loonyblog.

So beautiful...should have sent...a poet.

Both movies were simply stunning. Hero, with its bright, bright colors and sweeping camera movements was just jaw-dropping (particularly the fight among the leaves). And Days of Heaven (in my opinion, the best looking film ever made) just popped off the screen. And because DoH was shot in a 16:9 aspect ratio, it ran totally full-screen (like most recent films, Hero was shot in a larger aspect ratio, so it's shown anamorphic, with slight bars on the top and bottom of the screen). The scene with the locusts and fire in Days of Heaven should be seen on every HDTV ever made.

I went with the Sony KD-34XS955 for a few reasons. One, that I only have room in my wall unit for a 34 - 42 inch screen. And secondly, because of the image quality on all sources. This thing makes regular television look great (except for things taped off the WB, as that comes in really dark for some really annoying reason), Xbox games look amazing, and DVDs naturally look great as well. Plus it was relatively cheap for an HDTV. LCDs, rear-projection televisions and plasmas may get all the press, but believe me, if you can support the obscene weight (this thing weighs 200 pounds!) it's worth it.

The one thing I haven't tried on here yet is a pure HD signal. Time Warner's being their usual pain in the neck, and it looks like I won't be able to get a Cable Card until Friday. This year's Oscars will have to be in SD instead. I'll live.

Song of the South.

Still, if handled with the utmost care, this could be an interesting DVD release. But even if this is seen as a positive thing, I don't think we'll be seeing any of the more controversial Looney Toons cartoons released any time soon, like "Angel Puss" (featuring Li'l Sambo) or probably the most offensive one ever made, "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips".

The great gonzo has passed on.

No, what's most surprising about how he died is the method. If ever there was someone that was going to overdose or drink himself to death, it was Hunter S. Thompson. The only thing I can think of is that after decades of trying to kill himself with booze and drugs, he finally accepted the fact that it wasn't going to happen and decided to take the easy way out.

Still, it's quite sad. He was one of a kind, and we should probably all be thankful for that.

Shuttle headaches.

I looked over my options and went with the SN85G4v3 (just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?). This isn't the most recent XPC, but it is solid, and I wouldn't have to worry about buying a new video card, hard drive or RAM. I did need a new processor, but the AMD 64 3400+ wasn't expensive at all, and I got a good deal on the pair. One thing that I did have to give up was one of my three RAM chips, as the XPC only has two RAM slots. But that's not that big a deal, as I still have a full gig of RAM.

In my previous setup, I had two hard drives: an IDE and an SATA. The SATA was the secondary drive, and about ten times as large. Since the XPC only has room for one internal drive, I decided to ditch the IDE and go with that. That's where the fun began. See, here's the thing. For some baffling reason, Shuttle decided to put an NVIDIA RAID chip on the motherboard. If you're using an IDE drive, that's no big deal. But if you're using a single SATA drive as your main hard drive, you're going to run into problems installing Windows. And I did. I tried repeatedly, each time I through the basic blue screen setup and rebooted to continue, I got this lovely error: "error loading operating system."

Oh the fun.

I did a little hunting around online, and discovered that RAID problem. No biggie, right? Just pop in the driver during setup and...oh, wait. You can't pop in a driver CD during the XP installation. The only way you can add extra RAID or SATA drivers is by inserting a floppy disk. Which Shuttle was kind enough to include in the XPC box, but they kinda forgot one thing: there isn't room in the XPC for a floppy drive. Doh!

So I asked the Shack what to do, and a bunch of people pointed me towards XPCREATE, which lets you create a custom XP install CD. After reading over the directions a bit, and realizing that you need to have an existing Windows installation in order to do it (which I don't have -- I have a Linux box and two Macs, but the game PC is my only Windows machine) I opted for the other way out...I bought a USB floppy drive.

I went with this one from LaCie, since it's at least a little attractive, and I love my FireWire LaCie hard drive. And sure enough, using the floppy drive and the provided disk, it worked. Which is good, because I would probably have killed someone if it hadn't.

I can't realy blame Microsoft for this problem...after all, when XP shipped, floppy drives were still common on PCs (Macs had long been done with them by that point). No, I completely blame Shuttle. Why the heck is there a RAID chip on a motherboard with only room for one hard drive? I guess if you got one of those external SATA adapters you could hook it up, but that seems like an awful lot of work to go through to add a second drive to this thing.

Ah, who cares. What matters now is that the machine is working (I'm writing this on it while it installs Painkiller: Battle out of Hell, actually) and it's nice and snappy. Plus it's about a tenth of the size of my old case, and makes a third as much noise.

Next up: a Mac mini.

Marketing brilliance.

Other commands coming soon:

• /beer
• /twinkie
• /porn
• /hooker
• /tax return

Literature, Shack style.

Almost enough to make me want a DS.

It's nice to see quirky Japanese games coming out over here. Katamari Damacy aside (that's actually a game with somewhat large appeal), we've seen some very weird games coming out over here...Ubisoft brought over Sprung for the DS launch, which was very odd indeed, and let's not forget about Feel the Magic XX/XY (or as it's known overseas, "Project Rub"). What's next? Princess Maker? Or even (dare I say it?) Sakura Taisen?

No, probably not. Sega announced that we would see a Sakura Taisen game over here, but has since grown very quiet on the subject. Somehow I don't think this country is quite ready for a strategy RPG with dating elements set in the early 20th century with teenage girls battling in giant mechs in Paris. I know I'm not.

Ma Kent is cast.

Meet Jimmy Olsen (no, really this time).

Believe it or not, this was the best picture I could find of the guy (c/o Yahoo Movies). In everything else, he was either dressed up like a Jungle native, or decked out for a KISS concert.

Also cast, according to Entertainment Weekly, is James Marsden, who will be playing Richard White, son of Perry, and love interest for Lois Lane. Whiney (and occasionally weepy) Cyclops aside, I like Marsden, so this is an okay choice with me.

Definitely not a scam.

I'd post impressions of the thing, but so far all it's done is sit on the dock looking pretty while it downloads all my music and photos. I have 2043 songs in my iTunes library, and 1,800 photos, so even over FireWire, it's gonna take a while. My one gripe so far: it's sexy, it's in color, it comes with a ton of crap, including a carrying case, dock, two separate dock connector cables (FireWire and USB 2.0), A/V cables and other stuff...but no remote control. Which kinda sucks, because those things are expensive! Oh well. I plan on getting a better carrying case anyway (I'm thinking of getting the Contour Showcase...anyone have anything bad to say about it?), so I'll probably just walk over to the Apple Store tomorrow (I do work only one block away) and pick up both.

But for now I'll deal. Anyway, here's a photo of its supreme sexiness:

It's a phildickian world.

Only, you know...without the two way communication and all.

It's about time!

Oh, and for the record, the changes in iPhoto 5 are nice, but very, very subtle. I haven't even fired up iDVD yet, so I have nothing to report there, and I may never run GarageBand, so don't ask me about that (I launched the first version only once to verify that it was definitely not for me).

Anyway, here's some iMovie HD love...marvel at the size of that single movie:

Aaaaaaargh.

Update: Most things appear to be normal...I'm getting some server-side errors, but comment posting and general site browsing should be back to normal.

Bizarre.

Oh wait, no. Ewwwww...spam.

Reason #13561 I hate Windows.

For absolutely no reason...

1. Tetris (Multi)
2. Tempest 2000 (Jaguar)
3. Panzer Dragoon Saga (Saturn)
4. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (PC/Xbox)
5. Final Fantasy VII (PSX)
6. Doom II (PC)
7. Half-Life (PC)
8. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (PC)
9. WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness (PC)
10. Sam & Max Hit the Road (PC)

When I thought about this list, I surprised myself by putting Half-Life above Quake 1, but as much as I love Quake 1 (and I do love that game), Half-Life is a better game. Also, Super Mario 64 used to be in my top 5, but it's certainly plummeted in the last few years as I've grown tired of most of the platforming conventions. I still think it's a great game, but every game on this list is one I fully expect to play over and over again for many years to come, and I can't say I'm all that motivated to play through Super Mario 64 again.

Still, not a bad list, if I do say so myself.

Say hello to Perry White.

Laurie seems like a fine, non-offensive casting choice, although naturally we'll still have to wait and see if they decide to go in some kind of weird direction with the character, such as the weird Elvis obsession in the Perry White on Lois & Clark ("great shades of Elvis!" indeed).

Regardless, Laurie joins Brandon Routh as Clark/Superman, Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, Shawn Ashmore as Jimmy Olsen and Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. Not a bad cast at all. Here's a look at the Perry White-to-be (photo courtesy of the Hugh Laurie FAQ):

So who's left to cast? Unless they decide to skip the origin entirely there's still Jonathan and Martha Kent (even if they don't skip it, these two will probably be in there somewhere), there's still the possibility of an appearance by Kal-El and Lara (although let's hope to god it's not as excruciating as Marlon Brando's zillion dollar atrocity in Superman: The Movie), and beyond that, it could be any character from the Superman stable. Lana Lang? Pete Ross? Emil Hamilton? Brainiac? Metallo? Lobo? Supergirl? Darkseid? (Just for the record, if Darkseid is ever in a live action movie and not played by Michael Ironside, I will start an organized revolt). Filming is supposedly starting soon, so any casting should be leaking out in the next month or so.

Well, gosh...that actually worked!

Sadly, no response as of yet from MacPlay regarding my NOLF2 problems. Of course, after neither game worked last night (plus Painkiller: BooH), I decided to try out the Halo 2 single player campaign, so that's pretty much what I'm playing now (so far? It's okay...but nothing spectacular. Maybe I've been spoiled by Half-Life 2). But at least I know when I'm done with this I can go back to BFME (or at least it looks that way from my preliminary tests).

I'm having one of those days...

So I load that up, watch the inane cut scene, and...bam! it crashes. Actually, that one more locked up than crashed, exactly. In any event, I wasn't going to play that today, so I decided to try my luck on my Mac. Yes, my nice, reliable Mac.

So I pop in the No One Lives Forever 2 install disc, and start up the installer. Bam! it crashes. Actually, it didn't really crash, it just did that thing where it opens and then immediately closes before doing anything (I hate it when apps do that). Okay, okay. So I copy the install files to my hard drive and try again. The install seems to work this time, but when I start up the game itself...bam! it does that annoying thing. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

Some days I don't know why I bother playing anything but console games. With my luck so far today, my Xbox is going to explode the second I try and start up anything.

Frustration, thy name is DOS.

All of this is very frustrating, but it has made me appreciate ScummVM even more than I already do. Thanks to the ScummVM project, it's entirely possible to play dozens of classic, somewhat classic, and forgettable adventure games on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Dreamcast, BeOS, UNIX, Palm, PocketPC and even more. I applaud the efforts of that team. Also encouraging is GemRB, a similar project for Infinity Engine games (think Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment). While those games actually run in modern Windows systems, most of those games were never released for Linux and/or Mac, so that's a nice project.

Aside from just plain getting the game running on well on XP, I'd love the ability to remap the controls from System Shock...those keyboard commands were far more complex than they needed to be, and there's no way to change them as far as I can tell. Oh, well. I guess I could just reinstall System Shock 2 and run it with the very cool Rebirth mod, but I really was looking forward to playing System Shock 1, not its very cool (and slightly better IMHO) sequel. Sigh. Maybe in another ten years someone will have figured out a foolproof way for it to work on modern systems, although by then I'm sure Microsoft will have changed the Windows file system another three or four times, and we'll wind up having to run a Windows XP emulator just to run DOS Box to emulate DOS.

Macworld madness.

• iPod shuffle: Kinda cool. Not quite for me, but I like the fact that it directly plugs into a USB port, and for the price, you get a good amount of space. The lack of a screen would drive me nuts, but I think they'll sell a million of these...it's a great gift for the MP3-weary.

• iWork: Since when did two apps constitute a suite? And maybe it's just that I've been using Microsoft Word since the dawn of time...but Pages just doesn't look like a word processor to me...it looks like Preview. Which is probably intentional, but I don't want my word processor to be pretty, I just want it to well...process words. The price is definitely right, but until they come out with their own counterpart to Excel and/or publisher, it's a pretty weak looking suite.

• Mac mini: A lot of people are going to look at this and say it's like a new version of the 'cube. I was a big fan of the cube (even though I could never justify the purchase of one), and I still think it's one of the nicest computers ever made, but this is a different animal, methinks. It's small. I mean, it's really small. That's very cool. I think it'd make a very nice (if slightly expensive) HTPC. I also think it they'll sell a lot to the iPod crowd, although it's so underpowered, that anyone picking this up expecting to play Doom 3 on it is going to be sorely disappointed. I do take at least a small amount of pride in the fact that my steadily aging G4 is far more powerful than this thing, if only because if that wasn't the case, I'd hang my head in shame.

• Tiger: What's to say? Yeah, it has some nifty features, but that's all just for show. The fact is, as anyone that's been through this with each new OS X release will tell you, that these incremental upgrades are mandatory. In about three months after its release, practically every app will require Tiger, so any new features are nice extras. Mostly I'll be buying this because I have to.

• QuickTime 7: Okay, maybe there's one feature I can't wait for...I love QuickTime, and QT7 sounds pretty cool. I'm not crazy about the fact that I'm probably going to have to buy both Tiger and QuickTime 7 Pro, but I'll do it, I'm sure.

• iLife '05: Oh Apple, what did I do to deserve this? I'm a big supporter of iLife...I bought both iLife '03 and '04, and I'm sure I'll break down and buy '05 eventually as well...but jeez...what gives? Okay, it's nice to see HD support in iMovie, and hopefully this means the filesize limitation's been removed, but what's with the lack of dual layer support in iDVD? When I heard they were touting support for more DVD formats, my heart leapt, only to be shot down when I discovered they were talking about DVD+R/RW (which most SuperDrives have supported for years anyway, even if Apple didn't publicize it). The only reason I could think of for the lack of DVD-DL support is that they're waiting for the next refresh of the G5 line to introduce dual layer superdrives. And until those come out, they can't add support for it into iDVD. Hopefully that will just be a patch when it happens eventually, because I'd hate to wait a full year for that to be added in.

Why I lose at chess.

Lex locked, let loose the loons.

The question of course, is which one Bryan Singer & Co. are going with...will this be Lex the business man, as has been the case in the comics and animated series for the last decade or so? (Not to mention Smallville). Or will we see a return to the wisecracking evil genius Lex, as was depicted in the Gene Hackman-era films? Personally, I'd like to see a mix of the two. I've grown to like the more serious Lex, but there's always going to be a place in my heart for the classic version. I'm also going to be curious to see if they go with bald Lex, or opt for a revisionist look at the character (IE with hair), similar to the one John Shea depicted on Lois & Clark (although let's hope they leave out the cornball role played by the otherwise great Tony Jay).

In any event, Spacey's in, and that's good news indeed. Here's a pretty Lex-esque photo of the man (picture courtesy of Criminal Grace):

V for vindication.

Beyond that however, I find the tag line pretty cool as well: "Remember, remember the 5th of November." That's probably the film's release date (11/05/05), but it's also Guy Fawkes Day, and a line from the poem written about that day:

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot.

Is it wrong to feel sorry for a pop icon?

When Ashlee came on and began to perform, though, I literally dropped my fork. Then I cupped my hands over my ears, but it didn’t help. Ashlee’s singing sounded like a cross between a political prisoner being tortured and a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

...

I happened to look out the window and noticed that some of my neighbors were running down the street, their hands over their ears, screaming for help. I wanted to help them, I really did. Yet I was gripped by horror and disbelief. I was practically catatonic. For their sake — and for mine — all I could hope for was a swift end to the halftime show.

P for Portman.

