Category: Culture & Entertainment

  • Final Fantasy 9: The Legacy Continues

    I have a lot of love for Squaresoft (well, now they’re SquareEnix), despite the fact that I’ve played relatively few of their games.  I think Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 (originally released as Final Fantasy 3 in the US) are the pinnacle of their jRPG work.  I’ve also played Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy…

  • Otakon 2009

    For the first time since moving here, I found out about Otakon ahead of time. Unfortunately, the economics didn’t work out we didn’t buy tickets. But I did go to hang out outside Otakon on Saturday to get some photos. Lessons learned: Remember what you learned in Hawaii and don’t be afraid to approach people.…

  • Suspension of Disbelief Broken

    A few days ago, I saw the heavy boots story on digg and shared it with Dan.  To quickly sum up, in case the web page dissapears into the great bit bucket in the sky, a physics major was told by his philosophy TA that the astronauts on the moon didn’t float away because they…

  • Colbert v Steele in a Rap Battle

    It’s been pretty ridiculous recently with Steele claiming to bring Urban cred to the Republican party. I think they feel like they have to have a black guy too. It’s just odd that suddenly after Obama’s President, they have a black chairman. Well, I know that eventually Hulu will pull this clip.  But until they…

  • What happens when no one obeys anymore?

    A lot of people have been warning that rules/laws that everyone considers stupid are a very dangerous thing.  Essentially, what happens when every single person you know is a “criminal”?  It begins to create a sense that rules are pointless and if everyone’s disobeying this rule, why not disobey that one and so on.  These…

  • Hulu’s Streaming FAIL

    There’ve been a lot of people recently on the MythTv mailing list talking about Boxee as a convenient way to was content on Hulu.  However, the Boxee developers have blogged that Hulu has nixed that idea.  (And here’s Hulu’s side of the story)  I read a bunch of comments as well as both of those…

  • flickr programmers are fans of The Simpsons

    The other day I was messing around with flickr’s slideshow feature and I came across this: And here it is zoomed in: This comes from an episode where the characters are discussing the founder of Springfield who uses the word Embiggen and some teachers debate whether it’s a real word.  I love the way programmer…

  • Review: The Discworld Series

    Last week I finished the Discworld Series.  I started with a few books early in 2008.  From the first book, The Color of Magic, I fell in love with the series.  Although I have found British television and movies to be hit or miss, I have loved all of the geek genre British books.  So…

  • British The Office vs American The Office

    Over the last few days I’ve been watching season 1 of the British version of The Office.  I’ve come to the conclusion that to say, “the American The Office is based on the British The Office” is a gross understatement.  For the first season, at least, it’s almost a 1:1 copy of the British version. …

  • Another Reason Why People Illicitly Download TV Shows

    My father-in-law is over today and he’s been dying to watch the Bizarre Foods Paris episode.  I’m opposed to buying video media off of iTunes because of the digital restrictions management (DRM).  But, he’s been wanting to watch that episode forever and we no longer have cable so I can’t record it onto MythTV.  We…

  • End Game Piracy: Open Source

    As 2008 has proven – draconian digital restrictions management (DRM) does not stop people from illicitly using computer games.  Spore, whose DRM was so bad they got ratings bombed on Amazon.com, was the most pirated game of 2008.  The DRM caused hassles for legitimate users and did nothing to stop illicit use.  This is always…

  • Review: Sleepwalk with Me

    Over the Thanksgiving holiday I went to see Mike Burbiglia on his Broadway show “Sleepwalk with Me”.  I wasn’t going to blog about it originally, but during the performance he mentioned that he gets Google alerts about himself. He used to Google himself, but then he set it up to get Google to do it…

  • Getting Rid of Cable

    This week was my last week with cable television.  I’ve had it since I was around 12 years old or so.  Now I’ve been on my own for a few years now and I noticed two things.  One, I don’t watch much cable television.  Just a few programs here and there.  Two, it’s pretty expensive! …

  • Installing and Running Warcraft III via Wine

    First I updated Wine to 1.0.0 (It didn’t work properly on 0.94) on Ubuntu.  In there I have D as the CDROM drive. So I typed wine d:\install.exe  This installed just fine Here’s what happened with 0.94 when I first started this post: But the first time I clicked to play it, it did not…

  • Spore!

    Got Spore on Saturday and I’ve been playing it more or less non-stop since then. It was very, very fun! A lot more fun than I expected from the reviews. I don’t blame the reviewers since the game had been hyped for the past three years. I think the cell stage sucks and I don’t…