Oscar Night

Once upon a time, the Academy Awards, called the Oscars, were given to Hollywood's big productions. What the Academy thought was the best picture often didn't coincide with what the critics thought were best pictures.

While this is true today, it's not nearly as bad. In general, a film needs to have certainly minimal production values so it doesn't look truly indie, and it must not be too out-there strange, i.e., defying the usual conventions people expect out of films. And it needs to be in English. Given that criteria, the films picked are generally critically well received.

Despite the glamor and glitz of Oscar night, many people choose to skip it. It's shown on a Sunday night, the ceremony runs 3 hours, and it's as much tribute and performance as it is giving out awards. The ceremony would be done in half the time if awards were the only thing presented.

Hollywood feels the need to glitz things up when presenting the awards.

Due to slipping ratings, they tried something different this year. Instead of getting a comedian to host the Oscars (previous years include Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, John Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres), they had Australian Hugh Jackman, noted actor, but also big Broadway star, sing many of the numbers.

They also hired comedians to help present, and spice up the normally boring segments where awards are given out to the various winners.

This year's Oscars were mostly not about quality but about charity, for lack of a better word. Slumdog Millionaire, a good but not great film, reveals the Bollywood world to us, and in particular, focuses on the slums of India, a topic that has only been discussed in small documentaries (Born into Brothels) or smaller indie fare (Salaam Bombay). Made on a shoestring budget, this film had built up steam in December until it became the prohibitive favorite to win it all.

Another difference was to put all the nominees up in the front row rather than have them distributed in various spots so any time the camera panned down, you could see everyone.

They also chose to use previous winners of awards as presenters. They had five actors announcing the five best actor nominations, and the same for the five actresses. Steven Spielberg presented best picture.

Although the show ended at midnight, which is not much different from other years, it did feel like it moved along at a better clip.

The upset of the evening was Sean Penn for his role as Harvey Milk. Mickey Rourke was considered the prohibitive favorite to win this mostly because of how his real life mirrors the role he plays. This was due, in part, to the elections where Proposition 8 (which banned same sex marriages in California) was passed. This choice reflected a desire by the Academy to show its support for this issue.

This isn't to say Penn did a bad job, but that most people felt Rourke did a tremendous job. Even Penn was a bit surprised at his selection and gave due credit to Rourke (who has won a bunch of other awards for the role so he's not lacking in that department).

Jared Jared Jared!

It's like Marcia, Marcia, Marcia, but it's Jared, Jared, Jared (Richardson) that is.

So I was complaining about how white RubyRx is, but I did observe someone apparently Indian American (female) and there was a DZone rep that was Asian American.

Let me flip this and say that, otherwise, the conference is nice and cozy. This is one of the smaller conferences with two simultaneous talks rather than four simultaneous talks. The number of attendees is maybe under 100. The talks have been, for the most part, pretty good, as can be expected from a NFJS production (many speakers who speak here speak on the No Fluff Just Stuff circuit).

I was making an analogy to someone in the hallway. I like tennis, perhaps more than I like coding (I'm almost sure of it). If you're trying to sell a tennis enthusiast a product, it can't be introductory material. Novices in tennis typically learn from a friend who teaches them or perhaps take a lesson. However, tennis is suitably expensive that most people don't take that many lessons.

However, it's hard for a complete beginner to be really enthusiastic. Usually, you need to be about 3.0 on the NTRP ranking which means you're better than most of the weekend hackers that play once in a while, but you're not fantastic. You still have plenty of issues. These folks are looking to get better, and so you pitch to them.

Conferences are roughly aimed somewhere at a 3.5 or so in the tennis world (the scale goes to 7.0 and a 5.0 can play college tennis at a reasonably high level). The average person has had to pay something to attend the conference (or if their company has paid for it, all the better). I'm the rare interloper who doesn't code Ruby or Rails regularly (or even irregularly). I go because I think I should go, but that's like saying I'm dieting but cheating by eating meals I don't count.

You wouldn't expect complete beginners to show up to this conference. It's too expensive for that. They should get a book instead and get started in that fashion.

The good news is it isn't an academic conference where people of dubious presentation skills are presenting stuff they have spent hundreds of hours thinking very hard about and present it as if you had spent that many hours on it too because they don't have any idea how to simplify what they are thinking.

Ruby conferences are generally pretty high quality. Even when they aren't talking about technical subjects (such as freelancing of fear of programming), the quality is still very good.

And of course, Jared is a nice guy!

(So when can I expect my payment, Jared?)

