Reviews: Movies, books, music, shows and anything artsy.
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Sometimes there’s not much to say. One can only stare and let peace settle in...
I was recently invited to a tourism event at the Vancouver Art Gallery revolving around the presentation of summer exhibits. The star of the show, occupying the entire first floor, is called « Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden 
Age of Dutch Art ». It left me cold. I’ve never really liked Rembrandt and the paintings are too dark for my taste, even though a few were interesting from a lighting perspective (yes, I relate everything to photography...)
I was going to leave it at that and enjoy my sangria in the loud crowded lobby without tackling any of the remaining 3 floors when our host Joshua pointed out the photo exhibit on the third floor. « Andreas Gursky », he said, obviously expecting the lightning of revelation to strike me. It didn’t. I had never heard of the guy. « Do yourself a favor », Joshua added, « check him out. He does large scale photographs. » « Ok, » I decided, and finishing my glass, I climbed up to the third floor.
Boy am I glad I did. Gursky, a German artist, favours enormous images and is compiling what he calls an « encyclopedia of life ». There are a lot of aerial shots and although many of his photographs were actually presented in smaller versions for this exhibition - and for the first time it appears, not sure why - they remain captivating. The larger ones, a few meters long, are plain and simple fascinating. He shamelessly enhances his images digitally and achieves wonderful results without losing his documentary style.
His work isn’t for every one, I would say. But he excels at what he does and his art left me both humbled and motivated. The exhibit is well worth visiting if you are so inclined. Start with the third floor. If time and energy remain, you can still visit the rest. The paintings are so old, they surely can wait a little longer.
Next June 5th will be World Environment Day. The environment. Our planet. Of all the issues we can chose to address or ignore, to embrace or discard, to concern ourselves with or to make fun of, none are more critical. Make no mistake about it, our very survival as a species 
depends on them.
Well, found over at Orcas in the Mist (thanks for the scoop, Elo), here’s the upcoming eye-opener: a movie called Home, directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand and produced by no other than the mighty Luc Besson.
Home is an aerial ode to the planet and a call for us to wake up and empower ourselves before it’s just too late - in other words, tomorrow. Granted, there have been many such movies and as many such calls. Well, repetition is the mother of all skills. And this call, with a twist, preaches what it teaches in a very simple way: it will be released simultaneously, for free where it can, in a reported 87 countries and all mediums, theatre, DVD, TV and internet via YouTube. There will be a free screening at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and many other local or national events.
Shot from the skies of 54 nations, Home will be translated into 14 languages. The shooting was done exclusively from the air but was carbon offset - in other words all involved CO2 emissions were calculated and offset by money donations providing clean energy in areas of need. At the FNAC, major book and DVD store chain in France, the DVD version will go on sale on the 5th for €4.99. For reference, Quantum of Solace sells for €19.99 and An Inconvenient Truth for €13.00.
Of course as nothing is ever perfect, the main sponsor, PPR, is a group of companies and brands with potential questionable impact on the very issues they are sponsoring (we’re talking Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Puma, etc.) However I am no specialist and better analysis of their practices would be needed in order to make a judgment. But it is undeniable that a major sponsor was needed in order to pull a project like Home off, and to make it available worldwide for free. So in the end, they get their back patted and the Earth still gains much deserved attention. I think it is worth it.
Any way - the aerial photography looks stunning and I am very much looking forward to it! After all, there is nothing on Earth as beautiful as the Earth herself.
Update to self: Watching the movie is likely to turn, for most people, into yet another act of slacktivism. I say if you (I) like the show, do something about it. Right there and then. And then again. And yet again. We are very good at applauding nice initiatives, at passing along feel-good emails and petitions, and talking about the could’s and should’s. How good are we as movers and shakers of Change?
I spent last night doing some digging through my audio collection for Marie. We had been talking about eating beans the way Terrence Hill does it in My Name is Nobody - with obvious delight, big mouthfuls off a wooden spoon straight from the pan, chewing mouth open and eyes shiny. The conversation led to the movie’s brilliant musical score and logically drifted towards Ennio Morricone’s genius. I promised to make her a compilation.
