A History Of Violence is quite unlike many recent films. It does not try to cleverly tie together a dozen plot strands. It does not mind if characters are their to serve a single purpose and then move on. It does not need order and tranquility to be restored to the smalltown world view it portrays early on. And it’s far better for it.

Cronenberg shows us a portrait of a man who has forgotten his past and does not like the blood it coats his life in. Tom Stall wants to disappear back into his new community, but his world has been changed irrevocably and his family have to deal with the consequences. Viggo Mortensen is tragic, and broken, as the main character; only occasionally allowing events to become a touch comic book. The ending makes this film though, with no forced resolution. Great film.

Next is Serenity, the film based on the ill-fated but absolutely brilliant Firefly tv series. What can be said about the film? It’s good, it has some excellent action sequences and character building, some truly shocking moments (particularly for Firefly fans), and pads out the universe quit nicely. It does, however, seem to miss the point entirely in several places.

I can understand that Mal, the captain of Serenity, has to come back to a level of decency after becoming so jaded in the war, but it seemed a bit much to have him and the crew cast as heroes; superheroes even. They were smugglers on the frontier, people trying to make ends meet anyway they could. They were not saving the galaxy. River seemed greatly under utilised. Yeah, she kicked ass, but I always expected more than just a killing machine (though it was obvious she was more than capable of the carnage she caused). Most disappointing were the Reavers. Although you never saw them directly in the series, they were portrayed as people who had gone mad and carnivorous living on the edge of civilization. This was brilliant, far better than any alien race that could have been conjured up. Sadly, they are tied neatly into the film in the most cringeworthy way.

It’s a good film, don’t get me wrong, but as a fan of the series I felt a little let down.

Some Russian cinema next in the form of Night Watch, the first in a trilogy of films about a centuries old war between light and dark and the coming of the prophets who will end it. Add vampires, werewolfs and all sorts of other stuff and you get the idea. Although something of the plot was lost in translation, the world in which the story is set is reasonably solid, with interesting intracicies and mechanisms underpinning the metaphysics. The Gloom in particular is an inspired idea. The low budget did show at times, constant cuts commencing any time anything happened in an action sequence, but it was a decent start if nothing else.

Bill Murray is becoming pretty good at the quiet, deadpan style of comedy these days. Broken Flowers continues this with the tale of a man tracking down old loves to find out who send him a message about his long lost son. Cue the inevitable journey of finding himself, taking in various oddballs along the way. Sure, it’s predictable and a little formulaic (in the off-beat mould), but it’s still entertaining. Again, it comes complete with a solid ending.

Finally, Tim Burton returns to animation with Corpse Bride. I have little to say about this film. It was mediocre in every way, from the story to the acting, both Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp putting in character performances that are beneath their ability. It does have good moments, but nothing outstanding.

The winner? Hard to say. The first four films here could all have won in previous months, but I think A History Of Violence wins it purely on how satisfying the ending was to watch.

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.