Top Ten Films of 2006

This is the fifth list that I've made here and this year it seemed very easy. So in no particular order, here are the ten:

• Brick
  Rian Johnson's debut feature brilliantly combines film noir and high school. While much attention is paid to the dialogue, which is classic Raymond Chandler, the film is very effectively shot and efficiently edited. Not an homage or parody, but a film that takes the attitude of noir and updates it with style and grace.
  
  
  
  

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• The Science of Sleep
  Michel Gondry has a impressive resume with a distinctive style, but his previous two features films were both written by Charlie Kaufman. With The Science of Sleep Gondry wrote the script and while it has many of the elements of his previous films, it has a realism with honesty and darkness that surprised me. It's a complex and wonderful film that creates a unique world that took me a while to snap out of.
  
  
  

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• Away From Her
  With her feature directorial debut, Sarah Polley didn't create a vanity project and instead created a mature and moving film built around remarkable performances from Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie as a couple who deal with aging and Alzheimers. It was surprising and moving.
  
  
  
  

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• Brothers of the Head
  In the complex story told by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe they mix various styles in adapting Brian Aldiss' novel Brothers of the Head. While it could have been an interesting drama, by framing it as a documentary with clips from an earlier documentary and an uncompleted drama directed by Ken Russell, it becomes something much more. With amazing performances and casting it's an odd film that is more tragic and poignant than comedic.
  
  
  

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• Clean
  Olivier Assayas mixes reality and drama in a film with powerful silences and an extraordinary performance by Maggie Cheung as a recovering drug addict who is trying to pull her life together. Shot in a casual, almost documentary style, it is a beautiful film about redemption.
  
  
  
  
  

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• Strangers With Candy
  The much-delayed adaptation of the cult-classic tv series Strangers With Candy made me a bit nervous as I wasn't sure if it would live up to my expectations. But it worked surprisingly well and was so funny that the first time I saw it with an enthusiastic crowd I missed many jokes. It's a great introduction to the character of Jerry Blank and the writing of Paul Dinello (who directed), Stephen Colbert, and Amy Sedaris (who also act in the film). Edgy and bold, it follows a unique rhythm and style that you'll either love or hate.
  

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• Volver
  Pedro Almodovar creates a melodramatic and gorgeous film in Volver with a cast of amazing women with Penelope Cruz at the centre of a story that plays with expectations and has an infectious sense of fun and beauty that draws you in. It's bold and wonderful.
  
  
  
  
  

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• The Proposition
  Nick Cave wrote and John Hillcoat directed the dark and surprising western set in Australia. With an unconventional story structure that shifts the point of view, it became fascinating to watch the remarkable performance of Ray Winstone as the tragedy unfolds before us. It's a dark story that almost seems to be set in hell with an overwhelming sense of dread.
  
  
  

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• The Journals of Knud Rasmussen
  With a unique rhythm, look and structure, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen is drawn from the journal of a white man who lived in an Inuit community at the turn of the century. At the beginning of the film I wasn't sure if I could get into it, but it clicked and the documentary feeling adds to the power of the story which become more powerful and profound as the film progressed. Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn manage to combine a cross-cultural drama with a family drama that has a startling immediacy. It is surprising and unique and it works on a very cinematic level.
  
  
  

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• Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
  Michael Winterbottom films an unfilmable novel in a faithful and hilarious adaptation with Steve Coogan as the egocentric actor at the center of the film. Blurring the boundaries and identities of who and what we see it's a film that ultimately turns and turns and turns around so many times with so many layers that it feels simultaneously heavy and light.
  