So I opened iTunes and began browsing. I was there for an hour. His music grips me. It is closely associated in my heart to all kinds of memories, not only specific images and moods from the movies but also bits and pieces of my own colorful childhood.
In those days my parents had very eccentric musical tastes, especially my dad. I didn’t grow up listening to the hit parade or even to much so-called popular music. Instead the house was filled with the sounds of Spaghetti Western and other movie soundtracks, national anthems, Russian Army Choirs, Tahitian folklore, Mexican mariachis and the like. No wonder why I got such an early taste for travels. Later, my very first record purchases, back in the days of vinyls, were Jean Michel Jarre’s Equinoxe and Oxygen. Then I discovered Kraftwerk and Radioactivity. But I digress.
I can still vividly remember pretending to play my imaginary harmonica in the searing heat of New Mexico, my back against the bleached wall of a train station (played by my bedroom sliding door in Antibes), hat lowered onto my forehead to hide ever-watchful eyes, revolvers in their holsters adorned with Marlboro stickers (I didn’t really know about the evilness of smoking then, and they had a cool cowboy as a logo), a sheriff’s star pinned on my sleeveless leather jacket right next to the gaping (and dutifully painted in red) whole of an old bullet wound. The music of Morricone gave it all such intensity that like most kids playing roles, I just believed it was all real.
I think that composing the soundtrack of a movie is a sacred art. While excellent movies have sometimes survived without any music worth remembering, a great soundtrack almost invariably accompanies the ones I have liked most, the Ah!Movies as Anna would’ve called them in Fynn’s book. Think of The Big Blue, Dune, Star Wars, Empire of the Sun, all of Sergio Leone’s westerns, Frantic, Rain Man, Little Miss Sunshine, La Chèvre, Les rivières pourpres, they all have such powerful scores. Then sometimes a good soundtrack manages to lift an otherwise ordinary movie out of the ditch, as in The 13th Warrior, Immortel (Ad Vitam), Ghostbusters, Saturday Night Fever...
A musical score is the ultimate mood setting tool. It doesn’t say much by itself but can reinforce camera work and acting with either incredible punch or exquisite subtlety. It gives a movie its soul, a story its background and the audience, an anchor upon which to base memories. And I think very few composers have ever been as good and prolific at it as Morricone is. He has something like 400 scores to his credit and is still going.
The award-winning Italian composer scored milestone movies such as all of Sergio Leone’s westerns, The Mission, The Untouchables, Sacco & Vanzetti, Frantic, the three French La cage aux folles, episodes of the cult British sci-fi TV series Cosmos 1999, as well as an incredible number of Italian movies. He even had an asteroid named after himself (jealous tone.)
Of course, as always, this is all art and as such, subject to the requirements of personal tastes. My Ennio Morricone compilation might just turn out to be a flop. With movie music as with everything else, you like it or you just don’t.
My dear Marie has very diverse cinema tastes and simply adores old movies. She is able to find in them and extract the very essence of film making, the raw matter of acting and actors - as in the way they were before technology took over the industry and replaced talent with special effects and ideology with budget. I, on the other end, am a child of the 21st century and tick to the impact of an overall experience - technique, editing, creativity, decors, effects, image quality, photography, music, sound clarity and stereo or surround level, adventure content, escapism, dream value, virtual reality achieved, and yes, acting, too. I need my movies to transpose me, literally, into another world, another person’s shoes, and as such, they must engage all 24 of my senses. To me, old is usually less interesting because the technical flaws prevent me from completely immersing myself.
But yeah, French cinema had its giants, too, and I do enjoy a good dinosaur-movie now and then. Jean Gabin, Yves Montand, Alain Delon, Lino Ventura, et les comiques aussi, Tati, Fernandel, Bourvil, de Funes, they all deserve to stand proudly among the ranks of an army of Audrey Hepburns, Humphrey Boggarts and Charlie Chaplins...
