When this whole roaming nonsense started a week ago, I was told that unless I paid them something like $2,500 in advance, I wouldn’t be able to use the Pocket WiFi. And then I got back to HK, many emails and phone calls, a complaint to OFTA and finally PCCW dropping all of the ridiculousness.

Problems over, right?

Not so much. All day long, I couldn’t connect to the internet via the Pocket WiFi. Went to the PCCW shop at Wanchai Computer Centre where they dicked around with it for 15 minutes without being able to figure out the problem. And told me to call the service hotline.

Got home. Spent an hour trying to get to talk to someone because after navigating their ridiculously complex menus and being told that I’d be connected to someone and that “the call would be recorded for blah blah blah” the phone would ring and ring and no one would pick up and after 20 rings the line would just go dead.

Finally I get someone on the line. Guess what? Yeppers, that’s right. They cut off my service because I hadn’t paid the $2,500. The person who wanted to make sure everything was taken care of and that I was happy neglected to remove this little flag from my account.

I didn’t yell, I didn’t scream, I didn’t curse. Yes, feel free to congratulate me on this uncharacteristic display of self-control.

And yes, it’s working fine now.

Only 1 day of productivity lost.

Argh. And double argh.

Journalist Ken Auletta recently published a new book that’s getting attention in certain circles, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It.

He pulled one chapter from the book, saying it was “not organic to the book’s purpose.” But he liked it enough to publish that “missing” chapter online and it’s a good read. Found via All Things Digital, it features 25 things he’s learned from covering Google and media in general.

While they may seem somewhat obvious, I note that most of these things were completely fucking missing at my former place of employment. Things like:

• Passion Wins
• Vision is Required
• A Team Culture is Vital
• Treat Engineers as Kings
• The Speed of Change Accelerates
• Adapt or Die
• Don’t Think of the Web as Another Platform
• Don’t Ignore the Human Factor

Of course Auletta’s article isn’t merely a list of bullet points. There’s full explanations for each of these. A very good read indeed!

Lucky I have a lot of time on my hands. Because lately it seems that one of the tasks I’m spending the most time on is configuring computers. And I’m just pleasantly amazed at how much easier it is to get things done today than it was just a couple of years ago. (Forgive me for not including links in the following. But everything can be easily found easily enough via Google.)

Only three weeks ago, I returned my company laptop, a Dell that I never particularly cared for. And then spent time more properly configuring my MacBook in advance of my US trip.

On the return from said trip, I dumped Boot Camp and installed Parallels. After ten days of relatively heavy usage, I was sick of rebooting between Snow Leopard and Windows 7. (Using Win7 primarily because I haven’t found a Mac equivalent to the Usenet client (Newsbin Pro) that I rely on heavily.) The setup of Parallels is pretty straight forward and so far Win7 seems to be running smoothly. Parallels offers full support for Win7, something that BootCamp doesn’t do yet.

Aside from saving disk space, it saves me time too. Not just time not spent rebooting. As one example, I was running iTunes under both OS’s, each reading the same physical library. And anytime I loaded new files into iTunes on Snow Leopard, I had to remember to load them again when in Win7 or those new albums wouldn’t be available to me. Now I only need one installation of iTunes, one installation of Dropbox, Evernote, Firefox, etc.

In short, I’m finding Parallels to be well worth the money so far.

Anyway, still somewhat jetlagged, tonight I slept from around 9 PM to 3:30 AM. Earlier in the day, my troubles with PCCW behind me, I went to their shop at the Wanchai Computer Centre to claim my free bonus for signing up for their Pocket WiFi – a Lenovo S10-2 netbook.

Why do I need both a MacBook and a netbook? Short answer: I don’t. Except that the netbook is so much smaller and lighter than my 15″ MacBook that it’s something I can actually carry around with me every day without feeling the extra weight.

(So my daypack now includes: iPhone and headphones, Kindle, Pocket WiFi, Nikon D300, Lenovo netbook. The netbook is way under-powered for Adobe Lightroom but should be able to manage Picasa.)

Some of you may find the following useful:

Setting up the netbook tonight … Ninite.com allows you to download almost everything you need at one time and installs it all for you (standard settings) unattended. It’s brill.

