Sean’s Mental Walkabout

John came over prior to the game bringing his HD-DVD Video Essentials, and given that we had some time prior to the game, we spent some time tuning the set.  Honestly, most things were pretty good, though we had to tune down the color and up the brightness just a bit.  There was one adjustment we made that I can tell immediately made a difference, which was tuning the sharpness down to nothing.  One thing that had always bothered me was how Jack’s beard in lost seemed to shimmer in odd ways, though I was never really sure what caused it.  It turns out that sharpness on digital TVs pretty much just takes the digital artifacting and makes it 10 times worse.  The image looks a little softer now, but there are no annoying random artifacts on thin lines throughout the picture.

Thanks to John for bringing that over.  I still have the kit as I’m going to do audio balancing this week (as we didn’t quite have the time to do it before people showed up).  While my living room is only so tunable, I’m still looking forward to actually trying to balance in the sub woofer in a reasonable way.  I think it will be amusing to see how off my course grained adjustments are.

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That line is used twice in Futurama (in two consecutive episodes), uttered by Professor Farnsworth.  When Futurama was on Cartoon Network for the last 4 years, that line was blanked out on every airing of either episode.  Why that line was deemed too “something” to air, when nothing else was cut, always seemed odd to me.

Futurama is now on Comedy Central, and as of last night, is airing Futurama un-censored.

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Porkchop sent me this youtube video on Saturday.  ++ for an hour of really good entertainment.  My love for xkcd is even greater after this.

Direct link for RSS readers that don’t support embeds.

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While looking for a solution to my VMWare / USB issue, I came across a Linux.com article:
Developer crafts Linux support for Logitech Harmony remote controls.

Instead of using the Windows GUI to program the remote, you use the Logitech website (the windows gui is basically a fancy version of that). When you are done, you download a .EZHex file which you can then sync in Linux to your remote.

I haven’t tried it yet, though it is on my list of things to do. For those who have stayed away from the Logitech Harmony remotes because they required Windows, you need no longer live in the dark ages of remote controls.

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About 3 weeks ago Eben gave an invited talk at IBM Research about Copyleft Capitalism, which I’m kicking myself for not driving down to see in person. Fortunately it has been posted to Google Videos:

(direct link for those whose RSS viewer doesn’t do flash)

The talk weighs in at 91 minutes, and is really worth watching the whole thing. Unfortunately the audience isn’t miked, so there are some areas of silence which are a little awkward, but that doesn’t detract much from the talk. Eben is an incredibly engaging speaker, and weaves a wonderful narative around free software, and the software commons.

While there are so many interesting points that Eben makes, I found the most fascinating one to be about how creativity can not be contained and controlled. When the industry attempts to do so you get bursts of irrational creativity, such as Perl. Perl is about getting things done, and it does so by hook or crook, based on whatever made sense to go into the language during last saturday’s hack fest. While it disgusts many of the purists in language design, it shows that sometimes “just get it done” does work. Beauty isn’t everything. (Steve Yegge’s take on perl is also hillarious and dead on.)

This is one nugget of dozens in the talk. I think I’ll need to go back and watch the thing at least once more to make sure I’ve absorbed it all.

Dague’s Rule 47: if Eben Moglen is speaking anywhere within driving distance, I must travel to the talk.

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With the writers strike on full bore, and the clock counting down on scripted television going off the air, I thought this morning’s Ctrl Alt Delete comic was very apropos.

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The writers strike is going to start having an impact on scripted TV in about 4 weeks, when all the shows that were “in the can” end up being aired, and there are no more left.  (Inspired by season pass by jwz.)

Shows I can’t imagine not being around

• Pushing Daisies - seriously, I’m still not sure how this show manages to work, but it does, brilliantly.  An hour of Tim Burton-esque trippery each week with brilliant writing, incredible narration, and truly odd and compelling characters.
• Chuck - It started good, and it’s just hit a home run it the last few weeks.  It is seriously a toss up between Pushing Daisies and Chuck for the show I most look forward to each week.
• House - Ah, you thought they were going to get rid of all the cast in season 4.  They even managed to convince you they had, and your brain just ignores that you see all of the previous cast in every episode.  The culling of the interns “Big Love”, “Cut Throat Bitch”, “13″ and all the rest is just awesome.  “I’ll miss you most of all… Rediculously-Old-Fraud.”

My biggest concern here is that Pushing Daisies and Chuck are both freshmen shows.  Daisies is winning it’s timeslot hands down, so I have no fear that it will return after the strike.  Chuck is doing ok, but not great, and I’d really like to see where the story goes.

