EdKopp4

Light Rail in the Tampa Bay Area? We Need New Ideas

Ed — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 20:24:14 +0000

An article discussing the urgency for light rail in the Tampa Bay area, Ruth: Stop talking and build a rail line, recently came to my attention. Having briefly studied transportation in the area in an academic setting, this article brought back to my mind many ideas I had on the topic when it was fresh in my mind. Without going into too much detail or providing documentation, here are my initial thoughts as they relate to the article’s content.

I appreciate the author’s frustrations with a lack of comprehensive mass transit in the area, but this piece comes off as nothing more than upset ramblings.

First, it is very poorly researched. It is true that we have been doing lots of studies for many years about mass transit with nothing to show for it, but he seems to think that the only thing standing in the way of mass transit is stubborn politicians. He seems to forget that just a few years ago there as a measure on the ballot that would have made light rail a reality. It did not pass. I seem to recall a similar measure failing years prior to that one as well.

Second, if he wants light rail to happen in this area, then maybe the question he should be asking is why did the last ballot measure fail? I’m pretty certain it’s because you asked locals to pay a significant increase in sales tax. People don’t like voting for this in the best of times, especially in a tax-averse place like Florida with no state income tax, but they especially don’t like doing it when the economy is in bad shape and has an uncertain future. Of course that ballot measure failed, and no matter how robust the next light rail proposal, I’m sure it will also fail if the same approach is taken. Instead of just sticking a sales tax hike on the ballot, we should be looking into making the idea more palatable and making the funding more diverse.

We need extensive public outreach so that when the public sees something similar on the ballot in the future, they have an idea of the usefulness of such a project and don’t immediately check the “No” box because of its price tag.
We need to look into ways other than a sales tax increase to fund this massive project. While the exact method isn’t clear, we could start by discussing a combination of a comparatively minor sales tax increase, a property tax increase, a gasoline or other automobile tax, and in particular a tax that will affect tourists such as a hotel tax. Tourists look to benefit significantly from a light rail system and expanded bus service, and while they do pay sales tax when they’re here, it makes no sense to focus solely on a sales tax increase when such a tax is already regressive in nature and its increase would disproportionately affect those who can least afford it.

The Tampa Bay area certainly has a problem with transportation. Our roads are extremely congested at times, and the lack of good mass transit makes the area less appealing to tourists and businesses. This problem is no secret. Commuters know it, politicians know it, and business people know it. However, many people don’t understand how a comprehensive light rail and bus system can improve things, and they certainly don’t like the idea of paying for it through major sales tax hikes. Until we come up with new ideas that will better educate the public, get them even more involved in the decision making process, and make the funding issue easier to swallow and less of a burden for the poor, then we can expect a continued uphill battle in the fight to bring improved mass transit to the Tampa Bay area.

Filed under: News and Politics

30 Years After “Message in a Bottle”

Ed — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:31 +0000

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been 30 years since the release of The Police’s first #1 hit in the UK, “Message in a Bottle.” This song is a favorite of mine, as is evidenced by iTunes telling me that I’ve played the song 157 times, which doesn’t even include the 36 times I’ve played the live version or heard it on the radio. I’m sure that I heard it many times before this, but the first memory I have of really being moved by the song is when I saw Sting perform it live at Agganis Arena in Boston back in 2005. It may seem odd that he would play a Police classic while out on solo tour, but that was apparently one of his goals of the Broken Music Tour – to revisit his past. I certainly wasn’t one to complain, though, and neither were my fellow concert-goers, as we were thoroughly thrilled by his performance of the best hits of The Police and his solo career (At some points, people were even dancing by their seats. I don’t recall if I did or not, but it’s certainly possible. I was really digging that music). That concert was what led me to go out and buy the Message in a Box: The Complete Recordings CD box set, which contains all of The Police’s songs. Now, thirty years after this song thrilled listeners, Sting is putting “Message in a Bottle” to an even great use. He’s teamed up with numerous other major celebrities, such as Olivia Newton-John, Daniel Craig, and Harrison Ford, to send an SOS to the world, trying to get the word out to everyone that our world’s rainforests are in dire need of being saved. This song is used as the backing track to a moving video that will hopefully alert people to just how precious our rainforests are, and not just from a global climate change viewpoint. You can watch the video and learn more about The Prince’s Rainforests Project by going to this Huffington Post article on the matter or by going directly to the PRP’s website.

Posted in Music

Monk’s Final Season Premieres Tonight

Ed — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:36:34 +0000

At long last, the final season of one of the best shows on TV, Monk, begins tonight with its season premiere at 9 PM (EST) on USA Network. I had originally thought that the final season premiered on January 9th of this year, but as it turns out, that was just the premiere of the second half of the next to last season. Thanks to USA Network’s crazy scheduling of shows, it can be very confusing keeping track of whether or not your favorite show is delivering new episodes that week or if it’s on a break, as well as whether a show is beginning or ending a season or if it’s just going on or leaving a months-long break between new episodes. Between the network announcing the final season of Monk around that time and my belief at the time that the next to last season had already concluded, I assumed that the premiere in January was that of the final season. Luckily for me and other Monk fans, this was not the case.

According to the advertisements, it seems the writers have some interesting surprises in store for this season of Monk, with our favorite detective doing many acts that one would never expect him to do. My hope is that this final season delivers consistently good individual episode storylines where you’re frequently intrigued and left guessing until the very end, after which you’re amazed and impressed by Mr. Monk’s incredible skill and powers of observation. To make this last season perfect, the writers will also need to deliver some good character development and perhaps even some compelling multi-episode storylines, all ending in a final episode or two that give a bit of closure to series-long plot lines and character developments and resolve once and for all the mystery of Trudy Monk’s death. The writers on the show have really delivered in the past, so I feel confident that they will do the same again this season.

Posted in TV

Microsoft, Please Fix Bing’s Image Search

Ed — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 03:59:19 +0000

I’ll admit it. I really like Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. While it doesn’t have as comprehensive an index as Google, its results seem to be pretty spot-on, its video search is very handy thanks to its video preview feature, its travel search is incredibly handy, its one page image results load additional images instead of making you go to the next page, and the contextual links on the left are surprisingly useful and usually provide good related searches for most search terms. I have, however, noticed one glaring fault in Bing’s image search. For some reason, Bing cannot find any of the many images I’ve uploaded over the last few years to Flickr. If I go to Yahoo’s image search and search for the terms "edkopp4 site:flickr.com", it brings up 6,750 images, all of which appear to be images I’ve uploaded to the site flickr.com using my ID edkopp4. If I go over to Bing’s image search and enter the same terms, it returns no results. OK, maybe the "site:" operator just doesn’t work for Bing. However, when I search for just "edkopp4", I get only 12 results, of which none are from Flickr. Flickr is a wonderous treasure trove of some of the best images on the internet, with many of them tagged so well that you can usually be sure that you’ll find at least a few good images to match your search. If Microsoft wants me to take Bing image search seriously, they need to quickly index all images on Flickr and let me search for them with ease. This means that when a search term I enter appears in a Flickr image’s tags, title, notes, description, or the user who uploaded it, Bing needs to give me this image as a result for my search. This would make me happy because it would allow me and others to easily find my images, and it would make Bing users as a whole happy because they could finally have one of the biggest and best image sites included when they go looking for a particular photo.

Yahoo! has already figured out how to accurately search Flickr and its many images and return good results in its Image search, so there’s absolutely no reason why Microsoft should be without Flickr search. Especially now that Bing will be used to fulfill search requests on Yahoo!’s site, it is absolutely critical that Microsoft correct this oversight as soon as possible. If they don’t, then both Bing and Yahoo! users will be left without Flickr goodness in their image search. Google‘s results for this search also aren’t as good as Yahoo!’s, but this may have to do with the fact that I have a free account and you can only see my 200 most recent photos in my photostream. I suspect that this may interfere with Google’s bots’ ability to easily index all of my images on Flickr. However, at least Google properly indexes and returns 362 results for my search, most of which are photos I uploaded to Flickr.

Posted in Computers and Internet

Firefox 3.5 Now Available for Download

Ed — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:23:12 +0000

It’s been a fairly long time coming, but the latest major version of the popular Firefox browser is now available for download at Mozilla’s website. I’ve been using it since late this afternoon, and so far I’m fairly happy with it. As often happens with new releases of Firefox, many of my favorite extensions were broken by the release. I could enable them using Nightly Tester Tools, but I have a fear that doing so might turn on an add-on that really shouldn’t be turned on right now, leading to unpredictable behavior and a crashing browser. I don’t think I’ll have to wait long for my add-ons though. In the past, add-on creators, especially those responsible for more popular add-ons, have been very good about quickly updating their works not long after a new update is released. In terms of performance, I’ve been pretty impressed with the speed of this latest Firefox version. It seems to work much better on JavaScript-full sites compared to before, with Hotmail working noticeably better and Gmail and reddit seeming to be a tiny bit faster. I still want to say that Chrome makes pages load and work a bit faster than 3.5, but it’s really hard to say. I have a feeling that some sites will work a tiny bit better in one while others work better in the other. Regarding the rest of the application, the menus seem to be a bit more clunky than before with their opening being a bit delayed. This could very easily be caused by one or more of my extensions, though. I have been pretty surprised by the awesome bar. I don’t know if it has to do with me no longer needing the Hide Unvisited extension, but the awesome bar seems to load URLs as I type significantly faster than it was able to in the last version, in which I often observed a noticeable lag. Between its better JavaScript performance, Private Browsing mode, and other new or improved features, I think Firefox 3.5 should turn out to be a pretty good browser choice for most people, especially once the add-ons catch up.

Posted in Computers and Internet

Burn Notice Returns This Thursday

Ed — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:16:45 +0000

After a fairly long but expected wait, USA Network’s awesome series Burn Notice will be returning with new episodes starting this Thursday, 6/4/2009, at 9 PM EST. You may remember that it used to be on at a different time, but they’ve stuck it at 9 PM so it can be used as a lead-in for USA’s new series Royal Pains. Royal Pains doesn’t have me very excited, but Burn Notice certainly does. It’s delivered consistently over the past two seasons with great action, characters, and stories, and I expect this will continue. The end of last season was particularly good, thanks in part to the addition of Stargate SG-1′s Daniel Jackson (What? That’s not his name? Oh, that’s right.). When last we left Michael Westen, he was finally free of the people who burned him and will no longer be forced to do their every (usually illegal) desired operation. However, he’s still considered burned, meaning that he still has no spy job and no public employment history. Except for his friends and family, he’s on his own, and neither the US government nor the people that burned him will protect him. This means that he’s now at risk from anyone he may have crossed while he was a spy. This should be quite a season, and the slightly new premise leaves him open to a much wider variety of confrontations. In all, I’m very excited and hopeful about this season. If you’ve missed the last two seasons and want to catch up, you should check out USA Network on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, during which they’ll be showing Burn Notice marathons, including all the episodes from the first two seasons.

Posted in TV

Behold: The Power of Yelp

Ed — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:58:48 +0000

In addition to beholding the power of cheese, I’m also fond of beholding the power of awesome websites. To that end, I tend to be rather prolific when it comes to signing up for and trying out neat websites. In this Web 2.0 age, you can find a website that does nearly anything you want or gives you any bit of information you may be looking for. One of my favorite websites definitely has to be Yelp. It’s not an incredibly flashy site, but it’s an excellent resource if you’re trying to learn about local businesses. In particular, I find its reviews and photos for local restaurants to be a tremendously useful resource when I’m trying to learn about a restaurant or find a new one. I learned of many a great dining location in Boston and Tampa thanks to this site. You have to be careful when you’re looking at reviews and ratings and remember that everyone has a bias or may have had an unusually good or bad experience. Of course, this is true of any work of writing, reviews in particular. If you look with a discerning eye at the reviews of places near you, I’m quite sure you’ll be impressed by Yelp’s ability to point you to excellent restaurants.

Many people sign up for Yelp with the intention of writing reviews on the site. While I do hope to write some restaurant reviews at some point in the future, I expect that I’ll likely keep those reviews here on this blog instead of on Yelp. Instead, I use Yelp as a way of keeping track of many of my favorite restaurants. By looking at my list of bookmarked places on Yelp, you can see in one easy list many of my favorite food destinations in Boston and Tampa plus some others as well. Thanks to this list, you get easy access to the address, phone number, ratings, reviews, and other Yelp information bits for all these places. One really handy feature of this page is the map in the right hand column that shows markers for all these locations. By zooming in on different parts of the map, you can see the physical locations of my favorite places relative to one another and the layout of the city. While this is the main thing I use Yelp for, I also occasionally upload photos of my favorite restaurants and markets when I see that the place is missing a photo or if I think mine adds something to the quality of place’s photo album. At the moment I have 34 photos uploaded, and I’ll upload more in the future if I see a need. In all, Yelp is a really useful, easy-to-use website that makes expanding one’s culinary horizons and learning about the area around you about as simple as can be. You can check out my "local photos" by going here, and you can visit my Yelp profile page by going here.

Posted in Computers and Internet

Encarta to be Shut Down in October

Ed — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:56:18 +0000

As TechCrunch and other sites have recently mentioned, Microsoft will be shutting down its long-running digital encyclopedia Encarta at the end of October. I admit that I practically never use this service anymore with the accuracy and ease of Wikipedia waiting just a few clicks away, but I am a bit sad to see this service go away. We’ve already seen numerous restaurants, stores, newspapers, and other businesses close in recent months, and it seems that web services aren’t safe either, with their owners facing increasing financial pressure to have their web services yield a decent profit or face having to shut them down completely. While I won’t miss Encarta in my daily life, I will look back on it with fond memories whenever I think of computers and the internet in the pre-Wikipedia era.

Especially in the late 1990′s, Encarta provided me with a wealth of information and images. Finding content was incredibly easy thanks to its search feature, and it tended to provide much more up-to-date and detailed information than a traditional set of hardcover encyclopedias. In my dial-up internet days, and even in my early broadband days, such a wealth of easy-to-access information was a rarity, and Encarta provided me with much-needed information when I was pressed with the occasional information-requiring paper to write or a curiosity to be satisfied. The web we have now is very different from the one that existed then, and it seems that Encarta has been rendered irrelevant by the likes of Wikipedia. I hope that as it closes Encarta, Microsoft has the generosity to donate some if not all of its encyclopedia entries and images to the public domain. Wikipedia is generally accurate and thorough, but it could still benefit from the wealth of well-written entries and images compiled over the years by Encarta. Such a move would be a very nice gesture and would certainly benefit current and future people who rely on the internet for their information. Goodbye, Encarta. You served your purpose well and will be remembered fondly.

