Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.
Fri 12.31.10 - Goodbye 2010, I am not sure I will miss you. Maybe I will in later years, but not right now. I had hoped for good things this year, and the flat mundanity of it all plus a couple of punctures deflated such hopes. It wasn't all bad, but the good parts were a bit too few and far between.
Ciao bello.
Ok, so I have lived without a TV since 1986 and in the last 20 years or so, I have seen maybe one movie at the theatre once every 3 or so years.
People, I am a failed movie watcher. I try.
I have been trying with Netflix for two years now. I have 50 some odd movies in my Netflix queue, attempting to catch up on all the movies I have missed in my neglectful ways. I started with 2 movies a month and well, that was a grand fiasco. This time last year, I moved to 1 a month.
On Feb. 24, 2010, Netflix mailed me a movie that I have wanted to watch for years. I tried several times to get through it and I finally admitted defeat this week and mailed it back.
Ten months later.
I opened my mailbox today and there was another red envelope. Those bastards.
Let the new cycle of unwatched movie guilt begin.
I love a good Bruce Sterling rant / essay / rambling all over the place critique. The Blast Shack on Wikileaks and its worldwide cultural / political ramifications is one of Bruce's best in recent years, even if his thesis is a bit surprising coming out of the man who has in the past revered all things cyber & cypherpunk.
"The reason this upsets me is that I know so many people just like Bradley Manning. Because I used to meet and write about hackers, "crackers," "darkside hackers," "computer underground" types. They are a subculture, but once you get used to their many eccentricities, there is nothing particularly remote or mysterious or romantic about them. They are banal. Bradley Manning is a young, mildly brainy, unworldly American guy who probably would have been pretty much okay if he'd been left alone to skateboard, read comic books and listen to techno music.Instead, Bradley had to leak all over the third rail. Through historical circumstance, he's become a miserable symbolic point-man for a global war on terror. He doesn't much deserve that role. He's got about as much to do with the political aspects of his war as Monica Lewinsky did with the lasting sexual mania that afflicts the American Republic."
Sit down and read the whole essay, even if you don't agree with Bruce on many points. And if like me you are an annual regular at his SXSW free-for-all, you can hear his voice telling you his thoughts as you read The Blast Shack on the whole WikiLeaks v. the Superpower.
Tues 12.28.10 - The sunset was really beautiful tonight. Truly.
I have lots of thoughts to blog about but am still on Christmas induced small holiday. I will share them on Thursday, as tomorrow is full back at work day, but good work so it is not a burden.
Photo taken by Ms. Jen at the Seal Beach pier with her Nokia N8.
Sat 12.25.10 - Merry Christmas. I hope you had a lovely day with you and yours.
Fri 12.24.10 - Sunny, folks! Bright and shiny clean sunny. The storm has moved out and Mom and I went for a walk down to River's End. You can see in the far background, Mt. Baldy with snow on it. It is the day after a winter's storm that make living in LA/SoCal worth it, at least until the first good heat wave.
Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.
Thurs 12.23.10 - After nearly a week of rain, it was a delight to have some sun peeking through the clouds and to have folks out and about around Seal Beach. I went out to the pier to take these photos with my Nokia N8.
Tues 12.21.10 - Happy Winter Solstice to those of us who live north of the Equator and Happy Summer to those who live south. May your Christmas be Merry, your Festivus festive, your Kwanzaa be creative, and your New Year full of happy.
Photo of my computer after a very long day taken with my Nokia N8.
Mon 12.20.10 - Amanda and Andrew Hamilton are visiting and we had an opportunity to hang out tonight, this photo was towards the end of the evening. Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8, no flash.
Mobile:
Tech Crunch on Guest post: Symbian OS - one of the most successful failures in tech history
Qt Developer Blogs on Experimental packages for Symbian development on Linux
Qt Mobile Development Online Training
O'Reilly on HTML5 Mobile Web Development
Sarah Parameter on Designing for iOS: Life Beyond Media Queries
asymco on What has Android done for Apple?