In any event, I really, really, really hope they pick the right voice to play V (and since you never actually see the man behind the mask, it really is primarily a voice they're casting). I always pictured someone with a very theatrical voice in the role...V is, after all, a vaudeville-esque character (he says so himself). My first choice would probably be Avery Brooks, good ol' Captain Sisko from Deep Space Nine. This isn't just me being a DS9 fanboi (which I most certainly am) -- Brooks is a classically trained actor with just the right amount of theatricality. Also, the comic never actually says why V was in that internment camp. In the comic that's a perfectly acceptable literary device, but whoever is cast in the role will inevitably give off some kind of suggestion as to the background of the character. Putting an african american in the role gives a reason without coming right out and saying why (for those who haven't read it, in the book, minorities, homosexuals and other "deviants" are rounded up by an oppressive English government and put into camps).

But of course, I doubt they'll cast a relatively unknown actor like Brooks. My more mainstream picks would be people like Laurence Fishburne (again, a classically trained african american actor), Patrick Stewart (again with the Star Trek reference, but he's certainly got the theatrical background) or even Wesley Snipes.

Needless to say, I'm on the edge of my seat with curiosity. While Superman is the adaptation I'm following the closest (well, duh), this is a near-second. I think the Watchowski brothers can handle this well (even if they are only producing) and the material is ripe for adaptation. I think a stage adaptation would have been great, but short of that, this could be worthy of its source material.

I hope.

The anti-Warshaw awards.

But where Shacknews dropped the ball, GamePro of all places has picked up. An article up on GamePro.com has a top 20 list of lows for the year. While I hate top 10/20/30/50 lists in general, it's a pretty comprehensive list, and I only disagree with a couple of inclusions. This isn't the only article of its kind to appear in the last few weeks, but it's the least cynical of the bunch, and well worth a read.

Reason #39 why Blockbuster sucks.

To be fair, Netflix's recommendations aren't spectacular either...but this is just bizarre.

How I briefly hated TiVo.

Everything was going great. The TiVo was plugged into my TV via a component video connection, the audio was a digital optical connection to my receiver, and the cables from my cable box were all set to go into my TiVo. The problems started when I plugged it in and began Guided Setup.

But of course, it's never that easy. Read on for the whole story.

Continue reading "How I briefly hated TiVo."

MacWorld rumors.

According to Think Secret, the new version of iLife will contain a new, HD-enabled version of iMovie that supports 16x9 resolutions (finally). Hopefully this also means the unbelievably frustrating DV file size limitation's been removed as well. (In the current version, large movies have to be split up to be imported into iMovie, which makes burning movies using iDVD very frustrating). But even cooler than that, is the rumor that iDVD 5 will support dual layer DVD burning. Hallelujah! Praise be to Apple. Dual layer DVD drives are remarkably cheap, but I haven't bothered upgrading because the only software that supports it right now is Toast, and that's way too bare bones for my taste (technically DVD Studio Pro supports it as well, but you still need to burn the disc using Toast, and DVDSP is way too much money for a non-pro like myself). Being able to burn a two hour movie onto one DVD at full quality makes me giddy with excitement.

Of course, since we're moving in the very near future, I'll need to sell off something to be able to afford that upgrade. Fortunately I've got a copy of Shining Force III sitting on my shelf that should be worth just enough to cover that cost. Hmm...stay tuned to eBay.

Teeny tiny processors.

Baker's group will lead the industry forward on three new technologies; the move to dual-core, or two-chips-in-one, microprocessors; the shrinking of chip feature sizes to 65-nanometers, small enough to be on the same scale as viruses; and the move to more productive 12-inch silicon wafers.

When I last upgraded my game PC, I spent a moment to really look at my CPU. With the Athlon processors, you've basically got a roughly 3" square piece of ceramic with an itty bitty CPU in the center. As I applied some thermal paste to the CPU center (but not the ceramic!), it sort of struck me how odd it was to have this big giant (comparatively) thing for something that was barely larger than my fingernail. The naked eye can't see much of anything on there, and let's face it, that's been the case for a really long time now. And maybe I'm just crazy to even think about this...I mean, my new cell phone has more complex wizardry than my first few PCs combined, but it is amazing how fast these technological leaps are coming, even if Moore's Law has long whizzed by demand from the general public.

How I plan on spending my vacation.

So what am I going to do with all this spare time?

Um. Not much. I guess I'll sleep and play a lot of games or something.

This is my kind of vacation.

WTF?

OSCAR winner Steven Spielberg will bring one of the toy phenomenons of the 1980s to the big screen - generating a booming adult collectors market for the robots known as Transformers.

The director has announced he will follow next year's The War of the Worlds with a live-action tale of the mechanical heroes who disguise themselves as cars, trucks and jets.

My guess is that in the coming months we'll hear about John Woo's new Go-Bots movie, Michael Mann's Voltron, Sam Raimi's Bionic Six and of course, Quentin Tarantino's Mr. T and the T-Force.

Goodbye to GameCube.

I'm selling my GameCube for one simple reason: I don't play the thing. Since buying the system several years ago, there have been only two decent games for the platform: Ikaruga and Soul Calibur II. As much as I like those two, they're really not that good, and there's absolutely nothing on the horizon for GameCube that interests me in the slightest.

These days, I'm no fan of Nintendo, and I make no attempt to hide that. I think Nintendo is making themselves too niche oriented for their own good, and they seem to be getting less and less relevant to the industry at-large with each passing year. Am I saying that the company is going to go under? No, I definitely am not. But the DS is everything I hate about Nintendo right now. It's a novelty, one that is kind of cool for about five minutes, but eventually gets tiresome. I don't doubt that Nintendo's going to make money on the thing (they already have), but I'll be surprised if anyone but Nintendo's own development studios manages to take advantage of the hardware.

I wanted to like the GameCube, really I did. But every game that came out was a disappointment to me. Metroid Prime was good but lifeless (no dialogue == suck). Mario Sunshine was a big let down. Zelda...well, I've never liked the series, so I can't say I was disappointed there. The only game I regret never getting to play is Paper Mario 2, but even that doesn't interest me enough to hang onto the system. I'm sure it's fun and all, but I always have Mario & Luigi for GBA.

Sadly, the future prospects for the system don't appeal to me either. Advance Wars was the one I had high hopes for, but they managed to screw that up by making it a third person action game. Resident Evil 4 should be pretty good, but I'm just burnt out on that whole genre (and if I change my mind, there's always the PS2 port). As for the new Zelda, it certainly looks less grating than the last one, but somehow I don't expect the gameplay to change much at all.

So will the GBA be the last Nintendo system I own? Quite possibly. SPOnG is hardly a reliable source, but this rumor (which didn't come directly from them) suggests that Nintendo's next home system will have a non-traditional interface. Considering Nintendo's recent statements about gaming in general, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this turned out to be the case. Since non-traditional interfaces do nothing but send me running in the opposite direction, I don't have much confidence in Nintendo's ability to make a game or system that appeals to me anymore.

TiVo, your days are numbered.

Here's the deal: Comcast is coming out with a Motorola DVR that has 60 hours of standard TV, can record HD broadcasts and HD on demand, and has two tuners to record multiple shows at once. All of that for just $10 a month extra on your cable bill? There's just no way TiVo can compete with that.

So far TiVo has survived the onslaught from cable company DVRs on quality alone. Those DVRs never had season passes, or any of the features us TiVo lovers have come to enjoy so much. But it's only a matter of time before those cheap DVRs get as good, or better as TiVo. It pains me to say it, but unless TiVo gets a deal with a major cable company, their days might be numbered (especially if the DirecTV deal expires, which has been rumored for ages now).

Stranger than fiction.

I read the complete Sherlock Holmes stories not too long ago, so this whole thing was particularly of note for me. But what I found to be most intriguing about the whole affair, is how perfect it all seemed. Sure enough, the author came to the same conclusion I did: there was no murder, and in fact, it was all an elaborate suicide. Apparently Green had recently begun to question his life's work, even going so far as to say to a friend, "I've wasted my whole life on a second-rate writer".

So where he failed in life, he decided to succeed in death, creating an elaborate suicide that would be the talk of Holmes scholars for years to come. As for the question of how he garroted himself, he was found clutching a spoon, which could have (and likely was) used to tighten the string around his neck.

Unfortunately, this article isn't available online, however there is a Q&A with the author up on the New Yorker's website. It's worth a read. It's not the whole story of course (it's a super-abbreviated version) but it's better than nothing.

I can't help but think this is the sort of thing that would make a great movie. Although I fully realize that in doing so, I've cursed any chance of this being made into one. Although I suppose the last time a movie was made from a New Yorker article (or at least, a movie based on a book based on a New Yorker article) that turned out decent enough.

Requiem for a messenger bag.

So where has that bag gone over the last five years? Hooo boy...where do I start? It was covered in dust from the World Trade Center on 9/11, which I suppose ties it to history in a very strange way. In other NYC history, I carried it from Times Square to Park Slope on the day of the blackout, and it has traveled from Brooklyn to the Bronx and Queens on numerous occasions, and to Manhattan more times than I'd care to calculate (okay fine...it's been at least 5 times a week for five years, which is around 1,300...but that doesn't even count the many other trips I make on a regular basis). It transported my engagement ring the day I bought it, and kept it hidden as I brought it home, a full month before proposing to Heather. While I didn't have it with me the night I got engaged, I had it with me the day of my bachelor party, our rehearsal dinner, and even the day of our wedding.

It traveled to Italy with Heather and me on our honeymoon, has been to five E3s, been to Texas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, Virginia, D.C., Maryland, Louisiana, Illinois, Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side) and I'm sure lots of other places I'm forgetting at the moment. It was checked at the coat check at the Metropolitan Opera, carried into countless movie theaters, and checked at one Tori Amos concert. In the eight months that I've been at my current job, it has traveled nearly 28,000 miles across the country and back. It's been through rain, snow and hail, had beer, water and soda spilled on it, and it even survived one cat-related incident.

I have carried that bag with me on practically every single day (certainly every weekday) for the past five years. During that time, it has carried every single issue of Y the Last Man, Batman: Gotham Knights, Gotham Central and Fables, and thousands of Superman comics (at least one every Wednesday).

And so I retire this bag. I'm not getting rid of it...it's far too useful and in such good shape that it would be a shame to get rid of it. But it won't be with me on a daily basis anymore...it will be missed.

Yay for the Babylon 5 movie?

I actually found Galen to be a bit on the grating side on that show, although since the show was so mangled from its original vision who knows how much of that was intentional. In any event, Galen was a significant character in the post-B5 novels (not including the technomage ones, as I never read them), so clearly that's a character JMS cares about quite a bit.

While I absolutely love B5 and always will, I'm a bit disappointed in this news, to be honest. Legend of the Rangers was such a steaming pile of poo, and actually, only one of the B5 movies didn't suck, that I question how well JMS can work in such a condensed format.

Still, more B5 == ROCK, so I guess I'm happy. And I'm certainly looking forward to this more than Serenity/Firefly, because let's face it people, that show sucked.

A grand experiment.

I really wanted to get the fourth Dark Tower book by Stephen King, but the price is absolutely outrageous (it's over $50), as it's a loooong. So I've decided to take the plunge and give Audible a shot. The Audible Listener service is relatively cheap (the first month's only $7.95), and I get one full book a month, regardless of its length. So I'm basically getting a 25 hour book for under $8. Not bad at all.

Of course, I've never listened to anything this long before, so I have no idea how long it's going to take me to actually hear the whole thing. I tend to listen to books in 20 minute intervals, so it could theoretically take me months to hear this whole thing. If that turns out to be the case, I figure I'll either suspend my subscription until I've heard the whole one and am ready for another (assuming that's possible), or cancel it once I'm done.

In any event, it's something of a grand experiment. In addition to that one book a month, Audible also offers freebie shorts once a week. This week is a Philip K. Dick story, so that was pretty cool. We'll see how this whole thing turns out.

Who sells your e-mail address to spammers? (#1 in a series)

Ladies and gentlemen, the first addition to the official loonyboi.com Scumbag-Who-Sells-Your-E-mail-Address-to-Spammers List is...

(Drumroll please)

MacMall.com.

If you must do business there, be sure to give them an e-mail address you can cancel later on, as they are clearly the lowest of the low.

"But wait!" You say, "how can you be absolutely sure that it was MacMall who sold your e-mail address?"

A few reasons. One, their privacy policy clearly states that they share information with third party companies. Of course, they say you can opt out of such things, which I did, however apparently that wasn't enough for them. The other reason is that my e-mail domain is 100% absolutely private, and not linked to anywhere on the web. I create an alias for every conceivable use, and it was the mmall@ address (which had only been used for that one time I purchased something from MacMall) that started to receive spam. Since that address was never posted anywhere on the web, I can only assume that it was MacMall that sold my address to evil baby-eating spammers from hell.

So that alias has been turned off. I do a lot of shopping online, and every single place has a different alias, so I'll continue to post whenever one of them starts to get spam.

The genius is in out.

So today I did just that. I walked on in, walked up the stairs to the Genius Bar, and saw...a really, really, really long queue to meet with an Apple-branded genius. I asked about making an appointment (as I was told one would be mandatory), and was told that the earliest I could make one would be tomorrow. Here, go ahead and check the queue at my local Apple Store. Fun, isn't it?

Well, I decided it wasn't really worth coming all the way back in tomorrow, so I did what any self-respecting New Yorker who knows squat about Apple computers: I went to Tekserve. I've used Tekserve a few times before, and just as they've been in the past, service was fast and friendly. I was in and out of there in a half-hour, and I wasn't charged for the time there, as it turned out that it was just the A/C adapter that needed to be replaced. Phew.

I wonder how much business Tekserve gets from fed up Apple Store customers. The Genius Bar is great in theory, but in practice it just doesn't work. It should be a Genius Room for high-traffic locations like the SoHo store, as five guys behind a bar just won't cut it on the weekends. In any event, I'm just happy my iBook is okay. The thought of traveling without it would give me nightmares for months to come.

How I got involved in the great CFD dispute of '94.

As I said, if you lived in New York at the time, there was a very good chance you were a CFD reader. That's because the pair were at every major comic book convention. And in those days there were a lot of them. Anyway, when the two went their separate ways in late '93, they still attended comic conventions, only they were at opposite ends of the convention center. I've been going through my old comics n' stuff today, and I turned up some interesting documents from that time. Read on for a story of how I got involved in their argument, complete with scans of the offending document.

Continue reading "How I got involved in the great CFD dispute of '94."

Questionable logic.

I question that logic. By the same token, you would think that any artist who looks at Van Gogh for inspiration, no writer who looks at Shakespeare, no musician who listens to Beethoven and no basketball player who looks up at Michael Jordan would ever be able to accomplish anything. While I'm no researcher, my guess is that this sort of thing only occurs in insecure people who are intimidated by greatness. Most people, you would think, would not be so timid.

Of course, the entire nature of this study is questionable. They asked people if they would be willing to volunteer for a fictional community program after listing the characteristics of superheroes (and specifically Superman). What one has to do with the other is beyond me.

I watches the Watchmen.

In pulling all of this stuff out, I got a bit nostalgic, so I recently re-read some of my favorite comics of all-time: V for Vendetta, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. V and Dark Knight each require their own entry (which I intend to do eventually), but today I'm going to talk about Watchmen, a book that has only gotten better with age. I'm going to specifically talk in-depth about the ending and how it reads post-9/11, so if you've never read it, don't click below. But if you have, read on for my thoughts on re-reading this classic of graphic literature.

Continue reading "I watches the Watchmen."

Oh the humanity!

How do you spell joy?

