Since my brother was coming in from Florida for a visit, I got to be impressed again with a little web application that the little Madison airport has running on their web site. Any time you want, you can call up the same arrival and departure information display that they have on the monitors at the airport. This is incredibly useful, and saves a lot of calling and running around.

Do major airports have this sort of thing? I looked around O’Hare’s site and couldn’t find it. I know big airports have a lot more arrivals and departures than what used to be known as Madison International Airport (!), but it’s still a great idea, and more airports should be copying it.

I’m not usually that affected when celebrities die. Dudley Moore? Not that big a deal. The Queen Mum? She had a good run. But for some reason, hearing that Robert Urich died made me sad.

Found “Excalibur” on the DVD bargain shelf at Shopko, and I couldn’t resist. It even has a second audio track commentary by director John Boorman.

So I sat down to watch it. It’s been many years since I’ve seen it, and I was struck by the beautiful, dreamlike, jewel-toned photography. But what kept me from really enjoying it, I think, is that all kinds of Monty Python imagery kept running through my head. Boorman’s film is something you really need to buy into to enjoy, since everyone is so sincerely overacting in order to evoke that “long ago and far away” atmosphere. (Nigel Terry as Arthur best managed to carry this off without seeming foolish, I think.) And you can’t buy into the serious side of Arthurian legend when clomping coconuts keep appearing in your brain.

Bedevere: What makes you think she’s a witch?
Peasant: Well she turned me into a newt!
Bedevere: A newt?
Peasant: …I got better.

“If I may venture to say so, rather a burning question in my mind at present is, well, what about breakfast and all that? I mean, what are the meal-times, if you understand me, and where is the dining room, if there is one?”

–Pippin Took (who knows how to keep his priorities straight), Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Disturbing pop culture fact of the week

When “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” went off the air in 1977, the six actors collected a combined salary for the final episode of $100,000 ($300,000 in adjusted dollars). When “Friends” ends in the spring of 2003, the combined salary of those six actors will be $6 million.

I love Amazon – I think they have the best customer experience on the web. But this blurb on my empty shopping cart page sort of disturbed me:

Your Shopping Cart lives to serve. Give it purpose–fill it with books, CDs, videos, DVDs, toys, electronics, and more.

Went to see “Monsoon Wedding” last night, and I’ll admit, I was doing it mostly to prove to my friends that I’m flexible in my movie choices.

Turns out, I really liked it a lot.

I don’t have any idea if this movie is an accurate portrayal of upper-middle-class Indian society – it’s probably the first Indian film I’ve ever seen. But what struck me most is how relaxed everyone was. They seemed to move to a different rhythm than Americans. They danced and laughed and related to each other in ways that seemed all the more foreign to me because it seemed so natural and unforced. It’s like the difference between a clenched fist and an open hand.

Recommended as a tonic for these overstressed times.

If anyone wants to make millions in the computer industry, here’s the way to do it: get rid of the file system. Files and folders made sense when we only had a handful of files on a floppy disk. Now, with thousands of files on these giant hard drives, you have to be a particularly conscientious librarian to keep track of everything.

Even more importantly, the thing that new, inexperienced computer users have the most trouble with is files and folders. Anyone who’s done tech support will back me up on this. “Where did my file go?” For people who don’t even understand the difference between computer memory and hard drive space, this can be an almost insurmountable problem.

So what do we do? I don’t know. I for one would like to have a Google-like search function in Open and Save dialog boxes, but this wouldn’t be enough to solve the problem, especially for inexperienced users. We need some new way to organize things that’s visual and understandable.

See, I just point out problems. I don’t solve them. But anyone who figures this out is going to be unimaginably rich.

Movie That Everyone Else In The Known Universe Hated But I Liked

Joe Vs. The Volcano

What’s yours? Fess up.

Today I sent an Amazon.com e-card to a friend. It was a “congratulations” card, and I noticed just as I was pressing the final “send” button that the card spelled it “congratulatons.”

This is funny both a) because a giant site like Amazon can’t be bothered to spell “congratulations” correctly, and b) because I noticed it.