But Vancouver is about to be blessed with a ridiculous number of top-drawer, full-on, ass-kicking samurai films at Pacific Cinematheque in late January and February.

Starting January 18th and continuing until 21st, Cinematheque is showing Kill!, Samurai Rebellion, Yojimbo, Sanjuro.  Then on January 26th, the tales of everyone’s favourite blind, sword-wielding Japanese masseur (I am not making that up), Zatoichi, come to town for three nights.

Then, as if that weren’t enough, starting February 1st we get Sword of Doom, Kurosawa’s take on Macbeth, Throne of Blood and his samurai comedy, The Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai (the most expensive samurai film ever made, later remade into The Magnificent Seven), Harakiri, the hard-to-find Three Outlaw Samurai, Samurai Saga and Bandits vs. Samurai Squadron.

If you have it in your head that these films are the Japanese cousin to the swashbuckler or just glorious displays of violence, it’s time for some schoolin’.  These are some of the best films made anywhere, worthy enough to win at Venice and Cannes, funny, moving, occasionally deeply romantic and sad (Samurai Rebellion might be the best samurai date movie ever made).

Go.  Just go.

This afternoon, I read David Pogue’s review of a new phone offering, the Shadow, designed and sold by T-Mobile in the US.

The review starts normally enough, praising the phone’s physical shape and layout, hard controls and aesthetics. It then describes the enormous list of features the Shadow has: WiFi, voice dialing, Bluetooth, stereo audio output…

But then Pogue gets into the phone’s software, built on Windows Mobile 6 which he succinctly describes as “a mess.” He describes the dozens of taps required to make the phone go, the wait times between screens (wait times on a phone!?…), bad navigation, hidden menu choices of important items, counter-intuitive functionality…in short, says that “it’s a shame that such bloated, baffling software runs a phone whose hardware is so close to perfect.”

The review is clever and cuts to the heart of the matter.

So why does this matter to me?

Because I’ve been reading Getting Real, by 37signals. And one of the things they hammer home is that it’s better to deliver half a product than a half-assed product. They argue that leaving features out in favour of delivering something simple, smart and coherent is critical. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Get a few things right.

I think that the Shadow phone Pogue describes is the sort of fully-featured, half-assed product 37signals had in mind. It’s loaded with everything a user could want and a lot more, but its navigation is so dreadful that it’s likely to be impossible for them to find what they are after, let alone use it. Whether this is the fault of the software built on Microsoft’s platform or of the platform itself…well, I’ll let you decide once you’ve read the review and handled the phone.

Now, consider Apple or Palm products for a minute…

Palm (and later, Handspring, then Palm again), for all its faults, for an operating system and products that some have described as “stale” in recent years, got it more or less right the first time around: deliver something that works as a phone, syncs perfectly every single time, and delivers single button access to the four major functions. To do this, they dumped a lot of functionality and kept things simple: no multi-threaded operating system, heck, there isn’t even a “Quit” button in most Palm applications. Palm explicitly told its developers that they shouldn’t use one, that they didn’t need one. They told developers to keep important, frequently used things on top, one click away, put less important things in menus or secondary screens.

And Apple’s products: plug in an iPod and it syncs. There’s no button to push, it just happens. Plug in a camera, iPhoto starts. Simple…not simplistic…just simple and smart.

The complaints about the iPhone have been loud and long – that it lacks features that are “obvious” like GPS, no flash on the camera, no picture messages, no file organiser, no Flash support. I can’t help but wonder if Apple chose to leave all these out to make sure they delivered a phone with half the features, fully realised, instead of a fully featured, half-assed phone.

You can stack complexity on Apple’s products; witness the number of developers running MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Subversion or a hat box full of excellent development environments that find a happy home on OS X. But that’s not where you start with Apple; you start with Safari and Mail, iPhoto and iTunes, simple, smart applications.

You’ve seen lots of terrible software and bad interfaces, as have I. I confess to having a very personal beef with an LCD display in the light and fan control in an overhead stove vent (“…Light…is…off…”). So there is no shortage of examples for the issues raised in Getting Real. But the clash between the sleek simplicity of this phone’s hardware and the transcendental awfulness of the its software really got my attention.

Perhaps simplicity is what separates passing fetishes from disruptive technology; witness Facebook, My Space, iPod, GMail, Flickr and others. I also think that this might be what’s driving the market away from Microsoft Vista. Start with the fact that you have to choose which version of Vista to use. We don’t want to think about versions, antivirus, antispyware, firewalls. We don’t want to play the whack-a-mole game with the interface. We don’t want to think about the interface. Rightly or wrongly, we want appliances — plug it in, insert bread, push the lever, wait, and toast pops out.

Thanks to Mark and Amanda for putting Getting Real on my radar.

Manipulating bits to display intuitive, amazing nav, stunning illustrations and rock-solid copy is sexy. People will buy you drinks, toast your creativity, and possibly co-parent your children for a well-made, hip web site or annual report.

Backing all that stuff up is not sexy. In fact, it’s probably unsexy. Wait…no, it’s definitely unsexy.

So with that in mind, here’s a dirty little secret: many of my clients who are paid by their clients to manipulate data into interesting, attractive and possibly useful ways are one disk crash away from losing that data forever.

Seriously.

About half of the businesses I consult have no significant backup system. When I ask about backup, half say something like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking about getting some backup for a year now…but we have a sprinkler system so if there’s a fire, we’ll be fine.”

It’s remarkable how quickly a single sprinkler head can fill an office with water. But it’s more likely that your sprinklers will go off when the maintenance people hit them while trying to change a light bulb than due to heat from a fire. Anyone who has been inside an office building that’s had a flood will appreciate the devastating effects it can have. Fire is a minor threat by comparison.

And all hard disks fail, eventually.

Systems Administrators are a strange breed; we think about risk all the time. And I know it’s weird to suggest that you put your data, that very valuable data you’re paying someone to manipulate, alter, massage or otherwise sex up ahead of the creative ideas…

But I dare you, I double-dog dare you to go into the next meeting with a creative firm and, after the pleasantries and the pitch, ask them this: “If there was fire or hard disk crash in your office, would you be able to get the data back that I’m thinking about paying you to create? If so, how quickly?”

If they can’t answer the question in two sentences, preferably something like, “Well, we move your data offsite nightly, so we might lose a day’s worth of work for you, but we’d be able to get everything we’d worked on up until 6:00pm last night back within 24 hours,” you might ask them when the last time they did a test restore of one of their backups was. By this time, you might notice moisture on their upper lips. If you see that tell-tale glisten, I recommend building another couple of weeks into your project plan to allow them to rebuild your data (and the data of the their other customers with pending projects) from scratch, just in case.

Seriously. Back. It. Up. Dammit.

And during that time, I’ve often thought, “Geez, shouldn’t this be quantifiable somehow? I mean, after all this time, shouldn’t there be some basic principles that guide this stuff?” The answer of course is “yes,” but it never occurred to me that there might actually be math behind it.

Courtesy of the fine folks at Daring Fireball comes a link to Kevin Hale’s lucid prose and pretty pictures which describe Fitt’s Law, the relationship between time, size and space which governs how easy it is to hit a link, choose a menu item or click a button.

I especially resonate with the section on the lack of “corners” in web applications. In meatspace, buttons have corners, so it’s easy to get feedback (often without looking) that your finger is in the right place. In the screenspace of an operating system, while you don’t get tactile feedback, the world has definite boundaries, which makes the edges and corners of the screen valuable. But in a web application, the browser window doesn’t limit the travel of your mouse, making edges and corners far less useful.

Heady stuff, but Kevin makes it seem simple.