About a year ago I was wondering how I could use the web to make myself be more productave, I decided that I wanted an easy to make to-do lists, share them with friends and visa versa. In July I spent a few days with my good friend Chrys and we began designing and programming the site (I did most of the designing and Chrys did most of the programming that PHP magic elludes me). Now almost six months later we have gotten the website known as “twodoit.com” to a stage where we can launch a beta version for feedback and bug testing.
I’ve embedded a demo below, if you are intrested give it a try: http://twodoit.com.
Just over two weeks ago I worked with What We See is What You Get operating a second camera at a Gaslight Anthem concert. The footage is going on their website as well as The Waster’s. Using just my footage (and none of the audio they recorded) I cut together a six minute video of the interview with two of the guys from Gaslight beforehand as well as the concert.
Check it out then tell me what you think.
(Apologies for the aspect ratio Vimeo sort of butchered the 16X9).
Welcome to the new and improved travisfantina.com, or travisfantina.com 3.0. Whatever you want to call it it’s a brand new look with the same great content.
The first thing you will probably notice is that no matter what page you’re on it looks the same, as opposed to the old version where my blog looked a bit different then the rest of the site. Also you’ve probably noticed some of the cute little animals that are scattered around, and Kilroy who not only was here but still is here.
I’m using a sweet wordpress theme- the i3Theme by Mangoorange which allows for some pretty cool functionality. For example the two side bars: notice the little green arrows, if you don’t like one of the widgets or just won’t it cluttering up the page just hit that green arrow to minimize it. You can also change the order of the sidebars by grabbing the top and dragging one above the other. Give it a shot!
Tell me what you think of the redesign in the comments section below!
Today is Blog Action Day, I am proud to be participating in this for the third year in a row. For those of you just joining us now, Blog Action Day is when thousands of bloggers around the world dedicate a post to one specific topic or threat (2007 was the Environment then 2008 was Poverty) this year it’s Climate Change. The 10,403 blogs participating this year include but are not limited too: whitehouse.gov, The Google Blog, Mashable and Greenpeace USA (no surprise there).
I don’t really consider this blog a forum for serious topics such as climate change or global poverty, mostly I like to talk about films I’ve seen and occasionally dabble in some new technology or website that intrigues me. However I try and post every year on blog action day because these issues are quite important to me, and this years theme effects everybody in one way or another.
Back in 2007 I dedicated my blog post to climate change and I was thinking of being lazy and just reposting that. However instead I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on the state of things purely opinion.
The good news is that in the past five years we’ve seen a major trend in the direction of more climate friendly products from cars to washing machines consumers are telling corporations that they want environmentally friendly products. Hybrids and fuel efficient cars rule the roads and many products boast a high environmental rating on the tag. Good news certainly however it’s not enough and there is still a lot to be done, there are tons of things you can do to decrease carbon emissions you know them inflating tires, washing in cold water; all that fun stuff. One of the best things you can do is shop smart, climate change or not there is one thing that every corporation responds to: money. Buy environmentally friendly products boycott the polluters, personally you’ll be emitting less and saving money but you’ll also be sending a powerfully message. Lets hope that this trend of green capitalism not only continues but increases exponentially over the next five years and into the future, but it’s really up to consumers to make the decision weather we’ll be living in a greener world or not.
In closing I thought I’d share a neat blog from everybody’s favorite search engine talking about what they do to make the world a little greener: Google Blog.
That is all for now, back to my usual trivial nonsense next week.
This post is a continuation of Saturday’s which can be found here I recommend reading it first.
Ok so continuing where I left off Saturday night (Sunday morning technically)..
Twitter has a few neat ways to contact people, if you are “Friends” with someone (meaning you are both following each other) you can send that person a “Direct Message” which will only be visible to them. You can mention somebody by typing the @ sign and then their name (like @tfantina), this tweet will be visible to everybody who follows you and the person you mention will also be notified even if they don’t follow you. The highest complement you can give on Twitter is a re-tweet. If you like somebody’s tweet and want to show it to your followers just type “RT” then mention the person and paste their tweet ( “RT @tfantina ‘Some how I always cross the border during rush hour.’”).
So far I’ve covered the basics of Twitter, however it’s much more fun once you start checking the amazing apps that have sprung up around Twitter.
Some people will tell you to download a desktop app for Twitter like
“Tweetie” or “TweetDeck” however I don’t use either of these, however if you are tweeting from a smart phone or an iPod Touch I recommend getting an app for it. When it comes to apps here is a list of ones that I could not live without (this is relative we are talking about a micro blogging service);
Brizzley is a fun app that displays pictures and video in tweets (usually you have to click a link to see them), among other things it also allows you to organize people you follow into lists. I highly recommend it, it’s currently in beta however if you want an invite just drop a line in the comments and I’ll hook you up first come first serve.
Tinyurl is good when you have a super long URL that you have to fit into 140 characters or less (they usually shorten any URL to about 30 characters).
Twitpic allows you to post photos to Twitter from you cell phone or the web.
