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Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

A Week for Losers

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

Well, in the start the eventual Red Sox loss (#3 in a row) I got an IM from Josh that included a spoiler for this week’s beauty and the geek. Quit now if you don’t want to be spoiled. It was one line, all spoiler, no lead up:

Man, Luke talks then he’s gone.

I finished the game, yelling enough at Josh that he felt compelled to take up the Red Sox cause for one night only, which is a big step for him, and I post it here only so his family has evidence of his weakness and treachery. I finished the game, then settled down for a spoiled Beauty and the Geek at 1.1 time normal speed.

Oh so, I skipped last week’s Beauty and the Geek update, well it didn’t have much to do with Luke or Jesse, but it was interesting. Nicole tricked Sam into putting 2 strong competitors up against Rebbecca and Will, whom Sam wanted to keep in the game, but Nicole did not. Nicole’s trickery paid off her in the end. In other news, Nicole apparently attends Tufts, which is all of a 15 min walk away from here.

Ok so this week. There was a make over. Luke went from this:

To this:

In the end, Luke and Katie got put up for elimination by Shae and Josh because, as I said at the start, Luke isn’t really in the same category as some of the other geeks like Josh; and therefore, is seen as a threat to win. Although, Katie, after a 2nd best showing in the episode 2 debate, didn’t seem as smart as she was given credit for in the teaching segment this week. Luke went home in the end because Nicole knows what Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson are famous for; that is having 2 kids and shaving her air, and lip syncing respectively. Come on, even I knew that. The real question is that with Tony, Amanda, Luke, Katie, and Hollie gone, are Jesse and Erin really enough of a reason to keep watching this pretty awful show. Maybe I’ll give it a try at 1.4 times normal speed like I used to watch family feud with the room mates. At that speed the 44 minute long show would only take 31.4 minuets. Don’t expect an update.

Posted in Beauty and the Geek, Rants | Comments Closed

Mario Kart Double Dash

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

Remember, my room mate Sririam got a Wii not too long ago. Now, my primary interest in the Wii is as a 250% more expensive than it should be Game Cube, so that I can once again play the aforementioned game. Mario Kart is my game, so much as I have one. Last time I seriously played Double Dash was when I was living in Morrill Tower with Chris, which was sophomore year of college…. 2004. Its been 3 years; I’m not as rusty and I expected to be. I was pretty bored over the long weekend (I got Columbus Day off) so in addition to starting Arrested Development (now in season 2), I unlocked everything you can with the 4 non-all-cup-tour cups on 50, 100, and 150cc cups. I’ve never actually unlocked anything on the game before, as Chris came to me with everything already unlocked, so that was fun.

Wavebirds, thats what you call those wireless game cube controllers. They are ridiculously difficult to acquire. It seems Nintendo stopped producing them, and demand is way up because no one wants to use the plain old wired controllers with the wii (that just seems wrong). The only place I could find any is ebay, and the go for ~$45 a pop on there regularly. I got lucky though, so I thought. I found someone selling the game and 2 wavebrids (all separate auctions but the same seller), and I won all of the auctions. That saved me ~$12 in shipping, which made things more reasonable, and the game went for way less than retail. Anyways one of them was missing a part that was clearly pictured in the image. The seller has agreed to let me return that one, and 2 pristine controllers arrived today from another auction. I’m only 1 short now, and then, once my room mates get up to speed, the tournaments will commence.

Posted in Games, TV | Comments Closed

Beauty & the Geek Rankings

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

Beauty and the Geek actually airs on Tuesday, not Thursday as my blog would make it seem. Not much to report here, Jesse was almost eliminated, but survived. Luke was hardly in the show at all. Thats sort of a good thing, in that they will include you in the show more if you are more likely to be eliminated. I found a site, an ad laden annoying scummy site, but they are doing weekly rankings. In the first ranking Luke had the top spot, but hes slipped a little, down to number 3 and Jesse jumped to number 2, although the reasoning there is more wishful than scientific.

Posted in Beauty and the Geek | Comments Closed

Chuck and Beauty and the Geek

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

I watched the pilot episode of Chuck from Monday tonight. I had heard that it was going to be good, and wow was it not. I call it right now this show will be replaced mid season. This show felt like it was in the early ’90s in terms of how it portrayed computer geeks. That is a big no no if you want to attract geeks as an audience. Of course, targeting geeks at all, is a big turn off to just about every other demographic, which leaves the show with no one to watch it. Sure NBC will play some games, giving it the Heroes lead-in audience possibly (that would be a sign they desperately want to attract the geeks who like Heroes), but that won’t work because the writing is awful. They clearly do not have any geek consults at all. I will not tune in next week.

