Yawn to Mars

I recently watched both Red Planet and Mission to Mars, two movies that came out in the same year, about the same topic and are both REALLY bad for totally different reasons.

Why did I bother? I couldn’t tell you. I find myself watching a lot of movies in HD that I would normally skip.

Red Planet completely failed to create an interesting plot and Mission to Mars came off like, in classic Brian DePalma fashion as a rip-off of another film, in this case Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I know there has been a lot of interest in Mars over the last ten years or so and both of these movies had a fantastic opportunity to capitalize on the momentum Mars has gained (which is probably why they were made in the first place). And frankly I think it could be made into an interesting story.

Lets face it, from a location standpoint, Mars is a pretty boring place, once you get there isn’t like there is a whole lot to do. If your story is going to take place on the red planet then you pretty much have to invent some sort of alien to create conflict.

My advice to anyone thinking about making another Mars film? Its not the destination, its the journey. Take Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, a perfect thriller that just happens to place in space, one of my favorite movies of 2007. Or take Apollo 13 and the drama surrounding a failed attempt to reach the moon.

If I were to write a screenplay about Mars and would focus on the attempt to get there, not set 50 years in the future, but say next year. We know what space exploration was like 40 years ago during the space race, it is well documented in based-on-real-events movies, but what about today? I know relatively little about modern day space exploration.

And frankly I’m curious. If they could send a bunch of guys to the moon before we had computers, I wonder what would be possible today.

What would a modern day trip to Mars look like? What are the risks with traveling so far away from home? What purpose would it serve humanity? What are the political and technological ramifications or another space race? What character conflicts would arise from the crew during the nine months getting there? or the nine months getting back?

It wouldn’t be easy to offer answers to each of these questions in an interesting way, but I believe it could be done. I would have the story span multiple timelines, told from each of the characters perspectives, providing a fact-based account of the backstory. Focusing less on the flight itself, but perhaps about the challenges leading up to the journey.

As far as creating conflict, that should be pretty easy, as I’m sure there are a hundred reasons why not to go to Mars. You pick one and go with it.

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The King of Kong

Rarely does a documentary film come along that has enthralling characters, plot intrigue and the emotional ups and downs of narrative film. I found it in the most unlikely of places… in the world of competitive classic arcade gaming. In other words, a movie about nerds trying for the highest score in Donkey Kong.

The film is The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the story is the duel between the long haired, super nerd and hot sauce mogul Billy Mitchell, world record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong—apparently one of the hardest arcade games ever made—and Steve Wiebe, a soft spoken, friendly ex-Boeing employee who hasn’t seen many successes in life.

This movie was brilliant!

During the first couple of reels of the film you see a world of the arcade nerds (many that could double as a real life Napoleon Dynamite) still ferociously playing games like Pac-Man, Centipede and Missile Command 20 years later. At first you feel pity for these bizarre throwbacks to the 80’s. But once you get used to this bizarre setting the film shifts to what seems like the nicest guy alive, Steve Wiebe. Laid off and broke, he decides that he wants to try for the world record in Donkey Kong. It seems as though Steve has had 30 years of bad luck with whatever he does. He isn’t a competitive man, the best way to describe him would be Asperger’s.

What follows is an incredibly interesting and sometimes tragic story, filled with bizarre conspiracy and nerdy intrigue. And oddly you are laughing all the way until the end. I especially recommend the film to anyway that has been screwed over by a complete douche bag.

If you have ever thought to yourself, “you know nice guys DO finish last” this is the film for you.

The King of Kong comes out on DVD on January 29. I highly recommend it, definitely on my Top 10 for 2007.

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I Hate Books

I know that it is social unacceptable to say it, but I hate books. I don’t hate reading, I just hate the medium. They are bulky, difficult to hold with one hand and after spending most of the day looking at a computer screen, I find it hard to focus on the type. Since it is hard to read without the medium, I tend to not read as many books as I would like (which seems like a common goal).

I don’t have the same nostalgia for physical books as most people. I don’t feel like I need to display what I read on a bookcase as badges of honor to my intellect. After I’ve read a book, it just becomes “stuff.”

So I’ve found myself more and more interested in Amazon’s Kindle which is small, lightweight, can increase the type size for late night reading, it sounds perfect! I’ve just been on the fence as I wanted to see if E-Ink is as easy to read as people say. I want to see it in action before paying the high price tag (the last thing I need is another computer screen to stare at).

So last night as I was lying in bed reading, I got so frustrated tossing and turning with each page that I reached over for my iPhone to buy a Kindle right then and there. But they were SOLD OUT! Apparently I’m not as much in the minority as I thought I was. I took it as a sign to think about it more. I ended up reading a lot of the user reviews (on my iPhone which was much easier to hold than my paperback, just harder on the eyes), after reading most of the pros and cons I went from impulse buy to eagerly awaiting one.

So I will have to wait and see if the Kindle is a dream come true for the medium conflicted reader such as myself, or if it just become the worst kind of “stuff” in my life—another gadget. Due to high demand, at least I know I will be able to sell it easily if I don’t like it.

