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Swallows and Amazons (1974)

On holiday with their mother in the Lake District in 1929 four children are allowed to sail over to the nearby island in their boat Swallow and set up camp for a few days. They soon realise this has been the territory of two other girls who sail the Amazon, and the scene is set for serious rivalry. This is the scene where the Swallows meet the Amazons.

Thinking back to a distant era (1929) of stuff upper lip behavior  (‘grin and smile’ no matter how much it rains!). Swallows and Amazons is a British classic summer holiday film set on Lake Windermere. Our family began spending summers on the shores of England’s longest lake, coincidentally we relocated permanently very near to Windermere.

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Off Piste

Off-piste back county snow
Off-piste

Dreaming about this scene from my home in London. Enjoying the big landscape action on DVD. It’s a Transworld snowboarding classic, TB9 (Amazon: Totally Board Nine) (2001). Every daring act starts with inspiration.

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Jeff Bezos about Amazon

Outstanding gems of philosophy for any business or entrepreneur. Thank you for sharing and best wishes to Amazon and Zappos. This is how CEO’s should be, being able to speak to everyone on a same level and imparting and reinforcing statements and knowledge in a down to earth manner.

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Hugh Ferriss

Hugh Ferriss (1889 – 1962) was an American delineator (one who creates perspective drawings of buildings) and architect. According to Daniel Okrent, Ferriss never designed a single noteworthy building, but after his death a colleague said he ‘influenced my generation of architects’ more than any other man. Ferriss also influenced popular culture, for example Gotham City (the setting for Batman) and Kerry Conran’s “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”. “Just Imagine” (movie from 1930), strongly influenced by Hugh Ferriss’s book, Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), takes the archetype vision of the future city as defined by a Manhattan-like skyline, and portrays it in all its beauty and majesty.

Via Elecko Plankton’s reference. Enjoy the huge image archive on flickr showing off his spectacular imagery. They are taken from the collection available online at the Avery Library of Columbia University, where you can also download scalable high-resolution files. Check out his glorious books on Amazon.

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lab126

“Amazon started a company called Lab126 in Mountain View, 2004-ish, to design and manage the contract manufacture of the yet-to-be-named Kindle product (as opposed to partnering with an established mobile electronics manufacturer) because they wanted to keep the Kindle idea under wraps (as much as it is possible to do so, here in the Valley).”

lab126 guys’ main mission right now is to design cost out of the thing like crazy, and get the next version out there so it can be sold cheap, or “given away” as part of a subscription plan.

And Mr. Bezos concludes with some high-level thinking: “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds,” he said.