We just watched The Reader with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes. Based on the German novel Der Vorleser.

I really liked it. My wife thought it was slow at first but had a good ending. It definitely earned its R rating for nudity (both male and female) and sexual situations.

The story is a little hard to describe without giving spoilers, so I'll not say much. I am still reeling from learning a spoiler on Thursday from this week's episode of Lost that ruined the surprise ending. Some shows I really need to watch on the night of broadcast.

The one thing I really did like about The Reader was how different points of view are shown in the movie. Particularly poignant was the seminar where one of the law students has an outburst about the trial. I also liked how the movie portrayed both of the main characters as emotionally closed off because of events that happened in their life.

I'd watch it again. 4 stars.

One of the few celebrities I follow on Twitter is Brent Spiner who played Data on Star Trek:TNG. I also remember him from the Night Court days when he had a memorable role as the hick, Bob Wheeler, that used to show up in Harry's court from time to time.

In the beginning his Twitter feed had pretty interesting interactions with Wil Wheaton and Levar Burton. But lately he seems to have turned his feed into a murder mystery that casts himself as a man who is setup for killing someone. He uses the alias of Norman Maine (from the movie A Star Is Born). I find his use of that name interesting only because in the movie Norman Maine was a fading celebrity.

Where is he now in the mystery? The murder has happened and Brent is now in hiding. He even alludes to a NY Post article about the murder. The funny bit from today is that he has shaved his head because the swine flu mask he was using to go incognito isn't good enough. He is still recognizable.

It should be interesting to see where this progresses.

Well that didn't take long to get fed up with Entourage. Too many usability problems. It quickly reminded me of all the reasons why I hated using Outlook.

For one, it was always overcorrecting my spelling... adding capitalization where I didn't want it. So I go to the Preferences and try and turn off Spelling auto correcting and you get checkboxes named this: "Use German post-reform rules". Why do I need to go do a Google search just to find out what a checkbox mean? Another checkbox "Check spelling as you type". Can the MS Office team be any more vague. Does that mean auto correct? or putting the squiggly lines? Apple typically does a lot better job of describing a preference and what it will really mean when you enable or disable it.

The second thing that drove me crazy was crafting an email. When you click "New Email" it drops you into this pop out dialog that autosenses email address in a drop down list as you type. That's great. The problem is that I have no idea how to type in multiple email addresses without using the mouse. Return drops you into the Subject field. The space bar does nothing but think it is part of an email address. Comma again thinks it is part of the email address. Yes, there is probably some other way you can enter multiple email addresses by hitting some unintuitive keystroke, but I am tired of searching Google for answers to stuff that should just work.

The last thing that drove me nuts before I fixed it was the Signature. I entered in a Signature for my work account in the Tools->Signature dialog, but nowhere on the dialog is a way to associate a Signature with an account. What a pain it was to got to another dialog for accounts and find the drop down for the Signature.

I'd rather deal with the Calendar problems with time zone in iCal than the crap I have dealt with Entourage over the last 3 days. Every time I try to give MS a chance to wow me with an upgrade, they always disappoint.

Here is an awesome hi-res photo of two T-38s flying over Cape Canaveral with both Space Shuttles on the launch pad.

STS-125 is scheduled for launch on May 11, 2009. It is a repair mission to Hubble.

Our company got on Microsoft's Enterprise list so that we can get cheap software from them. The company gave us links to download the latest versions of Office for Mac and Windows.

Remarkably I have been able to avoid having to run Office on my Mac in the 3 years since I became a switcher. iWork has always been enough for me even when Pages formats incorrectly. So on Friday night I decided to download it and give it a try.

After installing, I tried out Word and Excel and wasn't very impressed. I think I am going to stay with Pages and Numbers. While the apps don't look very Windows like, they still stink of Microsoft for some intangible reason. Maybe it is mental. I did open some of my docs that I got from my Windows colleagues and the docs do look better in Word than Pages. Pages just feels cleaner to me. At least Word and Excel on Mac don't have the hideous Ribbon.

The one part of the suite I will probably try and stick with is Entourage (Outlook on the Mac). The Calendar support in iCal is just atrocious. Whenever I get a meeting request from my PM, the time of the meeting is always 3 hrs behind due to the time zone. I guess iCal just never assumes you'll take a meeting in a different time zone. Entourage figured it out OK. I did have to tweak the Entourage UI away from that horrible 3 column window approach. I changed the UI layout to be more like Apple Mail. I also had to disable the hideous sounds any time the program did any kind of action.