Posted in Computers and Internet

No New York-Style Pizza at JFK?

Ed — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:58:05 +0000

As some people who have been following my Twitter feed might know, I was recently at JFK airport in New York City for a short while on my layover going from Tampa to Chicago and on the one from Chicago to Tampa. My experience was generally a good one, but I was very disappointed to find that JetBlue’s fancy new Terminal 5 was completely devoid of an authentic (or even semi-authentic) New York-style pizza place. I had really hoped that I would be able to use this rare opportunity to further expand my food horizons and enjoy a New York-style slice in the general vicinity of its origin, but it just wasn’t meant to be. I would have even made do with a semi-authentic variation of the New York-style, like Pizzeria Uno does with its airport offerings, where you get the general gist of a Chicago-style pizza without the usual Chicago-style thickness or size. All I could find instead were overpriced bar and grill restaurants, really overpriced bar and grill restaurants, a sushi bar, and an overpriced food court.

In the end, I appeased my hunger with two Sicilian-style pepperoni pizza slices and one regular pepperoni slice from the pizza place in the food court that tries to be like a Roman pizza place. After having been to Rome recently and having tried good Sicilian-style pizza at Galleria Umberto in Boston, I can say with a great deal of confidence that the Roman pizza wasn’t what you would get in Rome, with the crust being reasonably similar but nowhere near the same quality and the toppings being inferior, and the Sicilian-style slices were like what you would get at Galleria Umberto but with inferior ingredients, not as hot and fresh, and not as much cheese. In all, I’d say it was a decent, rather expensive meal that was heading in the general direction of the intended pizza styles but fell far short. I won’t complain too much, though, because that’s just what I would expect with airport food.

I think that in its efforts to look trendy and appeal to wealthy travelers, the folks at JFK who were responsible for designing this new terminal really missed the mark in some respects. Yes, there is a decent amount of seating, although I much prefer cushioned seats like those in Tampa. Yes, there are charging stations where you can easily charge your mobile device with a plethora of power outlets. Yes, you have numerous rows of touchscreen-based delivered-to-your-seat dining stations. However, when I go to an airport, especially an airport in a famous, old, diverse, culture-rich city like New York City, I don’t want to go to expensive stores, overpriced generic restaurants, or knockoffs of good foreign food. Instead, I want to get at least a taste of what the city and the surrounding area is really like, and the best way I can think of accomplishing that would be to provide a decent number of restaurants and food court stalls that offer local cuisine, in particular New York-style pizza. Even if it is a bit overpriced (this is an airport, after all), I and I’m sure many other curious or cash-limited travelers would quickly seize the opportunity to grab a real slice of New York cuisine. I don’t want to feel like I’m in one of many overpriced malls when I’m in your airport. I want to feel like I’m in the gateway to "the greatest city in the world" (as they would say in the opening sequence to The Late Show). I hope that the people in power at John F. Kennedy International Airport come to their senses soon, but as long as customers appear to be reasonably happy and the vendors continue making enough profit, things will stay the same, and it really is a shame. What could have been a welcoming taste of what New York City has to offer is instead a cultureless, albeit pretty and comfortable, expensive shopping mall that doubles as an airline terminal.

Posted in Food

Stargate Atlantis Series Finale and Monk Season Premiere Tonight

Ed — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:40:40 +0000

If you like sci-fi shows or fun-filled detective shows, then tonight is the night for you. With its fifth season coming to a close, Stargate Atlantis’ series finale will be shown tonight at 9 PM (EST) on SciFi. It’s been a pretty good run, albeit shorter than that of its predecessor, Stargate SG-1, which lasted for an impressive ten seasons. Tonight’s episode promises conflict, action, and hopefully some story resolution to give at least a little closure to the character and story arcs formed over these five seasons. Also on tonight is the season premiere of the final season of Monk. This has been a great show and a favorite of mine, so it’s sad to think that it will be leaving soon, but at least we have one last season to enjoy. That episode will also be shown at 9 PM (EST) on USA Network, but if you want to watch both episodes like I do, then you should be able to catch the reshowing of the same episodes later tonight. USA will be reshowing the new Monk episode at midnight, and SciFi will be reshowing Atlantis at 11 PM. This is what my Verizon FiOS TV guide tells me, anyway. Happy viewing.

Update (8/7/09): I was originally under the impression that the premiere of the final season of Monk was on 1/9/2009, but that was apparently the premiere of the latter part of the next to last season, which followed a long period of time with no new episodes (except for the Christmas episode shown near the end of November). The premiere of the final season of Monk is actually tonight, Friday, August 7, 2009, at 9 PM (EST).

Posted in TV

Merry Christmas!

Ed — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 14:13:00 +0000

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas. Whether you’re having a white Christmas with lots of snow on the ground or a warm Christmas like I am (with the temperature supposed to get up to almost 80 degrees today), I hope you have a festive, fun day filled with presents, family, friends, good food, and lots of cheer. I’ll leave you with a picture of my family’s Christmas tree. Enjoy, and have a safe, merry Christmas.

Posted in Personal

My New Xbox Experience Avatar

Ed — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:57:01 +0000

I finally got the New Xbox Experience on my Xbox 360 this past Friday after signing up for the NXE Preview through Microsoft Connect towards the end of October. I was lucky enough to sign up during the short window before all of the slots filled up, but I wasn’t lucky enough to get accepted into the preview in the first or second waves. Finally, in the third wave of granting people access to the NXE, I was chosen, and as a result my console updated this past Friday, November 14th. The very first thing you do after updating your console and seeing the welcome video is to set up an avatar, and I must admit that it was a lot more fun than I expected. There weren’t enough clothing options, but there were far more possibilities for facial features and such than I had expected. I really hope that Microsoft keeps adding more options, and I trust that many of these additional options are kept free of charge. I could see myself coming back to my avatar and customizing it now and then to change up its appearance a bit as long as there are numerous free options. As it stands, my avatar looks a great deal like me (well, as much as a cartoonish avatar with limited customization options can).

Thanks to the update Microsoft made to Xbox.com last night, you can now see my avatar, as well as that of any other Xbox Live member who has one, right on their Xbox.com profile. Everyone not in the Preview will have to wait until tomorrow to download the NXE and customize their avatar, but that’s not too long. The wait is almost over. In the mean time, you can enjoy a look at my avatar below.

Posted in Video Games

Happy Birthday To Me

Ed — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:45:50 +0000

Today, November 11th, is a great day. Not only is it Veterans Day (formerly known as Armistice Day), and as a result a national holiday, but it’s also my birthday. In less than two hours at 11:00 AM (EST), I will turn 23 years old. It is remarkable how quickly time passes. It seems like just yesterday I was turning 21, and not long before that I had my 16th birthday. As a side note, today, more specifically 11 AM today, will also mark the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I. So, mark that on your calendar. 11 AM today is my 23rd birthday and the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War. So far I’ve been watching some World War II footage on the Military Channel to commemorate Veterans Day. Later, I’ll be opening presents, spending time with family, and having some tasty Italian food from Castellano & Pizzo for dinner. In addition, I’ll be having some ice cream cake from Publix for dessert, or possibly for an appetizer (or both). I hope everyone has a wonderful day today.

Posted in Personal

Windows Live Photo Gallery Stitches Are Easy and Impressive

Ed — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 03:58:13 +0000

I’ve been toying around with Windows Live Photo Gallery for some time now, and even still I am impressed by it. At the most basic level, it’s meant to make viewing, organizing, and uploading your photos a breeze, with some basic other features built in such as being able to crop a photo. It succeeds quite easily in all these areas, and for these features alone it would be a great piece of free software to have on your PC. However, Microsoft also managed to toss in some added features that make Photo Gallery really stand out. My favorite of these is the ability to create a panorama by having the software automatically stitch together select photos taken of the same place. Before I tried it for the first time, I couldn’t imagine that it would work very well. I’d seen other software before that could create panoramas, but you had to tell it what parts of each photo are shared among the photos.

With Photo Gallery, Microsoft has managed to make it as easy as selecting a few photos and clicking the button, then out pops a perfect or near-perfect panorama photo, with each individual photo aligned in the new photo so that they blend together properly. It amazed me the first time I saw it, and it still amazes me each time I see it. It’s especially impressive if the photos you’re using are of a grand scene that’s impressive in its own right. Whereas before all you could do was look at each piece of a vista on its own by looking at each individual photo, which at best captured one part of the overall picture, now you can blend them all together so you can truly appreciate the view just as you did when the pictures were taken. When used properly, you can feel like you’re back at the place where you took the photos. I especially found this to be the case with the photos I took of certain places in Rome. To see my current gallery of stitches I’ve made using Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can go to the photos section of my Windows Live Space and click on the album titled "Windows Live Photo Gallery Stitches." Not all of them were blended together perfectly, but I think that in most if not all of the cases this was merely the result of trying to stitch together photos that weren’t taken from the exact same location, which is critical for an accurate stitch. In all, though, I now have a collection of mostly-perfect panoramas from around the world, through which I can relive what it was like to be standing in each place the photos were originally taken. You may not be able to tell from the photos in my online gallery because they’ve been reduced in size for online viewing, but the stitches I have on my computer maintain all the original details and resolution of the photos used to make the stitch. If you were to open up one of them, you would be able to zoom in and see just as much detail as was in the individual photos. As a result, these panoramic photos are near-perfect blendings of smaller photos, giving one larger, more impressive photo of a place with all the original detail found in the photos that make it up.

If you want to make your own stitches, then you first need to get some photos that will work. You may already have some photos that qualify, or you may need to take some new ones just to make the stitch. Either way, for a photo to work with Windows Live Photo Gallery’s stitching tool, each photo needs to be taken from the exact same place. This means that, as the photographer, you need to have the camera positioned at the same height and location for each shot. You can then move a little either to the right or left (or any direction really – up and down, diagonal, whatever you like) and continue taking photos. While you’re doing this, be sure that part of each photo overlaps the one next to it (usually the one taken just prior to taking the photo). For best results, only move the camera a little for each photo so that each consecutive photo has a lot of overlap. This will give you a more perfect, smooth resulting stitch. Now, download and install Windows Live Photo Gallery from here. Once that’s done, open Photo Gallery and select the photos you just acquired by selecting the proper folder on the left. Select each photo you’ll be using for the stitch (which can be done by dragging the cursor to highlight the appropriate photos or by holding down the Ctrl key and selecting each photo individually). Next, click on "Make" in the top bar of the program and select "Create panoramic photo…" from the drop-down menu. Photo Gallery will then show you its progress and ask you where to save the file. Tell it the location and file name you want to use and you’re all set. You should now have a beautiful panoramic photo blending together the photos you selected. You may just feel like you’re right back where you took those photos.

Posted in Computers and Internet

Facebook Funkiness on September 29, 2008

Ed — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:31:41 +0000

There seem to be some weird happenings over at Facebook today. I first noticed something was going wrong this morning when I typed in "facebook.com" and it took me to facebook.com as opposed to new.facebook.com. This may not seem like a big deal, but facebook.com had been redirecting to new.facebook.com for some time now ever since my account was moved over to the new Facebook. This isn’t really much of an issue, indeed it’s more of an interesting point of note, but I did encounter a big problem when I tried to log in to the site. I must have tried more than a dozen times to log in, with every try being greeted by a message that I had entered the wrong password. I had changed my password a few weeks ago, so I double checked to make sure I was using the right password, and indeed I was. I even tried using my password from back before they changed it over to the new Facebook design. Nothing seemed to work. I deleted all the cookies in Firefox that were tied to the site. None of it mattered. Eventually, after trying even more, it logged me in with my latest password as if nothing was wrong. Very strange.

As if that first hiccup wasn’t enough, I now see that my Home page News Feed is littered with stories from about a week ago that had long since disappeared from my feed in favor of newer items. Other than these two issues, I don’t think there have been any more problems, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more pop up. Since I’m not on the Facebook team, it’s not immediately clear what the issue is. It could be as simple as server problems, or they could be tweaking certain parts of the site. I really don’t know why they insisted on moving everyone over to the new Facebook if there are still tweaks and changes to be made. If this were Facebook Beta (like the perpetual Gmail Beta), then it would be fine. This is, however, supposed to be a fully developed, final product, so such things shouldn’t be happening much at this point. I think it’s undeniable that not everything is working properly with the new design, irregardless of any of today’s issues. I still regularly have problems with a big gap composed of white space appearing between the bar on the left side of profile pages and the content itself, like the Wall feed. I also have had almost no success in viewing Posts by Others on my Wall that date back earlier than Sept 23, making it impossible to view anything older than the last five posts, which is unacceptable. I click on Show More Posts, but it does nothing.

I really enjoy Facebook, but their development team really needs to pull it together and finish tweaking and testing their site before widespread release next time. Today’s issues will likely be fixed soon, and with any luck the quirkiness present in the site since the redesign will be worked out eventually. In the short term, though, such occurrences can only annoy or even turn off the user from using Facebook, which is certainly a bad thing for a site that relies very much on user interest and interaction.

Posted in Computers and Internet

McCain’s Latest Political Stunt: “Suspending” His Campaign

Ed — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:46:56 +0000

As I’m writing this, I’m completely disgusted with the McCain campaign’s latest low move. On the surface, it may appear to be a genuine interest in helping the country solves its problems and do his job as a US senator, but if you dig deeper it becomes quite apparent that it is in fact nothing more than a political stunt intended to boost his numbers with only weeks remaining before the November election. It was just recently announced that John McCain will be immediately suspending his campaign for president, including all TV advertising, so that he may go to Washington and "solve" our current economic crisis. Just when I thought the McCain campaign might be running out of tricks, they pull this one out of nowhere, and it might just work.

Outwardly, this move seems like McCain is assuming his responsibility as senator and putting our country first. This is exactly what they want you to think. However, this image is merely a construct of his campaign manager’s imagination and is in reality far from the truth. First, if John McCain really cared about the success of our country and fixing our problems, then why has he been so reluctant to show up and vote when a major bill came to a vote in the Senate? In an article written on July 11, 2008 for The Washington Post, Jonathan Weisman noted that Senator McCain had failed to vote in the senate since April 8th. We’re not talking about just minor votes here, either. John McCain, whose job as a US Senator includes crafting legislation, understanding legislation crafted by his colleagues, and voting on legislation, has essentially failed to do his job from April 8th to July 11th, or a period of more than 3 months. Presidential candidate or not, such behavior is not good. While I don’t have another, more up to date source, to my knowledge he still hasn’t shown up for a vote, and it’s now September 24th. Either way, this information makes it apparent that McCain has shown little concern for doing what’s right and voting on important bills that could significantly impact our lives as Americans. For him to suddenly drop everything and run to the Senate to finally do some work wreaks of desperation on his part.

