Last night I watched a mess of Star Wars Fanfilms. Still washing the taste out of my mouth (watching the latest Res DVD, which had among other videos, the stupendously awesome White Stripes – Seven Nation Army video (dir. Alex and Martin) helped). I feel sorta bad since it seems that people put a *lot* of time and effort into these things, but most of them are just really, really bad.

Which, along with talking w/ my co-worker, leads me to believe that ‘Mob Spots’ might not be as successful as I originally got carried away with thinking… these ads will obviously be very self-selective, reflecting the communities thoughts; this might not play well against the general or swing voters that need to be convinced… Also, as those Star Wars fan films show, most people have really really bad eyes

Somewhat related: Sometimes is a simple but cool little video; Freestylecollective has a decent reel and some good links in their links section (Flash, alas)

Closing tabs:

• Chaosmint: Easter Egg? Final Cut Pro 4.0 Ramblings
  

  “If you want to see Bruce the Wonder Yak for yourself, go to “About Final Cut Pro” in the Apple Menu, let the splash screen scroll through the credits a few times, and in after a moment or two he’ll come out to graze on your desktop. Let him stay a while and he might even impart a few pearls of wisdom!”

• ~stevenf:
  Stagnant

  Dell today issued a press release
  announcing their intention to rip off every single good idea Apple has
  had over the last year or so.

• CIA pursues video game – ok, it’s being reported by the WT, but yeah, it does sound moronic
  

  The CIA is set to spend several million dollars to develop a video game aimed at helping its analysts think like terrorists, The Washington Times has learned.

• ::STEAMBOY:: – check out trailer #2; japanese steampunk by way of Otomo (his first feature since Akira)
  

  Steamboy is the most expensive animated film in Japanese history with a budget of some 2.4 billion yen (roughly $20 million). With more than 180,000 drawings and 400 CG cuts, Steamboy is sure to be one of the most elaborate animated features of 2003.

• mefi: Drug War Victims
• OJR: interview w/ Google News creator
• NYTimes: Waiting for Spielberg
  

  Unlike most urban legends, the one about the Iranian exile stuck at the Paris airport for 15 years is true. Surrounded by a mountain of his possessions near the Paris Bye Bye lounge at Terminal 1 in Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Merhan Karimi Nasseri is still there after all these years — a celebrity homeless person.

• NYTimes: The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide – ahh, Powerpoint
• Megnut: Teen girl bloggers – most of whom have more functional/better designed blogs than I

Over the weekend, Steven Johnson tossed out the idea of Mob Spots: using the web and blogs for campaigns “message” brainstorming. This afternoon, Jason Kottke tossed in the idea of creating a b3ta-like forum (community ranking) for these, which is a great idea.

Now, imaginge an ad percolator/rating system linked to a digital archive for source material (ooh, and have a clever method of handling versioning/forking/revisions), all hooked up to a licensing engine (CC or otherwise) and you’d have yourself a pretty powerful tool…

Should be interesting to keep a watch on and seeing how this develops.

Related: see me pontificate pretensiously about blogs here

Got back from Cinema Electronica + afterparty (great set by Amon Tobin). I voted for We Want Your Soul (dir by happy) as the best of the bunch, although a couple of the others were also quite good.

Roman Coppola’s Funky Squaredance had a few great moments (the blinking on the up/downbeat is brilliant) but overall didn’t quite capture my imagination.

Hmm, sorta sorry that I missed the Videos That Rock! – a bunch of those I know are great.

I just discovered videos.antville.org, a blog which aggregates/tracks links to cool vidoes.

Soon on DVD: Director’s Label

Building a Balancing Scooter – apparently not hard (of course, that’s coming from a who works on walking robots for a living)

See also: SMU nBot, Ted Larson’s Balancing Robot

So, I spent most of my time today reading about John Titor. I’m almoster certain I’d come across this a while ago, but not in the bloog, so here we go:

• The Story of John Titor – Was he a brilliant fraud, or an ordinary soldier from 2036?
• John Titor – Time Traveler
• Other links – fun links to some real and not so real stuff
• dmoz: science: physics: relativity: time travel – wackiness

While it’s highly unlikely to be true, Titor’s postings do make you go hmmm… (as in considering all that we take for granted) and if nothing else, makes for a great parable.

