I’ve been working off-and-on with Hal Hartley since 2001 when he was my college thesis advisor. I’ve spent time as his teaching assistant, production manager, editor, and now we’ve built a new website for his company Possible Films. There have been several incarnations of the site over the years. In 2004–05 I packed envelopes with DVDs and CDs ordered through PayPal. For the past few years the site has been a very simple affair, with no direct sales. But now we’re doing something that represents a very interesting future for film distribution. We’re selling downloads of movies and soundtrack music straight from the website. We’re also premiering original content (again, video and audio) for free streaming. The really exciting goal is to premiere a feature film as a downloadable movie. There’s no DRM on anything, so our customers can watch the movies they buy in any way they want. I put a lot of work into this project over the past few months, and I’m really proud of both the look and the functionality of the site. Please, take a look at it, and if you like what you see, think about buying something.
In honor of Halloween, we had some friends over last night and we watched Young Frankenstein followed by A Nightmare on Elm Street. Halfway through Nightmare, we noticed an amazing poster on the wall behind the doctor at the sleep institute.
Yes, that’s a giant cat riding a cable car in San Francisco. There was also a dogs playing poker tapestry in the basement where Mr. Krueger met his original end, but we didn’t get a picture of that one. Nice work, set dressers!
Look, I’m just going to admit this. I don’t use my Blu Ray player very often. Most titles that are available on Blu Ray are large, new releases, and if I wanted to see them I saw them in the theater. I watch a ton of HD TV on my DVR. The indie films that frankly I hardly ever see in theaters anymore (sorry, business I work in, but my TV is awesome and your theaters are a pain in the ass) are almost exclusively available on DVD. I pay the extra money for Netflix to send me Blu Rays, but I only have a handful of Blu Rays in my queue.
But like a lot of Netflix subscribers, I’m getting more and more accustomed to the instant gratification of “Watch Instantly.” The selection is growing, and it’s a wonderful rogues gallery of films nobody wanted enough to tie up with restrictive licenses. We even get movies that have been out of print for years. Hal Hartley’s Trust is only available in the U.S. through Watch Instantly. Unfortunately I don’t have an XBOX 360 or a Roku, but I do have an Internet-enabled TV, and of course the “let’s hope someone comes up with some interesting way to use this” feature BD-Live on my Blu Ray player. So far both the TV and Blu Ray player haven’t gotten much use from their Internet connections. I’ve been hooking up my Macbook Pro to my TV via DVI-HDMI cable and an optical audio cable, but that requires all kinds of plugging and unplugging and doesn’t allow HD streaming through Watch Instantly. Both my TV and Blu Ray player are Panasonic, and neither of them has partnered with Netflix to allow streaming on their devices. And I don’t want to buy another device right now.
Today I learned that Netflix will be sending out special discs to PS3 owners that will enable them to use Watch Instantly through BD Live. Now the obvious question here is: why not my Blu Ray player too? What does that supercomputer PS3 have that my Blu Ray player doesn’t? Well, obviously the large hard drive and massive processing capabilities, but neither of those seem particularly necessary. I have a small amount of storage space available for BD Live material, and my Blu Ray player can obviously handle the processing necessary to play back HD video. Is there a technical limitation here, or is it a business limitation?
Previously Netflix had an exclusive relationship with XBOX 360, so opening it up to the PS3 is a big step. But opening it up to every Blu Ray player would be huge. It would paradoxically create a larger market for Blu Ray players while simultaneously reducing the market for the overpriced discs. Anything that makes it easier to get movies in the hands of consumers (for a fair price) is a good thing.
So it appears that T-Mobile has lost all the Sidekick personal data stored on Microsoft/Danger servers. This is bad news for the Cloud. I always assume that my data is safer in the hands of professionals. But apparently the Sidekick data wasn’t backed up? It got me a little nervous about the status of my 5 years of Gmail data, which I’ve always been content to leave up on the massive Google server system. I imagined my Gmail data existing in multiple locations in massive data centers all over the world, and it could never be lost. But I’m in a backing up mood anyway, so last night I used Gmail Backup to download all my messages.
