Mad Max: Fury Road

Saw Mad Max: Fury Road over the weekend.

Hmpf!

I can't say that I liked the movie.

I will say that I was really impressed with Charlize Theron's rendition of the Furiosa character. That was truly world class acting!

But the rest of the movie? Meh! I know it's supposed to be over the top, an exagerated view of a harsh futuristic world, but I have to admit that some elements (like the guitar guy on the rig) just ended up making me laugh out loud, and a couple of times I just turned over to my wife and sighed deeply.

So, in conclusion, I think it's worth it to see Charlize Theron's really strong acting performance, but the rest of the movie is just... so disappointing!

6/10

/misc | Posted at 17:57 | permanent link

Apple keeps annoying me

Apple makes some good and neat products. The quality of their build and the attention they put to detail makes purchasing their products a really nice experience (just unpacking a Macbook is a first step in a very nice user experience).

But the decisions they make keep annoying me in really practical ways, to the extent that if I went into a store today, I would not purchase another Apple product.

In the past, they have left me stranded when I've tried to be an early adopter of their technologies (I bought a 15" MacBook Pro when Apple switched to Intel processors, only to be left stranded when it became the only Intel MacBook Pro not to support 64-bit OS X, and then I bought a 3G 64GB iPad the year they came out, only to be left stranded when releases of iOS stopped supporting the iPad 1 from iOS 6 onwards), but this time it's

The main use of my iMac these days is to manage our family's photos collection. I've been using iPhoto for about 10 years to keep our 36000 photos organized by events, and have spent quite a bit of time giving titles to events and naming faces in various photos.

With OS X Yosemite, suddenly iPhoto is gone and replaced by Photos for OS X. Now, not only is this a really annoying application name (try googling for Photos, you'll end up with millions of unrelated links), but even though it looks like a nice simple application, Apple has decided to remove from my PC useful features of iPhotos that I used on a regular basis:

• iPhotos events, which automatically grouped my pictures by date, have been thrust in a Photos album called iPhotos Events, where they are NOT sorted by date. This is extremely annoying and breaks a lot of the usefulness of events! A "sort by date" option, perhaps?

• iPhotos allowed me to export a set of pictures as a small website (it assembled a set of HTML pages and links), which I have used a number of times successfully.
  I understand that this is not a feature that Apple wants to push anymore (they want everyone to go to iCloud), but this is a feature that I had on my computer, that I had paid for, and that I used. And following an OS upgrade, suddenly it's gone.

So, I've stopped using my iPad, I've stopped using my MacBook Pro, so I guess I'm getting to the point where I'll stop using my iMac also.

Booo Apple.

/software | Posted at 08:21 | permanent link