Dying.

War & Peace is out in December. Along with The Children's Hour, according to current MGM rumours. I will be taking a lot of DVDs home with me, it seems....

Fitter, happier

While I'm still stuck trying to get the sockets to work, never mind the web server part that I have to build on top, the cheque for $800 that I have in front of me goes someway to reassuring me that I haven't made a terrible mistake. Bribes are always good.

I decided to skip the trip to the mall on the grounds that it didn't have everything I needed to buy, and I wouldn't forgive myself for spending a whole day there (my self-loathing is up there with Matt's), so I shuffled off to the dead mall again to buy some food and something to calm my oh-so-annyoing wisdom teeth. I also managed to pick up a jug, so I can make some Kool-Aid now (regular drinkers will know that the correct measurement of sugar is essential for obtaining something drinkable; too much and it's far too sweet. Too little, and you remember just why the US Navy uses grape flavour to clean pipes in submarines). I think the KitchenWorks shop I got it from is either over-staffed, or having a very quiet time of things; I was followed around, just in case I needed help, and they even offered to hold my ten or so bags whilst I was getting money out of my wallet. Back home, they'd just laugh to themselves as you were getting more and more tangled.

Right, I'm off to make a camera...

Treading Water

Three nasty assignments, a stack of marking, a general feeling of failure, and the week's not over yet. The fact that I'm being paid tomorrow doesn't really cheer me up that much, either.

Typically, the course I'm taking simply to fulfil the requirements for the Master's/Ph.D. programme turns out to be the one I'm enjoying the most. It's probably due to the lecturer, who is one of those great lecturers (there are a few at Manchester, as well) who loves almost every aspect of their work, and they're just dying to tell you all the great things that you can do with what they're teaching you. And today he invited us to a tractor pull. Next week, he intends to explain the Fourier Transform in a way that mere mortals can understand, and I can't help looking forward to it.

Whilst I should probably be working/marking tomorrow, I'm imposing a trip to the Mall; hopefully gazing at the Macs will raise my spirits a little. The Netflix account is for the same purpose. The first DVD arrives on Monday, apparently...

Nothing to say

I'm gutted that Radio 1 is cancelling the Evening Session. Granted, I haven't listened to it for a over a year, but it was an important show, being one of the few national shows where new acts could get airplay. The news that Peel is going to an after-midnight slot in the next few months just furthers the impression that Radio 1 is sending anything not chart-worthy to the night-time ghetto (Thanks to simon b for providing the news, and also for providing great summaries on his website about the UK music scene, so I don't have to pay extortionate prices over here on imported magazines).

The Tao of Jack McCoy

I shouldn't really like Law & Order. After all, it's a show that has an unrelenting and fixed format, a cast that seems to change from season to season, and 'rips stories from the headlines'. So why is it my favourite crime show? The answer is Jack McCoy, A.D.A of New York, played by the excellent Sam Waterston. He's the complete antithesis of the stereotypical 'good guy lawyer'; this man will stop at nothing to get his conviction. He'll bend every ethics law (and break several), trick defendants into incriminating each other, break witnesses down on the stand, use inadmissable evidence in creative ways; basically he'll go to any length to get a conviction. It's hugely entertaining. I know that he wasn't the original DA (Channel 5 started the show in the UK from the 1997 series), but without him, the show would be just like every other crime show on the television. Okay, so the alcoholic Irish Catholic bit is a little clichéd, but he does it so well...

The Decline of the Music Industry

Today ends in a 'y', so it must be time for the music industry to release another report showing a downturn in music sales, and to start shouting: "See!!! You're killing music! Give us the right to hack into your computer!". They were noticeably quieter last week, when a different report said that music downloading probably hasn't hurt music sales in the way the RIAA claim. Still, music sales are down, and have been declining for several years. If it's not the fault of file sharing, then what is to blame?

• The recession - There's an economic downturn happening all around us. Americans are not spending as much as they used to, thus they're not buying as many luxury items as before.


• The End of the Baby Boomer Conversion - From the record labels' point of view, the CD market was a fantastic idea, as it meant that everybody had to go out and re-buy all their albums, replacing the original vinyl versions. This probably helped push CD sales for over a decade, as people slowly worked through their collections. But what happens when practically everybody has done this? The sell-through of back catalogue will go through the floor. This happened in 1996. Strangely, the record companies don't mention this anymore. The downturn started before Napster.


