A trailer for the movie version of Kite Runner, posted by Yahoo alongside a video ad for The Bourne Ultimatum (at least it was last I checked) that plays at the same time, obscuring the audio of the trailer. Two ads fighting for control of your speakers. Yahoo must be hurting.
Another case of advertising gone wrong: this QSOL print ad. Sex and servers: sounds like a trashy novel set in the Bay Area.
Technorati Tags: advertising, movies, tech, trailer
Freakonomics, now wrapped in the folds of the Grey Lady, asks several notable people a question:
You are walking down the street in New York City with $10 of disposable income in your pocket. You come to a corner with a hot dog vendor on one side and a beggar on the other. The beggar looks like he’s been drinking; the hot dog vendor looks like an upstanding citizen. How, if at all, do you distribute the $10 in your pocket, and why?
This is how Arthur Brooks, Tyler Cowen, Mark Cuban, Barbara Ehrenreich, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Stephen Dubner, and Roland Fryer responded.
Tyler Cowen is currently popular-economics' big star with the release of his new book Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist. I read half of it on the flight out to DC today and wholeheartedly recommend it. Cowen has a distinct voice, very assured and direct, but his interest in food and art and popular culture give his writing a mass appeal that some of his peers don't tap (a conscious choice on the part of many of them, I'm sure).
Technorati Tags: book, economics, nytimes
I scrolled through a recap of Tuesday's big Apple product unveiling, waiting for the .Mac announcement that would blow me away, and it never came. The feelings of the large contingent of disappointed .Mac users is reflected well here. I end up paying $99 a year to sync all my Macs and backup some files.
I wouldn't care so much if it were cheaper, say $19.99 a year. Or, if you keep it at $19.99, up the storage space to 100GB or some non-trivial number that would allow for full backup of all my music files and documents.
Macs themselves are as hot as ever, though. I'm slowly steering everyone in my family to Macs. The last time I was visiting my parents I spent a good hour trying to speed up their Windows desktop. It had slowed to a crawl, and it's been so long since I've worked on a Windows computer that it took me a long time to decipher all the random software that had leeched onto the system like mold. You can only re-install the operating system and start fresh so many times before you just recommend they dump the thing for something lower maintenance. I see one of the new iMacs in their future.
Technorati Tags: apple, Mac, tech, web
Bruce Schneier interviews Kip Hawley, head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Good read as neither party pulls any punches. To Hawley's credit, he sought out Schneier to see how the TSA could improve its image on the web. I can't tell if security is improving or not--so much of what Hawley cites he cannot share. But that he's willing to engage Schneier on some difficult questions makes me feel a little safer. Even if that doesn't actually make air travel safer for me, there is an economic benefit to the slight boost in peace of mind.
I still do hate taking off my shoes and all that crap, though. Someone should follow that shoe bomber guy around and make him take off his shoes and put them back on every five seconds for the rest of his life.
Technorati Tags: flying, travel
Fresh off a victory in the Tour de France, Team Discovery Channel will disband at season's end (their previous sponsor was the USPS). Even with cycling's troubles, I would have thought someone would want to step in and sponsor such a successful team. I wonder what the operating budget of a cycling team is for a year--$25 to $30 million? You probably can't turn a profit, and with the taint of drugs hanging over the sport, even the soft profits from brand association are gone. Still, if I were extremely wealthy, I'd sink money into it just to be close to the sport, to travel around to races in Europe. The announcement makes it seem as if they could have found sponsorship but have chosen to disband anyhow. If so, it's a blow to a sport already staggering.
Though I'll always think of Lance Armstrong first when I think of the team, the team had survived his departure and continued its success. The next image that leaps to mind is Sports Director Johan Brunyeel barking in several languages into his radio to encourage his riders, and the third would be George Hincapie and his Oakley racing jackets, out front at the bottom of the final climb, trying to launch his team captain for the stage win.
