Impulse

It’s offi­cial: I’ve decided to sup­port Obama in the upcom­ing elec­tion.  More than that: I’m a del­e­gate! I’ll be going to the county cau­cus to turn in my vote and choose a state con­ven­tion del­e­gate (I’d love to go to the state con­ven­tion, but I’m booked to shoot a wed­ding that day).  By my math, my del­e­gate vote rep­re­sents votes for 19.67 peo­ple in my neighborhood. 

The cau­cuses this after­noon were amaz­ing.  Record turnouts.  I hap­pened to drive from one end of Seattle (Ballard) to my house in Wallingford.  All along the way, I saw hun­dreds of peo­ple walk­ing to their polling places.  It was the great­est dis­play of com­mu­nity I’ve seen in years.  Yeah, I know it’s corny, but it made me feel all warm in side. 

At my polling sta­tion, a local church, the line to get in went around the cor­ner then down the block (see pic: this is the line in front of me to the cor­ner; the line behind me was longer).  They had to break us up and present to us in shifts.  Some precincts had to meet out­side because there wasn’t enough room inside the church. 

Our precinct had a dra­matic upset.  At first tally of votes, Obama won 4 del­e­gates, Clinton 1, and 1 went unde­cided since we had sev­eral unde­cided votes.  Then, a cou­ple made a pas­sion­ate speech in favor of Kucinich and chat­ted up the unde­cid­eds in our group.  Their strat­egy worked: by the final tally, Kucinich picked up the final vote (their logic: send a few Kucinich del­e­gates to the con­ven­tion to force the big 2 cam­paigns left by court­ing the Kucinich vote). 

Myself, I stuck with Obama through­out.  Though both Clinton & Obama are excel­lent can­di­dates, I think we need inclu­sive pol­i­tics more than divi­sive politics.

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This photo is cool and amus­ing on so very many levels.

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I made some good progress this week on my Race Across America doc­u­men­tary.  It’s really com­ing together, and know what?  It’s not half bad! 

My break­through this week was real­iz­ing that I don’t have to stick to the chronol­ogy so dog­mat­i­cally.  Near the end of the race, for exam­ple, there were a cou­ple of days near dur­ing which the team was obsessed by the Brazilian team.  In the mid­dle of this com­pet­i­tive push, the our crew chief had to leave the race because he couldn’t get the time off for the full race from his boss.  I strug­gled with this in pre­vi­ous drafts — do I inter­rupt the whole Brazilian thing with Paul’s exit, or do I pull that out, break­ing the chronol­ogy but telling the story bet­ter?  Seems like an easy choice when I put it that way, but it took me a lit­tle while to real­ize the obvious. 

All of this is allow­ing me to keep the movie inter­est­ing while stick­ing to my The War Room inspired verite style I chose when I started this whole thing.  There’s not a sin­gle inter­view or talk­ing head in the War Room.  Being a doc­u­men­tary still pho­tog­ra­pher, I thought this would be a nat­ural style for me to slide into.  Having done it, I’ve got to say, “Damn, it’s hard!”  Watching War Room again, I see the sub­tlety of their work — it feels like you’re a fly on the wall, watch­ing events tran­spire in real time as Bill Clinton ran for office, but the film­mak­ers care­fully rearranged events slightly.  Events are grouped to fol­low sto­ry­lines, so that those sto­ries play out with­out much distraction. 

So while I’m rear­rang­ing things, here’s a lit­tle some­thing to keep you busy.  It’s the first 15 min­utes of the movie — pretty much every­thing lead­ing up to the start of the race.  I haven’t shown this sec­tion in its entirety to any­one yet, so I’d love any feed­back you have.  

First off, is it inter­est­ing?  If not, where do you tune out?

Second, is any­thing con­fus­ing or dis­ori­ent­ing?  Do you feel you know what’s going on in this and what this movie is about? 

Anything else stand out in your mind?  (good or bad)

Don’t worry about the sound edit­ing or color bal­ance & such.  I’ll do that once I’ve got the slic­ing & dic­ing done.

And for those, just join­ing us, here’s the whole saga of me mak­ing this movie.

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This is a very cool video.   I haven’t made my final deci­sion yet (we cau­cus on Feb 9th in Washington), but I’ve been lean­ing pretty far towards the Obama camp.  This cer­tainly is an inter­est­ing race, bring­ing up a lot of pent-up needs: opti­mism, change, prag­ma­tism, change, integrity, change, altru­ism, change, lead­er­ship, change. 

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I just fin­ished up some doc­u­men­ta­tion for my last gig.   9,700 words; 41 pages; 12.5 hours.  That’s 776 words / hour — solidly above my 500 w/h aver­age.  I love when it flows.  (Yes, as you can tell from the word to page count ratio, it was pro­ce­dural docs, thus lots of whitespace).

