Scoble on Soccer

Robert Scoble has an interesting comment regarding making soccer more popular in the United States. He says HDTV will do that.

I agree strongly. One of the reasons I bought an HDTV set 3 years ago was my experience watching a basketball game on an HDTV at the store. All of a sudden, the game wasn’t boring: I could see the whole court, and where the players were positioning themselves. It added a whole new dimension to the game, one I had only previously experienced at a live basketball game.  As I think I’ve said before, soccer is a lot like basketball: the real action isn’t around the ball, its the positioning of the other players. Being able to see them in HD-widescreen made the World Cup games much more enjoyable.

7/10/2006 9:43:58 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

An interesting article
Donald Sensing has an interesting article concerning alternative energy. He brings up a very good point: the real issue regarding global warming isn’t whether its real or not (or even whether people cause it or not), it’s what to do about it. Short of extreme hand waving, its a hard problem to fix.
7/7/2006 2:03:07 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics | world affairs

Emmy nominations are out

The Emmy nominations are out. Diane Holloway, in her TV Blog, has a list of the “major cateogory nominees”. Here’s my unsolicited comments

Outstanding Comedy Series:

• Arrested Development: I don’t know who (other than the critics) who watches/likes this. I tried it, it was boring, even though most of the actors are excellent. So, what’s Portia DeRossi doing next??
• Curb your Enthusiam: Another like above, but without the talent.
• The Office: An acquired taste, but it (at least) deserves to be here.
• Scrubs: It’s about time! One of the best comedies on the air.
• Two and a Half Men: An Emmy nomination? Really?? It’s a good show, but come on!

I guess this means my “pick” for Comedy Series would be The Office then…

 

Outstanding Drama Series:

• Grey’s Anatomy: A fantastic show. It went a little over the top toward the end of the last season, but still good.
• House: Not my cup of tea, and kind of a “formula” show, but okay, its good.
• The Sopranos: Another of those “critic favorites”. I don’t see the appeal.
• 24: Yuck! Ptui!
• The West Wing: It was once good, and the last season wasn’t its worst, but no longer an award winner.

My pick would be Grey’s Anatomy, but if House were to get it, I wouldn’t be too upset.

 

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy:

• Larry David: Sheesh. Nobody should be getting an Emmy for playing themselves.
• Kevin James: I like Kevin, and King of Queens was underrated; it was at least as good as Everybody Loves Raymond.
• Tony Shalhoub: I’ve lost interest in Monk, but Tony is still great.
• Steve Carell: A good actor, in a good part. Deserves the nomination.
• Charlie Sheen: He’s good, but I think that Angus T. Jones (Jake) deserves the nomination more; he’s terrific.

I’d give the Emmy to Tony Shalhoub.

 

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama:

• Christopher Meloni: Who? (He’s in Law & Order SVU, I don’t watch that)
• Denis Leary: This is on my list to watch, haven’t gotten there yet. I like Dennis, though.
• Peter Krause: 6 Feet Under was a great show. This is a good nomination.
• Kiefer Sutherland: No. No. No.
• Martin Sheen: Was he still on the air? Okay, he didn’t have much air time in this last season. Still good, though.

I’d say Dennis Leary or Peter Krause. But I have a sick feeling it’ll be Kiefer Sutherland…

 

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy:

• Lisa Kudrow: I didn’t see her series but I heard that it was bad, bad, bad. It certainly didn’t last long enough for an Emmy
• Jane Kaczmarek: Yeah, okay.
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Good choice.
• Stockard Channing: What a lousy show. She was wasted on it.
• Debra Messing: Definitely not.

Julia should get it.

 

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama:

• Kyra Sedgewick: Definitely. This is a great show
• Geena Davis: The only thing worse than the show was Geena’s acting.
• Mariska Hargitay: I’m a big fan of the actress, but definitely not the character.
• Frances Conroy: Good show, I don’t know about the nomination. Maybe.
• Allison Janney: This was not her best season.

I’d give it to Kyra Sedgewick, but I doubt she’ll get it.

 

I’m going to leave the rest of the nominations without comment…

7/6/2006 12:03:45 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

The weirdness of racism

So, Sony’s in trouble for “racist” advertising. Now, I find this to be a very offensive picture. Whomever thought this up should have their head examined.

