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2003 in review: Films

I saw 38 new films in 2003. (New to me, that is–not necessarily films that were released in 2003.) Although 38 is only one more than the 37 books I read, it feels like a more substantial number. Maybe it’s the way that movies are leased into the cinema in a relatively small trickle–a couple of new films every week–as opposed to the sheer volume of books you are confronted with when you enter a typical bookshop.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t hunger for films the way I do for books. I do love the whole movie experience: from seeing a trailer for the first time, through reading advance press on the film, to actually showing up at the cinema, buying a bag of sweets, and sinking into a deep comfy chair for a couple of hours. I think DVDs are great, but there really isn’t anything like the experience of seeing a film on the big screen. The darkness of the theatre, the sound all around you, the way the film fills your whole field of vision…it’s just magical.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve started bringing Alex along to the cinema with me. He’s all about the magic. The two films we saw together were Finding Nemo and Brother Bear. In both cases he came away utterly entranced, and chattered about the films non-stop for weeks. Much of his play acting right now consists of him telling Abi and me to take on the roles of his favourite characters: “You’s-a Marlin, anda you’s-a Dory, anda I’m-a Nemo!” Whenever he climbs up on my back for a ride, he’s a tiny bear and I’m a big bear. Hello tiny bear. Hello big bear.

There are a bunch of movies I’m looking forward to in 2004, but most of all I’m looking forward to Saturday or Sunday matinées, and seeing all of the silly kids’ films I would otherwise avoid.

Looking back on 2003, though, how did the year pan out? The average review score I gave for those 38 films was 3.2 stars out of five, which is okay. There were two really appallingly bad films that merited not even a single star, and I saw four that were worth a full five stars. Curiously, I saw both of the zombie turkeys at the start of the year, and all of the five star films in November or December. Here are the ones I rated highest and lowest at the time:

Highest

Lowest

I’m actually happier with those ratings than I was with my book reviews. With hindsight, the lists above really do stick out as the best and worst films I saw in 2003.

Performances that have stayed with me:

Worst performance: Christian Bale in Equilibrium. So bad it was funny…for a while…then it got worse.

Actor/Actress I most enjoyed wacthing: Colin Farrell. With highly entertaining turns in Daredevil, The Recruit, Phone Booth and S.W.A.T., he is quite simply a classic Movie Star. The publicity stills for next year’s Alexander look dodgy, though.

In 2004, I will be mostly looking forward to:

All sequels. (Well, apart from The Incredibles, of course.) Hmm. I suppose that’s why they’re on my radar already, though. I’m also rather looking forward to the extended edition of The Return Of The King. If it’s anything like the extended version of The Two Towers it’ll be a completely different film than the one we saw in the cinema.

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2003 in review: Books

I’ve been doing my “Quick Reviews” for over a year now. This means that for the very first time, I can look back over the past year and see a complete record of all the books I’ve read and films I’ve seen. (Well, almost complete. I haven’t kept notes on reference books and textbooks, or on films I’ve watched but had seen previously.) This is great because I always get terribly anxious when I think about how few books one can actually read in a lifetime. With so much fabulous literature (I use the term loosely) out there, and more being published every week, how can I possibly get through all of the good stuff? At least now I can quantify my fears: I read 37 books in 2003.

37. Thirty-seven. Yikes. Maybe it would have been better not knowing, because in the grand scheme of things, 37 is virtually indistinguishable from zero. It also makes me even more pissed off with Neal Stephenson for hogging almost the whole of October with the concrete block that is Quicksilver. James Bamford’s Body Of Secrets took me almost a whole month to get through, too, but at least I finished it and had another notch on my reading list to show for it. If it hadn’t been for Quicksilver I would have broken 40. 40 would have been poor, but almost acceptable. But 37? Thirty-seven??

I don’t normally make New Year Resolutions, but I’m determined that 2004 is going to see me pass the 50 mark.

Looking back on those 37, though, what interesting stuff does my review list tell me? Well, breaking the books down by genre, we have:

  • Crime: 21.5
  • SF/Fantasy: 10.5
  • Non-fiction: 4
  • “Mainstream”: 1

I’m counting Eric Garcia’s Casual Rex as half crime, half SF, because it’s genuinely a mix of both, as opposed to David Brin’s Kil’n People, which has strong potential as a crime novel, but ends up with both feet squarely in the SF camp (to my disappointment). The only “mainstream” book was William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.

