Disorderly Content

That's the name of the latest play in the Best of Broadway series my friend Carol and I have been attending up in San Francisco. I didn't know much about it, beyond it being a one man play about a transvestite in Nazi Germany. Which doesn't exactly sound like my idea of a good time. But the reality was far better and more compelling than that description. Jefferson Mays plays the real-life Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a cross-dressing gay man who somehow survived and even prospered through two repressive regimes: not just Hitler but communist East Germany. But how she survived is a question both her life and the play raise without pat answers; charges of collaborating with the secret police are impossible to dismiss, but perhaps not so damning in a state where there was little alternative. Mays gives voice to Charlotte, playwright Doug Wright and other lesser characters, imbuing each with his own personality. His performance is magnificent, easily matching that of his subject.

I've mentioned my hobby of making pins for my Scaper friends before. The latest pin's at right; it's Dominar Rygel XVI by way of the Fairly OddParents. Announcing the new pin on a couple of the Farscape boards led to a question about possibly doing charms. Not knowing anything about charms, and especially about their manufacture, I went back to the firms I'd used for my pins to see if they did that sort of the thing. And was very surprised to see that one of the makers is using one of my designs as an example of their custom work. I know that I was impressed when I first saw the pulse pistol I'd commissioned. I guess the artist thought it was pretty cool as well.

Who needs The Onion when the real news is so ridiculous? Yesterday, Reuters had the story of how Canada's Prince Edward Island was restricting the opening hours of its suicide hotline to 9-5 weekdays. Budget cuts, you know. Which makes perfect sense. I mean, how often do you feel suicidal when you aren't at work?

And then we have this San Francisco Chronicle story about a photo op of the Governator filling in a pothole in San Jose. Which wouldn't be much of a story, except that the pothole didn't actually exist until a road crew dug it up a few hours earlier. Glad to know there aren't any real potholes Arnie could have filled in for the cameras.

A quote from a Wall Street Journal article about the D: All Things Digital conference they put on:

Pressed about security by Mr. [Walt] Mossberg, Mr. [Paul] Otellini had a startling confession: He spends an hour a weekend removing spyware from his daughter's computer. And when further pressed about whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate safety from security woes ought to buy Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh instead of a Wintel PC, he said, "If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else."

Remarkable words from the new CEO of Intel, wouldn't you say?

I have an old friend who's addicted to Disneyland. And fireworks. And especially the fireworks at Disneyland. Which I grant are rather more involved and spectacular than the usual once-every-year-on-the-4th we get in the Bay Area. So when he practically insisted that I just had to see the latest incarnation of Disney's pyrotechnics, and that I had to do it on a weekday, and that it better be before Memorial Day when the crowds got insane, I found myself driving down to Anaheim for a little road trip.

It's been a couple of years since I did the park. And there are a few new attractions, as well as all the stuff at California Adventure, the Magic Kingdom's younger and less successful brother. Which was fun and all. But when you deal with a fanatic, you have to manage your fun and keep your priorities straight. Like getting in place an hour in advance of the parade. And then moving the moment it's over to get that perfect position for the fireworks. Which meant sitting on the curb for ninety minutes and watching the crowd grow to bursting. Ninety minutes when we could have been riding the rides. Which I suppose demonstrates that I'm not a true connoisseur. As did the fact that I spent half of the show watching the action and the other half trying to photograph it. Not entirely successfully, I have to say. Maybe if I had a tripod. And a faster lens. And fewer people crowding me.

Caught a 2PM performance of Episode III with some of my friends from our local Blogger Meetup. I'll admit that I wasn't expecting much; I hated Phantom Menace and disliked Send In The Clones. But as others have said, Sith is easily the best of the new trilogy and surprisingly well done. It's visually stunning and well paced. I thought Hayden Christensen did a good job of his transformation into Dark Helmet. And the guy who played the Emperor was by turns oily and vicious.

So what's not to like? Well, every damn scene between Christensen and Natalie Portman for one thing; these two have less than zero chemistry together. It's not that the dialogue between them was bad, although it was. I just didn't believe for a moment that they were into each other.

There's also a sense of deja vu about too many scenes. There are moments of homage or theft from 2001, Frankenstein and The Lord of The Rings. Heck, Padmé even has a line that was said better by Samwise Gamgee. And as dramatic as the battle on the lava world was, I couldn't help thinking that Peter Jackson did it all so much better.

