Just for fun.

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Filed under Amusing (if only to me), I love Oakland, Photography, movies (and tagged with Brainwash Movie Festival, flickr commons) on August 5, 2010 at 8:44 am

Yes, the 16th Annual Brainwash Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival is almost upon us!

I’ll bet you didn’t know that the New York Times says the Brainwash Movie Festival “pirates a piece of that old Hollywood magic and challenges conventions on the role of public space in the process.”

Funny, because Brainwash organizers say, “We project movies onto a tarp in a parking lot in Oakland.”

Brainwash features a great mix of new movies from the Bay Area and all over the world, featuring dark humor, animation, mockumentaries, and much more. See http://www.brainwashm.com/festival/2010-festival/ for this year’s full program.

What’s a Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival? It’s set up like a traditional drive-in with FM sound as well as two big amps. Arrive however you choose: drive, bike, or walk in, perhaps with your favorite chair or blanket. West Oakland BART is one block away.

The festival will be held Saturday, August 7th, Friday, August 13th, and Saturday, August 14th (9:00 p.m. each night) at the Mandela Village Arts Center at 1357 5th St in Oakland.

Admission is just $10, or a $40 Festival Pass gets two people into all three nights of the festival. Tickets are available at http://www.ticketweb.com/snl/EventListings.action?orgId=16986 or at the gate. More about Brainwash.

• Buy tickets here
• Brainwash’s Facebook page
• RSVP on Facebook: Aug 7 / Aug 13 / Aug 14

Also, I’d be glad if you wanted to post one of these lovely banner ads (below and in the sidebar) on your own site. Somehow that seems unlikely, but you never know.

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Filed under California, Culture, I love Oakland, Recommendations, movies (and tagged with Brainwash, Brainwash Movie Festival) on August 3, 2010 at 9:01 am

This tab has been open in my browser at work since July 11th, because I’ve been meaning to finish reading this article and posting it, but I just haven’t gotten to it.

From “How facts backfire” in The Boston Globe:

[W]e often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This dovetails with what Drew Westen was saying when I first saw him at Netroots Nation in 2007, and — going back a few years — George Lakoff’s work on frames.

This being an unfinished thought, I guess I shouldn’t feel too much pressure to come up with some kind of pithy conclusion (beyond this pointless sentence).

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Filed under Communication, I Hate Politics, Sad (if only to me), Unfinished Thoughts on August 2, 2010 at 2:23 pm

or about 3.2 posts per month. That seems right.

(And this is after importing my NaNoWriMo blog entries and my “Unfinished Thoughts” from my abortive tumblelog at gohlkus.wordpress.com.)

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Filed under Administrivia, Imagine a Novel Weblog, Unfinished Thoughts on July 30, 2010 at 7:31 pm

When I got my iPhone 4, my iPhone 3G became my new “iPod touch” (essentially). Though it only has 16 gigs of storage, it has better games and a nicer interface (and of course a much nicer screen) than my increasingly irrelevant 60 GB iPod classic. (I can hardly believe I watched half of season 2 of LOST on that tiny screen. However, if this rises to the level of “interesting” or approaches being a “problem,” it simply demonstrates how good my life is overall.)

In any case, “upgrading” the iPhone 3G to iOS 4 was probably a mistake (though I didn’t know it at the time). It is extremely slow at doing most things (the hardware is just not good enough to run the new OS). Luckily the 3G is no longer my phone and just hangs out in the bathroom, waiting to play music while I’m in the shower.

Lifehacker (which I’m starting to get a little bit addicted to) has tips for how to make iOS 4 usable on the iPhone 3G (or at worst how to downgrade it to iOS 3.1.3), since this issue is widespread.

[ flickr commons ]

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Filed under Fluff, Tech, iPhone (and tagged with commons comic, flickr commons) on July 30, 2010 at 5:43 pm

I have to go through usernames on GreenGov2010.org (”Building a Greener Governor for California”) to delete the spammers and approve the real people.

There are spans of time in which a ton of users are created by Russian spammers. You can tell because they all live in “Moscow, ALABAMA” and have “.ru” at the end of most of their URLs.

Occasionally some of their fake info is amusing to me, and the title of this post is the latest. (That’s all.)

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Filed under Amusing (if only to me), Spam on July 22, 2010 at 3:26 pm

I take a fair number of pictures, some of them good enough to put on the wall.

This New York Times article links to several services that will print your photos in a variety of formats (from 8×10 prints to giant vinyl cutouts). Good to remember.

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Filed under Photography, Reference on July 19, 2010 at 11:16 am