Then, I thought, if the figures were reversed, would it have affected me the same way. I’m sorry to say, probably not. What do you think?

And, to Sony: This is a great way to sell X-Boxes. Get your collective act together.

7/6/2006 10:11:56 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

I saw Superman Returns

This weekend, I saw Superman Returns. The movie pretty much lives up to all the critical hype that’s been thrown about. It’s at least as good as the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies, and possibly better than them. In fact, the movie is a sequel of sorts to them, using bits of history from those movies. At first, I was pretty leery of this concept. There’s been a lot of story development around Superman in the years since those movies came out, and I was hoping to see some of that included in this movie. Returning to the storyline of those old movies seemed a step backward.  In actuality, it worked out well. Instead of spending a lot of time developing the Superman “backstory”, the movie could just refer to its built-in history and move on.

All in all, this is a definite must-see. If you enjoyed the first two Superman movies (we’ll all ignore the other two), you should love this as well.

By the way, there was one interesting casting crossover: Superman’s father, Jor-El, was once again “played” by Marlon Brando! Pretty good for a dead man!

7/5/2006 3:28:18 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Project Runway

This weekend, I finished watching Season 2 of Project Runway (on DVD). I became a big fan of the show after watching the Season 1 DVD’s out of curiosity (and mid-season rerun boredom  ).  Some background: I originally passed on the show because I thought that it was another of those “Top Model” shows, and wasn’t interested. Then, I’d watched NBC’s The Cut last summer (another designer show, this one with Tommy Hilfinger); it was horrible: obviously an Apprentice knock-off with absolutely no creativity to it at all. So, I was pretty prejudiced against this genre of program. But, Project Runway had some serious buzz behind it, and I needed some new DVD’s to watch (since I’d finished with the last of the Stargate DVD’s), so I picked it up.

And, as I said, I was hooked. Now, anyone that’s seen my wardrobe will know that I’m no clothes horse. But, I think the show appeals to the software developer in me. In a lot of ways, fashion design is a lot like software design; both being “intellectual property” type professions.

So, after I finished the first season (congratulations, Jay McCarroll), I quickly ordered the second season. I whipped through the second season in just a few weeks; it was even better than the first (congratulations, Chloe Dao).

Next week, season 3 starts, and I’m ready for it. I’ve even signed up for Tim Gunn’s blog, where he discusses his outlook of the show.  This is going to be a new experience for me. This will be the first time I’ll be watching “live”, and won’t know who’ll win before the show starts.

As an aside, I have to talk about Tim Gunn.Tim is the Chair of Dept. of Fashion Design at Parsons New School for Design, in New York City.  In Project Runway, he acts as an advisor to the contestants. This is one of the ways that Project Runway differs from any other contest-style reality show that I’ve seen: they don’t just leave the contestants to sink or swim. They provide some guidance so that when people go astray there’s someone who can at least try to reel them in before the “big judgement moment”.  I’m looking forward to reading Tim’s blog as Season 3 progresses.

7/5/2006 3:22:29 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Loving that Resharper

First, a caveat: Resharper 2.0 still had tons of bugs in it. In fact, the unit test support still locks up Visual Studio at times. And, they’re horrible about letting people know about patches.

On the bright side, I’ve started using their template system, and I love it! I’m going template-crazy right now, creating templates that do all those tedious tasks that I’ve always done manually. So far, I have:

1. A File Template that creates an NUnit Test Fixture class that has all the right namespaces, methods, and attributes.

2. Property templates for Get-Only, Set-Only,  and Get-Set properties. It automatically tabs through the type and property name .

I’m sure there’s more to come…

6/29/2006 2:24:43 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development

Iron Man is so misunderstood

Today, John Campea, in the Movie Blog, was saying that Iron Man is just a Batman knock off. Now, I don’t want to say that he doesn’t know Iron Man, but he doesn’t.

There are some fascinating twists to the Iron Man story.

First of all, Iron Man has a “day job” as the bodyguard of his public identity, Tony Stark. This means that Iron Man’s always getting pulled into Tony Stark related stuff.

Second, Bruce Wayne is a playboy/philanthropist; Tony Stark is an industrialist/weapons manufacturer. As above, this means that storylines tent to focus on his company, Stark Industries, as opposed to the kind of “general crime fighting” that Batman is up to.