Oh I have to thank Jared for his book that I won in a raffle. I didn't even know he authored the book, so it was destiny!

The Three Foot Experience

Those in the digital living room arena, folks who make HDTVs and products that go onto them, talk about the 3 foot experience vs. the 10 foot experience. The 10 foot experience (shouldn't it be feet?) is the approximate distance from a person sitting on a sofa to their television.

Of course, with larger televisions, you can sit further back, but most people prefer the larger screens to better simulate the movie watching experience.

The 10 foot experience is contrasted with the 3 foot experience, which is really more like the 2 foot experience. This is the distance between the person and, traditionally, their desktop computer, though nowadays, their laptop.

Although people draw this distinction, there's one big advantage to the 3 foot experience. Zooming. And I don't mean a magnify that is implemented by software as some browsers do. I mean, leaning in to the screen.

I raise this point not because of TV or because of a computer but because I'm sitting in a RubyRx presentation. The presentation isn't the issue. It's how it the presentation is conducted. It's more like a movie experience.

Whenever you make a presentation, you make it so people can read it. Those in the back should be able to read it. Even if you sit in the front, it should be viewable. A computer screen can use very tiny letters because people can "zoom" in by just leaning in some more. At the very least, they might be able to use their browser to zoom in on their own to read things more clearly.

Edward Tufte complained about this. He's an expert in presentation software. He says traditional presentation can be too content-rich, but due to the nature of the projected "slide", the user can't zoom in closer. The presenter is limited to presenting what everyone can see, and therefore dictates what the viewer can see. They are in control, and the viewer can't experiment on their own.

Indeed, he suggests a few more low-tech way to present a talk. Give handouts. Of course, he believes that handouts should take advantage of the two dimensional structure of paper and its inherently high resolution. You should, he suggests, take a great deal of time to make a nice presentation rather than the rushed presentations that makes everyone's presentations look like everyone else's.

However, I don't see that changing much until either the software for presentation is changed or until the problem has just been rethought. For example, suppose a presenter could present something onto a sandboxed screen on your laptop. If they would let you move around during the presentation, then you could interact with the presentation on your own, independent of the presentation.

One reason this is unlikely to happen, other than the software needed for this, is the time it takes to prepare a presentation. Once upon a time, you had a chalkboard, and perhaps some written notes on a piece of paper. You couldn't do anything fancy with a chalkboard. Can't use too much text, because it's a pain to write. Can't draw elaborate diagrams. There are so many limitations that it forces the presenter to do very simple things.

Indeed, if the presenter knows something about the subject matter (or not) and doesn't need to prepare, they can present right away with no preparation. While this is a bad idea, there are many presenters that are more than content presenting with no preparation (i.e., they are lazy or great, but usually not both).

Presenting is a passive experience. The problem with making it more active, that is, allowing viewers to participate, is the viewers may not want to participate, and they may not be all equally able to participate. They might not understand the task you've set forth. They may find it trivial. They may lack the right software. And even if everyone can participate, it slows everyone down. You have to wait until they get done.

In a standard presentation, you talk about it, and if people don't get it, they can figure it out later on (or not). And with a laptop, you can do something completely different (like me, I'm blogging).

Presentation software has gotten trivially better, but apparently, people haven't really given it as much thought as they should. For example, developers of TextMate (and most editors) have yet to create a presentation mode with the text font suitable for viewing.

Anyway, back to the presentation.

RubyRx Impressions

Sometimes I wonder why I attend these Ruby conferences. I don't really program Ruby. I don't really do Rails. I think I do them to convince myself to do them, but honestly, I don't fit the profile of the typical Ruby programmer.

Which leads me to the profile of the typical Ruby programmer. Now RubyRx might not be the big Ruby conference, so its demographics may be somewhat skewed. However, I've been to RailsConf and RubyConf and it's similar to what I've observed there.

Ruby developers, in particular, those that attend conferences, are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white. I counted maybe 3-4 women out of 50 or so people in attendance. Superficially, they all seemed white. I saw no other Asians including Indians. There were no African Americans either.

For the sake of Ruby and its future survival, it feels like this should be a worrisome point. There's a sense of "we're geeks, we like to code, we like to code with other geeks, and let's not worry about anyone else".

How many Rubyists even care about trying to get Ruby used in colleges and in high schools? They should because otherwise it's going to have a niche status. When the AP exam seriously considers switching to Ruby, that's when Ruby will have real success. However, most Ruby developers seem pretty content in their Ruby universe. They don't care if no one else gets it. That's their loss.