Tweetstats is cool if your geeky like me and want to know the statistics of your tweets (time of day you tweet the most, day of week you tweet the most, where most of your tweets come from, ect.).
There are hundreds of cool apps for Twitter, a good place to start looking is Oneforty.com they have organized most of the major apps for you to try, rate and review.
Sorry it took so long, Twitter’s a bit of a hard sell at first but I take it with a grain of salt and appreciate all the neat apps and trends.
What is Twitter? It’s stupid! Why do you use it? Are you by any chance stupid? These are a few of the question’s I’m faced with when I tell people that I use Twitter. My goal with this post is to hopefully educate and enlighten readers about the wonderful world of Twitter.
What is it? Twitter a micro-bloging service, it allows users to convey short amounts of information (called ‘tweets’), in no more then 140 characters; this makes it compatible with SMS messaging from cell phones.
Once you join start following people. I know it sounds stalkerish but one has to assume that people aren’t going to post something on the public web that they don’t want everybody on Earth to see, if not why post it. This is not always the case but it’s there problem not yours. Twitter makes it very easy to find people; you can search by username, first name, last name, business or brand. In addition to my friends, I follow several people who’s tweets I find particularly interesting. With famous folk (like KevinSpacey and Oprah to name two) people like to create fake accounts in their names and post stuff, recently Twitter introduced verified accounts so you can tell if your really following Oprah or 14 year old in Santa Monica. As you start to follow more and more people you will get a feel for what tweeting style you like, some people tweet fifteen or twenty times a day others only once or twice a day. Some people’s tweets are more interesting then others, which brings me to my next point…
Don’t tweet useless junk!
One of the major stigmas surrounding Twitter is that it’s all really useless junk, people tweet stuff like “Eating breakfast”, “Going for a jog”, “Going to the bathroom”, “Washing my hands” and “Gross I touched my phone before washing my hands!”. True, all these tweets are under 140 characters, however that does not mean they should be posted. A quick and easy way to become a Twitter outcast is to post lots of useless jargon nobody reads or cares about. Twitter should be used to share stuff that you find funny, cool, interesting or enlightening. When I stumble across a neat blog or a funny video on Youtube that not to many people have seen, I tweet it. If I see something cool or something funny happens to me I tweet it. I don’t tweet boring junk that everybody already knows I do (like eating), and neither should you.
So, Twitter is a fun and quick way to share links, quick stories, and see what famous people are doing. However in my opinion the real genius of Twitter comes from two features, “Trending Topics” and “Search”. Trending Topics takes all recent tweets and arranges them looking for patterns; so lets say that the Yankees just won the World Series, a lot of people would be tweeting “Yankees” and “World Series” for instance. If enough people posted tweets with the words “Yankees” and “World Series” in them, they would both appear on the “Trending Topics” list. “Trending Topics” is a way to see what’s going on in the world as it happens. “Search” is also useful, but I don’t think you need that explained.
‘Up in the Air’ is a very hard film to explain. Something about a guy who goes around collecting frequent flyer miles and has no personal relationships. In writing this review I was hoping to shed some new light on the plot that would make readers jump into theaters on November 25th however I can’t really. The fact is ‘Up in the Air’ just very hard to summarize (well summarize and make it sound cool) without spoiling most of the movie. Just know that I liked this movie.
George Clooney is Ryan Bingham a corporate downsizing expert who travels the country doing a job some employers are too afraid to do: downsize. Sometimes employees cry, other times they use a string of colorful but not to original words, and occasionally they turn violent. These are a few reasons a company might hire a consultant like Ryan Bigham to do their dirty work. This job allows Bingham to remain in motion at all times making very few personal connections. In a hotel bar Bingham meets Alex (Vera Farmiga), he takes her to his room and then they part ways agreeing to meet again should their layovers ever cross ways. Bingham goes back to his corporate office for an important meeting, his boss Craig (Jason Bateman) informs him that the new hotshot Natalie (Anna Kendrick) has come up with a way to lay people off over the internet essentially making him obsolete. This greatly jeopardizes Bingham’s constant on the move lifestyle and his goal of obtaining ten million frequent flyer miles.
The film is not really about a guy trying to get ten million frequent flyer miles, it’s about the way different types of people interact with each other. Their are about six ‘main’ characters and each approach life and relationships in a very different way. So that’s really what ‘Up in the Air’ is a character study of six people, each trying to be happy and looking in different places.
‘Up in the Air’ is a well crafted character expose. The photography is not flashy but their are a lot of interesting visuals, as well as a brilliant title sequence by Shadow Play Studios (they also did ‘Thank you for Smoking’ and ‘Juno’).
My decision to see ‘Waking Sleeping Beauty’ was pretty last minuet, I just got up at seven on Saturday morning and looked for tickets, I made the right decision; purchasing a ticket for ‘Waking Sleeping Beauty’. It was one of my favorite films from the festival.
