can see a completed tree in the final picture - everything in one place clearly and each time you gain a level you just get another point to spend anywhere you like. The passive scanner item has gone, as have exploding bullets doing splash damage, but everything else is basically available although sometimes in a slightly altered form.  Then we come to the two big changes. Perhaps the most startling of these is the manufacturing system. If you have too much money and can't find that ideally suited weapon or armour, you can make it. It will cost you more and the orange quality items can't be manufactured - nor can some of the very best purple ones but it does mean you can make the equipment for your troops that you want. I found that at some points I used this a lot and although quite a lot of my weapons and some of my armour is now orange quality (on my old iPad - the pictures are from the new iPad and an older save of my hunters), I still have a fair amount of custom made equipment that I use. The other change we see is a campaign story. I won't spoil it, but there are 8 chapters that you can go through that tell a story. Chapter 1 also acts as an introduction to most of the game play and you only play it the once. Chapters 2-8 can be repeated in a cycle - and each time you finish Chapter 8 (after completing the cycle) you're rewarded with an orange quality item. There is a nice variety to these missions (different team sizes allowed, some with a more exploration feel, some with a more stealthy sense and some with a stiff series of fights). There is obviously some smart work in the background - these missions remain a challenge at all levels, and once you've hit level, even though you know where everything is, they grow harder as your equipment improves too. Hunters 2 is a game that I have, I know, spent many hours playing - I expect I will play again, I did keep going back to the original Hunters once I'd worked my way through it all as I wanted. I will, certainly, register for beta testing their next product. It was a lot of fun playing with this one and if you like this sort of game I'm pretty sure you'll love this addition to the market. As I think you'll agree the images look fine on the new iPad but there is meant to be a graphical update that will be along soon. Friday, March 16. 2012The New iPad
So, courtesy of some patience, perseverance and a later than normal night I managed to order a new iPad on the day they were announced. It duly turned up today - if I'd waited until breakfast time to order, I'd be waiting another week or two for delivery! Talk about popular.
So, although I've touched an iPad2, it wasn't for long and it was some time ago I touched my last one. On the other hand, I've spent chunks of today, while awake anyway, touching and using the new one. Although I didn't find the old one heavy or big, the new one is appreciably slimmer and lighter. It's slightly thicker and heavier than an iPad2 I read but my impression is of lightness and thinness in the hand. Intellectually I know the new iPad is quicker - but it doesn't seem that way in most circumstances. What it appears to be is smoother. Clicking on a button that brings up a sign-in alert box for example - it is probably objectively faster but subjectively it doesn't seem so. However, on the original iPad although there wasn't a sense of a pause there was a sense of process - it was always happening, always smooth, but it was clearly working. Now... there's not a "bam, instant UI change" shock, but a smoother transition that disguises the speed on a subjective level. Where it does seem faster, or at least even more responsive, is in things where fine control on the screen matters. That might be games - it was for me - but in other places too I'm sure. The size of the movements required hasn't changed but it responds better and noticeably faster. The other thing that has struck me, in a brief dip, is the difference in reading text. Webpages, iBooks and more seem crisper. I guess more pixels give you smoother edges to the characters and although it's not a conscious awareness it is noticeable. In fact, my new iPad is slightly easier to read on than the desktop! But then it has more pixels in less area... The other big change that I probably will use, is the dictation button. If I had an iPhone4S I might complain it's Siri-lite and where's Siri? But I don't and I won't. Generally dictation on the iPad coped pretty well with what I said. There is some fun and games, phrases became fazed for example, but largely it works well. It may or may not be something I use a lot. I tend to use my iPad for jotting down musing and ideas that come to me tangentially while thinking about something else. That's fine... but there is a shortish time limit on the amount you can say that the dictation tool will listen to. I'm often writing slowly, sorting things out, so I imagine I'll be talking slowly too and miss bits of ideas. That could be annoying. You, if you have one, may find it works much better for you in your work patterns of course. Me - I'm finding it's new but definitely workable. Whether I'll use it a lot I don't know - but in some places I imagine it will be valuable if I remember it, like dictating names and places for setting up calendar events. Dictating emails and the like... not so much. The new iPad is impressive after not many hours. But it feels nicer in the hand and it does everything the old one does, but better, faster, neater and more responsively. And at the same price as the old one. ----- Update: It takes appreciably longer to recharge the new iPad than an iPad-1. Not sure about an iPad-2 but I guess so. Overnight was not long enough for a full charge... although it went from 2% to 95%. Friday, March 16. 2012The Raven
There are, it seems to me, two films here - squashed, very uncomfortably, together.
