Halb Mensch. Halb Ding.
Ouzo, is there a liquid more vile, and yet more appropriate for putting the world on notice: “World, I’m ready to party” (Update: Yes there is, and it’s called Sambucca, and that’s what Garret was being lit on fire with in this shot, or so I’m told). At Bjørn and Chloë‘s wedding, Ouzo (capital O) Sambucca (capital S) was what it came to. Miraculously, my 50mm caught it at just the right moment.
It’s an exciting time to be a Pixar/Lucasfilm nerd, to be sure. Michael Rubin let me know — and posted about—that Loren Carpenter, co-founder of Pixar, put a copy Vol Libre, his 1980 CG fractal mountain short, online for our viewing pleasure. And it’s quite something.
Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter on Vimeo
The audience erupted. The entire hall was off their feet and hollering. They wanted to see it again. “They had never seen anything like it,” recalled Ed Catmull. Loren was beaming.
“There was a strategy in this,” said Loren, “because I new Ed and Alvy were going to be in the front row of the room when I was giving the talk.” Everyone at Siggraph knew about Ed and Alvy and the aggregation at Lucasfilm. They were already rock stars Ed and Alvy walked up to Loren Carpenter after the film and asked if he could start in October.
- Page 77, Droidmaker.
Though it’s only related to Loren Carpenter and not so much Vol Libre, Chapter 2 of Out of Control by Kevin Kelly has a very interesting mass-experiment by Loren Carpenter which is worth reading as well. And incidentally, this coincides with the release of the, as usual, wonderful trailer for Toy Story 1 and 2 in 3D.
Bjørn and Chloë‘s wedding was a truly fantastic day in the arms of friends and friends of friends, regrettable only for lasting a mere single day, not nearly enough under such circumstances.
Now, coming back from the mid-lands, we’ve stopped in London for the weekend, figuring it would be a waste to not lay down our hard-earned cash here, when we passed so close by. As it happens, I’m typing this on my brand-new 13” MacBook Pro, which marked a good ending to a great first day.
I know, I know, it’s starting to look more and more as if Binary Bonsai was reborn as a Star Wars and Droidmaker-reblog site after its hiatus, but if I merely updated the older entries with this information, it wouldn’t propagate, and dammit, when I have something to take credit for I’ll damn well use every excuse in the book to take it!
Then there happened to be an unusual series of events at the end of June, 2009, when a couple interesting Lucas stories were emerging. An old home movie from ILM in 1977. An older interview with young George Lucas from the BBC in 1972. My book gives some context to these items.
On June 30 I got a wild hare and generated a PDF of the entire book. I posted it on my blog and I made two public-ish announcements: I posted it on my Facebook page, and I emailed a note about it to a blogger in Europe who had just written something nice about Droidmaker a few days earlier. So I emailed “Binary Bonsai” – he posted it. And that was it.
The word spread globally in a few moments, and in 24 hours there were around 2,000 downloads of the book. A few weeks later there was another spike of interst, bringing the total downloads to about 13,000. In 14 days, more people have read my book than in the prior 4 years. And I finally feel like my work with this is done. #
Exciting for me, as I’ve been a fan of Droidmaker since it came out. I plowed through it in a few days, which is honestly rather rare for me. I hope to have the chance to meet Michael when we’re in California; a fitting encounter on a trip which is already taking us to see Pixar, Skywalker Ranch and a John Williams concert.
I honestly don’t know how all of this could get much better…
I’m hard pressed to come up with a topic as boring as ‘mail’, but I recently took a drastic step to counter my otherwise inate ability to never react to items passing through my inbox. This isn’t revolutionary as such, but it’s helped me tremendously.
I’ve hence found out that what I’ve been running is in essence a lite-esque version Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. It’s ‘lite’ because — on purpose — I don’t receive a whole lot of mail on my private mail address, and at work mail volume isn’t really a particular issue. Privately I keep newsletters and mailing lists to an absolute minimum — I mostly end up in flame wars anyway, so… — and I’ve told most social sites to shut the hell up. In short, I make sure that what enters my inbox is important.
I used to leave all incoming mail in my inbox, except for whatever was filtered into various labels for organizational purposes. I left nothing unread, and if something needed following up on, I starred it. Then I’d forget all about the stars and it would get pushed down as more mail came in, and being lazy, I would happily forget about it. Goto 10.
A while ago I selected everything in my Gmail inbox and archived it. A complete reset of the inbox was needed to start anew, and from that moment on, anything that entered the inbox was either deleted, responded to immediately or left in the inbox. If an item is in the inbox, it’s because I’m not yet done with it, but recon I will be within a day or so. Anything with a longer horizon than that goes into my task list (just out of labs, press SHIFT-T on an open mail to create a task from it), which is hooked into my calendar, and thus under a great deal more control.
Now, when my inbox is empty, I can rest easy, knowing everything is taken care of.
PS: To make this easier for yourself in Gmail, go to the labs tab in settings, and turn on the ‘Send & Archive’ button; this allows you to reply to a mail and automatically archive it when you send it, which speeds up the process.
The distance between the dream and the substance of augmented reality is an infinity of real-world problems. But…
The implications boggle the mind, and while they do, you can read up.
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