A painting of me

Life of Pi

   21 January 2013, early morning

I watched Life of Pi over the holidays, in 3D no less. The bulk of the film, like the book it is based on, follows a boy as he travels shipwrecked across the ocean in a small boat with a Bengal tiger. I should start by saying I feel like an idiot because I had thought they had an actual tiger for many of the shots in the film, but the tiger in the film is completely computer animated. It’s insane how good it looks. It’s a nice uplifting film. Both the book and the film have one of my favourite lines of text ever, which I won’t ruin for you now. I had never seen anything in 3D before and I thought Life of Pi actually looked quite amazing in 3D: nothing felt cheesy about it. So yeah, go watch this film. I thought it does the book justice.

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  • Crazy Blind Date by OkCupid. 

    OkCupid has got to be the coolest online dating site: based on their blog and side projets. I have no idea if they are actually good for finding dates.

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  • Open access, open internet, closed book. 

    Aaron Swartz committed suicide over the weekend. He was 26 years old. He was being prosecuted quite heavily by the US government at the time of his death for downloading files from JSTOR. Laurence Lessig and Alex Stamos have both written articles about the case that are well worth your time to read. Update: Another perspective: he was funny.

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Sea of Poppies

   11 January 2013, mid-morning

I finished reading Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. Shima has declared it one of her favourite books, if not her absolute favourite book. That’s a pretty strong endorsement. It’s been well reviewed as well. As I started reading I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about.

The book begins in a rural village in North India and ends on the high seas of the Indian Ocean. The road between those two points is a little bit slow. We meet character after seemingly unrelated character. Slowly you start to see where they will all end up. By the time you get to the third section of the book the story has really picked up. I am remiss to say much more than that. Suffice it to say its some solid historical fiction with a great cast of characters. Sea of Poppies reminds me of what a well edited Neal Stephenson story might look like. The language and sailor slang much of the book’s dialog is written in can be a bit impenetrable at times, though one can usually figure out the sentiment trying to be conveyed.

Sea of Poppies is the first book of the Ibis trilogy. The book is an exciting well written story. The second book River of Smoke is already available. I plan to start it shortly.

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  • Why did Flickr drop the "e"? 

    From the co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, we get the following answer:

    Because the guy who owned the domain http://flicker.com wouldn’t sell it and we loved the name. Dropping the “e” was Caterina Fake’s idea — I was against it at first because it looked so wrong, but I eventually came to see the wisdom: it was easy for us to get the domain, but it was also more distinctive & recognizable, easier to search for, etc.

    It’s funny they weren’t actively trying to be hip or start some sort of Web 2.0 trend.

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Photography is a thing I used to do

   20 December 2012, late evening

I thought after having Mythilli the number of photographs I would take would increase, but that hasn’t been the case at all. I used to be an avid photographer. At some point I stopped being one. I had some sort of crisis of faith, I suppose.

One of the last lines in Six Feet Under is, “You can’t take a picture of this. It’s already gone.” Photography is an artistic pursuit, but it’s also a documentary one. Photography is all about capturing a moment in time. Well, sort of.

I used to take lots of photos at concerts I went to and then I more or less just stopped. When I watch people photographing a concert now I find they look ridiculous. You are a few feet from a band, watching them play through some shitty LCD screen or viewfinder. Sometimes you should just stop and enjoy the experience.

I think about this a lot when taking pictures of my baby.

All of that said, I should take photographs again. I quite like it. And every so often I take a photograph that is pretty fantastic, if I do say so myself.

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  • Postscript: Robert Bork, 1927-2012. 

    Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.

    This is a pretty awesome obituary. (If you aren’t Robert Bork, anyway.)

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