television

Have you seen it yet? This is not something to miss! Personally I love the music, but the real charm is the humor. Neil Patrick Harris is the perfect comic hero/villain.

If you've not heard of this show, it's a little ditty by Firefly and Buffy creator Joss Whedon and cohorts, created as something to do while the writer's strike stalled all production in Hollywood.

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

(Of course, it will be available for paid download after today, but why not see it for free while you can?)

I can hardly wait. Hence this tweet-length post.

Some items are must-haves for any science fiction fan (and aren't all geeks and geekettes to some extent sci-fi fans?). We already know that Battlestar Galactica is the best show on television. Now we can celebrate not just this fabulous show in high-definition video, but those shows and movies that led to its creation (according to me -- Ron Moore may have different ideas).

Let's start at the top:

1. Battlestar Galactica - Season One [HD DVD]

   If you've stumbled across the show broadcast in HDTV on the UHD cable channel, you know that Galactica is really something else when you can see all the detail.

   Price: $69.95

2. Blade Runner (Five-Disc Complete Collector's Edition) [Blu-ray]

   Caprica Six, meet your cinematic ancestors -- the angry existentialist Ray, the touchy Leon, the cheerfully desperate Pris and the ass-kicking Zora. And, of course, Rachel. (I couldn't be offering a spoiler on this 1977 movie, could I?) You have to wonder if we'd have Battlestar Galactica if we didn't have Blade Runner. Remastered, re-edited by Ridley Scott, this is the definitive edition.

   Price: $27.95 for the 5-disc Blu-ray set, $66.95 for the Blade Runner (Five-Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition) (aka the special edition with dead tree material added)

3. Firefly - The Complete Series

   The mood of Galactica wouldn't be possible if it weren't for Firefly, which aired a few years before. This sci-fi classic series was ill-treated by the television, but lives on in gorgeous DVD video that upconverts very nicely, thank you.

   If you haven't seen Firefly, you're in for a treat. These characters you will love -- they will be your friends for life. I swear!

   Price: $39.99

4. Cowboy Bebop Remix, Volume 1

   You couldn't have Firefly without Cowboy Bebop. This anime series manages to surprise you. And the music is pretty cool, too.

   Price: $17.49

   Happy Holidays, Space Cowboy!

This is part of a larger holiday geeky gift guide I posted on BlogHer.

I can't say I'm a Ron Paul supporter, but this New York Times "analysis" by Julie Bosman of a Ron Paul television ad caught my eye as being a bit off the mark. Consider this:

The advertisement has a low-budget, unpolished feel, but that is unlikely to bother many of Mr. Paul’s supporters, who tend to be extremely devoted.

Let's pause right there. Ms. Bosman's assumption that only "devoted" supporters would appreciate a low-budget television ad strikes me as nuts, or at least naïve. I don't know anybody who likes the premasticated schmaltz sausages that pass for political commercials these days. They tell us nothing, really -- and are, in fact, some of the most tedious and boring crap (excuse me) on televison. If prescription drugs and iPods were sold like this, Pfizer and Apple would be out of business.

The advertisement accomplishes what the Paul campaign said was its modest goal: to introduce Mr. Paul to voters in that state, where he is emerging as a potential spoiler in the Republican primary.

Hmmm. Is he a "spoiler"? Considering that Paul raised $4 million online in 24 hours, he's already looking more viable than some of the other "contenders" out there, like -- what's his name? That actor guy that all the talk shows were buzzing about. The guy with the hang-dog expression. Oh yeah, he was too boring to remember.

For those of us paying attention, Clayton Christensen introduced the idea of the "disruptive" technology. Transistor radios, for example, hit the market by storm in 1965. Nobody saw it coming, except the Japanese. They were "competing against non-competition." Nobody was selling radios to teenagers -- or portable radios to anybody. Suddenly the Japanese were market players in consumer technology.

Disruptively financed Ron Paul is certainly starting to disrupt the political dialogue:

The war on terror and the growth of big government have had a dangerous side effect: the loss of privacy rights for the American people. Both parties have put their pet schemes ahead of our rights. Not me. As president, I won’t stand for it. No national ID card, no invasion of privacy.

