Bein’ a dad can sure make you mad
Man it even can drive you crazy
It’s as hard as it looks
You gotta read them dumb books
And you end up despising Walt Disney
— “Bein’ a Dad” by Loudon Wainwright
16 May 2011, early morning
In Between Days is the first film by Korean/American director So Yong Kim. Shima and I saw her second film Treeless Mountain at the Toronto Film Festival in 2008. Treeless Mountain was slow going and bleak. Watching her first film, I can see that her follow up was par for the course. In Between Days looks at the life of a teenage Korean immigrant. She writes lonely letters to her father, who is presumably still in Korea. She occasionally talks to her mostly absent mother. Her only friend seems to be a boy she clearly has a crush on. It’s also clear he reciprocates her feelings, but being teenagers both of them seem incapable of letting the other one know what’s up. The film is full of passive-aggressive attempts at communicating ones feelings. It’s a good look at loneliness. It leaves you feeling a little bit cold.
The official In Between Days website.
Movies
2 May 2011, evening time
The 2011 federal election is taking place today. For the first time in my entire life the NDP might actually do well. Our riding, Davenport, is one of CBC’s ridings to watch. The Liberals have been coasting here for ages. If Andrew Cash wins our riding I will lose my shit. This is Mythilli’s first election. We are both in our NDP orange. Things should start getting exciting in a few hours.
Update 10:38 PM: There are some tight races. Ours doesn’t seem to be one of them. With 20 polls reporting Andrew Cash has 50+% of the vote. What! I hope the numbers stay the same. Even more miraculous, my parents riding looks like it is going to go to the NDP as well, though that race is a much closer so far.
Update 11:04 PM: The CBC has declared my riding and my parents ridings for the NDP. Oh hells yes.
[5] Politics
20 April 2011, mid-morning
Podcasts have been around for a million years, but I never really got into them. iTunes has support for downloading and subscribing to podcasts, but like many parts of iTunes I found the support awkward. You can sync podcasts to your iPod (or iPhone in my case) and there they sit till you sync again. Because I have MobileMe syncing my contacts and calendar items I rarely actually plug my phone into my computer. I would never have up to date podcasts on my phone. A long time ago I stopped bothering with them. Ideally podcasts should arrive on your phone while you are on the go and remove themselves from your iPod after you’ve listened to them. It’s 2011 after all.
I read about the solution to my problems with podcasts in a pretty extensive review of a new iPhone application called Instacast. I think the sign of a well done application is that it solves a need you didn’t even think you had. Because I found my workflow around podcasts so messy I really wasn’t interested in listening to them at all. I didn’t feel like I was missing out. Now I listen to podcasts a fair bit.
I’ve been listening to two podcasts on my way to and from work: WNYC’s Radiolab and NPR’s Planet Money. They are both superlative. Radiolab in particular is so well produced and I can’t say anything bad about it whatsoever. This episode about cities is a good introduction to the podcast and what it’s like. 5by5 is producing a ton of podcasts that look like they would be right up my alley, but they are all so rambling I can’t get into them. I feel like there might be good stuff there, if only they were better edited. Are there other podcasts I should be listening to?
[6]
6 April 2011, evening time
Shima and I watched 127 Hours while up in Barrie over the weekend. It’s directed by the consistently awesome Danny Boyle. The film is based on the book by the same name, which is based on the real life story of Aron Ralston. For those who don’t recall his story, he was mountain climbing when he fell down a chasm and had his arm pinned to a cavern wall by a boulder, which he couldn’t move. He was trapped like this for 5 days, after which time he broke the bones in his trapped hand and cut it off with a dull knife. Seriously. Most of the film is spent in the cavern, watching him try to deal with the situation he is in. It’s surprisingly engaging and exciting. This is probably due to the great job James Franco does playing Ralston. The scene where he cuts off his arm isn’t glossed over at all. It’s very graphic. You know it’s coming from the start of the film, but when it finally happens it’s something else. 127 Hours is a good film, well worth watching.
The official 127 Hours website.
Movies
If I told you in 2007 that in 2011 we’d be killing Soc. Security, torturing Americans & bombing Libya, who would you guess won the election?
— Phineas X. Jones
4 March 2011, late evening
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay about the evolution of Mickey Mouse, from his Steam Boat Micky form to the version we know today. He argued that Mickey evolved over time to more closely resemble the proportions of a human baby. The eyes got bigger and bigger. The torso grew in size while the arms and legs shrunk. I hadn’t really paid much attention to how the character had changed till I read the essay. Sometimes Mythilli sleeps stretched out, her arms above her head. I couldn’t do this comfortably since I’d be half way down the bed. Her arms barely reach the top of her head. Walt Disney was on to something.
