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Sin City

I saw Sin City. It’s a movie. I guess some guy named Frank Miller (I’ve heard the name, but don’t know his work…. Or am I thinking of Herman Miller?) made some comic books (or are they graphic novels?) and they made it into a movie…

devildoll says this:

Was it a comic movie unlike any comic movie we’ve seen before? Yes. I respect that, and I admire it, and I’m glad I went to see it.

Now, I thought I should check on what a certain word means, because sometimes a word doesn’t mean what you think it means: comic:

arousing or provoking laughter; “an amusing film with a steady stream of pranks and pratfalls”; “an amusing fellow”; “a comic hat”; “a comical look of surprise”; “funny stories that made everybody laugh”; “a very funny writer”; “it would have been laughable if it hadn’t hurt so much”; “a mirthful experience”; “risible courtroom antics” [syn: amusing, comical, funny, laughable, mirthful, risible]

Hmmm, on second though, maybe Sin City is a graphic novel, not a comic book. Anyway, I think the part about “arousing or provoking laughter” and “an amusing film with a steady stream of pranks and pratfalls” sort of fits. See, I tend to find amusement in situations like someone getting an arrow shot through their guts, and then looking at the arrow, and talking about the arrow, but not seeming to feel any pain from the arrow. (Don’t worry, I can tell the difference between a movie and not-a-movie.) So, yes, some of it was comical.

Besides all that, it did live up to the promise. What promise? Well, I was told that it had half-nekkid chicks in it. And while it did indeed, it was all absolutely neccessary to properly tell the story. Where was I? Yes, the movie, it was different. I liked that. I was a bit worried that the style might be distracting, but I think they pulled it off very well. I can honestly say I’ve not seen a movie before that looked like it. No complaints about the casting or the storyline, and plenty of action, not a ton of thinking required, really more of a visual/eye candy thing. I have no complaints. Heck, I’ll even recommend it. At least until The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens.

Oh, and as far as comic book movies, I am eagerly awaiting Watchmen. See? Now that’s a graphic novel I can relate to. Hurm indeed!

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The K in KFC

I saw this KFC commercial on the television, and the background music was the song Sweet Home Alabama. Does the K still stand for Kentucky? Perhaps they should have used My Old Kentucky Home for the background music.

Hmm, upon further thought, with lyrics like “the people are gay” and “they hunt no more for the ‘possum and the coon” perhaps My Old Kentucky Home is not the best choice…

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Odeo Trust

I really don’t have anything against the guys behind Odeo, but I can’t help find it curious that we didn’t hear from them back in 2004 when things were happening. An iPod Lounge interview with Evan has this bit:

…we sorta stumbled on the idea of podcasting (although we weren’t calling it that yet) around the same time others did…

I can’t help but think to myself “Why didn’t you get involved?” I mean, I know we have to expect companies to pop up and “take advantage” (?) of the potential of podcasting, but this just makes it seem to me like some guys saw what was going on, went into super-secret mode working all on their own (perhaps tracking what was going on, and “borrowing” all of the ideas) and never contributing antything back. Well, until the company launches anyway. As I’ve said before, I lack business sense, so maybe this is just the way it always works…

The old line about “Would you trust a mechanic who doesn’t own a car?” comes to mind. I still don’t know of any podcasts done by the guys behind Odeo, do they create podcasts? Have they? What do they know about it? Am I being too critical? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but where I come from programmers scratch their own itches and eat their own dog food. Again, maybe they are doing all the right things, and we just can’t see it yet.

I really shouldn’t be so cynical, I mean, they do say things will be open, and there will be no DRM, so I really should just wait and see. My view of their goals is that they want to be the Blogger of podcasting, which, I suppose, is a noble cause. Maybe I’m not really the audience they’re after then, since I’m not really a Blogger user.

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Detached

Things I really don’t want/need in my life:

  • Emails with Word documents attached
  • Emails with Excel documents attached
  • Emails with anything attached that could have been better said in a plain text email or some other means more condusive to a conversation like perhaps a wiki or a weblog or heck I don’t know, anything but some darn proprietary format that forces me to use something like NeoOffice to read/write it…

(See Also: web geek sez)

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DaRn Music

Ok, I’ve never really used the iTunes Music Store to purchase music, mainly because they really don’t carry much from the artists I like, and I still have at least 500 pieces of vinyl and cassettes to digitize, but anyway, as a favor I purchased a few songs for someone. It didn’t turn out so well…

I was already registered, I’m sure I did that when the iTMS came out, or for some contest or something, so I managed to login ok. (Even though Apple still thinks my old email address should be my user id, though I’ve tried to change it, luckily it forwards to my current email address.)

Alright, so I purchase the music, it loads into iTunes, I can play it, and I now attempt to burn it to a CD. The user experience quickly goes to hell.

First iTunes tells me that “at least” of the songs in the playlist can’t be burned to a CD. So I try deleting one, then another, and another, soon there are no songs in the playlist. I assume that none of them can be burned to a CD. Did I miss a memo? Can you still burn songs you purchase from iTMS to an audio CD?

And still, some in the industry wonder why people don’t like DRM.

Now keep in mind, this is a favor for someone, and I said it should take 15-20 minutes. More than enough time I figured to download the songs and burn them to a CD, right? Well, now I’m searching for software to break the DRM, just so I can put these freakin’ songs on a CD. No luck there. I end up using Wiretap (old free version) and Soundflower to play the songs on my Mac and record the output right back to non-DRM’d files. This added 30 more minutes to the process.

In the end it did work, though I was told the sound quality seemed to lose something, which I will chalk up to preconceived notions about re-recording the audio to non-DRM’d versions, and nothing else.

Note: As I’ve recently received an iTMS gift certificate (Thanks Lenzies!) I’ll be trying this process again. I’m hoping to skip the whole “breaking the DRM” part this time though.