I met a few members of the team staff the last year I went to the Tour. In a sport notable for its turnover, the team seemed to be a tight-knit group. It's a sad day for this cycling fan, capping what has been a dark year for the sport.
Technorati Tags: cycling
I can't remember the last time I thought an airline was cool. That's just not an association one has with an airline brand except if flying first or business class internationally. But Richard Branson's new Virgin America sounds pretty sweet. Two 110-volt power outlets for every three seats! USB connectors! Wi-fi and Ethernet internet access on the plane (eventually)! Nerds everywhere excitedly rush onto Twitter to announce their in-flight status. Such is the technological prowess of their airplane that they earned a writeup in Wired's Gadget Blog.
What will the in-flight chat rooms turn into? I find most flights to be grim affairs, the social atmosphere rising at most to a level of quiet courtesy born from solidarity of suffering. Will users be identified by their seat number, or name? Or will they be anonymous? If it's the latter, I see a swarm of anonymous complaints arising when there's a screaming baby on board.
I tried booking a flight through their website and ran into a lot of problems (my session kept resetting), so they may still have some kinks to work out. But they fly out of LA to SF and DC, and they've done enough brand differentiation so that they'll be my airline of choice for those flights.
Technorati Tags: airline, flying, travel
How's the latest M3 coupe rate out? Pretty damn well.
Everyone should test drive one at least once, just to experience what it feels like to have 8000 rpm of torque compressing you into your seat as you corner on rails, the engine growling like a dog baring its teeth. It's pure joy.
How did I not hear about this movie sooner? Maybe being a film student has really insulated me from the world.
This IMAX movie, five years in the making, follows riders Jimmy Caspar and Baden Cooke in the 2003 Tour de France. But instead of focusing only on cycling or the Tour, the movie uses the two riders experiences to study brain science. I'm interested mainly in seeing IMAX footage from inside the race. The images of cyclists flying through the French countryside will no doubt evoke in me a near spiritual ache to be back in France, crawling up the side of an Alpine mountain like an ant on roller skates. I felt a related longing recently when the "camera" rose up over a rooftop to reveal Paris laid out before me (Ratatouille).
The movie's website includes a podcast you can download and listen to on your portable music player in the movie theater though how many viewers will watch the movie a second time to take advantage of that?
Technorati Tags: cycling, film, movies, science, sports
Funny link [Via Pogue's Posts].
Make sure to move your mouse around a bit or you may find it cryptic and uninteresting.
The trailer for the next Michel Gondry movie Be Kind Rewind is here (in Quicktime HD if you can handle it). I previously mentioned the movie in June. The concept: Jack Black stars as Jerry, who accidentally becomes magnetized, erasing all the tapes in the video store where his best friend Mike (Mos Def) works. To retain the store's best customer, an old lady who might be going cuckoo, Jerry and Mike decide to re-enact and film every movie she chooses to rent. Among the movie they remake, supposedly, are Ghostbuster, Rush Hour 2, Back to the Future, The Lion King, and Robocop.
I would give my left hand just for the discarded scraps of ideas that are in the trash bin of Gondry's brain.
Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer, video
I think I may have just experienced my first LA earthquake, but I'm not sure. It felt like a giant just leaned against the outside of my apartment and shook it the same way I'd shake a vending machine if my bag of chips failed to drop down into the receiving bay.
UPDATE: Not the most intuitive map, but I see a big red square on this earthquake map indicating seismic activity in the last hour. Judging by eye it looks like around a 4.0 magnitude earthquake. Ah, wait...here it is: a 4.5 earthquake at 12:58AM.
Technorati Tags: earthquake, LA
You want a proxy for the state of Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD? Sales of 300 on Amazon offer a good proxy. The movie was available on both formats. On Blu-Ray the sales rank is currently #5 on Amazon.com. On HD-DVD? It's Amazon sales rank is 12. Slight edge Blu-Ray. Of course, none of this matters because so few titles are available on either format, let alone both formats. In fact, most titles that are available on Blu-Ray are not available on HD-DVD and vice versa.
