Congrats Mo’Nique – you were so good in Precious I wanted to strangle your character! I could barely stay in my seat. Anything that gets me that riled up deserves an award.

Shot this today out my window.

Spring On The Avenue from Shawn Chittle on Vimeo.

The first nice day of 2010, Lower East Side, New York City

Haven’t used this but it looks pretty solid. At $135 with the universal lens gear ring at $29 bucks, it’s the most affordable follow focus I’ve seen. Wow. I’m not sure I love the design of using little screws to rest on the lens itself, so let me know if you use this and if you like it.

D|Focus Follow Focus System

Just picked up two of these Vestax Handy Trax turntables from B&H Photo Video Pro Audio. Gonna be a blast DJing this summer in Central Park! Battery-powered with pitch bending and high torque, these are a dream product come to life.

Not photoshopped. Real. Try it yourself.

How many grooves does a record have? from Shawn Chittle on Vimeo.

100? 50? 2?

My god, listen to this.

I love this new band I’m working for, Fall On Your Sword. I can’t stop playing this song or video! It’s my entire late 70’s/early 80’s childhood in ONE SONG AND VIDEO!

This is an example of where I want to just read a news story, and instead get a watered-down article written by someone who thinks they’re George Carlin. It’s a story about how a Vice Principal activated a remote camera on a student’s laptop while the student was in their home. The Vice Principal observed behavior they found to be offensive (one can only imagine), and notified the student, who notified his parents.

This is probably against Federal wiretapping laws, to say nothing of privacy invasion involving a child. The FBI is investigating.

But instead of just reporting on this interesting story, the writer, Joel Hruska, tries his best Judd Apatow shtick, complete with references to strip clubs and Japanese porn. How that has anything to do with the story fails me. He later asks readers to “put on your helmet, kids” and “you couldn’t make this stuff up.”

Enough of this. A story like this is important! Please just give me the news story. A tad bit of editorializing is generally OK – but to this excess is just plain distracting. It took me twice as long to digest and understand the story because I had to mentally filter out all the silliness.