From the time I started listening to podcasts until about two months ago, I had been using Rhythmbox to manage my podcasts.  When I first started using a Linux music application, Banshee ran hideously slow on my computer.  (As did most mono-based products)  As time has passed I’ve acquired a more powerful Linux computer and the mono code has been made more efficient.  But it was too late, I was already ingrained into Rhythmbox and it had all my music rated.  So I continued to use it.  On Linux Outlaws they kept mentioning how much they loved gPodder.  I checked out an early version and I didn’t see the point.  But after upgrading to Fedora 11, I decided to check it out.  It is so much better for managing podcasts than Rhythmbox and that goes to the Unix ideal - have your program do only one thing and do it well.  Banshee, by the way, is the opposite of that.  It seems to be moving in a Windows Media Player direction, recently gaining the ability to play videos as well.  So, here’s a comparison of Rhythmbox and gPodder and you’ll be able to easily see why I switched.  First, here’s the podcast interface for Rhythmbox.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“This happens later, but it was a great photo to open with”] [/caption]

And so the ceremony began, starting with the couples approaching the aisle. I was able to get some great shots because I was using both my Rebel XT and Rebel XTi with the EF 28-105mm (and the lens hood to help mitigate lens flare) on one camera and the Tamron 55-200mm on the other.  This allowed me to get close up shots no mater where the subjects happened to be standing.

Don’t worry, this blog isn’t about to become some weird fan tribute blog to Braid.  It’s more of a case of trying to make sense of the game I’ve just played.  There’s really no reason to make sense of The Beatles Rockband.  You are one of The Beatles playing music.  There’s nothing to “get”.  But finishing Braid has left me with more questions than answers.  Braid has the potential to leave you frustrated in the same way you may end up frustrated at a particularly dense painting where you see that there is a table of objects, but can’t figure out the significance of the objects.  It just looks like a cluttered table until the docent explains that the book with a skull on it represents that man will never understand his world until he dies.

This month finds me with getting two asian photos in my inbox from Photojojo.  Either an amazing coincidence or they have some great code going on the in background.  Interesting, the first one is a product of racism while the other is a product of love.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Yeah….racism….it’s great for selling stuff.”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“From Lisa and Pawel’s Wedding”] [/caption]

warning:  The following contains many spoilers about Braid.  I, personally, feel that your enjoyment of the game will be greatly reduced by reading this ahead of time.  You have been warned!

I finished Braid last night.  I did cheat a little.  Of the 60 possible puzzle pieces, I used a walkthrough to get about 10 of them.  Each of the ones that I used the walkthrough for (and I did not do this until I had spent a good chunk of time trying everything I had learned up to that point and even afterwards (since you could revisit worlds) were puzzles I would have NEVER solved.  For example, the puzzle piece that is accessed by moving around the giant replica of the puzzle in the level would never, ever have occurred to me.  Someone of a certain type of mind would surely have realized that the puzzles would not exist in the world if they did not have a purpose, but I could not figure this one out.  And the fact that most of the puzzles are one-offs means that you never do this again.

That a game like Braid can exist is a statement on where video games are as an art form with a well-established history and canon.  To make a parallel in the paint world:  without a long canon of traditional paintings of tables with fruit and bread, people wouldn’t have really understood the “parody” or “remix” of a Cubist rendition of such a painting.  In the same way, Braid is most enjoyable to those of us who have been playing video games for the past 20 years, growing up with Super Mario Bros. as our first video game experience.  In fact, Braid does indeed make a few callbacks to this classic game which has almost become a scripture to us.  Any game that allows users to design levels (eg Little Big Planet) cannot exist for more than a femptosecond before at least four people have recreated Super Mario Bros. World 1-1.  Braid does nothing so brash and that’s where the game design genius begins to show.  The game designer does not ape Mario, but hints at it here and there.  One can almost see the developer giving you a knowing look and a nudge in the ribs.  “Look here, I’ve made this or that subtle reference.”  I don’t want to ruin it by speaking of it even though this game has been out for ~ a year already.  It would ruin the delight of experiencing it.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Lookin’ for the Pot ‘o Gold in Mehoopany, PA”] [/caption]

When I read this article in Digital Photography School, I posted the rainbow photo shown above as an example of how much I had to learn.  Little did I know how much traffic that would generate for me.  In just one day I got 172 views after having spent the past 26 days with 0 views in that period.  It shot up from a photo somewhere in the range of 25-50 views to 213 views as I write this.

Recently this photo was published by the Associated Press and has been getting a lot of attention on the interwebs.  It shows Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, an American solder in Afghanistan, after being hit by a mortar attack and only hours before death.  A lot of the debate participants seem to feel one way or another depending on how they feel about our war.  But I think the debate deserves to be much more complicated and nuanced because there are actually a lot of issues at play here.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Fun, outdoor games requiring a minimum of only two players”] [/caption]

Danielle and I went to Rockburn Branch Park today to throw a ball around and maybe ride bike.  We ended up not riding bike because we didn’t like the trail too much and my water bottle holder came loose from my bike.  So we grabbed our gloves and brand new baseballs (we lost our previous ball in the woods behind our house) and went out to an empty baseball field.  The fact that we had a frisbee was simply due to the fact that Danielle threw it into the bag.  I certainly hadn’t intended to play frisbee.  It was so awesome to have a whole baseball field to ourselves.  It did, at the same time, feel a bit weird to have that whole field to ourselves.  It was great to just run around and throw the ball.  Eventually our catching hands got really sore from having the ball slam into it.  We tried our best to get the ball to end up in the part that didn’t contain our fingers or palms, but it wasn’t always easy.  So I looked into the bag and we eventually switch to frisbee.  It was so much fun.  We were both uncannily good.  I think it was mostly because we didn’t have the pressure of really awesome players to make fun of us when we did fling the disc in very wrong directions.  Eventually the bugs were getting to be too much and we left.  Still, yesterday’s play at the park made the weekend for me.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Jen appears from across the lake”] [/caption]

Jen was no where to be found at the wedding location because she was actually across the lake for her grand entrance.  None of the guests at the wedding knew about this so everyone was very excited.  I went on to the docks to photograph her entrance.