Television

NBC Schedule

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Variety reports on the new NBC schedule.

The good news is that Heroes is back, and they also have a short spin-off called Heroes: Origins. Origins will be six 1-hour shows, each showcasing a new hero we’ve never seen before. At the end of the series, you’ll be able to vote on the web for who you want added to the regular show.

They’re also adding The Bionic Woman, starring some Brit I’ve never heard of. Her name’s Michelle Ryan, and she’s looker, but doesn’t remind you at all of Lindsay Wagner. Still, from this photo, I wouldn’t mind trying out a Sleep Number bed with her:

Michelle Ryan

Gone is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Boo! And The Black Donnely’s, which I never watched, but would have had I known Paul Haggis was behind it. Oh well.

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Film, Technology

Netflix Streaming

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So I hadn’t rented from Netflix in a while, and thought it was time to remedy that. Especially with most TV shows having a season finale in May. I was actually surfing the site for a while before I noticed the “Watch Now” tab at the top. It turns out that Netflix now has over 2,000 movies available for streaming. I was amazed that they never sent me so much as an email about this major new feature. I can only guess that since I wasn’t costing them any money, they didn’t want to remind me I had a subscription, which is pretty lame of them. So I now must punish them by making up for my dormancy.

The feature is pretty simple, find a movie and hit play. You need to download a proprietary player, but that’s all quick and painless. Harvey, a 4:3 black and white film looked good in full screen on my 21″ monitor. The Italian Job (Marky Mark version) also looked good (certainly Charlize Theron did), but at 2.35:1, it used maybe 1/3 of my screen. Video quality is based on bandwidth; my connection rated “high”, which is the best offered at 1.6 to 2.2+ Mbps.

There is a limit on viewing, you get 1 hour per dollar you pay monthly. So my discounted 4-DVD plan gives me 20 hours of viewing per month. A nice, cost-free bonus.

Update: Looks like there’s an 18 hour cap, despite their wording. And another problem is that I was “charged” 1h50m for The Italian Job, even though I watched at most 10 minutes of it. So know that you’ll be dinged for the whole movie, even if you watch just a part of it.

The selection is pretty small by Netflix standards, but if I hadn’t already seen so many films, it might appear better. Here’s a partial list of movies I gave 5 stars to, which are available for instant playing:

The Bridge on the River Kwai
Casablanca
Chinatown
A Clockwork Orange
Cool Hand Luke
The Day the Earth Stood Still
The Dirty Dozen
Harvey
The Jerk
North by Northwest
Run Lola Run
Strangers on a Train: Special Edition

Now some movies, if you watch them on a computer screen, should get your subscription canceled. I mean, The Matrix? But many shouldn’t suffer at all from small screen viewing. And if you really cared about quality, you would have seen it in the theater.

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Music

FLA@NYC

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I saw Front Line Assembly for the first time at BB Kings, May 3rd.
Acumen Nation and The Start, opened.
FLA’s playlist was fantastic since they were set up like a band (drums/guitars riffs) which is my favorate style for them. There’s nothing worse than watching an industrial one-man-band sit in front of a laptop while hopping and down trying to get the crowd into it.
Bill Leeb was in a sarcastic mood. He apolagized for the tour-bus-incident last time he tried to come to NY. The smoke machine ran out of fluid, so he suggested we all fart to keep the mist alive. He also voiced his aggrevation at the lack of any PA system so he couldn’t tell how they sounded, but it wasn’t that bad.
Although I didn’t recognize the other band members, I overheard someone point to Chris Peterson and someone else said Rhys Fulber wasn’t there. I can’t confirm any of this.
After performing, they came back for an oncore including Mindphaser that was phenomenal.
After the show we ate at Lucille’s restaurant, located in the same building. When we were done, we went outside to get a cab and found Bill Leeb (my idol) was just hanging out on the curb while they were loading the tour bus. He was practically alone! It figures I went through two batteries on my camera to get 1.5 gig of pictures and videos. (requests?). Even my cell phone was dead after searching for a signal in the underground club for 4 hours.
So I ended up just gawking at him like a teenager, think of nothing better to say than “duh…, I like music!” as he finished up outside and hopped on the bus.

Next time I will be better prepared.