• The Music Industry is rotten - due to sweeping changes in regulation, one company owns most of America's radio stations. The majority of independent labels are nothing of the sort; they're vanity labels for corporations who want to present a 'Gen-X' front. The major labels are resorting to vapid talent shows to make a few quick hits, a big-selling album, and a fast slide into obscurity. So far, they seem to be doing okay with this strategy, but each time they do it again (as in the difference between PopStars and Pop Idol sales), their returns get smaller and smaller.


• Finally, CDs are too expensive. The RIAA can whine about how CDs are cheaper than they've ever been in real terms, and that it's naive to say that a CD only costs 10c to produce. True enough, but consider this: as far as I know, the most expensive pop album ever produced is Michael Jackson's Invincible, at a cost of $30 million dollars. The list price is $18.98. If we look at a film with a similar budget, say Austin Powers 2, and look at the DVD of the film, we can see that, for a dollar more, we get commentaries, a whole film, deleted scenes, interviews, music videos, and more besides. On the CD, we have a maximum of 74 minutes of audio. You can see why the DVD market is skyrocketing, whilst CD sales plummet.

What can the record companies do? Well, they could reduce the price of CDs, try and re-introduce some excitement back into the industry by allowing small record labels to flourish (and not buy them out when they look profitable), and making the CD package more enticing, e.g. by including DVD discs of the album/single's videos (they don't cost much to press, and they're already paying for the production of the videos already, so why not make use of them?) Will they do this? No. Instead, they want to pass laws that will allow them access to anybody's computer that they suspect is being used for file-sharing, and take measures to stop them. They want to lock up their customers, preventing them from doing things with their music that they've done for years. They'd love to force a new format upon us, to get the Boomer Effect back; but their efforts so far have failed miserably, as people are still feeling the pain from the vinyl-to-CD transfer. It's not their fault. Oh no. It's our fault. We should be grateful we can pay $20 for the new teen-pop sensation, coming straight from the baiting-pit of the smash hit TV show on Fox. We should be grateful that the watchful eyes of the RIAA are upon us, waiting to strike if we commit the sin of copying a music track to our computer, and we should be grateful that the RIAA, and its friend the MPAA, will make the computer safe for us nice little consumers.

Office Spaces

They're still in our office. Which meant that it was a little cramped this morning, but then only one person came to see me anyway, so it wasn't too bad. From the crawling pace of the Facilities trolley across the lower floor today, everyone should be in their proper places by Friday. Just in time for the holiday weekend...

Finally disposed of my traveller's cheques today. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that they'll end up in my bank account; the staff weren't especially helpful, and I used filled in the account number on the basis that one number filled all the spaces on the deposit form, and the other one didn't. And yes, it is a wonder I manage to get through the day without causing myself any serious injury due to my incompetence.

Today, I finally visited Lenoir Hall; those of you reading this from Manchester will recognise this as an amazing achievement; in the entire three years of being enrolled at the university, I never once set foot inside the Refectory. I only managed to last two weeks here. My big fear here was that, although I read the Dining web site thoroughly to understand what I could and couldn't do, I have all these horrible, TV-implanted memories of American students coming up against the evils of the dreaded "Meal Plan". But, aside from asking for a 6-foot sandwich (ho ho), it wasn't nearly as scary as my memories suggested it would be. Also, unlike the Refectory, it actually looks well-kept, clean, and a place where you'd like to sit and eat. Plus it's a wireless hotspot. Look, I promise I will make a post which doesn't mention it eventually. Give a week or so to get it out of my system.

I think I promised pictures at some point before I left. I have a groovy small camera, the Sipix Blink, which takes reasonable 640x480 pictures, which I was planning on carrying around for taking pictures. However, it doesn't work in Linux. This is not for the lack of trying; myself and others have puzzled long and hard about how to make the camera work. We've managed to decipher the USB protocol that it uses, and we take dump image data from the camera onto disk. This is where we get stuck. The data it spits out is completely unrecognisable. It's stumped the gphoto-devel list, who are much better as this sort of thing than the rest of us. Sipix refuse to answer our questions about the camera, so we're left with a useless collection of bytes on the computer. And as I can't run Windows at the moment, there's no point in taking any pictures if there's no way of viewing them. Hopefully, my office machine will have a USB port, and I can get some pictures taken then.

You may have noticed that the right sidebar has a few extra bits showing. I'm using the MTAmazon plugin to show what I'm currently reading, and then below that is a link to my Amazon Wish List, just in case anyone is feeling really generous...

