Fat Heads is full of Fat Heads

I've always liked Fat Heads on the South Side of Pittsburgh, but waiting over an hour for a table without anyone even apologizing is uncool. Our group of seven left for Piper's Pub across the street and we were seated immediately (and ate some great food). I'm not going to give any love to Fat Heads for a long time.

What of RIAs?

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the new old rage, reminded as I am of it by Adobe's launch of AIR. I'm with Tim Bray on this, though, in that I think RIA's are not that great.

The web comes with a lot of constraints, and that is a Good Thing, which leads to simpler designs by forcing designers to get to the heart of a problem. These simple pieces are also leading to composable applications (mashups and web service integration). I don't know if this is leading to nirvana, but it's certainly better than where we were before the Web.

So I agree with Tim that most of the richness claims are red herrings. However, and he doesn't seem to point this out yet, there is a compelling capability in being able to work offline using the same technology stack as the Web. Now, I don't believe Flash is the way to go here. Rather, some offline type of DHTML/AJAX that resyncs when connected would be pretty cool. However, this is a hard problem to solve--something I am currently struggling with at work (for a thick client app no less!), so I am also skeptical of claims that RIAs or AIR will help much in that space.

Atonement

A decent movie. The acting was good, the dialogue well conceived, the cinematography excellent. I found the scoring inventive but also somewhat intrusive.

I felt the use of WWII to be a rookie mistake in that the realities of it dwarfed the supposed main plotline and clashed with the fanciful storytelling aspects. However, that scene on the beach was incredible. Although the use of the war was awkward, Atonement far outshines in comparison to The English Patient, but I don't favor it for Best Picture tonight.

If it's not one thing it's another

So my surgery is scheduled for this coming Friday. They're going to remove a mass on my left parotid gland. It will be a conservative procedure since the pathology report from the biopsy was inconclusive (my doc said those things were useless in these cases). It'll take a week to get the results back, but I should be back at work in a couple of days, albeit with a nice long set of stitches. This is far enough ahead of our Florida trip that it shouldn't be a problem.