In the end, it’s all about magic, and for magic to be real, one must believe. I’m would guess Morricone always has.
Silent golden movies, talkies, technicolour, long ago
My younger ways stand clearer, clearer than my footprints
Stardom greats I’ve followed closely
Closer than the nearest heartbeat
Longer that expected, they were great
Oh love, oh love, just to see them
Acting on the silver screen, oh my
Clark Gable, Fairbanks, Maureen O’Sullivan
Fantasy would fill my life and I
Love fantasy so much
Did you see in the morning light
I really talked, yes I did, to Gods early dawning light
And I was privileged to be as I am to this day
To be with you, to be with you.Jon Anderson and Vangelis - The Friends of Mr. Cairo
Today I was invited to the Imax theatre at Canada Place for an advance screening of Giant Screen Films’ new Wild Ocean 3D, a documentary about the sardine run off the east coast of South Africa. It had been a long time since an large screen movie had blown me out of my seat. Granted, I’m not that hard to impress when it comes to giant screens, underwater footage and beautiful images. Yet my recent experiences were rather disappointing and this spring’s Dolphins and Whales 3D was a let down.
That all changed today. Wild Ocean 3D actually lived up to
my all-time favourite Deep Sea 3D. While Deep Sea 3D featured amazing shots and near-perfect 3D technique, its narrative by Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp was quite cheesy. Wild Ocean fixed that. For a change, Giant Screen Films have produced a serious documentary, one with breathtaking images, a solid soundtrack and a well written narration that actually fits in and keeps you interested and involved.
Of course, I am biased. I love the ocean. And it so happens that I now love that part of the world too. But the images were really superb, both above and below the surface. They managed to keep the human element present by reflecting on the impact of such an important multi-species migration on the lives of local populations.
The movie obviously preaches towards the conservation of our oceans but does it in a much more subtle and intelligent way then other movies, and I find it refreshing to be shown beauty and then told to preserve it, rather than having my face shoved into the terrible abuse we inflict on our planet and then have a lecturing finger waved at me while a sermonizing voice says something like « Listen, you guilty fool. They are bad, we are bad, you are bad. Everything’s bad. It must change, or else. We are right about this being wrong. It’s all right to feel like we have gone wrong and it will soon be too late. Brace yourself. Run for cover. Stop eating food and breathing air. Each time you move an inch you hurt the planet. » Etc. Your mind goes down in a spiral and you walk out of the theater more depressed than a penguin without water to swim in.
But Wild Ocean 3D only made me open my eyes very wide, it made my heart travel half-way across the globe, it made me want to see our world, to explore it, above and below, and to protect it by being wise, rather than by panicking.
Go see it!
This is the 21st century. Not so long ago, that number was synonymous with science-fiction. The world was changing slowly enough that it would take a century for things to become fully weird and enhanced to the point of seeming magical.
Now our science-fiction horizon has shrunk to a few decades. And even as I write this, new discoveries are made and technologies released that make the present amazingly fleeting and regularly spark flashes of wonders and magic in real-time.
However, with a shorter fiction span, our capacity for amazement has also diminished. We are becoming dulled by all this extraordinary stuff we get bombarded with on a daily basis and things that maybe should leave us in awe barely register as cool and not bad.
In the techie news these days, two headlines have caught my attention. The first one is the release by Google of its beta web browser, Chrome. That Google should take such an avenue is hardly surprising. The web has become a superpower, taking an increasingly central place in our society; anybody smart - and the Google team obviously is - would decide that to better control such potential, one needs to diversify (check), innovate to capture the attention of a bored public (check), become better at what they do than anybody else (check), and offer not only tools, but the entire toolshed, complete with a roof, power supply and lighting. In comes Chrome. Check.
Claiming to be faster-than-any-other-browser-period, Google’s newcomer also features the company’s now legendary searching simplicity and more important yet, it takes a very large step towards independent web applications and the eventual - by unavoidable - complete bypass of operating systems (yeah, you can read Windows here, and not so between the lines) in favor of a fully sustainable web-based environment.