Would Like To Meet

I'd love to meet the designer of the American traffic system. He (I'm guessing it was a He) was a rather odd sort, by all accounts. Back in sensible Britain, when you press the button on the Pelican Crossing (see? We even have a cute name for it), you expect two things to happen. One, cars will honour the red light and stop before they enter the crossing space. Two, you will eventually see the little green man telling you that it's safe to walk across the road. Obviously, over here, these two events are mutually exclusive. This leaves the pedestrian with a dilemma; should they risk life and limb by crossing whilst the red hand is present, or should they wait for five minutes, give up, and then risk being run over by the typical American's idea of a family car?

From that, you'd be right to deduce that I did some walking today; in fact I walked to a different city. Sounds impressive, but it's only a mile away from the centre of Chapel Hill. The temperature dropped to a level at which I felt I could make it there and back without needing to stop and die on the way, and I felt it was probably a good idea to get a feel for the area, considering I have to walk there and back for the upcoming Sleater-Kinney concert. Of course, when I get back to my hall, I remember that I meant to deposit my traveller's cheques into the bank today, so I'd been walking around with $1,500 all day. I will get rid of them tomorrow, promise...

People asked me questions today. And I could answer them. Which perked me up a bit, as after spending the weekend locked in my room (strangely, I can't seem to find hermit costume sellers on-line), I was feeling a little down. Being able to do something useful cheers me up somewhat. We still don't have an office; the people who are there are waiting to move into another room, and the people there are waiting on somebody else, and so on. Strange really; I didn't think situations like this ever arose outside of bad Frasier episodes.

I'm a bad person; I keep going back to this page, and finding something exciting each time I visit. You can connect one to an ethernet socket and use it as a base station! Give wireless to all your friends! Somebody take it away before I do bad things with my credit cards!

I spent a lot of the weekend trying (and failing) to get TV capturing to work successfully on my shiny new 8500DV (it has already killed Windows; Linux so far is resisiting), so I've been watching a little more television. Transformers: Armada premiered on Friday with an hour-and-a-half movie. The most impressive thing about it was just how little happened in that ninety minutes; three kids find some Transformers; other Transformers arrive and try to take them back. We don't even see any robots until around the twenty-two minute mark, which defeats the point of a show that contains BigGiantDeathRobots. The return to cel-based animation hasn't brought any big improvements - the drawings are less detailed than the orignal 1984 series, and action scenes are laughable, as they try to create an impression of movement by dragging a background across the screen, just like in Pokemon. The overall impression is of a show that was completed in a hurry, and it suffers greatly. There's a few interesting ideas (Prime's rather vague statment about the Autobots' treatment of the Mini-Cons suggests that there's more ambiguity here than in the original series, but we'll have to wait to see if anything is done with this), but it's not a great start.

Tomorrow - the RIAA, why I like Law & Order, and why you haven't seen any pictures yet..

Fun and Games with the MPAA

If the MPAA/RIAA get the nuclear option that will require every electronic device to have DRM technology built-in, does that mean that these people will not be able to watch any TV or movie? I'd love to see how they'd spin that story...

Operating at 3,000 miles

Obviously, Bonnie's computer decided join in with my computer's ritual suicide, so today I've been re-installing Bonnie's laptop by showing her how to do it via MSN and GnomeMeeting. Hopefully, this isn't going to a recurring problem, as it takes a lot out of Bonnie and myself. At the same time, I managed to come up with an answer for Comp 142's first homework (and Java's new regex classes make the solution much easier...). I've had a brief look at the BSD sockets; they look quite nice in Python, and unbelievably ugly in C. And guess what language I have to use? That's one of the nasty problems in teaching CS - most of the time, your students are going to have more problems getting their low-level code working than actually working on the problem you've given them. I don't really want to spend my time trying to hunt down a obscure malloc bug when I could be working on something more interesting...

This is how it is, then?

I see that Google is determined to make sure I don't forget the entire incident. How very kind of them...

RIP Windows.

I can no longer use Windows. This isn't a 'I'm so happy with Linux I'll never go back' statement. Windows no longer boots. It gets to the start-up screen, and locks up. I've managed to pinpoint the fault down to my new Radeon 8500DV card. If I put my old Radeon card inside the machine, Windows is quite happy to load. This should be aeasy, right? Just select Standard VGA as a Display Card type, shutdown, and swap the cards over.

Uh-huh.

For some reason, my installation of Windows 2000 does not have the 'Standard display types' selection in the Hardware list. So I can't install a Generic VGA card. Leaving me rather stuck. I really don't want to have to go through the hassle of re-installing everything again, but it looks as if I have no other option. If anybody has any ideas, I'm open to suggestions...

Hi, Steve. Gee, your house looks nicer than Bill's.