This guy is running for president? Nobody else anywhere in the presidential race is "selling" this. He's competing against non-competition. That makes his increasing numbers ... disruptive ... to the status quo.

Hat tip to Seth, who's not endorsing Paul, but merely notes:

When you're trying to sell something new, particularly in a business to business setting, there are always people like Julie Bosman. They are the defenders of the status quo.

They have an important job to do: to point out to everyone the risks of change. To identify potential spoilers.

In the 1990s, Ross Perot competed against non-competition, and totally disrupted the presidential election. Call him a spoiler, but I don't think it's an accident that Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress took up his message and balanced the budget. Four years ago, Howard Dean was the disruptive candidate with online power.

In the end, Perot and Dean couldn't hold it together in the context of mainstream media message making. A lot has changed since then. The web is not on the margins anymore -- it's the new reality that all the mainstream media are focusing on. Just check the hot topics on Romanesko.

Is Ron Paul a "spoiler"? My feeling is that you won't learn much asking the pundits.

[Photo credit: Vince Brown]

Well here I sit, fooled yet again by Comcast.

I was very excited to get the TiVo Series 3 DVR. This is my first TiVo ever. And about time! Or it would be, if it weren't for the absolutely horrid and appallingly incompetent "customer support" of Comcast.

We received the TiVo unit last week. Comcast was supposed to come Sunday morning, "between 8 and 10." They did not show. The tech claimed that nobody was home. I was sitting here all that time.

So they rescheduled for Monday afternoon. The tech came ... but with only one card, even though any full activation of TiVo requires two cards so you can watch and record different programs simultaneously. Not only that, he couldn't get even the one card to work. He left, saying he would return the next day with two cards and, hopefully, a way to get the central office to activate them properly.

And so today I left work over 3 hours early to sit here and wait for Comcast to come and do what they were supposed to do Sunday.

Nobody showed up. I called and was told he was coming. Nobody showed up. Calling again, they said that he reported the job as done. He never showed up!!

So Comcast is now supposedly looking into it and will call me back. But so far they are 10 min late in calling back, and with this track record, I don't expect any call.

So my question is this: Is Comcast deliberately slow-tracking all TiVo activations in order to promote their own competing DVR?

Oh, that reminds me: Comcast has been charging for having a DVR, even though it's just an ordinary HDTV unit.

With the writers on strike, will this break up the 22-episode final season of Battlestar Galactica? Will it delay the season altogether?

Show creator and WGA member Ronald D. Moore certainly isn't going to be crossing any picket lines, even if he is in that gray area of writer/producer/show-runner:

Some tense times as we head into the strike tomorrow.

Just wanted to take a moment and express my thanks to those of you who've made clear your support of the writers and of our staff in particular. There will still be a Galactica to finish when this is all over, and I'll be back to talk to you more then.

Thanks again and I'll see you on the other side of the Jump.

My hope is that they will run with the 15 or show shows already written. April 2008 is long enough to wait anyway.

The good news is that the strike will almost certainly leave NBC a bit thin on prime-time show programming -- this may prompt NBC to air Galactica which would be way cool for the show itself. Galactica sets a real standard for television. It would be really nice to give it a chance to capture more of the audience I really feel it deserves.

Via Romanesko:

CBS, ABC Deny Airing "Puff" on Thomas

CBS-TV and ABC-TV defended their networks' pieces on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas amid criticism that "60 Minutes" and "Nightline" had offered up uncritical "puff pieces" as they interviewed Thomas in connection with his new memoir, "My Grandfather's Son."

...As noted Monday, the reviews were different on the e-mail list of the National Association of Black Journalists, and in a discussion of the "60 Minutes" piece on PBS' "The Tavis Smiley Show."

"I've now watched the 60 Minutes interview and the Nightline interview. It was like watching the Home Shopping Network," wrote one. "You mean to tell me that there was not a single critical commentator on Clarence Thomas' record? These things could have been on Larry King and no one would have blinked. I'm rarely disgusted, but this was pure journalistic drivel."