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I am, as you may have noticed, a geek.  Total nerd.

I like hang­ing out in cafes with good food & good wire­less net­work access.  But, I get bored going to the same place all the time.  So, I decided to start a list.  Being a nerd, I want it acces­si­ble from every com­put­ing device I can access — phone, lap­top, jott, etc. 

Being a good natured nerd, I thought I’d share.   So, so for those in the Seattle area, if you’re ever in need for some cozy place to curl up with your lap­top, just go to here, or here, and you’ll see it.

Got a rec­om­men­da­tion for me?  Post it in the com­ment thread here. 

Remember: Technology is for sat­is­fy­ing crav­ings easily.

Update: Googling around, I found Jeff Carlson’s list

(photo from flickr by bru­tal)

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Just had to try this out.  Here, for your view­ing plea­sure, episode 15 of sea­son 1 of the 80’s smash hit TV show Buck Rogers.  Shoulder pads from the future!

Yes, I had a huge crush on Erin Grey…

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Moles & trolls; molls & trolls.  Work, work, work, work, work.  Hope everyone’s Thanksgiving week­end went well.

Me, I spent the last three days in front of a com­puter. Not that unusual, I know, but this time I had sin­gu­lar pur­pose: to bring­ing up a web site.  Over at Lilipip, we’re gear­ing up for our beta launch later this month.  I’ve been writ­ing migra­tion scripts, tweak­ing video com­pres­sion set­tings, build­ing automa­tion, test­ing the site, and keep­ing up with the flurry of emails from my equally busy col­leagues.  Ahh, the smell of fresh startup.  Stay tuned and I’ll keep you informed.  We’re very excited.

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I just fin­ished the first com­plete assem­bly of my RAAM doc­u­men­tary.  Heck, I’ll even call it the offi­cial 1st rough cut.  It only took me a year and a half, but hey, I made it this far, and that’s far­ther than I would’ve guessed a while back.  In a few days, I’ll watch it from start to fin­ish for the first time to see if it makes any sense.  After a few tweaks, I’ll unleash it on my unsus­pect­ing friends.   Bwahh, ha hah!! 

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Sometimes the bat­tle between good and evil is really the bat­tle between what I want long term vs what I want here and now.

Up until recently, I was only merely curi­ous about the TV show Heroes.  (Having my TV hooked up only to my DVD player gives me lots more free time, but takes me out of pop cul­ture).  That curios­ity ended when I walked into Hollywood Video ten days ago to rent the first disk of Heroes.  Two hours later, I looked at the clock and thought, “11:30… They’re still open for another half hour.  Plenty of time to get the next disk.”  I man­aged to hold out for a day, but I gave in.  One week and 21 episodes later, I’d seen the entire first season.

The first step towards recov­ery is admit­ting you have a problem.

I’m com­pletely addicted to Heroes.  Sure, the writ­ing falls flat every once and a while (Why did Niki help Peter in the finale when she’d never met him?), but it’s fun! A good mix of com­edy, sus­pense, and cathar­sis (who wouldn’t be attracted to as story about aver­age Joes fight­ing back the evil malaise many of us feel?).  I need more.

But there’s a prob­lem in Metropolis: to catch up with the cur­rent sea­son, I need to watch the first seven episodes of sea­son 2 — and these are kept under the lock and key of my neme­sis, DRM.  The pre­mier and 2nd episode are only avail­able on Amazon’s Unboxed — which only plays through Amazon’s DRM-laden down­load­able player — and I have sworn years ago to boy­cott all DRM products.

Curses.

I hate DRM because it puts the bur­den of main­tain­ing the media industry’s aging busi­ness model on the shoul­ders of tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies.  I hate it because it assumes that all cus­tomers are unscrupu­lous.  More prac­ti­cally, I hate it because DRM schemes pre­vent me from play­ing my media the way I want.  (e.g. Amazon’s player makes it impos­si­ble to watch those two Heroes episodes on my big TV in front of my comfy couch).  Thus, years ago, I vowed to fight DRM by boy­cotting all things DRM (includ­ing iTunes), and donat­ing time and money to fel­low cru­saders like the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and iPac. 

But I really want to see those episodes.  I need them.  It’d be so easy to just fork over the $2 each, install Amazon’s damnable player, and feed my addi­tion on through my lap­top.  Who’s going to know? 

It’s a bat­tle of short term gain — sat­is­fy­ing my Heroes crav­ing — vs long term gain: elim­i­nat­ing DRM from the mar­ket­place.  Selfish needs vs the com­mon good.  A multi-dimensional con­flict of desires.  All heroes must go to their Personal Hell.

And so I must wait.……

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