My new EeePC
I picked up one of Asus’s delightfully tiny new netbooks, the EeePC. A netbook is a new category of sub-notebook device with low end specs designed primarily for browsing the web. The EeePC clocks in at a measly 900Mz, but at 9″ and under 3 lbs it’s easy to forgive it’s specs in lieu of it’s ultimate portability. So far I’m finding it an ideal email machine for use at meetings at work, and as a great bedroom/couch machine for keeping an eye on the tubes while relaxing or watching movies.

Being entirely solid state (the EeePC 900 series comes with 12GB of flash memory rather than a hard drive with spinning platters) it’s shock resistant, and gets surprisingly good performance for it’s diminutive specs. Due to the random access nature of flash memory the EeePC boots quickly and gets great battery life (3 hours of real use). While solid state drive (SSD) technology is still not competitive in price or storage capacity to typical hard drive (HDD) technology I can see the potential and am starting to get excited about the predictions that in 2011 or so SSD will all but completely replace HDD technology in notebooks and desktops.

While the EeePC 900 I picked up came pre-loaded with Windows XP I’ve done some experimentation with putting Ubuntu on it. As with my typical annual cycle I attempt to put some variant of Linux on my computers to see how the OS X/Windows competition is doing. This time however I was surprised – the latest Hardy Heron (8.04) release of Ubuntu is slick, polished, and works ‘out of the box’ on all the hardware I had laying around. While Ubuntu might be getting attention as a decent desktop alternative where I think it really shines is on a low end PC like the EeePC – it’s limited feature set and lean architecture work perfectly on a device with CPU and memory constraints.

Movies
Being a 3 day weekend I took the opportunity to see a couple of movies with Brien and Brian. We saw both Indiana Jones 4: The Crystal Skull, and Iron Man. Both movies were excellent (if not over the top) and fun movies to see while on holiday. I was never the hardcore fan of the Indy series that Brien was, and much to his horror I actually liked the newest one best from the series. It captured the fun essence of the earlier flicks while maintaining a fresh and modern feel even while being set in not so modern times.

Iron man also kept a modern feel, although it did so with a very modern setting. Having never read the comic book I assume I missed out on a lot of the back story, but still found the story presented in the movie touching and engaging. Having grown up idolizing gadget superhero (Hello, Inspector Gadget) it’s nice to see a modern take on a technological super-hero. Final note on the movie: I need a flying metal suit, that looks fun!

Lensbabied sneaker opus
Last but not least, a quick shot I took with my Lensbaby 2G while out on a photo walk on Saturday. I’ve been using my 18mm and 50mm primes a lot and decided to take the Lensbaby out and go for a stroll. I’m certainly glad I did as one of the resulting shots is a clear winner in my odd little abstract world.

I have to say – I’m stunned. Hotel Rwanda is a fantastic movie – a beautiful portrait of humanity in the worst of circumstances. It’s the rare kind of movie that can be depressing and uplifting to the soul at the same time. Seeing Paul Rusesabagina’s courage and compassion in the face of such an brutal genocide reminds the viewer that the human race just might have a chance of making it after all.

A quick glance through the collection shows I have 8 of these movies unopened in my collection so those will be first up on the viewing list:

Barry Lyndon (1975)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Juno (2007)
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Magnolia (1999)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
The Shining (1980)

Which leaves 168 remaining movies to select from, listed in the full post. If you have a suggestion of a favorite movie from below that you particularly like and think I should prioritize onto the list leave a comment and let me know!

