A "Lifestream" Experiment

So I'm trying something new. For the next two weeks or so, Erikemery.com will go dark and I'm going to move all my blogging to ErikHanberg.com, which I've created using a service called Posterous.

Despite working with other blogging systems on a variety of sites I've created (Wordpress, Textpattern, Drupal, and Expression Engine) I've never seen a compelling reason to switch ErikEmery.com away from Blogger. Switching seemed like I was just going sideways--from one blogging platform to another. None of the other systems let me down anything that was really new from what Blogger let me do.

But I've discovered a service called Posterous that may allow me to do something different: move beyond just blogging and dip a toe in the waters of a "lifestream."

Let me be clear. I think the word lifestreaming is kinda dumb. But the concept it describes is actually pretty close to where my "online self" has been moving: combining "status" updates with blogging so that continued reading would give you a sense of my life.

My blogging has been a mix of three main things:

1. sharing my opinion, sometimes as part of an online discussion, but perhaps more often in my own private echochamber. :)
   
2. updating friends, family, neighbors, and readers, about where I am (ie, travel blogging) and what I've seen (ie, reviews of movies, theater, books, etc).
3. posting links to things I've found interesting.

But I've gradually started moving the status updates to Twitter and interesting links to Google Reader. Sure, they're both in the sidebar. But I feel like I could handle this a little better.

Posterous, which I'll be trying out in force for the two weeks, seems to be an opportunity to consolidate. The service works entirely via email. If I want to post a gallery of images, I just email the pictures and they show up in a handy flash gallery. If I want to post to Twitter and my blog at the same time, I have a separate email for that. Same if I want to post to Flickr and my blog. So I can draft different things to go to different places by simply using a different email address. But they will still all be assembled at ErikHanberg.com using Posterous.

Because of the direct email to post system, I'm expecting that I'll get a lot more "squib" content up directly from my phone: a short burst of writing somewhere between an essay and a Tweet, often  accompanied by a photo or two.

So. This is a two week experiment. During this time, I'm going to be on Madeline Island in Lake Superior. When I get back, my college roommate Joe from Minnesota will be in town for a few days and then after that our friend Deborah from the Netherlands will be here for two days. The next two weeks will be a hive of activity, and I hope I'll have a lot to share.

RSS readers--don't worry. If you're subscribed to the Feedburner feed, I'll change the address of the feed so that you get the Posterous content for the next two weeks. For anyone who wants to make sure they get content no matter where I move things to, here is the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ErikEmeryHanberg

I'll re-evaluate how this works. If things go well, I'll make it official and move everything over to ErikHanberg.com.

Be sure to visit!

Ebert on the Academy's change

Here's what Ebert thought:

Thinking it through, I suspect (1) more indie films will be nominated than the Academy expects; but (2) that the larger field will fragment the vote, so that the Best Picture winner will be a major studio picture. But it's almost always like that anyway. The most visible smaller pictures that won were "Chariots of Fire" (1981), "Annie Hall" (1977) and "Slumdog Millionaire" (2008).

The slumdog may have been the straw that broke the camel's back. Know what? In a field of ten, I think it would have been the winner.

Oscars decide we can now pick 10

The Academy Awards announced today that they are going to have 10--count 'em 10--movies nominated for Best Picture.

Allow me to discuss for a second.

The Positives

On the one hand, this helps make room for commercially successful pictures in a field that for the last 10 years has been crowded by arthouse films. Last year The Dark Knight certainly would have been a nominee for Best Picture had the field been expanded to 10. This is a good thing. The Dark Knight should have been included last year over films like The Reader, which was good, but certainly not "Best Picture" material.

And because of that, we have to assume that the Academy thinks it will improve Oscar night ratings. If the commercial favorites of the year are nominated, then--in theory--more people will tune in to see if they've won.

We can also assume that it helps the studios sell more movie tickets and DVDs. Being able to put "Nominated for Best Picture" has a certain cash value.

There's also a sense that some years the Oscar field is just ... weak. Like last year's slate: Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and The Reader. Nothing was particularly great.

The net effect of having 10 nominees would seem to be saying, "We'll always have something good on the list." On the other hand the list will almost certainly have something bad, too.

