Have you ever wanted to give a friend a quick pick me up? Brighten someone's day even though they are miles away? Then try this new Kodak Facebook app, the Kodak SmileMeter.



You can send a friend on Facebook a smile in the form of 140 letters... be sweet, be kind or be funny.


Here are a few of the smiles I sent to my Facebook friends. Your friend gets a notice on their wall that you sent them a smile, and then they can send their own.


The cool thing is, the SmileMeter keeps tracks of how many smiles are shared. I am happy to say I raised the count with my smiles!


Of course we all have our competitive side, so there is a leaderboard that displays who has been sharing the most smiles.

Maybe we can get everyone on Facebook to smile! Kodak SmileMeter.

What a weekend and start for the week it has been for Cinesite, Kodak's visual effects facility over in London!  At 3am on Sunday morning I awoke to the sound of my cell phone receiving a text message and was instantly awake.  I grabbed my phone and received confirmation from Cinesite Production Director Courtney Vanderslice-Law that over in Los Angeles it had just been announced that our team of seven nominees have been awarded an Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects on the HBO mini-series Generation Kill!  Fantastic news for everyone here.



This is the second Emmy we have been awarded; the first was for Rome (also HBO) back in 2005.  We have also previously received three nominations and a Royal Television Society award for our broadcast work.  For a Kodak-owned company primarily known for our feature film visual effects, that's not a bad track record!



It has been an exciting 6 months for Cinesite in many ways, particularly because we have won great visual effects work on some really cool films, due for release in 2010 and 2011.  Watch this space for more news about the spectacular effects sequences we are currently creating for the following films: Marmaduke, Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows: Parts I & II, Naked Beauty, Clash of the Titans, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Leap Year.  More productions will soon be announced.

It was early evening last month and as I was looking out the kitchen window into the backyard, I noticed a LOT of bugs flying around. I thought to myself - am I paranoid, or does it sort of look like the locusts are coming?!  It turns out that they were bees - and a lot of them! My husband and I watched them as they hovered in one area of backyard and then another and then back again. Then, they started forming huge clusters on an area of our eave. They would cling onto one another until the bottom bees could not hang on any longer and a clump of bees would fall to the ground. After awhile, they were able to hang on, and it looked like our bee swarm was trying to make a new home on the eave of our house.



At this point, what started out as somewhat fascinating to watch, quickly turned into mild panic as we realized that they probably weren't going to go away on their own! Some quick internet searching and a phone call led us to the local Bee Guild and soon a beekeeper was on his way.

It turns out that one only needs a five-gallon bucket and a brush for bee swarm relocation. Well, actually, a bee suit and an experienced beekeeper don't hurt, either! The beekeeper climbed a ladder, held a five gallon bucket underneath the bees and carefully swept them into the bucket.



  
Once most of the bees were in the bucket, he put the lid on, which had a small hole cut into the top of it. Since the queen bee was already in the bucket, the remaining bees were drawn inside of the bucket to follow her.



Once the temporary bee condo was full, the beekeeper was on his way, taking the bees off to their new home!