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Film, Humor, Music

Weng Weng: Kung Fu, Rocketpacks, & Mini Motorcycles

http://youtube.com/watch?v=eqh5O9LbjhY

A Crackteam agent sent me this link from YouTube and I HAD to share it for a good laugh.

It’s a rap video montage of clips from the movies of Weng Weng [from IMDb], and music stylings from The Chuds [from MySpace]. The collaboration was edited and produced by John R. of the R Room. It’s taken a couple views to really appreciate it since my attention during the first round went to the visuals and camera tricks. But the lyrics to the soundtrack song, “Weng Weng Overture,” are equally entertaining. They can be read at The Chuds MySpace page.

I’m a little late to the phenomenon of Weng Weng [from WikiPedia], but of all the Kung Fu and spy spoofs I’ve seen his look to be the most entertaining. Films credits include “For Y’ur Height Only” and “The Impossible Kid”, which received 8/10 stars on IMDb from 50 dedicated voters. There’s even a drink named after him, called the Weng Weng. Well, that may be a false claim but it should be true.

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Everything Else, Technology

Mmmm… PI

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I’ve recently been building a new computer system and one of the things I have been trying to work out is the overclocking of the system.� In my search for benchmarks and stress tests I came across a popular benchmark in the overclocking community that I thought was pretty neat.� Ever wonder what the 21,865,285th digit of PI was?

Super PI is a program that will calculate PI to various numbers of digits (up to 32M).� The standard benchmark is to run it for 1M digits and compare your time to other computers.� My current CPU (Intel E6600�@ ~2.9GHz) did it in a little over 17 seconds, and my 64-bit workstation at work (Intel Xeon 5150 @ 2.66GHz)�does it in 19.781 seconds.� I’ll add a comment to this once with my final�1M time once I finish overclocking my system and�verify its stability.

There is also a wikipedia entry on the program here.

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Everything Else, Technology

Track All Your Wasted Time

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For a while now, I’ve wanted a super-simple time tracking facility to track the various ways I throw my life away. Something where I can just add tasks, then hit a button to start and stop a timer, adding a comment when finished. A very short search unearthed Time Tracker, which provides exactly that. It’s also great if you’re doing consulting, working on different projects for different clients. And you can export your work log in XML or Excel (CSV). I hoping it will really motivate me, seeing just how little time I spend on the important things, like disco dancing, archery, and rape.

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Rants

Be interesting or be quiet.

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If you are in your 40s, male, wear a fanny pack, and have a corded earpiece for your cell phone stuck in your ear while eating dinner, please consider the possibility that you are a massive tool, and regardless of how enthralled with your inane conversation the tardfest you are eating with is, the rest of us really don’t want to hear your opinions, factoids, or ponderings. Talk in a quiet, indoor voice, not the one intended for sporting events. As a bonus, it may make your flock seem more interested in your verbal diarrhea, as they lean in closer to hear what you are saying. Even better, the rest of us will only know you are an idiot by your attire.

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Rants, Technology, Television

Apple TV: crap in a lacquer box.

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The rollout of the Apple TV Appliance reminds me of a story I heard when I was a kid. It involved a man from ancient Segovia buying a donkey for his farm in Spain. He bought this highly adorned donkey for an exorbitant amount and was proudly walking it home. When he started taking off the embroidered tackle, he found the unpleasant truth: the beautiful epaulets and head-dress were hiding sightless eyes, the elaborate tassels that reached to the floor were hiding the infection in the rear legs, and the lacquered and shiny saddle was hiding a lame back on the animal.

In the same way, I hope people are not deceived by the beautiful Apple design and ergonomic, logical menus. I hope that they get to examine the crappy video image before they buy. This device succeeds in *downgrading* all image sources to make them easily available anywhere in your house. Wow.

If it’s too late and you’ve already been screwed, go ahead and use the amazing human ability to justify our mistakes. We are really good at this, gauging from the various studies that�show that our satisfaction with a crappy product decreases markedly at first and then actually increases after purchase. I think it’s our attempt to justify our mistakes and say to the world “it’s not really all that bad if you consider……” Same behavior applies to poorly conceived marriages. Be aware; beware. ��

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The most famous covert organization in the world.