Blather and Nonsense

Where should we eat?

I just got back from seeing the funny, if uneven, Old School. While I could go off on the deplorable state of American youth (especially those present at this evening's showing), I'd rather focus on some more positive aspects of my moviegoing experience. First, I'm glad to see Luke Wilson in a role that allows for some good old lecherousness. I especially loved the scene that found his character, Mitch, good and drunk at a wedding reception: his combination of earnestness, confusion, and lust was pitch-perfect in evoking both sympathy and censure. Ellen Pompeo was radiant as Mitch's love interest, and I chortled with glee upon seeing Sara Tanaka in a filmed role for the first time since my favorite Rushmore (an uncredited role in Slackers aside).

Better than all of that, though, was the appearance of The Diner. The Diner is a location that has appeared in several movies so far; I know nothing about it but it keeps popping up. So far I've seen it in Seven, Ghost World, The Rules of Attraction, and now Old School, but I'm pretty sure I've seen it in at least one other movie that I have now forgotten. If you know of any other movie appearances of The Diner, I'd love to hear from you. Maybe I could start my very own Clint Howard Project minus the Clint Howard and plus The Diner, but I'm not sure if I'm ready for that level of commitment. Nonetheless, feel free to mail me with your Diner sightings.

Plates

Audio dorkage

There's nothing to see here, honest: I'm just taking a quick note so I can toss an old magazine. Self, if you are ever able to afford it, your choices for a semi-affordable surround preamp with XLR outputs pretty much boil down to either the Anthem AVM 20 or the Sunfire Theater Grand III, although currently you favor the Anthem for its THX certification. Now if only you could afford a matching set of speakers, too....

Heh, heh - you said "tool"

I've been reading a lot of rants like this one recently, where at some point or another the author complains about Apple's Safari browser not using NSToolbar. I'm here to tell you, folks: NSToolbar sucks.

The first reason NSToolbar sucks, and most likely the one that caused Safari not to use it, is that it's too big. I know you can set all sorts of options to make it smaller (icon only, text only, small icons), but by default it's ginormous. Safari's browser window was obviously designed to waste as little vertical real estate as possible and in that it succeeds admirably. Any design using NSToolbar would have wasted twice as much space by default, and most users don't change defaults.

The second reason for suckage is that toolbar items offer no prior warning as to what exactly they're going to do when you click on one. The AirPort Admin Utility's main window, for instance, has a toolbar item named "Other". I don't know about you, but I've never wanted to other my AirPort Base Station; the concept just doesn't appeal to me. "Other" actually presents a sheet that allows one to pick which other Base Station to configure, but it's not as if there's an ellipsis in the toolbar item's name to tell me that a sheet/dialog is going to appear before any othering actually occurs.

Lastly, Apple has gotten this strange idea in their heads that NSToolbar is an appropriate control for navigational use. Quick, go to System Preferences and tell me which pane is selected. Bzzt! System Preferences can actually be in one of two states, neither of which is actually reflected by the toolbar itself: it can either be showing a list of all available preference panes, or it can be showing a particular preference pane. In neither case does the actual static appearance of the toolbar change, so the only way to divine the current state of System Preferences is to read the window title. This particular toolbar could easily draw the current preference pane's name in bold or highlight its icon, but that sound you just heard was the other shoe dropping: toolbars can actually behave in at least two unrelated ways, yet they offer no indication thereto. You see, toolbars can either be used as an actual toolbar, where dragging has no effect and configuration is accomplished via control-clicking, or they can be used as a repository for dragged items, where no further configuration is possible. Since System Preferences's toolbar acts in the latter fashion, it couldn't indicate the current pane since its icon probably isn't visible.

And this is the control Safari should have used for its browser windows?

Harold Bloom

This afternoon at the bookstore I purchased Nick Hornby's Songbook, a collection of writings about Hornby's favorite pop songs (and a CD, although unsurprisingly it lacks most of the better-known songs about which he writes). I just love the following passage, which offers as fine a justification for pop music as I have ever read:

That's the thing that puzzles me about those who feel that contemporary pop (and I use the word to encompass soul, reggae, country, rock--anything and everything that might be regarded as trashy) is beneath them, or behind them, or beyond them--some preposition denoting distance, anyway: does this mean you never hear, or at least never enjoy, new songs, that everything you whistle or hum was written years, decades, centuries ago? Do you really deny yourselves the pleasure of mastering a tune (a pleasure, incidentally, that your generation is perhaps the first in the history of mankind to forego) because you are afraid it might make you look as if you don't know who Harold Bloom is? Wow. I'll bet you're fun at parties.

