To continue my latest obsession, I present a new Schoolhouse Rock video called "Pirates and Emporers"
Posted on 2007-11-16 at 22:07
when I can see the light of day again (work has ramped up a bit in the last month) there will be original content on the blog again. Til then, this video says all I feel like saying right now:
Bruce Lee’s Screen Test For The Green Hornet
Posted on 2007-09-09 at 20:57
The above video needs no comment other than, "Dude was just bad ass!"
These are a few of my favorite things
Posted on 2007-05-01 at 08:05
So, there are 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 things I like. I'll limit this point to 3:
- Linux
- Movies
- High Definition Video
A series of Buffy music videos
Posted on 2007-03-31 at 21:03
This is Your Life: Here's a music video recap of the whole series
Bitch: Buffy kicks a little ass
End of the World: A music video montage of Willow and Oz's relationship
She's My Everything: a music video montage tribute to the relationship between Willow and Tara
Anything but Ordinary: A musicial montage of the life of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Mad World: A music video of a few important Buffy moments
Take me back to the start: A music video montage of the beginnings of the series
Fear of the Dark: A music video montage of some of the scarier and more serious moments from the series
Walk Through the Fire: A snippet from the Buffy Musical (a sort of gag episode that turned out much cooler than a gag episode has any right to be)
If the above doesn't squelch your thrist for all things Buffy at this moment (or at least your will to live) then you are insatiable.
Buffy Season 8
Posted on 2007-03-21 at 08:09
So, BtVS has been off the air for a couple of years, but Joss Whedon (series mastermind) has brought it back for an "8th season" via the medium of comic books. I have issue #1. It's a great book---solid art, and wonderful writing---but it is a very different medium. The difference in medium is evident in the story and the "feel" of the work itself as distinct from the tv series it follows.
So it you are a fan, go yourself a favor is get a copy (if you can find one!). You will be pleased, but don't expect the same audience experience you had watching the show. It goes without saying that it may be as good, but it's quite changed.
What you want, what you need: fans and endings, and narrative satisfactions
Posted on 2007-03-20 at 08:41
I had the pleasure of reading this blog entry elsewhere that was ostensibly about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but far more about the nature of being a fan, of fiction, and of the needs of the reader. It's one of the few blog entries on the Internet worth reading. PEriodically, these come into my field of view and I feel bad about just how wastefully dumb my own blog is. Go. Read. Be Edified.
Oh, and to whet your appetite:
And there's the painful part: fans tend (here's the broad brush for you) to have a hard time making distinctions between what amplifies the story's dramatic impact or meaning, and what would satisfy them as fans. Get the difference? A fan isn't just a heavy reader: 'fan' is a social category. Wanting the story to continue isn't the same as wanting to know what happens next - one desire takes the text itself (the edifice, the mechanism) as its object, one takes the world of the narrative, the series of (unfortunate) fictional events. One frustrating feature of fan discourse is just this: a lot of the time fans fail to make this distinction.
I'm Linux
Posted on 2007-02-09 at 07:50
I haven't blogged in a while and yet this is all I'm offering in this entry? I should be ashamed of myself.
"Make Up" or "Make Believe"
Posted on 2007-01-21 at 15:07
There too he sculptured a broad fallow field
Of soft rish mould, thrice ploughed, and over which
Walked many a ploughman, guiding to and fro
His steers, and when on their return they reached
The border of the field the master came
To meet them, placing in the hands of each
a goblet of rich wine. Then turned they back
Along the furrows, diligent to reach
Their distant end. All dark behind the plough
The ridges lay, a marvel to the sight.
Like the field in the quote above from Homer's Illiad, these women are made into an image of beauty. It is not the dirt in the field we find beautiful nor the woman under the makeup, but rather it is the beauty, even the dignity, that our culture bestows on them that makes them pleasing to us. Aesthetic beauty and moral beauty are not easily distinguished. Like the education of our children, we move purposefully from a natural to a cultural state. It's what we do. We transform nature. We make it in our self-image as we perceive it, and when it gets too hard to do on our own, we ask for help---from ploughmen, makeup artists, painters...and each other.
I was leaving the building for the day. A co-worker was leaving at the same time. When we saw each other standing up, we gave our daily good bye's, put on our coats and left our cubes. Hollywood would have the decency to fade to black at this point, but real life is not so interested in transforming nature. No, we'd said all that needed saying. We both got up and left. Problem is, we both went the same way. So now, we are walking to the parking lot together in an awkward silence. No script was prepared. No protocol readied us for the silent walk out. I said, "So it's not so easy to get rid of me, is it?" We laughed. The moment was rescued from reality and given a cultural context---hence a beauty. As a species, we don't like ugly.