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It was a good year for films and it is encouraging to be surprised by the films and filmmakers of the past year. tags: film, lists, best, 2006
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Full Circle

Five years ago I started working at the Nova Scotia Community College and one of the requirements for full-time employees is that they have to take part in a program called CCEDP (Community College Education Diploma Program). It usually takes about 2 years to complete, which includes a couple of summers spent in residence taking courses. I completed the program and was lucky enough to be chosen as the valedictorian which gave me the opportunity to sum the experience up in my valedictory address. The best parts of the experience of learning how to teach adults were the connections made between the participants and instructors in the program. Now I know dozens and dozens (maybe hundreds) people from all over the province who work for the college.
A few months ago Carolyn asked me if I'd like to be part of a session that she was organizing called Engaging the Digital Learner that would be part of the New Faculty Orientation that happened in Yarmouth in October. I had a great time when I was in Yarmouth for it and I jumped at the chance to be able to give something back. It was a lot of fun and I contributed with some information about podcasting. I didn't realize until afterwards that I'd been in CCEDP courses with most of the members of the team that facilitated the workshop, but now we were all at the front of the classroom with a few years of experience within the organization. It was very nice to have it all come full circle, and I'm so glad that I could be involved. tags: nscc, ccedp, yarmouth, teaching
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The Myths of Innovation

With his second book, The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun takes a different approach to the subject. With The Art of Project Management, he provides a detailed and very useful guidebook to navigating the difficult world of managing people and projects. The Myths of Innovation is built (quite logically) around a series of relatively common myths about innovations and innovators. While I thought that I knew about the myths, the power of the story often remains even when you know that it's not true and Berkun manages to puncture the myths, while explaining the appeal. We all love a story about the bold lone inventor who had a brilliant idea that changed the world, but we don't like hearing about the failed inventions or the team of people who painstakingly followed the many dead-ends in the development of the product. Berkun shows how our love of a good story can make us miss what is important in creating anything. You need hard work, a willingness to follow your instincts, determination and being able to keep working even though many of your ideas will fail or will not be accepted.
The book is well-organized and entertaining with an extensive and annotated bibliography that can keep you reading for years. The concepts are covered clearly and extensive web links throughout the book allow you to find a broader context online as a springboard for more exploration. Berkun also drew on the experiences of innovators that he talked with and via a survey. While the book is casual and fun, it has a solid foundation based on research and experience. You can read it from front to back as I did, or jump around without getting lost. It's also a book that will be good to revisit for relevant stories and perspective as the challenge of trying something new starts to bog you down.
While much of the book debunks myths, it's also encouraging as the underlying message is that dedication and working together with people is essential for innovation to take place. It's the combination of all of the right factors that allows things to succeed and not merit or genius or luck. It's a call to action against complacency and conventional wisdom and it will hopefully get people to become more aware of what they are doing and the possibilities and opportunities that often exist in front of you if you're willing to see them.
The book boldly concludes by asking if innovation is inherently good, which made me think a lot about how our views of what we do and what we use evolve. I no longer use a pda, but a combination of tools that include a laptop, a cell phone, the web, and notebooks and pens. Progress and innovation doesn't mean more tiny devices or new things, but the innovative use of what is appropriate and what works. tags: myths, innovation, scottberkun, people, business, technology
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Integrating Humanity into the Classroom

All too often we seek technological solutions to human problems. In gearing up for the Fall term I've been thinking about ways to integrate technology into the classroom and I realized that I was approaching it the wrong way. I should be thinking about ways that I can improve my teaching and the learning that takes place. The focus should be the learning and not which tools are being used.
As with the design of curricula and teaching in general, the first thoughts should be related to the outcomes and less about the tools. I want to be a better teacher, not a better technologist. No matter what classroom you're in, there is technology involved, whether it's paper and pen, a chalkboard, a whiteboard, data projector, mobile phone, or computer. But we don't have fancy workshops or books about integrating whiteboards into your teaching or advanced flip chart use. A "smart" classroom is where learning happens, so it doesn't even have to be a room or have a class.
It's important to ask "why?" before a lot of time, effort and money is spent on setting up things that are never used. Whichever techniques or tools that you use for teaching have to be effective and appropriate for you and your learners. I love playing with the latest tools and being on the cutting edge, but if you're leaving a lot of people behind, it's not efficient or effective. So I am trying to think of ways to engage my learners and to use all of the tools that work for them. Ideally we can get out of me standing at the front of a room and talking and get into building spaces for learning. Technorati Tags: learning, teaching, technology
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Five Years of Bitdepth

