Century 1975: Love and Death

Love and Death. Woody Allen. 1975.

Woody Allen is terribly controversial at the moment, but this is an incredibly funny film. Diane Keaton is perfection and the one-liners keep on coming at you. Not to mention all the physical comedy.

It does tend to lose its steam with some regularity, and the standup-derived bits don’t always work. And there are some jokes (“I have come to the conclusion that the best thing is… blonde, 12 year-old girls. Two of them, whenever possible.”) that perhaps make you go more “eh?” in the current context than it did back then.

But I had forgotten that Woody Allen could be as hilarious as he’s in this film. It’s mostly a parody of all those insufferable Russian epic novels, but he manages to sneak in a couple of pokes at Ingmar Bergman as well.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Home Renovations

I’m not er very well versed in the mysteries of balcony furniture. But I bought this slatted thing years ago and it’s gotten sadder every year. And not it looks like this:

Something had to be done! So I rummaged around in the Cupboard of Mysteries and found this:

That I’m pretty sure I’ve never bought, so perhaps it’s something that just came with me from a previous apartment or something. It’s “vaseline oil” (is that a real thing?), white spirit and perfume. So I slathered it onto the slatted thing (which took forever because of all the complicated joints, and…

Magic!

So I definitely have to remember to do that again in ten years time, whether it needs it or not. I’m setting my calendar as we speak.

Oh, yeah, summer arrived early in Oslo this year…

Concerts in Oslo

I maintain a site that list concerts in Oslo.

In Facebook’s continuing war on its users, the events API was discontinued without warning a month ago. (That is, they may allow access to some apps after doing an individual review, but somehow I suspect that allowing access to a service that tries to drive foot traffic to venues that use Facebook to host their calendars won’t be one of those special apps, because Facebook never wants anybody to leave Facebook ever, I think?)

About a quarter of the venues have their event listings on Facebook only, so that’s a rather big blow against having a useful concert listing site.

So I spent an evening reimplementing Facebook event web page scraping, and while doing that I started thinking about whether I should fancify my Concerts in Oslo web site. Scraping an image and a summary from the event pages didn’t seem insurmountable… Just find the largest image and the most coherent textual part of the HTML and there you are. (You have to filter out the “COOKIES EXIST! DID YOU KNOW THAT!” texts on most pages, because they’re often the longest texts, though.)

What took most work was trying to determine how this data should be loaded. In total, all the extra data is about 45MB, so just having it all in that initial table doesn’t really work. And I wanted to keep the data structures the same, so that the apps would also continue to work.

I first tried displaying the event summaries on hovering, but that was insanely annoying. Then I tried expanding the table when scrolling into view, and that was even more annoying, because things would move around a lot and you’d get confused.

UX is hard!

So I settled on pre-expanding the bottom border of each table line and then putting the event info in an absolutely-positioned div relative to the line. It’s a crime against CSS! But it works!

And now I don’t have to do any work on the site… until Facebook changes their HTML again.

Century 1974: The Cars That Ate Paris

The Cars That Ate Paris. Peter Weir. 1974.

I’ve been cocktailing from this very old book, but I think I’m ready to move on to another book now. Oldee-tymey cocktails seem basically to be random combinations of boozes with very little finesse. I feel the need for less booze and more mixers.

Anyway!

This is an early low-budget Peter Weir film (that I bought while in Australia a couple of years ago). I’m not exactly a Peter Weir fan (OK, I hate his films), but I was curious as to what his earlier movies were like.

It’s well made, in a way. I mean, the cinematography is nice, and the audio is good, and the film stock is great…

And the concept is fabulous (a town of people preying on the passing highway), but it’s just a bundle of tedium.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Useful Consumer Review

Some weeks ago I bought this Levimoon lamp. I didn’t really think it was going to work or anything, but hey:

Unfortunately, despite being totally cool and fun, it makes a “BzbbbzbbzzHhghghzzbz” sound after it’s been switched on for about two minutes, so it’s a crapgadget instead of a useful lamp.

And getting the moon to levitate (it’s done with electromagnets) can take a few tries, but I think I’ve got the hang of it now. Instead of taking a minute to get it to the right position, it only takes me ten seconds now. If I’m lucky.

But I can’t believe that I’m complaining about a hovering moon lamp not being perfect. It’s a hovering moon lamp!

Only useless!

Oh well. Perhaps the next iteration will be silent and you can actually have it switched on.