The Fountain is a movie of ambition, mystery and darkness

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

In his first major movie, Pi, Darren Aronofsky used a cramped New York City conurbation as the backdrop to the even more cramped mind of the troubled genius protagonist. Then the brilliant Requiem for a Dream saw an expansion out to a wider cast of characters, more open spaces in Brooklyn and, in a few unpleasant scenes late in the movie, the American South. Six years on show that Aronofsky is leaving New York far behind in The Fountain.

Or is he? I seem to remember hearing about a revival of interest in hip New York circles about the “ethnobotanicals” of Central and South America mentioned early on in the movie. How exactly these jungle compounds, Amerindian culture, the Book of Genesis, pyramids and modern medicine weave together with film-making, myth, legend and mysticism must be necessarily complicated; and therefore The Fountain is an epic work of extreme ambition, mystery and darkness.

The movie stars a sullen Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, who is an intense, vulnerable and magnetic anchor for a story that spends much of the time weaving together ethereal threads–the kind that seem to confuse and bother people like this reviewer writing on the-reviewer.net.

Some people find fault with Aronofsky’s ambition and intensity. But that’s what he does, and this movie is one that his fans will find more to like about than not. Here’s an assessment by Weisz as quoted by wired.com:

‘It asks the most adult question of all: How do we relate to our own mortality? But it’s still messing with you on so many levels.’

Good riddance to Tony Blair

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Gordon Brown took over the role of prime minister from Tony Blair today.

Meanwhile, Blair received a major diplomatic post:

‘The international diplomatic Quartet of the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia announced Mr Blair’s appointment as its representative in the search for peace in the region.’

Another typical Bush administration appointment–putting a loyalist in charge of something he doesn’t know how to do. With Hamas violently in charge of the Gaza Strip and a war-monger in charge of the “search for peace” process, this is going to be one long search.

Seeing power pried from the hands of a mad zealot like Blair makes for quite a moment. But John Howson (pictured below via Getty images) probably summed it up best: “Good riddance.”

Or maybe Jonathan Freedland says it best:

‘I have written before that it is an indictment of our system of government that Tony Blair was able to remain in office despite Iraq.’

photo of John Howson by Getty via guardian.co.uk, June 2007

Qwitr 0.2 – and a change in the project title

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

UPDATE: Qwittr has evolved and is now called Flightpath.
————

http://pacificpelican.us/qwittr/beta/qwittr_beta_0_2.php

When I sent out an email to some family and friends to aunch Qwittr a little while ago, one of them wrote back to ask if it was really me that had written it, as I had called it “ad junk” in the subject line, and she also said it sounded kind of like web marketing these days.
Well then I guess that is some measure of success! Please try the Qwittr beta 0.2 yourself and decide what you think of the short messaging platform (be warned–it is rather crude and still near its infancy).
So I have discussed the philosophy of Qwittr enough already–but one thing that I have also mentioned is the need to make the program an open-source project public GPL plug-n-play download that anyone can use or modify. But I have a list of improvements that need to be made, ranging from relatively straightforward for me (streamlining and enhancing the basic PHP architecture) to the reasonably challenging (making the interface nicer with a new stylesheet or some Ajax enhancements) to downright hard (figuring out how to zip together an install file).
But as the farcical name and terminolgy of Qwittr: “What are you quitting now?” and “qweet,” have gone far enough and it will be time to release a user-friendly version, the working name (as Qwittr had been) for the project is being changed to MigratoryMessenger and the public release date is planned for some time in late 2008.

Blogs step into new advertising territory

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

More web 2.0 cred showdown news has broken since I wrote on the front page about this advertising controversy involving blogs using Federated Media. Now crunchnotes.com is sounding this rather bitter note:

‘I’m now pissed off at every single person involved in this. Denton for bringing up a non issue to attack competitors, Malik for folding immediately and making it seem like someone did something wrong, and now Battelle, our agent, saying he wished we had made a disclosure on this.

