I have no words to say, on this slow and useless day

Let's bring you up to speed in a round of updates:
- I saw the movie Juno with logpoes a few weeks ago. Good movie, quite amusing.
- I saw Persepolis with bakenius. Was a great movie. Loved the animation style.
- I bough an Airport Express today, to be stream music to my stereo. Works like a charm.

More later..

I've just made my first Wikipedia edit. Not sure if it is any good, but we'll see I guess. It does make me feel good, however.

In the meantime, I saw The Transformers, which was fun of course, to see them on the screen after so many years. Never seen so much stuff break in one movie, and I guess you need to see it on DVD on half speed to fully be able to appreciate all the graphic detail (in other words, the fighting scene(s?) were a little too fast). But still fun and amusing.

I've also finished my thesis design in the meantime. Consequently, I've already started working on my thesis.

I still need to figure out where to go to for a vacation.

I'm not much a fan of Nielsen, but the Top 10 Bloopers in Usability in Movies is actually worthwhile, although I disagree with some of the points, for example point number 10:

In the film Jurassic Park, a 12-year-old girl has to use the park's security system to keep everyone from being eaten by dinosaurs. She walks up to the control terminal and utters the immortal words, "This is a Unix system. I know this." And proceeds to (temporarily) save the day. (..)

Nielsen totally missed (or maybe missed it on purpose) that she used a 3-D interface to navigate through files, which was hardly in use anyway.

This list also reminds me of the discussion I had with fub about this.

Nielsen also says the following in his piece:

Does it matter that most films offer such an unrealistic depiction of usability? Mainly, no. A movie's purpose is entertainment, not task performance. So, go ahead and employ user interfaces and interaction techniques that are entertaining and would never work in the real world.

I think he also is a bit misguided on his first point about the problems with this approach. But by stating that these movie scenes make people uncomfortable when they can't control computers like computers are generally controlled in the movies, I do think he actually has a point.

(Hat Tip: 456 Berea Street)

I saw The Prestige this afternoon, and I must say, quite the movie. Probably warrants a second viewing.

I don't like IMDB's redesign (too much white, the sidebar is too small), but you gotta give them kudo's for their redesign FAQ, especially the question about not color seperating the menu from the rest of the page:

Throughout user testing, it became clear to us that a majority of users were not associating the left-hand side navigation with the title or name page with which it was displayed. Our approach to increase the connectedness of the left-hand side with the content was two-fold: first, we moved the movie poster/headshot into the left hand side, and second, we removed the yellow background in order to more fully integrate the left-hand side navigation with the rest of the content on the page.

I never guess people would have problems with tat association, so something new was learned.

First post of the new year, so I suppose that best wishes for this year are in order. Now that's out of the way, I can tell that the work on my thesis progressed from the experimentation stage to the writing stage. Here's where the almost 5 years of maintaining this thing comes in very handy. But even though I write easily, it's still a lot of work.

But besides this, there's always other stuff to do... I'm going to see The Science of Sleep now :)

We've all seen 'The Shining', don't we? A new trailer for that movie was made as an entry in a competition to create trailers for well known movies, but make it seem like they were of a different genre than the real thing. This remake trailer of The Shining won that competition, and it's absolutely brilliant. I think I've actually laughed my ass of there (via Waxy Links). Edit : See more of the trailers for the contest here.

On a related note, this clip of the cast of Lost dancing on the crash scene is hilarious too. (via MKT)

fub has responded in another entry to the one I wrote yesterday. It's a great post and it has excellent comments as well. Ha, let this be my reply ;)

What is on the screen is, often, completely irrelevant to the plot of the movie. Consider my example of Jurassic Park. What the little girl sees on the screen is not important: the audience doesn't even need to see the screen -- all they have to know is that the girl can somehow manipulate the machine into showing her the information she needs.

