I’ve written many times before about the poor quality customer service I’ve received from LOVEFiLM, the UK’s largest DVD rental service, and those posts have solicited a lot of complaints from other people too. I’ve finally bitten the bullet and cancelled my account: a combination of frustration with poor delivery times, them never sending me the titles high on my list, and that they won’t allow me to freely suspend my account for a reasonable amount of time. It’s sad, as they used to provide excellent customer service when I first used them a few years ago (when they were small), but acquisitions and growth seem to have made them fat and lazy, and they no longer treat customers with respect - written examples are all over their website, including the veiled threats of continued charges in the cancellation process itself.

Normally I write some rough notes about a film as I’m watching it in order to help me write these reviews afterward. The Godfather had me hooked, and I almost forgot.

The Godfather is a film I’ve been planning to watch for a long time, but have put off (as I wrote in my review for Scarface, I don’t particularly care for gangster films - nevertheless, I’m trying to watch some of the classics). The Godfather is not a film to be enjoyed, but it is a film to see nevertheless. The performances of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino are extremely strong, and it’s hard to imagine that the studio disapproved of the participation of both these actors. Fundamentally, the Godfather is about family ties and trust (or lack of it) rather than dominance and winning, and this - in my crude analysis - is how it differs from a film like Scarface.

I recently installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin on this blog. However, it seems to have attracted far too much spam. I’ve therefore disabled it again until a version is developed that’s a bit more hardy against spammers. You can always subscribe to an RSS feed for the comments on any post (as you can with any Wordpress-powered blog) by appending /feed to the permalink URL for that post.

Fun chemistry fact of the day: Acidity regulators regulate pH in general, not just acidity. Hence (presumably) why this smoothie bottle contains Citric Acid as an acidity regulator (my first thought was: shouldn’t it be an alkali?).

This is when I wish I’d done Chemistry A-Level rather than Further Maths.

A long discussion with plv the other day about open source and what it really meant got me thinking about that model when applied to other domains, such as mapping.

Google have clearly made a success of Google Maps (I’ve discussed Google Maps before as compared to Multimap - not entirely favourably - but whatever I think, the market loves the former). Plenty of competitors have also sprung up, notably from Microsoft. Incidentally, Flash Earth brings together all of these services into one ultra-slick interface; although I’d still love to see them available on Jeff Han’s touch screen (iPhone, eat your heart out - your interface is nothing on this).

(This review is about the 2004 film directed by Paul Haggis; not the controversial 1996 David Cronenberg film of the same name).

I’ve never been more in two minds about a film than with Crash.

Crash is primarily about racial tension amongst a variety of characters who pop up all over LA. As I began watching, I was getting ready to lay into it for its rather childish and simplistic treatment of these racial divisions. At times, I found it almost insulting to the intelligence. The strongest characters were the cookie-cutter car thieves, who at first seemed to be placed there for some sick comic relief - not an encouraging sign. The film ran through the usual murmurings about stereotypes and making assumptions based on them (some wrong, some right). Roger Ebert thinks this it does well because it shows victimizers being victimized. I respectfully disagree - I think that’s somewhat of a cliché and that it would be more accurate and honest to keep it simple. Scott Foundas describes this position eloquently.

This blog has now moved to my new domain andrewferrier.com. You shouldn’t notice any change if you are using a web browser or a well-designed feedreader to read it, as all parts of the old blog (including permalinks, RSS feed, etc.) should permanently redirect to the new one. You might just want to check that your RSS reader is pointing to the new blog though, or alter your browser bookmarks. The redirection will disappear in a few months. I’d appreciate it if you can let me know if you see any problems with the new blog.

I’ve recently taken to reading a lot more on-line - particularly as services such as del.icio.us have helped me to find high-quality content and more high-quality blogs come on the scene. This, of course, is the long tail of written content. One of the things I’ve noticed, though, is that as I read more and different things, I get more impatient with long articles. I hardly read non-fiction books any more, and fiction books almost never (preferring film).

It’s plain that the camera industry has seen a significant degree of disruption in the last 5-10 years, almost all of it driven by digital cameras. On the back of this, we’ve seen a huge explosion in pictures on the web (most obviously on sites like Flickr), as well as other interesting changes (such as print-it-yourself kiosks in photo shops and chemists). Amateur photography seems to be going through a resurgence - I have started taking a lot more photographs, as have many of my friends and colleagues. Whether that resurgence will be permanent is unknown, but of course the increase in the convenience of cameras (no more waiting for development, easy digitisation) is not temporary.

TEDTalks has hit a home-run again (seriously, I can’t recommend this series of videos highly enough - whatever you think about whatever else I’ve written here, you’ll find something you like). Bjorn Lomborg, who’s not a stranger to controversy, explains in this 2005 TED presentation why climate change, relative to the world’s other great problems (e.g. disease, sanitation), isn’t an efficient problem to solve. This is a finding of the Copenhagen Consensus, who expended no small amount of effort on the exercise. He makes very clear what the ranking means - not that it isn’t desirable to ‘solve’ climate change (it is) but simply that it’s inefficient - there’s more bang for the buck in ‘solving’ free trade or controlling HIV/AIDS than in solving climate change.