Haiku Current Events

Writers' strike over?
Broadway is no longer dark.
Read John Tan's entry.

Will you quit bugging me now!!!

This should make certain people who know me very happy. For my first post I found a video that combined two things which currently bring me great pleasure: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Football.

As a side note, I'm on a high because the Raiders, with win number three, finally surpassed last years win total. That's what I like to call progress, ladies and gentlemen. It's all gravy from this point forward. (sigh) Yes, this is really what it has come down to for fans of the Silver and Black.

Anyway, here you go.

The First Blogger Is Finally Online!

If you only read two blogs this year, make it (1) this one and (2) The Personal Journal of Doogie Howser, M.D.

Full of truisms and personal vagueness - and a kind of emo-ness that's decades ahead of its time - Dr. Howser's blog is far superior to most of the personal blogging in the Blogosphere.

Here's a sampling (which needs to be properly attributed to the writer of that episode):

Friday, February 26, 1993

Tonight I did the unthinkable...I acted like a [sic] impulsive, crazy, hormonal genius.

Posted by Doogie Howser at 10:37 PM 0 comments

Brilliant...even genius! Bravo, Dr. Howser, bravo!

Haiku Current Events

Carson Daly scabs?
Helio Castroneves!
Taylor dies of wounds.

Best. Commercial. Ever.

Virtually every longtime Late Night with Conan O'Brien fan has to remember one of the commercials scheduled to air during the XFL championship: "SHOES (2 Blocks past Radio Shack, next to the tall building)."

Yes, the XFL: When football met wrasslin'.

Radio@MutinyUniverse.com #22

The phone lines are open...okay, voicemail: (206) 309-0482. (Voicemail submissions become property of Mutiny Universe and may be used in a future podcast and/or elsewhere.)

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Ryan is thankful for this regular soapbox upon which to stand, rant, and sometimes shamelessly self-promote:

0. Johann Strauss II by way of yours truly "Künstlerleben"
1. The Society of Gloves featuring moxy phinx "Time (Lose Your Hold)"
2. moxy phinx "Centerfold"
3. Peter Chavez "Where You Stand"
4. Heather Donaldson "Honeybee"
5. ANTIQCOOL "Oh Mary"
6. Negatrude "Home"

Get ready for Saturnalia! (And those other winter holidays, too.)

Haiku Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!
Black Friday is tomorrow.
Where is the money?

Blog Readability Test

There's a humorous blog readability test at CriticsRant.com that quickly analyzes any given blog, giving it a minimum education rating. For instance, to fully comprehend this blog, a reader must have a minimum education of...

MU Blog

I don't know if one has to be a college graduate to fully appreciate the Mutiny Universe blog, but some knowledge of computers is required to download our podcasts, I guess. The concept of the haiku is a middle school or junior high thing, isn't it? While this certainly reflects the education level of the contributors of this blog, I don't think this blog's posts look like term papers...do they?

I contribute to a series of other blogs (shameless self-promotion alert!), and here's what the test says about them:

DeRamos.org

I've been blogging politically at DeRamos.org, so it's pretty flattering that my personal blog (as well as the collaborative MU blog) reflects my official level of education. Then again, I'm not blogging term papers at DeRamos.org, either.

The Society of Gloves

I'm actually glad the blog/website for my rock band doesn't have an extremely high educational rating. It's rock 'n roll for crying out loud...not rocket science! On the other hand, the self-producing process is pretty heavy. But if this is judging the end content of the band, then it's great not be an intellectual elitist...for once. I have to also point out that the blog readability test can give "results" lower than high school level.

And finally...

Chord du Jour

The irony is that Chord du Jour is supposed to teach beginning and intermediate guitarists some really basic stuff. If you have to be a genius to comprehend the concepts that I'm trying to teach, then I'm probably not teaching in an effective manner. Sigh. However, it is some consolation that I've been given genius status...even if it is from a humorous Internet analysis.

Now check your blog's readability level!

Haiku Current Events

Writers Strike: Week Three
Chuck Norris Hearts Huckabee
Thanksgiving ready?

Them Bones

This place is beyond words (but I'll try to use them anyway).


Welcome to Hell. I mean, the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic. You can get more pertinent background information from the church's official website at www.kostnice.cz. If you're an Anglophone, choose "English" on the homepage and then click on "Ossuary."

Without the necessary background history concerning the church - the short of it involves sprinkles of Golgotha, the Black Death, and a macabre interior decorator - you'd think a video game demon with a slightly cliched style (for video game demon standards, that is) lives there. Or at the very least, it's a million and a half heavy metal album covers come to life.


I totally want to go there one day.

Creepy chandelier photo credit: User:Chmouel.

Nightmarish coat-of-arms photo credit: Martin St-Amant.

Haiku Current Events

Writers' strike - new talks?
Kiwis block fat immigrant
Ron Paul dollars seized.

The Interrupter!!!!

This guy is so awesome. He is The Interrupter. What does he do? He interrupts - and he does it better than anyone I've seen and makes it worth your while. Played by Brian Stack on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, the bit has got to be on the top ten list of ultimate randomness. This particular episode is my favorite of his sketches. The rapport between Stack and O'Brien is as sharp as it gets and clean - with perfect cuts by the tech. crew. It also happened to be the show NBC aired tonight as a re-run due to the writer's strike. If only all comedy writing were as good as this skit. See for yourself below.