A brief history of shoegazing, a genre of music I should have been listening to in high school to express those oh so hidden depths of soul and heartfelt yearnings behind my otherwise shy facade.
NYTimes doing away with TimesSelect soon? Let's hope so.
Two new Nokia phones, the 7500 and 7900, look like...well, the analogy I'd us is that these new phones are to old Nokia candybar phones as Bizarro Superman was to Superman in the looks department. Cubist, or maybe crystallized?
Facebook is all the rage. I held out until I realized how many of my classmates were using it to communicate. I've now had a few months to fiddle around with it. It's a huge step up from the loud mess that was MySpace and the cleanest designed social networking site to date. It also did a smart thing in opening up for application development by third parties. But I have a lot of thoughts on how the site could improve and where it's vulnerable. I'm not sold on its longevity. Those thoughts will have to wait for another day, when I have more time. In the meantime, this article is a good read.
Technorati Tags: amazon, dvd, gadgets, mobile, music, nytimes, phones, facebook
...courtesy of Alex Ross. I like The Reich Reich and The Scarlatti Inheritance.
If I were to contribute to the list, I'd add The Ligeti Project. Oh wait, that is a title already.
In another humorous post, Ross reflects on the fact that everything is dead: classical music is dead, rock is dead, and so is hip-hop, jazz, cinema, newspapers, and of course blogging. Also, the United States of America is dead. James Brown Is Dead. Microsoft is dead. Sinbad is dead...is dead. Actually, I never even heard he was dead, so Sinbad is dead is dead is also dead. Dead is Dead.
This post is dead.
VMWare's Fusion may top even Parallels and Bootcamp as a way to run Windows apps on your Mac.
After downloading the first iPhone software update, I've found the iPhone to be generally more stable. Mobile Safari was crashing a lot just before the update. Now? Not as much.
Why are U.S. health care costs so high relative to the rest of the world? Perhaps because American doctors make so much more than their international peers and because of the way they are paid--by the procedure. I'm not sure the right answer is to put doctors on a salary. If the services American doctors provide are superior or more specialized, it may be worth the money. Arnold Kling blames a different issue for soaring healthcare costs, arguing that what we have in the U.S. is more health care insulation than insurance.
Baseball Prospectus posted an interview with Dr. Alan Nathan, physics professor and also chairman of the Science and Baseball committee of SABR. In response to a question about counterintuitive baseball truths as related to physics, he offered three, the last running counter to a baseball axiom:
One example is that the grip the batter has on the bat does not play a role in the ball-bat collision. That is, a batter could just as well let go of the bat an instant before contact, and it would not make a bit of difference to what happens to the ball. Most people tend to be very skeptical of this conclusion, since they believe a batter "muscles" the ball when it is in contact with the bat. But, that is not what happens, as shown not only "theoretically" but also experimentally.
Another example has to do with the ability of the batter to track the incoming pitch. In fact, it is really impossible to do so. So, just like my previous example, the batter could just as well close his eyes when the ball is halfway to home plate and it won’t affect the outcome of the swing.
A final example: Can a batter get to first base quicker by running through the base or in a head-first slide? Most people believe the former. I believe the latter. The essential physics is that by sliding with outstretched arms, the batter reaches the bag before his center of gravity reaches it, whereas those two times more or less coincide when running through the bag.
Technorati Tags: apple, baseball, economics, iPhone, Mac, software, tech
Amazon Flexible Payments Service launches. That was the last product I worked on before leaving Amazon. After finishing a product definition and filing for a patent or two for the payment web service, I left for NYC and the film world. It had been so long since I'd heard anything about it that I though it had been killed, but I'm glad to see it make it to market. Just glancing at some of the service highlights, it seems to be have retained almost all of the cool features we envisioned for it, especially the flexible instructions. In the next year or so, some people are going to build some really cool payment apps using this service. There isn't the option for free person-to-person bank debit transfers, however, which, though it wouldn't make any money for Amazon, would enable some cool consumer apps.
