Lollypop
Heard a great quote yesterday in the movie “Dodgeball” – “useless as a cock-flavoured lollypop”. That’s how I feel today. Can’t get into the groove. I’m stuck in the weekend. Not like the weekend was spectacular. Quite boring actually and perhaps today is just a result of Weekendicular Inertia.
The Algorithm
THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA
THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY
What is the Algorithm? Sorry, I’m a bit of an xkcd junkie. So what comes around there, goes around here.
Timezone Begone!
I removed the timezone adjustment from the Blog. For one thing, it doesn’t account for DST anyway. But more importantly, I’m posting at 4 in the afternoon and it’s showing as 8am because it’s offset for PST. But it wouldn’t make sense for me to adjust it to +3 because then all of your posts would show up in the future. So we’re going to try going timezoneless, which means we’re ALL in London. And that’s where all the hip parties are anyway…
The Clarkkkkson
This is interesting, but I found the following paragraph to be particularly hilarious. Please don’t make redundant comments about my peculiar sense of humour. You either find it funny or you don’t. I found the link to it on the XKCD Blag. FWIW, I also recently received these XKCD t-shirts (“Useless”, “Science”, and “Sudo”, of which “Science” is my favourite)
As you can imagine, K is big, and by the time you’ve read the w in the next word, it will already by unimaginably bigger. As a matter of fact, by tomorrow, it will have squared, and squaring is a very powerful function. I’m going to carry on writing right now just to give you an idea of how huge and vast it really is, but I don’t think I can describe it. Try looking at it for a few minutes and understanding what all those 0′s mean. They don’t just mean ‘nothing’ – they make the number 10 times bigger with each one you add. Am I getting this across? This number is big, Big, BIG. It’s bigger than the number of elementary particles in the universe. It’s bigger than a googol (and will soon be bigger than a googolplex). It’s bigger than the odds of rolling a bucket of dice and them all landing on 6, then picking a million aces from packs of cards, and then flipping every single coin in the world, and them all landing on heads.
It’s big, OK?
I am in your Senate… Corrupting your Peoplezzzz…
I was originally going to post this as a comment to Bryan’s Post, but it became too unweildy.
I must thank Bryan for this link for a number of reasons.
First, It prompted me to finally wikipedia NSFW, which I have seen on Wil’s Blog so many times before, and have consistently wondered what the fuck the SF stood for. Heh. SF. Stood – For.
Secondly, this was an amazing article. Just amazing. I won’t even get into the “what I liked about it”, but suffice it to say that I would like to add this particular Author’s SSG blog to my RSS feed(s). Can you (Bryan) please send me the link? SSG doesn’t seem to have a link back to the parent blog, or I am simply missing something. “His” blog there seems to have ended in 2005. Again, perhaps I am missing something.
Thirdly, I want to represent, a bit. I love this post because it brings a bit of personality and face to what is going on over there (ie: the Middle East in general). I don’t pretend to know or understand a fraction of it, however the one clear vantage I took in while visiting at the end of November was that “these people aren’t terrorists”.
As westerners, we are exposed to our fair share of propoganda. Of course, if you believe otherwise, you have your head in the sand. Just watch CNN and it should be obvious to you that the spooge spewed forth from the CNN mouth is, at best, vomit. But to use an example, you might believe that Al Jazeera is a terrorist media outlet and is funded by terrorists. No, it is not. It is equally outspoken against Middle Eastern factions. And outspoken it is. It is not opinionated, like CNN. It tells the news. It just tells it from both sides, and without opinion, and without hiding from backlash. In fact, most Arabs don’t watch it as they believes it speaks out against their own cause(s).
Our propoganda has us believing that it is “not safe” over there, because we only hear of the car bombs. We only hear of “Bad Hezbollah” and “Good Isreal”. Again, I’m not taking sides. I’m only pointing out that WE DON’T KNOW SHIT about what goes on over there. There are politics. There are people. Millions and millions of people – innocent people like you and I. There is ignorance over there but there is ignorance over here too. And there is a helluva lot more ignorance over here. 330+ million in Canada and the USA who don’t know enough about the politics of the Middle East, and a heckuva lot more politics in the Middle East than in North America.
All I can really say with any certainty is that we collectively need to get our heads out of the sand, stop listening to CNN and start watching Al Jazeera, or lobbying your local restricting body preventing Al Jazerra English from being broadcast here. Or start surfing the web for posts like this, which again I must thank Bryan for bringing to my attention.
The world is still in its infancy and it will eventually grow up. We all need to have a broader and more tolerant perspective to help get it there.
If you enjoyed this post, please go here and watch the video link titled “Ellison plays down Quran flap”. If you don’t know what this is about, read this first. And yes, I know I basically said above to not watch CNN. I actually went there looking for propoganda bullshit against Canada, but found this immediately and decided to post about this instead. And I’m too lazy to find a non-CNN link. I didn’t say CNN was all-evil. Sheesh.
My Superhero and Supervillain Personalities
As a Superhero, I’m definitely happy with the outcome, though as I was answering the questions I thought for sure I would come out as Tony Stark, the venerable Iron Man. But he came in second. As a Supervillain, I had no idea. The Juggernaut is cool though.
You are Superman
You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.
| Superman |
|
75% |
| Iron Man |
|
70% |
| Hulk |
|
70% |
| Robin |
|
65% |
| Green Lantern |
|
60% |
| Spider-Man |
|
55% |
| Supergirl |
|
50% |
| Batman |
|
45% |
| Wonder Woman |
|
40% |
| The Flash |
|
40% |
| Catwoman |
|
40% |
Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test
You are Juggernaut
Your strength and determination are difficult to stop.
| Juggernaut |
|
61% |
| Dr. Doom |
|
59% |
| Dark Phoenix |
|
59% |
| Apocalypse |
|
56% |
| Magneto |
|
51% |
| Lex Luthor |
|
49% |
| The Joker |
|
45% |
| Venom |
|
43% |
| Mr. Freeze |
|
40% |
| Riddler |
|
36% |
| Mystique |
|
33% |
| Green Goblin |
|
33% |
| Catwoman |
|
32% |
| Kingpin |
|
31% |
| Poison Ivy |
|
30% |
| Two-Face |
|
21% |
Uber Geek
I am repeatedly in awe of this gentleman’s achievement of uber geekdom. I mean this passage speaks for itself:
The fractal behind the comic is a mapping of the integers to a plane (it could be extended, I assume, to the real numbers). I came up with it in 1999 when I was trying to figure out a way to graphically show the contents of long blocks of computer memory, which is basically linear. I wanted a mapping that would show strings of consecutive addresses as contiguous, compact blobs, and that would work on all scales. I played with and coded a couple mappings, but this was the only one I found that really fit that qualification.
Uber Geek. How I strive to but pale in comparison. Alright, maybe I don’t strive
Stress
I’ve hit the “Stressed Out” level. I just wrote this email to my wife:
“Amazing isn’t it? Four little documents can take 6 hours to put together. I’ve been working on this since 8pm. It’s almost 2am now. And I’ve only *just* started drinking. When I get to Qatar, I’m going to buy a gun and fire 200 rounds into a sand dune.”
Then I imagined myself actually doing that, found it frickin hilarious as well as extremely satisfying, started to laugh my ass off – out loud – at 2:00am, and then started tearing up. (sorrow tears, not tears of joy). When you start to cry when you’re laughing, it is called STRESS. At least it is to me.
I can’t wait to buy that gun. I hope you can buy one over there, but expect that you can’t.
Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker – A review. Sort of
I’ve been shooting video for nigh on five years – mostly of my kids. I suck at it. I watch some old footage and the camera is rolling all over the place. I don’t frame my shot – hell I don’t HAVE a shot. I just point it at stuff and often not for long enough, while other times too long. I suck.
But what sucks more is that all 40 tapes (some of you may think that is alot, but over 5 years that is really nothing) sit on a shelf collecting dust. I’ve compiled no DVD’s. I’ve grabbed a few small, short clips for posting on web sites the odd time something interesting has happened. And it’s easy to say, “I don’t have time”. It’s not only easy, it’s also true.
But this begets the question: why should it take time? This stuff is supposed to be digital. Isn’t digital supposed to be better (substitute your favourite synonym or antonym for “better” with regard to digital)??? Well, you would think it is supposed to be better, but I have found that it is entirely not better. Editing video from tape to computer and then to finished media is nothing short of a pain in the ass.
At least, I used to think so.
I had tried several software applications for this purpose. Most of them have been lame. Meaning that the interface looks like video tape, and you are walked through a process of capturing, inserting into a scrapbook of sorts, and dropping into a timeline. The capture process sucked. The timeline interface sucked. The transistions were few and cartoony. And the interface itself was cartoony. I refer to “it” and “was” and “is” as though I’m referring to only one product. But no, they really all tended to fit these descriptions.
All but one: Adobe Premiere. Now you Mac fans go “Yay” to this. And so do you professionals. But I tell you – Premiere is a piece of shit. I find all of Adobe’s products to have the most cumbersome, unintuitive, clunky, cludgy interface ever conceived by humans. To add to this, the Firewire device support under Windows is HORRID. Don’t you dare open your brain cells to the notion that this is Windows’ or Microsoft’s fault. Every other program installed can see and use and control the DV device just fine (the camcorder). But Premiere says, “must be some other program’s fault – uninstall them or reinstall Premiere”. Yes Adobe, I’m sure that since all my other programs work fine and yours does not, it must somehow be their fault that yours fails. And I’m sure that since Adobe’s piece of crap fails in the same manner on multiple machines with different “other software” installed doesn’t speak to the problem or indicate responsibility.
Having enough, and needing to duplicate some tapes, I try the program that comes with Windows XP, “Windows Movie Maker” (WMM). You Mac people enjoy iMovie and wonder why I haven’t mentioned this yet. I’m sure iMovie is great. Apple is doing some wicked shit and you are welcome to toot your horns if you are so egotistical or insecure to do so. I however, use PC’s “because”, and have never tried XP’s bundled movie program because I assumed it was crap. I was very, very wrong.
The first bit of pleasantness came when everything worked. It knows my camera. It uses my camera. It controls my camera. Over and over and over again. Adobe, take note.
The second bit of pleasantness is when the wizard for capturing video was simple, intuitive, unencumberred, and worked. “Capture entire tape to file” not only worked, but it was an option! With Adobe, you have to go through a stupidly long process to do the same thing. WMM rewinds the tape to the beginning, and starts capturing. That’s it. A three-step wizard. Adobe, take note.
The next thing was writing out a new tape. Save movie – to DV Device. Done. Adobe’s process isn’t too dissimilar on this one point.
Now the best thing in the whole world. I ran WMM later and imported one of the video files I captured. An entire tape. I didn’t notice a small checkbox. The default setting of this checkbox was to “create separate clips”. You need to understand how your DV camera works to appreciate this. In a nutshell, when you capture a movie, the date and time are encoded on the tape. It’s not visible (unless you enable it through the camcorder’s menus). But this timecode is a permanent record of when the movie was shot. As you stop and later start the camcorder, the new movie you shoot has a different timecode than the previous one. WMM’s “create separate clips” detects the timecode change, and creates a contact sheet (like a scrapbook) of little movie clips for each clip. You can treat each one individually. You can import multiple files this way, and create a library of movie clips, not unlike a photo album. It’s fantastic! You can drag and drop different clips on the timeline and drag and drop transitions in between. AND THEY JUST WORK! Adobe: why didn’t you think of this?
This is so cool, it may be nearly time to capture all of my tapes to an external HDD and begin to make some real home movies. Like, the kind you actually pop into a DVD player.
Thanks, Microsoft.