Ah, we're treading on movie technicalities here ;). The point is, merely informing is not enough. Do you think that the scene would have worked the same way emotionally if the screen wasn't visible? I highly doubt that. By showing it on screen the movie is actually able to communicate a felling that something is difficult (or at least perceived as such;). If it wasn't on screen it would be merely a suggestion that such a thing would be difficult, but since you wouldn't actually know you'd feel less engaged.

Fub goes on:

Take, for instance, The Matrix Reloaded. In a certain scene, Trinity uses nmap to discover a known ssh exploit to hack into a computer. No fancy animations here: just a text-interface, and she typing on the keyboard.

You can't compare apples with pears, and you know that fub ;). There's a huge difference in setting. Recall that Neo was picked out because he was a hacker. Trinity was a hacker as well. Doesn't it make sense then to put those things in the movie that address that setting then?

You see, there you have it: we, as a society, are both enamoured and terrified of technology.

We aren't really terrified of technology. Are you? Am I? We might not be good representatives though ;). What is it then? We as individuals have imagination. And movies (and also books) are a way to explore that imagination. But that doesn't necessarily reflect our actual feelings about it. Plus, most of us are disaster tourists, like it or not ;) -- Just as long as we aren't in the disaster ourselves.

What makes a good movie? A good movie speaks to us about our hopes and our fears.

I could probably write a separate entry about this one line ;). Substitute hopes and fears with emotions and I can live with it -- sort of;p (Oh yeah, I'm slightly aware that I'm taking this out of context ;).

I'm skipping the remarks on society and technology here ;) -- I've already spent to much time writing the above ;).

Fub, explain to me why you are classifying Jurassic Park with The Matrix and Space: Odyssey, I, Robot etc. I don't follow you anymore here. Jurassic Park isn't about technology, it simple explores a moral debate and it deals with chaos theory. Yes, technology allowed for the revival of the dinosaurs, but it's made pretty clear that the dinosaurs wreak havoc as a result of chaos theory, not because technology overtakes the human factor.

Now, to answer your last question:

Does anyone know of a movie that is optimistic about technology?

What about D.A.R.Y.L.L ? Or the Short Circuit movies? Other people have already mentioned AI and Star Trek which are good examples as well. There's more I bet. You just need to know where to look. I think ;).

So, fub wrote about the use of technology in movies. Or, more specifically, the use of computer applications:

I am always fascinated at the displays various technologies have to divulge information about the system status to the human operators. In movies, most of these displays just don't make sense.

To which I agree, looking at it from a technical point of view. But fub, you are forgetting that movies are different from real life. What you see on that screen isn't something that is meant to be a form of communication between the actor and the computer, but in all it's purposes it's meant to communicate something to the viewer of a movie. That makes things completely different. Especially since those screens are in full view for only a couple of seconds. That makes it even more difficult. If you're using a computer program as you normally would, you build a mental model of it. But that only happens over time. Since that time is not at the disposal, they have to resort to other methods. The 3-D file system model in Jurassic Park isn't used because it is Unix (per se), but it is used because it represent a different paradigm of looking at your file system. The audience is not used to such a system, and will most likely perceive it as more difficult. And well, Unix was then commonly perceived with being difficult too. And the audience will see a computer geek as being able to deal with that. It is also exactly why there are doves flying on the screen in You've Got Mail, as arnoudens notes. It serves as a small hint, so we know where the e-mail comes from.

Fub, you also say that:

I think the movie makers want us to feel alienated from technology. The Computer is a mysterious machine that can be used for good or, at the drop of a hat, for evil. And you'd never know until it was too late: the Machines are mysterious and only the High Priests of Technology can mediate for the poor huddled masses.

But I totally disagree with that. First of all, Jurassic Park was a movie based on a book (by Micheal Crichton). Secondly, film makers resort to CGI scenes all the time. Why would they want us to feel alienated from technology, when they know like no other what the possibilities are, and what the impossibilities are? Furthermore, isn't You've Got Mail a good example of non-alienating use of technology?