Miscellaneous goo

I have always assumed that the aim of any local film festival is to bring challenging and provocative cinema to movie fans that crave something a little out of the ordinary. It was therefore with relative disappointment that I noticed so many mainstream movies being featured during the Oslo International Film Festival (OIFF) which opens next week.

What shocked me most was the presence of W. on the program. I cannot think of a more conventional filmmaker than Oliver Stone, not to mention the fact that the movie will open in local theaters immediately following the festival. Perhaps the festival is being underwritten by the local distributor but it seems a shame to fill the limited space of a festival program with something so ho-hum. I would say the same about Rocknrolla and Zach and Miri Make a Porno, both of which open locally on December 5, plus A Christmas Tale, Worlds Apart, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas which all open on December 26.

Other questionable films on the program include Slumdog Millionaire (opening in January), Synechdoche, New York and Lorna's Silence (both opening in February), and Hunger and Let it Rain which are showing with Norwegian subtitles so I can only assume they are coming soon to a theater near me. What is it with all these films that already have distribution deals in Norway?

My other peeve with the program has to do with the number of films from Asia. Before I am accused of being Anglo-centric I should say that just a month ago the Films from the South festival wrapped up, which is a showcase for non-western films, but this year's program was fairly weak -- IMHO -- and could have benefited from including any one of the 13 films from Asia and South America showing under OIFF 2008.

Fortunately, the program isn't all disappointment. I'm really psyched to see The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Ballast, which won both the Cinematography and the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and Birdsong by Albert Serra plus Waiting for Sancho which is a behind-the-scenes documentary from Birdsong.

The documentaries on the program seem especially good! I've got tickets for Up the Yangtze, Man on Wire, and Trouble the Water. But seriously, Religulous? If it was a comedic bent the organizers wanted why not The Linguists?

Other programming choices I would have made if I were queen include:

• The Pool instead of Slumdog Millionaire
  
• I've Loved You So Long instead of A Christmas Tale
  
• Real Time instead of Rocknrolla
  
• Good Dick instead of Zach and Miri Make a Porno
  
• Amexicano instead of Synechdoche, New York
  
• Before I Forget instead of Lorna's Silence
  
• Frozen River instead of Worlds Apart
  

I had high hopes of seeing some indy raves on the big screen like The Lucky Ones, Rachel Getting Married, and Starting Out in the Evening but I guess I'll be looking for them on Play.com.

It's summer in Oslo and I'm on vacation! I can really feel that I've finally put work behind me and have started to relax. Today was a glorious day so I naturally headed to the forest. All of my walks essentially start out the same but I have a lot of different choices once I reach the downhill ski slope. Today I tried a new path that took me up to Trollvann as per usual, but it had a fork I hadn't previously seen so I skirted the water on the south side for the first time.

My goal was a cache near Lachmannsfjell. I had unknowingly walked past it last weekend, and even stopped for a water break at a lookout not 25 m from the cache's location, but my GPS had died earlier on that hike so it wasn't until I studied the maps later that I realized what I had missed. GCMW4B is located on a lovely ledge with a nice view of Lachmannsfjell and the surrounding forest; it would have made a much better rest stop than the outcrop I used last week had I only known it was there. It was fairly easy to find and so, feeling greedy, I set off to find another cache that is not too far away. It was an easy walk to the second cache but I didn't actually find it. The spot where my GPS told me it was hidden was full of lots of holes in the ground around this funky tree (a perfect hiding place) but I just couldn't bring myself to start poking my hand into those nooks and crannies where creepy-crawlies could be lurking. Norway has snakes, after all, and a poisonous one to boot!

It's been a couple of days since the last heavy rain and the pine cones have started to fall and open up. The forest had this fantastic dry, piney smell which I couldn't get enough of. My, how I love summer!

Last night's walk had me scrambling up a ravine and this morning the bottoms of my feet feel kind of bruised. It was all boulders and tree roots and I'm wondering if some kind of trail runner wouldn't be better than the sneakers that I've been using. They seem a little soft for the trails I've been walking lately. I would like to have better traction and a more stable midsole to keep from twisting my ankle but my hiking boots would be overkill. I suspect there may be some conspicuous consumerism in my future...

Here's the elevation profile from June 17, 2008:

Yes, that was a cliff face I traversed. Since I am not at all macho (honestly, I'm a fairly timid and conservative hiker) I think it is pretty cool that I managed this route without injuring myself.

This summer the Opera community has been compiling a wish list of improvements they would like to see in the browser. Since I was once a test manager for the Macintosh product I thought I might be included in this little meme but, alas, that does not seem be happening. I suspect no one actually reads my blog any more

After having switched to Firefox when I started working at the university last year, I migrated back to Opera earlier this summer when a campus-wide upgrade to the start-up scripts running on our computers rendered all Mozilla products on the Mac unusable (I think this is USIT's way of getting rid of the few remaining Macintosh users on campus). In many ways my return to Opera was relief. I was really delighted by just how fast Opera feels relative to Safari and Firefox and I don't know how I ever got by without some of Opera's more hidden features like the Links panel or the flexibility of being able to open new tabs next to the active tab. There are, however, several things I encounter on a daily basis that make me roll my eyes in frustration so I am taking advantage of the opportunity lachralle gave his readers to self-nominate and hereby present my wish list for the five things I would like to see in Opera.

