C-Objectively

It’s always so encouraging to look at the weather forecast and see a week of rain coming your way. That’s just a little taste of the typical Seattle winter week. There are still plenty of things to do to keep busy though. Last Friday I attended the Leopard Tech Talk by Apple on the latest developer tools and features of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard. I’m particularly looking forward to being able to use Dashcode to help with some Dashboard development I might be doing in the near future. Also, while sitting in one of the sessions, I had an idea for a widget that is such a no-brainer that I have no idea how I didn’t think of it until now. I’ll tell you all about it if I actually get around to finishing it.

This weekend I saw the movie Stranger than Fiction which I thought had looked interesting since the first time I saw the trailer. Although I wouldn’t call the film revolutionary, it is at the very least a little different than most of the drivel in theaters today. It is a fun little story about a non-descript IRS agent Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrel, who is a character in a book being written by a famous author. One day he starts hearing the author’s voice in his head as she narrates the story of his life “accurately, and with a better vocabulary”. Turns out that Harold is not just a character in the unfinished book, but a real person. I won’t spoil the rest of the plot for you but suffice to say that while it was enjoyable, I think the original book ending would have suited the movie better as well.

Oh and speaking of Hollywood drivel, a blog called Drivl has a post about ten things that software code does in movies that it never does in real life. I love this list because it points out how the computer interaction in most movies is so very silly. My favorite of course is #9: “People who write code use mice”. For years, running on decades now, computer users in films and television have been banging away frantically at keyboards while performing all manner of tasks that would be impossible or extremely difficult to accomplish without the aid of a mouse or other pointing device. CSI agents touching up photos using their keyboard? Not likely. I guess clicking a mouse is not as dramatic as banging away on a keyboard.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 7:19 am and is filed under Entertainment, My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.