Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

The film festival is always a good opportunity to watch quality documentaries. This year wasn't any different. It's no coincidence that there are three documentaries in my top 10 of "best movies" at the festival. Actually, we like all these movies very much, except maybe the Morgan Spurlock documentary about product placement.

1. Senna (Asif Kapadia) (4.77 ; rank 1)
2. Life in a Day (Kevin MacDonald) (4.39 ; rank 22)
3. Eenentwintig + Zeven (Kenneth Michiels) (KASK Docs)
   

A couple of days ago, I published my personal top 10 of movies I really liked at the film festival. Now let's take a look at 25 feature films that didn't make the top 10, but that weren't bad at all.

1. Win Win (Thomas McCarthy) (4.15; rank 37)
2. The Future (Miranda July) (3.71; rank 72)
3. The Help (Tate Taylor) (4.70; rank 3)
4. The Descendants (Alexander Payne) (3.44; rank 80)
5. The conspirator (Robert Redford) (4.34; rank 28)
   

When we go to the film festival, we discuss the movies we've seen with plenty of people. It's always surprising how opinions can differ. For instance: many of the people we know really liked Once upon a time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan). We thought it was boring and the audience agreed: the film received a score of 3.27 out of 5 (ranked 84 of a total of 89 new movies). Many people we talked to didn't like The Future (Miranda July), but we appreciated the movie very much and the audience didn't agree, they gave it a score of 3.71 (72nd place in the top 89).

We've attended 52 screenings, but I've made a top 55 because one of the screenings (KASK Docs; 4.62/5; rank 4) consisted of four documentaries of half an hour. I've counted these four documentaries as separate movies.

Four months ago, I blogged about my son's surgery. The operation wasn't succesful, so they gave it a second try yesterday. As parents, we've been waiting by this door for hours:

This time, the surgery was successful: his old knee prosthesis was replaced by a new one. Now he's recovering. Just like the previous time, the morphine is making him ill, but the medical staff wants to keep him on this pain killer for an extra day because of the nature of the operation.

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In my previous Books I've read last month blog, I reported about reading a pile of graphic novels and comic books. Let's take a look at this month's covers:

These are some impressions of the reception after the closing film at the film festival in Ghent. Although the pictures aren't very sharp, you'll recognize the "friends of the film festival". Yes, that's an official title; we were even mentioned in the closing speech by Jacques Dubrulle.


We've seen 51 movie screenings in the last two weeks. We're a tad tired, because we've also been working during these two weeks (we've had meetings over lunch; I've even written code after midnight).

Some good news that may mean the end of the GA soap on this blog:

Check out the blog:

I'm really curious about it. Chances are that Google has now built its own PDF library. Or did they stick to iText? If so, which version?

Yet another episode in the Why Google's Corporate Politics Suck-soap:

Google can make all these people happy, simply by buying an iText license, and continue using iText for creating Google Analytics reports in PDF as was the case in the old GA. But as we all know: Google doesn't buy software, Google buys companies. (And we're interested in growing our business, not in selling out.)

Hibernate should be to programmers what cake mixes are to bakers: beneath their dignity. from JavaZone on Vimeo.

Does she also have a talk about Maven? (wink, wink)