Wow
(and be sure to click on the ‘proof’ link…)
btw, this is a great example of the frailties of perception…
magicians and con men (from salesmen to psychics) exploit weaknesses in perception and cognition, therefore “mind hacking” is a good description of what they do…
or perhaps “reality hacking”, since our faith in our own perception and cognition is the foundation of how we establish and experience reality…
well we just got back from visiting his parents again last night… i love his parents, they are the coolest people i know and can not say enough good things about them… i am glad to know them as people…
while we were there, he went with his dad to el paso for a doctors visit (that took all day, poor guys), but i was lucky enough to spend all day with his mom… they got to the va at 2pm and did not get in to see the doctor until 7:30pm and then it was only a 20 minute visit… geesh… but, mom and i sat around and talked about all kinds of things and i got to play with some of her favorite gba games…
she loves her games and has multiple gbasp’s and 2 gamecubes… just as we were saying that we were going to b heading home she mentioned that she loved the way we played final fantasy tactics advance on her cube and player and that we were having so much fun with it that she wanted us to have that much fun all the time…
so, they handed us a handful of money and said that she only wanted the final fantasy tactics advance game and wanted us to use the rest of the money to get us a gamecube and player for ourselves… we had not mentioned to her once that we wanted them to buy us one and so we felt pretty bad when she said that they wanted us to have one… we obliged… we had been wanting one for awhile but just like us, we want to find our price before buying anything and this has saved us grief of trying to search and search and never get anything in the end and tons of frustration in the process…
so, since we have a new gamecube we are trying out all the games that we have oohed and ahhed over the past year… we are not planning on picking up our ABSOLUTE favorite game in the world (PSO – Phantasy Star Online), since the last time we did that we did not do anything but play the game for months and months…
i am keeping this as short and sweet as possible since i am having to leave for work here in a couple minutes… but, when i get home tonight we are going to be trying out final fantasy crystal chronicles…
a couple huge lists i came across, including many personal collections…
http://forum.o2.pl/temat.php?id_p=1293507&start=1440 (the posts by deserted)
http://www.sitewrench.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27
better bring a lunch…
When DVD Spells B-A-D
Some Great Films Suffer in Transition To New Format
November 12, 2003
By FRED KAPLAN
The New York Times
a great article about things that drive us nuts about the dvd industry/format and why we are not giving up on our laserdisc collection any time soon…
for instance, here he adresses a great example of some of the issues at the very heart of the matter…
Digital technology seems, on the face of it, a preposterously inadequate medium for storing movies, and we should gape in wonder that DVDs yield coherent pictures at all, much less the gloriously sharp, detailed images they churn out under the best of conditions. Consider: A DVD stores only 17 gigabytes of data. A two-hour film, transferred to digital data and otherwise untreated, would take up more than 150 gigabytes.
So the data must first be massively compressed, mainly by digitally sampling a frame, then sampling only the information that changes in subsequent frames.
This is no big deal for a scene of someone standing still against a blank wall. But it’s a major challenge for a scene of someone running through traffic surrounded by dozens of flashing lights and moving objects.
while ld video definitely has its own issues, it is NOT compressed and cav laserdiscs even store actual individual frames of film, something no other format does even today…
If a film is old and damaged, the compression machine will “read” random dirt and scratches in the same way it reads motion. If the machine’s operator doesn’t pay attention and make adjustments, or if the machine is subpar, the digitized image will be full of waves, zigzags and other distracting distortions.
Similar problems can plague color or, if it’s a black-and-white film, the gradations of gray. When transferring film from a negative to a print, someone has to practice the fine art of “color timing.” The same thing has to be done, though electronically, when transferring it to DVD. The job can be done well or it can be done badly.
“The main reason a lot of DVDs are so bad,” says Robert A. Harris, president of the Film Preserve, one of the top film-restoring companies, “is that the people making them don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care what they’re doing.”
well, why should they care??? they are going to price these things to sell to any shlub, so, they will not bother… dvd regularly cheaps out, while makers of ld knew they could not sell them at the prices they were asking unless they threw in GOOD extras… Boogie Nights is a great example… criterion paid for the john holmes documentary the film was based on, but when the dvd came around, new line was not willing to pay for it… the dvd was around $30, the ld was nearly $100… but, you get what you pay for… and, right now, many ld collectors are selling off their discs at insane prices, therefore, now is a great time to buy…
Doing a DVD right takes time and money. A good Telecine machine, which transfers film to an image suited for television, costs about $2 million. Use of an outside lab’s Telecine facilities can cost up to $1,000 an hour.