Also, looking back on the whole list, I need to work on my rating of books in the 4-5 star range. I rated Robert Crais’s The Last Detective as only one of two 5 star books for the year. It was a very good book, but I’m not sure if it really was a top three pick. It made me cry, which is a good sign of the emotional impact a book has on me. On the other hand, it’s not as good as LA Requiem, which, if I had such a thing, would be on my list of all-time favourite books. Likewise, I don’t think it was as good as Harlan Coben’s Fade Away. So why didn’t I give that one five stars? I’m not sure. As I said, the ratings need work.

According to the ratings at the time, though, here are my top-rated books for the year:

I don’t think there can be much question that I’m in a heavily crime-oriented reading phase right now. When I was younger, I read almost exclusively science fiction. Nowadays I find that there are far fewer science fiction books on the shelves that really interest me. I’d much rather discover a crime writer with a solid series of private eye novels behind them than an SF writer with an interesting back catalogue. Hmm. What does that say about me?

The writer I most enjoyed reading in 2003 is Harlan Coben, no question. I just finished reading the last two hundred pages of Tell No One in a single sitting this evening, and Coben is da man as far as I’m concerned.

Worst books of 2003:

I came across fewer real turkeys than outstandingly good books, mainly because I tend not to dip into a novel unless I think I’ve got a good chance of liking it. I’m happy enough to take a chance on a film, because films only last a few hours. I have to live with a book for about a week, so I like to know that I’m going to get a good amount of enjoyment from it. That’s why I like Amazon’s recommendations.

What about that “average enjoyment”, then? Here are the average ratings over those categories:

  • Crime: 3.7
  • SF/Fantasy: 3.1
  • Non-fiction: 3.8
  • “Mainstream”: 4

According to these figures, I should probably be reading more mainstream and non-fiction, but the sample sizes are really too small to draw many conclusions from them. The gap between the crime and SF genres is very noticeable, though. We’ll see what 2004 brings, but so far there’s only one SF/fantasy book that’s firmly on my reading list, and that’s Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin Of Souls. Abi gave it the seal of approval, and Bujold is ever reliable, so I’m approaching that one without any apprehension. On the crime front, I’ve got the rest of Harlan Coben to get through (three more Myron Bolitar novels, which I’m going to have to get on import, or on Ebay, and another two stand-alones), and a bunch more Dennis Lehane. After being a bit disappointed by Faceless Killers I’ll probably give Henning Mankell another try. I also need to get back into Michael Connelly.

If there’s anyone else you’d recommend, I’d love to hear about them in the comments! I’ve got a quota to meet this year now, after all.

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Status Reports

A few weeks ago Rands posted a couple of articles (1 and 2) about status reports, those things that people hate writing, hate reading, and rarely tell you anything useful even when you do. In particular, he tries to come up with some ideas about how they can be improved in order to actually contribute to the running of a company instead of just slowing everyone down with paperwork.

I’ve been wanting to comment on these articles for a while, but I’ve had trouble crystallizing my thoughts. I’m still not sure if I can, but if I don’t get this out before the New Year, it’ll just sit in my head forever. It’s not a refutation of anything in particular that Rands said, just a bunch of ramblings that his articles sparked off in me.

To start with, there are two issues:

  1. Why are status reports necessary?
  2. Why are they such a problem?

The answer to these are linked:

  1. Managers need true and accurate information to run the company
  2. Providing true and accurate information–whether it’s good news or bad–is rarely in an underling’s best interests.

In any human organization, whether that’s a family, a company or a country, there is a certain amount of friction generated by self interest and lies, however white and small. Like in mechanical systems, this human friction can be minimized; but just as the second law of Thermodynamics forbids perpetual motion machines, basic human nature means that the whole truth will never make it from one end to the other intact.

A typical modern company is made up of three elements, in varying proportions:

  1. Systems
  2. Processes
  3. People

Those are the ingredients for a beast that eats raw materials and shits finished product (metal into cars, requirements into code, whatever). Status reports are a process. Wikis and blogs are systems. There is only so much in the behaviour and output of a company you can change by tinkering with its processes and systems.

In traditional industry this “so much” can be large, because you’re delivering tangible output from assembly lines (systems) and logistics (processes). Still, there is a limiting factor imposed by the people who have to operate the factory: it’s the workers who implement the directives from management.