So, what does it mean to say someone is a human? I suppose it depends on who you ask, but I would argue that we are not merely complex bipedal mammal. Being human is more than that. It's about stopping to enjoy a warm fire in a winter chill, it's about having a dream, seeking out the things that are pleasing. Being human is about enjoying the beauty that we, each of us, adds to the world in which we live. I could be crass about the Hollywood makeovers in the video above, but I think I'll just be grateful to the directors, the artists, designers, scriptwriters, and air-brushers who are trying to give us a little bit more beautiful world than the one in which we find ourselves. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Phear Mah Toad
Posted on 2006-12-15 at 07:40
ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!
Your will is but his plaything. Submit or croak.
Buffy Season 8
Posted on 2006-11-28 at 07:28
Joss Whedon, head writer and creative force behind the Buffy franchise, has annouced a deal with Dark Horse Comics to write a new comic series that takes place after the fade-to-black of the end of Season 7 of the Buffy series.
While not as good as a new tv show picking up where the old left off, this is still good news for those of us still entranced by the series. I believe I'll be subscribing asap.
In honor of the event, I've taken the Buffy Personality Test (to see which character I am most like). I did this because I have no life and dogged fanboyism is the way of my people. If you wish my tribe to accept you as one of us, you must go there now to take the test as I did. My results follow:
Glorificus
54% amorality, 72% passion, 90% spirituality, 45% selflessness
You probably have a complicated, multi-faceted personality. Kind of like Glory-Ben-Glorificus.
Passionate and driven with a spiritual side that comes out at times, a healthy taste for the finer things in life and a willingness to do what's necessary to achieve your ends. You're assertive and have no problems standing up for yourself. And, push come to shove, you're the closest anyone's ever come to straight-up beating the Slayer and her gang.
The upside of that result? Well, Glorificus was a god. Powerful. Capricious. The downside? Gorificus was raw evil. The sort of evil that steals wheelchairs and slaps the homeless. Glorificus is a survivor, but not in a good way.
I could swear I've taken that test in the past and gotten Xander as a result (which is much nicer, if a bit less interesting!).
Let the rant flow
Posted on 2006-09-16 at 09:31
I ordered my Tivo. I paid for next day shipping because I wanted it this weekend. What happened? They screwed up the shipping on everyone's order who ordered the same day as I did (the 12th). It'll likelu ship today and get here Monday. They did, on their own, refudn the shipping fee, but I'm still disappointed. I want my new Tivo now!
Tivo is dead. Long live Tivo.
Posted on 2006-09-13 at 07:08
I've ordered my Tivo Series 3. Have you ordered yours? I requested Next Day Air, because I must have this before the weekend hits. Following is my epic "Ode to Tivo":
Roses are red.
My devotion is spastic.
My Series One is dead,
But Series Three is fantastic.
I should submit that masterwork to the American Poetry Review.
Why are you looking for a Tivo replacement, Tom?
Posted on 2006-08-25 at 22:14
In my last entry I mentioned looking for a Tivo replacement. Why? Unbelievable bad luck, that's why!
I've been waiting for 2 years for the Series 3 to hit the shelves. I want an HDTV Tivo DVR. It's due out in October of this year (about a month and a half from now) and what happens? A mere month and a half from when I can move to my sweet sweet Series 3 Tivo and the modem dies in my Series 1. WTF? Really? It's like the gods of time-shifted TV have conspired with fate to see me suffer! Odysseus never had it so hard as me! He was only lost for a few years. I'll have no Tivo for over a month!!!
My final solution is to manually record what I want by time/channel until the Series 3 is in my greedy paws. The Tivo works, but without a modem I can't get the guide information, which means no working Season Passes. Seriously, couldn't Tivo have just stabbed me in the gut instead? The betrayal would have been less and my insurance would cover that problem.
Windows Media Center Edition 2005 blows vomit
Posted on 2006-08-25 at 21:55
OK. It's a bit of an overstatement, but...
When you buy a Media PC with a stereo rack component look and feel that bills itself as a replacement for your Tivo, it should be able to fill that role. Windows Media Center Edition 2005 does not. The system would go into suspend mode and require a reboot to return to normal operation. It wouldn't play many of the media files I threw at it. I understand not playing flac files out of the box (it's a bit obscure, I suppose) but many AVI files and even some MPGs were non-working. All those files, for the record, played just fine in Linux. The guide information was regularly incorrect. And finally, when I finally decided to show it to someone else, I fast forwarded through the commercials of a show only to find that it would not leave fast-forward mode.
Needless to say, the system was returned. I want to be clear, the system, an HP Media Center PC, was not the problem. The problem was entirely Mirosoft's. All the problems had patches which fixed those problems and added new ones. In the end, I found myself performing maintainence on a box that was supposed to be a stereo rack component. I don't have to do this for my DVD player, nor for my extant Tivo. I don't feel that I should have to do it for my Tivo Replacement.
