Author: Rory

Yesterday I finished my 18^th year of full time education. I’m pretty sure I still don’t know enough so the current plan is to stick at least another three years on there. Exams start in 19 days, so study starts in 18. Plans for the next two and a half weeks, the following four months, and most of the rest of my life are somewhat hazy and incomplete. Suggestions to the usual address…

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless are going to be broadcast as the Quandary and Quintessential Phases of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show. Obviously the BBC has the full story.

The trailer for the two phases is in Real Audio streaming format. If you’d like to download a copy to keep, you’ll need a copy of mplayer. Then do this:

mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/hitchhikers_trail2.rm
mplayer -ao pcm stream.dump

That’ll leave you with a raw wav file called audiodump.wav, with which you can do what you like (except distribute it, of course; I can’t be seen to encourage that). When the shows are broadcast you’ll be able to rip them in the same way. They stay on the BBC site for a week. Sometime during that week you should download the *.rm file and open it in a text editor. Copy the rtsp:// URL from that file and use it in the same place as the similar URL in the commands above. The steps are the same from then on.

I’ve been itching to link to Skeptico for a few weeks now. I couldn’t let it slide for another week or you would all miss out on the astounding discovery of a Chicago underpass bearing the likeness of Keith Richards. He is favoured by God. Maybe that’s why Keith can’t be killed by conventional weapons.

Google’s UK map service includes Ireland, which will no doubt do wonders for American geography education. Oh, who am I kidding? They don’t learn about other countries in geography class. Anyway, I just wanted to remark that I’m pretty sure there was another town just there last time I checked.

Proudly continuing my new hobby of bashing cool free services.

Wikipedia has a list of active Irish Wikipedians, which I’m on. I didn’t put my name on that list; I was included in the beginning. Anyway, I can hardly claim to be an active Wikipedian anymore. I’ve made 17 edits this year, compared to a thousand edits in the same length of time last summer. Should I remove myself from the list? That would seem a little too active. If I remove myself it would mean I should be on the list; but if I don’t remove myself I shouldn’t be there. Aren’t paradoxes (paradoxen?) fun?

MoFo just released Firefox 1.0.3, which fixes some security issues. Unfortunately it also breaks some extensions. Even more unfortunately, from my perspective, MakeLink is one of the few extensions it breaks. The fix was straightforward, and is basically described in full by this Bugzilla comment. MakeLink 2.0.1 incorporates the fix and will therefore work with versions of Firefox from 0.9 to 1.0.3.

So, Bloglines is broken. That’s okay, systems have difficulties sometimes. It’s a free service so we can’t really hold it against them. There are two things that are beginning to annoy me though. The first is that I have no other list of the blogs I’ve subscribed to so I’m stuck trying to remember what might have something new rather than just being able to open up the front pages of all the sites in my list like other people are complaining about having to do. The second thing is the Bloglines simply can’t be bothered to indicate anywhere on their site that they’re having technical problems, what those problems are, or when they expect to have them fixed. They deserve to have every single user email them asking what’s going on, as I did before I checked Technorati to see if anyone else was talking about them.

Update: ’tis fixed now.

I’m going to propose a hypothetical situation, and I’d like for you to take part in it. Suppose you are the editor of a major newspaper. It would work just as well with a minor newspaper but since this is our imagined situation we might as well be successful in it. Go ahead and imagine you’ve just got a salary increase or a hefty bonus too; I want my readers to feel good about themselves.

Okay, so you’re an editor. You’re introducing a new feature to your newspaper: film reviews (yes, you’ve managed to become a large-distribution newspaper without film reviews; you’re that damn good). Now I want you to imagine the person you are going to hire to write these reviews. What kinds of qualities do they have? They can write well of course. They’re punctual. Maybe you’re impressed by their broad education. No doubt those are all admirable qualities in a potential film reviewer. I think we’ve found our person.

Hang on though; are you like me? Did you think of one more attribute that might be desireable in a film reviewer? Did you think "hang on, shouldn’t they like movies?" I did. And now we step neatly out of our imagined world—leaving our raises and sexy secretaries behind—into the real world, where that critical (no pun intended) quality is absent from every reviewer in The Irish Times‘ The Ticket.

Take their opinion of Garden State:

Though Garden State believes itself to be startlingly fresh, it’s as formulaic as the average Jackie Chan film.

I might be tempted to agree on the grounds that the average Jackie Chan film is far from formulaic. Unfortunately I know what the reviewer really meant. I’ll refrain from rebutting the criticism for fear of spoiling anyone’s enjoyment of the film but I will remark that The Ticket‘s style of criticism seems to betray an attitude of "hating everything makes you look good". I’ll take Empire‘s "if you liked X you’ll like this", or "not as good as X", where X is some similar film. It’s important to realise that your job is to help people choose which film to watch, not to convince people that they’d be better off going and playing outside.

I’m continuing the movie theme here on SoylentRed for another day despite the growing list of subjects in my “to blog” bookmarks folder. Most of those are out of date anyway (anyone remember the Pope? Made a big splash a few weeks ago, seems to have faded into obscurity by now.) and I’m in too good a mood recently to get dragged into writing any of the other stuff in there. So I’ll take the more light-hearted road and mention a brutal six-person murder and, maybe worse, Michael Bay.

The trailers before Gardern State weren’t very encouraging about the coming weeks of cinema. I was cheered up briefly by what I thought was the appearance of Jason Lee in the preview of The Amityville Horror. That cheer was washed away by the words "produced by Michael Bay". Karl pointed out, by email, Entertainment Ireland’s review which starts with the line “The fact that the anti-Christ of intelligent filmmaking, Michael Bay, produced this remake of The Amityville Horror should tell you all you need know.” Why would Jason Lee lower himself to making this? Actually he didn’t; it turns out I just can’t tell him from Ryan Reynolds, a fact which became apparent when I watched the first trailers for Blade: Trinity. That’s a plus at least.

So did I just write another entry about how bad a film I haven’t seen is? In fact I did have another reason for mentioning this one. Snopes just published an article on Amityville, which contains the following observation:

The revelation that the story was based on a hoax has led to embarrassment, especially among the handful of "paranormal experts" who "verified" the fictional tale. The Lutzes must have had a good laugh at the expense of the mystery-mongering ghost hunters and self-proclaimed psychics who reported their terrifying visions and verified the house’s (non-existent) demonic residents.

So I got a dig in on Michael Bay and on "psychics". I couldn’t pass that up.

When I saw Team America: World Police my brother asked me if it was as good as South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. I told him that I couldn’t tell based on a single viewing, but we agreed that if it was even possible that I couldn’t tell then it must have been pretty close. I could say something similar about Garden State. I’m not going to tell you it’s the best thing Zach Braff has ever done, but I’m not going to tell you that it’s not. It is, however, the best thing Natalie Portman has done.

It’s not often that you can sit watching a film, completely engrossed but also completely unable to see what’s going to happen. I don’t mean that in the sense of a thriller where you don’t know where the bomb is hidden; or a mystery where you don’t know whodunnit. I mean it in the sense of watching someone tell a story and becoming aware that you’ve never seen this one before.

I usually watch films with some detatchment; I notice acting, directing, music. I often judge the quality of a movie based on its ability to make me forget about those things. While in retrospect I’m able to praise Braff’s and Portman’s performances, and Braff’s writing and directing, I think it’s most telling to simply say that I didn’t spend two hours watching Dr John Dorian and Padmé Amidala. Instead I watched Andrew Largeman and Sam, and I enjoyed the experience far more for that.

Zach Braff has a future when Scrubs is over. Natalie Portman has pre-emptively earned my forgiveness for Revenge of the Sith.