All posts by jasonian

Grease Live director calling camera shots is as impressive as the show itself   ◆

One of Grease Live’s Associate Directors posted a brief video showing her calling the show shots. People often think about how hard the actors/dancers/singers had to work in front of the camera, and forget that there’s a whole other world behind the camera, who have just as much rehearsal and choreography.

I was impressed by what Grease Live managed to accomplish, even though there were several things that made me cringe, as a big fan of the 1978 movie. Just lots of beats and reactions that I’m so used to that didn’t happen in the live version.

I know, you can’t reproduce that moment in film when you’re doing a live TV show, but so much of what was done in the live show seems like it was meant to be a remake of the movie that when something didn’t hit the expected beats, it stood out even more.

But I did enjoy the live show; it was both technically and creatively interesting, and probably the best of the live musicals that have been popping up over the last few years.

Sprint installs MDM profiles on new iPhones without customer permission   ◆

Johnny Kim on Twitter:

Hey @sprint @sprintcare, what’s up with sprint installing MDM profile on a new iPhone 6s at the store?

Twitter is blowing up over this, and Sprint seems incapable of understanding the issue.

Mobile Device Management (MDM) profiles are usually installed by companies managing a large number of devices and allow them to control and configure them (for example, to turn off certain features like, or to automatically add email accounts). There’s no real reason for an MDM profile to be installed by Sprint on a personal device.

Sketchy.

On top of that, Sprint seems clueless about the issue, and their responses on Twitter are—at best—tone deaf, and in fact seem actively obfuscatory, like they’re trying to hide something. Many people are accusing Sprint of using response-bots, and it’s not hard to see why customers would think that.

Jar Jar Binks: trained Force user, Sith collaborator?   ◆

I’m not sure if I want this to be true or not; from Reddit :

Here I will seek to establish that Jar Jar Binks, far from being simply the bumbling idiot he portrays himself as, is in fact a highly skilled force user in terms of martial ability and mind control.

Furthermore, I assert that he was not, as many people assume, just an unwitting political tool manipulated by Palpatine– rather, he and Palpatine were likely in collaboration from the very beginning, and it’s entirely possible that Palpatine was a subordinate underling to Binks throughout both trilogies.

And finally, given the above, I will conclude with an argument as to why I believe it is not only possible, but plausible that Jar Jar will make a profound impact on the upcoming movies, and what his role may be.

This might have come up with the most amazing and unexpected Star Wars theory I’ve ever seen, is thoroughly well researched, and may change how I view the prequels forever.

Pandora streams Serial Season 2 in five minute chunks   ◆

In this Investors Business Daily article on Pandora’s acquisition of TicketFly was this tidbit that Pandora

[…] would become the exclusive streaming partner for season two of hit podcast “Serial.”

The launch date for Serial’s season two wasn’t disclosed, and that podcast will still be available for download from other sites. Pandora will make Serial’s season one available in its entirety for listeners starting Nov. 24 […]. Each episode will be broken into five-minute chunks, allowing listeners to more easily pick up where they left off, go back to re-listen, or skip ahead, Pandora said.

What does this mean, five minute chunks? Do they mean each episode will be broken into separate five minute chunks? That there will be built-in end points every five minutes to make it easy to pause and resume?

Wired says the show

will be available in five-minute chapters on Pandora, tailored to listeners accustomed to the length of a song, rather than an hour-long podcast.

That strikes me as odd. Will season 2 be written to accommodate that five minute structure? Will each “chapter” have an opening and closing? Will their be ads on each one of the chapters? (“Chapter 4 of Season 2 of Serial is brought to you by….”)

The Pandora press release says

Pandora engineers focused on bringing “chapterized” content to the platform for the first time.

So engineers did something to make this work; is this automatic? How will that affect the flow of the story? Will you “break” in the middle of a sentence or (worse!) an ad?

And what’s with this whole “exclusive streaming partner”? Almost every podcast player app will stream content if the hosting server supports byte-range requests; are they saying they’ll be hosting Serial season 2 on a server that doesn’t?

Everything about this is confusing to me.

9th-grader arrested after taking homemade clock to school: ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’   ◆

Dallas Morning News:

Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.

Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.

So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.

In the meantime, Ahmed’s been suspended, his father is upset and the Council on American-Islamic Relations is once again eyeing claims of Islamophobia in Irving.

This kid may well be scarred for life, all because he has a Muslim name and is brown-skinned. If a young white boy had done this, there’s no doubt in my mind that none of this—none—would have happened.

Andy Ihnatko is infuriated, rightly, and there’s a hashtag (#IStandWithAhmed) supporting the young inventor.

The world I live in continues to depress me. How may brown-skinned kids are going to read about Ahmed and decide it’s too risky to pursue something different, to stay away from technology or engineering?

This is not the way to encourage more diversity in STEM.

Apple announces dividend and stock buy back   ◆

Apple PR:

Subject to declaration by the Board of Directors, the Company plans to initiate a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012, which begins on July 1, 2012.

There’s also a $10 billion share repurchase program.

“We have used some of our cash to make great investments in our business through increased research and development, acquisitions, new retail store openings, strategic prepayments and capital expenditures in our supply chain, and building out our infrastructure. You’ll see more of all of these in the future,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business. So we are going to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program.”

Translation: Our money printing press is oiled up and ready to go.

One interesting note from the conference call: Apple will pay dividends on unvested Restrcted Stock Units, but Tim Cook specifically requested he not receive this benefit on his 1,000,000+ million RSUs. That’s a lot of money he’s giving up.

This American Life Retracts “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory”

Ira Glass:

We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week’s episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.”

Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.

The original program1 was riveting. Daisey is a talented and engaging storyteller. Too bad it was in part a fabrication for the purpose of telling a good story.

Kudos to Ira Glass and This American Life for a full-throated, zero equivocation retraction2.

Daisey defends himself on his website:

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.

Rob Schmitz, the reporter who tracked down the interpreter, is American Public Media’s Marketplace China correspondent, and filed his own report:

Daisey told This American Life and numerous other news outlets that his account was all true.

But it wasn’t.

Daisey says “it’s not journalism. It’s theater.” That’s certainly true, but the “story” was put out there as truth, not fiction.

The Public Theater, where the show finally ends its run on March 18, also put out a statement:

In the theater, our job is to create fictions that reveal truth– that’s what a storyteller does, that’s what a dramatist does.

[…]

Mike is an artist, not a journalist. Nevertheless, we wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn’t his personal experience in the piece.

Even in defending him, they acknowledge the deceit.

  1. No longer available in audio form, alas. The transcript remains “only for reference”. ↩
  2. They blogged and did a Press Release about it, and released the audio two days early. ↩