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Journal Jan 2007

31 Jan 2007

Evelyn's officially in the 2-year-old room at daycare now. I guess she's ahead in development. Her latest repeated phrase is the "dot com!" from Expedia's jingle. It's very clear. And this came up because we were trying to use it to get flights to France for our vacation in May. We ended up using Travelocity. Our other favorite phrase repeated by Evelyn is "just a moment!" from my mom.

Timmy's favorite thing now comes from a joke of mine. My first CD-ROM drive ever came as a kit (the Creative Labs "Edutainment" kit) along with various CD-ROM games, one of which was "Just Grandma and Me," based on the book by Mercer Mayer. Claire liked playing it when she was old enough, and Timmy likes it now. He also likes the other books by Mayer. They feature the character "Little Critter" (not sure what kind of animal he is), and his voice in the game says the title on the title screen, "Just Grandma and Me...(quieter) by Mercer Mayer." The Mercer Mayer books generally start with the word 'just', and various books in the series are shown on the back cover of each book, such as "Just Me and My Dad," "Just Go to Bed," and "All by Myself" (one of the few not starting with 'just'). One night when Timmy just brushed his teeth but was stalling going to bed, I finally said, "Just go to bed!" Remembering the book title, I then said, "by Mercer Mayer," in the same intonation as the voice in the game. This, of course, made Timmy laugh, and now anytime I tell him "just do" something, like brush his teeth or eat his dinner, he'll reply with, "by Mercer Mayer."

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Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Selected notes from The Randi Rhodes Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Other news and opinion from the day:

30 Jan 2007

"Remix culture" is an interesting term coined by Lawrence Lessig, an expert on copyright law. Lessig encourages derivative works, but there's always a practical limit to these things, mostly seen in hip-hop with common sampling. I think generally audience reception of these works depends on their collective view of whether the remix artist gives a substantial, creative addition to the original material or simply rides the coattails of the original work. At least that's how I see it. I think the best way to go is to get permission, or, even better, work with the original artist (or their estate if they've passed) to make it official. Some of my favorites are Coolio's "Too Hot," which takes the Earth, Wind & Fire song and chorus and adds AIDS-awareness lyrics, and Missy Elliott's collaboration with Madonna, "Into the Hollywood Groove," which takes Madonna's song (minus the word "Hollywood") and adds a rap about...jeans and stuff, making it usable in a Gap commercial.

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Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

29 Jan 2007

Stephen Colbert's "The Word" (or "The Wørd") segment has some behind-the-scenes genius to it. Check out: More than PowerPoint...: The Best Use of Bullet Points...

A lot of emails go around describing lists of fun facts or whatever. Snopes.com is a good reference to check those facts. Here are some examples:

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Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

24 Jan 2007

I just discovered a new King's Quest remake by Infamous Adventures (IA), King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human, using the title of original game. I just downloaded it, so I haven't played it yet (and would be hard-pressed to find time to do so), but I'm really looking forward to it. I hope this follows the traditions of the remakes of King's Quest I and II by AGD Interactive (AGDI). Their King's Quest [I]: Quest for the Crown updates the original game well and uses its title. Their King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones takes the franchise a large step further forward by adding a rich and logical backstory to a previously unrelated set of characters, objects, and goals. Plus, it adds a new subplot that gives the the game its updated title (versus the original "Romancing the Throne"). But I think the backstory addition is the greatest benefit.

IA is also working on Quest for Infamy, an apparent spoof of the Sierra franchise Quest for Glory (originally Hero's Quest). It's an interesting counterpart to AGDI's current project, a remake of Quest for Glory II, a fan favorite and the only QFG game not updated to VGA graphics and the corresponding GUI interface.

As if that's not enough, a group referred to as "Magic Mirror Studios" (according to Wikipedia) is working on a KQ4 remake. They've got really nice screenshots, but I'm not sure when the game will be released. I would guess next year at the earliest, but you never know....

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ps Is it just me, or did W's mention of Baby Einstein last night remind you of Ricky Bobby saying grace in Talladega Nights?

Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Selected notes from The Randi Rhodes Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Other news and opinion from the day:

23 Jan 2007

It's my impression that writing a book (either a(n) (auto)biography or the "great American novel") is one of those common American dreams. I heard a story on KPBS about Marjorie Hart, who just recently published a book about her summer in NYC in 1945, Summer at Tiffany, after having attended last year's SDSU Writer's Conference (this year's being this weekend). KPBS correspondent Dwane Brown asks (using a quote) whether we all have a book inside us waiting to get out.

I don't think I have an interesting enough life to write a book about it, but maybe there's something for me to share. At least I have this outlet for my everyday thoughts (if somewhat slightly delayed in posting them). I barely even read much in school. In my Catholic elementary school, our "English" class was only grammar, which came naturally to me since it's just a set of logical rules for language. Literature was handled in the "Reading" class, which I generally did just well enough to pass. Maybe part of the reason for that was having a new computer at home to play around with, but at least I played some interactive fiction and read some books for fun (both HHGG-related). The first assigned book that I finished before the class was expected to do so (the class was halfway through it) was J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

A class in high school called "Great Books" (where we actually read short stories and essays) started me on the way to learning really how to write (for content, not just structure). The "Essay as Literature" class also helped. Too bad it wasn't till senior year of high school that I took those. A summer class in my college years finished the job in teaching me how to write well, especially for nonfiction.

