Archive for the 'Entertainment' Category

Sundance this year is proving to be uber busy – luckily my friend Susan decided to blog about our experiences thus far.  I will be posting my own perspective once things calm down…  in the meantime, here are Susan’s first and second Sundance Film Festival 2009 blog entries.

How did this happen?  That is, Rage Against the Machine as a “seed” and Paul Simon ends up being selected?

Pandora hiccup

I decided to watch this movie after some post kayaking discussion with Brian, Winsome, and Flan at Bridgeport brew pub. This evening I actually watched the movie (The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007) (TV)) – a documentary arguing that Gore’s movie (An Inconvenient Truth) and the current “winning” global warming theory, isn’t so much, true. The movie proved to be much more to me in that it spurred a bunch of thoughts, vs. just considering another view on the cause of global warming. I organized my comments about this movie below around other movie titles and quotes (plus a book title) – don’t ask why, it just turned out that way.  By the way, you can watch this movie online at stage6 for free – whohoo!

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION:
The movie was quite refreshing in that it really spurred many thoughts for me – particularly around how we think and interact with one another and how so many things are linked together, actually everything… and just how many linkages we may not be aware of. For example, when I listened about the fact that the sun’s magnetic field has more than doubled in the past 50 years and when I saw more correlation graphs (e.g. temperature and CO2) my thoughts went on a tangent (surprise) about other correlations – e.g. cancer and the sun’s magnetic field? Were they both increasing the past x years? Anyhow, no time to look into that – just a thought.

ONLY THE PARANOID SURVIVE:
The movie made me once again realize that we should think on our own. Just because someone is an “expert” doesn’t mean their advice shouldn’t be questioned. This is akin to your doctor being your health consultant vs. someone telling you exactly what you should do. Sure, you can take the latter approach, but you should be aware of the consequences if doing so. That is, one may argue that it takes too much time to do all the research when I can just ask an expert. I can understand that perspective, but again, I am just saying you shouldn’t complain when faced with the consequences. For example, Andy Grove decided to take his prostate cancer problem into his own hands and leverage the medical experts involved, not take their directions verbatim. He survived. Would he have otherwise? Perhaps.

CONSPIRACY THEORY:
Trust is another topic that came to mind when watching this movie. That is, who can we trust these days? The media, our doctors, our scientists, our government? It’s tough to say who we can trust. However, understanding people – their intent, integrity, approach, and background, etc. – helps one better gauge trust. Another trust litmus test is asking the question: “Has the position been argued from the other perspective? ” If it hasn’t, caution in agreeing with the argument may be necessary. This goes for this movie, Michael Moor’s Sicko, books, etc.

SHOW ME THE MONEY JERRY:
The movie highlights the subject of self-preservation in that it is a cause for why the current theory (CO2 is the cause) on global warming is winning out over other theories (e.g. sunspots). In the movie more than one person suggests that jobs, and ultimately money drives the theory more than anything. I find this interesting in that if I zoom out on this topic, what isn’t truly driven by money? How about we setup some graphs that correlate financial motivations and self-preservation with the national and worldwide actions/decisions made in the past 100 years or so? That would be an interesting movie.

WHEN YOU ARE SMART, PEOPLE NEED YOU:
The theory of self-preservation in the movie quite frankly disgusts me. I very much subscribe to the theory that when you are smart people need you. Also, don’t forget, when you are untrustworthy, no one needs you. So if you lose your job, move on and apply your experience and intelligence elsewhere but don’t lose your integrity (it’s hard sometimes). After all, there has to be a related tangent which you are just as passionate about no? Bottom line here, a brain is a terrible thing to waste, each of us needs to make sure we are using ours… (sometimes I think we don’t realize that we aren’t using it).

As I was upgrading to Office 2007 today on my laptop I was listening to music on Pandora.  As a side note, I tried upgrading to Vista on my IBM X60 Tablet and it was a disaster and WASTE of time – holding off now – reasons to be explained in another post perhaps.  Anyhow, I wanted to listen to Pandora on my digital music streamers (they can subscribe to Shoutcast streams) throughout my home but of course my home PC is pretty much incompatible with anything that would capture raw bits from my sound card since it is Vista and many developers don’t know how to code to Vista yet, much less OEM’s coding to Vista driver standards.  Anyhow, I did manage to use Vista’s “compatibility” wizard to get it working.  It rocks.  I can stream ANY audio I listen to on my master PC throughout my home.  I basically am running a Shoutcast server with Spacial Audio’s SimpleCast product doing the encoding.  As they say in Kazakhstan – “very nice”.  BTW, my Office 2007 Outlook upgrade seems to be working ok so far – it (mail) was my biggest worry next to the rest of the Office applications.  SpamBayes, LinkedIn, and gSyncIt still work for me – whew (although LinkedIn.com plugin did make Outlook crash once).

Well, Sundance is here and I am there, along with a ton of others this year. My friend Eric (attending Haas) is organizing a bunch of folks and Stacy, Flan, and I will be joining, along with some from Diamond. Needless to say, there were enough for a class photo.

I am lined up to see about 15 flics, and if half are any good, it’ll be worth it (plus I managed to score on timings this year, allowing me to ski most days). Woohoo!