Netscape Has Left the Building

Netscape Navigator, one of the first ‘popular’ web browsers, is dead.

Navigator will continue to function should you happen to have a recent copy stashed away. But American Online, which has been Netscape’s guardian during its long, downward slide in popularity, will no longer support the browser and will stop releasing updates. Support for all versions of the software will be off-loaded to the Netscape community forum. Netscape.com will continue to live on as a web portal.

A sad, if unsurprising and inevitable end. One of my earliest web pages bills itself right at the top as being ‘Netscape 2.0 enhanced.’ Times gone by….

Star Trek Optimism

When I first heard that work was beginning on a new Star Trek film, I suppose you could have described my first response as ‘cautiously optimistic’ — however, that reaction would have swayed far more towards the caution side of things than the optimism side.

However, as more and more (non-spoilery) details appear, I’m moving more and more towards the ‘optimism’ side. While there are still a few little details that raise warning flags (for instance, that the script was written by the guys who wrote Transformers), overall, things are looking good.

Recently, director J.J. Abrams, writer and producer Roberto Orci and a fair chunk of the cast and crew spent a little time between shots doing a couple of Q-and-A sessions on the Trek Movie fan weblog. Full transcripts are posted here and here, but they’ve thoughtfully provided an ‘executive summary’ list. All in all, I think there’s a lot of promise here.

  • First full trailer currently in the works, targeting early- to mid-summer release
  • Principal photography is scheduled to wrap at the beginning of April [about 1-2 weeks more than originally planned]
  • Documentaries on the film’s pre-production and production process can be expected on DVD release; Making of… book also discussed
  • [J.J. Abrams friend and frequent collaborator] Greg Grunberg will not appear in Star Trek due to his commitment to another film
  • About 1,000 effects shots are expected to be used in the film (more than any previous Trek film)
  • Target MPAA rating: PG-13
  • The two biggest challenges for Abrams were getting a handle on the vision of the future and casting the film
  • Humor is a very important aspect in the film (“humor and humanity go hand-in-hand”)
  • Abrams’ goal is to make Trek ‘real’ and is thus utilizing sets and location shooting rather than green- or blue-screens wherever he can
  • The Enterprise “will be a combo of the physical and the virtual”
  • An image of the Enterprise is “coming soon”
  • The doors on the Enterprise will go “SWOOSH!” when they open.
  • The set of the Enterprise bridge will be stored for future use;
  • the movie’s script is about 128 pages long (indicating a roughly 2 hour movie)
  • the script took about four months to write
  • [Orci] and co-writer Alex Kurtzman will not be making cameos in the film
  • James T. Kirk and the film’s villain (Nero) were the most difficult characters to write;
  • the TOS episode “Balance of Terror” and the second, third, fourth and sixth films helped shape the writers’ takes on the characters, as did novels by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens.
  • Script shoots for many memorable moments akin to the “Never forget the name of the ship…Enterprise” moment in TNG “Yesterday’s Enterprise”
  • Film makers have kept with Trek tradition and brought in academic and scientific consultants (more info on this promised)

Google Transit: A for Effort…

…but a solid F for practicality and safety. At least where my commute is concerned.

According to Google Transit, the best way for me to get from my apartment to North Seattle Community College involves grabbing a bus from the closest bus stop to the transit center just south of the Northgate Mall. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, after that, I need to walk a block, scale a chain-link fence, climb a hill, play Frogger across three lanes of northbound traffic, one express lane, and three lanes of southbound traffic on I-5, go down a hill, scale another chain link fence, hike through some woods, and swim across the lake on the NSCC grounds. Oh, and according to their estimates, it should take me nine minutes to do all this.

Google Transit Obstacle Course

I think that I’ll stick to the Seattle Metro Trip Planner for now. ;)

(Yes, I’m sure Google does much better in many circumstances. This one just gave me a good laugh.)

Make a Band (Altered)

Thom posted a fun little meme using Wikipedia, a quotations site, and Flickr to randomly choose a band name, album title, and cover art. I wanted to do it, but the one thing that bugged me was the cover art portion: the original instructions simply had people grabbing the third image off of the past week’s ‘interestingness’ page. A great way to get good images, sure, but one that paid no attention to copyright. Each time I reloaded the page, I was coming up with images that were published under a standard ‘all rights reserved’ copyright.

So, here’s my version of the Make a Band meme…

  1. The title of whatever random Wikipedia page you land on is the name of the band.

  2. The last four words of the last quote on this page is the title of the album.

  3. Put the last word of the quote (the album title) into the search box on this page, and the third image the search brings up is the cover of the album (this will search Creative Commons Attribution licensed photos and sort them by interestingness).

Put ’em together in your image editor of choice, and post your band’s new album for the world to see!

Here’s what I got, from this Wikipedia page, this quote and this image by Mayr:

HL-ADP Not to Need It

Good Action is Geography

Vanity Fair has a huge article looking at the new Indiana Jones movie, and midway through, there are some quotes from Spielberg that sent two thoughts running through my brain. The first was that what he was saying was making me more excited about this latest sequel than I already was. The second was how desperately I wished more directors would think like Spielberg does here (don’t worry, there aren’t any movie spoilers):

Rather than update the franchise to match current styles, Lucas and Spielberg decided to stay true to the prior films’ look, tone, and pace. During pre-production, Spielberg watched the first three Indiana Jones movies at an Amblin screening room with Janusz Kaminski, who has shot the director’s last 10 films. He replaces Douglas Slocombe, who shot the first three Indy movies (and is now retired at age 94), as the man mainly responsible for the film’s look. “I needed to show them to Janusz,” Spielberg says, “because I didn’t want Janusz to modernize and bring us into the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not dissimilar to the work Doug Slocombe had achieved, which meant that both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look, and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.”