HTML5:
Think Vitamin on 23 Essential HTML 5 Resources
Chris Heilmann on A call for quality HTML5 demo markup
Delicious:
Tech Crunch on Why Sunsetting Delicious Matters
Jeremy Keith on Home-grown and Delicious
Misc:
Userfocus on 7 myths about paper prototyping
FeldThoughts on Just Make it Faster
All photos taken this evening by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8 with the flash off.
Dave Winer at the Scripting News posted the New WikiLeaks documentary, entitled "WikiRebels" today in on his site. I watched all four YouTube videos that Dave posted tonight in less than an hour and it was time well spent, as the documentary gives the background on WikiLeaks, as well as interviewing at least 6 of the folks involved with WikiLeaks as well as various journalists and politicians.
WikiRebels was made by SVT and treads a fine line between being sympathetic to WikiLeaks and presenting the information from both sides.
The documentary spends a good ten plus minutes on the video of the Baghdad shooting of civilians and Reuter's journalists. Go watch it, as the information genie is out of the bottle and we all as a society need to be informed.
Tues 12.14.10 - The nice folks at WOMWorld invited me to join them and many other folk at Club Nokia in downtown Los Angeles for the Tron Legacy pre-view screening that Disney and Nokia were sponsoring as well as an LA mini-launch party for the Nokia N8.
The evening started with a pre-party on the first floor of Club Nokia of which the dj was playing music on the verge of too loud to talk, but we endeavored to try anyways. It was good to see a wide range of LA, OC, and outland blogging/twitter friends, as well as meet new ones.
The movie was shown upstairs in stadium style seating. I must confess that I am a cinema jacobite and have not been to a movie at a theatre since 2004 or 2005, and let's not even discuss how I have had the same unwatched dvd from Netflix since last February. The upswing is that I am not necessarily the best person to invite to a movie. But I did behave myself.
I liked Tron Legacy. It was a cute movie. It was beyond overly loud at Club Nokia and I spent half the movie with my fingers in my ears. I didn't take to the 3D glasses, so I only wore them when I really had to, mostly in the computer generated fight & flight scenes. Even though the sound was too loud and the 3D glasses made my eyes go askance, I enjoyed the film.
The story was a fairly simple but good father and son tale with technology and gaming culture woven into it with a well thought out sci-fi world. Jeff Bridges' Kevin Flynn as a 60 something zen-dude-programmer made me laugh as it was a bit too close to some of the older guys I know in California who lived fully through the 1960s and have lived to tell the tales. I think the Church of the Dude folks need to open a sub-denomination for the Church of the Zen-Flynn-Dude.
The most amusing part of the evening was when security was inspecting folks before walking into the seating area for the film. The security folks kept telling everyone that all cameras had to be checked in but phones could be turned off and put in your pocket or purse. Our group was all in possession of 12 megapixel Nokia N8 camera phones, of which I had been giving informal demos of the great video recording capacity at the pre-party, when the security fellow looked at me and said after shouting again about cameras needing to be checked in, "Oh, you have a phone, just turn it off." And then he waved me through.
After Tron Legacy was over, I decided that I had to take photos of folks in the 3rd floor lounge adjacent to the cinema area, as the lighting was an amazing lavender and the walls had a silky silver brocade material. Of which did not last long before the security ushered us down many flights of stairs to the exit area of LA Live. On to home.
Thanks to Nokia, Disney, and WOMWorld for the nice evening, good laughter, and a good film.
Mon 12.13.10 - Ms. Jen happy as can be to have friends visiting from a far.
Yesterday, Chanse Arrington asked on Twitter:
"What are some things I should be doing in 2011 to get more developers on board with Nokia in the US?"
Here are my suggestions as a designer | developer who has been working on an app or two for the Nokia ecosystem:
1) Take over the Forum Nokia twitter account and use it to update followers on what is new content on Forum Nokia and what is new in developer tools for Nokia. Right now the @forumnokia twitter account is just a mimic to the various Nokia marketing tweets that are going around, but it could be SO MUCH MORE.
The Forum Nokia website is a bit of a beast and many useful parts are updated frequently but there is not a full RSS feed for the whole site and the new content is difficult to find, so use Twitter as that RSS feed. Let us know what new articles have been added, let us know about additions to the wiki, use twitter to highlight the best and most useful of Forum Nokia today not just what the upper dudes at marketing think are important this week.
