Greedo Point Blank

Okay, so I get that Han’s a hero and Lucas didn’t want him to be killing people in cold blood, but even after the re-done scene was re-done, how could Greedo possibly miss from that range?

The Post's Poor Proctoring

I sent the following letter to the editor of the Washington Post today:

I’m disappointed with the Washington Post’s poor job of proctoring today’s Live Online discussion with Star Wars Trilogy DVD producer Van Ling. I would have liked to learn something about how one produces a DVD from one of the best in the business. Instead the Post repeatedly let in complaints on topics he had nothing to do with like the movies’ content and their audio mixing. In the interest of not wasting Mr. Ling’s time the Post should have rejected off-topic questions.

The World of Tomorrow

Reading this has gotten me really excited about seeing this. I might start playing this again to get into the mood. Any takers?

Identity Crisis Pencils, Inks, and Colors

There’s a gag in Chasing Amy about comic book inkers. It’s funny if you know what they’re talking about. For most comic books, the artwork is drawn first by the penciller, then given to the inker to go over the work and add form and defintion to it. It’s an important process, in part just because it takes most of a month to pencil one issue so it’s hard for a penciller to ink his own work and meet his deadlines. Once the inker is done it gets colored, these days usually also involving some computer special effects like gradiants. Getting back to Chasing Amy, the joke is that all inkers do is trace the pencils, so they’re really just tracers. The Pulse has nice examples of the process from an issue of Identity Crisis that shows how imporant each step is. Pencils are by Rags Morales.

Contrasts

I’ve so far been very good about not getting new games until I beat the ones I have, but Katherine and I loved the first one so much that when Pikmin 2 came out we had to pick it up. It’s been very strange going back and forth between it and Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow.

PGP for Apple Mail

I got around to setting up PGP on my iMac today. Email doesn’t have very much built-in security, so without a system like PGP there’s no way to know that the message you’re getting from someone is actually from who it’s supposed to be from and says what it’s supposed to say. Here’s how to set it up to work with Mail:

1. Download the latest version of GNU Privacy Guard for your version of MacOS.
2. Mount the GnuPG Mac OS X disk image and run the .mpkg installer.
3. Download the latest version of GPGKeys.
4. Decompress the .tar.gz and drag the GPGKeys file to your Applications folder.
5. Run GPGKeys. From the “Key” menu, select “Generate…” A Terminal window will open. You can select the default options for each choice unless you know what you’re doing. When prompted, enter your real name, email address, and comment (handle). Once the key is generated you can quit Terminal.
6. Download the Sen:te PGP plug-in for Mail.
7. Run the “Install GPGMail” script.
8. Open Mail. Everything should be working now. When composing a new message you’ll see a new checkbox that lets you choose your key and sign your message. When receiving a signed message you’ll be able to verify it.

Of course, this will only work for me when I’m using my home computer and not my Gmail account, but at least I have it set up now.

Weekend Media Roundup

HALO: Thanks to Steve for playing through the last few levels with me.

Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow: lots of fun so far. Using the headset to voice control your squad is just silly.

Alien vs. Predator: Not nearly as bad as the critics said it would be. The premise could have been better and they didn’t use neither the Predator(s) nor the Alien(s) up to their potential, but it was a very enjoyable film.

Hand Stretches and Plus Buttons

At work I make constant use of the “new tab” button on my Firefox toolbar. At home I use Safari which has no such button. The keyboard shortcuts to open a new tab are almost identical in both applications (CTRL-T for Firefox, COMMAND-T for Safari), yet I never use the keyboard in Firefox because the “T” key is too far away from the “Control” key to hit comfortably with one hand, whereas the “Command” key on a Mac keyboard is where the “Alt” key is on an IBM-compatible keyboard, making it easy to hit T with my left middle finger and COMMAND with my left thumb. The problem is that Safari’s “new bookmark” button is a plus sign, which is the prominent glyph in Firefox’s “new tab” button, which means that I’ll sometimes accidently try to bookmark a page instead of opening a new empty tab. I’ve moved the button in my Firefox toolbar a little (it was just to the left of the address bar and is now left of the “print” and “email” buttons), so we’ll see if that solves my problem.

Automating the Mundane

As a kid I’d say, “I’m bored” when I didn’t have anything to do. Now I have stuff to do but am still bored. Am I growing in my needs for stimulation or just getting better at automating the mundane?

The TiVolympics

PVRBlog has a good little rant on how NBC probably won’t do a good job covering the Olympics this year no matter how hard they try. It’s a tough problem: there are many more events than you can cover at any one time. Only some are very popular, but all have at least a small following. Since it’s happening in Greece, many events will occur in the middle of the night in the US, so internet reporting will beat network tape delay with the results. Here’s Matt Haughey’s suggestion:

You know what I’d do if I were NBC? Provide downloadable video of all sports, regardless of whether or not they aired on TV. Plus, I’d toss ads into them. You probably can’t air coverage of Archery on NBC in primetime, but imagine if you had every Archery event on the NBC servers. I bet companies selling bows and arrows would jump at the chance to buy an 30 second slot in a online-only video. You’d have happy fans and happy advertisers, because both NBC’s content and their advertising could reach their perfect audience: superfans.

Here’s my prediction: if in a couple months we hear NBC claim that internet downloads of pirate sports recordings cost them millions in lost revenue, know that a savvy network could have turned that kind of demand into a revenue source (via ads in downloadable video), instead of letting folks route around their damage. If NBC can’t look at someone cruising dozens of shady websites, then waiting hours to download a couple hours of shoddy video as extreme demand for something they’d happily pay for, then NBC has bigger problems than I thought.

If NBC had been thinking, they also could have plugged TiVo as the ultimate Olympics platform. Considering how much Olympics tickets cost, $99 for a TiVo box isn’t very much. They could air as many events as possible and supply very specific program data to TiVo so that viewers could set up Season Passes to certain sports. TiVo works 24 hours a day, so if a sport you cared about were on late at night it would still get recorded. Sure, people might still fast forward through the ads, but it’s better to have them fast forwarding through them then not have recorded them in the first place. (Networks would be well advised to do this with prime time television as well. Instead of worrying who’s going to win the Survivor/Friends battle this week, NBC and CBS could each rerun their primetime lineups late at night so that TiVo owners (and viewers with unusual schedules) could watch both.)

For as much time as networks spend trying to stifle new technology, none of them have realized how many hours there are between the end of the Late Late Show and the beginning of the Morning Show.