Remember, Remember the Fifth of November...

Remember remember the fifth of November

Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot...

Yeah, I guess you could count that as an endorsement! Go see V for Vendetta!

...Now I can't get the 1812 Overture out of my head...

Why I Hate US Airways

You know, I used to like flying.

I'm back at S.U. this week after a typically uneventful spring break, but I had a bit of adventure getting here. It's story time...

I was supposed to fly back sunday night on a flight that left at 8:40, and got me here around 10. That was the plan. After my typical last minute rush of packing (made worse by the obsessive need to watch the "Serenity" DVD my dad had purchased before I left) I got to the Pittsburgh airport, made it through security, and sat down at my gate with enough time left to play with the free WiFi.

Close to the time we were supposed to board, there's an announcement saying there's an "overbooking situation" on this flight, and they're looking for 3 or 4 (!) volunteers with flexible travel plans to switch to a later flight. I'd heard this before, and it didn't concern me much since the airline usually finds a few volunteers to keep their compassionless business model running (They'd rather overbook and kick people off a flight than risk having a few empty seats that aren't being paid for).

Unfortunatly, this went differently this time. A little while later, they called four names to come to the counter, and mine was one of them. We were informed that we might get bumped, and that we needed to wait here until everyone else got on the plane. We waited. And waited. While I was talking to another passenger who had been affected (a girl who also went to SU, and had an 8am class the next day), we overheard an interesting discussion. It seemed the plane was supposed to be ready to take off now, but they were waiting on some checked luggage that was late. The supervisor on duty wasn't happy with this, as apparently its against airline policy to delay takeoff for late luggage.

U.S. Airways overbooks its flights, and likes to leave suitcases behind when they don't make it to the plane on time. And they wonder why they're always on the verge of bankruptcy...

Anyway, eventually they mumbled something about being sorry for the inconvenience, and told us we could in fact get on the plane. Awesome! I gathered my things, and headed out to the plane. Since this was a small "Express" flight, standard carry-ons won't fit in the overhead bins. Instead, you put a yellow "Gate-Check" tag on them, and on your way to the plane, hand them to guy who puts them in the back of the plane. At your destination, you pick them up at the gate, rather than at baggage claim. I handed my roller-bag to the guy, and got on the plane with just my backpack containing my laptop and a few other small, expensive things I don't trust out of my sight. I sat down, and breathed a sigh of relief that this trip was finally getting underway.

Then the late luggage showed up.

Apparently, the luggage they had delayed the plane for was quite numerous. In fact, it wouldn't all fit in the back of the plane. The stewardess (attendant? What't the PC term?) started asking people very nicely if they could fit extra bags under the seats and whatnot. She was actually being quite thoughtful, doing everything possible to avoid leaving anything behind.

Then the supervisor showed up. He said that while the plane wasn't overbooked, it was overweight, so the four of us had to get off again. The thoughtful stewardess tried to offer us the choice of having our bags taken off and put on a later flight while staying on ourselves, but the supervisor said she couldn't do that. Dumbfounded, we exited the plane again.

The supervisor merits special mention. Now, most people still seem like people when they are working. Either they are pleasant and trying to help you (like the stewardess), or they hate their job and it shows, or whatever, but you can still tell they are human. Then there are people who come across as company policy books come to life. They aren't compassionate, they don't even offer a sad "I wish I could help" smile to calm you down. No emotion, no empathy. From all appearances, they have no souls.

The supervisor was of the latter type. Think Dick Cheney. Seriously, this guy looked (and sorta sounded) like Dick Cheney. (No joke!) His nametag said "Sean L." because apparently he doesn't have the guts to put his last name behind the work he does.

Once off the plane, I asked whether my gate-checked luggage would be taken off the plane. The supervisor assured me that it would, but that they couldn't just give it to me there on the tarmac (you guessed it: against policy), but that we could get our bags later at baggage claim F. Then one of the workers nearby got the brilliant idea to take our names down so that they could get our bags off the plane. Keep in mind, this only occured to him after the supervisor had assured us that all would be taken care of. Before we could ask any more pesky questions, the supervisor shooed us back into the airport.

