A huge thanks to my cousin Nate who wrote for the site while I was taking some time off. His football article was incredibly well received, and I heard from some folks on Twitter who watched Primer last night (it’s streaming on Netflix, fyi) and really enjoyed it.

While I was unplugged from work, a handful of things happened. And so here is some of last week’s nerdy news that’s still worth talking about.

Keyboard Maestro 6

When I saw the email about this update I just about laughed out loud for joy. In part because it’s always great to see there’s been a major update to one of your most-used apps, and also because there are some very useful new features in KM6 that I’ll be taking advantage of. Such as the ability to launch a macro when a USB device is plugged in, and the new Safari actions for grabbing a URL and Title.

Every Mac user has a few apps that they just have to have on their computer, without which they feel lost and just can’t get anything done. For me, Keyboard Maestro is one such app.1

Basically, Keyboard Maestro is the app you use to bend your Mac to your will. Don’t like the way Mail handles email signatures? No problem. Wish you could launch an app with just one keystroke? Easy peasy. Wish you could replicate the functionality of an app that’s no longer for sale? Done.

My friend and fellow Keyboard Maestro aficionado, Ben Brooks, wrote a brief rundown of some of the highlights of what’s new in KM6.

If you’re new to Keyboard Maestro, you may want to listen to Ben’s and my 35-minute B&B episode where we share some tips and tricks about the app. For additional primers, see also Ben Brook’s KM series, Rocket Ink’s Multiple KM articles, and Federico Viticci’s review from about 18 months ago.

TextExpander 2 for iOS

Speaking of nerdy apps with major updates, TE2 for iOS came out last week. There are some really cool new features, though I have to admit my primary use-case for TextExpander on iOS remains the same: I use it to supercharge many of the apps I use that work with TextExpander. Such as Simplenote, Scratch, Byword, Poster, and Writing Kit.

New Book: Manage Your Day-to-Day

Manage Your Day-to-Day is a new book by Jocelyn K. Glei, the Editor-in-Chief of 99U.

I read and greatly enjoyed Scott Belsky’s book, Making Ideas Happen. And after hearing some good and interesting things about this new book I pre-ordered the Kindle version — it’s just $4(!), or if you’re on Prime you can borrow it for free. It downloaded while I was on vacation last week. Though I haven’t yet started it as I’m currently finishing up Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design (which is a post for another day).

I’m not sure that they meant for it to be specifically targeted for the self-employed types who work from home, but this line from book’s description sure sounds apt to me:

Manage Your Day-to-Day will give you a toolkit for tackling the new challenges of a 24/7, always-on workplace.

Michael Schechter has a concise review of the book on Workflowing.

The New Flickr Design

Flickr got a major redesign and I think most of it is pretty great.

If you’re logged in, the Flickr home page is far more usable and interesting. And I think the look of the new profile pages for individual users encourages more frequent uploads without the need to upload gloriously professional shots. And if you’re a free user, there is no longer a limit on the collections and galleries you can have. Instead you see ads on the site as you’re browsing the home page or the Explore collection, etc.

James Hague wrote about the evolution of the design and how it wasn’t a total reworking all overnight. And Cap Watkins wrote about some of the shortcomings he sees with the new design.

I’m hoping the redesign garners more traction for the network because the iPhone app didn’t seem to do that. I’ve been using Flickr for six years, and it’s the main place where I upload my favorite images taken with my E-PL5.

But the interaction and feedback I get on Flickr is close to none even though I have about 800 contacts. And I can’t help but wonder if the low interaction rate has to do with the seemingly high expectation of talent: I don’t want to post images that are crappy, and I don’t want to favorite an image that isn’t something I’d frame on my wall, and I don’t want to comment on something unless I have something deep and constructive to say.

And that’s where Flickr totally differs from Instagram. Not that the former should at all try to replace the latter, but I get significantly more likes and comments on my Instagram photos than I do on my Flickr photos despite the fact my Flickr uploads are 100 times higher quality than my Instagrams. It’s the conversation and feedback of Instagram that keeps me coming back to it, and that’s what Flickr is missing right now.

I hope the new design, if nothing else, will encourage more feedback and interaction amongst the users.

