Today was a bit of a surreal experience. I got an email from myself, from a year ago. I had forgotten about it, but I found a website called Future Me and promptly sent myself an email.

Dear FutureMe,

Don’t know whether you’ll remember sending this, but you did. Today is 8th May 2005 and you just found a site called futureme that lets you email yourself at a date in the future. I’m sending this a year into the future.

What’s going on with you? Today is the day before our first exam of fourth year (Information Retrieval), the start of 3 weeks of hell. There’s no point in lying to you: I think we’re fucked for these exams. We need to get a 2:1 to get the job with [BigCo]. Did you get it? It’s looking unlikely from here.

Where is your life now? Right now, you’re back living at home but are barely ever actually there, beyond the occassional sleep and breakfast. You’ve been focussing on this university stuff but still fucking it up.

You’re in a 5-piece band called “[Awful Band Name]”. It’s still a bit rough, but we’re getting better.

Umm, not sure what else to say. Brain is in study mode (in that its what I’m thinking about, but not actually doing). Good luck, hope you’re doing better than me.

Best Regards,

G.

Receiving that was both amusing and a bit disconcerting: I got what I needed so I am working for [BigCo], I’m living away from home and spending about as much time in my flat as I did at home (i.e. I sleep here sometimes), and I’m no longer in that band (we never got all that much better). It’s good to be out of “study mode” knowing that I never need to go through that again.

Definitely another few getting sent into the future. Worth a go

In less than one hour from now, the time will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. There is no greater point or meaning here, just an observation of a moment with little significance that will pass by while we sleep. Good night.

Given recent form, this will seem like a relatively light month in terms of cinema. That is because, since the return of the classic Tuesday night film, I’ve been going to that a fair bit more than seeing new fodder. Anyway…

First up is the dreadful Hostel, a film that gets virtually nothing right. The premise is a reasonable starting point for a horror film: tourists off the beaten path get captured and tortured. The problem is everything else. The writer gives us protagonists we can’t like and certainly don’t care about, the director gives us sloppy cuts and gets a woeful acting performance out of the cast, and the sound director does an unbelievably heavy handed job on even the simplest of moments. It’s not often that scene-setting music jars so horribly with the set-up that undermines the little dramatic tension present, but Hostel has this effect in nearly every scene. Even if you’re just in it for the gore, it is, for the most part, timid.

Pierrepoint is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s rare that you see a thorough and detailed character examination that is more than just superficial, that gets inside the head of the character and pulls out every dark synapse, but this film does it with style. Timothy Spall (previously best known for his role in “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet”) pulls off one of the finest performances I have even see as Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s last chief executioner. Starting from humble beginnings, we see the complexities of the man as he rises to fame and descends into a broken shell. A stunning, faultless work.

Tipping away from the seriouss drama is Scary Movie 4. If you’ve seen any other chapter in the series, you will know exactly what to expect: crude references to well known films, slapstick and some awful jokes. It’s been so long since we had a good parody film (think Hot Shots, think Naked Gun) that an endless stream of toilet humour can pass. That’s not to say this is a worthless film, just don’t expect anything above simple and juvenile.

American Dreamz is surprising; it manages to fit some pretty sharp satire into a fairly clumsy mould. A take on both Middle Eastern politics and Pop Idol style tv shows, it’s not an obvious spoof. While much of the film is painful to watch, you know there are some good jokes been steam-rollered by bad pace, trashy caricatures and actors out of their depth (Hugh Grant being prime candidate). Probably not worth the time to go and see it, but if you get dragged along it’s not the end of the world.

Finally, Paradise Now is the story of two men, good friends, who are selected to be martyrs for the Palestinean cause. While this could be viewed as propaganda, it gives a reasonable view of what one side of the fight is thinking, without ever pretending that violence is justified. Indeed that is the real conflict in the film: whether or not the ends justify the means. As indie films go, it holds itself well, reasonable competence and confidence being shown. It just misses some real depth.

And the winner? Clearly, Pierrepoint. Early candidate for film of the year.

After about a year of hassle and countless arguments about the worth of social networks in general, I’ve finally done the (near) unthinkable and gotten a myspace page. You can find me, surprisingly enough, under the VKPS user name.

Why the change of heart? It wasn’t the getting slightly annoyed with people after every “What’s your myspace address?” question and ensuing debate (people can’t accept that it’s a pretty worthless site when you keep in touch with your friends and don’t really want a whole bunch of imaginary ones). It was the publishing of Mike Davidson’s guide to hacking a more tasteful myspace. I might not be much of a graphic designer or artist, but I know that the default design and masses of garish colour schemes and poor typography just wasn’t for me; I couldn’t put my name to it. Admittedly, I’ve done very little to the design I’ve put up, beyond the default hack; but it’s a simple, tasteful style that I can live with.

Speaking of design, I’ve started playing around with ideas for the next Solitude design. Current front-runner is based on picture I made (modified from stock photo) that I like to call Red Winter. I’ve got a few ideas of where that image might take the design, various variations in layout and structure but I definitely like the natural touch in the design. Incidentally, since a few people have commented on the current Solitude “Sunflower” logo, I want to put out that it’s not a flower. It’s actually a very heavily distorted picture of a star (blurring and colour bleeding used through-out).

Of course, don’t expect to see a finished design for, oh, another year at this rate.

The biggest problem I see when looking at material to be learned, whether technical documentation, tutorials, or other reading materials, is that they jump straight into the worked explanations of what is happening, and assume a reasonable knowledge of the surrounding material. This is bad.

For example, who remembers learning calculus? The first thing that 99% of schools will teach is how you do differentiation. Differentiation is a fine starting point for basic calculus since it is the lowest building block on which the subject is built, beyond simpler forms of maths. The problem is starting with “how” to do something rather than the “why”. Without at least a basic intuition for what differentiation (or any other subject) means and why it would be used, it becomes a much more abstract concept. Fair enough, it is an abstract concept but it’s one we apply to every day life. No-one, in the real world, cares about the quadratics it is applied to until those quadratics are modelling some very concrete problem.

Before a single example or “how” is shown in any documentation, you need to reinforce the “why”. Not only does it make the concept clear and applicable, giving a more physical and understandable notion of what is happening, it gives a goal to work towards: how to actually do the real world examples given.

This approach translates far better to being able to then problem solve using the same tools (like differentiation) in other areas, because the student has a feel for the subject.