I’m hoping that the upcoming Iron Man movie will be “true” to the character’s origins and have a plot around Stark Industries, industrial espionage, and global terrorism. This is where the Iron Man character really shines.

That alcoholism stuff they pulled was lame beyond lame; they never should have gone there. It was very un-Iron Man.

Finally, you want to talk “Batman knock-off”? Let’s talk Green Arrow!

6/23/2006 4:06:56 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Portland BarCamp anyone?

This weekend is the San Francisco BarCamp. What’s BarCamp, you ask? BarCamp is yet another form of the un-conference (like Code Camp). The thing that’s different about BarCamp is its only for participants. So, it breaks the speaker/audience model, even further than Code Camp does. Everyone presents (or at least participates in presentations), so its more of a peer gathering.  You can find more information on BarCamps here and there’s a “BarCamp for Dummies Newbies” here.

I’m wondering if this would be a neat thing for the Portland area… Any takers?

6/23/2006 9:25:39 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general | development

Apparently, America does have talent

I watched part of America Has Talent, last night and was surprised that it didn’t suck. I was expecting something along the lines of the (late, unlamented) Gong Show. And, while there were definitely gong-worthy acts, most of the acts were very entertaining. It reminded me of the good old days of the Ed Sullivan Show and Hollywood Palace.

It’s too bad that they’re purposely putting on obviously bad acts just to give the judges something to do. This is a good show for recording and watching later; then, just skip over the garbage…

6/22/2006 11:38:31 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Futurama Resurrection

Via TV Barn, Comedy Central has announced that they’ve bought the rights to air 13 new Futurama episodes! Yee ha! I was a fan of the series when it was on Fox, but hadn’t appreciated just how good the show was until I started watching the reruns recently. The show is pure, unadulterated genius. Fox really blew it when they mishandled the show. But then, they did the same thing with Family Guy, before reinstating it last season…

Thank you, Comedy Central, for your brilliance.

6/22/2006 11:33:45 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Joel on Bill

Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame, posted an interesting article on his first real experience with Bill Gates at Microsoft. It’s a very interesting read, that gives insights into both Bill himself, and how the rest of “techdom” view him (or at least those that know him).

I’d heard similar stories before, though it was interesting hearing Joe’s version. However, the thing that really struck me was that, this isn’t the way its done at Microsoft today and hasn’t been the way for quite some time. In the old days, Bill was central to the company, even after it became “big business”. This was how the now legendary “Internet shift” could happen. I think Bill liked having things this way, and he’s less interested in being just a “figurehead” for the company. This is probably central to his decision to wean himself from Microsoft and concentrate on his foundation, where he can have this kind of central role.

Good luck, Bill. It’s been a fun ride.

As a side note, I thought that it was interesting that last week’s Newsweek included a story on second careers for boomers, even before Bill’s announcement came out.

6/19/2006 10:24:21 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | development

Adobe vs Microsoft

Adobe is finally talking about its threatened suit vs. Microsoft regarding PDF writing support in Office 2007, and Microsoft’s new electronic document format, XPS. Of course, they’re talking anti-trust and Monopoly, having taken a page from Sun’s strategy in their lawsuits against Microsoft. Several thoughts come to mind:

1. The Justice Department should examine Adobe for anti-trust. After all, based upon Judge Penfield Jackson’s sliding scale approach to Monopolies (Microsoft has a Monopoly on OS’s running on computers able to run Microsoft software, the other computers, like Mac’s and Mainframes, and Unix machines don’t count), Adobe has a monopoly on PDF technology (it’s the ONLY electronic document format, and they own it).

2. Adobe should remember what happened to Sun: after winning their suit, and getting Microsoft to agree to remove Java from their OS’s, they had to go back and get Microsoft to agree to leave in their JVM to prevent Java usage from imploding since very few computer vendors seemed interested in shipping Windows with Sun’s (or anyone else’s) JVM pre-installed.

3. Microsoft also did a job on Sun by placing the C# language definition under the control of ECMA. What happens if they do the same thing for XPS? Just how does Adobe sue Microsoft for implementing an ECMA standard?

Adobe could find its core technology undermined in a big way if it tries to play hardball over this. Remember Ashton-Tate and Dbase: they sued Borland for copyright infringement and instead, wound up losing their own copyright over the database language.

6/19/2006 9:51:03 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | technology