Phlogiston

A sad day—one of the great stars of our time has passed away: Frasier’s dog Eddie dies aged 16. “A consummate professional.”

Over the last couple of years I have allowed myself to get desperately behind with my movie watching. Determined to catch up with it all, I’ve compiled a list of movies currently at the cinema and ones I’ve missed and will now have to see on DVD. At the cinema, in the next week or so, I want to see:

• Brick
• Thank You for Smoking
• Hard Candy
• United 93

I intend to see Brick tomorrow afternoon or early evening, and hopefully United 93 with James and Sara this weekend. Films I missed at the cinema and will now have to see on DVD (some aren’t out quite yet, but will be in the next few weeks):

• Inside Man
• Brokeback Mountain
• Good Night, and Good Luck
• Walk the Line
• Capote
• Syriana
• Junebug
• Pride and Prejudice
• Hidden
• Night Watch
• Jarhead
• The Family Stone
• King Kong
• A History of Violence
• Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
• Me and You and Everyone We Know
• Match Point
• Million Dollar Baby
• 9 Songs
• Vanity Fair
• Anything Else
• The Machinist
• The Life and Death of Peter Sellars
• Assault on Precinct 13
• Team America: World Police
• Hotel Rwanda
• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
• Vera Drake
• The Dreamers
• Irreversible
• Whale Rider
• Maria Full of Grace
• Finding Neverland

I’ll strike out movies as I’ve seen them and remember to, and I may add to the list of films I want to see on DVD.

Only one day late with this one: Opera have released Opera 9. I’ll shamelessly rip-off the summary of new features from Slashdot’s article:

The new version features correct ACID2 rendering, native support for the SVG Basic profile, a built-in BitTorrent client, support for Microsoft’s designmode and contenteditable extensions, per-site configuration, Atom support, Web Forms 2.0 support, Canvas support (and some Opera-specific extensions), NTLM authentication, some support of parts of CSS3 and lots more. The full changelog is available.

Cory Doctorow gave the Visionary Keynote address at the Red Hat Summit, and they have video of it. He’s a great speaker and it’s worth watching.

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of popular blog BoingBoing, EFF Fellow, and award-winning science fiction author, discusses the circular nature of advancement and restriction in visual art, literature, radio, television, and music. Learn about digital rights management technologies like Broadcast Flag, DMCA, Trusted Computing, and the companies we know and love who are behind this crippleware. Doctorow gleefully illustrates how they threaten consumer choice and have throughout history, and what you can—and should—do about it. The important question: Is it progress or piracy?

The Washington Post is celebrating ten years of being online with three special articles (may require free registration):

Web Site Starts from Memo, Gains Millions of Readers

A history of washingtonpost.com, from a hand-written memo in 1992 to its finally turning a profit last year.

As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry is Forever Changed

Asks some hard questions about the future funding of serious news journalism: as readers flock to online news, will news outlets make enough revenue to fund serious journalism?

Web Users Open the Gates

Discusses how newspapers must adapt and respond to the disruptive power of the web.

“When the Web was born as a commercial content enterprise back in the mid-’90s, we thought it was about replicating — that is, ‘repurposing’ — our news and information franchises online,” Curley said. “The news, as ‘lecture,’ is giving way to the news as a ‘conversation’.”

I’ve no idea whether the articles were supposed to be read in a particular order, but placing them in the order I have makes for a nice read: how they got to where they are today; what the problem is that they face; and, some thoughts on how they need to respond.

While the .com era has been and gone, there’s still plenty of money to be made on the web. The obvious way is to create something free, which people love and flock to in their droves, and just sit and wait for Google, Yahoo, AOL or MSN to buy you. But apparently you can make shit loads of cash even before someone buys you. I had no idea how potentially lucrative signing up with Google Adsense was. See this. The guy runs PlentyOfFish.com, a free online dating site. It’s very no frills. It doesn’t offer what many of the pay dating sites like Match does, and it has nowhere near the coolness factor of the best free ones such as Consumating or OK! Cupid. But right-click on the image of the cheque and you can see that in two months he has earned CA$ 901,733.84. He earns $10,000 a day by doing virtually nothing. Sure he has to make sure the servers are withstanding the load. Maybe he adds the occassional new feature. But that’s it. He created the site, signed up for Google Adsense and then sat on his arse and made money. Here’s an interview with him

I love the new Apple ad campaign. It tells you everything you need to know about why Macs are better.

Anyone interested in how I like to start my day each day may be interested in this little home movie: in iPod/iTunes format, in Quicktime format, or in Windows Media format.

Okay, that’s actually Boards of Canada’s video for their single Dayvan Cowboy. The first part of the video features archive footage of Joseph Kittinger’s record-breaking 1960 skydive from an altitude of 31,300m (outer space, basically). Apparently the footage I sent them of my skydive from the Moon was considered just showing off. In a feat that makes Chuck Yeager’s antics in The Right Stuff seem tame, Kittinger donned a pressure suit, took a helium balloon virtually into orbit, and then did what any right-thinking man would do: leapt off. He was in droguefall for four and a half minutes and reached a speed of 714mph.

Boards of Canada, so named for their love of documentaries by the National Film Board of Canada (each to their own, I guess), are actually an Edinburgh outfit and have been going since 1987. I’m slightly surprised to have only just heard of them.

Thanks to Chris for sending me the link to the video in the first place.

I only noticed last week that Slashdot got a facelift. They’ve done a really good job. They’ve managed to perfectly retain the visual identity of the site even though every part of it has been spruced up. I never thought I’d see the day when I admired Slashdot aesthetically. This also shows the benefits of their having moved over to CSS based presentation. This kind of redesign becomes much much easier.