Designing Blogs for Readers

Matt Gemmell wrote some good advice for weblog design. There are some pretty great tips in here for making a website that is readable for the readers:

Having had a decade to think about it, I want to share my views on what I think you do and don’t need on a blog today. Your needs may be different, but perhaps you’ll find something to think about. I bet you could simplify your blog in some way without detracting from the reading experience.

One of his tips (paraphrased) is to get rid of the sidebar and try to fit everything into the header instead. In some ways, I think this is a good idea. Having the text and nothing but the text underneath the header is a clean design for reading a website.

I think Matt’s site design looks great. It’s akin to some other sites, such as Zeldman.com, Marco.org, and zenhabits. But I don’t know that the single column of large serif text on a white background is the route for me. Part of why these site designs look this way is so that they’ll look really well when viewed on an iPhone — which they do.

My site doesn’t wiggle or change if you adjust the width of your browser. If you visit shawnblanc.net on your iPhone, it’ll look exactly like it does if you view it on your iPad or on your Mac. But my site is perfectly readable on an iPhone, you just have to double-tap on the main text column to zoom it in to a comfortable reading size. And that is by design.

When demoing Safari on the iPhone for the very first time at his Macworld 2007 keynote address, Steve Jobs said: “It’s a revolution of the first order to bring the real Internet to your phone.”

The iPhone doesn’t always need a “mobile” version of a website because it’s perfectly capable of rendering many websites as they would appear on a desktop computer. Now, of course this isn’t always the case since some sites (e-commerce websites in particular) are virtually unusable on an iPhone. But for websites where it works, why have a mobile version when the real version would work just as well? And that’s why my website doesn’t wiggle.

My time on shawnblanc.net is coming to a close, much to my dismay.

A natural topic for my final article is cinema. I’m a movie fanatic, probably a 6 out of 10, where 1 is “watches a movie a week” and 10 is “recognizes the type of lens used in every shot.”

My favorite part of watching movies is the vicarious experience that you get seeing what someone else’s life is like and hopefully coming away a broader person. A close second is the storytelling aspect of film. I love books as well, but I think it’s a lot easier to experiment with storytelling forms in a film than in a novel. Watching Memento feels like a revelatory experience, but reading Ulysses feels like a chore (to most people, anyway).

So anyway, I thought I’d pick a category and share some of my favorites in that category, and explain what I like about them. Since I wish I could go back to last Monday and start writing for you guys all over again, I chose Time Travel as my category.

For some of these movies, the category itself is a bit of a spoiler, but if you haven’t seen them already, I hope you won’t mind in the name of me trying to suck you in.

12 Monkeys

12 Monkeys is classic storytelling — a dyed-in-the-wool time travel mystery. The movie adheres to time-honored sci-fi tradition by assuming that the past is unalterable; the hero trying to change the past is a tragic hero doomed to failure.

The mystery unfolds in a slow and steady manner while clues accumulate until you think your head is about to burst for not being able to piece them together. Then as the cold truth finally splashes over you like a bucket of ice water, your heart breaks for the poor sap crushed by forces beyond his control. But then there’s that last meeting . . .

Happy Accidents

Happy Accidents is an “Is he or isn’t he?” love story/mystery. Like Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys, our hero is befuddled by his travels through time and struggling to make anyone believe him. Unlike 12 Monkeys, however, we don’t know whether he might be lying or possibly just crazy. The romance is cute and the clues are fun. One thing I like about the storytelling is that the movie sets itself up to break the usual rules of time travel well in advance, so that a crucial moment toward the end feels triumphant instead of feeling like cheating. The movie is light overall but worth watching.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

(Why is Judgment so hard to spell correctly the first time?) There are so many things to like about Terminator 2 that I don’t know if I’ll even be able to list them all.

First of all, I really like that the story abides by rules it doesn’t bother to explain but is consistent with. For example, there is obviously some rule about how often people (and Terminators) can come back to the past. Perhaps there is some great energy cost associated with sending them back. Perhaps there are nodes in space-time which are the only places that time travel is possible, which would explain why the time-travelers end up coming back so close to each other. Whatever the rules are, they are consistent and lend themselves to an interesting story — one time traveler each for the humans and the machines, roughly every 16 years. These rules, whatever they are, end up being violated for the spin-off TV show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, to its detriment (there are time-travelers everywhere) and aren’t even addressed in the miserable Terminator 4. Once time-travel becomes “free,” then the story becomes much less interesting, because you get bogged down in questions of “Why didn’t they just . . .”, which is the death knell of interesting discussion.

