Day: November 29, 2003

On Wednesday, I went to see Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World (warning: this website brought my computer to its knees… is Flash the culprit?), the first movie made using the Aubrey-Maturin characters from Patrick O’Brian. I read Master and Commander long before I started writing here; here are my notes on The Far Side of the World. Since the title derives from the first and the tenth in the 20-volume series, I was curious to see how the melange would come to life.

The movie’s plot pulls more from the tenth book, although I felt like various incidents were plucked from the intervening novels (but too hard for me to check). Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are clearly well acquainted in the film, and the naturalist instincts of Dr. Maturin are a known quantity amongst all HMS Surprise’s crew. I found the movie well done, but not compelling. With O’Brian, so often the anticipation of action or discussion of strategy demands more attention than any battle ever does. In that way, the books feel true to the pace of life. The movie did not ignore that in-between time, to the director’s credit. There are various interludes which, taken as a whole, probably fill the movie more than the three encounters with the French privateer which ostensibly drive the plot. The action, however bloody and true-to-life, is just more bang and crash. And bang and crash in this day and age is a losing measure… what does the 18th century have to counter Terminator, et al? That said, the personal details (an amputation of a young teen officer’s arm, the sewing of sailcloth around corpses, and the like) did bring the brutish nature of the time and the Royal Navy more to life than anything else.

I hope the movie does well at the box office, enough so that another installment is forthcoming. The ending left all possibilities open, of course. I didn’t love the movie, but I’m glad someone is trying.

Rajesh Jain at Emergic cites a NYTimes article about the sudden interest in Friendster and other community sites (yes, we’ve been down this road before… anyone remember SixDegrees and TheGlobe?). From the article:

When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other’s social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how. Friendster offers a mix of architecture-changing tools and technologies: e-mail, a profile (which offers a persistent presentation of self) and a coarse representation of a social network.

Jain doesn’t call it out here, but I think the elusive chimera here is how to represent and display depth. For a news website (say, News.com), you view one story at a time, but there are tens of thousands of articles from 1996 through 2003. How, from that one story, do you get a sense of the authority that depth of coverage can convey? (Hint: the NYTimes has the same problem, which explains why brands do matter.) A millisecond glance at a book tells you how deeply it attempts to cover a subject, but a website is worse even than a newspaper or magazine in its difficulty in expressing its place in the tapestry of information. Friendster and LinkedIn and these other social networking sites are trying to draw the (ever-shifting) map of ‘alliances’ between and among people. This depth is false and illusory, but that the space is even being mined is fascinating. Still not a business (despite the influx of funds), but fascinating.

New version of MacOS X, Panther (aka 10.3), is now running on the desktop as well as the laptop. I wasn’t in a hurry, until my sister bought an iSight in the Burlingame Apple Store yesterday. We wanted to test iChatAV between the laptop and the desktop, so that set off an afternoon of backing up, both to CDs and the external FireWire hard drive. Fortunately, those backups appear unnecessary for the moment… especially fortunate because it’s unclear whether or not the FireWire hard drive problems that have been cited by many, and acknowledged by Apple, are limited to FireWire 800 or 400 drives. Apple only owned up to the 800 drives, and my external is a FireWire 400, so less reason to be concerned. But data is data.

Anyway, I’m checking all the various applications, and things appear to be in good shape, via the Archive & Install upgrade method. I did appreciate the peace of mind offered by Take Control of Upgrading to Panther, the $5 e-book from the publishers of TidBITS.

Of course, the catalyst for the install still hasn’t worked fully… the iSight works beautifully, but using our FireWire DV camera, a Canon, isn’t yet giving us video, although the audio is definitely functional. Hmmm… let me know if you have any tips/URLs to consider. I’ll be muddling through today.