I’m sure all of you who care know by now that Luke made it through the 2nd episode of Beauty and the Geek. Jesse also made it, but there was 1 Ohio casualty, and unfortunately it was not Jasmine, but Amanda (and Tony). I liked Tony and Amanda, although possibly due to editing as all things on the show are, it seemed Amanda actually cared about him. One thing that someone I talked to suspected they were controlling is wardrobe. He or she (I forgot who it was exactly) refused to believe that the geeks really dressed that way (too geeky and with absolutely zero fashion sense), saying that the show must be giving them clothes to wear. Their primary complaint was with Jesse in the first episode. While not a lock, Luke’s sporting on one of our OSU FIRST shirts in the second episode hurts that claim.

The teams that won made a mistake in not picking Luke and Katie for elimination. So there are 2 events, geeks vs. geeks, and beauties vs. beauties. This means that 1 or most likely 2 teams will win these events. Each winning team gets to pick 1 team to put up for elimination. This is the first episode, so there is no past performance record to look at so you make the best decisions possible with your limited amount of information. In each event there was a clear second place team; because of Katie’s debate skills Luke and her were one such team, the other team was John the MIT guy and his girl (they did get picked). In the end the result was that a cute team who was no threat to anyone, at least initially, was eliminated, which makes the whole competition that much harder for everyone else. I can see some strategy in that, but I’m certain no such strategy was actually planned.

Posted in Beauty and the Geek | Comments Closed

Beauty and My Friend the Geek

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

My friend, former FIRST Robotics teammate, and guy I never really talked to in High School, Luke is on Beauty and the Geek this season. Tonight was the first episode. I had heard that he auditioned, but I didn’t know that he had actually made the show until tonight. That probably that stems from him being sworn to secrecy by The CW, and that I moved away from Columbus. I made myself watch the show, which was difficult at times cause wow is reality TV bad, no offense Luke. Here’s to you winning that embarrassingly small $250,000 grand prize.

(Luke and Sites with the 2005 control box in the making)

A coworker mentioned at lunch that they also had a long time, high school friend on the show. He is also from the Cincinnati area, but didn’t goto high school with Luke and me, so there must be another person from Cincinnati on the show. I presumed it was one of the geeks, but I did catch that one of the beauties was from Ohio. How many freak’n people from Ohio do they have on this show? I’ll have to ask him who it is tomorrow. I’m going to try to watch Luke until he gets kicked off. Does that even happen in this show, I have no idea.

So the contestant that my coworker grew up with is Jesse. There are 4 Ohio contestants, Luke, Jesse, Amanda and Jasmine. Oh, and of course people are eliminated on a weekly basis.

Posted in Beauty and the Geek | Comments Closed

Lazyness wins over Evil

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

I read a very enlightening story on /. yesterday. The Slate.com story was about watching Video on Demand (VOD) which other people nearby had selected. It turns out that comcast is not nearly as sinster as I would have made them out to be. I’ll summerize the important and non voyeristic results of the story and my testing below.

Before yesterday, I had always assumed that because they could cables companies would intentially obfuscate all signals carried over thier wires with the exception of the 50 or so channels which must be carried in over the air (OTA) format for all those legacy cable ready TV sets. Since they say that you need a cable box to recieve any other channels, I assumed that they were technically correct. It would not be difficult to slightly modify any existing transmistion protocol to the point were only “in the know” cable boxes could decipher the signal and display it. You don’t even have to eyncrypt the content to prevent its display; although, that is certainly a more fulproof method. Given how much cable and content companies are spending on DRM these days I took it as a mater of course that I was out of luck getting HD (or any digital) signal off of my cable wire without the appropriate $5-10 a month box.

But I was wrong! Comcast, at least in the DC (see above story) and Boston areas, is much more lazy than they are evil. They transmit HD signals for your normal OTA channels in the clear along side the the analog OTA channels, over their cable in a format called QAM. Now, it just so happens that my new HDTV has a built in QAM tunner. At the sugestion of the Slate.com story I tired it out, hooked a cable straight from the wall to my TV, and told my TV to search out the channels.

It found ~120 channels. Now, that includes the 50 or so analog channels as it also has a normal analog NTSC tunner in it. (To round out the info the tv also has a ATSC tunner which is the format for OTA HDTV). That number does not inlcude the sub, dot, or hyphen channels depending on what you want to call them. A digital tv singal can contain some number of sub channels it appears at least 14. The available bandwidth is split between these channels so you can say run 1 subchannel at 1080i resoultion, but you could run say 4 at 720p resoultion, or even more if you intended to only display standard 480i content you could run 14 or something nuts like that.