At this point, we obviously weren't too happy. I was already planning this blog post. The girl I talked to earlier was nearly in tears after a phone call with her boss in Syracuse who wasn't very understanding that she wouldn't be able to work her 11pm shift that night. A middle-aged woman in our group looked like she wanted to shoot someone. The supervisor gave us a very unconvincing apology for our troubles (again, think Cheney), and then it was time for the paperwork.

If you get bumped from a flight at US Airways, they are "generous" enough to put you on the next flight out, (in this case, at 7:15 the next morning) put you up in a hotel for the night, and give you a $10 meal voucher to use at the airport restaurants. The only real nice thing they give you is a free round-trip ticket to anywhere in the continental US, usable anytime within the next year (except for black-out dates like, oh, any significant holiday). Of course, you have to sign this ticket to accept it - right under some rather fine print that promises you won't sue the airline. Mmmm... extortion!

I took the free ticket and meal, but passed on the hotel; This is my hometown, I'll sleep in my own bed tonight, thank you very much! I called my dad, and told him he had to turn around and pick me up again. The supervisor reminded us that our luggage was at baggage claim F. (How could he be so sure? He hadn't checked or anything.) He also gave us the assurance that you cannot get bumped twice, so we were guaranteed our flight in the morning. (Gee, how nice...) Broken and defeated, we all headed to baggage claim F.

I'll bet you can see where this is going. Yup, my gate-checked roller-bag wasn't there. The other passengers' luggage was sitting on the corousel, but mine was MIA. After a fruitless search, I shuffled over to the baggage claim/customer service desk. I explained the situation to the nice guy behind the counter (at least this one seemed human!), and he went into a back room to check. After a phone call, he told me there had been some sort of "miscommunication," and my bag had stayed on the plane and gone to Syracuse without me.

Damn you, Dick Cheney-alike!!

The man told me that my luggage would be locked up in Syracuse overnight, and I could pick it up when I arrived the next day. I walked to the passenger pick-up area, my mind stuck on the image of an equally-pleasant guy in Syracuse telling my my bag had accidently been sent back to Pittsburgh...

On monday I got up much earlier than I generally prefer, brushed my teeth using my finger as a toothbrush (my real toothbrush was in Syracuse...), and went back to the airport.

My own trip would go smothly this time, but I did get one last glimpse of US Airways incompetence. While wating for my flight, the announcement came that this flight was in an "overbooking situation," and they were looking for seven volunteers to give up their seats. Seven! It seems the flight we had been bumped to was overbooked to begin with, and the four of us were making it even worse! So now, the events of the previous night had affected the travel plans of a total of 11 people. Fortunatly, they got the volunteers, so no one had to go through quite what we had, but still.

I count it as a minor miracle that when I arrived in Syracuse my roller-bag was, in fact, waiting for me at the baggage claim desk. I got a cab, rode back to my dorm, thanked God I had no morning classes on mondays, and collapsed in my bed.

So yeah, not liking US Airways too much at the moment. And Sean L, wherever you are.... YOU SUCK!

Huge X-Men 3 Spoiler Cover-up

As a movie studio, what do you do when the trailer for your highly-anticipated upcoming film reveals something it shouldn't? Modify the trailer, of course! Nevermind the fact that removing the evidence only serves to confirm that yes, that shot did mean exactly what you thought it did.

Bottom line: the trailer that is online now is not the one that was originally posted a couple days ago.

WARNING! REALLY MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Seriously, this is a big spoiler. Maybe not "I am your father" big, but possibly close. I couldn't even ethically make myself put the images on the front page of this blog, so you'll have to click your way to having part of the movie ruined. If you click any of the links below, I cannot be held responsible for the consequences. You have been warned

In the currently available trailers, the shot around time index 2:16 is Wolverine scratching his way down a wall.

However, when the trailer was first released, that same shot was something altogether different - SPOILER WARNING! Don't click this!!!!.

If you just clicked that second link, I'm so sorry. I won't describe what it is here, but it should be obvious if you look at what's in the picture, what's going on, and what's missing. I can't believe 20th Century Fox let that out, even if only for a short time. My guess - some editor's job is not as secure as it once was after this incident.

Rottentomatoes.com also shows the original image (SPOILER!) in their flipbook.

