Archive for February, 2005
Friday evening: Had very nice dinner at Ingunn’s - chicken risotto and yummy mascarpone cream dessert. A few glasses of wine, a finger of cognac to finish off. Woke up the next morning absolutely wrecked. Horrible day spent recovering. Recovered enough to get showered and cleaned up by six p.m. I’m blaming the half-bottle of portugese white wine I brought along.
Saturday evening to sunday morning: Shelly’s birthday - so lots of lovely caribbean chicken and dalpuri and rice. The left-overs were delicious too - perfect late night snack. Jens had enough rum, cointreau and vodka to feed a company of twenty - so the ten of us had lots and lots and lots of drinks. Fruity drinks. Jens had no mixers to speak of, but several kilos of fresh fruit, plenty of ice and a blender that worked wonderfully. Kiwi+Vodka was great - very green and quite sweet and healthy. Mango+Strawberry=yummy!
The less said about the minty frankensteins monster of a drink he put together shortly before passing out, the better. It looked like a lawnmower had collided with a vodka-bottle. And tasted about the same.
The next day: no headache. Slightly unsettled feeling, but apart from that today has been fine - lounging around in my underwear, watching zombies chase Milla Jovowhich (or was it the other way round?).
So, in conclusion: Fruity Drinks = good. White Wine = bad.
February 28th, 2005
Two movies this week: The Aviator and Comme Une Image.
The Aviator was a butt-numbing three hours., but really worth it. I think I checked my watch twice. DiCaprio is like a young Brando in this. You can’t stop watching him. The meeting between Hughes and Hepburn is great, and the scene with the rest of the Hepburn family is like something out of “Meet the Parents” - really funny. The Aviator manages to communicate several things really well: Hughes’ gradully encroaching madness (Scorcese gets to have fun with extreme camera angles and impressionist lighting towards the end), the solid aeronautic insight he had, and the risks he took while turning the airline industry upside down.
The dogfight sequence he films in the early part of the film is quite breath-taking. The way the audience is communicated the problem with the static dogfight shots is great - the audience gets to see the footage, agree that it looks boring, and then later on gets to sit in the middle of the dog-fight, just the way Howard Hughes intended it.
Comme Une Image was a proper french film. I came out feeling very intellectual. The actors did a superb job - the roles aren’t terribly sympathetic. The father is an arrogant prick. The chubby daughter is a self-centered angsty teenage diva. The daughter is a mirror of the father - both are incapable of self-reflection and change. As in life, the characters make mistakes, fumble opportunities, are stupid. More interestingly, they don’t really change over the course of the film. At the end of the story both father and daughter are still insufferable. Neither admits to being in wrong. But there is at least a ray of hope for the daughter.
Best seen with a bottle of wine nearby. We had bleu-cheese pizza before the movie, and we were all salivating as the people on the screen uncorked one bottle after another.
February 18th, 2005
My favorite pregnant co-worker just sent me a text message: one boy, one girl. The young Miss is seven minutes older than her little brother.
Congratulations to all concerned!
February 8th, 2005
Jef Raskin’s zoomable interface demo is cute. The idea that interfaces should leverage human aptitudes (in this case geographic spatial sense) is a good one, but good interfaces should also compensate for their deficiencies. Spatial sense in humans is reinforced by what fighter pilots call situational awareness. This awareness comes from being immersed in an environment. The zooming leads to tunnel vision, something that easily leads to becoming lost and confused.
A slight fish-eye effect might compensate. Fish-eye distortions have long been popular when dealing with the tension between focus and context. The extreme close-up view needs to have some way for the user to build awareness of the surroundings. This is even more important when the zoom is further constrained by being displayed on a small square display. On a larger display you might be able to get away with less of a distortion…
February 7th, 2005
Have been working twelve to sixteen hour days for the past week, getting ready for our first internal showing. Lots of check-ins happening (the p4 review daemon can hardly keep up) and not all the code quite up to scratch - getting everyone to go back and fix their “temporary” hacks will be a challenge.
But first, the entire company is decamping to wintery and chilly Lillehammer for a fifteenth anniversary bash. I’m really looking forward to seeing the reactions to some of the new features - our cow-orkers tend to be fairly sophisticated users, since they live with the product day in and day out. The post-briefing questions will tell me a lot about how well we have done.
But man - there is so much still left to do… I don’t see the twelve hour days stopping for a while - especially not if I want to build a couple of cool new mini-features in as well…
Stupid brain - won’t stop coming up with cool new ideas. Here - have some whiskey. Now let’s have some quiet between the ears, so I can sleep. Or I’m getting the tequila…
February 4th, 2005