The Criterion Collection, which produces some of the finest DVDs of classic films, routinely takes months to make a digital transfer. Lee Klein, Criterion’s chief technician, says: “If there’s a scratch, we draw it out frame by frame. When there’s 12 pieces of debris on each frame, it takes a long time.”
Most studios don’t bother.
Some simply take the master that was made for laser disc, or even for VHS videotape, and transfer it to DVD. This was an especially common practice in the infancy of DVD, four to six years ago.
and he gives a few good examples in the article of lousy dvd’s, showing the widespread apathy of dvd makers… their attitude is getting better, so, i hope by the time hd-dvd is the standard, they will have learned and can offer a consistently worthy product…
i am NOT saying that laserdisc is necesarily better in every way to dvd, my point is that laserdisc is still a viable format today, for those willing to pay, and should not have been discontinued so early (the last u.s. laserdisc release was in 2000)… many ld collectors out there are already regretting selling off their collection when they are left with substandard dvd’s, or even no dvd release available, such as the theatrical cuts of close encounters and star wars… and those two are great examples because there will NEVER be a dvd release of them…
laserdisc is a format for the serious film lover, dvd is the next vhs, the format for the masses…
what hd-dvd will be remains to be seen…
today, we finally got our Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Collector’s Edition LaserDisc Box Set!
it is a gorgeous set, great high-res cover, three discs, the film on three sides, and three sides of extras… in fact, the documentary runs 140 minutes and the movie is just 137… this is the laserdisc upon which the Collector’s Edition DVD is based, (which we also have, of course) and so far as we can tell, it has almost all of the extras that appear on the dvd…
got it off of ebay for just over $20 and it is in excellent condition…
this was the last ce3k item we wanted, we already had the dvd, the CAV Criterion set, the CLV Criterion set, and a couple releases of the inferior “Special Edition” version of the film… and, we also have the collector’s edition versions of the theatrical one-sheet poster and soundtrack cd, both released at the same time as the laserdisc set…
so, this set fills a gaping hole in our collection…
we will watch it tonight or tomorrow, but, we popped on side three (which is cav) and it looks fantastic, you can tell it is the same transfer used for the dvd… released in ’98, dolby digital 5.1, thx-certified, surely this is going to be on our list of the best looking laserdiscs ever made…
what do you have to do to get a good job in this city?
i have sent my resume to a ton of places since we have moved here and still have not found a decent paying job yet…
what is even more frustrating than looking for a job here is that the people that you interview with do not even give you a call back… i have made the efforts to call multiple places at least once a week to check on the status on my interviews and they give me the same answers over and over again… “we are not sure how things are at this time, please call us again some time next week”… what the hell? i have been calling you next week and the week after that and the one afer that and i still can not get a straight answer… i have never had this much trouble in my entire time of looking for a job as i have been here… this is insane…
i had an interview with one place 3 weeks ago and they keep telling me to call back next week… i am tired of calling and never getting any new information… what is the deal here? do you have to wait 6 months before you ever hear something?
rant rant rant…
grrrrrr….
well, i am going to have to spend yet another day off running around to all the businesses in this city with my resume in hand again this month… i have been doing this at least once a month the last 3 and seems like it has not done me much good but i am trying to be persistent but it has yet to pay off… i just do not get it and am getting very peeved in the process…
well, i think i have done more than enough ranting and raving today and it is almost time for me to go to my dead-end job that i have now anyway…
so, i am off…
well yesterday was a weird one… to start things off i looked outside and saw that my car had been moved from its original parking space to almost the middle of the street… some really weird things have been happening lately and this is just another one… i have a convertible and it is really hard to find parking where we live but i just do not understand WHY someone would decide to move SOMEONE elses car just to take their parking place… this realy freaks me out and pisses me off at the same time…
our downstairs neighbor said he had seen it that way at 5:30am that morning and thought that we had just broken down or something and did not move it to a spot…
i talked to the office people and they said that we were alright but still did not say anything more about picking up security or anything like that… this does not make me feel any more secure about the place where we live…
then, after that we decided that we were going to take the day and head out to santa fe since it is only about an hour from here… well, along the way i felt like my left front tire was making some weird sounds and thought that it would be best to pull over at the next stop and check it out… boy, was i sure glad that i did because the threads on the tire were showing and if we would have continued on much further we would have had a blow out… so, we headed on up the street to a small tire place and had a new tire put on it and finally off at almost 3pm to our original destination… (we had started our day a little before noon and were not getting where we needed to go until much later)… when we finally got to santa fe we were expecting a BIG city… we were surprised… it was like a small town with one mall and not much else… i guess if you are into the southwest thing then this is a good place to go but since we are not then it was not much to see and do not expect to be going there again any time soon… we did drive around a bit but nothing really looked all that enticing… so, we started heading out of town and decided we would hit the outlet mall (small also) and the regular mall… i have to say that the best thing in the entire town was the outlet mall with about 15 shops… we picked up a couple of things from the fragrance outlet, wilsons leather and one little thing for our bar…
so, the mall was just like any other and dead just like all the malls seem to be in this state… we have not been to a busy one yet… wonder how people make it in this place…
we, were ready to go home and wanted our frapps for the drive… they do not even have a barnes and noble in that town, and the freaking starbucks closes at 9pm… what the hell?
