You Know What's Weird?

OS X has no way to automatically mount a given AppleShare volume on login. Weird. It's OK, there's a shareware app. But really, seems like a natural thing.

OK, I'm sort of lying. You can do it by dicking around with shell scripts. I'm not sure that counts for the average user, though.

And...

I am now routing through the KVM switch. Meanwhile, the couple dozen people who have me in their friends list are going "WTF? He never updates, then he gives us this boring crap about OS X and USB? Suxor!"

Yep. That's just the way it is.

Too Good To Last

I'm really perplexed by this failure mode. It'll work fine for about 16 hours, then lose track of the USB ports; then you can reset it with a reboot; then you're back into the mode where you get about a minute out of it every time you switch back to it.

Possibly something's being triggered by the Energy Saver? But I don't understand why I wouldn't get another long chunk of OK time after a reboot, in that case. USB is supposed to be fairly stateless, and this feels pretty stateful.

Oh well. Next test is a direct connect and more patience -- see what happens when the Energy Saver kicks in then, see if there's still breakage after the first 16 hours, and so on. I still kind of think it's about the switch. If I physically unplug the switch and plug it back into the Mac, the USB seems to work for a while longer. Just switching to the PC and back gives me only a minute or so of functionality. I wonder if the switch isn't giving out some kind of trickle "I'm connected" signal that messes things up?

Room With A View

Not a masterpiece by any means, but I liked it. I've been stressed enough recently so that it was kind of hard letting myself slide into the movie at the beginning. The kind of hyperkinetic camerawork made it harder. I'm not sure what was served by the artificial long shots, particularly since it was pretty clear they were spliced together by CGI. (After all, real steadycams don't go through the handle of a coffeepot.) That really lessens the impact of the long shot, y'know?

So I spent about the first half an hour engrossed in nitpicks like unto the above. However, Jodie Foster is as always Jodie Foster. One review of this I read complained about the fact that the character's claustrophobia is mentioned once and then forgotten. Said reviewer has, apparently, forgotten what good and subtle acting looks like. Foster plays that particular issue to a T, and you never forget that she's holding in her fear for the sake of her child. The rest of her acting is on a par.

Jared Leto was weak. Dwight Yoakum and Forest Whitaker were great, though, which pretty much made up for it. Solid direction, well-written. One unfortunate cliched image at the end, and a couple of places where logic took a back seat to the necessities of the plot. But on the whole, very satisfying.