That much already had me nodding and thinking good things, and then he went on….

Spielberg promises no tricky editing for the new one, saying, “I go for geography. I want the audience to know not only which side the good guy’s on and the bad guy’s on, but which side of the screen they’re in, and I want the audience to be able to edit as quickly as they want in a shot that I am loath to cut away from. And that’s been my style with all four of these Indiana Jones pictures. Quick-cutting is very effective in some movies, like the Bourne pictures, but you sacrifice geography when you go for quick-cutting. Which is fine, because audiences get a huge adrenaline rush from a cut every second and a half on The Bourne Ultimatum, and there’s just enough geography for the audience never to be lost, especially in the last Bourne film, which I thought was the best of the three. But, by the same token, Indy is a little more old-fashioned than the modern-day action adventure.”

The script, Spielberg says, can provide the blockbuster pace. “Part of the speed is the story,” he says. “If you build a fast engine, you don’t need fast cutting, because the story’s being told fluidly, and the pages are just turning very quickly. You first of all need a script that’s written in the express lane, and if it’s not, there’s nothing you can do in the editing room to make it move faster. You need room for character, you need room for relationships, for personal conflict, you need room for comedy, but that all has to happen on a moving sidewalk.”

Not just yes, but hell yes.

I was skeptical when I first started hearing about Indy 4, but the more little bits leak out (though I am endeavoring to stay spoiler free), the more I’m looking forward to seeing this one.

Pre-Seattle Days

Those who follow me on Flickr will have noticed this already, but I’ve been spending some time digging through my old archive CDs and uploading a bunch of old photos from years (and digital cameras) past. At this point, I’ve made it through all my digital photos up to the last few days before I bailed out of Anchorage and migrated south to Seattle. As such, the two sets that have received the most attention are those for Gig’s Music Theater and Old Stuff: Life Before Seattle. Those who’ve met me (physically or virtually) more recently will find these of limited interest, but for those few of you who’ve known me for a while, you might get a kick out of some of these…and you might even find yourself in there a time or two!

Better Buy

I had to stop by Best Buy today to pick up a new WiFi router for our apartment. Normally, stopping by Best Buy is something I tend to avoid at all costs, and I’ll only go in when I know exactly what I need to get, so I can go in, grab it, and get out as quickly as possible. Today, however, I wasn’t quite sure what router to get (or if it would really be worth getting a new one), so I crossed my fingers and hoped I’d find a sales droid who had at least one and a half, if not two whole brain cells to rub together.

I ended up speaking to two — first, a guy in a green shirt, who was apparently the in-store Clearwire representative, but who happened to be free and knew something about WiFi routers. After describing the situation to him and batting things about, he led me back to the correct shelf, and he snagged a blue shirt on the way. I gave the blue shirt the Readers Digest Condensed Cliffs Notes version of the conversation I’d just had, he recommended a Netgear router to me, and — once again, crossing my fingers — I grabbed it and headed off to work.

(Minor aside: the issue in question was that our D-Link WiFi router seemed to have issues with Hermie, our Vista laptop. The D-Link worked fine over the wired connection with both Macs in the apartment, and connected fine via WiFi to my G5 desktop. Hermie consistently works fine with WiFi in public places — during travels, at the local Panera, and at NSCC — but it had serious issues connecting to the D-Link at home. Some days it would only connect after anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes of repeated tries, other days we wouldn’t be able to get it to connect at all. Needless to say, this has been more than a little frustrating.)

After getting home from work, I unpacked the Netgear router, plugged it in, and went through the installation song and dance, using the ‘Installation Wizard’ on the CD from Hermie. Once it said it was up and running, I checked both desktops via the wired connections, and they were fine. Checked the Airport connection on my G5, it was fine. Rebooted Hermie (to cover all my bases), logged in, and started to head to the ‘Network’ icon down in the try to initialize the connection…but wait, what was that? It was already connected! No muss, no fuss, no error messages telling me it couldn’t connect…it was just there, just like magic. Just like it’s supposed to work.

Thinking back on it, I realized that this now makes five times in a row that I’ve had to go into Best Buy for something, and come out with what I needed, and — when I’ve had to deal with any of the staff — actually not been driven to distraction by their idiocy. In this case, I was actually given good information, and they helped me find what I needed.

I must say, while I’m still no fan of the overall Best Buy experience (their stores tend to come across as oppressive to me…too loud, with aisles that are packed too closely together to make the experience pleasant), five consecutive good experiences have to lead me to admit something of a trend. I don’t know if they’re starting to emphasize more or better training that deals in actual knowledge rather than simple salesmanship, but for some time now, the staff has seemed far more competent than I would have expected.

I may not ever get to a point of just stopping by to browse, or remotely look forward to having to dive into Best Buy…but at least at the moment, I don’t feel the need to actively avoid the store or it’s sales droids when I do stop in. And, for Best Buy, that’s saying a lot.

Condescended

I’m hoping that now that we’re just about a year away from the transition to all-digital TV broadcasting and the government’s TV Converter Program is up and running, we’ll finally start to get some information and reviews on the various TV converter boxes that are (or will be) available.

I just applied for my two coupons towards the boxes, and then started searching on some of the listed eligible converter boxes to see what they’re like. Unfortunately, much of what I found was brief little snippets from über-geek and audiophile sites with comments like this

…one of the “digital switchover” converter boxes your stubborn granny can buy early next year with her $40 coupon from the government, in lieu of getting a new goddamn TV.

Okay, sure, that’s from Gizmodo. Still — not every geek out there works for Microsoft and has a gazillion expendable dollars…or sees the need to toss out a perfectly good (and, actually, very nice) TV set that works fine, aside from not having the ATSC tuner.