Month: January 2006

Categories
Spamatozoa

Touch my airborne froggy.

airborne froggyNothing really substantive to report here lately, as I’m sick as a dog and still having to be at work. I got an e-mail today, which I knew immediately was spam, with one of those randomly-generated Bayesian filter-dodging titles, and I got a big laugh out of the subject line: “airborne froggy“. I went ahead and looked at the e-mail’s contents in my MailWasher window and saw that it was yet another Viagra/Cialis offer. Perhaps this means that “airborne froggy” is a new euphemism-in-the-making for male genitalia? We need more of those in this world, y’know.… Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

This Week In Sci-ish-Fi-ish TV, 1/23-1/27-06

Lost: If you’re skipping any episodes that don’t feature glimpses of the Others or the Smoke Monster or some huge revelation about the Dharma dome, you can just move along. I quite liked this one because it jumped right on the big question mark hanging over Charlie at the end of the episode two weeks ago, and unlike some long-standing unresolved plot points in the series, this one really needed to be addressed immediately. It’s funny how, when confiding his dreams and hallucinations to Eko, Charlie pointed out something that I was already thinking – if Kate sees a horse in the jungle, or if, well, anyone sees Walt running around, no sweat, nobody questions it. But Charlie having premonitions about the baby in mortal danger? It’s gotta be the heroin. (Admittedly, the presence of the heroin doesn’t help his case.) Locke also voiced something I was beginning to feel was at the root of the story – Charlie trying to save the baby because he can’t save himself – although I really came to resent Locke’s handling of the situation. Charlie needs help and, like it or not, they’re stuck with him. A side note: I like the Hurley/Libby angle. I like it a lot. Sometimes the oddest attractions do pop up when and where and with whom you least expect them. Feel free to file this under “of course, you would say this, because you’re fat too,” but it’s nice to see Hurley treated as a fully-rounded human being and not just occasional comic relief or exposition about the mystery numbers. That said, I laughed out loud at Sawyer’s quip, “I bet you’ve got a load you’d like to drop in.” 😛
Invasion: Shades of Lost – quite a bit of this week’s episode was a flashback to nine years before the rest of the series so far, showing how Tom Underlay became the first person in Homestead to be infested and finally shedding some light on what role he plays within the community of the infested hurricane survivors. It turns out there’s an opposite number who may be working against him (and indeed, may be the one who shot him at the beginning of the episode), and it could be that as sinister as Tom seems sometimes, he could be all that’s keeping the infested humans from running riot and more aggressively trying to expand into the general populace. Which is kinda scary, to think that there’s someone out there even creepier than Tom. I rolled my eyes a little bit at the conspiracy theory which seemed to imply that the military is in bed with the possessed humans. Surely that’ll turn out to be something other than what it is, rather than an excuse to have mysterious black helicopters show up and snatch the bad guys out of danger continually. I’ll say it again: if you’re a Lost fan who’s upset over the lack of forward motion of the plot vs. character development, stick around for the show that comes on right after it.
Stargate SG-1: This is one case where yes, I can see the resolution coming from a light-year away, but the character touches are what make it. I’m glad to see some further nailing down of what makes Cameron Mitchell nuts-but-functional in a different way than John Crichton. A lot of this episode’s plot specific were pretty much paint-by-number, though I did enjoy seeing a previous episode’s plot development (the memory storage device) come back without being completely mission-critical or a throwaway gag.
Stargate Atlantis: Remember the “winter season premiere” where Rodney OD’d on the Wraith enzyme and became quite an entertaining one-man show? I think someone realized that sequence was some of the best pure entertainment that Atlantis has produced this season and decided an encore would be dandy. I was actually a little disappointed when Fantasy Carter showed up, because David Hewlett was doing a great job of carrying the whole show, on his own, locked into a room without even a speaking computer to play off of. And yes, I realize that Fantasy Carter isn’t bound in any way to act like the Carter we know from SG-1, but I somehow wasn’t expecting her to get as lowbrow as “…but I bet I can get you hot!” – that sounded less like something from Rodney’s subconscious and more like something a certain sector of fandom would want to hear. (I guess I can’t complain too loudly, because I can’t say I would’ve minded being trapped with this slightly yummier version of Carter.)
Battlestar Galactica: Y’know, I hope I’m not really picking up on a case of Janeway-itis hitting President Roslin while her immune system is still recovering from her miraculous cancer cure. There are times when she seems remarkably like a hard-ass, much more than one would expect her to be, and then there are times she comes across as being almost laughably naive, as in this episode with her expectation that the fabulous Adama boys were somehow going to wipe out the black market in one swell foop. If anything, Apollo probably has a much better solution, even if it is…muddy. (And speaking of Apollo, kudos again to Richard Hatch for making the best of a very brief appearance – and it seems like we’ll be butting heads with him again in the future.) Apollo wasn’t just standing in the mud – he was in it hip-deep. And Adama turns out to be the least naive of them all. I was sorry, however, to see Fisk go. (And who the heck is running the Pegasus now?) While still a relic of Admiral Cain’s regime, Fisk at least seemed redeemable. It’s almost scary to think about who’ll be running Pegasus next. Maybe she does get taken out after all, and sooner than I thought. As for Baltar, again, I think Roslin was extraordinarily naive not to see that coming. Forthright she may be after her recovery, but surely she hasn’t lost so many of her wiles as to realize that there was probably a more diplomatic litmus test she could’ve employed than an offer to resign.
Little boo-boo I spotted at the end of the promo for next week’s Galactica: “All New New Next Friday.” I can’t laugh too loud, I’ve accidentally done stuff at least that stupid and put it on the air before. 😀 Also, why does it seem like advertisers suddenly feel that Galactica is a prime demographic for folks who need cold medicine? Feelin’ stuffed up, buddy? That’s because you have a big big cold! I’d swear those two spots ran in every break.… Read more

