Dot Product

There are a few shows that I’d like to share, just in case you have not come across them in your travels. Aside from Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, which I’m assuming everyone has access to in one form or another via Sci-Fi or DVD, I would like to commend to your attention Hustle and MI:5, two british series that have exceptional writing and are top notch dramas. Hustle is about a group of grifters who work the “long con” together in London, and MI:5 is about the British domestic intelligence service (think “24″, but scrap the real-time angle and kick the writing up by a factor of 100x).

[dusts off the cobwebs of this spam-comment infested blog]
[taps the mic] is this thing on?

Yes, I abandoned my blog, as have so many others as time became pinched and finally snuffed from the list of resources I have at my disposal. Does this post signify that the air of free time has once again returned to breath life into this dark hollow?

No, it simply means I’ve learned to breathe under water.

I do not promise daily posts, but there will be something here to read, for better or worse, having to do with my life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the poor souls who must endure and toil beside me in this domain. Will it amuse? Edify? Uplift? Make your hair grow back? Do your taxes? Love your second aunt (once removed)? Surely not. Set not your expectations too high and you will always be pleasantly surprised.

Oh, and sadly I’ve turned off comments. I’m sorry, but the one thing I really DON’T have time for is fighting back the HORDES of spambots trying to use my blog to sell all manners of snake oil and quackery… and damned to anyone out there who buys their crap… THEY are the reason such spammers are still a problem, a decade after this problem really got bad. So if you have any comments, please send them to me in an e-mail. You’re a resourceful fellow, I’m sure you can find my address

No spoilers. Just wanted to say that having seen the movie, I think they’ve really reached the point where even a 2.5 hour movie is an inappropriate format for rendering the later books. Quite simply, the richness that makes the later books so good is gone. The movie is still a visual feast, but the characters often act in a way that would seem disjointed if you didn’t know the book.

In truth, a mini-series that lays it out over 7 - 14 hours is really the only way they could get it right. Too bad there just isn’t the money side to support that sort of move.

Yep, you guessed it: too many processes demanding time on my wetware, and writing this blog has always been a nice’d process, so hence no reports for the last couple of weeks. What’s been keeping me busy?

Well, beyond the usual suspects, the International Business course I’m taking at Union is wrapping up, and last week was the final, and this week is the project presentation. *Grind* *Grind* *Grind*. BTW, one of the cool things about the course has been reading The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. You may have caught him on the Daily Show a few months ago (that’s where I heard of him first). The premise of the book is that the world’s competitive environment is becoming flat, both for businesses and for people. Anybody in programming knows their competition isn’t necessarily the guy down the street, but some clever fellow in Bangalore, India. But it spans FAR beyond software engineering, and this book is for people who need to understand just how far it goes and what it might mean for us going forward.

The book has been a focal point of several fights between Maggie and I. She doesn’t like the book, thinks the author is wrong on several fronts, and is concerned that the perception that a flattening world is good will be at the cost of cultural diversity and heritage. The latter is my concern as well, though many of the factors that Friedman talks about in his book have made other cultures more accessable to the likes of me… and that has to be good, right?

Anyway, the book is worth picking up, even if Friedman has a tendency to make his point over and over again.

I got to see Serenity on Saturday. Wow, that was a GREAT movie. I had high hopes, but modest expectations. After all, how many episodic television series ever made a successful translation to the big screen, or even did well in 2-hour movie format in made-for-television? Even big story arc shows like Babylon 5 did not shine in 2 hour format… some were passible, but not what I would call outstanding.

Well, Serenity delivered. I won’t throw in any spoilers out there, just in case some of you were considering a visit to the local cineplex to see it. Just a bit of advice: if you’re going to see it, do it NOW, because it will be gone in another week.

“WTF?” you might ask? “I thought you said it was good!”

It is good. So is ‘The Constant Gardener’, which disappeared this week even though 2 weeks ago it was sold out when I tried to see it!

Indeed, if you have to wonder why Serenity is doing so poorly at the box office (just under $18 million since release), all you need to do is look at the cineplex market as a whole. There were SEVEN new releases for Serenity’s opening weekend, including the Jodie Foster thriller Flightplan (which looks EXCELLENT). There were FIVE this past weekend. Do the math… even the cineplex 18 will have to stop showing some movies just to make room for the new ones, even if they’re bringing in a respectable number of viewers.

