http://inquisitivesensitive.blogspot.com/

Be sure to send her some love. She’s just starting out in the blogging world.

Otherwise, she’ll give you the evil eye. See evidence to the right.

The special effects in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 really blew me away in theatres. When I looked into how the Davy Jones effects were pulled off, I was amazed to find that Davy Jones is actually a fully digital actor. We’ve come a long way from the day of Jar Jar Binks, eh? ILM used Bill Nighy’s performance, dressed up in a silly suit made up of dots, to do a sort of “realtime” motion capture on the set, without needing a crazy set up of multiple cameras. Pretty cool stuff. They put together a web-site to show off the things they did for the movie. To the right is a thumbnail of their “experience” section, which allows you to roll-over the film footage to show the raw footage. Pretty nifty.

Okay, so I’ve had the Zune for a while now. Here’s some more thoughts:

• The official 1.2 version is out, supporting Vista fully. I probably shouldn’t have hacked together an installation earlier, because installing the official 1.2 version just forced me to re-do my library. Oh well, my dumb fault. Other than that, smooth sailing on the upgrade.
• There’s no way to easily define what “type” of video you’re putting on the Zune. For example, in iTunes, you could right click on a video and specify that it’s a  TV show, or a music video, or movie, etc… but not so in the Zune software, at least not yet. Microsoft has an overly-technical writeup on the Zune site on how to provide content for the Zune with the proper metadata, but this won’t be helpful to consumers at all; just those mass-producing content for the Zune. Here’s hoping a newer version fixes this problem. Also, please, let us mass-set this categorization across numerous files! In iTunes, you couldn’t just select a bunch of videos and set them all as music videos.. you had to go through them one-by-one. Ugh.
• Microsoft is fully onboard with the Zune, it seems. This is good news, and hopefully they stick to it, to keep a strong competition going with Apple.
• The software reminds me too much of Windows Media Player. It obviously was based on the WMP codebase, but there’s just some design decisions I really disagree with, such as the sidebar to the right that tries to contain a playlist editor, sync list, burn list, and “what’s playing” functionality, swapable by clicking icons above the sidebar. I just hate that sidebar, and almost always want it closed.
• Playlists do not remember what order you sort them in! This was a feature in iTunes that I used all the time, and really miss it on my Zune. In iTunes, it would remember specific sorting rules for each playlist, even smart playlists. It would also transfer this sorting to your iPod. I found a way to sort of hack-it in the Zune interface, by using the sidebar’s playlist editor, and forcing it to sort by album, etc. — but that has problems of it’s own, leading me to my next point:
• When you choose to order by “album” in the interface, you get a smart sort based on album, then track number. Good. But if you do this while making an auto playlist, like so:
  
  You do not get this smart sorting method. You instead get an album title sort, with no secondary sorts thrown in. Your tracknumbers are random, but your albums are clumped together. Huh?
• The Zune marketplace has about the same timeout problems as the iTunes store. You may double click a song to preview it, and a few seconds later get a time out message. Really annoying. Also happens if you’re downloading/buying content from the Marketplace.
• The protected Zune marketplace files are sometimes too “picky” about being re-synched to a Zune. The rules may be different for non-ZunePass files, but on mine, after 3 syncs (add it to the Zune, then remove it, etc.) to the Zune, the file will no longer transfer, and you have to re-download it. I ran into this a lot, when I first reset my Zune and re-added all of the songs… most people probably won’t run into this problem, though.
• There’s no way to select files in an auto-playlist and be able to delete them from the hard drive. If you select files when just looking at a normal playlist, or your “library” view, you can select any number of files, right click and select “delete”. You get asked if you just want to remove the files from your library, or if you want them removed from your library and hard drive as well. It would be nice to be able to do this directly from an auto-playlist. I believe I could, in iTunes.

More bulletpoints to follow as I find them. I still stick with my decision to go with the Zune, and haven’t run into any dealbreakers for me yet. Don’t take my criticism as negative press! Just small complaints.

I have to be honest, this post started as a huge rant against Creative and their "boo-hoo" attitude about Vista drivers. But I decided to instead write about the benefits that the audio changes in Vista will bring about. We should be nearing the end of the lifetime of specialized cards with dedicated APU's (audio processing units), such as the Creative X-Fi, thanks to most audio processing being shifted back to CPU's, now that dual-core and quad-core processors are a reality.

And thank goodness. I've owned about 4 Creative soundcards over the years, and they were all considered the best available at the time.. but I always had numerous problems with them, either with hardware compability or drivers. And who really is competing with Creative right now anyhow? I briefly tried a Philips soundcard, only to find that the drivers were complete junk. Should I just use my motherboard's onboard sound? That might work if I just have a stereo speaker system, but myself, and many others have 4.1, 5.1 and sometimes even 7.1 surround sound systems hooked up to our computers. Most on-board audio solutions either don't let you hook up more than 2 speakers, or they severely limit your surround capabilities.