Judgment Day also does a great job of one-upping the previous film — which was a B movie — in every aspect. The previously unstoppable machine is now outdated and struggles to keep up against superior killing technology. The acting is better across the board. Linda Hamilton is now playing the character who can’t get people to believe that she knows the future (a common theme in these movies), a part that makes it easy to sympathize with her because you know that she’s right. But she plays the part with such animal ferocity that she almost pushes you back onto the side of the loony bin people, as she holds a syringe full of cleaning fluid to a guard’s neck.

The moment where she comes face to face with the specter that killed her lover and haunts her nightmares is one of the finest moments in the film. A lesser storyteller would play the moment for laughs. A better one would have her lash out in anger. Cameron, then at the height of his powers, knows that pure terror would overwhelm her despite all her training, and in that moment you understand all her earlier ruthlessness and fall back into rooting for her.

Ok, I was right, I don’t have time to talk about everything T2 does right. Moving on.

Looper

Looper is such a departure from storytelling norms that I’m still working through how I feel about it. On one hand, it’s easy to say that the movie is really two movies — the first half is a sci-fi/time travel movie about Bruce Willis in the city, and the second is about a small boy on a farm in the countryside.

On the other hand, the movie really works. It’s involving, and I cared about all the principle characters.

I liked that they decided to just throw all the conventional rules about time-travel right out the window. Time travel doesn’t make sense, right? There’s no way you can say that “this movie depicts time travel correctly and this one doesn’t,” because there’s no such thing as time travel (yet?). So whatever you decide to do in a movie is perfectly fine, as long as it’s consistent and isn’t so stupid as to be distracting.

For instance (BIG SPOILER), in Looper, there’s this bizarre phenomenon where a younger version of one character is having his limbs lopped off, and the effects are playing out immediately on the “older” version of him that has traveled back to the same time as his younger self. This doesn’t “make sense” because in theory, the older version of the man would have been crippled and would never have lived a life that allowed him to come back in time at all. But because time travel itself doesn’t make sense, we can always find some way to explain what’s happening. In this case, we could postulate that the effects of the mauling will make their way through space-time eventually. It’s just that it will take years for the effects to make themselves known “in the future” and prevent him from coming back, but right now they can propagate through the very short space-time to the older version who is trespassing in the past. He’s literally around the corner in space-time terms, and he’s the same entity as the younger man. Of course that violates the law of conservation of mass, but who cares about laws? Time travel!

In short, I liked Looper and I hope you will too.

Primer

Primer is the holy grail of time travel movies for time travel nerds. Written and directed for a paltry sum by an ex-engineer in Dallas, the movie is delightfully and willfully obtuse, resisting all attempts to be consumed as pop culture (easily digested, easily forgotten). Repeated viewings are a necessity.

I like to call it the only Gene Wolfe movie that will probably ever be made, although I don’t know that anyone has ever agreed with me. I’m not going to spoil one iota of the film because it speaks for itself, especially when it doesn’t.

After you’ve seen the movie, there’s some fascinating history about the director and his attempts to do something in the Hollywood system, his ultimate detachment from said system, and the saga of his new movie Upstream Color, which I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t seen yet.

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This is a guest post by Nate Spears, who has taken over the while Shawn is on vacation at an undisclosed location.

What causes this bizarre (to the film industry outsider) phenomenon?

I think it’s that studios keep a close eye on what their competition is doing, and the weird “hotness” factor comes into play when someone thinks his studio is going to miss an opportunity.

What seems so strange to me about that logic is the following: let’s say you’ve heard that your competition is going to make a talking pig movie and you think, “Man, I’m going to miss an opportunity to cash in on this talking pig thing that everyone is itching to see!”

One, it’s strange that you would jump to the conclusion that everyone is going to love this other talking pig movie before it’s been released. What if it’s a huge flop? Now you’re barreling ahead on a path that leads to a cliff’s edge.

Two, what makes you think that if the first one is a big success, anyone is going to want to see two talking pig movies in the same summer? If it’s a big success, that means by definition a lot of people saw it. That’s a lot of people who are probably not going to care that much about your johnny-come-lately pig movie that comes out two months later. Wouldn’t it be better to release yours a year or two afterward to let the people’s hunger for talking pigs revive a bit?

It seems like a lose-lose situation to me. Maybe the market research shows differently.

