I've seen freshman power forward/center Kevin Love of UCLA play three times in the span of a week and a half. For a big man, he's a phenomenal passer. It's pretty watching him pull the rebound and whip the outlet pass down court to start the break.
Technorati Tags: basketball, sports
I was shooting a classmate's film recently, and there's a line in her script about how the first ten years of your life go by slowly, but every decade after seems to accelerate. There's something to that.
I remember Sadie turning 1 and trying ice cream for the first time, and now she's 5 and ready to enter kindergarten. Meanwhile, the last 4 years of my life are smeared across my memory like some broad, impressionistic paint stroke.
I think we get along because she reminds me of me as a kid, somewhat shy.
Technorati Tags: photo, birthday, sadie
It's wonderful when you discover that there's a single word for something that, until that moment, you could only describe with many words. The word crystallizes it, makes it singular and whole, and gives the feeling or phenomenon some permanence.
Sarah Brown introduced the blogosphere to the term and defined it thus:
...the spirit of bershon is pretty much how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture, and you could not possibly summon one more ounce of disgust, but you’re also way too cool to really even DEAL with it, so you just make this face like you smelled something bad and sort of roll your eyes and seethe in a put-out manner. Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills, 90210 is the patron saint of bershon, as her face, like most other teenagers’, was permanently frozen in this expression.
A beautiful description, but if you're still unclear on the concept, the Flickr group I'm so Bershon will more than clear things up for you.
Walt Mossberg reviewed Hulu for the Wall Street Journal. Always a big milestone when someone like Mossberg or David Pogue in the NYTimes reviews your product. One reason they're so successful and important in the tech review space is their ability to write evaluations that are fair and useful to the widest range of consumers. His appraisal of our site is no different.
New trailer for Pixar's Wall·E.
Much revealed. I had no idea this is what the movie would be about. Can't wait!
Work has been so busy recently I haven't had time to pass along some great free Internet services I've been using for a while now.
Sandy, the virtual assistant. I don't have a real-life assistant of my own, but Sandy sometimes makes it feel as if I do. I have a fondness for command-line interfaces, and being able to fire off a quick e-mail to Sandy saying "Remind me to pick up dry cleaning at 9am tomorrow" and having "her" e-mail and text me at that time the next day is very handy. Besides the simplicity of the service, the other thing I enjoy is the pseudo-personalized nature of Sandy's replies. I asked her to remind me of something earlier, and Sandy began her reply, "Wow! You're up late!"
Tripit - Where Sandy's abilities end, TripIt takes over. Most people I know book their travel online, and in the process receive all those oddly formatted travel confirmation e-mails. Then you have to sit there and enter the information into your calendar. It's a pain in the butt, and don't ever do it again. Instead, just forward those e-mails to plans@tripit.com, and TripIt merges all of them into a master itinerary, adding maps and driving directions and weather and all sorts of other useful information. You can print it, send it to your calendar, send it to your phone, forward it to friends and family, or even enhance it with custom information. Ingenious.
Instapaper - Like many people who've grown up with the web, I exhibit symptoms of Internet-attention-deficit-disorder. I regularly have 20+ tabs open in my browser, and I've long searched for a simple way to save a tab to read later so I can close it out for the time being. Instapaper is the simplest solution yet. Add a simple Read Later bookmarklet to your browser, click it when you want to save the web page to read later, and you're done. Visit Instapaper later and all your saved articles are there to read.
Around 1:45AM this morning, Hulu shed the covers of private beta and opened to the public. Anyone in the U.S. can now come to our site and watch any of our videos for free. No special software needed other than a web browser, Flash player, and an internet connection. PC, Mac, Linux users, we support all of you.
We've all substituted caffeinated beverages for sleep for days now, and this morning I came into work with my t-shirt on backwards. Coherence is going to be a bit of a reach.
We have increased our content lineup significantly. Among my favorites:
People love to associate Hulu with big media because of some of our investors, but Hulu is a startup through and through (look at the team photo below, taken at around 1:50 this morning--I don't think we look big media, do you?). It's the smallest company I've ever worked at if you don't count the lemonade stand I ran one summer day when I was about 8. Smaller than Amazon.com was when I worked there. We have our initial investments from which to run our company, but we're not going to be spending it on big parties with models walking around holding trays of saffron baby lamb chops. No, our pre-launch evening meal for everyone pulling an all-nighter was some 100 tacos from a local taco truck here in Santa Monica, at the extravagant cost of $1.25 per taco. Our biggest spend that night, out of our own pockets, was to raise $160 among the team to dare one of our star programmers Andrew to drink two cups of salsa, one red hot, one green, in 30 seconds. Andrew woke this morning $160 richer, though I'd venture to guess he paid the price sometime during the day.