So with the change, hopefully we'll see a film like Up be nominated. Hopefully.

The Downside

Which brings me to the downside.

The Oscar "fight." With 10 films, that's 5 new films that the studios get to try to promote as Best Picture material. With a larger field to vote from, votes will likely be more spread out, meaning that well-placed marketing, and a concentrated effort (read: Weinstein) might push the balance of votes to a film that only a fraction of the voters liked.

It's the pluralism effect. With 5 films nominated, each has a claim to 20% of the vote. If you figure that one film has no chance, then you can assume that the remaining films have a claim to 25% of the vote. With that kind of distribution, I think it's fair to assume that a winning film can only grab 40 - 60% of votes.

But with 10 ... well. Each film has a claim to 10% of the vote. Figure 3 don't have a chance. That means each now has 14%. It seems unlikely that any given film can pull enough votes from the other six that they can get to the same kind of percentage. That means that a much smaller percentage of voters will have voted for the winning film (with the exception of years when there is a virtual lock, like Titanic and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.)

The other net effect is that the voters will now have to see 10 films instead of 5. Is that such a big deal? Maybe not. But it also might mean that smaller films are more likely to get overlooked. I'm glad that the system will help bring commercial films back in. But it will be interesting to see whether art films will be able to hack it.

My other concern: more and more of the actually good movies released in the fall. I don't know if it's bad to have a "movie season" but if more studios hold off their better work, it's going to make the spring and summer that much worse for movie-going.

Net Effect

I figure that, in the end, the real question should be whether better movies will win Best Picture. It seems that in years where there is no really great film nominated (like last year), votes will edge toward mainstream films that are now in the running. But in years where there is a great film, I think they would still probably win.

In which case ... maybe the net effect is not so bad. If great films will still win, then why not reward the very very good commercial films in years where there is no great film?

The last year the Academy allowed 10 films to be nominated for Best Picture was in the 40s. Look at the options:

Casablanca
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Heaven Can Wait
The Human Comedy
In Which We Serve
Madame Curie
The More the Merrier
The Ox-Bow Incident
The Song of Bernadette
Watch on the Rhine

How many have you seen?

I've only seen Casablanca, the winner.

Of course there are some years when the best film doesn't win. The most obvious in recent memory was Forrest Gump, which should have been beaten by either The Shawshank Redemption or Pulp Fiction. If it's going to happen with 5 nominees, then it will probably happen with 10. I just don't see any reason yet why it will happen more often.

I started this post thinking I was going to pan the Academy for the decision. But I seem to have talked myself to the other side. I think this is a net benefit for movies. We'll have to judge after a few years.

That Wacky Governor

I've been interested by the reports about the "disappearance" of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. At some point over the weekend, reporters started to wonder where he was (I haven't quite figured out why). His staff announced that he hiking the Appalachian Trail ... alone. And that his wife and his staff didn't know how to get in contact with him.

Turns out he was actually in Argentina? Weird.

Update. Oops. Looks like it was a South American affair. You have to wonder if disappearing to Argentina and not telling your staff or anyone else apparently is an attempt to be found out. Surely he would have known someone would start to look for him?

Next Update. I feel bad about calling him wacky. I thought he was just a little non-traditional for a governor. This is less wacky and more sad.

My new phone!

A friend suddenly lost touch sensitivity on her iPhone, and so offered to buy my original iPhone if I were interested in upgrading. (She has a jailbroken phone on T-Mobile, so an original iPhone with no AT&T contract was ideal for her). For me, I got to upgrade to a sweet new iPhone 3GS for very little down.

The phone is pretty cool! I like the digital compass, though it's slightly different at different times. I'm guessing it's handy for getting a general sense of direction, not for precise orienteering.

I've been playing around with voice control. Seems to work well for phone calls, and it's results have been mixed for music.

The camera quality is a noticable improvement too. And I had fun testing the "Find My iPhone" feature, where I logged onto me.com and it showed me a map of where my phone was and gave me the option to have it play a noise (handy if you've lost your phone or if it's been stolen).

And it is most definitely faster. I haven't spent too much time playing on that yet to tell, but apps seem to load faster (the camera used to be incredibly slow) and the Internet seems faster too.

