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Stuff that doesn’t fit in any other category

Too much realism in flight simulation?

As a (non-active) instrument-rated pilot, one of my favorite diversions is X-Plane—as it's the closest I'll ever get to flying the "big iron." There are realistic touches in many spots in the sim, including the occasional bird flock visible during takeoff or landing at some airports. Now I'd seen these flocks on many occasions, but hadn't realized that they were actually...involved...in the simulation.

But the other day, I was taking off in a 747 out of Portland (not like we really get those here), and a flock flew across the runway just after I rotated. Despite my best efforts, the 747 flew right through the clump of birds, and the he results were...quite surprising, and more gory than I was expecting. Read on for the details and a (too realistic?) screenshot.
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24 on an extended hiatus

24In case you missed it, CNN is reporting that the seventh season of 24 will not return until 2009. In the story, CNN notes that 24 would end during the summer if it started its run late. (Traditionally, networks won't air their top-tier shows in the summer.) Here's how Fox summarized their decision making process, from the story:

A January 2009 start seemed the best way to comply with viewers' wishes that a season's episodes run without interruption to conclusion, Fox said on Thursday.

Ummm, no. The best way to comply with viewers' wishes would be to start production, begin airing the show whenever it's ready, and then air it in consecutive weeks until it's done. The best way to comply with the network's wishes, however, would be to make the decision they made. Idiots.



Site upgrade complete

We're now running the latest version of WordPress -- if you run WordPress and aren't on 2.3.3 yet, I strongly recommend upgrading, or at least patching your xmlrpc.php file. There's a security problem with that file in older WordPress releases, as detailed in this WordPress blog post:

If you have registration enabled a flaw was found in the XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog.

This actually happened here; two posts were modified to include links to malware and ringtone sites.

Most everything is back up and working as it was before, though sadly, the King Login widget, which allowed logins directly in the sidebar, doesn't work at all with 2.3.3, so it's been disabled. While working on the upgrade, my comment spam blocker was offline for all of 10 minutes or so. During that time, three anonymous spammy comments were submitted -- sheez!



Catching up on my Macworld writing

Macworld logoOnce again, I've fallen behind in posting summaries of my Macworld articles here. I've now rectified that, and you'll find them all in the archives here on the proper date (i.e. the date that matches their appearance on Macworld.com). I've included both blog entries (rants, usually) as well as a couple of reviews and such that I've worked on.
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A most useful home project assistant

toolI took last week off as vacation, though what I spent most of the week doing was far from a vacation: I tackled many of the jobs on the never-ending household to-do list. So instead of relaxing on a beach, I spent last week hanging three curtain rods and curtains, installing towel bars in a couple of bathrooms, and doing some work in the garage to hang a pegboard and clean up the work area--among many other not nearly so exciting tasks :).

Through it all, the cool little device pictured above helped me immensely. That round thing is the STRAIT-LINE Laser Level 30 (LL30 from here on out), a cheap and effective laser level. Until about a year ago, I used to futz with an old-fashioned bubble level whenever I needed to get something straight on the wall. However, for most of the jobs I was doing, a bubble level was next to useless. It takes an extra set of hands to hold it where it's needed, and it seemed it was either too big or too small for the task at hand. So on a sojourn to Home Depot, I spotted the LL30. For the price ($15 or so), I figure I couldn't go wrong giving it a try...and after just one project, I was sold.
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On our declining attention span

In my last post, I discussed a couple of issues with the cinematography in The Bourne Ultimatum. However, while writing that post last night, I reminded myself of another movie-related issue I wanted to talk about: trailers.

I find most of today's spy, thriller, and action movie trailers basically unwatchable: there is simply too much action packed into every two-minute trailer. I know they're trying to grab our attention, but to a large extent, they've simply gone too far. In a modern trailer for movies in these genres, you're simply not allowed to actually watch anything; instead, it appears the objective is to see how many different shots of your movie you can fit into a two-minute window. So the "scenes" are incredibly short, leading to tons of cuts from one scene to another.

Just how bad has it gotten? I thought it might be enlightening to compare the Bourne Ultimatum trailer with some similar movies from the 1970s, and then one completely different type of movie from 1980.
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Cinematography and The Bourne Ultimatum

Last night, my wife and I had a rare night out. With two kids, we've really only got one non-family babysitter we trust, and she happened to be available on a Tuesday, so we took advantage of the situation. After a nice dinner (it's amazing how roomy a restaurant table is without all the stuff that accompanies a couple of young kids!), we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum (Flash-enabled loud site, sigh).

We both enjoyed the first Bourne movie, though we found the second disappointing (too much like a two-hour MTV music video). But we'd heard good things about the third, so we were anticipating a couple hours of decent entertainment. And generally speaking, that's what we got: I'd rate the third movie as the best of the bunch; there are some amazingly well done scenes, including a tense seen in London's sprawling Waterloo Station. If you enjoy spy/action movies, this one is worth seeing, even in light of what I'm about to discuss.

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My favorite comedy movies [#5 to #1]

As promised, here's part three of three--the final installment of my personal favorite comedies. Note that there's a big difference between my favorite comedies and the best comedies ever made. I would never pretend that my list represents the best of the best in the art of comedic cinema. Instead, these are the movies that have made me laugh the most consistently over the years. Yes, it's true, I have a sick and twisted mind. Anyway, on with the list...
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My favorite comedy movies [#15 to #11]

My friend Kirk and I were chatting the other day, and we got to talking about our favorite comedy movies. Both of us struggled to come up with just one, given the wide variety of comedy out there, and one's taste for the various comedic styles (dark, slapstick, etc.) may change as the years go by. Then there's the matter of era—comedies have been in production for nearly 100 years, so there's a huge body of work. How can one compare a film from the 1920s or 1930s with something made in the last five years?

After our chat, I got to thinking about my favorite comedies, and I thought I'd put together a list of my 10 favorites. To make things a bit easier on myself, I picked the somewhat arbitrary year of 1980 as the starting point, even though there are lots of comedies that I would include from prior to that date—The Blues Brothers, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Blazing Saddles, anything by Charlie Chaplin, etc. But I didn't think I could do a credible job of choosing from movies in many different eras, so I used 1980 as the cutoff mainly because it was a nice round number.

As I started working on the list, I found that I couldn't trim it to just 10 without leaving off what I felt were some of my personal favorites, so I expanded it to 15 movies. Even at that, there are quite a few that fell just below the cut line—Airplane, Meet the Parents, LA Story, Austin Powers—that I still consider great comedies and are in my DVD collection. Still, the line had to be drawn somewhere.

So at the risk of losing the last few readers I still have (by revealing my poor taste in filmmaking), here are the 'bottom five' of my 15 favorite comedies, arranged from "just barely made the cut" (#15) to "absolute favorite" (#1). (I was going to run the list all at once, but the post was simply too long; look for parts two and three in the near future.)
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