Ho John Lee’s Weblog

On the occasion of the Academy Awards, an interesting video montage featuring faces of famous actresses. via Instapundit 

I’ve noticed that over the past several years, I basically don’t see movies in theaters, except for kids movies. Everything else is either on airplanes, cable, DVD, or online.

I ran into Tom Conrad at Barcamp Block a few weeks ago, which reminded me to go check out Pandora again. I’d been an early adopter when they introduced it to the folks at the very first Barcamp, but accidentally stopped using it a while back when I changed out the computer in my office that I’d been running it on. I recently swapped in another system, and among other things I have it running Pandora again.

I like being able to launch a station with a single suggestion and get a few hours of “more stuff like that”, especially when it turns up something I haven’t heard before.

Here’s a sample “station” that I’m listening to at the moment, constructed starting with a track from Rick Braun, which has turned up selections from Larry Carlton, Jeff Golub, Joyce Cooling, and the Brecker Brothers on its own.

This is the first weekend in quite a while that Emily and I haven’t had soccer committments. Her spring soccer team played at the Davis World Cup last weekend to wrap up their season. The team got knocked out in the elimination round in a very close match that was settled in a penalty shootout to break the 0-0 tie. Even the shootout was close, it went to 1-1 on the 5 kicks for each side, which brought the game to sudden death. Eventually it went to 10 kicks for each side (and U10 plays 9 on a side) before the winning goal for the other side (which went forward to the end of the tournament).

So this weekend has felt a little different, with no practice and no game. This afternoon we went to see Gracie, a soccer-themed movie which Emily saw a trailer for this spring. It’s about a teenaged girl who wants to try out for the boy’s soccer team after her brother (also a soccer player) dies in a car accident.

My 10-year-old daughter and I went to see The Bridge to Terabithia yesterday. She read the book last year and wanted to see the movie, which has been advertised regularly over the past few months.

For movies that are based on a book, my general rule for my daughter is that you should try to read the book before you see the movie. In this case, I didn’t follow my own advice. Although this book is well known in children’s literature (winner of the 1978 Newberry Award), I never got around to reading it, and thus was utterly blindsided by the movie.

The movie advertisements make it look like mostly a fantasy and adventure story, kind of like Chronicles of Narnia or perhaps Neverending Story. It’s not. It’s mostly about friendship and pointless tragedy in middle school. I found it enormously disturbing. It pushed a lot of my emotional buttons, both as a parent today, and in recollection of being an odd kid out in a rural school system in the past.

This popped up on YouTube this afternoon - filmmaker Ahree Lee shot an image of her face every day for three years starting in November 2001, then concatenated them into a fascinating short movie called “Me”. The project is set to music by Nathan Melsted, which give it a hypnotic, X-file-ish feeling.

A slightly longer and sharper version is posted at AtomFilms. There’s also a short related project built on lots of different faces, called “Everyone”.

These guys have been shooting scenes for their movie at the house down the street for the past couple of days. I can see the lights from my home office on the second floor, and this evening we walked over to take a look.

Dan Engelhardt started making movies on his iMac as a seventh-grader in Menlo Park. Brad Leong put on a student film festival — which included his own work — when he was a junior at Palo Alto High.

This summer, these two precocious 20-year-olds are home from college to make their first full-length feature film, a coming-of-age movie they hope will be the next “American Graffiti.'’ It’s set in — where else? — Palo Alto.

A few days earlier they were around the corner over at a house on Bryant. Those scenes apparently involved hanging lots of toilet paper on the trees in the yard. They’ve gotten grants from Panavision, Kodak, and Apple, so they’re better equipped than the average videoblogging operation.

The past few evenings I’ve been working through a review copy of Google’s PageRank and Beyond, by Amy Langville and Carl Meyer. Unlike some recent books on Google, this isn’t exactly an easy and engaging summer read. However, if you have an interest in search algorithms, applied math, search engine optimization, or are considering building your own search engine, this is a book for you.