Categories
Critters ToyBox

Welcome to the Year of the Dog.

XenaIt turns out that the Chinese New Year rings in, in fact, the Year of the Dog. Somehow that seems appropriate – Xena has been acting up a little bit lately, ripping trash bags asunder and spreading their contents liberally across the yard, biting through the strap on one of the new gloves I got for Christmas, and completely destroying a perfectly good feather duster. After all of that happened in the span of three days, the past 36 hours or so have become not just a celebration of the Year of the Dog, but the Day The Dog Stayed Outside. I think she’s starting to get the message.
Today’s been one of those days. Literally, within half an hour of my boss telling me I need to come in earlier, my wife calls to tell me I’m feeding horses (and, presumably, donkeys) in the morning. Ah well, it’s almost February anyway – time to kiss the concept of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep goodbye. (Don’t be surprised if I also wind up kissing the concept of stuff like “giving my best shot to updating the blog everyday” goodbye for a bit too.)
I’ve officially pre-ordered some of the new Doctor Who figures, and have proceeded to beg a friend of mine in the UK to see if he can snatch up one of those dandy “transformer” figures which starts out as Christopher Eccleston and then, thanks to the magic of a removable head, can turn into David Tennant-in-Eccleston’s-duds. If I thought sticker shock was bad comparing the American dollar to the Canadian dollar, buying something priced in pounds sterling was even more sobering. By the time’s all said and done and shipped, it looks like I will have spent something in the vicinity of $15 per character on these puppies. (Fortunately, my Star Wars figure collecting has taken a steep nose dive since the holidays – they’ve relaunched the “saga” collection, heavy with characters from The Empire Strikes Back, which is kinda like going into reruns for me – so my toy budget is otherwise freed up.)
I’ve sent Character Options, the UK outfit producing the Who figures, a calm, not-too-gushing letter telling them that the product shots thus far look fantastic, and do they have any plans to produce pre-new-series Doctors/characters, and might they be selling these things even as close as Canada? Because believe me, I’d rather be putting my dollar up against the Canadian dollar than the British pound. And I know more people in Canada who I can talk into a trip to the toy store. 😛 … Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

Let us sit upon the ground a while and tell sad tales of the deaths of networks.