Does the civil war start in such a way that with this foreknowledge those willing will have time to remove themselves to safer locations.

Yes. You will be forced to ask yourself how many civil rights you will give up to feel safe.

Will you readily be able to identify the enemy.

They will be the ones arresting and holding prople without due process.

So wait, did the civil war already begin?

(it’s occurred to me that the Titor posts could quite possibly be an art project of some sort. if it was a student project, I hope he got an A, it’s quite more effective and smart than that whole mess of stupid e-bay tricks projects)

Russell posts about Palm’s future on Mobitopia. I too share Russell’s concerns, but well, yeah, the new Treo 600, w/ a BT of WiFi SDIO card is gonna kick so much ass.

And the question is really whether Palm is really even making a “smart phone” right now at all. Or whether the Treo 600 is actually more of a small “PDA Phone” and thus not anywhere near the sweet spot in the mobile phone market. In my mind the Treo is actually competing with all the PDAs and PDA phones like the P800 and other UIQ-based phones. With Nokia pushing one-handed smart phones like the 3650/6600 it’s hard to think that Palm is going to be able to compete in that area at all. I’ve said it before, but despite having a great brand, Palm is not Nokia.

Palm seems to want to change this by repackaging PalmOS 5 as the mobile version of their OS. But *why*!?! That’s not going to be able to compete with Symbian and Windows Mobile 2003, both 32 bit multitasking OSes with real file systems. Why would Palm think that? Why waste developer resources on this sort of thing? Better a mobile version of PalmOS 6.0 than old tech. Unless they’re targeting *really* low-powered devices (think about how little power is in the Zire 71, and that gives you an idea), but then they’re directly competing against J2ME and BREW. *That* to me is a *really* bad idea.

Related blogs:

• Mobitopia
• moblogging.org
• textually.org
• Josh Rubin’s Techetiquette, Cool Hunting

On the mobile-tech end, I’ve gotten the latest Hiptop OTA updates. Some nice features added, but it doesn’t change the fact that I can’t load my own apps onto my own system and that I don’t have an SSH terminal.

• Handspring NYC Treo 600 Launch Coverage
  

  The big news out of the event is the official announcement of four US wireless carriers. Sprint, AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile have signed on to carry the Treo 600 in the US. Orange was announced last week in Europe. The smartphone should be available in the US in early to mid-October. The specific price will vary by carrier and plan, but is expected to be in the $600 – $449 range.

• Mossberg loves the Treo 600
• Treo 600 Mailbag
• Treo 600 Coming to Four U.S. Wireless Carriers
  

  treocentral.com is reporting that Sprint will begin offering this smart phone on October 13 for $399, T-Mobile will also begin carrying in October 13, while Cingular expects begin offering it on October 20 for $549 before rebates, with the final cost expected to be $449.

  This should probably be taken w/ a grain of salt, an eWeek article from the day before gives much longer timelines for the other carriers

  Update: confirmation on dates @ bargainpda

Now the question is, do I stick w/ Sprint or T-Mobile…

I’ve been looking a bit at hardware recently w/ the slew of Athlon 64 reviews coming out. I’m going to hold out for a bit. As I’m doing all my video editing on my Mac right now (what I really need is a dual-G5), the main reason I’m going to need to upgrade is going to be for Half-Life 2 (and yeah, it’s delayed). Hopefully if/when I decide to upgrade, prices will come down, and more motherboards will be available.

I’ve also been taking a second look at building a terrabyte file server. If I combine that project with an Athlon 64 upgrade, i could save some parts money. Most of the price will be the cost of drives. Seagate is introducing its Barracuda 7200.7 SATA drives, which besides having 100GB platters, will also have SATA native command queuing (scheduled to ship in November)

• Wikipedia Phase III Features
• Tricster – Proffesional fireart and poi performance artist
• Trance Music Videos, Singles, Live Sets
• Maaz’s Genre Map, a sub-genre discussion
• Wikipedia: Electronic Music
• linked before, but always good: The Electronica Primer + Timeline