Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, is brilliantly paced to slowly reveal the truth about the characters and their world.
The film may be similarly well-paced but it hardly seems to matter. Everything is revealed (and explicitly stated) in the trailer.
Who makes these things? How many layers of approval do they go through? Why would anyone think it was a good idea to give away so much?
I came home for lunch today, put my key in the lock, and it snapped off about a centimetre and a half from the tip.
It was a shock but, with hindsight, not so surprising. It was more than ten years old and the lock is a bit dodgy. It needs a bit of jingling and jangling to get open at the best of times.
A few millimetres of the broken edge hung from the hole, not enough for my fingernails to grasp.
I managed to find an old pair of rusty tweezers at my mother-in-law’s house but although I have petite, girly hands I’m really not good with small, fiddly stuff. I thought there was a pretty good chance that I would end up pushing the broken fragment unreachably deeper into the lock. I’d end up spending several hundred dollars on a locksmith visit and more on a new lock and keys.
I have to learn to take it easy. On my first try I got a good hold on the chunk of key and it slid out easily.
The steamy summer interior of my hallway has seldom seemed so welcoming.
Something that I’ve not seen mentioned accurately in any reviews is the appearance of an “Edit User Dictionary” option in the Keyboard Settings. It appears if a Japanese or Chinese – Pinyin keyboard is selected.
Many people, seeing it, have assumed that it is a way to add words to the auto-correction or spelling dictionary. It is not.
The user dictionary is designed to help people writing Japanese or Chinese. It allows users to pre-set which Chinese characters appear when they type a phonetic version of a word. It’s commonly used for names of places and people and is a standard feature of most character based input systems and, as such, is a very welcome addition to iOS.
Entering words in here will neither add them to the auto-correct dictionary, stop them from being underlined in red or enable any Text Expander like features.
The auto-correction feature on the iPhone still amazes me. I can blaze away with both thumbs and ninety percent of the time it will correctly guess what I’m trying to type. I’ve been tapping away at little mobile screens for a decade now and have never felt so comfortable inputting text.
The iPad and iOS 4 have introduced a new trick. The system automatically spell checks your text and underlines errors in red. If you’ve used Word or any recent Mac it will be instantly familiar to you. Tap on an underlined word and choose the correct one. Simple as pie.
It’s a good idea but it is not implemented very well. Here are the main problems:
There’s no easy way to tell the system to learn or ignore a word.
I’m finding that almost every time I write an email or a note something gets flagged as an error that isn’t. It’s just a word that the dictionary doesn’t know. Names of people and places are commonly flagged, as are most Japanese words. I think I should be able to teach the system the word from the little contextual menu that pops up but it’s not possible. I get a message saying “No Replacement Found” but no way to remove the red line. What I can do is add a new contact to the Contacts app with the flagged word as the name. It’s a time consuming piece of hackery that feels completely out of place on the iPad.
You can’t turn off spell checking globally without also losing auto-correction.
I tried going without auto-correction for a while on my iPad but found it so cumbersome that I decided that I’d rather put up with red squiggles strewn throughout my text than go without it. The idea of using my phone without it is just ridiculous.
Spell checking can’t be turned off on an app by app basis.
Apple’s iWork programs have an easy to find toggle for spell checking. This, apparently, is not available to third party developers. It seems that someone at Apple realized that not everyone would want spell checking on all the time. It’s a pity that other developers don’t have the chance to do the same thing.
Here are some things Apple could do to fix spell checking:
Allow users to add words to the dictionary right from the contextual menu. This seems like the most sensible option to me and what I think most users would expect to be able to do.
Allow users to turn off spell check separately from auto-correction. I really hoped this would be addressed by iOS 4 but, alas, it is not.
Allow developers to add a spell check toggle to their programs. This is the least attractive option. It would add work for developers and also for users who would have to find the toggle somewhere. It could get confusing pretty fast with people losing track of where they do or don’t have it enabled.
Apple worked for two years to get copy and paste working just right. They probably could have introduced a half-baked implementation along with the original iPhone or iPhone 3G but they didn’t. They kept working on it till it felt just right. I wish they had shown the same care in building the spell check feature. It’s still early days yet for both the iPad and iOS 4. I hope that Apple do something to make spell check easier to use sooner rather than later.
