BunkBlog

1. What was the first CD/Record/Album/Artist you ever bought and what format was it in? (Vinyl/Cassette/CD/MP3 Download)? Heck if I remember. I’m thinking it was something on a cassette but otherwise…it’s been far too long.
2. How do you usually listen to music? (iPod/Walkman/Stereo/Radio) Generally on my Sandisk Sansa MP3 player. I listened to the radio when there was a station that didn’t suck.
3. What is your favorite genre of music and why? The non-country genre. Heck, check out my music archive – I’ve got all sorts of stuff in there. I just ripped my old Ministry and Sinead O’Connor CDs this weekend. Good luck finding a pattern there.
4. What is your opinion on music video shows and music televion? I miss them.
5. Do you usually agree with who the winners of the Grammy Awards are? I usually don’t care.

South Park tonight not only includes Flying Spaghetti Monster references, but the oh-so-important Buck Rogers sequence.  Have Stone and Parker been hanging out with Seth MacFarlane?

Here’s my Halloween playlist.  The cretins at work probably don’t know any of the songs. Hi, cretins.  😉

Supposedly if you’ve seen over 70 of the films on this list (either in the theater or on video) you have no life. Mark and count the movies you’ve seen. Put your score in the header and repost.
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This is awesome. A compilation of The 50 Worst Video Game Names Of All Time. My favorite has to be “Wild Woody” – who thought that was a good name for a kid’s game?

I actually remember a few of these, including “Tongue of the Fat Man” and “Jumpman,” from the Commodore days (that’s the late 1980s for you whippersnappers).

Creative is removing features from its Zen MicroPhoto and Zen Vision:M players. If you thought that FM recording feature you bought it with is a good thing, then you should never update its firmware. Creative has followed the Sony PSP approach of deleting features upon addition of new features. You can now use Audible files, but your recorder doesn’t record the radio. I’m sure the RIAA had nothing to do with this.

So far in the new television season, here’s my impressions of the shows I’ve attempted to watch:

Monday

Heroes (NBC) – I was a bit unsure what to expect from a superhero show. So far, so good. And, NBC must like it too; it got picked up for a full season.

The Class (CBS) – This comedy is still a bit uneven. I do enjoy Lizzy Caplan as set dressing, but if they don’t do more funny soon, it’s getting dropped from the DVR.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (NBC) – I’m pretty impressed by Matthew Perry’s dramatic skill, although I really don’t buy Amanda Peet as “tough executive.” I last saw Timothy Busfield as the bumbling brother on “Ed” and he’s been one of the bright stars of this one, along with Evan Handler and DL Hughley.

Tuesday

Help Me Help You (ABC) – Ted Danson just isn’t doing it for me on this one.  It’s just not giving the funny.

Wednesday

30 Rock (NBC) – Named after 30 Rockefeller Center, where SNL is filmed. The first episode left virtually no impression on me whatsoever.
Jericho (CBS) – Although it’s been picked up for a full season, making it and Heroes the only true “hits” from the new season so far, I’m not 100% sold on it. The sense of impending danger that you’d expect from a post-apocalypse show is just not there. The teenagers don’t seem to understand there are any hazards at all; they’re all wrapped up in some weird 90210 vibe. Spooky guy is definitely driving my interest, and not the “star,” Skeet Ulrich.
Twenty Good Years (NBC) – OK, it’s only one episode, but they need more funny. I have really enjoyed both of the main actors in previous work (John Lithgow and Jeffory Tambor), but the pilot was a lot of scenery-chewing and not many jokes.

Thursday

Ugly Betty (ABC) – This show stars Ana Ortiz’s ass and Vanessa Williams’s breasts. There’s some mysterious plot about a suspicious death and something or other, but if Williams wasn’t in it, there’d be no show. The vignettes with Salma Hayek in tiny outfits are good too; tonight was a bikini.