I was watching SNL (typical of this season so far, it was almost entirely bad) so I wanted to stay in the living room. But I wanted to download the data to the desktop computer in my office. I decided to use the Screen Sharing built in to OS X. I logged in to my desktop computer using my laptop. Everything worked perfectly right out of the gate. Nice work Apple!
My mother bought me this $60 used purple foam desk chair my freshman year of college, and I kept it for 10 years. It was quite comfortable, but the springs were so worn out that it was almost impossible to keep it level. So I recently went on a quest to find a replacement that wouldn’t break the bank. Since most of you reading this are sitting on office chairs, I thought I would share some of the things I learned.
I started at the top. I’ve sat on my share of fancy chairs in fancy offices over the years, and I know how comfortable those Herman Miller chairs are. The Aeron is nice, but I spent this spring sitting in one of their newer and less expensive Celle chairs. Rather than a soft mesh they have an unusual network of plastic circles. Despite the harder look of it, it’s really quite lovely to sit in all day. I prefer it to the Aeron. I went to Design Within Reach in Brooklyn Heights to check out the other fancy chairs available. The Humanscale Liberty won Slate’s desk chair round-up a few years ago, and I can tell you it is quite comfortable as well. But at $1000 it was well out of my price range. Nothing at Design Within Reach was what I would consider “Within Reach” so I headed downscale.
I spent some time sitting on chairs at my local Staples, but nothing really felt sturdy and comfortable. It was also impossible to get a salesperson to help me out. I spent a lot of time online, and wasted a lot of energy trying to find an inexpensive all-mesh chair because I was sure that was the best option. I ended up ordering a Super Mesh Office Chair from Bizchair that was extremely solid, and well-constructed, but the metal frame around the mesh seat dug into the back of my legs because I was too short for it, and the mesh seat was surprisingly hard on the butt. The armrests also felt flimsy. They’re adjustable in a way that never really locks in place and they always jiggled a little when I used them to move the chair.
So rather than disassemble it and pay for the round-trip shipping, I sold it on Craigslist to a much taller man, for a slight loss.
At that point I realized that it is in fact necessary to sit in a chair before you buy it. So I headed over to Office Furniture Heaven on 19th St. in Manhattan. I spent about an hour moving from chair to chair, experimenting with every combination of mesh, foam, and mesh-foam. There was an inexpensive all-mesh Raynor Apollo chair with a plastic frame that appealed to me, but even though it had an adjustable-depth back, the frame on the seat still dug into my legs a little. It seems like cheap mesh seats are not a good idea. I could imagine what it would be like in 10 years. I suspected it would not hold up as well as the old Purple Beast did.
Although by that time I had settled on a $400 price cap, I did spend a lot of time sitting in a Raynor Ergohuman mesh chair. It is highly adjustable, comfortable, stylish, and feels like it will hold up well under lots of sitting. MSRP is over $1000, but you can get it online for less than $500. I probably would have bought the Ergohuman if Raynor didn’t also make an Apollo chair with a foam seat. It combined a surprising amount of adjustment with a comfortable seat and a $215 price-tag. In addition to the usual seat-height adjustments, there are very simple back-height, back-depth, and seat-tilt adjustments. The seat even tilts forward if you like that sort of thing. I’ve had it for about a month now and I’m very happy with it.
I’ve been getting a lot of paying gigs lately, but it’s no excuse for taking almost a year to finish the 2nd episode of Time Travellin’. In the past few weeks I’ve made some really good progress. I’m going for a much more complicated style this time around, including actual movement, and full bodies. Here’s a little taste.
This is a short video I made in 2002 for a class called “Life Stories.” I thought it was lost, but I found it on a badly labeled tape today. It’s mostly of interest as a companion piece to The Epic Tale of Kalesius and Clotho (which I was shooting at the same time) and is another example of my inability to avoid fictionalizing even supposed documentary videos back then.
