General

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Method Studios

Ever see a commercial on TV that really just caught your eye? Beyond what it was selling, one that had a really interesting sense of design? Chances are pretty decent the visual effects were done by Method Studios.

They’ve done a wide assortment of work: The ‘Pictures of You’ HP campaign, the Mountain Dew Spy vs Spy ads, worked on Pirates of the Caribbean, and apparently even created the now-familiar Xbox logo. Lots of big name music videos, too. The Pictures of You ads still fascinate me every time they come on.

Lots of bits and pieces of their best stuff is compiled into this “CGI reel”. The commercials linked above and a huge number of others can all be viewed in the portfolio section of Method’s site.

From an artistic and technical standpoint, some of this stuff is among the best I’ve seen.

note: I think the links to specific movies will not be stable, the site seems to change them hourly to prevent just this kind of linking. But you can still find them yourself from the main site.

Xbox woes

I give in.

I bought a used Xbox just about 2 years ago, at first primarily to play Halo. Got quite the deal on it too, thanks to some rather arcane ebay happenings beyond my control. However, I’m paying for that bargain now. It seems that some early Xboxes have faulty DVD drives. There were three brands of drives used, and lucky me got the bum (Thomson brand) one. It’s taken some time, but the drive periodically refuses to load things. I’m told they have problems with layer transitions on DVDs.

I’ve started playing Knights of the Old Republic II, which is just chock full of layer transitions. About 1 in 3 fails and crashes the entire system, telling me that the disc is either dirty or not an Xbox game. Very frustrating to happen every few minutes in such an awesome game.

So I broke down and bought a replacement Philips brand drive on ebay. Cheaper than replacing the whole system, and I won’t lose all my save games. I paid about $60 for it, much less than the $250 Microsoft would charge me for the parts and service. Not like I have a warranty anyway. Now all I need to do is find a set of Torx screwdrivers that I’ll need to open the Xbox up when the drive arrives. Anyone know a likely place to buy such tools?

I figure I need to teach myself more about hardware replacement anyway.

Jack Bauer Power Hour

What 24 has taught me so far this season:

-A scrolling screen of red hex code means that someone is “trying to corrupt the internet” by “positioning the nodes”.

-You can listen in on a cell phone by finding the owner’s mother’s house.

But somehow, the show still manages to be wildly entertaining. Boggles the mind, really.

Best line from last night’s 2 hour premiere:

(Secretary of Defense to his son:) “Spare me your 6th grade Michael Moore logic.”

Two more hours coming up tonight. Excellent.

DRM woes

Teleread has a very insightful post up.

DRM (digital rights management) has been a repeated thorn in my side. For the uninitiated, DRM is a collection of methods content owners use to restrict use of the content. Preventing a non-owner from playing a music file for example.

I’ve had experience with DRM in both e-books and music. I buy tracks from Napster generally, and find the price fair. I had trouble getting the files to play on my Muvo TX MP3 player at first, but eventually figured it out. I have to transfer the tracks from inside windows media player, I can’t just drag/drop them onto the player as I do other files. But why can’t it be integrated? Drag and Drop functionality should be allowed with DRM protected files.

reb1100

The larger problem for me as been in the area of e-books. I am the happy owner of an REB1100 (pictured). I periodically buy content from fictionwise.com, the only large e-book seller I know of. Unfortunately, most of the new ‘best seller’ type books they carry are encoded with DRM. My REB1100 (which is not made anymore) just isn’t able to handle books with DRM in the formats available.

Here again, I’ve found ways to make it work. But for a full novel, the conversion process to get rid of the DRM protection can take me 15-20 minutes of decoding the file and massaging imperfections out of the results. This is time I really shouldn’t have to use. The process is somewhat arcane, requiring use of command line tools. Is the average user going to go through that process?

Fictionwise has now released the ebookwise-1150, a device very similar to my REB1100, built on the same technology. The 1150 is priced reasonably at just $100, including $20 worth of books. Finally, an affordable reader! (I had to scoop up my 1100 as a slightly damaged unit to make it affordable) However… publishers refuse to sell new content in the only DRM format the 1150 supports.

Old situation: Expensive readers that could handle new books
New situation: Affordable readers that can’t handle new books.

