Day: January 14, 2004

Eleven days, we got out to see Big Fish, the new movie directed by Tim Burton. Had enough fantasy to suit Burton (Beetlejuice, anyone?), but always in the service of the story. I really enjoyed this movie, and I had the refreshing experience of knowing very little about it before I went to see it. I’ve never read the book, and I had never even heard about this movie before seeing a preview sometime in the last month or so. I’m not much for plot regurgitation, so I’ll just encourage you to see the movie, although it’s not a film that needs the big-screen experience, so don’t feel put out if you wait for the DVD.

Ewan McGregor looks like he’s enjoying himself in movies, which is fun to watch. Big Fish definitely follows that trend. He also can be funny, as he was in Down With Love (see this one… DVD sleeper). In both Big Fish and Down With Love, he’s all the funnier the straighter he plays it.

Side note 1: Why do so many of the movie sites feel compelled to use Flash so heavily? Makes them often (1) slow down my machine and (2) hard to link to, beyond the home page. (And haven’t they heard about search-engine optimization? Oh well, never mind…)
Side note 2: As I walked out of the theater, the music playing over the credits sounded great, and the voice was familiar, but I didn’t realize it was Eddy Vedder of Pearl Jam. Where have they been? You can watch a short clip of a live performance of the song “Man of the Hour” song on the movie site… which I can’t link to because of note #1.

I’m not an advertising maven, but Ogilvy is cited as the genius of the field, at least for the last half of the 20th century. Here’s a list of quotes from Ogilvy. I liked this one:

Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.

[via Doc]

Tim Bray posits the “Two Laws of Explanation. I’ll let you go there to read the short essay, but the two laws complement each other, underlining the reality that it’s incumbent on the person describing something new to do a good job with the explanation, while it’s the responsibility of the person learning about something new to ask questions when the explanation doesn’t work. Bray phrases it more elegantly.

I’ve had similar points about application or web usability. When I watch someone do the ‘wrong’ thing or miss the option/feature they ‘should’ have used, I remind myself (and, if appropriate, the person I’m watching) that the application or service is at fault. Don’t blame the person using the application for an application shortcoming. I would coin this as a specific example of Bray’s ‘laws’ if I were going to spend the time to phrase it more carefully.

Richard Sandomir at the New York Times often covers sports broadcasting. He must have been as perplexed as the rest of us — or just unusually perceptive — as the passer rating (aka QB rating) of Peyton Manning was announced as ‘perfect’ at 158.3. That incredibly arbitrary number comes from a formula devised by a PR person at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, available for several decades, but only coming into more common usage during the last decade or so. But common usage is a bit overstated — it’s not one of those stats you just calculate in your head, even though it’s based on only four categories: completion percentage, touchdowns, yards per reception, and interceptions. I appreciate that even though the rating hasn’t been around the entire history of the league, it uses metrics that make it easy to calculate ratings for every passer who ever played the game (as long as the stats are there). Read Sandomir’s article before it expires, and let’s appreciate that a reporter realized that the story behind a number was an interesting (if not useful) topic.

Environment: MacOS X 10.3.2 and Mail.app 1.3.2.
Experience: Junk mail filtering stops working, and when manually classifying mail as Junk, Mail.app crashes.
Workaround: Quit Mail.app, delete the ~/Library/Mail/LSMMap2 file, then relaunch Mail.app.
Source: Post to Macintouch.

This has happened to me several times on the laptop, and now on the desktop. I just now tried the tip above, and it works well, although I did wonder, briefly, what deleting that 1MB file would do, and whether I should save a copy. But I depended on the accuracy of the Macintouch post, and I was not disappointed. Thanks to Allen Cronce.