Author: Mike P. Lewis

Recording Life

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I just read a great article by Clive Thompson called “Head for Detail” about Gordon Bell‘s latest experieement.  Please just read the first 2 paragraphs.  It’s about Gordon and how he is recording everything he’s doing (video, audio, emails, web, everything).  He’s been doing it for the past 14 years and is able to bring up almost eveyrthing.  Clive writes about Bell, saying:

He[Bell] had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics–Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area’s gorgeous weather–Bell’s gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I’d sent him, copies of my articles he’d read, pages he’d surfed on my blog.

This really resonated with me as i am already trying to record my life. I have photos up on Flickr, i have my ideas going to my blog, i have my mundane thoughts going to Twitter, my videos going to YouTube, and my friend interactions recorded on Facebook.  I’m already on the web but just in the totality that Bell is.  Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper it’s gone from $233,000 for a gigabyte in 1980 to less than $1 today.  Soon there will be enough storage in your cell phone for your entire life to be stored.  I do this because i want to remember. I want my memories to be accesible all the time and reading the article made me realize how inefficent i’ve been in capturing them.

I really like articles like this becaues they make you think about where the world is going and wonder how human interactions and functions will change.  It touches on how humans will change when we no longer have to remember stuff.  I already don’t remember phone numbers beceuase of your cell phone. What if you don’t have to remember people’s names and interactions and you free you mind to be more creative.  Just imagine – that’s what i’m doing now….

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Agassi’s Autobiography is Really Good

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I just finished Andre Agassi’s new autobiography Open
and found it to be a great read – i’d give it 4.5 out of 5. Sure it’s not a deep and heavy work of literature but I found it really interesting to hear about his life and emotional path.   Agassi was such a talented player who was thought of as a choke artist for such a long time until he got his mind straight.  I like that he really goes into each match and tourney and discusses why he tanked or what he was thinking.  It’s clear from reading this that so many of his failures occurred due to his emotional state. And you can hear in his voice and in his match results how much a stable home life changed him.
Some highlights for me are:
  • Talking about his overbearing father and how that shaped his childhood.  His “Dragon” ball machine that his dad raised up so when it shot balls, it shot them down so Andre had to take each ball on the rise or he’d miss it
  • His journey to find friends and peers that he could relate to and that helped him
  • Talking about his hair and how much time and energy he spent finding and wearing a hairpiece to play in.
  • Talking about Steffi and how much of an impact she had on him.  It’s clear that once he established a solid home life his career peaked.  Without that, he’d without a doubt have much fewer wins
  • Comparing himself to Pete Sampras and how their two paths differed.  Also hearing the story of Pete tipping his valet $1
  • The anecdote of when his dad met Steffi’s dad.  Both were great former athletes who pushed their kids to greatness and when they meet two egos clash like i’ve never heard of before.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who likes tennis or Agassi.

I'm certain: Doubt is great

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I recently saw the movie Doubt with Philip Seymour and Meryl Streep.  Both of them are awesome (as usual) and the movie really delivers.  I was hesitant to go see it as who wants to see a movie about nuns creating drama – sounds really boring.  But, it is fast paced and captivating.  Some thoughts:

  • Meryl Streep is amazing.  Her character is a holy terror can’t smile and brings old school discipline to St. Nicholas.  She rules the halls through disapproval and suspicion oozes from every glance.  She’s terrifying and awesome to watch.
  • The direction of the movie is really good.  Rather than a quick action-paced direction you see in Slumdog Millionaire the movie instead rests on the actors and lets them fill the screen and act.  You see this in the first scene of the movie when Philip Seymour is giving a sermon on doubt.  The camera just sits on his face and stays there.  No movement.  You just see and hear him, nothing else. I like that.
  • There’s a 10 minute scene with Meryl Streep and the actress Viola Davis who plays the mother of a student that is under suspicion of being molested by Flynn (Philip Seymour).  This scene makes the movie.  It adds some complexity and weight to what could just be a he-said-she-said film.
  • I LOVE how the film takes an approach of not preaching the answer.  The movie is less about doubt and more about certainty.  Everyone (including myself) can relate to having a feeling of doing something that feels right but not being certain, yet unable to alter direction.
  • The film does a great job at showing the conflict between old and new, between status and change, between infallibility and uncertainty, gender roles, conservative versus progressive religious values, about rigidity versus openness and suspicion versus proof, about how far it’s appropriate to go when you are sure you are right. Timeless dilemmas that the Church is still trying to figure out
  • Apparenty the writer/director John Patrick Shanley only told Philip Seymour (who played Father Flynn) whether or not Flynn was guilty. None of the other actors knew.
  • The movie was great.  It took the best parts of a play and added in sweet scenery.   I just can’t believe it comes from the guy who gave us Joe Versus the Volcano.  Seriously, JP Shanley did that too.
  • Eight of out ten for me
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Why did Flickr stop innovating?

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Image representing Flickr as depicted in Crunc...
Why aren’t you better?

