After having so much fun with the iTunes software in Windows (especially Vista), I decided a change needed to happen. On Friday on bought a Zune. So far my experience has been most enjoyable, despite the fact that the Zune software isn’t even supported on Vista yet. But there are workarounds.

Here’s some reasons why I’m digging the Zune over the iPod right now:

• On setup, the Zune software found all of my iTunes music and imported it. It even imported my playlists and song ratings, thankfully. I’d hate to have to re-rate all my songs (it took me months!) The import process took a while, but that was to be expected, since I have nearly 20,000 songs.
• The Zune plays all the same formats of the iPod and more (Windows Media Audio.) I was worried that the Zune would have to convert the MPEG4/AAC (.m4a) files that iTunes ripped into a format that it could play… but no, it just works!
• I had to re-create my “smart playlists” (Zune’s software calls them Auto Playlists.) No biggie. The rule engine looks a little different than smart playlists, but it works the same. I was able to set my few smart playlists back up in minutes.
• The sync speed is crazy fast. To sync around 2000 songs, it only took about 10 minutes. If I hook it back up and sync it again (with no changes), it syncs in less than a second. Woot. On my iPod, iTunes would sit there for minutes trying to sync up all the data, even if nothing changed.
• For some reason, the Zune software wants to convert most of my music videos/movies to a Zune-compatable format. I suspect this is because I did not encode the MPEG-4 video in the proper resolution/bitrate that the Zune supports. I’ll have to do more research on this to see exactly what’s up.
• The Zune interface blows the iPod’s away. It’s way more graphical, and the “sideways menus” are much more friendly than having to go “up” a menu on an iPod. For example, when I choose “music” from the main menu, I’m taking to a series of menus at the top (selectable by using the left and right keys), and the list of the currently selected menu item. Hitting left and right, I can switch between artists, albums, playlists, genres and songs. On the iPod, I would have had to go “up” in the menu structure to change what category to search by.
• When music is playing, the album art takes up about 80% of the screen. Hitting the center button “zooms in” on the artwork and overlays a menu allowing you to change the song’s rating, turn shuffle and repeat on/off, send the file to a friend, or flag the song. The “flag” feature lets you set aside some songs for whatever purpose you wish. Maybe you just really dig those tracks, or you want to flag them to be deleted, whatever.
• Photos and video look great. You turn the Zune sideways to watch them. There is a small indentation in the back of the Zune (underneath the controls) so your hand can more comfortably grip the Zune when it’s sideways. Neat.

And to be fair, here are some of my gripes thus far:

• The Zune software “monitors” folders for changes, which I kinda dig, but at the same time, I’m used to how iTunes does it. Maybe I haven’t found out how to do this yet, but I don’t think there’s a way to just import a single song/picture/video into your library. You have to put it into one of your monitored folders. I want to be able to just drag something onto the Zune software, and have it imported/copied to my library.
• Can’t rip directly to AAC/MPEG4 format. You have to choose between WMA, WMA lossless and MP3. The MP3 encoder they use isn’t the best (LAME would be much better.) So I’m stuck using WMA at 192kbps, which sounds great, by the way. Just a different format to get used to, I guess.
• More to come in time…

After going back and forth with MySpace’s lovely tech. support, it seems they have finally cancelled my account. Thank God— good riddance and all that. Let it be known that it’s taken me an entire month to cancel my account, and at least 6 e-mails back and forth. I dread to think what a parent would have to go through to get their child’s account cancelled…

Please, leave the sinking ship that is MySpace. If you have kids, explain to them why it sucks, and why they should ignore the sexually-themed advertisements on the site. If you run a network at a company, why are you wasting the bandwidth?

And this shall probably be the last post on the subject of MySpace.

http://www.digg.com/politics/90_Million_Americans_Believe_Government_Behind_9_11

Ahh, the internet. It makes everyone a certifiable structural engineer, fireman, policeman, etc…

Forget Occam’s Razor. It’s clearly a government conspiracy! OMGZ!!!

Do a little research before using the conspiracy card, eh guys? And no, “Loose Change” doesn’t count. Check out “Screw Loose Change” to counter that. Next, please?

http://www.filmz.ru/pub/8/7626_1.htm has six photos from Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End. They’re pretty much the same outfits and very “teasery”, but cool non-the-less. My favorite shot is the one to the right… click it to make it bigger.