GMailSecure is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that forces GMail to use https.
Meemix is another one of those Internet radio sites like Pandora or Last.fm that tries to serve up music that you'll like. I've played with the beta a bit and it seems to be choosing songs well. But goodness gracious that is one confusing interface. Whoever designed that page did Meemix a huge disservice. There are all sorts of non-standard icons everywhere, the majority of which might as well be hieroglyphics. You cannot underestimate the importance of a clear, simple interface for a new product like this, especially one fighting for mindshare in an already crowded space. Pandora, iLike, Last.fm, The Filter, and on and on. I don't track the stock market and venture capital space enough to say whether or not we're in the midst of another bubble, but there are definitely plenty of markets that are overcrowded. They can't all survive. If they truly intend on treating this as a beta that they'll learn from, they better clean up that interface pronto.
The NYTimes outs Fake Steve Jobs: he's played by Daniel Lyons, senior editor at Forbes. Thanks, NYTimes, for now shaving in half the fun that we all had reading Fake Steve Jobs' blog.
Gilbert Arenas is the Microsoft of the NBA. He got outed for stealing someone's joke about shark attacks and posting it to his blog as his own, and after some folks called him on it, he responded on his blog.
Let’s not forget, “Hibachi
Reinventing the Wheel : A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition was formerly named Code Name Ginger, a reference to the working name for what would eventually launch to the world as the Segway.
It's a rare firsthand behind-the-scenes account of the launch of a high profile tech device, and perhaps of more interest, of the man behind the legend that is Dean Kamen. It's rare because the captains of industry, e.g. Gates, Jobs, Bezos, have little to benefit from allowing a reporter unfettered access to their lives. The image we have of these people is received, for the most part, through the filter of Public Relations. It is akin to always seeing actors with their makeup on.
Author Steve Kemper was invited to document the creation of Ginger by Kamen himself, and he had near unfettered access for a large chunk of the Segway's development. But when the product leaked to the press with details only available through Kemper's book proposal (the retributive deed of a jilted editor at one of the publishers?), he was booted from Kamen's good graces and from the offices of the Ginger team before the product launched to the world. And so the momentum of the book comes crashing to a halt near the end, but what remains is a good read.
I've ridden a Segway. It's a lot of fun, something that needs to be experienced to be appreciated, but against most standards--the pre-launch hype (hysteria?), the expectations of Kamen the Ginger team, the expectations of investors like John Doerr and Kleiner Perkins--the device has been a disappointment.
There are a few reasons the device failed to meet expectations. One is that it's expensive, a couple thousand dollars. I can buy a cruiser bike here in LA for $300. The second is that they fit into a very strange niche: they're useful for covering distances in between those short enough to talk and long enough that you'd drive. If I had one, the main use would be to commute to work. But LA's sidewalk network is not extensive. If I took a Segway onto the road here in LA I'd be roadkill about five minutes after merging into traffic. In NYC, pedestrians would pull you off your Segway and beat you up if you tried to jockey with them for space on the sidewalk. For longer distances, getting one down into the subway system and onto a subway car would be so difficult as to be impractical.
Where do you park your Segway? I wouldn't feel comfortable leaving it outside, even if no one could ride the thing away. If I had a couple bags of groceries, how would I carry them? When a geek contemplates the Segway, they see a device so cool and revolutionary that it will change the world. When the average person sees the Segway, they see an expensive device that doesn't fit into the world they live in. What are the problems it solves? Being kinder to the environment is not a sufficient purchase driver. People do not vote for green with their pocketbooks unless the impact to their lives is neutral.
What is the market for the device? A great product without a market is in trouble, whereas a lousy product with a great market may survive until it improves or until superior products flood the space.