About six years ago Carolyn was talking with me about weblogs or blogs as they're commonly known now. She saw the possibilities right away while I was trying to wrap my head around it to figure out how I'd like to do it. While I had a web site with Apple's Mac.com service, I hadn't registered my own domain. But then bitdepth.org was finally purchased and the next step was figuring out what to put there and how to put it there. I decided to use Rael Dornfest's blosxom due to the simplicity and elegance of it. The posts consist of text files and a small Perl script turns it into a blog. It has served me very well and at this point it's been running for five years and has been with two different ISPs. While "redo my blog" has been on my list of things to do for a long time, it hasn't been a high priority because it works and a lot more of my energy goes into other things such as 43 Things , Vox and tumblr (which I really like). The next step here is to switch from blosxom to typo and it could happen this Summer since I will have some free time and a new coat of paint and a bit more flexibility in configuring the blog will probably result in a bit more writing here. Thanks for coming around here and keep checking in for the next five years, which should be pretty exciting. tags: bitdepth, blog
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Home is Where Your Friends Are

Sometimes I feel that I'm spread a bit too thin online, but I can't seem to stop myself for signing up to new things because it's just so much fun. So in an attempt to widen the web and to break out of the patterns that I've been in with lots of newer tools, sites and communities, it's time to step back, get a bit of perspective and write on the site which really should be my home base.
Over the past few years my posting and surfing habits have changed a bit, but there are two communities that hold on to me after joining and participating continuously over several years. The oldest is Flickr, where I first joined and posted my first photo on August 26, 2004. Now I have 6,333 photos uploaded with 112,536 views of my photostream. On 43 Things I made my first entry on December 31, 2004 and since then I've written 317 more. On both sites I love sharing photos and goals, but the critical reason for sticking around so long are the comments. It's the sign of a community that the connections you make with people are the glue that keep you coming back. When you start getting comments on many of the things that you share, it keeps you coming back because you know that someone is there and you start looking for and commenting on things that other people share.
At first with both 43 Things and Flickr I didn't really know that many people, but it grew. The first people that I became friends with are people who I may never meet as they are in faraway places and I only knew about parts of their life. It wasn't until the last year or two that some of my real world and Flickr friends started to overlap. So now I'm able to keep in touch with friends and family through photos and comments. Now I share at least one photo every day, since it's habit and I also know that people are watching. It's not about the numbers, but that there are real people who I care about who are watching.
With 43 Things the collection of friends has shifted and grown over the past few years, but the most significant shift happened last October when I adopted the goal of Daily: Reflect on 5 things for which I'm grateful and now it's accounted for about half (and probably more soon) of the entries that I've made on the 43T site. I came to that goal via the Data Janitors group (which I've not been that active on) on 43 Places and primarily thanks to my online pal David, who is known as NYCinephile.
While much of my online activity now revolves around the 43 Things cluster of sites from the Robot Coop (43 Places, 43 People, All Consuming, Lists of Bests, and the Morale-O-Meter), the newest blogging that I'm doing is with newer tools such as Vox which is easy to use and has a great community that is supportive and fun. My other fun blogging is happening in my tumblelog thanks to the fine folks from Tumblr. In thinking about the 43 Things and Vox and Tumblr sites, the very significant link between them is how they allow me to combine my presence together through the way that I can cross-post or import from one to the other. So I post Flickr photos and I can use them on the other sites very easily. I'm also now starting to have friends that overlap with 43 Things, Flickr, and Vox, which hasn't really happened before.
But the latest thing are the social networking sites and (should I even say this?) Facebook and Twitter (but I started using it when it was still Twittr). With Facebook I find my usual online world inverted where I only have friends who I know in the real world and it's a way to stay in touch with what they're up to. I still find Facebook strangely intimate in that I know all of my friends, so in an odd way I seem to share a bit less there than I do publicly, since the people there already know more about me from me than from what I've shared online.
So now we're at the level of microblogging with Twitter and status messages in Gmail. The sign that the whole microblogging thing would stick came to me when I realized that my Mom and Dad were able to keep track of what was happening around me with the status messages in Gmail. So now I'm writing against the current with a longer post and I have to say that while I like microblogging, I hope that it doesn't take me away from longer things like this. But the best part of all of this is that while everything has become easier, the simple core of everything is connecting to people that I care about whether they are next to me in the same room or are around the world. That's reassuring and it's why I'm still here. tags: community, blogging, 43things, flickr, tumblr, vox, facebook, twitter
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Being Online

