I never knew

In the last couple of months I’ve seen a few movies and didn’t take the time to post about them, here’s a list with short reviews.

Science des rêves, La

Gondry must smoke some good stuff. Crazy dreamy world, beautifully analog looking, miles away from the all digital of recent years. Well acted all around, funny, sweet, sad. The almost documentary look didn’t do it for me in the beginning but it fits the movie well and proved a good choice. A great movie.

(Side note: how many actors can act in movies in three languages with no dubbing? Well done by Garcia Bernal)

The Fountain

Another director/writer who seems to be well versed in illicit substances. Weird winding obscure not quite understandable world. Beautifully beautifully shot and rendered, I loved the atmosphere and colors of every period. The ending was a bit disappointing and hard to comprehend but I still thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

Casino Royale

Best bond evah! Craig might be even better than Connery. As everyone has already said; a lot grittier, more violent and more vicious, all good things in this case. I loved the attitude Craig gave Bond, more of a “bounty hunter” feel than the “musketeer” of the last few. One thing that bugged me; the parkour scene from the beginning is very trendy but its impossible feel doesn’t quite fit with the rest in my opinion. Loved the humor and all the other action scenes, the settings and Eva Green.

Bood Diamond

Very very dark story, horrible scenes because you know they’re plucked from history and what’s still happening in Africa. A great performance from DiCaprio and, as I’ve read elsewhere, a movie where he looks like he belongs in a man’s role, looks rugged enough to not look like a kid with a gun. I don’t know the accents and patoie enough to really judge but he seemed believable to me speaking them. I thought Djimon Hounsou did a bit too much “crazy dad in pain yelling” but he also delivers a very touching intense performance. Jennifer Connelly is hot and pretty good. I was disappointed with the ending or rather the pre-ending but generally happy with the film.

I meant to skip this meme but since I’ve been tagged twice I’ll have to give in and post something. Initially I thought I wouldn’t have anything to say but, in the end, thinking about it was kind of fun. So, going chronologically;

1. Somewhere in a box in Sherbrooke I still have the toy plane my “first girlfriend” gave me when her family moved away. We were six years old, she was a curly haired redhead.
2. When I was 12-13 I went to a day camp named “ordinasport” (geeeeeek) where we learned to program in Logo on Apple IIs and played sports. I enjoyed the programming of course but I think I enjoyed the sports more, it was the first time I was picked first and kicked ass. Playing against nerds is much much easier than against jocks ;).
3. I used to race R/C cars (not the toy variety from Radio Shack, the expensive, tunable, “there are pros doing this” kind) and went to Québec (8th one year) and Canadian championships.
4. For years I used to buy lottery (6/49) tickets every week with the same numbers. I still play them once in a while.
5. I was puke drunk only once in my life, in New York. I looked so miserable a woman in line (for another bar) gave me a rose.

I’m such a dork.

[Update] I was too lazy to do that part but since I’ve been asked, I’m tagging: mj, Blork, ‘toine, Luce and Nika who probably doesn’t read my blog anymore or check her referrers so she won’t know I’m asking but I miss her so there, tagged. And, bonus, Éric who’s already been tagged a couple of times but I want to make sure he does it.

A great three part series by Matt Web, this guy must have steam coming out of his ears from his brain spinning so fast. (I, on the other hand, will just cut and paste a bunch of quotes)

3C products

Gen C make their own content. Gen C form strong communities, and care about communication. They want to be connected. Gen C take on broadcast media on their own terms: They get involved, and are happy to make their own celebrities. Gen C control their own lives; they’re happy with complexity and continuous partial attention. Gen C work and live creativity: they work in creative industries, don’t look down on making and crafting, and want to adapt mass market products in acts of co-creation.

There’s a growing community on the internet that realises it is able to easily create new services, and swap ideas and expertise. The realisation is spreading to physical things: Craft and microelectronics are growing in popularity; clothes and home furnishings can be home-made and look professional.—3C Products

The life of products

Products are not nouns but verbs. A product designed as a noun will sit passively in a home, an office, or pocket. It will likely have a focus on aesthetics, and a list of functions clearly bulleted in the manual… but that’s it.