To:  strongbad@***************.com
From:  Customer Service Homestar Runner
Re:  Shipment of your order - 234827

Dear jason bergman:

Thank you for shopping at Homestar Runner.
The following items for Order #  234827, have been shipped:

Qty       Item                                          Price
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1         BIG FREEBIE A                                 0.00     
1         STRONGBAD E-MAIL DVD SET                      29.95    
--------------------------------------------------------------------
                          Subtotal:                     $29.95
                          Discount:                     $0.00
                          Tax:                          $0.00
                          Shipping & Handling:          $7.00
                          Total:                        $36.95
--------------------------------------------------------------------

At last an answer...

<Expletive deleted>

The things I'll do for an iPod...

Most of the offers are pretty weak. There's the Columbia House DVD club and similar stuff, a couple of really high interest rate credit cards, and some other random crap. There are two that are actually pretty good though. The best, and least painful is Infone, as it's a pay-as-you-use 411 service. Sign up and never use it, and poof, you don't pay. That's easy enough. The other one is Blockbuster's Netflix wannabe. They're pretty desperate to compete with Netflix, so if you try and cancel your account, they'll give you insanely cheap offers, including an extra two weeks of a free trial, and a six month, unlimited use membership for the cost of one month. Crazy. Not all offers are available at all times, which does kinda suck, but Infone seems to be available most, ifnot all of the time.

Anyway, if anyone out there can help a guy get a free iPod, click on this link and sign up.

So uh...

Bloody hell.

Let's hope it's better than Hannibal. Much better, please. While that book had its moments (most notably in the first half), it fell apart completely in the end. Hopefully this will take place before the events in Hannibal, as I'd really hate to read a novel about how Clarice and Hannibal lived happily ever after.

Update: It sounds like this will take place before Red Dragon. Phew.

Today's humor from teh Shack.

VegasX: very interesting. Green Arrow to have HIV+ sidekick

Blackdawgg: well atleast you know she puts out.

Clever.

(Spotted on Idle Thumbs)

Forever Superman.

Needless to say, Reeve was my childhood hero. He made us all believe a man could fly, but he also embodied the role with an effortless charm that you can't fake. What I really liked about Christopher Reeve as I grew older is that unlike many actors who were type-cast and grew bitter about the role that made them famous, Reeve seemed to actually understand and respect what it meant to be Superman on the silver screen. He was a larger-than-life hero to so many people around the world and didn't just brush it off as so many other actors did.

In his later years, Reeve gained a new level of respect and admiration for putting a public face on disability. Despite his near-fatal accident that left him paralyzed, he never wavered, and never stopped fighting for new forms of research to help not just himself, but all victims of spinal cord injuries. He also became an outspoken crusader for stem cell research, and fought for widespread health and disability coverage in this country.

On a personal level, I'm sad because we'll never see Christopher Reeve walk again. I never doubted that I'd see that happen some day, and far more importantly, he never did either. As I said on this site in one of my earliest posts, I believe in the idea of Superman, and that will outlive us all. Christopher Reeve the man has passed away, but his image will live forever and his work lives on with the Chrstopher Reeve foundation. I think he'd be proud of both of those.

The Amazon sale to end all sales.

I also ordered the first seasons of Angel and 24. Angel I've seen and enjoyed, but 24 I never watched since you really have to watch it from the begining for it to make any sense. For $15 bucks (with free shipping), it's cheap enough where I'm totally willing to take a chance on it. Too bad The X-Files isn't that cheap. Milennium stunk and $15 is way too much to spend on that.

Fighting the urge to quit.

My primary issue with these games is one of math. They have it, and I don't like it. Games like Morrowind and KOTOR, and even the Fallout titles do a great job of hiding the math. It's all there, just enough out of the way where I don't feel like I need a degree from MIT to understand what the heck is going on. Neverwinter Nights, and all of these D&D RPGs (such as Planescape, Baldur's Gate and so on) don't hide it at all, and in fact, it's totally up front. As I've repeatedly said over the years, I don't like the pen & paper legacy, since I never played those games, and to me, these games always feel overly complex.

And NWN hasn't done much to dispel my revulsion to this math and D&D-influenced over-complexity. I'm literally fighting the urge every five minutes to stop playing. The reason I chose NWN over Planescape is that I figured being the more recent game, it's bound to have concessions for people like me. And thankfully it does, but the game still feels really overwhelming. I'm going to tough it out though, as I'm tired of having to explain to people why I've had a rare pristine copy of Planescape: Torment sitting on my shelf without ever having actually played the game. Actually that's not true...I have tried -- twice even -- but both times I balked at its complexity. But where I eventually gave away my copies of Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Icewind Dale and the rest of those games, I hung on to Planescape.

Incidentally, if anyone has any advice for dealing with this sort of thing, I'd love to hear it. I know I'm in the extreme minority on this one, which strikes me as being really strange, because I look at the complexity of a game like this and wonder how on earth it managed to sell so many copies. KOTOR I get. Baldur's Gate, not so much. But in any event, I'm going to conquer this once and for all, or die trying under the weight of all this math.

One step forward, two steps back.

My motherboard's been capable of Serial ATA since I first installed it, but the price of SATA drives has only recently dropped as rock bottom as comparable IDE drives. Anyway, one of SATA's big draws is its relative simplicity when compared to the ancient, clunky IDE interface, so I was definitely looking forward to giving it a whirl.

So this evening I did just that. My 80 GB SATA drive arrived from NewEgg this afternoon, and I figured, you know, it would be a total snap to install. Naturally, this wasn't the case (are hardware upgrades ever as easy as they're supposed to be?). While I didn't wind up with smoking hardware or anything like that (yes, that's really happened to me), but I did have to deal with an old nemesis...IDE master/slave settings.

Anyone who's built a computer has almost certainly had to deal with IDE channel settings once or twice (or twenty, depending on how many PCs you've built over the years). For the unaware, each drive on a computer that's connected via the IDE port has to be assigned a channel and then a drive relationship (either master or slave) within that channel. Which sounds simple enough, except it's not...it can be quite a headache. See, IDE cables have three plugs on them -- one for the motherboard, one for the master and one for the slave. And each IDE drive has jumpers that have to be set for either master, slave or cable select. Which means you have to have each drive with the correct jumpers on the correct part of the cable on the correct channel in order to get it to work at all.

That's probably confusing anyone who doesn't know exactly what I'm talking about, but anyway, it's a real headache. Especially since it tends to be seriously buggy when combined with BIOS settings and the like. Some drives simply will not work as a slave at all, or at least, they won't work as a slave to certain drives, but they will to others. Anyway, this sort of thing is exactly why Serial ATA exists. There's no jumpers, the cables are downright tiny when compared to those clunky old IDE cables (oy how I hate snaking those around systems), and there are no master/slave connections whatsoever. Thank god.

Okay, so what went wrong tonight? Apparently my motherboard's SATA connection works as the primary IDE channel. Which meant I had to move my other drives to the secondary. Which sparked the usual bit of IDE craziness, as my hard drive and DVD-ROM briefly refused to do much of anything.

But eventually I got it all working right, and went through the unnecessarily complicated process for adding a new hard drive in Windows XP (why is adding a partition so strangely difficult?). And once it's done formatting in about 12 hours or so (okay, slight exaggeration), I can start filling this one up with games. Whee!

I guess I should be thankful for one thing...I haven't had to deal with IRQ settings (*shudder*) in years.

I ♥ NetNewsWire

The list of changes in NetNewsWire 2.0 is pretty extensive, but the whole program has gotten much, much better from top to bottom. Incredibly, one of the things I like most about it is the decision to split the program in two. Whereas before NetNewsWire had a solid, but somewhat limited blog posting component, it's now been spun off into MarsEdit, which is a full-featured (and very, very cool) blog poster. If you already own NNW, MarsEdit is free, but if not, you now have the option to use an external program like BBEdit instead.

MarsEdit has everything I wanted out of NNW's blog posting software -- it now lets you preview the extended versions of posts, you can set it to nag you if you try and post without setting a category, you can even monitor and edit trackbacks from within the program. Plus the preview function's gotten better too.

It's been a while since I posted that list of my favorite OS X apps, and some of the things on that list are a bit out of date. I still use most of those religiously, although with Watson coming to an end in the relatively near future, I've learned to live without it. Also, MenuMaster is my new favorite Haxie of the moment, as it allows me change keyboard shortcuts with just a few key presses. But NetNewsWire just keeps getting better. And while I would have happily paid to upgrade, the fact that all this stuff was free is just icing on the cake. If you own OS X, download it.

Freaky.

SFGate: Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons

How sad.

Convergence.

This article from a while back solidified my firm belief that the next-generation of TiVos will be a pretty big step up from the first two, but if there's Netflix support from launch, I might just consider upgrading from my super-hacked Series 1.

Guinness vs. the iPod.

Damn you, Apple! Keep your fancy gizmos and doodads out of my beer!

(Thanks Engadget for the tip).

The greatest Archie story ever told.

While I may never find that Halcyon, I can say that yes, I have at long last gotten my hands on a copy of Betty & Me #40 from 1972. Why on earth would I desperately want to get my hands on an Archie comic that's over 30 years old? Read on and all will be revealed.

Continue reading "The greatest Archie story ever told."

Well...duh.

Well...duh.

Actually the rest of their list is pretty good too. I only have a few issues with it. For one thing, get The Matrix off that list. Scientists should know better. But I also take exception to the exclusion of Return of the Jedi among the Star Wars films (Ewoks and all, it's my favorite of the lot), and I happen to be one of those people who thinks The Day the Earth Stood Still is a ridiculously overrated film. I mean, it's not bad, but is it worth its acclaim? Heck no. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a better film from the same era.

And I'd also take off War of the Worlds, too. It's a great book, the radio adaptation is a landmark, and it's a decent film, but I can't say that really belongs on the list. Me, I'd put Planet of the Apes on there long before War of the Worlds of The Day the Earth Stood Still (to say nothing about The Matrix).

Truly groundbreaking.

Ladies and gentlemen, the barrels in this screenshot...aren't explosive. I'm not joking. I actually shot them a few times, expecting them to explode like every previous barrel in this, or any other FPS I've ever played. But incredibly, these don't seem to contain explosive material. I'd heard of such things in the Real World^TM but I never expected to see such unprecedented realism in a first person shooter. Truly groundbreaking stuff here.

OMG TEH SHACK IS FAMOUS.

Today's rhetorical Star Trek question...

Having said that, I don't care how goofy the Borg Megacube is...I still want it.

Maybe I'm just the biggest nerd who ever lived...

DVD overkill.

For the last six months or so (seriously, it's that big) I've been making my way through all the extras in Fox's absolutely brilliant Alien Quadrilogy set, which despite the name, is without a doubt the best DVD set ever made. But what's important about the Quadrilogy isn't that it's got nine discs for four films, it's that everything in here is super high-quality.

Each of the four Alien movies has both the original and a separate, special-edition (not director's cut) version, which contains extra and/or alternate footage. Every movie has a great multi-person commentary track, and each movie has its own disc of extras, containing a slew of documentaries, artwork, screenplays and archival material. On top of all of that, there's a ninth disc containing the extras from the old Alien and Aliens laserdisc sets, plus miscellaneous documentaries about the whole series.

As a long-time DVD owner/collector, I've seen tons of special edition releases, and I've come to appreciate a really nicely put together set of extras. The Quadrilogy screams quality, and it's not just a case where Fox gathered everything they could find and shoved them onto a bunch of DVDs. As much as I love the Lord of the Rings DVDs, the four disc SE for The Two Towers was already scraping the barrel, as the first set filled one of its discs with tons of general stuff about the entire series. What's left for the last movie? Got me. (Maybe that's why they haven't announced it yet).

I find it highly unlikely that there's really enough decent content to fill up ten discs for The Matrix films. The movies aren't long enough to be spread across two discs each, which means every movie will need to take up 3.3 discs on its own, and let's face it, even the most die-hard Matrix fan won't be that interested in all that junk. WB should concentrate on creating higher-quality content on less discs instead of competing for the largest box on the shelf.

But then again, I couldn't care either way. I didn't like the first movie enough to bother with any of its special edition releases (of which there were several), and certainly won't bother with this.

Awesome.

It's a mock-trailer, of course, and not a real film. And it probably wouldn't work as a real film, so it's just as well. But it's such a fanboi's wet dream, that it has to be seen to be believed. The film depicted in the trailer is an amalgam of various plotlines from both universes, but it's basically a mix of the President Lex storyline mushed together with various scenes from various animated series and the Superman and Batman movies.

Much like Batman: Dead End, the production's top-notch, or at least, it is for a fan film. Heck, for a fan film, it's downright amazing, even more so than Dead End because of all the different stuff involved here. Go check it out. I still think a Batman vs. Superman movie is a bad idea, but this? This is different. I'd go see this movie in a heartbeat.

A glimpse into my chaotic setup.

The big black tower on the left there is Fred, my gaming machine, and the silver bullet's Superboi, my desktop. Other names on my network: my iBook's Highlander, Zoidberg is my firewire drive, Frotz is my iPod, my server's name is Guinness, and Heather's iPod is named Gandalf. Yes, I am a geek. But you knew that already.

(By the way, can I just say how cool it is that MT 3.0 will create thumbnails without ImageMagick? I had no idea until now. And that's a pretty damn good quality one, too! Just as good as the one I had created in Photoshop!)

How I'll be running Doom 3.

Here's my rig:

So there you go. It's not a perfect setup, to be sure, but it's pretty damn good I'd say. Of the parts, the weak spot is really the CPU, but there's no reason for me to upgrade at this point. The next time I upgrade anything will be a ways away, and when I do, I'll get a new motherboard/CPU combo (and most likely go 64-bit at that point). But that's not going to be for a really, really, really long time, since this can run Doom 3 at Very High Quality, and will more than likely kick ass at Half-Life 2 as well.

It took me a while, but I've finally got the temperature inside my case down to a relatively frosty 40 - 45 degrees C. A big part of that was my recent addition of the Thermaltake heatpipe and CPU fan, which are a huge improvement over my previous heatsink, which was AMD's stock heatsink/fan. With that thing running, my case temperature was at least 10 degrees hotter, and my CPU was getting so hot (even without overclocking) that the system would force-restart on its own during CPU-intensive apps. Not good at all.

For anyone that's curious, I'm using a CompuCable 2-port ADC to DVI KVM switch to share my monitor between my Mac and PC. This baby's amazing. I get full quality on both machines with zero image degredation, and because both my monitor and keyboard have USB hubs on them, I'm not just sharing the monitor, but also the keyboard, mouse, printer, bluetooth and joystick adapter.

But I'm very pleased with my setup. Or at least, I am for now, anyway. I'm sure once the next-next-generation AMD processors come out I'll be filled with geek lust all over again. But that's what makes all this stuff fun.

Comic-Con photos: day two.

Comic-Con photos: day one.

The greatest show on earth.

Anyway, I'm totally psyched. I've been to six E3s, but not a single Comic-Con, and I can't wait. I'll be naturally pretty busy with work stuff, but I'm hoping to find some time to be able to wander around with my digital camera. Look for pictures when I get back on Sunday.

Today's random gaming news.

• It's hardly minor, really, but Namco announced today that Katamari Damacy, the big rolling ball of crap game, is coming stateside. Hopefully it won't go for more than $30, because I really can't see myself paying full price for it. But if it is that low (or the price drops relatively quickly), I can't wait to get my hands on it.
  
  
• Apparently the PS2 version of Viewtiful Joe will be released in Japan as Viewtiful Joe: A New Hope. No word on whether or not Viewtiful Joe 2: The Empire Strikes Back or Viewtiful Joe: Episode I: the Phantom Menace are on the way.
  
