Solitude 

Yes, it’s another obligatory birthday post (see last year’s and the one from 2003 for examples). Last year I said 21 was an interesting age and that it’d be a good year. I was very right.

It’s been a very busy year, but also an enjoyable one. I’ve learned more about the world, people, friendship, the real world (come back, student life, all is forgiven!) and everything else in the last year than I have in any other period of my life. I guess that’s growing up.

New friends, new challenges, new job, a new band (with new drumkit), and new world view.

Then there’s the old. For the first time on a birthday, people have been calling me old (I’m only 22!). I almost feel bad about calling Matt old all those times… then I realised he’ll always be old. Also, I know Derek has this fun to go through in a year or two, so I’m sure there’s some karmic balance between those two with me in the middle.

It’s been busy. I can’t remember a time when I had so much stuff going on. Since starting my job in July, it seems like I’ve been doing stuff pretty much every day and night. The one or two nights a week I’m in, I’m generally too tired to do anything worthwhile, hence the post rate and my creative output in general dropping. Things seem to be settling a bit now, so hopefully that’ll change.

I’m not going to make any predictions of where I’ll be, or what I’ll be doing this time next year. This last year has taught me that if you just go with things and take risks and chances, you’ll end up better off. Fortune favours the brave and all that.

Anyway, I’ll finish with a verse from a song that’s being going through my head all day:

Another day down, it’s another month gone, God knows how many shows, Yeah we still keep moving on and on, But that’s rock’n'roll I ’spose.

We’ll see how that stands in a year.

Anyone who uses linux or unix-like systems will, at some point, shoot themselves in the foot with rm and *. I, after several years of being careful, just joined the glorious ranks of people who messed up by executing the following in my cygwin home directory:

rm notes *

The space between notes and * was unintentional. Ah the fun.

You think my last post on the design of Lotus Notes was all there was wrong with it? You’ve never even seen it have you? Remember we’re looking at v5 so these bugs gaping holes in design may have been fixed later. Four more:

• Back and Forward - I have no idea what kind of rationale is behind the back and forward navigational buttons in Notes, but it does not conform to our Earth logic. Instead of having a back button that sensibly means go back within the current context (i.e. the current tab), it goes back through different tabs. This is particularly infuriating in browser mode, where there is not necessarily any other easy way of going back a page. It’s also easy for it to just get stuck and throw away the history, stranding you where you are. Good move. The forward button? Well, it doesn’t work so much. It goes forwards when it wants to, but not always.
• Attach - The Attach icon only works if a new email message body is in focus. If you’re in any of the header fields, you can’t attach things. This might be remotely excusable if being out of the correct context disabled the attach icon but it doesn’t. Instead, clicking it produces an error. Oh yes, and a minor point: it uses the wrong verb for attachments. You do not “create” an attachment, you “add” it or “attach” it.
• Scroll Bar Sizing - Notes gets it’s scroll bar usage hugely wrong. Think of the scroll bar, from top to bottom, as representing the length of the associated document. The scroll block (the bit you can grab to drag up and down) should be proportional on the bar to the size of a single page of the document in the view port. So, if a document takes up 2 pages (i.e. it’s twice the size of the view port) then the scroll block should be half the size of the scroll bar. This sets up all sorts of great visual cues and feedback. Notes ignores that. It sets it to the minimum size allowed. As a side effect of this, it also doesn’t implement smooth scrolling; it’s perfectly possible to drag the scroll block down a bit and have it snap straight back to where it was previously. Oh yeah, and scroll wheels don’t work either. Kudos to the Lotus team for ignoring a really simple and highly effective bit of standard design.
• Crash - If the program crashes (which it will), you must do an OS restart if you want to open Notes again. So, it messes up and you have to restart everything. That’s failing gracefully for you. This will happen when you’re running several server processes and waiting for an email to help sort an important issue.

That’ll do for now.

Anyone ever used Lotus Notes? No need for hands in the air, I’ll pick you out from the gentle sobbing. I feel your pain. Notes has got to be one of the worst pieces of crap software I’ve ever seen in terms of design. It is woefully poor. Here are 4 of my favourite headscratchers:

• Alerts that aren’t - Sometimes you’ll set a reminder in notes, say for an important meeting at 4pm. A sensible program would tell you 5-10 minutes in advance, thus providing a “reminder” that you have something to do fairly soon. Not so with Notes. Instead it tells you half an hour after the event begins, by default. Genius; you’re so late that there is no longer any point in going. Thanks for streamlining my life like that, Notes.
• Save - The Save button often, but not always, means “Save and Exit”, kicking you out of the document after every save. This is despite the frequent inclusion of a separate Save and Exit button.
• Standardised Exiting - Instead of doing the same thing that every other Windows App has done since 95, the Lotus team seem to have thought they know better. If you’re writing something and try to exit without having saved it, a normal app will ask you if you want to save before exiting and provide 3 buttons: Yes, No and Cancel. Everyone who has used Windows knows what these do. Notes provides a slightly different solution: 4 radio buttons labelled “Save and Send”, “Send only”, “Save only” and “Discard Changes”, combined with “Ok”, “Cancel” and “Help” buttons. With this bizarre bit of UI, I can see why they included that last button.
• Mixed Metaphor - What UI form component am I describing: rectangular, white background and black text, a grey button-like square flush righ with a symbol in it that looks like it provides the main action? If you said a dropdown, you’d be absolutely right. Except in Notes. Here it describes a focussed tab. You will click that symbol at least a half dozen times without thinking about it, finding it exits that tab.

I should say that these all come from version 5. I have no idea if they’ve been fixed in newer versions, but that they happened at all is fairly shameful. There are another few obvious ones to come. Note that these are just the things that really bug me, not the day to day annoyances.

For more, see Design: Lotus Notes, Part 2.

Away from the fairly unhealthy food of last week, there are some meals that I know how to make that won’t absolutely kill you from either sugar or fat content. They are, however, few and far between. The Beef And Cheese Tortilla is the best of them:

• Get some Tortillas, preferrably with a light sprinkling of flour.
• Buy some fresh beef ham. By that I mean, go to a real butchers. I know, fresh ingredients; crazy. You may need to specify that you don’t want any spices added, depending on how your butcher sells the stuff.
• Get some peppers.
• Get a block of strong cheddar. Or, if you don’t like the finest cheese known to man, pick something else. Your choice.
• Dice the beef ham and peppers.
• Grate the cheese.
• Prepare a thick gravy. It should not be watery at all. That would cause a mess later.
• Fry the beef ham until nearly done (frying pan or wok), then add the gravy to coat it a bit. When it’s all bubbling and nearly done, add the peppers for the last minute or so.
• Lay out the tortillas flat and add a few drops of the grated cheese.
• Fill with the contents of the pan, add more cheese and wrap.
• Enjoy.

And some people think I can’t cook anything without a hundred calories. Bah! Next time, how to make a pot noodle.

Google, in all their wisdom, have created a web-based feed reader, imaginatively titled Google Reader, and, as I mentioned in my del.icio.us links, it is rubbish.

In the past, the big G have been the Technic of the Lego family. Robust, complicated and well-designed toys reduced to the simplest UI that could possibly work. Every cog and brick has been perfectly placed to add the right functionality to the right audience, and these systems have been slowly built up into a collection that has become the cornerstone of most people’s web toybox.

Google Reader is Duplo: big, chunky and useless. The UI is far from intuitive. All the best features are hidden behind tabs and button pushes. Why should I have to go through several (confusing) steps to find the add feed button? It’s one of the primary use cass, it should be a permanent fixture! Who thought that item-level menus was a good idea? It just greatly slows down the time it takes to get through hundreds of feeds. I want to click on a feed (or group of feeds) and see everything all at once. I do not want to navigate to the item level for each feed and then have to navigate back to the main menu, then to the next item level, then to the main menu. No feed reader has ever done that, and for good reason: it’s slow. Every feature is accessed through ugly blocks of design and disparate widgets. They should have made up their mind.

Bloglines is your bog standard Lego. It’s functional, but not brilliant. There’s so much more that it could be done with it if it was just a little nicer (for example, I hate the page load of the menu frame when saving or unsaving items. Very unnecessary.) It’s still a lot better than this latest Google effort. I’d have expected more.

Someone, yesterday, asked me what “ennui” means. While it has a dictionary definition (listlessness), it is hard to convey the precise meaning of the word, for me.

• Lethargic dissatisfaction,
• Life dragging pointlessly into a grey stupor,
• A melancholy drudge of indefinite length,
• Apathy in the extreme.

Not that I’m currently feeling any of the above, but I think we’ve all experienced that level of nothingness before. In fact, it’s a good way to be to truly appreciate the better parts of life.

It was quite some time ago that, as part of an inebriated challenge, I made it my goal to significantly improve the plain cheeseburger. I have relatively simple tastes. If I’m eating a burger, I have the burger, some cheese and the bun. That’s it. Mayo or other sauces are out, leafy green crap (I believe we’re calling it lettuce these days) is in the bin, and gherkins… well, no sane person likes gherkins anyway. Nice and simple.

