Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

LotR:TYEBEE update

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A reminder e-mail with directions and details has been sent out to those of you who expressed interest in attending my little Lord of the Rings: Till Your Eyes Bleed Extended Edition deal on Saturday. Looks like it’ll be a rather small crowd of about five or six people if everyone who was interested can make it.

No matter what, it should be fun. Prairie’s baked lots of cookies for us to munch on — the going theory right now is that if the screaming battle cries of the orcs don’t keep us all awake by the end of the last film, the sugar rush sure will.

See y’all then!

iTunes “Reverence” by Faithless from the album Reverence (1996, 7:44).

Quick Review: Dawn of the Dead

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Last night’s fun was the modern remake of Dawn of the Dead. I’ve not seen the original, so I can’t compare the two in any way, but this one was exactly what I expected it would be — a fun, sometimes silly, and very gory horror flick.

No reason is given for the zombies, but then, that’s not really the point. Plausibility, rationality, and logic have no place here. What does have a place is lots of creepy dead and decaying people, exploding heads, and creating a enjoyably icky couple of hours of entertainment, all of which were pulled off quite well enough for me.

About the only bummer for me were some of the special features. Occasionally during the movie we’d see snippets of television news broadcasts reporting on the catastrophe in progress, and these are presented in full on the DVD. Unfortunately, it turns out that there’s a reason that we only saw snippets during the actual film — most of the zombies (who didn’t have to do much more than scream, grunt, growl, grimace, ooze, and bleed) were better actors than the reporters in the broadcasts. The extra background was entertaining enough for what it was, but they were a little painful to watch straight through.

On the bright side, though, the ten minute long featurette exploring the special effects behind the myriad exploding heads was really entertaining. As much as I enjoy computers and digital effects, I’m always fascinated by the real physical effects work — everything from the puppetry of Jim Henson’s films to the blood and gore of horror films — and it’s fun to watch the effects crew geek out when they get a good shot of some zombie’s brains blowing out the back of their head.

Okay, so it’s a little sick. That doesn’t mean it can’t be fun!

iTunes “Drama” by Club 69 from the album Junior Vasquez, Vol. 2 (1997, 3:36).

Quick Review: Timeline

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I just finished watching Timeline, based on the book by Michael Crichton. I don’t know anything about the book it’s based on — I haven’t read a Crichton novel in years — but the movie?

Oooh, ouch. Bad movie. No biscuit.

Bad enough that I spent most of the movie bored and often rolling my eyes, but I pretty much knew I was in for a dud (well, I’d picked it up already by the utter lack of acting ability by anyone in the cast, but…) when the group arrived in the late 14th century and anyone they ran into who spoke English spoke perfectly understandable, if anachronized, modern English.

Given that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales around the end of the 14th century, and it reads as follows (as many people will remember from their high school english classes)…

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.
Bifil that in that seson, on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye

Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

…and generally needs a translation for modern readers to comprehend it, the fact that the language barrier wasn’t even mentioned in passing, let alone given any sort of (however implausible) explanation, was enough to have me scoffing.

Bleah. Don’t bother.

iTunes “Happiness (Dub)” by Front 242 from the album Mut@ge.Mix@ge (1995, 6:10).

New Styles

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I’ve done very little posting or reading over the weekend, and I’m up way too late tonight (tomorrow morning is really going to suck), but it’s all for a good cause — well, okay, depending on how you define that — as there are now two new stylesheets available in the switcher over to the right.

Simple Green style screenshot

The first is “Simple Green”. There’s really not a whole lot to look at, as I was mainly using it to play with a couple ideas that I had but wasn’t sure if I could quite get them to work correctly or not. Green monotype text on a black background, very little styling aside from that. In all honesty, while it’s kind of fun for a few moments, I wouldn’t want to read my site this way on a regular basis. Who knows, though, maybe someone will decide that it makes me look more ‘l33t’ and Matrix-y.

Blue Distressed style screenshot

The second is “Blue Distressed” and is the reason I’m up so late. I’m really, really happy with the way this one turned out. Cool blues and greys, distressed edges, and a lot more visually interesting than any design that I’ve come up with so far. Many thanks must go out to Keith Bowman, whose Photoshop brushes and color palletes made this design possible.

Now, neither of these stylesheets have been tested in anything other than Safari yet, so they may very well look like ass in other browsers (especially IE, and even more so with Blue Distressed, as it uses transparent .png images that I don’t believe are supported with IE). Caveat emptor and all that jazz.

For me, though, Blue Distressed is the way I’m viewing my site from now on.

And now — bedtime. I’m so going to hate my alarm in the morning.

Update: After a little tweaking, I’ve deemed the appearance under IE 5 “good enough” to make Blue Distressed the default stylesheet for the site. If you haven’t already used the stylesheet switcher to pick a style or if you’re a brand-new visitor, you should be getting the fancy-shmancy new design now.

I still don’t know how this looks under IE6, though. That’ll have to wait until I actually bother to turn on the PC in my apartment, something that tends to happen about as often as America elects a Democrat to the White House.

Or so.

It’s close.

iTunes “God is a DJ (Edit)” by Faithless from the album Sunday 8 PM (1999, 3:32).

New camera!

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Nine months ago (yikes!), I was an idiot and left my camera at a bus stop on my way to work. Ever since then, I’ve been using a camera that my friend Rick very kindly let me borrow until I could afford a new camera of my own. Well, it looks like that day may be coming pretty soon — I’m getting a new camera for free!

My current job has me staffing a facilities management (FM) site — running a small on-site copy facility for a company’s local offices. There’s been an ongoing contest for the past few months among all the various FM sites that we run for this company (they operate in a number of states) for the most number of positive customer comments. Each FM site was to send in any customer comments they received, good and bad, and the site with the best ratio of positive comments to income (to keep smaller single-person sites like mine on an even keel with larger, busier facilities elsewhere) wins.

