XyzzyB - television

Post Christmas Pre New Year

2008-12-31T02:15:00Z

Hey, I’m managing to take the time to write at least one more blog post before 2009. Woo!

My paternal Grandmother died this week. She was an amazing lady and I’m sure she’s much more comfortable now. I always think of her when I hear a piano playing. I don’t know that many grandmas could transpose songs to different keys on the fly just for kicks.

Speaking of music, one of the things I got for Christmas was a five string banjo and a new guitar. Edward loves to play with the banjo strings and I find it to be a most enjoyable instrument to learn. The first string is the highest pitch, the standard G tuning is a little weird coming from a guitar, but it all somehow comes together to make picking out seemingly any combination of notes sound really good. I’m focusing on getting used to the fingerpicks and the four finger rolls.

I’m also flooded with computer books from the Pragmatic Programmers, yay! I’m current enjoying learning about linear vs. rich brain processing with “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning” and will either dig into computer science concepts with Python, a book on crunching data, or a book on Clojure after that.

Work continues to go well, getting paid to think is nice.

Edward can, when he puts his mind to it, manage to pull himself up to standing from sitting. We will have to baby-proof sooner rather than later.

Sarah and I are finding School Rumble to be highly hilarious. It’s kind of a Scrubs/High School Romance silly anime.

So, what's up?

2008-10-05T03:20:00Z

We now return our regular infrequent updates, already in progress.

The iPod Touch continues to be a really nice gizmo. Now only do I still use it as my primary home email interface, but it’s also my front end to Wikipedia, the New York Times, and Pandora Radio thanks to some excellent applications. Every night Sarah and I pass a game of Scrabble back and forth. The Scrabble app is surprisingly complete, considering Hasbro phoned in their facebook version. It includes a nifty game play mode wherein each player places a word from the same set of letters, each player gets the score from their word, and whoever’s word has the higher score is kept on the board. It nicely eliminates luck from the game, so it’s all down to whoever can tease out the best word.

My XBox 360 briefly suffered from the red ring of death, but Microsoft’s surprisingly expedient (and free, even though my box was out of warranty) repair service had it back to me in about a week. While there was a gap in my high definition gaming I decided to actually buy a game for the so far only used for moving watching Playstation 3. I wanted a game exclusive to the PS3 (why would I play a game without achievements when I have the choice?) and a game on the cheap: Motorstorm fit the bill. Turns out, it’s not all that bad. I mean, if I had bought that as a first game for my PS3 for $60 I’d be mighty let-down, but as a bargain-game is pretty ok. Just imagine Excitbike thrown into a multi-route, gorgeously 3d (and it a very gorgeous game), and multi-vehicle game work and you’ll have a pretty good grasp of the game. It’s even got the same boosting/overheating mechanic. Unfortunately the developers were so focused on making the pretty, the forgot some of the fun. Yes there are some races were you can just pick any vehicle from big rig to motorcycle, but to artifically extend the length of the game the developers take away that choice whenever possible and force you to race in a a specific type of vehicle. As you win races you unlock new cars and courses, but most often you’ll unlock…the same course but with a different vehicle type that you are forced to use. Lame.

Sarah and I are enjoying the new series, Fringe. The science is completely bogus, but the show clicks together in a fun way.

Work continues to be awesome. I’ve finished up an internal IP address tracking tool and had a great time learning mod_python and jQuery while I was at it. jQuery is, simply put, an amazing accomplishment. JavaScript and AJAX made sane. jQuery plugins allow us coders to add in some terrific shiny things (e.g. jQuery Tablesorter) for the cost of properly marking up our HTML (which would have been done anyway), a one line include, and a one line jQuery script ($(”#myTable”).tablesorter();). Hello awesome!

Edward continues to get cuter and cuter. He loves to play peek-a-boo and is starting to get ticklish, which is exceedingly adorable. Moving continues to be his activity of choice and his favorite place to be is hanging out on one of our shoulders peering around at the world.

