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ok, i am posting this here for my own future reference, i would like to check these out, since i am flirting with the whole mp3 thing…

i got this list from here, and he got it from somewhere else, so, i will leave his credit intact, since this is just a c/p anyway… (so, on that note, remember that any comments about each one are his, not mine, as i post this, i have not visited a single one of them, nor have i edited this list…)

btw, he has invited people to post more mp3 blog links in the post’s comments thread…

• Fluxblog-one of the best
• Tofuhut-comprehensive and great
• TTIKTDA
• The Suburbs Are Killing Us
• Mystical Beast
• Freaky Trigger
• Tyrone Shoelaces
• Boom Selection
• Cocaine blunts and hip hop tapes
• Chromewaves
• Blahblog
• Punkassbitch
• Frank Payne
• Planet Blarg
• Bubblegum Machine
• Burned by the Sun
• copy, right?
• Do You Feel Loved?
• Dream Chimney
• Enthusiastic but mediocre
• Essele
• Badger Minor
• Fingertips Music
• gabba pod
• Global Pop Conspiracy
• Klepshimi
• Large hearted boy
• Moistworks
• music (for robots)
• new (ish)
• Nit-pick
• Oh Manchester
• Opacodex
• Moebius Rex
• Royal music
• Said the gramophone
• Sleeve Notes
• So This Is Love
• Soul Sides
• Talkie Walkie
• Thank Me For The Music
• The Daily Charlie
• totally fuzzy
• Zero-G
• Raymondo’s dance-o-rama
• Daz Automatic
• Canto Do Leo(in Portuguese, some Brazilian music)
• Cuechamp
• Kempa
• listen closer
• La Blogotheque (in French)
• Bornbackwards
• Empty Free
• Ishib
• No Name
• WFMU’s blast o’ hot air
• Word in the alleys
• The Big Ticket
• birth-music-death
• Mystery and Misery
• Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Real World
• Retrolicious
• De Subjectivism
• Lost Bands
• Radio Babylon
• Dolby Surrender
• Modern Life is Rubbish (in Spanish, Zipped files)

via nevercamehome

now that i think of it, i saw one earlier, somewhere, A Million Love Songs…

How Film Is Transferred to Video

i dug this up since it covers the whole original aspect ratio vs. pan&scan thing covered the previous post…

some damn good info and pretty much covers all one needs to know, though, as usual, i am not sure it adequetly explains the point of anamorphic video…

in a nutshell, your tv only has a certain number of scan lines to display the image… and those scan lines cannot come anywhere close to matching the resolution of a frame of film…
widescreen films on video have black bars at the top and bottom, taking up sometimes as much as half of your screen and thus half of those precious scan lines that weren’t enough to properly show film even when you were using all of them…
now, you COULD ditch the bars and use all the scan lines, but, then you lose the shape of the image… in other words, you basically zoom in on the image, but then, of course, you either have to cut off the sides or distort the image, stretching it vertcally…
hence widescreen tv’s and “anamorphic squeeze” buttons on standard tv’s… the proper shape is kept, with little to no scan lines wasted on nothing but black bars…

meh, it might make more sense if you read it again after you read the article at the link… it is not the easiest thing to explain without examples…

i doubt it…

this article is much more optimistic than i am, though, i agree that a large part of the battle is educating the cinematically ignorant…

Last year, something remarkable happened in the world of cinema. Blockbuster Video, the country’s dominant rental chain, announced that from that point on it officially preferred widescreen DVDs to pan-and-scan (also known as “full screen”). For those movie buffs who had been eagerly watching this battle, the news came as a shock. In the fight for the hearts and minds of viewers, widescreen and its film-geek adherents had won an unexpected and glorious victory. Just a few years earlier, Blockbuster had discouraged widescreen DVDs, on the grounds that customers confused by the letterbox format thought they were defective. Now, the chain was conceding what cinephiles had argued for years: that widescreen was the superior way to watch a movie at home, even if it left black bars at the top and bottom of your television screen.

Anyone who scrounged for widescreen tapes during the VHS era will understand the historic nature of the announcement. Back then, widescreen tapes were tucked in obscure corners of the video store. When film buffs advanced the moral argument against pan-and-scan—that it butchered the filmmaker’s vision and cut out as much as half of the picture—they were met by a blank stare from store clerk and casual fan alike.

the rest is here…
How Widescreen Won – The way we watch movies at home has changed. What happened? By Bryan Curtis

(it even mentions laserdiscs and Criterion, properly crediting the format and company with the initial victories in the original-aspect-ratio-vs.-“foolscreen” war…)

HoustonChronicle.com – Dallas once again No. 1 big city for crime

Associated Press

DALLAS – As expected, FBI statistics for 2003 show Dallas has the highest overall crime rate among the country’s largest cities for the sixth year in a row.

City and police officials have known since last summer that Dallas was on track to keep the top crime spot. Since then, they have instituted new crime initiatives, fired the police chief and replaced him with a proven crime fighter, former Arlington Police Chief David Kunkle.

incidentally, arlington is the suburb where we lived…

more info at the link…

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,63578,00.html
damn fascinating…

here are some excerpts…

The world of massively multiplayer online games is often a dangerous place, what with constant threats from bloodthirsty monsters and murderous non-player characters. But now players have even more peril to contend with: addictive drugs that can incapacitate or kill their characters.

The designers of Achaea, one of the biggest online text-based games, have recently introduced a virtual addictive drug — known as gleam — as part of a story line in which a crime ring has been attempting to infiltrate the game’s cities. And some players can’t take it fast enough.