Chrome is only in its beta phase, of course. Lots remains to be said and done and bugs are very present, like a major incompatibility with Window Blinds which for now makes Chrome useless to me. But Firefox is feeling the heat and will issue a 3.1 release that aims at countering Chrome’s speed advantage. In any case, make no mistake about it: this is History in the making.
Then there’s Google’s (yes, them again) Picasa Web Albums latest innovation. You might have heard of face recognition technology; if you own a decent and recent point-and-shoot camera, the odds are you’re using it daily, knowingly or not. It detects human faces in a shot and allows the camera to focus and expose selectively. Picasa, being an online photo gallery system, obviously doesn’t have a need for focusing pictures. Instead, the design team has chosen to focus on labeling, which after all, is one of Google’s major strengths (think of Gmail’s very convenient labels).
So how does face recognition technology come into play within Picasa? Easy. Upon first use, the site scans your entire collection of photo albums, searching for faces and patterns. The process takes a few minutes, after which you are served probable matches, in groups of 5 to 15 or so pictures, of the same person. (Granted, I’m not the ideal test user because my Picasa albums feature predominantly... the same person.) 
Still. It bloody works. So all I had to do for most of these groups of pictures was assign a name tag to them, new or chosen from my contact list (uh-uh, Google’s tentacles already span many an application). That’s it. Fast and efficient. And from now on, Picasa will analyze the pictures I upload and scan them for faces, which if found, will trigger a rectangle overlay on the head and a prompt to tag, suggesting probable matches.
At that point, I have to take a deep breath. This is like being inside science-fiction itself. We’re not talking about a high-end covert application, here. This is for you and me. Millions of you and me. And it’s brought to you by Google.
Which reminds me: when Gmail first came out, its very essence yielded much controversy; the fact that every single message you ever wrote or received would be stored online and search-able by Google’s sophisticated algorithms caused much concern about privacy. Then the storm passed, mostly because people liked Gmail more than they disliked the vulnerability it implied. It’s a sign of times. Our notion of personal privacy has to be - and is - changing because whether we like it or not, in a world ruled by information and communications, there can be no such thing as complete privacy. We just have to live with it. And better ourselves so that the fear of seeing our secrets exposed diminishes. In a sense, Google and the like are for modern society what the church was in the past: a strong motivation not to sin, or else.
Now let’s get back to Picasa, and let me be the devil’s advocate for a moment. Millions of users. Billions of portraits analyzed, tagged and associated with email addresses and further contact info... Need I say more? What an incredible database for Big Brother to tap into. Because let’s face it, criminals own cameras too. You rob a 7-Eleven, the security cameras record your face. Police can’t come up with a match, only being able to search through criminal records, official ID’s and whatever other sources they have. BUT. What if they could search the Picasa database???
Sure, I know, they can’t. Oh but wait a minute. The privacy policies of such online services as Google promise to protect yours, unless required by law or to assist enforcement of said law. Oops. Big Brother 1. Visitors 0.
Still. What a cool toy for those of us who will be geeks before being afraid.
In this very dark hour, I have chosen not to dwell on the difficulty of the moment - because in the end I am still the luckiest guy on Earth - but rather to concentrate on things that inspire me. Well, I just found one.
I have never been too impressed by macro photography and usually find bugs creepy. I know a cat who eats them. But there are people who photograph them, with various degrees of success. The following has made me rethink everything I thought I knew about macro photography and reevaluate the definition of « impossible ». In order not to steal the guy’s images, I’m linking below to 4 pages of his gallery with frantic enthusiasm and I hope you will take the time to browse, either through my selections or his.
If I ever caught a glimpse of photographic genius, this is one. I can only dream of some day managing to get results that would be a tenth as amazing as these. From what I gather, he shoots at dawn in the fall and uses bellows and either an enlarger lens or a standard 50mm lens that he doesn’t even reverse. I hear that people also get good results with the Canon MP-E 65mm Macro lens, but that’s out of my league. And then, where does one buy a few ounces of genius?