UPDATE: This gets better. My Windows 2000 install CD does the same thing. So I can't even re-install. Yay for Microsoft!

Scott of the Antarctic

Today's taste sensation: Mountain Dew: Code Red, or as non-marketing types call it, cherryade. Not a particularly nice one, either. Today's journey took us along the F Line all the way to University Mall. Well, almost, as I got off with somebody else to prevent getting lost, only to end up that way a few minutes later. The decision to walk in a random direction eventually paid off, and I discovered University Mall. The name is a bit of a delusion - it's nowhere near the Unviersity, and it falls on the very small side of the mall spectrum. However, it does have a supermarket, and I should be able to walk there once the temperature becomes somewhat sane, so it's good enough for me. Besides, I can go to the Southpoint Mall if I need to visit the bigger stores.

The weather shows no signs of changing. Last night, I went to the first meeting of The Promethan group (it's a poetry/arts thing. They mentioned film, okay? It appears that UNC-CH has no film society, so this was as good as I was going to get). We were getting together to watch Donnie Darko, starting at 8:30pm. Like Matt, I don't really like shorts, so I thought that I'd wear a pair of jeans. After all, the sun has gone down, night is approaching - it has got to get colder, right? I arrvied at Hinton James North, not dripping, but drowning in sweat. It was still warm at 11pm when I went back to Carmichael. They tell me it gets better. Getting below 30^oC would be a start.

But what about the film? Well, it was okay. It had a few too many obvious plot-points, overly-arty camera angles and effects, plus it kept telling us that a certain character was incredibly important, but never actually gave us any detail or explanation whatsoever. Mind you, a six-foot demonic rabbit absolves the film of many sins.

Some things have been floating around my mind recently. Anyone who's been to a multi-level building in America and Britain will know that American floors start at 1, whilst British buildings start with a ground floor. Is there a reason for this? Has this always been the case, or did one country make an explicit change at some point in history? Secondly, when did timezones become important? I'm assuming that due to the scientific knowledge we had amassed before the invention of radio, we knew that the time would be different depending on where you were located on the planet, but when did we start to care? I presume it was soon after radio was first discovered, but it'd be interesting to find out about what changes it made in the Industrial World.

Yes, I probably do need to get out more.

My favourite song so far from the new Sleater-Kinney album:

Remember...

If they ask you whether you want chips with your sandwich, it's not what you think. It's the equivalent of them opening three packets of Walkers Crisps and throwing them over your plate. This may be the desired effect, but it's a good thing to remember for future reference. I'm avoiding the sweet tea on principle; where I come from, tea that arrives cold is inherently suspicious and Not To Be Trusted.

Undergraduate days may be coming back quicker than I thought - today I had the familiar experience of turning up to a lecture having done the assignment, only to discover I didn't need to have done it at all. Still, it was probably a good way of getting me back into the programming mindset.

As I may have mentioned, tomorrow is my exploring day. I was planning on going crazy and heading out over to the Southpoint Mall as well, but I think that I'll wait until next week unless everything goes really well tomorrow morning. This means that I won't be able to drool at the iBooks for a week or so. This is probably a good thing, as I have recently come into some tax refund money, and I am Weak. I would dearly love one of these machines (plus an iPod, if anyone's feeling really generous), but I don't need it. Sure, I'd love to have a tiny, wireless-enable computer that runs a cool BSD-based OS, plus built in FireWire/USB ports that Just Work, and...and...*rushes to get VISA card*

Ahem. What I meant to say is that I may get one eventually, but only after I've sorted out my major bills of the semester. Like housing. And the plane ticket back home for Christmas. Also, given the release of Jaguar, it may be prudent to wait until Apple release a revision of the iBook that can handle the upgrade...

Scary moment of the day: walking towards Franklin Street, I pass a talking on her mobile phone. She sounds exactly, exactly like Emily Proctor. I'm afraid...and now I'm even more afraid. Her imdb profile says she comes from Raleigh, NC. Oh God. Shoot me now. And she also played Lana Lang in The New Adventures of Superman. That's quite funny.

Partial Successes

Well, I don't think I know much about BSD sockets, but it can't be that hard, right? Excuse me while I pause for laughter.

I got the compiler stuff working about an hour ago. I plan to keep very quiet tomorrow, as I don't think that I'm up to the task of explaining how it works (and I'm convinced that any attempt to do so will cause the program to suddenly stop working). But at least I'm not panicked as much as I was yesterday.

The new Sleater-Kinney album is excellent, by the way.

