Jason Clarke

I just finished watching Empire Falls. My grade: F.

A school shooting? …a school shooting?

F, Russo.

F.

Going to see it tonight with my Dad.

UPDATE: Short review: It was pretty damn good. One thing that’s been bothering me over the past few weeks as I’ve been following all the reviews was the sheer extremity of the opinions. Some critics loved it, others hated it, and as time went on, I didn’t see much of a “middle space” evolve. I became convinced that both sides- the lovers and the haters- were simply over-reacting to their individual expectations, either met or failed.

After seeing it, I think my middleism was generally correct, with a slight tilt towards the lovers. You haters, back off and go home. It’s not fair to judge the film as a failure on your own set of unmet expectations. And to those who said it’s the best of the lot: whoah, nellie! Just because it’s the first good once since 1983 doesn’t mean we should start declaring it the best thing ever.

The ending was classic, the middle was damn good, and the dialogue was terrible. It was definitely a PG-13 movie though-there were at least two parts I thought went a bit far.

My rating: ***1/2

Today’s Tales from The Long Tail link is an interview with Peerflix co-founder Billy McNair by my closest-in-geography-blogger, F-Stop Blues‘ Tim Coyle. In the interview, Peerflix is explained (if you don’t know what it is, read the interview!), and its founder talks about the service’s bright future:

Currently people mail DVD’s to one another. Do you see a point where people might download digital copies of the movies instead of mailing them? It seems to me this service might be a great way to legalize P2P trading in some aspects.

While we think that the U.S. is still a few years away from the masses downloading digital movies, Peerflix is absolutely well positioned to take advantage of that opportunity when it arises. While early adopters will move to digital files of movies within the next couple years, the mainstream American consumer probably will not be at that point for at least 3-5 years. There are a number of factors in play to move to digital movies including, for example, integration of Internet connectivity/PC/television, as most people aren’t interested in watching movies on their PC. In addition, there are bandwidth and distribution limitations.

All that being said, Peerflix has the technology today to legally enable our members to trade digital movie files via the Internet. We are waiting for the right market opportunity in terms of technology adoption, consumer preferences and legal environment to deploy this technology to our user base.

But the best part of the interview came as McNair was taking about the advantages of Peerflix over more “traditional” models like Netflix. Here, I think McNair really hits the “long tail” moment of the interview:

Peeflix is a peer to peer network and, as such, Peerflix is able to keep overhead to a minimum. Peerflix has no regional distribution centers (in fact, every household in America is a Peerflix distribution center!) or other logistical overhead. As a result, Peerflix is able to save on these significant capital costs and pass this cost savings along to our members enabling them to receive DVDs that they’d like to watch for only $0.99 each!

Thanks to my affiliation with the Media Bloggers Association (disclosure: I am a board member and web developer) and the organization’s book review copy distribution program, I came home the other day to find a free copy of Ben Hammersley’s new book, Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom, waiting for me.

I’ve only glanced at the book, but I hope to start reading it sooner than later. More on it when I get there. In the meantime, thanks to O’Reilly publishing for the book, and for joining MBA’s review copy program.

One of the media/tech gurus I look up to, Jeff Jarvis, has quit his big-media job at Advance.net to strike out on his own as Buzzmachine, LLC. Among other things, Jeff will consult for The NY Times Company and is working on a “stealth-mode” citizen’s media startup.

I first became a fan of Jeff’s when I was a geeky magazine-loving teenager holding my first copy of Entertainment Weekly back in 1993. I also read Jeff at TV Guide, and his Buzzmachine was one of my earliest and most influential blog reads. Though I haven’t always agreed with him, it’s incredibly cool to be able to follow a media mentor from magazines to the web over the course of more than eleven (!) years. Much has changed during that time, and here’s to Jeff’s continued success down the line.

I’ve been following some “Service” blogs and RSS feeds of late (my definition for a “service” blog or feed is one that provides some time of factual info, such as movie releases, weather forecast, dvd releases, etc).