Students of search and information retrieval literature may recognize the authors, Langville and Meyer, from their review paper, Deeper Inside PageRank. Their new book expands on the technical subject material in the original paper, and adds many anecdotes and observations in numerous sidebars throughout the text. The side notes provide some practical, social, and recent historical context for the math being presented, including topics such as “PageRank and Link Spamming”, “How Do Search Engines Make Money?”, “SearchKing vs Google”, and a reference to Jeremy Zawodny’s PageRank is Dead post. There is also some sample Matlab code and pointers to web resources related to search engines, linear algebra, and crawler implementations. (The aspiring search engine builder will want to explore some of these resources and elsewhere to learn about web crawlers and large scale computation, which is not the focus here.)

We went to see Curious George at the movies this weekend. We were probably at the old end of the target demographic, but my 9-year-old and I have spent many hours reading Curious George stories together since before she could actually read, and we both enjoyed the movie. Unlike many current kids movies, this one doesn’t have a frantic, over-the-top feel to it, and the soundtrack by Jack Johnson is pleasantly calming.

A few thoughts upon reflection:

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a working turntable at home. This evening I suddenly have lots of new old stuff to listen to.

There’s a divide in the music I’ve been listening to for the past ten years or so. I packed away the records and turntable around the time our daughter was born, thinking that I’d put it back together when she was old enough not to destroy the records. So, ten years later, I have a fairly large collection of digital music, and a large collection of analog recordings which don’t overlap much, but which have languishing in storage.

I’m happy to find that the turntable still works. Modern stereos don’t have phono inputs, so I ended up rummaging in the garage to dig up an old amplifier, which makes for a large but serviceable preamp. Right now I’m listening to Brian Eno’s Music For Airports.

Our family has enjoyed Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean in the past, so this weekend I thought I’d see how Monty Python went over with our daughter. I think British humor is partially an acquired taste, but the 4th graders around here seem to have a keen appreciation for the absurd, especially if it involves naked people and/or underwear. A bit of animation doesn’t hurt, either.

And Now For Something Completely Different isn’t really a movie so much as a collection of skits that can be watched (or skipped) separately without missing anything.

A few notes:

The cable guy actually did turn up last week, so we still have cable TV. In the meantime, there are many interesting, non-mass-media video projects online.

A few days ago I got around to fixing Azureus on the house server so I could download Star Wreck - In the Pirkinning using BitTorrent. This is a Finnish-made take-off on Star Trek and Babylon 5, created by a group of motivated fans over a period of seven(!) years. (Wikipedia entry)

Digital video tools became drastically cheaper and better during the project, and the quality of the composited sets and special effects is impressive.

The movie is available (with English subtitles, too) free, under a Creative Common license.

See also: Rocketboom

It seems I only see kids movies in movie theaters for the past few years. Most of my personal movie watching happens on trans-pacific flights, which leads to occasional surprises when I get the DVD later to see what United Airlines sanitized away. (Singapore Airlines leaves the movies intact, though.)

This weekend we went to see Wallace & Gromit - Curse of the Were-Rabbit at the local Century Theaters megaplex.

Although I enjoyed the movie, I think it was upstaged by the short feature before the film, which was a Christmas-themed adventure featuring the four penguins from Madagascar. The smallest penguin, Private, heads off to the city to look for a Christmas gift when he sees that the polar bear is lonely on Christmas eve while the rest of the zoo animals are having festive parties. He ends up on his way to becoming a chew toy for a ferocious lap dog, and is rescued by the rest of the penguin squad. Rico, the incomprehensible one, eventually gets to put his dynamite to good use.

I found Hemo the Magnificentin the Netflix catalog a while back.

I remember watching these in elementary school, in the days before VHS videos, DVD players, or the internet. The classroom window shades would come down, a projector cart would be rolled into the back of the room, and we all got to watch film strips or slides, or occasionally, movies, which would be shown on an ancient 16mm projector with a built-in amplifier and detachable speaker built into the cover. Aside from the entertainment value of the film, it also meant a change from the usual class schedule, plus nap time for one or two in the back of the room.