Still haven't got my office, but I now have a key that opens the door. Getting there slowly. I'm not sure just what the grading of the undergraduate programs involves yet; there was a mention of an automatic tool, but I suppose I'll find out more next week.

Lunch today was an introduction to an American BLT. My God. An inch of lettuce, another inch of bacon, almost half a tomato, and what seemed like a full jar of mayonnaise. I may return.

Despite having a long list of comics to buy, I left the comic shop with nothing. Which was a surprise, but I decided that I really didn't need books like Captain America #4, even if they do have fabulous art by John Cassaday. On the other hand, I may have to return to pick up the Invisibles Guide and the second Animal Man book next week.

Friday is my day for exploring. I shall be getting on various buses, and discovering where they all lead. I just hope I don't end up in Durham by mistake...

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

First, a warning. Today's entry is likely to be rather long and full of ramblings. As opposed to short and rambling.

Having spent most of my life with only four TV channels (the Government eventually decided we had been good enough to give us another one a few years back. We mostly wish they hadn't bothered), having 50 all of a sudden comes as a bit of a shock. It also seems that the proability of you finding one channel with something you want to watch rapidly approaches zero, whilst the probability of missing something interesting due to the incessant advert breaks is very close to 1. I'm still laughing at Fox News, by the way...

A problem which has become apparent since my parents left is how am I going to feed myself, without not dying of nutritional deficiency before Christmas? After looking intently into a McDonald's meal today, and not particularly enjoying it that much (no, I haven't read Fast Food Nation. Ignorance allows me to continue to eat there), I have come to the decision that my time in America will not be spent by visiting the fast-food restaurants that you can find all over the world. Tomorrow, I find something local. And I will find a bus that goes past a supermarket before the end of next week.

Incidentally, does anybody else have a packet of patroitic M&Ms that seem to be lacking in blue? Red and white are adequately represented, but the shortage of blue worries me. Is this so each pack can be used to build a flag? I don't know what's worse, that I thought of the idea, or that I'm considering trying it out...

First day of lectures today. Oh boy. I may have forgotten just about everything I was taught during my undergraduate course. We had to fill out a pre-test for the Graphics course, and it went badly. I managed to get the cube roots of 1 completely wrong (1, -1 and i indeed. So dumb), stumbled my way through a couple of questions, and answered 'I used to know this' on everything else. Not a good start. With my confidence shaken, I head towards the Compilers course. If you don't know anything about Computer Science, then take it from me - Compilers are hard. One of the hardest and most complicated class of computer problems in existence. Not good if you're already feeling vulnerable. No pre-test, just a Java program to finish by Thursday. And I don't understand what it's asking me to do at all, but it's so basic that I dare not ask anybody about it. I've sectioned off tomorrow afternoon/evening/night/Thursday morning to try and get my head around it. On the bright side, there's no exam for that class. That's because we have to turn in a working compiler at the end of the semester. ha ha ha ha ha. ha.

The TA meeting was fairly informative, although it strikes me as weird that a lot of lectures have a laptop ban in place, despite the fact that every freshman has to buy a laptop. The perils of wireless connections, I suppose.

I've been here a week now. The biggest surprise so far (and this may come as a shock to many people who know me) is just how English I feel. I keep on thinking that I should break out the tweed jacket and head off to the library. The Hugh Grant stutter is in full effect, and I have to change my clothes half-way through the day, as they're soaked through with sweat. The culture is different in so many subtle ways. A asked me where I was from this morning, and after I told her, she said That's cool. I was in Madrid during the summer. My first reaction was to look rather puzzled. It's nice that she went there, but what does it have to do with me? The distance between London and Madrid is 783 miles. To me, that's quite far, further separated by the different languages in France and Spain (travelling in a straight line). In America, that's less than the distance from Washington to Miami (924 miles) . Yet I view Spain as a far-off foreign country, when all the time it was on my doorstop. So, a thank-you to the in the lift for the world-change.

Right, I think that's plenty for today. I will try and get the blog back on a daily schedule again, depending on how nasty/hideous/life-threatening the courses become as the semester rolls on. I've got my Sleater-Kinney ticket all booked, so I'll let you know all about that in October (I haven't got hold of the new album yet, as I've ordered it through KillRockStars, and it hasn't arrived). Presuming I find a way of getting back without walking...

Out of interest...

Is the Fox News Network for real? Back home, we used to laugh at Americans who behaved like that.