Here’s the work of Martin Amm from Germany. Kudos.
Once in a while I run into something I really like, a service, a product, a piece of software, a recipe, a movie, something. And then I plug it. Not for the rewards, not for the fame, not for attention but just because I think a compliment costs me nothing and goes a long way. So the opinions expressed hereby are mine solely and most likely biased. After all, I’m from the south of France where objectivity is often replaced by passionate enthusiasm and colorful language.
A few weeks ago, my sister sent me the link to BetterWorld.com, an online used book reseller with a conscience. I visited them, did a few searches, found an old book I hadn’t seen on any shelf in years and years, and ordered it. It was cheap. Used books should be. They shipped cheap too. Free in the US, $2.97 worldwide. My book took a while to arrive, maybe 10 days. So what, I was in no hurry.
Then a few days ago, their follow up email arrived. I read it and smiled. Well done, I thought. Some humour, some shameless self-promotion, nothing out of this world, just a nice touch. I have bought very expensive stuff on the internet for substantial sums, and rarely does the seller bother with following up. Better World Books did, even for the $3.98 purchase I honored them with. That’s what I call good business. I will buy again.
« Hey Vincent,
We’re just checking in to see if you received your order from Better World Books. If your order hasn’t blessed your mailbox just yet, heads are gonna roll in the Mishawaka warehouse! Seriously though, if you haven’t received your order or are less than 108.8% satisfied, please reply to this message. Let us know what we can do to flabbergast you with service.
Before you resume watching cats playing piano (or books discussing their love lives) on Youtube, we’d really appreciate your help with something. We have one question that we’d like to ask: Would you recommend us to a friend? It will take less than one minute, we promise. Please click here for the survey.
If you’ve really got some gumption, there’s one other thing you can do to help. Become our fan on Facebook by clicking this link. It’s the easiest way to let your friends know that you’re part of our movement to fund literacy by buying books.
Humbly Yours,
The Better World Books Automatically Generated E-mailing Robot
email: help@betterworld.com
Order Number: [removed]
Fund literacy, care for the environment, and get a fair price on the books you want.
BetterWorld.com (http://www.BetterWorld.com/)
2 Million Used Books. Free shipping in the USA, $2.97 worldwide. »
Draw a salad bowl in your head. Throw in, at random, pieces of Google Analytics, Stacounter, ClustrMaps, Geoloc and Skype. Add dressing. Mix well. You’ve got Woopra.
New kid on the trendy block of web statistics, Woopra is another one of those applications that seem to explode into stardom nearly overnight. The concept hasn’t even emerged out of beta testing yet and already, it is the talk of the hour. The design team had planned to steer 250 beta testers into a controlled study; they now have over 25,000. Something must have gone right.
For someone who is currently using Google Analytics - the so far unchallenged leader of the pack - to track their web site traffic and statistics, Woopra will feel both familiar and weird. There are many similarities - after all they tap into pretty much the same data to render their stats - but there are also interesting differences. Let’s start with the interface; anybody familiar with Google products, and Analytics is no exception, knows that their engineers either favour plain, white backgrounds with minimal eye candy, or have something stuck... somewhere. Woopra is the opposite: total pleasure for the eyes, color-rich interface, dark theme. And just as I’ve now turned to Gmail Redesigned for a richer Gmail interface, Woopra hits the spot in the same tones.
Then there’s the very important fact that while Google Analytics and most other similar tools are web-based, Woopra is a desktop application. This has great advantages but also means that the host application needs to be installed on each computer one intends to track from. Worth mentioning, though: Woopra offers a minimalistic web-based mock-up of their stats readout accessible from anywhere online via your account.
Yet another noticeable difference between the two soon-to-be rivals, is the fact that Google Analytics remains very evasive when it comes to singling out individual visitors, concentrating rather on networks, keywords and general traffic. Woopra, on the other hand, approaches the issue like StatCounter does, offering very detailed information about every single visitor in a voyeuristic way that will probably appeal most to low-traffic site webmasters and bloggers.