A small group of people, a little family, work night and day (sometimes more night than day) to put this site together from scratch. Some of the user e-mails I've read make the easy assumption that we're an ignorant, uncaring media behemoth, but we do care, perhaps too much for our own peace of mind. Between Eric, Betina, and myself, we've read well over 10,000 e-mails since we went into our private beta, and rather than go the form e-mail response route, we've tried to respond personally to every e-mail we can. We're gratified by the compliments, and we agonize over the angry e-mails, even the inaccurate and/or profane ones.
We do want to be able to distribute our content internationally. We do want to offer more episodes of every show on our site. We do want more varied ad creative so that we don't have to watch the same ad spots over and over. We do want closed-captioning on every video on our site. And we do want to do it legally, in a way that compensates the creative people all the way back at the start of the food chain. Not a day goes by that we don't wish we could just accelerate the future with a snap of our fingers and have everyone in the world streaming HD content to their plasma TV's.
It's easy to bash big media and claim to be forced to resort to piracy, and it is absolutely the right of users to write in with their honest feedback. It's the most useful kind. But it's far harder to try to fix the problems. It's easy to open up your blog editor and rip the movie you just saw. It's exponentially harder to go out and make a movie. It's easy to laugh at some startup you read about in the news because the business plan sounds terrible. It's much harder to start a company yourself.
We're working here to try to fix the industry from within. We want to be able to watch all our favorite videos however we want, just like you. We're building this service to be one we want to use. We're not anywhere near the finish line. It always feels like the to-do list outweighs the completed side of the ledger. But if it didn't, then it wouldn't be that interesting a challenge, and most of us probably wouldn't be here.
Check out our site, and if you don't mind, help spread the word. The more users we can rally to our cause, the quicker we can transform things for the better.
Cheers!
Based on the true story: "I fell in love with a female assassin." A common movie plot (True Lies, La Femme Nikita, e.g.) finds a riveting real-world proof.
If adapted into a big-budget Hollywood film, likely Angelina Jolie as Marylin and, hmm, Ewan McGregor or Ed Norton or James McAvoy as journalist Jason P Howe?
We (Hulu) got a write-up in Fortune today. It's one of the more detailed profiles of the company so far.
I'd only really ever heard one song by Grizzly Bear, "Knife", but I really wanted to experience the acoustics of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in action, so last Saturday I attended a crossover concert composed of two halves: before intermission, the LA Philharmonic played three pieces that inspired Grizzly Bear, and after intermission, Grizzly Bear played a set on the same stage.
The 2,265 seat main auditorium is the most intimate classical music venue I've ever been in. The audience surrounds the stage, a contrast to the usual alignment in which the entire audience sits behind the conductor. All the seating is stadium style, so even seated behind Yao Ming you'd have a decent view of the stage.
The acoustics of the auditorium (designed by Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics) are stunning. Seated inside, with curved cedar sound panels like ribs on the ceiling, you feel as if you're in the belly of a whale carved by Gepetto himself.
The classical pieces on the program:
Boccherini (Berio) - Ritirata notturna di Madrid
Britten - Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes
Stravinsky - Firebird Suite (1919)
It's been a long time since I've been to a classical music concert, though in years past I've always tried to attend at least three or four shows a year. Hearing pieces I've played before reminds me of my childhood, and classical music in general recalls weekend nights home with the family, my dad reading a Chinese newspaper, my mom cooking, my sisters on the phone or playing, me buried in some book, a classical LP playing in the background.
At intermission my friend showed me around the hall, outside and in. Gehry's work doesn't always work for me, but this structure is gorgeous and alive. A series of pathways allow you to navigate between all the hall's shaped metal petals, with many sweeping views of surrounding downtown LA.
Grizzly Bear's music is difficult to describe, all vocal harmonies over dreamy sonic landscapes, psychedelically mesmerizing as transported by the crystal clear acoustics of the hall. Just a well-conceived concert.
Technorati Tags: architecture, LA, music, grizzlybear
Fortune has an interview with Steve Jobs, who's always a good read.
Fortune is a reasonably well laid out magazine in print. Jobs is a design-obsessive. So there's some irony in the fact that this interview is stretched out across 15 pages so that Fortune.com can run more obnoxious ads that can cover up parts of the screen.
Technorati Tags: Apple, business, interview, stevejobs
I'm not sure why I didn't notice this before, but the person asking the question in the (in)famous Miss South Carolina clip from the Miss Teen USA competition is Aimee Teegarden.
Friday Night Lights was a really good book, a good movie, and it's a great TV series, too, though admittedly I've only been able to watch 7 episodes here on Hulu, 15 minutes here and there over lunch at the desk.
With shows like Arrested Development and Friday Night Lights, what's the truth? Do devoted fans overestimate the mass appeal of the show, or is it really, as fans claim, misguided marketing strategies on the part of the studio. If Friday Night Lights aired on a better night, not Friday night, would it grab a wider audience? How could Arrested Development have been saved?