I’ve been a big flickr fan for years.  I take a lot of photos and that’s always been my favorite spot to put them.  Flickr‘s been great at pioneering the 2.0 photo experience. They were the first to have a photostream view – not just albums. And they were the first to have tags which allow you to organize your photos in a better way.  However, they haven’t done much lately.  Sure, they added videos which is GREAT but that’s about it.  The look hasn’t changed, there aren’t many new features and i feel that they are getting out developed by facebook’s photo experience and Google‘s Picasa.   Sure those sites have different goals for their photo experience but at least they are moving forward. What’s Flickr done for me lately? Nothing.

Both Facebok and Picasa allow you to specifically name who is in each photo. Facebook does this by “tagging” a photo with a user and Picasa does this by analyzing the faces in the photos.  Both are brain dead simple to use and are really slick.  I’ve always used Flickr’s tags to do this with thier photos but i’d like to more specifically associate a photo with a user.

I also think that Flickr could make the “editing” of photo metadata easier.  The order a picture shows up in your photostream is effectively the date you took it – but if you upload a photo much later, you have to go back and manually adjust the dates so it appears in the right spot. Flickr has always made title and description editing amazingly simply by keeping it in-line but adjusting the date and privacy of a photo still takes you to another page.  Why can’t they make that easier? Same thing with setting a group of photos to a later date. This is too hard to do.

The bottom line is that i still love Flickr but i feel that it’s getting stagnant.  i’m starting to think that Flickr has officially become a Yahoo company and not a nimble startup.  And i don’t want to hitch my wagon to something that is in maintenance mode.  I knew this day would come and i think the day might finally be here. I think i could say the same about delicious too.  That site could have been much bigger than it is.

I’m wondering now – where should my photos go? What’s going to be be even better.  I don’t like how Picasa is only albums but i do like how they are at least getting better and better.  Is there a 3.0 photo experience that i can use?

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Slumdog Millionaire is the best of 2008

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Last week i saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire and it was amazing.  Easily the best movie i’ve seen yet this year.  It’s a story about an orphan in the city of Mumbai, India who rises from the depths of poverty to become filthy rich on the strength of his intelligence.

Some thoughts:

  • A scene in the beginning of the film when the main character (Jamel) has to jump through a pool of crap/sewage to get an autograph from his idol is one of the best scenes i’ve seen in a long time. Not only does it immediately introduce the two main characters (Jamel and his brother) but also perfectly depicts their completely different personalities.  The picture above is from that scene
  • The music in the movie is incredible. The pace of the movie is frantic and the music does a great job to keep it going.  I specifically love the MIA song in the middle of the movie.
  • the cinematography is awesome.  You can see lots of shots that are similar to Trainspotting (another Daniel Boyle film) but used in a different way here.  Instead of depicting a drug addict, it’s used to show the insane Indian culture
  • At the very end of the movie they have the stars (Jamel and his girlfriend) do a Bollywood-type dance.  I think this dance does wonders for how people feel when leave the theater and their impression of the movie.  The movie ends on a positive note but very little of the movie is upbeat and happy.  But by having a light and fun scene playing at the end, I was able to let a sigh of relief out and smile.  I think that really matters
  • I’ve been reading two books: The Post-American World (Fareed Zakaria) and Hot, Flat and Crowded (Thomas Friedman) – and both tell the tale of India and what it means for our future as a planet.  India is as important as China because of the size of its population and its embrace of Democracy.  This movie is the first film where i’ve seen the India described in these books, an India that is a Democracy, that’s over crowded, that is both corrupt and opportunistic, that is changing from being very poor to being very industrial, that is become more and more American.
  • By naming it the best movie of 2008 (so far) made me realize how few great films there have been in 2008. With maybe the exception of The Dark Knight, nothing from the summer or fall were even contenders for Best Picture. Hopefully there will be a surprise in the next few weeks (Doubt, Benjamin Button, Revolutionary Road) that will totally redeem 2008, but it’s seeming like a pretty bad year
  • The movie also shows how multi-cultural movies are becoming.  A good review on NPR says this too, saying:

Ours is, after all, an age when cross-cultural impulses inflect everything from music to presidential elections. And Slumdog could hardly be more cross-cultural: a romantic adventure set in India, financed in Europe, made by English filmmakers, featuring Muslim characters speaking Hindi, with a climax hinging on the answer to a question about a French novel. And it’s a blast.

Don’t let the above points distract you.  This movie is AWESOME and you should go see it.  It’s my leading candidate for best movie of the year.

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Changing it up every 3 years

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A good post today by Chris Anderson about completely changing jobs every 3 years.  He writes:

When I was at The Economist, there was a policy to rotate everyone every three years. The idea was that fresh eyes were more important than experience. “Foreign everywhere” was the mantra, and around your second year in Cairo, you could expect to get a call from the editor asking you to consider Mumbai or Sao Paolo–ideally two places you’d never been to and knew nothing about.

I’ve changed jobs every 2 years and do find that if you don’t continue to challenge yourself and learn new things, you can get complacent and bored.

Another interesting point about the post is the connection with Macolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, which talks about how people achieve success.  Anderson writes:

I was thinking about the three-year rule while reading about Malcolm Gladwell‘s observation that it takes 10,000 hours to become truly expert at something. If you really throw yourself into a job, you’ll spend 60 hours a week working. That’s 3,000 hours a year (allowing for vacation), which means you’ll hit the 10,000 hour mark a few months after your third year.