As of late, it has become more and more apparent to even the casual observer that McCain is clueless when it comes to economic policy. Those of us who have been following his campaign for a while have known this fact for some time, but it is now apparent to even the most uninterested voter that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. In recent days, even as major financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers were crumbling, McCain continued to exclaim that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." While our economy certainly does still have a lot going for it, it’s undeniable that rapidly-inflating prices, stagnating wages, and numerous bankruptcies or other troubles for our major financial companies spell trouble for our economy. To me, all of those are major parts of our economy, "fundamentals" if you will, and they’re anything but strong. How anyone can take McCain’s economic wisdom seriously is beyond me, and that’s neglecting knowledge of his past actions that show his ignorance of the economy. His insistence in going to Washington to fix our economic mess will be trouble in every respect. First, since McCain has no idea how to fix the economy, it’s virtually impossible that his going there will do any good. If a person knows that his actions can do no good, then why do them at all? At best, he’ll be able to whisper his party’s line in the ear of those making the decisions. At worst, his presence will annoy or even hurt any possible economic fix, which even with the best people in charge will be difficult to execute.

McCain’s campaign suspension will only do good for one person: himself. By rushing to DC to fix an economy when he has no idea how to fix it, he knows that he can do no good. Such an action, however, makes it seem, at least to the casual observer, that he must know what he’s doing with the economy. After all, who in their right mind would try to fix something if they have no knowledge of how to go about fixing it? Also, this reinforces his fictitious image of being a good senator, a good patriot who puts his country first, and a responsible senator who cares about our problems. If he’s lucky, this stunt will make people forget his fundamentals-are-strong mantra and maybe even reassure them that he actually does have a clue when it comes to one of the most important aspects of being a president (sound economic knowledge and judgment). This alone is as great a reason as any for McCain to suspend his campaign, especially given the recent shift in voter preferences in Obama’s favor, largely due to Obama’s perceived ability to better handle the economy. This last effort might be the only way for McCain to plug the holes in his ship’s hull. The benefits to the McCain camp don’t stop there, though. By extending the invitation to Obama to suspend his campaign as well and travel to DC to fix the problem, McCain has handed Obama a no-win situation. If Obama says no, then he looks unpatriotic. People would think he’s unwilling to do his job, that he doesn’t care about them or their country, and that his words have no substance, especially his words about solving problems with both parties working together. If he accepts, then Obama will lose significant ground in the run up to the election. Obama needs every day he has left before November to campaign and show voters why he’s right for them. As was true in the primaries, Obama’s numbers tend to go up the more exposure he gets, especially after he visits a place and gives speeches. Stopping his campaign would halt his campaign’s momentum and keep his message away from prospective McCain voters who could likely be swayed by Obama’s words.

There really is no great option here for Obama. McCain’s latest move was unexpected, unwelcomed, and difficult to respond to for Obama’s campaign. No matter what they do, their actions can be distorted as a bad move. At the moment, it appears that the Obama campaign is making the only good move they have left. They will insist that they can fix the economy while campaigning at the same time. If it works out right, this could put Obama over the top by demonstrating that he truly is the only candidate with presidential material: the ability to handle more than one thing at once. I think it could work, and indeed I think it will generally work. No matter what some will say of their character and choices, the campaign certainly couldn’t risk suspending for any amount of time in this crucial period, so this is really the only sound choice left to them. I hope they can pull it off. I’m sure the McCain campaign won’t be happy about this, though. He was hoping to use this economic crisis to get around having to take part in this Friday’s debate where he was sure to get put in his place by Obama. To my relief, the Obama campaign won’t have any of this, insisting that they can debate with the best of them while fixing our economy at the same time. I look forward to seeing McCain squirm on Friday, assuming he even shows up.

Posted in News and Politics

Best Buy’s Price Drop Policy

Ed — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 03:59:48 +0000

In the past, I mentioned that Amazon.com has a pretty useful price drop policy that guarantees that if you buy an item from them and the price drops within thirty days, you can get the difference in price refunded to you. While I tend to use Amazon for a lot of DVD and CD purchases due to their free shipping (on orders over $25), no tax, and great prices, I also do a lot of shopping at Best Buy. As such, it would be in my best interest if Best Buy had a similar price drop policy like the one offered by Amazon, and as it turns out they do. I think most people by now know that Best Buy, like many other stores, will match an advertised lower price offered by another local store (or even its own website), but not too many know about their incredibly useful price drop policy.

I recently used Best Buy’s price match policy to my advantage, and I can attest that it was as painless as possible. I showed the competitor’s ad to the cashier, and to my surprise, he even recommended that next time I shouldn’t even show the ad and they’ll do the deduction anyway. I don’t know if I’d necessarily trust that advice, but it was still a hassle-free process either way. Then, not long after my first encounter with Best Buy’s price adjustment policies, I had good reason to see how well their price drop policy works. The weekend after I bought a DVD, Best Buy advertised a sale on all TV DVDs, so I looked it up online, and sure enough, it was cheaper. I verified that I was eligible for the price drop guarantee, and since I was, I subsequently received a gift card worth the price difference (since I had originally paid with a gift card), with a print-out of the sale item’s page on BestBuy.com as my evidence of the lower price when in the store requesting the refund. In all, it was incredibly easy, and I got back a decent amount of money in the process.

Much like Amazon’s price drop policy, Best Buy provides a very generous time frame for a possible price drop. With the exception of a few types of items, Best Buy gives you a 30 day window to find a lower price at a local Best Buy, its website, or a local competitor. If you find that an item that you bought within this window has dropped in price, just run on down to your local Best Buy and they’ll refund you the difference (110% of the difference if it’s a competitor). You can read more about this policy here. Also, if you prefer shopping at BestBuy.com, you can rest assured that you’ll be taken care of, too. As BestBuy.com describes on this page, if you find an item that you bought on the website is now a lower price at a Best Buy store or on the website, they’ll refund you the difference just like if you had bought the item in one of their stores. The only difference here seems to be that BestBuy.com won’t match competitor’s offers, while Best Buy stores will. This makes sense given that BestBuy.com is a nation-wide store and local sale prices can vary wildly across the country. Plus, it would be difficult for BestBuy.com staff to check up on every claim of a better local sale price.

Thanks to Best Buy’s price guarantee policies, you can be sure that you’re paying the best price when you buy the product and that you don’t get cheated out of a good sale price because you bought something just before a price drop (temporary or not). All you have to do is pay attention to Best Buy and competitor’s ads right before and in the month after your purchase. For cheaper purchases, you might not feel the need to put forward this effort and watch the ads since you’re not going to save a ton of money, but if you’re considering a big purchase or just made such a purchase, it’s certainly in your best interest to keep your eyes open for lower prices on the item you bought. Everybody likes to save money, right?

Upcoming Season Premieres

Ed — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:44:14 +0000

With the exception of a small number of good shows that are on right now, including So You Think You Can Dance, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, In Plain Sight, and Doctor Who, there’s currently very little on TV worth watching. That should all change in the near future when three great shows return with all new episodes, practically doubling the number of good shows on TV (sadly, Doctor Who will be back in reruns in the US shortly). Unfortunately, we won’t be seeing any more of The 4400, The Dead Zone, Bionic Woman, or Journeyman, but we will be seeing lots of three excellent shows that have been gone for far too long. Starting tonight, Burn Notice will return to USA Network (10 PM EST). Based on last season’s episodes, I expect this will be just as action-packed, funny, and well-written as ever. Then, tomorrow night marks the return of Stargate: Atlantis (10 PM EST), with the following Friday offering up the debut of the latest season of Monk (9 PM EST). It won’t be quite the same without Dr. Kroger helping Monk when he needs him the most, but I’m sure it will be well-written and well-acted as usual. If you can’t watch Monk or Burn Notice the first time around, they will likely be posting the episodes to USANetwork.com not long after the initial showings, so you should be able to catch these great shows whenever you are able to fit them into your schedule.

Let’s Be Friends

Ed — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:31:48 +0000

It’s amazing just how many web sites and services are now available to make it as easy as possible to keep in contact with someone or get to know that person better. Way back when, your best bet to keep in contact was to email them or perhaps to instant message them. For finding long lost friends, your only good hope was the now-antiquated Classmates.com. If you wanted to get to know someone better, your options were pretty limited, with a personal web page being about as good as you could get. Now, it’s possible to network with friends (and strangers), keep in touch, find out what’s new with people you know, get to know friends better, and meet interesting new people with minimal effort. Over the last few years, sites that make such actions easy have become incredibly common, and given my love of most things technology or internet-related, I’ve signed up with a decent number of them. If you know me, or even if you don’t know me and want to get to know me better, you now have a multitude of ways to keep up with what I’ve been doing lately and to get to know me better. Below are some links to some of the more significant social networking/profile sites I’m on. Feel free to befriend me (like on Facebook or MySpace), follow me (like on Twitter), or just give my profiles a glance. You can even poke me if you want (only on Facebook, I believe). For a list of more of the sites I’m on along with links to those profiles, you can go here or go to the main page of my Windows Live Space and click on the "My Profiles" link near the top left of the page.

Here are the links to my profiles: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, MyBlogLog, Last.fm, YouTube, del.icio.us, Xbox Live, reddit, Digg

No Dead Zone or 4400 Season Premieres in 2008

Ed — Mon, 26 May 2008 06:06:06 +0000

Thanks to a handy visitor statistics feature present in Windows Live Spaces, I’m able to see the referring address for visitors to my blog. I’ve noticed a trend over the last month or two that a number of visitors are coming here looking for information on the season premieres of The 4400 and The Dead Zone sometime this year. I thought that I should take a moment here and let anyone who happens to stumble across my blog know that you can stop looking for information on these premieres. Both of these shows were canceled, and as such you can expect no more season premieres or new episodes of any kind. I was rather shocked when I first learned the news from TV Guide late last year, but with the promise of new episodes of Monk and Burn Notice plus an interesting new series in the form of In Plain Sight, I’ve slowly gotten over losing these two great shows. They definitely had many exciting episodes left before their proper endings, but the last season finales should serve at least as reasonably solid series finales as well. Luckily, we live in an age where the majority of TV shows are available to own on DVD, and these shows are no exception, letting avid viewers like me relive these shows whenever I want. Sadly, besides the possible occasional rerun, this is our best way of watching these shows now.

Unbelievable Prices on Star Trek DVDs

Ed — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:53:54 +0000

I remember when seasons of Star Trek on DVD were around $100 (or more depending on where you shopped). For the longest time, it seemed like the price would never drop. I’ve been a fan of Star Trek in all its TV iterations for quite some time, and I was eager to own it and watch it in high-quality whenever I wanted, so I slowly but surely started buying the DVDs. After a few years, a lot of money spent, and some very generous gifts, I finally owned all of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and The Original Series. It was a lot of money, but I didn’t mind too much because I love those shows and knew I would get a lot of enjoyment out of them, and I certainly have done just that. However, after I’d bought those seasons and it seemed like the price would never change for years to come, Paramount went and lowered the prices on all of the seasons I’d already bought. As a result, it’s not unusual now to find the aforementioned seasons for about $50. Naturally, Voyager and Enterprise, the two series I still have yet to buy, still have the same old high suggested price. I’m not one for overpaying when I know there’s a better price to be had, even if it means a little waiting, so I wasn’t about to buy seasons from either series until the price dropped as they were bound to do sooner or later given the price drops for the other seasons.

Paramount (technically CBS Television now, I suppose) still hasn’t lowered the MSRP on Voyager or Enterprise yet, but that hasn’t stopped Amazon from going ahead and lowering the price anyway. Thanks to a handy extension for Firefox, I’ve been monitoring the prices of these Star Trek DVDs, and I was shocked when I unexpectedly saw Amazon’s lower price. At first, I thought it would be a temporary reduction, but after watching the prices stay the same ever since, I think it’s safe to say that Amazon is keeping the price of all Star Trek seasons low for the foreseeable future. Voyager season one had been $116.99 as of 10/30/07. Amazon cut the price to $59.99. Enterprise season one was $116.99 on 10/30/07. Amazon changed it to $69.98. Both of those price cuts offer a significant price cut to Trek fans, and it’s even more impressive given that the MSRP has stayed high with no expected change in the immediate future. As someone who still has yet to buy these seasons, that got me really excited.

Then, I saw Amazon’s latest promotion. As part of a promotion for a new section of its site called Amazon Cosmotopia, Amazon.com is lowering the price of all Star Trek seasons on DVD to $35.49 per season during the month of April (2008). I thought that $60 or so per season was a great price, but $35.49 per season is simply an unbelievable bargain that you may not see again this year (who knows, maybe ever). Unfortunately for me, I don’t have any spare money to get these DVDs right now, but that doesn’t stop anyone else out there from getting them at this stellar price (pun definitely intended). If you’re like me and don’t have the money to spare right now, the prices will likely go back to around $60 for a season after this month, which is still very reasonable compared to the old prices that topped $100. For your convenience, I’ve included links below to each season that’s on sale (technically, that’s all the Star Trek seasons). Amazon hasn’t just reduced the price on Star Trek, though. There are many other great deals to be had during this promotion. In my opinion, two of the best other deals are the entire series of Buffy on DVD (40 discs, no less) for just $99.99 and the first four seasons of The Dead Zone for a mere $11.99 each. So, if you have the spare money and are looking for some great, cheap entertainment to last you for years to come, this sale is just for you. I don’t think that you can beat these prices anywhere, either – even DeepDiscount.com isn’t this cheap, and in this sale, you’re dealing with a site you know you can trust no matter what and you won’t even have to pay tax (or shipping, for that matter, assuming you spend at least $25). Enjoy.

Star Trek (Seasons 1, 2, and 3) – $35.49 per season
Star Trek: The Next Generation (Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) – $35.49 per season
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) – $35.49 per season
Star Trek: Voyager (Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) – $35.49 per season
Star Trek: Enterprise (Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4) – $35.49 per season

The Dead Zone (Seasons 1, 2, 3, and 4) – $11.99 per season; Season 5 – $15.49; The Final Season – $23.99
Buffy The Vampire Slayer – Collector’s Set (40 discs) – ~~$99.99~~ $164.99

Update (4/11/08): At least for the moment, it appears that Amazon has raised the price of the Buffy set up to $164.99. Shame on them. That was definitely one of the best DVD deals around.

