Status-Q

Scott Kirsner: IM is here. RU prepared?. See also John’s Observer column.

Anyone with an academic background who also knows Tolkien will appreciate
Dave Pritchard’s The
Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?.

John Naughton forwarded this
to me originally, but I found it, with lots of other rather good stuff, on
Danny Yee’s Humour
Collection. Tolkien enthusiasts who are also familiar with Microsoft’s
operating systems might enjoy One OS to rule them all.

Have you ever noticed how often characters in films say things twice? It’s generally used to end a scene, along the lines of:

Frodo: I’m glad you’re back, Gandalf!

Gandalf: So am I, Frodo Baggins.

[thoughtful pause]
So am I.

[Fade to black]

It’s the modern equivalent of Shakespeare’s rhyming couplets, and it happens all the time. No matter how realistic the movie dialogue in general, people still repeat themselves like this. Try it in real life to make yourself sound more like a movie star.

Actually, of course, you’ll just sound silly. It only works at the end of a scene before the lights go out, so it’s a little trick, perhaps, best saved for your deathbed, to make your last words stick in people’s minds.

Just make sure you don’t misjudge the length of that thoughtful pause.

Splendid! Nottingham City Council has started ‘fining’ its staff for incorrect use of the apostrophe. A marvellous idea.

If only they would do the same thing in schools…

Now, I can think of dozens of fun uses for a CerfCube!
Weblogs are great. I glanced at weblogs.com and picked a blog almost at
random (Frank McPherson’s
PocketPCHow2 log, in this case) and it led me to something largely
unconnected with PocketPCs but which might be very useful in my work. Fun,
eh!

I’ve just come back from a fascinating talk by the illustrator Quentin
Blake. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Quentins (a rare plural,
there) are always worth listening to, but this talk was a particular gem.
His book Words and Pictures is definitely going on my shopping list. There’s a lot more to illustration than simply drawing pictures.

I love the insight that you get from this sort of talk, for the same reason
that I love watching DVDs that have a director’s commentary as one of the
soundtracks. Some people tell me that films aren’t meant to be watched that
way; that you spoil them by over-analysing them. It’s like saying that
scientists who understand botany can’t appreciate flowers.

I disagree. Knowing a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes makes me
realise how much I take for granted, how much more there is to the creative
process than I would pick up as a casual observer. The more levels there
are to life, the more interesting it is. I can still enjoy a Hitchcock
film while knowing about some of the camera tricks he had to use to achieve
the result. I can choose to forget the lower levels. The whole point of art
is that you know it’s an illusion, but you are willing to be taken in by it.
Perhaps, the more aware you are of the mechanics, the more satisfying is the
willing suspense of disbelief?

Sometimes I put things in here just so I know where I can find them later. I’m having to create a lot of presentations at the moment, and I was thinking of Tom Stewart’s Fortune article Friends Don’t Let Friends Use PowerPoint. It’s an oldish article and it took me a little while to find it, but it’s here now! Worth a read if you missed it when it came out, as is the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address which it mentions.

(Often weblogs are really just shared, commented, bookmark lists.)

The biggest problem with the otherwise wonderful
Radio software is finding coherent tutorial documentation for it. But Emmanuel Décarie’s Frontier Newbie Toolbox is the nearest thing I’ve found. Even though it was written some time ago and is about the related product Frontier, much of it is applicable to Radio too.

I’ve recently been trying to help a couple of different people get on to the web who have never used it in any form until now. It’s amazing just how easy it is to take certain bits of knowledge for granted in this situation.

So I wrote down my one page guide to The Web – the Absolute Basics in the hope that it might be of use to somebody else and their grandmother.

BBC News: Don Norman likes the new iMac. So do I, having played with it a little bit this week. A lovely bit of design.

Because of this, before the year is out, a very large number of people will have full Unix machines in their living rooms. I would never have believed it 18 months ago.

BBC article:

Passenger ‘stuck’ in lavatory: The woman used the toilet, but pushed the flush button before standing up.

To her horror, she realised that the powerful vacuum action had got her in its grip.

[from Adam Curry’s weblog]

Want a different view of the movies? Try Mr. Cranky’s Reviews.