Category: Comment

Up until April 11th this year, Katie Holmes had not met Tom Cruise. Two weeks later they appeared together as a couple for the first time. Strangely, no one else saw or heard from Katie during the 16 days from when she went to audition for a part in Mission: Impossible 3, until her re-appearance on arm of Cruise on April 27th.

Sixteen days, eh?

Realistically, is that enough time to fall in love with someone, fire your long serving agent, and cut loose your best friends while hiding from the rest of the world? Or is that just enough time for a Scientologist to brainwash you into submission?

Thanks once more to Kieran, we’re watching the second series of 24 after he loaned us the box set. With this series, a few things have become apparent after only four episodes:

• Ass pulls are now considered to be a fair and reasonable way to construct a plot. If you need a character to do something either completely out of character, or seemingly at odds to their continued wellbeing, have them do it anyway. It’s only tv after all.
• Characters can and will refrain from explaining their circumstance fully, even when it may be to their great benifit to do so, solely to further complicate the plot.
• No matter how dedicated a team of makeup artists are, if you are a pock-marked, acne-ridden individual, all the slap in the world isn’t going to hide it when that camera zooms in close. Just as well for Kim Bauer that she has big norks then, isn’t it?
• If you are a cameraman, living in the Los Angeles area, who assumed their career to be over due to the onset of Parkinsons Disease, look no further than the production companies involved in the creation of 24 for your next paying gig. Evidence would suggest that the entire crew of camera operators has been assembled with the aid of a mailing list dedicated to people with the unfortunate affliction. Not only that, but stomach churning spasms are actively encouraged, whilst filming, in the somewhat misguided belief that it creates dramatic effect.

I’m sure more imparted wisdom will come to me as the season progresses. So far, though, it’s pretty good. ;o)

The news of Adobe buying Macromedia has come as a bit of a shock to me. Shortly after I became a professional web developer, I started using Allaire Homesite as my IDE of choice. Soon after that, Allaire were swallowed up by Macromedia and, in time, I ended up switching to Dreamweaver MX as the company neglected the development of Homesite.

With Adobe already having GoLive (a poor competitor to DWMX), I wonder what’ll become of the two tools when it all shakes out. It doesn’t seem likely that Adobe would keep identical horses in its stable of applications, and I dread to think the collision course that Fireworks and Photoshop are on.

It’ll be interesting to see how things go, but should Adobe make a mess of things I’ll probably jump ship to the Zend development suite. At least that’s intended for php development and, hopefully, isn’t as bloated as Dreamweaver has become.

Update: The Register have an article up that echoes my concerns about the Adobe / Macromedia “merger”.