I don’t invent characters. I invite strangers. Out of my subconscious. Then cut them slack, to see what they’ll do.

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. 

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 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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.

It’s reached the point where Attention Deficit Disorder is like the only thing I ever think about any more.

I have strong opinions about what works well on Twitter, and what doesn’t. I decided I would start writing down these opinions so that I can easily reference them in the future. This advice is as much a memorandum to myself as to any readers who might feel that I am preaching to them. I violate most of these recommendations on a regular basis, but I hope that writing this guide helps me to do so less often.

Daniel Jalkut’s Twitter guide is the best thing like it that I’ve read. I don’t agree one thousand percent with every thing in here but there is no bad advice. Also, read the first couple of comments.

Fingers crossed. Eyes averted.

Damon Krukowski: It was an adventure from the start. I think every band experiences that same thrill– it’s like joining the circus.

Before reading this oral history of Galaxie 500 I really had no idea how strained things were in the group. I kind of wish I could go back to having just a vague notion of what went wrong. Still, while knowing this adds nothing to the music it doesn’t detract either.

This cold cut combo is perhaps the best encapsulation of the difference in philosophy between Android and the iPhone.

“The national bakery and restaurant chain launched a new nonprofit store here this week that has the same menu as its other 1,400 locations. But the prices are a little different — there aren’t any. Customers are told to donate what they want for a meal, whether it’s the full suggested price, a penny or $100.”

Nice idea but I would hate this. I’d probably always pay the suggested price AND feel somehow ripped off. If I paid less I’d worry that someone somewhere would think (know?) that I’m a cheapskate.

“To my mind, ‘success’ in the real world is much more the equivalent of achieving a new personal best; it’s not about whether you won the ‘Springtime in Springfield SunnyD®/Q105™ 5k FunRun for Entitilitus,’ and got a little ribbon with a gold crest on it.”

This essay by Merlin Mann is not that long but it’s dense and hard to parse.

Read it three times to get it and then twice more for kicks.

This could have been an informative piece about the challenges facing foreign care-workers in Japan but someone got the idea to tack on some nonsense about robots. It’s a nice, sensational, headline but I’m a bit worried that they couldn’t find any elderly Japanese to actually say that they would prefer to be cared for by a robot than by a immigrant.

I watched American Beauty again a couple of weeks ago and was terribly disappointed. All the characters seemed like cardboard cutouts. There was no them there. The family in Little Miss Sunshine crackle with life.

Not sure which was scarier: the look on Toni Colette’s face after hearing that her “winner” husbands plan for riches has fallen through or the young absurdly made-up beauty pageant contestants. Actually, no contest. The latter.

Happiness Theorems: “Do not spend energy criticizing the source of others’ joy.”

(Via win and tonic.)

“Delicate crystalline growth on the Häagen-Dazs, you are my Fortress of Solitude.”

“Any sufficiently advanced ineptitude is indistinguishable from malice.”

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.