There. With as many SPOILER tags as I put in this post, you have no one to blame but yourself. And that dumb editor at 20th Century Fox.

Hanley Films: Coming Soon (Again)

Yes, thanks to Will and his contacts on the AnandTech forums, I now have reliable hosting for HanleyFilms.net again.  Well, for six months anyway.

If you click this link and see a smiley, it means I finally got the stupid DNS settings right.

Penny-Arcade Guys Get Macs!

That's right folks; Tycho and Gabe, creators of the wildly popular and gamer-oriented webcomic Penny-Arcade, have both purchased computers from Apple. Gabe's MacBook Pro (I still think that's a dumb name) hasn't shipped yet, but Tycho has been using his recently-arrived Intel iMac, and has all manner of good things to say about it:

I've used my own Mac for every computing task this week. What I have ascertained is not that PCs as we know them lack good design, but that PCs as we know them have hardly any design to speak of. I'm not trying to be insulting. Use a Mac for a week, and we'll talk again.

(mocking snarkiness follows...)

To my PC-loyal friends: What now, guys?
We are toppling your monuments, your idols, your bastions of power... and comedic sarcasm. People are beginning to see - There's a better way! (And unlike the current Democratic Party, we actually know what we're talking about when we say that!) Resistance is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. With drop shadows, and translucency!

Internet2 is Fun

Seeing as both our schools are on Internet2, Will and I decided to play around with that a little bit. Will had already seen AIM file transfers work over Internet2, but we wondered how well HTTP would work. I fired up the webserver (Apache) on my PowerBook G4, and put up a simple page offering up one of the > 1 gig DV Quicktime masters for my movies.


Wheeeee! Nice and fast. Almost 1 megabit a second, across state lines! (Don't worry, the movie only consists of footage shot by me, and music by Edgen, so it's all legit.)

In related news, the University of Pittsburgh is mean and firewalls thier students so Will can't do this. And they have the same "one computer per residental connection - no switches or routers!" rule that SU has. Pity, since a dedicated server running 24/7 out of my dorm room would totally solve my movie-hosting issues.

Fun With SU's Unix System

I decided to finally get around to seeing what Syracuse is giving me in terms or webspace, of for nothing else than to finally host my movies in a stable place. So, I started looking around the Computing and Media Services site.

Andy is probably the only one who will appreciate this, but I was delighted to find that students set up their webspace through a normal, old-fashioned UNIX shell account! And on a Sun server, no less? Geek heaven!

But here's the fun part: some of thier instructions are flat-out wrong! In particular, once you've logged in, made a public_html folder if it wasn't already there, and created index.html with pico, (Yay pico! More geekery!) you are told to set permissions. I though this seemed like a lot of work for non-UNIX geeks, but at least they spelled out exactly what to type, right?

Well, explicit instructions don't help much if they are incorrect. Check this passage:

changing permissions on files

1. Change to the public_html folder by typing "cd public_html" and press Enter.
2. Type "ls -l" to view the folder's contents.
3. To set permissions for a file within the public_html folder, type "chmod 644 name of file" and press Enter.
   NOTE Replace "name of file" with the actual file name. For example, "index.html".
   To set permissions for all files within the folder, type "chmod 644 *.*" and press Enter.

Nice and simple, right? Problem is, those aren't the permissions you want for public HTML files. "chmod 644" gives everyone read access to the files, but a webserver needs execute privileges to show the page. So if you followed the instructions, then tried visiting your site, all you would see is a nice "Error 403: Forbidden". So I just went ahead and fixed it with "chmod 755 index.html", and now my test page is up for all to see. But someone who isn't a total nerd can't be expected to know that.

I guess I'll have to call/e-mail them tomorrow. Calling might be more fun - how knowlegable of a person do you think they put in charge of the phone? >:)

More Emulator Geekery

In my last post I hinted at my initial playing around with Q - an x86 (and other) emulator for OS X. Well, I got "somewhere" with it, and here's the results.

Warning: the following images depict the results of me being bored, frequently late at night. Emulation of a foriegn processor architectures redefines the very word "slow." We're talking 10x decrease in performance over native speed, easily. On a 1.67 GHz laptop. The tasks depicted cannot concievably serve any useful purpose whatsoever, and were done purely "for the hell of it."