  
• In Active Xbox's interview with Microsoft's Larry Hryb is a list of the top 15 Xbox Live cities around the globe. Checking in with such cities as New York, London and Tokyo is none other than Brooklyn. Word.
  
  
• And lastly tonight, Nintendo, who long ago realized the value of a new paint job, has announced a new emerald-colored GBA and "starlight gold" colored GameCube in Japan. Hope those work out for them.
  
  

Muhahahahahah.

Before, my score was around 1,500. After? It's over 9,100. Now that's what I call an upgrade!

(For the record, yes, I know that 3DMark isn't the most relevant benchmark in the world...but I don't care. It's eye candy, and I'm not reviewing this for any serious hardware site, just my own edification).

Freaky.

Four discs of love.

Oh boy, here we go...

Of course what exactly I'll upgrade to is a slightly harder decision. The real choice for me is whether or not I'll buy a 9800 Pro, which is still great, and much more affordable now, or the newer, and naturally more expensive, X800 Pro (not Platinum, that's overkill). As we're buying an apartment (whee!) this is probably my last significant purchase of any kind for the foreseeable future, which means I probably won't be upgrading my game PC for at least two years, possibly more. So with that in mind, I'll probably go with the X800. It's more than I need for now, but in three years, if I'm still using the same video card, that extra power will go a long way.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Doom 3 ain't gold yet (as far as I know), so I'm not making this decision right this second. We'll see how much longer it takes to get Doom 3 in the can (hopefully long enough for those X800s to come out in larger supplies).

The mind boggles.

On a less-exciting, but still kinda cool note, is word that Manny Coto (who let's face it, sounds like a sci-fi character himself) is joining Enterprise as a show runner next year. While I haven't watched Enterprise for a long time, and at all in over a year (due to its ever-increasing mediocrity), Coto's addition might help the show out a bit. Coto is the creator of the short-lived Showtime series Odyssey 5, which I suspect I was the only one actually watching, let alone enjoying (there were many reasons why I enjoyed it, but the fact that one of the cast members was really cute didn't hurt).

A decent gaming art book?

How to rip DVD audio commentaries.

Anyway, until this week, ripping was a fairly convoluted procedure. Using a PC (as opposed to my desktop Mac), I would extract the audio tracks in question to AC3 format using DVD Decrypter, convert them to WAV using Ciler's AC3 Tool, and then convert them to DVD using Musicmatch, which I would also use to add in proper ID3 tags and rename the files to a more acceptable format. This system, although a bit clunky, worked fine. But thankfully, I've finally stumbled upon an easy-to-use alternative that's native to OS X (yes, I know I could have used OSex all along, but that was an even worse procedure).

This method's not free, but it works great, and I've even got some fancy touches thrown in for good measure, so read on for complete directions.

Continue reading "How to rip DVD audio commentaries."

Silly man, you cannot hurt a twinkie!

What's amazing is that this guy actually had to get a TypeKey account in order to post, which is a lot of effort to go through just to post spam for some lame online casino. Why even bother?

Awards and awards and awards.

All I know is that this post had better win next year's Award-related Blog Entry Awards. I've been waiting far too long for my ARBE, dammit.

Fox huntin'.

Here's why: speed. Firefox is stupid fast. So is Safari, but there's one major difference: Safari won't stop loading a page if you click on a link or enter a form. If there's some image that's taking forever, you have to either manually stop it or just wait until it loads before you can move on. Is this a big deal? Heck no, but I'm an impatient guy.

Beyond that, Firefox is just as attractive as Safari, it renders cleanly, it has nice bookmark and download managers, and it has whitelisting for its pop-up blocking which is just awesome. Here's what I really love about Firefox: you can easily add extra search engines to the toolbar search box. I can't get enough of this feature. On top of the usual Google box that comes standard, I've added several different Amazon.com search engines (Video Games, DVDs, Books and all products), Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and good lord, even the IMDB. That last one alone is enough to make me giddy. I've also had some real fun with the available extensions, and have tweaked the UI (especially the tabs support) like crazy to meet my particular tastes.

So what's it lacking? Only two things as far as I can tell: snapback (which after using for a while, I really wish every browser did), and the ability to copy images to the clipboard (although both of those might be available in different extensions -- I just haven't found 'em yet). At the end of the day, a browser isn't going to change your life -- it's just there to look nice and make browsing easy. And Firefox does it better than any browser I've used to date (and I've used almost all of them, including oddities like HotJava).

Tabula rasa.

Continue reading "Tabula rasa."

Merchandising run amok.

But then, I guess I shouldn't talk...I was totally drooling all over these super deformed Alien figures recently. But then, that's different. Those are really, really cool. Ditto for the Predator and Army of Darkness figures. Those rock. It's totally different.

Today's random spam casualty.

Yep, sure enough, as the image above shows, I had nearly 250 thousand e-mails in the root account at loonyboi.com. Since I've never even once checked that e-mail account (why on earth would I?) it's just been piling up. Deleting that much off the server's no small task, either. Sigh. Just another inconvenience in the war against spam.

This is totally nuts.

Fun things you learn on this side of the industry...

Okay, maybe I'm just a huge geek...

“All of these cases are just gonna be filled!” exults the jovially ursine Greg Bear, raising his voice above the shrieking saws and banging hammers inside the Potato. He is SFM’s board chairman, an adviser to Microsoft and the CIA, and a quintuple Nebula-winning author. “E.T. has just arrived. We’re gonna have the Alien Queen [from Aliens], all 18 feet of her, kinda hunkered down.” Since the case is 12 feet high, she’ll be crouched as if to pounce and devour visitors. Expect Harrison Ford’s Blade Runner spinner car, but not Anakin Skywalker’s podracer—it was too big. “Probably the centerpiece is Spacedock—you’re gonna have 25 spaceships from films and books . . . all lined up in glorious 3-D!” Viewers will be able to manipulate the digital models in virtual space, compare them for size, armaments, fuel capacity, top speed. “You’re in the viewport of the space station, and you’ll be watching Rama,” Arthur C. Clarke’s alien spacecraft, “90 kilometers long, the size of an asteroid!”

Amazon eats Google.

It's neat, and sort of fun to play around with, but I find the color scheme to be absolutely appalling. Google's blue and black on white scheme is sheer perfection. It's easy on the eyes, the information is clear and well presented, and the interface never gets in the way. A9 has two of these down pat, but that color scheme is fare too irritating for me to actually use the thing on even a semi-regular basis. Call me when I can change the color scheme to something less painful to look at.

Still, it's way better than Yahoo's search engine (sorry Stef, but it's true), which offers no real reason to use it instead of Google. If only A9 had yahoo's great user interface, it'd be a serious alternative (or enhancement, really) to Google.

Yikes.

Yowza. You'd have to be pretty infatuated with Fred to go through all that effort (not to mention toner!).

Snuh?

Recently we received confirmation that the first retail samples of ATI's R420 (AGP Radeon X800) will debut April 26 as Radeon X800 Pro. NVIDIA's NV40 (GeForce 6800) officially launches April 13th, but retail availability will occur around April 26th. Notice the NV40 product to be released April 13th is GeForce 6800, not GeForceFX 6800. ATI's naming scheme for R420 has been closely guarded as well, but the open term we hear from vendors is "Radeon X800."

What seems highly unusual is the scheduled introduction of Radeon X800 XT on May 31st; only a month after Radeon X800 Pro's unveiling. Recall that Radeon 9800 and 9800 XT were launched six months apart. We can speculate ATI has either changed their marketing strategy, or the difference in performance between R420 and NV40 hastens ATI's release schedule. Further inspection of the ATI roadmaps reveals that "Non-Pro" Radeon X800s are absent. Perhaps "XT" has replaced the "Pro" Radeon series, and "Pro" thus replaced the "Non-Pro" Radeon series. Even though the initial launches of Radeon X800 will use 256MB of GDDR3, before the end of the year we also anticipate a 512MB revision. Furthermore, we will almost certainly see Radeon X800 SE with 128MB of DDR1; which will also debut with much a lower clockspeed.

GBA games you'll never play.

Aside from licensed titles, there are the "alternate version" kind of games, like Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (which reproduces the same "style" of gameplay as its bigger brothers) and then there are lots and lots of nostalgia-type games. Some of these are better than others. I love my Atari Anniversary Advance and Phantasy Star Collections, but think the upcoming NES rereleases are shamelessly overpriced even at $20 (I'm sorry, but Ice Climber is not a $20 game, and I won't pay that much for Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda when neither has any extra features of any kind).

Having said that, I think the GBA could have some amazing classic games ported to it, although the failure (apparently a spectacular failure at that) of the Blizzard Classic Arcade line pretty much means we'll never see many of them. But just for the heck of it, I present my list of games that I'd love to see ported to GBA. The chances are slim-to-none, but I can certainly dream.

Continue reading "GBA games you'll never play."

Behold the power of Slashdot.

IF Quake.

IF Quake is a port of the Quake engine to the Inform programming language. Inform being an Infocom-compatible language for creating text adventures. Anyway, the site's being slashdotted, but if you can read this, you can still check out the site (and download IF Quake, as the files been moved to FileShack).

Pointless TV on DVD.

The overwhelming popularity of something like Friends or Everybody Loves Raymond sort of ensured their release (and there are sets of Seinfeld coming in the next year). But how well do you think the first season of the Dick Van Dyke Show is selling? Okay, okay that has the classic audience, and they'll buy anything. How about Party of Five: Season One? Oh right...Neve Campbell's hot. Okay, how about Little House on the Prairie: Season Four? Or Felicity: Season One?

Those not good enough for you? How about Saved by the Bell: Seasons 1 & 2, The Best of Laugh-In or Sanford & Son: The Complete Fourth Season? And you really know they're scraping the barrel when Good Times: The Complete Second Season is available (I guess the first season sold well enough to warrant a sequel). And let's be honest here: who really loves Gumby enough to shell out $100 for a seven disc boxed set?

Clearly these shows all have enough of an audience to warrant these boxed sets...I mean, I guess there are a lot of people who would wonder why on earth anyone would want the complete collection of The Critic...but I think that's easier to justify than some of the above mentioned shows. I would hope The Critic is outselling Good Times. Good lord do I ever hope so.

The big, big news.

My letter to the Shacknews community lays out pretty much all the details, but as far as this site is concerned, there shouldn't be any real difference. I won't discuss anything related to my job here, but anything else is still fair game.

It's sort of a relief to be announcing this. For the last couple of days I've felt a bit guilty, as if I were hiding something from the Shack community. Anyway, go read the announcement, and if you have questions, I'll answer them here or in the comments over there.

Carmack in 3D.

An artist (who also was behind the "Fake Screenshot Contest" exhibition) has created a foam resin sculpture based on the character model in Quake III Arena modeled after engine programmer John Carmack. This is really a clever little project, as it's a sculpture based on a 650 polygon model, not the actual person. This gives the model a unique look. Here's a quick glimpse (check out the artist's site for more pictures):

Further proof that I am truly a dork.

I remember being very disappointed at the time that it had nothing to do with the actual Zork games.

I still liked it though. :)

You will be assimilated.

The most bizarre result of that would be that Microsoft would officially own Netscape. Oh how the mighty have fallen, that the browser most responsible for the web as we know it would be merely a footnote on a billion-dollar buyout.

That's my guess, anyway. Time Warner may own Netscape, not the AOL division. But since it was AOL that bought Netscape (prior to the disasterous merger with Time Warner) it would probably be included in the package.

Call in the PsiCops!

Here's an excerpt from the story:

"A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain," said developer Chuck Jorgensen, of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.

Jorgensen's team found that sensors under the chin and one each side of the Adam's apple pick up the brain's commands to the speech organs, allowing the subauditory, or "silent speech" to be captured.

Drool.

But the promise of dual layer burning is too hard to ignore. As I've said here before, I've taken to archiving shows from my TiVo onto DVD, but because I can only burn to single-layer discs, there's a two-hour limit per disc. While I recently picked up some dual-sided single layer DVD-R discs, it still means that for maximum quality, I'm forced to burn a two hour movie as a flippy-disc, and nobody wants that.

I'm guessing that Apple's next version of iDVD will support dual-layer burning (for up to four hours on a single disc!) and their next superdrive will support dual layer DVD-Rs. And that for me, is the holy grail of DVD burning.

It's like grouphug for gamers.

There are some really entertaining ones here. Mine is that I cheated to beat the last boss in Half-Life (the guy was so lame I just didn't have the patience) but there are lots of others, including admissions of cheating with aimbots and wallhacks with online games, people who admit to never having played Doom, Quake and/or Half-Life, and the inevitable confession from someone who lets his friends win occasionally so they won't get frustrated and stop playing.

It's highly entertaining stuff. Not quite as perverse as some of the confessions on grouphug, but still entertaining nonetheless.

The girl who would be Rock.

I guess Mr. Rock forgot about number portability, huh?

Scary.

I was wondering why my Microsoft User Data folder was over 2GB...guess this is why.

John Carter, where are you?

Personally, I still don't think we should be planning a manned mission to Mars (even if it is a long, long ways off) at a time when government spending is already maxed out and gathering impossible amounts of debt.

But hey, who knows what they'll find there?

(Artist's rendition of what Mars once looked like)

Dave's not here man.

In a somewhat shocking twist, you'll actually be able to use the illegal drugs you confiscate throughout the game. In fact, they'll actually give you short-term benefits. Smoking marijuana causes the player to go into what the developers call "weed time," which is functionally identical to Max Payne's bullet time in that everything slows down, giving you more time to react to a crowd of enemies. Speed, as you might expect, makes you move quickly. Dropping acid fills the screen with crazy colors, but it also gives innocent citizens large jester heads while giving criminals large devil heads, for easy identification. Smoking crack causes the controller to vibrate as though you have a heavy, pounding heartbeat and pumps up the damage you can do. Finally, taking liquid soul turns everyone on-screen into an enemy, but it also lets you kill everyone with one hit.

Although they left out the heroin. I guess they have to leave something for the sequel.

A new low.

If you're wondering how this is possible, it's because T-Mobile by default, apparently will receive faxes on your voice mail, and you can then forward that to a real fax number from your voice mail system. That's actually pretty cool, except of course when something like this happens.

I've turned off this feature, but now that I've received one, I'm sure more will follow. Even if my voice mail doesn't pick them up, I'm going to get nagged by fax calls to my cell phone.

How on earth can companies still do this? It's not legal, no fax spam is. They use auto-dialers to find fax machines. I know this from experience...we get fax spam at home. But scanning mobile area codes is just sleazy. I have no intention of simply taking this and living with it. I've read through the comments on this blog and Junkfax.org, and I intend to do everything in my power to fight back.

Today's random unedited IGN screencap.

Saving Angel.

Which brings me to the latest such campaign, the one to save Angel, the Buffy spinoff that has proven itself to be a fine and entertaining show in its own right (and last year was a hell of a lot better than Buffy's final season). The show's been canceled, and the general consensus is that it's a really big long shot that any campaign, no matter how big, will manage to convince The WB to bring it back for another year, or UPN or any other channel to pick up the show. But I admire the concept.

So far they've raised over $9,000, and will be placing full page ads in both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. Their next goal is to raise another $8,000 for a "Guerilla Billboards campaign" (I'm not sure what that means exactly). Whether it's successful or not, these campaigns have gotten much more organized, and like I said, I admire the effort.

And hey, if it works, all the better. I like Angel. I'd like to see it continue for another year or three.

Cool stuff.

I'm sure the content will be as varied as the Shack community itself, which means there's bound to be a wide variety of conflicting opinions. But it should be fun to watch develop, and joins other unofficial Shack community sites like Shackifieds (down at the moment) and the Shackers' Gamertag Database.