Haiku Current Events

Haiku blogs not new
Writers Guild strike at week two
Mounties taser Pole.

How's This for Some Extra Hard Drive Storage?

So you think your 500 gigabyte hard drive is pretty cool? Thinking about upgrading to a terabyte? Well, if you think that these storage solutions are pretty high up on the information storage food chain, think again. One byte consists of 8 bits of information. For example, Final Cut Pro (on normal settings) renders 8 bits (or one byte) of information at a time. The old Sega Genesis could process 16 bits (2 bytes) of graphic info. at a time. Most computers these days are using either 32 or if you're really on top of it - 64 bit processors. And as far as storage - well - we all know those media files are large - often hundreds of megabytes or even a few gigabytes large - so we have our external hard drives that eventually fill up. Now just try to comprehend the following. Be sure to click on the title of this blog when you're through reading this to see where your hard drive falls in on the charts of available defined storage space for information. The yobibyte is the largest one on the list. I don't know who is using a capacity this immense but I would love to find out. Perhaps in 40 years, everyone will be walking around with 500 yobibyte mph - hologram players...or perhaps, it is simply some unattainable single figure that could only apply to collective data. Either way, gigabyte or yobibyte, I just want to know - does Yoda bite?

From Wikipedia:

A yobibyte (a contraction of yotta binary byte) is a unit of information or computer storage, commonly abbreviated YiB.

1 yobibyte = 280 bytes = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes = 1,024 zebibytes

The yobibyte is closely related to the yottabyte, which can either be a synonym for yobibyte, or refer to 1024 bytes = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, depending on context (see binary prefix).

The zebi and yobi prefixes were originally not part of the system of binary prefixes, but were added by the International Electrotechnical Commission in August 2005.

You can click the title of this blog to find out more about the levels of information storage.

Radio@MutinyUniverse.com #21

Celebrating a belated Veterans Day, Ryan covers all sorts of topics!

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1. Peerless Quartet with Henry Burr and Billy Murray "My Dream of the Big Parade"
2. Poetique Khaotique' "Gun"
3. ANTIQCOOL "The Storm"
4. The Sumner Brothers "When a Mother Calls"
5. moxy phinx "Leave Me"

Note #1: Help Ryan write a book by taking a few ten question, multiple-choice surveys at Survey Sunday.

1. Pop Culture
2. Religion
3. U.S. Politics
4. Abortion
5. Anthropology

And more in the future!

Note #2: Ryan's Top Ten (well, Top Eight) essential computer programs. Come up with your own list!

10. [Some sort of DVD burning program would be nice, but not currently essential.]
9. [Some sort of video editing program would be nice, but not currently essential.]
8. Microsoft Excel
7. Microsoft Word
6. Character Map
5. Mozilla Firefox
4. Mozilla Thunderbird
3. Apple iTunes
2. Adobe Photoshop
1. Digidesign Pro Tools

(Well, an anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-phishing program would be good too.)

Helpful Final Cut Rendering "Trick"

As I was doing some final editing on a film last night, I found an interesting way around a looooong rendering wait. I was using my 15" Powerbook G4 1.67 GHZ with 1.5 RAM. In this case it was not the fastest computer I had avialable but I had a feeling that a lot of the files I needed may have been on that computer instead of on the ext. hard drive. It had been a long time since I opened the project and had moved a lot of things around since the last time I had opened the movie. In any case, this was the computer I chose to use. When I opened the project - sure enough - a whole mess of files were now offline. I cursed myself for moving things and then reconnected everything. After that, I added the song that I was there to add and changed my rendering settings to the highest possible for final output.

All of this done, huge parts of the film needed to be rendered - some for previw and some completely. I selected all and hit "apple R." I watched the total render time climb from 20 minutes up to well over an hour. I didn't get into this for an hour wait so at this point I considered changing computers for the faster one with more RAM but instead thought I'd try something else.

I started selecting sections of the film a few at a time and rendering them. At most, it took one minute per section but was usually around a few seconds. All in all, the process took less than a half hour! Now, I am not quite geek enough to understand why this was the case - though I'm sure it has to do with Final Cut using RAM to store render data. What I do know is that by putting just a little more elbow grease into it, I saved myself a lot of time for a process that would have otherwise been a slow and helpless experience (any editor knows what that is like - sitting and watching and waiting while the blue bar ever so slowly works its way to the right - noticing all the other things you want to fix but unable to do so until it is done) -- and kept myself occupied at the same time.

I recommend this incremental process for anyone who is working on a non-hyperspeed computer and needs to do a lot of rendering. Good Luck!

Two Fingers = Obscure Right Click

Two fingers is not only useful for hand gestures and measuring 18 year old Scotch, it will also make using a MacBook more efficient. I don't have the Mac cred to explain it, as I have built my machine from the body parts of insane criminals, so let's have an annoyed nerd do the explaining:

Until I can bear to part with a couple grand so I can test this for myself, let's file this under: Good to know.