I was reading the end of Neil Gaiman’s ‘Neverwhere’ last night when I noticed a hat tip to William Gibson. As Richard Mayhew emerges from London Below he sees:
The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.
It’s an echo of the first line of William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’:
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Nice.
I’ve read that line of Gibson’s dozens of times in articles over the last twenty years. It’s a lazy quote; the first line of the first novel, and universally well regarded. But there is so much more.
I’ve recently been reading ‘Pattern Recognition’ again and have been amazed by the power and inventiveness of Gibson’s language as he introduces us to Cayce Pollard.
Damien:
Damien is a friend.
Their girl-boy Lego doesn’t click, he would say.
Jet lag:
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
Her new black 501s
… every trademark carefully removed. Even the buttons on these have been ground flat, featureless , by a puzzled Korean locksmith, in the Village, a week ago.
That’s just in the first few pages. I last read ‘Pattern Recognition’, partly in paperback and partly as an audiobook, a few years ago during a really stressful time. I’m sure there’s a lot I missed. Looking forward to finding out what.
Both Neil Gaiman and William Gibson are active Twitter users. Gaiman as @neilhimself and Gibson as @GreatDismal. They both seem very nice and surprisingly responsive to questions and comments.
I managed to avoid finding out anything about Season Five of Lost before it was released here in Japan. I hope I will be as lucky with Season Six. I have a feeling that, now that it has ended, people will be more likely to talk about it. I’ve already had to click away from a couple of (non-Lost related) websites that looked like they might contain spoilers.
Fingers crossed. Eyes averted.
Pavement. Terror Twilight Tour. Tokyo. 1999 or 2000.
I was scared of being caught but more scared of being left out. So, when my friends jumped onstage and walked backstage in search of Pavement’s dressing room, I followed. Less than a minute later we were there, beers in hand, chatting with Pavement. My favorite band ever.
I was terrified and felt really uncomfortable. Part of the reason for this was that I was an uninvited guest. Meeting the people who make the sounds that have been in your head almost every day for the last five years is strange enough. Meeting them when they have no idea who you are or why you are talking to them is even stranger. Maybe I’m too sensitive.
My memories are hazy but two are clear:
Memory One
I asked Steve Malkmus if he was bothered that Pavement CDs in Japan shipped with very odd translations of the lyrics. He said that the English versions weren’t much better. I realise that it was a fairly lame question to ask but I don’t think I’d do much better if I found myself in the same situation today.
Memory Two
An annoyed woman came in and demanded to know who the hell we were and how we had gotten backstage. Our sheepish looks made it pretty clear that we were not actually the opening band (as had been thought). It looked as if we were about to get thrown out when Malkmus came to our rescue and said that it was okay for us to stay until they all left. I thought that was pretty nice.
Hiking on Mount Ikoma today I came upon a group of firemen training. They were standing on a bridge practicing lowering people into the valley below and raising them up again.
As soon as they saw me coming they started shouting “Pedestrian coming through! Pedestrian coming through!” As I passed each one they saluted. Not a sarcastic salute either. Backs straight. Crisp movements. It was accompanied by a shouted apology for getting in the way.
Most games give you 100 points for doing X, 200 for doing Y and 400 for doing Z. Pretty soon your score creeps into the thousands or tens of thousands and becomes fairly meaningless.
The great thing about Orbital is that every point counts.
I’m reading in the bath. It’s steamy and the water is up to my neck. I notice that the phone is getting pretty steamed up and try to dry it off with a towel. The more I try to dry it the wetter it gets. I notice a splashing sound.
It’s full of water.
I shake the phone and water splashes about inside. I can’t get the water out though. I realise that the phone is still on and frantically try to turn it off. It won’t turn off. It sounds like I’m shaking a half full bottle of water.
Home Is where I want to be Pick me up and turn me round
Talking Heads’ This Must be the Place (my alarm ringtone) wakes me and ends the terror.
This was my second dream of iPhone destruction of the week. The other was simpler. I just knocked it to the floor and smashed the screen. Good thing I don’t believe that dreams mean anything or I’d be worried, but I don’t, so I’m not, and if you see me checking out waterproof cases in Yodobashi Camera this weekend it has nothing to do with this dream. It’s just something I’ve been meaning to look into for a while. Really.