Slumdog Millionaire will make you think about life, hope, and love.
As the story unfolds you will experience youth from the perspective of children growing up in a culture of poverty, religious intolerance, and gangs. Slumdog presents a somewhat tragic tale of two brothers and a girl who survive a religious massacre, hunger and poverty, the uncertainty of who to trust, and the bias of a socially stratified society. Despite hardship and the loss of family we see the strength of human connections through friendship and love. In the end happiness is proven to be grounded in loyalty to your family and an unbreakable bond of friendship and love.
I found the visuals of the tent cities in India and children rumaging through mountains of trash in a landfill juxtaposed to a city skyline populated by skyscrapers filled with condos and apartments for the wealthy to be compelling. I considered how Americans argue over seats in a movie theater or impatiently honk the horns of their shiny sport utility vehicle. Even though the story of Slumdog Millionaire is designed to entertain, I could not help but think how different and isolated our life experience can be. Pair this perspective with the role envisioned for America by President Obama in his inaugural speech: we can no longer stand idly by and watch what unfolds on the global stage.
I love movies that make me think. Slumdog Millionaire had a great story, memorable characters, and multiple thought provoking messages. It is one of the best movies I have seen in the past six months.
I had a little time over lunch today to walk across the street from my new office in Olds Hall to check out the MSU museum. Inside I saw several examples of regional handmade art including ducks hand carved out of wood, painted eggs, and very detailed woven containers. There also were a historic exhibit showing off some of the items from MSU’s collection of artifacts. I saw a skeleton of an asian elephant, a wooden phrenology bust, and a samauri’s armor.
There was also a photo exhibit from Mali. Students there had been given instruction regarding photography composition and story telling. The photos were really beautiful and included descriptions written by the young photographers. I liked the honest and simple approach of the photo captions. It felt like I was seeing the world from the perspective of a young person. I saw their day-to-day life, their family, heros and friends. Many of the photos showed the connection these young budding phtoographers had with their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
Really cool stuff. I’m going to have to go back soon and check out the rest of the museum — I only had time to check out part of the first floor! I’ve heard that there is also a cool art museum on campus.
This morning, as I exercised with friends in an early morning spin class at the Borgess Health and Fitness Center, I heard an old song written and performed by the band Journey (sorry, can’t remember the lyrics or which song it was). I’ve always loved the feel of Journey’s 1980s hits. The particular track made me think about their song “Don’t Stop Believing” — a song used in the final scene of the Sopranos to bring an engaging story to a close. As with a couple of other songs I mentioned in a post in recent weeks, I think this song has some good ideas and feelings in it. I also like the dialog in the final scene of the sopranos: “Focus on the good times.” Indeed.
Over the years there have been a handful of songs that I loved from the first moment I heard them. I tend to catch on to a riff, melody, or rhythm in a song — a connection with the lyrics comes later. I wanted to share three songs that I have always found comforting, hopeful, and uplifting. I think each song contains a lot of good ideas and sentiments.
Semisonic - Closing Time
I love the tune, but one of the strongest statements for me is the lyric “Closing time - every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end… “.
Phish - Back on the Train
Phish has always been capable of generating an amazing groove. They are a very talented band. This particular song is one that I can rock out to every day. I also really like the opening verse:
When I jumped off, I had a bucket full of thoughts
When I first jumped off, I held that bucket in my hand
Ideas that would take me all around the world
I stood and watched the smoke behind the mountain curl
It took me a long time to get back on the train
Bob Schneider - Cap’n Kirk
Bob is another very talented musician. He has produced several fun themed albums focusing on various music styles including swing, r&b, acoustic, etc. This particular song, aside from having really fun animation (note the song came out shortly after JibJab re-popularized this Monty Pythonish animation style), has a great theme throughout about getting the most out of life. The first two opening verses are:
I want to be like Captain Kirk
get up everyday and love to go to work
Don’t want to be like Mr. Spock
want to kick out the jams and rock the block
I just want to feel good
I don’t want to hurt nobody
I just want to get a good time out of my life
With everything going on in our complex lives (i.e., the economy, constant change, politics, work, and everything else) I marvel at the abundance of opportunity that stands before us. I have been lucky in my life — I have known (and know) many smart, creative, and wonderful people; I have had the chance to learn a lot in both safe and wild environments; the stream of life has brought me to some interesting ports and destinations.
