Musings From New York

As I Come Late To The Game ...

I have no choice but to remind you, nay beseech you, if you haven't already done so, to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, the musical. Co-written by Joss Wheedon, and starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillon, this is a hilarious and touching little project on the Interwebs. The Lady is already obsessed with the first song from Act I.

The three acts stream free until July 20th, after which it'll be available through iTMS, until the DVD comes out, of course.

What are you still doing here? Go! GO!

A New Way To Keep In Touch

I've installed Flock, the little Mozilla-based browser, which has finally gotten out of Beta. It's like Firefox, but has been configured to work easier with Web 2.0 elements - blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. In fact, I'm trying this out via Flock.

I've also signed up for Twitter. I note my b-i-l is also on Twitter, but the last update he made was 1 month ago :-) If you want to follow me via Twitter (or vice-versa), drop me a line.

An Icon Is Dead

It bought instant joy.

RIP.

Man, I need a new blog theme.

'Nuff said.

Who the !@#$ said Apple was perfect?

Some of you may know (at least, if you're family) that The Lady & I decided to do a photo slideshow for the Sangeeth part of our wedding. I decided to use iMovie 06 rather than iPhoto, as I wanted to burn it onto a DVD and take it with me to Bangalore. There are about 70 photos in the slideshow, and I spent quite some time agonizing over the Ken Burns effects. Hours, perhaps.

And then, for whatever obsessive compulsive trait of mine led me to empty iMovie's trash.

And now I'm redoing everything.

Apparently I didn't know about this significant bug in iMovie.

Double Vision!

I've hooked up my old HP LCD monitor to my iMac now. Pretty sweet experience, although
the HP monitor seems somewhat faded in color & contrast.

I've set up the windows such that things like iTunes & IM programs reside in the HP monitor, but main apps that I work with (Firefox, Mail, iPhoto, etc.) are on the iMac monitor.

When the Mac Sucks ...

It sucks BAD.

So I bought a new camcorder. Took it with me to Seattle over the long weekend, and shot about 1 hour's worth of footage over the 4 days. I have been struggling with importing it into my Mac, for two reasons:

1. Final Cut Express HD refuses to recognize the camcorder. I mean, one of the things Mac ads boasted about (back in the days of the Switch campaign) was that no special drivers were needed for anything ... it was supposed to be literally plug & play.

2. iMovie does recognize the camcorder (thank the Gods!) but crashes if I import more than 10-clips (or thereabouts), thus forcing me to manually sop and restart capture every so often.

I've spent one hour just getting through all this, and have only imported the footage from Day 1! It's going to take me some time to get all of it in ... the good news is that once I've captured in iMovie, I can open the iMovie project in Final Cut.

What cumbersome process.

My iPod tells me summer's coming ...

I was fooling around with my Mac's iCal program, and I was trying to add US holidays. Apple's website has a great library, including a great a calendar subscription about movie releases. Unfortunately, it only goes out 30 days (or maybe its 2 months, I won't be sure till next week ... Kartik, any ideas?)

Anyway, I thought I'd list some of the movie releases I hope to be seeing over this summer. I say "hopefully" because, quite frankly, the Lady has some serious hangups about my choice of movies.

• Spiderman 3, May 4th: Ah, the Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman. Catches thieves just like flies, apparently.
• Shrek the Third, May 18th: The second movie was a bit of a disappointment compared to the sheer exhilarating originality of the first. The trailer to the last installment doesn't offer me much hope, but the glass is always half-full, I always say!
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, May 25th: Following the disappointment that was Dead Man's Chest, I'm hoping that this movie will offer fans "more Gore, and less Verbinski" (to quote the Ninja)
• Ocean's Thirteen, June 8th: Does anyone detect a trend of excellent first movies, mediocre second movies, with the third & final installment this summer?
• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, June 15th: To be fair, I thought the first FF movie was pretty crap. But what the heck, this is the only movie to open this weekend that I considered putting on this list.
• Evan Almighty, June 22nd: Two words. Steve Carrell rules. OK, that's three words.
• Ratatouille, June 29th: Can Pixar boounce back from the ignomy of losing an Academy Award? Their movies are innovative in plot and setting, to say the least.
• Live Free and Die Hard, June 29th: Refer above, regarding strong first movies in a franchise. The thing that really irks me about the Die Hard series is that the producers seem to have forgotten what makes a good Die Hard film. One man + A closed environment = Die Hard. Not running around New York City, or Chicago. That's any run of the mill action flick.
• Transformers, July 6th: I played a lot with these toys as a kid, though I can never remember which action figures I had, or what they turned into. Hopefully, this movie will not be part of the "Wreck your childhood dreams" camp (ref: any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie)
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, July 13th: Admittedly, I thought Book 5 was pretty darned crap. Yeah, he's going through puberty. Yeah, he has emotional turbulence wrought by hormonal imbalances & stuff. Someone smack this kid along the ears and tell him to stop sniveling, please?! The last few movies have been pretty good though. Hopefully, the writers for this movie installment can edit out the emotional crap we had to endure over 500 pages.
• The Simpsons Movie, July 27th: I love anything Matt Groening has done. Long live Futurama! Oh wait ... this is The Simpsons. Ah well, still good stuff. The writing of the show kinda flopped around a bit over the last few years, but this last season has been very strong in political and social satire. Hopefully, the movie producers kept the same writers around.
• The Bourne Ultimatum, August 3rd: Hmm ... yet another trilogy with a weak middle part. But Matt Damon really owns this character, and I do look forward to this movie.
• Rush Hour 3, August 10th: Verbal constipation meets verbal diarrhea for the third time. But I'm a fan of Jackie Chan and his crazy ass stunts.
• Mr. Bean's Holiday, August 31st: A big hit across the pond, this movie spawned an essay examinging why Bean was the cultural ambassador to the rest of the world.

Cutting Edge Apparel

This is quite close to my heart ... and most of those who read this blog!

Holy Fermented Potatoes, Batman!

Harish "Vodka" Shivaram has a blog!

And he was inspired by Akshay "Axe" "Studmuffin" Anand!