Of course the first thing is Firefox to replace IE. And then Xmarks, which keeps your bookmarks synchronized across multiple computers, so in a matter of seconds the netbook has all of my bookmarks.

And then Evernote – which keeps all of my numerous notes synchronized across my PC, my MacBook, my iPhone and now my netbook as well.

DropBox – file synchronization – after a couple of minutes all of the data files I need on a regular basis have been wirelessly copied to the netbook.

And then all the other stuff that I use on a regular basis – iTunes, WinAmp, VLC, 7Zip, Skype, so on and so forth.

The point is … a few years ago, setting up a new PC and getting all the software one needs and all the files one needs was an all day, back-breaking task. Tonight it was just a few mouse clicks, entering some account info into some of the programs, and then moving the netbook off to the side, letting everything get done for me.

And so I can focus on other things. Like the new 40th anniversary edition of King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King. And the latest episode of Californication. And how freaking cold it is tonight!!!!

Sunday, one of the things we watched was the Criterion Blu-Ray release of The Third Man. I wasn’t originally planning on buying this – I was going to get by with my standard def DVD until I saw this was going out of print and figured, “better get it while I can.” And while it’s now pretty much sold out everywhere, I still think the movie is worth a mention.

I haven’t watched this in awhile and was just constantly struck, from the first frame to the last, of what an amazing film this is. All of this talent coming together, a “package” in modern Hollywood-speak, yet seemingly working to do the very best they could, coming from an era where the concept of the blockbuster didn’t exist. Maybe not quite art for art’s sake, but damned close.

Director Carol Reed, writer Graham Greene, star Orson Welles (and Joseph Cotten and Valli and Trevor Howard and Wilfred Hyde-White). And the music, played on the zither by Anton Karas. Academy Award winning cinematography by Robert Krasker. And the amazing production design that fully captures Vienna in 1949, still bearing open wounds from WWII amidst its splendor. It all comes together in the amazing climactic sequence shot in the sewers of Austria – a confluence of talent that is rarely equaled. The photography, the editing, the expressions on Welles’ face, that shot of the fingers reaching up through that sewer grating to the street above, grasping for escape or freedom that will be denied.

Welles, in archival footage, also talks about the benefit of a “star part” like Harry Lime – that for an hour, people in the film do nothing but talk about him, mythologize him, so by the time he finally does appear on screen, a face momentarily appearing out of the shadows, he doesn’t really have to do anything to dominate the film. Except that this time, here, he does everything.

Orson Welles takes great pains to inform people that he did not co-direct the film, as is often rumored. And equally great pains to inform that he wrote his famous speech, 2/3rds of the way through the film.

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The Blu-Ray disc provides the original British version of the film (Selznick cut 11 minutes for the US release), the far superior version. The opening narration (spoken by Reed himself) sets the tone brilliantly for the film – and this is something that American audiences were robbed of for many years.

Bonus features on the disc are equally amazing. An audio commentary by directors Steven Soderbergh and Tony Gilroy, a second by film scholar Dana Polan. An introduction from Peter Bogdanovich. A 90 minute documentary from 2005 on the making of the film. An hour long profile of Graham Greene from the BBC from 1968. And a whole lot more.

Simply put, if you’ve never seen this, you’re poorer for it. And if you haven’t watched it in years, it’s time to watch it again and remind yourself what real filmmaking used to mean.

===============================

There is discussion about a remake of The Third Man, with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to the project. Given the way that films are made in Hollywood today, there is no chance at all that they can improve on the original but every chance that they will make a lot more money with this remake. It’s sad.

A sad remake that I tried to watch today is the remake of the classic British TV series, The Prisoner, more than 40 years after the iconic original. I watched it because Ian McKellen plays Number Two, but I gave up on it after 20 minutes. Perhaps that’s not fair? Perhaps I should force myself to sit through the entire thing before publicly critiquing it? Maybe this actually has somewhere to go during its 6 episodes? Ah, fuck dat shit.

Simply put, they took everything that made the original great and tossed it out. I barely know where to start. And I don’t think it’s worth my time or effort. So I’ll just say, ten years from now, when people talk of the Prisoner, they will still mean the original McGoohan series – this remake will have been forgotten long before then.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!