http://circleplastics.co.uk/wp-2018.php Cocktail (1988, D+). Shake jigger of smarm & dash of greed, top with paeon to female subservience. Beach Boys garnish.
Pingdingshan The Descendants (2011, B-) A VitaminWater film: slickly packaged to look nourishing, but really just the same old sugar-water.
Corridors of Blood (1958, B+). Late-period Karloff turns “Tops in TERROR!!” poverty-row shocker into a chilling character study.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012, A-). As heady, pulpy and earnest as the best comics but takes Bruce & Bats to a hard-won ending the books can’t.
The Adventures of Tintin (2011, C-). AKA Tintin & The Uncanny Valley. “Billions of blue blistering boring action scenes! Where’s my whisky?”
Also filed in
|
|
Just recovering from a slight cold I contracted whilst in San Francisco for the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, known outside the developer community as “Are they going to announce a new iPhone? No? Maybe I heard something about an Apple TV? Not that either? Oh. So… what’s the big deal again?”
Inside the developer community, though, even a lesser WWDC is a pretty big deal. While there was nothing on the scale of 2011’s iCloud or, um, Automatic Reference Counting, there were some nice changes that will make our lives easier. Of course, we’re all sworn to Apple-style nondisclosure, but I can reveal that I’m particularly excited about the new [redacted] views, which will make things a lot nicer for the new [redacted] app we’re working on for iOS [redacted].
The bestest was getting to talk to people, especially the Apple engineers who spent well over an hour with us while we fired questions at them about what’s happening underneath the public APIs. Not to mention hanging out with our remote OpenGL guy, Trent, and catching up with various indie iOS developers and grad school comrades.
Plus, thanks to WWDC interest far outweighing the actual number of tickets for sale, we’ll soon be dining out at L’Abattoir on the proceeds of eBay-ing the attendee-only schwag. So overall, the week was educational and profitable!
Tomorrow we make our way to Brisbane after a little more than ten weeks in New Zealand and Australia. We saw some scenery, came up with some ideas and shipped three versions of Color Splash for iPad, so I’ll chalk it all up as a success. Where will Pocket Pixels appear next? Berlin? Thailand? Only time will tell.
Also filed in
|
|
Thursday, February 10, 2011
This Saturday, I leave Vancouver, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. The Saturday after that, I get married on a jetty in Surfers Paradise to the most awesome chick in Aus. The Saturday after that, my new wife and I will be toting backpacks on a boat to an island in the Andaman Sea. I don’t know where we’ll be the Saturday after that.
It’s definitely a time of changes. In the past few weeks, I’ve handed in the final, revised draft of my PhD thesis, co-planned a wedding—a modest wedding, to be sure, but a wedding nonetheless—and I’ve moved out of my East Van apartment and onto a West End sofa. I only lived in the apartment for two and a half years, but it seemed longer. The thesis felt a lot longer than that.
Our plan is, post-wedding, to travel across Asia with no real fixed schedules other than what’s required by the imposition of the seasons and our own ability to deal with where we find ourselves. I’m not sure how long it’ll take, where we’ll go, or what we’ll find there. I don’t mean that in some romantic way, of peaking behind a curtain of the unknown. After all, we now live in an age where information is essentially free and instantaneous. And I’m not shy about using it. I’ve looked at blogs posted from well-trod paths, and Googled remote villages to check out the local guest house situation.
But while information is free (monetarily), experience still has to be earned, and it’s paid for in change (not the monetary kind). I have not the slightest hesitation about getting married, but I’m curious what will happen to the bachelor incarnation of Eric. Travel, I have a few more qualms about, but I’m excited, too. What will be the relationship the married Eric getting sick in a Mumbai toilet—for I will be getting sick—has to the Eric who currently sits in a Strathcona office debugging Objective C code into the evenings? Will the earlier Eric seem naive? Foolish? Pretty much the same, but with a bigger bank account? Google has no answers. I know. I checked.
Also filed in
|
|
