Shaun of the Dead

I am quite pleased that I actually purchased a copy of Shaun of the Dead. The movie is top notch and the special features are surprisingly good. There are a ton of out takes, extended scenes, and rather funny bits.

But what takes the cake for me is the fact that it has 5 different subtitle tracks. English, French, Spanish, Storyboard Comparison and Zomb-O-Meter.

The first three are self-explanatory. Storyboard Comparison displays an icon in the upper right-hand corner which when accessed via your DVD player's remote allows you to check out the actual storyboard for that scene. 'Flippin Sweet!' (Ref. Napoleon Dynamite)

The "Zomb-O-Meter" option is the bit of fried gold though. While watching the movie, from time to time, interesting information about the scene is posted to the screen. In fact I'm watching SOTD right now with ZOM active and its the ZOM that prompted me to write this. As I was watching the movie Noel, one of the "2-scene" characters, says "...I was totally munted last night." And the ZOM pops up with "Fact: 'urbandictionary.com' definition of 'Munted' - to be completely twatted off your face." Which I thought was flippin sweet! A reference to urbandictionary!

Alright alright, I'm a dork.

cock it!

d

Still trying to catch up...

So much information. So little time.

Still trying to quit smoking. I had a little slip-up. Things should be back to normal soon though.

I have been having vivid dreams lately. No doubt a result of the patch. A certain someone has appeared more than once and she has certainly made things interesting. I'm not sure what to think about it, though according to Time magazine it really has nothing to do with reality.

I'm still recovering from the shock of information overload but I should adjust in a couple days and be back to normal.

Out.

Welcome Home.

Thanks, its good to be back.

You know that feeling? The one you get when you haven't had something you love in a really really long time, and then you get unlimited access to it? That feeling resembling absent-minded panic-stricken hyper-activity?

Yeah, you're feeling that right now.

One.

Withdrawl...

So I am writing this from my Aunt's house in Kailua and I gotta be quick. I'm such an internet slut. I'm on vacation and the only thing I can think about is how disconnected and "out of it" I feel.

So to be as succinct as possible, I am currently going through internet withdrawl, nicotine withdrawl and caffeine withdrawl. I'm on my uncle's 15" Sony Vaio laptop maxing out his 56k DU connection. Things here have been going quite poorly and well, since I'm not on my mac I'm am realizing for the first time how horrible my spelling is.

More when I get back to the mothership.

Love,

d

Tension

I can't describe in words what I'm gonig though right now. I will try to assemble an appropriate description in time. Suffice it to say that I am quitting smoking cigarettes and this is my first day.

I am using the patch. However I am more addicted psychologically than anything else to this addiction and the patch doesn't actually treat that part of it.

I could get pills for it and perhaps I will in time. It depends on how the next week goes. I'm flying to Hawai'i Sunday morning and I will be staying there for 10 days. Upon my return, should things have gone poorly I will be seeing my physician for an appropriate perscription.

I have had recurring visions/thoughts of a t-shirt. The shirt would be black with the words "Sometimes quitters do win." In bold lettering on the front.

Much love.

-d

My brain is scratched...

And its skipping like a madman. Today has been one of those days. You know, the ones where you're partially retarded most of the day.

For christ's sake I get this strange feeling that I'm missing something. I think someone's birthday is this week, but for the love of all that is secular and pure I cannot remember whose it is.

Shiaat.

In other news I have a new favorite word: Chrishannakwanza.

Sorry for the crap...

Dearest,

The complete craptitude of your writing lately is giving me dyspepsia.

You must apply yourself vehemently to the pursuit of good writing.

Peace.

d

At First Blush

There will be more to come as I familiarize myself with my new toy.

At first blush, all I can say is that the dcr-pc109 is nice. First off, its extremely easy to use and quite intuitive, as long as you're using a Mac. There is a big selector switch on the back with which you can select the mode of operation. The top most position is off, switch it down once and it turns the camcorder on and selects Camera/Tape. From there the selector switch can be used to select the memory stick, for video recording or still photo's, or playback mode by moving the switch down.

Unfortunately, there really aren't any other positions other than the top most and one below it, its kind of a spring loaded mechanism. there are a set of LED's next to the switch that indicate the mode the camcorder is in and as I wrote earlier you move the switch down to select which one you'd like. The drawback is the completely non-intuitiveness of this switch. It's not what I expected right off the bat and I'd expect it wouldn't be what you'd expect either.

I've only used the camcorder with my Powerbook G4 so far and it was a breeze. I shot about 3 minutes of test footage and in the space of about 20 minutes I had imported the video to my powerbook, cut it into 4 clips, arranged the clips in a random order, added an audio track of music, and added an opening title. Let me reiterate, I did all of that in only 20 minutes!

