Archive for the ‘Review’ Category

I sometimes think Optus sales reps will say almost anything to make a sale or get the customer to commit to another two-year mobile phone contract.  You know the people I mean, the ones that call you offering to make your mobile plan cheaper (why call -  just do it!), or sell you a plan for a wireless adapter/dongle thingie for your laptop, that sort of thing.  I’ve had unpleasant experiences with them in the past.

Promises Promises

This time around a sales rep called and offered to waive the last five months of my two-year mobile phone contract and send me out a new phone if I commit to another two years.  Nothing wrong with that, so I accepted.

But he also talked me  out of waiting for an iPhone and into getting a Nokia N97 on the promise that the new v2 Operating Software for the N97 was great.  The sales rep even claimed to own an N97 himself and to have upgraded the OS, and praised all the cool new features v2 offered.  Since I already own an iPod Touch, I went for the Nokia N97.

Delivery

Well, the phone arrived, and it’s a great unit, plus the 3G coverage out where I live is vastly better than my old phone’s reception.  So I have no real complaints with the phone itself at all.

BUT there is no upgrade to software v2 available for it in Australia under Optus — not by using the PC application, and not using the phone’s built in updater.  This kind of deception (dare I call it lying?) to make a sale leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.  And it’s so pointless — there’s nothing really wrong with the current OS on the phone, but I was sold the new OS, and was delivered the old one.  It’s basic customer service — If I pay for X, don’t deliver Y.  It’s made worse when watching a video that shows the significant differences between the two versions:

My phone runs like the one on the left of screen in that video.  My attempts to get an answer out of Optus about why the firmware isn’t upgradeable is an exercise in futility.  They connected me to “Nokia Australia” in the end (the nice lady at Nokia “Australia” had a mild Indian accent, but maybe she was in Australia), and after a ten minute circular conversation she eventually put me on to the local Nokia Customer Care Center in Brisbane.  Now those guys responded very quickly to my email, but all they could do was inform me that, yes indeed, the upgrade is available to generic N97s, but not the Optus ones.

So the score is Optus 0, Nokia 1, Me 0.  Perhaps Nokia should let Optus know they have sales reps making promises the Optus network can’t deliver (yet).

Not The First Time

Almost a year ago I had a similar annoying experience where an Optus sales rep called me and promised to send me a wireless dongle but to also lower my mobile fees by the same amount as the internet service attached to the dongle – effectively making the wireless plan free.  Of course I said yes, but shortly later someone else rang to confirm the deal and they denied that such a generous offer was possible.  So I withdrew my acceptance (which they weren’t happy about), but the dongle arrived anyway.  I wasn’t home to receive it, so it went back, and after a couple of confusing calls I later did get a call apologising for the mix up.

They also assured me that the sales rep that made the “generous” invalid offer no longer worked there.

But after today, I’m not so sure.

ZoomIt

ZoomIt is the best PC-desktop-screen-zoomer-inner-thingy I’ve ever seen – and it’s free!  Great for zooming in on presentations or during software demos – both of which I do at home and at the QSFT.  I wish I had found it earlier.  Here’s a quick video of me using it (be sure to select HD mode when viewing it).

I’ve been looking for a smooth screen-zooming tool ever since I saw uber geek Chris Prillo use one on his desktop when demonstrating software and websites during his YouTube videos. His PC is probably more powerful than mine, but I could see he wan’t using the standard Windows magnifier, which magnifies a screen area into a separate window – his zoomer was zooming the whole screen into itself.  ZoomIt seems to offer the same effect, and as well as being free, it’s also tiny – less than 300KB, allows you to draw and write on the zoomed in desktop, and on Vista the magnified desktop is “live”, rather than a freeze-frame.

And yes, Mac lovers, this desktop zoom effect is standard on recent Macs – I know, I know.

The Ladykillers

I’ve been a big fan of The Ladykillers for a long time. My initial interest in the film was because Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness were in it, so I eventually tracked it down many years ago on late-night television. And it’s true that Guinness is terrific as Professor Marcus, and Sellers, in his first feature, showed a lot of promise – even if he was still a bit inexperienced.

Mrs Wilberforce takes a nap – maybe for good?

But what I didn’t expect, when I first saw it, was to be so impressed with the whole cast – Herbert Lom, Cecil Parker, Danny Green, and most of all Katie Johnson as Mrs Wilberforce. This little lady, who was seventy-seven at the time, gives a quiet and almost minimalist performance that gently but firmly dominates the film, despite (or because of?) the fact that she is surrounded by the relatively over-the-top antics of the male cast. She is perfect, and this is a nearly perfect film.

I recently rediscovered and rewatched the film thanks to three things: Kareena buying me the DVD of the film (what an amazing new transfer compared to the versions I have seen!); news of a recent remake (the trailer makes it look like it could be rather bad, but if it leads people to the original, then it’s a good thing); and stumbling across a great web page that compares the locations in the film to how they look now (I’ve always found that sort of thing interesting). Here’s a review that contains no spoilers for the second half of the film.

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Title: Suspended Alibi
Where:ABC TV
When:2 February 2004 – 2:00am

As the film Suspended Alibi opens, all seems well in the household of Paul Pearson (played by a wooden Patrick Holt). Their house is large and attractive, situated in a leafy suburb that seems green even when viewed on black and white film. Lynn, his attractive if stuffy wife (played by Honor Blackman) sits on the couch wearing a starched dress and a concete hairdo.

