I’ve been trying to think of a good term for a particular kind of music for a while now but nothing immediately springs to mind.

I’m thinking of albums that are technically solid, enjoyable to listen to, but entirely forgettable. The sort that you can’t say anything bad about but probably don’t listen to as much as you should; probably because there’s no particular reason to break it out. Maybe if you see the band live it spurs you to listen to them again, but the notion fades.

The particular album that spurred this doesn’t matter too much I just want a concise way of describing such an album.

Suggestions?

Those fine young engineers over at Microsoft are trying to edge their way into the search engine space with MSN Search. In attempting to take Google’s dominance, they need to not only at least match the quality of results, they have to make people want to leave Google. It’s not sufficient to simply have good links. Google is the search engine. To make people leave it, they have to have some tangible improvement to the user experience.

Their answer? The search builder.

This is a terrible move that will not win them the search war. The problem is that people don’t want to build up searches, they couldn’t care less about most of the options presented to them (assuming they took the time to understand them in the first place), they want to “type their 1.3 words into the search window and let the search tech do its stuff”. They won’t do any more than that.

Google understood that. The UI is as simple as it can be: a textbox and a button. No ambiguity, no ignorable complexity, just the functionality.

An unusual proposition: take a fairly successful Japanese horror film, the original crew and director (who also wrote it), an American star, and remake the thing in English.

That is precisely what The Grudge does.

It makes for interesting viewing: we have an American actress (Sarah Michelle Gellar) speaking English in what is otherwise a very Asian film. Everything from the minimal dialogue, to the quirky characters, to the unsignposted time transitions make this seem Japanese; which is both impressive and somewhat jarring at the same time. Although it’s good to see a remake for the Western market that doesn’t molest the source material like Steve Irwin in a crocodile pit (The Assassin AKA Point Of No Return, I’m looking at you here), a question hangs in the air: why bother?

I’m sure Gellar doesn’t need the money, the original film could easily be viewed with subtitles (it did get a UK release after al), and the director was probably fairly happy with his original vision. The only answer that makes sense is that the potato farmers in Utah didn’t want to read while viewing a film. Mass-market appeal means something to the money men.

Not to say that The Grudge is bad. It is not great though. Fairly middle of the road horror, if we are being honest.

Via Jack Mottram comes news of the The Publisher. Leveraging the offer made by Archive.org to host any CC-licensed audio or video files, the Publisher is a tool to upload such files and provides a link to give people to download.

This has all the signs of a good thing:

• Free.
• Easy.
• Not likely to go down anytime soon (although the archive does get stressed at times).
• No legal or moral issues (yeah, big problem there).

I’ve been getting more and more impressed by Archive.org’s contribution to the net. The free movie archive is good, then the legal bootleg archive (which I recently noticed features shows by Texan alt rockers And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead… reason in itself to visit) and now this. Good stuff.

The rest of the links from yesterday’s batch. It seems that all the flash games and fun stuff ended up in the other lot:

• Brain In Dish Can Fly Plane – Those crazy scientists have done it again, creating a brain capable of flying simulators out of rat brain mush.
• Guide To Bash – Learn more about the Bash shell.
• Bring On The Tables – If you need to use a table (semantically), then this is how to do it properly.
• Pure CSS Scroll Table – And this is how to make it look good and take up little space. Very nice.
• Hallmarks Of A Great Developer – Traits that separate the good and the great.
• DVD to DivX – I’m sure this conversion guide will come in handy sometime.
• Thinking Machine – Java chess game that visualises the computer opponent’s thinking. Purdy.
• Zen Garden 132 – Very nice looking Zen Garden submission.
• Starting A Label – A lot of useful information for starting your own record label.
• Project Cryo – Put a frozen lego-man inside your mouse.
• iPod BMW – For the rich only, but hella cool.
• Fear And Loathing Campaign – Hunter S. Thompson analyses the election run up. A bit late, but still funny.
• Languid – Samples text to guess the language. Seems to be fairly reliable.
• Silktide SiteScore – Gives your website a score based on various things. Not sure I agree with a lot of the criteria, but interesting anyway.
• Thinking With Type – A very handy resource for typography types.
• Was Darwin Wrong? – National Geographic pose a hell of a question, and the answer is a good one.
• Cornell Note Taking System – Very nice system for note taking. If only I had heard of it a few years ago.
• Grand Theftendo – Stunning port of GTA3 to the NES. I want to play.

Hopefully that’s the last of the links for a good while.