One appears, as you watch them, to be an attempt at a biopic of Poe's last days. There are several scenes that seem to establish Poe the struggling, broke poet and critic that otherwise make no sense. However, a quick search on the internet suggests that Poe didn't keep pet racoons (although he did keep a pet raven and some cats) and while he may have been thrown out of a tavern it's not a recorded event. The fact that the events that to my mind fall into this biopic film aren't true makes me really wonder why they are there - they don't seem to serve any purpose in the movie at all. The other film is a suitably gothic romance. There is a romance, it's actually quite a strong driving force of the story and may be loosely based on Poe's real attempts to woo his childhood sweetheart in his final years. There is also, as the trailer will tell you, a police investigation into a serial killer who seems to be using Poe's stories as his inspiration. This film is the larger part and seems to work quite well. There is a sense of ticking off the various grizzly deaths - Pit and the Pendulum, check. Immurement, check. Ravens croaking, check. There are a number of quite subtle clues that the real Poe scholars and obsessive nerds will appreciate, not least the death of Griswold (who was actually Poe's literary executor and tried to ruin his reputation). The clues string together reasonably coherently to lay out the plot and it's all pretty nicely done. If they'd edited out the false biopic parts, stayed with the gothic romance, this might have been an excellent film. Thanks to the way they spliced the two parts together is a confusing mess at times and decidedly mediocre. Which is a shame, because there are elements of at least a decent film in there. Friday, March 9. 2012International Woman's Day
Yesterday was the International Woman's Day. I'd intended to publish the following:
The idea of quotas for female board members is doing the rounds again. Nothing too onerous - 25% of board members should be women. Good, I say! Let's crack through that glass ceiling once and for all. To those that say we should wait and appoint only on merit I want to know why the women who are, we are told, well represented at the next level down, not being appointed? You're really asking me to believe they're not capable? Yeah, right. Or, more likely from what I hear they're not seen as having served the right apprenticeship. Why not? Lack of patronage maybe? Knowing this is the track to the board and women won't get to the board so they don't get those jobs? How is that not discrimination? It is broadly possible that, for some high level jobs, there is a benefit to being male. I'm struggling to think of cases though, to be honest. But it's unbelievable that the route to every board job in every company runs through such a post. Even if you must appoint some from different career paths, is that really bad? In most places a diversity of experience is considered good. Why are boards so narrow and traditional? Historically, I have been suspicious of quotas. But as I've grown older I've seen more and more cases where it seems this is the only way to start the process working. Get some women in on quotas and within a decade at the most and I bet we're close to 50-50 on the board, leave it to a 'voluntary system' and I bet we don't see a lot of changes in the 25 years. Although it's not all good news, it's not all bad either. This piece from the BBC contains some hard data about how the proportion of women in various jobs has changed. Over the last decade women in senior positions and positions supporting them directly have both risen to 44% for the senior positions and 50% for the directly supporting roles. It's not perfect but not bad. Then I saw a story that, well I won't give you my uncensored opinion of, but lets say it's taken me until today to calm down about. In one story, Virginia (and other states are considering this), is going to compel a trans-vaginal ultrasound before an abortion can be performed. I'm depressed - the only reason I can imagine for them considering this is to try and force women to change their mind. It's supposed to be in the interests of "full disclosure" but I'm not sure what it discloses - she already knows she's pregnant after all. In a little ray of hope, the same state has existing laws about object rape and this law seems to be trying to compel doctors to stick objects into women without their free consent and a prime candidate for reporting under their own laws. In the other, under some other pretext, they (Arizona this time, joining 9 other states) allowing doctors to not inform women of the medical case for abortion, for example if they have an STD or similar. There are many reasons I'm pleased I don't live in the US. Sorry to those of you that read this and are based there. But denying that women are capable of making rational choices about their pregnancy, that they deserve the proper information without state mandated object rape - that's made its way right to the top of the list. PS I have turned comments off. Not just for this post it is becoming my default because of excessive comment spam (typically I am now receiving >200 spam comments per day). If you wish to comment, please email me and I will post your comments for you. This is not an attempt at censorship (although I expect some people will be offended by this post and I might want to censor the comments) just to stop me spending over an hour per day coping with spam. Thursday, March 8. 2012A month on Google-lite
So it's been a month since I decided to try and move to life without Google, or at least without much Google. A decision that various legal protests about the changes and running rough-shod over EU citizens rights and other things has served to confirm for me.