I think I saw Hemo the Magnificent, Our Mister Sun, and Powers of Ten a couple of times in 4th and 5th grade or so, and hadn’t seen them since.

Bruce Schneier, noted crypto and security guy, has an entertaining thread of comments on various security issues at Hogwarts in the latest installment of Harry Potter, starting with a post from Karl Lembke:

In the latest Harry Potter book, we see Hogwarts implementing security precautions in order to safeguard its students and faculty.
One step that was taken was that all the students were searched – wanded, in fact – to detect any harmful magic. In addition, all mail coming in or out was checked for harmful magic.
In spite of these precautions, two students are nearly killed by cursed items.

Brent Dax comments:

Pandora officially launched this morning. It’s been over a week since I signed up for an account and I’m still using it. It’s specifically designed not to provide on-demand streams, but I’m getting the hang of steering Pandora into building playlists that have what I want, which is almost better than on-demand, since I don’t have to actually build the playlist myself.

What I really wish for is a sane way to make my personal digital media effectively (and legally) portable across my networked environment. Pandora will be providing $36/year streams of interesting-but-not-on-demand music, Rhapsody provides on-demand music subscriptions at $100/year, and iTunes Music Store provides downloadable purchases that may or may not work elsewhere on the network and won’t survive a computer transplant.

Dorrian Porter has assembled a wonderful video (55MB .mov) capturing the feel of the past weekend at Barcamp, hosted by Laughing Squid . A great job of compressing the idea of the weekend into under 4 minutes, using commodity video and computing tools. It’s still beyond the casual consumer, but this level of production would have been remarkable (and expensive) even a few years ago.

Dorrian’s post discussing the selection and use of the Creative Commons-licensed music (in this case, “One Big Holiday” by My Morning Jacket) is also interesting.

Now, I am a lawyer and I have to say that it wasn’t as easy as the good folks at creative commons made it out to be to figure out my rights.

I’ve spent a few days now playing with the prerelease “friends and family” version of Pandora, the “music discovery service” demoed by Tom Conrad at Barcamp last weekend.

Summary
Some quirks, but overall really good, and easy to get going. Unlike some other services, I’ve been running it most of the time I’ve been at my desk for the past few days.

Discussion
My personal taste in music is simultaneously eclectic and encyclopedic in some areas, yet with odd gaps. Using Pandora, I’ve been able to think of one or two songs, albums, or artists that’s representative of what I want to hear, and it will come up with a fairly decent playlist of similar tunes.

You are Morpheus, from “The Matrix.” You
have strong faith in yourself and those around
you. A true leader, you are relentless in your
pursuit.

What Matrix Persona Are You?

Vacation notes: Here’s a view of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. It was recently moved from its temporary location elsewhere in the museum to its new permanent home in the refurbished Salle des Etats , with non-reflective (and probably bulletproof) glass, climate controlled environment, and presumably, assorted security features. (In the past, it’s been stolen, as well as been attacked by acid and by stone throwing.)

Something like 90% of the Louvre’s 6 million annual visitors stop by to see the Mona Lisa, including Ron Howard and a crew filming a movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code who were there a couple of weeks before us. Visiting locations mentioned in The Da Vinci Code is apparently popular enough that there are tours for it.

The Louvre is immense, so it takes a bit of walking around and following signs before you get to the right section of the Denon wing, which houses the Italian painting collection.

It’s Friday, and I’ve come across a brilliantly funny pair of Harry Potter flash animations. Not quite G rated, but generally work safe. You’ll need the sound turned on, though. (link, link)

Quotes: “Let’s bother Snape!”, “Botherbotherbother”, “Naked Time!”, and “Ronicus Explodicus!”

The Potter Puppet Pals present
“Bothering Snape”
animated by Neil Cicierega

and the sequel,

“Trouble at Hogwarts”
animated by Neil Cicierega
with help from Alora Lanzillotta and Emmy Cicierega

The second animation has a hidden bonus feature which should not be missed. To view it, use the button at the lower left corner to pause when Snape gets zapped, and move step by step until you see the green star, which you can click to view the bonus animation.

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