Weddings Not to Crash: Rachel Getting Married

Possible Spoiler (on hover).

I say "possible spoiler" because the plot is essentially revealed in the first shot of the film to anyone paying attention. We then spend two hours dwelling on that obvious point.

The film would be more interesting if the characters were at all sympathetic. Defenders of the film might expect me to empathize with Anne Hathaway's Kym, likely mistaking attraction for empathy. Kym's the fuck-up, which might be endearing to some, because, well, we're all fuck-ups in one way or another. But mere humanity is hardly enough to earn my interest. Ken Lay was a fuck-up, but I'm not on pins and needles for his docudrama.

Characters neither sympathetic, nor entertaining. Add to that a lack of any novel or meaningful message and you get a film that feels purposeless. I suppose you could get a "Don't Do Drugs" message from the film, but the film doubles back on that a few times to appear more nuanced. In shooting for something slightly deeper than an after school special, it somehow misses, and achieves less.

The one interesting part of the film was the setting: a bohemian wedding populated by random musicians, friends of the musician groom to be. I found myself constantly craning my neck to look at what was going on behind the action, ultimately a bad sign for a film.

If there's one major message to take from Rachel Getting Married, it's that handycams are overused. If you want to create the image of documentary honesty, try using craft sometime. Rack focus and call it a day. Maybe shake a camera in the beginning of one shot, to create the illusion of a handycam, without actually ever touching one. You should especially avoid this desperate grab at verite if you're Married to the Mob's Jonathan Demme. Nobody's really buying it from you.

The handycam trend is disturbing, and it's not just limited to Beloved's own Jonathan Demme. It comes off like an Opera singer using Auto Tone or a typograhper using Arial. Auto tone and Arial are both wildly popular. But when a professional uses either technique, it screams at the audience "You aren't worth my time."

Maybe Rachel Getting Married isn't worth yours.

The Great Idea Embargo

Some have wondered why you can't view full episodes of the Daily Show online outside the US. I suppose this is likely related to DVD region codes and why I can't access BBC television via internet in the states: silly restrictions on the trade of culture across borders.

Most states maintain cultural quotas, which limit how much film, television and other media moves into the country. This creates scattered worldwide release dates and enormous import markup for media.

Perhaps most perniciously, it keeps everyone around the world culturally isolated.

It's as if everyone decided, "Well, we'll buy/sell their clothing, but we don't want to actually listen to anything they have to say."

If we trade anything throughout the world, shouldn't we start with ideas?

Auto Industry Relief/Bailout

At the risk of rehashing, there are some interesting videos to watch about the Auto Industry.

Jon Stewart argues that the Auto Industry should be supported:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Autoerotic Explanation

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

The folks over at Zakaria's GPS (Tom Friedman, Niall Ferguson, Anne-Marie Slaughter) think we should cut them loose:

(Part 2 is here).

Brin's Rule

I just realized something as I tried to find something on Hulu.

Brin's Rule: No matter how good you think your internal site navigation is, a Google search from outside is more efficient.

Page's Corollary: This holds even when your primary site navigation is a search powered by Google.

File Names

Ever notice how you can't use a question mark in a filename under NTFS¹, but ¿ is perfectly legal?

Does the upside down question mark see a lot of use on its own?

Other legal filename characters on my system:
Smiley: ☺
House: ⌂
Integral: ∫
Sun: ☼
Gender signs: ♀♂
Suits: ♠♣♥♦
Musical notes: ♪♫
Greyscale Shades: ░▒▓
Triangles: ▲▼
Arabic Place of Sajdah: ۩

Sure, the question mark and colon are reserved because they are associated with system commands.

This wasn't a very thorough list of exclusions though. Unicode 266A, the eighth note (♪), results in abnormal behavior, but it's still allowed.²

There are some names where question marks and colons still thrive: books, film and music. As our filesystems grow increasingly cluttered with media files, you'd think someone would want to address this issue, if only for all those hapless fans of "Who's Harry Crumb_"

Maybe the workarounds haven't occurred to anyone. You'd think that a system font could reserve a little unicode space somewhere for system friendly versions of colons and question marks. That's a pretty jury-rigged solution, surely if anyone actually bothered to think about this, far better solutions could be found in under an hour.

¹ Maybe Mac/Linux handle this better. If my Ubuntu machine wasn't currently a giant paperweight, I might know.

² Make a file with the eighth note character in the middle of the title. Navigate to that directory via command line, and type "dir" to see this in action. The filename will spill over the date at the beginning of the line.

Personal TV Guide

This seems handy.

In the html section, they recommend a format for their links! They are trying to get linkers to bump up their search engine rankings! They are searchacking by proxy, and I will not play their game.
...
Oh, fine: TV Guide.

AdBlock on Chrome

I've been using Chrome more and more over the last few months. It's been a battle of speed vs. features for me. When FF is loaded up with a dozen extensions, its features clearly outstrip Chrome, but it slips in speed.

I stripped out a bunch of my extensions, and I'm down to these "essentials":

• AdBlock Plus
Ads have grown increasingly obnoxious on the internet, this is a good way to take back some control.
• Delicious Bookmarks
I bookmark anything on the internet I might want to reference later. It has become easier to build a delicious collection of personal links than to store all of those in one browser.
• Download Statusbar
The built-in download window for FF is kinda obnoxious, because it resolves something via a popup that could otherwise be resolved in the same window. Chrome defaults to providing download info in a statusbar, but allows you to pop out a window for more info if you choose. The Google statusbar could still be more informative (speed info and pause/restart/multithreading options would be ideal).
• Google Gears
Lets me use Google Docs offline. No doubt this will become better as more webapps use this to allow offline access. No doubt Google will include support for this extension in Chrome very quickly.
• Linkification
Converts text links into a clickable links. Saves me about a dozen copy/pastes every month.
• OpenDownload
Restores the "open when complete" option to the FF download dialog, a feature that was stripped from all users sometime during FF's paternalistic security freakout.
• PDF Download
Keeps you from accidentally clicking through to a PDF link and losing control of your browser for a minute while it loads. Chrome's architecture should make this less of an issue, as each tab is handled in a separate process.
• Repagination Lets you view multi-part articles in one giant page. This is currently dead, but is very handy for those obnoxious sites that put out 25 part articles with a short blurb and photo on each page. Currently dead, and needs some enterprising developer to make a version that supports 3.0.4.
• Tab Mix Plus
Includes tab features that should probably be included in FF by default, like an "undo" for recently closed tabs.
• Ubiquity
An addon by Moz devs that allows quick interaction with website APIs, and stands to completely revolutionize browsing.

Some of these features would be redundant in Chrome, some might not make it for a long time. But I'm still very excited to hear Chrome will support Adblocking and other extensions soon, and hope that Chrome's architecture helps it stay fast while becoming feature rich.