OMG Vacation

2008-09-01T02:38:00Z

Vacation! I’m taking the entire week off of work. Four vacation days buys me nine continuous days off. Sweet! No special plans, just relaxing at home with Sarah and Edward. Ahh.

Sarah and I have been watching Hill Street Blues on Hulu and we’ve been very impressed. From the very first episode the characters and story are gripping and nuanced. Of course we have both been imprinted by the theme music, which is now an almost irresistible psychological command to relax and get ready for bed.

Speaking of Hulu: Jaadu has proven to be fantastic for controlling our home theater mac. This great app allows an iPod Touch (or iPhone) to connect to VNC servers (such as Leopard’s screen sharing) and does it extremely well. It comes with some shortcut setups that are supposed to be geared toward driving powerpoint presentations, but also happen to be perfect for controlling mplayer or hulu. Now we don’t even have to keep a laptop on hand, just a couple clicks on the iPod controls anything we need on the tv computer. Establishing the connection only takes a couple seconds, and everything works intuitively. Tapping the screen is a click, double tap is a double click, double tap and drag is a click and drag, and dragging with two fingers pulls the scroll bar for the current window. Jaadu even perfectly scales our odd resolution (when tilted to horizontal mode) to fit, although it scrolls so seamlessly I usually just use it in vertical mode.

Moving on to current videogames. If you have an XBox 360 download the demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Unless you think that pulling down Tie Fighters and throwing them at squads of storm troopers sounds boring. While you’re on XBox Live, you should download the demos (or full games!) of Braid, Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and Castle Crashers. The wonderfully, magical, and myterious game Braid is a moving and beautiful mindbender about time. It’s kind of like Einstein’s Dreams in videogame form. If you don’t know about Bionic Commando don’t bother, it’s a perfect remake of an old school Nintendo game of the highest order. If you don’t already have the ingrained reflexes from the ages of high hand-eye coordination games then you’ll just be frustrated. Castle Crashers is the next game from the geniuses behind Alien Hominid. If you get it, hit me up for some four player fun on XBox Live.

Six Reasons why Avatar: The Last Airbender is more awesome than Harry Potter

2008-08-19T01:24:00Z

The best kid’s television series ever ended a couple of weeks ago and not nearly enough people watched it. The show? Avatar: The Last Airbender. And since you probably didn’t watch it I’m going to extol its virtues in the time honored tradition of the comparative list. Since you are practically guaranteed to have read it, the otherwise relatively excellent Harry Potter series serves as our lens to the world of Avatar.

A world-spanning adventure

In Avatar the adventure literally spans the globe from pole to pole. Our heroes travel from the frigid arctic to sweltering swamps to dry deserts to lush tropical paradises and everywhere between.

In Harry Potter we spend 90% of our time with our heroes in a castle in England. Sure, we hear some small snippets about the wider world, but even that wider world doesn’t extend beyond Europe. Really? No magical people from, say, China are interested in stopping the ultimate evil?

A celebration of world cultures

Harry Potter is just as limited culturally as it is geographically. It barely hints at cultures beyond British, and still doesn’t get past Europe and doesn’t really care to. We must either conclude that the rest of the world is simply irrelevant, or that Voldemort was just a serial killer/cult leader stalking around the UK.

In Avatar, the world spanning conflict spans the world culturally as much as it does geographically. Bits of practically every world culture are found in the many disparate peoples of the series. Although the series does have a focus on Asian cultures it is by no means fixed. Bits of Western, Inuit, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and many more cultures make the world of Avatar a rich and compelling place. The global conflict really feels global, and not like some power play for a small European island.

Complex characters and motives

In Harry Potter, with the notable exception of one or two characters, the evil people really are the evil people. The Malfoys are evil from the start. House Slytherin really is the house of evil fighting against the three houses of good that we all thought it was. The Ministry of Magic really is as slow-moving and incompetent as we suspect.