Xdrive Ups Storage to 7.5 GB?

Ed — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:06:35 +0000

I was trying to upload some video files to Xdrive last night, so I fired up Xdrive Desktop Lite. It was taking far too long to browse to different folders and see their contents, so I decided to quit that and try the classic web interface instead. Before I did so, however, I noticed something curious in the top right of the screen. It said that I have "7.31 GB Free". While I found this odd, I thought that maybe it had something to do with the fact that I have a lot of full resolution photos stored at AOL Pictures and that there was an error in this fairly new program that misinterpreted my total storage space. However, when I navigated to the web interface in Firefox, I saw yet another unusual yet similar sight. In the top right next to the bar that indicates how much storage you’ve used, it says "7.49 GB available". To make things even more strange, upon highlighting the bar, I saw the alt text "7.49 GB of 5 GB remaining".

This just strikes me as odd. Is this a system-wide error? Does is have to do with the recently-released (although, in my opinion, buggy and slow – it results in the continuous accessing of my floppy drive) Xdrive Desktop Lite application? Lastly, could it be that AOL has felt more pressure in this space thanks to Microsoft’s recent release of Windows Live SkyDrive out of beta with an equivalent 5 GB of storage and has decided to up its own storage limit to fend off this attack on its territory? I would like to believe this is true, but the rest of the site indicates that they’re still only offering 5 GB in their free offering. As often happens with sudden product changes, however, it could just be that they have yet to change all of the related information on the site to reflect an increase in storage space. I suppose that only time will tell what the real situation is. Whatever the outcome, though, it appears that things aren’t going perfectly over at Xdrive when it comes to calculating storage space.

Update (3/27/08): Xdrive’s classic web interface is once again showing 5 GB as the storage limit. I guess this means it was a bug after all. I still hope that in the near future they will increase the storage space for real, though.

More Fenway 13 Midnight Movies Unveiled

Ed — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:34:00 +0000

It appears that the recent run of midnight movies at Regal Fenway 13 was a success, because four additional movies have been added to the list of upcoming films. The original list ended with Fight Club (to be shown initially on 2/22), leaving me to wonder just what other films, if any, would follow. Thanks to a recent post at the official Facebook group (Flashback Features At Regal Fenway 13), we now know what movies will be shown in late February and most of March. Here’s how the schedule looks:

Fri., 2/29: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Encore Performance – Wed., 3/5 @ 8pm)
Fri., 3/7: Home Alone (Encore Performance – Wed., 3/12 @ 8pm)
Fri., 3/14: Pretty in Pink (Encore Performance – Wed., 3/19 @ 8pm)
Fri., 3/21: Office Space (Encore Performance – Wed., 3/26 @ 8pm)

First, I have to point out that I cannot verify firsthand that this is in fact the correct schedule. However, the post by one of the administrators of the Facebook group seems very credible, so I’ll take him at his word. If I find out anything to the contrary, I will of course post an update, but as of now, I’d say it’s safe to say this is the schedule.

In all, I’d say that it’s a pretty decent schedule, although I think it could have definitely been made stronger had better choices been made. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off should bring in a large audience, and given that I’ve only seen it on a TV, it should be pretty enjoyable for me too. Home Alone is a classic, and although it would be better suited to a showing right before Christmas, I certainly can’t deny that it would be fun to see it on the big screen any time of year. Office Space should draw a good crowd as well, but I can’t help but feel that this slot in the schedule will be wasted on it given that I saw it during the previous run of AMC Fenway 13 midnight movies on 4/29/05. I suppose three years is enough space between showings, but I think I would rather see another classic film instead. The only strange choice in the bunch, at least in my opinion, is Pretty in Pink. I know that they’re trying to pick a diverse schedule that appeals to everyone, but I can think of much better films to take its place (I would much rather see Jaws or The Blues Brothers, thank you very much). Who knows, perhaps I’ll give it a chance and go watch it anyway. It’s only $6, after all.

If the previous movies are any indication, I’d expect all of these films to draw a pretty good number of people, and at $6, it’s hard to go wrong. It’s practically impossible to find movies in the theatre for even close to that price these days. If you read this and you’ll be going to one of these films, you’ll probably see me there as well. Look for me to likely be in the back middle of the front section since the middle front of the back section seems to always be filled when I get in the theatre. Maybe I’ll have better luck with one of these films.

Midnight Movies Return to Fenway 13

Ed — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 03:54:29 +0000

I was looking around the movie listings at Google last night in preparation for my viewing of Cloverfield earlier today when I saw something that immediately brought a smile to my face. In fact, at first I couldn’t believe my eyes, but there it was: a listing for Reservoir Dogs at 11:59 PM on 1/18 at Regal Fenway 13. Could it be? Yes, indeed it was. The long-absent weekly midnight movie series made famous by AMC when they owned that theatre has returned at last. I saw many excellent movies thanks to that previous series of midnight movies, and I was certainly upset when they discontinued it right before Regal took over. I was hoping that Regal would catch on and bring it back, and it seems that they have. I did some searching after seeing that listing, and apparently they are referring to this series of movies as "Flashback Features." At the moment, they only list six movies (including the one tonight), but with any luck, they’ll be adding to that list.

While I was at the theatre today to see the 1:10 PM showing of Cloverfield (which was excellent, by the way), I looked around with the hope of getting some more information about this series. According to the display stand they have set up in the lobby, this series of movies is exclusive to Fenway 13 and the list of coming movies shown on the stand agrees with the list I found online. Apparently, they also had one more movie in the series that was shown last Friday. That movie was Pulp Fiction. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t see it, but I wasn’t even in Boston at the time. I’m just glad that I found out about this before I had missed too many movies. Now that all the backstory is out of the way, here is the list of movies coming to Regal Fenway 13 that I found on this page at Fandango.

Fri., 1/18: Reservoir Dogs (Encore Performance – Wed., 1/23 @ 8pm)
Fri., 1/25: The Shining (Encore Performance – Wed., 1/30 @ 8pm)
Fri., 2/1: The Goonies (Encore Performance – Wed., 2/6 @ 8pm)
Fri., 2/8: The Matrix (Encore Performance – Wed., 2/13 @ 8pm)
Fri., 2/15: Princess Bride (Encore Performance – Wed., 2/20 @ 8pm)
Fri., 2/22: Fight Club (Encore Performance – Wed., 2/27 @ 8pm)

In particular, I’m looking forward to The Goonies (which I’ve only seen on the small screen) and The Matrix (which will be quite a treat since I really like that film and its sequels and haven’t seen it in its true glory since its original theatrical release). Also, as you may have noticed from the list above, all of these movies will be reshown the following Wednesday at 8 PM. That seems like a bit of an odd day and time, but if you can’t make it to the Friday night showing, it’s certainly nice to have an alternative. As if the quality of these movies wasn’t reason enough to see them, the fact that tickets are only $6 (as opposed to the student price of $8.50) should make you want to go even more. I know I’ll be seeing Reservoir Dogs later tonight.

Amazon.com’s Price Drop Policy

Ed — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 01:28:21 +0000

I love Amazon.com. It almost always has the best prices, carries pretty much any item I can want, especially when it comes to DVDs and CDs, doesn’t charge tax, and ships purchases over $25 for free. Thanks to an article at Lifehacker, a while back I got to liking Amazon for yet another reason. If you buy anything at Amazon.com and they lower the price on that item within 30 days after your purchase, they’ll refund you the difference in price. I don’t know of too many stores that do that. In fact, I don’t know if I can think of any stores that do that besides Amazon. I’ve yet to have an opportunity to test this policy myself, but it certainly is reassuring knowing that you can buy any item confident that they won’t lower the price just days later and you’ll be stuck paying the higher price. Unfortunately (or, perhaps fortunately for Amazon), not many people seem to know about this great policy. I know that I’ve tried to mention this to everyone when the topic of buying things online comes up in conversation, but people are still generally unaware of this fact. With any luck, this post and others like it will help make people more aware of the potential savings to be had, especially given how many purchases people made recently at Amazon for their holiday gifts. For the complete guide on how to use this policy to your advantage, you should read this wonderful article that Lifehacker pointed to in its article on the subject. Now go get some of your hard-earned money back.

Xbox 360 Fall Update Looking Good

Ed — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 04:58:04 +0000

Every spring and fall, Xbox fans start getting excited as they wonder what Microsoft has in store in its biannual 360 dashboard updates. Although some updates are better than others, every update has delivered at least some features that make using Xbox 360 more enjoyable and makes a great console even better. A while back I posted a list of the 30 improvements that I’d like to see come to Xbox 360, and these fall and spring updates are exactly where Microsoft would deliver such improvements. People have been speculating wildly lately as to what this fall’s update will bring, and as of today, they don’t have to speculate any longer. While there are still some things missing from this update that I would have liked to have been included, I have to say that this update is looking to be one of the best yet, adding a ton of new features and improvements that I and many others have been hoping for ever since (sometimes even before) we got our hands on a 360.

I’ll have to wait until Christmas break to download and experiment with this latest update, but everyone else with a 360 readily available and a high speed internet connection will be able to upgrade on December 4th. There are a lot of features that I’m looking forward to putting to good use, but a few really stand out. In particular, I’m looking forward to:

DivX and Xvid support – With this addition, Xbox 360 will finally support just about any video format you can ask for (well, unless you’re asking for Flash Video, in which case you’re out of luck). If you’re wondering about video specifics, the Xbox Team recently posted a handy FAQ over at MSDN on this very subject.
People who were under 18 when they signed up for Xbox Live (like me) but who have since passed this landmark birthday will no longer have to see that annoying "What are you waiting for?" message every time you boot up your console. You joined Xbox Live, you’re an adult, and now you get to be treated as an adult by Xbox Live thanks to a handy "child account graduation" feature. Major Nelson has more info on that here.
For those who linked their gamertag to a Windows Live ID they no longer use, you will finally be able to change the ID your gamertag is associated with. You can also get info on that here.
A faster Guide – I love the Guide. It’s handy, always there, and gives me a ton of info. However, it is definitely slower than it needs to be. If a line near the end of the fall update list of features is correct, the guide will now be a lot quicker. How quick? How about "~2x". Twice as fast sounds good to me.
Cheaper Xbox Live Arcade games. I call it finally lowering the prices on old titles that don’t sell as well anymore, they call it "Xbox LIVE Arcade Hits."
"Enhanced online profile" – Some people may not care for this, but I look forward to being able to put a little bit more about me on Xbox Live for my friends (or pseudo-friends) to see. Did you forget who I am because we haven’t played together in a while? That’s OK. Check out my profile to refresh your memory.
"Expanded Friends List access" – I don’t think I ever even thought of this feature before, but I’m really looking forward to it. The people I play with are all of a similar type, in that they all play nice, are good sports, don’t curse and scream, and are just all-around fun to play with. My friends also seem to only have people like that on their friends list. Instead of having to wait and play with some of these great people, I’ll be able to just go down a friend’s friends list and find someone fun to play with. This will also come in handy if you play with someone who you know is friends with one of your friends but you can’t remember their exact gamertag.

There are a lot of other fixes and features coming in this update, but these are the ones that get me the most excited at the moment. Now I’ll just have to wait a few weeks to give it a spin. For more info on the major features that have been added, check our Major Nelson’s recent article. If you’d rather look at the full list of updates heading our way, you can read this extensive article at Xbox.com. If these new features have you excited too, then go over to this thread at Xbox365 that I started and add your thoughts.

Dance to the Music? Not with iPod

Ed — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 03:57:54 +0000

To beging with, I own an iPod. While I still think that it’s overpriced compared to other portable MP3 players on the market, I certainly believe that it has one of the best interfaces available, a great look, and generally solid performance. However, one thing about the iPod that I have never liked is its advertising campaign. It seems like wherever I go, I see another advertisement for an iPod, with each ad looking almost exactly the same. It’s always an overly large, bright colored poster depicting an apparently young, happy person dancing while listening to music on their iPod. These people aren’t just dancing though. Many of them are so into the music that they look like they’re about to fall over. Never mind the fact that this is a bit unrealistic. Even in the best concerts I’ve been to where people were really into the music, I don’t recall ever seeing anyone act like that, but that’s OK. In the heat of the moment (and the privacy of one’s own home), I suppose it’s possible.

However, what I do have a problem with is that dancing to the music, exhibiting pure happiness and love of the music, and listening to an iPod simply do not go together in real life. Maybe the Apple advertisers would like you to think of their product as a cool, fun product that makes you happy and brings some joy to your otherwise boring life, but the reality is that the iPod seems to do just the opposite. It seems like wherever I go, whether it be waiting at an airport, walking down the street, sitting in a subway car, or standing in line to pay for something, I see at least one person listening to an iPod, and everytime, without exception, I see the exact same thing. Instead of showing happiness and feeling, these iPod junkies look dazed and out of touch with reality, almost like they’re staring at a TV right in front of them that only they can see. Rarely do you see one of them crack a smile, or even exhibit any emotion as a result of listening to the music being pumped through their iPod. If I didn’t know that they were listening to an iPod, I might otherwise think that these people were high on pain killers or some other equally-numbing medication or drug. These people paid hundreds of dollars for a device so they can listen to their music on the go and add some fun to their lives, and instead they get something that makes them look and act just like zombies. They’re as out of touch with reality while connected to an iPod as can be, and exhibit none of the social characteristics that a non-iPod person would. To make matters worse, many of these people seem to even be addicted to their iPods, sticking those white ear buds to their ears every chance they get, just as zombies crave human flesh.