The birth of a UPN stationSo it was made official today: this fall, Paramount and Warner Bros. are closing the book on their respective grand experiments to start “The Fifth Network.” In about a generation, talking about UPN or the WB will be about as relevant a conversation as a comment about the Dumont Network is today. Now, to be fair, they’re planning a new joint venture, the moronically-named CW network, that’ll have programming from both the Warner Bros. and CBS/Viacom/UPN ends of the spectrum. But UPN and the WB will be DOA. As, perhaps, it could be said that they have been since January 1995.
I remember turning in for the first night of both that year, and I was doubly invested in the bold attempt to launch networks #5 and #6 – UPN would have the new Star Trek spinoff, and there was a better than even chance that the company I was working for at the time would be launching this area’s first UPN station (which, indeed, it did later that year; click the graphic above for that story). So admittedly, I had an investment in the UPN end of it, and I then proceeded to spend about four years of my professional life trying to push the UPN lineup and sell the UPN dream.
Which means I also got to see loads of classic UPN missteps.
Here’s the thing…I think either of these networks might have survived as cable entities, but when you have to recruit or build affiliate stations in every market in the country, support them with advertising co-op money and materials on an almost daily basis, and do things like custom promo shoots with show talent for them, your expenses skyrocket. Either WB or UPN would have thrived minus those expenses, when all they had to do was promote themselves instead of helping a combined total of 200+ stations all promote themselves against varying degrees of local competition.
And both Warner and Paramount should’ve bloody well known this, because they had both tried before. Paramount tried to launch a fourth network in the late 1970s, using – try to contain your shock here – a revived version of the original Star Trek (give or take a few characters – Leonard Nimoy wanted nothing to do with it) as its flagship show. But studio and network politics were different in the pre-Fox days, and Paramount’s top brass, to say nothing of their investors, didn’t have the confidence and nerves of steel it would take to shake up the broadcast landscape. That task fell to Barry Diller and Fox in the late 80s and early 90s. The Paramount Network never signed on, and that planned Star Trek series mutated into the first movie.
And it was only after Fox had reared its head, sounded its challenge and survived that Warner Bros. attempted its own “micro-network” in the form of PTEN, the Prime Time Entertainment Network. Launched by the “Prime Time Consortium,” a conglomeration including Warner Bros.’ domestic TV syndication arm and Chris-Craft, a major group of U.S. independent stations, PTEN tried to offer packaged nights of programming that could, in theory, fill out the weeknight schedule of a Fox affiliate (back when Fox was only broadcasting 3-4 nights a week). They had decent programming (much of it in the SF and action-adventure vein), but when the opportunity to get in bed with Paramount for a full network schedule beckoned, Chris-Craft bailed on PTEN and took its stations to UPN, and PTEN collapsed under its own weight. PTEN’s flagship show, the woefully under-promoted Babylon 5, actually outlived its network by getting a cancellation reprieve from cable network TNT. (And for what it’s worth, the ever-present threat of Babylon 5’s cancellation actually had a lot more to do with the ever-present threat of PTEN collapsing than it did with any studio heads not “getting” the show.) PTEN breathed its last in 1997.
So what went wrong? I can only speak for the UPN end of things, but the problems were manifold.… Read more

Categories
Serious Stuff

How the mighty (dollar) has fallen.

I know that currency exchange rates are a pretty good barometer of international relations, but I just don’t keep up with them on a daily basis. I got an Amazon.ca gift certificate recently, totaling a little over $20 CDN, and after looking over a few items such as Doctor Who DVDs and whatnot that wouldn’t be covered by that amount, I settled on a CD of traditional Maori music from New Zealand (don’t ask – it’s just something I’ve really grown to enjoy over the years, and sometimes the chorus of Crowded House’s “Together Alone” just doesn’t quite cut it), punched in the gift certificate code, and placed the order. This left me with a balance of $9.74 CDN that w0uld still have to come out of my debit card. OK, that’s cool. I figured that’s gotta be, what, five U.S. dollars?
Wrongo. According to XE.com, $9.74 in Canada = $8.45. Holy crap. I mean, I suppose it’s good for Canada – I remember visiting Toronto and picking up a stack of something like eight or nine books and forking only over a few dollars in my native currency, so I suppose this evens the scales – but wow. Though I don’t think it’s solely a case of their dollar gaining value. I think it’s more likely a case of our dollar losing value. And lots of it.
So much for my quarterly “Woohoo!” when I get a $20-odd Amazon.ca gift certificate in the mail! Though it’s still worthwhile – there’s something perversely humorous about an American guy buying a CD from New Zealand through Amazon in Canada. Now watch the disc ship from a warehouse in Cleveland and shatter all my illusions.… Read more

Categories
Critters Gaming

Negative…it just impacted on the surface.

