Posts

Snowboarding, 7th day (Taken with Instagram at Alpe Lusia).

150 friends (Dunbar’s number)

I have deleted my Facebook account a long time ago and I can confirm that I can live very happily with no Facebook around.

This article by Robin Dunbar (did you know about “Dunbar’s number” ?) is very interesting however. It does say that Facebook can be a positive thing. But it also says:

Yes, you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life.

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In this previous post I linked to an article that upset me.

It tells a story about these incredibly smart kids that waste their time and energy (and considerable amounts of brain, apparently) to build yet another ‘social’ things; Internet services that basically allow the user to shut their minds, do fuck-all (apart from taking a picture maybe), and in return be “famous” (in the Facebook sense).

Is this really the way the Internet is developing? Towards a weapon of brain annihilation?

“DailyBooth appeals to people who want even less friction than Twitter: Here, you don’t need to think of something witty or informative to say in 140 characters or fewer. All you have to do is take a picture of yourself.”

– The Viral Me (via Instapaper)

Somehow (twitter maybe ?) I’ve found the transcript of an interview to Bob Dylan which appeared on Playboy in 1966.

So¹, I don’t know if Bob Dylan was totally out of his mind or if he was just playing crazy, but this 1966 interview is brilliant stuff.

For example, the interviewer asks if he’s selling out:

What can I say? I’d like to see one of these so-called fans. I’d like to have him blindfolded and brought to me. It’s like going out to the desert and screaming and then having little kids throw their sandbox at you. I’m only 24.

“It moves along at a vigorously restless pace, with the energy of a Labrador retriever off the leash, racing up to each person it encounters, pawing and sniffing and barking at every fragrant thing, plunging into icy waters only to dash off again, invigorated.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/books/review/Browning-t.html

I swear it was unintentional. Second post straight after [this one where I blurbed about my next camera]((/2010-08-19-my-next-camera.html), and here it is, the GF-1 in my hands.

So how did it happen: I spent last weekend in Livigno for some mountain biking. On Sunday afternoon, half an hour before end of business, I went into a shop and asked for the Panasonic GF-1. They had only the body, as they sold separately the 20mm lens which was part of the kit. So I asked, maybe you have a spare lens like the 17mm from some Olympus body?

I have sketched a series of yoga poses that I follow as a daily exercise.

I thought they might be of interest to someone else as well, so I’ve put them on this Flickr set.

Feel free to grab them, print them out but remember that they have been hand-draw¹ on a few evenings between August and September 2010, so be nice to them and send me an email if you need them for other purposes apart from your personal use.

I’ve stopped using my old Nikon D70s after it gave up once again during my last vacation (random failures in recording the photos on the flash card). For now I’m stuck with another remain of the past (Canon Ixus 60, small point-n-shoot with a 6Mp sensor) and my iPhone 3Gs. My plan is to get the Panasonic GF-1, which looks like the perfect solution for me: image quality on par with SLRs yet portable (almost) like a compact camera. However, I’m still waiting for the perfect deal (i.e., someone that goes to the US and gets it from amazon.com or B&H), so I can’t help but wondering when Nikon or Canon or Panasonic starts putting these features in a complete package:

[Farewell, Facebook](http://www.flickr.com/photos/aadm/4855655751/#/photos/aad m/4855655751/lightbox/) (by aadm)

I got very bored with all this facebook craze lately so here’s what I did last June.

Using everytrail for iphone: the app shows for this particular trip 33km in 1 hour and 19 minutes with a resulting average speed of 25km/h.

The same trip displayed on everytrail.com is 1 hour and 46 minutes long, however, which makes for an average speed of 18.6 km/h.

I have paused the tracking after having arrived at destination, then resumed for the return trip. I think that everytrail.com does not understand the timecodes in the gpx file.

I am wondering about the next iPad. What is available now is certainly enticing and must be a joy for light computing / intense internet reading. I do have limited budget, however, and think that probably the iPhone 4 is a better way to spend my money. But I look at the iPad and keep thinking that it could be a photographer’s ideal machine; if only it had a straight usb port to connect a camera (if I travel light, I certainly do care about bringing yet another little piece of plastic).

The creators of Lost, in an interview given in 2005 (right after the conclusion of season 1):

The survivors will not learn they are part of some dastardly experiment, or discover they are in purgatory, or wake up from a bad dream.

(The Laws of the Jungle by Lorne Manly, 18 September 2005).

So how did it end season 6, exactly ?

I’ve been a great fan of 24 since its first season, years ago. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the first season, and also the second and the third. However, the show has been moving towards full improbability with the latest seasons. I think I also watched season 4, and then I don’t remember anymore; maybe I’ve also seen season 5, but maybe I slept through some of the episodes – I honestly don’t recall. And then I didn’t even know they made yet another season (number six), and now I can’t be bothered finding out more about it even less watch it.

I am an enthusiast mountain bike rider, but because I seem to be affected by a number of injuries associated with slow recovery times (my old age plays a big part here, as it is physiologically proven that is faster to recover from a broken bone when you’re 20 than if you’re approaching your 40s), I don’t get as much time riding my bike as I’d like to.

So that’s why I enjoy mountain bike movies; and I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone here, and plenty of other people like watching this sort of things because, apart from professionals, nobody really rides as much as they like.