I was also bugged here as in Clones by George Lucas's insistence on connecting every dot from the original movies. Like a "blink and you'll miss him" scene of Governor Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing back in 1977 and by Wayne Pygram here. There was absolutely no reason to include the character, although I'm always happy to see a Farscape alum get work. And are we really supposed to take seriously a character named Commander Cody? Or am I the only one to remember both the rock band and the television series that gave them their name?

In the end, the biggest disappointment is that there were no surprises. Science fiction writer David Brin wrote a wonderful piece a couple of years back about how Lucas could save the series by giving events a twist. He knew, as did I, that no such thing was going to happen. But he had to try. And I get to rant, much good either action will do.

While doing some reading on Amazon web services, I came upon a very interesting example of their value: an RSS feed generator that creates periodic searches on Amazon. If you read blogs with an RSS newsreader like, for example, the wonderful NetNewsWire for the Macintosh, you can use it to run searches and let you know when it finds something. So rather than waiting for somebody to tell me when Amazon has the next Farscape Starburst Edition ready for preorder, I let my newsreader do the work. Simple and elegant.

I thought the severed Sauron finger the New Line folks were hawking was the weirdest movie tie-in I'd seen. Then I saw this Return of the Jedi era Princess Leia slave girl outfit on Boing Boing. For your pet! That's just wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to begin.

(There's also a Darth Vader model, which is more dumb than creepy. After all, any dog that will let you put a Darth Vader costume on him is clearly unworthy of it.)

"Help me, Obi-Wan Cannoli. You're my only hope!"

Gotta love them Thai fighters...

A perfect example of seeing a need and filling it: Geek Squad provides an absentee note generator for all the nerdly among us who will be suddenly unable to make it to work or class or whatever tomorrow. Of course, it won't help you if you encounter your manager or teacher on line at the theater, but what's life without a few risks? Me, I have my ticket for Saturday. Besides, being unemployed means never having to say you're under the weather. Even if you are.

Sadly, not from one of ours. Crooks and Liars has a four minute video clip of British MP George Galloway giving Senator Norm Coleman a verbal whipping over accusations related to the Iraqi old for food program. Galloway is articulate and forthright. He may even be telling the truth, which makes a nice change.

Putting the lie to the idea that only right wingers have God on their side is this communiqué from a group calling itself Unitarian Jihad. Why they chose SF Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll as the conduit for their message is something I leave to wiser and purer souls than yours truly to divine.

That's the subtitle of a book called The Tipping Point. I picked it up at Borders a couple of days ago; something about the cover caught my attention, although I can't say what it is. And I opened it at random, started reading and got caught up in an anecdote about mavens, people who become so expert on a topic that they become evangelists on the subject. Having a little of that in my own makeup, I bought the book and inhaled its contents over the next couple of days.

The Tipping Point attempts to explain a range of social phenomena, from disease vectors to fashion trends to societal issues like teenage smoking. And not just explain them, but to break them down in ways that offer approaches to dealing with them. Along the way, it presents psychological studies that demonstrate how much of what we know (or at least what I know) is wrong and why we believe otherwise. It's part pop psychology, part business book, part cultural history.

It's been ages since I've read anything that got me thinking so hard about so many subjects. If you haven't heard about it, you really ought to pick up a copy. And if you've already read it, why in the world didn't you tell me about it sooner?

Sometimes it's good to live in Silicon Valley. And tonight was one of those times, thanks to a panel at the Computer History Museum. The subject was computer animation. And the panelists know a bit about the subject: Ed Catmull, cofounder and president of Pixar; Alvy Ray Smith, one of the pioneers of computer graphics; Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo and writer on Pixar's first four films; and Brad Bird, writer/director on The Incredibles.

Although the discussion started with some history of 2D computer graphics and dropped more than a few well known names in the biz, it turned pretty quickly to the creative side of animation, the storytelling that uses all that hardware and software rather than the mechanics. And one of the joys of being in such a young industry is that so many of its leading lights glow with boyish (yeah, it was all boys on the panel) enthusiasm. Gives me hope that I can hold on to my own excitement for the field for another decade or two.

