News from Great Castle Wilson

Author: adminmcq

  • Star Wars and inspiration

    While waiting for the rest of my family to awaken this morning, I happened upon Star Wars episode 3 showing on one of the pay tv stations. I find it interesting that even though I wasn’t happy with the way episodes 1..3 went, I still find the strength of the myth to be extremely compelling.

    Is it possible that the Star Wars mythos transcends the marketing that brought it into being? Outside of the mainstream religions, what stories are known by as many people, the world over, as Star Wars is? There have been literally hundreds of books written in and about the Star Wars universe. It’s touched every media that mankind has invented. I wonder if, when whatever species succeeds humanity on this planet searches the archeological record of this time period, they will assume that SW was a religion? Heck, maybe it is, I don’t know.

    I do know that, whenever I watch a Star Wars movie, I get inspired. Sometimes I write music; sometimes I write more of my own fiction; whatever happens, I think about my place in the world, and whether I’m on the side of light or of dark.

    Ya, I know, that’s pretty corny, but people get inspiration from some pretty strange places, and I bet even post-JarJar there are a lot of people out there who feel the same way.

    “May the force…” (you know the rest (/em winks))

  • I didn’t like the Battlestar Galactica season opener.

    [Update: After Ken’s ever so subtle hint, I feel compelled to warn you that this article contains numerous spoilers. Sorry, Ken.]

    Who thought it was a good idea to wreck every interesting character?

    • Adama? — losing his grip
    • Baltar? — getting a conscience(!)
    • Apollo? — a fat slob
    • Starbuck? — turning into a Cylon sympathizer
    • Colonel Tigh? — an absolute raving psycho
    • Laura Roslin? — shot. (ok, I’ll give you that one; I saw her in the trailer for next week’s episode, so…)

    Man, I smell a Matrix sequel!

    Even the g.d. cylons have gone nuts. Guys, I get it: Cylons are starting to behave like people. Did you think we wanted to see that? Ask yourself this: If you blur every distinction in the damn series, what are you left with? My guess: Another generic “rebels versus the empire” story.

    And for the record, “stepping over the line” into suicide bombing as a fucking plot device is so absolutely unfeeling that I was speechless when I saw it. Who do these morons think they are?

    Bah!

  • Maybe Microsoft isn’t going to win, after all.

    Take a look at this chart (sorry about the size, that what it takes to get it to fit):

    That’s the breakdown of the browser hits on my server over the last five days. Now given that I know *I* use Safari to visit the site, I find it interesting that Firefox (65%) is way ahead of Safari (26%), and IE is getting only 4% (best case just over 8%, even if all the “Unknowns” were IE). I wouldn’t bet the farm on the veracity of this data, and certainly wouldn’t attempt to generalize this further, but it’s still interesting.

  • TV Listings on the Mac

    Hey, I found a Mac application to read Canadian XMLTV data from Zap2it. It’s called MacProgramGuide. Here’s a shot of the GUI:

    It’s sparse, but good enough. It supports scheduling via eyetv2, but not, of course, via the software that came with my myTV.PVR box. *sigh*.

  • The Gallery is popular.

    I have never worried about who wanders around my website before. It’s not topical enough for most people to be interested, and I just assumed I didn’t get much traffic.

    For grins last night, I decided I would start running some traffic measurements on the server. There weren’t many surprises, except for the number of hits that I get from the various crawlers out there (Google, Yahoo, MSNBot, etc.).

    One thing that I did find odd though, was that last night, between 10:00 and 11:30, I had three separate, theoretically non-bot, IPs hit on the photo gallery site. I almost never update that site, and almost all of the content is password protected anyway. One of them was probably me, since I was clicking around while testing the web stats software, but who were the other two? Weird.

  • Software music studios, Logic and UI Design

    Back in the good ol’ days when I used a PC to make music, Cubase was my tool of choice. When I got my G5, I tried running the Mac version, but for me at least, Cubase on the Macintosh is just too frustrating. Crashes, incompatibilities, the need to have a USB dongle, bah! The last time I rebuilt my hard drive, I didn’t re-install Cubase, and I don’t miss it.

    In fact, I have been using Reason 3.0 for most of the music I’ve made lately. As an all-in-one software studio, it’s almost everything you need. Even though it doesn’t support software plug-ins, what’s there really is quite inspiring. The Combinator, in particular, has made a huge difference in the scope of things you can do with it. Unfortunately, if you want to mix in recorded sound (like a cello ;-)) Reason just won’t cut it. There’s just no way to reasonably (sic) get digital audio tracks into it.

    So the obvious thing to do on a Mac is to try Garage Band. As I found, GB actually works quite well. It’s surprisingly powerful, for an essentially free piece of software, with features like commercial-grade software instruments, multi-track recording, the ability to freeze tracks — they call it “locking” –, and pitch correction. It also has an easy to use GUI, with “Mac-like” simplicity at first glance, but lots of flexibility/capability when you need it. I’m sure I could use Garage Band as my main DAW, but it’s missing a few features (like, score creation) that I occasionally need.

    In the Macintosh world, the next step up from Garage Band is Logic Express. I had some cash to blow on tech toys (since I just sold my old PowerBook) so I picked up a copy. After playing with it for a day, I can say that it seems like it is what I was looking for, but man what an arcane GUI.

    Now, I’m sure there are Logic-heads out there who will tell me that it’s the “one GUI to rule them all”, but it’s obvious that the Apple GUI designers lost the battle when they tried to bring that we-bought-the-company app into the fold. I’m heading out for dinner, so I don’t have time to do a full rant about it, but the capsule summary is “This one makes Cubase look easy to use.” ’nuff said.

  • Welcome, Planet OTI

    Apparently, I’ve been picked up by the Planet OTI — it looks like Planet OTI is gone now too — feed aggregator.

    To any new readers this drags in: Welcome.

    I must say though, this is a personal blog, and I expect most people will find that it has an extremely poor s2n ratio for anyone who isn’t one of my relatives, or otherwise interested in my home life. 🙂

    In any case, I welcome comments from one and all. Akismet is my friend, but I do have moderation-on-first-post turned on, so there may be a delay before your words show up.

  • The joys of upgrading

    I finally figured out that the RSS feed for my wiki had stopped working. After some digging, I realized that it was caused by my last upgrade of the wiki software, where they had renamed the file containing the rss code which, of course, was referenced by name in my initialization file.

    Anyway, if anyone was crazy enough to be tracking that feed, it should be working again. If you want to check it out, here’s the link.

  • I didn’t know it had a name.

    I blame the narrow scope of the computer scientists education. 😉

    “Received Pronunciation”

  • Link of the day: Jack Thompson Thinks He’s Jesus

    At Grumpy Gamer:

    Jack Thompson Thinks He’s Jesus

    I have no idea what this was about, and can’t find any pointers to the article.