I am getting to do a lot of Mac programming this week using Cocoa and Objective-C.

I have done a lot of dabbling with Cocoa in the past by fixing application bugs and going through sample apps from books, but this is really the first time that I am starting an application from scratch. My first impressions? I love it. You can really see how there was a lot of design work in the Cocoa APIs. It is much nicer than any MFC or Win32 I have written.

The other thing that I think is cool is I have had to do a number of Google searchs to find APIs to do what I need and the search results point me in the right direction really quickly. I couldn't always say that about Windows. Half the time Google searches for Win32 or MFC type stuff always pulled back crap info or stuff that really was better implemented in C# or one of the .NET languages. I remember it was pretty often that I'd have to "port" something from C# to C++ because the C++ APIs were not very well documented, but still were similarly implemented in .NET. That kind of stuff got really frustrating after a while. Inevitably, I always ended up going to Codeproject or Codeguru and drilling down deep to get the info I needed... if I could even find it.

I am sure there will be some things that will drive me crazy about Cocoa after a while, but for now I am just enjoying the research and learning something new that for now "makes sense".

It is a definite. I got hotel and airfare setup for WWDC yesterday. I am really looking forward to the iPhone track this year.

I finished up all but one of the WWDC 2008 videos that I downloaded. All the info in the sessions I went to and the videos I watched is surprisingly informative. The sessions do a good job of balancing slides with demos so you never really get lost in the topic at hand. It is definitely a lot nicer than the videos I have seen of PDC. I feel like I am being marketed to when I watch the PDC videos.

It looks like I am going to get to go to WWDC again this year.

It happens about a month after my daughter is born, but I already asked my wife and she wants me to go. I think it should be OK since my wife’s mom should be in Orlando for most of the summer.

Looking at the sessions, I think I am actually looking forward to the iPhone sessions this year. Last year since it was my first WWDC, I went to a number of the Mac sessions. However, I did get some cross-training because a number of the sessions were both Mac and iPhone.

This weekend I was actually bored and so I decided to fire up a couple WWDC 2008 session videos that I downloaded last year but never watched. I have watched about 6 of them, but I have 4 left to watch. One of them was about scripting your application. Because of the session video, I decided to try and implement some new functionality that we are trying to add to our application.

I need to talk to my manager tomorrow to see if I should book the hotel. Last year it was difficult to find a reasonably priced hotel room.

It took me about 4 nights, but below is the 3D star puzzle that my wife got me all the way back at Christmas.

It is a Ravensburger puzzle that my wife found at a puzzle store that is now unfortunately out of business.

Today I deactivated my Facebook account. I did it for a number of reasons.

Ever since I joined I was always kind of leery that the information that I posted there didn't seem like it was mine. I didn't want to get to the point where I was posting pictures of my daughter with some entity besides me owning the rights to distribute her pictures any way that they choose.

I was also getting to the point where the service had run its course. Yeah it was fun to post status messages and links there, but I can do the same thing at Twitter in an easier UI. I think the quizzes and applications also get kind of grating after a while.

I hope I don't upset some of my friends from high school and college, but I also went through both a friend purge and a wall purge before I deactivated my account. I did that as a security measure on the off chance one of my old friends tried to contact me via the wall and my work colleagues potentially see all this stuff I'd never respond to.

I was also getting to the phase where I had already met up with most if not all of my close acquaintances over the years. While it was nice to see what the friends were up to, I know that I'll never reconnect with many of them in real life. Our circles just go in different paths now. I know it is rather harsh and maybe even egocentric, but the people who took the time to get my email address are the ones that I will continue a relationship with.

Another thing, the recent friend requests were from people I either never talked to in high school or college, or that I maybe had one conversation with. Those people I never had a need to add. Facebook isn't a faux friend race.

I probably would have done a full deletion of my account if I didn't have some past work colleagues still online. If one day I need to contact them, I'll probably reactivate my account. In the meantime I am glad to have broken a tie to something that was taking much more time than it should have. More time and effort to put to my daughter when she comes. :)