Friday

Men in Trees (ABC) – I had never thought of Anne Heche as attractive before, but this character is growing on me. The gorgeous Saleka Mathew is a nice feature too. Oh, and the “fish out of water” plot has a lot of potential, I think. Hopefully they can milk it longer than Ed or Northern Exposure.

Sunday

Brothers and Sisters (ABC) – I don’t buy Calista Flockhart as a right-winger, and I wish Tom Skerritt has stuck around past the pilot; I like him. I don’t think this one will stick around long, but I may be wrong.

I’m inspired by Ferrett’s confession. I, too, am a magazine addict. Here are the ones I can recall that show up in my mailbox (only the ones I actually pay for-some freebies show up that I don’t care about at all):

• Cuisine at Home
• PC World
• PC Magazine
• Computer Power User
• Maximum PC
• Seed
• MIT Technology Review
• The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
• Granta
• Mental Floss
• Wired

I can quit any time I want.

I love the series Bullshit, as I may have mentioned before. The big revelation today? John Gray, the author of “Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus,” is a yoga expert with a PhD in psychology from a diploma mill that has been forced to shut down due to its years of fraud.

Apparently doctors are from universities and quacks are from yoga school.

Alex is bopping around chanting, “Guns don’t kill people, rappers do!”  Yeah. Goldie Lookin Chain. That’s my boy.

Everyone who said that they didn’t need to worry about TiVo’s closed architecture, because it did everything they needed, including that nifty TiVoToGo that let you make DVDs on your computer from your TiVo box? Yeah, you got punked.

The new and improved TiVo Series3 boxes, the ones that finally allow you to record HD (something you could do with MythTV for years), have deleted the already-very-limited ability to do what you want with the recording you make on your machine that you pay for. Cheers.

There is no legal reason to do this, by the way. The fair use doctrine and case law (Betamax decision) are on the side of people who want to make personal copies of free over-the-air broadcasts. Aren’t you glad that TiVo is more interested in not offending Hollywood than they are in providing features their customers want?

The new season of Saturday Night Live started this week. Not only do I still not find Dane Cook’s “fratguy observations” humorous, the rest of the show is not doing much for me either. There were about two bright spots during the news (which really needs Tina Fey to return), and otherwise the funniest bit was a two-minute stretch of water bottles falling from a closet. Yes, two minutes of just water bottles pouring out of a closet; so many bottles that it’s obvious the closet is actually a Tardis.

My friend Dora hosted a party at her house last night, and I catered it. We had tapas and sangria (white and traditional), and Jenn brought cheesecake, while Tammy brought pie and homemade bread.

One of the things Alex and I enjoy is trying out new recipes. Everything last night (except the traditional sangria) was a new experiment. Based on the speed with which food disappeared, I’m gonna say that oven-roasted potatoes are always popular, and the chorizo in red wine was a big hit too (although I found it too strong personally). Sadly, the one thing The Boy helped with was not one of the hits. We put little bits of roasted pepper and green olives on cocktail toothpicks, along with feta cheese or cocktail onions. The onions were almost universally unloved, and the feta eventually got eaten, but not something worth bothering with again.

The game Hoopla is a load of fun, if you ever throw a party for a decent-sized group of people. Apparently everyone is on the same team. Huh? Anyway, hope for the demolition derby card.  😉

Most parents probably realize that the cartoons they show in prime time are not really meant for kids. Example of the day: American Dad. Stan comes home from work, and Francine says, “If I’d known you were going to be home so early I wouldn’t have taken care of myself in the bath earlier.”

As Quagmire would say, “Gigity Gigity Gigity!”

Update: And on Family Guy, “Spit on me. Now tell me I’m scum.”

I noticed that the “review” category has not had much activity, so I’ll remedy that.

