The season of pumpkins and haunted houses is upon us and at my house that means an annual viewing of the Tim Burton classic The Nightmare Before Christmas.  

My original DVD, purshased a few years ago, was a moving casualty but that gave me an excuse to go out and buy the new Collectors Edition (Amazon, Netflix), which contains a pretty awesome audio commentary detailing the highly collaborative and iterative process used to create the film.  While not exactly invoking a well defined methodoligy like Agile, as we might use on a software product these days, Burton, director Henry Selick, and composer/’80s icon Danny Elfman working model had some interesting twists to it that anybody can learn from.
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Technorati Tags: creativity, iterative, nightmare before christmas, process

Only one more week to go in the labor strife induced lull in the action for Lost Season 4. During the downtime, I went back and watched the bonus disk from Season 2 and was fascinated by one of the behind the scenes pieces. At the end of the credits for almost every Lost episode, the following seemingly simple statement appears:

“Filmed entirely on location on Oahu, Hawaii.”

Given that most of the shows plot occurs in a tropical jungle environment, in order to get realism into every shot, it completely makes sense to have principle photography done in an actual tropical location. But, as the “Fire + Water: Anatomy of an Episode” bonus feature on Lost Season 2, Disk 7 tells us, the requirement to have these realistic shots has a ripple effect on other parts of the production.

Just like some requirement on your project might have a ripple effect on aspects of your design.
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My favorite thing to do in software is build prototypes. Gone is the laborious rigor required of a full production release, absent is the pressure of having to meet a deadline. Instead, you get to learn, try stuff, and have fun. In that same vein for computer animation, this past holiday season, Pixar released a collection of its past short films on DVD complete with a fascinating featurette on the history of the company called Pixar Short Films Collection.
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I know what you’re thinking: “Dude, that’s a kids movie!”Yes, it is and it’s actually a quite notable one because it was the last feature film produced by Disney that was completely hand drawn and it returned the company to its musical roots, ushering in a string of successful films in the early 90s reminiscent of the kind of work not seen since Walt himself oversaw production. That’s not why you should get your hands on Disk 2 of the 2006 Platinum Edition DVD (Amazon, Netflix), though.
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October Sky is Hoosiers for nerds. Both movies feature teenage boys from small towns overcoming incredible odds in stories that, if they were fictional would be deemed implausible but because each is based on a true story, each is inspirational. Drawing on the book Rocket Boys, October Sky tells the story of how, after seeing Sputnik fly by in the early days of the Space Race, a group of teenagers from a West Virginia coal mining town pour all their energies into rocketry. Eventually, their efforts are rewarded by winning the National Science Fair, earning each of the boys a college academic scholarship.
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It has often been said that luck is nothing more than opportunity meeting preparedness. Another way to look at that was once told to me by a mentor as, “You never know when your opportunities are going to come up.” Such is the case with the genesis of Lost and the rise to nerd fame of David Lindelof, as told on the Season 1 bonus features on Disk 7 (Amazon, Netflix).
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Once, I had a 10 hour delay/layover in Salt Lake City during which I passed the time by eating 6 Cinnabons. Then, there was that time in Austin when I got lost finding the hotel after midnight in a scary neighborhood where I ran over a dog. Plus, seeing as I’m 6′6″, any time the person in front of me puts their seat back it’s an adventure in pain.Bad travel happens. You can either get really angry about it, or find the amusement hidden within. To help you find that comedy, I highly recommend the definitive “everything that can go wrong does go wrong” business travel movie and John Hughes classic: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (Netflix, Amazon).
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My Disney obsession continues. This is a longer article than normal, but stay with me, the videos at the end are completely worth it.
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Have you ever had a goal for yourself? I mean a really high goal. A dream. The kind where maybe even you sometimes wonder if you can achieve it? How long do you stick with it before giving up and doing something else?

Setting the bar high for yourself is important in any career, but often times for engineers, some technological breakthrough that nobody thinks will work is at the center of such things. To achieve those goals, you have to believe in that dream. A lot. Rent creator Jonathan Larson, who I’m betting you’ve never heard of, is the poster child for holding onto a dream, showing a level perseverance that most people don’t have (myself included).
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Having a case of The Monday’s? Let Mike Judge help.

The same man that brought you clever humor in the form of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill focuses his comedy acumen at the technology workplace in Office Space (Netflix, Amazon). (more…)