There’s no need for it to be this way. If publishers could get together and iron out competing DRM standards, eBook readers could finally take off big time.

I love my 1100, and have never regretted getting it. But the average user, without my technical background, is just not going to be able to make it to work for most average-use purposes. And they shouldn’t have to deal with that.

And content owners wonder why people turn to piracy. When it’s easier to do than the legitimate way, the system is broken.

Star Wars III – Revenge of the Leaked Images

Vader

The Psychotic has a whole bunch of hi-res Star Wars episode III images up. Dunno how long it’ll last, cause I’m pretty sure these aren’t supposed to be released. I like the looks of them; there’s nothing spoilerish here, just character shots – mostly of characters with lightsabers. Vader, Anakin, Yoda, etc. A few shots of Clone Troopers and two of our favorite droids as well. The site is getting hammered at the moment, so I’m hosting two that I really like:

Vader in motion
General Grievous

Grievous is my desktop at the moment.

The Vader pics on the site intrigue me in particular. Do we get to see him doing his thing: running around, slaying Jedi and just being the classic villain we know he is? If so, that’ll go a long way towards making the movie good.

Episode I was very disappointing.
Episode II was a good movie, if you ignore the romantic plot and Hayden Christensen’s ‘acting’.
Episode III has much potential.

My fingers are crossed.

And in related news, there’s going to be more Clone Wars shorts!

Christmas at the Movies

According to this Post-Gazette article, there was a big melee on Christmas day at the Waterfront Loews theater, made up largely of teenagers. The theater was apparently “overrun” as the article says. And this isn’t a small theater either, I think they have at least 20 screens. Now they’re thinking about closing on Easter and future Christmases.

I remember in elementary school, I was good friends with a guy who was Jewish. He said his family always went to the movies on Christmas because they knew it would be empty. Apparently they (or at least this one) aren’t anymore. And I have to admit that the idea of spending Christmas evening at a movie theater does seem foreign to me, especially on my own as these kids seem to have been. As a family event maybe, but going by myself or with a couple friends just isn’t something I would have wanted to do at that age on Christmas.

Is this unusual, or am I just really out of touch with society? It hasn’t been that long since I was a teenager…

Defenders of the Night

Goliath

Ain’t DVD a wonderful thing?

Work is slow today and I don’t have any classwork to speak of yet. So while browsing around, I noticed that Gargoyles Season 1 is on DVD!

It’s 13 episodes, and I’m tempted to buy it for the first five alone. It was all one plot, and amazingly done. For a mid-90s Disney cartoon, this was hardcore stuff. Blood was shown! gasp! The battle scenes weren’t glossed over either, and there was some pretty dark subject matter at times.

If you want to get more of a plot summary, check out this review of the set.

When this first aired, I remember it was on at 2:30 in the afternoon. I routinely arrived home from school at about 2:35. As a result, I didn’t get to see very many complete episodes. But what I did see hooked me. To my 6th grade self, this was my first exposure to the idea that animation could go beyond kiddie shows.

I had the opportunity a couple years ago to watch a good chunk of the series on old VHS tapes. While not every episode as wonderful as my memory made the show out to be, the best ones are still spectacular. The ones dealing with Shakespeare and Arthurian legends were always among my favorites. There was this whole grand epic feel to the show that is rarely duplicated. One episode in particular sticks out: Goliath was mystically thrown back in time to the Blitz of London. He met up with some 1940s gargoyles and it went from there.

Plus, it had Keith David doing the badass voice of Goliath as only he could.

I really want to buy this set, but I’ve got enough waiting to watch as it is.

Lasagna for Dummies

I made the most delicious dinner tonight. It’s lasagna, but with cheese ravioli instead of the noodles. Simplifies the process a whole bunch.

Line the bottom of the pan with the ravioli, mozzarella cheese, sauce, and other toppings (meat, etc). Repeat the stack as tall as desired. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes. Voila!

It doesn’t hold together quite as well as ‘real’ lasagna when dishing it out, but it gets the job done. Plus I have leftovers for a week.

Quite a handy recipe to have on hand for the lazy bachelor who is tired of microwave meals.

It may be hyperbole, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it

“What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. Librarian — that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between libido and licentious — it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly title: Keeper of the Books.”

~Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime