Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

As you might guess from my glowing review, I was happy to see The Aviator nominated for best picture in this year’s Academy Awards. I’m fairly convinced it will win, too, based on Oscar’s track record. Here’s why:

1. It’s an epic. Let’s face it: comedies and smaller movies rarely win best picture. More often than not movies like Dances With Wolves, Braveheart, Titanic, Gladiator, and Return of the King win the day.
2. It features crazy people. The Academy adores mental illness (see: A Beautiful Mind, Shine, Silence of the Lambs, Rain Man, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, etc.).
3. It’s about Hollywood. OK, this is probably my weakest argument—I don’t really have anything to back it other than, say, The Player (which was nominated for lots of things but didn’t actually win any). But come on—we all know that Hollywood is deepy narcissistic.

I think this hat trick attack will allow Aviator to handily trouce its competion.

Just a quick note to anyone who has been wondering: I have finally been able to confirm that PodWorks is compatible with the iPod shuffle. That means that my stalwart little app can boast compatibility with every iPod from the original 5 GB model up to the new wave, flash-based shuffle. Pretty cool!

I’m not going to say too much about this because I want to be careful not to short-circuit the proper HR processes, but I wanted to briefly mention that my group at Apple (Software Update Integration) is in hiring mode right now, and that the following job postings are ours:

• Software Update Integration Engineer
• Integration & Performance Engineer
• Mac OS X Integration Engineer Intern

(UPDATE: I changed the session encoded URIs above to ones that correctly link to the job descriptions. This has been an advertisement for the principles of REST.)

If you’re a smart, enthusiastic, OS obsessive with good CS fundamentals and a desire to positively impact the quality of Mac OS X, these might be a good fit for you. Extra brownie points for some level of previous Mac development experience.

A few random thoughts on this year’s MacWorld before I go to bed:

• I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else say this so far, but for me the most amazing moment in the keynote had nothing to do with the product annoucements. Rather, it was the sight of Sony President Kunitake Ando on stage and evidently feeling the effects of the famous reality distortion field. This was incredible stuff—like witnessing an episode right out of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. Sony is arguably Apple’s only credible threat in the digital music arena (disclaimer: my opinion and mine alone), and here’s Jobs (who clearly genuinely admires the company) charming the pants off their president, touting common goals in promoting HD video, and generally making the guy feel like a rock star. In a word: wow.

• Working the Tiger demo area at the Apple booth was a lot more fun than I expected. I was scheduled to work right after the keynote emptied out, and the sudden influx of eager people reminded me of the scene in Pirates of Silicon Valley where Jobs and Woz are mobbed by geeks while demoing the Apple II. I enthusiastically talked about Spotlight, Safari RSS, Automator, Mail, and other new features for about three hours nonstop, until my throat was so parched I could barely speak.

  It can be hard being a Mac enthusiast who works for Apple. Often the day-to-day grind of keeping your bug queue under control and generally “seeing how the sausage is made” can slowly drain your enthusiasm for the product. Fortunately, getting out and talking to actual end users, and seeing their enthusiasm for the result of all that hard work, always reminds me why I’m in this business.

• One of the best things about conferences is the opportunity to hang out with people, and this year’s show was no exception. I particularly enjoyed finally meeting the ever affable Eric Case, as well as his friends Willo, Ryan (of wiPod fame), and Skylar. I also got give restaurant recommendations to Jochen Wolters and catch up with Courtney Patubo, Allen Hutchison, and Lucien Dupont. I finished this evening at the 43 Folders meetup, where I got to meet Jasmeet, tell Danny O’Brien how much I love NTK, and get my own commemorative hipster PDA from Merlin Mann himself. Hooray for socializing!

• Update: One thing I almost forgot to mention is that I had lunch with Scott Knaster a little while ago, and at that time he explained to me how he thought Apple could make a flash-based iPod compelling (he later wrote the idea up on his weblog). At the time I thought his ideas were interesting, but I had no idea he was on the right track as much as he was. Good thinking, Scott!

• I just realized that, in all the excitement, I completely forgot to eat dinner tonight. It’s been a long time since that happened!

