Here’s someone’s take on Pulp Fiction:

You can also watch Good Will Hunting.

This Google Wave thing seems like a lot of fun.  Can the rest of us get invites now please?

Apparently it’s a collaboration between Blu and David Ellis who are… well I’m not actually sure who they are.  But they’re pretty amazing.

Thanks FormFiftyFive.

Pretty hilarious.  And kind of sums up the way I feel about the movie (and Tom Hanks two (!!!!) academy awards).

These guys have other ones too: 28 Days Later and Kill Bill.  I like this one best.

And apparently there’s an ‘In 5 Seconds’ genre as well, although the only ones I’ve found of those are not so funny (which is sad.  ‘Titanic in 5 Seconds’ seems like a pretty easy layup).

Thanks BuzzFeed

I don’t know much about Fool’s Gold, but they sound like an interesting project…

Microsoft is now encouraging people to host “launch parties” to honor the release of Windows 7.  No.  I’m not kidding.

Now you too can help usher in a whole new era of mediocrity.  Forget all those parties you threw to help Obama get elected.  This is bigger.  Much, much bigger. And space is limited so you have to act now.  Hurry.  Your multicultural friends of all ages are waiting.

Only Microsoft could make technology look even less appealing than late-night infomercial products.

I swear.  Microsoft, next time you need an idea for an ad campaign or a promotion, just give me a call.  Me and my friends in your target demographic have lost cocktail napkins with better ideas of appearing “hip” and “with it.”

In honor of this latest blunder, here are a few of the funnier Microsoft parodies I came across while researching this:

Man I love anything that makes fun of Clippy.

Thanks Gawker for getting the ball rolling.

UPDATE: People seem to be working round the clock on this one.  There’s already a hilarious (dirty) parody of the Windows 7 House Party video.

Great work, people.  And thanks for the tip, Wired.

Check this out:

1. The logo is blurry.  Maybe they’re trying to reduce the file size?  But man. I think that’s a no-no.  Maybe it’s worth the extra K or two to have the logo be sharp?

2. The borders on all of their photos in the (freaking annoying) Highlights section are totally out of whack:

Come on Facebook! Pull yourself together!  It’s not the weekend yet!  Put down the margarita, re-save your logo, tweak your CSS and THEN you can leave for your rafting trip.  K?

World Cinema, the Cohen Brothers contribution featuring the amazingly talented Josh Brolin, is great (and apparently until recently, very hard to find).  Have a look see:

Apparently a lot of filmmakers contributed to Chacun son Cinema including Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Roman Plolanski and David Lynch — and all of their films are included in the DVD.  But somehow World Cinema was omitted.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, it’s now been released in Technicolor!

Thanks interwebs!  And thanks VSL!

Google: Gmail Outage Was Our Bad

So, yeah.  If you hadn’t heard it from 20 different places, GMail’s servers were down yesterday.  There was a massive unanticipated routing problem when they tried to do a routine server upgrade.  These things happen.  It was not a big deal.  It was not the end of the world.  The entire outage lasted less than 100 minutes (I’ve had power outages last 3 days.  Stop whining, internet.)

So fine.  It happened.  And it sucked for about as long as it takes you to go to lunch and come back.  And Google explained the whole thing.   And issued a huge apology. Seems like that should be it, right?

So why does Jennifer Van Grove have to be so snotty?

That’s one big oops Google. But it’s nice to see that you’re publicly apologizing for the outage and attesting to the fact that you will do everything in your power to prevent it from happening again. Here’s hoping you stick to that.

Google owes you nothing my dear. They’re a free service. They’ve been free since they started.  And they’re nice.  And they’re incredibly transparent (compare an apology like this to Apple’s App Store Rejection Process).

There needs to be a little professionalism in blogging.  That, to me, would be the great loss inherent in the death of traditional news media.  At least The New York Times can just report a story and not be complete dicks about it in the process.

I think this is part of a bigger discussion going on right now in blogging — especially in terms of anonymity and criticism (I’m, at the moment, trying to understand Time Out New York Theater editor David Cote’s  beef with George Hunka).

But in the end it comes down to — do you really need to populate the internet with a re-blog of a dead story just so you can bitch about it?  Try Facebook.  Or Twitter.

Or is it that you really don’t have anything to say?  In which case, maybe keep quiet?