In Avatar, the four nations are truly balanced, with good and bad in each: even the ‘evil’ Fire Nation. At the start of the series the Fire Nation is the faceless horde, bent on world domination. As the series progresses we learn of internal conflicts within the nation, and eventually a face is put to their people and culture and we learn that this isn’t the work of an evil nation but that of an evil person who happens to be a powerful and charismatic leader. Avatar doesn’t really treat people as good or bad, they just follow their logical motivations.

Breaking that down a little more:

In Harry Potter Voldemort wants to kill everyone. Why? Because he’s evil.

In Avatar Fire Lord Ozai wants to dominate the world because he desires power, yes, but also because he believes that his domination will lead to a better world. As we learn about the Fire Nation we find that under his rule the people in the Fire Nation are insulated from the war and actually enjoy a very prosperous lifestyle, albeit with some restriction on individual liberties.

Avatar presents a simplistic but very effective starting point for a discussion of both the lure and peril of imperialism. Harry Potter starts a discussion about why we shouldn’t like evil Wizards and bureaucracy.

Further, Harry never questions what he will do when he finally, inevitably, duels Voldemort. In Avatar Aang seriously soul searches for a solution that will allow him to face Fire Lord Ozai and restore balance to the world without taking a life.

Bending is martial arts based and has set rules and limits

Magic is great for a writer because you always have an out, because it’s magic. Harry Potter can introduce entirely new concepts and abilities as needed by the plot (see Horcruxes and every other plot device that requires Hermione to do something obscure she happened to have read in a book).

Avatar sets down the ground rules for bending and then never breaks them or introduces new plot devices. Instead, it demonstrates how cleverness and real honest to goodness hard work and training (shocking!) can be used to make great things happen within those limits.

Also, each style of bending being based on branches of actual martial arts means that bending is a million times more awesome than magic. Just about every fight scene in Avatar contains some of the best martial arts action I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something.

The adults aren’t all blindingly stupid (but aren’t always right, either)

It would be difficult to find adult characters more utterly, staggeringly idiotic and blind than those in Harry Potter. Look at the Quiddich Referee as a microcosm. Harry is the subject of openly obvious cheating and unusual events, yet the game goes on without a foul or whistle? Hmm, that bludger is continuously making hideously powerful attacks on that one player, even chasing him around and off the court…I’m going to allow this. His broom is clearly being immobilized by an enchantment…I’m going to allow this.

In Avatar, the story is about the children, yes. And they are also unusually gifted children. But the adults of the series are actually clever and competent as well.

You don’t have to be “magical” to be relevant

My biggest gripe with Harry Potter is that the lesson is: only magical characters matter.

In Avatar, many characters, including one of the main characters, has no bending (i.e. magic) ability and still contributes in a major way. We learn that if you work hard you can do whatever you set your mind to. That’s a lesson worth learning.

A bunch of cool stuff

2008-07-19T02:19:00Z

There are a ton of cool things happening now. Let me show you them.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is pretty much the best thing ever. It’s a musical starring Neil Patrick Harris as the eponymous Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as a swaggering superhero, and other people that I don’t really know or care about. Watch it now, part three of three comes out tomorrow and it’s all gone by Sunday. After that if you want to watch you’ll have to pay.

Avatar: The Last Airbender has finally had new episodes all this week, leading up the to inevitably incredible two hour movie “Sozin’s Comet” tomorrow (Avatar and Dr. Horrible on the same day, sweet). If you don’t watch it, you are missing out one of the best shows on tv.

Sarah and I have made semi-complicated plans to see The Dark Knight) tomorrow (oh yes, Avatar, Dr. Horrible, AND Batman on the same day). We still can’t bring ourselves to both leave the baby at the same time, so Sarah and her sister will see it in the early afternoon, followed by a dinner by Lance, then Lance and I will see it in the evening.

E3 is going on. The coolest announcement so far may be for the 1-to-1 movement add-on for the Wii that will come with Wii Sports 2. Wii Sports 2 has frisbee throwing and sword fighting. Sword fighting and frisbee.

Terminator 4 looks fantastic. I was very “meh” until I saw that we have Christian Bale as John Connor. Bam!

