I didn’t realise until today that there was a part of iTunes Genius that makes suggestions when browsing the iTunes store.
I went to click on one item, and got:
Now, why would you go and recommend something you can’t give me? That is just plain mean!
Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.
Star Wars: The Crazy Ones [via retrophisch].
Finally, Microsoft put out something worth downloading, and it won’t install on my VMWare machine:
Wed 26th Nov 2008
Pragmatic Programmers are having a sale this Friday. Use the coupon code ‘turkey’ to get a 25% discount.
We all know Wall•E, who cleans up Earth.
This is the story of Burn•E, who does maintenance on the ship:
http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/k1uCDheC6Itc4PQ1V4&related=1&canvas=medium
The thumbnail kind of spoils the impact of the image, but oh well…
Via twitter, but I can’t remember who!
The greatest TV show I have seen in a very long time is Dexter.
Channel 10 here in Australia decided to show the first season earlier this year, after Rove, but after watching it, and seeing that they don’t seem to be planning to “Fasttrack” it like some other, less worthy programs, I downloaded Season 2.
We finished watching the last episode last night.
There are so many reasons that this is a great show. I’ll try to be general enough not to create spoilers from season 2, but I can’t promise anything.
Firstly, Dexter breaks lots of rules. We are forced to identify with (and like) a person who is truly evil. Lets face it - Dexter kills people. I can’t even bring myself to accept killing people who have been legitimately convicted of murder, or even the Bali bombers. I’m not saying I support them in any way: I do not, but I also do not believe that any person or government has the right to take the lives of any other person. Under any circumstances. Even if they take more than 12 items through the 12 item or less isle at the supermarket. Yet, even after a couple of episodes, the likeableness of the monster that is Dexter grows on us. It’s not really his fault he is a monster - he just deals with it the only way he knows.
Secondly, the plot is well written, and the writers still manage to throw in heaps of surprises. When we first discover that Rudy is Dexter’s brother, Jaq and I both looked at one another, and it was a bit like the time you first saw “The Sixth Sense,” and played back all of the scenes with Bruce Willis and his wife, thinking about how well it was all done. Far too often the suspense is not hidden from the viewers, and it is based simply on the lack of knowledge of one or more characters. Indeed, this is the case with how Dexter is living amongst the police he works with, and we all know something about him, yet everyone else doesn’t.
Many of the characters in Dexter annoy me, or at least did to begin with. Debra is kind of funny looking, and a bit dopey at times. Doakes appears to be simplistic, and the only member of a whole department of police who even have any inkling that Dexter is strange. LaGuerta and most of the rest of the cops are single-dimensional, and it’s really only Angel and Misuka who have much of a character development arc. However, Paul, Rita and her family are all very “real,” and we can’t help but feel bad for them when things go against them. Even Paul. Having said that, I really like Doakes and Angel, and when the lives of these two men are put in danger, one can’t help be worried about their fate. There is another character in Season 2 who I really felt no connection with - but I won’t give away too much by saying their name. (wink).
The other thing I really respect about Dexter, over something like Heroes or Lost is the realisation that not every episode needs to end with a cliffhanger. Sometimes it does, which keeps you watching, but the reliance on “I have to know what comes next” wears thin. This was what turned me off Lost, since the cliffhanger what not really resolved. With Heroes, too, I stopped watching, because the complexity meant the only way to watch it was to watch it all in one go. Which I did for Season 1, and most of Season 2, but one does not always have time to watch 22 hours of television in one sitting. Dexter, on the other hand, was happy to resolve “everything” at the end of each season, and often have resolution at the end of episodes. This makes for a healthier viewing schedule, and less annoyance!
Without giving too much more away, the first season is about Dexter learning about his past, and how he deals with the Ice Truck killer. The implications of the story are that he has been killing for years, but the interesting times come when he is put under the pressure of someone else knowing about “his work”, and how he struggles to deal with this. The second season starts with his “corpus of work” being found, and how he deals with the fact the FBI are tracking him down. Both of these are real times in his life of upheaval, and the underlying increasing memory of his early childhood complicates how he deals with these. But what does that leave us to learn from Season 3? How can things possibly continue to ramp up?
I have faith they will manage to make Dexter Season 3 interesting…
My RSS feed reader this morning was graced by a fantastic article over on a new addition to my feeds list: Terminally Incoherent.
They don’t need to split it into a trilogy like Lucas did. They can do it in one movie if they can and want to. The aim is to still keep it somewhat the spirit of the Classic continuity but the Vader parts ought to be darker and more serious for obvious reasons. Make sure that R2D2, C3PO, Chewbacka and Fett family do not appear in this movie at all.
That’s all of a teaser I will provide. Please, go and read it in it’s full glory.
Open Letter to the future George Lucas Estate
Tue 7th Oct 2008
Wed 17th Sep 2008
Less than 12 months ago, my (effective) father-in-law bought a new Acer laptop. It came with Vista installed, and was “better than a MacBook Pro, and heaps cheaper.”
I’ve spent countless hours since then trying to get it to work smoothly. For instance, if you create a bluetooth connection to his HP printer, it prints. Once or twice. Then you need to delete the printer and re-create it for it to work. My MacBook Pro connected once, and all was good.
Another issue has been with network connectivity. He’s using a GSM USB dongle to get wireless internet, and it’s rather flaky. I plugged the same dongle into my laptop, and it worked. I can’t recall if I needed to install any software, but, and here’s the important part, if I did install a driver, it used the system’s networking stack, rather than installing another one. This is something that the PC world just doesn’t seem to get. I had to “fix” a similar problem with my sister’s machine. Using the basic Windows WiFi driver gave a much better result than the one that came with the laptop.
Finally, he decided that it was worth the effort getting an iMac. He’d then set up most of the stuff before I arrived, including the wireless internet, and all I had to do with install VMWare (and WinXP) so he can run his share-tracking program, and anything else he may have to run under Windows. Oh, and Office. I’ve got him trying out iWork, but we’ll see how that goes.
I also had to help him transfer across all of his iTunes music and photos. I’d bought my laptop with me, and had set up an ad-hoc wireless network, which I had confirmed was working. I had shared his Public directory on the iMac, and was able to connect to it from the PC, but was having trouble getting the PC share to actually appear on the Macs. Eventually I did, and copied the files across. As it turned out, I needed to change the ad-hoc network name several times as I tweaked the settings, as Windows seems brain-dead when dealing with changed network properties and the same network name. I’d hit this issue in the past when trying to connect with an old laptop (no WPA) to an ad-hoc network created by one of my machines.
I then imported all of his photos into iPhoto. Which, I discovered, is now not the clunky old program it used to be. It feels more like iTunes, but is even more snappy. It has the nice little feature of scrubbing over all of the contained images like the new iTunes view.
I think I’m going to have another try with iPhoto. I got right into Lightroom when I had a DSLR, but since I don’t take too many photos anymore, so something less high-end will do me fine.
And, I can then use the fairly cool screensaver that uses the iPhoto library to create mosaics. I’d forgotten how cool that was. I think that feature alone caused his other daughter to proclaim she too would get a Mac.
