January 5, 2007
A Matter of Authentication
I’m turning anyone-comments off. This journal has become mainly a spam-trap and I don’t have the time yet to commit to solutions, so if you do want to say something you’ll need to get a TypeKey from SixApart. I apologize to the people who distrust any sort of tracking method.
Mainly people seem to come here for the post Academic Funding Frustration, a warning to people about agressive sales techniques during a vulnerable time.
In short, don’t let anybody push you around.
Posted by jenkins at 4:39 PM | Comments (0)
December 27, 2006
Blue Christmas
This year we had a very blue Christmas. Water’s blue, right? We had a lot of that. It wasn’t the nice, soothing warm water of late autumn that we’ve had around here lately, but the hard, I-want-to-be-snow (or-at-least-sleet) water come spring. A gray, drizzly day is not the best way to greet the most familial day of the year, whether your family is connected by genetics or friendship.
Fortunately, I have nephews, and it’s great to be jumped on by a pair of excitable boys who want to drag you into their world of Christmas-time greed first thing in the morning (but not, thanks to efforts of their parents, at 6 am). So it rained, and rained, and rained some more, and I hoped that all that rain wouldn’t turn to ice in the evening, but it felt like Christmas and for that it could be as blue as it wanted outside.
Posted by jenkins at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
November 28, 2006
MacHeist: Falsities of Value
Recently I started paying attention to the Delicious Generation interactive advertisement, MacHeist, taking half an attempt to their puzzles and seeing which shareware apps are offered as prizes.
But not is all as it seems behind the vault…
The list isn't bad. Alarm Clock Pro, Soulver, Cha-Ching. These are apps that have either been done before or serve a very niche role. But that doesn't matter because they're free? Right? On top of that, each puzzle gives me $2 off some super-bundle to come at the end. In fact, the current MacHeist list I have so far says that I have $144.75 for free. Wow.
I'm put in mind of the economy of digital theft. Music and movie industry representatives put great store in saying how much money they lost over pirated content, as though "lost" is the same as "never had". In the case of MacHeist, I'm being told I have $144.75 in shareware, only somehow it's become the opposite of digital theft. I'm being told someone's stuffing huge wads of dollar bills into my pocket, or at least software of equal value.
The reality is a little different. Of the nine programs currently on the list, one of them comes with a serial number and can be upgraded and the others are locked to that version. And that upgradable app? Yeah, it's in beta. There's no telling whether or not the serial number will extend to the finished program. So what I have, in fact, is my choice of limited trial licenses, billed at current application price. From a marketing standpoint it's a great idea, and I applaud it, but just as the music industry is overvaluing their loss, these companies are overvaluing my gain.
Now, I know these are shareware companies and they're unlikely to come beating down my door for not paying, but to tell me that I have a $25 app when I have maybe half of that is worth a healthy eye-roll. When I pay for a program I'm not just paying for the effort you put into making it, but I'm also paying for the effort of getting all the bugs out and the security that if I do have a major problem with the app you'll do something about it. I may or may not be paying for the extra features to come later, but that gamble is on my shoulders. My eye-rolling comes from billing functional demos as full-priced apps.
There are kickers to this, but they're hardly worth in-depth study. I'm unlikely to use all of these applications. I'm certainly unlikely to get more than 15% off the final package, because nobody is going to pay for crippled software and the Delicious Generation programmers are quickly learning that giving things away for substantially cheaper or free is a huge gamble.
Because I'd only play around with these programs, having them limited in scope is quite alright, and the companies get exposure to people who might then pony up $20 for the full thing, so in a way, everyone wins. They're big demos, presented in a fun way, with an increasingly active community of junior sleuths. Do we get something for our troubles? Oh yes, but it's worth about as much as we put into it, and that's not $144.75.
Posted by jenkins at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)
November 8, 2006
Lever, Button, Cookie
Yes, yes, I voted, stop hounding me! I voted so hard my state turned blue! Some people might not think voting yourself blue is something to be proud of, and might think of sending me a hand-creme or something so it doesn’t happen again, but it’s good to finally get that kind of release.