This is a guest post by Nate Spears, who has taken over the site this week while Shawn is on vacation at an undisclosed location.

This is a guest post by Nate Spears, who has taken over the site this week while Shawn is on vacation at an undisclosed location.

* * *

I’m going to take this unique opportunity to introduce you guys to something that’s going on across the pond. If you have zero interest in sports, then just move on to the next item in your RSS feed now! If you are interested, this is going to be a long read. Fair warning.

The world of European football (soccer) is a fascinating place, endlessly rich for the sports fan, whether she be casual or fanatic. I could spend several posts detailing the scene from different angles. I could talk about the different flavors of the major leagues – the English, Spanish, German, and Italian leagues (in no particular order) being the richest and generally producing the best soccer, but with different playstyles prevailing in each league. There’s the amazing Champions League, which is a super-league where the best clubs from the whole continent compete in a tournament similar to the format of the World Cup (every year!). There’s the drama of great coaches coming and going, rising and falling, with the best ones changing the style of the game for years. There’s the character of the clubs themselves and their traditions, chants, stadiums, and histories. Along with all that are the intricate, evolving strategies that work their way around Europe like the DNA of successful offspring. Who can find the next step in tactics and formations that will produce the most from a team of talented stars? These are the questions that try men’s souls.

But a lot of that would be a bit, er, inside football to the uninitiated. So I’ve decided to focus on something that’s happening on a more individual level. Right now two men playing in the Spanish League (La Liga) are playing to a sustained level of individual brilliance and one-up-manship that is unparalleled in the history of football, perhaps in the history of sport.

These men are an Argentinian named Lionel Messi and a Portuguese named Cristiano Ronaldo (not to be confused with the Brazilians Ronaldo or Ronaldinho). Leo Messi plays for Barcelona and Ronaldo plays for Real Madrid. These clubs are the richest Spanish clubs and vie for the title each year, and each time they meet the contest is (perhaps unfairly to the rest of their teams) billed as a clash of the two greatest players in the game – Messi vs Ronaldo.

Their individual stories are an interesting study in contrast. Ronaldo has a fairly typical superstar striker story. He started at small clubs in his home country Portugal, and worked his way up to the highest level there. Then he caught the attention of a big club, Manchester United, in one of the four big soccer countries, England, while still young, and developed into a true superstar at Man United. Ronaldo is tall and handsome, some might say pretty, and he fostered a reputation as a bit of a whiny diver early on in his career. He has mostly overcome that reputation now, and his work ethic is tremendous. He’s still a bit infamous among fans of the English national team for winking at his team bench after getting a beloved, hotheaded English player sent off in a World Cup. After making his value at Man United obvious, he joined the only club in the world richer than Man United, Real Madrid, and moved to Spain. Ronaldo has the healthy ego typical of a tall, handsome, talented superstar.

“Some fans keep booing and whistling at me because I’m handsome, rich and a great player. They envy me.”

But he’s not an unsympathetic character either:

“There is no harm in dreaming of becoming the world’s best player. It’s all about trying to be the best. I will keep working hard to achieve it, but it is within my capabilities.”

Lionel Messi, in comparison, is a bit of an oddity in the superstar market. He came up through Barcelona’s youth system and has stayed with the club through his whole career to date. He has stated repeatedly his desire to retire at Barcelona (he probably has at least another 7 years to play). This doesn’t mean he’s any more loyal than Ronaldo – it’s just good luck for him and Barcelona that he started out at one of the biggest teams on the planet (Barcelona is the 3rd richest club in the world, behind both Man United and Real Madrid). Many teams have youth systems and try to promote “from within”, but statistically it’s just unlikely that you will be able to identify all the talent you need from a young age. For every Ronaldo that Man United brings over at 17 or 18 who makes it big, there are ten strikers they bring in who look promising at that age but never quite develop into a striker of “big club caliber” and eventually move on to play their football at smaller clubs. And I don’t even know how many very young kids go through a club’s youth system without ever getting a chance at “first team football,” that is, practicing with the real players and perhaps getting a chance to play towards the end of a real game.

