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Saturday, September 16th, 2006
After a long week of work what better way to celebrate than to go celebrate with a little consumerism. In the last 24 hours I have managed to obtain both a 2nd generation iPod Nano as well as a new Core 2 Duo 24″ iMac.
I’m extremely happy with both (with a few minor exceptions) and find both to be pure engineering marvels. The Nano is small, sleek, and more responsive than it’s predecessor.
The iMac is simply stunning. The 64 bit Core 2 Duo chip keeps things brisk and the gorgeous 24″ 16:9 screen is easily replacing the ancient 27″ SDTV that I had in the bedroom. It’s a great media solution for the room, and provides the Mac desktop I’ve been missing so I can have an always on unix machine in the house for dev/network stuff.
I’m really impressed so far with every single feature of the new iMac save one: Frontrow has a fat ass and needs some work. It’s a great idea, and by far the best ipTV solution out there, but it’s sluggish, and forces you to import items into iTunes in order to properly browse or play them.
I’ll get some photos up of the iMac soon. For now here is some Nano Vs. Nano photo action!
Technorati Tags: Intel iMac, Intel iMac, iPod Nano, Mactel
Cory Doctorow: interview at the Singularity Summit
Sunday, September 3rd, 2006Check out Cory Doctorow’s interview with Rick Kleffel at the Singularity summit. It’s a great interview and goes into some of Cory’s thoughts on the future, and the economic and social impacts on our society as a result of the onslaught of technology.
Technorati Tags: Cory Doctorow, Interview, Podcast
Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children was just released on DVD. Now I was a huge fan of the first Final Fantasy movie - The Spirits Within, and even a fan of a all but the most recent Final Fantasy games, but somehow Advent Children manages to disappoint me.
I just got the DVD in the mail and popped it in to watch it. The story seems too built on top of Final Fantasy VII (the video game) and without having played it I found the movie difficult to get into. There are some cute cliches, and a lot of throwbacks to the game as a series, but Advent Children lacks the intelligent story and true artistry that the The Spirits Within was so rich with.
To top it off the DVD is a very poorly encoded. For such a cutting edge computer generated movie I would have expected much higher video quality. Other CG content (The Incredibles for instance) looks so fantastic, and given that the production company does not even need to worry about a film transfer so it’s really a shame.
I’m suddenly inspired to go get another copy of Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within for my collection. It’s a much better movie, and from what I remember is an order of magnitude better of a transfer.
Damn I watch a lot of movies
Thursday, August 10th, 2006Damn - I decided to give up my OCD alphabetizing of my DVD’s about three weeks ago and just started sorting them by date last watched. Every time I watch a movie I put it at the beginning of the collection. I was just looking at my collection and realized that I watch a lot of movies! In the past 19 days I have watched 32 movies. That works out to about 1.7 movies a day.
It’s actually a bit more than that because I have watched a few of the HD-DVD’s more than once, and have watched V for Vendetta four times. Once you throw that into the calculation it actually works out to about two movies a day.
To continue this trend I’m watching a movie right now - The Dark Crystal in all it’s Jim Henson goodness! To see a full a full list of the movies I have watched in the last three weeks (in chronological order no less) click through to the full post.
Technorati Tags: Cancer, Cinema, DVD, Movies, Obsessive, stat, statistics, Technology
God bless
Sunday, August 6th, 2006Or so I was just told by a random stranger outside while walking Skype. It’s been a fantastic week. I’m settling into my 25th year of life with style, and have been spending a lot of time at home working on a few new projects as well as enjoying my new home entertainment setup.
Of note regarding the home theater I was able to add a HD-DVD player to my personal digital entertainment ecosystem. Thanks to the many great friends to each pitched in a bit for my birthday the amazon gift certificates added up to let me get the Toshiba HD-A1 player, and a few discs. I’m very impressed with the quality of the picture (MPEG-4 makes such a difference over MPEG-2 for HD compression) but agree with most other reviewers that the HD-A1 has some usability and performance quirks that will hopefully be ironed out once HD-DVD players are no longer gen-0 products.
Of note in the new project space I’m working with some cool new people in the blogosphere and aiming to start a few new concepts in personal and business blogging. More on that later - I promise, but I have a couple of weeks of work to do on the project before it’s ready to share with the world at large.
Outside of those projects my professional work life is going well. This week I got invited to interview for a full time Program Manager position at Microsoft, and will be following up on that next week. If all goes well I should be a “real employee” rather soon rather than being the dash trash I currently am.
Now I’m enjoying the bliss of blogging, watching The Return of the King in all it’s upscaled goodness, and waiting for some friends to show up for an afternoon matinee of A Scanner Darkly - sounds fun huh?
My new setup
Friday, July 28th, 2006
A pair of Bowers and Wilkins 600 series DM602 S3’s and a LCR600 S3 paired with a Sony 34″ WEGA all powered by my Pioneer Elite VSX-82TSX and wired with Kimber Kable.
Could I be more obsessive about my media experience? I guess the next step is getting a larger TV, and adding soundproofing to my walls so I can crank those babies a bit louder.
YAY!
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006I just got the call and my speakers have been delivered! I am ridiculously excited now (particularly since they are 2 days early), and now somehow the 2 hours until I can get off work and go pick them up just seems like an eternity. I’ll have some initial comments up soon, and hopefully a full review in the next week or so.
God I love gratification. Instant gratification is the best, but I’ll take what I can get!
Two more weeks
Saturday, July 15th, 2006
But daddy, I want them NOW!
Friday, July 14th, 2006The week is over and I’m video-podcasting again! This week I try out my new camera, and take a crash course in video editing. Sorry that it’s quicktime video, and not an embedded Flash video but I was having problems with re-encoding it and am too drained to futz with it. You might have to upgrade to Quicktime 7 if you are on Windows to see it because I encoded using h.264.
I’m happy with the camera quality, but my workflow needs a lot of work to avoid the compression artifacts that you will see in this video. I managed to have to re-compress it twice, both times losing significant amounts of quality. I also need to figure out how to wrangle audio - something went horribly awry right, but then I seemed to keep it under control.
Anyone have a recommendation of a lossless video codec that’s Mac friendly? I’m doing the editing using iMovie HD because it’s both slick and handy. Video editing in general seems to have a bit of a steep learning curve, but I’m always up for a challenge.
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