What do you think – how often do you try something new?

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Top Albums of 2008

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Cover of
Cover of Evil Urges

Here are my top albums of 2008.  It was a toss up between MMJ and Dylan but when i looked back at my total plays for 2008 in my iTunes, it was no contest – i’ve played MMJ a bunch mor

  1. Evil Urges – My Morning Jacket – totally unexpected departure from the Southern rock band but that made it all the more awesome.  There songs are all great.  From start to stop, this album totally delivers.   “Librarian” and “Smokin’ From Shootin'” are my favorites.
  2. The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Bob Dylan – previously unreleased tracks from 1987 to today.  And they are amazing.  I love both versions of “Mississippi” and “High Water”
  3. Consoler of the Lonely – Raconteurs – These guys totally rock.  The title track is one of the best rock songs i’ve heard in the past 10 years and the rest of the songs are good too
  4. For Emma Forever Ago – Bon Iver – incredibly catchy and chill record.  This got stuck in my head for about 2 months in the middle of the year.  Plus you’ve got to love a guy from the woods of Wisconsin. Love the songs “Flume” and “Skinny Love”
  5. Only By The Night – Kings Of Leon – this album isn’t as good as 2007’s Because of the Times which had 2 amazing (5 star) songs but it still rocks. The songs are all pretty good and continues KOL’s rise to be one of the biggest bands in the US
  6. The Way I See It – Raphael Saadiq – a pretty smooth and groovy album that brought some soul back into my life in ’08.  The songs “Take a Walk” and “Never Give You Up” with Stevie Wonder are the best of the bunch
  7. The Stand-Ins – Okkervil River – a good followup to the awesome The Stage Names.  It’s songs are just as punchy and fun to listen to.  I didn’t get to this until later in the year, otherwise it could have been higher in my list

Honor Roll – these albums have one or two good songs but not enough to be a “top” album of 2008 but i did like them:

  • Ra Ra Riot – The song “Dying is Fine” is one of the best songs of the year
  • Born Ruffians – very addictive album but also kind of annoying.  Can’t tell if i really like it or not
  • Ryan Adams – all the songs are just okay
  • Girl Talk – not my favorite mashup artist but still catchy and good for working out to
  • Mudcrutch – two great songs in “The Wrong Thing To Do” and “Six Days on the Road”
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Who Says You Can't Go Home?

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An interesting article (Read the Article at HuffingtonPost) was sent to me today about the “quarterlife crisis” that people experience around the age of 22-26.

This is a common statement i’ve heard by many people. I think much of it stems from the expectations of family and society (aspirational TV, for example) going up and the realities of the world coming down (ability to get a job and succeed being that much tougher)

When the expectations and reality are conflicting, people get frustrated. Combine that with the trend that people move around so much and don’t have a solid “base” and you get a crisis. We’re malnourished in our relationships.

I can’t read an article like this and not immediately go bak to the book “Generation Me” which i wrote about here: http://loo.me/2008/05/15/generation-me/ Check it out.

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Mothers and The Internet

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A friend of mine from MN posted this on her Facebook.  It’s a conversation between her and her mother.  It’s amazing…

me is my friend
bcscott is her mother


me: ok.
7:05 AM

<3
bcscott: Howed you make that heart
7:08 AM me: it’s this:
<
and this:
3
pretty cool.
7:10 AM bcscott: doesn’t work on a non Apple

9 minutes

7:20 AM me: yes it does, i’ve doen it at work
you have to type them together.
but it ONLY works in this chat box, nowhere else.
7:22 AM bcscott: I typed them separately and together and I get a 3. Do you use shift or control? See if you can see the heart and smley face I inserted.
me: you have to type them in this window
i can tell you haven’t because i should be able to see you doing it.
7:23 AM don’t insert them,
type them here.
bcscott: ,3 There you go.
me: you hit the comma. try it again.
< and 3
7:24 AM bcscott: My greater symbol IS the comma.
me: doit again, barb.
< and 3
7:25 AM bcscott: #< There you go. That’s with the shift.
me: mom, you can’t be serious. instead of the 3, you typed # and you did it backwards.
< and 3
7:26 AM bcscott: Carrie, what kind of keyboad do you have? My 3 IS the #. The shift controls all this. ,3
me: yes, but you keyed in a #
you need to type exactly <
and then 3
just do it.
7:27 AM bcscott: I know, maybe you have a numbers pad. I don’t have that on my laptop. Otherwise, this conversation is ridiculous.
me: this conversation is ridiculous.
i am not doing this on a number pad.
you’re going to do this, mom.
type <
and then 3
you’ve been typing ,3 and <#
bcscott: I can’t type < without the shift key. if I use the shift key on the 3 I will get a #
7:28 AM me: then ONLY use the shift key to get the <
and then don’t use the shift key to get the 3
do it, mom.
bcscott: <3 There you go!
me: that was unbelieveable.
absolutely unbelieveable.
7:29 AM bcscott: I had to do shift < and then regular 3. Now where did you get your smiley thing.
me: oh boy.

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