OMG GIRLZ PLAY GAMES

Every six months, some mainstream news outlet decides that this is a story. As far as I can tell, the "OMG GIRLS PLAY GAMES" stories are doing more harm than good.

Think of it this way: these stories aren't about how girls are a significant part of the gaming scene, they're always about those weird, exceptions to the rule: girls who play deathmatch, or games like Counter-Strike. Where's the story about the fact that the overwhelming majority of Sims players are women? Or the fact that most of the gamers playing mainstream games on sites like Pogo.com and Yahoo Games are women?

This is a tired, tired, subject. Girls play video games. Guys play video games. Quite frequently they play the same games. Get over it, people.

Somebody stop this guy. Please.

Take a look at that list. Now, I'm sure most people can guess the (ahem) four reasons why a Fear Effect movie is a good idea, and BloodRayne has that dominatrix-vampire thing going for it. But freaking Dungeon Siege? I mean come on! How on earth that could possibly be anything better than the worst kind of low-level renaissance faire drivel is unknown to me.

In an attempt to steer Mr. Boll in the right direction, I present a few suggestions for games that might make for similarly entertaining movies:

• Fantasy Zone: The story of a little spaceship nobody believed in fighting against impossible odds. And weird looking flying mushroom things. With Chris Rock as Opa Opa.
• Tetris: The story of one man's quest for revenge against the system that ruined his life. With Keanu Reeves as the detective who never gives up hope. And Lawrence Fishburn as the diabolical madman bent on world domination.
• Yar's Revenge: Evil insects from the Razak system are invading our space! It's time to fight back as only we can..with extreme force. Featuring Jim Carrey as Yar, the man who's been pushed too far.
• Breakout: A taut political thriller that follows one FBI agent (Renee Zelwegger) as she fights against the clock to prevent nuclear war. With George Clooney as the man she loves.
• Zero Wing: All your base are belong to us! When that mysterious phrase begins appearing randomly across the globe, one woman (Nicole Kidman) tries to decipher its meaning. But can she do so before time runs out while raising two kids and working part-time as a waitress? With Omar Sharif as CATS and Robin Williams as the pilot who takes off for great justice.

The bane of my existence.

In all, I've probably killed about five different pairs of headphones. The reason's not too hard to understand...when not in use, I wrap the headphones around the iPod. Over time (and the abuse anything put in my bag goes through) this wears them out, and this will kill even high-quality earbuds (for the record, I went through three pairs of Apple's buds faster than anything else). I solved this problem by picking up Macally's Retractable Earphones. These things totally rule. They're the only headphones I've managed to keep alive for any significant period of time.

But the earphones are only part of the problem. The bigger issue is the wired remote. As I said, I love my retractable headphones. But see, I'm a tall guy. Which means I can't clip the headphones' base on my belt, because then it won't reach my ears or my iPod. What I usually do is clip the remote to the shoulder strap of my bag, and my headphones plug into that. The retractable cable gives me plenty of room to work with.

Unfortunately, I've killed two of those wired remotes so far. And they're expensive! Again, I have a first generation iPod, so mine didn't actually come with one. I had to buy it. That means I've already shelled out $80 for these damn things, and I keep killing them. Grr.

I can't justify spending another $40 on headphones that won't last a month and a remote I'm just going to kill again. Apparently the wired remote that comes with the third generation models is much more durable, so when I do get a new iPod some day, hopefully that will last.

Until then, I've been forced to clip my headphones to my jacket pocket, where I have to keep my iPod. This is awkward since the headphones can get pulled out of the plug there. But I'll live with it...for now. We'll see how long I can tolerate this.

Remote patrol.

As I said, this is a favorite subject of mine. Since I have so many electronic devices connected to my surround sound setup, I used to have a serious problem with remote controls. My solution was to invest some serious money in a Philips Pronto TSU2000, and after a great deal of time tweaking and programming the device to my custom specifications, I was able to replace 14 remotes with that single device.

In doing so, I did a lot of thinking about what features are really needed in a remote control. Programming a Pronto is a lot like designing a web page, and while the TSU2000 isn't as flexible as the newer ones are (which basically give you complete freedom to design whatever you want), I think I was able to make it as simple as possible. I basically took off completely anything I never use at all, and moved less commonly used features (like the subtitle, angle and audio commands for my DVD player) to secondary screens. I put in little touches like the "All Off" button that's on the main TiVo page (since that's the screen that's used more than anything else), created a screen filled with favorite channels, and made a whole screen of macros to switch between the most common devices (TV to DVD, TV to PS2, DVD to TV, etc). I got to go through this all over again when my father got a Pronto, and for him I dumbed things down even more.

If anyone's curious, my Pronto CCF file is up at Remote Central. It may not be the flashiest one around (well it does have custom graphics for 11 different console systems...I think that's pretty cool) but it's worked perfectly for me for a few years now.

Let's hear it for the "boi".

A "boi" describes a boyish gay guy or a biological female with a male presentation

I think I'm secure enough in my masculinity to live with this.

So long as "loony" doesn't become the new term for radical right-wing fundamentalism, that is. I'd hate to think what the term "loonyboi" would translate into then.

But they seemed so happy!

I can't wait to see the Divorce Court playset. Or "Alimony Ravaged Ken" doll.

Digital comics revisited.

CBR and CBZ files are scanned and compressed digital copies of comic books. Apparently they're being traded en masse on BitTorrent. These files can be read using a CBR reader, such as Comical, which is available for OS X and Linux. As I said, these files are being traded en masse, although I had little success in my attempts to find a sample file from either BitTorrent or Gnutella. As with most file sharing, persistence is the only way to get anything, and I'm far too lazy for that. Luckily I stumbled across a comics retailer that offers a preview comic in CBR format, so I was able to download that instead.

Using Comical (once I went through the clunky process of installing unrar in order for it to work, as it originally froze every time I attempted to open a file) the experience isn't half bad. It's a very bare-bones program, but you can view one or two pages at a time, and zoom to various degrees. I found the lack of an interface a bit off-putting, but that's just me being weird. I imagine the reason comics are traded in this format instead of PDF is because these files are compressed (using RAR for CBR and ZIP for CBZ), but Adobe's PDF Reader is a far more full-featured program. But in all, it's a reasonable format for reading comics.

While I doubt it'll ever happen, I would love (read: love) to be able to buy my weekly comics in a high-quality digital format. Yes, nothing can compare to being able to hold an actual book in your hand, but individual issues are flimsy, and more importantly, they pile up like you wouldn't believe. I have stacks and stacks and boxes upon boxes of comics, and it's just getting worse with each passing year. Being able to pay $1 instead of $3 for each book in a digital format is nice, and with that extra cash I'd be able to purchase a collection for the stories I really like and want in a nicer format.

Why would I consider this to be a viable alternative, while the official CD comics that are out there are mostly just a mildly amusing distraction? Because this is just the comic itself. There's no animation, no music, no cheesy sound effects, just the comic itself, presented in a straightforward manner. Like I said, it's doubtful it'll ever happen, But I would like a way to keep reading comics every week without the annoyance of those stacks of comics

The return of Captain Power.

If all of this sounds awfully familiar, it's because it's been done before. Back in the 80's there was a live-action show called Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future that basically did the exact same thing. You could buy special toys and spaceships that "reacted" to events on the screen. The results were exceptionally lame. If a ship blew up on screen, your toy would suddenly eject its passenger, or make chirping noises. Even people who liked the show itself were of the opinion that the whole idea was really silly. But at the time, Captain Power was primarily competing with first generation consoles from Nintendo and Sega (and the remaining stocks of Atari and Colecovision systems). In an age when most kids already have a platform several hundred times more sophisticated than this, is anyone going to go in for it? I doubt it.

R.I.P. Julius Schwartz

Today's random proof that I'm a complete geek.

In case it wasn't perfectly clear yet, yeah, I'm a geek.

Just a thought...

(Thanks to Reuters and The Hellbound Web for the screencaps, respectively)

Best DVD packaging ever.

Review: Comic Book: The Movie (DVD)

Continue reading "Review: Comic Book: The Movie (DVD)"

Save the Hubble!

So go sign the petition. It only takes ten seconds to fill out the form (less if your browser can autofill!) and you can at least say you tried. Plus, with NASA reconsidering the current plan to let the Hubble die, every signature helps.

The new Space Ghost.

Yeah, you read that right.

Here's the description from writer Joe Kelly:

“It’s really a hardcore, pulp-feel story, with him being betrayed by the police force and taking his revenge. It’s really dark, and it’s going to be a blueprint for them to revamp the character and keep it going.”

Sigh. What's next? An evil version of Herculoids? I can picture it now:

When enemies from beyond invade the planet Quazar, it's up to Zandor and his family of badass supercommandos to take back what's rightfully theirs. You've never seen violence until you've seen Gloop, Gleep, Zok and Igoo go on a killing spree.

Eeewww.

Spurlock starts out the picture of health, a strapping 6-foot-2 and 185 pounds. Three doctors and a nutritionist, who reappear throughout, examine him and attest to his well-being. But within a few days, he's vomiting out of the window of his car. And it's downhill from there. Spurlock's body goes through a general deterioration that surprises even his doctors in its rapidity. (His girlfriend, a vegan chef, is beside herself.) Gaining weight is just the outward sign; his liver becomes toxic, his cholesterol skyrockets, his libido sags, he gets headaches, and he becomes depressed.

You ever have one of those days...

I'm surprised it took so long.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

This of course proves my long-standing theory that of the various pulp icons, only The Shadow was fully prepared for winter (lord knows that with his shirt always hanging open like that, Doc Savage would have frozen to death years ago). There's just something very sensible about a guy who knows how to keep himself bundled up like that. Although I'm willing to admit that only Tarzan is prepared for those impossibly hot global warming summers we've been having.

Yeah, I'm a dork.

Hard drive envy.

For my needs, that 120 GB size is just about right. It's the exact same size as my desktop drive, so if there's a crisis and I need to backup everything or clone the drive I can do so easily. But for the truly power users out there, LaCie has unveiled something incredible...a 1 terabyte. drive.

Yeah, that's right, 1 freakin' terabyte. That's nearly ten times the size of the drive I have right now, of which I've only used about 40GB. For professional users of Final Cut Pro or DVD Studio this is like a dream come true. It's small, supports all three high-speed protocols (FW 400, FW 800 and USB 2.0, plus iLink support for direct DV input) and if necessary, it can be stacked and daisy-chained for increased storage. Oh, and it's entertainingly called "Bigger Disk."

For standard desktop users, the falling price of storage has accelerated much more rapidly than the amount of space they actually need. But at the same time, I fully welcome the release of 1 TB drives. That uber-TiVo I mentioned the other day is the perfect use for a drive that's 1 or more TB...if you can get 30 hours of HD video (at questionable quality) on a 250 GB drive, then you can get over 100 with a terabyte. And that's really what I need in a TiVo. My massively upgraded first generation unit has about 100 hours of high-quality storage, which is enough that I've never filled it, and have never been concerned about space for new recordings. Actually, looking at the list of things currently on my TiVo, I'll soon have a movie that's been on there for a full year!

So bring on the terabyte drives. I'm sure someone will think of something to put on there.

Priceless.

Microsoft has said that it plans to offer its own MSN music store later this year. Thursday the company appeared unprepared for the Apple-Hewlett agreement, which clearly stung Microsoft executives. They said the agreement would limit choice and harm consumers.

"Windows is about choice, you can mix and match all of this stuff," said David Fester, general manager of Microsoft's Windows digital media division. "We believe you should have the same choice when it comes to music services."

The TiVo of my dreams.

It's a combination TiVo and DirectTV receiver that includes a whopping 250GB hard drive. But what makes this particularly amazing is the fact that it records HDTV content alongside regular television, and it will hold 30 hours of HDTV or 200 hours of standard TV, or any combination of the two. Now obviously those numbers are inflated and probably at the lowest quality setting...but even if I only get 100 hours of standard TV and 7 of HD, that's still pretty darn amazing.

But wait, it gets better! This TiVo can record up to four broadcasts of either regular or HDTV programming at once! Four! In HDTV! With full 5.1 digital surround sound! Ohhh...my geek lust is in overdrive.

Someday, when I have the money to buy an HDTV, this, or something a lot like it (possibly with an even bigger hard drive) will be mine. And truly songs will be sung about that day.

Opa Opa is my co-pilot.

Not bad, huh? My first iteration used the cover image from the second issue of loonygames, and it did look really funny, but ultimately I decided to go with Opa Opa, my favorite forgotten Sega hero. The font is Aspirin by T26, which is not at all coincidentally the font used on the normal Shack logo. If you're curious how people managed to hack in the ability to add their own logo, check out shackFAQ for details.

The Bloggies

Of course even if I did win one of these things it wouldn't be nearly as cool as my real honor, being singled out by Wil Wheaton. Me, I'll be voting for some of my favorite blogs, like CheapAssGamer, Gizmodo and Roger Avary's blog (even if the damn site doesn't have an RSS feed, it's worth it when I do get around to reading it).

Yikes!

So what's the beef? Here's an image showing Russian soldiers honoring their fallen comrades from the Chechnyan conflict. And now here is an article that ran in EGM, in which the images of fallen soldiers were replaced with images of SOCOM II.

How sick is that? I mean wow...that's just in staggeringly poor taste. Who knows what they were thinking.

I'm a lazy, lazy man.

As far as I know, the Blogger Pro features haven't been rolled into the free service yet (although they should be soon), but there are still plenty of free ways to add feeds to Blogger-run sites. Hopefully when those features do get integrated, Blogger will start doing what LiveJournal does and give everyone automatic RSS feeds. Even if they're just basic, headline-only feeds, that's better than having nothing. Until then, I'm going to have to continue checking these sites every few weeks or so. Or I guess I could just train myself to check them manually, but like the headline says, I'm a lazy, lazy man.

Yeah, I'm a sucker.

So yeah, I'm a sucker. I'm a subscriber to .Mac, which I primarily keep because of how much I use iPhoto, so I really shouldn't have to pay on top of my subscription fee. All I know, is that this is as far as I'm willing to go. If Apple decides to charge for the next release of either Safari or iTunes, they can stick it up their collective wazoo. I don't expect that to happen, but then, I expected iPhoto to remain free.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

• New iLife Suite: The only app I care about is iPhoto, and now I have to pay just to get the new version? How much does that suck? I don't have any desire to own GarageBand, so why should I pay $50 for a package that includes that? I'm good and angry about it.
• iPod Mini: Nice, but at $250 it's waaaaay too expensive. They desperately need a $150, 2GB version.
• Bigger low-end iPod: Okay, this is actually good news. I'm not looking to buy a new iPod anytime soon, but when I do, this will be the one I get.
• New Office: Some of the new features sound interesting, although I haven't heard much about Entourage, which is the app I use the most (and desperately needs better IMAP support). Ditto for the new Virtual PC.

Just a quick note.

At last, recognition.

My letter to Christopher Byron

Update: Because this blog is under a Creative Commons license, anyone who wishes to reprint this in part or whole may do so with my permission. See here for more details.

Continue reading "My letter to Christopher Byron"

More GTA Hysteria

People, this [the violence in GTA: Vice City] is insane. This is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy - or than any lie the feds think Martha Stewart ever told them, or any line in any song that Bruce Springsteen ever sang that rankled a cop in the Meadowlands.

Michael Jackson is charged with seven counts of child molestation. Seven counts. Plus an additional two for using an "intoxicating agent." Mr. Byron, the author of this article, claims that the violence in GTA: Vice City is 10,000 times worse than nine counts of harm to a child? With all due respect to Mr. Byron, a single count of child molestation is far, far, far worse than anything you'll find in any video game. That he would claim otherwise is sick and reckless.