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A lot of people like to think they understand the mobile space, but they really don’t. It takes a lot of time and effort to become familiar with all the in’s and out’s.

It is completely unlike the Web as we know it. It took me about four years of working with multiple mobile companies, attending mobile community events, having conversations with to a lot of smart mobile folks before I started feeling even the slightest bit comfortable writing or talking in public about it. And even with a considerable amount of mobile experience under my belt for a “web guy” I still get really nervous talking in front of mobile crowds.

That is why is irks me when I get criticized for talking about the impact the iPhone has or will have on the mobile space. I think that Wired has a good piece on The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry that begins to illustrate to what lengths the iPhone is different from anything that has come before it.

I think we will continue to see stories of just how the mobile industry is being shaken up in the wake of the iPhone, how out of sync the mobile industry has historically been from the needs of consumers, and how newer mobile devices like the iPhone will change the way we use information.

And with a new MacWorld keynote a week away, I imagine we can expect more mobile revolutions coming out of Cupertino soon.

I’m not trying to say “I told you so,” just that in my time in the mobile space I’ve learned a few important lessons:

1.) never underestimate the complexities of the mobile ecosystem. 2.) never give up being optimistic that there can or will be a better way of interacting with mobile devices.

In an industry wrought with complexity and people saying “you can’t do that” you can never sacrifice a passion for creating incredible mobile user experiences.

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What's different about seeing movies in a theater?

Why is it that seeing a movie in the theater makes you like it more than seeing it at home? Lately I’ve been watching a lot of movies in HD. Most of these movies I remember really enjoying, but haven’t seen since the first time in a theater. After watching them again, I think to myself, “this is a piece of crap! How could I have ever liked this?”

In fact I used to go see movies that I knew would be terrible, like Independence Day or the Godzilla remake (both by the same awful director Roland Emmerich), on opening night. My logic was that the best time to see a movie that you knew was going to be a Hollywood-shlock, was on opening night, with all the other losers that want to be there, that go out of their way to see a piece of shit (or maybe really likes bad movies).

Does seeing a movie in the theater give a bad or even mediocre movie some sort of intangible quality? Does being in a room with strangers having a shared experience adjust our perception of entertainment? The latter is certainly true with live music performances. Does anonymity allow us to let down our protective facades and engage with the characters and story on the silver screen more than the small screen?

I mean who didn’t cry watching E.T.? Seriously? Sure it was a puppet on a stick, but it had the ability to make us shed tears in front of perfect strangers. I don’t know what is more strange, that we were able to get so caught up in the with the little foam and latex gremlin or that we displayed such intense emotions in front of others.

Maybe it is these days we expect so much more from our entertainment. Last night my daughter, wife and I watched The Wizard of Oz (I promptly fell asleep). Having not seen the movie since I was a kid, I was amazed just how bad the production values were, I mean even for the period, it is pretty bad. People were tripping over sets, the choreography was awful, the lip syncing was way off. Yet, I was amazed how much of that film is engrained into our popular culture. It seemed like every scene had a phrase that comes up in common conversation today.

Is it possible for today’s films to still engross society? You don’t see a whole lot of people quoting lines from Titanic, the high grossing film of all time. In fact most people seem sick of the thought of it today and its only 10 years old.

Can a modern movie become a classic today? Or does modern film only maintain temporary status within the social consciousness? Due to be replaced with the next summer blockbuster?

And if you saw a film in your home worthy of being a classic, would you know it?

As a parent, I may only see a few movies in the theater per year. Most of the movies I see are in my home. I believe that these days there are more people like me then there are people that see movies in the theater. But while seeing a movie at home is convenient, it is hardly the best environment. My movie watching experience is often filled with distractions, preventing me from really getting engaged.

I know the creative community is morning this loss of the cinema experience. David Lynch offered his thoughts about the ridiculousness of watching movies on a phone. I think he has a really good point. But as irony would have it, I just recently watched his last film on my laptop while flying to Boston. Shot entirely with digital video I didn’t feel like I missed some defining moment in my life by skipping this one at my local multi-plex.

Will advances in technology, which will create new contexts and mediums to enjoy content, kill off the theater experience? Or will society evolve with the technology and find new ways to have these shared experiences?

I’m not sure, but until then I’m going to try and stay away from seeing movies again that I remember liking. Choosing to cherish the initial experience, rather than tarnishing the memory.

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How-to Consolidate Your Web Services

All these online services are driving me crazy. It was okay when there was just a personal blog, Flickr, del.icio.us and maybe LinkedIn. But these days presence among multiple communities is a must.

It seems like you need to have a personal blog, Tumblr, MySpace, Facebook, Virb, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Flickr, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, the list goes on. Then add professional responsibilities, like updating the company blog, Basecamp, Highrise and Campfire. And lets not forget a couple hundred emails written and received each week, mailing lists and filtering spam.

And somewhere between all this reading and writing I need to figure out how to spend some time away from my computer and with my family. I fear one day I will have spent so much time updating all these sites—for people I rarely ever see—that I will have missed my daughter growing up, a mistake I’ve made in the past.