F-Secure writes about a brand new MySpace worm that is making its way like crazy throughout profiles. It spreads by executing a bit of JavaScript embedded in a Quicktime file. And of course, users can embed whatever objects they want on their pages!

Spyware Sucks has a write-up sharing my same thoughts of MySpace: block it from your networks now. If you have kids, educate them about the badness of the site and get them off of it. If you’re in charge of IT at a company, filter it out.

Unless you want to stick with a website that sends password information unencrypted, lets its usernames and passwords get phished, and semi-knowingly exposes (and possibly infects) a million users to an old exploit via a banner ad.

Sheesh.

I’m almost at my wit’s end with iTunes. Syncing my iPod for the first time this week (with just music and pictures) took all day (~8 hours.) Totally unacceptable. I don’t believe this is problem is specific to Vista, because XP was slow as well for me; it just wasn’t this slow.

My installation of Vista has the latest Intel chipset drivers, ensuring my hard drive is reading/writing as fast as possible, so that’s not the problem. Check out my Vista experience rating to confirm this… 5.7 out of 6 for hard disk speed:

Furthermore, none of the other “heavy” applications I run have experienced a slowdown in going from XP to Vista. In fact, Photoshop seems to be running faster, as do my video games (Oblivion’s level transitions are super fast now!)

Looking around the web for iTunes+slow posts, I came up with this forum post from someone experiencing very-slow network share access under iTunes. Funny enough, I had this exact problem a year or so ago, and ended up ditching my network audio drive, instead copying all the files to my local hard drive. When that still wasn’t speedy enough, I reconfigured my hard drives into RAID0, with very little improvement in speed.

Scott Hanselman also recently wrote a post about iTunes 7 and slowness. He comments more on the UI aspect of iTunes sucking more under Windows/Vista, and I have to agree. Re-sizing the iTunes window is terribly slow, as is the “filtering on the fly” of search results, etc. — in general, iTunes’s speed is a joke.

So what can Apple do to speed things up?

• Implement a real database back-end that will keep track of your files, metadata and thumbnails, making searches more “realtime”.
• Utilize the new Windows Presentation Framework (it’s what gives Vista its flashy interfaces) to make the interface. WPF will even work on XP (via .NET 3.0) so I don’t know why Apple is holding out on this one. Resizing delays, window redraws, etc. would become a thing of the past.
• Optimize the code for Windows. I have a hard time believing that Apple is doing all they can to squeeze performance out of Windows. This might be off-topic a bit, but even though my machine exceeds the minimum requirements put forth by Apple, my machine still cannot play 1080p Quicktime7 video without “pausing” every couple of seconds, yet my machine can handle 1080p WMV-HD just fine. Something is wrong with that picture.

So clearly, iTunes is doing something wrong here and Apple needs to address it. Apple has a feedback form for Vista and Quicktime, so if you’re having problems too, you should fill it out, cross your fingers, and hope your e-mail actually goes to someone who gives a darn.

Apparently disabling UAC had a weird side-effect: Onfolio doesn't work anymore! Onfolio is a Windows Live Toolbar add-on that displays RSS feeds in a "newspaper" format inside of Internet Explorer. If you turn off UAC, Onfolio's newspapers no longer work, and show script errors. Arg... why!?

So I guess UAC will have to be on for now, and I'll just deal with the iTunes problems for now, and hope Apple fixes it soon.

Update: Please check out my other entry involving poor speed in general with iTunes 7 and Vista.

Running with the default Vista installation, you get a feature called User Account Control, which basically lets you be an Administrator on the machine (like you were by default in XP), but every program you run will run in the context of a normal user, in order to prevent programs from having too much access to parts of the operating system, say, a virus or spyware.

It seemed to work okay, only running into a problem with a few programs. There's an option for programs that won't behave that can force the program to run as an administrator, and that usually takes care of the problem. iTunes, though, complains that it's in "compatability mode". Also, every now and then inside of iTunes, it will pop up an error saying that it could not write to the iTunes library. This causes you to lose any new files you just added, etc.-- major bummer.

Searching Google for iTunes and Vista doesn't really yield any valuable results, and I have to run iTunes.. just no way around it for my iPod.. so I had to disable UAC. I probably was going to disable it anyway, being a "advanced user", but for typical PC users, I can see UAC being a great tool in preventing bad software from affecting your operating system.

