For the fifth time, I’ve been at Gnomedex this weekend. It’s the usual melange of fascinating speakers, good friends and general nerdiness. Derek aptly described it as “a web society annual family reunion”.
I’ve been collecting a few of the better quotes I’ve heard over the past two days, and thought I’d share:
Phil Plait: “You know what you call alternative medicine when it works? Medicine.”
Phil Plait: “Your lips say 0, but your eyes say 1″.
Todd Friesen: “Pay Per Click = PPC = ‘Pills, Porn, and Casinos’”
Chris Brogan: “Twitter is a good way to tell the world what you’re thinking, before you think about it.”
Jim Ray: “Are there any Django or Python hackers in the room? Well we got the guy who invented Django. So [with a certain gangster pose], what?”
Jim Ray: “Every journalist in the country discovered Twitter on January 15 of this year.”
Chris Pirillo: “Does anybody still use Second Life? [A very quiet room] One person?”
Last week Julie and I spent a couple of days working from a cabin on one of the islands off the Sunshine Coast. There’s no cable or landline phone service to the cabin, so the only way we could manage this feat was by using the Internet Tethering feature on our iPhone.
For those outside the Cult of Mac, tethering transforms your iPhone into a modem for your computer. You use the phone’s 3G signal to access the web at slow but manageable speeds. You’re not going to play World of Warcraft, but it’s good enough for email or work-related web surfing.
This is kind of a game-changer for us. It means that we can work anywhere there’s 3G cell service. How much of BC is that? Not very much, but it’s a good start and I suspect that it’ll get better. Still, the promise of working remotely more–as well as always being able to access the web on my laptop in the city–is excellent news.
Canada Line, Ho!
When we’re in Vancouver, we usually stay near Cambie and Broadway. So we’ve been anticipating the opening of the new SkyTrain line for months. Since it opened last Monday, I’ve taken it like, 17 times. Okay, maybe more like six times, but it’s fairly awesome.
The trains are frequent and spacious, and it takes only 25 minutes to get all the way out to Richmond Centre. It’s a joy to ride the Canada Line right now, because it’s entirely advertising-free. All of the poster frames are empty, and the video advertising screens are off.
My only criticism of the Canada Line is that the subterranean platforms are aesthetically banal. Having ridden subways in a bunch of other cities around the world, I’ve always enjoyed it when individual stations have distinct designs. The Canada Line platforms look pretty much identical. Maybe this is due to time or budget restrictions, and there are plans to individualize the platforms down the road.
On a vaguely related note, we went out to Richmond Centre for a meeting on Wednesday morning. We walked through the mall–I don’t think I’d ever been before–before the stores were open. We passed several hundred Chinese seniors doing calisthenics to the music of, oddly, the Counting Crows. It was, I must say, a little Maoist. There was also a smaller group doing Tai Chi. I’d heard of seniors doing mall walking, but the scope of these exercising oldies was truly impressive.
I recently spent some time in a government office. While in the usual back and forth through the front door, to the bathroom and so forth, I observed that they had a surprising number of signs that stated the obvious.
They seemed, like so many preventative measures, to attempt to indemnify the government against potential legal action. They amused me a little, so I snapped some photos. Each one is really mundane by itself, but the volume of them was a little overwhelming.
This one was on the inside of the mens’ room door. I wonder how I’ve survived the hundreds (thousands?) of sign-free swinging doors I’ve confronted in my life.
Ironically, I had to hold the door open to snap a photo of this one:
Here’s one more photo from the same office. These packages were attached to the underside of each desk in the conference room:
I gather they’re individual disaster preparedness kits. I didn’t look too closely, but they contain a filter mask, a little bottle of water and whistle, among other things.
I only discover them because I accidentally kicked one under the desk. I’m not sure I’d like to be reminded of my potential doom every time I took a meeting.
Over the weekend I listened to last week’s episode of the Slate Political Gabfest podcast. In it, Slate intern Jefferson Pestronk referred to a CNN article about poverty and urban gardens in Detroit:
In this recession-racked town, the lack of food is a serious problem. It’s a theme that comes up again and again in conversations in Detroit. There isn’t a single major non-discount chain supermarket in the city, forcing residents to buy food from corner stores or discount chains. Often less healthy, less varied, or more expensive food.
I got kind of interested in the subject, so I also read this BBC piece about Detroit’s urban gardens:
Motown has lost more than a million residents since its heyday in the 1950s and it is common to see downtown residential streets with just a few houses left standing. Taja Sevelle saw the hundreds of hectares of vacant land in the city and came up with the idea of creating an organic self-help movement that would be “affordable (and) practical”.
