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This Week In Movies
So, well, this week was quite the exciting week for movies and, well, Lisa asked.
On Sunday I received the DVDs of A Mighty Wind, Waiting For Guffman, and Best In Show for my birthday and we watched A Mighty Wind that night. These are a bunch of fake documentaries where the actors are playing realistic yet still over-the-top characters. A Mighty Wind is a documentary that shows a folk reunion concert of these 60s folk artists. Really funny music and really funny characters ensue.
Friday night the guys went to see Children of Men at Coffman on the U of M campus. The video quality was, at best, painful - but the movie itself was amazing. It was an amazingly thought-provoking movie, although it definitely wasn't easy to watch.
Last night after most went to bed I watched Robin Hood: Men In tights. It was the first time that I had seen it in years, and well, Mel Brooks always has some great (but sometimes crude) jokes.
This evening we went to see TMNT, the new animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. It was pretty good. I thought the animation was pretty nice and it had a pretty good amount of action. It definitely wasn't the best movie of the week, though.
Mute Math's Crazy First Music Video
I love Mute Math. 'Nuff said.
The Drupal Dojo
By the end of next week, I'll probably be either a Drupal ninja or I'll be fired. So what am I going to do this week? I'm going to be downloading lots of screencasts from the Drupal Dojo site. They've got plenty of stuff to get you thinking about the ninja-like moves you could do in Drupal too.
What Happened To The Daily Update?
Some might be wondering such a thing. Well, it depends on what you're really asking.
A couple weeks ago I dropped the "Daily Update 3/21/2007:" from the post title. I realized that was not really helping Search Engine Optimization at all. Plus, well, it doesn't look cool. Plus, trying to make it include a "da" wasn't working well either.
Most of you may not have noticed that the posts were also posted at 8am Eastern every weekday morning. I also realized that it's a bit suspect and decided to let the posts flow a bit more freely. So now there's no real schedule, but just good content.
Am I going to keep posting daily? Hopefully, yes. I'm thinking that I just took the last couple days off after my birthday. We'll see if that happens, but that's my aim.
A Milestone
Guess what? Starting today, I can rent a car!
Oh wait...
Here's a great Birthday greeting for me from my sister. It was so cool, I just had to share it with everyone!
Point and Click With Your Eye
I recently ran across this article on a Search Engine Optimization site. Many may not know that SEO/SEM peoples are also interested in interface design for the best and easiest way to reach their customers. Bill Slawski of SEO By The Sea found some interesting research papers from Stanford about a point and click interface - except without a mouse. I haven't read through them entirely yet, but somehow the computer senses which part of the screen you're intently staring at and if you hang on it for long enough, your eye will "click" it. It's mostly for people with disabilities at this stage and it might not be too easy to figure out, but it may become the "wave of the future", as some say.
Music Industry To Kill Online Radio
You'd think that one of these times the RIAA would make a smart move. Well, I guess the only word in their vocabulary is "money". One of these years, they will figure out that just means, "losing money".
The Copyright Royalty Board recently released its updated rates for Internet radio stations. Five or six years ago, the board finally required online stations to pay royalties and it killed most of the small radio operations on the Internet. It was the case that many did not make enough money to pay the eight cents per song played to the right persons. It's just insane, too, that the real over-the-air and satellite stations are not required to pay these fees. Thank the Lord for that, because RadioU can still be on the air despite a much higher Internet streaming cost.
However, even the biggest names in online broadcasting are crying foul because the rates are going up drastically. Many, including the Music Genome Project's Pandora, are saying they will have to go out of business. No online radio will be left unless its sponsored by companies that can bleed cash. If you run the numbers, stations will be required to pay thousands or millions more per year. But there's even something more at stake.
As the folks at This Week in Media were saying, the RIAA has almost run out of town all the ways to get free promotion of their music. If online radio does not exist, there's only boring over-the-air radio that is free for listeners. How am I supposed to listen to music that I like? Where am I to find new music? The guys on TWiM were saying that they don't buy any new music because they don't hear any new stuff. I'd love to bring the music of inReview.net to the Internet in the form of podcasts or something, but with all the fees, it's never going to happen.
What can you do? Write your state representatives, the Copyright Royalty Board, and at least sign this online petition.
The Academy Awards of DVD
The guys over at The Digital Bits have been covering the wide world of DVD for a whole decade now. I've always enjoyed that they find out the advance word on DVDs. Plus, their in-depth reviews tell me all that I want to know - if the video and audio quality is good and how many special features are on the disc.
This week they announced their yearly awards for the DVD format, The Bitsys. This year, of course, they also branch out to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray related awards. It looks like there's great stuff here: I want to see the beautiful new copy of Seven Samurai from Criterion. Bill Hunt has talked up the extended cut of Kingdom of Heaven a lot too - apparently it's a well-made movie that suffered from excessive cutting for theaters. Of course, they rightfully moan about George Lucas and Star Wars as well. Plus, for the kid at heart in you, there's even an award category for "Best DVD - Retro Saturday Morning". I mean, who doesn't want The Animaniacs on DVD?
Apple TV and Hacking
So, apparently the Apple TV should be coming out any moment now. However, some of the other portions of the info at AppleInsider were more interesting to me. Here's the juicy bits:
As AppleInsider exclusively reported back in January, Apple TV will drawn its graphics capabilities from NVIDIA's G72M graphics chipset with 64MB DDR2 video memory -- essentially the firm's GeForce Go 7400 chip.
At the heart of Apple TV device is a 1.0GHz Pentium M-based Intel chip with 2MB of L2 cache (code-named "Crofton"), which will be under-clocked to run on a 350MHz bus. The device will also pack 256MB of non-upgradable 400MHz DDR2 main system memory, a 40GB 2.5-inch PATA hard disk drive, and a 802.11n capable wireless card.
Let me tell you. There definitely will be a whole underground movement of geeky hackers doing amazing stuff with this box. There will definitely be a couple distributions of Linux for the machine. Hopefully they'll even get a version of MythTV running on the box if it has enough power. With that underclocked processor, there'll definitely be whole cooling systems the size of the machine itself to make it into something nice and snappy. Who knows? Maybe someone will even find ways to install Mac OS X and make it the even cheaper Mac Mini.
Internet Marketers and Getting Married
Marketers are odd people. Internet Marketers - doubly so. Sure, their jobs are getting their client's sites to the top of the search engines, but they also know how to use the web for fun (or personal gain - or both). And, of course, they're not your normal blue-collar workers; they're out-of-the-box, mind-blowingly smart people.
In the last couple years, one thing they've used the media for is to make engagement proposals. The owner of Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz, even made mainstream news headlines by working with Ask.com to propose to his girlfriend.
But only this year was Barry one-upped by another member of the search industry. Apparently Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz (which has a great site and Internet marketing blog, btw) had been secretly planning to propose to his girlfriend during the Super Bowl. It didn't work out because even the local the Super Bowl ads are sold out far in advance, but about a month ago he did the next best thing. Rand ran a spot during his girlfriend's favorite show, Veronica Mars. She agreed and they are to be married, but that's probably the most public thing I've ever seen anyone do for a marriage proposal.