I intend to write a letter to Christopher Bryon (cbyron at nypost dot com) and suggest anyone else outraged by this pathetic excuse at financial advice do the same.

May god have mercy on us all.

Best Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler.

At Shacknews, we unveiled our GOTY winners today. Unlike most places, our awards are 100% determined by our readers, which usually leads to some interesting results. We're going to be publishing the staff top ten lists later in the week (I think), and those should be interesting as well, but they won't be our formal GOTY winners. Just what each of us believes to be the ten best games they played. Having only played a handful of the winning games, my list will be radically different. And that's fine. It'll be an honest list.

Naturally, every other site is unveiling their picks as well this week. GameSpot has an okay setup for themselves: they name the nominees, and then pick a single winner in each category. There are a lot of them, but it's not too much, and they have their own dubious awards (sort of like the Warshaw Awards over at the Shack).

GameSpy on the other hand, has gone awards crazy. They give out ten awards per platform, plus genre awards, plus specific category awards, plus multiplayer awards, plus an overall GOTY award. And on top of all that, there are still reader's choice awards. Yeesh. Naturally, every single award, from Best PS2 RPG to Best GBA Remake has its own, highly reproducible image. Which is good to know for that inevitable Rock n' Roll Racing GOTY Edition.

Non peer-review awards in general don't carry a lot of merit, but if you're a third party dedicated to giving out awards, then perhaps it would be wise to exercise a bit of restraint. The reason I never take the Golden Globes seriously is because they are basically just an excuse to hand out as many awards as humanly possible to as many different people as possible. That's why they have awards for both film and television, plus separate awards for comedy and drama movies. At the Golden Globes there are always two sets of best picture, actor and actress, which means none of it means much of anything (and that's not even addressing the fact that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is comprised of what, 30, 40 people?).

Maybe at Shacknews we should start up a set of awards for other websites. There could be the "Most Pointless Awards Award" the "Most Clearly Biased Award" (I'll happily accept that on behalf of all of my horribly biased LNC posts), the "Sleeziest Download Site Award" and of course, there would have to be the "Most Insane Advertising Campaign" award. Because we all know who would get that.

A new low.

It's called "Santa isn't coming this christmas" and it attempts to sell people on the idea that the cow's milk they're leaving out for Santa Claus is making him impotent. To quote their slogan, "Milk can make you impotent. Soy brings joy." Leaving aside for a moment the fact that their attempts to connect dairy and/or beef products with impotence in the past have been sketchy at best, isn't this a bit sleezy even for them? Like it or not, there are a lot of children for whom Santa Claus still means something, and it's just mean-spirited to post something like that. Of course, compared to their other new campaign, that's nothing.

PETA activists will be standing outside of showings of The Nutcracker and handing out pamphlets titled, "Your Mommy Kills Animals!" to children. Here's their description of this clearly child-friendly tract:

Kids will see the bloody truth behind their moms’ pretentious pelts. Accompanied by graphic photographs of skinned carcasses and animals languishing on fur farms, children will read: "Lots of wonderful foxes, raccoons, and other animals are kept by mean farmers who squish them into cages so small that they can hardly move. They never get to play or swim or have fun. All they can do is cry-just so your greedy mommy can have that fur coat to show off in when she walks the street

It-it-it just keeps going!!!

T-Mobile is my new best friend.

Unfortunately, I can't afford a new phone right now, so I can't completely take advantage of this. My t68i is great for things like connections over Bluetooth, and it's has a very capable WAP browser and does e-mail fairly well. But if I had a Sidekick, or Nokia 3650? Wooo.

Sometime next year when Nokia's high-end phones come down in price I'll have to pick one of those up. The idea of using a real browser like Opera on a cell phone is pretty darn awesome. And without any data metering, I can actually do that to my heart's content.

Kill all the game developers!

"It's too little, too late," said Ringo Cayard of the Haitian American Foundation. "They made the money, the message went through."

Readers of this blog probably already know by now that I'm the first to speak up when I think there's something potentially offensive going on (the most recent example being the bizarre Chinese servant on Smallville), but this was purely a misunderstanding, and nothing more. GTA: Vice City is a work of fiction in which there are various gangs of specific ethnicities. Similar concepts have been portrayed dozens, if not hundreds of times, on television, movies and literature, and when put into the proper context, the phrase "kill all the Hatians" isn't offensive in the slightest. Rockstar could just as easily given the gangs various wacky names (like they did in Manhunt) and then the phrase would have just been "kill all the <gangnamehere>s". You could make the argument that doing so would have been a better decision, but it's a little late to blame them for not acting sooner.

Shack Holiday Guide 2003

Own your very own Shacknews.

The end is nigh.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. You will adapt to service us.

Pixar in 2D?

So we'll see. I was just thinking that someone with a lot of clout (like Pixar) should pick up the slack left over when Disney canned their traditional animation department. If anyone can do it, it's Pixar.

Recommended Reading

"Government regulation is no big deal, they're just reinforcing industry ratings." Wrong. None of the proposed bills are based on the ESRB ratings system. In fact, it's unconstitutional for the U.S. government to regulate or enforce a private ratings system. As such, each bill aims to set its own moral barometer and establish often vague metrics for what is acceptable for everyone to purchase and play. Dancing around a state-by-state patchwork of content restrictions and peculiarities would be prohibitive not only for developers, but also for time-deprived parents and retailers (who are already working with an existing rating system).

Great moments in Shack history.

Silent Wolf: I'd still like to know why the chicken crossed the road :(

MrSpyral: dude...it was to get to the other side.

AMikaboshi: omg, spoilers!

I guess videogames cause violent behavior after all!

Anne Arundel County police say they have discovered the cause of a Friday night shooting in Edgewater: an Xbox game system.

Angry that his roommates were being too loud at 2 a.m., Robert Preston Kersey, 34, of the 1700 block of Fairhill Drive stormed into the living room and fired a single gunshot into the game system, disabling it, police said. The 9mm gunshot did not penetrate the system and did not injure anyone at the scene, police said.

Kersey has been charged with two counts of reckless endangerment and one count of destruction of property, police said.

And yet Futurama's still dead.

There aren't many shows that were criminally killed off before their time. Most of the time it's for the best that they end when they do. But Futurama was still in its prime when it ended, and it's simply a better show than Family Guy. Don't get me wrong, I like Family Guy as much as the next geek, but given the choice I'll always opt for Futurama. It's smarter, funnier, and wildly original.

How can you have any pudding if you doint eat your meat?

Oh great...now I'm going to have "The Trial" stuck in my head all day. That's just what I need.

Good morning Worm your honor...

You can keep Halo, but I'm taking KOTOR.

Lex Luthor's Personal Chinaman

Boy, that Lex Luthor sure knows how to live. As depicted on Smallville, not only does the guy have a huge mansion, expensive cars and lots of faux antiques lying around, but the guy's even got his own personal Chinaman.

Yes, that's right, as this image and movie clip from last night's Smallville shows, Lex Luthor actually employs an Asian servant who looks like he walked right out of a Charlie Chan movie (except, I imagine for the fact that the actor is actually Asian, not a white guy pretending to be).

The first time I saw this character (who I have dubbed "Ming" for no particular reason), I couldn't believe it, but then last night he showed up again. Obviously, there's nothing patently offensive about the fact that Lex Luthor employs an Asian servant. But there's something particularly grating about the way he's clothed and his demeanor that strikes me as being an odd throwback to the 50's. And not a particularly good one at that.

To be fair, not every ethnic servant in old movies was necessarily a negative stereotype. Long debates have been held as to whether or not the character Mammy from Gone with the Wind was a positive or negative role for a black woman. While there will always be some who disagree, it's always been my impression that by and large Mammy was a positive character, especially when compared to others from the same time period.

So with that in mind, take a look at this clip where Lex dismisses Ming, and tell me if you find anything creepy about it. For some reason I just get the feeling that Ming is off to go moonlight as a rickshaw driver somewhere. It seems weird to me to see an old stereotype manifest itself on such a modern show.

This is pretty clever.

www.iwanttoworkatea.com

I can't say I understand why he's chosen Electronic Arts out of all the companies in the industry (one can only hope he's heard the horror stories) but you have to admire the concept. Good luck, man.

So what do you think...should I start iwanttoworkatdccomics.com?

Kiss me, I (still) don't smoke.

Just for the heck of it, I decided to figure out how much money this has saved me. I did indeed smoke a heck of a lot. I'd smoke anywhere from one to two-and-a-half packs a day, which adds up pretty quickly. So in four years, at an average of 1.75 packs a day, I figure I would have smoked 2,555 packs of cigarettes (that's 51,100 individual smokes, for anyone who's curious).

New York is the most expensive place to buy cigarettes in this country (I believe, anyway...as I no longer smoke, I have nothing to compare it to) so at an average of $7.00 a pack over four years, the total amount of money that I would have spent on cigarettes comes to...

Drumroll please...

$17,885.00

And that, kids, is a crapload of money.

I wish I could say I've saved all of this money, but of course, the chasm of money I used to spend on cigarettes has been funneled into my other expensive habits (namely comics, games and movies). Oh, and I got married. Does that count? That wife of mine, she ain't cheap.

I did it cold turkey, but if you're looking to quit smoking, there are lots of great resources online, including QuitNet, QuitSmoking.com and WhyQuit. Also see the American Lung Association's smoking page for reasons why it's a good idea (in case the money alone isn't enough to do it for you) and there's also The Truth (which is funded by tabacco companies, incidentally) if you like being berated for being a smoker. I find their attitude to be insulting, but since their primary purpose is to keep kids from smoking, that's understandable (that doesn't mean I have to like it).

The great Britney Spears nude survey.

Based on Gallop Analysis of 5,329,755 search engine results for "Britney Spears Nude"

Links with actual nude pictures of Britney Spears:  0.0%
Links with fake nude pictures of Britney Spears:  11.4%
Links with nothing even remotely related to Britney Spears:  52.6%

Okay, this is where I shamelessly admit that this post was all just a ruse to get the words "Britney Spears nude" added to my Google results. Ten bucks says my search engine results quadruple over this.

Or...not. I'm sure there are people much more clever than me who have people working round-the-clock to make sure they have optimal Britney Spears nude placement.

The Friendster bubble.

Let's set aside for the moment that the dot com burst is still a painful memory for anyone who lived, worked, or was within earshot of the stretch of NYC once known as Silicon Alley or the barren wasteland of abandoned office buildings that makes up much of Silicon Valley. To raise any venture capital these days is a major feat (I should know...we just did here at netomat!), but in order to get any funding from any venture fund requires some serious, hardcore business plan (well, maybe not every fund), and I have seen nothing on Friendster that couldn't be replicated in a weekend by any halfway competent programmer.

If the Friendster model of social interaction really does become the next big thing, it won't be as an independent entity. It'll be as part of one of the big matchmaking sites like Match.com, Lavalife or Nerve. And that's still a big if. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Friendster quickly goes the way of such other once high-flying dot coms as Pets.com, Blue Mountain or snap.com.

Crazy Japanese blogging mag.

Thanks Kotaro Yamagishi (by way of Boing Boing) for the image.

The AMAZING X10 Wireless Bankruptcy!

X10 isn't all evil, of course. Their home automation equipment has long been a rousing success with gadget geeks, and I'm sure they'll turn their business around once they slim down a bit. But until that happens...

Ha hah!

Tapwave responds.

Well that's a relief. It still doesn't make things much easier for me for reviewing the platform at launch, but it's good to know they're not just ignoring Mac users (as Sony does).

Damn you, Tapwave!

That same error is quite familiar to me, as it's what I got when I first tried syncing my Clie with a Mac. But, thanks to Mark/Space and their MissingSync software I was able to get past that hurdle. I contacted Mark/Space, who told me that they have heard that the Zodiac isn't Mac-compatible, but at this time they have no plans to release a product to enable it. I tried getting it to work with Virtual PC, and I couldn't get that to work either (which is weird, because I know people have managed to get Palm devices working with VPC).

Admittedly, for more than 90% of potential Zodiac users, this won't be an issue (Sony's managed to get a huge portion of the market without any official Mac support). But it's still disappointing. I have been able to send files over Bluetooth, and this includes installing new software. But for formal syncing, I'm out of luck.

Look for my full Zodiac review to run on Shacknews next week.

Must-see site.

Is this the best addition to the Internet since FARK? Quite possibly. And it's got an RSS feed!

Is Panther worth the hassle?

If all it took to upgrade to 10.3 was just running the installer I wouldn't question it...but this review on OS News disturbs me. Apparently the author was told his Jaguar installation "had errors" and he was forced to do a full, clean install. With Jaguar, I did the "archive and install" method at work and on my iBook at home, and that was fine. But my G4 tower (which came with Jaguar pre-installed) has some 70 gigs of files to worry about. Not to mention my super-customized installation of Dreamweaver MX (which is another thing I have no intention of upgrading). An unfortunate side-effect of having an obscenely large hard drive, is that I don't have any easy way of backing up all that data. And while the idea of a 120 GB FireWire drive is tremendously appealing, that's just not something I can afford to run out and buy right now.

There's also another issue at work here. I'm not sure I really need to upgrade my desktop at home. For the same reason I'm not tempted by the awesome power of the G5, I can't say Panther is really that enticing. As of right now, my desktop does everything I need it to, and it does so with no problems at all. Exposé seems cool, and I love the look of the new Finder, and that improved Samba support would be very handy. But I don't really need any of that for my day-to-day use. Pretty much the only real reason for me to upgrade is that eventually (probably sooner, rather than later) Apple will stop supporting 10.2 in their software releases. Chances are that the next full release of iTunes will require 10.3, and the same goes for iSync and probably QuickTime as well.

So I'm not sure what I'll do. I'll probably wind up installing it on my work machine and then waiting to see if I miss those new features when I'm at home. If so, I'll go ahead and upgrade, even though that will mean a great deal of work for me to do so.

Atomic Supermonkeys Master Mind Control

The real story is that scientists have successfully gotten a monkey to control a prosthetic arm using impulses from the brain. This landmark study could someday allow for those suffering from paralysis to move damaged limbs without the need for prosthetic devices.

I've been fascinated by stories like this for years, ever since I first got my hands (or brain, for that matter) on the failed gaming device known as The Mind Drive. This was a cheap looking plastic device that plugged into a computer's serial port (which was the cause of many, many problems back in the day) and could be used to control specially-written games using impulses from your brain.

Basically you put your index finger on the thing and thought about moving to the left or right, and poof! The cursor would move. There were only a handful of games released for it, and I only used two, one of which was a bowling game, the other was a downhill skiing title, and neither worked particularly well. But it was a really cool piece of technology.

This wasn't the first attempt at using brainwaves in games. Sega and Atari both toyed with the idea, and long after the demise of the Mind Drive, I had a conversation with someone at Logitech, who apparently bought the technology when the original company folded. Apparently Logitech tried to make something worthwhile out of the tech but just couldn't get it to be reliable enough.

That's a shame, because I thought the technology showed a lot of promise for handicapped people or for those whose carpal tunnel has gotten so bad that they cannot use a regular mouse (or even trackball) anymore. But it wasn't particularly reliable, and while I did succeed in getting the clunky mouse drivers to work in Windows 3.1, it never worked very well (then again, maybe my mind wasn't disciplined enough for it). Maybe this newer technology will lead to a similar, but more reliable device being made, because I think there's a real need out there for something like this.

I wish I knew what this meant about me.

Galadriel

Possessing a rare combination of wisdom and humility, while serenely dominating your environment you selflessly use your powers to care for others.