Anyway, hopefully this blog entry is helpful to anyone else who stumbles on this problem, and hopefully Apple's next version of iTunes takes care of the problems..

This past weekend, I wiped my laptop and main machine clean at home and installed the final version of Vista, available from MSDN if you have a subscription.

I'm loving it so far, but I ran into some hard drive problems along the way.. namely one of my hard drives dying in the middle of installing iTunes. Joy! Not Vista's fault, though.

Anyway, Vista's start menu is completely different from XP, and by default always shows the top used applications. You have to click "All Programs" to see your full start menu. And the view then switches to a single scrolling list, with folders that expand inside this list. What's been driving me crazy is that clicking/hovering to open the start menu folders takes seconds. CPU usage goes to 100%, and the start menu becomes sluggish while this happens. Then the folder opens. Unacceptable.

I did a search on Google, and funny enough, people have been having this problem since early betas of Vista. It's crazy that it hasn't been fixed in the final, but here's hoping Microsoft releases some quick fix later on, and preferably before the January public release, hrm?

In the meantime, like that forum post suggests, if you go into your start menu options and turn off the highlighting of new programs, it solves the problem. I'm guessing that Vista is trying to look up the "last modified date" of every start menu item on the fly, and that's causing the delay?

You've probably heard about this video floating around YouTube of UCLA police officers using a taser on a suspect:

Let's just cut right to it. My thoughts:

• Based on this clip, we don't get a full picture of what happened. According to "news sources" the guy was not supposed to be in the CLICC area after 11 without a student ID. He was asked to leave, and did not do so in a timely manner, so UCPD was called in. This video seems to start a little while after the initial confrontation. Who knows how he acted to the cops initially. And as any decent officer will tell you, treat them with respect, and they'll show the same. I'm sure this guy didn't, based off of my next point...
• "DON'T. TOUCH. ME. Don't touch me. Don't touch me." while being escorted out of the building. That's just dumb. If an officer has his hand on you to escort you out, you need to just relax and be escorted out. Don't insult him, or pull away and tell him to not touch you. Put yourself in the mind of the officer, here. This guy is being uncooperative, and keeps trying to pull away from you. He's not in cuffs at this point (as far as I can tell in the video) so who knows if he has any weapons he could reach for, etc.
• The Taser is used, and he screams "I have a medical condition! Here's your patriot act! Here's your fucking abuse of power! I'm not fighting you! I said I would leave! I said... I... WOULD... LEAVE. I got tased for no reason.. I was leaving this god-forsaken place, you stopped me, you're abusing your power. Here's your justice.." Yeah, you were really complying when you were yelling at the officers and pulling away from them, genius. And way to make this a patriot act issue-- that's just odd. Kind of like you wanted to make a scene? Hrm. As for the medical condition comment, what medical condition keeps you from complying with the officers? Is it something breathing-related? Because you seem to be having no problem screaming yourself hoarse.
• And what happens when the officers tell him to stand up? He tells them to fuck off. Wrong move, buddy. That's just disrespectful! And would it have been so hard to get up? I am reading all over the web that people claim that being tased immobilizes you for minutes, and you can't stand up or anything. I happen to know a sheriff deputy who has been tased (and has tased others) and knows this claim is bogus. Most officers go through training and get tased themselves so they know exactly what it does to the body and how it feels. Go ahead and do a search on YouTube for "taser" (and no, a stungun is not a taser.) Watch how quickly people can recover once the juice is done.
• If you're not in the know, a taser fires two "dart" type projectiles with barbs on the end that try and catch the person's clothing or skin. These darts have long wires connected to them (that stay in the ammo pack in the gun) that deliver the actual shock to the person. Once a taser is fired, and the probes are stuck in someone, as long as the trigger is held down, a cycle occurs: the initial shock is sent (several seconds) and then several 1.8 second bursts are sent. The initial shock is going to make your muscles and body involuntarily tense up. The follow up shocks are going to keep you from ripping the probes off your body. Anyhow. Update: There are reports that the taser was used in "drive-stun" mode, which is the secondary-fire essentially of a taser, where the front of the taser is pressed directly against the subject, no probes involved. This causes localized pain in the area being hit, but does not incapacitate like a full taser probe-hit would. This doesn't really change anything in my opinion, and makes an even greater case for him being able to still physically comply with the demands.
• People constantly criticize the police's use of taser weapons. What-- you'd rather they had used lethal force in those cases? I hate to break it to you, but your odds of taking a taser hit and surviving 100% undamaged are waaaay better than having a police officer shoot you. As most police forces train to shoot-to-kill (and not to "wound"), I find the non-lethal approach a good stopping/compliance method for police to employ.
• The people crowding around didn't help this particular situation, and I'm sure that's why quite a few more police officers showed up to calm the scene. And of course they keep yelling they want badge numbers, etc.-- what would they do with them anyway? They could request a copy of the police report and get them that way, as well. This isn't some undercover operation, or anything. Sheesh. I'm reading on many blogs that the general sentiment is that the crowd should have overpowered the police and protected this suspect. Hah.

