China Week: It All Started In China

In honor of the start of the Beijing Olympics, we've decided to make it "China Week" here on the Common Craft blog. 

In a lot of ways, China was where we first started to experiment with video.  We bought our first video camera (a Sony DCR - PC 1000) in Hong Kong, just before spending about a month in mainland China in 2006.  Over the time in China, we edited and posted our first "real" videos.   

This week, we'll share a few of those videos and some stories from our time there.  It's stuff you won't see on NBC, I promise.

Are Spammers Machiavellian?

It started with a tweet.  Eddie Codel described Boston's streets as "Kafkaesque."  I found it on Wikipedia (it means disorienting), along with a listing of other name-inspired words. One caught my eye: Machiavellianism. The first line of the Wikipedia entry:

10 Photos from Our Time in Japan

The delicious food, the amazingly nice people, the sites, the experience, Japan is one of our favorite places. Thankfully one of our friends moved there recently and has an extra bedroom (thanks Ken!).  Before the planning was done, 5 of us from Seattle decided to go. The photos below will give you a taste of our time there.

I took 2,900 photos in the 15 days we were gone. You can see a set of 135 photos on Flickr.

Having an Old Dog

He's 13, his breath smells really bad, he's deaf, he walks like a retired football player, begs with renewed vigor and is increasingly obstinate. 

Indeed, the old dog experience is so different than the young dog experience. He's still the same sweet dog, but with new quirks that keep things new, even in old age. He is not the Frisbee catching dog of yesteryear. He is more like Jabba the Hut. A deaf Jabba the Hut with with a better disposition.

China's Three Gorges Dam Project - Our First/Only Documentary

Exactly one year ago, we published the video below - one of our first. We had just finished a six day river trip from Chong Qing to Shanghai, China on the Yangtze River, which goes through the Three Gorges.

China is damming the Yangtze River with the Three Gorges Dam Project, the worlds largest dam. It has displaced over a million people and caused a huge and well-deserved global controversy.

At this time last year, we had just purchased the camera we use today. I decided I'd try to do a short doucmentary about the things we learned about the project and it's impact.

I admit it's a bit cheesy, but I thought you might enjoy seeing something besides a whiteboard

Would You Share Your Retina Online?

Robin Hamman just got new glasses and at the same time, had high-res digital scans of his retinas...

Today, about a month later, I've finally received an email with those images attached and they're really beautiful. Not just because they contain a view of my own eyes that I've never been able to see before or, indeed, because my eyes are in any way particularly lovely or different from the next person's. But from a "isn't biology wonderful" and "hey, check this out" perspective, I'd love the post the photos here and/or on flickr.

The question is, should I?

View With Comments

Dog Sledding or Blog Sledding (groan)

Blogs-n-Dogs today was much less about blogs and much more about dogs. We took a break, piled into the Howling Dog Tours vans and went up into the mountains for a couple of hours of dogsledding. Being that Common Craft is not so focused on recreation, I'll point you to the entry on TwinF, Eric Rice's videos and the Flickr tag blogsledding. Great, great fun.

Random Reflections on Gambling

I survived Vegas with about even money in my pocket and quite a few hours of lost sleep -- sleep I’m still trying to get back. It seems like it’s taking me longer and longer to recover from such weekends as I get older. I had to take a power nap a little while ago to get through the day.

I’ve been thinking about the whole gambling thing and what a heathen I am. OK, not really. I’ve really been thinking about two types of gambling: with machines and with people. I don’t like gambling with a machine- it is such a mechanical way to spend time- put the money in, pull the handle, repeat. You may win or lose, but the experience is always the same- the machine never consoles you when you lose or roots for a good hand.