Poor kid. One day he’ll Google himself and discover this blog post and realize some chic in Boston knows too many details of his life, including his height and weight and birthday and sports awards and career aspirations. But for now, I’d like to send a big shoutout into the anonymity of cyberspace and wish my very tall half-brother a happy 18th birthday, not to mention a happy graduation and happy official adulthood. This was supposed to be the day our father would break the silence to P about my existence, but I suppose we all make promises we never really intend to keep.

I took these in December, but don’t think I ever posted them.

Machinist has introduced me to FLEKTOR, which could only be cooler if it were open source. I have yet to try it, but you should, and then tell me about it. It’s about time someone added interactive elements.

Flektor is a fantastically well-made Web-based editing program that has two big selling points: It’s free. And it’s packed with a great many features that other free editing programs — the ones bundled with Macs and Windows — can’t do.The advantage of creating a video on Flektor rather than on your home computer is that Flektor comes with hosting: I can put this flek anywhere I’m allowed to add an HTML embedded tag — on Salon, on a blog, on a MySpace page, on eBay — or I can e-mail the link to all my friends. Fleks are also interactive — notice the poll at the end; you can add a viewer chat feature — and they’re updated “live,” meaning that any time you change your flek, all instances of it posted anywhere change along with it.

Excerpted from Machinist/Salon’s article:

Facebook, she says, attracts upper- and middle-class kids — kids “from families who emphasize education and going to college” — while MySpace is “still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, ‘burnouts,’ ‘alternative kids,’ ‘art fags,’ punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.” Boyd’s findings aren’t exactly groundbreaking — they’re evident to anyone who has used both systems — nor are they hard to explain. Still, they point to an intriguing fact about life online: that class divisions crop up even when there are no physical barriers to integration, that freedom to associate with whomever you want online doesn’t liberate you from the psychological limits of association bred into you offline.

Thank God, someone is finally addressing class/race issues in cyberspace. You know who would have something great to contribute to this dialogue? Fred Turner from Stanford, author of “From Counterculture to Cyberculture”. I saw him at Digital Disobedience at Harvard a few months ago, and he was one of two people who had something relevant and interesting to add to the social networking conversation. His point was along the same lines as Machinist’s article.

Well, maybe the best in Savin Hill. DD has decided to use medium format film cameras almost exclusively this summer…

Do yourself a favor and subscribe to Monocle, a “global affairs, business, culture & design” magazine based out of London, New York, Milan, Hong Kong and Zürich, respectively. I discovered it in the DC airport the other day and have fallen in love. It’s almost worth the £75/yr subscription, which I’m trying to justify paying for.

But it’s totally worth it: stories in the June issue range from hybrid architecture in the new Afghanistan to a profile on a Japanese pastry chef to boat shows in Maine to mobile communications developments in Seoul to Azerbaijan’s new school of diplomacy to interviews with Georgia’s notoriously young government officials. There’s also music recommendations from various countries, and housing prices from around the globe. Meant for the international traveler, I think you can enjoy this magazine even if you never leave your living room.

No news. Still working on alignment. Two more months! Or so he says…

1. I am changing the look of this site soon:
It’ll feature a new header, with links to photo slideshows, videos, this blog and my mobile blog, reflecting my effort to merge content on four of my six sites: tapiocaproductions.com, pazonada.blogspot.com, audubon.blip.tv, and tapioca.tv. When I get around to it, I will also finish my mom’s site — whatsupmsdoc.com.

2. Isn’t this a cool photo? DD took it while I was in DC this week:

Reposted from Anil’s blog of world travels:

There is little rhyming couplet in Arabic that Cairenes use in reply when asked how they’re doing. It’s Milla milla, walla fa’rkh gammaaya, or “Hundred percent better than the government-issued chicken.” …I suppose the Egyptian government isn’t known for high-quality food aid. But that’s how I feel now: fantastic. Far better than government-issued meat.

Not kidding! Wow! Our film “In Medas Res” (which I accidentally spelled “En Medias Res” during the festival) screened tonight at Coolidge as part of 48HFP’s Best of Boston screening, and we won best cinematography, best editing (Ben Eckstein, for both), best directing, best actor (Michael Leo Judge), best use of required line of dialogue, best use of barely noticeable required prop, and….drum roll….BEST FILM, beating out 99 other teams.

I actually feel guilty — there were many great teams with awesome, funny films. I think any one of them could have taken the cake. Ours had seamless production quality, but little humor and not really much plot. Still, if Thelma Schoonmaker wants to give us seven awards, we’ll take them! Congrats to all the other teams who totally could have won. On to the national competition!