While wandering around LinkShare, the folks who mangle manage the iTunes Store's affiliate program, I ran into a little bit of nostalgia. If you're old like me, you may remember collecting catalogues full of fascinating yet useless junk and then poring over every picture and bit of deathless prose within. So seeing the name of Edmund Scientific among all the other merchants dying to pay me for conning you into buying stuff you really don't need brought back some wonderful memories. Heck, click on their logo at right and do a search on "airship". I just dare you to resist getting one of these babies!

Sure is nice to know my taste is just as random as ever...

By now I'm sure you've read about how a Newsweek article that claimed military interrogators at Guantanamo had flushed a copy of the Koran (Quran?) inspired protests in Afghanistan that left fifteen dead and more than two hundred injured, and that the article is unsubstantiated and likely false. Ignoring for a moment the irresponsibility of publishing a story with such tenuous basis, I have to wonder if those in the Moslem world who were driven to violence by it will stop and reconsider. How many will accept that it was all a terrible mistake? How many will continue to believe the original story? And how many will make a conscious choice to believe it, because it plays to their own prejudices about the western world? It's one of the sadder aspects of human nature that we continue to be angry and self-righteous, even when it is revealed that the cause for that anger was an error.

Not that this turning out to be an error is much solace to the dead and injured. Somehow a retraction doesn't seem like enough of a response.

Update 05/17: And now the pendulum swings back. Several news outlets, including an interesting piece at Salon (watch a commercial for free access), question both the idea that it was Newsweek's reportage that started the riots and the suddenly conventional wisdom that no such desecration took place. An article by Molly Ivins enumerates all the reports of Koran abuse before Newsweek ran its story. Surely that pokes a hole in the whole "It's Newsweek's fault" scenario. To say nothing of the White House demanding more than an apology from the magazine. When exactly did they/will they apologize for getting the whole WMD claim wrong?

One other change in Mac OS X 10.4 that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere. I use the tar command to upload files to my website. And since my upgrade to Tiger I started seeing something odd. When I created a tarfile containing image, specifically the album covers for my iTunes blog, I'd see an extra dotfile along with the JPEG image:

./._Spamalot.jpeg
./Spamalot.jpeg

After extracting the contents tarfile on my FreeBSD-based web server, I ran the file command on the extra file:

$ file ._Spamalot.jpeg
._Spamalot.jpeg: AppleDouble encoded Macintosh file

Interesting. Apparently, Apple changed the behavior of tar and, from what I can determine, a few other commands, to preserve the metadata that Mac filesystems store in a file's resource fork. The AppleDouble file format stores both a file's contents and that extra information. Extracting the tarfile on a Mac recreates both the data and the metadata, while on another operating system it generates two separate files.

Not a problem once I know what's going on; I just had to set up a script to delete these unnecessary files on my web server. Sure wish they'd provide a way to turn this behavior off when I know I don't want the metadata. And I sure wish they'd found a place to document this kind of thing. Preferably a place I could have found.

Looks like I spoke too soon when I raved about how smooth my upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 was. While diagnosing the instability caused by a flaky memory module I discovered a couple of million errors being reported to the system log. One of these was being generated every second:

May 14 10:00:02 Timbala postfix/master[7073]: fatal: fifo_listen: remove public/pickup: Permission denied
May 14 10:00:03 Timbala launchd: org.postfix.master: exited with exit code: 1

When my own attempts to diagnose the problem went nowhere, I tried various Google searches. And eventually I found a blog entry from someone with the same problem. His posting led me to to the launchctl program, which confirmed the presence of the offending process. Telling launchctl to stop it didn't make any difference. So I went searching through launchd's various directories. And in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ I found the file I was looking for. I moved the org.postfix.master file out of the way, rebooted and am no longer getting all those spurious errors.

It's obviously a bug that Tiger tried starting Postfix's daemon in the first place. But what's really curious is that my G4 Cube running Tiger doesn't have the same problem. For some reason, it doesn't try to start the Postfix daemon in the first place. Curious.

Update 05/25: Thanks to a blogger who linked to this post, I have undone my brute force solution and replaced it with something that solves the real problem. Apparently, there was a user for the postfix software that didn't get created, as well as a permission problem. After moving the file back where I found it, I ran the following commands:

sudo /Library/Receipts/Essentials.pkg/Contents/Resources/CreateSystemUsers
sudo /etc/postfix/post-install set-permissions
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist

That seems to have done the trick. Everything looks okay, and the console isn't getting any more spurious messages.