• The “IBM Office” shirt I got from Panic is my new favorite article of clothing. I can’t believe the attention to detail that Cabel puts into Panic’s swag. The shirt even has an embroidered label that actually says “Panic.” I’d be willing to bet that Panic could be pretty successful supplementing their software income with clothing sales if they ever decided to!

• I’ve got some photos up on Flickr. I think “Girl with iPod Shuffle” is one of the best photos I’ve ever posted, if I do say so myself.

I suppose we all knew it was only a matter of time, but when I checked my mail from the floor of MacWorld today, I discovered that I had received ill tidings from none other than the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (which, incidentally, sounds like it should be headed my C. Montgomery Burns). Actually, it was from Dreamhost, but I don’t hold it against them:

Hello Laurence,

We have received a formal DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice
regarding allegedly infringing content hosted on your site. The specific
items in question are as follows:

Contents of: http://www.scifihifi.com/beatles/audio/

The party making the complaint (International Federation of the
Phonographic Industry), claims under penalty of perjury to be or
represent the copyright owner of these works. Pursuant to 17 U.S.C.
512(c), we have removed access to the files in question.

So, I hope everyone got them while they could, because I’ll no longer be able to host my Beatles Christmas Records site. I eagerly await the digitally remastered CD that must surely be coming out in its place, and which would necessitate its removal.

Many thanks to all of the people who have emailed advice about my comment spam problem. In particular, I’d like to thank co-worker and fellow Blosxom user Stuart Morgan, who sent me the .htaccess file he uses to block common spam offenders, along with other advice. I think I’ve got the situation well enough in hand to re-enable comments—we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve always somehow managed to avoid the comment spam that seems to plague so many other webloggers, but I guess the golden age is over, because I’ve been under attack for the past few days now. I’m going to have to temporarily (and crudely) disable comments until I can figure out how to deal with the problem. Guess I might have to move up the schedule on my Wordpress transition…

Since the blogosphere seems to be increasingly in the grip of MacWorld Fever, I suppose now might be a good time to mention that I’ll actually be there, in Apple’s Tiger booth, pretending to be a marketing person, on three occasions next week. My schedule is:

• Tuesday, January 11, 2005 (8:00 AM - 2:00 PM)
• Wednesday, January 12, 2004 (1:30 PM - 6:00 PM)
• Friday, January 14, 2004 (1:30 PM - 4:30 PM)

If you’re going to be there, feel free to stop by, say hello, and check out Tiger!

I spent most of New Years Day feeling, shall we say, a bit under the weather (let’s just say that the restaurant we ate at the night before has been called one of the five best places in the country to drink tequila). Nonetheless, some friends did manage to coax me away from my deathbed long enough to catch one of the movies I’d most been looking forward to: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Rushmore is one of my favorite movies, and I liked The Royal Tenenbaums, but based on its lukewarm critical reception, I had low expectations for Wes Anderson’s latest effort. Fortunately, the movie was well worth braving the waves of debilitating nausea I was feeling.

Certainly, Anderson’s movies don’t appeal to everyone. Unlike, say, The Aviator, which I thought was a masterpiece of structure, the plots of Tenenbaums and Zissou tend to be almost secondary to character and setting. Rather than following a distinct arc, Anderson’s characters tend to meander dejectedly from episode to episode, finally finding peace with themselves and others in the end (seemingly more out of weary resignation than any great personal epiphany). I also think Anderson’s pacing tends make his films seem a bit long, and they’re not exactly what you’d call “laugh out loud funny.”

If those are the kind of things that bother you, then Zissou is definitely not the movie for you. If, on the other hand, you’re the kind of person who laughs hysterically at the absurd image of an enraged and Speedo clad Bill Murray engaged in a pitched firefight with Filipino pirates, or who claps delightedly upon recognizing the opening strains of “Life on Mars” as sung in Portuguese and accompanied on a classical guitar, or who appreciates Anderson’s devotion to Futura, or who lusts after a pair of limited edition Team Zissou Adidas, then you will walk away happy. I certainly did.