The month has been relatively smooth in fact - although I have avoided the major nightmare of moving away from gMail. DuckDuckGo rapidly became my preferred search engine, beating out Bing - phew no selling out to Microsoft either! That was easy to do with Alfred, and thanks to a little thing called Glims which lets you do this and quite a bit more, proved not to hard in Safari. Prior to finding Glim options such as hacking the binary code of Safari seemed a little daunting! By the way, DuckDuckGo offers a nice !search syntax too. Searching for !auk Rowling will search amazon UK for that author name for example, or !php explode will search the PHP manual for the explode function. There are many of these available, but a few that I use often and happily. It took me a while to turn off AdWords on my blog, simply because I'd forgotten it was from Google, but it's gone now. It was an interesting moment in how pervasive they have become though. The passive and second-hand consumption of Google content is the remaining thing and not really something I can do much about. I've been sent links to 3 surveys powered by Google (and a few by Survey Monkey too). I've commented on about 10 blogger blogs, although more on either home brewed blogs or WordPress blogs. Reading Zite has linked me to maybe a dozen YouTube videos, but an equal number on Vimeo or other hosts. Shrook has become my preferred RSS feed reader. I went back and looked at NetNewsWire and the like, but Shrook has a nice interface and works smoothly. I don't read RSS feeds on my iPad any more - the Shrook client is a bit too weird there - but I can cope with that in my current working patterns. I did look at a home-built RSS reader. Such a thing is certainly possible, and not even really hard, however it hammers my server given the number of RSS feeds to which I subscribe. Not worth it, because Shrook on the iMac is definitely nice. Living entirely away from Google while living online is practically impossible - it didn't surprise me that much, although I was a bit surprised at some of the places it showed up. However, minimal Google is possible as long as one is willing to invest a little effort. I'm not sure I'll be moving away from gMail just because of the level of nuisance involved but it has to be a possibility and one I might just move towards. One place that did surprise me - I've been having a bit of a go-slow with a couple of things recently so ran some tidy-up utilities (must tidy up the mail database too!) - and one of the things that was recommended was proxy browsing via Google's proxy sites. No thanks - but a bit eye-opening. On a side issue, Apple also launched the new iPad yesterday. A number of experts and technical bloggers were "expecting to be disappointed" and their expectations seem largely to have been met. In part this is because various last minute leaks of the specifications and details are becoming more and more common so there aren't really any big surprises (Mountain Lion caught them off guard, but no hardware components so I guess it's easier to keep it under wraps). Regardless of the low expectations, the length of time it took me to order my shiny new iPad HD suggests that there's a fair old consumer demand. But what do we know? For the record, I didn't go bigger on memory, but didn't bother with the 3G card this time. Tuesday, March 6. 2012Sharing project notes and ideas across the iPad and iMac
I’ve been jotting ideas about a project on both my iMac and my iPad. This is something that lots of people do I’m sure but I’ve not previous found a really good solution. Pages is usable on both platforms but involves firing up iTunes and transferring the document back and forth that way. DropBox is a solution but again it's active and adds extra steps for no obvious reason. Undeterred, I hit DuckDuckGo for ideas and two possible apps popped out at me. One is ThinkBook, the other SimpleNote.
