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Showing posts from July, 2008

Dr. Horrible now on hulu

Joss Whedon has made Dr. Horrible available online at hulu and you can watch below: I'm still glad I paid for this, because I hope there will be more like it in the future. I think you can even watch this in Canada now, which is good. Some of the jokes make sense in Canadian, too. If you've not seen this and you have about an hour to kill, go ahead and do so.

An open request to ABC

Dear ABC, I'm really happy that I can watch e very single episode of LOST online, in streaming HD . It's fantastic. I'm re-watching Season 4 again, and the interface is pretty spectacular. However, we have to talk about the advertisements. Please figure out a way to advertise to me somehow in a way that is non-invasive. I recommend maybe figuring out some mix where local companies can sell me an ad during that time, perhaps with the local affiliate serving as the ad broker. I'm 34. I don't have any need for Cialis, don't need anything produced by Astra-Zeneca, and really, I don't have Fibromyalgia . So, please, stop reminding me that my future is going to be filled with a whole series of pills and side-effects. I know that's coming. But, have you noticed, I'm trying to watch LOST? That means I'm seeking escape. When the ads are jarring, it's much less likely I'll get used to coming to your site. I'll be more likely to go to hulu , whe

The Joys of Wikipedia #1: The A428 Road

This likely will not become a series on this blog, but you never know. Maybe blogs should do series, which is what many people do. Maybe it helps people focus on what to write. Gives them something to say. In any case, I came across this article on the A428 shortly after reading an article on Negativland . I hit random once, and got the name of some German occultist , before settling on the above article. I skimmed it quickly, spent about five seconds scanning whether I knew any of the towns or not, and then had a brief thought about how much I thought it would be interesting to develop Wikipedia articles for our roads here, to personalize them in a much nicer way. Would that be something people want to see? The article, as you can see in this print-screen I made quickly lists all of the various places the road goes, followed by the various intersections it comes across. There's a tremendous sense of love and order that comes along with this, something that seems so fundamentally

Thoughts on Cuil, or maybe we need another search engine

All over the world, thousands of bloggers are dumping on Cuil , the search engine launched today by former employees of Google. The release got a lot of press, as I read many press reports of its creation, which is backed by about $33 million in venture capital. So, after I read the fifth one, I decided to check it out this thing, which is pronounced "cool." I googled Charlottesville Podcasting Network, and a lot of stuff showed up. I was pleased, and I was also pleased with the look of how the site displayed the results. Instead of listing it with pure text and a very brief abstract, Ciul displays three columns of paragraphs, and takes a picture from somewhere on the web and makes a little in-line photograph. The organizers of Cuil say they're searching more sites than any other search engine out there. That's supposed to the beauty of their start-up. They also claim to not collect any of your search information. But, they had issues today. For starters, I have no cl

NASA turned 50 today?

Okay, I'll admit, I don't read the mainstream newspapers like I used to. Instead, I periodically skim the news through news-feeds via Bloglines. I'm mostly focused on what's happening here in Central Virginia, though I try to stay on top of what's going on in transportation policy, urban design issues, and my pop-culture interests. So, it's at the end of reading through my third-tier search (English media) that I came upon this gem in the Independent listing 50 things that we can thank the space program for . The article was posted as part of NASA's 50th anniversary. A quick scan of news.google.com reveals it's not a big story here. Fifty years of amazing and tragic history, and there don't seem to be too many articles celebrating it. Do we have so little pride in our accomplishments? Is this not judged to be of interest to people? I did see some other articles of interest, though, on the Discovery Channel's Space Diary. Burt Rutan is preparing

Negativland News

If not for Negativland, there would be no Charlottesville Podcasting Network . I grabbed onto this collective in my first year of college, when listening to WUVT my dorm-mate telling me he couldn't believe the station would play a lot of noise, a comment prompted by a Negativland track. Just before then, I read a note in the Record Exchange's Music Monitor that U2 was suing Negativland for copyright infringement . Then, my friend Jeffry Cudlin let me borrow Dick Vaughn's Moribund Music of the Seventies , a radio show in which Negativland pretended to convert KPFA, a Pacifica station in San Francisco, into a 1980's Top 40 outfit called the California Superstation. Those three pieces of evidence led me to conclude that the band was worthy of further study. Of course, this was back before the Internet, when music stores often were your only source of information on something you were interested in outside the mainstream. So, I walked to the Record Exchange on Main Street

Free video = $6 for Joss Whedon and Dr. Horrible

So, I watched Dr. Horrible twice when it was online. My wife watched it once. I thought it was absolutely tremendous, and the songs have been running through my head all day. It was great entertainment, and I really admire the way this experiment has turned out. But, today, it's gone. The easy-to-play buttons that a clean iteration of hulu were gone, replaced with links to favorable press about the three-act project. I spent about an hour today reading through these accounts. Whedon wrote the story during the writer's strike, and then made it afterwards on his own dime. Spent something in "the low six-figures" according to Variety, all part of his master plan . Taking it down is genius. What was once available is now gone. Scarcity is created. Desire is created. Demand rushes in through the only available pathway - paying $6 to purchase the whole thing from iTunes. Now, in a few minutes, I get to watch it again. A very small amount of disposable income easily spent i

The Age of Video

If you stop and think about it, it's pretty amazing that I can pull up nearly any video I want. And, that it can be very easy for me to watch something that someone tells me I should. I'm listening to Radiohead's House of Cards after being told by another blogger, Corbin at I'm Spatial , which has me really digging this band for the first time. I've never been much of a fan, but this song is kind of catchy. The way they captured these images is interesting, given that it's all made up of data as near as I can tell. We'll come back to that at one point, but this video seems pretty important to me because of the way it is introducing the concept of visual representation by pure data to a wide audience. And now I'm listening to an interview with a young Jimmy Page, thanks to this blog , playing some skiffle. The blogger might not know it, but skiffle is the name given to what was played in Liverpool, this style of taking the blues by way of the early rock a

You must watch Dr. Horrible

I sound like a bad salesman or a spammer with a headline like that, but time really is running out for you to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog , for free, through hulu. It may be availabe through iTunes for a couple more day, but this free three-part musical by Joss Whedon has to be seen to believed. So, you must go and watch if you want to see something incredibly fun, somewhat sad, and ultimately sort of moving. I'm watching it now for the second time this weekend, and there's a chance I may watch it a third time. Of course, I have two other computers I'm working on at the same time, and the music is pretty catching. Performances are good, and it's a neat way to distribute something like this. So, go watch! Did you watch? What did you think?

Addams Family Pinball Promo

The world is a better place with YouTube. Or at least, it could be if we could use the Internet to change the world. Or, in this case, to at least figure out a way for me to play some more of my favorite pinball game of all time - Addams Family. When I was a waiter at a pizza place in Nashua, New Hampshire in the fall of 1997, much of my life revolved around wanting to just play that game. The game is successful because it combines a lot of great elements into an entertaining pinball machine that you just want to play and play and play. I mean, any game where you get bonus points for hitting Cousin It with the ball is worth fifty cents a go. There was a certain rhythm to the game and I was up to the point where I could play for half an hour on one play. I could get free game after free game, and knew how to work the various mini-games to my advantage to score a lot of points. I'm not usually very good at video games, but I seemed to own the game. When I lived in Calgary, Alberta, a

I will not apologize for Rush

I am sitting here doing my bills, and feeling pretty low about my finances as the reality of buying a house settles in a bit. But, then suddenly "Finding My Way" from Rush's first album comes on and there's Geddy Lee singing in that weird Canadian way. Suddenly, I'm cheered up and I feel like I can do anything. Anyone can do anything if they have such a jaunty bass line playing counterpoint to that tough-guy songbird voice that Geddy Lee was able to do back in those days. I will not apologize for liking Rush. I keep seeing them listed as a huge joke, but at best, I'll give you "tongue in cheek" joke, as seen in their marvelous opus "The Trees" And after watching that, I feel a little bit of relaxtion creeping through my veins, at least, breaking free from the worry for just a second. Because, come on. The above is one of the silliest songs of all time, and it's definitely something that can cheer me up. I wish I could grow a mustache li