Well, I survived the funeral. That was probably about the longest weekend of my life. Most of Friday was spent helping mum do things like formatting the program, ripping the music and scanning and cropping the photos. The funeral home had been kind of vague on what format it wanted media in (protip: "DVD format" is not a recognised media type), but after some discussion I broke out Keynote and made a slideshow.

Saturday involved re-doing the slide show according to the somewhat complicated music/photo syncing that mum wanted to go in time to the different speeches and readings. With my Google-fu, I managed to get about 90% of it worked out sweetly and was only foiled by the fact that Keynote doesn't have the ability to loop two tracks on one slide, and I was too lazy to find a way of splicing the music together.

This turned out to be just as well, because come Monday we found out that while we could totally plug T'Kyn into the funeral home's TV screen (after a bit of cajoling and assertions that we'd "put it back the way we found it after, trust us we're totally in IT"), the sound wasn't hooked up. Luckily we'd bought a CD of the soundtrack, so the funeral consisted of me and ~Mat [h] sitting in the AV booth at the back of the chapel, queuing music and pressing space bar to progress the slide show (the actual funeral conductor having disclaimed responsibility on account of it all being too complicated). It's the only funeral I haven't cried at – okay, two tears – mostly because I was spending the entire time panicking that I'd fuck it up. Because, yanno, it wasn't like the audience solely consisted of my entire family and all their oldest friends or anything. Black. Shame.

And then – to make matters more exciting – the conductor comes into the tiny booth about halfway through and says, "Since you're in here anyway, you can do the lowering of the coffin." Oh great, no pressure.

I was supposed to wait for a signal from mum to press the green button that would take Pa's coffin away into the floor but, well, as it turned out I didn't. And, yeah, that thing lowers a lot faster than I'd expected.

But, other than that I think it went well. It was mentioned a couple of times during the ceremony that the reason we didn't have a minister or anything was because family was very important to Pa. So all the speaking was done by family, the program was made by the family and even the AV – the thing I'd be guessing everyone leaves up to the professionals – was done by the family. Even if that meant a few… hiccups.

I still think he would've approved.

Of course, thanks to her investigations into Pa's history for her eulogy, mum's now obsessed with Freemasonry. I told her I'd get her an apron for her birthday. She didn't believe I'd be able to buy one without actually being a Mason myself but, well, I have Great Faith in the Internet trumping a not-so-secret-society any day.

And then, on Tuesday, we went to the Kino. Going to the Kino is, like, a family tradition whenever we're in Sydney. I was alarmed to note that they seemed to be cutting back their stocks of A5 and B5 sized ring binders. I love these things and I've go no idea where I can buy them online. I was kind of after a large A5-sized one to archive the stuff from the "working" notebook I keep in my bag but, alas, there was nothing suitable. Hrm…

I also bought The Plucker because Brom is, like, my art hero. Okay, he's apparently not a great writer but… Jesus the illustrations well and truly make up for it. And the final thing in my basket was Issue #2 of Tokyopop's translated Gothic & Lolia Bible. For old time's sake (I couldn't find Issue #1). Haven't read it yet, so no opinions on that front but… yeah. These times, they are a'changin'.

Anyway, the thing about the Kino in Sydney is that it's about two blocks away from the new Apple Store. So – like everyone else – we went for a stickybeak.

The place is… really weird. Now, don't get me wrong; I love Apple. I was a reluctant convert but since getting my first PowerBook I've never looked back. Once I got over the fact that it wasn't Windows,¹ I fell in love with OS X. I've always loved the sleek physicality of the high-end aluminium laptops (I'm not so keen on the plastic ones), and I adore the batPod's glass front² and the fact the thing is so damn heavy. Apple products feel quality. There's so much cheap consumer tech floating about and I love that Apple doesn't 'do' that, even if it means its products are more expensive.

So I love Apple… but I don't get the zealotry. I really don't. I mean, yeah, Apple makes nice stuff and I like nice stuff… but travelling to a foreign country in order to line up overnight outside a store just so you can be one of the first people in? I don't get that shit. And the thing is, Apple just don't sell that many products. What the hell are they doing with three floors of shop front?

Well, as it turns out, they're selling the "Apple lifestyle". Hard.

Here's the deal. The whole front of the store is glass. The actual shop floor itself is much longer than it is wide, with every floor ending at a half-height glass partition that looks down on the open atrium entry thing. The famous "glass staircase" is hidden behind the back wall and is the only part of the shop not visible from the street.

Because that's the thing; the store isn't made for the people inside. It's made for the people outside. It's designed so that people on the street can look into a living display case of people using Apple products. It's taunting the people outside.