The best of intentions

On paper, it seems a great idea to stick 12,000 students in one place in order for them to bond. In practice, it normally only helps to depress the lonely students even more. The new people showing up are heavily outnumbered by the second, third, and fourth years, plus the returning graduate schools. As you walk down the shut-off South Street, all you can see is multiple groups of people, laughing and joking, as you drink your free bottle of water alone. However, at times, you get a glimpse at another solitary person, seemingly looking as miserable as you. For true Billy-No-Mates points, you must not speak to these people. Ever. To do so would disrupt the Universe itself.

The traditional method of overcoming this difficulty, favoured by eight of ten Manchester freshers, is to drink copious amounts of alcohol, babble incoherently for many hours, and awake with many new friends. But the block party is alcohol-free. Damn those Americans.

That's why I came back after an hour. The reason I'm going back out there now is that a probable evening of misery has to better than a guaranteed evening of misery sitting here feeling sorry for myself. I reserve the right to change my mind in the morning.

Carmichael 531, Where Are You?

The first thought that crossed my mind as I stepped out of Durham airport was "I'm going to die. They'll find my dessicated body in under two weeks." By the end of the week, the thought had transmuted to "If the heat doesn't kill me, the University might."

Actually, the weather isn't quite as bad as I feared. Yes, it's hot, but I seem to cope rather well, considering the state of the climate back home in Europe. Culture shock has yet to fully hit me, although it's been a tough task trying to decipher some people's accents. I'll get used to them. Eventually.

The course looks...welll...hard, to be honest. Everybody seems to be incredibly clever, and I expect someone to jump on me at any moment, pointing out that I'm a fraud, and that I should be deported immediately. My family have threatened to hurt me if I continue this line of thought, but I can't help feeling that I'm out of place. Which is probably because I am different from all of them, at least in the subtle way of being from Britain rather than anywhere else, and it makes me hyperaware of everything and everyone, increasing me shyness to the point where I find it difficult to communicate with anyone. Which is great. Still, there's plenty of time to get to know everybody, I suppose.

Pictures will be coming soon, after I convince Windows to understand that I now have a USB keyboard and mouse...

Emergency Blogging System Test

My computer is all packed and ready to leave. This post is coming from an aging laptop, running on the spot with Redhat 7.3 installed. Nothing really to say today, so I'll just finish this test, and be on my way. Look out for me on Wednesday...

More pitiful excuses

My plan to write yesterday's entry in Oxford came unstuck when God's Own Thunder decided to pour down upon me. I don't really have a lot of time left before I leave, so I promise that I will eventually write the piece I've been talking about, but I won't mention it again for fear of building up the hype too much.

My final night out with my friends consisted with a drab meal at Old Orleans, plus Austin Powers 3. It's the first film I've ever seen at the cinema where I had to fight the urge to walk out. Over-extended, unfunny scenes, complete lifts from the first two films, and less of a film than a compilation of a few mildly amusing moments and almost ninety minutes of filler.

Next week is going to have a more sporadic blogging schedule than usual, as I'm going to be rushing all over the place trying to get settled down in Chapel Hill. I'll try and get back to normal as soon as possible. Wish me luck.

Service will be resumed shortly

Today's excuse is that Bonnie's laptop turned up on our doorstep earlier this afternoon. I spent five or hours making sure that they had, in fact, not fixed it at all, and getting annoyed at the customer helpline, who didn't want to believe me. It's going back tomorrow. After that, I felt completely burnt out, so the piece I mentioned yesterday will have to wait until tomorrow or the weekend.

Tonight, we've been looking at furniture and things for my room (when I get it, of course) in Chapel Hill. So far, we've scoped out a fridge, a bookcase, and a bath-in-a-bag (which I might buy just to see what it is). Next week is going to involve quite a bit of furious shopping.

From The Trademark Blog. Yes, McFarlane is a good example of the worker taking over the production. Especially if you subscribe to the Animal Farm viewpoint.

EDIT: It looks like I read far too much into that last paragraph over at The Trademark Blog. The tone of my comment was also, in retrospect, unnecessarily harsh. Apologies all round.

Housing available

The good news is that I do have a room waiting for me at Chapel Hill. Unfortunately, they haven't decided where yet. But they say they'll get back to me. I'm a bit calmer now.

Cheering me up even more is this news:

Next up is a big wave of catalog classics on 11/5, led by three new special editions. The classic Sunset Boulevard is presented in its original 1.37:1 full screen aspect ratio and English mono, with extras including an audio commentary by Ed Sikov, "The Making Of Sunset Boulevard" and "The Music of Sunset Boulevard" featurettes, a Hollywood Location Map, and the trailer. Newly restored is the Audrey Hepburn favorite Roman Holiday, in 1.37:1 and mono, along with the all-new "Remembering Roman Holiday" documentary, "Edith Head - The Paramount Years" and "Restoring Roman Holiday" featurettes, and 3 trailers.