The wonderful Hulu:http://hulu.com has The Secret of Nimh available for your viewing pleasure. My favorite Bluth movie and it holds up quite well.

I’m on del.icio.us roughly eight years behind everyone else, but now I have a cool little linkroll widget over there on the side. I’m pretty sure you can subscribe to del.icio.us links as an RSS feed if you’re all that interested.

Identi.ca just annouced that they’ve implemented the Twitter API, which is great because that means that every cool app people have written for doing Twitter updates will seamlessly work with identi.ca with just an address change. So Twitterific, can I have an Identi.cariffic for my iPod Touch?

Speaking of the iPod Touch. Its firmware 2.0 is great for two reasons: multiple message movemenet and deletion in email, applications. As for iPod Touch/iPhone applications I have three standouts: Remote, Pandora, and Scrabble. Scrabble is scrabble, so that’s a given. Pandora gives me access to my Pandora radio stations via my iPod Touch anywhere there’s open wifi (and that would be a huge win for an iPhone user, Pandora everywhere! Who needs XM?). Remote lets me control the iTunes on our mac over wifi with my touch. Let me say that again. I can sit on my couch, and with just a flip of my iPod Touch start browsing through our entire music collection (including videos and podcasts) and play them on our nice surround sound system. Of course I could do this before, but it involved: turning on the tv, switching to the computer video input, turning on the surround sound, getting the (sadly, wired) keyboard and mouse, and then going to iTunes and playing the music. Now I just have to turn on the surround sound, and start up Remote on the touch. Oh yeah. It’s really nice to be able to jump around our whole music collection while feeding Edward. It even streams the album artwork to the iPod just to be cool.

Maintaining Sanity

2008-06-15T21:49:00Z

A steady stream of flashing lights and sound really helps with keeping awake and alert during late-night feeding and baby care. And when you’re only sleeping three to four hours at most, everything is late-night.

Sarah and I have come to really appreciate the following inputs:

Cable Television with DVR

From National Geographic to Food Network to HGTV to Discovery to SciFi to Comedy Central: there’s always something cool, fun, or interesting to watch on our DVR. While channel flipping would be ok, the DVR is really what makes cable worth it. Frequent interruptions for the baby mean that without the ability to pause and rewind our shows we’d essentially only watch about twenty five percent of the content IF we happened to catch something really cool during the weird hours we’re feeding the baby. Unless you’re into paid programming, there’s not a lot of tv on at 4:27am.

The News and Weather via the Wii

For quickly keeping up with the news and weather with one hand (the other holding the baby) nothing beats the Wii weather and news channels.

The Internet via the Wii

The Internet is, of course, just stuffed with fun content. The Wii’s internet channel allows truly one handed browsing of all of our favorite sites.

Hulu.com

We finally tried out Hulu after discovering to our chagrin that our DVR had dropped two of the last three Battlestar Galactica episodes. Awesome! It has a wide selection of TV Shows and even quite a few movies, all with very small commercial breaks. The commercial breaks are denoted on the video’s progress bar and have a timer countdown while they are running. I’ve always said that I’d be right onboard with official tv torrents that included commercials and, since there’s no download time, hulu.com is even better than that. Hulu even has full movies and a pretty decent selection of them at that.

While it isn’t supported by the Wii’s browser (Flash higher than version 7 required) it does, of course, work great with Opera 9.5 on the PowerMac connected to the tv. The full screen mode taxes our Internet connection a bit too much, but using the mac’s mouse scroll wheel zoom with cursorceror to hide the mouse cursor we get a nice full screen presentation without stuttering video. Since we have the PowerMac connected into our surround sound system as well, the sound is even (thanks to Dolby magic) pretty decent. In a stroke of genius they even mapped spacebar to pause, so after we get the zoom in situated we don’t need to move everything around to find a pause button.