Meanwhile, the man who does the real fake journalism, Jon Stewart, seems to demonstrate a bit more journalistic integrity, albeit in his own comic style, than is de rigeur for the mainstream media book promotion routine:

Oh the irony!

I suppose I should feel like the cool insider for being a Joost beta tester. All I did was fill out a form some time ago.

Joost has a pretty logo, and their website is full of Flashy color. However, the actual Joost application experience is much more monochrome.

I find the GUI a bit clunky, but that's to be expected in beta. It's better than the ridiculously bad Comcast digital cable UI, a little. Personally I found the placement of navigation buttons to be awkward.

I spent only 15 minutes or so in my first try of Joost. Most of the time I was trying to scroll through channels to find something that actually interested me. This is where the navigation proved a bit challenging. I think my experience was hampered by the fact that I was trying it out at peak hours -- prime time. Maybe in the morning it would be better.

My first impression was that there wasn't all that much on Joost. I can spend hours surfing through what, 500 channels of television on Comcast, and find nothing on. Same with Joost, I fear. In the end, Joost can be only as good as the content it presents.

The low resolution of video is to be expected. You're not going to get high-quality video through the puny ISP bandwidths available today in the US. That puts an imperative on Joost to offer something different, something somehow better -- or at least other -- than what we find on the three-digit cable channels.

Maybe I'm the wrong customer because I'm watching TV on a 42" plasma HDTV. (Hey, it was a deal and it was cheaper than the smaller LCD.) I look at upconverted DVDs and HDTV programs and see something new: details. High resolution is nice.

I'll try Joost again and perhaps share some more thoughts. I hate to leave this post on such a down note, so I'll give it another shot. I want it to be great. I'll settle for okay.

One of my favorite "old media" tech sites, Creative Cow, has launched a community blog site. With anticipation, I clicked on the link in the email announcement and as soon as the page loaded I had to laugh.

The Cow uses Drupal!

The Creative Cow has been a fabulous resource for tech talk on video, HD, DVD. It's a truly grassroots effort, forged in the 1990s, when many in video, television and film were spinning from (or left hanging by) the enormous upheavals that took place as "desktop" postproduction and digital video cameras started to disrupt the long-standing hegemony of the multi-million-dollar production houses. What system do I buy? What video card is best? How do I change my BIOS to get the most video performance? My system has been EOL'd by the manufacturer -- what now? Oh no, the blue screen of death -- what now? How can I make this effect? Anyone know a sound recorder in Santa Fe?....

My blog account has not yet been approved, but I see that they've adopted a wysiwyg editor. (TinyMCE? Oh dear!) Still, it's nice to welcome a "web 1.0" powerhouse in old media into the "web 2.0" world.

So Jeremiah Owyang has started a media consumption diet meme, and Marianne Richmond has tagged us BlogHers, so here goes....