ThinkBook is quirky. I think it might be quirky odd for me and my needs, although in a job I had about a decade ago, if iPads had existed back then, it would have been ideal. It lets you quickly create new collections (in various combinations of ways) of bullet-point type notes and to do items. You can easily track your to do items across multiple projects and do some other smart things too. It makes it easy to copy and paste notes, to do items and the like too, including setting up templates for common things. A lot of this would be great - if my days were dominated by meetings, to do lists, action points and so on it would be ideal. For longer writing though, it’s not so good. SimpleText on the other hand is a pure writing app - a text editor with some options to help you share it. Rather than creating “notes” you create pages to which you add text (without additional formatting). Each page can contain as much or as little as you like. Sharing options include creating a web-page for sharing, pasting into Instapaper and particularly interesting for me, syncing with Scrivener. There is a quick search tool, options to tag notes, and the ability to pin notes to the top of the list while you're working on them actively too, to make managing the list easier. Scrivener is a serious (and not cheap) writing tool. It is really designed as a tool to support writing books, with draft writing and research areas, choices about viewing items as cards on a pin-board or pages in a column, the ability to create layouts and synopses and the like. I follow the blogs of a number of authors and Scrivener is the most popular single bit of software mentioned, although certainly not the only one. It provides tools to track characters and things too. I don’t use it like that (although I have), but it is a great place for writing - well just about anything including the first draft of this post. Since I already use Scrivener in a fashion not dissimilar to SimpleText it is ideal for me. Syncing between the two is simple and fast and so far seems hitch free.† Add in the fact that it’s free too and I was certainly happy. It is an active process but it's done from inside Scrivener - simply go to the File menu, find Sync, Sync with Simple Note, and click OK a couple of times once it's up and running. The first time through there's a little more to do, to identify your project and sign in to your SimpleText account (which is freemium but should work nicely while free). † Having written that, with the next sync I found problems with syncing from Scrivener to SimpleNote and no understanding of why. It appeared to just freeze despite a good connection to the internet, a working SimpleNote account and the like. Since it's all driven from inside Scrivener there was no communication... oops. If you prefer Scrivener’s cork-board and notes interface you might prefer Index Card on the iPad which seems to do the same thing to me. Unfortunately Index Card is not a free app and although I can see the attraction of the interface more on the iPad than on the Mac, I prefer the price point for SimpleText although Index Pad certainly looks prettier. Although the interface is nice, syncing with Scrivener is a bit of pig, involving sending information back and forth through Dropbox. It's not impossible, but it's a nuisance. ThinkBook is cheap and probably worth a look if you juggle multiple projects with different deadlines and need to jot notes in meetings and similar. If you use Scrivener, one (or both) of SimpleText and Index Card are almost certainly worth a look on your iPad. While I was hunting around for these, I also came across many links to Notational Velocity. Notational Velocity is a note-taking and organising tool for the Mac OS. It's designed to be driven from the keyboard, so there are simple short-cuts for most things and no buttons. That's a little odd at first, but right-clicking brings up good context menus with the shortcuts indicated so it it easy enough to learn them. Although it's suggested that you should keep the contents of the notes short (the search tool will work faster with distributed information or so the notes that pass for a manual claim) it's capable of handling editing this document and more. There is also no manual syncing required - just set it up and let it rip, every 5 minutes or so you get a sync to SimpleNote. That's nice because it saves from mentally maintaining version control. It is a different tool to Scrivener - it's a note management tool rather than a book writing tool but since I'm not writing a book that might be better for me. Although NV offers tagging I suspect that's rather pointless unless you can't exist without tagging everything. NV comes with a 3-pane window paradigm: the top pane is a search bar that narrows down the notes based on what you type, the second pane displays the notes that match the term, the final pane displays the active note for editing. Once you select a note the search pane changes to its name. If you want to add a new note you type it into the search bar and hit return. If multiple notes match your search term you can keep extending it or use the up and down arrows to move into the next pane and move up and down through the notes to find the right one. It also supports minimal formatting - italics, bold, strikethrough, indenting, which is fine for writing blog posts and notes. Although I'm not writing a dissertation, I am working with someone who is. Notational Velocity would be my choice for software for researching a dissertation these days - instead of all those cards with notes and references a quick NV note and away you go. That prompted me to look at Windows near equivalents and both ResophNotes and CintaNotes seem like reasonable (and free) choices - judging from their websites rather than any hands on experience of course. ResophNotes is also on the SimpleNote syncing list. Having gone looking for an easy-to-sync app on the iPad I found one easily enough that, despite syncing to a tool I was used to moved me to a new app on the Mac too. I suspect with Notational Velocity the worst thing will be stopping it from taking over. With just a little more formatting (justifying centre and right as well as left) it would be easy to write quotes, emails, letters, invoices and the like here and keep everything in one place. Tempting too.