Ahem. Anyway, after several hours, (during which I went to class and did some homework) the WinXP install finished, and I tried to boot it, only to be met by this confusing error during login:

A problem is preventing Windows from accurately checking the license for this computer.
Error Code: 0x800703e6.

Whoops. At this point I figured XP wasn't going to work (though I didn't know why) but I didn't really care since something with lower requirements like 98 would be much more suited for this anyway. With XP giving me problems, I tried to fool around with my Knoppix LiveCD, creating a new virtual machine with no hard drive, set to boot from CD.


Obviously, this worked, but it wasn't pleasant. Those of you who have used it know that Knoppix is pretty sluggish to begin with. Put it on a virtual CPU that would be lucky to get up to 100 MHz-equivalent speed, with only 256 meg of RAM allocated to it, and the experience becomes downright painful. Frozen Bubble wasn't even playable at lowest graphics settings. (Granted, no one uses a PC emulator for gaming, but it's Frozen Bubble!)

After that entertaining but useless experiment, I returned to the Windows issue. Looling through various online forums, I found that the error could be avoided by installing Service Pack 1.

Problem: I have a SP1 CD, so I don't need the internet, but how does one install SP1 if you can't even log-in?
Solution: Everyone's favorite last-resort, Safe Mode!


This did the trick, but do I even need to mention how god-awefully slow it was? Eventually, however, the "machine" rebooted...


Success! The system was beyond sluggish, but it worked, and as far as Windows was concerned, nothing outside of the "computer" it was running on even existed. I was even able to use what is arguably the most frequently-run and well known pieces of Win32 software on the planet:


Although it would be difficult to do much on a slow, emulated system like this, I was suprised to find that, once they were launched, basic GUI applications like Solitaire or MSPaint were actually quite useable. (Here I mean "useable" in the same sense that Doom 3 on a GeForce 4 MX is "playable") Networking even worked, although with no anti-virus, and the fact that Windows update would take too long to be feasable, I wasn't to eager to go online with this. While I obvously couldn't do any gaming on a setup like this (my main reasone for having both a Mac and a PC) I could easily see this sort of solution working for someone who just has one little program that they can't leave behind.

Granted, this is really nothing new. VirtualPC has been around for years, and Microsoft's tweaking of it allows Windows to be run faster on it then on this solution. The main draw to Q is that it's open source, and consequently free, whereas VPC costs $250.

Q is an interesting curiosity on my G4, but on the new Intel-based Macs, it has a chance to really shine. A preliminary Unversal Binary has been released, and users are already reporting that it is quite fast, with the virtual CPU benchmarking as high as 600 MHz on the Intel iMac. If the QEMU Accelerator is ported to OS X/x86, things could really get interesting.

I'm Such a Geek

Just a little teaser of what I'm playing with right now...


I'll post more on this when I get somewhere with it. For the curious: Q Emulator homepage.

I love open source. :)

Hallmark Day

Instead of merely echoing most of my friends' sentiments, I'm going to do it Film Student style with a movie quote:

"Random Thoughts, for Valentines day, 2004. The day's a holiday invented by greeting card companies, to make people feel like crap."

- Joel Barish, as played by Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The year's off a bit, but it still applies.

It's Not My Birthday!

Past midnight - looks like it's technically no longer my birthday.

Woo-hoo, 19. I can officially do... nothing I couldn't last year. Except maybe buy beer in Canada. So if I go to Canada in the next year, I'm all set.

Thanks to eveyone who wished me a Happy Birthday in person, on AIM, on Facebook or on the phone. Even if most of you will never read this!

It's My Birthday!

Past midnight - looks like it's technically my birthday now.



Yay me.

Really cool multi-touch interface

I've seen lots of weird research ideas into "alternative" interfaces for computers, but this one seems really, really interesting. It's a touch-panel interface that can recognize multiple contact points at once, and do things based on the movement of both points. For example: if you touch opposite corners of an image and then pull your fingers apart, the image will scale up. If you rotate. Or, (depending on how the software is set up) you could zoom in.

This NYU page has a quicktime video showing some great proof-of-concept programs in action. The "Google Earth"-ish one looks especially fun. I want one!

