Friday 13 July 2007 @8:45
Somehow we got hooked on the Discovery Channel show Man vs. Wild, where former UK special forces soldier Bear Grylls parachutes into some god-forsaken landscape with just a knife and a windbreaker, and demonstrates how to survive for several days and find civilization again. Along the way, he ingests unspeakable things and gets himself in more trouble than needed — knowingly jumping breast-deep into quick sand, for example — ostensibly to instruct us on how to get out.
It’s a little hard to explain my fascination. I can tell just from the adverts that I’m not the expected target audience. But I think it stimulates some deep-seated survival instinct that we all must have. (And if this effete urbanite has any interest in survival under such conditions, then it must be innate.)
I sense a certain connection to another of my unlikely interests: dystopian literature and film. I am fascinated by the various ways healthy societies collapse, and what it takes to navigate the new world order. Bear’s adventures end the moment he finds a paved road, but I’m much more interested in what would happen when there’s no reasonable civilization to return to. If you can never again be certain of getting your next meal from a supermarket or restaurant, what then? How to organize a new society, and possibly a resistance, whilst surviving in the jungle?
Perhaps these questions are beyond the scope of the show, and the only question needed to explain our fascination is this: When will the Etonian hottie take off his shirt?
There’s also a sense in which I’m waiting for him to fail. Just once, one of his ballsy maneuvers should land him in enough trouble that he needs an airlift. For the sake of realism, of course, not Schadenfreude…
Wednesday 14 February 2007 @10:02
I’m really not into file sharing. Really! We currently have a 40G music archive and the vast, vast majority of it is legit; I have a closet full of CDs to prove it. The few tracks that are less than legit are more likely to be ripped from a borrowed CD or copied from a friend’s hard drive than downloaded from an anonymous peer-to-peer network.
The first time I heard about BitTorrent, it sounded extremely cool. You get pieces of the file from various peers, and make the pieces you’ve got available to other peers. They call the whole thing a swarm. Until today, I have used it only to download images of Linux Live CDs — perfectly legit.
But even for less legit targets, I’m not sure it’s doing me much good, perhaps because my tastes are too obscure? If there’s just one peer, in rural Spain, with a 2kb/s throttle, then it’s going to take two days to download a 1 hour video? And if nobody wants the seeds I have, am I destined to remain a leech?
This doesn’t really seem worthwhile!
I blurred the torrent filename, but for the curious, I’ve been a Showtime subscriber for the past 6 years, and for now I have no intention of canceling. I guess we subscribed for Queer as Folk, but when that ended the various other original series have kept us hooked: Huff, Sleeper Cell, L Word, Weeds, Penn & Teller Bullshit; and I’m looking forward to The Tudors and This American Life. But the other day, my DVR messed up and missed one episode in an ongoing series. I already pay for the production of these shows, so I firmly believe using an ‘alternative’ distribution channel to access them is legitimate.
Monday 8 January 2007 @12:12
I missed a big chunk of yesterday’s Simpsons because it was delayed by some silly game and the DVR is not smart enough to compensate.
But in what I saw, the Aquarium by Camille Saint-Saëns (from Le Carnaval des Animaux — that link is to the iTunes Music Store) played a significant role. It was the soundtrack during the home movie. (I wish I could say I identified the piece on my own, but the closed-captions gave it away. In fact, they’re often helpful for decoding cultural references in the Simpsons, e.g.: [March theme from The Great Escape (1963) playing.])
It occurred to me that I don’t have much Saint-Saëns in my collection. Now, I’m not typically an enormous fan of French impressionists — in music or painting — and I guess I sometimes lump Camille in with Debussy and Ravel. Maybe not an entirely accurate classification, but I’m not a musicologist. Anyway, I certainly enjoy the Saint-Saëns Organ Concerto. In fact, I thought I had a copy, but if so, it never made its way onto my hard disks. (My grandmother was a big fan of that piece, having encountered it in the France part of Epcot… I believe it’s the soundtrack during the simulated lift up La Tour Eiffel. Took us several visits to identify it when I was a kid.)
No, it turns out the only Saint-Saëns in my collection is The Swan from Carnaval — probably the most famous piece therein, and part of some other compilation — and a Havanaise for violin and orchestra. Will have to remedy that.
Sunday 17 September 2006 @11:18
This TV show advert — plastered all around New York lately — is making me angry. Why?
That curly thing is not an apostrophe! And you don’t have to be a font freak or typography wonk to know the difference. In grade school — before I could distinguish Garamond from Gill Sans, before Adobe Systems was founded — I knew that an apostrophe curved down and to the left.
So how did this happen? Considering that computer keyboards have no ‘left curly single quote’ key — and that probably 98% of all computer users wouldn’t know how to type that character if their lives depended on it — how could this gaffe occur when the apostrophe key is right there on your keyboard?
Yes, you know where I’m going with this: SmartQuotes.™
This is the feature on many word processors and desktop publishers that automatically converts typewriter-style straight quotes into curly ones. Unfortunately, it does a poor job of it, and that’s often worse than not doing the job at all.
Now, I’m not one to ridicule or be offended by home-made garage sale fliers and grocery store signage with their superfluous quotation marks. Er, well, I don’t extensively ridicule them.
But here is a case of a major broadcasting firm with professional graphic artists plastering their large full-color ads across a major city in which you can’t swing a cat without hitting a designer. There’s just no excuse.
P.S., it’s even wrong in the HTML on the web site:
Sunday 20 August 2006 @10:43
I just read with horror (but not, perhaps, surprise) that TiVo won its long-running patent infringement lawsuit against EchoStar. Moreover, the judge issued an injunction that EchoStar would have to disable the infringing features of its customers’ systems within 30 days! This is a nightmare scenario.
I have to imagine that EchoStar will manage to negotiate a licensing deal in time, rather than update all its (soon to be ex-) customers’ boxes with paperweight functionality.
The functionality that my DishPVR provides is nowhere near as fancy as the real TiVo, and to think that what it does do is patent-worthy in 2006 is laughable. Folks on slashdot pointed out, though, that TiVo built its prototype and filed its patents in 1997, when the A/V capabilities of stock computers were more primitive. Also, supposedly TiVo approached EchoStar to license the technology way back, and left them with a demo unit. The demo unit disappeared, and sometime later Dish came out with their own knock-off.
I guess this is the one major difference between Dish Network and DirecTV; the latter licensed TiVo software from the beginning. (Didn’t I read at some point that DirecTV bought Dish, or vice versa?)
Thursday 15 June 2006 @19:19
Nothing that new or amazing, but fun all the same: the church sign generator. Found via god hates shrimp.
Thursday 8 June 2006 @13:48
Many bytes have been spent comparing Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to the ‘legitimate’ news organizations, most notably when Jon appeared on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004. Today I just want to point out a particularly great moment I witnessed on Tuesday night.
The guest was conservative author Bill Bennett, pimping his new book, America: the Last, Best Hope. The ‘hope’ in the title refers to the hope of all people to live free, and this history of the United States is a narrative about the progress of freedom.
Jon Stewart jumped on this to get Bennett to defend the talking points on Bush’s constitutional amendment to restrict marriage—once and for all—to straight folks. How is that about the progress of freedom?
Bennett began, predictably, by defending the traditional family structure and the stability it provides. This led into Stewart’s strongest moment:
Stewart: So why not encourage gay people to join in that family
arrangement if that is what provides stability to a society?
Bennett: Well I think if gay… gay people are already members of
families.
Stewart: What?
Bennett: They’re sons and they’re daughters…
Stewart: So that’s where the buck stops? That’s the gay ceiling? [laughs]
Bennett: Look, it’s a debate about whether you think marriage is
between a man and a women.
Stewart: I disagree. I think it’s a debate about whether you think gay
people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.
Slam! Huge cheers from the audience. The conversation continued, and they even split it over the commercial break, which is rare. It only got worse for Bennett, but to his credit he seemed a very gracious guest, even in defeat. There are video clips to be found on YouTube if you’re so inclined.
I guess I don’t need to say much else about Bush’s marriage amendment, except that I find it difficult not to take the right-wing rhetoric personally: “Watch it, that’s my family you’re libeling, you pricks.” I think a perfectly rational response is: “how I live my life is none of your god-damned business.” But it doesn’t seem to hold much sway with these folks.
To my conservative friends: yes, I know very well that Democrat candidates don’t tend to endorse gay marriage either, and that Clinton sold us out years ago by signing the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Furthermore, at least the position of some social conservatives seems to stem—at the best of times—from their deeply-held (though misguided) convictions. Democrats that don’t fully support gay marriage seem to base their positions on the poll numbers instead, which I admit is pathetic.
One more of Jon Stewart’s lines from the segment: “Divorce is not caused because 50% of marriages end in gayness.”
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