Star Wars: The Arcade Game (Atari 2600)ARGH. I think I’ve mentioned a few times recently that I’m working on a monumental project – creating a Flash movie, viewable online, for just about every game review existing in Phosphor Dot Fossils. That’s a lot of work, seeing as we’re at well over 100 arcade reviews and a comparable number of reviews have been done for various consoles. But now I’m running into a speed bump: the infamous “flicker” of the Atari 2600. I was trying to create a video clip of Star Wars: The Arcade Game (seen above) and ran into this dilemma. When too many moving objects occupied the screen at the same time, the Atari 2600 would have to draw them in staggered cycles. This produced the “blinking” effect that made games such as Pac-Man infamously hard on the eyes, because for every cycle that the software in question redrew the screen, it didn’t have enough memory real estate to draw everything on the screen at the same time. So Pac-Man would be shown in one cycle, a couple of monsters in the next, and the other two monsters in the next – and while modern machines and modern displays with 60-frame-per-second refresh rates on their video might be able to pull this trick off seamlessly, if they even needed to resort to that approach, the 2600 was slow enough that it showed even to the naked eye. Painfully so.
Star Wars is a particularly bad example of that – if a TIE fighter got off too many shots on the same screen, they would all start flickering madly until the number of object on screen dropped off. Worse yet, the program for Star Wars on the 2600 draws the two side walls of the Death Star trench in staggered mode…so in the resulting video, I can see the left wall of the trench just fine, but not the right wall, and not the barriers across the middle. I’m trying to figure out some video tricks to put a “trail” effect on things so they’ll be forced to stay on the screen all at once…but so far, not much luck. I really hope this doesn’t scuttle the project or force me to use emulation for the 2600 video. I want to be able to show everyone the real thing, for two reasons – #1, from a standpoint of academic and historical accuracy (and yes, I really do see this as an academic project, silly as that may seem), and #2, because it enforces some playing time for me on an almost daily basis, and I’ve enjoyed that tremendously here of late. There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that I set out to put three minutes of Star Wars game play on digital videotape and wound up with about 25 minutes of footage from one game. I don’t have any idea how these tall tales get started.
We finally got some rain today, much-needed rain I might add. I’m normally not too thrilled to be feeding horses and working with horses in pouring rain, because they want to get into the barn where it’s dry and warm, and it might not occur to them to, say, not walk right through me to achieve that goal in their haste. (My persistent sneezing has returned after this morning’s horseplay, so perhaps the horses are smarter than I am.) Today, however, I found new faces to feed – a couple of my sister-in-law’s donkeys have joined the herd, although they’re isolated in their own round pen. I haven’t worked with donkeys before. There’s a big one – well, relatively big for a donkey – and a small one, so I spent the morning calling them Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior. I was about to go in to feed them when I realized that I had no idea if they were kick-happy or not. I announced my presence by telling them I’m sure we’d all get along just fine, because I have food, and food is a good thing. After someone kicked a big wet clod of mud right past my head – he was a safe distance away but got spooked by my presence and tried to run away, kicking up mud instead – I said “I can see we’re going to have to work on this relationship a bit.” I guess I need to start putting on a Mike Myers faux-Scottish accent, ’cause that man can talk to donkeys like nobody’s business.… Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

This Week In Sci-Fi-Esque Entertainment: 1-16-06

Lost: You guys are gonna have to start this one without me; due to a basketball pre-emption I haven’t gotten to see this week’s two episodes yet.
Invasion: Okay, some of the loose threads aren’t dangling as loosely as we thought. It appears that Tom Underlay is slowly restaffing the sheriff’s department with the possessed/supplanted “hurricane survivors.” This doesn’t bode well. There were a few points in this episode where I started to feel like Jesse’s life expectancy may not stretch past the end of the season. If nothing else, Tom is too damned clever for him – he’s managed to get Rose and Kira to turn against Jesse a little. This whole running thread of Tom-as-master-manipulator is so nebulous without knowing exactly what it is he holds over everyone. As for Larkin – she’s going to walk right into trouble if she takes what she now knows and tries to report it on the news, given that her boss is one of the possessed. I know I’ve criticized Shaun Cassidy for recycling elements of American Gothic (creepy deep south setting, creepy sheriff who seems to be answering to the devil himself, complex family politics), but I’ve got to give him kudos for, if nothing else, interweaving the characters’ relationships with the advancement of the plotline in such an integral way. Compared to Lost, Invasion’s plotline is now a runaway train thundering down the tracks.
Stargate SG-1: Sliders SG-1: Yesterday’s Enterprise! Okay, I’m joking there. Actually, a pretty fun little episode, and I thought it was an inventive way to point up why what’s happening on Atlantis does actually affect Earth. And it doesn’t hurt that it tied back to one of my favorite season 2 episodes. Some light-hearted non-arc fun that still lets us know what the heck is going on.
Stargate Atlantis: Or, this week, Stargate Atlantis: The Musical. I actually loved this episode – best one so far this season, by a vast margin. It’s interesting how both of this week’s Stargates referred fairly heavily to one another. Not necessarily “crossover” episodes, where SG-1’s plot bleeds directly into Atlantis or vice-versa, but episodes that embrace the whole franchise. That’s kinda neat. Topically, this episode dealt with some areas of national security and military ethics that I haven’t seen the Stargate franchise touch in a long time. The build-up of Kavanagh as the potential mad bomber (since it’s Stargate, can he be the Unas-bomber? okay, okay, never mind…) was quite well done and dovetailed with what’s been established about him in previous episodes, so much so that I never saw the real perp coming – in fact, it almost had the effect of making that revelation a little bit of a “where the hell did that come from!?” I wonder if this is the end of Caldwell as a semi-regular.
Battlestar Galactica: Compared to the Pegasus trilogy, tonight’s episode was almost a tone poem. Quite a few surprises about Roslin’s background, and almost undoubtedly the beginnings of Baltar turning toward the kind of unabashed treachery that the original version of the character was noted for. (And then some.) The Cylon sympathizers’ movement kinda came outta nowhere (seems to be a good night for that too), but that trail leads back to where Baltar’s hiding Gina. The utterly bizarre deus ex machina (quite literally) that got Roslin back on her feet was…well…kinda convenient. But it also really muddies the water as far as the relationship between humans and Cylons – if word of her miracle cure gets out, that’ll only fuel the sympathizers’ fire on the one hand, and have people questioning whether or not Roslin has somehow been “taken over” on the other. Oy vey. With the whole fleet primed for that kind of paranoia, neither is a good option. Of course, handing a nuke over to a Cylon ain’t either.
Am I the only person waiting on the edge of his seat to see the first Sci-Fi Channel Doctor Who promo?… Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