Endless Ocean

Videogames and baby watching are a tricky combination. If he’s deep asleep I can get in some game time, but I can’t really focus on anything involved. Even Super Mario Galaxy requires a bit more concentration than I’d like. Endless Ocean, on the other hand, is a game that requires absolutely nothing from the player. You get to run around beautiful underwater environments and have absolutely nothing that requires focus. In fact, the entire game encourages relaxation over acoomplishment. You can even drive the boat to a scenic spot then just sit in a deck chair and watch the ocean. While diving you don’t need to worry about air, depth, or anything at all. Drop the controller and your character will just patiently wait while fish and creatures swim around to the soothing music. When you do have time to explore, the game is actually pretty interesting and rewarding. Seeing a whale glide in and swim alongside me was an awesome videogame moment.

RiffTrax

2008-05-24T02:06:00Z

RiffTrax, the successor to MST3K, seems to have slipped past Brent, so it may have slipped past you too!

RiffTrax are audio commentaries done by Mike and other stars from the show MST3K. You buy the trax and then start the trax and movie at the same time, they helpfully provide instructions on how to sync them up at the beginning of each trax.

They are all completely, wonderfully hilarious and the best part is that since they don’t need to secure broadcast rights they are free to riff on new and popular movies. Sarah and I give a big thumbs up to their X-Men rifftrax.

The Final Cylon

2008-05-17T14:52:00Z

It has come to me. The identity of the final cylon. There are several key questions that led me to the answer.

Who has been with the fleet the entire time (i.e. hasn’t died)?

Who has always acted as a neutral party, treating cylons and humans alike?

Who has criticized the war between cylon and human?

Who is a hugely key figure that has saved many lives and kept the fleet’s leadership intact?

Who is the straight talker, cutting through all the crap of both sides?

Who is the one key person that has medically examined all the cylon skin jobs the fleet has encountered?

That last question should give it away.

Dr. Cottle has been with the fleet from the start. Is contemptuous of the conflict and treats all beings alike. He has always been a neutral party, treating injured human and cylon alike.

He also continually declares that there is no way to tell the difference between human and cylon even though we know that to be false (e.g. Baltar’s cylon detector). Now it may well be that he just can’t tell the difference, but I don’t buy it. I think he knows how to tell cylon from human and so he knows who the other final five are.

Or he knew who they were already. Going even more out on a limb, I think that he knows he’s a cylon and has always known that he is a cylon. He isn’t confused or surprised by this, it’s just who he is. Capable, reliable, neutral, ever there in need, and cynical Dr. Cottle.

But I’m not sure how to apply the words of the hybrid: “And the fifth, still in the shadow, will claw toward the light, hungering for redemption, that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering.”

Maybe Gaeda will start singing “All Along the Watchtower”.

HBO's John Adams

2008-03-27T02:36:00Z

If you aren’t watching the new John Adams mini-series on HBO you are missing out on some seriously great historical drama.

If you want to check up on the series’ historical accuracy, Boston 1775 is a great blog.

The Martin Luther King you don't see on TV

2008-01-21T15:06:00Z

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Watched: House - Season Two

2007-12-16T16:27:00Z

Watched: House – Season Two

Review: 4/5

With a first season (and character introductions and dynamic) out of the way the season season of House delivers with some interesting characters arcs culminating in a fantastic season-ending cliffhanger.

Watched: House - Season One

2007-12-16T16:18:00Z

Watched: House – Season One

Review: 4/5

The show is actually much more enjoyable than I orginally gave it credit for. The medical hand-waving is ok, but the real draw is Hugh Laurie’s excellent acting and the delicious soap opera dynamic of the cast.

Watched: Bender's Big Score

2007-11-30T17:54:00Z

Watched: Bender’s Big Score

Review: 5/5

Futurama is back and better than ever! This feature length movie is full of everything wonderful that makes Futurama, Futurama. Funny, clever, poignant, and utterly wacky. The only downside is that it’s only an hour and a half long.

Seth MacFarlane speaking at the writers' strike

2007-11-27T03:08:00Z

Seth MacFarlane on why WGA strike is for the ‘little guy’

House, MD?

2007-11-26T22:31:00Z

House episodes reviewed by an actual doctor