I wonder if there's a good explanation of why the demographics are what they are. I know I'm already an outlier. I'm like a guy who attends a meeting with poets but doesn't write poetry, so I don't help the demographics at all except in a weird sort of way (conferences don't require you to show your Ruby merit badge so you can show up, which I think is a good thing).

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BAFTA Rocks

Sometime recently, right around the election, I imagine, I discovered I had BBCA which is BBC America. It's the BBC repackaged for the US.

Last evening, I watched about a 3 hour telecast of the BAFTAs which are the British equivalent of the Oscars.

Several things to note. Without an intrusive band, the winners of the prize somehow managed to keep their speeches mercifully short. A few thanked a bunch of people, but many chose not to do so. What causes Oscar winners to prattle off name after name? Is it in their contract? No one remembers the names except the people who are named, so why must we, the audience, be subject to this?

The reason the Oscars run so long is because they build up all these other specials in between. Long musical numbers. Long tributes. If they simply handed out the awards, they'd probably get done sooner.

A fair number of Americans show up for the awards. Ron Howard was shown many times. Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and best actor winner, Mickey Rourke.

Admittedly, the awards ceremony is what it is. Is it that exciting to see a bunch of people get awards?

Slumdog Millionaire won best director and best picture, and although the main actors were nominated as well (why?), neither won.

US gets its chance soonish, but the affair will be drawn out much longer. Sigh indeed.

Facebook Killer?

Of course, I mean killer more in the sense of an app-killer (and not even a killer app, though it would take a killer app to be an app-killer).

Once upon a time there was Livejournal. This allowed individuals who wanted to blog to blog. Blogger (which I'm using now) is quite similar.

This worked for a little while until people realized they had nothing to say in their blog and updated it so infrequently that no one bothered to check in. Good idea for a while but requires insane amounts of dedication to keep it going.

Then came MySpace. It was gaudy, but it had a bunch of things that made it appealing, none the least of which was the fact bands, big and small, often had a MySpace page and thus having a MySpace page was cool.

It was easy to install an audio player and have visitors wince as you impale them with your musical tastes. Even were your visitors deaf, you could pummel their retinas with shockingly bad backgrounds that made text well nigh impossible to read.

MySpace was more like a friendly poster of things about you. The key to its popularity, other than the aforementioned background and music was your list of "friends" collected like so many baseball cards, and the inane comments they would leave on your comment board. Appealed to high school kids until they learned better taste.

Big point. Blogging was completely optional which is good since most people have very little to blog about.

Finally, Facebook. Originally aimed at Harvard kiddies then spread to other Ivy Leagues, then universities, then high schools, then just everyone. Facebook solves the problem that these other two sites had. You had to visit your friends page. If they weren't updating it, you weren't visiting it.

Facebook neatly inverts the problem. You get a feed which Facebook algorithms gloms together from all your friends, and you get the information that's most up-to-date. Information being used loosely, of course.

Thus, the friend that never posts anything except once a year, still gets their info sent your direction so you can see it. More active friends have their content sent more frequently.

Two other things that made Facebook succeed. First, status. This is microblogging a la Twitter. You get feeds sent to your main page when the status updates. Second was tagging of photos. That way, you get to see your friends in photos.

Due to recent security concerns, you don't get to see every photo your friend appears in. In particular, if your friend's friend (who isn't your friend) posts a picture of your friend (call him Al), you don't get to see that picture of Al. Facebook used to let you see these photos by default, but I guess a few people got concerned their parents or some such would be able to see embarrassing photos.

The other aspect is the myriad of addictive games, including the now defunct, Scrabulous which allows the Facebook fan who is tired of reading status and looking at pictures, many hours of uninterrupted interruption.

And Facebook's UI prevents gaudy backgrounds so you don't have to deal with your friends' awful tastes.

But with all that, is there room for other Facebook-like competitors to succeed? What could possibly be missing that could allow someone to jump in and create something so compelling that people would leave Facebook? One wonders.

Dental Plan

David after Dentist is one of those viral videos that you wonder about. This video had 6 million hits in less than a week. Indeed, the SNL video, Jizz in my Pants had fewer hits in the same amount of time, and they had the virtue of HD, advertising on SNL, and high production values.

How did this video, about a kid that was a bit drugged up from the dentist, being spaced out, and the friendly dad who tells the kid not to touch his stitches and wonders if the drugs are making him "feel good" get so popular?

Does it go to show that emailing friends clever videos is still the number 1 way that material is sent virally? I rarely get friends who mail me jokes or mail me links or stories. I feel I'm quite the exception. This is exactly the kind of email most people like to send.

