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Strange product positioning
"OK, so what desserts shall we buy? Jello? Tapioca? Paraffin?"
Read MoreFilm: Franklyn (2008)
I’ve just seen this excellent film at this week’s movie night and felt inspired to write a review. But since images speak louder than words, I have attached the trailer to whet your appetite.
This trailer is a little misleading, as it weaves some elements of the story together in a different order/with a different significance, but it should give a good flavour of the feeling and style of the film. Don’t pay too much attention to any plot suggestions the trailer makes.
This film passed me by, I hadn’t even heard of it, and yet it’s exactly the sort of film I love most, films that keep you guessing as to the story you see unfolding, films that twist reality(ies) in interesting ways. I’m very glad to have been introduced to it, and I can thoroughly recommend it. If you enjoyed Sliding Doors, Fight Club, Total Recall or Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind I think you’ll like this film.
Like many of my favourite films it’s hard to describe without giving too much away, but I’ll take a stab at it.
Road Testing Posterous
I tried posterous a couple of months back after hearing it mentioned on the net@night podcast and thought it seemed very impressive. I love the fact that you can email your blog posts with minimal effort, and even include photos and media and have it seamlessly embedded. But it was a solution waiting for a problem, I didn’t know quite what to use it for. I already have a blog at http://alexbowyer.blogspot.com/ .
But then I met Werner Vogels and he told me about http://werner.ly/, his posterous site which he uses for things that don’t quite fit on Twitter or on his blog – and I was inspired to do something similar myself. I realised that the time it takes for me to write a blog post properly and add photos, links etc, using the Blogger interface, has become something of a barrier to my blogging. I’m typically only getting one or two posts a month out as a result. Part of that is that I use it somewhat for therapeutic writing, and part of it is that I want every post to be “as good as it can be” (my perfectionist streak coming through).
And at the same time, at the other end of the spectrum, I manage to update my Twitter status several times a day. When you have to fit something into 140 text only characters, there is much less barrier to entry. But I know that there are plenty of things I’ve wanted to share and haven’t – maybe because I wanted to plan them out and make them something more complete, or maybe because they needed images or media to do them justice.
So I’m hoping that this posterous blog will be the perfect thing to plug the gap. I’m going to impose a limit of 500 words and try and blog here more often than I do on Blogger. You can expect the content here to be a little less polished, but hopefully a little more frequent and certainly more images, clips, etc. I am not sure yet if I am going to blog some or all of these posts to Blogger too.. perhaps if they relate to one of my categories. Will see how it goes with that. Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!
I was just testing the facilities of posterous and I uploaded a picture and some music (Soundcheck Song by Hera). I’ll leave them in for you to enjoy …
One week in startup-land
The last month or so has been a period of change for me – in that time I started one job, left it after two weeks, had a week off, and started another one! As a result of which I haven’t really established any kind of routine and haven’t been very good at blogging (although I have been “tweeting” or micro-blogging – you can follow me on Twitter as @alexbfree).
The first job was a web development job I found via PHP Québec, and it was the first tech job that came along really. It was perfectly ok, and helped me brush up my PHP and MySQL skills, but as you will have realised from my recent posts, my heart’s not really in it to “just” be a programmer any more. I want to work with real teams and businesses, develop ideas and do stuff that matters.
A Serendipitous Moment
I felt it was a most fortuituous occurrence when I discovered this job ad back at the start of April. I knew I had to apply; it described an ideal candidate with insatiable curiosity, an analytical mind, a passion for all things Internet, an awareness of GTD for organisation and most of all a desire to change the world a little at a time. It was like reading a description of myself. I knew I had to apply.
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