Total satisfaction score: 3 out of a possible 10. The idea has promise, but the software implementation was a miserable failure. I suspect MythTV would have been a better choice for HP to put under the hood.
2006 Craptacular Awards
Posted on 2006-07-13 at 09:06
And the Award for most head-splittingly ironic thing heard on TV last night goes to...
Hyundai for the phrase "The following program is brought to you commercial-free by Hyundai. Hyundai: Rethink Everything!"
Hey Hyundai. Thanks for the (pretend) effort, but I prefer to have all my programs brought to me commercial-free by TiVo.
Tivo Series 3 HDTV
Posted on 2006-01-06 at 10:21
My drooling fit has come closer to an end.
At this year's CES, Tivo announced that they will be releasing in 2006 the High Definition Series 3 Tivo unit. This unit will sport two tuners, the ability to be used with or without cablecards, external SATA, ethernet and USB, and a front panel that shows you what is currently tuned in and how much space is left on the drive! There are pictures here to be pawed at.
Gadget fetish engaged: Must. Have. Now.
Joss Whedon talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Posted on 2005-09-01 at 08:01
"I designed the show to create that strong reaction. I designed Buffy to be an icon, to be an emotional experience, to be loved in a way that other shows can't be loved. Because it's about adolescence, which is the most important thing people go through in their development, becoming an adult. And it mythologizes it in such a way, such a romantic way—it basically says, "Everybody who made it through adolescence is a hero." And I think that's very personal, that people get something from that that's very real. And I don't think I could be more pompous. But I mean every word of it. I wanted her to be a cultural phenomenon. I wanted there to be dolls, Barbie with kung-fu grip. I wanted people to embrace it in a way that exists beyond, "Oh, that was a wonderful show about lawyers, let's have dinner." I wanted people to internalize it, and make up fantasies where they were in the story, to take it home with them, for it to exist beyond the TV show. And we've done exactly that." (The Tenacity of the Cockroach 375)
VideoCD follow up
Posted on 2005-08-12 at 08:02
I've since learned that when k3b burns the video to disk it does so based on video length, not file size. Firstly, that's odd because it implies that the video is being re-encoded in some way. I may be misunderstanding what I'm seeing. Secondly, it means I can't fit one week (four episodes) of the Daily Show on 1 CD (I mean, assuming I were to illegally download and try to do such a thing, which I've not done. Nope. Not me. Never.) because the show is just over 20 minutes in length per episode and the VideoCD can only hold 80 minutes of video. That means it inches over the limit by a scant two to five minutes, depending on how many commercials were taken out. So close. Not close enough. The only way to get all of a week's episodes onto one disk would be to open it up in something like Kino to edit the video and cut out the last few minutes myself. That's kind of a pain in the butt. Putting two to three episodes on a disk seems easier to me. It's just that, it'd be so good for my OCD if the episodes could be burned at a [one disk = one week] ratio. I suspect this will be one of those many things that will not be accomodating to my OCD. I think I need some sweet tea now please.
Converting AVI files to VCD disks in Ubuntu Linux
Posted on 2005-08-07 at 08:01
Since I dropped my paid TV subscription, I've missed the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I'm not saying that I'm gonna start downloading The Daily Show and burning it to disk to watch---because that would be wrong and bad and evil---but if I were to do it, here's how I would go about it:
1) Convert the downloaded AVI files to MPG files.
ffmpeg -i The_Daily_Show_08-03-05.avi -target vcd dailyshow1.mpg
ffmpeg -i The_Daily_Show_08-04-05.avi -target vcd dailyshow2.mpg
etc...
2) Burn the video to disk with k3b (I normally prefer native Gnome applications, but k3b is an outstanding KDE app!). To burn to disk with k3b, I just started a New Video Project, then selected the MPG files to go on the disk, then hit Burn. Simple.
One caveat, k3b gave me a "charset conversion failed" error at first. I went into the k3b preferences, and added the "--filename-encoding=iso8859-1" parameter to vcdxbuild (an app it calls internally). That solved the problem.
Firefly
Posted on 2005-05-31 at 08:02
I've started re-watching Firefly. Man, that show was some good SciFi. What a shame it's off the air. I can't wait for the movie. I hope it goes gangbusters just to spite Fox for taking the show off the air!
TiVo's CES announcement
Posted on 2005-01-07 at 08:02
TiVo has said that they plan to offer TiVo units that accept CableCards so they can bypass cable companies and market themselves as a hi-end DVR. Sounds good to me, but I still want my HiDef DVR, and I want it now, not in 2006 when TiVo plans this rollout. That could be too late for them, and it's definately too late for me.
A great ending to a great show
Posted on 2004-12-06 at 08:01
"To the best crew any captain ever had, no matter what the future holds for us, a part of us will always remain here on Deep Space Nine." - Captain Benjamin Sisko