Archive for June 24th, 2009

Trailerrific: Ponyo (On the Cliff)

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

I love Studio Ghibli’s movies and this latest one looks cute! I’ve seen almost all of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies (including Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle); I think I’m only still missing one of them.

Ponyo (known as Ponyo On the Cliff in Japan) is about a 5 year old boy and his relationship with a goldfish princess who wants to become human. I blogged about the Japanese trailer ages ago, but this US one shows much more and is easier to follow. It’s a bit jarring though to hear the English dubbed voices; I prefer the original voices and usually avoid all dubbings. It just doesn’t sound right!

Ponyo – Release Date: August 2009 (US)

Day In The Cloud Challenge

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Google Apps and Virgin America have teamed up for today for the “Day In The Cloud” Challenge, the first online scavenger hunt played simultaneously in the air and everywhere else. For the entire day of June 24th you can enter the one-hour game and try to earn as many points as possible. If you become a top scorer (and are a legal US resident), you can win a “Year In A Cloud”: a brand new HP laptop, 1 terabyte of Google Account storage, and a year of free flying and free wifi on Virgin America (actually what this means though is 12 one-way tickets on Virgin America and 12 complimentary wifi passes, slightly less impressive than “a year of free flying”).

dayinthecloud

The idea is to solve 9 rounds of tasks, within one hour. The tasks range from Googable questions and trivia, to word puzzles, to using specific Google products to find an answer, like Google Calendar and Google Books. And I think also a special creative round where you have to do something, well, creative.

I didn’t get that far though. I wasted too much time in the first round, so only made it to Round 6 with 9500 points. The tasks can be pretty fun though, and especially the more puzzle like ones were nice to solve. If you try it out though, keep in mind you only have 1 hour to attempt all the rounds.

Check out Day In The Cloud for more details.