The Stoning of Soraya M.

I watched this movie at a screening by Amnesty International in Dunedin a few months ago. It’s a really good movie but extremely graphic. The stoning scene near the end is prolonged and very hard to watch, especially as Soraya’s sons take turns throwing stones at her.

This is such a brutal way to die, but it brings up the power that men wield over women in strongly Muslim countries, and also how people can be such religious fanatics that they will go along with whatever their religion tells them to.

The most memorable scenes for me are the parts leading up to the final scene. Soraya is sentenced and has to spend the next hour in her house saying goodbye to her daughters. The fact that such a painful experience is ahead of her makes these scenes difficult to endure for the audience.

You can watch far more graphic videos on the practice of stoning if you go looking for them, but the power of this movie is seeing things from the female’s perspective and seeing how corrupt the male authorities are in this Iranian town and how much power they wield.

I’d highly recommend that you give this a watch. You’ll need a strong stomach for some of it but it’s certainly eye opening to see inside this abhorrent practice.

The emphasis of this film was more about women’s rights than about stoning itself. Stoning is often the method of execution in these countries, but that the justice system seems to stone women easily, without a whole lot of thought for the circumstances.

Ellie Goulding is Amazing!

I’ve just spent the last few hours listening to Ellie Goulding’s latest album, Bright Lights. This is a re-release of her earlier album, Lights, but has 6 bonus tracks, including an amazing cover of Elton John’s Your Song. This is pretty similar to the version that Janet Devlin sings at her X-Factor audition earlier this year, which is also amazing.
The amazing thing about this album is that every song on it, although not really like the Your Song cover, is brilliant. I don’t generally like the whole album of any artists but this is stunning.
Ellie’s doing amazingly. She’s only 24, and her first studio album’s already sold over 600,000 copies! I’m just surprised and disappointed I haven’t heard of her earlier. I’m listening to her album as I write this and it’s awesome to just have in the background while focusing on something else.

Plus, check out the stunning album cover:

Here’s one of my favourite songs, Human:

And here’s Janet Devlin singing on the X-Factor. The uploaders don’t allow embedding videos, just follow the link.
Janet Devlin singing Your Song on UK X-Factor

Credibility Indicators

I was talking to a friend last night about Tim Ferriss and his tricky way to gain credibility with people. He doesn’t lie, but he understands the importance of having a way to make yourself sound impressive on paper.
Here are just a few of his accomplishments:

• National Champion in Chinese Kickboxing
• Conversationally fluent in 6 languages
• World Record in Argentinian Tango
• Guest lecturer at Princeton

A lot of these things sound a lot harder than they are. Not to say that any of them are lies, but you have to read closely.
Chinese Kickboxing is NOT normal kickboxing. It is a smaller sport with not as many American participants as normal kickboxing. In the back-story in the book, Tim admits that he hyper-dehydrated and fought in a lower weight class than he should have been in, and also made use of a loophole that allows fighters to win by pushing their opponents out the ring rather than actually fight them.

Argentinian Tango is NOT normal Tango, and the world record is for the most number of spins in a minute, which although looks pretty dizzying and somewhat difficult, is a bit different from what I originally thought a world record would involve.

To be fair, Tim quite plainly states exactly what he did to achieve each of these, and even this is impressive, but having a list of awesome-sounding achievements is a huge asset for self-promotion, something Tim is renowned for.

The fact that he realises how important these things are, is what shows he really is a genius. Having accomplishments like these, that come up every time someone mentions you, (or you introduce yourself) opens up a lot of doors and makes people listen to your message.

I call these “Credibility Indicators”, they show people that you are a motivated and impressive person. Things like degrees and organisation affiliations are also credibility indicators but some are harder to get than others, and certainly, some look a look more interesting on paper than others.

A few months ago, I met some entrepreneurs at a start-up incubator that I hope to work with. They asked me about myself and I was able to tell them about some projects I am working on that are on the internet and have real users. This helps people understand what I am passionate about. I’m no more interested in this stuff than I was before I made the sites, but now I actually have something to talk about, that others can use and interact with.

Just saying “I’m really interested in x” isn’t enough. A lot of people are interested. But “I’m interested and I’ve actually started building something in this area that I can show you” is a lot more powerful.

The take-home message here is the important of showing proof of who you are and what you are capable of. These things aren’t hard to do, you just have to do them. And if you care enough, you will.
If you’re a designer starting out who wants to work with more experienced designers, show them a portfolio of things you’ve made. Even if they are for fictitious companies, or companies that don’t use YOUR design. People can see what your skills are and and what you need to learn. Plus, anything you learn, you can instantly apply to the project and concrete it into your mind.

Just something I’ve been thinking about. Hopefully a more eloquent version will come, but I just had to get this out into the world.

Learn Rails the Zombie Way!

This is cool. I always love when people attack new ways of teaching difficult material. Programming (as well as languages) is often considered one of the toughest, most unlearn-able types of material.
The Headfirst series of books by O’Reilly (but devised by Kathy Sierra) are amazing at empowering the user and getting people to create things that they never thought they could.

Rails for Zombies takes a fun, practical approach to teaching Ruby on Rails. Instead of screencasts or books, the site teaches you concepts, then gets you to enter the answer to a problem into the window, where they will check it. So instead of being all alone on your computer, the Code School guys are there to guide you along. Code School, the parent site of Rails for Zombies, has a whole bunch of tutorials similar to this for things like HTML5 and CSS3. This one is free but the others cost around $50.

They recommend you spend some time learning Ruby first as Rails is only a framework written WITH Ruby. They suggest going to tryruby.org which is an insanely awesome site that takes you through the basic of the Ruby language.

I’ve only just begun the course but it’s really fun, and I’m looking forward to working through it in the next few weeks.

Build 31 iPhone Apps in 31 Days

Just discovered this awesome website that you can use to learn iPhone development.
At http://www.appamuck.com, you can go through tutorials which take you from building an extremely simple timer app, through to more complex apps. The last project is a full featured app that was rejected from the AppStore. The tutorials are a little terse, but show you the source code and build up from the basics, so you can get to grips with the language. There might be better options for absolute beginners who don’t know how to use Xcode, but once you have the concepts, this gives you good examples to learn from and hopefully keep you motivated.

Other great tutorial websites that I will talk about in later posts are lynda.com (video tutorials for pretty much all computer-based tasks, not free), Academic Earth (for free university lectures from around the globe), and cs75.tv, a course at Harvard on building dynamic websites.

Learn Swedish!

Stockholm, by Kjell Eriksson

Swedish has always interested me and because it has similar origins as English doesn’t actually seem as difficult as most people imagine it is.

I think a very effective way to learn about a language is to see the Swedish (or any language) version next to the English version and to compare the two to find similar usages of words.

I like to read brochures where the content is presented in both languages and to try and work out which words in the foreign  language correspond to the English version.

Here I present an example of this. This is taken from the article on the Indus on Swedish Wikipedia, which was a featured article a few weeks ago.  My friend Kristian from Uppsala helped me to translate.

Key points:

• There is no ‘the’ in Swedish.
• I have added words in brackets in English to help the sentences flow where the word didn’t exist in the Swedish version.
• The pronunciation is fairly phonetic, pretty much how you’d expect it to sound.
• Those strange symbols with the dots above them are pronounced similar to the vowel sounds in these keywords:

1. å – LAW
2. ä – LAIR
3. ö – NERD

Work through the article below and enjoy!