PABCAS, the blog of Paul Martin Campbell

So I went along to the ‘Halo 3 event this evening and met neither Mullley nor MacGyver ...

I did however feel an enormous sense of community. Something about the conversations I had tonight with Fergal and Clare stirred something in me – made me feel even stronger that sense of undercurrent that I feel has been bubbling away for the past year or so round here.

With Fergal, the conversation was more about networking – kind of following on from my own asshole post ( I got to personally apologise about that tonight, which was a weight off ) ... that it’s important to treat each other with respect and that it pays dividends.

Conversing with Clare ( and Pascal and Conor ) we discussed the power of social networking and followed on from discussions we’d had previously about privacy and transparency online.

Basically, at OpenCoffee a couple weeks ago, I argued with Clare that there are dangerous levels of paranoia out there and that one should be responsible about what one shares online – I made a promise to myself this year that I’d only blog about those things that I wholeheartedly wanted in the public domain – I decided that private thoughts would go in a private journal, personal things on Facebook, and public things here.

Clare’s argument was that younger people are potentially sharing too much on Facebook.

From my idealistic, Star Trek idealistic point of view, I find it very sad that privacy should be an issue at all – I believe that transparency is such an important attribute in all relationships – private, personal and business—that said, there are people out there whom the term “screwing over” means nothing and will readily do just that as part of due course.

Conor raise the point this evening reflecting back on a conversation we’d had that I argued that I’d no inherent problem with being finger printed going through US customs. Perhaps I was a bit biased as I love America and would probably jump through even more hoops to get myself in. I argued though then that I have nothing to hide and if they want to finger print me and keep my US activities on file then so be it – everything I do is legitimate and I’m a citizen who actively encourages both a) respect for the law and b) diplomatic influencing of laws that may be out of date or irrelevant – and I’ve given that a lot of thought.

At the end of the day, privacy online is down to the individual. I had an argument a while ago that there should such thing as a generalisation in moral issues as every case should be taken individually. That said, I think it should be generalised that net citizens – everyone who partakes in distribution of themselves and their personalities online should take responsibility for their actions online as much as they do offline. Therein lies a whole other argument that could branch and stretch far and wide after I’ve gone to sleep.

But it’s food for thought nonetheless. An open source world is a wonderful ideal, but for now, an ideal it remains.

I hit up Transformers in Dundrum yesterday and noticed a few subtle, but outstanding features of the way the operation was designed – challenging the conventions of standard cinema practice.

• 1. You can buy tickets at any counter* The convention we’ve come to expect in cinemas the world over is the factory line process – queue for the ticket booth, tickets to ticket clerk, queue for food, enter the cinema.

There is a ticket booth at Dundrum, but a small sign says that you can pick up cinema tickets at any register. I found it hard to believe, but we bought our snacks and tickets from the same booth. Smart thinking – one less queue, one less hassle.

• 2. Fixed Seating* I’ve come to expect fold up seats no matter what cinema I’m in, even if they’re really comfortable. It’s just engrained. In Dundrum, the seats are all fixed, with glow in the dark seat numbers on the arm rests. There’s something very satisfying about a cinema seat that stays put when you stand up to let someone by, or need to go pee during the movie.

• 3. Basement Location* The cinemas in Dundrum are all below ground – there’s no cellphone reception at all. I don’t know if it’s a universally good feature, but mobile phones in cinemas piss me right off. Not in Dundrum.

It felt really good to give custom to a place where obvious thought had gone in to small, but important details. Needless to say, the picture quality and sound were great.

Just back from lunch in the Winding Stair with Alistair , Richard , Olivier and Niall ... Note to the winding stair: you should get a website, or some SEO if you have one!

The lunch was the last of us standing after OpenCoffee Dublin … yet again another successful event with a few new faces – most notably Brian and Bernard from InterTrade Ireland. Brian was gathering contacts and ideas for a networking event to promote Inter Trade’s services to the grass roots entrepreneurial community. We had some good discussion about how we can infiltrate the culture and engender leadership amongst the community.

I argued that it’s leadership at an educational level that might spark the biggest problem. I remember a conversation I had last year with Eamon Conway of the UL Centre for Culture, Technology and Values of UL ... where we discussed the promotion of leadership programmes as part of the education system. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for example, cite courses of such nature being very inspirational in helping them build Google.