Perhaps the most fascinating story in tech over the past couple of years has been the attempt by SCO to claim ownership of the core technology in Linux. This has led to SCO suing Linux provider Red Hat, Linux advocate IBM and several of SCO's own customers, including Autozone and Daimler Chrysler. Following the case has been made far easier due to the efforts of Pamela Jones, the prime mover behind the Groklaw website. Groklaw has followed every twist and turn of the various legal cases and SCO's various public utterances, which are often surprisingly out of sync. It has done so by quoting from public court documents and from a range of first person accounts of hearings in the cases, as well as providing carefully thought out commentary on what it all means.

Groklaw is clearly positioned in opposition to SCO's claims. Needless to say, the other side has been less than pleased, and that they've done what they could to discredit the site. Those efforts have been nasty, although nothing like the firestorm over a vicious and, as best I can tell, completely irrelevant attack on Ms. Jones by industry reporter Maureen O'Gara. That attack was withdrawn by the publications that initially ran it, which might have been the end of one particularly ugly chapter in the story.

But then the publisher of Sys-Con Media, which employs Ms. O'Gara as an editor and ran the story, made the mistake of accepting an interview with Free Software Magazine. And in the interview he makes it clear that he doesn't believe his magazines or Ms. O'Gara really did anything wrong by printing personal information about Ms. Jones and her family, or by the use of some pretty vile language along the way. The editorial staff at LinuxWorld Magazine plainly disagrees; they resigned this morning in protest at Sys-Con Media's failure to meet minimum levels of journalistic decency and ethics.

Me, I wonder where the SCO saga will go next. And I hope the former editors at LinuxWorld all find gigs at publications that know the difference between industry reportage and personal attacks.

Warning: What follows is another post hoc ergo propter hoc story. If you haven't been following this blog from the beginning (and shame on you if you haven't) and you haven't encountered that particular bit of Latin, you may find this posting instructive. Or at least entertaining. Or not.

As a rule, I reboot my two year old Titanium PowerBook every couple of weeks, generally because some software update insists upon it. When I'm not using it, I just close the lid and let it sleep. It sleeps better than I do these days.

A few weeks ago Apple released a patch that brought Mac OS X to version 10.3.9. During the post install reboot, I noticed that my clean and perfect guitar chord suddenly sounded awful, all staticy and nasty. I assumed, in a post hoc ergo propter hoc way, that something about the patch screwed up my startup sound. But since the rest of my audio sounded just fine, I didn't give it any more thought.

And then this past Monday I installed Mac OS X 10.4, AKA Tiger. And when I had a bunch of applications running, the system felt more sluggish. Not unusual with a new OS release, although I wasn't exactly happy. But then I brought up the About This Mac screen to check something. And was surprised to discover that my 1 GB PowerBook now reported a measly 768 MB. Had Tiger bitten off some of my memory?

As the week wore on, and as I started more and more apps and left them running for quick access, the performance problems became more pronounced. And I began to wonder if the About This Mac screen was telling me the truth: that my computer had suddenly lost its memory. So I tried shutting down, reseating the second DIMM and rebooting. No change. Then I finally did what I should have done from the beginning: I pulled out that second DIMM. And what do you know? The startup sound was as perfect as the day the PowerBook came home from the hospital. I guess it was trying to tell me something with that static; I just wasn't smart enough to pay attention.

A quick trip to Fry's later (well, two quick trips; the first one didn't have the memory in stock), I inserted a replacement DIMM, rebooted and verified that I'm back to a full 1 GB. And I'm marveling at how I associated two events (applying a patch and the bad startup sound) and missed the smaller connection: that the memory partially failed at some point since the previous reboot, and this was just the first boot attempt since then. If I hadn't applied the patch, I wouldn't have needed to reboot.

And to think that I used to provide tech support for a living. Good thing I didn't have to do with customers as clueless as me!