Lightwave is fun!

Ok, it's been awhile since I updated this (although I think I'm still ahead of my friends with that...) but I wanted to put up some of what I've been working on in my 3D Computer Art class. Lightwave is a much less intuitive 3D program than I'm used to, but it's also a lot more powerful, and I'm liking the control that I have over what I'm modeling.

The first thing we modeled was a mug. Simple enough, but it taught us about lathes, the bend tool, sub-patching, and a slew of other features of the Lightwave interface.


Our next few models were a little more free-form, as we had to make three things from a really crappy poem we had to write. I made a pencil, a pad of paper, and a hand.




Really, I think the hand says it all. I thought I was ok at modeling, (even did some nice low-poly characters for Andy's and my senior project) and I could probably have made something resembling a hand in TrueSpace, but not like this. Well, maybe with a lot of practice, but not in the hour-and-a-half that it took me to do this. I like Lightwave.

On another topic, I've finished watching all the existing episodes of Firefly. Shiny! Very, very good series - Fox executives were fools to cancel it. Of course, this seems to be a theme with them (vis-a-vis: Family Guy). Haley, thank you for having this at the LAN party! Now all I need to do is see Serenity.


Extra fun bit of trivia: This post does not randomly jump from one topic to another...

The visual effects for both Firefly and Serenity were primarily done in Lightwave. :)

'Tis the Season

Looks like none of my friends have done this yet, so I'll be the first to say:

Happy Winter-een-mas!

If you are very confused right now... well, the official site might help you. But maybe not. ;)

Jack Thompson is a terrible human being

Most of you who read this blog also frequent Ctrl-Alt-Del, so you may have seen this on their main page already. In case you haven't I'll just quote Tim here:

A reader has just brought this matter to my attention.

From GamingHorizon.com:

"Earlier this month, gamer named Mitchell S. with the online screenname "Kuja105" who posts on a few online videogame forums (including GameFaqs.com and MetalGearSolid.org) committed suicide. On January 2 he posted a message in both forums detailing his intent to end his own life, citing overwhelming complications with school and finances.

A very brief period of initial disbelief was followed by a barrage of replies from fellow forum members pleading that he not take his life, trying to talk him out of it.

For days, no word was heard from Mitchell. Fearing the worst, members and administration from metalgearsolid.org began searching for contact information, spending hours on the phone trying to get in touch with him. Finally on January 4, Ryan K., an administrator at metalgearsolid.org, got him on the phone and spent hours desperately trying to talk him out of it.

Sadly, Mitchell soon ended his own life by consuming antifreeze and painkillers.

Later, members from the site contacted Mitchell's family to find out the grave news. They reported it to their online community, and posted a tribute to their passed friend on the front page of metalgearsolid.org." Full Report Here.

Mr. Jack Thompson then sent in the following letter regarding the situation to MetalGearSolid.org, one of the forums frequented by Mitchell, where he was known well:

"Your "gamer friend" will find peace through the Lord, Jesus Christ, but sadly it's too late for that.

There is a void in every heart. You can fill it up with the things of God, or the things not of God. This unfortunate soul chose to fill it up with combat games. The playing of these video games is masturbatory activity, meaning senseless self-stimulation. If you gamers could use a dictionary you would know that that term is not necessarily a sexual one.

The real tragedy here extends beyond the life and death of this one fellow. There are literally millions of young people and young adults whose despair is deepend by turning to the things of this world and then finding them meaningless.

All of you gamers need to put down the controllers and get a life. The utter inanity of the vast majority of postings here shows how vapid "gaming" really is.

You are one of the cheerleaders for this wasting of time and the wasting of lives. Do you feel any remorse for having contributed to this "culture of death?" Of course not. Hey, let's all play MORE games, and ignore all the really productive things to do with our lives.

Let's pretend to be shocked that a gamer might descend into deeper depression, as his gamer "buds," knowing he was killing himself, couldn't figure out how to call 911 themselves for him. That would have involved leaving their computers I guess.

Sad. Sad for all of you."

Ok, so I was well aware that Jack Thompson was an extremist idealogue and an idiot, but I was previously unware that he lacked a soul. Seriously, what kind of person takes the tragic death of a member of a community and tries to twist it to damn the very community which is still grieving over the loss? That's just evil!