Also use this twitter account to announce webinars, cool mobile & dev conferences (even non-Nokia), contests, blog posts by mobile devs who are writing about Qt/dev tutorials and tips, and what the community is up to, feature apps, etc. And like @NokiaCareUS and @womworldnokia, have @forumnokia have a set of photos of the tweeters for the account & their names so that it personalizes the account.
Use Twitter to make us excited about Forum Nokia's content and thus excited about developing for Nokia devices.
2) Convince the Qt folk to make sure that the full Mac Qt with Symbian & Qt Mobility gets released extra super soon. Like it or not North American mobile app developers love their Macs, even if Nordic/Europeans are still PC/Windows committed. If you want to win over North America, get all of the Nokia dev tools fully working on Mac & Linux as well as Windows dev platforms. Steve Jobs has kindly convinced developers to dump their PCs for Macs over the last five plus years, so rather than fight it or be angry about it just give us all the tools we need to develop without hassle or dual boots or having to switch to another OS. Be developer OS agnostic, make great tools that work across the platforms so that developers can create great mobile apps.
3) Highlight the Qt Quick and other Nokia web runtime tools to web designers and developers on Twitter to show them how easy it is to transfer their current skill set of HTML/CSS/Javascript to developing apps for Nokia devices. There are quite a few great tools for web designers to start creating mobile apps, but they need to know where to start. Highlight videos, webinars, and online blog / Forum Nokia tutorials on how to create mobile web apps and mobile web sites from scratch.
Many of the current resources are native mobile app focused with the assumption that the developers have a full four year computer science bachelors background and are now Java or C++ engineers at large companies, when there are tons and tons of web designers and developers out there who could be reached but are currently being alienated by the current offerings.
Case in point, this last week's Forum Nokia webinar on Qt Quick, where the presenter just assumed that the audience were C++ programmers who had already created Qt desktop apps and were moving into mobile, rather than presenting the material as a great place for web designers & developers with javascript experience to get started with Qt Quick / QML and mobile app development.
I have more ideas, but a great Forum Nokia twitter account, fully powered Qt for Mac with Mobility and Symbian, and a real outreach to web designers & developers is where I would start.
Well, this was silly of me. Really silly of me to promise you all that I would go through each year of mobile photo blogging and then highlight the best of each year.
Yesterday, Friday, I went through each post from 2005 and picked out about 12-14 photos that were my favorite. This took over 2 hours. By the time I was done selecting, I didn't have time to make thumbnails and then write the post. Today, I also blanched about taking another couple hours to finish up 2005 and then do 2006, amongst all the other work and personal related things I had to do today.
Sorry to tease y'all with my over-ambition but this week is very busy and I don't think I will get to daily photo essay of each year.
Here is the list of URLs that I selected yesterday, feel free to go view them.
01.17.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/01/looking-up.html
02.02.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/02/nancy-laughing.html
03.12.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/03/sxsw-day-2-lunc.html
04.09.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/04/at-the-poppy-re.html
06.04.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/06/sat-geek-party.html
06.13.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/06/in-perfect-repo.html
07.01.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/07/at-the-warped-t.html
07.10.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/07/note-to-goat.html
09.10.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/09/frankie.html
10.31.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/10/happy-halloween.html
11.07.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/11/image-46jpg-12.html
11.22.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/11/image-48jpg-11.html
12.03.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/12/image-49jpg-17.html
12.06.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/12/image-49jpg-15.html
12.09.05 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/12/image-50jpg-3.html
12.19.10 - http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/2005/12/scruffy-belle-t.html
All the photos above where taken, to the best of my knowledge, with my Nokia 7610.
The really interesting part about taking the time to go over all of my blog posts from 2005 was how hopeful I was that year. I would like to be that hopeful again.
Here are two YouTube videos where an Illinois State Senator, Rickey Hendon, and US Congressman, Ron Paul, throw down/peach to their colleagues about lies, hypocrisy, politics, telling the truth, DADT, Wikileaks, and what it means to do the right thing.
Illinois Senator Hendon:
US Congressman Paul:
I want to know where I can donate to Senator Hendon to encourage him to run for the US Senate.
