Next month, the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale is opening a temporary exhibition which will present the photography collection of Martin Z. Margulies. From the pictures that have surfaced online, this appears to be a stunning sample of 20th America, from the early 30’s to this day, from one coast to another:

Historical American photography is one of my personal favorite and History only gets better when it is told through the stories of common places and people. I keep my fingers crossed that this exhibition ends up traveling to the various places it documents.

The adaptation of Gone Girl is finally out and the quest for a real 2014 grown-up movie is finally over. I’m not big on reading fiction novels, but I very much enjoyed Gone Girl and have been impatiently awaiting the release of the motion picture.

I have to admit being a little disappointed – while Ben Affleck manages to give life to the character of Nick Dunne, Rosamund Pike’s performance is well below what I was expecting. Amy is lacking a lot of substance and credibility – people in the audience laughed at what should have been the most dramatic scene of the movie.

Some aspects of the book are fairly well rendered – the love progressively dying between Amy and Nick, the ambiguity of Nick’s character – while others seem to have just been dismissed, if only to fit into a screenplay that ends up being shallower than the book. So, go read the book instead.

As far as grown-up drama movies go, Gone Girl is good, but it is lagging well behind its 2013 predecessor: Prisoners

Danny Macaskill has been the star of a number of breathtaking cycling videos in the past few years. The latest installement, shot over on the Isle of Skye, take things up to a whole new level. Just go full screen, sit back and stop blinking for the next 10 minutes.

Every Tuesday evening at the Port of Oakland, an almost spontaneous gathering of cyclists takes place. For a couple of hours, they just spin around a 4 kilometer loop as fast as they can. I’ve participated once and couldn’t keep up for more than a couple laps but I’ve loved the energy, the location and the fact that there is basically zero organization: it simply happens.

This past Tuesday, I went with my camera and snapped a few pictures – the attendance is higher during the racing season but Tuesday’s group was nicely sized:

The rest of it is here

In my last post about XOXO 2014, I said this would be my last post about XOXO 2014. I lied – this is the last one. Below is a small sample, the rest of my pictures from that week-end may be found here.

The word you’re looking for is ‘fun’

That’s what the guy at the merch table said when I was trying to express what I felt about the performance that had just ended. He’s right — that was downright plain fun. Don’t stop at the name.

I had no idea who these guys were before entering Bottom of the Hill last night – the kind of place I go to without even checking who’s playing. It’s cheap, it’s small and the line-up is usually pretty good. On occasions, it has been stellar. A couple of years ago, Art vs. Science took the stage and spent 45 minutes delivering one of the best shows I’ve ever seen – it was dance-y, powerful, joyful. They won the crowd over even though no one knew them.

Yesterday, that was Fartbarf. This time around, it looked like everyone in the audience knew them except for me. I’m gonna leave it at ‘fun’ but it was so much more than that.

For quite a while now, I’ve been lurking on blink-dev, the mailing list on which the development of Blink takes place.

There are many good things to be said about the project itself and its development process. The forum has seen its share of heated and very interesting discussions, from the deprecation of SHA-1 certificates –where the position of the CAs essentially boils down to “work is hard”– to that of the showModalDialog API. The list is generally exemplary of a well-managed, large open-source project.

Just today, this post was published and I personally find it mind-blowing, regardless of the interest you may have in the subject in question. The email is succinct, documented, tells a story and just drives the point home. It’s truly rare to see technical people lacking enough in ego that they’re publicly announcing not that they failed, but that incorporating their work would not be in the best interest of the project. They had an idea, spent months working on it, ran precise, repeatable and favorable benchmarks, and then decided to just scrap their work.

A stellar example of engineering.