The Aptly Named, Sam's Blog » Culture http://blog.samgrover.com Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:08:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Liz is making films http://blog.samgrover.com/2010/01/03/liz-is-making-films/ http://blog.samgrover.com/2010/01/03/liz-is-making-films/#comments Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:54:46 +0000 samgrover http://blog.samgrover.com/?p=295 The last few months, Liz has invested her time into learning more about the skills of filmmaking. Here are a couple of short documentaries that she has created recently.

This first film, about Ignite Portland, is her solo work.

Ignite Portland, A Documentary Short from Liz Grover on Vimeo.

This second film, about sustainability, was done in collaboration with a few others.

Building Sustainability from Liz Grover on Vimeo.

You can read more about these on their Vimeo pages via the links under them or on Liz’s blog.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

]]> http://blog.samgrover.com/2010/01/03/liz-is-making-films/feed/ 0 Why I http://blog.samgrover.com/2009/06/21/i/ http://blog.samgrover.com/2009/06/21/i/#comments Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:50:21 +0000 samgrover http://blog.samgrover.com/?p=243 I released an update for Avatari two weeks ago. Since then I’ve found a few blog posts talking about it. See them here, here, here and here.

Did you check those out? I did and found that none of them are in a language I know!

So, what do I do? Well, there’s Google’s language tools which can translate foreign language pages to a language of your choice. Google has handy bookmarklets for many languages. Find yours and set it up in the bookmark bar in your browser. When you’re at any website in a foreign language, just click that button for a quick translation. Awesome!

By doing that I read those blog posts and am quite happy to see that folks like Avatari and are finding it useful. Thanks folks!

I appreciate all comments and feedback regarding Avatari. Blog it or write me directly!

]]> http://blog.samgrover.com/2009/06/21/i/feed/ 0 The Machine is Us/ing Us http://blog.samgrover.com/2007/07/30/the-machine-is-using-us/ http://blog.samgrover.com/2007/07/30/the-machine-is-using-us/#comments Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:30:13 +0000 samgrover http://blog.samgrover.com/2007/07/30/the-machine-is-using-us/

I’ve been sharing this video with friends since I first saw it some months ago. It’s informative and elegant and the music is cool too. It provokes my curiosity, especially with the way it ends. Take a look!

]]> http://blog.samgrover.com/2007/07/30/the-machine-is-using-us/feed/ 2 Downloadable media http://blog.samgrover.com/2006/09/27/downloadable-media/ http://blog.samgrover.com/2006/09/27/downloadable-media/#comments Thu, 28 Sep 2006 04:57:32 +0000 samgrover http://blog.samgrover.com/2006/09/27/downloadable-media/ Amazon started offering downloadable movies a couple of weeks ago. That’s great, especially since they offer rentals. I prefer to rent movies since I usually only see a movie once. If I feel like watching it again and again, I would buy it. In that case, I wouldn’t buy a restricted downloadable file and wouldn’t recommend it either, especially with draconian agreements. I’d rather just buy the physical DVD at an affordable price. You can’t just give a restricted file to a friend and say, “Hey, check this out. It’s cool”. The same is true for restricted music.

The hassle of maintaining my own digital store and backing up stuff is another deterrent. Hard disks will fail, so one needs a more comprehensive backup policy than just saving the data onto a second disk. With movies, that’s a lot of data. There’s no way I’m going to put money into a backup system for that.
Amazon’s videos won’t play on the Mac, so I can’t even rent it if I wanted to. That’s another side-effect of the restrictions. Apple is also offering movie downloads through their iTunes store, but they don’t offer rentals. So, I’m off to Movie Madness these days. If someone figures out a convenient way to offer downloadable movie rentals, I’ll sign on.

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