Some people don’t like that though. It’s boring, they say. Those people are wrong and missing out on the beautiful simplicity that is the plain cheeseburger. However, I did take them up on a challenge: to find an ingredient, a single addition, to make the plain cheeseburger rival a burger with the works in their eyes. It would be hard work, a lot of burgers would need eaten but, damn, someone had to do it.

I started where any sensible person with a knowledge of junk food would begin: the humble pizza. Yes, pizza. Master of toppings, mixer of random flavours. Ham would be cheating as it’s too close to a bacon cheeseburger. Pineapple was a bad idea on pizza, it wasn’t going to be better on a burger. Smaller. Sweetcorn!

Sweetcorn is an interesting vegetable. A lot of people really like the taste and the texture, the slight squirting sensation as your bite into the main section and the watery goodness inside. It is, however, a terrible idea for burgers. It just makes the taste seem an out-of-date lumpy. Bad.

Another choice: beans. Everyone likes beans. Juicy, tomato tinged and just the right side of “I’ve got some in the cupboard”. The beans were interesting. Although it did work to an extent, some couldn’t understand the bean/burger combo. The beans were dripping out of the side in ways they couldn’t stop, and more ended up on the floor than anywhere.

Damn.

Another look in the fridge revealed something so simple, so lowgrade, so brilliant that it would have to work. And it did. The secret ingredient was barely noticeable but it tasted fantastic, the perfect counterpoint to cheese and the minced flavourings. What was it? Another kind of beef: corned beef. A slice of that in your burger and you’re set.

Challenge accepted and won.

Food. I like it. You probably like it too, everyone does. So a short series on food seems like the right thing. I’m going to go over a few very unhealthy recipes (that sounds a bit formal for the kind of thing I mean but alas there are no better words), and possibly diverge a bit. To my knowledge (ie from recall, rather than from looking through the archives), this is the first post I’ve done on food since the ill-fated omlette incident, way back at post number six. Anyway, the best place to start when it comes to food is the dessert.

‘Now’, you’re wondering, ‘what culinary masterpiece is Gary going to teach us how to make today?’ Today, today, we make mars bar melts. Here’s how:

• Buy a Mars bar.
• Put it in the fridge for a day. You want it to be cold to the touch and rock hard.
• Unwrap, put it on a plate, and microwave it for 20 seconds.
• Enjoy! If you’ve done it right, the chocolate shell should still be relatively solid and the middle should have melted. Warm goo! Nummy.

If you’ve got any masterworks of the black art of cooking that would make Mr Grossman envious, I encourage you to take this opportunity to post about them. Another, more savoury, treat in a day or two.

A full month of cinematic goodness brings us four films pretty decent films.

The 40 Year Old Virgin is almost entirely predictable. Our protagonist’s colleagues find out he has never had sex and set about fixing that, in increasingly bizarre ways. In the end he finds the right women and all is well. Even though the premise doesn’t warrant the two hours or so that the final cut is, it’s still a good film. Steve Carrell pulls off both the geeky and awkward side of the character and his quiet wit with aplomb. If nothing else, this film should be a vehicle for him to go on to bigger things.

Next up is new Wes Craven film, Red Eye. A killer corners his victim on an aircraft and tries to get her to assist in his plan. Being a headstrong young women, she resists. Until the final acts, it does pretty well; the two lead characters showing a fair amount of depth and creating a real tension. Sadly the final section, away from the enclosed space of a plane, is truly awful. The film degenerates from a creepy encounter to a farcical horror film. Shame.

Sadly, I’ve yet to see Dogtown And The Z-boys so can’t compare it with its dramatised reimagining, Lords Of Dogtown. The story of the friends who reinvented skateboarding by introducing aspects of surfing, we see fame and fortune tear them apart. An enjoyable film, even if the acting lets it down at times.

Finally, George Romero, king of zombie films, adds another chapter to his infamous series with Land Of The Dead. Set decades after the dead begun rising, the last remnants of civilisation are holed up in a walled city. The poor stay in slums and the rich in a fortified tower block, keeping everything else out. In a continuance of the smarter zombie theme from Day Of The Dead, the zombies begin to realise that the city is where they need to go. Mix into this the theft of the one weapon capable of taking away the power from the rich, and you’ve got the makings of an interesting storyline. It’s not as good as the predecessors, taking in too many action movie influences and making sure the increased budget is spent rather than focussing on the characters, but still damn good.

Film of the month is Land Of The Dead, but if you know me you would have known that before it came out.