Archive for February, 2009

Treasure hunting

I don’t recall when, exactly, I became aware that Wil Wheaton had an active blog pres­ence. It would have been a few years ago, prob­a­bly men­tioned in pass­ing in com­ments or a link-​​​​in some­where else, point­ing to a post he’d done. Likely it was on a nerdy sub­ject of some sort, since I often con­sume nerdy blogs, and odds are good […]

Apple improved its DRM-​​free purchase policy! Woot!

A while back Apple went DRM free with iTunes, a move her­alded far and wide by sundry and all. On the plus side, los­ing encryp­tion while improv­ing audio play­back is a clear value-​​​​added bonus for we long­time users. I can actu­ally put the music I pur­chased onto non-​​​​iPod devices now, such as my smart­phone. This has empleas­ened me. On the […]

Samsung might be a little tone-​​deaf

For the NV100, Samsung is try­ing to illus­trate how crisp its cap­tures are by a pos­si­bly clever, and cer­tainly notice­able, cam­paign. They’ve got images show­ing peo­ple cap­tured in a split sec­ond, so fast that their bod­ies appear to be bisected: The imagery is effec­tive and star­tling, and cer­tainly arrests your atten­tion. But in the series of ads, […]

Going off message

Oh my. Police say an upstate New York tele­vi­sion exec­u­tive who sought to improve the image of Muslims in the media beheaded his wife after she filed for divorce. Yes. Really. I do not believe this is going to do much to reform the image of Muslims. Who knows, though? Maybe he anes­thetized her first or […]

What she said

in reply, bor­row­ing from Song of Songs: More delight­ful is your love than wine. My lover belongs to me and I to him. I sought him, whom my heart loves. I sought him but I did not find him. I will rise then and go about the city. In the streets and cross­ings I will seek him whom my heart loves. I […]

Then, and now

What I wrote in 2004: They still ride in the lock of time, breath­ing with tril­lions of oth­ers across three wide dimen­sions and a fourth still unbro­ken in one direc­tion, and they know they will die but will never die, for this is the feel­ing that has moved every man from the first human stir­ring of heart […]

Oh, well yes, of course.

Naturally I’m in love with her, and told her so on Valentine’s Day.* I mean, duh. She can quote from Holy Grail**, knows what a d20 is, likes Firefly and doesn’t live in her par­ents’ base­ment. You just can’t do bet­ter than that. ==== * Awwwwwwww. ** Those of you think­ing, “She’s got huge tracts of…” You […]

Hup!

I’m work­ing on start­ing a stu­pid meme, derived partly from Harvey Birdman: Ending dif­fer­ent thoughts with “…in my pants.”* A sort of com­bi­na­tion of Bulwer-​​​​Lytton and ado­les­cent humor, as in, “It was a dark and stormy night … in my pants.” The only real rule is that it’s got to be a rec­og­niz­able lit­er­ary ref­er­ence. I men­tioned this at […]

So much for that

And thus doth win­ter end. This is the same view as this morn­ing. Amazing what a dif­fer­ence nine hours can make.

I’m dreaming of a white … uh, Valentine’s Day?

This is just plain weird. Now many, many, many of you might look at this and think oh, win­ter, so what? Well, this is what the land­scape more nor­mally looks like.

Two movies, one review

Went to see Inkheart and Coraline this week­end with the GF, and thought it might be con­struc­tive to do a par­al­lel review of them, because to my mind they have at least a few things in com­mon. Also note that there may be spoil­ers, depend­ing on how you view things, below the fold here. For starters, I haven’t read […]

I miss the Talking Heads

I really do. I’ve been a fan for more than a quar­ter cen­tury. Eeriest part. “Years ago, I was an angry young man…” Byrne’s pre­sen­ta­tion, his face. Nice, effec­tive. Eyes closed, then open, then closed again. That video was made twenty years ago. Christ, they all look so young. What does that mean about me?