Presence online is a interesting thing as we put various parts of ourselves online and share different words, images, sounds and video. Habits change as new trends and tools emerge. As you may have notice, I haven't written here for a long time. While I have been online in other places such as Flickr, 43 Things, Bad Metaphor, and more recently, Vox, I haven't wanted to give up this site, which is where it pretty much started. One of the things on my to-do list has been to upgrade and change the system that this runs to make it easier to post. But I haven't gotten around to it, but maybe I will do it soon. In some ways I'm amazed at the durability of blosxom in keeping things running with a simple Perl script. Ultimately it will probably migrate to Typo, since I love how it works and looks, but now Blosxom is fine.
Maybe I haven't been here since I don't have comments, so the feedback is infrequent. Maybe it's because the other places that I've been have a lower barrier to post. Or maybe I just needed a bit of a change. It's been an exciting year and while it doesn't look so here, it's the most that I've written, photographed, recorded and published online. It also doesn't look as though it will reduce a lot in the next while either.
So now I finally come back to bitdepth before my annual year-end posts to look back at the past year. Thanks for sticking around and I'll pop in here more over the next while. tags: bitdepth, blogging
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Why blip.tv Rocks

There are many places to upload and share video now and it's very easy to view and create it too. But a while ago I found blip.tv and liked it right away because of the people, the technology and how they do things. What was surprising to me was how everything that I wanted to do was in blip.tv when I started using it. I could cross-post to a blog, I could cross-post to the Internet Archive, and I could set the licensing and add a Creative Commons license to video. They also transcode video to Flash to let you view it just about anywhere. It's made me shoot and upload more video, which I'm enjoying a lot.
Those are reasons to use blip.tv to upload video, but what makes them rock is that they're a small and committed group of cool people who are doing this. You can have the best technology in the world, but without the people you've got a big, empty machine. I sent a note to them when I mentioned blip.tv on commandN and 2 of the 5 founders emailed me back right away thanking me. The support from blip.tv is amazing and fast with apparently a very small core group of people. I had a small problem when I was uploading some video and sent an email. Within an hour I had a response, and from the time that Jared (one of the cofounders) had started writing the email to me to when he sent it, the problem was fixed. Now that's remarkable service for something that is free.
So now I've been trying to make and share more things on my blip.tv blog and it's a great tool that encourages you to create more. Thanks blip.tv, you guys rock! tags: blip.tv, video, sharing
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Bad Metaphor #8 - Camping

Things don't always turn out the way that you plan which most of the time is a good thing. Hitting a home run every time would start to get boring after a while as Buck 65 says. The big Summer of adventures that John and I planned changed a lot, but we've had some fun. I wrote about our rainy day in Fundy and our abbreviated adventure on my Vox blog, but we also recording some audio that has made it into our eighth Bad Metaphor, which is about Camping. You can see the pictures from our camping and hiking in Fundy on Flickr and I may be uploading some video snippets from the still camera to my blip.tv blog. tags: badmetaphor, podcast, fundy, camping, summer
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commandN Episode #58