Before Messi played in Spain for Barca, he was a young boy in Argentina whose potential was obvious to anyone who saw him play. He had the ball glued to his left foot from an early age, reminiscent of the greatest Argentinian and perhaps greatest footballer of all time, Diego Maradona. The problem was that Lionel Messi had a growth hormone deficiency, and the payments for the treatments were beyond his parents’ means. When Barcelona’s scout saw the boy in action, he was so convinced of Messi’s talent that Barcelona offered to bring the whole family to Spain and help find his father work, and to take care of Messi’s medical treatment. There was a now-mythical contract on a paper napkin to seal the deal.

Messi was so small when he came over to Spain that his coaches asked the other players not to hurt him. Says his teammate Pique:

“He was really good, but he was really small and thin. His legs were like fingers. One coach said, ‘Don’t try to tackle him strong, because maybe you will break him.’ And we said, ‘O.K., but don’t worry because we cannot catch him.’ ”

In 2006, the dominant superstar at Barcelona was an electric Brazilian named Ronaldinho, whose infectious smile and otherworldly skills charmed the world. Upon receiving the Ballon d’Or (the Golden Ball, an award voted on by players, coaches, and press to give to the best player in the world), Ronaldinho said of the young Messi:

“This award says I’m the best player in the world, but I’m not even the best player at Barcelona.”

Despite the growth treatments that he eventually got, Messi is still a short man (5’7″), and although his legs are no longer skinny, he still comes across as a bit slight. He looks like an average Joe, and his personality is the antithesis of the headline-generating superego. He constantly deflects praise to his teammates and speaks of the team’s achievements, downplaying his own importance. In short, if he wasn’t the greatest player of his generation, he might be a bit forgettable.

So why bring up these two players together? Well, it seems to be one of the boons to fans of football that these two players, both of whom would normally dominate a decade of football with ease, are playing at the same time. They also seem to be, despite the mild protestations of both players to the contrary, pushing each other to greater heights. Ronaldo secured a move to Barcelona’s great rival, Real Madrid, at the height of both of their powers. If that isn’t a declaration of war, I don’t know what is.

So what have these two been doing that makes them so special? They are scoring at an unprecedented, inhuman rate, and they are keeping it up over a period of years.

In 2007-2008, Ronaldo scored 42 goals in 49 appearances in all competitions for Man United, meaning the main English league, the Champions League, and other English tournaments that Man United participated in. This is an astonishing achievement in and of itself, and would be a great achievement even if he had never scored again. The position of striker/forward in football usually plays as close to the opponent’s goal as possible and receives the ball far up the pitch (field) in good position to attempt scoring goals. A striker who scores a goal every two games is considered proficient and deadly, and will command a high salary at a top club. Ronaldo scored his 42 goals playing from a winger position – meaning he played on the side of the pitch and would often have to run past two or three people to score his goals. On top of that, he was scoring free kicks on a regular basis – kicking the ball from a dead stop after a foul of some kind. He was kicking the ball so hard that it swerved back and forth like a knuckleball pitch in baseball, making many a goalkeeper flap at the ball like a large ungainly bird. Sometimes the ball would change direction so rapidly that it looked like it had bounced off an invisible wall in midair. At the time I thought this scoring achievement was so incredible that I remarked to a friend, “He’ll never score that many goals again in his life.” And indeed, the next season he scored a merely excellent 24 goals for Man United. But he would make me eat my words later.

By contrast, in 2007-2008 Messi was not yet the most important player at Barcelona. A glittering array of scoring talent like Thierry Henry, Samuel Eto’o, and Ronaldinho still played there. While establishing himself as an important player in that squad, he scored 16 goals in 40 appearances. and started to let the world know the amazing things he was capable of.

But Ronaldo was just getting started as well. The year following his “slump,” he was traded to Real Madrid; although Man United didn’t want to see him go, they didn’t want to hold him back if he was ready to leave. After that, both their careers started to accelerate. Football isn’t just a numbers game, but take a look at these numbers anyway.

You can see that in 2010-2011 both players approached the absurd “1 goal per game” mark and in 2011-2012 they achieved it. That year, in the 38 Spanish league games, Messi scored 50 of his 60 goals. This was 10 more than the previous record, set the year before by Ronaldo, and 12 more than the record previous to that, set in 1989 by the legend Hugo Sanchez. Consider the ramifications of surpassing the previous high scoring mark by 20%, and what that would look like in other sports. Also consider the number of games played and the consistency required to keep up that output over 50 games, sometimes 2 a week, almost always 90 min per game. By way of comparison, Dan Marino’s astonishing record of 48 touchdowns in a season surpassed the previous holder at 36, a mark which had stood for 20 years, and Marino’s record lasted another 20 years (before being eclipsed by 1 and 2 touchdowns). I think this is the type of once-in-a-lifetime athletic performances by geniuses that we are seeing with Messi and Ronaldo.