The first floor is almost solely laptops. The second iPods, and the third is dominated by the "Genius Bar"; tech support, essentially. The first and second floors are dominated by large tables, each containing about a dozen of the product each particular floor is selling. The whole point is to get people touching and playing. To be honest, I like this idea; the selling point for Apple products is their user experience, and Apple obviously knows this and is working it. Hard. I also didn't notice this at the time – had to have it pointed out to me by someone else – but there are no obvious cash registers in the store. Instead, the staff all have portable PoS devices. It's interesting, because it adds to that feeling you're in a showcase rather than a shop.

Very clever, Apple.

So mum and dad spent a lot of time fiddling with iPods after becoming curious of mine when they caught me watching videos on it in the car. ~Mat [h] and I jumped on the staircase figuring that if we could get it to shatter we could sue Apple for zillions (it didn't work). We were there for, I dunno, fifteen minutes maybe – fighting the crowd and sweltering in the heat³ – and left with the impression of a company making way too much money.

… but I'm still getting an iPhone next month.

Those videos I was watching in the car? Yeah, Smallville.

It's an… odd show. It's taken me one and a bit seasons, but I've finally come to the opinion that its main flaw is, indeed, extremely crappy writing (I was originally tossing up between bad acting and bad writing; the writing won out). When the show works, it works. I think it skims across some really interesting and quintessential themes – teenage alienation (pun intended), the importance of family, the nature of heroism – and there's a good show under there somewhere.

But it all gets eaten up by the hideous beast that is Clana.

I was kinda surprised to find I didn't actually dislike Lana. Okay, she's kind of morbid and self-involved, but she actually seems to be aware of this fact (when she catches herself sleeping on her parents' graves in "Nocturne" she says something along the lines of "What am I doing?") and when she's a Scooby in the Clarkgang she works. I don't like her as a love interest. For anyone. Her relationship with Clark in S1 veers between stalking and unfaithfulness, with I don't think is fair on anyone's character (and, for the record, I actually really like Whitney) and in S2 seems to mostly involve her banging on tediously about Trust and Honestly.

And, yeah. I agree with gnosis on this one; the main thing that throws me out of the show is when it starts beating me over the head with heavy-handed metaphors. Smallville wouldn't know subtly if it bit it on the ass, and this is what I mean by bad writing. It's like, okay we get that Clark's secret causes strain on his personal relationships. Seriously, we get it. Bring it up every now and again but not every damn episode. Multiple times.

And the other thing is that the interactions between the characters just don't work. It's an ensemble cast show but the ensemble is just too separated. This is where I think it gets soundly trumped by, say, Buffy. Buffy established as of the Pilot that the Scoobys were 'in' on The Secret. SV doesn't and it suffers from it. Badly. There's far too much telling and not nearly enough showing. Clark takes about four episodes to start referring to Lex as "like my best friend" but they never actually do anything that doesn't involve The Plot in some fashion. Chloe and Pete get the same treatment – though we can at least assume that Clark goes to school with them – because, again, all the spare time in the show is eaten up by the Clana monster.

God I hate that thing.

So, yeah. There was something decent in here but, seriously, NEEDS LESS LOVE TRIANGLES.

Thank gods for fanfic.

And finally, I left a copy of Chainbreaker in the library today. I've never stolen anything out of a store before, let alone in and it sure was an odd experience.

I think I got away with it. No idea what the library will do with it once it's discovered but, well, that's half the fun, isn't it?

… I still need to get used to Firefox's new address bar thing. Searching on title rather than URI; what's up with that?

1. I tell people it takes about three months. ^
2. I'm totally bummed that Apple has ditched this look for its latest generation iPod Classics. The new rounded edges and matte finish just make me go… meh. ^
3. Overcoat plus hoodie plus long sleeve t-shirt make for a sad Dee. ^

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First off, thanks to everyone who offered their condolences about my grandfather. For those of you who missed the Tweet, he had a massive stroke on Saturday night and was rushed to hospital. There's not a lot the doctors can do for him – he's like, 90-something – and there's not a great deal of hope that he'll pull through.

So, yeah. We're mostly just waiting now. No, scrap that; mum just called to tell me he passed away this morning at about 3am. So.

Funeral's probably this Saturday.

In less sober news, my review at PSGR came up the other day. Go me.

I have been a sporadic visitor to your website for a while now. Not so much for your blogs as the content doesn't particularly interest me, but for the aesthetically pleasing layout you have up.

I have to admit this line threw me a bit. It's just… someone visiting multiple times just for the layout? Bizarre.

what I'm going to assume is fanart used in your header image

For the record, it's Ulfrun; my Troll Shaman character in World of Warcraft. So it's fanart, but fanart of… myself.

The only thing I can suggest here is that you link to the page about log.code from your comment form.

