More & Bigger (and hopefully sooner)

Posted on September 30 2003 by Mickey
    Saw this link on The Digital Bits. According to an article at e4engineering.com, Japanese engineers have unveiled “Ultra High Definition Television”. HDTV is obsolete before it had a chance to catch on, since this new system offers 4,000 lines of resolution (compared to HDTV’s 1,000)! Since it’s taken HDTV about twenty years to become available, who knows when UHDV might show up. But that kind of jump in clarity sure sounds worth an upgrade. (The video discs however might be a bit ungainly. It takes three and a half terabytes for only 18 minutes of UHDV video!)
    [Archivist’s Note: Not sure where that “1,000” figure came from!]
Posted in Gadgets, Tech, TV | Leave a comment

The Precious

Posted on September 29 2003 by Mickey
    I missed seeing the new announcement by mere seconds. I was just at the official site, but it was seconds later at TORN that I saw word the new ROTK trailer had been released, right around 3:30 PM (EDT).

Actually it’s a still from “Night on Bald Mountain”

    I can’t see it at the Apple site, since I’m behind a corporate firewall right now, and I can’t get the official site‘s Large version downloaded (since WinZip keeps telling me it’s not a valid archive). I was able to at least get the Medium version, as shown above. I just have to wait till tonight when I can go home and download things properly.
Posted in LOTR, Movies | Leave a comment

To Me! To Me!

Posted on September 29 2003 by Mickey
    While waiting for a hopefully better version to show up at the official site, I’m spending my time watching AOL’s Return of the King trailer offering.

A Nazgûl on approach to Minas Tirith Metropolitan Airport


Shelob. Ick. I’m already feeling itchy.


At last this image of Arwen, first seen way back in the original online teaser trailer, might finally appear in a movie


It looks like Minas Morgul might be exploding


A Nazgûl in the sun? Or maybe a Luck Dragon who’s lost his way?

    By the way, shortly after accumulating the above screen grabs, I found that TORN has a QuickTime version of the AOL version of the trailer. Of course the official version, coming out later today, will supersede this, but if you want you can download it here.
Posted in LOTR | Leave a comment

PWNED!

Posted on September 26 2003 by Mickey
    Found out from eBay this afternoon that I’m the victim of credit card fraud! Some jagoff was using my credit card to start an eBay account, make a thirty dollar BidPay payment, and some fifty dollar RegSoft purchase. Of course I and my credit card company put a stop to that, but it hurts that the Internet I thought was my friend has turned against me.
    No more blog entries till you all shape up.
Posted in Personal | Leave a comment

Come to Sméagol’

Posted on September 26 2003 by Mickey
    The One Ring.net has a snippet of the Return of the King trailer, released today. Their download page is understandably getting hammered, so I figured I’d mirror the QuickTime file here [since removed], on my site. The file was recorded off E! and the brief glimpse is mainly dialogue scenes.
    Apparently, the trailer will debut online on AOL over the weekend. I’ll see if I can share that too, although it will be readily available at the official site on Monday. (I guess my laziness pays off, since, after seeing version 9, I’ve been intending to drop AOL for a while.)   [11:24 AM]
    Update: TheOneRing.net has a complete copy of the trailer available for download, from some overseas video source. I’m downloading my copy as I type. However, I’m at work, and my fear is the link will be shut down before I can get home and download the file there! (And it’s too big to simply e-mail.)   [3:59 PM]
    Update update: Just looked at it. It appears to be only 2/5s of it. I’ve tried downloading it again, but it appears 10 MBs is all I can get. Still, what I’ve seen looks pretty cool.
    P.S. Wouldn’t the accent mark Tolkien uses in “Sméagol” make the name three syllables? Every time I hear it, in the movies and in the radio play, it’s pronounced “Smee-gill”.
    P.P.S. Same goes for “Glóin” too. But they followed that for the Rohan names though (Théoden, Éomer, Éowyn).
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Ring, Ring, Go Away

Posted on September 25 2003 by Mickey
    The much anticipated activation of the Do Not Call list, slated to take effect October 1, had been put on hold, as usual, by some spoilsport judge. A US District Judge in Oklahoma says the FTC does not have the authority to block telemarketer calls in that fashion, even though 50 million households are all for it.
    The judge says he will not allow the matter to proceed until he hears back about a new aluminum siding deal and that trip to Ft Lauderdale, Orlando, or Miami. Congress is poised to overrule the judge’s findings, but either way the telemarketers can kiss my ass because my Caller ID makes a fine little “Do Not Answer” list of its own.
Posted in News, Tech | Leave a comment

Q: …Yeah?
A: …Yeah.

Posted on September 24 2003 by Mickey
    Congratulations NBC. Just as I feared, you turned The West Wing into ER. You’ve got another show where the dialogue has no flourish but exists only to serve the plot; with anguished close-ups and spinning camera moves, and that ends with a montage set to a song on the soundtrack. Another hour-long drama that goes through the motions and is by the numbers. I hope you got what you wanted, and I’m even more pleased that all four years of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing were honored with Emmys. Bring on November 18!
    (And did it seem that this episode had more commercial breaks than usual? [Or was I just impatient since nothing seemed to be happening?])
Posted in TV | 1 Comment

Can a Guy in a Bear Suit Break into Dave’s Montana Home and Eat His Candles?

Posted on September 24 2003 by Mickey
    An amazing number of blog entries today. I guess I’m going for the record. Maybe I’m turning into Jaquandor who always posts numerous entries per day, except mine aren’t so thought out and well-written.
    I’m adding this entry however since I just saw Yahoo! has an article about Dave Letterman’s entertaining story (from Monday night’s show) of the bear that wandered into his Montana home last Saturday. And since Yahoo! has deemed the anecdote newsworthy, I thought I’d add that screen grabs of the bear can be found at this fan site.
    Title stolen from Tom Cronin.
Posted in TV | Leave a comment

Sharing the Love

Posted on September 24 2003 by Mickey
    Tee-hee. Ya gotta love this. KaZaA is now suing the RIAA! KaZaA claims the RIAA, in tracking those 261 people who were later sued, was using KaZaA Lite, an unauthorized version of the file-sharing software, and by doing so violated KaZaA’s terms of usage. I grudgingly agree with the RIAA spokesperson’s quip that KaZaA’s “‘newfound admiration for the importance of copyright law’ [is] ironic and ‘self-serving’”; but anything that gives the RIAA a hard time is fine by me.
Posted in Music, News, Tech | 1 Comment

DCOMbobulate

Posted on September 24 2003 by Mickey
    Skeptical as I am about unknown e-mail attachments, even I was puzzled by the latest file sent to me from “support@microsoft.com”. The e-mail [My Life as a Fischer has an example of it] looked official enough and, stranger still, Norton AntiVirus did not flag the file as infected. I nevertheless did not run the attachment, of course, and I wasn’t surprised, afterward, to find out the attachment was indeed yet another variant of the MS Blast worm.
    Evidently all these worms in the MS Blast family want to exploit vulnerabilities in DCOM, a component that allows networked computer to communicate. Since DCOM would hardly ever be used in a home environment there’s no reason for it to be running at all. But Microsoft, instead of deactivating it, has concentrated on distributing patches that simply rewrite the code. DCOMbobulate, another great free utility from GRC.com, is a small program that will deactivate DCOM for you, eliminating the vulnerability that MS Blast-type worms try to exploit. It’s a quick and painless and highly recommended. Why leave something running that you will never use?
Posted in Links, Tech | 3 Comments