The 58th episode of the video podcast commandN is live and ready for download now. I've been helping tape the segments from Halifax and have made a few appearances as well. Since it's the Summer and I've been on vacation, it's been possible to spend a bit more time working on the segments and that means that we've gone to some interesting locations and continue to shoot in ways that are more fun. If you haven't looked at commandN yet, it may be a good time to check it out to get caught up with technology trends with a Mac flavour. In this episode Jeff and I did the webPICKS segment from Halifax where I talked about Dabble, which is a great way to find and share video. We shot it in the Hydrostone neighbourhood, which has some neat views of the city through the trees. tags: commandn, video, technology, news
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Bad Metaphor and Camping

It's Summer and it's time to hit the road and do some camping and Bad Metaphor podcasting too. John and I will be camping in Fundy National Park and you can follow along by checking out my Vox blog as well as the Odeo Bad Metaphor page where we may podcast from the phone. Full podcasts will follow later, but for now it will be brief. tags: badmetaphor, camping, summer, vacation
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CC:365

There is a lot of great Creative Commons licensed music out there, but it can be hard to find things that you like. Grant Robertson started a podcast at the beginning of this year called CC:365 where every day for a year he would post a CC-licensed song. I listened from the beginning and wrote a fan letter and then found out that Grant was moving up to Halifax, which is close to me and where I work every day. Things were rolling along quite well, but after 142 days and 143 songs (one was a preview) there was a bit of a break and Grant asked for help with the podcast and I eagerly jumped in and now there are 5 people doing it as a team that rotates the awesome power and responsibility of picking songs. I'm coming up to the end of my first round of picks and I love it. I've been able to convince three new people to officially release Creative Commons licensed tracks, so I feel as if I've really accomplished something. Now I have about a month to come up with another seven picks, so I've got to keep looking. tags: cc365, music, creativecommons
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irrepressible.info

The web is an amazing way to share things, connect and find information. But the unlimited freedom of expression is threatened when technology and politics collide. Amnesty International along with The Observer have launched the irrepressible.info campaign to raise awareness of web censorship to lead up to a November 2006 United Nations conference on the future of the internet. It's important that freedom online is preserved and by signing the pledge you can help defend internet freedom and add your voice to those who fight repression. tags: irrepressible.info, amnestyinternational, humanrights, freedom
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Valleyschwag

Today I received my first shipment from Valleyschwag. It's a fascinating idea of subscribing and have a random package that includes at least one t-shirt and a range of other promotional material from Silicon Valley companies in the mail. I signed up as soon as I heard about five weeks ago it and a lot of other people did too which seemed to slow things down a bit. I was also billed for my second month before the first month arrived, but now that I have a new t-shirt, it's ok and next month should be much better. For me it's a great way to get some more t-shirts and other promotional stuff that I collect like a pack rat. I documented my opening of Valleyschwag Issue 2 and in my first package I got a Rubyred Labs (the people who created and run Valleyshwag) t-shirt, a couple of stickers (including a FeedBurner one!), a temporary tatoo, a Livejournal pencil and Movable Type keychain, as well as some neat-looking puzzle cards from Perplex City. The whole project is being written about and documented through the Chronicles of Valleyschwag as well as all over the web. The team that has pulled this together seems like a great group of people and it's neat to watch how the popularity exploded so quickly and how they are responding to it. tags: valleyschwag, schwag
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Bad Metaphor 6 - Work

Last month I took John in to work and we recorded a podcast at the Halifax Downtown Site of the Nova Scotia Community College where I work. Bad Metaphor 6 - Work is finally edited and uploaded and you can listen to it now. I give John a tour and we talk about work. If you haven't checked out Bad Metaphor yet, you should take a listen and subscribe to it as we'll be making more podcasts during the summer in an attempt to document our adventures. tags: badmetaphor, podcast, work
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