‘Waking Sleeping Beauty’ is a documentary about about the revitalization of Disney animation from 1984-1994. It chronicles a fascinating power struggle between Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Nephew of Walt, Roy Disney and head of animation Jeffery Katzenberg. From the lowest point in Disney history, in the early eighties when the animation department was moved out of the original building that Walt built to a run down off site location, most of the animators felt they would all loose there jobs by the end of the week. It was even suggested that Disney get out ofthe motion picture business! This dismal state of affairs is how ‘Waking Sleeping Beauty’ begins and it carries us right through to one of the many high points in Disney history: ‘Beauty and the Beast’ had just been released and ‘The Lion King’ was going into production.
‘The Lion King’ producer Don Hahn directed ‘Waking Sleeping Beauty’ and did a very good job at showing a non biased look at the craziness of the Disney Animation world from 1984-1994.
I loved some of the very candid moments in the film, we see a young Tim Burton (he hasn’t changed much), we hear the voice of a young John Lasseter. We are shown first hand the antics of a group of pent up, prodominatally male twenty something year olds. It’s a lot of fun and very informative.
Ricky Gervais is funny, his humor is often dark and cynical. So it’s safe to assume that anything he co-writes, co-directs and stars in will be fairly funny, cynical and dark. In ‘The Invention of Lying’ Ricky Gervais pulls punches to keep it PG-13, this is not ‘Extras’ or ‘Fame’, so not as dark as you may expect.
The film takes place in a reality much like ours, the only difference is that lying is totally and completely unknown. There are no lies, no flattery, no fiction. Advertisements always tell the truth “Pepsi: What you get when they don’t have Coke”, films are nothing but famous people reading historically accurate screenplays. Gervais plays Mark Bellison a failing screenwriter (stuck with the unlucky thirteen-hundreds), who has landed a date with his longtime crush Anna McDoogles (Jennifer Garner). At the door Anna makes it known how she feels about dating a ‘little fat man with a snub nose’. Mark feels bad about this but it’s not Anna’s fault nobody knows how to say anything but the painful truth.
The film progresses with several hilariously painful truths told by all the characters. Just as the idea that everybody can’t lie begins to become a dead horse, Mark discovers that he can in fact say something that’s not true. Of course everybody believes him so as he begins to come up with more and more stories his career as a screen writer begins to soar and so does the media attention given to him.
It’s an entertaining film a more dark and cynical then your average romantic comedy and much, much more funny.
There is a large cast of supporting actors including Jeffrey Tambor, Jonah Hill, Tina Fey, Louis C.K. and Rob Lowe. There is also a disgusting amount of hilarious cameos, however I won’t name drop as that would spoil the fun.
‘The Invention of Lying’ hits theaters on October 2nd.
Fans of Matt Damon should like of Steven Soderbergh’s ‘The Informant!’ he’s a bit more doughy then usual and he rocks an odd little mustache but he’s what carries this humorous take on Mark Whitacre and the lysine price-fixing conspiracy.
The film is based on true events. I did not read the book and I don’t know much about the incident so I can’t say how well the film stuck to what really happened. But I will say the film tells the story in a way that is very believable.
Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) is climbing the ladder at ADM and earning a boat load of money. Mark Whitacre also has has a problem, the lysine his company is supposed to produce is being destroyed by some mysterious bacteria. Whitacre’s been speaking to a shady Japanese business man for a while and it’s he who tells Whitacre that ADM has a mole and that he will reveal the identity of said mole and also provide a solution to the lysine bacteria if ADM will deposit millions into his off shore bank account. As any good employee would Whitacre tells his boss who intern tells the FBI. As the FBI is putting a trace on his phone Mark decides to come clean (sort of), at the insistence of his wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey). He tells the agent that there is actually a price-fixing conspiracy going on at ADM. The FBI opens an investigation of ADM which thorough the film grows more and more complex due to Whitacre’s habit of omitting certain aspects of the truth.
I liked this film, it was very funny. As stated before, it’s totally a Matt Damon vehicle, he’s in almost ever scene and all the laughs either come from his lines or from his character’s actions. Laughs are plentiful as are plot twists but it’s slower then what I was expecting. In a way it almost felt as if I was watching a very interesting and fact filled documentary about Mark Whitacre and the lysine price-fixing conspiracy. I mean that as a complement.
I thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Informant!’ it made me laugh out loud several times and I really got to know Mark Whitacre but as for the other characters I think if I had gotten to know them better it would have made Mark Whitacre’s story even more engaging.
‘The Informant!’ hits theaters this Friday and it also stars Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Clancy Brown and Tony Hale
Travis Fantina (website)...
About a year ago I was wondering how I could use the web to make myself be more productave, I decided that I wanted an easy to make to-do lists, share them with friends and visa versa. In July I spent a few days with my good friend Chrys and we began designing and programming the site (I did most of the designing and Chrys did most of the programming that PHP magic elludes me). Now almost six months later we have gotten the website known as “twodoit.com” to a stage where we can launch a beta version for feedback and bug testing.