We're likely to see such viral videos again and again. And wonder what is it about these videos that touch so many people?

5 Squared

Perhaps as viral as anything that has hit Facebook, other than, of course, Facebook itself is the recently phenomenon, 25 Random Things About Me.

The idea is simple enough. Write down 25 facts about yourself. I suppose there's more to it than that. You're supposed to "tag" other people, presumably so they can also fill out their own list.

To put this into a little context, I want to rewind back to more than ten years ago when webcams were cheap enough and high-speed Internet which wasn't so high speed then was affordable enough that people, in particular, teens began their first foray into removing anonymity from their lives. There was something compelling to a few people where they would take photos of themselves of their rooms once a minute or more often.

Of course, the bandwidth was not what it is today where live streaming video and audio are now possible.

In those days, you would get one view of someone's life and yet that view was rather restricted. For, you see, a person isn't merely the physical shell you see outside. Even were you to interact with them, as people do at work, you wouldn't see them as they see themselves. Although self-perception can be flawed, it opens up what's important to someone.

Roughly the same time webcams were becoming popular, the earliest forms of blogging, mainly LiveJournal, but even homespun versions, opened a window, much like reading a secret diary, into the lives of individuals.

25 random facts is as much a reflection of the current desire by the youth and the not-so-young to tell the world, albeit in a small self-censored way, a little about yourself. That world is limited to your so-called Facebook friends, many of which are mere acquaintances if even that. Even so, they're usually not total strangers save for a few stragglers where you pressed "yes" when they asked if they could, pretty please, be your friend.

I don't know if 25 random facts is particularly compelling to me. I don't know I could dig up 25 interesting things to say about myself. Some of those things are less facts than things desired for. I want to be a better husband, better friend, better person. That kind of thing.

It's very much "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" but obviously a bit less titillating. The hope is to learn a little something about someone that you've only interacted in a certain way, or perhaps to learn something about them even though you thought you knew them quite well. Some people, I'm sure, would not enjoy this exercise at all.

The first are those that value privacy who don't believe their personal information is all that interesting to anyone else and certainly shouldn't be out there for just anyone to read.

The second are those who, even if they are perhaps tempted to write something about themselves, feel strongly that they aren't the types to jump on bandwagons, to follow the rest like mindless sheep. But then, they probably don't have Facebook accounts as part of their desire to remain independent.

Which one are you?

Phelps Drama

Even those who don't follow much in the way of sports have heard of Michael Phelps. Can you name another American swimmer that's still active? When the Olympics ran, I could rattle off a few names, but since I haven't thought about them in 5 months, I can't recall any. Except Michael Phelps.

Recently a photo surfaced where Phelps was shown inhaling from a bong, a device, as I understand it, meant to make the inhalation of marijuana more pleasurable. I wouldn't know because I don't think I've ever witnessed its actual use.

Phelps has been in a bit of trouble before. In particular, he had a DUI incident and he apologized for that.

Now there's an issue of whether he should be in trouble for this incident or not. Some say it's youthful indiscrimination. Had he been a politician, it would have been ignored as a bit of youthful folly. Obama admits to it, as does Clinton.

Sports is a pretty conservative institution. They love to celebrate the military, especially in the US. They're supposed to uphold family values including avoiding illegal drugs.

Yet what makes marijuana illegal? Because the government says it is. There's evidence that shows it's illegal because African Americans used it, and the police or the politicians wanted legal ways to put African Americans into jail.

So some reporters are saying it is wrong and chastising Phelps because he is a role model. To the extent that the drug is illegal and his actions may encourage some people to use it, they have some justification to criticize Phelps. However, they could have also used it as a platform to ask, why is marijuana illegal? What is wrong with making it legal?

Why are cigarettes legal? Why is alcohol legal? Are they not harmful? We can't even make it illegal because people are rather addicted to both. Since we already have products out there that are legal yet harmful, it stands to reason that marijuana, considered less harmful than cigarettes and possibly a value to the snack industry should be legal.

Now if Phelps's sponsors want to remove his endorsements because they think he's no longer a role model (unlikely, it appears), then that's fine. Phelps may have to pay for his behavior with reduced income. But consider the numbers of politicians that have failed to pay taxes. Would Phelps be under more scrutiny if he hadn't paid his taxes?

It's time the government thinks about its stance on this issue, and while I doubt this incident will prove the tipping point to the repeal of this law, it would be nice if it were.

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