3:10 to Yuma (2007)
8½ (1963)
A Christmas Story (1983)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
All About Eve (1950)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
American Gangster (2007)
American History X (1998)
Amores perros (2000)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Annie Hall (1977)
Battaglia di Algeri, La (1966)
Belle et la bête, La (1946)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Boot, Das (1981)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Brief Encounter (1945)
Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
C’era una volta il West (1968)
Cabinet des Dr. Caligari., Das (1920)
Casablanca (1942)
Casino (1995)
Chinatown (1974)
Cidade de Deus (2002)
Citizen Kane (1941)
City Lights (1931)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Crash (2004/I)
Diaboliques, Les (1955)
Dial M for Murder (1954)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Du rififi chez les hommes (1955)
Duck Soup (1933)
Ed Wood (1994)
Fargo (1996)
Frankenstein (1931)
Gandhi (1982)
Glory (1989)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Goodfellas (1990)
Grindhouse (2007)
Harold and Maude (1971)
Harvey (1950)
Heat (1995)
High Noon (1952)
His Girl Friday (1940)
Hot Fuzz (2007)
Hotaru no haka (1988)
Ikiru (1952)
In Cold Blood (1967)
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Into the Wild (2007)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Jaws (1975)
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Ladri di biciclette (1948)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Leben der Anderen, Das (2006)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Lola rennt (1998)
Léon (1994)
M (1931)
Manhattan (1979)
Metropolis (1927)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Modern Times (1936)
Mou gaan dou (2002)
Mystic River (2003)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
North by Northwest (1959)
Notorious (1946)
Notti di Cabiria, Le (1957)
Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1988)
Oldboy (2003)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Once (2006)
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Out of the Past (1947)
Paths of Glory (1957)
Patton (1970)
Per qualche dollaro in più (1965)
Platoon (1986)
Quatre cents coups, Les (1959)
Raging Bull (1980)
Ran (1985)
Rashômon (1950)
Rear Window (1954)
Rebecca (1940)
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Rope (1948)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Salaire de la peur, Le (1953)
Scaphandre et le papillon, Le (2007)
Scarface (1983)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Shichinin no samurai (1954)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Sjunde inseglet, Det (1957)
Sleuth (1972)
Smultronstället (1957)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Stalag 17 (1953)
Stalker (1979)
Stand by Me (1986)
Strada, La (1954)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Taxi Driver (1976)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
The African Queen (1951)
The Apartment (1960)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
The Big Sleep (1946)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
The Conversation (1974)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
The Departed (2006)
The Elephant Man (1980)
The Exorcist (1973)
The General (1927)
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
The Gold Rush (1925)
The Graduate (1967)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
The Great Dictator (1940)
The Great Escape (1963)
The Green Mile (1999)
The Hustler (1961)
The Kid (1921)
The Killing (1956)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The Lost Weekend (1945)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
The Pianist (2002)
The Prestige (2006)
The Searchers (1956)
The Sting (1973)
The Third Man (1949)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Umberto D. (1952)
Unforgiven (1992)
Untergang, Der (2004)
Vertigo (1958)
Vita è bella, La (1997)
Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
Wo hu cang long (2000)
Yojimbo (1961)

Update:Removed Amelie and Spirited Away from the list as I didn’t recognize their non-translated titles. Bad Sparky – BAD!

That day has finally come – my Lutron smart dimmers arrived, have been installed, and are now hooked into my Logitech Harmony home theater automation remote with great results. With a little help from Brien the dimmers are installed, and the wiring is now again safely hidden away behind nice looking wall plates.

The Lutron Maestro IR smart dimmer intelligently fades the lights up and down to preset levels at the touch of a button on my Harmony remote. With the track lights dimmed properly and pointed away from the TV screen it bathes my movie goers in soft warm light while avoiding distracting reflections on the TV.

Next up: painting the living room a darker color to help reduce light bounce around the room. The question has become deep midnight blue, or rich royal red?

• There will be blood
• Michael Clayton
• Juno

In particular I need to see Juno – I’ve heard a majority of it was shot with the new motion version of my favorite camera lens, the Lensbaby.

Michael Clayton is already available for hi-def rental on my AppleTV so that should be an easy one. The other two have yet to be released so it may be a short while before I get the chance to see them. There will be blood is still technically in theaters so if I manage to get the motivation and energy up to leave the house this weekend I might still be able to catch it in the theaters.

The entire user experience is re-envisioned to be more flashy – much more fun to use. The fact that the AppleTV can now independently sync podcasts, buy music and TV shows on the iTunes media store, and rent movies makes for a most delectable icing on an already moist and delicious media cake.