Another reason for the Segway's disappointing sales, and one I think is underestimated, especially by the geek set, is the mortification you feel when riding around on one. I think a lot of people would be embarrassed to be seen riding around on one in public. Some of it has to do with pop culture and how it was quickly depicted in shows like Arrested Development as a visual gag. But more damaging is that when I see someone on a Segway in public, wearing a bucket of a helmet, rolling along, my first impulse is laughter. Though the perception is unfair, riders seem like people who are too lazy to walk. Perhaps it's because people on Segways don't appear to be moving very quickly, or because they seem so still when standing on the device, gripping the handlebars. I don't think of that person as using the Segway in lieu of a trip in the car. I think of them as using the Segway instead of walking or biking.
A more desired reaction would be to think that the rider was aiding the environment, that they were hip, an early adopter, a trendsetter, the first on the block to get the hot new toy. Do other people think that, or am I the only one who would be a bit hesitant to subject his public image to scrutiny by riding one of these around town? It may seem like a minor branding issue, but it's hugely important.
Compare that to my iPhone. The first week I owned it, every time I pulled it out I felt like a celebrity nipple, so great was the attention it attracted. The Segway is really sexy from a geeky standpoint, but really geeky (in the bad way) from a consumer image standpoint.
Maybe it was ahead of its time. Given the elevated stature of the environment in recent months, perhaps the device would have had a greater success if it had launched a year or so ago as a powerful volley against pollution and global warming. If, at the same time An Inconvenient Truth came out, Al Gore and Leonardo Dicaprio appeared on every TV show possible, riding around on Segways, pushing them as one way to prevent impending environmental apocalypse; if every high profile celebrity in LA and NYC were given one and were seen riding around town on one; then maybe, just maybe, the device might have launched to greater sales and momentum. Not the type of sales predicted by some of the early investors, but stronger than the ones seen to date. Riders might have the sense of pride that Prius owners feel when passing each other on the road.
I also suspect that he devices best bet for catching on lies somewhere outside the U.S. Americans love their cars, and the country is built around them. Overcoming that requires not just solving practical problems but surmounting cultural inertia.
Reinventing the Wheel : A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition
Technorati Tags: book, gadgets, science, tech
UPDATE: And now we can add Michelangelo Antonioni to the list. The pantheon is summoning some legends. Revered by film students everywhere, Antonioni had a huge influence on directors perhaps more popular among modern arthouse crowds, e.g. Wong Kar Wai or Sofia Coppola. Blow Up and L'Avventura are his most famous movies and well worth seeing, though I lean at this moment towards La Notte as my favorite of his scripts. The Passenger has one of the most brilliant and famous ending shots in cinema.
***
The film world lost two all-timers in the past week in Ingmar Bergman (NYTimes obit) and Laszlo Kovacs (LATimes obit).*
I met Laszlo Kovacs a few weeks ago at Cinegear. He and Vilmos Zsigmond were honored for their distinguished cinematography careers. He signed a poster for me and chatted for a few moments. He wasn't content just to hear abotu who I was but wanted to pass on advice about being a cinematographer. Friendly to the end. In hindsight, the timing of the tribute for Kovacs seemed scripted. His work as a DP (Director of Photography) is vast and wide-ranging, everything from Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces to Ghostbusters and Say Anything. When I think of Kovacs, I don't think of a particular look but of shooting out in the open air.
For a film student I still have a great deal of Bergman's oeuvre to cover (though he likely occupies more positions in my Netflix queue than any other director). But the movies of his that I have seen have all gotten under my skin. How many modern movies have you leaving the theater thinking you know who made it? You wouldn't ever ask that of a Bergman film. If you're looking for one movie as an introduction, Scenes From a Marriage is where I'd start. Years from now you'll be able to walk on set and say you want a Bergman-Nykvist-like aesthetic and a knowledgeable film crew will know what you mean.