I am thankful for my family and friends, meaningful work, and love for creativity and the arts.
My friends, we live in interesting times. The future is peeking at us from around the corner. I have a smile on my face and am ready for whatever the next adventure brings.
I was watching a podcast episode of the 1UP Show. The hosts were discussing the upcoming Little Big Planet game for PlayStation 3. Little Big Planet will ship with a powerful set of level creation tools — lots of folks are excited about the possibility of dabbling in or doing full level design. One of the hosts described the process of making a good stage by referencing a quote that made me think.
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
- Scott Adams (yeah, the Dilbert guy)
This quote rang true to me. I was surprised I never heard it before. I think another part of creativity and art is finding partners to collaborate with. You really need folks who are not afraid to fail, can look at things from a lot of different angles, and actually have a well developed sense for seeing potential and understanding benefits and consequences of going down certain paths.
Creative and artistic people are comfortable with play and are able to play well with others. It is amazing what can happen when all these things come together at the same time.
Problem
You want to save your avatar photos taken using Adium X.
Background
Adium X, an instant messaging client for OS X that connects to multiple services (e.g. Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo, Groupwise Messenger, etc), includes the ability to take photos using your iSight camera to use as your avatar image. To add a custom avatar choose Adium > Preferences > Personal > Chose Icon. The Image Picker will load up, and you can shoot your photo by pressing the camera button.
Solution
Browse to Macintosh HD > Your User Folder > Library > Images > iChat Recent Pictures. There you will find all of the photos you have taken using Adium X.
While working on my undergraduate degree I used to take some time to sit in Waldo Library and read magazines — looking for visual inspiration, interesting ideas, etc. I loved to read about everything. This was during the mid to late 1990s when Wired magazine was at its best, and when I first learned about an intriguing fellow named John Maeda.
Over the years, John has done some amazing work at MIT, in the Media Lab, through MAEDASTUDIO, writing about simplicity, and has in the past year moved on to new endeavors: becoming the current president of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. I followed him from his old blog on simplicity, to his new one titled Our RISD, where he has been writing about getting into his new role and building community etc.
This week he posted an interesting video, done by the folks over at cool hunting, about simplicity and the glass house. I found it very interesting, and wanted to share it with you:
In 2006 I started to work primarily on an Apple Computer desktop and laptop at work. I have used Windows-based PC(s) for many years and my desktop at home is still a PC. While there are lots of great applications developed for Windows by the independent and open source communities — I was and continue to be amazed by the large number and high quality of free applications available for OS X.
I wanted to keep a list of a few of my favorite free OS X applications on my blog — so that when I perform system maintenance or OS reinstalls in the near and distant future it will be easy for me to download and install software that I have come to use on a daily basis.
So, without further ado, here are a few of my favorite free OS X applications. Links to the developer’s Web site are included. A description of the application from the developer’s site is also provided as a general overview of what the application does.
7zX - “7zX is a file archiver with high compression ratio. Compression ratio results are very dependent upon the data used for the tests.Usually 7zX compresses to 7z format 30-70% better than to zip format, and 2-10% better than most of other zip compatible programs.7zX currently supports tar, zip, gzip, bzip2, UNIX compress, 7z, s7z and various kinds of segmented archives.”
Adium - “A free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.”
AntiRSI - “a program for Mac OS X that helps prevent RSI (repetitive strain injury) and other computer related stress. It does so by forcing you to take regular breaks, yet without getting in the way. It also detects natural breaks so it won’t force too many breaks on you.”
Apimac Timer - “a complete and professional stopwatch, alarm clock, countdown and clock utility for Mac OS X. “
Blender - “is a free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems”
Celestia - “a free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions.”
Changes Meter - “Do you need to check a web page or a local file frequently, looking for changes in them? You know it’s boring, error prone and a real waste of precious time.Several web sites offer RSS feeds, but they do not necessarily cover the type of information you are looking for and there aren’t many tools to check local files. Changes Meter does this exact job and it will notify you with a colorful, useful and unobtrusive pie chart icon on the menu bar.”