Then again, according to this quiz, I'm an 1980s geek:

I don't know what either of these actually means, but hey, I guess that says something, right?

The robots are coming!

There really is a push in Japan right now for humanoid robots. I can't say I really understand why, but gosh aren't they cute? I bet when they reprogram themselves as rampaging killbots and rise up against their human overlords they'll probably lose some of that.

Catwoman scares me.

This costume doesn't even look good for what they're trying to do! By comparison, the neoprene suit Michelle Pfeiffer wore in Batman Returns is a stunning bit of design work. That one at least conveyed a real sexiness. This one looks like an S&M Halloween costume bought at Rite Aid that was mauled by a tiger. No offense to Ms. Berry, but she's going to look absolutely ridiculous in this getup. For her sake I really hope Sharon Stone has an even sillier costume in her role as the evil she-bitch bad person.

What all the amazons will be wearing this year.

What the heck is this?

The titan humbled.

The new company will be called AOL Time Warner and will combine AOL's online services with Time Warner's vast media and cable assets. In a world where online services, media and entertainment are rapidly converging, the new company could have almost unparalleled resources.

"It is probably the most significant development in the Internet business world to date," said Phil Leigh, an analyst at Raymond James. "If it hasn't been evident to most of us yet, it should be obvious to us now that the Internet is about audio and video and not just merely text and graphics."

News of the merger, the largest in corporate history, sent Time Warner's stock up at "dot-com" speed, with shares rising $25.31, or 39 percent, to $90.06. The stock has traded as high as $78.63 and as low as $57.19 during the past 52 weeks.

You gotta be kidding me.

What year is this? I haven't used a one-button mouse since the mid 80s, and don't know anyone who stuck with Apple's default mouse. The argument out of Cupertino that single button mouse make things simpler doesn't wash with me. You tell me which is the easier scenario: using the right mouse button to bring up a contextual menu, or hitting the option key + the single button? Right clicking is so integrated into every single OS X program (including Apple's own!) that I just don't understand why on earth they would bother shipping a $70, single button wireless mouse. And even without a second button, there's no doohicky wheel! Can you imagine paying $70 for a mouse that didn't even have a scroll wheel? I paid significantly less for a wired mouse not too long ago that has eight buttons and a scroll wheel. How Apple thinks they can get away with only one button is beyond me.

Head shot!

I've long learned to live with sniping, and whenever I'm bidding on something where I think there's a high probability that someone's going to try and snipe me (which isn't very often) I try and monitor the last minute of the auction and stop this from happening. Which I was doing last night, in fact. I checked at 1 minute 39 seconds, then 59 seconds, then 27 seconds, and then at 17 seconds...bam! Some bastard outbid me by $0.25 and won the auction. Grr. What really annoyed me about this is that for the entire length of the auction I was the sole bidder until this last one stepped in. Which means that this person had to have been watching the auction all that time (this was a week-long auction) and waiting for the final 17 seconds to send in his winning bid. That's just plain wrong.

Next time I'm going to have to switch to a text-only browser so I can do single second refreshes. But I shouldn't have to. I don't think eBay should change their rules to make it impossible for people to snipe, I just think people should know better.

Today's bit of bizarre youthful rebellion.

Why on earth anyone would want to splash this word across the door of a place of worship is beyond me, but it's worth mentioning that the system just celebrated its 20th anniversary (complete with a particularly ghastly commemorative GBA SP) in Japan.

As with so many things, thanks are due to FARK for the tip.

RealPC == vaporware.

I'll believe it when I see it.

NetNewsWire Rules!

Update: It's out of beta already...w00p.

Wireless and pointless.

Don't get me wrong, I don't love all the cables coming out of my computer, but with their ADC connection Apple's already reduced the power, USB and DVI connections for their LCD down to one, and there's a single USB cable running from my monitor to my keyboard and another from my mouse to my keyboard. That's hardly a mess.

By my best guess, I'd say the average amount of space between a monitor or CPU and keyboard is a foot, maybe two or three. How lazy do you have to be when that becomes too cumbersome for you? Here at work, there's literally mere inches between my keyboard and CPU (it's an LCD iMac, so my large Microsoft keyboard starts underneath the raised monitor).

And then there's the problem of batteries. Batteries! In something as simple as a mouse or keyboard! I'd hate to be in a situation where I can't get any work done because the batteries on my mouse have died. Logitech found a satisfactory solution to this problem by adding a cradle and rechargeable battery, but then that means you have to have a wire going from the computer to the cradle (or the wall to the cradle). I imagine Apple's planning something similar, since I can't see them releasing anything that requires AA batteries.

Hopefully this new cordless mouse will at least contain more than one button. Wireless mice and keyboards are significantly more expensive than their wired counterparts, and Bluetooth ones even more so. And if someone's going to have to shell out $100 or more for a keyboard and mouse, one would hope it offers a bit more than a single button. Actually, I'd love to find out if they're going to use this wacky wheel patent they filed for some time ago.

Update: According to Think Secret, these new devices will run on AA batteries. The mouse will require two, while the keyboard needs a whopping four.

The Internet, defined.

How Stuff Works is easily the single most useful site on the web (not counting Google of course, since it's a search engine and not an individual site), as it contains specific information on how practically everything works (and continues to grow daily). If you've ever wondered how something (whether it's mechanical, biological or astrological) functions you can find it there.

As for FARK, well it's FARK. No source is better for wild news stories, and when I say that I'm including the AP and Reuters, both of which have their own Oddly Enough stories. What FARK doesn't get enough credit for are those times when the site mentions actual breaking news stories...which happens fairly regularly. I'm not ashamed to admit that I first heard hostilities had broken out in Iraq care of FARK...the crazy thing is that FARK's news feed had the headlines up before CNN or The New York Times sent out their e-mail news alerts. FARK is so ingrained in the web these days, that apparently radio stations that have a wacky news item segment regularly get their stories from there, often not even attempting to change the order of the stories they lifted from FARK.

Both sites have user interaction, which is obviously one of the real strengths of the web, although FARK is much more two-way, with a large community of readers, and increased interaction through the regular "Photoshop this" posts where readers are encouraged to doctor photos.

For me the Internet is about two things: interaction and information. With the Internet you have a virtually unlimited amount of information at your disposal, and these two sites typify that, along with the kind of two-way communication that no other medium can enable.

Bill Maher's Blog

Make Weird Al #1

As such, I propose the following to test this theory:

Anyone reading this with an iTunes Music Store account should log in and purchase Weird Al's "Amish Paradise". Why this particular song? Because I can pretty much guarantee that it won't just randomly pop up in Billboard's charts. Let's see just how easy it is to game the list.

If you can, do it yourself, and tell everyone you know with a Mac. At only $0.99, it's hardly an expensive experiment.

The Ubiquitous Phil LaMarr

While he's probably best known for being the guy who got his brains splattered in Pulp Fiction or his work on Mad TV, he's actually been doing an insane amount of voiceover work in the last few years. He's the voice of Green Lantern on the Justice League show, the voice of Static Shock, he's Samurai Jack, he's the voice of Hermes, the rastafarian accountant on Futurama ("tally me banana!"), he played a couple of characters on Family Guy, he was a deluded warrior in The Animatrix, and he did an admirable job of not laughing out loud at the dumbass dialogue he was forced to spout in Metal Gear Solid 2. And that's just my quick list...check out this much larger one at the Voice Actor Page...the guy was on Mr. T and the T Force, for god's sake!

Clearly the guy is a talented voiceover actor. I mean, he had to say "La-li-lu-le-lo" repeatedly without laughing, and he worked alongside Mr. T. Who knew the guy who cowered and splattered in Pulp Fiction was capable of so much?

Hey, that's kind of clever.

Holy crap.

Everything must go!

My goal in all of this is to raise enough cash to buy a new, super high end video card. Those things are damn expensive, and as it currently stands, I'm looking at 5 FPS in Doom 3 or Half-Life 2. Tops. If I'm lucky. Now, if I manage to sell everything on the list...well, then I might just be able to justify a serious overhaul of my gaming machine...I'd love to replace that aging case and move up to an Athlon XP 3000+. But that's a big "if." For now, I'll be perfectly happy with a 256 MB video card.

Well that didn't take long.

Now I just need to convince Heather to move her blog to a more RSS-friendly place. I'm willing to accept that my friends have none, but no wife of mine is going to get by without a feed (not as long as I can change that, of course). Besides...blogs without comments are just weird, and I deserve the right to heckle her just like she's done to me.

Update: I've already moved her over to Movable Type here at loonyboi.com, complete with a full RSS feed.

Nü Blogs

I was surprised to discover that Harvey Pekar has a blog. I mean, I guess his comics have been a graphic blog for years, but with the American Splendor movie coming up, his blog should be pretty entertaining. It's actually a group blog, with his wife Joyce and adopted daughter Danielle contributing as well.

Sadly, neither of those two sites has RSS feeds that I can find, which means I'll have to remember to check them manually. I have a hard enough time remembering to read Roger Avary's blog, let alone three, but I'll manage.

Lastly (and this one does have an RSS feed, since it's on LiveJournal) is from my brother-in-law. His journal is what you would expect from an angst-ridden teen, so consider yourself warned.

As for this here site, I've added a small new feature which should make deciphering the XML icons on the left hand side a bit easier for newcomers to syndication. It's a little snippit of JavaScript taken from Karelia Software, the creators of the excellent OS X utility Watson. I've tweaked it a bit for my own use of course, but the idea is the same.

Jesus Spam!

It's good to know that a faith that condemns so many things has found a nice wholesome outlet like spam for finding a new audience.

So long, sweet mouse.

C'est la vie, I suppose, but I really did like that mouse. As I can't stand that Apple mouse(it's a fine mouse, but I hate the single button), I've already ordered a new one. Rather than pick up the latest version of the Intellimouse Explorer, I'm using this as an excuse to jump back to Logitech's side of the fence, where I've already ordered an MX 500 Optical Mouse. This looks to be a slight step up from my old Intellimouse, as it has a whopping 8 buttons, and an uber-optical system which should hopefully overcome my one problem with my old mouse, which was the lack of precision that plagued the first generation of optical mice.

While I'm sure the mouse itself is going to work just fine, I can't say I know anything about Logitech's OS X support. I've got a zillion and one application-specific commands assigned to the various buttons on my Intellimouse, and hopefully I'll be able to adapt those to my new hardware. I'm optimistic. And for what it's worth, 4 years is a long damn time for me to stick with a single piece of hardware. Especially one I used all day, every day for much of that time. That mouse long outlived the machine it came with, and the only piece of that box that's still around is the case (which is in remarkably good shape, although it needed a new power supply after the original literally went down in flames). Hopefully this next mouse will last just as long.

Harry Potter Hysteria

It's easy to forget in all this hysteria that all of this isn't about a movie, or a new toy, or even a video game...it's all about a book. And a big one at that, clocking in at 255,000 words, making it some 70,000 words longer than the New Testament. How cool is that? I mean, besides a few crotchety British writers and some religious nutjobs, who could find anything wrong with this? I think it's great that kids are lining up around the block to get their hands on an actual book. Besides, I'm looking forward to reading it as much as they are (well, not quite as much, but I'm looking forward to reading it after Heather's done with it). Harry Potter is remarkably well written...yeah, it's no Shakespeare, but who cares? It's intelligent, surprisingly mature in its subject matter, and kids eat it up with a spoon. I say keep 'em coming.

Yikes.

NASA Gets Loony

If I had my way, there would be cartoon characters on every kind of heavy weaponry and artillery. PATRIOT missiles would have the face of Sluggo on them, F-16s would be adorned with Goofy and Donald Duck, and tanks would have Speedy Gonzoles. Because nothing would be better than turning on the news and hearing how many people were killed by Sluggos, Goofies and Speedies. But then, I'm weird that way.

(Thanks to Boing Boing for the story)

The Matrix Unloaded

Speaking of The Matrix, on a whim last week I went and saw The Matrix Reloaded. While I certainly enjoyed myself (there are worse ways to spend an afternoon), I remain an outsider to the whole Matrix fan base. This sequel had more of what I liked from the first movie (great action sequences and special effects), but sadly it also had a lot more of what I didn't like (terrible dialogue and unlikable characters). And like the first movie, I found pretty much every moment that didn't take place within the matrix to be a big bore. When the characters shut the hell up and started pummeling on each other, I thought it was a decent movie. But when they started talking, or standing around in a poorly lit room with sunglasses on just for the sake of looking cool (you can't see! What's wrong with you people! It was like an entire cast of Bonos!) I found myself wishing for a fast forward button.

But it wasn't a terrible movie. Not particularly good, but I think I liked this one more than the first. If nothing else, this one has the lovely Monica Bellucci, who doesn't do a whole lot more than stand there and look pretty -- but at least she's in there to shine some light on the movie.

My anti-phone line

Here's how it works: they send you a box that you plug into your local network (you'll need a router if you intend to use your internet connection at the same time as your phone), and you then plug your regular telephone(s) into that unit. You get a real phone number in the area code of your choice, and it costs about 1/3rd of even the cheapest line from Verizon, and you get features like Call Waiting, Caller ID and Voice Mail for free. And best of all, there aren't any mysterious charges, like those FCC line fees you're not supposed to be charged for in the first place.

I've only had it plugged in for one day, but so far it's really very cool. I can make and receive calls with no problems, and the sound quality is great. And it works through my firewall with virtually no extra configuration needed.

The only down side to this is that I probably won't be able to run a UT2003 (or 2004, when it comes out) server, as that means I'll be taking bandwidth away from my phone line. My cable modem offers plenty of bandwidth in both directions, but running a game server might be a bit too much. But it's worth it to have a working phone line without having to deal with a company like Verizon.

Verizon's Pointless WiFi Hotspots

All over Manhattan (they claim to have thousands), phone booth ads are popping up that delightfully inform you that "you're hot," meaning that you're standing within a Verizon WiFi Hotspot, which in theory offers free WiFi Internet access for one and all. Now ordinarily, I'd be the first to say this is great, and a wonderful idea...except you have to wonder what the heck Verizon was thinking when they placed some of these. While WiFi hotspots are wonderful, they're only useful if you're someplace where you can actually pull out a laptop to utilize it. This is what makes those T-Mobile hotspots at Starbucks so inviting. But having them on random street corners is downright pointless.

I mean, what am I going to do, stop in the middle of the street, plop down on the sidewalk and check my e-mail? I've seen a handful of these things already, and not one of them has been anywhere near a bench, table or chair of any kind. It kind of makes you wonder...what if these aren't really hotspots at all, but just ads that claim they are? After all, if you don't pull out a laptop or WiFi-enabled PDA to verify this, you're just taking their word on it.

WiFabulous

What's really quite funny, is that while my wireless network is locked down with wireless encryption, apparently the other two networks within my building (or the ones nearby) are not, as I'm able to connect to them at will and browse the web while leeching off their bandwidth. And as a testament to the awesome reception of my iBook, I'm able to get just as strong a signal to those networks as I am to my own. Yowza.

I'm amazed that people leave their networks so open, probably without realizing what they're doing. I think it's great when people intentionally set up WiFi hot spots, but most people just forget how far that signal can go. At E3 there were people browsing through some poor shlub's vacation photos, because he forgot to turn off his WiFi sharing. Oops. At least there weren't any particularly private photos there!

Hooray for gamers!

The article goes on to say that in a study, people who played Medal of Honor for 10 days scored better on visual perception tests than those who played Tetris for 10 days. If you ask me, forcing someone to play Tetris for 10 days in a row is nothing short of insane. At least Medal of Honor offers huge amounts of variety. I mean, I love Tetris and all, but 10 days? Good lord, I'd go nuts.

TiVo!

