Interesting links for May 13th through May 14th:

• Kris Kuksi : Sculpture – These sculptures are just creepy! And yet at the same time still beautiful.
• Top 10 Incredible Time Capsules – Ooh, I hadn't heard of most of these time capsules. Interesting read.
• io9 – 15 Evil Corporations in Science Fiction – Hehe, some of my favourite evil corporations are mentioned here, like Blue Sun and Fatboy Industries. But how about Umbrella Corp? Or Shinra?
• The 10 Most Visually Stunning Movies of the Last 10 Years – I don't agree with the order of this list (Sunshine on #1??), but it's almost spot on with which movies are included. I would have replaced Transformers with something else.
• The next generation of The Next Generation – Post about who might play the characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation if they ever make a reappearance in Abrams world.

If a clock could count down to the moment you meet your soul mate, would you want to know? That’s the premise of TiMER.

Emma Caulfield (Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) plays Oona, a girl who lives in a world where an implanted device on your wrist counts down to the moment the wearer meets his/her true love. Everyone has a soulmate out there, somewhere, and each person’s timer will go off on the exact moment you two meet. But what if you have a timer and it remains blank?

I can’t  embed the trailer here, but head on over to YouTube to check it out. I really like the look of it; it just feels like a weird and unique romantic comedy. Plus I love Anya, Anyanka, ehm I mean Emma Caulfield.

TiMER – Release Date: 26 April Tribeca Film Festival (USA), not yet announced for wide release

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As I mentioned in the SocialMediaCampLondon2 blog post a couple of weeks ago, that day ended with a Photo Scavenger Hunt. It turned out to be hilarious! 

The rules were simple: Kat (from SafetyGoat) had created a list of items, which we had to find and take photos of, and each item would be awarded a number of points. You could score more points per photo if the photo was funny, or had at least one team member in it. I joined a team with Cristiano, Kevin and Farhan, and we called our team The Auto-Savers, in reference to Kat having lost the first version of the scavenger hunt list (because she closed the file without saving it).

The items on the list were ranging from simple to absurd; here’s a sample:

A jogger – 5 points

A Canadian flag – 10 points

Hamburger sauce – 10 points

Person with bright pink shirt giving thumbs up – 15 points

A unibrow – 25 points

Genuine celeb – 30 points

We had a great start, finding a lot of the items immediately. Here’s a couple of our photos:

A square (with team members!)

Person with bright pink shirt giving thumbs up

Kevin with onions

Someone on rollerblades

Me pouring a pint

The most surprising, amazing thing that happened to us though? We met Catherine Tate! (and unintentionally managed to annoy her) Our team had split up at the Waitrose in the Brusnwick Centre to find a couple of the items, leaving Cristiano at the front of the store with the camera to take photos whenever the rest of us had found something. We all came back to Cristiano discussing something about some item, only to have him shush us and whisper “I think Catherine Tate just walked past us”.

We didn’t believe him at first, but on closer inspection it turned out it was actually her! I walked up to her and asked her autograph, while Cristiano took a photo of us. She mistakenly thought he was paparazzi and turned irritatingly away from him; I apologized and said he was with me. We tried explaining the photo scavenger hunt, but by then she was already annoyed we had disturbed her shopping:

Still pretty cool, right? After that we wandered around for a little while, before heading back early to the pub to meet the other teams. In the end we won with a massive 470 points! If I remember correctly that was about 100 points more than the runner-up (so even if we hadn’t gotten our celebrity, we still would have won). The prize was a Hot Rod toy car and tickets to Spring Awakening (more about that another time). 

It was a fun end to an already great day, and I love to do something similar again. Anybody else interested in organizing our own scavenger hunt?

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As some of my Twitter followers may have noticed yesterday I wanted to do something crcreative with butternut squash. I got a lot of replies back suggesting curries, but I settled on something (in my eyes) simpler: gnocchi.

I didn’t make the gnocchi itself from scratch, but everything else (= the sauce) I pretty much did. Here’s how it turned out:

For those of you who might want to recreate this dish, here’s the recipe:

– Gnocchi
– 300 gr Butternut Squash
– 300 gr Mushrooms
– 3 strips of Parma Ham
– 200 ml Creme Fraiche
– Garlic, Thyme and Pepper

First I put the butternut squash for half an hour in the oven (in a buttered oven dish). The gnocchi you just have to prepare as it says on the package (2-3 minutes in boiling water). Then it’s basically just throwing the mushrooms, parma ham and butternut squash together in a pan. After a couple of minutes, add the creme fraiche, the spices and some water, and Tada! That’s it!

Easy, right?

Episode 111: “Cowabunga”

Interview with the Cookie Monster… Need I say more? Enjoy:

[Watch the video on MissGeeky.com]

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Last weekend was Yahoo’s Open Hack 2009, two days full of hacking, networking and fun. I’ve been to two similar events before (Over The Air and Mashed), but never ended up hacking anything together (choosing instead to make swedes and trailers). This time around I really wanted to make something.

I’ve recently been getting into PHP and have started messing around with APIs. And I had a cool idea for the weekend: Flickr Ego Tracker. An app that would track activity on Flickr photos that I was in and update me when someone commented or favourited. I was slightly optimistic about me being able to hack that in 24 hours though. While my programming skills are pretty okay, I had to read up on and try a lot of stuff I’ve never touched before.

Photo by Nate Lanxon – CNET UK

I didn’t end up presenting my app, but I still feel as if I actually did do something this year. I didn’t even play a single game on the Saturday night, opting instead to go on with my hacking. Maybe next time I’ll manage to actually finish something (although I am continuing working on my little project).

