No Liberal Bull

MOSQUITO KINGDOM TRAILER

My cousin, Jedidiah Ayres, wrote the story and screenplay for this independent film. It looks a little noir for my tastes, but I’m still excited to see what comes of it and proud of him for it, so I thought I’d share.

Interesting story… and I have no idea how long they’ve really been working on this feature, but I’ll tell it from my perspective anyway…

First off, ff you don’t know what RSS is, you are missing out and wasting your time. Go here, learn about it, then go to Google Reader and start using it, and live a better life. Now that that is covered and you know what a reader is and furthermore that the best reader is Google Reader, I can continue…

In Google Reader, each item in your feed has a ‘Share’ icon at the bottom of it, allowing you to kind of bookmark it for public viewing via either your Shared Items website, it’s own RSS feed, or even widgets like the one to the right of this page. (Those links are to mine)

This is great: it allows you to publicly share (duh) items in your rss feeds that you liked… but what about those that aren’t in your feed? What about those weird one-off items and websites that you find that either don’t have an RSS feed or you don’t necessarily want to subscribe to the whole website for? Well, earlier today, I twittered that it would be nice if google would let you share things that weren’t necessarily in you feed… and a hour or so ago, an intern for Google Reader twittered back simply “Good idea, done!”

Now, it may simply be that they were working on this already and I just happened to twitter about it on the day they planned on releasing it… but I like to think I initiated the change

That said, I wonder if Google knows how cool and powerful this is… I wasn’t kidding in my headline: I think this makes Google Reader almost a replacement for Digg without having to deal with Digg’s inane users (yeah, I said it, and I’m one of them). I can now share ANY site, ANY time, and make a comment on it for my friends… It makes Google Reader a strange and wonderful mashup of Digg, Twitter, and email. It’s amazing, and I’m very excited about this development. Thanks, Google Reader team. Whether you really got the idea from me or not, you guys rock.

Within the course of the past week:

Iron Man breaks records by pulling in $102,118,668 domestically on opening weekend.

Grand Theft Auto IV rakes in $400,000,000 worldwide, and if video games correlate at all with movies, at least $200million of that was American.

The US Economy Grows 0.6%, which means that there is no recession by the very definition of the word.

The jobless rate falls again, to 5%, statistical full employment.

The DOW crosses 13,000 and foreign markets bet on the American Dollar to rise for the first time in months.

…and still all I hear is how we are in an economic downturn with recession inevitable… self-fulfilling prophecy anybody?

…truly amazing.

I love elephants, they’re right up they’re with puppies and penguins on my ‘favorite animals to watch’ list… I don’t know why, maybe it was one too many viewings of Dumbo and The Jungle Book as a child; whatever the reasons, I loved watching this. I don’t know if the picture is truly out of the creative mind of an elephant or a trained set of motions, I suspect the latter, but it’s cool either way. I particularly found it fascinating how deliberate the elephant was with every stroke it took. I’m not saying I’d pay a bunch of money for it, but it’s fun to watch…

Yale Daily News - For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse

This story is sad and disgusting on so many levels I can’t even begin to describe it… I pray that it’s not true.

[UPDATE] - It’s been confirmed that the story is a hoax, thank God. The woman who even thought it up needs to have her head examined though…

You can now Drive google maps. Have fun.

In an iTunes world, there is a lot to love about the convenience and ease of the Apple system, but it’s not without its flaws. There’s the lack of a subscription, the ever-more bloated software, and then there is always the DRM issue, but all-in-all, it’s a pretty good system and it works as advertised. That being said, I’d like to make a couple software requests that could make a great system just that much better.

I don’t know about you, but I hate singles. If I’m going to get a tune or two from a band, I’m going to just get the whole album. I don’t think I’m alone here since Apple let’s you purchase an album at a discount if you’ve already purchased a song or two from it. My pet peeve is in the management of these files once they’re on your system.

Picture this: you’ve got Artist X’s first and third album, and you also have their ‘Greatest Hits’. Now, that greatest hits disc has what are essentially 4 duplicate files; songs you already have on the first and second album. To make matters worse, you also bought the soundtrack to the latest summer blockbuster, and it also has a song from album one and the greatest hits. But being the pack-rat and organization freak that you are, you don’t want to delete any of the tracks for continuity sake. There you are with 2 copies of some songs, 3 of others, each getting a separate play-count and taking up twice the disk space they actually should require.

So my question and request is this: why isn’t there an alias/shortcut (for you windows users) system to create what would essentially be a placeholder in your library: a way to say ’song A’ is track 2 on ‘disk X’, track 5 on ‘disk Y’, and track 8 on ‘disk Z’, but all of those things point to a single file and playcount? I haven’t gone through exact numbers, but I bet I could save a few hundred megs from this tactic, and have a more organized library (I have deleted some duplicate tacks only to later want to burn a disc which is missing a track and I no longer have any recollection of what I deleted).

I’ve programmed very little, and realize this would take a bit of effort, but I know it can be done. iTunes already tracks duplicates for you, and both Windows and OS X support this kind of thing at a system file level with shortcuts and aliases respectively, and I can only assume iPods are powerful enough to recognize these type files as well. Just something to think about for iTunes 8.

My other requests have to do with the Apple TV, and are probably a bit simpler:
A) I wonder why it is that every Apple device is able to play Audible files except the Apple TV? It actually wouldn’t bother me that much except in iTunes there is always a (!) error in syncing my Apple TV, which is always Audible books. Either get the licensing done so that Apple TV can play them, or make iTunes smart enough to know it can’t and not even attempt to sync them.

B) Why doesn’t the Apple TV have volume control? I mean really, when you have to have a support article telling people that their remote does not control what it looks like it controls, not only have you failed in function, you have failed in UI/Design, something Apple takes pride in not doing. I realize the device has no amplifier in it, but it doesn’t need it to control volume simply through software/gain. It’s especially frustrating to me since the speakers mine are hooked to do not have a wireless remote… browsing youtube videos is a recipe for a blown eardrum not knowing how loud they’ll be. Get on that, please.

My family and friends can tell you that I love Apple products. I believe they are better designed and generally provide a better user experience. I still have plenty of use for Windows (at least ’til Adobe gets Audition on Mac), but I personally am a mac guy now: they’re great, I just want them to be perfect, and who wouldn’t want that?

… and that makes me happy.

Go Mudcats!

That is all.