The A’s completed the sweep of their cross Bay rivals today with a 16-0 victory which has to be one of the most one sided matchups of all time. The A’s line was 16 runs, 24 hits, and 1 error. The Giants managed one hit. The A’s had six players in the starting lineup with three or more hits.
Happy Birthday, Jason Kendell.
It’s a rather curious fact that both I and my charming wife have a thing for zombie movies. You name it, if it has a zombie theme, we are out there watching it on opening weekend. It was then with considerable anticipation that we trundled off to see George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead. After all, it was Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead which practically invented the genre. Other directors have gone in many directions, but Romero’s influence can be seen in literally every horror film since then.
His new film begins years after the first zombie attacks. Living humans exist only in isolated pockets surrounded by seas of the undead. The very rich have surrounded themselves with barbed wire and electrical fences, and live as the lords of the Dark Ages did, by exploiting the perpetually poor and downtrodden around them.
A band of mercenaries discover an interesting fact: the zombies are slowly becoming more intelligent. They are displaying a larger range of awareness, and are slowly unifying themselves into an army of the dead.
That’s where complication sets in. 🙂
This movie is a pure zombie film: it’s plot is somewhat thinner than some. It’s got a large variety of shuffling, decaying, flesh eating monsters, all bent on making a quick snack of our heros. It’s got very archetypal (some would say stereotypical) characters, but I’m inclined to be forgiving, since Romero invented the archetypes. It’s got some pretty serious gore effects, minor amounts of drug use and flashes of nudity, but you shouldn’t be going to a zombie film if you aren’t braced for that.
Both Carmen and I enjoyed the film a lot. I frankly think that 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead are two zombie films with greater originality, but Romero still has the touch. I give it 8.5 out of ten, a solid B performance.
You can also download the 1968 Night of the Living Dead in its entirety from archive.org.
Dear God. Some hacking projects seems horribly misguided. I like the idea of using junk and recycled components as much as the next guy, but The Poor Man’s Raid Array is simply an abomination. Why? It’s got 14 50gb SCSI drives in it. Holy crap, think of your power bills. You’ll never need a space heater at his house.
Try Marree Man, as seen by Google Siteseeing.
I keep scanning the news being blogged on Technorati about Gnomedex 2005, and frankly, I’m still mystified. There seems to be a whole bunch of people who are united in their desire to promote RSS.
Did I miss something?
Don’t get me wrong, I use RSS everyday. I’m a big fan of bloglines to monitor lots of blogs. But we are just talking about a simple XML based text format. Yet as simple as it is, it also has a pretty confusing specification, as is witnessed by the relatively large number of projects which accept incompatible versions of the specification. It is used as the basis for applications which rely on polling to catch updates, which can generate lots of unnecessary web traffic on servers.
And yet, apparently large numbers of individuals converge to laud its creators. I just don’t get it.
Giants looked ugly, with five errors. Nice catch by Byrnes, who also had a bad running mistake on a Giants error.
Second inning.
Addendum: Wow, how crappy is the zoom feature on my camera phone? Rhetorical question. Serious answer: really crappy.
Take a look at their announcement, especially concentrating on the What is Gnomedex… section.
Someone, please, explain it to me. Why is Gnomedex significant?
Useful link: Technorati: gnomedex2005
Addendum: Just what here requires a license at all, much less a Creative Commons License? We don’t need licenses for other data formats like HTML.
I’ve tweaked my flickr upload template a bit to be a bit more
WordPerfect friendly, and to use my existing style sheet instead of
interjecting its own CSS in every post. This photo was one I did with
my Nikon 4500 using an infrared filter. I kind of liked it.
Just testing some magic from A List Apart for doing CSS drop shadows. This requires all sorts of skullduggery with negative margins and the like to pull off, but doesn’t pollute the markup too badly.
While in front of the Copia center in Napa last weekend, I tried snapping close up photos of a wide variety of plants and fruits they had growing in their gardens. I think this pear image turned out the best. I like the general shape, the out of focus background and the subtle shifts in green coloration. It seems nice to me. Enjoy.
Every once in a while, you read something that makes you just shake your head. Dave Slusher mentioned David Coursey’s anti-podcasting article. I’m not so opposed to his opinions on the grounds that he’s a knee-jerk-off (although he does seem to fit the description) but rather from the simple fact he’s hopelessly off target in his criticism.
If you go and spend a few minutes reading his article, you’ll find that he’s really all over the map. First off, he begins with a rant about iTunes and iTunes Radio Stations. What this has to do with podcasting is anyone’s guess, but he goes off four the first four paragraphs about it, so he must really have felt it was worth saying, given that he introduces his article with it.
And then drops the topic entirely.
