Reel Reviews

Ex Machina -- This is a good movie...just not as good a movie as the breathless hype that surrounded it made it out to be. It does make you think, mostly about how you would react--and interact--in just such a situation. The film also makes a point of keeping things ambivalent enough that you don't really know if Oscar Isaac's inventor is a villain, or not...or, for that matter, if the AI is a villain or not, a murkiness about the subject that mirrors the real life debate on the seemingly inevitable rise of the robot world. I guess we'll find out that answer eventually, but you're not going to get it here. Still, I'd say this one's worth a look, as a change of pace if nothing else.

Clever That Way

Recently, my car started having a little problem with its radiator. That little problem being a crack along the top of the casing, which is allowing water/steam and coolant to escape the system and putting my car in danger of overheating if I run it too long without refilling the reservoir.

Unfortunately, I've been way too busy to actually go and get my radiator replaced (nor do I want to spend that money at this moment), so refilling it every other day is the current jury-rig maintenance option. But I found myself with a problem the first time I tried to refill the coolant reservoir: the jug containing the coolant was big and heavy, and the fluid came out in an inconsistent, glugging gush, causing me to spill almost as much coolant as I put into the reservoir.

Obviously, I needed a funnel--but, again, no time to go get one at the auto parts store. (Plus I'm not at home right now, so don't have access to anything in my kitchen I could use, just someone else's stuff which I mustn't ruin on maintaining my car.) What to do?

As was long ago observed, necessity is the mother of invention. I used to keep a very clean car, at least on the interior, but those days are long gone; my car's interior is usually home to a cornucopia of trash these days. And among that trash: a cardboard french fry container from one of my too frequent trips to the drive thru. As you've no doubt observed, those fry boxes are collapsible, and to that end they have cuts and holes in them in order to make them fold flat, particularly holes in the bottom corners. They also tend to have a tapered shape.

You see what I'm getting at? A french fry sleeve, sitting on the floor of my car, became an improvised funnel for pouring the coolant into the reservoir. It worked quite well, and cut down on the spillage enormously--though the width of the sleeve still left something to be desired for total efficiency, since some of the pour would inevitably spill through the other openings.

Fortunately, my car's trash collection also contained a plastic water bottle--one with a nice long tapered neck and a top opening that was just the right size to fit the reservoir's mouth. Once that bottle met with the razor scraper (kept in the car for cleaning sticky stuff off the windshield), I was able to cut the bottle in half and Macgyver a great little improvised funnel that does the trick perfectly.

It would have been nice to have come up with my solution from the start and not spilled any of the coolant in the first place. But it's important to recognize that, if you don't come up with a solution right away, it's still important to keep trying to solve the problem, because maybe you will get it right on the second or third try. And, of course, it's also nice to crow a little bit about being "clever that way," if you know what I mean.

Sour Notes

I don't remember things very well these days, for various reasons. That's why I like having the ability to jot down notes when they pop into my mind. Keeping the ideas that come to me by recording them on the fly, or using a simple note pad to keep handy information handy, is really useful to me.

Thus, I've found the iOS app Notes very useful these last few years, first on my iPod touch, and recently on my iPhone. What I really liked was the fact that every time I synced my device, my latest notes would automatically update into Apple's Mail application. Changes to old notes would similarly update onto the computer, so that new info or ideas that I had had while on the go would then be live and available when I sat down to work at the laptop.

Well, screw all that, said the increasingly clueless Apple. A few weeks ago I made the grotesque mistake of "upgrading" my macbook's operating system to OS X Yosemite, which is turning out to be perhaps the most hideously awful iteration of the Mac environment ever. And among its many abortions is the truly bizarre revision that makes Notes (now in its own separate desktop app) virtually impossible to sync. I've tried everything indicated by Apple's help documentation, short of enabling iCloud--no, I don't want you to have complete access to my devices; screw you and your shitty iCloud--and nothing will get my damn notes to update.

I don't usually agree with the plain, on the face of it, overly simplistic analysis that most folks tend to wallow in. But with Apple, all those people who say that things have really gone downhill since Steve Jobs died may be on to something. Notes was fine as it was; I would enter a note on my phone, and--bam--it would just appear there on my laptop after a sync, and I'd never have to think about it. This seems like a really simple thing to accomplish; hell, it didn't even need to be accomplished--it was already done. All they had to do was not screw it up...and sure enough, they screwed it up. Yosemite's other flaws--slow performance and memory hogging, poor visual design, program updating issues--are bad enough; screwing up a minor program like Notes, which was already perfect the way it was...well, there are reasons why I've long been off the Apple bandwagon, far enough off that I have had no inclination for a long time to buy any Mac hardware other than after market. But now I'm starting to consider the possibility of just saying screw the whole thing and finding a new computing paradigm. Windows remains dreadful, but...Linux, perhaps? Has it come to that? Maybe.

Apple used to be the greatest thing ever in computing and its associated implementations. I stayed with them through the dark days and never really wavered in my belief that their stuff was the best that was out there. But Yosemite is just plain shit, and these days Apple is looking moldy and full of worms. It may be just a matter of time before everyone concludes the thing is simply rotten to the core.