There are a couple of major drawbacks however and at this point they are all hardware design based. One, the way in which you are required to hold the camcorder is awkward at first. The strap goes diagonally downward on the right side of the camcorder from about the middle rear down to the bottom front, which is just weird.

See the pictures on the Sony site for a better idea of what I am talking about. Second is the positioning of the Nightshot, lens cover, and zoom buttons. They're all on the right side front of the camcorder which is the same side as the strap and that requires using your pinky to operate these controls, that is, if you intend to use the strap; as is fixed on the right side of the camcorder. Which kind of sucks for me because I am much more comfortable holding it in my left hand. (Fortunately I'm ambidextrous.)

All in all, at this point I would definitely recommend this camcorder to any one who asked. Why? You might ask after giving the hardware an apparent thumbs down? Well simply because it has been completely straightforward to operate and unbelievably easy to incorporate into the rest of my digital lifestyle.

That being said, it would be prudent to mention that the majority of my life centers around the Apple platform. I cannot speak toward the compatibility of this camcorder and the windows way of doing things.

Besides, why would I want to do that!? If you aren't yet, do switch to the Apple Mac platform. If you are using a Mac then get this camcorder. Its so so sweet if you're an amateur on a budget.

Snap!

Mild Confusion.

I should feel relieved right now. I really should. Its been a long quarter and today was my last final.

Somehow though, for some reason, I don't feel relieved. Not even in the slightest. I don't feel any sense of satisfaction, I don't feel like I did my best and the rest is left up to statistics.

Curious.

I had the urge to call up a few friends and go out and get drunk after my last final. Kind of a "fuck this shit" send-off for the quarter but I didn't. For two reasons; one, its only Tuesday and I don't think anyone would be down, and two, I guessed I had better things to do. My father rented a couple movies that I have been chattering non-stop about lately for us to watch as kind of a psuedo-celebratory thing for the end of finals. We watched Hero and The Bourne Supremacy.

I had already seen Hero and I highly suggest that if you haven't already you go out and buy it immediately. It's that good. The Bourne Supremacy was awesome as well but fell flat at the end in my humble opinion.

And so ends another quarter. Many down, two to go. As far as the next few days are concerned, I have nothing but relaxation and packing to amuse myself with. From now until January 3rd its video games, alcohol consumption and hopefully--girls.

Who's yer daddy?

As you've no doubt noticed I have changed the look of this site. Blogger makes it quite easy through the implementation of templates.

In other news I recently received a Sony DCR-PC109 as an early christmas gift. Due to finals, I haven't had much of a chance to play around with it. I have a few first impressions but I think I'll wait a couple days until I get a chance to really play with it before posting a review.

Its late and I have one more final tomorrow.

Night.

A thought

Note to self: title rotation via text file/javascript? Think about it.

Something just occurred to me. Given all the buzz generated by the apparent death of email in korea, I wonder; what will replace weblogs? All things come and all things go, as is the nature of things, and if or maybe when weblogs eventually do die, what will replace them?

Hmm...I don't know. I'm not as on top of shit as usual with school getting so hectic.

Speaking of which, I really, really have to study tomorrow. No more blogger stuff, no matter how much fun it is to screw around with.

Though, while I'm at it I should probably mention my upcoming vacation. Next Sunday I'll be going back home for awhile. Home as in Hawai'i and awhile as in 10 days. I should be getting an early Christmas gift soon which will allow digital video in addition to pictures. I'll be taking my powerbook along as well so I think I should be able to post videos, pictures, and whatever else I desire while in the islands.

But you're on vacation!? You might interject. Yeah, but I'm also a geek so I have to maintain my image you know. Besides, at heart I'm a complete information whore. I think 10 days without access to the internet would probably scar me for life.

Almost but not quite...

So I think I have the blogroll moved over to RSS Digest. I just have to wait for it to re-cache my del.icio.us daily links.

Once it does, out goes the blogroll and in comes the Daily... section over there in the sidebar.

Weeee!

You know, sooner or later (SOONER) I'm gonna have to get to my studying.

Revalation...

Something occurred to me today. I was thinking about the innumerable times that people I have come across have asked me how school was going. Usually I respond with something along the lines of a demure "Oh its going well. I will be graduating fairly soon." Inevitably the next question is always "What are you studying?" the answer to which is I am double majoring in theoretical mathematics and general computer science. This without fail garners raised eyebrows and impressed looks and nods which is a satisfying ego boost.

