Friday, August 29, 2008

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Game for Men

Speaking of games, this one is a classic. 1 minute of hilarity.

Fantastic Contraption

I am addicted to this game. If you solve level 12 or higher, post a link to your solution in the comments. It's driving me crazy!

Monday, August 25, 2008

EW Action 25

Another cool list from EW. After reading the list, it makes you wonder what would happen if you put Arnold, Mel, Bruce Willis, and Chow Yun Fat together in a movie (with a Keanu Reeves cameo) directed by James Cameron. How cool would that be?

Vid of Week 2008-08-25: The Blackberry Helmet

Erik Steele:

A recent survey in Great Britain found that one in 10 Britons had suffered some kind of injury from walking into something while they "texted. Unless Brits are a lot klutzier than the rest of us, millions of Americans are probably getting injured the same way.




(thanks to Erik Steele of the Bangor Daily News for the quote and The Forrester Blog for alerting me to the article and the video)

Thursday, August 21, 2008

EWs Best Sci Fi of the Last 25 Years

Entertainment Weekly lists its Sci-Fi 25: The best Sci Fi since 1983. What makes me geekier--the fact that I have seen everything on the list except one or the fact that I moved that one item to the top of my Netflix queue?

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites - Apps and Services - Reviews by PC Magazine

Usually, I find that lists like this are terrible. They either contain obvious choices or sites of little interest, a.k.a., filler. Not this one. Check it out.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

I'm Not Video Crazy

YouTube was having some kind of problem. I was in the habit of posting my 'videos of the week' from youtube and then marking them as draft and postdating them for V.O.W. selections. However, recently I have had trouble posting from YouTube. Like, I post and nothing happens. apparently youTube kept my requests and processed them all at once. Hence the onslought. Sorry. I'll leave them up in case people are interested.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Vid of Week 2008-08-18: Minority Report Technology Today, For Cheap!

This guy Johnny Lee is brilliant. #1 Geekazoid in my mind. Check out this video of his Wii Remote hack, and if you like what you see, take a look at his other equally impressive Wii Hacks and other cool projects.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

I'm Burning, Yearning, for Burn After Reading

I just saw the trailer for Burn After Reading, the latest from the Coen Brothers. It looks awesome! I can't wait for September 12!

Monday, August 11, 2008

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Broadband Caps & Internet Video At Odds (duh?)

Scary Article from Gizmodo. Especially for me--downloadable HD content is the foundation of my geeky paradise. Giz Explains: How Broadband Usage Caps Will Kill Internet Video

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Latest on Amazon vs. iTunes

Ars Technica posted an interesting article on the battle for market share in the digital download areana here. Particularly interesting are the thoughts on DRM and the flexible pricing models. Personally, I prefer Amazon for the selection and, more importantly, the lack of DRM.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

CertifiedMail is Marketing BS

An anonymous poster recently responded to my posts on Goodmail. He/She wrote

What is it about CertifiedEmail that upsets you so much? The way it makes it impossible for a sender to spoof identity? Or maybe you are upset that there finally accountability for senders who blast messages to inboxes uncontrollably? Consider for a moment that Goodmail is probably the most exclusive email program going today, and its users have to adhere to extremely low complaint thresholds. So while marketers and others are sharing some of their email-generated profits with the ISPs (read: offsetting the high costs of email infrastructure that YOU the recipient pay for), Goodmail is making the internet a much better place.

Rather than carry on a conversation in the comments section, I thought that I'd post my response as a new blog post.

I reject the assumptions in the commentors' question. Giving the practice a pretty name like Goodmail or CertifiedMail doesn't make it good, and who is doing the certifying anyway? Along the same vein, "Adhering to low compliant thresholds" is a meaningless statement. Goodmail may not allow deposed princes from Uganda looking to tranfer millions into your bank account through their system, but the email that they traffick in is still unwanted. Across the board people don't generally take the time flagging email as spam, so high "compliance" whatever that means is just a load of PR spin. I also take issue with your statement "offsetting the high costs of email infrastructure that YOU the recipient pay for". There are plenty of free email providers that don't use services like Goodmail. Rhetoric is cheap. There should be other ways developed to prevent email spoofing and inbox blasting.

So despite the fact that I reject your assumptions, I will still try to answer your direct question. However, read the articles hyperlinked in my last post on the topic, they articulate it better than I. Here's the short version: there are two things about Goodmail and its ilk that I don't like:
  1. Assuming that all Spam is bad, ISPs are complicit in filling my inbox with unwanted content. Yahoo, AOL etc tell me that they provide SPAM filters, yet they selectively disable them for certain parties.
  2. If you believe that spam is a legitimate form of marketing (I do not), allowing some paying customers to have access to my inbox over and above other is a blatant violation of net neutrality. SPAM should have the same barriers to access for all purveyors. Should a legitimate small business owner not be able to send out a catalog over postal mail because they can't pay the fees that LL Bean pays?
This hypothetical on Slashdot sums it up:
If I could ask one serious question of anyone who was defending pay-per-email, or sitting on the fence about it, this would be it: Suppose you sent an extremely urgent e-mail to your doctor or your lawyer, who for the sake of argument you're not able to reach by phone. The recipient's ISP owner happens to see the message before the user retrieves it, and realizes how urgently you need to get it through. So he moves it to the recipient's "spam" folder, and then calls you up and says: pay me $1,000 to move it to the recipient's inbox, or they'll never see it.
Read the full article for the rest of his argument.

Bottom line. Spam sucks and I wish we didn't have to deal with it. But getting rid of most of it at the expense of net neutrality or legitimate email being blocked or delays is simply unacceptable.

Sorry if I babbled a bit here. I feel pretty passionately about this, and I wrote this off the cuff while trying to get back to my day job.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Stephen King's N

This looks pretty cool. As good as Dr. Horrible? I doubt it. So far episode 1 looks primising. Pretty freaky, as you'd expect from King.



Vid of Week 2008-08-04: Puppy Vs. Robot

This is kinda funny.

Friday, August 1, 2008

Gates vs. Jobs: THE GAME

Thanks to the folks at Current. Sound effects and graphics are funny. Game not so fun.



YouTube - tapdawg's Channel

This guy posted video of the Lost panel at Comic Con 2008. Cool stuff.

July Was CG Month!

Hooray for me! July was officially my most prolific month in the brief history of this blog. My series of film podcast reviews were concentrated there, so it makes sense.