At a more conceptual level, the peer relationships Generation C expects mean that the traditional do-as-you’re-told products are inappropriate: A brand that says “I’m cool, associate with me” or “You can be a great runner too” can feel condescending or trite. Gen C likes to be involved in conversations–products should express their brand through the experience. The brand, the stories, the interactions: These are all part of the product.

It’s important to consider the owner and all the people they encounter as the “user” for any particular product. No design surface is out of scope: Aesthetics, online social software, embedded displays, the billing and vending processes, and more.—The life of products

Experience hooks

The human brain is an incredible thing. It’s a carrier bag of thoughts and emotions, stored by association and popped to the top by association too. Advertising, through whatever medium, can be used to feed in stories that’ll come to the surface when the appropriate experience hook is encountered. Or it can use the memory of a particular experience hook to show what the brand cares about.

What these have in common is interactivity and lack of explicit rules (you use play and experimentation, not instruction manuals, to find your way around Nintendo games, Amazon, and Macs).

Not only is there opportunity with physical things, there’s an imperative. Just as manufacturing techniques are becoming shorter-run and more accessible to individuals and small companies, the knowledge of how to use these techniques is becoming more available. People are learning how to use 3D software using free tools such as Google Sketchup, and stepping more easily to professional software, previously reserved for expert product designers. The communities gathering around actuators, electronics and microcontrollers are infected with the internet sensibility, fully aware of the social worlds their technology will inhabit. And as Instructables shows, they’re sharers through-and-through. Not only this, but the net has put logistics, vending and distribution channels at our fingertips.—Experience hooks

I’ve been waiting for the actual sale to post about the numbers but it’s not happening so I’m clearing those tabs from my browser anyway.

I’ve written before about Dropsend being for sale and some of the numbers involved but I’ve been proven wrong (or might) since it seems it could go for $900 000US which is way more than I thought and more than the highest initial valuation in the comments of the announcement which was for $325K. The sale hasn’t gone through though so the only thing we have to go on is Carson’s affirmation that they had three bidders still interested at that price (one pulled out since then) so who knows what it will go for?

The other related post I pulled out of the archives is this March 06 post by Ryan on 37Signals; The Cost of Bootstrapping Your App: The Figures Behind DropSend. You see that the total cost of development was $50 000US so if the sale goes through that’s a 18 to 1 ratio for dev. and sale. There’s still the time spent on it in the mean time that’s not tabulated but you’d also have to add the actual revenue that reached $7000/month so overall a very very good investment for the Carsons.

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it’s not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone could socialize with anyone, they don’t. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don’t call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.—On Being Virtual

So we’ll be having a white christmas after all. A white knuckled christmas but hey, beggars cant be choosers right? Thanks for the ice Santa and good luck to everyone on the roads .. and on outdoor stairs, and on sidewalks and those suffering the inevitable blackouts, etc.

Une belle liste de prédictions chez cfd. Pas grand chose à redire, on est pas mal toujours du même avis ou tout prêt. Mais Carl, pour les widgets, tu parle de ceux sur desktop ou des “includes” pour les sidebars? Je ne trip pas sur le concept des widgets à intégrer à un site mais j’ai l’impression que ça va être (plus) gros, si ce n’est que par leur utilisation dans MySpace (que je suppose mais je vais vraiiiiiment pas souvent par là).

Deux tendances qui décollent ces temps-ci et risque de continuer; les life streams, un fil/page ou plusieurs de nos “sorties” de contenu sont rassemblées en une seule liste représentant le fil de pensées.

L’usage d’ OpenID, “an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity”. Qui permettrait de se logger une fois pour plusieurs services et de développer une identité unifiée. Intéressant mais plusieurs semblent y mélanger le concept de portabilité des profils, pas vraiment la même chose, le second serait vraiment pratique et, outre le fait de simplifier les inscriptions à de nouveaux services, permettrait de changer plus vite et aiderait des migrations de masse rapide quand un meilleur service se présente, au lieu de rester collé sur celui qui arrive sur le marché en premier.

Je sais pas si ça va vraiment être un “première partie” mais en écrivant mes deux tendances ça m’a donné le goût d’en écrire plus donc peut-être.

Evan has written up an interesting overview of the 10 most interesting and important APIs you can use for real programming problems.

Christmas comes early for Gruber who will probably get to hand out a bunch of “jackass of the week” awards when the Month of Apple Bugs comes along.

A fun and reliable way to learn about your next international destination.—Geobeats