Joel Spolsky has a new article on his website called "Making Wrong Code Look Wrong" that's well worth a read if you're a programmer. But it's about more than programming. Hidden in his story of Microsoft's Charles Simonyi and the Hungarian notation coding conventions he forced on the Windows world is something I'd not heard before: that what Simonyi developed and what Windows programmers were forced to use are two completely different things. Somehow in the depths of Microsoft history, as Hungarian notation moved from the Word and Excel teams to the larger Windows base, the rules got misunderstood and mistranslated. And in the process, nearly all the value got leeched out. They still had the syntax right; they just lost track of the semantics. Put another way, they knew there was value in what they were doing; they just didn't know how to do it so they actually got the value.

Sounds like another case of Cargo Cult Science to me.

...and the world will try to invent a better mouse. Such is the case with Dashboard, Mac OS X Tiger's new mechanism for little user interface doohickeys. (The technical term for these elements is widgets, which is in fact no more descriptive than doohickeys. But I guess I'll go along with the powers that be.)

But widgets aren't perfect, at least not yet. One problem is that Safari, Apple's web browser, is happy to install new widgets. And those widgets could be malicious. It didn't take more than a couple of days after Tiger's release for an example of a self-installing but thankfully benign widget to be developed and deployed. And it doesn't take much imagination to see that there's a serious problem here.

But as the saying doesn't say, but really oughta: "Build a better mouse and the world will build a better mousetrap." And it took just another couple of days for a developer named Zack Schilling to invent Widget, The World Watcher. Basically, this Widget adds an action to the Widgets installation folder. And if something tries to install a widget, the action will pop up a dialogue to let you know and give you a chance to abort the install.

I suspect Apple will do some work to reduce the risk associated with widgets, since otherwise Mac OS X could become as big a security risk as, say, Windows. But in the meantime, it's nice to have this Widget watching out for us.

Well, not quite that bad. But close. Very close.

Sunday, driving home after my theater outing in San Francisco I noticed that my back was a bit sore. By that evening it was a whole lot worse; I'd pulled a muscle or something. Couldn't sleep; every time I moved it sent a shot of fire through my lower back.

After a couple of hours I gave up, very slowly and carefully got out of bed (which took a long time - moving the wrong way hurt like hell) and tried to make myself comfortable on the couch. Where I exhausted everything I'd recorded on my ReplayTV and then, around four AM, decided to sleep on the floor.

That worked a lot better. Woke up around seven, took a long time trying to stand up without agony and went back to the couch. By the afternoon I was on the mend and only getting twinges when I moved too quickly or with insufficent care. And today the pain has reached the annoyance stage.

So I'm feeling more like my own age instead of my father's. Although I did have the thought yesterday morning that I'll never again make contemptuous remarks about those teevee ads for the Craftmatic Adjustable Bed. Coulda used one of those...

This morning the UPS guy delivered my copy of Tiger, which for you non-Mac people (and you know who you are) is the latest version of Mac OS X. So, being the brave soul I am, I popped the DVD into my PowerBook and let the installer do its thing. And now I'm running happily away on the new OS. What's that thing they used to say at Holiday Inn? The best surprise is no surprise? Yeah, it's like that.

But it was really, really hard not to call this one Putting a Tiger in My Tank. So I think you ought to appreciate my strength of character.

Oh, and it looks like iSync now works with my Motorola phone via BlueTooth. So no more USB cable. Thank you, Apple. Hope you weren't too put out about my earlier complaints.

Last Sunday I went to the next play in my Best of Broadway series, Sir Peter Hall's production of As You Like It. Personally, I wasn't thrilled. The combination of avant garde sets and costumes (a sort of post-WWII fascist theme, or at least that was what they looked to me), the difficulties of Shakespearean dialogue, the cast's accents, the lack of amplification made for a trying time. And I have to say, As You Like It strains credulity more than most of Will's work.

Today it was Lennon, a musical whose subject is obvious. I'd heard the reviews were unenthusiastic, so I wasn't expecting much. But I enjoyed it: the music (Lennon's own compositions used to annotate his life), the performances (including Terrence Mann, who was an unforgettable Chauvelin in The Scarlet Pimpernel on Broadway a few years back), the stylish staging. Lennon the play is as unorthodox as Lennon the man, with the entire cast, men and women, playing the ex-Beatle, as well as all the other characters. Whether it's true to John Lennon I can't say. But it feels true. And it was a wonderful afternoon in the theater.