And here we encounter the most significant difference yet: while Google’s stats are only updated daily, Woopra woops results to you in real time. Visitors to the site are reported just about instantly, and in that aspect, Woopra reminds me of Geoloc and its flashing dots. But things are now pushed one step further: the webmaster is able to initiate a live chat session with anybody currently visiting the site! Are you a blogger from South Africa? You notice a fellow SAfrican visiting your blog, in real time, and you send them a chat offer that appears in their browser, from the « webmaster ». If they accept it, a standard chat window opens up and you are live with your visitor. How cool is that? Maybe not unique, but now coming to the masses.
What else? Oh yes, the downside. Well, for one thing, how do YOU feel about having so much of your personal information revealed and possibly exploited by the webmaster of a site you are visiting, or getting a chat request by said webmaster when you wanted to remain anonymous? Not good? That’s too bad, because it’s been happening for ages. Woopra just makes it more user-friendly. Now what do I mean by personal information? Nothing worth killing for; your (approximate) location, browser version, operating system, screen resolution, language, IP number, point or web site of origin, keywords searched for, duration of your visit, and color of your socks. Well maybe not the color, but whether you are wearing one or two. But not your name, not your email, nor phone number. Not your secret goulash recipe. Nothing you haven’t flashed publicly on the web for years already.
Another problem is that Woopra, probably because of its unexpected and sudden success, is still only allowing sign-ups upon an individual web site approval process that is taking days and sometimes weeks. I waited 2 weeks for mine. Others wave waited for months. But hey, the thing’s still a beta, so I guess we can cut them some slack. And yes, I’ve found a few bugs, and taken a couple of notes of features I think might be important.
But really, in the end, Woopra is fun to play and interact with, or just fun to watch. Will it replace my Google Analytics completely? Time will tell. For now, I’m hooked.
Bon, ‘faut pas craquer, je m’applique. Having not yet achieved the results I was hoping for, which would be nothing short of « divine perfection », I am still regularly experimenting with le flan. Here’s the updated recipe. See also Flan pâtissier - 1er essai for the initial results and full length cooking drama.
The dough hasn’t changed much, but the quantities are now reflecting an overwhelming North American tendency to use the dreaded « cup » as a measuring unit, a nightmarish fact that has kept me on my toes doing intense maths. Here’s the formula for the dough:
1.4 cups flour (fun to play with)« The making of » the dough is available at a reasonable cost, but you can also find it for free in the above mentionned post. I’m getting better at it. It no longer sticks desperately to the counter in a heroic effort to avoid the oven - and I have also perfected my technique when the times comes to lift it up, rolled flat, into the cooking pan. Now, this is very scientific, so pay attention... Since I don’t have a flat and thin mobile surface I could roll the dough on and then lift the whole apparatus and reverse into the pan, I use two clean sheets of paper taped to the counter. When the dough is flat and stretched, I undo the tape, put the pan on top and spin everything upside down. I cracked myself up so hard doing this that I almost dropped the whole thing!
Ok, dough in the buttered pan, pre-cooking is the same as before, I use my thickest spoons as weights to prevent the dough from rising like a balloon!
On to the flan itself. After experimenting with brown sugar, icing sugar and maple syrup, I am back to the basics: plain, normal white sugar. I’ve switched from corn starch to custard powder just because I was out of the former. It’s basically the same stuff, with a bit of salt, flavor and color added. So the flan formula looks like this:
Pre-heat the oven to 1.21 jigowatts, or just 375°F. I used to get mixed results when mixing all this, at times ending up with a rather chunky cream but I’ve got it down to a drill. Bring the milk (minus one glass which is used to mix the cornstarch and eggs) and the sugar plus one tsp of vanilla to a boil. While this is happening, mix in a bowl the glass of milk, 2 more tsp of vanilla, the cornstarch and the eggs. I’d love to experiment with electricity but all I’ve got is a hand whip, so I go crazy for a few minutes until I feel like a few more visits to the gym are needed and the mix is unctuous.
