<i>Ocean's 13</i>

I saw Ocean's 13 last night and I give it two enthusiastic thumbs up. The plot isn't flawless, nor even completely coherent at times, but this is a film that draws you in to a whirlwind of flashy Vegas fun from beginning to end. The ensemble acting is even better than the first two installments of the series, with Pitt, Clooney and Damon effortlessly inhabiting their roles. The high quality performances, combined with an energetic soundtrack and amazing editing keep the film cruising almost non-stop. For me the cherry on top was the way that Vegas itself plays the fourteenth member of the crew: the movie really captures the simultaneously horrifying and electrifying nature of the city in the desert.

Go see it!

Customer service

Why is there such an abject lack of design sense in the computing and electronics industry? I'm currently on hold with Thames Water (who have screwed up my bill for the third time). Their hold system plays muzak in the background, which is periodically interrupted by a voice apologising for keeping me on hold. They have layered on top of this a much louder periodic interruption to thank me for waiting and encourage me to do my business on their website. This results in one apology being gratingly interrupted by the other apology with a frequency that is making my jaw clench tighter and tighter.

When people set these things up, or design consumer electronics, do they even spend five minutes thinking about the user experience?

On my mobile phone, for instance, if I want to send a text message I type it in (that interface is a whole other story of horrendous design), then I have to go through four option selections to get to my address book. Greater than 99% of the texts I send are to someone in my address book. Shouldn't the interface go there straightaway? Did the person who wrote the software even try it?

This is one of the reasons I love Apple so much. As much as people (I'm looking at you, Jules) gripe about certain aspects of it, watching Jobber demo it just made me giddy at the thought of a handset that had been so clearly designed with ease-of-use in mind. As has been observed before, iPod wasn't the first portable MP3 player and iTunes wasn't the first music store, but both have tenaciously grabbed their respective markets in large part (in my opinion) through good design and appreciation of the user experience.

For what it's worth, I just got off the phone with TW and the woman who helped me was perfectly nice and efficient.

Jobber

Steve Jobs' keynote address at WWDC 2007 left a lot to be desired. After the iPhone's huge splash at Macworld in January I had high hopes for another demonstration of Jobs' renowned showmanship. Instead we got the following four announcements:

1. EA and id will be concurrently releasing new titles for PC and Mac. Enh, I'm not much of a gamer.



2. Some neat-looking, but not groundbreaking features of Leopard, the next version of OS X. A lot of these had already been previewed and none of them were knock-your-socks-off exciting. And while the switching animation is neat, various UNIX distros have had multiple desktops since the mid 90s.



3. Safari on Windows. I don't use Windows or Safari, so this one was a dud. I am considering giving Safari 3 another shot to be more useful to me than Firefox, but I doubt it will win.



4. 3rd party development on the iPhone via AJAX web apps. Boo. This one actually really sucked: the message to keen outside developers? Make a goofy Web 2.0 site and pretend that's a real app. Pretty weak, Apple.

In addition to the mediocre content of the address, you could tell that Jobs was off his game. In contrast to his rollicking iPhone announcement, where he had the audience eating out of his hand, he was adrift here. He kept awkwardly pausing for applause breaks where the audience half-heartedly obliged. He's demo some fairly lame feature and finish with an embarrassed, "Yeah, we think this will be really useful." I guess my expectations were too high — you can't hit a home run every time.

Sopranos, posted without comment

Tony: Did you ever know anybody who, uh, committed suicide?

Janice: Mm. Plenty. I used to live in Seattle.

For the americans

Coverage of the WTCCC in the paper of record, including quotations from everyone's favourite Icelandic blowhard, Kari Stefansson and everyone's favourite local geneticist, Mark Daly.

D-Day

Today was not only the 63rd anniversary of Operation Overlord, but also the D-Day for the publication of the papers that I've been working on for the last two years.

Cano

Robinson Cano evidently had a problem with Mike Lowell in last night's Sox-Yanks game:

"He [Lowell] played dirty because he threw his elbow at me, but that's the game
of baseball," Cano said. "I have to protect myself any time I have to
tag somebody. I have no complaints about it."

Umm, actually, aren't you complaining about it right now? Isn't what you're doing the very definition of the word "complaint"?

"I've never had a problem with him before. Today he threw his elbow at me, but I never say anything."

Oh, you never say anything! How gentlemanly of you!