Whenever I use an iPod, I tend to be in a situation where there is little else to do and I need something to occupy me, such as at an airport or on a train or airplane. Unlike these iPod junkies, though, I can never resist the urge to feel the music and tap or move as necessary with the music. If you see someone playing the air drums or conducting an invisible orchestra at the airport, that’s probably me. I don’t know why I am able to use my iPod like it should be used (for happiness and enjoying music) and these junkies are not, but it certainly is worrying. Our society already has too many people who watch TV or play video games so incessantly that they have lost touch with reality and their physical wellbeing has suffered as a result. I sincerely hope that in the future, this iPod syndrome doesn’t have any ill effects on us or future generations, because like it or not, it would seem that the iPod, and along with it its numbing syndrome are here to stay. If you’re wondering what you can be for Halloween (which is tonight, by the way – Happy Halloween!), don’t bother going to the costume store. Instead, just fire up your iPod and insert the white ear buds. I guarantee that you’ll look just like a zombie and perhaps even scare a few people who have yet to be infected by the iPod syndrome. Happy listening…

Adblock Working with Windows Live Hotmail Again

Ed — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:12:15 +0000

Anyone who was having problems with Windows Live Hotmail and Adblock (or Adblock Plus), such as not being able to compose new messages or reply to messages, should be happy to know that the two are once again compatible. I previously posted about a workaround that would allow you to block ads in Hotmail and still have full use of all of Hotmail’s features. That workaround still works just as it always did, but if you prefer not to use Greasemonkey and stick with Adblock, you can do so simply by updating your filter subscription. In Adblock Plus, this is done by either left clicking on the red ABP symbol in your toolbar near the top of Firefox (or right clicking on the red ABP symbol in the status bar near the bottom of Firefox) and clicking on Preferences in the menu that pops up. If you don’t see the symbol in either of these places, you can bring up the same Preferences window by going to Tools > Adblock Plus. People using the USA filter list should scroll down to where you see "Filter subscription: Rick752′s EasyList (usa)" and right click on that line of text. Click on the first option in the menu that pops up ("Update subscription now"). Once that’s done, click on OK on the bottom right of the window. The newly updated filter list should be fully compatible with Windows Live Hotmail and allow you to use all of its functions while also blocking all of its annoying ads.

If you’re using a filter subscription other than the one mentioned above, I’m not sure if it has been updated to be fully compatible with Hotmail, but it is very likely that it is, so you can follow the same procedure, but instead of right clicking on the subscription mentioned here, you will right click on the one you are using.

If you used my previously mentioned workaround to get full functionality in Hotmail with Adblock installed, you now need to undo the changes we made before (or if you just decided on your own to disable Adblock on the Hotmail domain). Here’s how we do that. Now that your Adblock Plus is once again compatible with Hotmail, you can block Hotmail in Adblock Plus. This is done by opening up the Preferences window as you just did, and finding the web address near the top in green under where it says "Exception rules" that applies to Hotmail. This entry is most likely something like "mail.live.com" with some additional text on either side of this address. Go ahead and right click on this address and click on Delete in the menu that pops up. Click on OK near the bottom right of the window.

Since Adblock is now doing its job of blocking ads in Hotmail, you don’t have to use the Greasemonkey script I mentioned in my previous post anymore (although you still can if you want to – there shouldn’t be any problems with using both the script and Adblock at the same time). Right click on the Greasemonkey icon in your status bar or go to Tools > Greasemonkey and click on "Manage User Scripts." Then, click on "Cipher’s Live Hotmail Companion 1.4" in the left hand column. If you think you might want to use the script again someday, just uncheck the box near the bottom left next to where it says "Enabled." If you want to get rid of the script, you can click on the Uninstall button near the bottom middle instead. When you’re done, click on OK near the bottom right.

Finally, if you also want to uninstall Greasemonkey because you have no further use for it, go to Tools > Add-ons. In the new window, click on Greasemonkey, then click on the Uninstall button on the far right of that same highlighted line.

That’s it. Adblock Plus should once again be working properly with Hotmail, allowing you to fully use all of Hotmail’s features and block all of its ads, and all of the changes made in my last post should be undone. Enjoy.

Problems with Live Hotmail and Adblock? Try this.

Ed — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 03:47:09 +0000

If you’re like me, then you love Firefox for its seemingly limitless number of customization options and the ability to add a wide range of useful add-ons to your web browser. Among these add-ons, one of the most crucial to a good browsing experience has to be Adblock Plus (or Adblock). This practically invisible add-on eliminates just about every advertisement you’d come across while surfing the net. Some may say that this is wrong and immoral, but I say that since I’m one of the people who never clicks on advertisements, serving me ads while I’m browsing is bad for everyone. It distracts me while I’m browsing and uses up my bandwidth, and it increases server load and uses up the server’s bandwidth. Plus, if I like your site’s content enough and your ads are unobtrusive, I’ll probably unblock your ads anyway.

If you share this mindset, then you were probably very disappointed when it was recently revealed that the latest release of Windows Live Hotmail (now available for everyone) has some major problems when it’s viewed in Firefox with Adblock Plus (or Adblock) enabled. In particular, it is impossible to get the Reply, Forward, and New Message forms to properly load, making it impossible to send email in Hotmail as long as ads are blocked by Adblock Plus. The Hotmail team recommends that everyone in this situation should simply disable Adblock Plus. Doing this will make Hotmail behave normally, but it will also make ads visible once again (both the top banner and the small ad in the lower left-hand corner). Another option is to find the exact filter in Adblock Plus that is messing up Hotmail and to remove it. This will leave Adblock Plus enabled on Hotmail, but it has the same effect as disabling it since it will make the ads viewable, plus it will make some ads visible on other sites.

Since neither of the above options sounds very appealing, I present to you another option that will not only make Hotmail work properly but will also block the ads just as Adblock Plus normally would. All you need to do is follow these steps:
1. Make sure you have Greasemonkey installed by going to Tools > Add-ons. If you don’t have it, then download it by going here and clicking on "Install Now." If it’s disabled, make sure you enable it.
2. Install Live Hotmail Companion 1.4 by going here and clicking on "Install this script" at the top right of the page.
3. Go to Hotmail and sign-in as usual. When it finishes logging you in, right click on the Adblock Plus symbol visible in either your toolbar or status bar. (If it’s not visible, go to Tools > Adblock Plus. In the new window, go to Options and make sure "Show in status bar" is checked.) Click on "Disable on …", where … is your Hotmail server visible in the address bar. (In other words, click on the top option, not the lower one that says "Disable on this page only.") This will disable Adblock Plus on Hotmail.
4. Go to another website and go back to Hotmail. You should now find that Hotmail behaves like normal but the ads are blocked. Test this out by trying to create a new email message. The email form should come up like normal, including the box where you enter the body of the email.

An added benefit of this Greasemonkey script is that it also removes the empty space at the top where the ad would have been, giving you even more space to view your email. I’ve tried this workaround personally and have found it to work very well, with the only negative being that it may make Hotmail very slightly slower (although this could just be in my head – the difference is negligible, at least on a high-speed connection on a fairly fast computer). While you’re improving your Hotmail experience, be sure to go to Options > More options… (in the top right of the Hotmail page) when you’re logged into Hotmail. Scroll down to "Customize your mail" and click on "Today page settings." Click in the bubble next to "Skip the Today page and take me straight to my inbox" and then click on Save. This will do away with that annoying Today page and take you straight to your Inbox next time you log in. You can still access the Today page by clicking on Today in the bottom left corner of the Hotmail page.

Monk Season Premiere Tonight

Ed — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 23:59:08 +0000

It’s been a bit of a wait, but Monk is finally returning tonight with all new episodes to keep your summer nights nice and happy. The premiere of Monk begins at 9 PM (EST) on USA Network, with future episodes being at that same time as well. Unfortunately, despite the obvious lack of good TV series currently airing new episodes, somehow the powers that be decided that it would be smart to show new episodes of Doctor Who on SciFi at the same time that USA is showing new episodes of Monk. It seems absurd that neither network could find a different time to show these great series even though most of their primetime TV slots are lacking anything worthwhile, but they nevertheless decided to leave them be at 9 PM on Fridays. I suppose it could be that the audience for these shows doesn’t really overlap very much, but I for one thoroughly enjoy both series. I guess I’ll have to try and catch a showing of Monk later in the week so I can watch Doctor Who tonight. Also of note is that the fairly popular series Psych returns with new episodes in a few minutes at 8 PM on USA. Personally, however, I’ll save my enthusiasm for Monk and Doctor Who.

Stargate SG-1 Series Finale Tonight

Ed — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 20:21:19 +0000

It’s been a great ten seasons of action-packed science fiction, but tonight Stargate SG-1 will finally draw to a close its impressive run on television. This season has been a rather unusual one, with many of the episodes of course dedicated to the major story arc involving the Ori threat to Earth but broken up unexpectedly every now and then with episodes focusing entirely on smaller, fairly unimportant plots that allow us to focus our attention more on the further development of the characters and making further progress on sub-plots that have been present on the show for some time. I don’t think it was the most cohesive final season of a show by any means, but it was still definitely a good one, and I expect tonight’s finale not to disappoint. The promo promises that the episode will focus on resolving the Ori threat, and my money is on the inclusion of a heavy dose of action to supplement a great deal of plot development. This historic episode will first be broadcast tonight at 8 PM (EST) on SciFi, followed by the season finale of Stargate Atlantis. In all, it should be a very good night of television for science fiction fans everywhere.

The 4400 and The Dead Zone Season Premieres Tonight

Ed — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 20:56:56 +0000

With the exception of a few shows like Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and So You Think You Can Dance, there are very few good shows worth watching on television right now. That will change considerably tonight, when two of the best shows in recent memory, The 4400 and The Dead Zone, return with brand new episodes to kick off a new season. As always, the ending to each show’s previous season left the viewer wondering what would happen next, and tonight’s episodes look to relieve that curiosity, at least to a certain extent. My only concern is that The Dead Zone’s new season promises to be "the season that changes everything." Frankly, I hope that they don’t change too much, because I really like the way things currently are, in particular the main characters and their relationships with one another.

They better not have one of the main characters become poorly written-out like the creators of Monk did with Sharona. It really would be a disservice to the show. I suppose some evolution on the show is necessary, though, since the main characters have been largely the same throughout the series, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a little shakeup. If you missed last season’s finales or just want a refresher, USA Network has been kind enough to provide these episodes free of charge for your viewing pleasure online. Just go to each show’s site for the proper links. You can watch The 4400 tonight on USA Network at 9 PM (EST) and The Dead Zone following immediately after on the same channel at 10 PM (EST). If you miss tonight’s episodes, then you should be able to see them again later in the week. Also, if viewing episodes online is your thing, then USA promises that the premiere of The 4400 will be viewable online on Monday.

Great Movies Coming to Coolidge Corner Theatre This Summer

Ed — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 03:59:25 +0000

If you live in Boston or the surrounding area and are fond of good, classic movies, then you’re in for a real treat this summer. I am very fond of Coolidge Corner Theatre, and I have been for some time now. Its purpose is a fine one, bringing classic, international, or otherwise unseen movies to the Boston area. Unlike most movie theatres, Coolidge is not-for-profit and is motivated only by the desire to bring the "finest international, documentary, animated, and independent film selections and series" to its elegant, old-time movie theatre so that movie-goers in Brookline and all around can enjoy some fine movies. I personally have seen a handful of good movies there, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Napoleon Dynamite, The Breakfast Club, and one of my favorites, Xanadu. I had a lot of fun each time I saw a film there, and I have a feeling that a lot of movie fans will be having a great deal of fun there in the coming months as well. Unfortunately, since I’m at home in Tampa right now, I won’t be able to enjoy these great films, but I am certain that many people in the Boston area will cherish these showings.

I had been expecting there to be a few good movies showing at Coolidge over the summer, but I was shocked at just how many they’d added to their list in the recent weeks when I viewed my Coolidge email newsletter earlier today. There are many other movies coming to the Coolidge this summer, but here are my personal highlights (movies so good that I would go see them this summer if I could). On Monday, June 18th, the Coolidge Science on Screen series continues with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. June 21st brings Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and August 23rd features the original Back to the Future, both of which are part of the free outdoor family screening series. August also features a number of other great films, including The Big Lebowski on the 6th, West Side Story on the 13th, Casablanca on the 20th, and Lawrence of Arabia not long after on September 3rd. Not to be forgotten, of course, is the charity screening of Serenity on June 23rd.

All in all, I’d say that Bostonian movie fans have a lot to look forward to, with the exception of an empty wallet after buying the tickets for all these movies. However, all profit goes right back into helping the Coolidge theatre. My hope is that Coolidge will continue to show such great movies over the coming year, because I found this past year to be relatively void of what I would consider to be great movies that appeal to me.

Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis Return Tonight with New Episodes

Ed — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:31:27 +0000

It’s been a bit of a wait, but two of SciFi’s best shows, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, are finally returning from many weeks of reruns tonight with all new episodes. Both will pick up where their respective cliffhangers left off, meaning that both episodes should be full of excitement. SG-1, in particular, should have a great deal of action and plot development given that this will be the first of the very last episodes before the show’s finale. Once the finale has come and gone, all we’ll have left to do is to sit around and wait for the already-announced SG-1 direct-to-DVD movies titled The Ark of Truth and Continuum (and keep watching Atlantis, of course). My XP Media Center PC is already set-up to record these episodes tonight, and if you enjoy goof sci-fi or action TV, then hopefully you will be able to watch them tonight or when they are reshown later on in the night. The new episode of SG-1, titled "The Quest – Part 2", will be shown at 8 PM (EST) on SciFi, followed by the episode of Atlantis, "The Return – Part 2", at 9 PM.

Xdrive Still Down?

Ed — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:40:34 +0000

I mentioned a few days ago that it looked like Xdrive might be adding improved performance and storage while the site was taken offline overnight. The upgrade was only supposed to last that one night. However, I have been trying each day since then to sign into my Xdrive account with no success. The website came back online not long after the supposed overhaul, including a slightly prettier main page. However, every time I go to sign in and enter my (correct) AOL screen name and password as I always have, it says "We’re sorry, but we’re unable to confirm that Screen Name & Password combination." I know for a fact that I’ve been entering it correctly. While I don’t see any obvious reason why my login attempts could be failing, I do notice that it stops adding asterisks in the password field as I type in my password after I have entered only 8 characters. While this may be intentional, it may also be possible that the system is only accepting 8 characters for the password from the user and as such it does not show these 8 characters as matching my (more than 8 character) password. I would usually find the website administrator’s contact information and send him an email letting him know about the problem, but in AOL’s infinite wisdom, they have decided that only paying customers deserve to receive email support. As a result, I see absolutely no way of informing the site’s technical staff about this obviously debilitating error. Everything else on the site looks and feels very finished and works correctly, so my guess is that this error is unintentional and that the site’s staff are currently unaware of it. I sincerely hope that someone (who is actually able to) alerts them or that they notice the problem themselves so that I will once again be able to sign into this handy website and actually get to experience the enhanced performance they claimed during the site upgrade.

More Storage Coming to Xdrive?

Ed — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 01:07:46 +0000

Just now I went to Xdrive.com to upload a few videos to my free Xdrive/AOL account for safe-keeping when I was greeted by something I had never seen before. Instead of the usual Xdrive login page, I was shown a short message that states the following:

Service Notice
Xdrive is down right now while we perform upgrades that will allow you to experience an increase in performance (faster!) and expanded storage capacity.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

We anticipate being online 9AM Eastern Standard Time.