The few of you who read this journal have those teachers to thank, Mrs. Sambuceti and Ms. Glass (respectively) (for the high school classes). If I do write that great American novel or some sort of retrospective that becomes popular or, more importantly, critically acclaimed, I'll thank them even more. Hopefully my grammar, sentence structure, and style is good for those of you who (like me) care about that stuff; I did that on my own. Except some of my grammatical style has to credit Douglas Adams as an influence. =)

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22 Jan 2007

Stephen Colbert and Bill O'Reilly appeared on each other's shows last Thursday, in what I think is a great achievement. By Colbert. Crooks and Liars has the stories (with video clips): Colbert on the O'Reilly Factor, "Papa Bear" O'Reilly on the Colbert Report, Olbermann Dissects Colbert vs. O'Reilly.

I only saw the full Colbert Report, and I was a little worried that O'Reilly might either storm off the set or do some other kind of smear on Colbert, given that Colbert is a mockery of O'Reilly. However, O'Reilly made some subtle attacks but mostly played along in the interest of civility and to make his usual points about American culture. I got to see the converse appearance using the Crooks and Liars video links (since I'd never actually watch Fake News), and Colbert was similarly brilliant, playing up the "agreement" and "emulation" between his character and O'Reilly('s). Of course, Colbert owes a lot to O'Reilly for inspiration. O'Reilly is generally more palatable, and I think actually slightly funny, when he appears on The Daily Show, so I sort of expected the same anyway this time.

But O'Reilly still plays a bully with questionable journalistic credibility and little (if any) fact-checking of his own or by his staff. Whether that's who he really is or just intellectually dishonest (like Ann Coulter apparently is) is still indeterminate.

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Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

18 Jan 2007

The Toy Story series of computer-animated films by Pixar has a lot of jokes and references more grownups would likely get than kids. One of them is the pizza truck that has "YO" on the back. In the real world, this is a common alteration of the large Toyota logo on the backs of older Toyota trucks. They don't seem to mention it in the first film, but the second one shows Hamm reading the manual for the truck, and the make is "Gyoza" instead of "Toyota." The cleverness here is that Gyoza is also a Japanese word and, when written in Romanji (the Anglicized version), would also yield the modification to "YO."

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Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Selected notes from The Randi Rhodes Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Other news and opinion from the past:

15 Jan 2007

Well, I guess we survived the weekend after all.

Charlene's flight got canceled from the ice storm that hit the night before, so we missed her visit. I'm not sure when she'll be back here, but we'll probably see her on the East Coast later this year.

James and Whitney's wedding went well (congrats to them!), and we got to see old friends from the UCSD Catholic Community, including Fr. Jim, who's been to LA, Rome, Boston, and now NY, and Fr. Peter, now director at the UCLA Catholic Community, both of whom served together during all our undergrad years.

For those of us here in SD since our undergrad days, it looks like everyone's settling down, building families, and forming the next generation of residents at the UCSD Catholic Community.

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ps Oh, and Happy MLK Day! Check out real footage of the "I Have a Dream" speech and the "Mountaintop" speech (where he eerily appears to foreshadow his death).

12 Jan 2007

Argh, well, this week has been pretty hard on all of us, mostly due to Evelyn's sickness and the resulting toll on our schedules and sleep. The weekend won't be any less busy.

Tomorrow we'll be celebrating the wedding of James and Whitney, where Timmy is the ring bearer, and I'm playing guitar for the choir in the ceremony. Our friend Charlene is scheduled to fly out and stay at our place, but the weather looks suspect. If she makes it, maybe she can help us with our Sunday Dinner turn. Oh, and we have Sunday Dinner.

Here's to a smooth weekend!

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Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Selected notes from The Randi Rhodes Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Other news and opinion from the day:

11 Jan 2007

I share a birthday, today, with Alexander Hamilton. I heard an interesting piece on him on NPR this morning. I think I may be more of a Thomas Jefferson man really (at least his vision of the Constitution), but Hamilton was more vocal about supporting slavery.

Interesting tidbits about our founding fathers. I think I need to go back and read my history books. But at least I've got Wikipedia.

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Selected notes from The Randi Rhodes Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

09 Jan 2007

Evelyn's been congested for the last couple of days, so Maureen and I have had to tag-team going to work and watching her. I'm starting to feel a bit sick, but a bit better today.

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Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Selected notes from The Randi Rhodes Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Other news and opinion from the day:

08 Jan 2007

For our anniversary, Maureen and I had it really simple. On the night of, we just had babysitting and stayed home to watch Little Miss Sunshine and ate pizza. Sometimes you just need to make time for the little things. The next day was my off-Friday, so we had a nice lunch in Del Mar, near her work.

Taking care of two kids, especially with one as clingy as Evelyn really distracts our attention away from each other. So I find that on non-anniversary days I can keep the joy alive with random embraces around the house and watching our favorite shows together.