In general, I agree with the amount of force deployed/shown in the video. If the suspect had just cooperated from the start, none of that would have happened. And don't try to turn this into a racial/Islam issue, ugh.

Update: Michelle Malkin picked up on the story, and got some feedback from an officer.

Police officers that attempt to match a person’s resistance with the same amount of force all to often end up in litigation or dead.

Wow. I am just speechless right now. I’ll let you read the response that MySpace’s technical support gave me regarding the cancellation of my account:

Hello,

If you wish to terminate your MySpace Account, start by clicking on "Home" in the top navigation menu from any MySpace web page. Once on your personal home page, click on "Account Settings," appearing in the upper left portion of the page, next to your picture. Click on the "Cancel Account" link. You can find it above the "My Account Settings" box. This will link you to the "Cancel My Account" page. There click on the "Cancel My Account" button. Your MySpace Account has now been deleted. Keep in mind, canceling your MySpace account will permanently remove all of your profile information from MySpace, including your photographs, comments, journals, and your personal network of friends. This information cannot be restored. You may re-register your current email address after canceling, but you will need to rebuild your personal network from scratch.

If for some reason you should be unable to delete the account, provide the email plus password for your profile and we will cancel it for you. If you don't remember the password or it has been changed, please send us a salute as verification and we can remove the account.

To send a salute, please do the following:

Create a hand written sign that says MySpace.com and your friend ID. Your friend ID is the number between ID= and &mytoken in your profile's URL.

Get an image, or digital picture of yourself with this hand written sign.

This is image is a salute. Next, reply to this e-mail with the salute as an e-mail attachment, or as an e-mail link to where it is uploaded.

If this does not answer your question, please click:

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.contact

Thank you,
MySpace.com

What the.. so let me get this straight. I can’t use the automatic function to cancel my account, which is what I e-mailed support in the first place with; indicating that this is a standard response letter. Okay, no biggie. They say I need to e-mail them my password and e-mail address, and they’ll delete it. Okay, I already e-mailed you from that specific e-mail address, asking to be deleted. Why do you need my password too? Ugh.

Furthermore, if you forgot your password, you’re supposed to take a picture of yourself, holding up a sign with “MySpace.Com” and your profile ID? Wow. That just blows my mind. I won’t even get into privacy implications.. why they need a picture of yourself.. and who recieves/views/stores these photos.

I’m reminded of Vinny’s fun time at trying to cancel his father’s AOL account. JUST CANCEL MY ACCOUNT.

MySpace is scum. Block it from your computers, especially if you have young children. If you’re running the network at a business and haven’t blocked it yet, shame on you.

I tried to delete my account. They send you an e-mail with some sort of confirmation link, which of course, I never receive... probably the same broken e-mail logic that doesn't send me an e-mail when I want to change my e-mail address. So, in their support section it says to e-mail them directly from the e-mail address the account is under, and they'll cancel it manually. It's been a week, and still no deletion!

So I decided to just make my account "dead"; remove everything from it, remove all my friends, remove my "real name" so people can't find me on there, etc... After I'm done with all that, I go back to my home page and see:

Apparently I "haven't added any friends yet", but I have 13 friends.

And that, my friends, is reason #46835 why MySpace sucks.

Okay, I get like a million people a day hitting my old blog post about Fergie's "London Bridge" song and it's lame lyrics.

Let's set the record straight. Of course the song has it's own Wikipedia page, so here goes.

According to Fergie herself, the song refers to a sex act whereby two women and two men form a bridge-like shape during intercourse

Of course. Thanks Fergie. You're charming and sophisticated!

While I'm ranting about her lameness, has anyone heard her new "single", Fergalicious? Just how many songs can she steal on one track? I heard at least 3 freestyle beats, including J.J. Fad's "Super Sonic" and Afro-Rican's "Give It All You Got". This just proves she's a talentless hack riding on the success of Black Eyed Peas, and using mostly sex to sell records.