Ever since AOL bought Xdrive and made it free to anyone with an AOL screen name, I’ve found it to be a useful yet inconsistent service. No one can argue that having 5 GB of free, secure online storage accessible anywhere with an internet connection is a valuable service. However, site responsiveness has always been very unpredicatable. Sometimes it will load pages quickly with no upload problems, while other times you will be lucky to login at all because it is so slow or you may have difficulties successfully uploading files. If this site upgrade does in fact improve performance, then it should make the site much easier and more enjoyable to use. Also, while 5 GB is a very large amount of storage space for a free service to offer as it is, any additional space offered for free would be very welcome. I look forward to the site coming back online and seeing how effective these upgrades prove to be.

Monk Season Finale Friday at 9 PM

Ed — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 04:52:58 +0000

It seems like the new season of Monk just started, and already it’s coming to an end. As always, it was a great season full of Monk’s wonderful tendencies, phobias, and awesome detective skills. The season finale looks like it will place Monk into an environment that a germ-ophobe like himself is sure to detest – the hospital. Hopefully Natalie will have plenty of wipes on hand, because I’m sure they’re going to need every one of them. The episode will first be shown on Friday, March 2nd, at 9 PM (EST). However, if you can’t watch it firsthand or have your DVR record it, then you shouldn’t have any problem catching it later on because USA is usually pretty good about reshowing new episodes of its series during the following week. Here’s the description of the episode from the official Monk website:

Monk goes to the emergency room for a bloody nose, but when a doctor in the hospital turns up dead, Monk joins the murder investigation … and soon finds his own life in grave danger. Don’t miss the Monk Season Finale — "Mr. Monk Goes to the Hospital" this Friday at 9/8C

Free Xbox Live Arcade Games for Me

Ed — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 18:37:40 +0000

On Friday, February 16th, I got an email from Microsoft that I really wasn’t expecting. I had completely forgotten that a while ago, I had registered on an Xbox promotional website with the promise of free Xbox Live Arcade games to come in the future. I didn’t think any more of it until I got an email with the subject line "Your Xbox 360 Reward is Here." As it turns out, just for going onto that website and registering, I get to download the full versions of Joust and Frogger from Xbox Live Arcade for free thanks to the two codes included in the email. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of Frogger, but each time I tried the demo on XLA, it grew on me a bit more. As for Joust, I’ve always been a big fan of that game. I played it many times on Gameboy, and when the XLA version came out, I played the demo repeatedly on my Xbox 360. I tend to spend money on Live Arcade sparingly, but I was always somewhat inclined to buy this great title. Now that I get it for free, I won’t have to. I look forward to enjoying both of these classic arcade titles on my 360 over spring break and over the summer months. Thanks, Xbox.

RA’s Are Noisy Too!

Ed — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 04:28:59 +0000

Some people, in particular Boston University Office of Residence Life employees, would have you believe that their employees, in particular their resident assistants, are infallible, but I assure you that this isn’t the case as one recent incident shows. Last night I was sitting here in my room in Warren Towers browsing the internet as I often do. I usually have the window open a bit because it gets so hot in here, but not this time. No, this time I wanted it to warm up a bit. The open window usually adds a good amount of background noise and masks a lot of slight noises coming from beyond the walls or the door. This time, with the door closed, I could hear all – not that there was particularly much to hear. The walls do a good job of insulating noise, and there was no one in the hallway.

However, at that very time, I heard something that would most definitely be worthy of a noise violation if any RA were in hearing distance. Bu wait… what’s that? The noise came from the senior RA’s room (who just happens to live right next to me)! No, this wasn’t a case of playing music too loud. I had heard his girlfriend come into his room earlier (and not long after the incident I heard and saw both of them leave). How can I describe this noisy disturbance that penetrated the wall and reached my ears?

I can only characterize the noise as "female orgasmic exclamations." To put it simply, either the RA with high seniority status was watching a porn flick with his girlfriend in the room and the volume on high, or he was showing his girlfriend a really good time. I’m not going to judge him or his girlfriend. They’re both adults and should be able to do whatever they want in private as long as no one gets hurt and nothing illegal takes place. However, given the fact that these cries of "joy" were loud enough for me to hear through the wall, it’s a safe bet that such a disturbance would have warranted a noise violation. To make matters worse, the fact that two people of the opposite gender were in the same dorm room together with the door closed probably violates some BU housing policy (such an event happens regularly next door and on virtually every floor of every BU residence). It’s safe to say that Mr. SRA would be in a decent amount of trouble if the proper authorities had caught him.

I have no intention of telling on him though. I understand that everyone makes noise and that in order for a close-quarters residence like this to function properly, all residents need to be flexible and be forgiving of minor infractions against BU policy. I hope that RA’s, in particular this SRA, keep this in mind in the future. However, I can guarantee that if an RA gives me (another) noise violation for my reasonable music volume, then I will most definitely be filing a complaint with the Office of Residence Life about this apparently joyous incident. I wonder what this RA’s parents would think when they receive and read the letter from BU describing his noise violation?

The Serial Defecator

Ed — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 15:37:23 +0000

As we go about our daily lives here at Boston University, we usually assume that our fellow classmates are upstanding, law-abiding people. It would seem that, however, there is an exception to this rule. We do, in fact, have a criminal on our campus. No, he is not a burglar or some other common criminal. He is… a serial defecator! This past Friday night, it felt like a scene right out of Austin Powers. I was walking into the Men’s restroom on the first floor of Shelton Hall, ready to do my business and return to my room to go to bed. Things did not go as I planned, however. I opened the door and took a step inside. I immediately said to myself "this bathroom smells like shit!" I looked down at the middle of the floor, and to my horror, there was a pile of dark brown excrement lying in plain view. A voice inside my head said "it is shit, Ed." Well good, then at least it’s not just me.

I let out a few loud, shrill cries expressing my anguish, and I quickly left the bathroom and returned to the lobby. I told my friend Alex that he had to go to the bathroom to experience it for himself, but he thought I was pulling his leg. Oh, I wish I was. He comes back from the restroom shocked as well. Sarah Hemperley, the late-night security guard thought that we were working together to pull one over on her. After sufficient urging, she too went to the restroom to investigate while we watched the guard booth. Naturally, she too was disgusted at the sight she had just witnessed. While Sarah filled out the incident report, Alex and I felt it necessary to further investigate to confirm the exact nature of the defecation.

While it’s not possible for us to know exactly what happened, it appears that someone decided to relieve their bowels on the floor of the men’s restroom, squarely in the middle of the room. Someone, possibly the defecator himself, had stepped in it and tracked the excrement into the stall, leaving skid marks behind. Then, we looked into the stall and witnessed something that may make me not want to ever use that restroom again. Whether intentionally or by accident, the toilet seat was completely smeared with light brown excrement. Lovely.

With the incident report complete, Sarah informed me that I have the honor of being named the discoverer of the incident. Does that mean that I get a badge or certificate or something? As is customary, Sarah also called in the incident to the proper BU building and grounds upkeep people, and not long after, the usual Saturday morning B&G guy came and was tasked with cleaning up the mess. In his opinion, it was the worst mess that he had seen in three years. To make matters worse, it was apparently hardened into the floor, making cleanup very difficult.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been quite as bad if this was an isolated incident. However, according to Sarah, this had apparently happened a few times before on the ninth floor of Shelton Hall, where someone had defecated a while ago and proceeded to smear it on the walls. The B&G guy confirmed that such incidents have happened elsewhere on campus, including such places as residence hall elevators. It seems that we have at least one serial defecator on campus. It is up to us to find this person and hold him accountable for his disgusting defecation habits so that such incidents never happen again. I don’t think anyone ever wants to witness what Alex, Sarah, and I saw, and we don’t want the BU B&G crew to have to clean it up either. Remember: only you can prevent serial defecation!

30 Ideas to Improve Xbox 360, Live, and Xbox.com

Ed — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 15:06:25 +0000

Major Nelson recently posted a call to everyone interested in the future of Xbox to post either in the comments on his site or in the comments of the original post on this topic over at Ozymandias. He asked that the Xbox community detail its ideas for improving Xbox 360, Live, and Xbox.com, and the Xbox team would then take this feedback and use it to determine what should be included in future updates to the various Xbox platforms. This is just another example of why I love Xbox and the team behind it. Unlike many other companies who decide what they’re going to do and stick to it regardless of what the community thinks, Microsoft’s Xbox team has always been very good at reaching out to the community and asking for its input. As a result, past dashboard updates have made significant improvements to the Xbox 360 experience, and many if not most of the changes were at the direct request of the community. Xbox 360, Xbox Live, and Xbox.com are continuously evolving and improving, and we as the community are the main driving force in deciding how they change next.

Naturally, I couldn’t resist this chance to let my opinion be heard. It took a little while and a decent amount of thinking, but I finally came up with this list of 30 ideas that would improve Xbox 360, Xbox Live, and the Xbox.com website. This list doesn’t include all of my ideas, but I think it does highlight the changes that I think are most crucial if the Xbox platform is to continue to improve.

1. Keep releasing new updates to improve back-compat.

2. It’s currently very slow trying to go up one level when browsing music. It needs to be much faster like it is when using the other console menus.

3. There needs to be a way to categorize one’s friends list. Sure, I remember who most of them are, but it would be nice to easily and quickly see who is online that I often play Halo, Gears of War, Rainbow Six, etc with. One option is groups like Windows Live Messenger has. Another, better option is tagging. Allow me to make custom tags/labels like "Halo 2" and apply this label and others to any Live friend I choose. An option to message or invite all friends in a certain group/tag would be nice as well.

4. Allow me to keep a short, private comment on each of my friends viewable only by me on my console and on Xbox.com. This will make it easier to remember who a person is and to keep notes about future meeting times, etc.

5. When streaming from Windows Media Player 11, I am currently unable to stream track 1 in each of my albums. I should be able to stream all my tracks regardless of their track number.

6. I still can’t see the ads on my Xbox Live blade. I’ve had Xbox Live since fairly early into its lifetime on the original Xbox. It gets very annoying constantly seeing "what are you waiting for?" I’m not waiting for anything. I joined years ago and I want that message to go away. I want my ads. If age is a concern, it shouldn’t be a problem because I am over 18.

7. Support more video codecs. WMV is great, but I’d also like divx, xvid, .mov, and maybe even flash video. Other codecs would be welcome as well.

8. A universal, cross-game clan option accessible from the dashboard and guide. Unique clans for each game would also be welcome, because while I may like to play Rainbow Six with a certain group of people, I may like playing Halo 3 with a totally different group. The universal clan could be simply for people who I just like to play with and associate with regardless of the game.

9. The ability to listen to voice messages on Xbox.com and save them as mp3′s.

10. The ability to view Live Vision pictures on Xbox.com and save them as jpg’s.

11. The ability to send pictures using Xbox.com.

12. The ability to stream videos downloaded from Xbox Live on my Windows PC. This includes purchased content such as TV shows and movies.

13. I should be able to search the Xbox Live marketplace by keyword and results should be as fast and accurate as Google. The current categories are helpful, but there will come a point where it will be much faster to do a search for "halo" to find Halo 3 content instead of browsing for it the old-fashioned way.

14. Instead of just saying "Play game", my dashboard should say "Play" followed by the name of the game in the DVD drive.

15. I should be able to chat with more than one other person within the same chat session. If you have to, you can require that all people in the chat be in the 360 dashboard and make the chat a sort of application in itself (like it was on the original Xbox). A better option is to allow me to chat with more than one person while doing anything as I currently can with private chat. As each additional person joins the chat, make one of the private chat slots unavailable so that I don’t use any more bandwidth than the current version where I can have a few individual private chats.

16. Allow me to see the negative feedback I left on a person. It’s great that I can see in my recent players list that I left them bad feedback, but it could be helpful to see what that feedback was. For example, if I left negative feedback for a person not being good enough at a game and now they are good at it, I might want to change my mind and prefer them. However, just seeing that sad face next to their name might make me want to never prefer them even though I might enjoy playing with them now.

17. Provide a defragmentation utility accessible from the System blade. As I download and delete large pieces of content regularly, I’m sure that my hard drive is becoming rather fragmented. Along with this utility, include the option to cancel the defragmentation process at any time in case I suddenly decide that I need to use the console.

18. Discounts or occasional sales on marketplace content for Gold members.

19. Increase the maximum number of friends to 200. The current limit of 100 is simply too restricting for most online gaming enthusiasts, despite however low the average number of Xbox Live friends may be.

20. Allow me to do other things besides editing the id3 tags while a CD is being ripped to the hard drive. It would also be nice if I could listen to a song as soon as it has been ripped instead of waiting for the entire CD to be ripped.

21. Add more trims for the 360 dashboard blades.

22. Remove Xbox Live Arcade demos from played game lists, including the gamer card.

23. Provide a way for a person to capture a screenshot or video of his current game and allow the person to send this picture as a picture message to other Live members.

24. There should be a way to try out gamer pics from the 360 dashboard. Perhaps when browsing picture packs, there could be an option that allows you to see your gamer card with each of the gamer pictures you are considering.

25. There also needs to be a way to try out themes before buying. One option is to allow a person to use it on his console for a minute and then have it automatically display a message asking if the person wants to buy the theme. If he says no, it’s automatically deleted.

26. It’s nice having status messages telling people if I’m online, away, etc., but it would also be nice if I could set a custom message, particularly for when I’m away.

27. It’s nice that we can now fast-forward/rewind while watching a video, but we should also have this option for music. It’s been a standard features on PCs and regular old CD players for many years, so it’s only right that 360 should have it as well.

28. Provide a way to download original Xbox free downloadable content to the 360 hard drive using the marketplace instead of the in-game option. Sure, I could pop in each disc and use its custom downloader to download maps and other content, but marketplace is just so much easier.

29. It would be fun to see a list on Xbox.com showing how many people are currently playing a game while connected to Live. It’s always interesting visiting Bungie.net and seeing how many people are playing Halo 2. It would be even more fun if I could do this for all games in one convenient place. Plus, if I see that no one is playing a game, it might save me the trouble of popping in the disc.

30. I love downloading free content from marketplace, but it gets annoying when I have to browse through every game just to find a free gamer picture here and there. There needs to be a way to browse only the free content on marketplace.

This list of ideas can also be viewed in the comments section of Major Nelson’s post by going here.

2007!

Ed — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 05:19:54 +0000

Happy New Year! I hope that everyone has a wonderful year, full of happiness and prosperity. May this year bring peace to places where there is unrest, joy to those who are sad, good health to those who are sick, and success to those who are going through difficult times in their various endeavors.

YouTube Spam!

