not my blog

As I had stated in a prior post, the Doom movie was pretty decent, and the FPS sequence cool. But, it’s not all that original. Way back in 1996 three friends and I did a movie for our end of year project in World History. Somehow we got an A on the project. Not bad considering our budget was $0, the thing was shot with a single old camera (and by old, I mean at the time), edited with two VCRs and the pause button and a little 3 channel mixing board. This became the staple of the following two years of High School. Campy little movies that had plenty of silly moments that seriously made you question our sanity. But on to the real meat and potatoes…

The movie that we created for this year was call A History of Warfare, and was basically a tracing of man from discover weapons like clubs and stones, all the way up to nuclear weapons and beyond. There was some interesting fact sequences in the movie, but the part that really made it stand out was the over the top left field parts. One of the most memorable parts of this movie was the “Doom Sequence”. We were trying to recreate the “gun” portion of the movie, and since my house backed up to 10 acres of woods or so we went out back and had ourselves a little battle.

No please remember while watching this that these parts were never really meant to be taken very seriously and were mostly for the enjoyment of my friends and I, they just happened to get us an A on the project. Also, I am sorry for the quality, but this is a 10 year old tape almost, so there is only so much that I can do in that respect. Without further ado, here is what you guys have come for in the first place:

A History of Warefare: Doom Cam Sequence
Runtime: 1:04
Divx Encoded
Filesize: 11 MB
Downloads:

• Bittorrent (Preferred)
• Direct Download (Local)

I hope you enjoy this little clip, and if I get some good feedback I’ll make sure to post some more silliness from my younger days when I get a chance. If nothing else though, I proved that I had the FPS sequence on film long before Doom came out! *grins*

Digg just received money from venture capitalists…

$2.8 Million of VC money for a start-up company who currently has a single revenue stream based solely on ad revenue. Granted I don’t have the full proposal that was presented to the VC’s that invested in Digg to see what type of future plans they have to build the site to something worthy of a nearly $3 Million investment, but I would really love to see the financials on this.

Truthfully if you ask me, the most likely strategic plan would be for them to attempt to grow their user base and develop their software to the level that they can sell it out to someone like Yahoo, especially since Yahoo has been on a Social Networking buying frenzy recently. But you never know how things could evolve, especially with a key player in Digg also being a part of Revision3. Possible buyout in the near future? This could always be possible, especially since people constantly seem to be under the impression that Digg and Revision3 are the same company, even though on numerous occassions it has been explicitly stated that they are seperate legal entities with no official affiliation to each other.

Either way congrats go out to the entire crew at Digg, and here is hope to more features and future expansion. In reality $2.8 Million isn’t a ton of money, but it is surely enough to begin to deploy some spiffy new features for sure.

read more | digg story

More and more recently I’ve become to realize that the entertainment industry as it stands is a stagnant old dinosaur that needs to die. They continue to charge us more and more for Movies, Cable, Music, while delivering us less and less actual content… not to mention the ever increasing number of ads. The industry needs to wake up and see that the times are changing (for the better, at least for the consumer).

Everyday we are provided more and more options for our entertainment dollar. Music, TV, Movies, Video Games, specialized web content and more have begun to completely invade our society. Where does the problem lie? All of the tradition mediums force you around their schedule for when you are allowed to view their content. Case in point, I’ve recently just gotten into the show Supernatural. Really up my alley, and quite enjoyable. I like the whole mystery horror genre thing they have going, was a huge fan of Gabriel Knight on the PC back in the day. Such a shame that series was dropped. There is a problem with Supernatural, and that being it is on Tuesday nights. Well guess what, I’m not available Tuesday nights to watch it. So there in lies the problem… how am I supposed to watch the show since I am given no viable options to watch the show. Currently my answer lies in Bittorrent. Do I feel a little bad downloading it, yeah, I truly enjoy the show, but they don’t really give me another option.

What they really need to begin doing is offering HD quality downloads from the internet that you can own forever. Cause let’s face it, if I’m going to pay to watch a TV show I want HD quality, with no ads, and it’s mine forever. No DRM would be nice, but I know that is asking entirely too much from the entertainment industry. Apple’s steps with the new version of iTunes is nice, but not good enough. The price is not overly obsurd, as a DVD box set of something like 24 when it first comes out runs for somewhere in the neighborhood of $50, but I really think we need something a little bit different than what Apple is offering us. In other words, give me the TV Show in HD for download to my computer so I can watch it whenever I have time, not when you tell me I should make time to watch your show (ads included).

In the end do I really have an answer for any of this, not really. It’s more for me to add my voice to those saying “Wake up and smell the revolution”. Your traditional methods of distribution are dying… embrace the technology that is available to you and give your customers what you really want. Who knows, it just might save your industry. In the mean time, indie programs such as those from Revision3, From The Shadows, TWiT, The Scene, and others are getting more and more of my “TV Time” as they continue to show more and more promise with each passing release. Hollywood, be afraid.

Seems that we have a customer that is a Beer/Wine Distributor. Gotta love it. Went out and pronounced death on a machine and got a new one setup for them. Simple call. On the way out the door the owner told me to grab a bottle of wine from their sample rack. Awesome! Looked for something I had never had anything close to and found this interesting looking bottle of Italian Red Wine. Never had an Italian Wine before, and figure since it’s free I might as well try it out.

The bottle I got was a Vintage 1999 Dardano Barbaresco. I was informed that it is a very strong red wine and would go great with a good hunk of quality steak or another strong food. I’m quite looking forward to my next steak night so I can try this bottle out. Probably have to have my Dad come over to try it with me, since if it is strong as it sounds I don’t think the wife will enjoy it very much.

And for those of you reading, yes this is a new category. I figure I should start chronicling my adventures in beer and wine for everyone as well as my technological exploits. Till next time.

So for the past six months or so I’ve been using Azureus as my faithful Bittorrent client. Very nicely done program, good interface, lots of features. But, it is an amazing resource hog as it is a Java based application and can cause the Java runtime environment to reach nearly 200MB in memory usage. My machine has no problems handling the load, as it is a Dual Core CPU with 1GB RAM and RAID 0 SATA Drives, but this is just really more than I am willing to give up just for sharing some files. I’ve spent lots of time perfecting my Bittorrent configuration and have things working beautifully, but I finally decided to switch to a new client that is less resource intensive.

I did a lot of reading while looking for my new client, and finally came across the µTorrent client and decided it was worth the time to test it. µTorrent is under very heavy development with new versions coming out close to weekly, which is a bit of a pain, but the upgrades so far have been painless. The program is tiny, with the current version weighing in at somewhere just under 100K. Memory usage is a great improvement as well, with µTorrent currently only using 4.6MB of memory on my system. Some people might think the interface and options are too simplistic, but truthfully I like it that way. I don’t want a billion features, and all the main stuff is there in this program. It allows me to run the 30-50 torrents I seed and any new stuff I download and I haven’t noticed any issues in the past week compared to my use of Azureus. Mostly I help seed the latest version of several Linux distros as well as things like Diggnation, TWiT, and The Scene.

The next major version of µTorrent is supposed to have DHT (trackerless) support, which will make this program completely rounded and good enough for my needs totally, so unless something horrible happens with this program I’ll probably be sticking with it for some time to come. Don’t quote me on this though, I’m always looking for new and better programs, so if someone has something they think I really should try, please do let me know.