A bug drank my drink
Scott has been playing with animation recently. First, he photographed an animation on paper that he started but never completed 20 years ago. Now he is experimenting with stop-motion photography.
His first attempt is called “A bug drank my drink”. The technique can probably be improved, but I love the results anyway.
The spider in the movie belongs to Santiago, the 3 1/2 year old son of our friend Diego. He came here a couple of weeks ago and forgot his spider. Scott made this movie for Diego. He send an e-mail with the movie as an attachment, begging Diego to come and get his bug. If you watch the movie you’ll understand way.
Watch A bug drank my drink.
Technorati Tags: animation, bugs, stop-motion
Help me promote my artist friend Ariela Böhm
In November, I went to Italy to visit my family and I had a chance to meet a couple of times with my old friend Ariela Böhm. Ariela and I went to high school together. The year we graduated from high school we went on a camping trip through North Europe (Germany, Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands) with her brother Emanuele and his girlfriend. It was the first big trip I took without my family. Since then, I’ve always thought of Ariela as my travel friend. 
Ariela and Antonella in 1979 during their North Europe trip.
A couple of weeks before my last trip to Italy to visit my family, Ariela wrote me an e-mail. I had not seen her for more than 20 years. She found my website and sent a note with her contact information so I wrote back and proposed to meet during this visit to Italy.
The unbearable lightness of a free copy of USA Today
A couple of weeks ago I travelled for work. One evening I found myself in the lobby of the hotel reading a free copy of USA Today left on a chair. I started thinking how rarely I read a true paper copy of a newspaper nowadays. Flipping through the pages of the newspaper, I also realized that, unless there were video-cameras in the hotel lobby, nobody would ever know what I was reading. Nobody would be able to reconstruct my behavior (which articles I read, how long did I spend on each page, which pictures I looked at). Then the thought hit me of how unusual this freedom is in our cyberconnected world.
From my site logs, I can learn a lot about people who visit my blog. I know which page they hit first, how long they stay, which pages they visit, an where they are coming from. I know their IP addresses, their geographical location, which words they entered in which search engine before coming to my site. Often I can even piece together who they are (”Hey, my friend Joy visited my site today. How nice of her!”)
Which means that when I surf the web, my behavior is recorded with the same frightening level of detail. Even the books I read can be connected to me, if I bought them on Amazon or at a physical store with my credit card. At work, most of what I do on my computer is logged and my e-mails must be stored for 7 years.
Nothing new here, of course. But for some reason that evening the true significance of our constantly logged life became very real to me. Reading that copy of USA Today seemed the lightest thing I have done in a long long time (light as in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; that book is haunting me in this period.)
I felt free. I felt anonymous. I felt happy.
Technorati Tags: big brother, kundera, weblogs
A Scanner Darkly
Sorry, I could not pass this one. David Pescovitz at BoingBoing.net has published the link to the trailer of the movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. The director is Richard Linklater, the guy who directed Waking Life.
From the trailer it seems an awesome sci-fi animation movie. This summer, let’s go all together to watch the movie.
Technorati Tags: Movies, scannerdarkly
2006 Google Earth Census: Find people on the virtual planet
» Visit the 2006 Google Census Page [Updated on 3/13/06].
In January, I wrote a post on Google Earth in which I complained about the eerie lack of people on the virtual planet. Since then I have been alerted of human sightings on Google Earth. Derek first noticed people in Saint Peter’s Square and around Nelson’s Column. Then Rosi left a comment saying that she saw a guy playing tennis, but she didn’t remember where.
In light of these sightings, I decided to open the 2006 Google Earth Census. If you find people on Google Earth, leave a comment on my blog or send me a note with the number (or approximate number) of people and the location and any other detail you can collect. Make sure to send the Lat/Lon coordinates, so I will be able to find the exact location of the sighting.
In the next few months, I want to know how many people inhabit Google Earth, where they live, what they wear, and any other detail you learn when exploring the planet.
Update 2-17-06: Thank you for all the sightings! This is great! And thank you for the link love, too (hi, Derek!): Jeneane Sessum at Blogher, Inside Google, Manuel at MitchPeru, and Metafilter.
Update 2-18-06: I have created the 2006 Google Census Page. Continue to send sighting!
Update 4-1-06: Look at the latest unusual Google Earth Sightings.
In praise of ego-surfing
Everybody does it, but nobody wants to talk about it. I am talking about ego-surfing: that shameful act of vanity that occurs in the private of our own home or office, when we type our own name on Google (or Yahoo, or any other search engine we like to use) and look through the list of pages listed in search of love, fame, and recognition.
When you have a blog, ego-surfing gets to an all different level. Now we have people linking to our blog and posts, link ranks, and many more sites to explore: Technorati, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, TalkDigger, and oh, so many more. We can collect on del.icio.us all the sites that link to our blog and posts and while we are there check if anybody else has tagged our posts. We can look at our site logs to see how many people visited, which posts they read, how long they were on our site, and where they came from. Read more »
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