One sentence review of "The Other Boleyn Girl"

Do not meddle in the affairs of kings, for they are childish, petulant and capricious.

Is this supposed to be that fucked?

If there is one piece of technology design that needs to be obliterated on pain of considerable amounts of pain, it is this: Power plugs that are too wide to fit next to other plugs. Has anyone worked this out? Some companies have avoided this by putting the big chunky transformer halfway along the cord, with perhaps another cord plugged into it to help with adapters for different countries. But this gets messy and most just give up, and give you something that takes up so much space that you need a four-socket power board just for two devices.

And then there's Samsung. My growing annoyance with this manufacturer was given a good boost this morning when I attempted to move the charger from where it was plugged into a mega-powerboard behind my computer to somewhere it could be both plugged in and get reception at the same time. The adapter is very neat and svelte and quite sexy. And goes off to the left. When sitting in the powerpoint, it takes a sharp left turn. I couldn't put it there because it would run into the wall. I couldn't put it in the right-hand side of that double powerpoint because it would block off the left-hand side. I tried putting it in a powerboard, but between the power pack for the cordless telephone and the plug for the digital clock, there wasn't enough room. I now have three devices plugged into two powerboards.

I have to wonder: What do the designers of these products do at home?

From the den of the beast.

There are several problems with open-plan offices, and I'm not even going to mention noise pollution. These are my favourites:

• In an office of a major national government department, it makes any attempt at protection of privacy data a bit of a pathetic joke, really.
• Everyone who is standing in a queue that is slowly growing to stretch from the line in the carpet towards the door, entangling with the other queue and threatening to head outside, can see you when you stand and yack with your colleagues instead of talking on the phone or even trying to fake work by pointing at a computer screen.

Stop complaining about people hating you if that's the best customer support you can come up with.

(Updated) Don't look an expensive mobile phone in the mouth

Fucking Samsung. I've come to the conclusion that they're just not serious about playing any sort of leadership role in the mobile phone arena.

Harsh, you say?

No.

Ignoring for a moment that they can build a mega-power-user looking horizontal QWERTY touchscreen slider and install a hacked version of their old proprietary operating system on it instead of a property smartphone system like the Windows Mobile on their less-powerful Blackjack or the Symbian that they have chosen for their extremely tasty looking G810 5mega pixel 3x optical zoom cameraphone, they just don't sweat the details.

On my A701 the Java performance is inconsistent at best, stalls occasionally, and using predictive text in any Java app is an exercise in alpha-quality software. On my much older Sony-Ericsson, adding a word to the T9 dictionary would result in that word being the first solution offered from then on. On the Samsung, adding a word puts it to the back of the cue. It now takes three key presses to spell the short form of my girlfriend's name, and another three to select it from the available options.

And now I find this, about the recently released G800 camera phone:

"Compared to other GSM-models, Samsung’s 3G handsets are somewhat better performers; however they aren’t too far ahead. Generally, Samsung is chasing the market on this front, for its devices come with slower CPUs and no full Java support. As it stands today, new applications can be uploaded only over the air (wap)." (Mobile Review)

Right there are three of my favourite gripes about the A701: They cut corners on the hardware, the Java support is sketchy and limiting, and the file system management options are rude to say the least.

It gets worse: On the G810, which comes with GPS (well, they can't really take on the Nokia N95 without it, can they?) you can only use this functionality if you install the maps yourself. Excuse me? Build a GPS receiver and leave it blank? What sort of customer service is that? And the application that it comes with is crippled anyway: No zooming in real-time? (Review also from Mobile Review). Oh yes, and you can't install a better application (other than Google Maps, which makes you pay for data downloaded whenever you use it) because it lacks security certificates - another thing I hate about the A701.

Once again I arrive back at the highly depressing conclusion that only Nokia, a maker of devices with all the design flair of fellow Scandinavians Volvo, are the only company able to competently make a complete phone.

(Edit): Do you have one of those mobiles that shows you the ID of the mobile tower that it's connected to? Well I just found out that I could tell mine to do that. And now I find that when it does the softkey that normally calls up the menu is renamed "View" to view the full message from the tower. What the? This now means that the menu is not accessible without hitting Cancel and then, within about two seconds, hitting the menu key. This is fucked. Once again, they have not sweated the details.

Thoughts from the first thirty minutes of Catwoman

• Has anyone tried to quantise just exactly how sad it is that an obviously CGI cat is a better actor than Halle Berry?
• When she is lying on the rubbish heap covered in toxic cosmetics goop, what if she had been found by the seagulls first? "Seagullwoman" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
• Michelle Pfeiffer was sexier wearing a full bodysuit.
  

Ain't that the truth

We are lying on the couch watching Constantine (a good script and great visuals ruined by Canoe (he either goes upstream or down) Reeves displaying his one facial expression and one of his two vocal ranges, when we watch the scene where Rachel Weisz says that her twin insisted on seeing visions of demons for so long (stupid girl, she really should have learnt to shut up) that they forced her... to take ... antipsychotics...

When I comment to my partner that there is a highly disturbingly scientological anti-psychiatry bent to Hollywood.

Well yes, she says, because if they embraced science then...

They wouldn't have as many storylines? I finished.

Yes, she confirmed.

I reckon that Hollywood needs some competent fucking scriptwriters. I'm beginning to wonder how much sympathy I have for the scriptwriter strike.

N.B.: Competent scriptwriting: House: Occasional woo-woo religious spiritualism crap explained by cold hard medical neurological disorder or hallucination. Six Feet Under. We know they're hallucinating or dreaming. Douglas Adams said in one interview how disappointed he was with X-Files having the spooky explanation as the true one week after week, when he remembers Doom Watch which, week after week, explained human credibility through noisy drains and light diffraction through low-lying clouds and... Come on people, how bad was your basic high school science education??

I'm helping pay for what exactly?

This really pisses me off.

I have just received a letter from MBF telling me that thanks to an increasing cost of payouts to members, my health insurance premiums are about to go up again. Along with which there was a notification of improved and added services: Increases in various optical care limits, which I will benefit from, and:

MBF MemberCare services will now include chiropractors.

This is the part that really pisses me off. Chiropractic therapy is based upon a deeply flawed theory of illness derived by an idiot who clearly knew nothing about any scientific processes and made one observation, once, which gave him an idea. Chiropractic treatments are not just useless, they're actively dangerous, having been linked to instances of stroke and crippling neck pain (ironic, that). And now a nation-wide provider of financial health care assistance is legitimising this pursuit of charlatans and dangerous fools by funding members using funds partly provided by me.

I think I would be justified in complaining about that. Surely if a medical insurance organisation are going to pay out for somebody else's medical care, they should have some expectation of that care being effective and preventing the need for future payouts? Chiropractic has comprehensively failed to provide any proof of any efficacy outside of the placebo effect.

I'd go looking for an alternative provider, but I have a sinking feeling that I won't receive any joy anywhere else either.