April 2006 Archives

The longest commute I had was when I was living in San Jose and commuting to Redwood City -- 29 miles each way, for a total of 58 miles each day. That's nothing compared to Dave Givens, who spends a total of 7 hours commuting each day travelling a total of 372 miles. Dave Givens makes a 186 mile commute to Cisco.

Givens is the "ultimate road warrior," according to Midas Inc. (NYSE:MDS) and drove home with its first-place prize in the nationwide search for "America's Longest Commute." Givens out-drove thousands of other entrants to take home $10,000 in gas money and a range of maintenance services and products.

I don't like gaming on laptops. The keyboard's too small, a trackpad is nigh unusable for all but the most casual of games, the graphics and sound quality is sub par, and for the price of a gaming laptop, you could have a pretty nice configuration for your desktop and still have money leftover for your living room entertainment center for the same price. That being said, for those corporate executive types that can authorize their own purchases of equipment, Dell's new XPS M1710 Gaming Laptop is packed to the gills with an Intel Core Duo processor, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX 256MB or 512MB graphics, up to 4GB of RAM, SerialATA hard disk and a 17-inch 1600x1200 display. Prices start at $2600, while a fully loaded M1710 with all the options will cost $3855. It looks like Dell isn't wasting anytime with their Alienware purchase.

Today parakkum posted about racial diversity in entertainment, and mentioned that I knew right off the bat who he was talking about in 16 Blocks, because there's really only two choices when casting a Chinese restauranteur in Hollywood:
Kim Chan (below), who is typically the proprietor of a hole in a wall Chinese restaurant (or in the picture's case, the owner of a futuristic flying Chinese restaurant junk)


Or James Hong (below) who is usually in a black suit typically owns a Chinese restaurant that is either being extorted for money or the one doing the extorting.

The general rule casting directors seem to follow for these two actors is if you need a friendly old Chinese restaurant owner who helps the characters, you hire Kim Chan. Nothing bad usually happens to Kim Chan's character, although it's not uncommon for him to be beaten up and left for dead. If you need an old Chinese guy to be either the victim or the villain on TV or in a movie, you hire James Hong. James usually doesn't get beaten up or killed, and quite often he's the man the heroes need to stop. Because of his stiff demeanor, he's often cast as an ambassador/diplomat, a triad boss, or a businessman (usually of ill repute). James as been in numerous televison shows as the Chinese man/grandfather/gangster boss.



Victor Wong (above) was the stereotypical eccentric old Chinese man -- he usually got to play Grandpa or "supernatural" type characters such as a fortune teller. He died in 2001, so Hollywood currently needs a new eccentric old Chinese man.
Other Asian men in Hollywood in the extended. Everyone on this list has been on film and television for over twenty years, with over half of the actors having been born in the United States. These actors, mainly Chinese and Japanese have played several different ethnicities that are not their own, including Thai, Phillipino, Tibetian, Vietnamese, Singaporean, Korean, Hawaiian, and Irish.

The New York Times reports that 65% of women age 25-34 play video games, while only 35% of men age 25-34 play video games. The study was released by by the Consumer Electronics Association.
They cite the difference in game types, as men more likely to be playing console games (such as Xbox 360, PS2 and Nintendo), while women are more likely playing casual games, "like Minesweeper, Solitaire or Tetris".

According to a recent article in Comic Book Resources, Judge Harold S.W. Lew of the Ninth Circuit District Court ruled that the heirs to the creator of Superboy (Jerry Siegel's wife and daughter) recaptured the Superboy copyright as of November 17, 2004.

"The ruling was based upon changes made in 1976 to the Copyright Act, where the length of copyright renewal was extended from 28 years to 47 years, and allowed that any copyright transfers could be terminated so that the original copyright owner (or his/her heirs) could gain the benefit of those extra 19 years of protection (with the presumption being that it would be unfair to the original copyright owners, as any deals they made before the change were based upon the 28 year duration, not 47)."

I'm a big fan of Pilot G2 Pens. They don't seem to dry out as quick as other pens, they're refillable, and they're commonly available for $4-5 for a pack of 4 or 5 or 6 (depending on what their promotion is at the time). The G2 Pilot Pens are made of plastic, retractable, and includes a nice chunky rubber grip. The G2 Pros are little more professional looking, using a slightly heavier plastic, and chromed pieces to give it more of a upscale appearance.
Mont Blanc is one of the brands of very expensive pens that you always see located behind glass cases. There's some renown in them in having some of the finest writing instruments in the world,
Now instructables has put together a tutorial on how to transform a G2 Pilot Pen into a $200 Mont Blanc Pen (they claim $200, I've seen Mont Blancs be available for less than $90) by replacing the Pilot G2 Refill with a Mont Blanc refill ($10 for a package of 2) and snipping off the end of the plastic cap.
Since G2s are pretty much all I use, I've got plenty of empty shells of pens lying around waiting to be refilled, so I gave it a try. It works. You don't even need to cut the end of the tip off if you're happy with not retracting the tip back in. This also works with other Pilot pens that can use the G2 gel ink refill cartridge -- such as the G6.

G4TV: Emperor Palpatine Gets a New Job.
Why You Shouldn't hold a funeral on a PvP World of Warcraft server..
Once the games industry sets down the Wal-Mart path, forever will it dominate their destiny.