In the “knowledge” industry (software houses, financial institutions, etc.) people play a much greater part. Which is a problem, because people are so much more complicated than systems and processes. They get depressed, they affect morale in their departments, they raise awkward questions in meetings, and they need paid every damn month.

Executives hate this, which is why they cream themselves over workflow and knowledge management systems that promise to get the workings of the company out of the heads of their staff, and into easily tweaked databases. These knowledge systems can then be shipped offshore to wherever the labour costs are lowest this month, the original staff can be made redundant, and the executives can jerk off about shareholder value in their annual reports and reward themselves with some healthy stock options.

But surely reducing a company’s reliance upon its people, and increasing its systems load can’t be the only option for affecting overall performance? I don’t think that Rands’s quest for a more systems-based approach to status reports is going to lead to massive redundancies, but I do find it symptomatic of this particular school of thought.

So what’s the alternative? I can only think of one:

  1. Hire people you can trust
  2. Give them a measurable stake in the success of the company

The (big) problem with this approach is that it isn’t scalable. From my experience, it works fine with a company up to about 30 people, but after that it breaks down. First of all, the company starts to get too big for the founders to handle all the recruitment themselves, and secondly, unless the company’s revenues scale with the number of employees (hint: they don’t), the “measurable stake” dwindles to the point where it’s nothing more than a 5% Christmas bonus.

So here we’re back to where Rands started: how do you improve communication in a larger organization, when you’ve had to hire people you don’t even know, let alone trust, and where the only stake an employee has in its success is the continued arrival of his salary every month?

Here is also where Rands ended: have people tell the truth.

Teams represent[ed] by more compelling Status Reports are going to be rewarded by getting their agenda fulfilled. People will talk about these teams and wonder about their success. Soon, we’ll be talking about the products created by these teams and trying to figure out what is the secret of their success… which is simple… they’re just writing down the truth.

Except…they won’t. Human friction, selfishness, and little white lies to cover your ass will get in the way. Better social software (whatever) will result in more innovative ways for staff to hide what it is they’re really doing all day. The content-free status report will be replaced by the content-free daily blog entry. It may be a slight improvement, but only a slight one. If you want to tweak the people of a company, you actually have to tweak the people, not just the systems they work with.

Summing up: damned if I know. But if I ever start my own company, I’m going to try and keep it small and successful, rather than aiming for enormous growth and a fat IPO.

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Quick Plug: Glen Phillips

It looks like Glen Phillips has got most of his new album in the can, and has got proper label backing for its release early in the new year. This is a Good Thing. Glen’s debut solo album Abulum is a solid favourite of mine, and I’m eagerly looking forward to hearing the new material.

One of the tracks is already available for download, and not just as an mp3. The artist Ken Fountain has produced a sweet and sad animated video to go with the sweet and sad song “Brain Trust Kid.” It’s quirky, melodic, moody, emotional, and very typically Glen. (The smoky backroom jazz club feel is a new and interesting direction, though.) If the rest of the album is as good as this, it’s going to be something very special indeed. Head for Glen’s site forthwith, and indulge yourself.

Glen Phillips - Live at Largo

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A Very Whisky Christmas

About eight years ago I spent a short time in a temp job working for the whisky company Macdonald and Muir, which is now known as Glenmorangie PLC. At the time, the company was still based in Leith. Their main industrial plant occupied pretty much one whole side of Constitution Street between the Shore and the part of Leith docks that has now been turned into the very fashionable Ocean Terminal. The factory held three or four bonded warehouses (“bonds”), administrative offices, a bottling plant, a small cooperage, and an enormous vatting and blending operation. Most of their output was blended Scotch whisky rather than single malt, primarily the Highland Queen and Bailie Nicol Jarvie brands.

Most of the job involved enumeration: counting barrels as they were trundled into and out of storage, weighing the barrels on enormous industrial scales to see how much was still left in them, checking the volume of spirit pumped into and out of the tanker trucks that transported the stuff, and double-checking as the vat men took dips and measured the strength of the spirit. One of the great things about this job was that hardly any of these tasks took place in an office. I had to wander around the whole plant, from bond to bond, to wherever the latest counting operation had to be performed. It involved a lot of standing around and chatting while whisky was being pumped or poured into the huge wooden vats. I learned an awful lot about whisky production.

