The Big Think

Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support … With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees–not Bill Gates’ departure.
As a daily user of Mac OS X, Ubuntu and Vista, I’m keenly aware of what works and what doesn’t. Mac and Linux work.

Why Microsoft should abandon Vista.

Plasma TV buying guides. I’m in the throes of a decision on which 32″ HDTV to buy for my studio wall. Guides like this help.

I want one. Make that four, so I can battle my friends.

Speaking of cool war toys, how neat is this?

Had a good time today on the set of Friday Night Lights as an extra. We worked from 3:30 until 9:30 (actually on set from about 6-9). If you watch the show look for me in the background of both the breakfast and the dinner-time scene of episode 8. I’m wearing the brown fabric baseball cap in the b-fast scene and a generic blue t-shirt (no cap) in the night scene.
Fun! My friend Zach, who I worked with a few years ago on the 48 hour film festival, was pulling focus for camera C. I caught up with him briefly after we were done. He’s been working on the show for its whole run so far. Good on him.

I also observed that they run a very tight audio ship, which is typical (20 crew for the camera and visual side of things and three for the audio side). All the actors were wired (yikes!) and the boom supplemented for a couple of tight shots. Very efficient and fast moving set.

I hadn’t eaten much when I got to the extras holding area and I just missed the food being served, so I was pretty hungry. When we got to the diner they put our breakfasts in front of us and said “eat!” so I dug in gratefully. I was almost finished and a set decorator said “oh, you’re almost done. I’ll get you another one so we can do the scene again”. So I had to eat some more.

Thirty minutes later they picked me and one of the female extras to sit at the same table for the dinner/nighttime scene. This time they plopped down a couple of cheeseburgers and said “eat!”. By this time I was getting full, but I took a few bites. Same story. “Oh, your burger looks bad. Here’s another one. Eat!”.

No wonder everyone exercises so much in Hollywood. *burp*

It’s getting closer. Here’s an overview.

I’m going to open up comments now and hope the spammers don’t invade. Post away if you’re in the mood.

Attention, please. Attention! This means you.

Let it be known that Sean McMains is a real mensch, which my Jewish friends assure me is Yiddish for “great technical brain”. Sean has managed to wrangle all of my old content from the pre-move site into this here installation. This involved having to do a complete reinstall of an old version of WordPress (the software that’s running this blog), converting all 2600 or so old posts over, and reposting them here (hope you had a batch script, Sean).

I’ve been wanting to do this for about two years now, and had honestly given up hope that it would ever happen, but Mr. Brainy went and tackled the job. No doubt he had to postpone his anniversary, neglect his children, shun the advances of his wife, and almost get fired from work, but he did it anyway.

I declare today officially Sean Day. Everyone please join me in raising a glass.

Thanks, Sean!

Quote of the day:

“You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”
Columbia President Lee Bollinger to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

This guy builds a Master Chief bust (and some other pretty cool stuff) from Legos.

It’s a little early for turkey (for most of us), but you can now see the Thanksgiving video I worked on a few weeks ago over at eleven72. Enjoy!

There’s either a mild cold or general allergies around our house the past few days. Erin and I both have the same symptoms (sneezing, watery eyes, drainage, stuffy nose), but neither of us has the run down “sick” feeling, so we think it’s allergies.

I was tired of the congestion so I took one of those “non drowsy” allergy tablets around 5pm. What I failed to realize was “non drowsy” probably meant “stuffed with chemicals to keep you awake”. So I was awake in bed last night until 5am and only slept 3-4 hours or so. Shoulda gone with the “extra drowsy” option.

Got a call today to be an extra on FNL next Tuesday. Don’t have any details yet (aside from the generic role). I’ll probably be that itty bitty spot in the back, but it’s still fun to be on a set and watch the crew work. Now if only I could parley this into a boom job…

This is pretty cool. (h/t Scott)

what a great story.

YouTube video making the rounds of an IED going off. Nobody gets hurt. Some adrenalized blue language, though. Under the circumstances, I think that’s understandable.

What would you say, how would you teach, if you knew it was going to be your last time?
Randy Pausch knew.

Good news on the cancer front. UK researchers are reportedly claiming the possibility of a cure for some cancers “within 2 years“.

Prof Cui injected granulocytes from immune mice into ordinary mice, and found it was possible to give them protection from cancer.

Even more excitingly he found the transfusions caused existing cancers to go into remission and to clear them completely within weeks.

A single dose of the cells appeared to give many of the mice resistance to cancer for the rest of their lives.

More here as well.

Dr. Cui now has FDA approval to test his proposed “GIFT” (Granulocyte InFusion Therapy). He will transfuse granulocytes from cancer resistent people to people who are battling cancer. He just needs funding.

Give the man his funding.

Red light cameras may be coming to Austin. Glenn Reynolds wrote a good article for Popular Mechanics about why these devious municipal money machines don’t really solve the problem, and actually cause accidents to increase.

I’m obviously messing around with a few templates. (U2) I still haven’t found what I’m looking for (/U2), though. I have to pester Sean to install a couple more templates and then things will stabilize. Sorry about the eye-burningly loud page.

Jan lent me the PS2 game Valkyrie Profile 2 and, try as I might, I just couldn’t get into it. The main thing was the horrible battle system. Talk about half-baked! The difficulty is supposed to scale in these games to gradually teach you tactics. Unfortunately, the game throws a three minute battle system tutorial at the player and then immediately ramps the difficulty up. Sorry, Square-Enix, I don’t want to waste 40+ hours in frustration. I play to enjoy my games, not to be aggravated by dying every five minutes.

It feels like the developers had what they thought was a good battle system idea but then fell in love with it too early and let it out the door half-baked. I really wanted to like this game (V.P. 1 was apparently a knockout-great game). I’m always disappointed when a game fizzles for me. Ah well.

Maybe I’ll take a page from Katherine’s book and go play Civilization.