Month: April 2004

Weird

This is perfect training

Steve Stanzak had been sleeping in the basement at NYU for 8 months when school officials discovered his web log describing the experience. The student apparently had four jobs, a scholarship and was receiving no tuition help from his parents. The $15K scholarship would lower his tuition to around $16K a year but tack on the $7K to $17K a year for housing and he wasn’t able to make ends meet.

This story really proves how well our Universities are preparing our students for the real world. Steve’s major? Creative writing. Yep, prepare to work long hours, eat out of dumpsters and live in a cardboard box dude!

Movies

Directors: slow motion does not enhance the plot

Post author By Reeves Little
Post date April 27, 2004
2 Comments on Directors: slow motion does not enhance the plot

I’ll tolerate a lot for some mindless entertainment… so when Out for a Kill was on USA network last night I had MCE record it. It only took 10 minutes for me to write off this movie. What a piece of crap! You can’t spend the first 30 minutes of a Stephen Segal movie with no action… it’s just painful. Yes, after 10 minutes I decided the movie sucked and I waited an additional 20 minutes to see some action (guess what? the action sucked too).

My advice: do not see this movie. In fact, go out of your way to not see this movie. If a network broadcasts this movie, call up your cable/satellite provider and demand that network be removed from their lineup.

The only positive thing this movie did was remind me to post a notice to directors and aspiring directors: please, for the sake of all that is holy, stop using slow motion in an attempt to make your movie look cool. The money you spent by running your cameras faster would have been better spent on a script writer.

Tags Movies

Gear

Two for the price of one

For a little bit of extra cash and a little bit of extra effort you can turn your one person PC into a two person PC. It’ll be great… tell your friends you have a main frame (and then feel old when you have to explain what that is). Head over to BeTwin for the goods.

Here’s the quickie details from Gadget Madness

Forget that low-profile dual-user system, take any Windows 2000 or XP PC, add a PCI video card (or just use a dual-head nVidia or ATI if you don’t mind a performance hit), a USB keyboard and mouse and install BeTwin. Thanks to Windows’ profile system and terminal services engine, as well as a bit of nouse from ThinSoft, you can have two people using the one PC. In fact, you can go up to five users if you can get hold of enough PCI graphics cards and USB hubs. Unfortunately it doesn’t like my laptop’s dual-head adapter, but I will be trying this out on a machine as soon as possible.

Tags Gear

Idle

Seems everything’s made in China these days…

Post author By Reeves Little
Post date April 24, 2004
No Comments on Seems everything’s made in China these days…

… except Chinese food (well, the containers at any rate).

Tags Overseen

Gear

My mind is already racing…

Post author By Reeves Little
Post date April 23, 2004
3 Comments on My mind is already racing…

If you like computers but live in the physical world you need to check out Phidgets. The development kit they provide allows you to easily create sensor and display interfaces for your PC. They have a basic USB interface which plugs into sensors (force, light, motion, etc.) as well as USB interfaces for server motors, LED systems, LCD displays and (for you big brother types) RFIDs.

Now that you have all this cool USB hardware, you can create an computer control for it. Phidgets are interfaced via their supplied VB APIs (other languages are rumored to be in the works).

Tags Gear

Idle

I’ve come to the realization…

Post author By Reeves Little
Post date April 22, 2004
3 Comments on I’ve come to the realization…

… my dog doesn’t understand sarcasm.

Tags Overheard

PAD Photography

Updated

My week-long vacation gave me a chance to get caught up on all the unprocessed picture-a-day “digital negatives” I had sitting around. My PAD gallery is now mostly up to date.