Now obviously I don’t need to manage all of these accounts. I have to prioritize which ones I update and which ones to languish. The problem is that different groups of people tend to gather at each. For example, my business connections have a tendency to use LinkedIn, Plaxo and Facebook. The mobile community uses Jaiku, Twitter and mailing lists.

New web services could be discarded as temporary online cliques, but new services also seem to have a pretty high signal to noise ratio, so they have the potential of being important networking tools for building future business relationships.

Pulling everything together

I believe that personal blogs should be pivot points to our digital identities. A person can provide context to information, therefore it should aggregate content from the different sources we publish to. Allowing friends and family to follow all the content we post around the web.

So what I’ve done is minimize the number of web services I use, mostly based on task or context, then republish content to other sites using RSS, essentially allowing me to post once, publish to many, creating a central nervous system branching out to 8-10 other services, therefore hundreds, possibly thousands more people than one site alone could.

Plus I have it setup to automatically notify my friends via Twitter of each new post, mixing presence publishing with blogging, photos and more.

Inspired by this post then seasoning to taste, here is how I did it.

Step 1. Setup Tumblr

Any micro-blogging service will do, but I like Tumblr for its dead simple, single-minded focus on blogging. Its free, fully customizable, I can use my own domain, I can import external feeds really easily and I can post to it via my iPhone, Sandy or Jott.

Step 2. Setup other Blogs

One problem with blogging tools I’ve used in the past, is if I blog elsewhere the best I can do is add a link to it. What I wanted to do is pull the entire entry into my personal blog. So I created a personal RSS feed on Blue Flavor’s blog, then added it to my Tumblr feeds. Basically any time I post an article to Blue Flavor, it gets republished to my Tumblr site.

Step 3. Setup Ma.gnolia (or del.icio.us)

Tumblr supports posting links with commentary, but its navigation options are pretty limited. I wanted to be able to recall links without going through my archives. So I setup Ma.gnolia to be my central link repository (I have a del.icio.us account, but opted for Ma.gnolia in case I want to add the site previews). I may still use the link feature of Tumblr as well if I want to link directly to an external site and not the page, we’ll see.

One thing to note, I’m only using Ma.gnolia to publish links to my blog, not as my primary bookmarking tool (call me old school, but I still use my browser). I could have just as easily created a unique tag like “blog it” and republish the unique RSS feed instead of my global feed.

Step 4. Add Flickr Photos

Next up I wanted to pull in some photos, but not all, as I often will post 40 or 50 photos at a time and didn’t want it to accidently dominate by content stream. For this one I took a dual approach. First, I added a Flickr widget along the sidebar that shows my nine my recent photos.

Second, I used Yahoo! Pipes to create a custom RSS feed based on the tags “mobilephotos” and “flinglog.” My thinking is that the photos I want to publish most frequently are the candid shots when I’m away from my computer which are automatically tagged with “mobilephotos” and then any photo I want to show up on the blog I tag with “flinglog.”

Yahoo! Pipes grabs both those feeds (or more if I want to add more later) and creates a new one that I can import into Tumblr. Again I could just use Tumblr to post photos that I own, but I want to keep all my photos at Flickr so I can recall them easier. Instead I use Tumblr to post photos that I don’t own that I want to re-blog.

Step 5. Setup Feedburner

Like all web services Tumblr creates a perfectly acceptable RSS feed, but a couple times I noticed the file would be blank. Since I am going to use RSS to populate several other sites, I figured that setting up an external service like Feedburner would be a good idea. This gives me metrics as to who is reading my site AND makes sure that other my other sites are being fed properly (It also creates a brief time delay to re-blogging to make sure that there are no typos and my links are correct).

Step 6. Link other Web Services

At this point I can post text or other content direct to Tumblr, my primary source, then I pull in links with Ma.gnolia and certain photos from Flickr, these three things are pretty much all I care about. This creates a master feed which I send to Feedburner to create my consolidated activity feed.

At this point you can take your pick of which communities you want to publish to. I picked Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Virb. The settings for each one vary, but all you need to do is point to the Feedburner feed and you are good to go.

Step 7. Notifying Twitter

Finally I want to send a notification to Twitter each time Tumblr is updated. This is where Twitterfeed comes in. You simply verify your Twitter account, point to your Feedburner feed and set your options, how often to update, include link, preface each tweet, etc (By the way, you’ll need an OpenID in order to use Twitterfeed).

It is important to not include your Twitter RSS feed to Tumblr AND use Twitterfeed. This will create an infinite loop of posting, each service automatically adding entries to each other. I made this mistake during the initial testing.

Now I’m using Tumblr to send personal updates instead of Twitter. I send updates to Tumblr from my phone via my unique email address. This saves me some text messaging fees and allows me to post a longer post if I wish. But since Twitter is disconnected from Tumblr I can still use it as a standalone service, replying to my contacts without a bunch of @person updates showing up on my blog.

Did I mention this is free?

None of this has cost me anything. Sure you could use the premium options of Flickr and Feedburner if you wish, but you don’t have to in order to make everything work.

I’m still working out some bugs with grabbing content from a Movable Type blog and feeding of Twitter, but so far everything else has been working well.

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