3/24/10

The opposite of irony

For about two hours, I was unable to research my script about a worldwide data center snafu... because of a worldwide data center snafu.

3/12/10

The flip book movie of your life

I've been playing with the new features in iPhoto '09. (Instead of polishing the latest draft of something else, I know.)

When you drag the cursor across one of the images on the Face cork board, it flips through the tagged photos in date order. If you've taken a lot of pictures, this flip sequence makes a little movie of your life.

It's particularly fun with kids. I just watched a flip book movie of Precious Nephew changing from tiny baby to gawky five-year old. Cool. For me, anyway.

In years to come, the parents of kids who grew up with digital photos will be able to massively embarrass their kids not with a few snaps, but with a flip book record of their precious darling's baby face gettin' older and older and older -- complete with bad haircuts and facial hair and wrinkles and everything. Hee-hee.

3/3/10

Past and future imperfect

Enjoyable article in Slate yesterday. It's always fun to look back and cluck at how wrong we were fifteen years ago about technology advances today. Of course, "we" fifteen years ago are also "we" today. It's likely that I'm missing retrospectively-obvious game changers in my current fiction. Uncomfortable thought, that.

The immediate past can be a problem, too. One
link in the Slate article threw me for a loop: YouTube has only been around for five years. How is that possible? I remember five years ago. It all seemed so normal. And yet... jeez, how did I manage without YouTube?

This kind of myopia for the last decade must drive the production designer of
Lost nuts. The flash sideways episodes are set in 2004, near enough to seem perfectly normal. And yet, I noticed flash sideways Jack Shephard had one of those ancient flip phones. Apparently, ancient = FIVE YEARS AGO. In my mind those phones seem decades old. But of course, five years ago I had a honking great computer sitting on my desk. With a monitor. Remember those???

Nope.