Okay, this is my last video post of the night. Sorry!

I couldn't find any detailed links about these, but they seem a bit dangerous. But then again, I'm sure there are giant warning signs and such saying to stay away unless you have the proper dood-dad to lower them.

Reminds me of the hundreds of tiny toll-road pop-up things here in the US, to block off toll roads when they aren't in use. But they are flexible...

If you've never done the "match wizard of Oz up to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon" trick... someone did it for you on Google Video. It's about 2 seconds off, though. But no biggie. You get the point.

I love MythBusters. They remind me of Mr. Wizard. If you know who that is, you get a cookie. Anyways, here's some video I found on YouTube of MythBuster bloopers, as well as some more "flatus" myths that didn't make it to air, such as "Do Girls Pass Gas?" and "Can You Light Your Farts On Fire?" Hah.

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that's the War on Terror.

 

And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election.

 

If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.

 

Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case -- if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.

 

But at least there will be a chance.

 

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations.

 

But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. And since the Democratic Party seems hellbent on losing it -- and in the most damaging possible way -- I have no choice but to advocate that my party be kept from getting its hands on the reins of national power, until it proves itself once again to be capable of recognizing our core national interests instead of its own temporary partisan advantages.

 

To all intents and purposes, when the Democratic Party jettisoned Joseph Lieberman over the issue of his support of this war, they kicked me out as well. The party of Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- the party I joined back in the 1970s -- is dead. Of suicide.

Link to Civilization Watch - October 29, 2006 - The Only Issue This Election Day - The Ornery American

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been lately, since I haven’t been updating my blog… then I suggest you get out a bit more. There’s more to life than my blog!

Hah, just kidding.

Anyways, she is going to kill me for posting that photo of us, but it’s all I have right now. Heather and I have been dating for two months now, and it’s been amazing. I love her!

This is coming from a guy who thought he’d never date anyone and be alone for the rest of his life. This just proves it… girls can find geeks sexy too!

While we’re on the topic of Halloween, check out these costumes from ILM (yes, that ILM)’s Halloween party. I have to say I’m fairly partial to the Serenity-themed outfits these two are wearing. And who could resist some Monty Python knights?

Oh yeah, found this video on YouTube of an “amateur” fireworks display placed to snippets of the Haunted Mansion’s narratives and Halloween-themed music. Awesome!

Ahh, Michael Jackson – Thriller. This was before he went psycho. Check out the Wikipedia page about the video.. pretty interesting. Check out all those pop culture references.

I know the subject is kind of stating the obvious, but I’ve reached the snapping point.

A few days ago, I realized my entire inbox contained all the mail I had ever received. It wasn’t that surprising (and was what I was expecting), I just didn’t think MySpace would work that way, and instead would clear it out after xx days, like they do with bulletins, etc.. anyhow, since there’s no “delete all” (???) I had to manually delete hundreds of e-mails.

After clearing out about half of my mail, it would come back with “Page 1” and there would be no mail on the screen, just the “next page” link. Huh? Clicking “next page” took me to another page of e-mail, this time with actual mail on it to delete. I repeat this, until I get to about 6 pages or so left, but each page is completely blank. This leads me to conclude that:

1) MySpace doesn’t actually delete the e-mail permanently, and is instead setting a flag or something (DeletedFlag?) in the database that indicates the mail is deleted.
2) MySpace’s inbox “pager” which generates page numbers and forward/back links is most likely not factoring in the DeletedFlag.

So that’s one issue to report to the support department.. as well as another issue I’ve been having involving changing my e-mail address— I simply can’t do it. MySpace claims it sends my new e-mail address a confirmation number, but I don’t get it. MySpace’s mail servers never even connect to my mail server.

So anyhow, I send the e-mail to support, expecting to never hear back, but surprisingly, I got an e-mail yesterday with just “We’re working on it. Thanks, MySpace Support”. Wow, thanks for the detailed and professional response. And what are you working on exactly? My InBox problem or the e-mail thing? *shrug* It looks like they meant the InBox problem, because the page numbers are gone today from my InBox, and it truly looks empty.

Moving on, this is what set me off tonight:

This problem has been happening since MySpace started, and Tom’s just now making it an announcement? Nevermind how unprofessional it is. (all lowercase??)