Just a short entry today, as the storms are rolling in. A longer piece on my secret musical shame should be coming tomorrow. I bet you can't wait.

We're inclined to disagree...

News Corporation is planning a 24-hour 'reality TV' channel. This depresses me.

Why is it called 'reality' anyway? When was the last time you were shoved in a house with ten other people who you've never seen before and made to perform tasks for other people's amusement? Or whisked off to a desert island to test your marriage vows? Is it just that this sort of event programming is cheap, easy to produce, and thee's no hassle over negotiating contracts, as you have people lining up ready for their chance to be famous (despite that none of the winners of these shows have lasted more than a few months longer than their final appearance)? No, I'm sure it has nothing to do with that...

HyperCrisis!

My one regret about my brief falling out with DC after the 'Superman Incident' is that I didn't get to do my Hypercrisis series at DC to explain all this stuff and set up a whole new playground. It's the one thing I could still be arsed doing with classical superheroes. If I ever go back, I'll explain the whole Hypertime thing and recreate the Challengers of the Unknown as Challengers: Beyond the Unknown.

It's one thing I still want to do. It had a monster eating the first few years of the 21st century and Superman building a bridge across this gaping hole in time. A bridge made of events. The Guardians of The Multiverse and a new Green Lantern Corps made up of parallel reality Green Lanterns, the Superman Squad and the mystery of the Unknown Superman of 2150 etc, etc. There's a huge synopsis filled with outrageous stuff.

When I grow up, I want to be Grant Morrison.

The Internet continues to find ways to make me part with my money. Today, it's a fantastic album by The Polyphonic Spree (the link goes to their website, but I got more information by using Google). Imagine what would happen if Godspeed You Black Emperor woke up to a perfect summer day, and decided that, hey, it's all gonna work out. You'd probably get something like Soldier . Definitely worth a listen.

One week to go...

...and I still haven't heard from the Housing department. I'm not scared. Oh no.

Not much to talk about, really. It is a Sunday, after all. Watched The Hot Rock, which was a fun heist film written by William Goldman. Also hacked Drag and Drop support into my little Blogging application, so I don't have to type links anymore. My next task is to integrate spell-checking, leading me back into the Bonobo nightmare.

Apple and Open Source

I'm not sure I understand what Dave is saying here. But anyway, reasons why open source types might like Apple (although Slashdot is always filled with anti-Apple vitriol whenever they post a story):

• Apple is viewed as the only real competitor to Microsoft on the desktop. The "enemy of my enemy is my friend" feeling applies here.


• For the most part, the Open Source community is comprised of hackers who love seeing a great hack or a paradigm shift in computing. Apple's innovation with Lisa/Macintosh (and before you start shouting at me - yes I know about PARC, but even the people who were there at the time say that Apple did much more than simply steal WIMP from PARC) was such a shift. That Microsoft basically stole the interface for Windows 95 helps to reinforce the first point.


• Finally, yes, Apple isn't an Open Source company. However, they do release products under an open source licence. They also contribute improvements to the GCC compiler. I would imagine this endears them to the community somewhat.

As for the rest of Dave's rant, I fail to see who he's talking about. Most of the open source proponents that rose to fame during the dot-com boom had no problems with working with proprietry companies, and believed that the worlds should co-exist and cooperate. The only person who fits Dave's description is Richard Stallman, who has been around for over twenty years, and isn't going anywhere. I also don't understand the section about how open source excluded many well-intentioned hard-working developers. Surely, open source is more inclusive than the traditional methods of software development? The only reason I can think of people being excluded is for patent/trademark issues, like with the Mono Project. This has less to do with Open Source, and more a damning indictment on how the software industry abuses patent/trademark law to prevent competition.

Bonnie didn't give a title

Look here I am. There much to be said for having IM conversations while being in the same room as the other person. It's fun to watch other people in the room looked totally confused when the conversation occasionally involves actual talking.

Not a lot going on today. We watched Ghostworld which was alright. Not as funny as I was expecting but still good. I didn't like the ending though. I felt like it left too many things unsaid but maybe that was the point of it all.

Ian is leaving soon. :( The plus side is that he is hopefully going to tape all of my favourite american shows and send them to me. It also allows me to buy products that are only sold in the US. Still he is leaving me, which isn't very nice at him. I think everyone should yell at him and make him feel bad about it. Or not. Probably not a nice thing to do at all but still. The meanie is leaving. Puff.

