Institute of Contemporary Arts

There haven't been any new films out recently that are worth seeing. Over the weekend I watched 300 (lots of scantily clad muscular dudes slow motion fighting) and The Illusionist (lots of forgettable computer generated illusions with a lame-ass twist at the end). I suppose all the best stuff was unleashed at the Oscars and now choice is limited. I've been increasingly disappointed with the films coming out of Hollywood, so I was pleased to discover the Institute of Contemporary Arts, an art gallery, cinema and bar situated on the Mall close to Buckingham palace. The films on offer have clearly been selected on merit rather than their ability to make money hence providing the opportunity to see some of the best in independent and foreign films that were not on general release. I've seen two AMAZING films there over the past month..

The Bridge

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Fransisco is the capital location for suicides in the world. For the whole of 2004 a camera crew filmed the bridge catching all but one of the suicides that year, and multiple close calls. I should point out that several attempts were aborted by the camera men who alerted the coastguard when it became obvious that a person was about to jump - but in the majority of cases the victim did not wait to be dissuaded after they had climbed over the fence.
In one particularly haunting scene a nearby photographer began taking pictures of a girl who was about to jump, she is show in the video above holding one foot over the edge of bridge. The photographer said he felt disconnected from the would-be-jumper before coming to his senses and pulling the girl back over the fence.
I highly recommend this film, it's sad, hauntingly beautiful and will stay on your mind for days.

Sheitan

A French horror comedy starring that guy from Ocean's 12. This film in now top of my facebook list of favorite films... It's that good! It has lots of very ugly people and some hard-core French Rap. I think that's all the description I need to give it, check it out here.

Comic Strips

Back in uni I went through a phase of drawing little comic strips - I say "drawing", they were actually stick men taking the piss. Seem as my old website is long gone they now exist in this Flikr album...

A couple of real comics strips from which I took my "inspiration": White Ninja, xkcd.

The Perils of Messenger

I used to used MSN messenger all the time about two years ago. ALL THE TIME! Thankfully my transition to Google talk has been painless, and now I'm addicted to social networking rather than instant messaging. I was initially worried about starting over with my contacts list, but thankfully most of my friends are technically minded and saw the benefit in moving over too.

I do however have a couple of friends who haven't migrated. Friends who are stuck in a 90s time warp and probably enjoy listening to Brit Pop and wearing Doc Martin boots while using this vintageIM client. They just don't understand why they should change. They become offended when I call them Luddites and get confused when I attack Messenger from a software engineering orUI design perspective. So for their benefit I present my top five annoyances of MSN Messenger:

(5) The Protocol
Have you ever blocked someone or just closed the window when someone tries to start a conversation with you? How rude! The Messenger protocol broadcasts that kind of information and other clients that have reversed engineered the the Messenger protocol have the ability to decypher it. I used to use an MSN client on Linux that had the ability to do this. Quiet eye opening when you're chasing down someone in your group project who doesn't want to reveal how little work they've done.

(4) Advertising
It's free software and Microsoft want some return on their investment. But OMG! Way to ram it down our throats guys!!

(3) Cluttered interface
MSN provides a clickable "Send" button for you to use instread of just pressing Enter. It also provides a "Search" button so you can type in an MSN Search query directly into the message field. USEFUL! The UI designers really need to make some priority calls about what is included.

(2) Use of user selected nick names
"http://news.bbc.co... has just signed in" INFORMATIVE! Yes you can hack about, install extensions etc, but why not release something that is useful by default? Messenger certainly got better when it introduced both name and personal message fields, but this is often abused and is particularly distracting when trying to have a conversation with someone who has a handle that spans more than a line of text (especially if it includes smileys).

(1) Feature Bloat

"I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don’t want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features." - Steve Jobs talking about innovation in iTunes

MSN messenger has gone waaaay over the top with feature bloat. Winks? Great - someone is illustrating their point by sending me a cheesy flash animation. Nudges? FFS! I'm having conversations with three other people, wait your fucking turn! The first time I received a nudge I calmly closed downMSN and didn't open it again for six months.



Rant over.

Cool Blog: JohnChow.com

I'm constantly hearing about people who are able to make enough money from their blogs to become full time bloggers. I've also met (in real life!) someone who is able to pay his rent from the advertising revenue he receives from his site Bristol Lair. But most people who start blogs seem to languish in obscurity. So how can you make money from a blog? Or rather how can you generate enough traffic to get advertising revenue?

John Chow appears to be dominating the blogsphere right now. He has quirky blog about internet advertising and how to make money on line. His regular posts and reviews from high profile sites seem to have manifested a huge following. He thoroughly tests new advertising services and referral systems on his own site before posting indepth reviews. Obviously this kind of real life test drive yields a much more interesting article than a quick review by a magazine editor.

Perhaps one of his most amusing experiments is his quest to gain page rank by using reciprocal linking. Bloggers link to his site using a particular series of words and in return he links back to them. A link from a high traffic page such as his could bump the traffic and the page rank of a smaller blog considerably. In return the number of bloggers linking to him bumped his website onto the first page of a Google search for "The root of all evil" (currently he's 5th place). Now his shrewed marketing mind has decided to begin reciprocal linking on the phrase "make money online" which is a popular Google search. If he can manipulate the Google Page Rank and get on the front page it will be extremely lucrative.

So head over to JohnChow.com to make money online (I'm shameless ;))!

My new ambition in life is to be the first result of a Google search for Andrew Smith. There are lots of us, but I want that first place! So if anyone out there wants to participate in some link karma......

Satanism

Yesterday I attended a talk arranged by Skeptics in the pub about the mass hysteria surrounding child abuse by satanic cults. This organisation invites speakers to present their arguments against blind faith or the paranormal and the event takes place in a pub near London Bridge. Last night's speaker was Jean La Fontain, a social sciences professor at the LSE.