I noted how Thompson stole Bush's "culture of life" speil and called gaming a "culture of death". Sorry Jack, but if your "culture of life" allows and promotes the cold exploitation of an individual's death for one's own means, then I want none of it.

Dead Pixel Fixer?

I thought WidowPC's dead pixel fixer looked interesting. It's a epilepsy-inducing movie you are supposed to run on loop behind a dead pixel overnight, and it might be able to un-stick it. I have no idea whether or not this actually works, as I've had the incredible good fortune of never owning an LCD with any dead pixels (over an old Dell laptop, a PowerBook, a 19" display, a PDA, an iPod nano, and a cell phone!) but I can't think of how it would hurt to try if you suffer from this all-too-common problem.

This thread on Applegeeks has a couple testimonials that the thing does sometimes work.

Comic, Apple, College, Yay! (or, Yet Another "Update" Post)

It's another multi-topic update post, so I've broken it into sections for easy reading.

Comic

First off, new comic on Directionless! That's right, I have real honest-to-God content again, and I even introduced a new character!

Apple

Tuesday was the keynote address at the annual Macworld expo, and as usual Apple rolled out a bunch of new stuff. Most interesting among the things announced was the actual introduction of the first Intel-based Macs, specifically, the iMac and the MacBook Pro.

Let me just say this: The name "MacBook Pro" sucks. A lot. "PowerBook" sounded cool. "MacBook Pro" makes you sound like a clucking chicken if you say it too fast. I can understand wanting to drop "Power" from the name since the PowerPC G4 chip is no longer being used, but wanting "Mac" in all your product names was no excuse for accepting such a sucky name. "ProBook" wouldn't have been great, but it would have been better.

Sigh... Name aside, the hardware looks good, although since Final Cut Pro/Express isn't a universal binary yet, it wouldn't do me much good even if I could afford a new laptop. But is is good to see the PowerBook get a big update like this. The G5 is still an awesome chip (That's why Microsoft is using something based on it in the XBox 360) but the G4 was getting more than a little long in the tooth. And Core Duo is actually really cool! Best of all, it seems it's good enough to wow the Penny-Arcade guys!


In other Apple-related news, I used some of my Christmas money to buy another 512 meg stick of RAM for my PowerBook, bringing it up to a Gig. Mmmm.... RAM. :)

College

Heading back to Syracuse tomorrow, classes start tuesday. The online scheduling system for SU doesn't offer nice online schedules like CMU does (well, it kinda does, but they aren't publicly-accessable) but that doesn't stop me from making my own:

My Spring 2006 Schedule

All in all, a mixed bag. I have no classes on friday, and nothing starts before 12:30pm, which is awesome. On the other hand, on thursday I have class pretty much straight from 12:30 to 10pm, with less than an hour break in there for dinner. Yuck. I got into the "Intro to 3D" computer arts class, so I get to spend 3 hours a week sitting in front of a PowerMac playing with Lightwave, which is cool. Unfortunatly, I also have Writing 205, which is a whole class devoted to research papers.


So that's recent events. Don't expect another update until I get back to college and settled in. Now I have to pack. :(

New Content on "Directionless"

It's not much, but there's some belated Christmas-themed filler up over at my webcomic, "Directionless." (remember that?) I do plan on continuing the comic, and should have something along the lines of real content up this coming weekend. I have a few ideas and such, I just need to draw them.

Upcoming absence

My break so far...

Got home at like 3:00 AM Saturday morning, slept most of the rest of the day. Sunday night I hung out at Haley's for A Very Bitter Beer Pong and watched Donnie Darko, a very weird but interesting movie. And, uh, that about brings you up to speed. Yeah, the amount of craziness leading up to finals makes the lack of stuff going on now seem a little odd. Of course, there's nothing unpleasant about doing nothing! :)

But I didn't make this post to point out how little I've been doing, I made it to point out that from December 23-27 I'll be visiting relatives in New Hampshire. (Another long car trip? Noooooooo!!!) So, if anyone (coughHaleycough) is planning anything (coughlan partycough) over break, please don't do it then!

And Halapy, I fully plan on updating the webcomic.

Eventually.