Consider that in La Liga, a league that has hosted many of the finest strikers in history, Messi and Ronaldo now collectively occupy 6 of the top 9 spots on the “Most goals in one season” table. Consider that Messi reached 200 goals in La Liga when he was 4 years younger than the previous youngest. Consider that Ronaldo has scored 199 goals in 201 games for Real Madrid. Finally, consider that they have done it all in an age when improved sport science (diets, training, etc) and the immense amounts of money involved have produced faster players, more coordinated teams, and better preparation (analyzing video of your opponent, for example), all without increasing the size of the pitch. Theoretically, there should be less space to operate in and less opportunities to score as athletes and tactics improve. Thankfully, the players are rising to the occasion and thriving in circumstances that would have seemed stifling to players of an earlier time. Even at the highest level, if you’re not careful, Messi will score five on you.

I’ve painted this article a bit more favorably to Messi than Ronaldo, because I like him more, but don’t be misled – both players have rabid legions of fans, often divided by no more than club loyalty. In another world, Messi plays for Real Madrid and Ronaldo plays for Barcelona, and people change their opinions as easily as their shirts.

There’s so much more I could tell you. The exciting head-to-head encounters, the back and forth fortunes of their clubs, the weird tension that is there because Messi keeps winning the Ballon d’Or (4 times running!) despite Ronaldo’s brilliance. The drama of this season’s Champions League, when the clubs were set up oh so perfectly to play each other in the Champions League final, only to bow out in the semifinals to German teams that have been modeled to a large extent on the play styles that Madrid and Barcelona have embodied recently. The epic tale of Madrid’s coach, Jose Mourinho, once spurned by Barcelona as a coach, who made his reputation elsewhere, finally returned to Spain to lead Madrid to prominence over Barcelona, but is now departing with a black cloud over his head after a disappointing third season in which Barca reclaimed the crown. The strange fate of the player Asier Del Horno, whose desperate foul on Messi was so blatant that it basically ended Horno’s career at Chelsea. So many stories, so little time.

Instead I will leave you with two videos. Both of them show off the respective player’s strengths, although of course Messi’s is my favorite. Messi is a player to whom taking a dive is an unknown desire, which leads to one of my favorite videos of his exploits: Lionel Messi Never Dives. When your livelihood depends on your legs, especially for a goalscorer who requires the most finesse from his feet, many players take a seat as soon as things get dicey, because it’s just not worth it to them to risk their careers for the chance to score one more goal. That thought never crosses Messi’s mind and that’s one reason so many people adore him.

Ronaldo is a striker of incredible power and precision, and many of my favorite plays of his involve his breathtaking free kicks. Here’s one in particular that I can watch over and over. See how fast the ball gets up over the wall and then dips back down; that’s not just gravity, it’s magic. Note the force with which it hits the back of the net: it looks like it might rip through the netting.

If you’d like to see more of either player, youtube is chock full of highlights of both. Keep an eye out at next year’s World Cup! I hope you’ve enjoyed this not-so-brief foray into a world you might not be that familiar with.

Shoutout to reader Matthew S. for encouraging me to write a footy post. I hope this satisfies you! Matthew wants me to let you know that the Welsh sensation Gareth Bale, plying his trade in England, deserves to be mentioned in an article about the greats of the game this season. Bale had 26 goals in 44 games for Tottenham, also from a winger position, and has the talent to become worthy of mention in the same breath as Ronaldo and Messi. Here’s hoping he keeps getting better!

Good morning. I’m Nate Spears, and I’m going to be posting a bit while Shawn takes some well-deserved time off. Shawn gave me a very kind intro, and I thought I’d expand on that a bit so you have some idea what to expect this week.

I studied computer science at the University of Kansas (Rock Chalk!), and I’ve been working in the software industry since 2004. I tell people that I’m a software consultant; my business card said “Senior Solutions Architect” for a long time, which basically means “I’ll do anything you ask me to.” I worked in the Novell software sphere for about 7 years, alternating between Identity Management and custom software development. Now I’m working in the GIS world, which takes me to San Francisco during the week.  My point is, I’m an “in the trenches” developer, so hopefully I can bring something interesting from that to any discourse we have. Also, I’ll try not to use so many quotation marks in the future.

