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.

Hey Everyone! Yesterday my server died. I finally bit the bucket and rented a VPS. Sadly this means that I am no longer hosting my own site on my own personal server. However, hopefully this will translate to greater reliability for you guys. You no longer have to go through my POS home router and crappy comcast upload speeds. So I hope it’s a better, faster experience for you guys now. It’s great to be back!!!

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 the case.  Ever since the beginning of DRM on video games there have been people getting around it.  These DRM schemes are not cheap.  They are licensed from companies who tell the video game companies that this is the only way to protect their games.

Now that I have “I’m Not Mad” caught up for the next month, I thought it was an OK time to upgrade to Fedora 10.  Unlike with the Fedora 9 release, there haven’t been huge complaints of the upgrade causing the system to become unusable.  (Most, though not all, of that came from the version of X.org that Fedora 9 used)

As usual, I followed instructions at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq and I started the yum upgrade command at 1852.  KDE basket-contact gave me dependency errors so I had to uninstall it.  It had been giving me problems with updates as well - I had just forgotten about it.   1854 - started upgrade again.    This time a problem with gstreamer - I think gstreamer gives me problems every upgrade.  So I remove gstreamer08-plugins.  (Which was apparently hanging around from fedora 6).  This also got rid of some more gstreamers packages hanging around from Fedora 5.  Don’t know why I still had that kruft there, but it’s gone now…  1859 - started yum upgrade again.  This time it works!  2.8 GB!  Well, it’s certainly the least painful yum upgrade process I’ve gone through yet - at least from this point in the process.  The download process seems to be moving along pretty quickly.  I guess getting that “fastest mirror” package out with Fedora 9 really does find the fastest mirror.  Also, this far out from the Fedora 10 release, there shouldn’t be too many people hogging up the mirrors.  What am I looking forward to in Fedora 10?  Oddly, not much.  Compared to previous releases, there isn’t any one technology I’m very excited about for Fedora 10.  Sure, it’ll be nice to have the latest Gnome, but that release is so incremental, I doubt I’ll notice much.  The latest KDE MIGHT be enough to finally get me back to KDE.  KDE 4.1 was good, but not good enough.  Other than that it’ll just be nice to have the latest stuff.  Something I can do every 6 months or so with Linux and only every five or more years with Windows.

Welcome to 2009!