Archive for January, 2006

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I’d Like to Thank the Academy

Tuesday, January 31st, 2006

The list of Academy Awards nominees was announced. I had great hopes this year that I would have been able to avoid seeing all nominees, but alas, I have seen three (I bet you have seen more). On the upside, they are three of the less respected ones. I have seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Batman Begins, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for costume design, cinematography, and art direction respectively.

If you know me at all this may come as a surprise to you. There was a time when I would see about seventy-five percent of all movies released, and for a brief moment I may have seen all of them (in current release at the time). More recently I have been chased out of the theatre by knuckle dragging fuck-nuts who can’t seem to shut the hell up while the movie is on. I would love to pound these maggots into a pile of mush, but at the same time I don’t want to go to prison. For the most part, I have decided to switch to seeing the few movies that are released in IMAX. The fifteen-dollar price tag tends to keep the riff raff out, though this is not a sure thing anymore.

What we need is a theatre that operates as a club. You would have to pay a little for club membership, but the real value of the club would be that all members would have to agree to be quiet and well behaved, or they would be ejected from the club and never allowed to return. Paradise.

Most of the problem nowadays is that there is no enforcement to make people shut up.

I really love seeing movies in the theatre, and hope to someday be able to return. Till then, Netflix all the way.

Posted in Uncategorized, anti-hip | 1 Comment »

iDisney

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

[Update]
It looks like the deal is basically done. A little voting here and ther, and trade review, but none of that will stop it from happening. I am a little surprised at the final price of about 7.4 Billion. That makes about half a billion more than I thought. A little out of control, but I do like what they have done with the executives. I just hope they can all work together to make the future bigger and better for Disney.

Discussed on Gigaom.
[/Update]

A while back Pixar broke off talks with Disney about continuing their distribution arrangement amid talk that there was a rift between then Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Pixar head Steve Jobs. Jobs, who also heads Apple computers, thought that Disney wasn’t being fair with the distribution rights and the amount of money it was taking in the deal. He was probably right, but I thought that Disney should have just let the deal fall through and concentrated on making its own computer animation division stronger. Most of the Disney stockholders and board didn’t agree with me, apparently, because Eisner announced his retirement a short time late, and many people looked at this deal as the last in a string of bad decisions he had made. Robert Iger took over at the head of Disney, and almost from the start was again in discussions with Pixar. If he could get a new deal with Pixar, it would surely be a coup for the new CEO.

Talks continued and I expect an announcement shortly that Disney will be buying Pixar. The deal will probably be for 6.9 billion dollars, or so.

Is this the coup I was talking about? Maybe, but I don’t think it was for Iger or Disney.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that Pixar is a bad thing to own, or that it won’t be alright in the long run, I just have a little problem with the purchase price, and with the possible culture shock of the two coming together.

The real coup is for Steve Jobs. It wasn’t like he was hurting for money, or anything, but this deal should net him something like 3.5 billion, making him the largest individual shareholder in Disney. Additionally, there is some talk that there might be a Disney presidency for him in the future. The presidency issue both excites and worries me.

Jobs is a visionary and a creative type. He may not be an artist, but he sees the way to guide a forward thinking company like Pixar. Same with Apple. He doesn’t invent products (I don’t think), but he has the vision to see them to fruition. The thing I fear is another Ovitz situation.

Disney is a creative company, to be sure, but there culture is so sprawling that the men at the top need to be ready to plow through a bureaucratic like system, as well as take creative lead. If Iger can successfully separate the jobs between the president and the CEO, there will be good, if not, bad. That is all too speculative at this point, however.

If Disney does buy Pixar as expected, and Jobs doesn’t become president, there is still a huge culture gap to deal with. I just hope Disney realizes what they are buying. Pixar isn’t just a name. If you want a name, you couldn’t do much better than Disney anyhow. It certainly isn’t just a pile of computers and software. What Pixar is mostly, is a way of thinking about and doing things. It is a commitment to quality while others are content cranking out sub-par offering like Shreck or the like. They way the stories are developed is much like it was in the old Disney days. If Disney goes through with this deal and tries to change the way Pixar works to fit in, they should just save their money. It would ruin the process at Pixar.

I just wish they bought it five years ago when the purchase price might have been about half. Oh well.

Posted in Bidiness, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Don’t Despair

Thursday, January 19th, 2006

Looks like the 2Pac Barney mashup was taken off of Google, but it is still available here.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

What the Fuck Was I Talking About?