I’ve been reading Shawn’s writing since he started his own website, so I have some idea what usually goes on here. I hope you won’t hold me to Shawn’s standards or his insights, since he’s a pro at this and I’m a fill-in. If I make any obvious blunders please let me know.

Since the site often covers technology, I’ll give you a quick rundown of the usual suspects.  I use a Galaxy Nexus as my phone, and a 2nd generation iPad with the Logitech ultra-thin keyboard as my tablet and primary personal computer when traveling. My personal home computer (which I built, in time-honored nerd tradition) runs Windows 7; I mostly use it for web browsing, playing Starcraft 2 and League of Legends, and video editing. My work laptop is company-issue, also runs Windows 7, and has the standard Microsoft Office installs. I have never owned an Apple desktop computer, although I have seriously considered getting a 27″ iMac with a case for use as a portable computer. I have a vision condition that makes using a regular laptop an exercise in hunching, but carrying my personal computer/monitor setup everywhere is not really an option.

My other nerdery involves movies and TV series, books (a lot of the requisite science fiction and fantasy), soccer (playing and watching, mostly the EPL and La Liga), and playing a few board games.

As for my time on shawnblanc.net, I’m hoping that I can spark some interesting discussions and entertain you a little bit along the way. My gmail id is spearofsolomon; feel free to email or IM me with topic suggestions, questions you think I might have a unique perspective on, etc. However! I’m not going to run the show in Shawn’s inimitable style, so expect a much lighter tone this week. When the cat’s away, the mice will play.

Enough about me. Here’s my first question for you guys: what do you think of Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr? In a big picture sense, is it possible for a once-dominant Internet giant to work its way back to those heights? It seems to me that Marissa Mayer may feel that Yahoo can’t be what it was (a dominant search engine, for one), so she’s trying to make them into something different in order to stay relevant, but I’m not sure what the vision is.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

This is a guest post by Nate Spears, who has taken over the site this week while Shawn is on vacation at an undisclosed location.

There is a swell new trailer for Man of Steel. Actually, it’s beyond swell; it’s epic. In fact, it’s so epic, if you removed a few of the fast cuts to give a bit more plot clarity, and then add in something about Superman conquering General Zod, then, well, you’d probably have the world’s most epic 3-minute film.

It reminds me of the 2002 Spider-man Trailer where just about the only part missing is Spider-man actually defeating the Green Goblin.

With trailers like these, who needs movies?

This isn’t wholly new. In the trailer for the classic 1940’s film, The Shop Around the Corner, even though the plot isn’t given away we do see the main two characters fighting and then later being lovey-dovey with one another. If you saw the trailer before watching the movie, you’ve got a pretty good guess at how it ends up. (Of course, come on. It’s an old-school, feel-good romantic comedy — you don’t need spoilers to know how it ends up.)

But then there’s the trailer for Citizen Kane. In it you get a sense for the feel of the movie without really knowing what the movie is about. We’re shown some of the acting and the characters, but without any deep revelation of what the plot is about or what awesome stunts this film is pulling off.

The trailer for Citizen Kane aims to entice you without giving away the plot. The same goal as in the trailer for The Shining.

What used to be a trailer is now called a teaser. Like the trailers for Citizen Kane, The Shining, Alien, and others, a teaser doesn’t try to squeeze the biggest visual moments and most powerful dialog into a 3-minute clip. For example: the teaser for Man of Steel was incredible and was all I needed to know that I’d be going to see the film when it came out.

Perhaps it’s because the summer movie market is so crowded. Movie studios want to show as much of their epic blockbuster as possible to prove it’s a film worth seeing in the theatre instead of waiting for it to come to iTunes.

I’ve always viewed trailers as film art in and of themselves. And while I certainly enjoy watching today’s epic trailers, I have more appreciation for the ones which maintain some self control, aiming to tell me just enough and no more.

Dave Caolo is putting together a collection of some of the heroes and the acts of kindness surrounding yesterday’s events in Boston. The bombing was a horrible tragedy, but seeing the unity and the selflessness that it brought out in the citizens of Boston is heart warming and encouraging to say the least.