Speaking of TiVo, they actually had some good financial news for a change. They're still losing money, but they're down to a mere $7.9 million loss for this past quarter, down from $35.2 from a year ago. With any luck they'll get profitable in the near future, as life without my TiVo is a scary idea, and I'd rather not see them bought up by AOL Time Warner, Sony or some other company.

Spam Begone!

But all that is coming to an end, as I've finally found a mail filtering system that works: it's called POPFile, and it's a Perl-based system, that once trained, works like a charm. After just a day of training, I've already seen a huge drop off in spam, and that's a good thing indeed. If you're really hardcore, you can actually run this concurrently with Spam Assassin, although that's really not necessary. Once trained, POPFile is all you need. And if you're as sick of porno mails or HGH ads, or Nigerian confidence scams, I highly recommend checking it out.

Reciprocity

New for me at Amazon.com.

Here's the description that accompanied this item:

Second only to Nature. Astroglide® enhances the comfort and ease of intimate activity and acts as a moisturizer for vaginal dryness. Doctor Recommended. Water-Based. Water-Soluble.

So I decided to comb through my purchase history. What could I have bought that would have suggested this item? Was it all those Deep Space Nine DVDs? My Bluetooth adapter? My cell phone? Babylon 5? Super Mario Sunshine? The mind boggles. I mean, I guess it could be worse...my TiVo doesn't think I'm gay.

I guess T&A's not worth all that much after all...

Um...whee?

Pretty Cool

For the unaware, here's the general idea: you browse the store like you would your own collection, and can purchase songs for $0.99 and whole albums for $9.99 (two disc sets are around $19). After you've bought it, it's more or less yours, and you can put it on an iPod, or burn it to CD. No monthly fees, no expiration dates, nothing.

I only rarely buy new CDs, but I have to admit, this is pretty cool. Ever since I got my iPod and a computer with a seriously huge hard drive, I've been convinced that CDs suck...this pretty much cements it. As I've seen from my insane packing experience, CDs take up space, and they can be scratched or cracked, and generally speaking they're overpriced as well. With Apple's music service, I can bypass that whole burden and get straight to the music right now, and it's legal to boot.

But of course, I really don't buy music very often. The selection on the iTunes Music Store (couldn't they come up with a better name than that?) is pretty good from my casual stroll around the listings. There's an impressive selection of Tori Amos and Pink Floyd, although since I pretty much own all that there's no reason for me to buy any of it. I like the idea of being able to buy a single track off a CD single though, as you can with certain releases. I mean, how cool would it be to buy just the b-side tracks off of singles for $0.99 a piece? And unlike Amazon or any other online retailer, therea are 30 second clips from every song that's available for purchase, with no exceptions. That rules.

I also like the idea of being able to make my own "greatest hits" compilation. In order for this to work there has to be enough music from a particular artist, and that doesn't look possible quite yet with most bands. But if you want your own David Bowie or Bob Dylan collection, you're in luck, as there are plenty available from each.

One criticism I've read online is that there aren't any songs from indie labels. I can't imagine that being a long-time thing. In order to launch they needed mainstream music and lots of it. Now they can concentrate on building their catalog, and I'm sure indie labels will get in on the action. If they really want to be cool, they can go the MP3.com route and let anyone who wants to sell their music. By leveling the playing field, they could really give new bands great exposure.

My one real complaint is that there aren't any reviews of albums on here. I'm a total review junkie, and whether I'm reading ShackReviews before buying a game or movie reviews at NetFlix or book and movie reviews at Amazon, I always like to know what other people think about the stuff I'm about to pay for. There's a rudimentary recommendation system in place, but reviews would be much more helpful.

Beyond that, I'm sold on the thing. The next time I buy music (whenever that may be) it's safe to assume that if I can, I'll get it off of iTunes.

Boxes...so many boxes.

The apartment is of course a mass of unpacked boxes (it looks sort of like a poorly made first person shooter, actually) but it's a start, and it's going to take a long time to get everything put away.

In the meantime, I'd be happy if I was able to get cable or internet access, which I still don't have thanks to a series of incredibly frustrating events. I successfully got online last night using my cell phone via Bluetooth, although that was at a whopping 9600 kpbs. But it did work, so that's good enough to check my e-mail (even if it did take 10 minutes to download 100 e-mails). And tonight I plan on firing up a text-only web browser (either Opera with images turned off or good ol' Lynx) to try and surf that way. It's a pain in the ass to do now, since I should have my nice beefy broadband connection, but if I'm somewhere on the road it's actually quite cool to be able to check my e-mail or fire up ICQ. Hopefully that will be resolved soon though, because being without Internet access makes me all jittery.

What would you do?

But here's where it gets really weird. There's no accompanying text of any kind in the package (it's just a nondescript CD mailer envelope), and the CD itself just says "V Communications" in white. Upon putting the CD in the drive, I was surprised to see it had the cryptic title of "62100824", and as for its actual contents? There's just one file, labeled "PartitionCommander801.exe". Very strange. It seems unlikely that it's a virus, but why on earth would anyone send such a suspicious package? Even if we had asked for this, I can't imagine we'd trust it enough to run the file on here. Unless it's some kind of Geek Porn, there's no logical reason for this.

Products that don't exist, but should (Part 1)

As I've said before, when I move, I intend to use my cell phone as my only phone line. Since this is one of those new fangled Bluetooth phones, I want a way to use my existing telephone as a headset for when I'm at home. I like the feel of my current corded and wireless phones, and within my apartment, I'd like to be able to use those instead of my small cell phone. This is something that is theoretically possible with Bluetooth, but alas, such a product does not exist, or at least if it does, I haven't been able to find it. Yet.

Woah. I just posted to...

Wired, Wireless and Wire-Free

We did some looking at our various expenses, and made the decision to move completely to cellular, and not bother getting a land line when we move. The fact is, that what use is a land line if you have two cellphones in a household? In our current apartment, it's not really an issue, since being in a basement apartment we don't get stellar reception (it works, but it's not great). In our new place, we'll be above ground, so that won't be an issue.

I'm also using this as an excuse to ditch Sprint PCS in favor of T-Mobile. Thanks to this awesome deal at Amazon.com, I'm getting a Sony Ericsson T68i, which has built-in Bluetooth and a color screen, for the low-low-price of -$30. Yeah, I've heard mixed things about the phone, but at that price, if it sucks I won't feel bad for ditching it.

With this new Bluetooth wrinkle, I'll be pretty set up in this new apartment. Between all of my devices, I'll have Bluetooth, WiFi, and some good ol' Ethernet cabling, all hooked up to a broadband internet connection. Not too shabby.

Way to Go LiveJournal!

And now for something completely different.

(Thanks to Boing Boing, who got it from Meme Pool)

Just when I thought I couldn't get any geekier...

I've actually been immersed in *nix geekiness lately, as I've been working to get the loonybin back up to full speed after flushing it out and starting anew with the recently released Mandrake 9.1. I had previously attempted to upgrade from Mandrake 8 to 9.0, but that didn't go well at all, thanks to a handful of issues that plagued the initial release. Some of those remain in 9.1, but by and large this is a much better version.

One thing I was thrilled to discover actually has nothing to do with Mandrake, but OS X. Ever since I switched from a PC to a Mac as my main desktop, I've had issues with Apple's implementation of Samba. For some reason, when copying to a Linux machine over SMB, it's painfully slow, but also has a tendency to lock up the system after a few minutes. This was a really big annoyance for me, and was driving me nuts. It wasn't until I rebuilt my server that it occurred to me that using a protocol meant to connect Unix to Windows machines to connect two *nix boxes was actually quite moronic. So I switched to NFS, and good lord, is it better. It's stupid fast, I have it set to automount my backup and user directories on startup in OS X, and it doesn't crash at all.

...but that all just contributes to my ever-increasing geekiness. I make this pledge: if I ever get so bad as to declare all Linux distributions inadequate and insist on compiling the kernel myself, I'll check myself into geek rehab.

Star Trek, Michael Moore and 9/11

For those who want More, Moore, More, Entertainment Weekly has an interesting Q&A with the director of Bowling for Columbine. He talks about his controversial Oscar speech, along with his plans for the future. Apparently his next project is tentatively titled Fahrenheit 9/11, and deals with the Bush administration's actions after 9/11. Sounds like fun to me.

And now for something completely different.

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Save the original trilogy!

Why, it's just like TiVo!

...only it takes away all the freedom that makes TiVo such a worthwhile service. Where TiVo puts all the freedom back in the hands of the user, this device keeps it firmly in the grasp of the broadcasters. You can still timeshift alright, but broadcasters can prevent you from timeshifting their programs. Not only that, but broadcasters can also insert their own commercials whenever you hit your pause button.

What, exactly is the point of a timeshifting device, if it cripples itself? There isn't any. But that doesn't matter to the people pushing this device...they see TiVo as taking away their advertising dollars, and this is their way of combating that.

Hey, I understand, I do. But if TiVo's having a hard time reaching critical mass with total freedom, how on earth is someone going to be pushed into getting a device that offers only marginally more convenience than the device they already have?

Sadly, this could actually be quite successful. If you get Time Warner's InDemand service, you already know what broadcaster-mandated timeshifting is like. This could theoretically be an extension of that idea, and if it were fully integrated into cable boxes, there is a very real possibility that people might choose to take advantage of it.

So how can we prevent this Orwellian take over of cable broadcasts? We can't. All we can do is hope that TiVo continues to pick up more steam and become the mass-market device it should have been from day one.

As readers of this blog may already know, I'm a serious power-TiVo user. I love my TiVo...earlier today I opened an SSH connection to my home server and set my TiVo to tape a show after reading about it over lunch. Now that is what I call cool. I'm a serious believer in Fair Use. I have no moral problems with fast forwarding through commercials, nor do I have any problems about sucking video off of my TiVo and archiving it on DVD or VCD, as I'm doing with .hack//SIGN.

I think everyone should have the freedom of a TiVo. It's a totally liberating experience...I haven't had to worry about catching a show during its original time slot in years. When my TiVo was having problems I was terrified that I would suddenly have to look up when some of my favorite shows air...I don't even know what channel some things are on! And don't even ask me what numbers any channels are...my Pronto has totally spoiled me there.

So support TiVo. Heck, support ReplayTV if that's your schtick. But whatever you do, send a message to AOLTW: that freedom is here, and we ain't giving it back.

The great and powerful blog.

Blogs are a strange thing, really. Individually they're simple journals, but collectively, I believe they represent a kind of hive mind...a diverse, but very real vox populi, and there's a lot to be learned by scanning over the survey sites like Popdex, blogdex and Technorati. All bloggers are not alike, as can be seen by reading over some of the more controversial topics at Popdex. But nonetheless it can be fascinating to read all those different, often dissenting viewpoints of a single issue.

So if we agree that blogs present a unique way to gauge the voice of the people, what can society gain from this superstream of data? I think the answer lies in politics. Blogs can, and should play a larger role in how politicians view their constituents. Think about it for a moment: which presents a better source for opinions, a focus group, cold-call survey, or a scan of the blogspace? If blogging continues to get more and more mainstream (and the entry of AOL, Lycos and Google into this space certainly has the potential to do just that), then the power of the blog can only grow.

But let's be honest here: it has a long way to go before this is possible. Bloggers are a diverse group, but it's still viewed by the general public (those who even understand the concept, that is) by something that's done by a very specific kind of person. And while that's not necessarily true, the fact is that if one were to survey the entire blogspace, they would find a lot of similar traits among bloggers. But there's nothing that says this has to be the case forever.

Some of the most exciting developments in the evolution of blogging come from the kind of social upheaval it can represent. The fact that blogs have given a voice to the homeless is a huge development. And it's absolutely amazing that during the recent hostage crisis in Russia, it was a blog that allowed the first unfiltered news to get out.

In the near future, blogs will almost certainly remain a pastime for geeks from all walks of life. But I look forward to the day when people turn to blogs as a way of scanning the current zeitgeist. Who knows...the day may come where blogs change the world.

Good lord, Barbie has a blog.

Back and better than ever.

Friday evening, when I probably should have been relaxing after a week's worth of work, I undertook the rather stressful task of disassembling my beloved TiVo and installing a new second hard drive and TurboNET ethernet adapter. While the procedure wasn't without its difficulties, I did finally get the deed done and now I've got one really badass hacked TiVo to play with.

I didn't just install Telnet, FTP and TiVoWeb, I went for the whole hog, adding the MfsStream module for extracting video (I then use TY Converter to make 'em into MPEGs...it works great!), CptanPanic's great MovieSearch module (which makes browsing for movies really easy) and I've even got PHP running on this thing. So while I'll never be able to play MP3s or show photos on here like the Series2 boxes can do, I think I'll be just fine without them. Besides, who needs that, when I can burn as many episodes of Futurama to DVD as I like?

Here's a shot of my tricked-out TiVoWeb installation. Neat, huh?

He's okay, folks!

After a rather tense day and a half of work, my TiVo is alive and well. Or close to it, anyway. The extra hard drive I put in there did indeed die on me, and after trying several low-level recovery methods, I've pronounced it dead. The good news, of course, is that everything else seems to be working fine.

While I had briefly considered upgrading to a Series2, since this one is still alive and kicking I've decided to get a new hard drive, since I can never go back to having a "30 hour" (that is to say 9 hours, at the best resolution). While I was at it, I've gone and ordered a TurboNET ethernet card. TiVo's official Home Media Option sounds nice and all, but I'd much rather use the TiVo Web Project, a free alternative that only works with Series 1 and also can be used to extract video for backups on VCD/DVD (and let's face it, that's a seriously cool idea). So I'm greatly relieved by all of this. The thought of being TiVo-less for even a day or two is a frightening notion, something that other TiVo owners I'm sure can understand.

Stranded.

Think about it: how prevalent in your life is the Internet? Leaving aside the necessities like e-mail and IM to communicate with others (that's pretty much exclusively how I talk to the other members of the Shacknews crew), there's a whole host of smaller things that are no less important.

I get 90% of my world and local news from the Internet. I pay bills online, monitor my bank account online, shop for games, books, movies and gobs more online. I check movie times online. I look up directions and phone numbers online. I check the weather online. Heck, I even use the Internet for reference...I haven't had to pick up a dictionary or thesaurus in years. Actually, truth be told I do a lot of those from the same program: Watson...I can't live without it.

All these major and minor things that I spend my time throughout the day doing depend heavily on the Internet. I'm not some 'net junkie who can't go a week without it or anything (this has been proven...I never went online while I was on my honeymoon, thank you very much) but it's amazing just how much my life depends on Internet access.

It makes me wonder just how devastating a nationwide Internet blackout would be. Would people be rioting in the streets? Probably not. But it would cause a lot more chaos than you might think. Sure, there would be a lot of angry perverts who can't find their pr0n, but the problems would be much more widespread. Wall Street probably wouldn't shut down completely (maybe Nasdaq) but many of the major companies would be brought to a standstill, particularly those multi-national conglomerates.

Then again, maybe there would be rioting in the streets...all those pasty-faced programmers unable to re-order their Penguin Mints, Jolt Gum or Caffinated Soap from Think Geek might get a bit violent. And after ten minutes without Slashdot who knows what they'd be capable of?

Perhaps we'd all switch to a completely different system for exchanging information...instead of dialing up to the internet, which is structured like a giant web, there would be one long chain of direct connections. If you were the person on Point A who needed to get something to Point Z it might take a while, but it would get there eventually. Or perhaps you could just give it to your local geek who would put it on his iPod and messenger it down the line.

Ah, but what do I know. I'm just a geek stranded in his office without access to the rest of the world. Maybe I'll go outside and get some fresh air. Nah, I think I'll take my chances in here.

Take me, I'm old!