Give Us The Future. Now.

Published by jimkem on November 23, 2011 in Entries. Closed

I’d like to think of myself as someone who knows a couple of things about technology. And even if it turns out I don’t, that at least I know a few things about stupidity and how to avoid looking stupid. I’m sure a lot of you have spent most of your lives mastering that art.

That being said, wouldn’t you say it would be a fairly harebrained idea for a company to release a concept video about its future products that have (1) no relevance to its current situation or products and (2) are free from any physical, technological, ergonomic and economic actualities? Products that are probably 20 years down the line, when the technology hopefully catches up with these futuristic delusions. Imagine your relatively successful neighbor telling you he’s going to rule the world one day, literally, the entire world. You might be nice enough to humor his fanatical notions but you’ll only believe it once it actually happens, but only before you laugh your lungs out once you walk back to your house and close the front door after cleverly stifling it the entire time he was talking. I’ve been laughing about this since someone forwarded me the link.

These are the kind of ‘Nowhere Man’ showcases that Microsoft has been known for putting out. Previously with Surface, which thankfully, has made a somewhat fractional penetration into the real world we live in but still miles from the wonderful reality that Microsoft wanted to paint into our minds through the video.

Microsoft is lacking focus now, more than the usual amount, and it knows that maybe we realize that. So to put back that sense of customer faith that it thinks it has lost recently, it goes and makes an idealistic video about the world of the future that it hopes will look like. Microsoft and idealism? That’s a joke in itself.

In the video, its pretty clear they have put money and energy into this. Money and energy that they could have otherwise spent on making better products for the present. You know, the kind of things we could actually buy use without having to wait a few more decades.

But lets face facts. This isn’t Microsoft’s vision but rather the vision of their engineers and the designers that were paired with them at the media company they employed. This is the future they envision, though not necessarily feasible, but definitely desirable. I imagine after a few weeks of filming, animating, editing and palling around with the media and animation people, the engineers took back the final reel and presented it to the Microsoft board for approval. Their consensus was that “wow it looks good” then green lit it. The mentality that the better it looks, the more we can distract our customers into thinking the new and amazing products are just over the next hill. Guess what, they’re not. Customers are smart and they’ve already seen sci-fi visions of the far future. Say that again – Far Future. Let me just add that I have very big doubts about my fridge running MS Office.

Need further evidence that a futuristic concept video is a sign of a company that lacks a clear vision, leadership and focus? RIM just recently released their own flavour of it – now there’s a company that’s definitely booming right now.

People talk about Steve Jobs and Apple having a reality distortion field? Please.
If any company spends as much effort as Microsoft and RIM has in producing these future vision videos and, yet down the road doesn’t deliver these things, they’d better be prepared to look monumentally stupid(er).

Update: I would have embedded the RIM/Blackberry Future Vision video in this entry too if not for the fact that RIM has taken it down from YouTube and pretty much every other video site I can think of. That’s the smell of confidence all right, but is arguably the smarter to save themselves from being the butt of many internet jokes. I’ve heard on the grapevine the video that I originally watched (4 times) was leaked. A very low priority leak, I suppose. I smell more confidence.

Senna

Published by jimkem on October 27, 2011 in Entries. Closed

This is a review that I’m not surprised took me this long to write/finish. Not because I was meticulously placing the words or deciding which angle to attack it from, but because I quite liked it (the film) and didn’t think my writing about it would mushroom into something worthwhile. I am probably, therefore, a lousy reviewer in that respect.

The cinemas in Malaysia cannot be counted on to show anything but movies with explosions or mushy romance – sometimes the two overlap. With that in mind, I had to find a way to watch it outside of ‘traditional means’. There seems to be many ways to achieve that end here in Malaysia.

For the sake of this review, let’s assume that it was playing at my local theatre and that watching it would only mean around 10 bucks out of my wallet and a 10 minute drive. I still wouldn’t have gone. For good reasons. Largely because of the fear that I’d be subjecting myself to an experience that would leave me in an incompatible emotional state with sitting in a public auditorium with strange people within earshot of my restrained squeaking. So I bravely decided that in my room, on my Macbook Pro would be a better venue for my inevitable unmanly display.

I had no clue of what to expect outside of the positive reviews its garnered and seeing Top Gear plug it at least twice1. But a movie about an F1 driver? Seriously, no way I could miss out on this.