The tool I used to get myself raw with delight was not in fact made by the infamous Diebold but instead was made well-enough that other people (who were voting themselves either red or blue, since that seems to be the way of things these days) noticed that the machines were turning them the opposite color desired. I say: If you’re going to get raw on a machine, you’d better be sure it works.
So now I’m going to coddle my blue state until I’m over it.
Posted by jenkins at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2006
Capsule Review: Dead Man’s Chest
Did I like it? Yes. Was it as good as the first? No. Read on for my 99% Spoiler-Free review.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is a fun movie about love interrupted, greed, and doing the right thing. Surprisingly, not the Disney version of "doing the right thing" but a version more closely in line with the real world. Dead Man's Chest is much darker but, unfortunately, weaker version of the original.
The Good: ILM is not always dead-on (The Mummy Returns, for instance), but except in very few cases here they've absolutely nailed the special effects. The story is good, but Jack Sparrow is much more of a bumbling buffoon than drunken master in deference to focus more upon the Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann characters - and a few other re-appearances. The story isn't much about Jack at all, but that's okay.
The Bad: The things that Disney shoves down your throat, which they don't do in the first movie because they didn't expect it to succeed this well. But now they have you, and they're going to do things to you that you don't necessarily want. The fortunate part is they don't do it much, which takes the pressure off. There are enough that different people will see different problems, and some that I didn't notice, just be warned that they're there.
The Ugly: I didn't like how in Matrix Revolutions the movie ended and they tacked on an extra five-minute teaser scene in attempt to tie it into the next movie. I don't like it here, either. It's not the cliffhanger it is in Matrix II but it can't help but smack of "oh no, what will happen next!"
In second place is that it is not always clear where people are.
Defining Moment: Will Turner, looking for Jack Sparrow, very quickly goes through the first half of the first movie in about thirty seconds. You might miss it. Dead Man's Chest has a lot of this; every so often there's something - from a nod to a scene that's uncomfortably out-of-place - that harkens back to the first movie, to the original Pirates ride, or both.
And, as in X3, stay to the end for fun, after-credits huzzah.
Posted by jenkins at 3:32 PM | Comments (0)
April 29, 2006
Click-Click, Snap-Snap
Hey, everybody! When you go on a trip and take hundreds and hundreds of pictures, it’s difficult to pare those down to enough that your free Flickr account doesn’t have a fit, but I think I’ve managed to get across the idea that I like museums more than soccer. Not that I don’t like soccer, but in the right places soccer is just a gateway drug to museums.
Posted by jenkins at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2006
Academic Funding Frustration
I’ve been casually looking into alternate ways to pay back my student loans when I was approached by a loan consolidation company known as Academic Funding Foundation. They tried to push me to do everything over the phone so all I had to do was sign the contract and Fed-Ex it back to them, to which I kindly declined until I could find out more about the company.
It turns out that nobody knows much about the company, not even the Better Business Bureau. Huge warning signs, big and red flapping in gale-force winds. So I asked: How do I know you’re legit? Their answer: We’re working with graces from the Federal Government. My retort: Prove it.
I’m still getting phone calls, almost daily, asking if I have any questions. Today I said, “Yes, and you should know what they are by now.” I should just tell them to take me off their list, but it’s now a test. Can they prove they have the backing of the Federal Government to properly handle my student loans?
Posted by jenkins at 2:53 PM | Comments (6)
November 11, 2005
Not-So Capsule Review: The Legend of Zorro
(For those unaware, sometimes I see a movie and want to either praise it or warn people about it, without - if possible - giving anything away. Plus, Stella tells me I don’t write enough.)
