As much as I am excited to see Ratatouille this summer, I am really looking forward to WALL-E, which is scheduled to be released on June 27, 2008. Pixar has shared very little about the film so far except a small plot summary and two pictures of the title character, WALL-E the robot (pictured at right). We can expect to see a trailer when Ratatouille hits theaters.
The movie excites me because its plot ties into sustainability. It is set in the future, in a time where wasteful consumerism has covered the Earth with so much trash that it is uninhabitable. The human population has to evacuate, but before they do so, they build an army of robots to clean up the planet. The plan fails, and WALL-E is the last robot left on a dead Earth.
I hope that Andrew Stanton and his team of animators stress the possible environmental consequences that could result from our current overuse of energy and willingness to cover our beautiful natural landscapes with trash. A future where humans need to evacuate the planet is a dramatic notion, but it is a realistic projection of what could happen should the human population continue to be indifferent about sustainability.
As you can see in the sidebar, I’ve decided to do something with my previously empty Flickr account. I mentioned in “Seven for 2007” that one of my goals for this year was to learn more about digital photography. I’ve started by posting a few of the pictures that I like best from my iPhoto library.
Flickr is a phenomenon that you can’t understand the hype behind until you have used it yourself. It is intuitive and easy to tag your photos, add them to sets and link them to others’ work by adding them to groups. I could spend hours browsing through the millions of creative and beautiful shots that people have taken.
In this process, I’m also realizing how inadequate my little Canon Powershot Elph SD450 snapshot camera is. It’s 5 megapixels, it takes good pictures for a non-SLR camera, and it has a really large LCD screen, but to get really good photos you need an SLR. I can’t justify spending money on one, though, as I have no idea what I’m doing with photography yet. For now, a tripod would be a much better investment.
Recently I’ve been thinking about my need for a permanent email address. Currently I use my mail.rochester.edu account for virtually all of my online communication, but I won’t be able to retain that account after I graduate. In anticipation of that day, even though it’s at least 2 years off, I’ve started moving a lot of correspondence to a Gmail account that I just signed up for. Don’t make fun of me, I know that all the cool people signed up for Gmail years ago, when invites were a hot commodity, but I only felt the need recently.
Being a big fan of a hierarchically organized folder system, I was initially put off by the complete lack of folders in Gmail. I have at least 20 folders in Mail.app, and 10 or so rules so that most of my mail gets sorted as it comes in. Then I realized that Gmail has tags, which might be better than folders because messages can have more than one tag. In addition, they won’t immediately disappear into a folder where I’ll forget about them; they’ll stay in my inbox until I choose to archive them. Also, Gmail’s conversation feature, which groups messages by thread, is really, really nice.
I’m about to pull the plug on Mail.app by forwarding all my Rochester email to Gmail. The only thing that is holding me back is that if I do that, my mail will be split between residing on my hard drive and on Gmail. So I think I’ll open Mail.app every once in a while and download my Gmail messages, so I have a copy on my hard drive. This would also save me the problem of having no access to my mail if I did not have an internet connection. I haven’t completely decided what to do yet; hopefully I’ll figure it out in the next week or so.
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