UPDATE: Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch seems to be a bit crabby about it too. Seriously. Was it just a slow news day?  The only thing you have to talk about it to re-post a blog post from the Official GMail Blog and then bitch about them?  That’s some great journalism.  Hey, New York Times! you can close up shop!  We have a replacement for you!

Why not write an article about how a lot of big companies have growing pains (Facebook goes down all the time.  Or Twitter!  Jesus!) or a discussion of how Google’s massive, elegant server architecture system is still prone to human error?  Or a suggestion of how to improve it?

I originally created Geek Chic primarily as a way to share things I thought were cool.  Usually snagged from my daily trolling of the internet, I’d post a few gems that caught my eye.  Call it re-blogging, call it regurgitating.  Call it whatever you’d like.  I saw it as an electronic way of curating and sharing a collection of things I thought more people should see.

With the advent of Twitter, the evolution of Facebook and now the more social integration points of Google Reader (my primary means of ingestion / procrastination), there seem to be more and more ways to share things you think are cool with the rest of the world.  And it’s becoming easier and easier — for example with Google Reader, all I have to do is click one button and I can share a post I think is interesting.  Clicking another button, I can instantly post a link to Twitter or Facebook. Done.

So the question arises, what good is this blog?

One answer to that question is my sort of secondary reason for creating this blog.  I occasionally like to rant and rave and share my opinions.  And it’s easier on the people around me, I find, if I post them online so they can stop reading when I’ve started to annoy them.  For those of you who like reading what I have to say, I guarantee that will continue.  But it feels even more narcissistic than Twitter tends to be for me to want to turn this blog exclusively into a soapbox for my rants and raves.  There are enough opinions roaming free on the internet (just look at how many people threw in their 2 cents about the FCC’s Google Voice inquiry).

So the question remains, what is this for?

There is something to be said for the blog format as a means of curating content.  If I want to show off things that I think are interesting, intriguing and cool, a blog is still a better format than the others I mentioned above.  Facebook’s information stream is a complete mess — it’s very easy to track down things that were posted 5 minutes ago, but anything before that is lost.  Facebook is a great way for me to aggregate things from my friends, but not a great way for me to see what any one person likes or has been up to.  Even the profile feed is so cluttered with nonsense that major topics get lost.  So curating is, basically, out the window.  And while Twitter may be better at letting people identify things I think are cool and my (very brief) opinions, it’s not all that interesting to look at.  I’m a very visual person. I like pictures and video.  That’s primarily what I post around here.  Posting links to these things via bit.ly just isn’t quite the same.

Google Reader maybe comes the closest to what I’m trying to do in terms of being able to re-post and comment on content.  The interface is easy, and sharing is a snap.  You can also post notes to your feed (basically the equivalent of a blog post — or more specifically a container for one of my rants). It’s not possible to customize the look of it, which is not ideal for me — I like to design things (event though this blog might not look like it lately) and dig around in the guts of the application to customize it (thank you, WordPress!).  With the shared feed, what you share is what you get.  And you can’t really change or pare down any of the content you’ve shared — so for example if the title of the post is 500 characters of Korean or the post is 5 pages long and you share it, that’s what shows up.  But it’s a pretty good alternative and I could definitely see myself using it more extensively.

So seriously, what is this blog for?

I can’t give you a great answer on that one.  I’m certainly leaning towards posting more of my own content — photos from Flickr and videos I shoot — rather than re-blogging content.  I’ve been meaning to do that for awhile now (you have no idea how many photos I have trapped inside of Aperture.  Be afraid.).  In addition, though, I might try to find some way (read WordPress Plugin) of integrating content from several sources into my blog — maybe pulling in content from Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader and Flickr in addition to posting my own (long-winded) opinions.  If there’s a good way to do it, I think that’ll be the best way to keep doing what I want to do with this blog: curating things that I think are cool (including things I’ve made) in order to share myself and my ideas — my personality — with my friends and the internet at large.  I think that’s what a blog is for — sharing yourself with the world.  I’m interested in continuing to do that, but I want to find a better way to do it.

Anyway, all of that is to say there will be some changes coming to the site. It might be rocky at first figuring out how to get all of these services to play nice with one another, but I think I can do it.

Cross your fingers and look for something new to pop up here any minute now.

Until then, thanks for reading!

-J

If you like it, there are a few more episodes floating around.  If not, pretend you dreamed this post and you just woke up.

Thanks HuffPo.