There were a lots of great apps hacked together that weekend, like Dan‘s London Undersound, an app that uses last.fm and the Oyster API to visualize what music you listen where on the underground, and Cristiano‘s ShouldIBackupMy, an app that would tell you whether or not you should backup certain data (fill in Magnolia and it says “Too late”, fill in Yahoo, it says “probably”, fill in google, it says ” Not really, but why not”). 

It was a great two days and I do feel as if I actually participated in the right way this time. To check out more of the hacks (including the winners), take a look at the Open Hack wiki.

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I’m a sucker for the old musical Disney movies, so I’ve been looking forward to The Princess and The Frog ever since I heard about it two years ago. And now we finally have a trailer!

Like most of the other Disney movies, this movie is based on a fairy tale, with one key difference. Here the setting has been uprooted and moved to another location and time: The Princess and The Frog is set in New Orleans’ French Quarter during the Jazz age (1920s). Take a look at the trailer:

[Watch the trailer on MissGeeky.com]

I’m not too sure about the change of setting, but with both main characters as frog and the New Orleans swamp as a backdrop, I can see what the writers were thinking. I’m really curious to see/hear a bit of the music; in my eyes, it’s always been the songs that have made me love/hate a Disney movie.

The Princess and The Frog – Release Date: December 2009 (US), February 2010 (UK)

I’m wondering if these seats from Qayot were intentionally meant to look like PacMan; either way the result is wonderfully geeky:

[Via Shiny Shiny]

One of my Must-Watch summer movies of this year was Star Trek. Ever since I first heard about this “reboot” I’ve been curious to see what it would turn out to be. With J.J. Abrams and friends at the helm, I was bit dubious at first; I’m not a huge fan of Abrams, even though he’s behind some of my favourite shows. I always see him as a hyper-active kid with ADHD, jumping from one project to the other, without caring how to wrap up those projects neatly (see: Alias, Lost). With Star Trek, however, I realized that (unlike with his TV shows) that wouldn’t be too much of a problem: a Star Trek movie would be a self-contained entity and even if there were unanswered questions and cliffhangers, it could never be as “unsolvable” as Lost, right?

Star Trek is set before the original series, featuring the beginnings of Kirk, Spock, & co at the Star Fleet academy. We get to see how and why Kirk joins the academy, and how he ends up on the Enterprise. Likewise we get an interesting glimpse of Spock’s childhood and family.

Abrams delivers a great summer movie, that not only pleases fans and newcomers, but reboots the entire franchise, taking it into a fresh and exciting direction. Some might say the differences between a “remake” and a “reboot” are non-existent, but in this case I truly believe this movie is more than just a “remake”. This Star Trek manages to introduce us to the same characters we’ve seen before in a different new way, yet still stays true to the original portrayals, story lines and cannon. And, to be frank, it’s pretty amazing that they were able to pull that off.

Besides that this Star Trek is the first Trek that’s a “real” movie, delivering an actual cinematic experience. This Star Trek looks and feels like it’s worth seeing in the cinema; it’s visually stunning and it’s got that epic Star Wars-like movie feeling that all the previous Treks were missing. This isn’t just a B-movie-slightly-overbudget-extra-long-tv-episode; this is an actual Movie.

All the actors are great in their roles, some of them freakishly channeling their predecessors. Chris Pine as Kirk captures that same arrogance and charisma that Shatner had, without it going too over the top. He’s got that Han Solo/Indiana Jones vibe going on; on the one side you kind of want to slap him, on the other you can’t help but like him. Zachary Quinto was born to play Spock; he had the toughest shoes to fill (mainly cause those shoes were still half full), but he pulls it off flawlessly. His Spock is cool and logical, trying to keep his human emotions in check, but there are a couple of great moments where we get to see what’s brewing underneath. Karl Urban as Bones gets some difficult lines to deliver, which could have easily gone very cheesy, but he delivers them with pitch perfection. All the other characters have their shining moments, but I still wish we got to see more of them (especially Sulu and Chekov don’t get enough screen time). 

The plot has a couple too many coincidences for me to be completely satisfied by it (I won’t spoil anything here, but if you’ve seen it, just think about the ice planet scenes). It could all be explained away with “fate”, but that feels a bit too lazy for my tastes. For the rest, it felt very much like a first episode, introducing all the characters and setting up the unvierse. Overall though I did enjoy the story, and I can’t wait for the next ‘chapter’.

As I said before, the look and feel of Star Trek is beautiful. The costumes and set pieces are all reminiscent to the older designs, yet slightly slicker and more practical. I loved the CGI worlds of Earth and Vulcan; the architecture was just amazing. Before the screening I had seen a couple of reviews complaining about the amount of lens flares, but these didn’t really annoy me. 

Star Trek is (as I said at the start of this review) one of the MUST-SEE movies of this summer. I got to see it at the Imax, and if you get the chance to see it there, do it. The mega screen is completely worth the little extra you pay for a ticket. Also: whether you’re a die hard fan or someone who’s never seen Star Trek ever in your life, you’re sure to enjoy it (newcomers might not get all the little in-jokes, but those aren’t necessary to make sense of everything). Seeing this Star Trek has gotten me completely primed and in the mood for more. In other words: I can’t wait for a sequel!

Episode 110: “Don’t know why I feel this way”

Sometimes animations don’t have to be that extravagant to be beautiful:

[Watch the video on MissGeeky.com]

This video was created by graphic artist James Jarvis, and it represents the transcendent, meditative nature of running. I’m not completely sure, but I think it was produced by Nike (I got an email with “Nike is proud to present…”). What surprised me the most though is that I took this photo at the marathon last weekend:

That’s the same character, right?

Check it out on Onwards.tv.