Life
13 February 2011, the wee hours
Around this time two weeks ago and a day Shima started having contractions. At the time we didn’t think much of them. We were watching Six Feet Under. We didn’t stop because of the contraction. Shima didn’t seem particularly bothered by them, all things considered.
Read the rest of this post. (800 words)
[5] Life
2 February 2011, late morning
There is a pretty obvious blog post in the works, but before I write it up I wanted to post something for my brother. His friend Krisy desperately needs a bone marrow transplant. She’s younger than me and has cancer. You can help by registering to be a bone marrow and stem cell donor. Please read my brother’s message to me, below.
—
At the end of 2009, Krisy was working as a legal assistant and she and her boyfriend Dan had just moved into their first home together. What they didn’t know was that less than 2 weeks later, Krisy would be diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia.
After months of intensive chemotherapy, Krisy’s condition improved and she remained in remission for most of 2010. However, her leukemia recently relapsed and this time, Krisy needs a bone marrow transplant. Sadly, her family is not a match, so her hope now is to find a match from an unrelated donor. That’s why we need your help.
What can you do? All it takes is a simple and painless swab of the inside of your cheek.
Please register at an event being held on:
Thursday, March 3rd between 2:40 to 8:30pm
Donald Cousens Public School
315 Mingay Ave, Markham, ON (map)
You can also learn more and register yourself on www.onematch.ca, a bone marrow and stem cell donor matching network.
Why should you do it?
- Minority groups are hugely underrepresented within the global stem cell network. Asians, for example, represent only 3.8% of potential donors. The likelihood of finding a match is from one’s own ethnic group. I am asking as a friend for you to register as part of this database; while you do not get to know or choose whom you donate to, you could potentially save a life, maybe even Krisy’s.
Who can do it?
- Anyone between 17 and 50 years of age (covered under government health care, e.g. OHIP)
- In good general health (click here for eligibility)
For more information and future events please visit our Facebook page.
Krisy is a girl with a sunny personality and a big heart. If you asked for her help for something, she would do just about anything for you … which is why we are trying to do the same for her.
Even if you are unable to register, please help us spread awareness and encourage others to join.
[2] Life
23 January 2011, late afternoon
If I wasn’t superstitious, back in August I probably would have posted this picture.
Couples usually keep the fact they are expecting a baby a secret till they pass the first trimester, because the chances you will have a miscarriage are much higher early on in your pregnancy. I am so superstitious this is the sort of secret i’d want to keep till there was a walking talking baby to show people. In the real world this secret gets harder and harder to keep because of pretty obvious physical changes that take place in the mother to be. On the Internet you don’t really have that problem. Shima and I are going to have a baby. We’re at the point where it’s probably going to happen any day now.
[13] Life
17 January 2011, early evening
Fantastic Mr. Fox was fantastic. (The film is available on Netflix, which I now officially love.) I’m a big fan of Wes Anderson and this film was very much a Wes Anderson film. It’s amazing how well all the things that make his films so unique translate to stop-motion: the wardrobe, the sets, the shots, the music, etc. The film’s writing is great and the voice actors are all excellent. You’ll probably recognize every other voice in the film. I’d love to watch the film with some children to see if it’s as enjoyable for them as it is for someone my age. This film is definitely a must watch.
The official Fantastic Mr. Fox website.
[2] Movies
2 January 2011, evening time
Shima and I watched Hunger over the Christmas holidays. (It’s not really a “Christmas” film.) Hunger is about the final days of Bobby Sands. The movie starts with near the tail end of the ‘no-wash’ protests and moves on to the Bobby Sands hunger strike. The movie is very terse. The whole film is about an hour and fifteen minutes long. There is barely any dialogue. The film jumps between being beautiful and haunting and ugly and brutal. There is a conversation between Sands and his priest in the middle of the film that takes the entire film to a whole other level of amazing. Hunger was excellent. You should watch it. The film will probably make you want to celebrate the death of Tatcher with champagne — if you weren’t planning on doing so already.
The official Hunger website.
[3] Movies
25 December 2010, mid-morning
Merry Christmas everyone. 2010 is almost over. It’s been a pretty crazy year.
[2]
2 December 2010, late evening
My friend Jonah was giving away rolls of Kodachrome. His only condition to claim a roll was was that you had to actually use the stuff before Dwayne’s — the last place in the world that still develops the stuff — stopped processing the film. I wanted to shoot with the film at least once in my life and so I told him to save a roll for me. The film I was given was Kodachrome 64, from 1992. That makes it 18 years old. I shot all 36 frames on my birthday, mostly taking portraits of my friends hanging out in my parents backyard. Some photos are better than others. This photo I quite like.