Catching Up

I went out and finally did it--I got a smartphone. In my case, an iPhone 5c, in a lovely lurid green color (high visibility). I've had it since Thursday. So far, I'm finding it at both delightful and slightly frustrating.

The good:

• more space (16GB vs my old 8GB iPod)--more music available to me, space for all photos, and room to grow
• more features (the biggie: constant connectivity via the network; slightly lower down the list: a better camera, and more newer apps available to me)
• combining my music player with my phone (not trivial; I've missed plenty of calls in the past by not being able to hear my phone due to headphones and music via my iPod--now, of course, my phone is my iPod)

The bad:

• its a slippery little devil (this has been a pox on the iPhone from its first incarnation, and it hasn't changed yet--purposefully, of course, in order to prop up the secondary market for accessories like cases)
• a more baffling interface (iOS 7 is not as user friendly as the earlier operating systems; at first I found using it confusing and non-intuitive, plus the visual design is not as friendly and inviting)
• loss of some settings/data (several of my apps did not transfer their data; I had to restore some from backups, and others needed direct input of info; plus using iCloud [since disabled] killed some features like syncing my contacts directly--not good)

But, as with the ACA, among other things, I'm sure this is a thing that will iron itself out with time. I'm happy to have joined the 21st century (or at least its second decade) with my communications device, at last. I gratefully accept your congratulations. Selah.

Search me?

I'm bitter. As usual. And, as usual, I'm bitter because something in this world does not do the very thing it says that it is going to do. Of course.

I'm talking about this blog. One of the reasons I started porting over my old blog's movie review pages was that I wanted to have that database of movie capsules available and--wait for it--searchable, something I did not have over on my own, self-produced web space. Blogger lets you add a search box to your site, and it states somewhere in the mumbo-jumbo that with the search field, the whole web including your own blog is then searchable. Except for the part where NO, IT'S NOT. I've had several of these Reel Reviews posts on this site for quite a few weeks now, perhaps even a couple of months in the earliest cases, and I still get no results if I search for anything from this site that's in those posts, namely film titles or specific actors and such.

This is for shit. It should not take so long for the contents of this or any other blog to be searchable via this host's own functions. They're queering my deal here. And making this whole exercise nothing more than a routine of navel gazing. Unacceptable.

crApple

I have an iPod. Two of them in fact. And I have long been an Apple partisan, having been the owner of a series of Macintosh desktop systems. But I'm getting fed up.

My iPod Touch is--or rather, was--a delightful piece of technology. But then it took a swan dive into the toilet, and this unscheduled dip had, shall we say, a negative effect on it. The screen turned dopey, and no longer displays everything in clear, sharp, vibrant tones. But it's still readable, for the most part. And the speaker/headphone interface wound up screwed up; the music being played would come out of the speaker even when the headphones were plugged in, thus decreasing the volume going into the ears and rendering the volume control non-operable. Not great, but the machine retained some measure of its functionality. Apps still worked, info kept being stored, the music would play, albeit in a crippled state.

Then Apple released an update to the system software. And ever since that update installed on the Touch, there have been issues. The music volume, already problematic, now has developed a habit of going schizo right in the middle of playing, with the usual result being the iPod stops playback by itself. This renders listening to the sounds frustrating, at best.

So I tried to perform a restore on my Touch. The panel in iTunes clearly says, if you're having problems with your iPod, try to restore it. So I did. Except, when I did, the computer informed me that "there was a problem." The upshot being, it couldn't restore my iPod to its last known settings. Hence, some of my personal info--app content and settings, mostly--got lost in the process. (Oddly, not all; just most of it.) Boom. Gone. Several months worth of checklists, high scores, bookmarks, etc. down the drain.

You may ask, well, what do you expect? You're Touch is broken. Yes, it is, but it was not functionally broken. It still worked, and showed no sign of not working before the software update. Being dinged up should not be a death sentence for a piece of tech. My old iPod mini--the one I now use for music listening--has gone through many a hell of knocks and drops, and it survives quite nicely and does what it always has done. And I've heard stories of other pieces of equipment that have been through a lot--some even through the washing machine--and still came out working. What's up with the Touch that it's so fragile?

Plus, remember, it wasn't the brief toilet swim that knocked it out of semi-working condition. It was limping along, but usable, before the update. It's a software issue, not a hardware issue. And it's further complicated by another software issue: those backups iTunes runs every time you link up your iPod apparently aren't worth shit. Because when the time comes to restore...oops, can't do it.

This episode--along with other recent news--only increases my sense that Apple more and more doesn't give a shit about the quality of its products. It only cares about getting them publicity and selling them.

And that has me thinking about the future. At some point, I may need to seriously reconsider my choice for a computer. And a personal music player. And whatever else the future has to offer. Because Apple is not making the grade. And now, for the first time ever, I'd have to say that if I were asked by someone on the fence, someone looking to buy a first computer or phone or whatever, I would not automatically recommend anything Steve Jobs has had his hands on.

Think different indeed.