In 2007, Matt Morris, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, directed a short film about a barber shop near where I grew up. One of the owners of the shop, David Shirley, the well spoken gentleman with the full head of white hair in the movie, is the father of one of my best friends and guitar mentor, Phil Shirley. The movie does an excellent job of capturing a dying southern American small town bluegrass culture.
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Just over a year ago, in May of 2010, we bought Roomba. We had two recommendations from friends, so we splurged the 300€ and bought a robot to vacuum our floors. Initially it seemed pricy, but it’s some of the best 300€ we’ve ever spent. As my wife said to me soon after we bought it…
I think I like the Roomba. It doesn’t clean as well as I do, but it cleans about as well as you do.
Several weeks ago, I got an email from my Uncle Neil recommending a movie to me. He had previously recommended Primer to me, which I loved and watched several times to catch all the intricacies of the time travel, so I had high expectations. Timecrimes is a low budget Spanish film shot here in Cantabria, my region of Spain. If you look at any of the movie posters or trailer (I recommend not watching the spoiler-laden trailer), you might get the idea that it’s a horror flick with a bloody-bandage-wearing scissor-wielding homicidal maniac, but it’s really not at all. It’s more about an average man trying to outsmart himself.
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Taking advantage of a surplus of free time this week, I endeavored to watch all of the films nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award for 2010. Previously, I think I’ve never gone into the Oscars having watched more than two nominees, so this is something of a feat for me. They were all good films in their own ways. Some, like the nerdy one about a college hacker appealed to me more than the western or the one about boxing. I made no effort to be objective in my evaluations, valuing honesty over impartiality. Take away from my reviews what you will. You can’t really go wrong spending two hours on any or all of them.
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I have now had an Apple TV (2nd gen) for two weeks and I thought I’d post some thoughts about it. Unlike the first generation Apple TV, this one has no permanent storage on the device. Everything is streamed from an outside source. So all my movies and television shows live in my iTunes library on my computer, which I can browse on the Apple TV and select an item to view. It takes about two or three seconds sometimes to start playing, but then the rest of the video downloads into a buffer while the first part of it is playing, much like when you view a video on YouTube on your computer.
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I bought my first Kindle book. I bought it on my computer, and when I started up the Kindle app on the iPad, it magically appeared. While the UI of the Kindle app is not as nice as iBooks, it’s not at all bad. I hear the Barnes & Noble one is horrible. From what I can tell, because the Kindle books are created principally for use with their monochrome device, none of the images aside from the book covers have any color. For most books, this isn’t really a drawback, but it could be for some. There are two major pros to the Kindle app that has me convinced that I will not exclusively be reading iBooks:
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