It's probably ironic that none of the supposedly ironic things Alanis Morisette has to say in her song Ironic are in fact ironic. For a proper example of irony (which isn't like bronzy except made of iron, no matter what Baldric may have thought), we turn our attention to Gizmodo, which tells us about an amazing tool for opening those hard to open blister packs. But (and here comes the irony part) guess what kind of package this wonder tool comes in? Yep, according to Boing Boing, it does indeed arrive in a blister pack.

And that, Ms. Morisette, is what we mean by irony. Rain on your wedding day, indeed!

I like listening to A Prairie Home Companion on public radio. Not as much as Car Talk or Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me or Fresh Air. But it's definitely in the top five. I like it because Garrison Keillor is a liberal, and a cheerful and upbeat one at that. But mostly I like it because it and he are warm and funny and more concerned about entertaining and enlightening the audience than about espousing political views.

And maybe part of that is that Mr. Keillor enjoys what he does. As this wonderful essay he wrote for The Nation shows, he has a true appreciation for radio, what it was and what it might just be again. He sees hope in the face of Clear Channel's attempts to homogenize the medium, with iPods and satellite radio and the like drawing away their audience, leaving the unique and kooky and highly entertaining to fill the void.

I just hope he's right.

From Boing Boing comes the thrilling and surprising news that the broadcast flag is dead. The US Court of Appeals declared that the FCC exceeded its authority by ordering that digital televisions implement the flag, which would have prevented us from doing anything with broadcast programs not explicitly permitted by the content creators.

Read the Boing Boing report for more detail. But in short it means that the guys who tried to sue the VCR out of existence the first time (and failed) and then tried to order it out of existence via the FCC (and failed) now have to talk their Congresscritters into legislating it out of existence. And any Congresscritter that goes along better hope we voters don't know who they are, right?

Update 05/06: Professor Lessig points out that it was the American Library Association who challenged the FCC on the broadcast flag, with PublicKnowledge paying for the legal talent. We owe a big debt to both.

Granted, first you have to be relevant before you can become irrelevant. So by that measure maybe nothing's changed. But let's hold off on that analysis for a moment...

You may know that I have a second blog, where I review music on Apple's iTunes Music Store. I put a lot of time into finding and reviewing music; why sometimes it takes actual minutes to get a single review ready for publication!

So I great the arrival of Indy with a combination of admiration and hostility. Indy is an application for Windows and, as of today, Mac OS X, that lets you listen to and rate music from a variety of independent artists. The idea is that as you rate each song, it gets a better idea of your taste and adjusts future suggestions accordingly. And when you like a song, the website of the band is only a click away.

The Mac version is build 2, which would normally be a very scary prospect. But so far it works very well. And it's free software, so you can hardly complain about the price.

As for my other blog, well, I guess I could keep it going for another week or so. Just in case, y'know.

A while back, Google Blogoscoped had a piece about how SEO Inc., a search engine optimization firm, has disappeared from Google. Bad for any company hoping to get business from the number one search engine. But how much more embarrassing and damaging for someone whose entire raison d'etre is to help others get good placement in search results?

Anyway, SEO decided to fight back. No, not against Google. Nope; it's classic "shoot the messenger" time: a cease & desist letter against the guy who pointed out the embarrassing truth. I guess they hope they can control the damage if they keep people from knowing that their questionable ability to influence Google's results has gone from questionable to nonexistent.

But of course this is the web. So the story they don't want out will be spread further and faster than if they'd just quietly taken their lumps. By those fine folks at Boing Boing. And John Battelle. And me, at least for the five or six people who read this.

Boy, you'd think they'd know better.

So today I went to see The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy for the second time. This time I went to the local digital projection theater, which I should have done the first time. Believe it or not, there were imperfections in the print I saw on Friday, despite it being the first public performance. Digital's nice that way; the quality is the same at every showing.

The reviews have been mixed on Hitchhiker's. But I liked it. A lot. As is obvious by the fact that I went back after just four days. Interestingly, I think I enjoyed it a little more the second time. I suspect that's because I was past being bothered by changes from the book and the radio series and was focused on enjoying the movie for itself. If you've seen it and enjoyed it, I wonder if you'll have the same reaction on a second viewing.

Oh, and in other news, BBC 4 is now broadcasting the new Quandary Phase radio series: eight episodes that cover books four and five. For those of us outside the British Empire, the website offers each episode starting each Tuesday afternoon and for a week after.