Wil Wheaton has posted an interview with the founder of Metblog: Azeroth, Sean Bonner.

Sean: Dude, seriously, it's nuts, you should check it out.

Wil: No way. I lost a year of my life to a MUD, and that was free and just text over telnet. I'm going to have to go to a meeting now, just because you brought it up.

When I was taking Chinese, my professor would say that tone-deaf people couldn't function in China because you need to to be able to reproduce relative pitch in order to speak the language. Chinese is a tonal language, so you would think that they should always have perfect pitch. However, this video of a
Chinese singer shows that being unable to carry a tune is a universal problem.

The woot-off which started yesterday is now at hour 37, with no end in sight. The present item up is the infamous EA Sports Hockey and Football game, which stalled the woot-off for like 5 hours last month, as 1300 units were unloaded. Today they're up again, for the low price of 99 cents.
In the description of the woot, they write:

Features:


• Single-player only - no head-to-head play
  
• Simply plug the controller right into your TV and play!
  
• No game console required
  
• Lightweight, compact, all-inclusive controller allows you to play video games anywhere there is a TV with ATV input jacks
  
• Features 2 action-packed sports classics: Madden Football 95 and NHL Hockey 95
  
• Requires 4 AA batteries (not included)
  
• Please buy these, we are tired of looking at them in the warehouse
  

A few weeks ago, I blasted the games industry for trying to find a solution in Hollywood, and Hollywood trying to find solutions in games. Yesterday, I read how
Galatica writer-director Ronald D. Moore is attempting to mimic James Cameron.
Moore:
"I've thought about doing something where you start a property across mediums, with Internet participation and role-playing video games. Not every show or property will lend itself to that type of hybrid environment, but if you set it up from the get-go to design it that way, I think that's a really rich and interesting place for the business to go."
Cameron:
"In my next film, I can only tell you what we're planning on doing, which is simultaneously developing a major motion picture and, hopefully, a major game title that coexists in the same world that shares characters. Going into that world will actually inform those watching the film and vice versa. I don't want to say anything more than that, because I don't want to give away some of the cool stuff that we're working on."
This is not what the games industry needs, and it's not what Hollywood needs. I understand the logic of Hollywood wanting to get into games -- they think that's where the money is, and they're right to a certain extent. There is money in the games industry.
The structure of games and movies are different, much in the same way that poetry and literature are different. They may use the same tools to compose the works, but fundamentally, they are two very different beasts.
Movies are a passive experience -- everything is experienced vicariously, while video games are much more an interactive experience -- everything feeds back directly. That difference in experiences is what makes a videogame/movie hybrid hard -- you need vicariousness in the movie, and you need a world interesting enough that the player wants to be there and take part in the events that are happening within the videogame world. And of course, things begin to break down when you start to realize that not everyone is going to start watching the show or playing the game at the same time -- so the timing of the flows of information will be different, which will affect how the player perceives the game.
There's a movement for games to be the new storytelling medium. I think as a storytelling medium, it's a relatively weak one.

Today Apple announced the release of Aperture 1.1, which is a Universal Binary. They also dropped the price of Aperture down to $299 (previously it was $499) and are offering those who bought version 1.0 of Aperture a $200 coupon.
For a photographer like me, I always thought that $499 was a large chunk of change to drop on a photo program, especially since programs like Photoshop Elements, Picasa and the free (while it's in Beta) Adobe Lightroom did many of the same functions that Aperture did. At $299, it's still a rather pricy tool, but I'll wait to see what the retail pricing of Lightroom is before I decide which photo processing program I go with.

If you grew up speaking English, when you look at Guge, you probably think it rhymes with huge, making it sound like googe. For a Chinese speaker, "Guge" sounds approximately like goo-geh. Try saying Google without the 'L' sound, and that's kinda what it sounds like. It's not that the Chinese don't have the 'L' sound, but while 'goo-geh-le' is definitely possible, it changes Google, a 2 syllable name into a 3 syllable one in Mandarin Chinese. I'm curious to see what the Chinese characters for 'guge' are. 'gege' is 'big brother' in Chinese, so I'm sure there will be a couple of puns generated from the guge/gege similarity.

BEIJING (AFX) - Google said it has adopted the Chinese-language brand name 'GUGE' for its Chinese operations.
At a conference in Beijing, company chief executive Eric Schmidt said the new name demonstrated Google's commitment to China.

Firefox 1.5.0.2 was released today, the first Universal Binary version of Firefox available for the intel Macintoshes. A rough comparison of the browsers:
Firefox: 3 threads, 31.15 MB of Real Memory, and 363.46 MB of Virtual Memory.

Safari: 6 threads, 15.5 MB of Real Memory, and 355.34 MB of Virtual Memory.

Camino: 4 threads, 21.69 MB of Real Memory 365.41 MB of Virtual Memory.

Years ago, I used to be quite the Star Wars fanboy. Of course, those of us who grew up as fanboys are now old enough to drive and create Star Wars themed cars, so why shouldn't Lucasfilm licensing allow a set of Star Wars themed bar utensils?
Darth Vader/corkscrew, Yoda/wine stopper, C-3PO/foil cutter, R2-D2/bottle opener.
I'm not so sure about the Yoda wine stopper though -- he didn't work too well on Luke.