Address Bar (Mac specific): The drop-down menu in the address field is often much longer than it should be, extending under the search field to the full width of the window. Regardless of any long addresses contained in the drop-down menu or Opera's "memory" of the maximum window size, the drop-down menu should only ever be as wide as the address field. Yes, this has long been one of my pet bugs

Content Blocking: I really prefer Opera's manual content blocking (relative to the Firefox extension Adblock Plus, for example); it makes me feel much more in control of what I do and don't see on a page and less vulnerable to decisions made by others. Opera could, however, be a lot more sophisticated by blocking the object containing the image or plug-in content thereby avoiding those ugly blocks of empty space that are often left on the page. This is something that Adblock does really well.

Blogging and Rich Text Editing: I maintain a couple of web sites that make use of web-based WYSIWYG editors like Kupu and the interface for WordPress, and unfortunately none of them perform at all well in Opera. There are trivial issues like not being able to follow "Previous Entries" links on a WordPress blog, to annoying things like editing buttons not being responsive to mouse clicks, to really devastating things like losing content while editing. I've lost one too many posts while editing in Opera and I simply cannot do my job while this feature remains so buggy.

.Mac/Yahoo/Flickr: The webmail interface for .Mac members is unusable in Opera. Yahoo is beta testing its new mail interface and blocks Opera completely. Flickr wants to block Opera users from organizing their photos but offers a "proceed at your own risk" warning instead. I know these issues do not exclusively have to do with limitations in Opera. There is probably some middle ground between Opera adding support for specific technologies and these content providers testing more broadly, but the reality is that I spent a lot of time on these sites and if they don't work in Opera then it will never be my primary browser.

Synchronized Bookmarks, a bona fide feature request: Like most computer users these days I have access to more than one machine and wish there was a way for me to access my bookmarks regardless of where I am working. I am a big fan of the Firefox extension Foxmarks. I can be at home, in the office or working in the GIS lab, on my Mac or using a Windows machine, and my bookmarks move right along with me. It's a pretty nifty way to stay in synch

I hope that both of the Opera employees who still remember me appreciate the fact that I did not mention that telnet.exe is still coded into the Macintosh Preferences by default, and although you can now edit the helper application (by setting it to Terminal.app) telnet links still do not work. I have, believe it or not, finally come to terms with the fact that telnet addresses hyperlinked from web pages are non-existent (rendering a fix for this unnecessary) and am totally comfortable being the only person in the world who believes that Opera will never be taken seriously in the corporate marketplace when such silliness is allowed to persist over three version numbers!

The president of Chile is in town and I happened to score an invitation to a lecture she gave last night at the Nobel Institute. President Bachelet's address described a framework for strengthening multi-lateral institutions (she is adamant that medium-sized countries like Chile and Norway have an important role to play in this arena) and touched on the themes of globalization, equality, peace and security.

I often find it difficult to have much faith in what politicians say but I found myself quite inspired by President Bachelet's comments. Among her very progressive views on equity and social justice, she had some remarkable things to say about the environment. She rejected the notion that there is a tradeoff to be made between economic growth and environmental sustainability, and advocated for immediate global action toward meeting Kyoto targets because

climate change is a threat to universal well-being.

I am currently organizing a workshop on climate change and human security (a.k.a. human well-being) so this was music to my ears. While the consequences of climate change seem evident to most of us who follow the news, I rarely hear politicians (let alone a head of state) speak so candidly about impacts and solutions. Perhaps that is a prerogative afforded when one comes from a region (South America) that emits only 0.2% of global greenhouse gases (in contrast to, for example, the European Union which contributes about 24% of greenhouse gases globally).

But the most amazing part of the evening came after President Bachelet's prepared comments when the floor was opened to questions. This was astonishing to me since my president (Bush, the lesser) barely fields questions from the media, let alone the public at large. While I scored a VIP seat in the audience, the lecture was in fact opened to the general public and there were all sorts of people present so the questions ranged all over the place, from the composition of the UN Security Council to Chile's technology policy with regard to developing an infrastructure for broadband internet access. There was really only one question that was framed in a way that it could actually be answered; the others seemed posed more for the thrill of speaking directly to a world leader. Yet President Bachelet treated each question with respect and found something meaningful — and substantive! — to say in response everyone. It was an amazing display of grace and diplomacy, and as I watched her performance I knew one thing for sure: I will never be a politician as I simply do not have the patience for engaging with the public like that.