When the milk is boily, I pour it into the bowl (and not the other way around) slowly, while whipping lightly to mix it well. Then the whole flan mix goes back into the pot and, over medium fire, is stirred into a thick cream. At times the bottom tends to send chunks up and I then use the whip to beat the crap out of those chunks, with the pan lifted momentarily off the stove. Eventually, the mix is so thick it uncovers the sides of the pot when stirred. That’s my signal. The original recipe said « let it boil for a few seconds », so I do, having no idea of what that does, but it’s fun because I can see the bubbles approaching the surface way before they burst. The things I’ll do to amuse myself.
The flan is poured into the pre-cooked crust and evened out, and stuck in the oven at 375°F. At precisely 35 minutes, I take it out and carefully brush a thin coat of apricot jam onto the surface, and put it back in. 5 minutes later, I switch the oven to broil for another 3 minutes. (This time, distracted by my post, I went to 6 minutes, and those 3 extra minutes made a huge difference; I wanted to avoid the brown patches that look like a skin desease.)
I let the flan cool off for a while, then put it in the fridge to get it to become a little firmer. Voila.
Well, I got sidetracked. Again. In the middle of posting pictures of the recent Victoria whale watching expedition with Marie, I drifted and have just upgraded the South Africa galleries [1] and [2] with the coolest eye-candy, a 3D photo browser called PicLens, by Cooliris. Now this is going to require a 
small effort on your part (so small, really) if you want to enjoy the full experience, but I guarantee that if you bare with me, it will blow your mind!
So what are we talking about here? Well, until now, I’ve used (and still do on the blog because implementation here isn’t yet an option) the awesome Lightbox 2 Ajax script to display my photos in a slideshow fashion. However, web-based applications are evolving fast and more than ever, it’s about user experience and 3D interfaces. That’s where PicLens comes in: you install a plugin to your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser and voila (voila, but as always, the plugin installation is much faster and easier on Firefox than IE. No sweat for you sorry Internet Explorer users though, it’ll just take a few additional clicks and maybe a browser restart); the plugin transforms each photo gallery into a super-slick 3D photo-browsing interface, completely immersive and fluid.
Now, for those of you who are really lazy and don’t want to install the plugin, you will still get a PicLens mock-up, but without the 3D effect which, I think, is the most amazing part of the trick. So be bold, install the little plugin, it’s a 
matter of seconds, you can always uninstall later if it doesn’t live up to your expectations. Convinced? Cool. (No, I’m not getting a commission. I just love the gadget!) Click on one of the browser links above to get the plugin and see you soon in the South Africa galleries...
I’ve placed an entry link at the top of each gallery (gallery links above) but once on the gallery page, the mouse hovered over the lower left corner of each thumbnail will also reveal a blue arrow allowing you to start PicLens on that image.
Once in PicLens, have fun! Drag the 3D wall with your mouse to navigate along it, roll your mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the wall, click on pictures to enlarge them, navigate in all four directions with your cursor arrows, double-click on an image to get the slideshow in full screen, it’s all very intuitive and mesmerizing.
And of course, if you install the plugin and have Picasa Web Albums, a Flickr account, or even Myspace or Facebook, or Youtube, it’ll work there too! And if you don’t have accounts, you can still do generic searches on those sites and get the effect! Or try a Google Images search.
In case I haven’t convinced you yet, you can watch a video of the 3D effect here. Yeah, I know, I’m biased.
You gotta love Web 2.0. 
Update (01-12-08):
I have since overhauled the web site completely and removed the PicLens functionality. The South Africa Gallery can now be found here.
Serendipity
66 Square Feet Don Estorbo de la Bodega
Design and web things TechCrunch MakeUseOf A List Apart
Vancouver Beyond Robson Orques dans la brume Metroblogging Vancouver Miss604 Hello Stephanie Vancouver Lookout
Elsewhere Away from the Ocean Serendipity Weblog World Changing Global Warming Blog
Photography blogs TOP LENS J.R. Photoblog Travel:Japan Farrar Focus Daily Pete Tomagine
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