SansPoint

Wes Anderson^[1] is one of my favorite directors, and watching Hotel Chevalier, his new short film/prologue to the upcoming The Darjeeling Limited hits all but one of the right notes. It’s a standard Wes Anderson bit through and through, from the slightly desaturated colors, shots with near perfect lateral symmetry, detached dialog, and Futura titles. It’s 13 minutes of concentrated excellence, and has me pretty excited about Darjeeling Limited.

The short itself features Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore), and Natalie Portman^[2] reuniting after a dismally failed romantic relationship, while Schwartzman hides in an expensive French hotel room. I’m not sure how it connects to the main attraction, but as a little dose of Wes Anderson, it’s excellent.

If it’s missing anything, it’s the requisite Mark Mothersbaugh score, but the music in it “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” by Peter Sarstedt suits it excellently.^[3] The film is available from iTunes for free, and I highly recommend it.

1. No relation ↩
2. I don’t know what it is, but this is the second Wes Anderson film that features an actress I have sexual interest in presented in a way that drives me batty. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson managed to do the same thing with Gwyneth Paltrow, who does not interest me at all. Her character Margot Tenenbaum, however, is bizarrely attractive. Cate Blanchette in The Life Aquatic, though didn’t work for me in that way. ↩
3. Mark’s apparently sitting Darjeeling Limited out, which is a shame. His scores are what got me interested in Wes Anderson to begin with. ↩

Many moons ago, I read an article by Merlin Mann on his plain text setup for organizing his life. I gave it a try, but was quickly overwhelmed. In response, I tried to force some sort of hierarchy upon the files, rather than use the arcane Metasymbol SphereOfLife Project UniqueIntuitiveFilename VersionNumber.txt file names that Merlin uses. This lead me to a host of programs to house and organize these files: Yojimbo, Mori, Journler, CopyWrite^[1], MacJournal, even DevonThink to a limited extent. All of them, every single last one, had something that didn’t work.

Yojimbo’s two major flaws were a .Mac sync that was utterly broken and it’s lack of an actual hierarchy, though the .Mac thing was the biggest problem. Journler and Mori both had issues with speed once their library filled up with serial numbers, running lists of movies and books to read, project ideas, and other deitrus of life. The more I loaded into them, to offload the required hassles of organization, the less useful they became. DevonThink, which Mr. Mann speaks highly of, proved to be completely confounding to use. If I can’t figure out to put things into it, the program is useless.

What I need is a way to have my life: projects, action lists, class notes, and everything else organized and portable, so I can access them on my desktop machine, my laptop, and nearly any other computer I have to use (preferably), off-line or on-line. Obviously, then, a system that relies exclusively on a single application to hold everything, or even parts of things, is not the best system. In this case, the only thing that provides cross-platform compatibility and portability is good old plain text.

I’ve not set up my system yet, but I’m working on the basic plan. I have a lot of data holed up in Journler’s database, iGTD’s database^[2], and assorted other programs. To do this, I’ll have to rip these things open, export (when the application provides that functionality), and build a system up from scratch. Once I have the data in text, however, it shouldn’t be a huge chore, thanks to OS X’s wonderful little features: tagging, smart folders, and Spotlight—as well as a healthy bit of Quicksilver-fu. Stay tuned.

1. Still the best app to do writing in, though not the best for organizing one’s life in ↩
2. iGTD exclusively holds my action lists, and nothing more ↩

Sorry for the lack of updates. Real life, college, and various other things have interfered. Consider this post a resumption of form.

One thing I love about Apple is their attention to all the little details of the UI experience. No other company or open-source project has been able to match Apple’s quality control over interfaces. That is why I am so upset.

See, the headphone jack on my 5th Generation iPod video broke. I had to get a new one or learn to solder. I opted to get a new iPod classic, and I fell in love with it immediately. It’s everything my old iPod was and more. The new interface is quite nice, save for one thing…

See that? That is an errant apostrophe. It’s unacceptable, it’s incorrect, it should not be there. Apple, shame on you.

An apostrophe is never, ever used to make a word plural, nor abbreviations, not even when the word ends in a vowel. An apostrophe is used to indicate a multiple of a letter (e.g. “The word letter has two t’s.”). That’s the beginning and end of the apostrophe’s role as plural.

The saddest, most pathetic part of this, is that the previous iPod iterations have all done this right. The menu option was “To-Dos,” and that is the way it should have stayed.

Maybe it’ll be fixed in the next update. I can only hope. Apostrophe abuse must be stopped.