Sharing project notes and ideas ... Posted by Eloise Pasteur
in Mac reviews at
10:38
Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) Thursday, March 1. 2012Why only one U-turn?
Yesterday the government changed the work experience programme a little, following public protests about it being "no better than slave labour."
That claim is obviously highly emotively written and while not entirely true, it's not entirely false either. The people on the dole are encouraged, not forced it appears, to take on the experience - but receive no additional money and, after the first week, were penalised if they left the scheme for any reason by withdrawal of benefits. Given that leaves them with no income for leaving what was meant to be a voluntary scheme to gain experience, that slavery tag suddenly becomes more reasonable. The scheme has changed so that, barring those dismissed for gross misconduct, those on work experience can leave the scheme throughout its life - a position that the employers basically forced on the government, warning that they would not be part of the scheme (many already were leaving it or had left in fact) without these changes, without the element of coercion. While I'm dubious about the impact of such a scheme in terms of helping people get work (or even get off benefits) (and it's not only me - there are many more too, but they largely argue in more or less similar terms around that graph that shows there's no difference between those on this scheme and others at the 13 week mark), I have no problem with offering such a scheme once it is a voluntary thing. It would be much better if they could find real jobs but that's not really an option that can just be magicked up. It would be good if a reasonable proportion of those on the scheme went into a job with the company they were getting work experience with but times are hard. it would be great if there was a measurable difference of successfully entering the job market but some experience won't hurt even if it doesn't help. But why has this changed while the health reforms and the welfare reforms are being forced through despite strong opposition within parliament and interest groups? Looking at the situation one thing stands out. For the work experience scheme the scheme was falling apart and the people withdrawing for it and saying "We can't do this" were many of the major employers in the UK. These are not only the people implementing the scheme, they are the "wealth creators" the "business leaders" telling the party that fancies itself the party of business to sort its ideas out. The scheme was actually collapsing as employer after employer was withdrawing. This may just rescue it - whether or not it's worth rescuing statistically, politically it would have been a disaster to watch it collapse. The health reforms have massive, and increasing, opposition from those who will be implementing it. Last week saw a crazy "summit" to which only those organisations who were still (at the time) supporting the reforms attending. (Since then at least two more groups of doctors have changed their stance to oppose the changes.) But those against it so far are "only" the medical professions. Most groups of doctors, the nurses, midwives and so on. What is notable is that, while this scheme and the work experience scheme both have those responsible for implementing the changes more and more opposed to the original shape of the schemes, in the former case it is employers, in the latter case, employees. In fact the business interests are still very keen on the scheme. And there's the difference. Cynics, who me?, will wonder why the business interests are still very keen. It can't be anything to do with seeing an opportunity to make a big profit surely? And I'm suddenly left wondering how profit making organisations improve healthcare delivery again. We currently spend about £160 billion on the NHS. If we maintain that level of expenditure how much will get diverted from healthcare spending/management to profit I wonder? And how much will increase the quality of healthcare? One thing that the media are focusing on, possibly rightly, is the difference between protests from the unions directed at the government (familiar to the UK) and protests from small groups directed against the shops and similar implementing the scheme. It's not clear that such tactics can be brought against the NHS reforms but it is an interesting change.
Why only one U-turn? Posted by Eloise Pasteur
in Elections and Politics at
09:53
Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) Wednesday, February 29. 2012A Dangerous Method
This film is touted as a biopic of the relationship between Freud and Jung. And, to some extent, that is true.
