Review: Star Wars Episode 7 The Force Awakens

Solidly OK, especially if you don't think about it too much. So don't think about it too much. Not really having the urge to see it again, though.

Review: In The Heart Of The Sea

A fictional story inspired by the same true story that inspired another piece of fiction you may be familiar with, or, Thor chases whales. Overall pretty good, has the same sort of petering-out ending that real life does.

What Happens When Automated Pricing Algorithms Go Insane

Sooo.... cruising around looking for cute Christmas gifts, and I stumble on this:

Heh, that's funny. Jenn and I are sort of accumulating Lego Minifigures at the moment, so this might be worth it as a laugher for a stocking stuffer... $16 is a bit stiff for one minifig, but it is Darth Vader and we're not likely to see another one, right? Sure, let's click on it...

That's right, kids, the $16 minifig can be yours for the low, low price of $59.46... PLUS the $5 shipping fee.

Now clearly what's happened is that some automated supply-and-demand algorithm has noticed that there is suddenly a lot of interest in this item, with an increased number of executed sales, and increased pricing accordingly. What's interesting to me is that when I caught it the first time, the offered price was $64.95 -- although the shipping was freely included. So I'm not sure what the algorithm is trying to do to me.

But $60 for a $16 toy?

Ugh.

Feedly on a 1st Gen iPad Mini

Hi Feedly guys.

I said:

And then you said:

...and while it is great that you've found a problem in general and are working quickly to fix it, that isn't what I'm actually on about. (I think.)

I have a first-gen iPad mini, being an early-adopter and all that. One of the problems with having a first-gen iPad mini is that it is getting a bit old, and applications are starting to get big enough that I can't run them without issues.

I don't think Feedly by itself is the issue. The problem is that something has changed in Feedly, and/or the surrounding environment that Feedly is running in, that the iPad mini can't deal with properly.

What happens is this:

• I load Feedly. Feedly goes off and collects the latest feed information. I have a lot of feeds and don't read them during the work day, so there's lots and lots of stuff there.
• I click on something and Feedly shows me the feed item. Most of these items don't have "full feed" functionality, so I only get a little bit plus maybe a picture.
• I click on the "show me more" (or whatever) and here's where it gets interesting. Sometimes Feedly seems to shell out to what looks like Safari to show me the entire page. Sometimes it shells out to Chrome to show me the entire page.
• I read my page, and then click "done" or "back to Feedly" as appropriate.
• Feedly has been swapped out because my iPad only has 512MB and I've just had Safari or Chrome running, so Feedly restarts, goes off and collects the latest feed information, and shows me that list from the newest-first page. Which is fine except that I'm a couple (or couple dozen) pages in to the list, and getting kicked back to the top of that list is annoying.

It doesn't happen on my iPhone 5S, but that's because the 5S has more memory so Feedly doesn't get swapped out, so it doesn't lose my place. However I like my mini, it has a better form-factor than the phone. Plus if I use up the battery on the mini, my phone is still usable.

I suspect the root cause of this is my trying to use an Apple device that's more than two years old at this point, silly me, but while I am an early adopter I'm also not in a place where I can buy something newer at the moment. (And anyways, I suspect my next tablet will be a Windows 10 tablet instead.)

Sure, this is a first-world problem. But it is annoying.

Thanks for reading.

Legacy Management Pages - A Tragedy In Three Parts

So you want to manage this old voicemail system, do ya?

Remember when Java was write-once, run-everywhere? Yeah, me neither.

Review: Suffragette

Yes, it is the dreary days of November when the only movies out are Oscar bait. And so, to Oscar-bait we went. Overall I would rate this movie as better than Still Alice, but since it is a parallel-history there is no happy ending for anyone and so I really don't have the inclination to see it again.

TV: Supergirl Pilot Is Really Bad

We finally watched the pilot. A super hero story with a strong female lead, what could go wrong, right?

Well for starters, the previews made it look like it was some kind of teenager drama, with emphasis on the drama. Not a fan.

Then the pilot actually starts, and we're in some kind of comic-book teen-drama mash-up with The Devil Wears Prada. And I'm not a fan of either genre. And it manages to conflict with the teen-drama aspect too, since our teen lead is not a teenager, she's clearly some kind of young, probably post-college, career woman who behaves like a teenager.

Then the whole episode they manage to go without identifying Superman by name. Did the series not get a license to use that name? It's always "him". And I turn to Jenn and say, why to they refer to Superman that way? He isn't fucking Jesus. Well except at the end of the episode where we hear: "He's proud of you." Maybe he is Jesus! TV rights do strange things.

Then Supergirl's secret identity is the only one to come up with a clear photo of the super hero. A real Peter Parker moment, if you would. And at this point I said to Jenn, have we seen an original idea here yet? And she couldn't think of one.

I'll give the show a pass on how bad the special effects were, too. They were cramming a lot of other bad things into the show and there clearly wasn't the time to design the effects properly.

At the end of it all Jenn didn't want to watch another episode. My view is, we gave Heroes Reborn two episodes before bailing, we should give this at least another episode. 

But on the other hand, Heroes Reborn wasn't this bad.