• Web: I used to use NetNewsWire Lite for RSS, but I tried Shrook and found it to me easier to use, with some of the features NetNewsWire makes you pay for. Shrook is easy enough, so I'll stick with it for now. Do I need to mention Firefox? For search, I use Google pretty exclusively (I find myself wondering how Yahoo! gets by, what with all the barriers they put up for people to get listed in their index) and if I'm blog-hunting, I go to Technorati. I blog using Drupal for platform and either Performancing or ecto for blogging client (though neither is optimal -- Performancing repeatedly loses my drafts and ecto keeps embedding cruft into my html, even when I define the tags myself). For online video, I find YouTube too useful to ignore. It can be a bit hard to take, though, just browsing at random.
• Music: I've started trying out Pandora, but in some stations they keep trying to push the strangest things -- sorry but how do you get Foreigner or Journey from Led Zeppelin? -- and they limit how many songs I can reject in a given time. (Am I just too persnickety?) I have several of my old CDs burned to mp3 files, which I play on my desktop iTunes, but as I've moved from my nearly-dead PowerBook to two iMacs to my current MacBook Pro, it's been a challenge carrying those 20GB of files along for the migration ride. (It doesn't help that some of the discs were defective bulk coasters.) I haven't signed up for the iTunes Store, though, because the DRM restrictions and poor audio quality make downloads there less than appealing, no matter how appealing and easy-to-use the GUI is. Stop treating me like a criminal guilty until proven innocent, Apple and RIAA, and you'll have my business. Meanwhile, as CD music continues to fade away at the big box stores, I'm finding my music horizons diminishing, and that's a terrible place to be. My whole live is defined by soundtrack.
• TV: I don't have much time to watch television, especially the commercial variety -- I think I'm more and more intolerant of commercials. I will watch the NewsHour if I'm home early enough, the Daily Show if I'm up late enough (and thank goodness for the 9pm rerun of last night's show), Frontline if I stumble across it and (of course) Battlestar Galactica. I don't do cable news -- it strikes me as an entire industry getting excited about the lint in their own navels. However, since getting HDTV on Comcast, I've found that I'm more likely to just watch anything as long as it's high-def. Well, not anything at all, but it's amazing how much more interesting Nova or Discovery (or reruns of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly) are when you can see so much detail on the screen. (Ironic that local news is in high-def, but most network shows are not; the Rose Parade was in high def, but the Macy's parade was not; sports are in high def but arts typically are not; and all HBO seems to play on their single high-def channel is Rome [though it could be worse].)
• Communication: My cell is a Palm Treo 700p, but I hardly ever use it. It comes in handy when I need to keep up on email or check something on the web, but I'm realizing the touchscreen I so wanted (and thus the reason I rejected alternatives like Blackberry or Q) is pretty over-rated. Ah well, live and learn. The phone part is actually great for clarity and reception, but I don't use it as a PDA at all, as the 320x320 screen is just too damned small. Other phonage is Vonage. I haven't had a land-line phone in quite a few years now. --Not that any of this matters, because I really really hate talking on the phone unless it's necessary. For IM, I use Jabber (via Adium), which we have set up on one of our domains, and the sadly unavoidable Skype, which as a relay is an absolute bandwidth hog even when it's just sitting there.
  I don't use Skype much for voice, since so many people seem to have so many problems configuring it to work well. We thought it'd be great for talking to clients overseas to save a few pennies a minute, but all too often it was too much like the Cone of Silence. I use Apple Mail for email, mainly because Thunderbird on Mac is too slooowwwwww (I wish it weren't).
• Movies: Once upon a time, I saw several movies a week, sometimes several in one day, but now that they blast commercials in your face before showing generally sucky movies -- not to mention the overpriced junk food, sticky floors and noisy patrons -- it's just not worth it. It's not fun any more. So I watch movies on DVD, where I'm not limited by the, excuse me, crap selection of the week, and which on an HDTV plasma is an entirely new experience. I tend to buy, not rent, because rented discs always seem to have scratches that make the flick skip or freeze.
• Magazines: I subscribe to Post, HOW, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Macworld and occasionally Wired. I rarely buy a magazine off the rack. It amazes me how many magazines are in print. Do people actually read all these things? Somebody must. I have to say, however, that the supermarket tabloids do keep me informed. I mean, I could've gone for weeks or even months without knowing that Brittney Spears shaved her head or that Brad sent a note to Jen! Eeep!
• Books: I live for novels, but it's hard for me to find writers I like, so I'm stuck with the five or six authors who could write just about anything and I'd read it. Maybe if my life weren't so fast-paced, I'd be able to relax enough to get into a new writer's style, but usually I can't get past the first paragraph, so I do without. Meanwhile I'm reading more non-fiction than any time since I was in college. How She Does It, Blink and Designing Interactions are three of the most recent delights.
• Newspapers: I love reading off paper, but unlike magazines I don't hold the same love of newspapers. I like the print design of the New York Times, but I hate getting newsprint all over my fingers, and at a buck a pop for something I may not even have time to read that day, it becomes a dead-tree guilt and a recycling burden more than a source of news. 15 years ago that wasn't the case -- I loved getting the paper! How life changes in these times! I still read the "newspapers" online, including the NY Times, the Mercury News and the odd site that happens to have the AP wire story I want to read.

So there's my consumption in a nutshell. Now in the tradition of tagging, and because they are such an eclectic group of geeks and artists, I'd like to tag everyone on Planet Drupal.

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