Any competing ad networks out there want our business, and promise not to throw us under a bus whenever Valleywag attacks?’

This story seems to be breaking very quickly–and Battelle is admitting that “we certainly stepped in it.” In what? Microsoft money?

Twitter and Jaiku–which one, and where to now?

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

I found an interesting article on a PBS blog about the short message service blogs. Basically the writer focuses on Twitter and gives an overall outline.
I think he may have given short shrift to Jaiku, Twitter’s nearest competitor. It is a very cool service as well and actually is a close number two right now in my opinion, with potential to overtake based on how they develop.
I’ve used both services. Check out my pages on the sites:
pacificpelican.jaiku.com
twitter.com/pacificpelican
Since my text messaging on my phone doesn’t usually send out for whatever reason, I like being able to use Twitter for messaging–people that add you as a friend can receive your tweets over their cell phone. So lately I’ve had a lot of fun using Twitter to text message my girlfriend. Twitter also allows updating from a variety of online services like Netvibes and Facebook, and GoogleTalk or AOL IM. I have been using the Twitter Tools WordPress plug-in to cross-post all of my tweets (Twitter messages) on my front page as well as generating “new blog post” when I write a new Diary entry.
Both of these services have been prone to going down or having drops in service levels on either posting public timeline updates and feed updates or in receiving messages from one or more messaging systems. But overall the quality of service has been improving.

Both services allow customized photo backgrounds on user pages, 140 word updates and rss feeds. They both offer “badges,” which are widgets in JavaScript or Flash code that can be put on your Blogger or WordPress or or your Myspace page or wherever you can place code, even your Pageflakes homepage. Don’t make your URL links too long in your messages on Twitter and Jaiku, and don’t use any HTML tags–the former will become a “tinyurl.com” address, which will work but has limitations (like being replaced with a later link you send in another message) and the latter will just appear as ungainly code text on your Twitter page.
Jaiku is a more Euro-centered version, and they are second to Twitter right now I think but they seem to better understand the pure telecom angle in this–getting large numbers of people using either or both of these services could really drive text messaging revenue for telecoms. It’s not surprising that Jaiku is selling a specialized Nokia phone, the S60.
For keeping tabs on what people are saying on the services, you can watch Twittervision 3D and Jaikuvision among many others. Another service in a similar field that I have been using is Tumblr–it’s more of a short blog (“tumbleblog”) than online short message service, which can take a single link or photo as well as a short blog (showing how photos certainly have a place as well in this geo-tagging online mapping/short messages craze–as does the very fascinating Flickrvision)–here’s my page, which mainly uses feeds to track most or all of what I post online:
pacificpelican.tumblr.com
Could these and all the other new messaging platforms all manage carve out their own niche? Twitter is known as the “What are you doing” update service and has a techier feel (for example, reply is done in a “comment on this” blog kind of style on Jaiku whereas it is done by making the @-sign and then the username being responded to the initial word of the tweet) while Jaiku has a slightly better overall web 2.0 feel on the home page. I have no clear preference, but I guess I might start preferring one more than the other depending on who’s using them or which one is more convenient at the moment–for a while I really liked Jaiku, kind of thought I had done the “switch” to it, but lately the range of tools available with Twitter has pulled me back in that direction.

So what is next for the short messaging services? Well here’s one theory. Just as blogs used to be a way for one person to write simple, off the cuff messages to a handful of interested listeners and they have grown into the enormous multi-user data-base-driven CMS-included software packages of today like WordPress, B2evolution and Movable Type, the short message services will expand enormously as they look for ways to grow by incorporating a little feature here and a small one there. What would these changes look like? Well, how about more explicit group setups, allowing people to host their own Jiaku or Twitter powered page (maybe by allowing C-name record based site like Blogger.com and livejournal.com), messaging from more IM platforms (or any in Jaiku’s case), more depth to the home pages in terms of search, features and original content, tagging, and of course, at least one of them should open their source code, or maybe a really cool open source project could be built along those lines. Well, maybe I can get Qwittr out there as one of the attempts.