Withing minutes of the film starting, she is screaming unconvincingly as her young son dangles a worm in front of her. I’ve seen Ms Blackman do much better in other films so I’m going to blame the script and direction for her passionless performance in this one.

But this peacefull if dull existence is not all it seems. Paul, a newspaper editor, has been having an affair with Diana, his fashion reporter (played by Naomi Chance, who manages to act around some terrible lines). So – right at the start of the film we discover that the central character, the one we are presumably meant to be cheering for, is a cheating cad. Mind you, given the bland stiffness of his wife Lynn throughout most of this film, who can blame him?

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I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s nearly four in the morning and ever since we got home (about seven hours ago) the house has been in one long brown out. Obviously I’ve seen brown outs before, they’re a fact of life in Brisbane and they’re part of the reason I bought a UPS unit to protect my PC data, but until tonight they’ve always been momentary events.
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Title: Underworld
Where: Balmoral Cinemas, Screen 7, Queensland, Australia
When: 26 January 2004 – 9:20pm

I went into this film with very low expectations. The seen-too-often trailers for Underworld, with their Matrix-style slow-motion acrobatic gun battles and cast members strutting around wearing black clothing of various tightness and glossiness, made the film seem so preposterously pompous and self-consciously cool that I was sure it was going to be a silly, silly film and a drag to watch.
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Yeesh – it seems the PFTC is damned no matter what they do.

Today’s Courier Mail had a headline on page three that read “Movie body backs down on search for ’slave labour’“. You can view the online version of the article here (note the online edition is now gone – it had a less sensationalist headline, but the body of the article appears the same as the print edition). After reading it a couple of times, it looks to me like the PFTC tried to do the right/smart/realistic thing on a slightly touchy subject, handled it a tiny bit clumsily, and got well-and-truly roasted for it.
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Unlike last year, I’m not going to write a full rant about this year’s Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF). Due to work commitments I only went to one screening at BIFF this year, so I can hardly comment on the festival. The film I saw was the short film, Other People, produced by Vickie Gest and written and directed by Kieren Galvin. I helped out a bit with the sound on the film, and it was great to see it in front of an audience and on a 16mm film print. Remarkably, the print was taken directly from the PAL video edit and kine’d to a 16mm print, rather than going back to the original negative. I must say that the kine looked very good indeed, I found it very difficult to tell that it was a PAL video blow up and I’m usually pretty good at spotting that sort of thing (though the State Library doesn’t have a huge screen, and I’m sure being a black and white film hides a multitude of sins).
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I’ve just watched my first, and hopefully last, full episode of Cheaters on Fox TV. I’d seen bits of the show before, ages ago, but never actually sat through a whole episode. Wow. I had my hand over my mouth through most of it, I was so shocked at how bad and yet how compelling it was. If there really are aliens out there tuning in to our television broadcasts to find out more about our species, Cheaters is one of those shows I pray they don’t see or else we’re doomed to be shunned by the rest of the cosmos.
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Star Wars Episode III is going to have Chewbacca in it! Which means that Episode III cannot suck.

Ned Kelly was a let down. Not since In a Savage Land have I been this disappointed with an Australian film, and for mostly the same reasons. With all that money and talent, both in front of and behind the camera, I foolishly got my expectations up before seeing Ned Kelly. It’s not that Ned Kelly is a bad film in itself, in fact it’s quite good (and a lot better in many ways than In a Savage Land), it’s just not what I was hoping for.
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Wow. Every day this guy produces an image from his 3D software, and he puts it up on his web site, which he oddly calls Boring 3D. Images range from apparently random flights of fancy to the on going “story” (if story is the right word) of box and naked mining guy, along with other great images. Simple but great composition and colours.

Check out his archive. Scroll to the bottom and look at them in chronological order as you scroll up. Is he really doing this every day? Amazing.

This week, thanks to the generosity of a friend with a spare gold pass, I attended about eight screenings at the 2002 Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF). I’ve attended a few festivals in my time — from small to medium sized — as an audience member, a filmmaker, and even a judge. Maybe it’s just my bad luck, but film festivals I attend seem to have more than their fair share of issues. BIFF was no exception.
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After attending BIFF 2002, I got to thinking about how film festivals could be better. What things would make for a perfect film festival? Here are a few thoughts…
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Today I downloaded Microsoft’s Speech SDK v5.1. All 68 MegaBytes of it. I wanted to see how accurate it’s voice recognition could be. After all, talking into my script-writing program would surely be faster than my fairly hopeless typing.
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Some people collect autographs as a passion. Others casually get autographs from famous people they meet (athletes leaving the field, an actor in a coffee shop, that kind of thing), keep them for a while, then throw them away. From a fairly early age I realised that autographs meant nothing to me. I just didn’t “get” it – and I still don’t. What’s the big deal about getting someone famous to sign a piece of paper? Perhaps my contempt of autographs was just part of my contempt for fame. I’ve rarely been “awed” by seeing a famous person. But there is an exception. One day I did ask someone for their autograph: Spike Milligan.
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I guess it was only a matter of time, but after Tuesday 11 September 2001, several people with their own agendas have bolted the facts of what happened onto their own beliefs and prejudices.
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