Ed — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 21:41:58 +0000

No, someone didn’t post a video featuring everyone’s favorite canned meat. Instead, I’ve been noticing lately that my YouTube General Messages inbox has been filled with spam one day after the next. It’s bad enough that we’re subjected to spam in our e-mail inboxes, but I really don’t want to receive it at YouTube as well. I know that people like getting the word out about their website, but the fact is that I do not want to visit your sex site. The problem got so bad that I had to tell YouTube to stop sending me emails whenever I get a new message. Luckily, this problem seems to be getting better in recent days, but the problem never should have happened in the first place. Does YouTube have spam filters? If it doesn’t, then it desperately needs them, and if it does, then it really needs to improve them. It’s sad that we as internet users are subjected to spam at every site that offers us a messaging feature. I guess it’s just one of those things that we’ll have to learn to deal with. In the mean time, I’m hoping that YouTube prevents this from ever happening again and that other sites learn a lesson from this (MySpace, I’m looking your way).

Show Me the Money is Awesome

Ed — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 05:40:53 +0000

I was a little nervous about Show Me the Money before I watched its first episode on Tuesday night. It seems like all the time a new game show is popping up, and it fades away just as quickly thanks to a poor concept, boring contestants, or a bad host. It doesn’t feel like this has been happening as much recently, but it used to be pretty common and still is to a certain extent. It’s therefore pretty much a given that I was unsure whether or not ABC‘s latest venture in this space would be a success, despite it having one of the best hosts imagineable in William Shatner.

I still don’t know whether or not the series will be a success. That’s unfortunately entirely up to the American viewing public as a whole. However, I can say with certainty that I very much enjoyed the first episode of Show Me the Money. It started off a bit slow, which is only natural given that it’s a new show and that you have to get the audience and the contestant used to the rules of the game. However, once the rules became clear and everyone had settled into the style and pacing of the game, it was a lot of fun. Thanks to the way the show is set up, knowledge and luck play large roles, with knowledge giving the player the upper hand and a chance to walk away with many thousands of dollars. If I recall correctly, the first contestant won more than half a million dollars.

The game seemed complicated at first, but it is really rather simple. Essentially, you choose to answer one of three questions that begin with the same phrase. If you don’t like your question, you can choose one of the remaining two, and if you still don’t like that one, then you can choose the third question, which you then have to answer. Once you’ve answered the question, you pick a dancer who has a poster revealing a certain large sum of money. If you got the question right, your total goes up that much. If you got it wrong, it goes down by that amount. Once you get a total of six right or six wrong answers, the game is over and you leave with your ending total. This system makes both luck and skill important. If you get a question right, then you have nothing to worry about, and you want to get the highest money poster, but if you get one wrong, you want to get lucky and land on a low money poster. To make things more suspenseful, they don’t reveal if you got the question right or not until after the money poster is revealed. For a little added suspense, one of the posters contains the "killer card." If you pick this one, then you better hope that you got your question right or that you can answer a question posed to you. If you can’t do either of these, then you leave right then with nothing.

As I said, the game is simple but complex enough to keep it interesting. That alone would make it a good show. However, it really shines thanks to its host, William Shatner, its dancers, and the dancing they do. It’s easy to imagine a modern show where lots of pretty women come out in revealing dresses and dance around to music. That happens here, too, with dancing taking place regularly for commercial breaks, at major milestones in the game, and when the show starts. However, what you won’t find anywhere else is William Shatner, Captain Kirk himself, dancing along with them. Of course, he’s wearing a nice suit sort of outfit, and he doesn’t dance as well as the women, but it may even be better because of it. The simple fact is that witnessing William Shatner dancing many times on the show is simply a joy to watch. It’s not great dancing by any means, but it’s very entertaining and sometimes funny. As if all this lively dancing wasn’t enough to keep you interested, Shatner also uses a wealth of facial expressions, hand gestures, and unexpected but often funny remarks to keep things fresh and interesting.

Overall, I was very happy with this show’s first episode. It started slow, but once the audience, the contestant, and Shatner got into the swing of things, the show got really good. I hope that next week’s episode on Wednesday at 8 PM is just as entertaining and that America makes the effort to watch it as they should. I don’t think that they’d regret it.

My Music Isn’t Too Loud (But Certain RA’s Are Too Senseless)

Ed — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 05:10:42 +0000

Common sense would tell you that a person who is a resident assistant at a fine higher education institution like Boston University has some common sense of her own. It would seem that this isn’t necessarily true. I sometimes like to listen to my music a little loud (no, not really loud, but sort of loud, to the point where you can hear it a little if you’re standing right next to my door). I sometimes do this at night while I’m doing homework or doing things on the computer. It helps pass the time, and it’s fun. So, I figured, who would it hurt if on a Friday night I listen to a little great music at below-normal level. Apparently for one BU Warren Towers RA, it was a huge deal.

The time was 11:20 PM. A short, thin, Asian girl with glasses knocks on my door. I figure that it must be someone soliciting, as often happens at night in Warren Towers. I was wrong. Instead, she told me that my music was too loud because she could hear it through the door. I had passed another person on my floor earlier who was getting told to turn their music down, but I didn’t think much of it because their music really was loud. Mine was not. At best, it was just audible from a little beyond the door. What a shock! Someone can hear something from beyond a room’s door in Warren Towers?! Anyone who has been in Warren for any length of time knows that virtually everything can be heard through a room’s door, whether it’s someone talking, the traffic noise from I-90 if a window is partially open, a bottle opening, etc. The fact of the matter is that the doors here are made of such poor insulating material that virtually any sound can be heard through them when one is standing in close proximity to the door. Because of this, it is necessary during the night to place limits on noise within rooms. However, this RA went way too far.

Let’s break it down. It’s a Friday night at 11:20 PM. I’m guessing at least 90% of the residents of Warren are out getting drunk or partying in some other capacity. Second, virtually no one does homework on a Friday night, certainly not at 11:20 PM. Third, a little common sense tells you that if music is just able to be heard when you’re standing a little beyond a door, there is almost no chance that it can be heard in someone else’s room if they have the door closed (and probably not even if they had the door open). Plus, if the noise truly was a bother to someone, then I’m sure that they would have approached me or the RA about it to get the problem resolved. Naturally, this didn’t happen, nor has it ever. I presented the RA (whom I had never even see before) with my arguments, and she presented me with the most illogical responses possible.

To my arguments that it can’t be heard in someone else’s room and that it wasn’t particularly loud, her only fallback response was that the BU policy is that music cannot be heard in the hallway. Genius! Pure genius. Someone give this girl a Nobel prize. The simple fact that music can be heard at some arbitrary location in a hallway is not grounds for it being too loud. Such a policy defies all reason. If a student were studying two feet away from my door in the hallway, then I could understand it, but they don’t (and I would be a little freaked out if they did). Students study in their own rooms, usually with the door closed, or in the common room. The chances of my music penetrating the hallway and into the place where the student is studying are so slim that it’s more likely that George W. Bush would learn how to pronounce "nuclear" correctly. Even if this were technically BU’s policy, then the person tasked with enforcing that policy should have the sense to enforce it wisely and in the spirit of the policy, instead of mindlessly reciting the policy verbatim. This is why we have judges in our judicial system. They are supposed to be wise enough to understand the law and make rulings as best they can based on the law’s intention.

So, let’s run through it one more time: no chance of anyone studying because it’s Friday night and no one is here, no chance of anyone being able to hear my music, and everything that takes place in a room can be heard at almost any volume within a short distance of the door anyway. All that this girl’s telling me to turn down my music could do was lower my level of enjoyment of my music. The music was affecting no one else.

When presented with my logic and refusing to budge, I stood firm and reiterated my reasoning. Coming up short of a reasonable argument in her defense, this RA got extremely defensive and started essentially flashing her badge, saying that if I had a problem with it, she could give me a noise violation and I can take it up with her boss. Naturally, I wouldn’t want a noise violation, and I have a feeling that her boss is probably as thick-headed as she is. All I know is that any level of respect I may have had for her was quickly destroyed when she started asserting her authority. It was roughly equivalent to a police officer declaring that he can do whatever he wants simply because he has been placed into a position of power.

Frankly, I don’t care if you’re a resident assistant and have been given certain powers. That doesn’t make you instantly wise, and power without wisdom is a dangerous thing (just look at how certain politicians behave). To be an RA, one must be at least an undergraduate junior. This is truly scary. This girl will be going out into the business world shortly, she’s completed at least half of her "higher education", and she still lacks almost all common sense. I have never seen this girl before tonight, and I hope I never do again. Going along with the song I was listening to, I hope she spins herself right round and never comes back.

While this demonstration of a lack of common sense had little major impact on me or others, it is a perfect demonstration of how well-educated modern people, in positions of power no less, can lack the sense that is so vital to their future ability to properly deal with others in a positive way and make the world a better place. Our world desperately needs many improvements if we as a species are going to continue to inhabit it in the centuries to come. Up until now, our major shortcoming as a species has been a profound lack of common sense and our inability to use logic in solving real world problems. It accounts for pollution and global warming, it’s accounted for many wars, and it has accounted for many prejudices (as well as many other major problems). If we are to overcome the problems that face us, then we urgently need to adopt common sense and employ logic as best we can in as short a time as possible. I thought that we were on the verge of this, but tonight’s incident is yet another reminder that we might still have a ways to go before common sense really is common. I just hope that the majority of people adopt it before it’s too late for all of us.

As a last word, I sincerely hope that this RA isn’t in the school of management. The thought of her making major decisions and telling others what to do in the business world is truly terrifying. To quote a great novel: "the horror!" Also, for future reference, never argue points of logic with an intelligent person who is also a big Star Trek fan (like myself). Endless numbers of hours of watching have impressed a great deal of Vulcan logic on me, and combined with my own knowledge and experience, I have a very sound knowledge of logic and the employment of common sense. I doubt that any BU RA touting a rule book can match that.

Show Me the Money on ABC Tonight

Ed — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 02:00:38 +0000

I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about watching something on ABC. ABC is not usually my first choice for primetime TV programming, but thanks to its newest gameshow, that may very well change. Tonight is the series premiere of Show Me the Money, starring William Shatner. With the exception of Boston Legal, I’ve watched all of Shatner’s major recent TV series, including the wonderful but under-appreciated Invasion Iowa and the short-lived Iron Chef USA (it only lasted two episodes). Even if the rest of tonight’s episode is awful, I know that William Shatner will make it worth watching. Show Me the Money will run from 9:30 PM to 11 PM tonight (EST), and in subsequent weeks it will be shown during its regular one-hour time slot at 8 PM on Wednesdays. Be sure to watch it tonight, and remember – hold on to your shat!

Windows Media Player 11 (Final) Now Available

Ed — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:53:26 +0000

I was ecstatic when I saw that the latest version of Microsoft’s popular media player, Windows Media Player 11, was finally out of beta. It did make sense, though, given the fact that the recently released fall update for Xbox 360 added the ability to stream video from WMP 11. This feature wouldn’t be of much use if one didn’t have a final build of the media player. I had a lot of reason to be excited about this software release. I tried the beta (beta 2 I think) on my home computer over the summer, and except for a few bugs (which I could easily ignore given that it was a beta product and most betas are full of bugs), I was really impressed.

The interface is simply gorgeous, and in many ways more pleasing than iTunes. I was a little hesitant at first about whether I would like the new black color scheme, but after using the player for a bit, I found that I really liked it. The different album views for music worked very well, thanks in particular to an effective use of album cover art. The search feature was surprisingly fast, and the relocation of certain buttons and menus worked really well compared to previous versions of WMP. Except for the bugs and the fact that it can’t sync with my iPod, I thought that the software was nearly perfect. In fact, I was so impressed that I even said to myself at the time that once the final version is released, I may very well start using it as my primary media player for music over iTunes. That’s quite a statement given that I’ve been using iTunes exclusively as my mp3 player on my school computer since the fall of 2004. Sure, WMP 11 doesn’t have the neat Cover Flow option for viewing album artwork that’s present in iTunes 7, but that’s not a very big deal. Frankly, I’d take WMP 11′s awesome visualizations feature over Cover Flow.

Given my apparent love of Windows Media Player 11 and my anticipation of its release, you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that I wouldn’t be able to install it on my school (primary) PC. As I often like to do before install major new software, I took a look through the release notes, and I was very sad when I read that WMP 11 could be installed on virtually every version of Windows XP (that has the latest patches) except for Windows Media Center Edition 2002 and 2004. Unbelievable. I bought a WMCE 2004 PC from Dell over the summer in 2004 in preparation for going to college. It’s served me very well over the past couple years, functioning as a great PC (carrying all the features of XP Pro) and a great TV/PVR/media player. I wasn’t thrilled when I saw not long after I bought that PC that WMCE 2005 would have more features, but they weren’t that significant to me. I was just happy that my PC was as great as it was.

Then, when going to install the next great piece of Microsoft software, I see this:

"Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP cannot be installed on computers running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2002 or Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004."

It just doesn’t seem right. My PC is still pretty high-end, even more than two years later, running a rather new version of XP in Media Center Edition 2004, an operating system that has its media abilities as one of its major features, if not its biggest feature, and yet I can’t install the latest version of Windows Media Player on it. I really hope that Microsoft figures out how to modify WMP 11 such that it can be installed on PC’s running WMCE 2002 or 2004 so I can use this great WMP 11 on my primary PC. In the mean-time, I guess I’ll be sticking with iTunes. It never has cared what version of Windows I’m running, and I’m hoping it never will.

If you are running any updated version of Windows XP other than WMCE 2002 or 2004, then I still highly recommend you go here and download the final version of Windows Media Player 11. I think once you play around with it a little bit and get a little used to its new interface, you’ll really enjoy it and may even find that you want to use it as your primary media player for now on. Enjoy.

PS3 Launch Titles Look Good for a Reason

Ed — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:27:21 +0000

Now that the PS3′s often-delayed release is nearing closer, it’s becoming more and more common to see hands-on reviews of the system and some of the games that are scheduled to be released at the same time as the console. Even though the PS3′s release date is so close, it seems that many features of the console still have yet to be enabled, including its online network. Because of this, journalists posting their impressions of the console have tended to focus instead on what they actually can experience at the moment with the PS3 – near-final games and the basic user interface.

Overall, the reactions to the UI seem a bit mixed, with some people loving its simplicity, and others hating it because its too small and doesn’t work well enough given how many features of the console it has to incorporate. It worked pretty well for the PSP, but a next-gen console probably needs something a bit more complex and user-friendly for its UI. This really isn’t the focus of this post, though. The more PS3 hands-on articles I read, the more frustrated I get at the people who write these articles and the websites that publish them. It’s never a good sign when I start yelling at my computer monitor because an article lacks so much sense that it infuriates me.

