So you remember that whole dot-com thing, right? You know, investors funding companies with millions to sell dog-food over the ‘net?
Well, not all the ideas were so outrageous. Some, such as working with local government to make online parking-ticket payment possible, actually seemed somewhat feasible.
Startup.com is a film about a company taking a realistic vision of how the net could help people and following it through the dot-com boom. There’s a definite element of dramatic irony playing here, because as the viewer, you are fully aware of the company’s eventual demise, but the characters you are watching have no idea.
Usually, I find movies about the technology industry are waaay out to lunch. But with Startup, I actually found myself saying “whoa” out loud several times while watching it because I was amazed at how many details occurred exactly the way I expected them to.
It wasn’t until the film ended and I had listened part of the commentary on the DVD that it became clear why this film was head and shoulders above the other tech representations I’d seen so far on celluloid. All this stuff actually happened.
What makes this film so interesting is that, so far as I know, it’s the only one to completely document the rise and fall of a dot-com from start to finish. GovWorks — the company followed in the film — is just one of the thousands of companies out there that went through the same thing during the period.
Everything’s there, from the founders leaving their day jobs, to raising stupid amounts of capital in short periods of time, to stressed-out friendships, to rapid company expansion, to even more rapid dissolution. I know people who went through everything I saw in this film.
If you’re at all interested in or were part of the dot-com era, go check out Startup.com. It’s unlikely you’re going see anything that comes so close to portraying the heady and often-chaotic atmosphere of the time.

I think I shall be giving Mom a call tonight. Perhaps we’ll set up the iSight and do a video conference! 🙂
So the Edmonton Oilers did end up getting their collective booty kicked by the Canucks on Saturday after all. Booyeah!
Spend a bit of yesterday cleaning up, then drove up to G.T. Bray park for a little pickup Ultimate action. A funny thing happened while we were warming up on the soccer fields. We could *hear* rain pelting the roofs of the houses that were lining the field (only a couple hundred metres away), but we weren’t being rained on! It was the strangest thing!
We put our equipment back in our cars and took cover under the trees. The rain continued for a while, and some of the folks who were local decided to call it a day and left. Six of us — Cam, myself, Sonia, Scotty, Amy and John — decided to stay and play “hot box” in the rain. It’s sort of like half-court Ultimate — instead of endzones at either end of the field, there’s a single, small square (the “hot box”) in the middle of your field. And your field is no longer a rectangle, it’s a big square (we played 30 paces x 30 paces). The goal is to pass the disc to your teammate in the hotbox. After a point, you retain possession and have to “take the disc out” — that is, pass to your teammates until you leave the bounds of the bigger, enclosing square. Then you “work it back in” — pass to your teammates — toward the hotbox. Possession works as in Ultimate, changing hands when the disc touches the ground (either by an incomplete pass or an interception). We played for about 2 hours, and holy cow, I don’t think I’ve been that tired in *months*. Hot box is a physically intense game — even more so than Ultimate — because play doesn’t stop after you score a point!

Getting into the Hallowe’en spirit: Sonia and Eric’s “Devil Dog” Melvin.
Anyways… afterwards Cam, myself, Sonia and Eric went out to a nice Italian restaurant, Jonny Carino’s for a bite to eat. We had a good time, I think I’ll be going back.
Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian readers! 🙂