For example, let's say I was listening to something that had a lot of bass in it. You'd expect your subwoofer to be playing back the deeper tones, right? On older multi-speaker systems, there was a crossover built into the amplifier unit that always sent certain frequencies to your subwoofer. With newer and more typical multi-speaker systems (such as those run through receivers), your amplifier is expecting you to just send the raw audio signal to your subwoofer. Creative cards such as the Audigy and X-Fi have a feature that does this for you automatically. That way the "booms" go to your subwoofer instead of wimply trying to be recreated by your tiny cube speakers. Most on-board sound cards do not have this feature! It just isn't in their hardware at all.

But thanks to Vista's new audio stack, you'll be able to get this feature "for free", as well as other enhancements:

Bass Management does what I was just describing, essentially acting as a cross-over for all audio passing through your speakers. It defaults to 80Hz, which may be just coincidence, but it’s what THX recommends if you’re using all-THX approved hardware/speakers. Most people are not. So you may want to up it to 100 or 120, which is what most people are using anyway. Check your actual speaker’s specifications to see what frequencies the speakers and subwoofer can reproduce and go from there. In the “settings” panel for this enhancement, you are able to adjust the crossover, change the room size (unknown what effect this has), and inverse the subwoofer’s polarity.

Speaker Fill allows you to “upmix” a stereo signal into more than 2 speakers. With this option enabled, there are no settings you can change. It just automagically happens. It seems to do a fairly decent job, and is comparable to the “CMSS” feature found on Creative soundcards. Liken it to a version of “Dolby Pro-Logic” for all your audio content.

Room Correction is a pretty exciting feature that is usually only found in high-end receivers. It allows you to use your computer’s microphone, placed at eye/head level, to automatically have Vista calculate what delay and amplification each speaker should have. This is very important in order to ensure that an equal sound level is coming from all speakers based on your regular listening position. My harmon/kardon receiver has this feature built into the remote, and it made a huge difference for me in setting up my speakers initially.

Loudness Equalization is essentially a real-time soft compression on all audio, making all sound stay at a constant level, whether it’s blaring or quiet. This comes in handy for watching videos, etc. where the volume may be different for each one.

I went looking on the web to see if anyone else had done an extensive write-up on Windows Vista’s audio stack, from more of a consumer perspective, but didn’t come up with much. I found some very technical documentation on Microsoft’s site, as well as a write up from Microsoft’s Larry Osterman regarding what’s changed in Vista versus XP. I also found an article on ExtremeTech about gaming audio and Vista, which is a subject I was very interested in, because I play a lot of PC games.

When Microsoft announced the new Vista audio stack, they also dropped a “bombshell” — DirectSound3D could no longer be accelerated by hardware. This meant that those shiny Audigy, X-Fi, etc. cards were now semi-useless. You can read all about it on the OpenAL site. I’ve already run into this problem myself. I installed Dungeon Siege II and fired it up, went into the options and tried to turn EAX on, only to have the game tell me I don’t have EAX hardware. Huh? Well, the lack of hardware acceleration explains it. Creative is suggesting that everyone move to the “OpenAL” model of sound acceleration, which only recently (past 2 years or so?) started to get used by developers. Here’s hoping that the development studios are paying attention to this technical paradigm shift, and are planning accordingly.

According to the ExtremeTech article, Creative is working on a “wrapper” to emulate full DirectSound and pass those calls to the OpenAL driver, in order to fix these older games. Here’s hoping it works. It would be a shame to lose EAX/3D audio on almost 80% of my games…

I remember when Half-Life 2 was about to come out.. I was shocked that Valve wasn’t implementing EAX support into the game. But then I realized that they were actually doing something better for the consumer by allowing any audio chipset to reproduce the game’s sound effects. That’s why right now, in Vista, I can run HL2 on both my X-Fi and on-board audio and get the same great sound quality out of both, with full effects in 5.1. And that’s the way it should be, in my humble opinion.

That’s him on the right, supposedly. Enjoy!

Was digging through my old photos today, and found a long-lost image from the ol’ western days of an ancient relative (on the right) and his gang of troublemakers:

Man, those were the days. Look at all those money bags! And his gal sure is pretty…

For some reason, sometimes older entries (like my Halloween ones) show up on LiveJournal again as if they were brand new posts.

I have no idea why that happens, and it seems like a bug in their code. Just check the date on them.. hopefully LJ is showing that right?

She’s been begging me to put up a more recent/better photo of us, so here goes

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.