About Schmidt

Alexander Payne

I am pre-disposed to like anything with Jack Nicholson and I enjoy edgy, downbeat alternative movies, so I was hoping About Schmidt would turn out to be quite a treat for me, but I ended up somewhat disappointed. I found it oddly uneven in tone – seemingly about to veer into conventional Hollywood sentimentality in places then retreating into embarassment or gloom.

Perhaps I’ve been too conditioned to look for something to ”take away” from a film? I never felt I really knew Schmidt and by the end of the film I didn’t feel I understood human nature any better. I just felt a little more depressed than I was when I started watching.

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… and (completely unsurprisingly) first impressions aren’t good. Even months after the much-delayed launch. Oh well – I’ll give it another two or three years at least before it starts to become something I would have an interest in (and I’m certainly part of the target market).

Thanks to my poll I know that some people at least are interested in how I made my weblog in the first place and weblog-related hints – so here are a couple, mixed in with a rant about how complex all this stuff is getting to be.

I feel as if there’s a kind of arms race going on as more and more weblog-related technologies are implemented. Weblogs used to be simple – I just typed in some text on a web form and magically it appeared on my site.
Then I put in a counter so I could track my traffic.
Then I decided I liked the idea of being able to categorise my writing for easier access (see long list at R), so I moved to Moveable Type. Then I started to hear more and more about RSS and XML so I added this XML feed – I no longer remember how but someone else’s computer is generating it automatically.
I have always been interested in the idea of content rating as a voluntary way of ensuring kids are protected from unsuitable material, so I gave my site an ICRA rating.
Then trackback came along so I had to figure out what it is and what it does (let you see who is linking to you) and I had to change my template so that people could do it.
Then I learned about affero and decided it would be fun to give people a way to express their aggregate opinion of my site.
Then I was intrigued by the idea that sites could indicate where they come from so I registered my site at geourl.
Then I thought I would put up a poll to find out how people were using blog.org.
And now I spotted a feature I thought was really interesting – offering people the ability to search the weblogs I read myself (which you should now see at R). But in order to use Micah Halpern’s code I had to convert my list of weblogs I link to into “blogrolling” format (I still don’t quite see why editing one’s HTML template to add or subtract a simple link is so hard people use external software to do it, but it does mean that my list of links is now in a database and can be used and accessed in other ways as well). And then I got a Google API key so your searches wouldn’t use up his allowance.

So altogether having a moderately sophisticated weblog has tied me in to at least nine different organizations or sites providing different complementary capabilities! And I know there are lots of other weblog capabilities I haven’t yet implemented – and that there are features provided by the sites I have already used that I am probably not fully utilizing.

Weblogging takes too much time and intellectual energy at this moment in its evolution – and that’s not even counting the time and energy that go into writing these posts! Of course you can always just ignore the various new technologies coming out and keep plugging away with simple text and links but there’s always the risk that one of those new facilities will turn out to be the Next Big Thing and if you don’t have it your weblog risks looking hopelessly out of date.hot free movies momfree movie galleries housewifes fuckingsex movie indian freesex no movies latina membership freelesbians movie freemovie long free pornfucking machine free moviesmovies free midget porn Map

The BBC has reported that Concorde is to retire in October.

I know Concorde is environmentally destructive and noisy but they used to fly over my flat regularly when I lived in South London and I thought the planes were gorgeous. They also remind me of the days (I am too young to remember myself) when people dreamed that one day we would all travel supersonically or by now we’d have colonies on Mars. The dreams might have been unrealistic or even pointless but they were at least ambitious and exciting. As this rather sniffy post-mortem points out, it may be many years before we get to fly supersonic again – even with newer technologies it appears we still can’t make supersonic flight economic.

The Kurds had obligingly stayed out of Kirkuk, but now they’ve gone in – and they’re looting, apparently. Let’s hope the military observers Turkey will be sending don’t stir things up further…

Whew! Now we have to try to win the peace…

[Later] This – US-backed militia appearing to be goons is the kind of thing we have to make sure doesn’t happen!

blam! is a weblog add-on for book and other product reviews, linked to Amazon. The interesting bit is that it pulls various bits of information from Amazon into one’s posting automatically (including a link to a book jacket photo if there is one) and can also automatically post your review to blaxm, which is a meta-weblog containing other people’s reviews. (It’s a pity it doesn’t post them into a more flexible database instead, but it’s a beginning).

This is an early example of the kind of collaborative content tool I would like to see- something that lets you express yourself personally but at the same time share the results with the world in a structured way.

I found blaxm a little frustrating in its implementation – but through it I found allconsuming which doesn’t yet provide the same e-z integrated automatic posting that Blam does (or is supposed to anyway) but is built around a database interface and has some interesting features of its own (it’s easier to look at it for your self than to explain).

A minor grievance is that since these rely heavily on Amazon’s database, if the book you have isn’t there, you can’t use these tools to indicate you have read it – at least not easily. Oh well – nothing’s perfect.

Here’s an example review I just did using Blam (together with the sample HTML they recommended I paste in here, which as you can see doesn’t work too well):

At Home With Computers

Elaine Lally

A useful academic book for anyone who wants to examine the place of computers in everyday home life (in Australia). It takes an ethnographic perspective which means at the end of the day you can often think, “but that was obvious” – yet it is sometimes useful to state the obvious in an academic form. It looks at such issues as “why do people buy computers?”, “who uses them in the home?” and “where do people place their computers in the home and why?”



[Later] Oops – I forgot to credit Ant’s Eye View for helping me find this stuff in the first place.free full download porn length moviesadult free movies watchsex movie free clipsmovies amatuergay movies blackfree gay movies longmovies playboy freenude beach movies Map

A new report by one of my professors, Robin Mansell is summarised here by the BBC. It points out (what should in any case be obvious) that third world organisations are not getting significant new orders via B2B exchanges because these tend to facilitate exchange between firms that already know each other. Companies are reluctant to place large orders with others without some kind of ongoing relationship built up through personal contact.movies free toon tgpmovies teen hotmovie sutra kamamovies fuck maturemovie nudepsp movie creatorin rape movies thesample movies sapphic Map

UpMyStreet, a pioneering experiment in delivery of geographically-based information in the UK, (which also employed a number of people whose work I respect) has
gone into administration. I hope that someone decides to pick up its assets and do something with them. The idea of linking information and discussion to postcodes is an excellent one and with the growth of location-based services of all kinds the site is bound to have a future – its directors say it is “only months from turning a profit”.

I have just put up a small poll to try to learn more about what brings people to this blog and how to improve it. I hope you will take a few minutes to fill it in. It’s anonymous and it isn’t being used for any commercial purpose – I just want to get to know you better.her about mp3sample 2525 mp3matchbox mp3 3am451 mp3 x4gb mp3 watchmp3 01 mp3 search dance myamp3 encoding 320kcruzin 8ball mp3 mjg Map