I was pretty tired during my first viewing and I can’t remember why I ignored the logic to just put it off until the next day. In my half-dazed state only my eyes and a few other basic brain functions remained, allowing me to be as easily impressed with Senna as would my ten year old self. There was much glorious engine noise sprinkled in parts with narrative voices to make sense of the amazing footage but I was just burying my face into my bed pillow until they’d shut up, allowing the interviews with Senna or Prost or some actual race action resumed. I was awake enough to absorb the story and the tragedy, the thrill and the joy until the credits rolled. And yes, I did cry.

Yeah yeah..

“Tomorrow. One more time.” was the last thing I probably mumbled before I my face slammed back into my matress, leaving all the lights and the laptop as they were.

When I emerged and could finally gather enough coherence to make sense of last night’s final hours, the first couple of paragraphs about this film saw first light. They weren’t very good. So I watched it again that evening, still not finding a meaningful opinion but happy to solely enjoy the spectacle.

In most parts, Senna is a great piece of filmmaking, the result of real effort – the kind that I find hard grasp for myself. Within the genre of a documentary and if viewed dispassionately (which I only managed the 3rd time watching it), it can be hard to fault. The passion for the subject matter comes across immediately. Asif Kapadia, the director, and his team clearly holds Ayrton Senna, his family, his career, his spirit, in very high regard. Ayrton Senna de Silva was, and still is, my hero and I’m glad the man at the helm of this film shares this admiration.

You can pick faults at everything and despite my wanting to leave it alone and rave about it to everyone around me, there were a couple of things that made me squint in confusion. For a start, the title is a little ambiguous. It should be called Senna: The F1 Era. The title Senna implies that it is a reflection of his entire life. And as a reflection of his entire life, I think Senna falls short. I don’t completely agree that it deserves all the universal praise it has been awarded. And I say that as someone who wells up with pride and disbelief that a film about a dead racing driver from nearly two decades ago managed to cause such a huge stir when it was released at the start of association football season. Just as a great race in any motorsport is the residual of all the effort hammered out in the days and weeks leading up to it, so too a great driver and a great man is the legacy of previous struggles. In during the film, we get a few key glances at Ayrton’s go-karting days in the late 70s, but confusingly without peeks into his subsequent tribulations in Formula Ford and the fierce competition between Martin Brundle in Formula 3.

Journalistic corroboration is delivered through two people I’ve never heard of before who do a decent job to fill the narration roles. Experts, they are, but I just needed a higher degree of vindication from the people who went head-to-head with Senna, people from his life rather than outsiders looking in. There’s no Nigel Mansell, no Neslon Piquet, no Gerhard Berger, no Rubens Barichello to lend their surely amazing first-hand accounts. But the move to leave most of the scenes un-narrated, whether deliberately or not, was genius. The film is notable for its absence of talking heads to provide commentary for a noisy and chaotic grand prix atmosphere, where some would argue it needs it most. There’s so many scenes in this film that don’t need words, Ayrton’s expression imparts more than any expert commentary could ever hope to.

So its not an intimate look at his life before F1 but instead focuses more on his many epic moments during F1. Fine. Great. But to find out by the end that the 93’ Donnington race opening lap was swept over is just incomprehensible.2

Secondly, the on-board footage during the Monaco GP didn’t sync to rhythm of the lap. It really annoys me when these instances of over-dubbing creates a rift between the sounds and the behavior of man/machine. Why they didn’t just leave the damn filmstrip alone baffles me.

This disconnect is aggravating enough when you’re watching a regular DVD but when you’ve got Ayrton Senna, a 1200bhp turbo V8 and a manual gearchange to look forward to hearing, its just unbearable.

Nearing the end of the film, and we all know how it ends at Imola in 1994, it became evident that many of Ayrton’s friends, family, former rivals and colleagues chose to exclude themselves from this production. A crying shame, honestly – and I hope they can finally see how beautiful and moving this film is, both on small and big screens, to understand how their insight and support could have added the final golden piece to this powerful tribute. The weekend of the climactic San Marino race began and the complete absence of nothing but ambient sounds adds a heavy poignancy for the events I knew were about to unfold, which became even more muted when Roland Ratzenberger had a fatal accident during qualifying. Only the simple narrative of images, tools clanking, wailing sirens, nervous hands, darting eyes and facial expression; the roar of a monstrous V10 exploding against Imola’s concrete walls.

The climax of Ayrton’s crash and the aftermath, that final 20 minutes of induced stillness are the film’s crowning glory. I teared up again.

