joe posts

The Kids in the Hall’s “The Customer” skit, performed on an anon chan.

My solution to Fantastic Contraption’s “Unpossible” puzzle.

The key seems to be that tiny blue piece that I left in accidentally. It doesn’t work without it.

Here’s an odd Toronto story: An irate bus driver threatened to have me arrested because I didn’t know that I needed a $3.00 fare to get OFF the bus in York Region. The TTC has to pay that particular section of Toronto extra money to prop up Viva and the other bus service that operates there. Now that I know, I can see that they post a little note on the route maps to let us know that it’s a double fare, and sometimes those screens on the exterior of the bus flash a “double fare” message. But I wasn’t paying attention – when I mapped it out online it looked like I would still be in Toronto.

I was going to a job interview way the heck up Keele street, and the bus driver made an announcement saying it was $3.00 to exit the bus north of Steeles – but of course he makes the announcement as he leaves the stop at Steeles street, and I assumed the NEXT stop would, naturally, be the ‘last chance.’ I wasn’t carrying any cash, just tokens, so I wanted to jump off and just walk there. I tried the back door, but it was locked..

“You have to exit at the front of the bus.”

“Ok…”

“It’s $3.00.”

Rummaging. “… I only have $1.00.”

“Then I’m calling the police to have you arrested. I made an announcement. I HAVE WITNESSES!” (waving towards the other passengers)

He picked up his phone and started dialing.

Oh sure. Call the cops. I know mistake was mine, but it’s trivial, and I almost want to know what exactly the police would do about it. Slap handcuffs on me and take me to the station? Or just force me to ride the bus forever? Part of me really wanted to push it. Hell, if I’m going to get “arrested” over two measly bucks, I at least have to make my feelings known. So I opened my stupid mouth. “Look, you made the announcement north of Steeles, I thought this was the last…”

“WHAT????!”

I stopped myself from going down that dark road. Another strategy:

“Um, I’m really sorry – I must have misunderstood your announcement. Hold on. I only carry tokens.”

“Oh. Tokens are good. You can use tokens, but not passes.”

“Just one?”

“Yes.”

“Can I keep riding? I wanted to get to Langstaff.”

“No, get off the bus. Now. Before I call the police.”

“Thank You. Have A Great Day.” (I actually said it with capital letters)

“You’re the one who needs it, Buddy.”

I swear I did not make that up. Weird scene. I was tempted to vandalize a nearby Viva touch-screen ticket terminal, but someone had already messed it up. Oh well.

Anyways, this morning I woke up extra early because Viva has gone on strike. Something to do with management screwing them over. I can understand that and don’t hold it against the workers, even if they insist on picketing the passengers and not their managers (um?). But I have no use for Viva, and neither do a lot of other people, apparently. I arrived at Downsview full 10 minutes early (I had hit snooze like a dozen times) expecting to find a crush of Yorkians, cursing Viva under their breaths, clambering to get on the TTC’s 107. Nope. It was me and a dozen other people, just like most days. I figured we’d get a lot of people connecting to the bus at Finch and Steeles. But nothing. Apparently almost nobody uses it. The Toronto Star is running an article with the headline “Viva strike causes few delays.” If there’s ever a sign that a service is just slightly redundant… Yeeesh. I guess some people use it as an express route, but there are at least three bus companies running down the same roads. Seems kind of silly.

Meanwhile, part of the subway shuts down for emergency maintenance, and because the whole line is designed as a U instead of an O, and there’s no way to reroute any trains, thousands of people suddenly have a loooong walk.

Funny place to live, Toronto is.

I went to clear out my history in Nautilus (GNOME’s [far superior] answer to Windows Explorer) and I got this warning message. Hehe.

Probably the best part about it is that it’s programmed to come up randomly or every X times a user clears out the history. Normally it’s a boring old computer-type message.

I’ve been watching M*A*S*H DVDs – seasons 3 and 11. Basically.. I’ve been watching them for like a week straight, pausing only to watch Futurama’s new movie and, you know, work on a bunch of exciting copyediting assignments. But I am re-obsessed with the show. It’s playing right now in a little VLC window so I can blog about it at the same time. My neighbors are probably getting tired of hearing Suicide is Painless over and over again. Let me explain.

Unlike a lot of fans, I prefer the later episodes – I found the pre-Alda-takeover episodes to be just a little bit on the corny side. But the DVDs.. ahh.. the DVDs.. have blissfully given us the option of turning off the laugh track.

(Laugh track.. one word, or two? Blech. I’m all dictionaried out for today. Should there be a comma between word and or? Hmmm.. sigh.. turn off the brain.. it’s a blog..)

Anyhoo.