Many people say that they like to just shut off their minds when they go to the movies, and a Bergman movie is not for that person. But I question the idea that you go to the movies to sit there as a brain-dead receptacle. I suspect that people actually want more mental stimulation but have been fed so much empty formula that they've started to lower their expectations prior to walking into the theater so that the actual experience is less disappointing. The idea that you want your brain to work less only makes sense if there is some limit to the amount of mental processing power in a given day, and I've yet to see any biological proof for that idea. I suspect physical fatigue is the limiting factor and is confused by most for mental fatigue.
I always seek more, rather than less, for my brain to chew on. Far from tiring me out, intellectual stimulation wakes my brain up, brings it to life! I add the caveat that I'm the type of person who ends up bored after a minute of sitting on the beach on the first day of a vacation and has to get a book in hand or frisbee to toss. Still, the idea that a movie can't be intellectually bracing and entertaining is a false dichotomy. Avoid that trap and demand more for your $10.50.
*Look at the number of Google News obits for Bergman and Kovacs and you'll get a useful proxy for the popularity of directors versus that of cinematographers to the public at large. Don't feel sorry for the DP's. They're happy to stay in the shadows. Also, the DP is less likely to be a egomaniac than the director.
Technorati Tags: cinematography, film, filmmaking, movies
As long as the web's been around, it's frustrating how many goofy website issues I still encounter. A catalog of a few that have vexed me recently...
For lack of a compelling alternative, I still use Citysearch to look up restaurant locations from time to time. Their map links are terrible. From a restaurant page, when I click on the map link, I expect the resulting map to show me a close-up of the restaurant's location. For a long time, all I'd get was a giant map showing the United States. That really narrowed it down. Thanks a lot.
Now that bug has been solved, but the map view they send you to now is zoomed out so far that you have to click a few times just to be able to see the cross streets around the restaurant. Furthermore, instead of just showing you a red star for that business/restaurant you want to locate, you get a map showing all sorts of local businesses near that address. On that previous link I was searching for Urth Caffe. Can't see the red star showing you the location of the restaurant? That's right, it's hidden behind the huge flag indicating some place called The Galley. Who designs these sites? Citysearch was never going to set the world on fire, but it used to be mildly useful. Now it's the equivalent of an aging movie star who underwent a botched plastic surgery.
On that topic, I decided to try Yelp since I've heard a lot of buzz about them. I tried putting in Urth Caffe in the search box and it brought back two locations, but not the one I was searching for in Santa Monica. Apparently Yelp Los Angeles uses Los Angeles, CA as its default search location, but that doesn't include Santa Monica. Yelp! Oops. I meant Help!
The top search result, by the way, was a huge sponsored search results for some yogurt place. I hate how sites like these make the top search result a massive ad banner for something totally unrelated. What are the odds if I'm searching for a specific restaurant name that Yelp is going to pick out another restaurant that happens to be more interesting to me than the one I just typed into the search box?! Put that damn ad banner off to the side. On a positive note, at least the map on the page for each restaurant location was useful, zoomed in at a level where cross streets are visible.
Yelp's tagline is Real People, Real Reviews. That's a pretty thin proposition on which to differentiate that site from dozens of others city guides.
I placed an order for a book through Amazon.com. Subsequently, I was told the ship date had to be pushed back over a month. So I decided to see if it was available sooner elsewhere on the web. I found a copy at CafePress and was about to add it to my cart when I read the availability message more carefully: "Books will ship in a minimum of 5 business days." What does that mean? It will take at least five days to ship, but it's the maximum I'm interested in. The book could ship in ten years and still live up to that vague message. Needless to say they didn't get my order.