  1. Actually Clarkson’s Ayrton Senna tribute is well worth a watch [↩]
  2. Over the course of the first lap, in the rain, Senna muscled past 5 cars to gain first place while driving a struggling McLaren MP4/8 [↩]

Great Having You, Steve. Insanely.

Published by jimkem on October 12, 2011 in Entries. Closed

 

The night Steve Jobs passed away I was having dinner with some friends. I can’t overstate the impact he’s had on the way we all live our lives, even in some small way. I raised my glass of coke, everyone at my table did the same “To Steve!”, we said in unison. The two tables to our sides raised their glasses, one by one, with a knowing nod. Cheers.

There’s no shortage of things to read about Steve Jobs’ death; about its abruptness, about the aftermath, about the future of Apple, about him and about his legacy. And there’s nothing I could probably add or say better or more factually than them.

Steve was sick, we all knew that, but I didn’t care for the opinion that he was not long for this world. People would show me some new picture that their friend had forwarded them from some other friend showing a gaunt and impossibly frail Steve, at which point I’d quickly dismiss that as a photo doctored by some fat slob with too much free time and too big a bladder to keep his ass planted on that long-suffering desk chair of his through the long nights he must have endured to make that picture look as real as it could. Crazy optimist was a label that, now more than ever, you could have badged me as.

Before it happened, the death of Steve Jobs to me was, like in his own words “a useful but purely intellectual concept”. All the things in my head concerning Apple at the time revolved around being right in predicting the iPhone 4S (gadget lust) launch. More accurately, I was busy plotting how I was going to shove my rightness into the faces of the friends and acquaintances morons that were so obnoxiously sure that an iPhone 5 would be launched instead of a 4S to precede it. Yeah, fuck you too, but I was right.

But then I woke up on Thursday morning. 8.50am.

It sort of irritates me that a text message can be enough of a jolt to yank me out of sleep, but my head happened to be on the edge of the bed by the end table where my phone was. It plainly said “Dude, Steve Jobs is dead.” and it was from one of my ex Apple colleagues who I wouldn’t put down as someone who’d pull a prank, especially about this and at this time of day. I fell back into bed and let out a few sighs because I couldn’t think of much else to do or say (to myself).

I was sad and I was confused; got out of bed, tripped on the sheets that were still wrapped around my leg and opened Apple.com – there it was. No escaping it now. It might seem difficult for you to get a handle on the why. I mean, sure I never met the guy and these emotions seem more warranted for somebody I actually knew closely. In a way I did know him closely, he just didn’t know me.

Ever since I could use a computer I’ve always coveted Macs, and as I learned more about them an admiration grew for the man who championed them: The innovator, the tyrant, the visionary. To a 13 year old boy living in Alor Star, a town in northern Malaysia, a Mac was almost god-like to behold – especially in contrast to my beige-ugly-as-fuck slow ass PC at the time1 . I’d surround myself with info about the Mac, about Apple and about Steve. The TV at home was almost always stuck on TechTV whenever I was around, with the remote “missing”. I was hooked. If you follow technology, I’m sure Apple’s renaissance2 and meteoric rise back to power (and then some) must have been impressive to say the least. It was utterly and unblinkingly awe-inspiring for me.

I doubt that there’s any publicly available footage of Apple and of Steve that I haven’t seen, and seen many times. And I’ve read more stuff that I can care to mention – books, magazines, blogs. I grew up with and around him and the values he held close are the same values I have always wished for myself. And what better mentor to have at such a young age.

Knowing how Steve is, he’d probably not want people like me feeling grief over his death. He’d want us all to move on, to follow our hearts and to follow it forward. He had a great life and he wouldn’t want to keep us from living own greats lives by dwelling on this.

And he’s right, again.

It still amazes me how well I tied everything off and how the subtly irony flies past the brows of most of us. Here I am typing this entry about him on a Macbook Pro. I first heard of his death on an iPhone. He cryptically said “That day has come” in his resignation letter and neatly put his successor into place at Apple and he eloquently spoke of life and death during his speech at Stanford University in 2005(→), a year after he underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his pancreas. You just couldn’t make his story up for a movie. I feel lucky to have lived in a time when the appreciation for this man and his contributions are at its peak. He really did change the world.

“Stay hungry, stay foolish”

So it goes. Thank you, Steve.

  1. I once hacked that same PC to run Mac OS X 10.3 Panther [↩]
  2. After the shithole they were in [↩]