24-31April2011 :: This Week

01May2011 [weekly]

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• iPad

• A shortened work week, with no reduction in work, of course, so things got too crazy for much reading and writing, but caught a few movies through the week.
• Watched Johnnie To's Sparrow (Man jeuk) (imdb); it's a curious piece — a rom-com made by a guy who makes gangster movies, with four common pickpockets falling for a woman in unusual circumstances; it's okay, but confused, so neither the rom-com nor the gangster flick parts of the whole are particularly strong, getting by just on the slightly quirky premise; parts of it are beautifully staged and shot though, and I especially loved the final ten minutes or so, all slow motion kinda-fighting amidst falling rain, lit with spots as on a dark stage.
• Watched Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (imdb); a surprisingly funny and clever take on time travel, with a bunch of ordinary characters one warms to quickly, and a delightfully absurd premise, with three guys stumbling into a time leak, repeatedly, in the toilets of their local pub.
• Watched Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (imdb); it's interesting if only to see where Tarantino's come from, but on the whole a rather boring movie, a heist flick post the heist, shot in the style of the French (and later Hong Kong) New Wave, without the frenetic pace one associates with Tarantino's later works.
• Watched Robin Williams' Weapons of Self Destruction (imdb); only mildly funny unfortunately, not living up to its potential, with the politics scaled back and Williams' delivery often just ranting; I find he's funnier in an interview setting, given the opportunity to flow on a topic, and to make mistakes, but he seems to be less risky and more formulaic in this setting.
• Watched Johnny English (imdb); dumb, but a good spoof; upsetting in comparison to the recent Get Smart (imdb) though, which I think does a better job.
• Caught an episode of Detroit 1-8-7 (imdb); while I'm not into police procedurals enough to really get into this, it seems great, with a cast full of real, flawed people, made up of men and women and a whole range of ethnicities, without being patronising; shame it's not going to last beyond the first season.
• Having been using the iPad another week it's worked its way deep into my digital life; it's curious people talk about it as post-PC, because while there's an element of truth to that, I've found it doesn't so much replace the PC as it does paper; all week I've avoided pen-and-paper, and I've been able to carry the tablet around and to meetings for note-taking and not had to wonder whether I should be carrying the laptop to avoid re-entering notes; my use has made the question of sync-ing data more important, because it's ridiculous having to think about sync-ing both my iPhone and iPad to my laptop, in order (and one would have to be done twice) depending on where I've updated my calendar, but I've made the switch to Google Calendar to work around that, and Dropbox helps in its way to move files around — it's great that I can download a file in Mobile Safari and just push it across to Dropbox so I can pick it up on my laptop later!
• Zite on the iPad is also fascinating; I'd previously mentioned Flipboard, and while it's a cool way to read, it's mostly only showing me things I can already find; Zite, though, shows me things I wouldn't necessarily see; all I had to do was tell it my Twitter handle, and it's gone and worked out who I follow, and drawn some conclusions from that about what I'm interested in, then it shows me articles from those topics, culled, I think, from a degree of separation away from the people I directly follow; this is great, because rather than showing me things I'm already seeing, it's showing me things I'm interested in, with a basic thumbs-up/down system and some topic preferences to pull more or less of particular items; it's (a) a little bit creepy just how well it picks my tastes from my Twitter handle (because my follows aren't that explicit), and (b) what people have been promising the internet would deliver for over a decade now (and I wonder how much of that is enabled by the context provided by a reading device like the iPad?).
• My Instapaper archive for this week (what a great way to read! I scan through Google Reader when I have short breaks and push articles to Instapaper to read when I have time) includes Khoi Vinh's My Column on Columns, a great article that touches on how we read on the web, and the design differences between print and screen, all particularly of note now that people are bringing magazines and newspapers to the iPad.