I'm a good girl, I am

The MPAA is currently spreading word about how 'thieves' on the Internet are stealing the livelihoods by sharing movies, and how copyright laws need to be strengthened and extended, to last for "forever minus one day" (The US Constitution demands that limits must be set on copyright terms). Meanwhile, the film companies seem to be sitting idly whilst some of the great works of the 20th century are rotting away in their vaults.

The master camera negative of My Fair Lady was found in a quake-riddled vault in California eight years ago, forgotten, slowly decomposing. This wasn't an obscure film that had been langushing out of the public consciousness. This was a huge, $20 million dollar film, one of the last productions that Jack L. Warner ever undertook, and garnered eight Oscars at the 1965 Ceremony. And yet here it was, disintegrating. In this case, a happy ending was found; a restartion team was formed, and they managed to produce a new, digitally-enhanced print which is almost the equal of the original 1964 print.

However, other famous films have not been so lucky. At the moment, the prints for The Alamo, and It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World will be completely lost by next year. The Nun's Story is apparently in a bad way. And yet, very few people seem to care.

It's galling to see the movie companies clamouring for infinite copyright terms when they're prepared to let some of the greatest works of Western art in the 20th Century rot behind closed doors.

The British Museum Is Falling Down

There was an interesting report on Newsnight last night which got me thinking about the differences between the Internet and 'real life'. The current director of the British Museum, Robert Anderson, is standing down, and the report by Julian Spalding labasted the Museum for not organising the Museum in a more interesting (to him, anyway) fashion. One of his examples was that the Tribute Penny, was buried in a glass case with many other coins, and should be given a section all to itself. Anderson pointed out that the Penny was part of a much larger display explaing howthe idea of money, and how it has developed through the ages.

Who's right? They both are.

How do you group things like the Penny, Vietnamese art, ancient writings, and all the myraid of items at the Museum? There's just so many ways of doing it, all providing perfectly fine classifications, but which may appeal to some people more than others. For a more mundane example, think of all the different ways you can organise your music collection (I have the honour of being called a freak by Jo Whiley about the order of my CDs, so I speak with some authority). You could do it alphabetically, by title or by artist. There's a chronological option, either by release date or purchase date, thus providing snapshots of music of the time or the music you were listening to respectively. You could group by the movement that a band belongs to (Britpop, post-rock, pop, and so on), or simply by the colour of the album. Each classification provides a slightly different view of your music collection, which also seems to alter your reaction to your collection (an album that may have been swamped in the alphabet classification may stand out when albums are organised by year, for example).

The problem is that changing these classifications is normally a tough job. Computers, however, allow us to change our view of things on a whim. The Internet Movie Database is a great example of this. Looking at the entry at My Fair Lady, we get reams of information about the film, but it has links which make us look at the film differently. With one click, we can see how it releates to Audrey Hepburns's career. Another click shows us that is part of the latter part of George Cukor's directorial life, whilst yet another click takes us to a list of films released in 1964. Completely different ways of looking at the film, which would require major physical upheavals in the real world, but extremely simple given a computer and a hypertext system.

Erm, yes. No, I don't get out much. Why do you ask?

Interesting Times

When was the last time that the publication of a single comic changed evrything? Was it ten years ago, when Youngblood #1 signalled the speculator boom? Fifteen years ago, when Watchmen #1 cast a mature and accomplished look at superheroes? Forty years since Stan Lee's Fantastic Four announced the Marvel Age? Showcase #4? Detective Comics #27? Action Comics #1?

Shonen Jump #1 is being published in November. In Japan, it has a readership of 3.4 million every week. It will be in every Suncoast store in the USA. It is being published on a returnable basis. It's cheap, crammed full of exciting, energetic manga, and it has the possibility to change everything.

With a price tag of $4.95 for 240 pages, the Marvel/DC newsstand selection will be slaughtered. Children will go for the value, rather than spending $2.25 on a (admittedly very lovely) 22-page New X-Men. pamphlet. Retailers, especially in the more traditional outlets (bookstores, newsagents) will prefer the higher profit margin that Jump will provide, and the fact that Viz will be making the comic returnable just adds to the appeal.

Shonen Jump will feature series such as Cartoon Network's popular Dragonball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh, meaning that advertisers will be more plentiful than other publishers whose audience often skews the wrong side of thirty.

Viz Communications could own the US comic industry within two years.

Fasten your seatbelts. The Japanese are coming.