Photography
1 December 2010, late at night
We have a new mayor in Toronto. It’s his first day and there is already so much stupid. At least I’ll be able to ride a gravy train to Scarborough. I miss Miller.
[3] Toronto
29 November 2010, early morning
WikiLeaks has released 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables. I haven’t looked at them all, but I am guessing this is the best one:
PERHAPS THE SINGLE DOMINANT ASPECT OF THE PERSIAN
PSYCHE IS AN OVERRIDING EGOISM. ITS ANTECEDENTS LIE
IN THE LONG IRANIAN HISTORY OF INSTABILITY AND INSECURITY
WHICH PUT A PREMIUM ON SELF-PRESERVATION. THE PRACTICAL
EFFECT OF IT IS AN ALMOST TOTAL PERSIAN PREOCCUPATION
WITH SELF AND LEAVES LITTLE ROOM FOR UNDERSTANDING POINTS
OF VIEW OTHER THAN ONE’S OWN.
— By Victor L. Tomseth, from the Tehran Embassy, Cable 79TEHRAN8980, NEGOTIATIONS.
This was written/sent a few months before the hostage crisis. He was one of the top three ranking people captured when the students took over the embassy. He is on LinkedIn, which is both strange and interesting.
Update: This was originally just a link-post.
[9]
11 November 2010, early morning
I went to the Gladstone with a coworker and Tyler to hear Ali and Matt from Well.ca talk about how they keep Well.ca chugging along. They discussed the software development process at Well, the tools they use to get things done, and the corporate culture that facilitates the work they do. Ali’s one of the smartest people I know, so if you’re interested in starting a start up I recommend you copy what he does, more or less verbatim.
Since i’m new to web development I thought the talk was particularly interesting and informative. I learned about a few cool projects that I will share with you now:
- Matt’s told the audience about an automation tool he wrote called doo that looks quite nice. It’s made out of surprisingly little code. Ruby is a strange beast.
- Ali showed off a jabber bot called well-partychat. It’s an implementation of Partychat you can run behind your own firewalls. Partychat is a way to do group chats with Jabber, regardless of how shitty or not your IM client is. Since most everyone already has a Jabber account, this is a good way to set up a persistent chat room. Since it’s in something people already have open and running, I can see how it would actually get used over something like status.net or Campfire.
- Well.ca have somehow managed to trick out Speedtracer to do all sorts of magic. Sadly, i’m not entirely sure how. Speedtracer looks like a seriously awesome project in and of itself. It’s a profiler for Chrome that can tell you all about your web application.
After the talk everyone headed over to the Rhino for drinks. How did that place become the defacto hangout for Toronto software geeks?
Life | Technology
9 November 2010, early morning
Yesterday was a long and exhausting day. What better way to cap such a day off than by watching Primer, one of the craziest movies I have ever seen. It’s a time-travel film, but calling it simply a time-travel film does it a great injustice. I think it’s one of the best science fiction films i’ve seen in quite some time. It’s very creative. It’s also fairly confusing. At 77 minutes in length, I was tempted to watch the film again right after Shima and I finished watching it. At the start of the film it’s not quite clear what’s going on. Then there comes a moment of clarity when you realize, “hey, they finally figured out they built a time machine.” They explain how the machine works, and then the film quickly becomes confusing again. The film was made by a real life engineer, who wrote and stars in the film. (Nice.) They apparently made the movie for $7000, which is amazing: the film doesn’t look low budget at all. I really enjoyed the movie. I’ll definitely watch it again. (Yet another Netflix FTW!)
The official Primer website.
[2] Movies
6 November 2010, late morning
I decided to watch Butcher, The Chef, And The Swordsman without reading its description. I saw the photo on the web site, read the title, and assumed it’d be a kick ass movie. Now, the film was good, but it was also not at all what I was expecting. The Butcher, The Chef, And The Swordsman is a slapstick comedy, somewhat akin to Kung Fu Hustle. I was expecting an action movie. The film is split into three stories: one about a butcher, one about a chef, one about a swordsman. (Hence the name.) I liked the Chef’s story the best. The love interest in the Butcher story is incredibly hot. (It’s nuts.) As a film it is very crazy. There are some really bizarre sequences. I think it’s one of the more creative films I’ve seen come out of Asia in recent years.
The Butcher, The Chef, And The Swordsman on the TIFF website.
