Churbuck.com

Slob Evolution (Dove Spoof)

This is the 75-second version of my holiday vacation.

Then use Google Reader  … you can sail through a hundred feeds in no time, can star and note them with a touch of the pen, and using the X60 tablet’s “bezel mouse” can scroll and pan to your heart’s delight. Marking a feed as “read” is a snap … I am in love.
I used to consider Microsoft OneNote to be the killer app for demonstrating a tablet’s power, but rolling through an AJAX interface to screen hundreds of feeds via Google is my new de facto show-off app.

I would not recommend trying to blog or comment using the pen interface — my handwriting sucks and it is just as easy to swivel the thing open and start typing.

I have been using a combo of SnagIt and Flickr’s uploading applet to snag screen shots and move them to my Flickr account — this cool little applet does both and spares me from the eternal process of resubscribing to SnagIt.

Webimager

The past few days have been an education into obscure film. Working off of my son’s spectacular Janus collection of 50 Years of Art House films, I dove into (with his recommendations), three great classics of French cinema and one Italian great.

This morning I finished Pepe Le Moko, a gangster film set in the Casbah, starring Jean Gabin and directed by Julien Duvivier. Gabin, who also starred in one of the other French classics I watched this past week, The Grand Illusion, has been described as the French “Bogart.” He is incredibly charismatic in the role of Pepe, a fugitive thief self-imprisoned in the exotic back alleys of the Casbah, a dark place the police dare not enter. The film is about their repeated efforts to lure Pepe out of the safety of the Casbah into the city where he can be apprehended. Deceit and treachery, plot and counterplot, and some of the best lines I have ever heard (or read in subtitles), made this one of my favorites of all time.

The Grand llusion is one of those films you know you should see, but manage never to get the chance to watch. This is hailed as a classic of war films, set in a World War I German prison camp and focused on the experience of some French officers and their German guards. Another Jean Gabin film, Grand Illusion ends on a beautiful note near the Swiss border, when Gabin and his fellow-escapee find refuge in the home of a German farmwoman, widowed by the war. The scene reminded me of Barry Lydon, when Ryan O’Neal seeks refuge from the wars in the home of a German woman.

Wages of Fear has been remade as Sorcerer and stands as a prototype for suspense films. Clouzot’s original was chopped up for American distribution, so when I first saw it as a Saturday afternoon television film, I know I was missing something and this reviewing in the original cut confirmed it. William Friedkin’s remake with Roy Schieder was great, but the original, as always trumps. The synopsis: four men accept the impossible task of driving two trucks filled with nitroglycerin to the scene of an oil well fire in South America.

Fists in Pockets is the 1965 debut of director Marco Bellochio, who, at the age of 26, filmed this tale of family dysfunction in his own family home. The protagonist, played by Swedish actor Lou Castel, manages to solve that dysfunction in such a way that the film freaked out the Catholic Church and Italian political establishment, as well as earned Bellochio rebukes from his heroes Bunuel and Antonioni.

And the last film in the ongoing series:

Alexander Nevsky: Sergei Eisenstein’s comeback made for Stalin as an anti-German propaganda film. The cinematography was pretty amazing. Especially the big panoramas and facial closeups. The plot — medieval Russian prince kicks ass on the German knights invading Russia. Battle scenes are pretty cheesy, the exhortations to defend the motherland are kind of quaint. Can’t recommend it unless you want to be able to say you saw it, or have a hankering to see more Eisenstein than the Potemkin

More pick-up of my post on why I don’t like Second Life. What I do like, conceptually, is the Croquet project pointed out by Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady blogging at Tecosystems.Again, Second Life defenders, I am not throwing Second Life under the bus, I just challenge the ROI, from a marketing standpoint, of committing to a closed architecture controlled by a single commercial entity — again, it’s Prodigy’s walled-garden crumbling under the onslaught of the Open Web. If more of a committment was made to a Croquet-like architecture, where an organization’s or individual’s “island” was on their own server or hosted environment, and where there was an open source community supporting the tools and standards, then I’d be moving into a 3D metaverse at the drop of a hat.

The latest pickup is from Business Communicators of Second Life :

“Waves. You know, they swell, hit the shore and then they recede.

The Second-Life-for-Marketers debate feels like that. Waves of “second life is the new now thing” hit with the requisite response/undercurrent of “oh, it is SO not.”

It’s been fun, frequently amusing, sometimes irritating – and the vehemence is more than a little baffling.

A month ago Horace Clutterbuck’s real world persona wrote on the Churbuck.com blog 10 reasons why he didn’t like Second Life for marketing. It garnered its share of comments and blog responses. But, with every ounce of me, I hope you read Giff Constable’s blog post response to 9 of Horace’s ten points (one was about Horace’s dislike of being pitched – n.a.) “

Sorry if “vehemence” was detected in that first post — which actually was an internal email I wrote out of irritation as the umpteenth Second Life proposal crossed my desk for comment. I continue to point to that post internally as my position on SL, and it should not be taken as a blanket screed against metaverse models. I could, if I chose, to cite each and every embarassment and issue surrounding Second Life, but I have no axe to grind there. I continue to maintain an account, and I continue to invite people to discuss Second Life with me in Second Life. So far, only one person has, and that was sadly through an instant message forwarded to my email — again some sort of proof that SL is probably fine for real-time interaction, but inadequate for a time-shifted discussion.

Do check out Croquet. I intend to spend some time playing with it to determine if there are any signs of life there. From Wikipedia:

“The Croquet Project is an international effort to promote the continued development of Croquet, an open source software platform for developing and delivering deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Croquet provides a flexible framework in which most user interface concepts can be prototyped and deployed to create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations. Croquet can be used to construct highly scalable collaborative data vizualizations, virtual learning and problem solving environments, 3D wikis, online gaming environments (MMORPGs), and privately maintained/interconnected multiuser virtual environments.”