So whoo-hoo! I didn't re-buy last year when the phone improved from the original iPhone to the 3G. But this seems like a good jump to make.

Fun with voice control.

So ... I got the iPhone 3GS. More on that in the next post.

But I've been trying to use the voice control, which in addition to making calls also works for music. My conversation went something like this.

Me: "Play The Beatles."

3GS: "Playing The Eagles."

Me: "Play Love Me Do."

3GS: "Playing songs by U2."

Me: "Play Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band."

3GS: "No matches found"

Me: "Play The White Album."

3GS: "Playing songs by Mel Torme."

Me: "Play Yesterday."

3GS: "Playing album Ray."

Me: "Play album Abbey Road."

3GS: "Playing album Abbey Road."

Success!

Turns out there are some key phrases to use. Like "Play songs by" tells it to look in band names. I'm still trying to figure out some of the specific commands. Looks like I can't ask for a specific song. But I can ask for a certain artist, playlist, or album.

Microsoft's Bing

I haven't seen anything yet with Microsoft's new search engine that would encourage me to switch from Google. Especially because ... well, my entire life is tied to Google at this point.

But I will say that Bing has some incredible photography. They change the picture every day. Here's today's.

And they don't always make it clear what they're taking a picture of, which means I usually click to find out (this is New Zealand by the way). It's pretty smart.

Back with Office

When I got my new laptop in February, I was frustrated because I couldn't find my Office for Mac CD. I had loaded it onto my desktop but could not for the life of me find it again.

So I've been using the Mac iWork suite. Pages, for a word processing program, is just fine. I haven't tried to do anything too complex in it--mail merges or labels or anything. But for writing, it's been no problem. Numbers, on the other hand, drove me absolutely freaking nuts.

I live and die by my spreadsheets.

When I was at the Grand, I created intricate spreadsheets of attendance. I could tell you how many matinee tickets we sold on Tuesdays in 2004. I knew the average concession purchase per patron. Every month I reported to the Board, along with the month financials, a page I called "10 Important Numbers." This was a handy business trick I'd read about somewhere. The idea is that a small data set of numbers and ratios can tell you a lot about the health of a business--if you chose the right numbers.

Now that Mary and I are self-employed, I have not given up on my spreadsheets. In fact, I feel like I spend more time with them. Monthly hours worked, monthly billed, sorted by client, sorted by spreadsheet, graphed in bar charts, line charts, and pie charts.

I know that sounds a little dorky, but it's so helpful for planning and for really knowing how things are going.

Anyway, Numbers was just never up to the task for me, but I've been using it for the last five months. And then! I found the Office CD! Now that I have it back I've converted my Numbers spreadsheets back to Excel.

If there is any Microsoft product I love as much as my Mac stuff, it's Excel. That program rules.

Re-reading "The Pillars of the Earth"

It's been years since I've re-read a book. But after re-reading the Harry Potter series, I seem to have gotten into it again. I just finished re-reading Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth.

This is a fun read--one of those long, sprawling 1,000 page books with a bunch of interweaving melodramatic plot lines--but it also has some interesting history of England in the 12th century. The main through-line is centered around the building of a cathedral, but there's a lot more to it than just that. I loved it the first time and discovered it was still pretty dang good the second time.

I wanted to re-read it because I am interested in Follett's sequel, World Without End. I have no idea what that book is about, but I thought I should know where the first book left off.

It also made me interested in some medieval English political history, as it did the first time I read it. But this time I had Wikipedia handy. I started with William the Conqueror and read through the succession of English kings up through Henry VI, who became king when he was eight months old in 1422.

Maybe I'll try to go through the next 500 years of kings and queens the same way tonight.

Murders in NYC

The New York Times has an interactive map of all homicides in the city since 2003. It's a pretty interesting map, since it's sortable by gender, race, borough, weapon, etc. Most of the murders are in Brooklyn.

One random fact I noticed: there hasn't been a homicide in Central Park in the last 6 years.

In all, there have been 3,402 homicides in the last 6 years, with an average of 540 per year. That's a big number, but interestingly, out of the ten largest US cities, New York has the lowest crime rate (as of '05). Also, 2007 had 478 homicides--the first time since 1963 the city had less than 500.

I love maps. And interactive ones like this are what the Internet is made for.