For some strange reason I decided upon Hairspray as test of the new HD rental service. The rental experience was a breeze – two clicks of the remote (plus a one-time password entry) and the HD movie was playing with surprisingly good quality within two minutes.

I went into Hairspray with low expectations and came away impressed. The movie is fun, engaging, and oddly thought provoking. Don’t get me wrong – it’s completely campy and over the top, but really well executed. The music and choreography is well thought out and the cinematographer did a great job of showcasing some of the dance moves without distracting the viewer with too much camera movement.

Featuring fantastic performances by John Travolta, Christopher Walken (it had been so long since I’d seen the Weapon of Choice music video I’d almost forgot how good a dancer he is), and new to film actress Nikki Blonsky who leads the film with confidence and flair.

For the record: John Travola in drag is just plain wrong, but wrong in the kind of way that I can get behind. Travolta in drag for President 08!

The new lighting will arrive in 2-3 weeks and consists of track lighting over the couch, decorative accent lighting for near the screen, and Lutron Maestro home automation switches to let my Logitech Harmony programmable uber-remote control the lighting for home theater macro’s.

Best part of it is this light, the Lightstik. The base is electrified (very weak current – you can’t feel it with your fingers) and the LED sticks just sit in there. The moment they make contact with the base unit they light up.

Aside from the car life has been good. Traskpro has his a solid and stable 0.9 (and graduated from alpha to beta) and is rocking my task list right and left. I even have acquired a few other heavy users which is oddly gratifying. I’ve still got 31 remaining features/tweaks to make, but those can happen gradually over the next few weeks as I continue to ramp up on JavaScript.

Also in the world of good things Scott came over last night. He hadn’t experienced a proper viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End so we did dinner and a showing of that. As silly and overly-Disney as the film is I really do enjoy watching it. I really do hope that big budget swashbucklers never die – they are just so much fun to experience.

Right – back to work now. I have to finish up a ton of stuff today and tomorrow to be ready to take off a few days to be home for Christmas!

Things have been pretty crazy of late and I’m stressed out as a result. Work has been and explosion of activity and my personal life has been busier than I would like. It’s all added up to me being stressed out. After last week I decided I needed a plan to get things back under control at work, as well as a plan for getting better control of my other commitments.

My boss has been somewhat unhappy with the performance of the team. I’ve decided the only way to make things better is to reapply myself to my job and focus on keeping my eye not only on the project’s current status, but also looking ahead a release or two making sure we don’t paint ourselves into a corner or repeat old mistakes.

I’m making a few modifications to my typical productivity style and adopting some of the more extreme GTD behaviors to try and better segment my time and plan better. I’m also going to get more into my backpack for tracking little tasks.

Luckily I have a few things to keep me distracted. Earlier in the week I purchased all 5 seasons of Mythbusters on iTunes and am slowly perusing it on my AppleTV. It’s funny that these days a single click can cost $100 and take 2 days of bandwidth on my fast connection to deliver 58Gb of content. 48 hours might seem like an excessive download time, but for perspective bear in mind that my Mythbusters collection spans over 80 hours of content so leveled out to be nearly a twice-realtime media acquisition.

Super Mario Galaxies came out this week for the Wii. It’s a load of brainless fun and in typical Nintendo fashion it’s quite rewarding for the player. The spherical level concept is fresh and new – a blast to run around the puzzling little worlds finding the start that rockets you to the next one.

I just got done blogging the rollout out their new Starbucks WiFi Music Store here in Seattle and I’m aquiver with coffee as a result. This morning I happened to stop into the Starbucks for a latte when I remembered that the new partnership for free iTunes access at Starbucks retail locations was lighting up in Seattle this morning so I whipped out my iPhone to check it out. The new Starbucks review is a good sister article to they soon to be posted in-depth review I did of the new iTunes WiFi Music Store.

Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me in the morning so I had to come back to review it over lunch about 90 minutes later. Between the quad shot earlier, and a triple over lunch I’m completely wired. *Bzzzt* *Bzzzt* *Bzzzt* *Bzzzzzzt*

Luckily I don’t have anything left on my to-do list for today so I’m pretty much free to lay on my couch watching movies with Skype. Finally getting a long weekend is really helping me feel a lot more relaxed from all the activity at work recently. Now for the rest of The Matrix Revolutions and then perhaps a little Lord of the Rings to continue on with the epic feel.