Another theme cropping up recently and one that I cited Derek Organ on from his blog post was the need to “think big” for new enterprises. I’ve heard this said so much recently. I remember watching Oliver Stone in Trinity mentioning how he thought the upcoming crop of new filmmakers didn’t think big enough. Recently ReadWriteWeb blogged about how “Apple is playing this game to win and to win big.”

So just what will be the next big idea? And in the words of Farzad Jamal “How’s does it make money?”

I took a selection of the pitch videos at Curry2.0 last night.

Here they are:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0D2778549B9DFDD0

Really grainy and the sound is crappy ( excuse my phone, I’m in the market for a camcorder…. )

I’ll write more about the night later, but voila for now.

Apple is known for products and software that “just work.” For video conversion, they have their Compressor app that gets bundled with Final Cut Pro ... Now, I’m still way back at Final Cut Pro 4.5 HD, so I don’t know if Apple have improved Compresosr much since then, but I do know that I’ve just discovered a veritable swiss army knife of video conversion: VisualHub .

I discovered it after checking out iSquint , a freeware app for converting video to iPod format. There’s a neat comparison chart between iSquint and VisualHub on the iSquint homepage. It just so happens that I’m editing some YouTube clips together ( did somebody say copyright?) at the moment and needed to convert from FLV to DV. I was a bit nervous about how I’d do it. With VisualHub, it’s as easy as drag, drop and click start. It even has a “Ready for Final Cut” check box. I don’t know what it does, but I’m happy it’s there.

If you’re doing any video conversion on a mac, this software is so worth it. It supports incoming and outgoing for iTunes, PSP, DV, DVD, AVI, Mpeg4, WMV, Mpeg and Flash Video. It’s a serious tool that does one thing really, really well.

As I flew toward California, I couldn’t help thinking that the US landscape was like a sea, suspended in time – mountains hang as sheer waves in a storm, great plains expand across other horizons, the calm ocean.

The theme of this trip is turning out to be humility. I stood beneath a cap rock today in the Joshua Tree National Park and … well, I imagined it was something like standing next to a dinosaur. Similar feelings as I flew across the southern tip of Greenland, looking out at the snowdrifts receding into eternity.

Coachella was also humbling in a way, but also inspiring. Let me explain.

I first saw The Frames in Whelans about 7 years ago. I then watched Damien Rice rise out of the obscure Juniper (now Bell X1 ) and saw him join the Frames onstage several times, even once in Simon’s Cafe, where he sat beside me with his guitar before being called up by Glen to perform the Jackson 5’s “I want you back” ... then about a year later just before he released “O”, I watched Damien play through the album acoustically in the Temple Bar Music Centre before which, Brazilan couple Roderigo y Gabriela wowed the audience and began their rise to success.

Having been out of touch of the music scene in Dublin for about 4 or 5 years, it was both novel and exhilarating to see bands who were local just a few years ago and whom I was excited about then really shaking up audiences 5000 miles away. In a way, it was inevitable, but it sure felt good to watch those three acts against a backdrop of palm trees.

Right now, I’m about to watch Heroes on NBC, on a television, as it’s meant to be seen. Now that’s novel.

I’m publishing this in all the available sections. The south west of America has fundamentally influenced the person I am. The centre of the film world for the best part of the last century in Southern California. The tech capital of the world to the north. And I’m sure there’s enough of a music scene between San Francisco and LA to have my appetite for that covered (have you seen the Coachella lineup?

I got offered Coachella tickets yesterday and today I decided to go. I’m flying in 11 hours. Then I’m moving out from palm springs and making my way north on Tuesday…

In a way, it feels like I’m going home

If anyone has any pointers, let me know.

Heroes is back and I’m very excited. VERY excited. I’m singing “Tonight is your night bro’” inside my head like Danny DeVito in Twins

Meanwhile, after two dramatic episodes of Scrubs involving Laverne’s accident, we were back to plain old voiceover swapping and Elliot’s quirkey relationship woes. It’s the last chapter – it feels nice, but we all know it’s about to end.

silent teardrop

Just saw The Lives of Others there in the IFI. Completely sold out show – there’s something really intense about seeing a show when the whole place is packed out of it.

I’m normally awkward about clapping at the end of a film, but I joined in rapturously at the end of this. Some serious acting going on. The story is Shakespearean, the drama gripping. Huge film.

I was lucky enough to get tickets to the Irish premiere tonight of Sunshine , Danny Boyle’s new sci-fi space movie, written by Alex Garland. To commemorate the event, the IFI organised Danny himself, lead Cillian Murphy and science advisor on the film Dr. Brian Cox for a post screening Q&A.