Most these subchannels above channel 80 were broadcasting black, not no signal — actually broadcasting black. Three of these were actually broadcasting video. One of them was playing V for Vendetta, another some unkown movie, and third one was playing something with an MTV on Demmand logo in the lower right — confirming that these are the on demand channels as described in the story. There is little reason why we would want to watch this stuff, but its interesting that we can. I am paying for digital cable so non of this should be content for which I am not already paying. Anyways, I am quite excited about the OTA HD channels coming on the cable because it means I won’t have to futz around with an antenna.

Posted in Rants, TV | Comments Closed

Gilmore Girls Movie

Friday, May 25th, 2007

And here I thought I’d never move beyond 5 enteries in the Gilmore Girls category. According to this, the show’s original creator wants to make a made for tv Gilmore movie. I am a skeptic, but aparently she had a great ending all planned out with four magical words which she has told no one. Maybe she could just remake the 7th season? maybe she should make a web comic if she can’t get the actors; similar to what Firefly did to bridge the gap between the show and Serenity (but with the web not a book). Or, or, she could anonymously submit the script to a fan fiction site. All of these things seem equally far fetched to me; at this point it might be better to let dead dogs lie. I do want to know what those four words are and what they mean.

Posted in Gilmore Girls | Comments Closed

Slashback

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

For the uninitiated Slashback is a /. feature that periodically redresses previous stories with clarifications, more information, or new developments.

Some more on the xkcd talk: at one point someone asked Randell “Where are you from on the Internet?” (see the hover text). He talked a bit about a chat room of yore (no reminiscent of the dustbowl) where he hung out, but then he let everyone know that he spent a lot of time at live journal during high school (apparently thats a frowned upon place to be from). So I got to thinking where do I come from. In 8th grade (my family didn’t get the internet until part way 7th grade (1997)) I spent a lot of my time in the wy2 (thats wonder years 2) chat room, on some IRC server I don’t recall. That seems like a good place to be from, at least its on IRC. But really before that I was from geocities. http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/2296, that link, of course, is long broken. I’m proud of that though, I had a website about, um, Star Trek/Sci-Fi , The Site, and later Wonder Years complete with easy to send of a 14.4 modem Real Audio clips. Where are you from?
For anyone missing Gilmore Girls a little bit: Kirk’s top 10 moments. Ok so I don’t really miss it like I miss a person so much as I feel the need to seek out these kinds of stories which you can only find shortly after the end of the show. I don’t remember even half of the episodes kirk lists so I will have to go back and watch each one. Feel free to drop any similar links on the comments.
I have been super busy this week (at home — work is normal). I don’t even know why but it feels like I’ve got no time. Its not like I’m doing lots of things. I guess I should be going ;-)

Posted in Gilmore Girls, xkcd | Comments Closed

Bon Voyage

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

I got HDTV over the air (yes that works) working about 20 mins before the series finale of Gilmore Girls. This is the first actual HD program I’ve watched on the TV and I was very impressed. First, I couldn’t find the adapter which turns my old rabbit ear’s screw terminal wires into a normal coax wire. I did find, in my search, the little FM radio antennas that came with my TV tuner cards. It had a coax output on it so I plugged it in. The reception on the analog stations was awful. But the HD stations came in crystal clear! That really surprised me, but I took it because I didn’t have much time. I’m very much happy with how they ended the series, these last 2 episodes have really shined, well beyond the rest of the last season.
Part of me finds it hard to believe that the show is over. I really got into it in 2003-2004 when there was a lot of drama going on in my real life and I used the show as an escape/comfort (cause what else is tv really good for?). It is also an icon in my move to not be ashamed of the kinds of entertainment I enjoy most (coming of age dramas and comedies). I’ve found that to be a stength, at time, but none more so than during the season 4 finale:

liryon: ooohh luke and lorali finally :-)
girl: …?
liryon: they kissed
girl: awww
liryon: yup
girl: :)
girl: you’re such a girl
liryon: thx
girl: :) I love you

After season 4 the show, and well the girl too, went down hill. Looks like I have to be over both now, and the tv show is the harder part, 2004 me would not have guessed that.

Posted in Gilmore Girls | Comments Closed

The TV Arrives

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

I didn’t blog about it, but as many of you know I ordered an LC-42D72U Sharp HDTV recently. It has arrived and there are pictures to follow. I got this TV because it was one of the 2 sharp models that met all 4 of my requirements:

Full HD 1920x1080p resolution
Built in HDTV tuner
DVI Input
37″ or larger

So far I love it! It took about an hour to get it working with Linux. I quickly realized that a lot of my media is not up to snuff. I’m already adjusting my bitrates upwards.