It's finally getting hot enough in LA that shorts are a necessity. I ordered a pair from Cordarounds about two weeks ago. I'd nearly forgotten about the order, but a nagging feeling that a some package hadn't arrived yet led me to follow up in my e-mail. Since Cordarounds has no online order tracking you'd better keep your order confirm e-mail or you'll be forced to call them to even get your tracking # or order status. Fortunately I had kept the e-mail, and through it I checked the UPS shipping status online and got the cryptic message: Billing Information Received. Just another customer-friendly message from UPS that means absolutely nothing to me.
Today I checked UPS again and received another informative status message: Manifest Pickup. If it read Manifest Destiny at least I would have felt hopeful about annexing some territory. Maybe "Manifest Pickup" would mean more to me if I were wearing a trucker hat. It reminds me of some of the error messages I used to get in Microsoft Windows. I don't mind if they include the technical terms for those who understand it, but a plain English explanation for the rest of us (who make up most of us) should've been up on the site ages ago. Anyhow, it's been two weeks, I don't have my shorts, and I don't know who to blame, but everyone involved elicits little black cartoon clouds over my head.
(UPDATE: Chris Lindland, the founder of Cordarounds himself, looked into my order and resolved the situation and knocked $20 off my order for the inconvenience. It's surreal to have the founder of a company answering your customer service e-mail, but suffice to say I'm happy for the personal touch and resolution. It's the old business adage that you can get a customer even more loyal than the one you might have had with a smooth order if you resolve an order gone awry with a quick apology and resolution and some compensation for the customer's trouble. It's well worth the customer goodwill in the long run. I'm still not happy about the UPS status messaging, however.)
It just reminds me that Amazon does with its online retailing experience appears simple but is in fact quite rare. I worked there for so many years that much of that I just took for granted, but being reliable and not doing goofy things with your website messaging and functionality are still enough to differentiate you on the web.
Most days I can't imagine how I used to live without the web, but somedays, like today, I just glare at my screen and shake my head in disapproval.
Technorati Tags: web
I covet one of these Field Notes brand notebooks. No idea when they come out, though they appear to have distributed some to a small number of folks because they show up in lots of photos. I have a weakness for notebooks and fine writing instruments. Writing with a plain ballpoint pen pains me.
A picture I snapped while in Dubrovnik, Croatia last summer appears on page 158 of the Aug. 2007 issue of Travel + Leisure, on newsstands near you. It's a cropped version of the pic below of the Buza bar which hangs on the side of the cliffs outside the city walls. I've had a few pics in magazines before, but they were mostly cycling pictures in odd European magazines I'd never heard of. This one comes with a paycheck which counts at some sort of mini-milestone.
I don't get anything if you buy the magazine, but I picked up a copy for posterity's sake and it looks to be a useful issue for travelers as it features their annual World's Best Awards.
I highly recommend Dubrovnik. I meant to write about it after the trip but I was having too much fun just traveling, and then I got back and school started, and now it resides in my brain as a happy memory, one that triggers a smile whenever I jab it. Dubrovnik is the choice for Europeans when they want to get away for a vacation and hide from the hordes or summer tourists descending on their hometowns.
Derek and I had just finished our Eastern European travels when I left for Dubrovnik where I was to meet up with Jason and family. On arriving at my hotel, I took a bus into town. Jason and I'd loosely agreed over e-mail to meet at an Internet bar outside city walls. Even so, there's something special when it works out in a foreign country, when you can't just call each other up over a cell phone (is this how we had to meet up in the days before mobile phones?).
I was walking up to the cafe when a newly shorn Jason called out to me on the sidewalk. He'd already been there a night or two, and the first stop he took me was Buza bar. We sat down on the balcony (if you look at my photo below, we were sitting at the open table that's just above the guy in the blue shirt on the steps) to catch up over a beer. The Buza is rumored to be a favorite of folks like Bill Gates when they're in town. Looking out on the ocean with the crisp air brushing past my face, an ancient castle city above my head, and an ice cold Eastern European lager in my hand, I couldn't help but think it was one of the truly epic bars in the world.
Technorati Tags: photo, photography, travel