Synopsis:
Originally, I heard that this movie would be called Zorro’s Last Ride and I was pretty excited. I enjoyed the dark-suffering-into-something-better of the first movie, The Mask of Zorro, in much the same way that I enjoyed Batman Begins. I thought: Ahha, they’ve taken the story to the end, and we’ll see what kinds of troubles Zorro has in ending his career. That they changed the name of the movie to The Legend Of Zorro only suggests that a studio executive somewhere wants the option to continue the franchise.
The story is exactly that: What would make Zorro take off the mask for good?
The Good:
As far as I can tell, the movie's set and costuming is historically accurate, with a bit of Hollywood polish. Catherine Zeta-Jones is particularly fitting in them -- er, fits in them particularly well. Er, I mean, I like Catherine as an actress and respect her talent, when she bothers to give it. I liked it in The Mask of Zorro and I liked it here.
Antonio Banderas can probably stand around smoking a cigarette and be paid millions for being suave. In this movie, he gets drunk, despondent, angry, and comedic. He gets to be a caring father, a jealous husband and Zorro. It's not as deep or as intense as his first Zorro movie, but it's definitely, even definitively broader.
The Bad:
They've completely ignored the tone and theme of first movie. Forget you saw it, if you did. You'd be better off watching the classic Disney Zorro series to see what happened in the intervening years. What I'm saying here is that this is a family movie. (I didn't know! I swear I didn't know! Oh, God, why didn't anyone warn me?) There will be no Alejandro de la Vega standing atop a wall in his Zorro gear, in the rain, having lost everything, bleeding but still fighting on. Nope, no Dark Hero Symbolism we get in the first movie. None of it.
The Ugly:
The movie is confused as to what it really wants to be. It's like those movies that are really two TV shows thrown together and slapped on the screen. So you have three episodes of Antonio Banderas As Zorro slapped on the screen, apparently written by three different writers. Part One: Zorro v. Culture. Part Two: The Ugly West. Part Three: The Train Job. Worse than that, each part has a subtly different mood.
Defining Moment:
A drunk de la Vega sitting on a drunk horse, leaning both against a wall. This kind of thing, though rampant, was not played up near enough; don't people know slapstick is timeless? When you go comedy, go gold!
A close second was the introduction of Alejandro and Elena's son, Joaquin (pronounced "Wakeem", which confused my not-at-all-hispanic-cultured self until it was explained to me). Joaquin is a real life hero. Now we're building up an interesting mythos, something the movie itself, alas, fails to do.
Finally, the use of an obviously laser-printed symbol in an otherwise obviously hand-illuminated Bible page takes the cake as "worst use of art department ever". This is a very pretty movie to watch, which makes it all the more jarring.
Conclusion:
The Legend of Zorro is a dull, safe movie where not very exciting things happen to our daring heros. Elena (Mrs. Zorro) is not as daring as the ads make her out to be, but more daring than anything Disney would put out without being pushed. The number of deaths can be counted on one hand. I walked out of the theatre and almost immediately forgot what the movie was about.
As a family movie, however, The Legend of Zorro deserves five stars. It's safe without being too safe, calm without being too calm, and teaches rebellion as an acceptable way to either have fun or save the day. There is probably just enough black-and-white morality to make many parents happy, but enough gray to keep a kid thinking.
And not just about Zeta-Jones' corsets.
Posted by jenkins at 6:57 PM | Comments (1)
November 1, 2005
Pirate Prince, B.S.
Yes, it’s real. Just take a look.
As seen across time, or what should be across time, nearly ten years late.
Posted by jenkins at 5:30 PM | Comments (1)
October 3, 2005
An Ounce of Prevention
I’ll tell you what, TV Studios: I promise to watch an hour of advertisements per five hours of TV shows as long as I don’t have to watch commercials during the TV shows.
Deal?
Posted by jenkins at 9:08 PM | Comments (1)
August 22, 2005
It’s a Lulu!
Does anyone know anything about Lulu? I heard about it on a This Week In Tech podcast (you hear that, Microsoft? Podcast!) — the company apparently started by a co-founder of Red Hat.
Thanks!
