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03.30.06 A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renee Zellweger’s wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you’re always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner. The anxiety is contagious: anyone who winds up talking to a person infected with [continuous partial attention] feels like he or she is accepting an Oscar, and at any moment the music might stop the speech. A great point, and a sin of which I am very, very guilty. I know, because I've been told it before. And many of my friends are guilty of it too. It's like a social disease in the way that it enables others in your presence to commit the same crime. But it's one of the habits that I really want to change this year. I do think that it's ok to have the phone with you most of the time, but I think there's a need to change the priority that we give it in the company of others. And that goes for text messaging too (I'm even worse about that, if you can imagine). But there are times, like family emergencies (mine has had 2 this year) when it's invaluable to be readily available, and I think acceptable to be a little inconsiderate. (via 43 Folders) # So many changes over the last few weeks. Changes and purchases. I bought a new laptop. A 15" MacBook Pro. It arrived yesterday, on the last day of my old job and the first day of my (brief) vacation from employment (and insurance!). And I love it. Unabashedly. I was freaking myself out with all this talk of noise problems. My new toy does have a slight, occational hiss, an electrical noise very clearly connected to the second processor core (goes away when you disable CPU2). But it's barely noticeable. Like, I can't hear it when the refrigerator is running. And even when I can hear it, it's not bothersome at all. It's not a screaming fan. It's not a buzzing drive. It's 20x quieter than any laptop I've ever owned or used. A non-issue for me. One thing that did bother me, a software issue, is that when making a large file copy operation, the machine slowed way way down. Obviously it's an operating system thing, a Finder thing, maybe even a Spotlight-indexing thing, because the machine is fast in every other way. Not just fast, but fast. Snappy. Big file copies aren't really in my future, so it's not an ongoing issue for me, but it is a little disappointing. I thought the Finder had been re-written as multi-threaded to take advantage of multiple processors/cores? Maybe it's just specific to this Intel build of OS X. Hopefully it'll be addressed quickly in a revision, and hopefully, now that I'm done copying backups data over from the firewire drive, I wont have to deal with it again. But still! It bugs me on principal. # I found this gallery of excellent commericial photo retouching on digg under the headline "the most EXTREME retouched photos!" But honestly, this is nothing. Believe me. It is, however, a REALLY great example of exactly how to get an image out of reality and into that glossy, surreal world we call advertising. Personally, I think these look pretty amazing. (And for those of you who don't know, this is part of what I spend my working-day doing; not the retouching, but working with the retoucher, and sometimes with the art director, to get these kinds of changes made to a photograph.) # 03.29.06 On the movie theme- I just watched the trailer for Idlewild, and it looks perfectly delightful! The Moulin Rouge of hip-hop movies, perhaps. It's certainly no soul plane. # Let's call it, the film is deceitful above all things. It turns out that Asia Argento, the co-writer/director/star (and Courtney Love Look Alike Content 2005 Grand Prize Winner) of the utterly worthless excuse for a film that was The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, is in fact the daughter of Dario Argento (get it, same last name?). Dario Argento, for those of you keeping score in the Really Bad Films game, directed the 1977 shock-and-yawn horror film Susperia. Why do I, who not only hates (the middle aged woman formerly known as) JT LeRoy but also hates horror movies, know about the film Susperia? Because it happens to be a favorite of (among, it appears, many many other people) Ultrasparky, who lured Jessie and I into watching it once. Only we didn't get all the way through it. Or maybe Jessie did, but I know I sure didn't. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I'm not at all surprised. # 03.28.06 Text a payment to someone. Has the potential to change a lot of things about how we pay on-the-spot, if Paypal can get further onto the mainstream radar. But be sure to include an extra $0.10 when you pay your friend back for those cute shoes, to cover the cost of the text message. # Tomorrow will be my last day working for (fill in the name of a monolithically large retailer here). I'm moving on, in order to fill in what might well be the last remaining holes in my production experience, to a new ad agency. I'll start there next week and I'm very, very excited about it. As much as I've loved (and loathed) working for G_p during the last two years, my role there was starting to stagnate. And I wasn't seeing any real way out of it within the company. There are, as always, 101 reasons why a person decides to leave one job for another, but that was the biggest one. But the agency looks like a good place to be right now (God how I never thought I'd say that again), and I think it'll be a good break from the corporate bureaucracy of such a large company. I'm at the top of my game right now, and this new position offers a new level of responsibility (meaning, complete) and a new level of opportunity to go along with it. And the work they do is very cool. The vibe around the office is very good. The kind of projects I'll have access to are great, and very specifically, this will allow me to get experience with 2-3 really crucial areas of focus that I haven't been able to get yet, and wasn't going to find at G_p. I'm ready to play the Agency Game again, and I hope that after a stop at this place, I'll finally be ready to take on just about anything. # 03.22.06 So, a question for you, dear friends: IF I had a (free) iPod Mini that was only used for active events, like the gym or running or traveling very very light, and IF that iPod Mini were to suffer some kind of fatal, brutal demise, would it make any good sense to replace it with an iPod Nano? Or would prudence win out and insist on a teeny little iPod Shuffle? Mind you that, while it might sound totally unreasonable to some that person would really and truly own a second iPod for the express purpose of going to the gym, the person who thinks that has clearly never tried to run with a half pound of hard drive bouncing around in their shorts pocket. Update: looks like the Mini was still under warranty, so I've dodged that little bullet. Walked into the Apple Store with a dead iPod and walked back out with a new (refurb?) live one. Not too bad. New problem: my Big iPod (40 GB clickwheel, pre-color) just died. WTF?! I'm going to wait and see if there's a new-new video iPod coming soon. # 03.20.06 The city under the City smells like shit. And it's almost 70 years old. Let's hope San Francisco gives PUC a chance to repair and replace before we all sink into the muck. # 03.19.06 Geek moment: Daring Fireball reports that (as of 10.4.3) Disk Utility in Mac OS X can verify a startup disk while it's still mounted. No more single-user mode or booting from an installation CD whenever you need to check out your drive's status. Of course you'll need to boot from the CD if anything needs to be repaired. Something's better than nothing. # 03.17.06 Foodie megasite Chowhound get's bought. By CNet. Wha? # 03.12.06 Japantown hotels sell without the promise of long-term ownership. Pins and needles on this one, kids. Realistically, I doubt anyone cares too much if the hotels get demolished in favor of condos. It would dillute the neighborhood some, but if the Japantown malls stay standing, and continues to be occupied with a fair assortment of local-flavor small businesses, the community will probably be safe. Probably. # Curbed comes to San Francisco. A welcome addition. # « February 2006 | archive index | April 2006 » built with movabletype |
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