But the very best part of it was…the smell.

Whisky barrels are not spirit-tight. Over time, a certain percentage escapes into the air. As casks are emptied into the blending vats, a certain amount is lost on the floors. Also, taking dips from casks for nosing or measuring the strength of the whisky is not exactly a tidy, clinical process. It splashes and spills. And while the drops and splatters evaporate away, the peaty, flowery aroma of the whisky stays behind. It soaks into stone and wood, softening and mellowing as it does so, and it permeates the whole fabric of the bond. There is nothing quite like walking into a bond first thing in the morning, and being enveloped by the sweet aroma of decades-old whisky. I adored it.

But the taste? That’s a different matter. I love the smell of coffee, but I’ve never learned to like the drink itself. Even though I grew to love the smell of whisky in the morning, I could never abide by the harsh burn of the actual spirit in my mouth. Until recently, that is.

As I was reading Iain Banks’s new book, Raw Spirit, I was heartily affected by his enthusiasm for our national drink. A good few years had passed since I’d last tried a dram, so I figured it was time to give it another try. A fortnight ago we were out to dinner at No. 3 Royal Terrace with my parents. After a rather splendid steak, I ordered a glass of Highland Park to round off the meal. I nosed the glass with some apprehension because Abi and my parents–knowing how much I’ve disliked whisky in the past–were all watching me intently to see what I thought. I took a sip, let it wash around in my mouth a bit, and drank it down.

“Hmm,” I said. “That’s actually quite nice.”

Hence the “A Very Whisky Christmas” title of this post. As soon as it was known in my family that I liked whisky, my Christmas present fate was sealed. I now have a nice selection of malt whisky books with notes on all the distilleries, tasting notes for the spirits themselves, and a tidy little collection of single malt miniatures.

Can’t say that I mind, you understand.

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Oliebollen

In the Netherlands, the whole New Year thing is called “Oud en Nieuw”, which means “Old and New”. One of the traditional things to eat around this time is Oliebollen, which translated literally means “Oil balls”. Essentially, they’re deep-fried balls of dough, dusted liberally with powdered sugar. Mmm, donuts.

But don’t picture American style cake-like donuts, or British style sweet dense bread-like donuts. Oliebollen aren’t for dunkin’. They really are oil balls. They’re fried to an greasy golden crisp on the outside, and are hot, thick and sweet on the inside. You can buy them in bakeries and in oliebollen stands on street corners. Buy them from a street vendor, and they’ll come in a white paper bag that will be saturated to the point of see-through by the time you get them home. If they last that long. They’re delicious on their own, or with a beer, or with some champagne at Oud en Nieuw.

We bought my parents a deep-fat fryer for Christmas. Guess what we were munching on Boxing Day?

Here’s the recipe we used, cribbed (and translated) from the web site of Bakkerij Steevens:

Ingredients (makes about 40 oliebollen)

  • 1kg flour
  • 1l water
  • 25g salt
  • 50g sugar
  • 80g yeast (yes, really 80g)
  • 10g cinnamon powder
  • 200g raisins
  • 100g chopped apples
  • A splash of lemon juice

Dissolve the yeast in the water. Mix the cinnamon, salt and sugar into the flour, and then add the yeasty water. Stir this for a short while (or use a blender on slow) until you’ve got goo. Fold in the raisins, apples and lemon juice. Then cover the mix with a damp tea towel (to stop it drying out) and leave it to stand and rise in a warm place for at least 45 minutes. Make sure you put it in a big container, because it’s going to at least double in size.

Heat your oil to 180° C (350° F). Use an ice cream scoop or a large spoon to drop lumps of the dough into the oil, and let them sit and bubble for about 5 minutes, turning them over half-way through so they are golden on both sides. Then take them out and let them rest on some kitchen roll.

Don’t eat them immediately, because they’re burning hot. You can let them rest for a while until they’re merely warm, or you can keep them for longer and then gently re-heat them in an oven. Don’t re-heat them in a microwave, because they’ll go all soggy and horrible. (You can eat them cold, too, but they’re really meant to be eaten warm, on a frosty night.)

To serve the oliebollen, place a whole bundle of them on a big plate, and smother them in powdered sugar. Then make sure that everyone has enough napkins to wipe their fingers with….