Well, I got a call from our local account manager this morning letting me know that we won! Not only did we win, but it was a virtual shutout: our site got somewhere around 120 positive comments (no word on how many negative comments there were, but I know I haven’t seen any), and from what she told me, all the other sites got zero. Apparently, for some reason, while we were passing out comment cards and following up with customers to make sure their jobs were done correctly and on time, the rest of the sites just didn’t bother to participate in the contest. Seems more than a little bizarre to me, but I’m hardly going to complain!

So next Wednesday, I’ll be heading out to have a little celebration after work at one of the local happy hours with my manager and our account manager, and at some point in the near future, I’ll get my prize — a new digital camera!

Of course, seeing as how I’m a greedy little self-centered sod who’s never satisfied with anything, I’m wondering if I can manage to do myself just a little bit better. According to the flyer announcing the contest from a few months ago, the camera in question is a Nikon Coolpix 3200. Now, it doesn’t look like a bad camera, but is has gotten a few troubling user reviews on DPReview. Also, it apparently comes without a memory card, and the memory cards it uses are SD/MMC, while I have a couple of CompactFlash cards (including one 256Mb) here that I’d hate to have to replace with something else.

What I’m wondering is if there are any local business (Best Buy or something similar) that will take a receipt-less “return” of an un-opened box — this is the Christmas present season, after all — in exchange for a sale on a slightly better camera in the same rough price range (letting me pay the difference if the target camera is slightly more expensive). Since the current retail for the Coolpix 3200 is in the \$200 range, I figure I could get one of the mid-range Canon Powershot series for just a fairly minor out-of-pocket cost — if there’s a place that will let me do this, of course.

Any ideas? If not, I’m certainly not going to turn my nose up at being handed a free camera, even if it’s not everything I might want! No matter what, it’ll be nice to have a camera of my own again.

iTunes “See My Ships” by Violent Femmes from the album 3 (1989, 3:17).

Konichiwa!

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First off, my apologies, as it’s entirely likely that I managed to mangle the Americanized version of a Japanese greeting. As I only speak English (and some 10-year old, mostly forgotten German), these things are bound to happen.

Looks like the recent Wired article that I’m mentioned in just got picked up in Japan (Yahoo, Hotwired, Goo, Excite, and Infoseek), which is sending another round of visitors my way.

As I said earlier this week: If there are any visitors hitting my site for the first time who might be curious about just what happened to me, I can direct you to my fifteen minutes of fame archives, and specifically, the photo, the day I was let go, and my wrapup and responses on the whole shebang.

And, of course, feel free to kick around and poke around the rest of the site. Nice to see you here!

Mind Hacks

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Just added to my daily reads: Mind Hacks, the companion blog to Tom Stafford and Matt Webb’s book Mind Hacks, recently released by O’Reilly.

Full of fascinating brain play (literally), like this post on how we perceive our sleeping habits:

Our own perception of how much we slept during a night can be startlingly inaccurate. Dr Allison Harvey (now of UC Berkley) took insomniacs and measured how much they actually slept during the night. Despite the insomniacs reporting that they had only slept for two or three hours, they had in fact been asleep for an average of 7 hours – only 35 minutes less than a control group who didn’t have any problems sleeping.

This shows that insomniacs (and probably the rest of us) are very bad at judging the time it takes us to get to sleep, and the time we actually are asleep. It also suggests that worrying about sleep, and our beliefs about how we’ve slept, have a big role in the negative affects of what (we believe) is a sleepless night.

I’m looking forward to seeing what else pops up on their weblog, and I will definitely need to pick up the book as soon as I get a chance.

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes “This Hollowed Ground” by Legendary Pink Dots, The from the album From Here You’ll Watch the World Go By (1995, 3:04).

Blade Trinity

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I’d been iffy on whether I wanted to bother, but this pre-release review of Blade Trinity just put it on my “must see” list:

I attended a free sneek preview of Blade Trinity this evening at Pacific Place…. I expected very little from this movie and I received my expectations in abundance.

Pluses:
– Parker Posey as a vampire
– Ryan Reynolds mostly naked
– visual effects

Negatives:
– plot
– dialog
– editing
– direction
– poor action scenes
– Kris Kristofferson
– cliche footage of the city moving at 20x normal speed
– unintentional comedy
– excessive product placement (iPods)
– lame pop cultural references
– vampiric pomeranian (really!)
– “Dracula” err, I mean “DRAKE” groan

Parker Posey is always fun to watch, and a vampire kick-me dog?!? Oh, this I’ve gotta see!

(Maybe not until it hits video…but then, I’ve occasionally paid for worse in the theaters…)

iTunes “Melt” by Leftfield from the album Leftism (1995, 5:13).

Howdy, Wired readers!

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Over a year after the incident, I’m getting another few seconds added to my fifteen minutes of fame: last week I was interviewed by phone by Wired, and their article hit the ‘net today:

What do a flight attendant in Texas, a temporary employee in Washington and a web designer in Utah have in common? They were all fired for posting content on their blogs that their companies disapproved of.

Aside from that leader being a wee bit misleading (I was let go by my previous employer, not the copy company I currently work for), it’s not a bad article.

Update: Wired was kind enough to slightly edit the introductory paragraph to clear up the wording a touch. Thanks much!

If there are any visitors hitting my site for the first time who might be curious about just what happened to me, I can direct you to my fifteen minutes of fame archives, and specifically, the photo, the day I was let go, and my wrapup and responses on the whole shebang.

And, of course, feel free to kick around and poke around the rest of the site. Nice to see you here!