During the late 90s there was increase in reports of child abuse by Satanic cults in America and the UK. This was widely reported by the papers and conspiracy theories were rife. Many believed that children were being abused and possibly sacrificed during satanic rituals, furthermore the satanic movement was so pervasive that it had influence in the police force and government that allowed it to operate above the law. The government took notice of these rumors and sponsored the research of professor La Fontain to discover what was really going on.

As it turns out only a minor percentage of the cases exhibited any evidence of real abuse, and in the ones that did the perpetrators were mentally ill, there was no consistency in the satanic rituals that they used and no link between them. The talk touched on how the masses can become over enthusiastic about rumours, especially when child abuse and devil worship are concerned. She explained how improper questioning of children may be equivalent implanting suggestions and explained how children who refused to admit they had been abused were considered to be in denial.

She also suggested that the rumour may have originated unknowingly from Evangelical Christians. Satan is a Christain concept and as Evangelism increases in Britain so does the denunciation of "sinners" as being in league with Satan. A combination of fear mongering and high emotions fueled by the media resulted in a widely held belief, despite the lack of any evidence.

I saw a documentary that covered similar subject matter called Capturing the Friedmans. This was a film that avoided making conclusions while telling the story of a father and son who purportedly abused a series of children at a computer class they were teaching. One of the most memorable scenes was when an expert is explaining how children in abuse cases should be questioned contrasted with how they were actually questioned. To avoid implanting suggestions children should be asked open ended questions and be allowed to explain the situation in their own words, however in reality they are often asked directly and repeatedly "were you abused?" and often accused of lying or being in denial until they answer affirmatively.

The talk was certainly thought provoking, and I look forward to attending the next one.

Innovation

Today everyone at my company was issued with a booklet about innovation. I'm viciously skeptical about corporate management and the rhetoric that they produce. When I hear managers speak I visualise them standing around a white board constructing every sentence to be inspirational and motivational; they always fail and produce something that is condescending and stupid. It pisses me off when people from a non-technical background claim to have developed the skills to manage and believe those skills can be applied in any area. They don't understand how to build a culture of technical innovation and are seemingly oblivious to the solutions that other companies have implemented. Rather than leaning from companies like Google and Apple they have decided to to take a cheap, non-committal option and produce a booklet. My booklet is now filed top of a banana skin in my bin.



I mentioned Apple. I would like to point you in the direction of this speech made by Steve Jobs that I stumbled across on the Positivity Blog. This is one of the most inspiring speeches I have ever heard, and it allows me to be very Web 2.0 by embedding a video in my blog. Watch it now! I think this video illustrates that for innovation in a corporate environment you need inspirational leadership and incremental development (you can only join up the dots looking back).

I will start my own business on day (I'm just waiting for that awesome idea to smack me in the face). For now here a couple of sweet-ass out-of-the-box ideas that I have seen recently

India

You may have noticed that I'm posting again! That means that I have officially abandoned my secret anonymous blog and am now free to spend time on "Andrew's Blog".

Today I bought tickets to India. I'm travelling out to Mumbai on the 16th May and staying out in West India for two weeks. I hope to visit a vast open air market and visit the shrine of SriNisargadatta Maharaj. I also want to travel down to Goa and sip cocktails on the vast beaches. Currently the plan is that we turn up at the airport with a rough idea of what we want to do. No hotels booked, no internal tickets purchased, just play it by ear. I'm sure I'll blog about it closer to the time.

The Phantom Logger

Boarding school can provide a very strange environment and fantastic opportunity for toilet humor.

On our floor their were four toilets to serve about 15 people. Most of the humor that revolved around these ceramic receptacles consisted of practical jokes like switching off the light leaving the victim to finish their shit in pitch blackness, or "dive bombing" which involved soaking hand-fulls of toilet paper in water and throwing them into the victims cubical while they were helpless to retaliate, ah happy times.

Their was, however, a more sinister side to compliment all this good clean fun. Every so often a shit of vast proportions would appear in the toilet bowl. These beasts were of epic proportions, often averaging about 5cm in diameter. These would often attract considerable attention and the legend of the Phantom logger was born.

Now obviously with hindsight a highly feasible explanation can be offered in place of the Phantom logger theory. An ordinary sized shit remains in the bowl while all the toilet paper is flushed away unbeknown to the patron who goes to wash his hands. While floating there the log begins to absorb water by process of osmosis. Concurrently the toilet water takes on a brown gravy-like consistency to compliment the "dumpling". Some time later the log has doubled or tripled in size.

One day the common room was alerted to the fact that the Phantom logger had struck. Naturally we all rushed to see. What greeted us was the biggest shit I had ever seen. A vast, stinking globule of faeces that consisted of about twenty-five percent sweet corn. The Phantom logger had produced his magnum opus.

But the shit had a dark aura, much like the one ring. As soon as the group had been exposed to it bickering and in fighting began. Vehement denials and brutal scrutinising of alibis ensued. I felt the best way to counteract this decent of evil would be to scapegoat one of my patrons thus providing the rest of the house with closure. The person I chose was Higgins. I got a permanent marker and wrote "Higgins did it" on the underside of the toilet lid. Higgins wasn't very happy.

During the resulting hilarity our house master wandered in taking by surprise. He began shouting about his disgust and incredulity while we strained to suppress our mirth. "I can't believe...Boys your age...it's disgusting...Flush it away..FLUSH IT AWAY!!!" He told me to clean off the writing, before giving Higgins the most disgusted, disappointed look. Imagine a proud father being told his son was a murdering paedophile addicted to heroine, and you just about come close.

Epilogue
In the following months and years I crossed paths with the Phantom logger on many occasions but I would never see such an impressive shit ever again. THE END.