Coconut Identity Card - “a small app that reads out where and when your Mac and your iPod were built by Apple.”
Cyberduck - “an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and Amazon S3 browser.”
Disk Inventory X - “a disk usage utility that shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called treemaps.”
DotMatrix - “easily make pop-art using your web or iSight camera”
Electric Sheep - “Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves. It’s run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.”
FileSync - a free utility for copying files in multiple folders/locations to an external or network drive.
GrandPerspective - “a small utility application for Mac OS X that graphically shows the disk usage within a file system.”
GridWars - “an extremely fun shoot-em-up game developed by Marco Incitti “
Halo Demo - “an online multiplayer demo of the first person shooter many consider to be the best. Hours of fun can be had by playing the demo and mastering the Blood Gulch map.”
HandBrake - “an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter.”
HexEdit - “a hexadecimal file editor for the Macintosh. The most widely used editor of its kind on the platform, HexEdit can handle file sizes of up to four gigabytes with ease, yet has memory requirements of less than a megabyte (with colour turned off). It can also compare files for similarities or differences.”
Integrity - “an powerful utility for finding broken links on large Web sites.”
Paparaazi! - “a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages.”
Plasma Pong - “a really impressive real-time fluid dynamics version of Pong created by Steve Taylor. Sadly, it is no longer available online.”
Quicksilver - “A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.”
Rember - “a front-end GUI to the ‘memtest’ command line memory testing program. This application will allow the user to select the number of test loops, as well as the amount of memory to test. There is a ‘Log’ tab that will allow the user to monitor memory testing. The user can toggle a ‘verbose’ switch to limit the amount of output.The user can choose to quit Finder and other applications.Defective memory can cause computers to malfunction, crash, and behave in a variety of ways which can sometimes baffle end users and computer technicians alike. Apple provides hardware test CDs with most of their products, and there are some third-party utilties for Mac OS X which perform memory testing. In my experience, these tools have not always been able to quickly and efficiently diagnose memory problems. Rember has been designed to simplify the testing, and diagnosis of these problems.This software is free, and is covered under the GNU GPL. Please read accompanying “COPYING” file for more info.”
Permanent Eraser - “provides an even stronger level of security by implementing the Gutmann Method. This utility overwrites your data thirty-five times, scrambles the original file name, and truncates the file size to nothing before Permanent Eraser finally unlinks it from the system. Once your data has been erased, it can no longer be read through traditional means. “
Pixer - “a little application that helps you to scale (or rotate, add pad and, crop) PNG, JPG, Tiff, PSD , BMP or PICT images in batch.”
SiteSucker - “a Macintosh application that automatically downloads Web sites from the Internet. It does this by copying the site’s Web pages, images, backgrounds, movies, and other files to your local hard drive. Just enter a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), press return, and SiteSucker can download an entire Web site.”
TextWrangler - “is a powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool”
Think -a small application that lets you focus on one application at a time using an illumination panel and backdrop.
ThinkingRock - “a platform independent Java application for Getting Things Done (GTD) - the action management methodology and best-selling book by David Allen.”
Time Tracker - “Track the time you spend on projects with this simple and easy-to-use application. Divide your work into projects, and split each into individual tasks.”
viJournal - “designed as an analogue of the good old-fashioned page-a-day bound diary - the kind you buy in a stationer’s. You write your entries under dated headers and save them collectively by month and year.”
This morning I was listening to the NPR FreshAir podcast from Feb. 22, 2008. One of the segments on the show, titled “An Oscar with your ‘Ratatouille’?”, presented an interview with writer/director Brad Bird and comedian/actor Patton Oswalt. During the segment Bird describes why he wanted Oswalt to play the role of rat/chef in Pixar’s Ratatouille — he had heard a comedy skit performed by Oswalt about the Black Angus restaurant and how the nature and quality of their advertisements had changed and become more aggressive. Oswalt was convinced to perform the skit — which as I listened, caused me to burst into laughter. Included below is a clip of the skit from YouTube (note that the language in the video may not be appropriate for all listening venues).