In LA

• OMFG, there’s a new Wallace and Gromit movie? Now I’m really excited to be heading back to the states, where there are actual movie thea … #
• Tonight an infant in split pants was handed to me at a KFC in Yiwu. A minute later it unleashed a combination of piss and crap on me. #
• Stayed up discussing possible Genesis straight-to-disk workflows with Felipe til 3AM. #

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All the VFX folk have left, which made me the last resident of the VFX villa. I finished my last day of work in Hengdian (which consisted of packing boxes and printing up manifests for all editorial’s boxes) and headed home. As I rode my bike up the hill to the villa, I passed a group of four college-age Chinese kids and greeted them with a ni hao as I passed.

Arrived home, showered, changed, and heard a noise outside. I walked out on the balcony outside my room to take a look, and saw the same group had set up a tripod on the street in front of the villa and two of them were in costume.

I walked out and watched for a bit, then talked to the director. The director was wearing a yellow Beijing Film Academy T-shirt and an askew black bowler hat (a prop? was he trying to create his own signature look?) They were all Beijing Film Academy students making a short film set in (if I understood correctly) 1910 era Shanghai or thereabouts. The scene involved a couple meeting on the street, the woman (in heels and a red dress) showing the guy a couple of photos, and then the two of them leaving. I looked up the word for ‘viewpoint’ (观点) in my Chinese dictionary, and told the director (Lou Sai) that he was welcome to take a shot from the balcony if he wanted a higher view. He came up and got the shot.

Afterwards, we went downstairs, and I spent a while generically helping and talking to one of his colleagues (Ling Yi Qing) who was working as the assistant. She kept alternately lifting one leg and then the other, apparently to ward off mosquitoes (蚊子). I tried to show her the tons of bats (蝙蝠) that were flying around eating mosquitoes, but they were being elusive. There really are massive number of bats that come out in Hengdian as the sun sets, and often as I walk around I feel like one of the characters in the film Pitch Black as they walk along carrying torches to ward off the creatures of the night.

I let them know that they’d be welcome to shoot from the balcony again the next day or two, not knowing that the next morning I’d have to move back to the main hotel housing the rest of the crew (影都兵馆).

Eventually the filmmakers departed and I went to sleep.

• I’m wrapping cables. lots of cables. I hate cables. The sooner everything is transmitted wirelessly the better. #
• packing packing packing #
• Presently eating fish skin salad, shun tak special fish head, fried pepper green beans, and chicken fried rice. #
• upgrading my blog so that the twitter tools work #
• Once again I ride off into the night on my bike. This time I leave a nearly empty office behind. #
• Watched 10 minutes of tv. Happy that my mandarin is now good enough to understand a kids movie dubbed into Chinese. #
• 我尽快试试做个美梦。。。 #

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• the internet is sucking today, from here. #
• Loving the Amon Tobin, ‘Verbal’, from ‘Out From Out Where’. #
• all single Chinese women are 20 years old. Not sure if that’s an ode or a lament. #
• I think by the age of 24 they’re stowed away indoors and never see daylight again. #
• I set to follow kadcoger’s tweets, but he’s never listed in my "Following" list. A definite twitter bug. #
• researching Inphase Technologies. Is that Lucent spin-off co. publically traded? Holographic storage is cool. #
• Many of my friends are watching the eclipse right now #
• "Ancient Chinese astronomers believed the eclipse showed the moon being consumed by celestial dragons." (http://tinyurl.com/24w4s8) #
• Twitter bug#2: the search engine is nearly useless. Ken couldn’t find me, I couldn’t find him. I tried searching with both his name and … #
• Ben, the dragon already vomited blood onto the moon. Why scare it away and spoil its meal? #
• Heading out to the dark streets of Hengdian for my bike ride back to the villa. #
• Woohoo, got twitting from my phone to work. I feel so connected to the universe. #
• I explained twitter to Jeremy, he was not amused. #
• At the local bar, 1798, with the remaining VFX team members. most of ‘em leave morrow at 5am. #
• Jeremy is here. Now that he sees how truly useful twitter is, he’ll have to like it. #
• Everyone was too tired to actually be lively tonight. We leave to the strains of ‘another girl, another planet’. #
• 在twitter中文好用吗? #

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Today I captured the last of the footage from the film’s 402 HDCam SR tapes, all shot on the Panavision Genesis camera. The total number of clips I’ve logged and captured¹ for this film: 10,062. That’s got to be some kind of record.

1. If you don’t know what this post means, what a Genesis is, etc, don’t worry. This post is just a brief bit of gloating. I’ll cover some of the details later. [↩]

• This keyboard waffle iron, by designer Chris Dimino, makes QWERTY keyboard shaped waffles. They look tasty.
• The Hide-a-Pod iPod and iPhone anti-theft device:

  Just tell us what iPod model you want to protect and we provide a gutted and hinged Zune with our custom molded iPod casing adapter. We also include a custom cable from the Zune’s controls (see FAQ) and audio output jack that you simply plug into your iPod. No iPod modifications are necessary.

  It’s a bit of a cheap shot –the Zune didn’t look¹ all that bad²– but that page is pretty damned funny. Do click through and attempt to buy one (don’t worry, it’s not really for sale, but the ordering page is amusing).

1. especially in brown [↩]
2. at least, the hardware didn’t look bad. Users seem to report plenty of software problems [↩]

I am now a believer. I believe in RSS, Flickr, social networking sites, text messaging, AJAX, web 2.0, and any shiny object I see on the ground. Ooh, shiny. So rather than put up several more months of resistance, I’ve just signed up for a twitter account.

I know what you’re thinking (not “you”, a rhetorical-device version of “you” –the “you” who laughs in the laugh track on the teevee and audibly gasps when guests hit each other over the head with conveniently-portable chairs on Springer): You’re thinking this is a big break with my long-standing tradition.

With every other hyped internet tech that’s come along for the past couple of years, I’d first read about it and be unimpressed by the hype. Then the virtues of the shiny new thing would be extolled to me by friends who use it, and I’d just think instead of the multitude of alternatives that seemed to me to be better, more customizable, can run on my own server, etc. Then eventually I’d try the hyped technology and very quickly realize its value and coolness. And finally I’d spend actual money to buy software that enhances my use of that technology. NetNewsWire to better read whatever RSS feeds are, Ecto to post to whatever a blog is, a Flickr Pro account to which to upload whatever a digital photo is, etc.

So even though I have only the barest idea of exactly what twitter is all about, I’ve decided to skip a few of my normal stubborn steps and sign up. Awesome. Now I can send really short messages to a bunch of people much more easily than before, I guess. I bet after I use it for a couple of days I’ll like, totally grok it, and then it’ll become an integral part of who I am, like my 3rd eye and my car’s 5th wheel.

So I’ve joined twitter. If you want to read whatever I twit, here’s a link to my twitter page. You can see what I’m up to, or something. It’s easy to join twitter and then receive a torrent of inane text drippings from all your other twits. I’ve added my twitter page to the growing list of my accounts on social networking sites. I’m now a member of 7 such sites, and soon I may have to outsource the job of maintaining my profile page on each site so that I can get some work done in the real world.

PS. It was tough, but I exercised a modicum of restraint and avoided making any awful puns in this post’s title out of the word ‘twitter’ and all its variants, synonyms, or nonextant seemingly-related naughty words ( ‘atwitter’, ‘nit-twit’, ‘chirp’, ‘twits in a bunch’, ‘twatter’¹ ).

1. Don’t even think of registering that last one as a domain name, every useful variant is taken, probably since 5 minutes after twitter launched [↩]

Last week, after a couple months of ordinary sit-ups at home, I did some sit-ups on an inclined bench in the disorderly weight room of the nearby hotel, and was surprisingly sore for days afterwards. This week I returned to the weight-room and realized the reason that the sit-ups had taken such a toll: the insanely accomplished Jackie Chan / Jet Li / Yuen Wo Ping stunt performers who also frequent the weight room had not only set the bench to it’s steepest setting, but had placed weights beneath the legs to steepen the angle further. I must not have noticed on the previous visit.

This time, the same number of sit-ups resulted in no soreness, so maybe I’ll have to prop up the end of the bench with a few more weights or an apple box. That bench is one of the few operational “machines” in the room, so I might as well make the best use of it that I can.

From an Associated Press article:

Thai police officers who break police rules will be forced to wear hot pink armbands featuring “Hello Kitty,” the Japanese icon of cute, as a mark of shame, a senior officer said Monday.

Are Thai police officers so excessively macho that they consider the wearing of Hello Kitty gear to be a punishment? Maybe for really severe offenses such delinquent officers should be required to host tea parties with the department’s doll collection.

I think the armband is kind of cool, it should be made part of the official uniform even for officers who don’t break the rules.

The AP article is a short summary of a Bangkok Post story that includes this photo and additional cultural information that make the idea seem slightly less bizarre.

I spent a rewarding bit of time today catching up on friends’ blogs. A couple of highlights:

• Hoops McCann writes about “when people seem to be literally ‘not themselves’” in Psychic Invasion, and drops a whopper of a short story in After The Rain.
• An ill Jason Ocampo tells a funny, wistful tale of a “complex technical conversation with an attractive young female” and a missed opportunity in Memorial’s End.