Thursday, January 12th, 2006

The haze of the wedding-honeymoon-holidays is finally wearing off for me, and I am feeling the need to get back to work. We had hoped to finish more than we did before the wedding, so there is still plenty left to do.

The upstairs still has much to attend to. The hardwood flooring is only about one-sixth done. We have laid the floor in one of the bedrooms, but we still have the other bedroom and the hall to go. Then there is the sanding staining and finishing. We probably should have gone the pre-finished Bellawood route or something, but we are too stupid for that, so we had to go with a more traditional product. This is something that is usually, and probably rightly so, done by a professional, but we are trying it ourselves. Just so you know about Bellawood, there is always a way to tell if it is being used. It has a slight bevel edge on each side of the board. The way I understand it, there are slight differences in thickness when the planks are milled. Normally this would be evened out in the sanding step of hardwood flooring, but since this is a pre-finished product, there is no sanding step, so the bevel edge makes it harder for us to notice the difference between the boards. Neat trick, but we didn’t want it just because we didn’t like the little grooves in the floor. I think it looks dumb.

There is a gang of work to do in the front, or what will be the master bathroom. We got a really cool tub with champagne bubbles and shit, but we have yet to install it. We are still waiting on the grouting of the tile, and the finishing of the plumbing. It should be pretty cool when it is all done. It is closed now with entry only from the bedroom attached. I did some ok work on that.

There are some other plumbing issues with the upstairs bathrooms too. There is a somewhat major leak from the main bath to the dining room, and that ain’t good. It’s going to be a nightmare to repair, but what are you gonna do, right? We will be relying on professionals for that one. When they fix it, we can finally get the king of all tubs reattached. It is the coolest bathtub in the world, but until it is attached is just a really odd towel hanger.

There are some other more minor things to take care of, then it’s off to the kitchen and the most extensive project yet! We’ll put my carpentry skills to the test as I try to make something that is virtually level.

Posted in Homework, Renaissance | 1 Comment »

To All the Crap I’ve Done Before

Sunday, January 8th, 2006

I was just looking through my website at all of the silly crap that is lying around. It is something I like to do periodically. Here is a partial list of what I have found lurking about. Most of it is entirely useless and just silly, but it does show a developmental process. Compared to now, it seems as if I knew very little indeed, even though I know practically nothing now.

Some of the links may not work totally right, as some things have since moved around.

First we start off with some Christmas cards I did for the site on my blogroll. These are a little primitive, but I still like them, and I think a couple are pretty funny.

The Rater Creator was something I made so people could set up a way to have visitors rate things, in kind of a contest sort of way. This was one I made for CheddarX, but nothing ever happened with it. I don’t even remember how it really works.

The editor test was meant as a way to generate html in something of a WYSIWYG environment

Editor Test2 is similar, except applies different editing stuff. I probably meant to combine these at some point, though I don’t really know why.

I always liked this little thing. It takes some text and makes an email address out of it. Stupid and easy, but I always liked it nonetheless.

I include this familytalk thing because it was one of the first things I ever did when I got my website.

I used to think this import test thing was more or less old fashioned, and that I probably wouldn’t use it, but now that I am doing more AJAX style stuff, I think it will come into play more. Boring though.

Here is something to automatically generate pages of stuff. I think this is somewhat useful, somehow. I’m not sure that I would ever implement it for anything though.

This populates a table and provides additional details in a floating box. I think that this combined with some newer AJAX php jazz might work rather well.

I was looking at the code for this calendar, and I think I must have been out of my mind. It is just crazy, and I don’t think it works right either.

I still love this. I don’t understand why GetUpOffMYNuttster isn’t sweeping the nation. It’s a social exclusion network.

I think I was going to work this into a Card Playing redesign at some point, but it never really worked right, and I couldn’t decide what the point of it was. Some cool images found around the web though.

here is a basically moronic madlib thing I made. I thought it might be cool to set up a way to define your own madlibs, but never got around to doing it.

I created this big ass, and dumb, numerology thing, for no reason. I think the method used to get the result is actually reasonably accurate though.

The linkentry thing was an ambitious effort to create a way to show the interlinking of the internet, or more specifically, blogs. Nothing ever happened with this, but I still think it is essentially a good idea.

There you have it. A variety of silly unused crap. Some if it is sound at least in concept. I’m sure the list of tried tested and failed ideas will continue to grow over the new year.

Posted in Gee-Gaws, Uncategorized | No Comments »

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