All this spells bad news for Serenity and fans of the show. In my area, they had 4 screens of Serenity on opening weekend at 4 different venues. I don’t know if they were sold out opening weekend, but if they were, it still wouldn’t be much of a splash in the till overall… there are only so many seats in these theaters!

The showing I went to on Saturday was almost sold out. There were still a few front row, snap-your-neck seats in the front, but it was at least 95% filled. I’m betting it won’t be showing in another 2 weeks though. If the same thing is happening in the majority of other markets, it’s going to look pretty bleak for any follow-up movies. Serenity cost $40 million to make, not including marketing.

For an interesting discussion on this topic, and some speculation that the DVD for the movie will be out December 20th, check out this link.

I’ve been avoiding Second Life since it became available last year. I recognize pure, unadulterated mind-crack when I see it. When I was at Clarkson, I knew a few folks who were into Multi-User Domains (MUDs), and Multi User Shells (MUSHs), and one or two that were totally consumed by them. I dabbled a bit in TinyTim, a MUD run by some friends at Clarkson. It was alot of fun, and if you weren’t careful, you could blow significant chunks of your day away in there.

I didn’t have that kind of time then, and I don’t now either.

Still, when an article showed up in Make about some of the things they were going to be doing in Second Life, and still other articles caught my interest in virtual economies… well, it’s been nagging me: Is it really all that?

So last night I opened a free account and downloaded the Mac OS X client. Click Click Click, and I’m in.

They start you out on an island with some handy demonstrations and tutorials on how things work. Then you teleport to one of the Welcome areas where you can run into other noobs and those who prey upon and protect said noobs.

Is it the Metaverse from Snow Crash? No, but it’s the closest thing yet, and that’s definitely the direction Second Life is going. The amount of stuff to look at and interact with is astounding. As a sample, I went to Seacliff (which was recommended in their in-game guide book). Here is a snapshot:

Pretty damn cool. I’ll definitely be back for more exploration… and another crack junkie is minted.

Many thanks to MattH for sending along a link to some excellent Machinima: Return. I’m amazed at just how much they are able to do with the game engine. I think the level of expression for the characters is on par with some animated series… wow.

While we’re on the subject of media stuff worth looking at, if you haven’t looked at Star Wreck: In The Pikinning, I can highly recommend it. It’s sort of half-spoof, half serious in a blending of Star Trek and Babylon 5 settings. Maggie (who spent a year in Finland and knows the language) says it was made by Finnish Sci-Fi fans for Finnish Sci-Fi fans, with Finnish humor. It’s still accessible for the rest of us, and worth the trouble of download.

Finally, for those of you using OS X 10.4, check out Widget Television VF1. It has quite a few channels on there, including NASA TV. My only complaint is that it’s kinda big to clutter my Dashboard with…. but I’ll remove it from my active Dashboard and save it for when I need a fix.

Well, it took almost 5 months, but the blog spammers have finally caught on that I switched to WordPress. @#&$$@!!!! Over the past week I’ve had at least one post requiring moderation from some dipwad trying to promote their online poker game or some other biznatchery. This is still worlds better than the 20+ per day I was fighting with MoveableType, but still a bad sign. At least the interface in WordPress makes it a snap to delete all those comments.

For the music buffs in the audience, I can heartily recommend giving Pandora a go. Created by the folks at the Music Genome Project, it’s a service for finding other music that you like based on an initial artist or song that you already love. I started with Delerium as the artist because they’re currently in heavy rotation on my listening queue. So far, it’s come up with some interesting alternatives… ones I haven’t found through other apps that purport to do the same thing (like MusicPlasma, which is also excellent). But it’s also come up with some stinkers (Jessica Simpson! Britney Spears!).

What I find interesting is not just what it finds, but what it does *not* find. I would have expected cuts from Conjure One to show up in the rotation, since it shares alot of musical DNA with Delerium. Ditto regarding the absence of Enigma and Dead Can Dance.

Shrug.

Still worth a look. I’m sure as people give various cuts “thumbs up” and “thumbs down”, the database will become more refined.

Holy cr@p! According to the Center for Environmental Health, kid’s vinyl lunch boxes may contain up to 90 times the limit of lead in paint for childrens products! Found via Tree Hugger. BOTH my kids use this type of lunch box! Ian uses the Spiderman lunch box that was tested and found high in lead content!

Now before we get crazy, at least in my case the kids have been tested for lead in the last 3 - 4 months and found no excess exposure. So maybe we were lucky. I’m *still* going to replace those lunch boxes though. Damn!