I never did see "The Virgin Suicides" but I do love Air, the band who did the soundtrack. Very nice profile of Coppola, who's directing this new movie "Lost in Translation."

Initially, with ''Lost in Translation,'' Sofia wrote a kind of short story instead of a script, and the film retains that loose, lyrical feel. The plot is minimal: an American movie star named Bob Harris arrives in Tokyo to film a commercial for a Japanese whiskey. His sense of midlife dislocation is matched by the 20-something driftiness of Charlotte, an equally jet-lagged and sleep-deprived woman who winds up seated next to him late one evening in the hotel bar. When her husband, a self-involved fashion photographer, gets an opportunity to go off for a few days to shoot a rock band, he takes it, leaving his young wife to fend for herself. Bob and Charlotte strike up an unlikely alliance.

The relationship of the fashion photographer and his young wife may or may not have shadings of Coppola's own life and her relationship to Jonze. Giovanni Ribisi, who plays the photographer, speaks with Jonze's mannerisms, and Scarlett Johansson, as Charlotte, is dressed and styled to seem a lot like Coppola. ''I know,'' Coppola says, ''how narcissistic.''

The Coppola Smart Mob

CRAZY SCARY photos! Give that pilot a raise!

EasyJet vs. hailstorm

J.D. Biersdorfer has a nice piece in the NY Times on how a college in Chicago with a distributed campus is using a Sony NSP-100 network A/V storage device to move TV data around the various campus buildings. I've never seen one of these but they sound like a really simple Tivo or digital video recorder.

I bought a Sony CDR-W33 CD Recorder because it has an incredible amount in inputs and outputs (all digital, and optical) and it is a quality piece. I should also mention that professional audio equipment usually is not stymied by DRM and copy protection software.

A Television Network With a PC at Its Heart

more info on the Sony network recorders

Today was busy but invigorating.

I went to go hear Howard Rheingold (author of Smartmobs, both the book and the weblog) and Anthony Townsend (of NYU and NYC Wireless) speak at a GLOCOM event which was arranged by Izumi Aizu of Asia Network Research. I met Izumi last month at the First International Moblog Conference (see my notes from the conference.)

I've been wanting to meet Howard for quite some time as Justin is good friends with Howard and I was taken by many of the ideas in Smartmobs. Anthony is also someone that I've been wanting to meet for quite some time because as a founder of NYC Wireless, he worked closely with my motorcycling buddy Terry Schmidt, whom I met when he was still an undergrad at UCLA. The venue was the Academy Hills conference room on the 49th floor of the Mori Tower of Roppongi Hills, which was quite the location and view! Izumi-san, you put on quite a conference!

After that I had a nice chat with Gary , who was at the conference as well, went back to the office, did a little work, and went to dinner with the Sony Mac Users Group, which is an unofficial group of Mac users in Sony. They told me some crazy stories about how at one point in time Sony was the largest Appletalk network in Japan and that Sony had made and sold a Unix workstation called Sony NEWS. My jaw droped at that one. We also looked at a beta release of Panther (which I thought was already out in the wild ;) and it is really cool! I'm dying to buy that new 15" Powerbook!

Finally I'm currently in the RDF Interest group IRC chat.

A long but interesting day.

Greg Elin has a sad but resonant post on this catastrophe that was the Shuttle. I hope he doesn't mind if I quote him in full:

Listening to news last night and this morning regarding the recently released report on the NASA report on the Shuttle crash and coverage of the EPA's Inspector General's report on the deception of air quality downtown, I can't help but feel an eery premonition of the news coverage a decade or two from now as an array of natural disasters caused by poor management become more and more painful and even catastrophic: over fishing, deforestation, global warming, inefficient use of non-renewal energy.

Seems to me the overall lesson of the recent crisis is that complex system like space shuttles, stock exchanges, electrical grids, computers, human bodies, and ecosystem often have sudden catastrophic failures. The same integration which makes the whole so much greater than the sum of its parts makes whole of failure much greater than the sum of the failing parts.

DUH BLOG :: 2003-08-27 :: The Shuttle and Complex Failure

Fire up your RSS readers everyone!

Jeremy Zawodny's blog: Yahoo! News RSS Feeds Launched

COOL! An interview with Hiroyuki Nishimura who founded 2ch.net, the most popular website in Japan by a long shot.

Japan Media Review -- Q&A With the Founder of Channel 2

Hmm...9th? Eh, these stupid lists don't mean anything anyway ;)

Besides, Dartmouth has the prettiest campus in the top 10! (ok, maybe Stanford is nice too.)

usnews.com: America's Best Colleges 2004: National Universities-Doctoral: Top Schools

This news it a tad old, and who knows really how they estimated these numbers, but it's kind of interesting for reference. I'm a bit skeptical that Blogger, Diaryland and LiveJournal have 50% of their registered blogs updated, but that may be true. Japan isn't even in the top 10. Farsi and Icelandic beat out Japanese.

Blogging is only done by 2% of those online. It's important to remeber that.

Blogging By The Numbers

Mike Johnston of Luminous Landscape talks about how he's looking forward to the new Sony 8MP digital camera.

My main beef with digital SLRs is that too many compromises are made to integrate old lenses and traditional camera body styles. If you look at a high-end Nikon/Canon digital camera and the corresponding film cameras, they really almost identical to each other. If we are getting rid of the film, why not take the time/effort to build something new and better that takes into account the fact that there is no film? To me, the F828 is exciting for many reasons including the new CCD, the Compact Flash card slot, and the body style, which seems purpose-built for digital, not a carry-over from film.

But I have to report that I find myself much more strongly drawn to the new Sony F-828. Of all the digital cameras IÌve owned, used, held, or seen, the Sony F-717 (which I wrote about here) was, so far, the only one that IÌve placed in my personal pantheon of favorite cameras. It was nifty, fun, cool, and different.

via Gizmodo