Posted by jenkins at 7:02 PM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2005
You Drive Funny
“Visitors are informed that in the United Kingdom traffic drives on the left-hand side of the road. In the interests of safety, you are advised to practise this in your country of origin for a week or two before driving in the UK.”
Questions about culture often come up around me — usually because of me — and so I find it interesting to hear who drives on which side of the road and why.
Posted by jenkins at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
July 27, 2005
A Gut and Holy Nam
I don’t necessarily know where the people I know find these kinds of things, but they give them to me, and I share them with as many people as I can.
This one uses sound files to show you how the following conversation might have sounded in various points in history. It makes me wonder how it will sound a hundred years from now.
http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/gvs.html
Posted by jenkins at 9:34 PM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2005
So …
Sssssoooo…
What have you been up to lately?
Me? Oh, school. Object Oriented Analysis and Design looks to be interesting, with the theory that if you modularize the parts of the problem as well as the project, you can develop a view and documentation about the view much quicker.
Er, yeah, it doesn’t sound exciting when I read it, either.
Posted by jenkins at 1:50 AM | Comments (2)
June 12, 2005
Recursion
So, I hear that 95% of all blogs are just links.
Preposterous!
Back when the World Wide Web was loosed upon the computing colonies, I could only think, “These are just .plan files with some cool linking potential, a “what I am doing this month” concept.
Let me tell you, that feeling hasn’t changed in ten years. Livejournal, Blogger and Typepad have just made it more obvious.
My own first web site was titled “Hubris” for this reason. Everything there was about me. It’s telling that the page went unfinished for a long time.
I had a point, but you’ll have to wait for it.
Posted by jenkins at 1:18 PM | Comments (1)
June 6, 2005
Art is for the Artist
Some time I should get to showing people that I cannot, actually, draw. (I can paint.) One of the things I learned about Art School is that they expect you to actually be good at art before you show up. The word they used for me was “promising”. (The words they didn’t use with me were “willing to take your money”.)
If I were crazy enough to publish some sort of game — and why would I ever do that — I have a short list of people I couldn’t well afford to do the art. Sometimes I call this my “Web Comic Orgasm” list, not because they spend their lives doing web comics, but because that’s how I find them. And how much I like their works.
Perhaps you didn’t need to know that.
One such crazy pansy is Vera Brogsol (which looks like it rhymes with plimsoll, but I wouldn’t know).
Posted by jenkins at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)
May 21, 2005
Broken Things
Things are breaking on me this week. My calendar page (sneakily hidden, until I can get the security working again) won’t upload calendars via WebDAV, I can’t keep the screens in my apartment windows, and today one of the pedals broke off my bicycle. Gah!
Recently, big-money England football (nee soccer) team Manchester United was bought by Tampa Bay owner Malcolm Glaser. Manchester United fans are upset, to say the least. (In spite of what we might be told, most of England doesn’t really care for their neighbor across the pond.) For anyone who remembers when Japanese companies were buying United States property hand over fist, their reaction is much like ours was. Or imagine if Sony bought the Lakers. Yeah, now you’re getting it.
To add injury to more injury, during today’s FA Cup Final, the Superbowl of British football (er, soccer), Man U’s opponent’s fans taunted the team by chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” Inspiring to us, not so much to Manchester.
Posted by jenkins at 1:36 PM | Comments (0)
May 8, 2005
Smoking, Not Smoking
In spite of the fact that I believe smoking kills in horrible and inventive ways, I am nonetheless defending it in a school group project. While I don’t believe that smokers should be alienated or looked down upon, but most smokers are inconsiderate toward non-smokers. There is a certain etiquette about smoking — where you blow the smoke, when you don’t smoke, asking before you do — that is simply ignored. In the face of this, the rallying cry of, “We’re being discriminated against!” is less impressive. The flagrancy of many smokers toward non-smokers as-is borders on the profane.
Not all smokers. Just a lot of them.
Still, I fully support the smokers’ rights to smoke.
Posted by jenkins at 3:20 PM | Comments (0)