In March of 2005, I bought a Rio Karma. This MP3 player was fantastic, with 20 gigs of storage space (enough for about 1/6th of my music collection), a fantastic interface, on-the-fly playlisting and all that jazz. It did not have an FM tuner or voice recorder, and it did depend on proprietary protocols to save music, but the ability to rearrange music and choose popular songs and all that were great. Sadly, the Karma is a delicate beast, with its hard drive not being the most durable they could find. Since it broke and Rio is gone, I was quite happy that I had paid for the 24 month warranty from Buy.

In June of this year, I replaced the Karma with the warranty money, getting a Sandisk Sansa e260 4 gig flash player. At the time, it was a 200 dollar player; it’s now routinely available for 150 or less.

With the most current firmware installed, the Sansa is a wonderful music player, although I do miss the Karma’s interface. The Sansa has two protocols: MTP and MSC (sometimes called UMS). In MTP mode, the player works only with Windows XP; in MSC mode it works with anything that recognizes USB removable media. Playlists are transferred only via MTP, although MSC mode is a faster system for simple transfers.

The Sansa also has a cool feature few players do these days: expansion. You can plug in a tiny little memory card, the microSD, to add up to 2 gigs of memory in theory (so far I can only find 1 gig cards at most). The expansion card can’t hold subscription content, and it’s not visible in MTP mode on the computer, but for music you want to keep on the player, or if you use MSC mode anyway, it’s another drive letter in Explorer.

That covers connections, but what about features? It has an FM tuner (and recorder), a voice recorder, and can manage videos (through a converter), photos, and either MP3 or WMA audio files. It supports the PlaysForSure stores, including subscription content, but I’m told does not support Audible files.

Playback is from a rather straight-forward interface, using a wheel and six buttons. Playlists from the computer are visible and usable, as well as one on-the-fly playlist on the player. I can’t tell you how well PlaysForSure works, as I refuse to participate in DRM. Thankfully, I can tell you that it works wonderfully with MediaMonkey in MTP mode. I don’t try to sync in MSC mode, so I’m not sure how well that works with MM; MSC mode is useful for clearing out old content you decide you don’t want to listen to, and it’s mandatory for firmware updates.

Photos are bright and sharp, although there is no zoom and a 1.5 inch screen is not exactly usable for a photo album.

You can play all your music, an artist, an album, a playlist, a genre, or a single track. In any of these, you can have shuffle engaged or not. There are several equalizer settings, and a custom equalizer (with latest firmware). Album art is displayed when you are playing a track, and you can cycle through a fairly useless spectrum analyzer, a larger view of the album art, and the next song in the queue. I rarely can tell what the next song will be before the player switches back to the default view, though. You have about three seconds to see it before it changes away, but it scrolls slowly through artist/album/track so if you have an artist and album with too many characters, you’re out of luck.

So, other things I dislike about the player? You can’t delete content on the player. The voice recorder button can’t be disabled without locking all controls; you will end up recording yourself without meaning to. You can’t edit playlists, except the “Go List” on the player. I really miss the “songs of the 80s” type playlists that the Karma had. Of course, with only 4 gigs of space, some of those modes are less useful than they were with 20. The videos are pretty pointless; not only is the screen only 1.5 inches, the videos are converted to an incredibly inefficient codec to play: the MJPEG format in Quicktime.

My son is able to navigate his playlist without any hassle, the radio works pretty well, and overall it’s a great and reliable player. Highly recommended for anyone who hasn’t already paid too much for DRM-infected files from iTunes Music Store.

Penn & Teller have a show on Showtime called Bullshit, where they debunk various things which people believe.  I’ve got them on Netflix, and the first disk of season one is in my player now.  During their ripping of “alternative medicine,” they convinced some people in a mall to put snails on their faces as a means of reducing wrinkles and stress.  Ah, placebo effect!

I was going to link to a post someone had with a few dozen episodes of the show that were available on Google Video, but apparently the copyright police got to them. So, rent ’em if you want to see ’em (or get Showtime, but that seems a bit excessive).