My Fan Flicka

“The wheel turns, does it not, Ambassador?”
Okay, that line’s from the first episode of Babylon 5, and at this point, Babylon 5 is about the only thing that hasn’t been recreated in fan-film form (though if you’re willing to put up with cheap visuals, there’s a clip in my multimedia section on the right-hand side of your screen proving that even the space battle stuff wouldn’t be completely impossible). But it fits the situation so well, I kinda have to use it.
In the 1990s, with Doctor Who cancelled and no new Doctor Who on the horizon, it fell to the fans to keep the saga alive. Fan writers went pro with Virgin Publishing’s New Adventures. Fan actors like Nicholas Briggs and Gary Russell produced audio plays set in the Doctor Who universe, making barely-legal use of existing sound FX records from the series itself, and not realizing they’d both be doing that as a full-time business venture with an actual BBC license (and completely legal use of those sound FX) by the end of the decade. And would-be movie makers like Bill Baggs and Keith Barnfather started taking little bits and pieces of the Doctor Who mythos and making their own movies.
UK copyright law has an interesting loophole that allowed this to happen without these amateur filmmakers getting sued into the 16mm film era. While the BBC owns the copyright to Doctor Who, the copyright in individual villains, aliens and companions lies with the writers who first created them. In other words, the BBC doesn’t own K-9 – Bob Baker and Dave Martin do. The BBC doesn’t own the Sontarans – the estate of the late, great Robert Holmes does. And so on. So these amateur filmmakers couldn’t even touch the Doctor, the TARDIS, or the Time Lords, or certain characters who had been created by the show’s producers (such as certain companions; K-9 wasn’t originally intended to be an ongoing companion, and in fact an ending of his debut Doctor Who adventure was filmed that left him behind). So the Sontarans, Draconians, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, and others got their own adventures sans the Doctor. (And just as often, other characters in their adventures would wind up being played by former Doctors and former Companions; Sophie “Ace” Aldred was a mainstay of the amateur film circuit.) Cheaper video technology and the emergence of desktop CG and editing made this possible, and even after the 1996 Doctor Who movie starring Paul McGann the fans’ cameras kept rolling.
It’s funny: Doctor Who is now riding high, with its last renewal giving it two more seasons. And Star Trek is, at least temporarily, history – and now it’s Trek that’s in the hands of the fans. The most visible of these endeavours, Star Trek: New Voyages, is making serious waves by inviting former writers and actors of real Star Treks past to join them – and they’re being taken up on their offer. George Takei and Grace Lee Whitney have agreed to star in the next “episode” produced by the team of amateur actors and filmmakers at New Voyages HQ in Ticonderoga, NY, and they’ll be taking part in a story scripted by TNG writers Michael Reaves and Marc Scott Zicree. And this comes right after another “episode,” currently in post-production, written by D.C. Fontana and starring Walter Koenig, due to be released for free download later this year. David Gerrold is also writing two scripts for the New Voyages, one a rewrite of a never-produced TNG season 1 script, and the other a sequel to The Trouble With Tribbles.
Wow. Now, to be fair, there are parallels here – pro writers like Terrance Dicks and Marc Platt participated in Doctor Who fan films, Mark Ayres scored some of them, and at least one fan film, The Airzone Solution, told a story completely unrelated to Who mythos but starring every Doctor from Jon Pertwee forward, with the exception of Tom Baker.
Needless to say, the shelf of Doctor Who “spinoff” videotapes on my shelf at home gives away how fond I am of these things. I’ve only just started watching the Star Trek: New Voyages stories, and while there’s an inherent fannish goofiness to them – Captain Kirk is played by an actor whose history includes a steady gig as an Elvis impersonator – I have to admire the craftsmanship of their meticulous reproduction of the classic Enterprise bridge, their uniforms, and their CG effects – roughly on par with early Babylon 5 (aha, there is a connection!) and light years ahead of what some of my friends and I used to do when we were cooking up our own fan-made spoofs in the early 90s.
There’s always going to be a debate about whether or not these people could be spending their time better coming up with something original, and just how far over the copyright lines they’re stepping. That’s a valid debate. But some of them, I suspect, just simply want to tell their own Star Trek stories. There’s a reason Who fans kept shining a light on little corners of the Whoniverse: they love the settings, characters, and backstories. They couldn’t even so much as mention the Doctor, but they could continue to explore the universe. The Trek fan flicks are a similar phenomenon; fan projects other than New Voyages are looking at original crews on ships and missions we haven’t seen before, so in a sense, much of the Trek fan film community is doing what the Who fans were doing ten years ago. The New Voyages gang, for good or ill, is getting so much attention precisely because they’re leaping right across that line and saying that these are, in fact, the voyages. Time will tell if it catches up with them in a legal sense; for the moment Paramount is turning a blind eye because they’re offering their productions, made with thousands of hours of volunteers’ time, as free downloads.
Then of course, there are the Lucasfilm-sanctioned Star Wars fan film competitions, where the vaults of Lucas’ sound effects are opened and things are left up to the fans’ twisted imaginations. In a sense, Lucasfilm has probably taken the best proactive approach possible that doesn’t involve alienating the fan base. Not that any other sectors of fandom are waiting for the intellectual property holders of the objects of their respective adorations to adopt a similar policy, mind you.
I guess what has me so fascinated with this is the amount of skill and creativity and, yeah, sometimes, just pure cheek that goes into these things. I admire that. It’s a better use of everyone’s time – both the fans making the stuff and the fans watching the stuff – than, say, re-editing Phantom Menace so there’s less Jar Jar.… Read more

