January 2006

Thanks to this blog (or perhaps I should be cursing them), I saw something that had me wide eyed and slack jawed in its horror. Proof that Disney is a soul devouring machine of pure condensed powdered evil. I found myself appalled, and yet I couldn't stop listening. As each consecutive clip played, I wished I could burn my own ears with a red hot poker until they were solid masses of flesh which could not be further violated. Instead I bolstered myself, summoning my strength of inner will to shake off the effects of this travesty and instead face this dark material; look this beast in the face to gain what knowledge and understanding I could without being cowed. I faced it and came out stronger, more knowledgeable of this insipid horror like some Lovecraftian hero who must be able to face monsters and demons and look them in the face to know their world and learn how to defeat them. Mark Mothersbaugh, why have you forsaken us?

There's a subject line I never thought I'd type. For a long time there wasn't much on TV that we watched. Usually just a handful of programs. This last season has been one of our busiest. Many of the shows we started watching to see if they would be any good, ended up canceled (Nightstalker, Threshold) while we still have many more that we are watching. I would say that a very large chunk of shows that we now watch were discovered in hindsight. We let everyone else suffer through the crap and wait to see what seems to consistently rise to the top. Eventually there are always certain shows that we can't seem to escape. Everywhere we turn, we hear or read constant praise. When this happens and we finally decide that we must check out this show that everyone's raving about, we will usually download or Netflix all the previous episodes, get caught up and then start recording new episodes as they air. This is how 24, Lost, House, Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica and possibly a few other shows came to be in our regular watching schedule (if you want to get technical, I think we actually caught up with BSG when they re-ran all of season 1 before season 2 began).

Our latest addition is Arrested Development. As with most of the other shows, I had been subtly inundated like Chinese water torture with references to how great this show was. I was always reading about how, despite its greatness, it was on the verge of cancellation because television can't possibly let something good and original survive. Only the most cookie-cutter, bland, lowest denominator pablum was fit for our airwaves! When I heard it was canceled, I decided to finally give in and check it out because now I knew there was a finite quantity, and therefore I wouldn't be investing myself into another indefinite television relationship (the small irony of that being now that I'm watching it, there are rumors that some other networks may pick it up).

I gotta say, I think it's worthy of every nugget of praise that has ever been lodged into my brain. Very original and hilarious.

A few other grains of sand which have settled in my oyster hoping to irritate their way to making pearls are Scrubs and Deadwood.

With Deadwood, we don't get HBO, so we have no choice but to download or wait for DVDs. Catching up and watching live isn't really an option. We'll see if Scrubs is persistent enough to break my resolve. Usually, once I'm aware of a program's presence in my psyche, it's only a matter of time before I give it a go. We shall see.

Many of you have probably heard of "collectible card games", the most popular one being "Magic: The Gathering." After Magic became such a huge hit, everyone on the face of the planet was mandated to put out their own CCG, 99% of which quickly faded into obscurity. Well I've just stumbled upon something even cooler. A "Constructible Strategy Game" and even better yet, it's all about pirates! I present to you "Pirates". Each pack contains everything you need to play: cards that you punch pieces out of to construct your 3-D pirate ships, a punch out island, treasure tokens, crew member tokens, and instructions. It's a simple little game that looks like it could be a lot of fun. It's similar to the "CCG's in that there's a whole list of ships and crew members which you try and "collect" ranging in rarity. Their website has a lot of great information including a flash animated set of instructions and game examples. We just bought a couple of packs and will probably end up with one or two packs from each expansion. Check it out!

Because I haven't updated in quite some time, and really don't have much to say, instead I'll jump into the latest thing going around my friends' blogs!

Interesting that even though I told it I am male, I am the world's tallest woman. This also means that Chainsaw and I must be the same height, and Donald duck has a LOT of middle names.

Most people know that Final Draft has had a pretty firm hold as the most used screen writing software in Hollywood. That could change soon. As I previously mentioned, I was swayed from FD to Sophocles. I personally find it to be a superior program that's more pleasant to use. I was happy to see that Sophocles is developing a new version which looks phenomenal. It's a full pre-production tool with the ability to do schedules, breakdowns, call sheets, etc. Maybe they'll give FD a run for their money. something to note is that Sophocles currently retails for $120, but I think that if you download the demo, you get a 50% off offer (though don't quote me on that). This becomes particularly important due to the fact that current registered copies can upgrade to the new version (which they claim will retail in the $1000 range) for free when it comes out.

Another very interesting contender that has caught my interest is Celtx. This is particularly interesting because it is also a full pre-production tool, and most importantly it is completely open source and free. It's built on Firefox's technology. It has a lot of really cool features. I highly recommend trying it out and keeping an eye on it as well as Sophocles.

I know that probably no one who normally reads my blog has any interest in these posts, but I like to document certain things for my own sake, and the sake of anyone Googling for info.

When we moved into the condo, a new problem presented itself. The TiVo, which needs to make a daily call to update its information, had no phone jacks anywhere near it. Not even any that were in a location that could have been used with our 50' phone cable which was used in the apartment to run across one doorway and around the edge of the room to the phone jack. It would have had to run across our main entryway and kitchen doorway into the kitchen where the nearest jack was. No way. It was time for the great TiVo Upgrade, part two.

I had always intended to this upgrade at some point, but could never be bothered to unhook the TiVo and take it apart, buy the parts I needed, etc., since everything was fine as it was in the old place. Since I knew we needed to do it now, I just left the TiVo unhooked after the move. The first upgrade I had done was adding a second hard drive to increase its capacity to 40 hours of recording at the best quality setting. I love TiVo but I think their naming conventions are deceptive. A "30-hour TiVo" is only 30 hours at the crappiest quality setting, which was unbearable to me. At best quality, it was more like a 6 hour TiVo.

For round 2, I decided to install a CacheCard. I had also other options, but this seemed to be the best. I could put a 512 MB stick of RAM on the card to cache the TiVo's database, thus speeding up the access to menus and certain operations, plus the card also had an ethernet connection on it. Since there are also no ethernet jacks in the living room, I also bought a Linksys wireless bridge to connect to the TiVo and give it access to our wireless network to make its daily "call". I followed all the instructions for backing up my TiVo and installing the CacheCard and drivers, and that part all went flawlessly. I had various fiascoes in the wireless bridge department, but that's another story not worth the telling. Eventually I got it all working, and now my TiVo makes its "call" via wireless networking, which has the added advantage of being a LOT faster than the phone call, too.

I figured as long as I was tweaking, I might as well also install Tivoweb Plus. Now I can also access my TiVo via the web to do anything I can do on the TiVo itself, plus far more. Mine is an old school Series 1 TiVo (the modern ones are Series 2 at the time of this writing), and sadly a lot of the cool new features (such as TiVo's own multimedia network functions) will never be available on Series 1 units, but since I've done all this upgrading, and since I bought the lifetime subscription (which has long since paid for itself) I'll be sticking with unit. To be honest it does everything I need it to do, and while I love bells and whistles, I certainly don't feel like I'm really missing out.

If you have the time (about 10 minutes) and the bandwidth, take a virtual tour of our new condo!