That being said I decided to experiment a little bit with advertising on Futurist Now. I’m not really doing this with a financial goal in mind (although having my hosting bills paid for every month would be nice) but more to see how the various contextual algorithms handle my content and what kind of companies they select to place advertisements on.

Obviously they have a vested interest in pushing companies they think my visitors are likely to click on (as their revenue is entirely click based) so seeing the products and services selected provides an insight into the web-browsing consumer, although in a statistically averaged way.

Provided the random nature of my content, and my wide range of topics this experiment has already led to some very interesting results. For instance the Amazon.com contextual advertisement script decided that linking the name Jack Thompson to a product in their catalog which contained a director of the same name as shown by the image below:

Now on the surface this not only makes sense from a technological perspective, but also from that of delightful social commentary. In the post in question I was referring to the now infamous Jack Thompson, legal attack-dog on a crusade against violence in video games. Jack Thompson the ex-attourny (the State of Florida BAR association pulled his license to practice law last year) has spent the last few years trying to ban violent video games as he perceives them to be the cause of almost every ill that threatens society.

Amazon was kind enough to link his name to the movie Feed, which starred an entirely different Jack Thompson, and yet somehow seems fitting. Feed is one of the best trashy C rate movies I am proud to own. The movie revolves around a murder detective who crosses continents in search of a serial killer who lovingly fattens feeds his victims to death. Upon their deaths he liquifies their fat to feed to his next victimlover, thus closing the loop on the food chain and completely disgusting the movies audience.

There is justice in advertising!

Today I woke up early for brunch at the B&O with Brien (mmm Beni Thai Crabcake Benedict!) and then to go for a photo walk. I had to pick up some food for Skype so I decided to start out in my car and after picking up the food went back to my perennial favorite location to shoot: the conservatory.

My favorite shot of the day – a backlit palm frond in the conservatory. I actually shot it specifically with an iPhone wallpaper in mind (and tried to frame it correctly for the overlays at the top and bottom) and am quite pleased with the results. You can check out the iPhone specific version here, and the rest of the shots I liked from todays walk can be found here in my Flickr archives.

“Sunlit frond” by sparktography

I just found the coolest bridge between my Apple iMac and Microsoft Xbox 360. I found some software called Connect360 from Nullriver Software. It’s a simple preference pane that allows any Mac to share it’s photos in iPhoto and music from iTunes with a 360 seamlessly. It’s now possible for both Windows and Mac’s to communicate with the 360 for living room entertainment.

Installation was a breeze: after opening the zip demo from Nullriver’s website I double clicked on the Connect360.prefpane to install the preference pane. After starting the service I was able to select what I want shared and configure transcoding options for any files that the 360 won’t be able to play natively.

I walked into the living room and used my Media Center remote to browse to the media tab on my Xbox 360. My imac showed up and after clicking through an authorization screen I was able to browse my music library and playlists as well as browse through all my photos and albums in iPhoto.

The interface is snappy, and browsing the photo libraries were response. It even increments play counts and last played dates in iTunes when you play music. I have to say that Microsoft keeping media interaction open to developers is a big win. Connect360 supports MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF and AAC Lossless for audio files, and JPEG, RAW, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF for photos.

Update: With a photo update Connect360 now supports video as well. Check out the Connect360 website for more information.

If you have both a Mac and an Xbox 360 I suggest checking out the free demo. If you like it it’s $20 to unlock the ability to browse your full library rather than 1,000 items that the demo restricts you to.

Sadly for now Connect360 does not support transferring movies or iTunes store purchased content but hopefully that will be released in a future version. While waiting to check out Apple’s upcoming iTV it’s nice to have a good solution for getting my media from my Mac to my living room.

Technorati Tags: Connect360, Intel iMac, iPhoto, iTunes, Mactel, Media transfer, Xbox 360