Tonight’s episode of the Scifi show Eureka is required viewing. Any show that involves Salli Richardson getting down to her lingerie is a keeper.

Welcome Google Images users. Sorry Ms. Richardson is actually clothed.  I know what a disappointment that must be for you all.

I find it amazing that MS has still not figured out how to avoid punking their customers and partners. The wonderful DRM embedded in earlier versions of Windows Media Player is bad enough. Then came PlaysForSure, which many people say is more like “PlaysForShit.” There are many instances of the PlaysForSure files not transferring, or requiring multiple updates of software on the PC and firmware on the player. Plays For Sure as a slogan implies that your music will Just Work, but that is obviously not the case, based on how many complaints you can find online with mere seconds of research.

So, MS decided that the whole integrated solution thing Apple has going is a good idea. They partnered up with iRiver and MTV to produce the Clix and Urge. The device and service were designed together, to ensure that things actually would Play For Sure.  So far so good, even if it did effectively snub all the previous MS partners who had signed on for the Janus DRM train (anyone think it’s interesting that Janus had two faces?), as well as the hardware partners whose machines hadn’t been tested and certified for the MTV Urge service. They’ll probably work, but if it’s not marketed together, many people will assume incompatibility.

And now the latest change to Microsoft’s music roadmap – Zune. Not only does this get Microsoft involved in the hardware market for media players, effectively telling all the manufacturers who thought they were partners to piss off, it also introduces a new Zune-only store. That’s right, the Janus DRM-encumbered music you thought you owned from Rhapsody or Napster or whereever won’t play on Zune. You’ll have to buy it all again, if you want to play it on that new slick MS-branded player.

Might I suggest never buying any DRM-encumbered media? The result of ever buying any music or video from a service that puts DRM on it is that you don’t control your own property. You may think you own the latest Beyonce album, but if you bought it from Napster or iTunes, you don’t own a damned thing. You have a right to listen to it only on the device you bought it for and any new technology is likely to render your music collection so much junk.

Just for an added stab in the back of their customers, the Zune’s vaunted wifi sharing system will add DRM to any file, including public domain and Creative Commons files. For the public domain files, that’s just evil. For the CC files, that’s actually a violation of the CC license, which states unequivocally that no encryption can be applied to the file by anyone.

To recap, DRM is evil, Microsoft hates their customers, Microsoft can be trusted only to betray their business partners, and DRM is evil.

A friend once mentioned that his children wondered why he called Hastings a record store – what are records? It goes even further afield when I think of my son. He doesn’t really deal with CDs even; it’s all a playlist to him. In fact, his current playlist is posted online, just because I’m that kind of geek.

Proving that he is definitely my son, notice the totally eclectic nature of his choices. It’s important to note that I only add songs to his playlist when he asks me to. He recently asked for the Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” and I was astonished to realize that I didn’t have that ripped yet – soon that will be rectified.

Seriously, what other child nearing his seventh birthday wants Harry Belafonte and Elvis Costello and The Beatles? What other child has even heard of Ozomatli? I have a cool kid.

UPDATE: As noted in comments, Alex’s mother also has very eclectic musical tastes. One of our earlier conversations when we first met was our mutual astonishment that the other had heard of, much less listened to, Ani DiFranco.

Samuel Jackson on the Daily Show tonight was the first time I’ve seen an actor do a promo appearance with Jon Stewart and actually talk about the movie.  When Robin Williams was touring for RV, he did schtick about the President and other random Robin things.  When Will Farrell was doing appearances for his latest NASCAR thing, he mentioned the movie briefly and then wandered off into other stuff.

Only Snakes on a Plane can get actors and talk show hosts hyped enough to talk about the movie as if that’s the reason they got together that day.  And, seriously, Samuel Jackson seems to be a very animated fella. He even used the word “blogosphere” without sounding like a clueless dork.  Sweet.

Snakes on a Plane, not Ferrets on a Panel Truck.  Oh yeah.