World Cinema

September 3rd, 2009

This is a Cohen Brothers short that was made for Chacun son Cinema (To Each His Own Cinema) — a short film festival featuring 3 minute shorts to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival.

World Cinema, the Cohen Brothers contribution featuring the amazingly talented Josh Brolin, is great (and apparently until recently, very hard to find).  Have a look see:

Apparently a lot of filmmakers contributed to Chacun son Cinema including Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Roman Plolanski and David Lynch — and all of their films are included in the DVD.  But somehow World Cinema was omitted.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, it’s now been released in Technicolor!

Thanks interwebs!  And thanks VSL!

People! Be Nice! (Or At Least Be Professional)

September 2nd, 2009

I know I’m not the first one to say it, but I really wish people were a little bit nicer online.  Or more considerate.  This “story” on Mashable kind of got my goat today:

Google: Gmail Outage Was Our Bad

So, yeah.  If you hadn’t heard it from 20 different places, GMail’s servers were down yesterday.  There was a massive unanticipated routing problem when they tried to do a routine server upgrade.  These things happen.  It was not a big deal.  It was not the end of the world.  The entire outage lasted less than 100 minutes (I’ve had power outages last 3 days.  Stop whining, internet.)

So fine.  It happened.  And it sucked for about as long as it takes you to go to lunch and come back.  And Google explained the whole thing.   And issued a huge apology. Seems like that should be it, right?

So why does Jennifer Van Grove have to be so snotty?

That’s one big oops Google. But it’s nice to see that you’re publicly apologizing for the outage and attesting to the fact that you will do everything in your power to prevent it from happening again. Here’s hoping you stick to that.

Google owes you nothing my dear. They’re a free service. They’ve been free since they started.  And they’re nice.  And they’re incredibly transparent (compare an apology like this to Apple’s App Store Rejection Process).

There needs to be a little professionalism in blogging.  That, to me, would be the great loss inherent in the death of traditional news media.  At least The New York Times can just report a story and not be complete dicks about it in the process.

I think this is part of a bigger discussion going on right now in blogging — especially in terms of anonymity and criticism (I’m, at the moment, trying to understand Time Out New York Theater editor David Cote’s  beef with George Hunka).

But in the end it comes down to — do you really need to populate the internet with a re-blog of a dead story just so you can bitch about it?  Try Facebook.  Or Twitter.

Or is it that you really don’t have anything to say?  In which case, maybe keep quiet?

UPDATE: Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch seems to be a bit crabby about it too. Seriously. Was it just a slow news day?  The only thing you have to talk about it to re-post a blog post from the Official GMail Blog and then bitch about them?  That’s some great journalism.  Hey, New York Times! you can close up shop!  We have a replacement for you!

Why not write an article about how a lot of big companies have growing pains (Facebook goes down all the time.  Or Twitter!  Jesus!) or a discussion of how Google’s massive, elegant server architecture system is still prone to human error?  Or a suggestion of how to improve it?

Geek Chic, Blogging and Me

August 22nd, 2009

Some of you may have noticed I’ve been posting a lot less lately.  It’s true.  I have.  It’s because I’m more than a little bit confused about the blogging.

I originally created Geek Chic primarily as a way to share things I thought were cool.  Usually snagged from my daily trolling of the internet, I’d post a few gems that caught my eye.  Call it re-blogging, call it regurgitating.  Call it whatever you’d like.  I saw it as an electronic way of curating and sharing a collection of things I thought more people should see.

With the advent of Twitter, the evolution of Facebook and now the more social integration points of Google Reader (my primary means of ingestion / procrastination), there seem to be more and more ways to share things you think are cool with the rest of the world.  And it’s becoming easier and easier — for example with Google Reader, all I have to do is click one button and I can share a post I think is interesting.  Clicking another button, I can instantly post a link to Twitter or Facebook. Done.

So the question arises, what good is this blog?

Read the rest of this entry »

Patrick Duffy & The Crab

August 5th, 2009

Where on earth did this come from?  This is pretty hilarious.  But totally random:

If you like it, there are a few more episodes floating around.  If not, pretend you dreamed this post and you just woke up.

Thanks HuffPo.

The App Store and Apple’s Recent Behavior

July 30th, 2009

Alright.  I’ve been holding my tongue about Apple’s iPhone App Store and their general iPhone shenanigans for awhile now, but I’ve had it.  Apple, you’re being stupid and you need to shape up.

