Latest Movie Rental: Once

It’s 10:45 PM on Friday night, but I’m staying up to write this blog post because I liked the movie I just saw that much.  The movie is entitled Once and stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.  You may recognize the name because it won an Oscar the other night for best original song, beating out three songs from that stupid Enchanted movie (thank goodness).  When Marketa’s acceptance speech was cut off by the “Oscar music”, John Stewart had her come back out after the commercial break and do her speech.  It was a nice moment.

Frankly the likability of the two stars in their acceptance speeches is what drove me to see the movie.  In this day and age, I’ve grown incredibly tired of the same old Hollywood bull crap.  It was nice to see two humble people up on that stage.  It was nice to see something different.  So tonight at Blockbuster, my wife picked up Once, and I wholeheartedly agreed on the rental choice, a rare occasion.

Once is the story of a struggling Dublin street musician and a poor Czech immigrant that make a connection through their music.  In some ways it was reminiscent of Lost in Translation in that it was a story of two people that find something in each other that they’re missing alone.  In contrast to Lost in Translation, however, the main characters in Once have much more in common than did Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson.  On the other hand, the two movies ended in a very similar fashion.

The movie is one of the best films I’ve seen in awhile.  I suggest you get your butt over to Blockbuster and rent it if you haven’t already.

Technorati Tags: once, marketa, hansard, oscar, film, movie

A day later: Issues with GrandCentral

Ok, yesterday I posted about GrandCentral.  I think it’s a really good idea.  For a more complete rundown of all the stuff it can do, you should read Lifehacker’s post about it.  Despite being a REALLY good idea, I’ve discovered a few things that are going to prevent me from jumping head first into the deep end:

- GrandCentral does not support text messaging.  It does, however, look like they may be looking to change this soon based off of reading their help section.  What does it mean?  Well, if I tell all my friends I’ve changed my number to 555.555.5555, if they try and send me a text message it wouldn’t make it through to my cell phone.  I don’t want people to have to keep two numbers for me (one for voice, and another for SMS).  That doesn’t simplify my life.

- Caller ID doesn’t work the way you want it to.  For example, if I call my wife from my personal cell phone, the number of my personal cell phone will show up on her caller ID, not my GrandCentral number.  This will do nothing but confuse people.  If I send out an email to my contacts saying, “My number has now changed to 555.555.5555″, and then later I call them and it shows up as my cell phone number, 333.333.3333, they’re going to want to change the number back in their cell phone contacts.  Confusing for someone who doesn’t know what’s going on (i.e., you).

- In-network calling isn’t a two way street.  My wife and I both have Verizon Wireless.  If she calls my GrandCentral number and I pick up on my VZW cell phone, I will not be charged for out-of-network calling, but she will.  You see, she dialed a non-Verizon cell number (GrandCentral), which is how the cell companies determine in-network calling.  Of course, if you talk during your “unlimited anytime minutes”, this isn’t an issue.

Like I said, I think this is a really good idea, but these few things are keeping it from the big time, in my opinion.  So, you ask, how will I use it?  Well, in our household, we don’t have a local, landline phone number.  This can be a pain in the neck when you’re trying to order a pizza, or someone from town without a cell phone wants to call you.  It’s also a pain when people want a joint number for our family (like at church).  Solution?  With GrandCentral, I simply set up a new local number and associated both my and my wife’s cell phone with it.  So now, whenever anyone calls it, both of our phones will ring.  To your average Joe, it will seem that he’s calling a landline phone.

The other nice thing is that we can give the number out and if a telemarketer starts bugging us, we can just mark him as a “spam caller” on the GrandCentral website and block him, just like in email!  Furthermore, any time we get a voicemail, it will be sent to our joint Gmail account that either one of can check from anywhere (or we could do it the old fashioned way and just call in to listen to it).  Genius!

Technorati Tags: grandcentral

All about GrandCentral

Mobile post sent by ndbutter using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Ok, so I had to cheat a bit to post to my blog.  Unfortunately, WordPress.com won’t let you post flash to your blog, so in order to get this up here, I had to go through Utterz.  I’m a sneaky kid.  Just press play above!

New Gear

So it’s my birthday next week, and I’ve asked for a bunch of photography gear this year.  Yesterday I got a new flash for my camera, and I’m quite excited about it.  I know no one else will care, but it’s a big deal to me.  I have a ton to learn about how to use it and whatnot, but I played around a bit last night.  It’s going to be fun learning how to do this stuff!  This is the best shot I came away with:

This is why I switched from Comcast…

Get Mobile with Swift

I know, I know.  I haven’t posted here in over a month.  Well, tough.  Big whoop.  Wanna fight about it?

I’ve got a new website for you to check out called Swift.  Basically it’s an online tool that allows you to create a mobile site for all your content.  Here’s how it works: you go to the site, register, and create a site in the format http://username.swiftmob.com.  Then you design your site.  Thankfully, no prior HTML knowledge is required.

The real backbone of service lies on the utilization of RSS feeds.  Think of Swift as a mobile pot to throw all your content for easy access from a mobile phone.  So for me, I threw in my Twitter feed, my Flickr feed, my blog feed, and the feed for my shared stories from Google Reader and Swift produced this.  Swift pulls all those feeds together on one page and formats to show up correctly in a mobile browser.

The whole design interface is easy-to-use AJAX, so there’s a lot of intuitive dragging and dropping involved.  There looks to be a pretty decent stats system that I presume is built on Google Analytics, so that’s nice as well.  There’s also a bunch of stuff you can do to actually design your site like photo headers, footers, background/text colors, etc.  I haven’t played with any of that yet.

I’ll keep playing with it, but mobile is definitely the future of computing so it will be interesting to see how this develops.

Technorati Tags: swift, mobile, ajax