Categories
Serious Stuff

Radio free…well…anything.

Flack pointed me to this nifty little PC card today that turns your computer into an FM transmitter. Slap the amp module on there (funny how that’s not available in the U.S.!) and you’ve got yourself a little radio station. (And the FCC will love you for it, at least one you’ve been arrested and they’ve fined you eleven grand.) OK, pirate radio amp aside, I’ve got to say that I’m seriously considering this gadget for home. Working around the house or around the yard/pasture, this would be great. I’ve had a gadget somewhat similar to this in my car for quite a while, which in theory is supposed to broadcast a little FM bubble around my source so whatever portable audio device I have (in my case, a Net Minidisc player) can make the jump to my car stereo. Neat idea, except that little doohickey is very analog and very unreliable (I almost think the FCC clamps down on these things to where the manufacturers are all but forced to make them unreliable). It also puts me in mind of a thought exercise I’ve thrown out before on Digital Press and NotNews.org, about setting up a seven-day TV programming schedule with shows you have on tape or DVD. What would you put on the radio if you had a little FM bubble of radio free you? (I have to admit, some mischievous part of me would love to set up a disposable PC somewhere with the FM card and the 5-mile broadcasting amp, load up the drive with the most annoying music ever heard – I have several remixes of “Hamsterdance” in my collection – and throw in some bogus station IDs saying stuff like “You’re listening to K-Y…….jelly!”, and then leave the thing plugged in and running somewhere and take off for the hills.)
Speaking of broadcasting yourself into the world, I saw a report on World News Tonight about how “social networking” sites such as Facebook and MySpace are coming back to haunt folks – i.e. underage college students getting expelled for mentioning drinking, etc. – and I’m a little torn on that. I agree with the assessment that one of their on-screen experts gave – don’t put anything you wouldn’t want your family to see on one of these sites – but at the same time I found myself conflicted with the idea that – according to the report – at least one government agency is checking out prospective employees’ MySpace sites before hiring. I know that putting anything on these sites, or blogging, or anything of that nature, is something that you’re putting out there for the world to see, so technically the liability is that of the end user. So it’s not like finding someone’s Myspace site or their blog or what have you is really prying. But there’s still something a little disturbing about the idea. I think my concerns lean toward the younger crowd. Kids say and do stupid things. God knows I did when I was a teenager. The thought that, in some respects, people can more or less by tried and convicted by a judge and jury of one based on their blog bugs me. Maybe this means I’m just not really a member of Generation Blog (and y’know, I’ve never claimed to be), but it almost seems like we’re slowly supplanting things like, oh, talking to people and getting to know them, as opposed to having read every thought they’ve ever confessed to having online and making some kind of judgement there. Even in this age of Perhaps Too Much Transparency (where individuals are concerned, at least), the internet is still a barrier that allows some people to put up a front. The thought that we’re now going to judge people’s livelihoods, college admission worthiness, and other major, life-changing things by someone’s blog bugs me.
Be careful what ye blog, brothers and sisters, ’cause Big Blog Brutha is watchin’.… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Gaming

Hello, old friend.

Obsolete technology never dies at my house. It goes to sleep for a while and then, kinda like an old analog Merlin, returns when it is needed most.
Since my new camera doesn’t seem to have manual focus (grumble…) I had to enlist the help of a piece of gear I’ve had for nearly 20 years. Meet the old camcorder. AKA “the Jump Cut City camera.”
The old camcorder vs. the Vectrex… Read more