Achaea characters who take gleam get hooked quickly — suffering typical addiction symptoms: violent vomiting, shivering, irrational sobbing, begging for the drug and even overdoses resulting in death. Some of the game’s players are angry about gleam’s introduction into their world.

and then, there are virtual performance-enhancing virtual drugs…

In A Tale in the Desert, players discovered that by dosing their characters with a potion called Speed of the Serpent, they could gain extra waypoints, a valuable attribute allowing for instant travel across the game’s wide three-dimensional globe.

Speed of the Serpent was poisonous, though, and required the ingestion of an antidote within 30 days, or the character would die. If a player took the potion a second time, the antidote was needed within 29 days; a third use meant 28 days and so on.

Eventually, as players succumbed to their desire for the extra waypoints, the interval between potion and antidote was short enough that even the hard-core couldn’t keep up. According to Andy Tepper, the game’s lead designer, 18 players’ characters have died from addiction to Speed of the Serpent, more than from any other cause in the game’s history. Unlike in many multiplayer online games, where death means little, in A Tale in the Desert, a character’s death is final. It means starting over from the beginning, no small price for dabbling in a little performance-enhancing potion.

meanwhile, elsewhere in the virtual multiverse…

But even the larger games have elements some consider akin to addictive substances. For example, in Galaxies, smuggler-class players traffic in spices, spells that increase characters’ skills.

In an article in RPG Expert called “Life of a Smuggler,” the author wrote that spices can offer terrific benefits, such as increased strength. Yet there are also side effects, like lowered strength and vomiting, that last as long as the high.

Given the side effects, though, one might ask why the risk is worthwhile. [the eternal addict question, eh? -i_p] The author’s answer sounds just like it came from a real-world drug dealer.

“OK, who will buy and use your spices? Almost everyone that tries them a few times gets hooked,” the article read. “Free samples are good for business!!”

http://towelday.org/
the site explains it for all strags out there…

and, since it is a classic quote and it partially explains it, here is something from the site…

To quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,

A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine soredly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a brush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

i just have to publically say how much i love the weather here…

for something like two weeks now, we have had every window and this huge sliding glass door open from the time we get up to the time we go to bed and, aside from times it gets too windy to have them all open (we live on a mesa on the edge of town), it has been more than perfectly comfortable…
we sometimes close the sliding glass door and blinds in the afternoon because it faces west and the sun shines right in and it can be a bit too warm, but, even that is not necessary every day…

and, even on the warmest days, once that sun goes down, the temperature starts dramatically dropping…

and, btw, if someone wants to ask how something like good weather can be so exciting, it is because that back in dallas, i bet it is 212 degrees and 115% humidity already… for 4 months or more, you have to stay in all the time, even at night, with everything closed tight, no sun, no fresh air, with the a/c cranked… and that is no fun…

it’s great to be back in the desert…

and with that, the huge pics post is knocked off the front page…
(i ran out of things i had been meaning to post…)

i would just like to call attention to this link, since i get a daily kick out
of it…
over there on the menu on the left of this page, under “Links”, is a link that
says “My LJ Feeds”…
this is part of the “Friends Page” features on LiveJournal…

for those not familiar with the concept of feeds, it is a way to gather
content from a site, without going there… this blog of mine has an atom xml
feed, so, you could get my posts in your favorite “feed aggregator” (along
side feeds from other sites), rather than stopping by to see if i’ve posted
anything new or signing up for the email notification…
at livejournal, people set up xml/rss/etc. feeds for various sites, or use
feeds already offered and you can add those feeds to your lj friends page for
a public online aggregator… there are hundreds of choices, everything from
daily comics like garfield and dilbert, to news, weather, movie reviews, all
sorts of stuff…
you just have to see it to appreciate the sheer coolness of it…
since i have few lj friends, i fill it up with these feeds and then i get
stuff from sites i would not otherwise go to everyday, in one convenient
trip… so, you can see the stuff i am interested in and, if you share those
interests, it can make for a good daily visit…

here are the feeds i have on there currently…

some post several items a day, some once a day, some once a week or once a
month, some post rarely, which makes it even handier to have it appear on my
feeds page… and some may be broken, so, i am still waiting for them to post
something…

firstly, i get posts at “syn_promo”, where people publicize cool feeds they
have found or have made…

astronomy photo of the day

ask yahoo
answering trivia and imponderables, using yahoo

blog of death
sort of a big, far-reaching obits page

boingboing blog

coming soon
a movie news site

dictionary.com’s word of the day

engadget
gadget news, reviews, etc.

filmadd
news of movies added to the Internet Archive

filmtease
an unusual movie trailer review site

found magazine’s find of the week
unusual objects people find

aaron swartz’s googleblog
a blog about google

googleblog
the official blog of google.com

penniphile
the writings of penn jillette, mostly new entries to “road penn”

word spy
dealing with new terms, slang, etc. as they enter the language

quote of the day
not as good as refdesk.com’s quotes of the day, but, they have more than one
per day, so it sort of balances out

snopesrecentadd
one of my favorites, posting urban legends as they are added to snopes.com

thinkgeek
various merchandise of interest to those involved in modern technology

and wordsmith’s word of the day

oh, and almost forgot, i also get “ljnifty” where people post various fun
things you can do with livejournal, such as adding feeds to your friends
page…

and i add cool new ones as i find them… and occasionally remove the ones
that get annoying or boring…

anyway, if that sounds interesting to you, as i said, the link is on the menu
on the left side of this page… “My LJ Feeds”
i stop by at least once a day and it is a pretty good collection at this
point, after some tweaking…

now if only i could get scifi.com’s “today in sci-fi history” on there, which
is almost always interesting to sci-fi buffs… (there is a link to this, as
well, over there on the left…)
i would add the fark.com feed, but, it does not have comments links and the
comments threads are at least half the fun of fark…

btw, geez, it seems today is list day on my blog…
admittedly, i am trying to come up with posts to make so i can knock that huge
“april pics” post off the front page…