Keeping in mind all of this crap that’s been floating around the internet for the past few days (in no particular order):

  1. Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store
  2. Apple’s Chickenshit Approval Process Has Gone Too Far
  3. There’s No App for That: VoiceCentral Removed From App Store
  4. What Steve said about the App Store and why we need to suck it up
  5. IPhone SMS Attack to Be Unleashed at Black Hat
  6. iPhone Jailbreaking Could Crash Cellphone Towers, Apple Claims
  7. Is the iPhone causing Apple to lose the plot?

Apple, I’ve stood by you for a long time now, but you’re just being stupid.  Your App Store rules of rejection and acceptance need to be TRANSPARENT.  And when you reject an app like Google Voice, man up and give a freaking reason for it.  The Beckettian back and forth in #3 above is something I would expect from Dell.  And quite frankly, you deserved the unofficial response you got from Google’s Marissa Mayer (passive though it was).

As for #4, I completely agree.  If developers keep putting up with this, they’ll need to suck it up.  But after #3, why on earth would any sensible company want to spend months developing for iPhone, wait a month or more to be accepted then rejected with no explanation and no suggestions for how to get the app back into the store?  As a developer it makes my blood boil.  Makes me want to start coding mobile apps for basically any other platform — Android, WebOs… even Windows Mobile.

And as for the crap you’re trying to pull against the EFF and their campaign to make Jailbreaking a legal option, can you smell what you’re shoveling?  How can you say Jailbreaking would crash a cell tower?  Sure it’s a possibility.  But do you really think a serious terrorist would use an iPhone to do that?  You can do that with just about anything that can connect to the cellular network (an eval board, an old cell phone… basically anything but a tin can).  PLUS, unless you fix that SMS bug in #5 above right quick, a hacker wouldn’t even NEED to jailbreak his phone.  He could just send a text message and not only overwhelm the cell towers but crash all of the system’s iPhones in the process.  I only hope the courts can see right through that one (see #7 for more analysis on this one).

I’d been a pretty satisfied iPhone customer since the 3.0 (iPhone mind you.  not AT&T.  AT&T can suck it. I only hope Apple doesn’t renew their exclusive contract with them and I can ditch them for another provider when my contract is up.  And if they don’t I hope there are better iPhone alternatives by then.)  Most of the apps that I installed via Jailbreak were accounted for or rendered unnecessary with copy/paste, better integration with Google Calendar, etc.

But now, just out of principle, I’m going to jailbreak my phone again.  I advise you all to do the same.  This walled garden that Apple’s is creating is really stagnating for developer innovation (when there’s 15 variations of ‘Pull My Finger’, how many of those ‘approved’ applications do you really think are useful?).  And frankly, their guardianship seems to be done by a gang of ADD monkeys (I need to be 17 to use Wikipanion? Really?  And AroundMe?  It’s like you understand only the letter of the law, but not the spirit.  And frankly I’d rather not have a guardian of my phone than have an overprotective, uncommunicative one).

I guess in my mind, for any healthy industry to thrive, there needs to be some competition.  Where’s the competition?  Android, step up your game!  Palm, your marketing sucks.  Do better.

Until then, the best we can do is rebel in mild ways.  Like Jailbreaking.  Thanks Dev Team, for giving us that option.

UPDATE: A bold move from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch: I Quit the iPhone.
UPDATE 2: Developer Steven Frank is ditching the iPhone too.

The Saga Continues: Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone
EVEN MORE: Apple Rejects Dictionary App for Containing Swear Words

It’s not enough that they have a warning on Wikipanion that some of the content in THE OPEN SOURCE ENCYCLOPEDIA might have content that’s inappropriate for children under 17?  They now ban dictionaries for swear words?

It’s like they have the Three Stooges manning their application approval process.  I really hope the FCC beats Apple to a pulp on this one.  They deserve it.

three_stooges

Escape Tools

July 29th, 2009

Great photography and fascinating exhibit from Marc Steinmetz Photography.  Paging through his site, his photography is really captivating.  Below is the collection I saw first — Prison Escape Tools.  Check it out:

escape-tools

Thanks VSL

Comic Genius

July 29th, 2009

William Shatner interpreting Sarah Palin’s incomprehensible farewell address as a beat poem on The Tonight Show: