Archive for October, 2007
Heroes’ Sophomore Slump
Oct 31st
I’m not the only one wondering where the heck the excitement is with the TV show Heroes. Entertainment Weekly’s TV Watch has been tearing it up lately. They directed me towards a “Heroes” feature article that was recently posted. Last season, I was vocal about where “Heroes” succeeded and failed. This year, of course, is no different.
Heroes, where it was cool last year, is just dull this year. We have several storylines, but none are advancing with any meaningful devices. Let’s examine:
* Mohinder is working with HRG to infiltrate the company. He gives them Molly, and they… uh… lie her down in a bed.
* Nicki is working with the company because… uh… I have no idea. They want to help her, or something, but I don’t know what they’ve done other than make her a bit of a bodyguard.
* The “twins” are the most hated new characters – the Paulo and Nicky of “Heroes,” I think – but I find the whole power between them kind of interesting. Too bad their “coming to America” plotline has gone on about 4 weeks too long.
* Sylar lost his power for unknown reasons we’ll likely never be told, but is still so ridiculously and obviously evil its comical.
* Micah is still a complete tool who is way too positive for a 12 year old and is still using his powers for… nothing in particular — hacking pay-per-view and stuff.
* Monica has a “photographic muscle memory ,” and one of the first things she does is pick up from supporting her family and go to New York to “train,” no doubt leaving her family hungry.
* Peter is the least convincing of all. I know if I had amnesia and woke up and found my entire life in a box, I’d probably ditch my whole life for a 50% cute chick and not bother Googling my name. That way I would never have to find out that my brother is a New York state senator. Also, I wouldn’t suspect there’s an interesting back story with the FIRE THAT SHOOTS FROM MY HANDS.
* Matt Parkman is professionally annoying and is creepily attached to a little girl he’s known for 36 seconds.
* Nathan Petrelli is a drunkard; apparently, senators don’t do publicity and no one recognizes him.
* Claire is kinda hot and actually has the most convincing storyline, along with her a-hole friend West, who behaves more like a real person than anuone else in the entire show.
* HRG has suddenly decided the best way to hide is to trek around the world and murder his ex-mentor in order to find the paintings that show his demise. When he finds them, he can’t make heads or tails of them.
* Someone sent Veronica Mars after Peter, but she didn’t find him in the first 10 seconds, so they recalled her. Haven’t seen her since.
* Who can forget Hiro, who has the silliest story of all. He goes back in time and finds a nasty drunkard theif, who, despite the fact that he’s known a Japanese girl for about a day, goes to the enemy when Hiro kisses her. Lame, get Hiro back to present day. Anyway, if I could bend time, even though I went back to ancient Japan, wouldn’t you just return to the present when you finally do come back so there is no “gap” when you’re missing??
Heroes had better coalesce quickly, because it’s currently just wandering aimlessly. Once your story is just filling time, which I think this one is, you’ve losing people’s interests. The fact is that this story is creeping along at a snail’s pace in order to fill a season. Viewers don’t appreciate that.
iPhone: 1 Month Later
Oct 23rd
I’ve now had the iPhone for over a month. Let me just come out and say it: there’s a reason this device has something like a 97% satisfaction rating. The thing is awesome. It’s easy to love it: it feels like Apple, it’s beautiful, it’s easy to use, it’s pretty first and utilitarian second. It really makes its competitors blush, particularly things like the Blackberry Pearl, which looks like an old terminal compared to a 24″ cinema display: it’s just not even comparable.
There are surely missing features: no Flash is one, no current SDK is a big one, no copy/paste is often cited (but not a big deal for me), no way to mass remove images from the camera without first importing them into iPhoto, no iChat, and a big ball buster is the crippled Bluetooth profiles (no send file? No send contact? C’mon apple!) But the two biggest for me are as follows:
* No voice dial.
This is just silly. If you truly store all of your contacts, it’s a REAL pain in the ass to call a random one. And secondly, what good is a headset if you have to fish the phone out of its holster to scroll to the contact first? There is no way to go hands free on this device, period. Lame!
But the biggest one is this:
* No MMS.
This is more and more unacceptable every day. No only can I not send someone a picture via text, as my friends do to each other ALL THE TIME, but should someone send one to me, I get a stupid message that says something like “Yu’ve received a multimedia message! Go to viewmymessage.com and type in code 12345678 and password r4ndDoMPaS5w0rdd and retrieve the worthless picture that was worth a glance on your phone, but is almost certainly not worth the work it will take to check it out online. By the way, even though you have a browser in your phone, we won’t provide you a link, making it virtually impossible to check this unless you happen to be in front of a computer right now, bitch.”
Apple, please make 1.1.2 or 1.2 worthwhile and add some of these features present on like EVERY PHONE MADE IN THE LAST 3 YEARS. Seriously.
Live Blogging the Birth: Chapter 1
Oct 15th
We’re at the hospital. We were just admitted – now it’s just a waiting game.
Thoughts on the State of the Yankees
Oct 12th
I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about whether or not the Yankees should fire Joe Torre. On one hand, I believe that Torre is the best coach in the league and it would be silly to replace him for what amounts to an offensive collapse and the inability of our pitchers to perform. At the same time, I believe that some fresh blood would do the Yanks some good.
The fact is simple: the Yankees first 50 games or so were a disaster. They lost about 30 of them, for one and they looked piss poor as a unit. As fans watched some of the most expensive players in baseball tank, other, smaller, less expensive ball clubs succeeded with young prospects.
Now, I have maintained for about 3 years that the Yankees need to purge some of the their older veteran superstars and invest in some young talent; they have to expect to trade 2-3 years of post-season appearances in order to season their players with experience. But George Steinbrenner wouldn’t ever do something like that. And that is why the Yankees are a $200 million plus club with no ring since the millenium.
As a result, I advocate taking a backwards step for the future of the club. Every dynasty ends and must be rebuilt. Now is a good time to let that payroll wind down a notch.
So, while I think the best choice is to keep Joe Torre, installing another coach would not break my heart. And if they allow Rivera and A-Rod to go, they might as well dismantle most of the core team and start over with your young stars: Cano, Hughes, Joba, Shelley Duncan, Melky, even Jeter. But might as well refresh Posada, Abreu, Mussina, Pettite, Giambi, etc.
Some will say a true fan would never agree to a plan like this, but I would ask them what’s more embarassing: rebuilding, conceding a few years of postseason play, or losing 6 years in a row with a payroll almost twice that of every other team?
Madonna Gives the Music Industry the Finger
Oct 11th
The time draws nigh, my friends. Madonna dumped Warner, her record label of more than 20 years in favor of a deal with Live Nation, who will promote her concerts and release her albums. Last month, Radiohead announced a “name-your-price” download option for their new album. Amazon.com now offers DRM free MP3 downloads, and even Apple, the creators and maintainers of the world’s most common DRM, have rolled out iTunes Plus, which is DRM-free.
The record industry is crumbling, as it should, and music is slowly coming back around. If artists make only a few cents per recording, why wouldn’t they prefer to charge 25 cents a song and take home almost 100% of that? If “internet piracy” is such a problem, why not reward the true artists who can compel us to see them live, buy their merchandise, etc?
Yes, the days of DRM, the RIAA, in fact all record labels are drawing to a close. Mark my words: the music landscape will be dramatically different in a decade.
A Violation of the Spirit of Free Software
Oct 10th
For a long time, I really liked this unattractive, but incredibly useful website called macfreeware.com. I am not linking to the front page because shortly ago, it was sold and the result is really bumming me out.
The new owners decided to make some changes to the site that I personally think are a slap in the face of Mac freeware developers. See, the first thing they did was remove the developers’ credit in the RSS feed. Then, they took the developers’ info out of the individual pages, and finally, in the final insult, they cloaked the download links so that all of the downloads direct through a form hosted locally, so even if you were crafty, you couldn’t find the actual software on the internet without your favorite search engine.
I wrote the guys over at MacFreeWare.com – via their generic contact form, since there is no other method of communication available – and told them about this egregious violation of developers, and they temporarily complied, re-adding the developer info to both the RSS feed and the software pages. And yet, today in my Bloglines feed, and once again, the RSS feeds do not include developer info at all – not even a link to the application’s webpage – and the majority of the featured apps don’t include links on their individual pages. Some examples:
http://www.freemacware.com/inquisitor
http://www.freemacware.com/disk-inventory-x
http://www.freemacware.com/vacuummail
Click the thumbnail for a larger version
I didn’t search these out – they were the first three links I clicked on the homepage.
So what we have is an ad-supported website aimed at cataloging Mac freeware that doesn’t even feature, or allow you to research, the very developers writing that freeware. They are making money of free apps, without any credit, any outlinking, or any way to research the software beyond their two sentence write-ups. Am I wrong or is this a complete violation of the spirit of free software?
Update: Okay, so at least some of the items in the RSS feed have a link to a developer website and most of the newer featured app pages have a link to the developer website listed. But most still don’t, which is pretty bad.
Peace, Love, Tolerance, and Truth
Oct 4th
I stand for peace, love, tolerance, and truth. I stand for science. I stand for nature. I stand for humanity. But have you ever noticed that people who:
- are anti-science
- are anti-gay
- don’t believe in evolution
- don’t believe in global warming
- are anti-stem cell research
- are anti right-to-choose
- believe in forced school prayer
- are pro-war
- believe there is actually a “war on terror”
- disregard separation of church and state as envisioned by the American founding fathers
…tend to be the least tolerant and most narrow-minded people of all? Have you noticed these people are sheep who spout uninformed political nonsense, flock to church and swallow the tripe whole, are perfectly comfortable with genocide anywhere but in the US, and then preach about morality? Can you believe that these people dare to call themselves “patriotic Americans” without bothering to even contemplate what that even means? The founding fathers – brave men who stood for honesty, integrity, truth and liberty – would be ashamed of us.
It’s no surprise these people exist. These people are routinely the least educated in the nation! That’s right, smart people voted for Kerry, and dumb, white, fat Wal-Mart shoppers voted for Bush. Hey, don’t yell at me, this is what the statistics show!
That’s not to say Kerry was a shining star, it’s just to say that the decline of the United States in general can be placed squarely on the shoulders of George W. Bush and his brainless followers, so-called “Christians” who preach war, intolerance, and anti-American initiatives. Oh, and it’s pretty much a sure thing that history books will concur.
A Review of Online Photo Services
Oct 3rd
Some time ago, I switched to Google’s Picasa Web Albums online photo management software. Although it’s simple to use, Picasa Web has been missing too many features for too long, and after Google locked me out of their software for a few days due to a bug of some sort, and their iPhoto plug-in stopped working, I decided it was time to start checking out the alternatives. I have played with a few services, and judged them based on a number of criteria, including these 15 questions:
1. How easy is it to do batch uploads?
2. Are there decent Mac and Windows upload tools?
3. Does it work in all major browsers (Opera and Safari are both important)
4. Will the default display scale to upwards of 2500 photos?
5. How fast does each page load?
6. Is the image scaled down? If so, is the original available?
7. Is it a fly-by-night startup that I can count on to be around?
8. How much does it cost for a pro membership, if anything? What are the benefits?
9. What are my storage requirements?
10. What is my traffic/bandwidth limit, if any?
11. Are there integrated ads?
12. How easy is it for others to access my photos?
13. Is there any sort of privacy?
14. What type of tools exist for me to manage my photos once they are online?
15. Is there some sort of embed/slideshow for my webpages?
I’ve tested the following services: Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Zoto, Zooomr, SmugMug, Photobucket, Facebook, and MySpace. Read on for my initial results.
More >
Dear Abby Supports Gay Marriage
Oct 11th
Posted by Adam S in [...]
Comments
Quite a bit of noise was generated when the beneficiary of the monniker “Dear Abby” announced she supported gay marriage. But for the life of me, I just can’t see why this is an issue for people. What is the big deal?? Who are the people who feel so threated by this prospect that this is an important issue to them?
The divorce rate in the United States is somewhere between 40% and 60%, Wikipedia has a thorough statistic review. Marriage, as a general institution, may in trouble. The family unit may be in trouble. But it’s not because of gay marriage. No, Americans have f’ed this one up all by themselves without the help of the gays.
So why would anyone care at all if two gay people want to commit to each other and enjoy the same tax and governmental benefits? How is this anything but defying the Judeo-Christian “Live and let live” doctrine; how is this anything but boldly defying the “love your neighbor” adage? The world needs more peace, but obviously, those who oppose this on religious grounds feel they are worthy of passing judgement.
Then there are those who oppose it on political grounds. They favor a ban on gay marriage via an amendment that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and thereby excludes gay couples from such a practice. What is the motivation for this? Do we not have enough problems in this once great nation? I just can’t see how you can favor a constitutional ban on gay marriage and claim to be a patriotic American at the same time. Nothing could be more anti-American than intentional discrimination. Remember, that is exactly that from which our forefathers were fleeing! But then, as a nation, we have little respect for the vision the forefathers actually had. In fact, too often it is argued that they meant something other than what they eloquently and laboriously detailed.
Look back at the 18th amendment, which reads
It seemed like what the United States wanted at the time, but what is perceived as more American in this century than a man enjoying a cold Budweiser? Just a few short years later, we had to alter the constituion of the nation once again just to repeal this crazy knee-jerk amendment. Gay marriage will, in my lifetime, be permitted and seen as normal. It’s inevitable.
It’s foolish of us to think that if we build a discriminitory amendment into the constitution, future generations won’t look back and us and laugh. It’s amazing that there are actually old curmudgeons who care enough, who suggest they feel threatened by gays getting married. I can’t find anything more ridiculous, particularly when Larry Craig and Mark Foley and a host of other elected officials campaign strongly against homosexual rights, only to go home to their gay hooker boyfriend for a good bathroom-stall shagging. I think it’s amazing that there exist bigots like this (read the comments) in this country and that they dare call themselves Christian. If there is indeed an afterlife, they will face their long overdue judgment.
Thank God “Dear Abby” is enlightened. Hopefully, she can change even just one narrow, dogma-fed mind. Too bad there are others who sit in judgment who believe they are qualified to judge their fellow man. So — who are the people who most vocally and actively oppose gay marriage? I’ll tell you who: self-hating closeted homosexual men.