Shows I’ll miss

• How I Met Your Mother - the only 30 minute show that we have a season pass for.  I went to school with the show runners, and have loved it since day 1.  There are a lot of great wesleyan in jokes in the show as well.
• Heroes - but seriously, why has it take 2 months to get Hiro back to modern day?  The speed of this season has been way too slow.
• Bones - it’s enjoyable, and has some fun sub characters

Stuff I’m going to be annoyed isn’t returning any time soon

• Battlestar Gallactica - Though not returning until deep into 2008 means I’ve got a better chance of DishNetwork carrying SciFi HD.
• Lost - the season finale was just freaking incredible, but the planned 8 months until return is definitely going to end up more like 12.  I think their audience may have wandered off by the time it airs again.

Current Filler that I probably won’t notice is gone

• Bionic Woman - all the sub characters seem to be wooden in different ways.  It’s fine, but not compelling.
• 24 - I’ve given up on multiple years in the past, though eventually caught up and watched them.
• Stargate Atlantis - it’s reasonable filler, and plenty of fun.

I’d be curious in getting comments on what you’ll miss in the writers strike.  Some time later this week I’ll post my “stuff to catchup on while the writers strike is on”.

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Ben had the following as his AOL status today:

The Browncoats Prayer

OUR JOSS,
Who art in Hollywood,
Whedon be thy name.

Thy ideas come,
and will be done
On film as they are in Comic Books.

Give us someday a little more Serenity,
And deliver us from Reality Television.
For thine is the Wit, the Wisdom,
And the Imagination

Forever and ever,

AMEN.

And it got me thinking again about the current state of American television.  Yes, there are some new shining bright spots (Pushing Daisies, House, How I Met Your Mother among them), but most of TV is aweful.  It’s been a few years since Joss had a show on TV, and all of the attempted shows by Tim Minear (who worked with Whedon on Angel and Firefly) have managed 6 or less episodes aired on TV (Wonderfalls, The Inside, Drive).  It’s a sad state of affairs for TV.

Recently I was introduced to Blake’s 7, which ran 1978-1981 on the BBC (I’m 1/2 way through series 3 now).  I was introduced to it by Joe, who sold me on the story that Whedon was in the UK when in originally aired.  You can definitely see that Firefly owes quite a bit to Blake’s 7, in a very good way.  Blake’s 7 has no issue in killing off characters, which I suspect may have also influenced Whedon in his writing.

The failure of Minear’s series, all of which had really compelling characters and stories, makes me wonder if there is a place for people like Whedon or Minear in American TV at the moment.  But maybe there is a better place for them, like the BBC.  The BBC is in remake mode now, reviving Dr Who, doing a new Prisoner, so why not bring back Blake’s 7.  And why not bring Whedon over to do it.  Whedon’s take on Servalan, Avon, Blake and the rest would be really interesting, and I think incredibly compelling.

Not that Joss will ever read this, or anyone that could make this happen, but if I had one wish in the whole realm of TV right now it would be to see a Whedon powered remake of Blake’s 7.

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For my grad school class this semester we are using the book Lucene in Action, as we are doing projects in and around search engines.  I did a quick search on getting this book, and found that if I ordered directly from Manning they would provide me a pdf version as well.  Sign me up!

This is the same sort of deal you get with the Pragmatic Programmer books, and I love it.  The PP folks went a step further, and let you buy into a BETA book where you get revs of the PDF during it’s editing cycle, and then send you a paper copy once it ships.  They also provide updates to the PDF after ship (I’ve gotten at least one for my rails book), removing the need for “errata” inserts.

It’s unfortunate that the larger publishers aren’t doing this yet, as I’d love to have my O’Reilly books in both PDF and bound versions.  They are selling some electronic only copies, but the lack of the safety net of having paper sort of sucks, and I’ve not quite bought into the whole safari approach yet.

Props to Manning for doing this well (or at least the way I like it). 

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The first time I watched an episode of Coupling, I knew I was watching something different.  It was much like a Joss Whedon show, smarter than it needed to be for the genre, and funnier because of it.  There was a very natural flow of humor and drama that made it stand out.  That show was brought us by Steven Moffat, a writer for BBC.  

This is also the man who has given us the best episodes of the new Dr Who: The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace (all of which won Hugo awards), and Blink (which airs on SciFi this Friday).  Again, each of these were characterized by a playfulness with the format that kept you engaged in a way that rarely happens in the medium of television.  The Girl in the Fireplace showed everything that Dr Who could be, and convinced me that David Tennent was well chosen to be the Doctor.  I would have said that it was the best episode of Dr Who, period, but then I saw Blink, and it’s a toss up.

Obviously when I heard that Moffat was doing another show, I wanted to see it, no matter what it was.  The show is called Jekyll, and has done runs on BBC and BBC America (hopefully they’ll do some reruns again soon), and tells a modern day version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  It is everything I’ve come to expect from Moffat, more intelligent than the genre demands, garnished with comedy at just the right level, and telling a story in a less than traditional way that ensures you don’t have everything figured out from early on.

Find it.  Watch it.  You won’t be disappointed.

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