I’m happy to hear that new MacBooks will have Firewire ports. It was a dumb idea to get rid of them in the first place, and Apple seems to have listened to its customers in this case. A concerned customer emailed Steve Jobs last year about the lack of Firewire in the MacBook, and Jobs responded “Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2.” which is patently false. What he was referring to were the consumer HD cameras that are gaining in popularity, but leaves out HDV, which is also rather popular. What it also leaves out is the vast legacy of firewire cameras still out there, not least of which is the venerable DV camcorder. And what about hard drives? Sure USB 2.0 can hold up fine editing DV, but if you’re planning to edit HD, even if your camcorder uses USB 2.0 for transport, you’re going to want a firewire hard drive while you’re editing.
This argument is old now, and it’s not an issue for people who didn’t buy the sans-firewire Macbooks, but it’s the arrogant attitude of knowing what’s best for people—and dropping legacy support—that drives me crazy. It happened to my beloved Apple II in the early 90s (ok, that one might have been for the best) and now it’s moving into my beloved MacBook Pro.
Apparently the new MacBook Pros don’t have any expansion slots. The old G4 PowerBooks had PC Card slots, like everyone else. Those were great, and were awesome for P2 card loading. Then the MacBook Pro went for the ExpressCard, which meant I need a slightly dodgy adapter for P2 card loading, but still works great. And if I ever did any work with SxS cards, they would work without an adapter. But now the MacBook Pros have a……. SD card slot?
The only word for this is downgrade. SD cards are media storage devices. Sure, they’re very popular, but you can get a USB SD card reader for $6 at Newegg. You know what you can’t get at Newegg? A direct connection to the PCI-Express bus. That means you can’t put in an additional Firewire bus for peripherals that require a dedicated bus, and you can’t get eSATA.
I’m sure there are lots of uses I’m not thinking of, but the point of giving direct access to the PCI-Express bus is that developers can come up with any crazy thing they want to and get some serious speed. Do you know what you can do with an SD Card slot? You can put SD cards in it. Sure the 17″ still has an ExpressCard slot, but have you ever picked one of those things up? They’re monsters. They’re about as portable as my Apple IIc was (it had a handle). If I wanted something that didn’t fit in my laptop bag and weighed a ton, I’d carry around my desktop computer. Who is Apple to tell me I’ll be fine without ExpressCards? I want options!
And finally I want to complain about those charming John Hodgman/Justin Long ads. I think they’re really well made, and Hodgman is a blast, but this idea that Windows-based computers constantly crash, and Macs are impervious to lock-ups is ludicrous. On a bad day I can get Final Cut Pro to crash 10 or 15 times (that’s on a real Mac Pro, not my hackintosh. The hackintosh tends to be very stable). I’m sick of the false idea that Macs are perfect and worth the extra cost because they’re more stable, and Windows is cheap and you get what you pay for. I think this is the worst one:
Are there “Meghans” out there who are looking for “fast processors” and are disappointed by the speed of new PCs? My girlfriend just bought a netbook that’s significantly faster than her old Thinkpad, which did everything she needed already, but has a bad battery and weighs a lot more. Computers these days are incredibly fast as long as you’re not an FPS-obsessed gamer (who is going to buy a PC anyway) or a FPS-obsessed HD video editor (who is going to need a Mac).
And let’s talk about Vista. I installed it recently, and it runs great. It’s a lot better than the barely-alive XP install I had after I tried to upgrade to SP 3. The only problem I’ve had so far is a deadbeat peripheral-maker who hasn’t made a 64-bit driver for my firewire audio interface. I’m fine using my soundcard though. I only really use the interface with Mac apps. And I understand it’s tough getting everyone on the 64-bit bandwagon. Has Apple released a real 64-bit operating system yet?
Look, I’m just going to admit this. I don’t use my Blu Ray player very often. Most titles that are available on Blu Ray are large, new releases, and if I wanted to see them I saw them in the theater. I watch a ton of HD TV on my DVR. The indie films that frankly I hardly ever see in theaters anymore (sorry, business I work in, but my TV is awesome and your theaters are a pain in the ass) are almost exclusively available on DVD. I pay the extra money for Netflix to send me Blu Rays, but I only have a handful of Blu Rays in my queue.