The thing is, and this is the revelatory part, I don't like studying computer science.

Not one bit.

It's just not interesting to me for some reason. Don't get me wrong, I love computers and I get a funny feeling deep down in my secret place whenever I'm near them. I think its the forced rubric of the university has killed it for me. What I like is playing with computers, hacking about with them and figuring shit out; learning them at my own pace in my own way. Studying CS at the university seems to, in a way, rob me of passion; stealing away like a thief in the night a part of who I am and forcing me to examine it at length and forcing me to learn every little esoteric and completely useless nook and cranny of it until I barely recognize it and it thoroughly disgusts me.

I picked wrong as far as my major is concerned. I shouldn't have picked up CS. I should have picked something that interests me and not something that I was already interested (heavily) in. Which leads to a second interesting thing that I have since realized.

For the longest time whenever someone asked about math I always told them that I was terrible at it and it was extremely difficult for me and I had a love/hate relationship with it. All of which is true--except that last part. Which is totally new to me. The more I thought about how much I dislike studying CS the more I realized that I actually do like math. Not that I know what exactly I'll do with the degree since what I am enjoying most is the actual studying of the math. The difference, I think, between my two majors, other than the obvious, is that I started as a CS major and added math down the road.

In the end I suppose that the moral of my story is that I should have started earlier and thought more about what I wanted to learn since its learning new things that I really like. If I could go back and change any one thing in the last three years it would be that. I would not have picked CS. I definitely would have picked math, and I probably would still be double majoring albeit in something new I wanted to learn about and be challenged by.

That, or I just have a short attention span.

tasty...

I added a del.icio.us section in the sidebar at the bottom. It uses the boss services of RSS Digest which grabs my recent del.icio.us bookmarks from an RSS feed and caches them for 24 hours. RSS Digest provides a line of JavaScript which makes it easy to add to a web page and produces a sweet list of the recent links.

I'm thinking the next step will be to move my blogroll over to del.icio.us and do the same thing for it so it'll be more dynamic. Unfortunately that means adding all the different links to my del.icio.us which at present is a one-at-a-time affair. Unless someone out there knows of a way to do it more succinctly.

In any event, if you don't already, use del.icio.us Its rad. I love it, and so will you if you do any web surfing at all.

innocence...

innocence3
Originally uploaded by droo5ki.

This is the final image in a 3 image series.

I hope you like it.

Umm...well yeah...

timer?
Originally uploaded by droo5ki.

You haven't really figured out the whole "timer" setting thing yet. You should RTFM. Good thing the flash was disabled huh?

Idiot.

It's official...

Yup, I'm definitely sick. I'm starting to get all glassy-eyed and spacey. Although those who know me would no doubt say that's not really too far from normal, but trust me--I hab a code. *ha-choo!*

Could someone make me some miso soup pweeease?

*sniffle, sniffle*

Awww man.

The State of the Intersection...

So I actually spent quite awhile thinking about the title of this entry while listening to Randi Rhodes on the radio talk about the united church of christ situation for some reason. I thought it would be a clever play on "State of the Union" and perhaps convey some sense of the cosmic interplay between my reality and whatever reality actually is.

I was wrong and now I am only keeping it for posterity.

Today sucked. It really really did. Especially this morning. I was unaware that the end of the world comes with a paper clip. Four nice neat 8.5x11 inch sheets of emulsified, chemically bleached and pressed tree, terribly and horribly deformed by the vitriolic strokes of a red Bic pen thoughtfully paper-clipped together by my Linear Algebra professor. My my, how nice of her. Unfortunately however 26 out of 60 points was not, and apparently studying doesn't work for this class.

There was however a brief respite in the form of coffee and company. I met up with a sweet and kind young woman who listened to my bitching and then through some form of double x chromosomal magic trick promptly made me forget all about it for an entire hour. The wonders coffee and companionship can do for a young lad. Well, in any event I am forever grateful to her for that act of kindness, whether or not she actually new what she was doing.

In the meantime I have an awful lot of studying to do this weekend if I intend not to fail my algebra class, and I will get to it. But not yet--not yet. As if to remind me that this day was meant to suck, after coffee I headed into the office to catch up with the guys and mess around, hack some shit, get into mischief, you know the usual. No sooner had I gotten there than I found myself in the midst of a maelstrom of poorly written code, horrible decision making and over-worked tech support. In case you weren't aware I work as part of the tech support/QA team at my company. Suffice it to say that everything was bad. Bad bad bad. *ugh*

Then the best part: I seem to be developing a cold. Fucking perfect.

Suck...I need some coffee stat.