It would be much more accurate, and historically pleasing, to say it is a historical film detailing the relationship between Sabina Spielrein and Carl Jung. The film opens with them meeting and him trying (for the first) "Freud's method of psychanalysis" later, of course, renamed to the more euphonic psychoanalysis. It ends when Dr. Spielrein goes back to Russia, leaving Jung in Geneva. Although she may not be as famous as Jung and Freud, as one of the first female psychoanalysts, Jung's mistress for a while, and the person who taught a generation of Russian psychoanalysts she should be better remembered. The twists and turns of this relationship, from patient of Jung and guinea pig of psychoanalysis to medical student and mentee of Jung, to his masochist lover and mistress to their final separation form the real story here - and an interesting, if somewhat odd one. The relationship between Freud and Jung is packaged within this too - in a way that makes a great story but seems to be reasonably accurate as well. Although Jung is using Freud's method, he feels unable to ask his advice on the case at first. That changes and the two become professional colleagues entering almost into a master-disciple relationship. That relationship eventually falls apart (of course) over a variety of difference of opinion and ethics. There are many chats and letters exchanged throughout this relationship which lays out these differences clearly, and as you might expect from a biopic with a deal of respect for each of them. From what I know on the subject, intellectually I'm with Jung that Freud was too obsessed by sex and denied other driving forces in the psyche and the fact that Freud expressed the view that the role of the psychiatrist is to show the person what they are, not to attempt to offer a path to healing and change is frightening. However the film presents Freud in a fashion where, although I disagree with him still, I have more sympathy for some of his need to distance himself from Jung. I certainly felt sorry for him in the last shot we see of him in the film. Biopics from a century ago might not be your thing. But the three great actors in the roles bring this rather critical period in the development of modern psychoanalysis to life in a film which although it lasts over an hour and a half feels remarkably short. According to Wikipedia the film originally had different actors intended for all three roles. I have to say I don't think any of them would have carried it off as well as the trio we got. Serendipity working for Jung I guess. Friday, February 17. 2012Cyborg Rat 7 Contagion review
My trackpad, which I loved, packed up recently. Although it worked wonderfully while it was going well, when it started dying it was really annoying because it would drop in and out of connection all the time.
So, I looked at trackballs and mice. The Cyborg Rat 7 I'd seen reviewed and the price was right so I thought I'd give it a go. It claims to be the most configurable mouse in the world and although it's very configurable it could be more so. You can adjust the effective length of the mouse (that's nice, and you get quite fine control to make that comfortable unless (I suspect) you have tiny hands. You can change grip and the width to make your thumb rest comfortably. I would like, given all of this, the ability to "explode" the standard front end of the mouse (left and right buttons, scroll wheel) because my fingers rest a little further apart than they expect, particularly after so long using the trackpad (which encouraged a slightly more spread touch). There are also two extra buttons - one to change "mode" and one to affect the responsiveness of the mouse. The thumb also gets three buttons and an extra scroll wheel to play with. That's the hardware configuration, well, nearly. The mouse also comes with 5 extra 5g weights. Playing with them took a little while too, but I've found with 15g the mouse feels comfortable and responsive to me. The software - you can't change the functions of the finger buttons, but the 3 thumb buttons and the thumb scroll wheel left and right can be programmed. The "modes" give you 15 different effects for this - I have an SL mode, an EVE mode and a browsing mode. EVE mode has click-D for jump, click-T for fast targeting and "hit F1, F2, F3" for shooting targets. Browsing mode has reload page, open in a new tab, open new blank tab, browse back, browse forward as the five choices. I don't currently use it, but you have choices like "latchable" keys (so you click once and it stays "locked" until you press it again) and the like in here. In addition to this, you can set up to 4 levels of responsiveness - this is the thing I've had to play with most - so that moving the mouse by some distance moves the mouse pointer by bigger or smaller amounts. I've now settled on something so I can keep my arm basically still and move the mouse with just fingers to get a full screen response but still feel comfortable with the control and clicking buttons comfortably. But if you use the mouse differently it's easy enough to change. This is a mouse for geeks, but actually, now it's set up it's a joy to use in almost every way. It does feel comfortable. The extra clicks from the thumb controls are nice and switching between modes is easy enough that it is starting to feel natural. I wouldn't do it on the fly, but it's comfortable to think "Playing EVE, click to blue" or "Browsing, click to purple" now. Very enjoyable.
Cyborg Rat 7 Contagion review Posted by Eloise Pasteur
in Mac reviews at
11:07
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