Movies
5 November 2010, early morning
The second film I saw at TIFF was Red Nights. This was the first of two midnight madness screenings I attended. As in previous years, Midnight Madness is by the far the best movie going experience at TIFF. The lines are long, but the crowd is full of serious-ass cinema fans. Red Nights was a very well done erotic thriller. It marks the return of Carrie Ng to the big screen. Ng plays a murderer. There is an ancient Chinese artifact a few people are trying to get. There is a French lady who scams her. It’s a strange film. I liked it, but I was hoping for ‘more’. I had very high expectations. (Perhaps too high.) The soundtrack was kick ass. It’s definitely worth watching if you have the chance.
The Red Nights page at the TIFF website.
Movies
4 November 2010, early morning
Shima and I watched Capote over the weekend. (Netflix for the win!) I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it sooner. The movie is a look at Truman Capote during the period of time he was writing the book In Cold Blood. I wasn’t familiar with the book prior to hearing about the movie, but after watching the film I very much want to read it. Capote wrote about the murder of an entire family in a small town in Kansas at the hands of two robbers. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Capote, and does an excellent job with the part. All the other actors in the film support him wonderfully. Clifton Craig Collins, Jr who plays the murderer Perry Smith manages to be sympathetic while also always having a creepy undercurrent to everything he does and says. The film suggests there was a real conflict between Capote’s genuine interest in the lives of the murderers and his compulsion and self-interest in finishing his book. There are all sorts of scenes where he goes from having a sincere and serious discussion with Perry to joking around in New York. The contrast in the scenes is stark. The film makers manage to balance the two sides of the man really well. Capote is an excellent film.
The official Capote web site.
Movies
4 November 2010, early morning
I finally signed up for Netflix this past weekend. Everyone had been complaining about the selection, but they seem to have enough movies to keep you busy for quite a while. I noticed they had a film I had been dying to see for ages, Luc Besson’s Angel A. (The trailer is excellent.) The film stars Jamel Debbouze as a down on your luck do-nothing and Rie Rasmussen as a mysterious woman who helps him turn his life around. Rie Rasmussen is smoking hot. The movie basically takes place over the course of a couple days, and more or less opens with an “It’s a Wonderful Life i’m going to jump off a bridge because no one loves me” moment. From there we get to watch Debbouze and Rasmussen interact, and that’s really where the charm of the film comes from. The entire movie is shot in black and white, and looks gorgeous. The cinematography is great. The film also features a pretty awesome sound track. I really enjoyed the movie.
The official Angel A website.
[2] Movies
29 October 2010, early morning
I thought a new milestone in my quest to get people to call the neighbourhood Blansdowne was reached a little while ago when Toronto Life used the name in an article about Drift Bar. Well almost, they referred to the area as Blandsdowne. That doesn’t even make any sense. There is nothing Bland about Blansdowne. More so, where are they getting the extra ‘D’? This is why no one reads Toronto Life.
The Globe and Mail mentioned my neighbourhood by name in their recent article about the area. I was pretty excited, but then I realized they too spelled the name wrong. What local calls the area Blandsdowne? Seriously? (I’m not even going to touch on the super obnoxious “let’s sell homes” tone of this piece.) This is why no one reads the Globe and Mail.
Journalists of the city: Bloor + Lansdowne = Blansdowne.
[4] Bloor and Lansdowne
21 October 2010, early evening
How did I not finish posting about my trip to India? Anyway, the last portion of our time was spent back in Chennai. For the most part we just loitered around in the city. My pictures of Chennai on Flickr. (Or IMG VQVZ) We made one day trip to the scenic coastal town Pondicherry, and to the archaeological site Mahabalipuram. My pictures of Pondicherry and Mahabalipuram on Flickr. (Or IMG VQVZ) You can see all my photos from India in a collection on Flickr. I took these notes to myself on my iPhone, hence the strange change in tense, poor grammar, and what have you.
Read the rest of this post. (1249 words)
[1] Life | India 2010
21 October 2010, early morning
Ward 18 has only gotten better since I moved here. I would like to think that some of that is due to me, but I suspect a fair amount of the credit should go to Adam Giambrone and his staff. Kevin Beaulieu is the first of Adam’s staff that I met when I moved here. He would attend DIG IN meetings when Adam could not make them, or in addition to Adam. He’s always been easy to get a hold of and very quick to respond to inquiries. He’s also very knowledgeable about the area and its issues. I was glad to see that he was running to take Adam’s place in our riding. There are lots of good candidates running in Ward 18, but I think Kevin is by far the best. At the public debates I’ve attended, he’s the only candidate who can ever offer up very specific solutions to the problems in our ward. Most other candidates speak in very broad terms. (“We need more community meetings!” Perhaps, but that isn’t a solution for every single problem ever.) I hope he makes it on to city council. It will be to our collective benefit.
Bloor and Lansdowne | Politics