If you read his blog entry, he talks about how people are making fake MySpace login pages (sometimes even using a MySpace profile itself to fake a login screen.. hahahaha!)

Look at the right hand side.. “check her for latest info” ? Did you mean check HERE, Tom? Or perhaps I am indeed supposed to check “her” for latest info?

I notice that my scrollbar on this blog entry is tiny.. the page must have tons of comments on it. Scroll down.. nope, only showing 48 per page. Turns out it’s the ENTIRE list of “Who Gives Kudos”, on each comment page. Like anyone cares. Why must it show the entire list? Why not show like the first 10, and then have a “show the rest” link, like the rest of the web does?

I posted a comment/reply to his blog, but it’s doubtful that he’ll respond. Here goes:

Tom,

Why not implement something like Yahoo does, that shows a custom piece of text or image on the login form (set by the user) in order to prove it's from Yahoo.com's login service.

Also, why are you letting profiles get created/modified in order to look like a log-in page? Some simple HTML filtering would take care of that. Or perhaps you could add a "report this profile" link to the page somewhere-- I've run across numerous profiles that violate the terms of use, either with pornography or other things, yet I have no way of easily reporting them.

And while I'm rambling, why do you allow sites to place their tags/crap all over the auto-generated profile code? Why not clean that up or disallow it completely? That's where most extra advertisements, tracking cookies and other "iffy" things come from..

And finally, I hope you guys fixed the cross-site scripting problems? Otherwise, that would explain why bulletins automatically get posted to people's accounts just by visiting another "bad" site while being still logged into MySpace.

Are you looking for an ASP.Net developer in Southern California who can help? Send me some mail.

I recently had to fix a friend’s computer because they let one of their daughters view MySpace on their computer, which was running Windows XP and for some reason wasn’t running automatic updates. An advertisement, either from MySpace’s ad pool or one of the profiles she viewed exploited a flaw in Internet Explorer, and downloaded/executed a program that proceeded to download about 20 to 30 pieces of spyware, toolbars, etc. — joy! The fact that someone can put code like that on their profile is reason enough to block MySpace from your network, and not let your children near it.

The Yahoo idea I mention is actually pretty darn cool. They call it a “sign-in seal”, and it’s a user-chosen piece of text or image that will appear in the upper right corner of the login box whenever it’s an “official” Yahoo.com login accessed via your computer. The downside is that this is not “automatic” and requires the user to set it up before they get the benefit of it.. but hey, if you’re worried about your personal information, you’d want to be on top of something like this, right?

I think it makes sense, and I hope other sites start to adopt something similiar. Now, if only we could educate people on what a strong password looks like..

Update: I did a quick search on Google's blog searching engine, and found these other bloggers who seem to agree with me:

http://darkmotion.com/blog/2006/10/24/why-myspace-sucks-ass/
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2006/10/myspace_sucks.html
http://onlinecomics.blogspot.com/2006/10/myspace-sucks.html
http://josepho.wordpress.com/2006/09/09/myspace-sucks-the-saga-continues/
http://www.leliathomas.com/2006/10/16/testing-my-myspace-theory-post-3/

This is hilarious. David Zucker directed it, who also did Airplane, Naked Gun, Scary Movie..

[if you’re viewing this in a feed, click here to see the video]

Ugh. I was looking forward to UPN and WB merging, but the CW is junk. I won’t even get started on the programming (it’s bad enough on its own) but my main beef is with their “HD” content. They take standard definition shows and zoom in on them slightly, leaving small black lines on the left and right.

Lame.

Another thing… the only two shows I watch on “The CW” are Smallville (don’t make fun of me!) and Veronica Mars. Both are filmed and broadcast in HD… when The CW feels like it. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with my local carrier/affiliate, but half the time the shows remain in standard definition, with the “Available in HD” flashing at the bottom of the screen, mocking me.

Arg!

I wrote a letter to their network site, and my local affiliate, and haven’t heard back. Didn’t think they’d write me back, anyhow. What do they care? They’re getting their advertising dollars, right?

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20349888-2,00.html

Wow, bummer. I even went and saw his Crocodile Hunter movie with Jason.. he seemed like a great guy who had a big vision for educating the world about animals, often misunderstood ones.

Man, the fun never stops around them wacky MySpace offices!

P.S. — I now have a “MySpace” category on my blog. Be afraid.