Thurs 12.09.10 - Today is the 6th anniversary of my having a camera phone in my hands and using the phone's camera and internet connectivity to send photos to this blog & Flickr as well as using Nokia's Lifeblog (r.i.p.) to mobile blog photos and text to this blog and others.
This six years has been the most consistently creative six years of my life, as taking photos daily with an internet connected camera that is always on you has honed my eye, sharpened my senses, made me *really* look & observe even in the most mundane moments, and has inspired many other areas of my life both my creative and other parts of my life.
Since SXSW 2003 when I heard Adam Greenfield & Joi Ito talk about how camera phone photography and mobile blogging was taking off in Japan, I yearned for my own camera phone. In July of 2004, Erika and I went to the "Sent" exhibition at The Standard that Xeni Jardin & SixSpace Gallery curated. My desire for a camera phone increased, as I hated that my computer's hard drive had become a cemetery for photos never posted to the web, I just wanted to shoot and send.
On Dec. 9th, 2004, when I picked up the Nokia 7610 and drove to AT&T to re-up my contract with a fancy new, shiny unlimited data plan and then started taking photos and moblogging them, a whole new world opened up to me. A world of mobile photography, mobile creativity, and community that I am very glad to have participated in the last six years.
I would like to thank (then) Nokia's Charlie Schick and (then) Creative Intelligence's Kristen Bennett for taking a chance on me for the Lifeblog Wasabi four month project from Dec 2004 to March 2005. I am grateful that Nokia has continued a six year run of excellence in producing the best camera phones, here is to another six!
To celebrate my 6th Anniversary of camera phone photography & blogging, aka Moblogging, I will be posting my fave photos from each of the six years over the next week, starting with my two favorites from 2004 above.
Celebrate along with me: take a photo or two or three or more with your camera phone and post them to your blog. To life & creativity!
Wed 12.08.10 - Photo taken this morning by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.
Quote of the Day:
"Wow! Assange cornered and detained, his bank account closed, Paypal refuses to accept donations from him and his lawyers are being harassed. All that mess for a broken condom?In other news, the Bin Laden family is still wealthy."
- Anon, Comment #82, Boing Boing post on Assange arrested in Britain
More on the WikiLeaks' Julian Assange's arrest:
The Guardian's WikiLeaks US embassy cables: live updates : This is a great, big round up of live blogged links, excerpts, and commentary from The Guardian.
Mefi discusses Julian Assange Turns Himself In
Salon's Glenn Greenwald on The lawless Wild West attacks WikiLeaks
Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Making Light on I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of people suddenly facepalmed and then were silent: Commenter #7, Steve C, "And in related news, the TSA will celebrate the Fourth Amendment."
Update on 12.08.10:
Evan Hanson in Wired on Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America: "Instead of encouraging online service providers to blacklist sites and writing new espionage laws that would further criminalize the publication of government secrets, we should regard WikiLeaks as subject to the same first amendment rights that protect The New York Times. And as a society, we should embrace the site as an expression of the fundamental freedom that is at the core of our Bill of Rights, not react like Chinese corporations that are happy to censor information on behalf of their government to curry favor."
Sorry, we have had a daily blogging malfunction here at Black Phoebe.
Ms. Jen will return the to regular scheduled programming within the hour or two and clear out some of the backlog of photos & thoughts from the last five days.
((O.o))
**** Where did all the time go? ****
Wed 12.01.10 - Visit Baby Hernandez 2.0 (as well as Paige, Alex & Diego).
Thurs 12.02.10 - Very unhappy back muscles trigger bad headache. Day lost.
Fri 12.03.10 - Eoin & Sally's wedding.
Sat 12.04.10 - Quiet day spent reading, no photos taken.
Sun 12.05.10 - Walk with Mom & Scruffy at Irvine Regional Park in the Rain, Dave & Lora Mau's holiday party.
**** [/there it went] ****
Wed 12.01.10 - Today I went over to meet the newest Hernandez - Greyson, who was born on 11.22.10. Greyson was lovely. Diego was delightful. And it was fun to hang out.
All photos of Family Hernandez taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.
.
I dedicate this post to Sean, who died in 1989. A bright life cut all too short.