Look again

Cam emailed me earlier this week and asked if I was interested in perhaps hearing Andreas Gursky speak at SFMOMA, to which I replied in the emphatic. After returning from an exhibit of Gursky's ultra-sized photographs at the Pompidou in Paris last spring, I had mentioned it to Cam, whereupon I discovered he was familiar with Gursky's work thanks to a catalog from the successful MOMA showing. After enquiring as to Steve's own interest in attending, we made plans to see the exhibit and lecture this weekend.

After some minor confusion as to our time of departure, we arrived just in time to discover that not only was the show vastly more popular than SFMOMA had themselves expected, but also that we should have called ahead since the lecture was sold out. Instead we took a docent-guided overview tour of the museum while waiting for Alex and Alicia to arrive. The tour was was fairly decent although somewhat simplistic for my tastes, which were also disturbed by a gentleman who was overly eager to demonstrate his own artistic knowledge, which was woefully inadequate. Shortly thereafter A&A arrived and we were off.

The Gursky exhibition was oddly unsatisfactory, if only because I was hoping to see a repeat of the Pompidou showing, which it was not. I don't remember the Pompidou gallery to be any bigger than the SFMOMA space, but some rather interesting prints were missing, including several smaller works, an interesting shot of a French shipyard replete with containers, and a fascinating portrait of what I took to be some sort of economic forum whose participants sat in vertically-arranged skyboxes. The floor plan was also constrained by a long cul-de-sac at the northern end. Plus, there was the ignominy of the book store: it didn't even stock any posters, like the one I had previously purchased of my favorite Gursky work, Chicago Board of Trade II. Phooey.

Afterwards we schlepped across town to House on 9th Avenue for a scrumptious dinner. I had the duck breast with a blackberry reduction, and it was to die for. Normally the word "reduction" causes my Francophobia to kick into high gear, but after one taste it had subsided nicely. After dropping A&A off again, it was back home for the three of us South Bay dwellers. While it wasn't my best San Francisco excursion ever, it was an interesting day and worth the trip.

Bst brthdy prsnt evr

Jorg, cognizant of my penchant for short email addresses, gave me a belated birthday present in the form of a new email address: n@ned.tv. Not only is it three characters shorter than my current email address, but it's within two characters of the current minimum-sized address (that would be n@n.tv, still available for a cool $10,000 per year). It's the little things that count.

A tale of two mixes

As Britt can vouchsafe, stupid pop music is a fascination of mine. Unfortunately, this fascination is often in direct conflict with another fascination of mine, audio reproduction. Perhaps I can illustrate my point by comparing two recent-ish albums, Vanessa Carlton's Be Not Nobody and Avril Lavigne's Let Go. Carlton's album gained popularity last summer for the single "A Thousand Miles" with its arpeggiated piano hook, orchestral backing, and, unfortunately, not much more to recommend it. Lavigne's album, on the other hand, has had one single ("Complicated") played to death, with another ("Sk8er Boi") rapidly approaching the same status. Neither album is terrible, but my vote goes to Lavigne for two reasons: lyrical maturity and recording quality. It's the latter reason that pops up over and over when I listen to pop music.

Carlton's album, mixed by one Jack Joseph Puig, sounds terrible. Note that this isn't about the music, it's about how it sounds. On "A Thousand Miles," for instance, the percussion is smeared, the vocals are punchy, and there's absolutely no dynamic variation, indicating that the song has been compressed to within an inch of its life. Virtually all of the vocals on the album have been poorly recorded and further "enhanced." Put all of it together and you get a recording that is absolutely tiring to listen to on a halfway decent audio system, which is where I do most of my listening.

Lavigne's album, on the other hand, was mixed by Tom Lord-Alge and isn't at all shy about it: Lord-Alge's credit is found on the back cover of the album instead of buried in the liner notes. No matter who mixed it, the album is full of nuances. "Sk8er Boi" features a recurring bass drum hit that is more accurately felt than heard and a number of tricked-out guitars that dance around the stereo sound stage. The vocals are much more tastefully processed, too, with an appropriate amount of reverb. "Complicated," too, features a rich sound texture with muted shaker and scratching lurking throughout. There's nothing earth-shaking here, but the sonic variety makes this an album worth listening to more than once.

The best thing about standards

Standards are great, but documents that explain standards are even better. A new favorite of mine is the X.509 Style Guide.

Boy, you'd think I'd try to be slightly less of a dork than this in public.

Reminder to self

Read this essay.