so, we had a really bad coffee drink from borders and headed on home…
well, we got home and played some fur fighters fluff match (one of the great 2 player games)… one of these days i will have to post about some of the great 2 player games for couples… we have had a database that we started and i am not sure if we have it online somewhere or not… games made for couples is hard to find… they need to make more games made for 2 people… but, that is another post altogether…
so, i am going to post this and then post again about another thing that has been bothering me lately…
so, i am done with this one for now and will not be going to santa fe again… what a boring place…
i love quotes… i love words, i love good writing, and i love thought boiled down to its irreducable minimum, so, quotes sort of wrap it all up into one for me… “the wisdom of many, the wit of one” i think is the way someone once put it… i have a db in my psion filled with great quotes and RefDesk.com’s thought of the day email keeps me well-stocked with consistently great quotes…
so, anyway, i came across this page today, which has random quotes at the bottom, so, i reloaded a few dozen times…
some favorites…
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
Rich CookWhen everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
Sir Winston ChurchillIf a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is “God is crying.” And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is “Probably because of something you did.”
[sounds like a jack handey deep thought to me – i_p]Free speech only goes so far until you need the right to bear arms.
Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.
Will RogersWe tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can’t scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.
it’s been reported all over the place, here is how Nybble covers it…
_________FIRST MOBILE PHONE VIRUS_________
http://snipurl.com/77lqThe first ever computer virus that can infect mobile phones has been discovered. The virus – called Cabir – is a proof-of-concept worm that replicates on Symbian phones. This worm repeatedly sends itself to the first Bluetooth-enabled device that it can find, regardless of the type of device. For example, even a Bluetooth-enabled printer will be attacked if it is within range. The worm spreads as a .SIS file, which is installed into the APPS directory.
If the virus succeeds in penetrating the phone, it writes the inscription ‘Caribe’ on the screen and is then activated every time that the phone is turned on. There is no payload, apart from the vastly shortened battery life caused by the constant scanning for Bluetooth-enabled devices.
as far as symbian devices go, i don’t see how this could ever become much of a problem… the Symbian OS started life as the EPOC OS, which is what the psion model 5 and up used, and, unless symbian has changed it drastically for the worse, it should simply be a matter of deleting the errant files…
i have had more than a couple applications i installed wreak varying degrees of havoc on my 5 and all i had to do was hit my System/Apps folder, get rid of the application’s subfolder, then go to Apps/Install and get rid of the .sis installation file… worst case scenario might involve searching for any files the app tries to hide (can’t really hide things very well with such a transparent directory structure) and/or running a spy prog to find all running apps… hell, just popping up the list of openly running apps should be enough…
given that these are the sorts of tasks any user should know how to do, plus the fact that this new app running and draining battery power should be very noticable, i just don’t see how this could ever be a real problem…
maybe i am missing something…
today, Nicole Kidman is 37…
she is, without a doubt, first choice on our list of favorite eye candy girls… (milla and charlize would probably round out the top three…)
nicole is simply perfect… we first fell in love with her in Moulin Rouge, and have since seen her in Eyes Wide Shut, The Others, Far And Away, Malice, and To Die For and thought she was just yummy in all of them…
(oh yeah, and she is a good actress as well 😛 her best performance i have seen so far is probably To Die For…)
last week we even bought two 8×10 photos of her in moulin rouge costume from that cool movie poster/stuff shop in nob hill and miss mary picked up frames for them today and has them over in her corner… (for the record, we didn’t know her b-day was coming up when we bought them, we aren’t THAT fanatical, we found out because it was on today in sci-fi history this morning… they are also talking about her on fark, btw…)
to borrow a great line i once heard used to describe someone else, she has been the cause of countless gay men and straight women to question their preference for over a decade…
and we try not to think about the whole weirdo tom cruise thing o_O