The cinema was buzzing and the event sold out. the rest of this paragraph removed by request

The film is set 50 years in the future and is something of a cross between Armageddon and Alien. The sun is dying and a crack team of astronauts and scientists have been sent to explode a bomb directly into the sun, in order to cause a chain reaction and light up the earth again.

Whilst the premise is absurd, as Boyle pointed out – there have been very few films made about the sun. This is interesting in a world context where global warming is the topic du jour and society is living in something of a fear of the sun – despite our pathological tendency to worship it as the source of all life.

A series of catastrophes befall the crew as their mission draws toward its climax. A simple mistake whilst changing trajectory causes heat damage to the ship and a mysterious message coming from a ship from a failed mission seven years previous divides the crew in their opinion on how best to complete their task.

Whilst there’s no huge performances, Murphy is solid here as Capa, the physicist hero who must be kept alive at all cost in order to deliver the bomb to the surface of the sun. The other performances are believable and real – the claustrophobia of how it might feel to be a million miles from home flying into doom is adequately portrayed, if a little contrived.

The climax of the movie is more art than adventure, more reflection than action, but a clever Alien style twist three quarters in to provide the drama for the climactic centrepiece was wonderful to watch. The villain of the piece, a crazed astronaut driven crazy in space, was perhaps not used to his full potential, but his presence provides just enough madness to make sure that Capa’s job isn’t quite straightforward.

The Q&A following the screening was prerty standard Q&A fare. The former head of Education and Access with the IFI, Grainne Humphries, currently doing something arty on the Dublin International Film Festival committee led the proceedings with a bunch of stock questions derived from what sounded like a brief conversation she had with Danny before they got up.

He went through the script writing process (35 drafts!) and the process of getting to the central issues. What I liked was his resolution to compete with the greats. He mentioned that the major sci-fi hits of the 70s & 80s set the bar and it was imperative that he “kill to get there”.

Cillian Murphy answered a few stock questions about just how hard it is to move around in a space suit. Most interesting, perhaps, was Dr. Cox (with a name like that…) whose insistence that “we are doomed anyway” was always accompanied by a large grin.

Cox summed up the theme of the film brilliantly – that Capa’s actions and attitude were motivated by scientific awe – a fascination about the universe that almost has a spiritual dimension. It’s that wonder that all true science should be motivated by – even to the point of touching the sun at the moment of death, in order to save the world.

Having watched all but one episode of Scrubs, I consider myself something of a die hard fan. The most recent episodes of Season 6, however have been weak, mawkish and I’m pretty much tolerating them now because the earlier seasons were like therapy for me.

I’ve just watched episode 14, “My No Good Reason” and if there there was back to form, this is it. Dr. Cox hard ass with glimmers of understanding. Dr. Kelso evil as ever with that softer side only revealed at the very end. Elliot being ditsy and weird. Carla not being annoying and actually motivating the drama on. A hottie for JD. Some exceptional JD fantasies ( and a great Janitor fantasy gag at the start )

And in true Scrubs style, a moral dilemma without mercy – a reality that comedy normally shies away from – a central character in a coma. Huge.

Scrubs, I’m glad to have stuck it out with you. Heroes got me through the tough times when you turned shit there for a while – you’ve come back in to your own and I’m happy to have you for the next month until Heroes comes back.

Excited tonight to open the Sunday Times Culture where The Importance of Being Beckett caught my eye as I opened the contents page.

The piece is under “My Must Sees” (any idea who it is??) and reads:

The Importance of Being Beckett (YouTube) In one of their several new shorts, the crazy kids from Dublin University Filmmakers cross Oscar Wilde with Samuel Beckett in a confluence of southside mating rituals.

It’s a great little film, good on you Tom and Max!

Being the only human in the world to have attended every Trinity College filmmakers society event held at the Sugar Club in Leeson Street, I wasn’t about to let my record slide.

Tonight was a night that really unleashed my faith in people putting their potential to good use.

About ten films were shown, interspersed with live music and even some drumming courtesy of the Afro Caribbean society. Whilst the music was barely audible above the chatter of voices, it was that chatter of voices that really lifted the event – the place was jammers.

A few films by new filmmakers set the scene for the night – live scores being performed in front of silent visuals. The concept was sound and the execution admirable. There’s just something about sitting in a venue like the Sugar Club watching films that continues to make me so happy and the added twist of live accompaniments was refreshing.

Kudos to Ruth and the TAF for organising the night and keep an eye out on the filmmakers youtube site for some of the films that were screened tonight