Recently, two new sites along these lines launched, and both look to be quite interesting:

* Chicago Crime: Built in part by Adrian Holovaty (one of the people who inspired me to pursue standards-compliant design), Chicago Crime is a thorough and thoroughly usable datbase of crime in Chicago, organized by neighborhood, time of day, and many other factors.

The site has two key features: Outstanding Google Maps integration, and a wide selection of RSS feeds. If I lived there, using this site would probably make me too paranoid to subsribe to- but it would be great to know it’s there if I need it.

* The second new “Service” site is StormTrack, built in part by Jordan Golson of the Cheese and Crackers blog. StormTrack is pretty self-explanatory- using weather data, the site will track and report on various summer-season hurricaines and other weather patterns. Since the site isn’t automated, it’s value will depend on how frequently (and consistently) the authors can keep it updated. Pending updates, it should be a useful tool, whether you live in the south or not.

While Chicago Crime is a combination service/hyperlocal site, it is also one whose readership value should remain fairly constant. On the other hand, it’s interesting to note that StormTrack, besides being a service-oriented site, is also capitalizing on the niche element that made many highly-targeted political blogs (like one of my own) highly successful for short bursts, depending on how much and how often their subject matter made the news.

Ouchie! The Professor reviews the new Star Wars movie, and let’s just say that he wasn’t a fan:

Actors’ words didn’t always sync perfectly with their lips, nobody even tried to capture room ambience to match the settings, and the lines often sounded dubbed — delivered as if into a microphone while reading hurriedly from a script, as they probably were. 90210 had more convincing acting.

The effects were great, but I couldn’t bring myself to care all that much. Really, nothing special, and, of course, drastically inferior to the original movies.

I’m planning to see it Tuesday night with my dad. I’m still holding out hope that my take is more in line with the many glowing reviews.

It’s a contest!*

UPDATE: The contest is over. Congrats to the winner. Please don’t email me regarding this contest! Thanks!

I have 1 gift Flickr Pro account to give away. I will give it to the first person who can correctly identify the location of the photo used in the header of this website.

Some acceptable answers might be: the street in the photo (you locals could get it in a second), or the town that this street is in.

Some answers that will not be accepted: “planet earth”, “the US”, etc.

Send your guesses to jgc-at-jasonclarke.org (don’t forget to replace the “-at-” with @), and good luck!

* Sorry, for legal reasons this isn’t really a Contest. More like a giveaway or something else that doesn’t have all the legal stuff attached.

The other day, I was grocery shopping with the fam when a sudden urge struck me: I wanted to buy Wheaties- you know, the classic bran breakfast cereal- but, strangely, I was craving Wheaties not in its traditional flake format, but rather in a new, exciting delivery method: I wanted my Wheaties in the form of vitamin pills!

I took a stroll over to the vitamin aisle, and thankfully, I got my wish: Behold Wheaties Vitamins.

I love WordPress, but I have two minor issues:

1. Let me add categories from within the Write Post page. This could be done relatively easy by Ajax, right? Or something less trendy? Whatever works, gang. But as categories (and bloggers) migrate more towards tagging, I for one often find myself saving a finished post as draft, switching over to the Manage Categories page and adding in tags (categories) specific to that post, and then returning to my post to update and publish it.

In the words of Homer Simpson, “can’t someone else do it?” Such as my blogging software?

2. Don’t automatically categorize my posts with anything by default…so then the question becomes, what if I forget? Does the system break?

Well that brings me to a design/interface suggestion that I think would be an both an enhancement and a user-switcher (my phrase for a design element that organically prevents a user from unwanted behavior) all in one (Keep in mind I haven’t upgraded to WP1.5.1 yet so I don’t know what they’ve tweaked).

The change I suggest is that the category chooser (it’s currently to the right of the blog post input area) should be moved in line on the page directly below the blog post input box.

In my view, the category chooser should not be located above the blog post input box (and for that matter, I think the post title input box should be moved down, too), because if you’re anything like me, you find that categories (and titles) are a natural extension of the body of what you’re writing…so it should follow that you can only logically categorize your words after they’re written, right?

From a programming standpoint, not much should have to change. I’m no database expert, but I’m betting that the excellent WP team could write some code to dump in your new categories at the same time as the post is saved.