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 put little homages into the code they work on.

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 I read the first four or five books here and there.  Then in November Borders had a “buy two get the third one free” and my wife bought me the remaining 20-something books for my birthday and Christmas.  She also let me start reading in November.  I started reading them during my lunch breaks at work, on business trips and - when things were getting really interesting - at home.

Some of these are the same as the previous two days, unsurprisingly.  But some are new to this list..

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.  Examples:

• Both Dave and Michael Scott have a raunchy friend who teases him, but he thinks he’s in on the joke
• Tim and Jim look almost exactly the same and react to the camera in almost the same way
• the British Pam character is dating a guy from the warehouse who’s less than romantic
• Both Dave and Michael Scott have a female boss who is much more competent than them
• In both shows a temp is hired in the first few episodes and knows way more than the boss
• In both shows Tim/Jim put Garrett/Dwight’s stapler in jello
• in both shows the “kevin” character wants to be in a band
• Both Garrettt/Dwight know karate and other such things

There are probably a few more similarities.  I almost feel like I’m watching the first season of the American version again.  There are a few differences, though, that make the American version more enjoyable to me.  Jim and Pam have more chemistry and play more pranks.  Of course, the American show has more episodes than the British one so there is more time for mischief-based shows.  I like Dwight’s quirkiness more than Garrett’s.  So far there isn’t an HR person that the boss in the British version hates and the animosity towards Toby made the show for me many times when the Jim/Pam love triangle was taking forever.  Oh yeah, the British opening theme is SO British.

Been silent on the blog because I’ve been very busy with other things. Mostly I’ve been busy going through the 800+ pictures I took on my recent trip to Oahu, HI. Expect to see a fully illustrated blog post about my trip once I’m done uploading the pictures to flickr. And I’ve been doing this in Adobe Lightroom 2, which I recently gave my first impressions of. I’ve been doing a live blog which I’ll be publishing later. I’ve also been working on “I’m Not Mad”. I hope to have some more tech and political posts soon, but even sooner I’ll have an entertainment post.

For quite some time I’ve been been struggling with the point of Adobe’s Lightroom.  Other than competing with Apple’s Aperture, it appears not to have a purpose.  Of course, right around the time Lightroom (LR) was hitting its stride, I stopped reading photography magazines.  The zine I loved the most was a British one published by the same company that puts out Linux Format Magazine.  Unfortunately, even with an exchange rate of $1:1 Britsh Pound (which isn’t the case), it’s still $90 per year.  So I may have missed lots of tutorial and explainer articles talking about why LR is such a great program.  My impression of it was of a Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw.  So I didn’t really see the point of paying $200 for that when those programs work just fine for me.  It also seemed to straddle some Photoshop territory and I just couldn’t figure it out.

Happy Year of the Ox!

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 bought it off of iTunes and then tried to watch it in iTunes.  It was skipping and stuttering worse than a Youtube video.  It was reminding me of the old dialup days when the buffer would keep running out.  Any TV show I have ever downloaded for free off the net has not had this problem - it has played flawlessly - even if it was an HD recording.  So why should I pay $2 for a stuttering video when I could get it for free and have HD quality??  And I’m not the only one - I searched the web and  3 million pages came up on this issue.  The solution was to play it in Quicktime, outside of iTunes.  This is ridiculous - pay content should NEVER be worse quality than free content if you want people to pay.  That is, after all, how the free market works.