The economics of more niche TV series and movies still seem prohibitive for creators. Talking to many producers of indie films, even finding a niche audience on DVD doesn't help many of them to recoup production costs.
Lower production costs, remove some layers of middleman marketing and replace with more efficient marketing channels (read: the Internet), lower distribution costs (again, the Internet), bump some of the revenue streams forward in time (overlap windows like DVD and theatrical/first run TV broadcast), and I hope the ecosystem is more friendly to shows like this.
As for Friday Night Lights, if you don't already watch it, the best way for me to support it is to try and hook you. Here are the first three episodes from season one.
Along the same lines as Radiohead's In Rainbows, Nine Inch Nails are releasing their new album, Ghosts I-IV, direct to users through the web. You can download the first nine tracks as DRM-free MP3's, pay $5 for all 36 tracks, $10 for a 2-CD set, or $75 for a deluxe edition with 2 audio CDs, 1 data DVD with the tracks in multi-track format, and a Blu-ray disc with all tracks in 96kHz/24-bit high-resolution.
Their servers were down every time I checked over the past 24 hours, but they appear to be up now for downloads. This new model for selling music is so much more sensible.
If pressed to name my favorite film score composer working today, my reflexive answer would be Alexandre Desplat. His latest for Lust, Caution lives up to his previous work. I was more taken with the score than the story adaptation, though it is the first movie I can recall that reveals hidden depths to shoe who are well-versed in the rules and strategy of Mah Joong. There are hidden clues in the moves and tiles in the game that only a fraction of viewers will understand.
Perhaps that subtlety is the movie's chief flaw, that it keeps too much under wraps for too long until the main actors, Tony Leung and Tang Wei, are literally unwrapped on screen in some athletic love scenes. It can't help but sound prurient, but the love scenes are the most emotionally complex in the movie.
I have not heard the entire album yet, but the one single I've heard from Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago is "Skinny Love" and it's friggin' gorgeous. You can hear it at his MySpace page, and you can hear other tracks here.
There's even a Walden-like story behind the album. Bon Iver is a deliberate misspelling of bon hiver, French for "good winter." Justin Vernon holed up in a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin at the start of winter, and out of that came this album.
Maybe one underrated strength of the Obama campaign is its design cohesion. Michael Bieruit analyzes Obama's branding campaign and comes away impressed, especially with his consistent typeface use.
And one of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he's such an unprecedented figure in American politics--so much so that everything he's trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal. Someone said, "Well, why shouldn't he have revolutionary looking graphics--graphics that make him look like grassroots, like an outsider? Things drawn by hand, things that look forceful and avant-garde." But I think he's using design in a way to make him look as normal, as comfortable, as inevitable as a brand can look in American life. Those are really deliberate, interesting choices. Whether or not a sans serif font like Gotham looks more "American" than a Swiss font like Helvetica, that's in our imaginations to a certain degree. I think it's much more incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control.
Meanwhile, Hoefler & Frere-Jones shudder at the typography of the Clinton and McCain campaigns.
2008 is clearly a year of unusual thinking in political circles, because none of these familiar approaches can explain the utterly confounding typographic dress chosen by Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Hillary's snooze of a serif might have come off a heart-healthy cereal box, or a mildly embarrassing over-the-counter ointment; if you're feeling generous you might associate it with a Board of Ed circular, or an obscure academic journal. But Senator McCain's typeface is positively mystifying: after three decades signifying a very down-market notion of luxe, this particular sans serif has settled into being the font of choice for the hygiene aisle. One of McCain's campaign themes is "Making Tough Choices:" is this the one you would have made?
Technorati Tags: barackobama, branding, design, gotham, typeface, typography
I would like to visit Dubai sometime, if for no other reason than it seems like one of the most peculiar places in the world, a Las Vegas of architecture. If it's not Agassi and Federer playing tennis on the helipad of a hotel, or the world's tallest tower, the Burj Dubai, it's news that Hyder Consulting is designing a structure that will be twice the height of the Burj Dubai, or nearly one mile tall.
BLDGBLOG whipped up a graphic to illustrate how this building would fit in with the world's other tallest structures. It is sublimely ludicrous.
Technorati Tags: architecture, dubai
From here:
Your net carbon impact depends far more on the number of children you will have than any other variable; remember good environmentalism uses a zero rate of discount. So people with no biological children should be allowed to fly a lot and people with lots of biological children should not get to fly so much at all. Is that so far from the reality we observe?
Seems like the incentives are aligned all around on this. It's rough flying with kids, both on the parents and all the other fliers who empathize but really wish their noise-canceling headphones could filter out the high-frequency screaming of a distressed child.