Over and over, I read that these journalists are very impressed by the PS3 because its "launch" games look as good or slightly better than the Xbox 360′s launch games that came out at the end of last year. Some are sensible enough to state that this bodes well for the PS3 in that its launch games look so good, and others are more willing to proclaim their ignorance by declaring these games as proof that the PS3 is superior to the Xbox 360 in terms of power. These "launch" games may look very good, but there’s a reason for this. These games are not launch games in the typical sense. Historically, launch titles are games that launch along-side a new console and are intended to be the first foray by many developers into a new generation of games. Developers often spend an unusually short time developing these launch titles. Many big-name games take years to develop, whereas many launch games are developed in under a year, with some only undergoing major development for about half a year. Obviously, this difference in development time would dramatically affect the end quality of the games. As a result, more launch games tend to look (and sometime play) very poorly.

There are, of course, exceptions to this, including the original Halo. Such games as this are very much a rarity in the gaming world. While other launch titles get the usual half year to a year development time, Halo was in development for years before the console launched, just not the Xbox. Once Microsoft realized that it would be launching Xbox in Fall 2001, it quickly bought Bungie so it could secure a good launch title in Halo for its new console. As I said, this was a very unusual circumstance, and most launch games in the past have not had the benefit of this extra development time. This was also generally true for the launch of Xbox 360, where many of the games were developed very quickly or were slightly-modified high-end PC ports. Microsoft delivered the final dev. kits to developers with very little time to spare. Between the lack of development time and the short amount of time with final dev. kits, it is a given that Xbox 360 launch games would suffer the same fate as most other launch games of years past: they played fairly well and look rather good, but they were not nearly as revolutionary or breath-taking as they could have been.

Playstation 3 "launch" games almost entirely defy the term "launch title" in every way. Unlike the Xbox 360′s launch titles, PS3 launch titles have had far more time in development. Most games developers switched over to next-gen. development when Xbox 360 was on the horizon. However, they didn’t just begin developing for Xbox 360 at this time. Instead, they also started development of PS3 titles. Since Xbox 360 launched about a year ahead of PS3, 360 games had approximately a year less of development time in comparison to PS3 launch titles. One would certainly expect PS3 launch titles to have better graphics than 360 launch titles when they’ve had that much extra development time.

Another major consideration is that much of the work necessary to make great-looking next-gen. games was done right before Xbox 360 launched or after its release during development of Xbox 360 titles. This could mean as little as the fact that developers now have far more experience with next-gen. game development thanks to their experience developing for Xbox 360, or it could mean as much as the fact that many developers have the basic assets needed to create impressive next-gen. games already done thanks to work with 360 games. While these advances in developer experience and programming assets will also provide a great deal of benefit to upcoming 360 games by making them easier to develop (leaving more time for polish and improvements), it will also come across unfairly when people look at these assets being used in PS3 games.

Some oblivious people might mistake a good-looking PS3 launch game as being a fact that the console is easier to develop for given the fact that its launch titles (which usually have a short development time) can look so good and have such impressive gameplay. While the power of the PS3 certainly is a factor here, the main reason that these games are so impressive is because of these games’ unusually long development time (thanks largely to the numerous delays of PS3′s release date) and the fact that these games were able to be developed easily since developers had already created much of what was necessary to build the games while working on 360 titles.

I’m not saying that PS3 titles aren’t impressive and have great graphics. I’d just like to remind everyone that when they see a PS3 title, you can not make a direct comparison to already-released Xbox 360 titles, especially launch titles. While these PS3 games may be called "launch" titles, they are essentially second-generation titles debuting as launch titles due to an unusually long development time. It is true that some code optimizations could not be done because final PS3 dev. kits weren’t delivered until relatively recently, but the fact remains that the bulk of the games could be completed before the final dev. kits arrived, making these titles still essentially second-gen. games.

If you want a fair comparison between Xbox 360 and PS3 games, I suggest you compare the premiere PS3 launch titles to soon-to-be-released 360 titles like Gears of War. All I’ve seen so far from hands-on previews thus far is that while PS3 launch titles look incredible for launch games and compare favorably to already available 360 games, they all fail to match the gameplay and visuals of Gears of War and other great 360 titles being released this fall. Once PS3′s games are finally able to catch up to this fall’s great 360 games, even more impressive Xbox 360 games will be released one after another, including such sure-to-be great games as Mass Effect and Halo 3. It’s possible that PS3 may someday be able to surpass Xbox 360 in visuals and gameplay, but I really don’t think it will matter, because by the time it happens, 360 owners will have been enjoying excellent games for years and the next generation of consoles will be upon us.

To all those who have yet to embrace Xbox 360, there’s no better time than now. Jump in.

PS3 Overly Power-Hungry, Cost to Consumer Mounts

Ed — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 13:34:40 +0000

Gizmodo recently claimed in this article that Sony’s upcoming Playstation 3 will consume far more power that any other gaming console, including Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s upcoming Wii. Here’s the important information from the article:

Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 3, due on US shores on November 17, sucks up 380 watts of power, a far cry from the PS2 which sips a mere 45 watts. That means the PS3 uses more than twice the 160 watts consumed by the Xbox 360. The PS3′s 380 watts will cost you around $40 a year to run if you play it two hours a day.

This will have a major impact on gamers planning to purchase a PS3 come November. While PS3 is well-known to be the most expensive console of this generation, many fans were writing off the inflated price by stating that PS3 will offer many things for free, such as its online service, wheras the competition charges a yearly fee. Thanks to PS3′s enormous power-usage, even though Playstation online will be free, PS3 owners who play for around 4 or 5 hours a day will essentially be paying the same amount that Xbox 360 owners pay for Live ($50 a year) plus power usage, except they’ll be paying it entirely on their power bill. In the case of Live subscribers, we’re paying for a superior online service and a miminal amount of power usage. I have a feeling that many PS3 buyers won’t realize this cruel economic fact until well-after they’ve bought and played with their new big, black console. I predict that PS3′s power usage will come back to bite PS3 owners in the wallet a year or more down the road when they finally realize just how much energy their consoles have been consuming, courtesy of their overly-large power bills.

To make matters worse, PS3 owners will have to shell out extra for component or HDMI cables since PS3 only comes with composite cables. Also, Sony fans who want to take advantage of free online voice chat will have to buy a headset separately since that isn’t included either. Sure, PS3 comes with the equivalent of the 360′s play-and-charge kit, but the sum of the prices of the headset and HD cables is far greater than the $20 a play-and-charge kit costs. I hope Sony fans have some deep pockets full of lots of money, because they’re going to need it.

Windows Live Mail Getting Better, Still Needs Work

Ed — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 16:08:30 +0000

Commenting on other people’s blogs is fun, especially when those blogs get a lot of page views and a lot of comments. Since I use Windows Live Mail (the next generation of Hotmail) as my primary email, I naturally like to visit the blog of the team who makes Live Mail so I can find out what’s new. It’s also a great way for me to post my concerns and ideas for improving Windows Live Mail. I did just this on October 6th, and it was very interesting seeing what came of it. I was just posting my thoughts and feature requests in the hope that the team would read my comment and adopt some of my ideas for their future releases. Little did I know just how many people would read my comment and post after I did.

I was one of the first people to post, and I guess a lot of people like to read the first set of comments, because a large number of the subsequent posts referenced mine. Some agreed with my statements, some echoed my thoughts without actually referencing my post, and one person even commented that I made so many references to other email services that I must surely be "an agent of Yahoo! and Google." I’m not an agent of Yahoo! or Google. I’m just a tech-loving guy with a thirst for great email products. If I see something great in another company’s products, I won’t hesitate to mention it because I want Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail to be as great as it can be when it comes out of Beta at some undetermined point in the future.

I’ll likely be adding more thoughts on ways that Windows Live Mail can improve as time goes on, as well as how I think it fares in comparison to other email services. In the mean-time, I thought I should post the comment I made on October 6, 2006 at Your mail is here, come and get it!. I encourage you to read it and see what you think of my thoughts. If you have an interest in the future of Windows Live Mail because you’re a current Live Mail or Hotmail user, or if you’re just a technology-oriented person who would like to see Microsoft’s next webmail product be the best it can be, I ask that you do as I have done and post your thoughts and suggestions for improvements to Windows Live Mail on the team’s blog. They won’t know that people want certain changes and additions unless we speak up and let them know. My original comment from 10/6/2006 follows:

I’m really happy with the improvements you’ve made in this release. It’s a significant upgrade over M7, and I really appreciate the work you put into it. Even if you had just added the Windows Live button with the drop-down list of Windows Live sites, it would have been worth the release. I do, however, still have some features that I would really like to see added before the final release, most if not all of which I may have posted on this blog before. They are as follows:

1) The ability to flag an email (make it a high priority/mark it as important). Windows Live Mail Desktop now has this feature (and it’s a very nice and needed feature, too). I would love to see this added to the web version of Windows Live Mail, however perhaps in not exactly the same way as it is implemented in Desktop. Desktop uses an entire column to display whether or not an email is flagged, and this uses a lot of screen space. For the web version, I think it would be sufficient to remove this column. Instead, add the ability to right-click and email and flag it. If an email is flagged, it would have a small red flag icon in the pane that displays the list of emails, right next to the message’s subject line by the icons that indicate if the message has an attachment. You could then add the ability to sort by whether or not an email is flagged, as well as the addition of a "flagged" category to the farthest left pane, perhaps under the other folders and in smaller font. As an added bonus, you can make it so that Windows Live Mail’s flags and Desktop’s flags automatically sync (although this feature isn’t absolutely necessary).

2) The ability to scroll through all my emails at once, without clicking on an arrow to show the next 50 messages. I get a lot of email, and while I don’t go very far back in my email often, it’s very annoying when I do need to do so. This feature could be implemented like the previously available continuous scrolling of search results in Windows Live Search. As the user scrolls down, more emails are loaded. Since this feature would probably require a good internet connection, you could have an option in the settings menu to switch between the continuous scrolling and the current method.

3) Accurate search results. While the relatively-new search is a welcome addition to Live Mail, it is not nearly as thorough and accurate as it needs to be. I have found that its indexing tends to be very behind (hasn’t indexed the last few week’s email quite often). Also, it seems to omit quite a few emails when I perform a search. If I search for, say, "bu.edu" (without the quotation marks), I expect it to return all emails that contain "bu.edu" in the subject line, the body of the email, or in the email address of a sender. I have found that search currently omits most of these emails. Granted, I do have more than two and a half thousand emails in my inbox, but the size of my inbox should be irrelevant. As previously said, such a search would also very often return results from a week or two ago, but omit very recent emails that should be included. To be useful, a search function needs to be completely up-to-date (like Gmail’s search function is).

4) The Today page needs more functionality (and by functionality, I don’t mean more advertisements). It’s far better than it used to be, but for me to have to look at it every time I sign in, it needs to be more useful and show more information that I care about. Perhaps it could tie into the calendar built-into Windows Live Mail and display Notes, Tasks, and the current day’s calendar listings. Perhaps it could show what the subject line and From fields of unread messages in the Inbox. Maybe it could somehow tie into other Windows Live Services. For example, it could include a Windows Live Favorites gadget like I can have on my Live.com page. It might even be sufficient if it just shows a few of the most popular MSN Video clips. No matter what you make it do, it needs to be more useful. Otherwise, it’s largely a waste of my time.

5) Automatic check for new email. It’s great that I can click on a button to check for new email, but I really shouldn’t have to. Like Gmail, Windows Live Mail should check every minute or so for new email in my Inbox and in other folders and update my current panes accordingly. It’s a relatively minor feature, but it would be a huge help. Outlook offers it, Gmail offers it, and Windows Live Mail should also offer it.

6) A better calendar. Sure, I can keep using Google Calendar, but I would really rather use the one built-into Live Mail. However, until certain features are added, I won’t be able to. All it would really take is a little Ajax goodness.

     First, when I click on a day in Month view, it should automatically give me the option to add a new appointment to that day. I shouldn’t have to click on the actual numeric date.

     Second, I need the ability to have more than one personal calendar. For example, let’s say that I want one calendar for my personal appointments and another one for the upcoming movies I’m looking forward to. I want to display them on the same calendar so I can see them at the same time, with some way of differentiating appointments on each calendar (such as a different color for each calendar’s appointments). I should also have different sharing options for each calendar should I choose to share one but not the other with friends.

     Third, it would be nice to have an RSS or Atom feed of my upcoming calendar appointments. I could use this feed in my feed reader or give it out to friends so they know what I’ll be doing.

     Fourth, there needs to be a way to quickly add calendar appointments. Google Calendar does this very well with its "Quick Add" feature. A similar method for easily adding appointments would be most welcome (although not absolutely necessary).

     Fifth, I should be able to search my calendar appointments. A full-featured search with lots of customizations like Google Calendar’s would be very welcome.

     Sixth, it would be nice to be able to set an appointment for any time of day, rather than just on the hour and at 15 minute intervals. Realistically, not everything starts at one of these times. I could do something from 10:20 AM until 10:45 and another thing from 10:45 until 10:55. It wouldn’t happen all the time, but I really should be able to set the appointment for any time I want.

     Finally, one feature you could add that Google Calendar lacks (and that would make me quickly switch over) is a way of syncing appointments, tasks, and notes between Outlook and Windows Live Mail’s calendar in a way similar to how Windows Live Favorites can sync with Internet Explorer when using the Windows Live Toolbar with the Favorites add-in.

This seems like a lot of complaints, but it really isn’t. I love Windows Live Mail. I just think that the addition of these features would make it a near-perfect service that can easily trump anything the competition has to offer. While I obviously don’t realistically expect that you’ll be able to add all these features any time soon, I sincerely hope that you add at least some of them before the final release of Windows Live Mail. Thank you.

You can read all about the improvements that the Live Mail team has made recently in the M8 release of Windows Live Mail by viewing their latest blog post. Windows Live Mail in its current state is a great email service. With the right feature additions and subtle tweaks, I can see the team pushing it above Yahoo! and Google’s email offerings by a significant margin in certain areas. As with any beta product, it is up to us, the people using the product, to find what needs changing and recommend these changes as vocally as possible. The team’s blog has a comment feature, and I think it’s time we put it to good use. (By "good use," I don’t mean leaving ridiculous comments like 2/3 of the commenters currently posting there. Oh well, at least we can make sure that there are some valuable comments on the team’s blog.)