Beginning three years ago, armed with $5,000 (£2,500) and a pamphlet, the singer and entrepreneur managed to win a wide cross-section of support around the city. Now her charity is expanding across the US. Ms Sevelle is also keen to discuss her ideas with the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. With a handful of full-time staff, Urban Farming co-ordinates the cultivation of what amounts to 500 family-sized gardens across Detroit.
The organization that Sevelle started is called Urban Farming:
Here are a couple ofFlickr photo sets showing some of these gardens. It’s a pretty clever idea, and coincides with the middle class’s increasing interest in locavorism.
Pestronk couldn’t remember where he’d read about it, but he described an idea where food stamp users could get twice the usual value for their stamps if they used them at local farmers’ markets. That sounds like a good idea. Except, aren’t the prices at farmers’ markets higher than those in the grocery stores? That might nullify a lot of the advantage, though such a program would still encourage healthy eating and local food production.
As a side note, I was curious about Detroit’s population loss. Check out this graph on Wikipedia–the city has about half as many people as it did in 1950.
On the weekend I watched District 9. In terms of pre-release buzz, creative marketing and a smallish budget ($30 million), it’s this summer’s “Blair Witch Project”. I’m still trying to reconcile how I feel about the movie, and how much I actually enjoyed it.
It’s a surprisingly difficult movie to categorize. It’s certainly a science-fiction movie. But it’s also, at various times, an obvious allegory for South African apartheid, a thriller, an action movie and, oddly, kind of a buddy flick. Director Neill Blomkamp (born in Johannesburg, but attended the Vancouver Film School and is still based here) draws on a lot of techniques from television news and documentaries. The first third of the film is constructed out of interviews and seen through the eyes of a camera crew following around the protagonist.
This technique, combined with effective CG work and naturalistic setting–the film was shot in Johannesburg’s sprawling slums, make for a really immersive experience. There’s a little of TV’s Battlestar Galactica in District 9, as well as some Starship Troopers and a dash of Hotel Rwanda.
The movie is Blomkamp’s and lead actor Sharlto Copley’s first feature-length film, and you feel that occasionally. The performances and writing are a bit broad in places, a bit simple. For example, I liked the way the humans referred to the immigrant aliens as ‘prawns’, with the same nonchalance that previous generations of white South Africans called blacks ‘kaffirs’. Yet the metaphor becomes overused and trite by the film’s climax. The whole film is a bit uneven–nuanced and clever one minute, clunky and obvious the next.
Still, it’s the most surprising and original film I’ve seen in months, and it has smart things to teach us about apartheid and the developing world. I’d definitely recommend it.
I thought I’d observed this trend in recent movies. The best way I could figure to illustrate it was with a little video. I think it’s self-explanatory:
What do you think?
As an interesting side note, I first attempted to upload this video to YouTube. I didn’t use any movie or actor-specific terms in the title, description or tags, though I did identify the video category as ‘Movies’. The video was immediately blocked because my video “may include content that is owned or licensed by these content owners: Content owner: FOX Type: Audiovisual content.” Presumably they have some fancy image recognition software running to identify the video’s content.
I’m pretty sure my usage here falls under fair use in the US, but I’m not going to bother disputing YouTube’s automated system.
I recently discovered Carrotmob, which is an awesome idea. I’ll explain what it is in a second, but I think their introductory video does a pretty exquisite job, without words, on its own:
I think they ruin the video a little with all that text at the end, but it’s still great work. Here’s their blurb:
Carrotmob is a method of activism that leverages consumer power to make the most socially-responsible business practices also the most profitable choices. Businesses compete with one another to see who can do the most good, and then a big mob of consumers buys products in order to reward whichever business made the strongest commitment to improve the world. It’s the opposite of a boycott
It’s kind of the equivalent of environmental NGOs just purchasing land so they can protect it. That is, you compel businesses to be responsible with the most powerful lobbying tool you have: your wallet. They call it a reverse-boycott or ‘joycott’. It seems like an utterly practical and pragmatic approach to enticing your local business community to behave more sustainably.
I gather this was the test run for Carrotmob, where local consumers chose a liquor store to support in exchange for their becoming more sustainable:
Carrotmob is partnering with 350.org to encourage people to run a Carrotmob on Oct. 24, a ‘Global Day of Climate Action’. Maybe we ought to try to organize one in Vancouver. Any thoughts on what sort of business we ought to work with?