Yeah, I keep telling myself that. The reason I haven't is technical; the space where the link would logically 'go' in the comments form isn't part of the template, it's hard-coded into a function. Linking the log.code page from there decreases that portability I keep kidding myself the code has in it, since the log.code page is a custom page and thus theoretically won't be the same between installs. I probably need to add a line in the template or something, but I just… haven't. Bad me.

First, the link to the Wikipedia entry on 'Lokean' doesn't exist. Being a psychology student, I made the assumption Lokean refers to the ideas of the philosopher of John Locke, but I could be wrong.

You are. And, damn. Teach me to pick the most obscure reconstructionist heathen religion to not believe in; I guess the page got deleted for (non-)notability. Now I have to find a new reference source…

How do you keep up with all these communities and chat programs!?!

I have a very short attention span.

So. Yeah. That was a lot better than I was expecting, to be honest, and I've got my shortlist of things I need to clean up. So thanks to Nellie for taking the time to spot the things the contempt of familiarity keeps hidden from me.

FenPress got the start of a layout yesterday,¹ and I think it's evident that while ten years or so of practice has helped me in the layout department, I still struggle when it comes to logo design. Oh well. Not to mention I now need to re-write a bunch of WP's code which I told myself I wouldn't, but… it's just layout stuff, so… that's okay, right?

Right.

I've been thinking about my whole user profiles problem, and the real issue with it finally hit me somewhere on Friday night. The difference between WordPress and LiveJournal is that, in the latter, the relationship between users and journals is 1:1. You are your journal. WordPress is different. A user can have zero to n journals, while a journal can have 1 to n users. This impacts on the friending system, since how are you going to apply it across multiple users and multiple journals? See, I was thinking you have two levels of basic friending. A one-way relationship makes you a "Fan" of a user or a journal, while a two-way relationship is a Friend. Initially, posts will be able to have separate user levels for Everyone, Registered (anyone with an FP account), Fans and Friends. (Friends are, by definition, also Fans.) But my problem here is which Fans and Friends am I referring to? Fans and Friends of the user, or Fans and Friends of the journal?

At the moment I'm leaning towards the journal, just because it makes more logical sense. But then what's the point of being able to friend users?

It also means I'm going to have to make a profile page equivalent for individual journals.

Hrm…

Last thing (and, wow, I haven't done one of these multi-topic posts in a while). So ~Mat [h] and I went to see The Incredible Hulk on Friday night. I'm still not really sure what to think about it. I love Norton as an actor and so forth, and the film wasn't bad like Hulk was (mostly because it allowed Hulk to be heroic instead of just tortured, which is always nice in a superhero story), but…

I dunno. Maybe I'm just spoilt after seeing Iron Man, because this film certainly didn't tap into the same chemistry that one did. And that's no-one's fault, exactly. Because RDJ's Stark made Iron Man and while Norton does his best with Banner the character himself just… well, just isn't as fun. I think one of the reasons we all love Iron Man so much is simple wish fulfilment; we all want to be Tony, rich and brilliant and witty and slowly digging ourself out of apathy and into heroism (with superpowers pew pew). But no matter how much we empathise with Banner, we don't want to be him, and I think that puts up a bit of a wall between the film and the audience.

And this is a problem, because – like Iron Man – TIH suffers from having a kind of a crap villain. I said to ~Mat [h] as we left the theatre that there are essentially two types of superhero films; the ones where the hero fights a villain who is his opposite and the ones where the hero fights a villain who is pretty much exactly like him, but evil(-er). I'm not sure which one I prefer. On the one hand you've got films like Iron Man, TIH and Batman Begins, all of which had Big Bads that were, well, pretty lame. The drama in the films came from the journey rather than the destination, and you have to empathise with the hero (which is why Iron Man worked for me, TIH and BB not so much). And on the super-extreme other hand you've got Superman Returns whose villain was, well, so much more fun than its hero that you were kinda maybe rooting for him to win. Just a little bit. And, okay, Supes saves the day like you know he will and he's earned his victory… but you kinda wish he didn't. Maybe. Because Evil is Cool. Even though it shouldn't be. You know.²

… where was I again? Oh yeah; The Incredible Hulk, okay-but-not-great due to lack of interesting characters.

… man, work distracted me with stocktake and now I've got no idea where I was going with this.

1. Purple, cream, charcoal and green. Oh Dee… ^
2. This, incidentally, has always been my problem with Superman full stop. He tends to be either a Christ-like nice guy (and thus extremely boring), or a total self-righteous dick (leading to a Luthor Paradox)… occasionally both within the same episode/issue! It bothers me that all his best writing seems to be in fanfic… ^

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So maybe I can disbelieve my co-workers, but the internet seems pretty sure.

Is it bad or just denial to immediately think of viral marketing?

Edit: And LiveJournal's slowed to a crawl, too. That's a eulogy right there.

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