I didn’t realize how much the laugh track (or laughtrack) wrecked the show until I did a few simple comparisons – watching a scene that made me laugh without the laugh track, and then going back and switching the audio channel to hear how unfunny the fake-sounding giggles made the scene. It just never made sense to me. I could never help but wonder why an audience would follow a bunch of soldiers around and laugh at them? It was just bizarre – disrespectful to the troops, even. Heh.

The raging torrent of anger I felt at the newtork’s incompetence, which, from what I understand, forced this insane gigglefest onto the series in an attempt to make it ‘less dark,’ had clearly overshadowed my ability to appreciate the hilarity of the first few seasons. They’re pretty great. I think it’s just the awful way the laugh track was synced – the giggles tend to creep in just before a witty line, or simply filled in any and all silences during the “funny parts.”

As it turns out, the show can be as funny as any of our fancy modern-day non-laughtracked sitcoms. It’s not corny at all, really. If I can figure out how to post a video comparison, I might do that. After consulting a lawyer. Hah. Or not – It’s becoming sort of a game to guess the amount of copyrighted footage you can post online without getting noticed by The Man. Divide the profit margin of Fox studios by the age of the series (in hours), multiply by the Neilson ratings for the episode in question, factor in the DVD sales and subtract all that from the number of lawyers Fox has on retainer, multiply the answer by 100…. I’m guessing… 9.7 seconds? We’ll see.

So there you have it – Joe recommends you immediately run out and purchase the M*A*S*H DVDs. Or download them, if you’re a dirty filthy pirate who wants to hurt big corporations. And everybody knows, pirates are totally uncool.

I’ve been fooling around with a USB gadget – the WinTV-HVR-950, to be exact – that lets me run analog video to my computer. I picked it up because I have a huge VHS collection and I wanted to record some of them onto my machine. Plus I might have free access to cable TV in the near future, so I’ll be able to record all my favourite FOX NETWORK reality shows, on the FOX NETWORK channel. Boy I sure do love that FOX NETWORK. It’s almost as if the FOX NETWORK is paying me to say FOX NETWORK. But, unfortunately, the FOX NETWORK is not paying me anything. FOX.

Anyways. It’s generally used for viewing/recording stuff via coaxial cable. Here’s Fantastic Planet:

The recording quality is surprisingly good and space-efficient. I was kind of irritated that my fancy nvidia graphics card couldn’t do this because it has a bunch of other esoteric features I can’t possibly use, though it’s not bad at sending video to a TV set with an RCA jack, as long as I use ffdshow to resize the video. I realized after a day that I could do something pretty cool – send the video OUT through the video card and into a VCR, and then connect the VCR output to the USB gadget. The computer sends video to itself, in full-screen.

It’s kind of a neat trick and a good way to bypass DRM/copy-protection scams. I don’t think I’m ‘breaking’ a digital lock, so Jim Prentice can’t come to my door and kick me in the balls. (Yes, lets discourage “piracy” by making the penalty for ripping a store-bought DVD higher than the penalty for simply downloading a digital copy! Another blog, maybe…). So any kind of digital video, even Tom Green’s hard-to-edit live feeds, can be easily re-recorded and re-encoded:

I used DownloadHelper to ‘catch’ his show when it goes Live. VLC can play that format of video as it downloads and sends it to the VCR in full-screen, which sends back to the computer video recorder. The black window is actually live video, it just didn’t show up in the screenshot for some reason. Tom Green’s live shows are fun, but the “commercial breaks” (sometimes ten minutes or more.. with no commercials, just… darkness…) are worth editing out, which I can now do.

But here’s the ultimate – When I shut off the video, the graphics card just sends a clone of the monitor/desktop image. Which gets looped back through the system, again and again and again. It’s infinite and beyond!

Ok… back to STUDYING.

I didn’t know Wil Wheaton had a blog! Oh Wesley!

wilwheaton.typepad.com

Fun stuff, definitely written for geeks of all stripes.

So the video game industry turns a record profit, then turns around and whines about how piracy makes them lose money. Makes… sense…?

ESA, IIPA slam Canada for not fixing copyright “deficiencies”

Maybe if they stopped using copy-protection schemes that prevent games from working properly on certain PCs they’d get a little more respect. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bought a game only to find it unplayable because of SecuROM or some other unadvertised ‘protection’ software bundled with the game. Even the game that came free with my system wouldn’t play – it failed the disc check every time! I’m not sure what my problem is – an unusual DVD/hard drive setup? I wonder if protection software just doesn’t like computers that don’t come from major companies.

I wouldn’t have a problem with protection software at all if they openly advertised what the company plans to install on your system. I recently picked up Bioshock and it really should have “Protected by SecuROM” in bold lettering across the front of the box. That way I wouldn’t have wasted my money on it. It’s twisted that their ‘protection’ schemes just force people to search for cracked .exe files to play games they’ve actually paid money for. It just makes websites like gamecopyworld get a lot more traffic.