He then accidently strays into something which I actually think is likely to be the truth:
Over time, I expect the “most listened to” Podcasts will be products of existing media companies that use Podcasts as a means of repurposing content.
While I don’t think this is entirely correct, it doesn’t immediatey fail the sniff test. After all, existing media companies do possess large libraries of licensed and copyrighted content that they can draw on which are unavailable or expensive for others to acquire. Even independents will be tempted to adopt the trappings of traditional media companies as they grow in popularity, so the “successes” in podcasting will likely be less different from big media than you otherwise might imagine.
That is, of course, if you are looking at the most popular end of the curve. The question is really what happens in the Long Tail.
The existing media industry works really well at the big end: selling hundreds of thousands to millions of units of works. It basically has no real coherent strategy for creating and distributing content to a few hundred to a few thousand individuals. It is in this end that I think that unconventional business plans and to a certain extent, just creating media for its own sake will rule the day. Ordinary media outlets will find it difficult to adapt their business to operate in this more rarified environment, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t find players in this arena. After all, the barriers to entry and the risks are signficantly lower than trying to follow the traditional path to wide media distribution, even if the payoff is somewhat more limited.
Coursey then strays off into what I think is really a short sighted argument:
Personal Podcasting, like personal blogs, is a fad and will fade. Just like personal sites were a fad in the early days of the Web. People experiment because content creation can be fun, sort of like finger-painting was back in preschool, but people also run out of creative energy, and the maintenance of a site, blog or Podcast becomes a chore. And the content gets boring, and the audience goes away.
First, I don’t know what Internet Coursey is using, but I’m baffled why he thinks that personal websites have gone away. The Internet is chock-a-block full of them: we call them “blogs” and everyone seems to have one these days. Yes, many of them peter out because they do become chores for people, but for many, they are not chores: they are significant outlets for personal creation and expression. I suspect the same will be true of podcasting.
He goes on:
Pioneer Webmasters quickly found that creating an interesting Web site required more art and photography skills than most of them possessed. They also learned that creating and maintaining an interesting site was a lot of work, with little reward.
I must admit, I do spend a fair amount of time each day working on my website: gathering content, tweaking software, uploading digital photographs and the like. But to me it’s fun. Interesting. Even exciting at times. Would it be cool if I got hundreds of emails or comments each day? Maybe. But even with my modest level of success, I consider it fun, not a chore. It’s just part of what I do.
Coursey closes with this gem:
I’ve been in the media all my professional life and have spent years trying to understand audience behavior. I can’t always tell what the masses will like, but I am pretty good at calling losers. And as a mass medium, Podcasting will be one of them.
Allow me to use the Brainwagon Universal Translator:
UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR ENGAGED
TRUST ME, I AM GETTING PAID TO WRITE, SO I MUST KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. THE EXISTENCE OF A MEDIA WHERE INDIVIDUALS ARE GRANTED THE SAME PRESTIGE THAT I ENJOY SIMPLY CANNOT BE TOLERATED.
THESE ARE NOT THE DROIDS YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.
DISENGAGE UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR
Your Jedi mind tricks won’t work on me, old man.
I have a couple of friends who are still Lego fanatics. Just in case they missed this, check out BrickJournal – the magazine for Adult Fans of LEGO. It looks pretty cool. You can download the premiere issue as a 35 page PDF file from their website.
While scanning for reference photos of brains, I found this baseball card for David Leonard Brain. He played for the Reds, the Giants, the White Sox, the Cardinals and the Boston Beaneaters. 🙂 You can get all his career details from baseball-reference.com, including the fact that he lead the league in 1907 with 10 homers.
Strangely enough, Dave Brain seems to be a really popular name.
Addendum: Dave Brain is the only NL player to have three triples in a game twice in one season. How is that for a bizarre record?
The House of Representatives has (again) passed a proposed amendment to the Constitution banning desecration of the flag, It reads (in full):
The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.
It’s a piece of cloth. Like most symbols, it has no intrinsic value to itself. If it serves to inspire, it must do so because the nation for which it stands stands for something valuable. Something like Freedom of Speech. Freedom of Assembly. Freedom to Petition the Government.
Some people don’t get it.
Proponents, who say the amendment has overwhelming public support, say burning or otherwise defiling the flag goes beyond the bounds of free speech. “To burn a flag is to disrespect America and disrespect democracy,” said Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga. “Desecration of the American flag is not a form of free speech. It is a challenge to the institutions that defend liberty. Our flag deserves to be protected and respected.”
When someone burns a flag, it isn’t the flag they are protesting against. It is burned as a symbol of someone’s displeasure with the actions and policies of the government for which it stands. Stifling the expression of that displeasure is contrary to the First Amendment.
Someone who does get it:
“If the flag needs protection at all, it needs protection from members of Congress who value it more as a symbol than for the freedom it represents,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y.