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Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Selected notes from The Randi Rhodes Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Other news and opinion from the day:

04 Jan 2007

One of my biggest organization issues is sort of a moot one, but one that requires some sort of system. The issue: tagging music files with a true artist and title. First, some artists' albums have songs that "feature" another artist, for example, Santana's latest albums. The track listing have the song name (e.g. Love of My Life) with the marking indicating a featured artist (e.g. featuring Dave Matthews). Using the standard CDDB services usually results in having the track's artist tagged as the album artist (e.g. Santana) and the track's title tagged as the song title plus the indication of the featured artist (e.g. Love of My Life featuring Dave Matthews). However, if you saw this song in a "various artists" compilation, it would have the artist listed properly as the main artist featuring the guest (e.g. Santana featuring Dave Matthews) and the title as just the song title (e.g. Love of My Life).

For simplicity, I can understand why it would be stored differently for different albums, because putting the featured guest in the song title allows the database to store the main artist as the album artist, saving some space. It may be a moot point, but when do you see the easy way in a song book or karaoke song list? You're not going to see "Love of My Life featuring Dave Matthews" there, right?

This sort of issue has been one of the banes of my existence, but I take pride in getting it right. I guess this is one of the ways I can be conservative. (The other major way, at least with music, is to get titles in proper English title case (hence my titlefix program).) But it's very time consuming, especially when ripping my whole CD collection from scratch. At least once I get it in FLAC, I'll (presumably, hopefully) never have to do it again, because the 'L' in FLAC is 'lossless'. From this, I can compress to any other format without the loss of transcoding between lossy formats. For most people, this means I can go to OGG if I want from the original wave file instead of a wave made by uncompressing an MP3 file, which has lost data relative to the original wave file. Or if I cared about space in my iPod or a CD-ROM with MP3s, I can make 128 kpbs MP3s from the original instead of downsampling from the 192 kpbs MP3s I normally keep.

Also, it's the fourth wedding anniversary for Maureen and me. Yay!

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Selected notes from The Randi Rhodes Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Other news and opinion from the day:

03 Jan 2007

I'm sure most people by now have noticed the ubiquitous TV station watermark, or digital on-screen graphic (DOG). I think as long as it's not interfering with the actual video (usually by being transparent), it's a good balance between stamping broadcast content (and the channel itself for self-identifying to channel surfers) and showing an enjoyable program. I first noticed it on VH1, which I only started watching because MTV stopped showing mostly music videos in the mid-90s. (I still like the VH1 shows better than the MTV ones, though, and they still seem to show more actual music videos on VH1.)

Anyway, the term I've been hearing for another on-screen graphic, the 24-hour news channel headline space, is "chyron" (for the pioneering company, Chyron), more properly called the lower third (for bottom 1/3 of the screen). (It took me a while to find this term because I thought it was spelled "chiron.") The 24-hour news networks use attention-grabbing headlines in the chyron, but of course, the most notorious is Faux News, which consistently adds partisan tints, praising Republicans (including Joe Lieberman) and attacking Democrats (including WH critics). They may try to be suave by putting question marks, as in something along the lines of "Rumsfeld: the Greatest SecDef ever?" or "Democrats: Helping the Enemy?" (NOT actual quotes that I'm sure of, but I wouldn't be surprised), but I think it's pretty easy to see through that crap.

Maybe now that the news networks' ratings are falling, especially FNC's, they'll all start doing more real journalism. In the meantime, it's PBS and NPR for me.

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Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Selected notes from The Randi Rhodes Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

02 Jan 2007

Happy New Year!

I'm a big fan of good film scores, and I've bought quite a few of my favorites, like those of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies (both John Williams) and collections like Danny Elfman's Music for a Darkened Theater. My one beef with some released soundtracks is the apparent lack of recorded score in the soundtrack album when there was so much more in the film. One publisher in particular, Varèse Sarabande, is (for me) notorious for soundtrack lengths of about half an hour, at least with Ghost, Vertigo, Dead Again, and Dolores Claiborne, and a notable exception in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I own the Dead Again score, and it's worth it, but I was lucky to get the Milan label version of Ghost, which has some bonus tracks, bringing the total to 45 minutes.

Despite their occasional longer CD, my running joke is that "Varèse Sarabande" is French for "ridiculously short CD." Of course, if those are spectacular 30 minutes of score, then it's okay. But it's hard not to feel cheated, unless that's really how much score was in the film.

My current favorite scores are those for Beyond the Mind's Eye (CGI video) by Jan Hammer, Dead Again by Patrick Doyle, Ghost by Maurice Jarre, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Joby Talbot, Stargate by David Arnold, and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet by Craig Armstrong, Marius de Vries & Nellee Hooper. I also recommend the John Williams' Greatest Hits 2-disc set and Danny Elfman's aforementioned Darkened Theater collections. Just about anything by them is excellent, but my favorites are Elfman's Batman and Williams' Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and all Star Wars.

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Selected notes from The Al Franken Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Selected notes from The Randi Rhodes Show and related stories (indicated times are Pacific) (why this is here):

Other news and opinion from the past:

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