Out of Cheese

I touched off an accidental firestorm yesterday by prompting Nick to comment (twice, actually) on whether one or two spaces at the end of a sentence is correct.

Unfortunately, I remembered incorrectly and Nick believes in the single space method. Oops. But he misunderstood my conversion to two spaces, so I ought to explain that.

Once upon a time, I used two spaces. Then I met Nick, and he presented a convincing argument for one space, so I switched. About six months ago, I mentioned the issue to Katie, who rebutted Nick’s argument very well and offered a convincing argument in favor of two spaces, so I switched back. I unfortunately don’t remember the details of Katie’s argument, but it certainly didn’t have anything to do with her status as an English grad student (not an English major; she majored in American Studies). I think she did mention various manuals of style, though.

Nick hasn’t ranted about much recently, but if he doesn’t rant about this I’ll be very disappointed.

Neil Gaiman explains what “disarming Saddam” really means.

The other interesting note from Michael Tsai today is a pointer to Glenn McDonald’s excellent piece describing why he switched to Mac OS X. It’s difficult to explain why using a Mac just feels more right (so to speak), but this article does exactly that.

Michael Tsai wrote two things today that I want to comment on. The first says this:

Chuq Von Rospach and Eric Albert are Apple guys, so they’re not impartial….

He’s right, of course, that you could hardly accuse me of being impartial regarding issues involving Apple (though I’m certainly not always in favor of Apple’s views). I just find it amusing that working for Apple means that I’m partial towards them. What was I a month ago, I wonder, when I worked for Microsoft?

News.com has a story tonight saying that Opera may cancel its web browser for the Mac now that Apple has released Safari.

I don’t understand why Safari’s entrance into the market makes much of a difference for Opera. The News.com article essentially says that Opera doesn’t think its browser can compete with a free web browser that’s bundled with the operating system. But Mac OS X 10.2 already has a free web browser that’s bundled with the OS — Internet Explorer. It’s true that IE is really showing its age on the Mac, but Opera shipped its first release for the Mac before Mac OS X shipped, competing against what was then a best-of-breed IE 5 on Mac OS 9.

The only way in which Safari is different now from how IE was then is that it’s an Apple product and not a Microsoft one. That’s not much of a difference, though. And as the competitive browser market on Mac OS X has shown, it’s all but impossible to write a browser that’s perfect for everyone. The Omni Group believes that there’s still a market for a pro-quality commercial browser on Mac OS X. I hope the Opera folks will come to the same conclusion once they realize that today’s market isn’t very different from the one they entered a few years ago.

Since getting a California cell phone number means that I’ll need a new contract anyway, I’m planning to get a new cell phone. My current phone, a Motorola V.8162, is wonderfully small and light but doesn’t get any reception at home unless I’m standing at exactly the right angle by the living room window. I can’t deal with that. It gets two or three bars if I’m standing on the street outside, but that’s not much help.

I’m hoping that a new phone will get better reception. Sprint apparently lets you return a new phone and back out of a new contract within 14 days, so I can buy a phone and bring it home to try it out without much risk. The question, then, is what phone to buy. Here are the requirements:

• Better reception than my current phone, specifically at home.
• A flip phone. I keep my phone in my pocket along with a Palm IIIx and my car keys, so anything that isn’t a flip phone will get severely scratched.
• A usable interface. I could design a better UI than the 8162’s if I was drunk. It’s awful. Windows 3.1 was more usable. I’ve had the phone for a couple of years, and it still takes me ten minutes to figure out how to enter a number. I don’t want to deal with that again.

Any suggestions? Price isn’t an issue; I’ll gladly pay more for a phone that’s a better fit for what I want. At the same time, fancy add-ons like Internet access aren’t necessary. I can’t imagine how you can do anything worthwhile on the Internet on a screen small enough to fit on a flip phone.

As for providers, I’m not tied to Sprint. It’s just that I know I get great reception from Sprint at work, their rates aren’t bad, and they seem to have much better phones than everyone else.

In his column in today’s Miami Herald, Dave Barry summarizes the plot of The Two Towers. My favorite line in the summary is one of Frodo’s: “How come, if I’m the protagonist, Lord Aragorn has TWO love interests, and I’m stuck in a subplot with Dick Cheney?”

Stephanie was taken aback by the Tech Museum’s theater, which is a huge dome with seating on a steep angle and a full-field-of-vision screen. But it was nothing new to me — I’ve seen a few Omnimax movies at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and I’ve often wondered why the Omnimax format seemed to be losing out to IMAX.

I was really confused, though, because the Tech Museum calls its theater an IMAX theater (actually “IMAX Dome”), not an Omnimax one. After a bit of digging just now, I’ve learned that both IMAX and Omnimax are from the same company, and the company renamed “Omnimax” to “IMAX Dome” a few years ago. Now I understand why I’ve heard so little about Omnimax in recent years. I’m also very happy to see that more and better movies are being made for it, since there always seemed to be a limited selection at the Franklin Institute. I have to say that I never imagined I’d see something like “The Lion King” on an Omnimax screen. Wow.

I went to see the IMAX version of “The Lion King” today with Stephanie. I think I last saw it five or six years ago, and I’d forgotten how good it is. It’s amazingly well done, full of lines that are funny to those who get them and don’t seem out of place to others, subtleties that you don’t notice unless you’re really paying attention, and plot development that builds a good story. And, of course, it has an excellent soundtrack.

Stephanie says that “Beauty and the Beast” was also terrific as an IMAX movie. I missed it, unfortunately; the only time I saw a theater that was playing it was New Year’s Day 2002, and the show times were really inconvenient so we couldn’t go. Stephanie thinks that “The Little Mermaid” would also work well on IMAX, and I’d love to see that because I’ve never seen the movie. A bit of research (albeit somewhat old) shows that Disney might be IMAX-ing both “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin”. More recent stories confirm that “Aladdin” is scheduled for December 2003 or January 2004. I can’t wait — that’s also a terrific movie that I haven’t seen in a really long time.