dirty (Taken with instagram)

clean (Taken with instagram)

Some have been grumbling over the iPhone’s Ring/Silent switch’s behavior. Currently, the Ring/Silent switch silences most sounds, except for some apps, alarms, and timers. The aforementioned grumblers wish that the switch would make the iPhone completely silent. I disagree; the current behavior is ideal.

Every night I have Siri set an alarm, switch the iPhone to Silent, and go to bed. In the morning my alarm sounds and I wake up. It’s simple, effective, and forces me to use no apps.

Making the iPhone completely silent would prevent me from waking up, or it would force me to enter some tertiary mode so that the alarm sounds and other alerts do not. So changing the Ring/Silent switch’s behavior complicates interacting with my phone every day.

A neglected aspect of this issue is that you may set an alarm or timer with a specified sound. One of these sounds is “None”. So instead of being interrupted by a sound for a trivial alarm set way in advance, choose “None” when you set that alarm. Then when it goes off later you will not be interrupted by a sound and the phone should just vibrate.

Other people seem to leave their phones on Ring when they sleep, and suggest that they would want to be woken by a call in the middle of the night because it must be important. These people must not have many friends in college, nor is it likely their names start with two “A”s. Since I am still in college, I get a fair number of texts in the night after I’ve gone to bed on the weekends. Waking up each time one of these comes in is unacceptable. More annoying is when I get a “butt dial” from someone’s phone after I sleep. A four minute voicemail of pocket noise is a lot less of a bother than being awoken at 3:30 AM by the call. Leaving the phone on Ring is not a viable option for me.

The iPhone’s Ring/Silent behavior has been acceptable since 2007, and it has only been an issue when a new user’s alarm goes off in the NY Philharmonic. This instance is not significant enough to change the nuanced behavior of the Ring/Silent switch to mute all noises. Doing so would greatly reduce the iPhone’s utility, and that is something that none of us want. 

Floppies (Taken with instagram)

It turns out that not only does ⌘⏎ let you edit a filename in the finder, but ⌘⌫ moves the selected file to the Trash.

San Francisco Windows

Last night I closed out the Alien quadrilogy with Alien: Resurrection. As I popped the DVD into the tray I had a hunch that it had to be better than Alien 3. I was not wrong. Although Resurrection was better, it was not so much better. The third and fourth Alien movies fail to recognize, much less capitalize on, the human element that made the first film successful. What makes the original Alien scary is that the Alien itself remains primarily unseen, and what occupies our screen is a slow dwindling of characters. As the number of characters declines and we begin to question their motivations, we get wound up. Scott harnesses this method of delivering suspense through storytelling to great effect.

Aliens provides a nice middle ground in the series of films, and is my favorite of the quadrilogy. It continues to explore the potential of the first movie in the series, but on a larger scale. We have a larger cast of characters, and we get to watch a new set of humans with different assumptions and motivations be challenged by an alien adversary.

Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection forget where they come from, and instead try to make a sci-fi horror film out of the Fifth Element. That’s just not going to work. Both films change the Alien’s behavior from other the other movies (between installments and whenever their plot requires). This is the same kind of discord that separates Star Wars into films that are great and those that ruin everything. Instead of following the form of a classic human drama in Alien (where individuals are challenged by some conflict and ultimately triumph), in Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection we have a creature feature where a bunch of dim witted humans are slowly picked off by the Alien. There’s a material difference in the structure of these two parts of the quadrilogy, and I believe that it was enabled by giving the Alien(s) more screen time.

Technical advancements in film-making between the 70s-80s and 90s-00s enabled directors to introduce significantly more special effects. A puppet could be replaced by a fully articulated digital model. In the 70s, it was challenging but manageable to make a significant movie using a lot of puppets, scale models, and cinematic trickery. But by the 90s these techniques were replaced with the green screen. (Note that I am making observations and haven’t researched these dates but instead am making general statements.) Directors could note easily make a feature length movie with a puppet in every shot. But it’s too easy to throw an Alien in every shot later. So as the capabilities of the Alien were enhanced, it got more screen time, and the narrative became a means for exploring what horrors the Alien was capable of. This leaves the narrative of the films dry.

Where Alien tortured us with humans battling the unseen, Alien: Resurrection tortures us with 109 minutes of Ron Perlman. That’s a material difference in quality.

I watched Alien 3 last night, and I’ve got to say that I was really quite disappointed. I forgot that David Fincher directed it, and when his name appeared on screen I decided to shelve that I was busy hating on the cuts between the narrative and the credits. (Here’s a tip: put the opening credits into their own thing, then go to the film’s content. See all Bond films and Tarantino.) But then the movie started. I watched Alien last week, and Aliens two nights ago, so I was primed to enjoy the movie. Those two films aged fairly well in my opinion, and by comparison Alien 3 was a complete disaster. In a recent piece in Wired on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Fincher is portrayed as extremely exacting, tweaking performances and parts of the set in order to fashion the experience he chose. That must have been a change since 1992, since there was an ungodly amount of green screen left around numerous shots of space ships and the Alien. Couple that with a change in the Alien’s behavior, movement, and disposition; as well as a generally uninspired story and some men from the Company dressed in some ridiculous outfits. 

The end result: Alien 3 is a complete turd compared to the first two movies in the quadrilogy. I was honestly surprised to see that it has 6+ stars on IMDB. I’d give it 3.

Neven Mrgan has a post on the impact of iMessage on his texting behavior. Mrgan finds that his volume of text messages is so reduced that it may make sense to cancel his messaging plan and pay per message. I was curious to see what the introduction of iMessage did to the number of text messages I send in a month. I pulled up AT&T’s billing portal and pulled the following information from my past bills.

My messaging rate has increased since iMessage was introduced. Since getting my first iPhone, I have been on a 1,500 message/month plan with AT&T. There were frequently months where I would be very close to going over my limit and I actively limited my text messaging. iMessage has made in impact on the number of texts that I send, but it is not as evident as it is in Mr. Mrgan’s data. As a growing number of friends get iPhones¹, more and more of my conversations move to iMessage. This has freed up my regular text messages, and I have begun to text more liberally on the whole. Thus, we see the upswing in the number of text messages sent since the introduction of iMessage. I think that I will be keeping my 1,500 messages for the foreseeable future.

¹Of the 10 most recent conversations in Messages (excluding some stray New Year’s mass texts), 4 are over iMessage. Pulling up Dialvetica, 5 of the top 10 contacts use iMessage.

A collection of fortunes I’ve received from fortune cookies:

• Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.
• You’re transforming yourself into someone who is certain to be successful.
• Your love life will be happy and harmonious.
• You have a deep appreciation of the arts and music.
• The job is well done.
• Keep your plans secret for now.
• Friends long absent are coming back to you.
• The only rose without a thorn is friendship.
• You are going to have a very comfortable old age.
• You and your wife will be happy in your life together.
• You’ll seldom experience regret for anything that you’ve done.