Disqus - Friends of PatrickMoorhead

Re: Did Lost Just Jump The Shark?

Brad Linder — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 13:40:41 -0000

Yeah, we stopped watching a few episodes back. To be perfectly honest I would have stopped watching last season, but Lost is one of the only sci-fi (barely) themed shows my wife was willing to watch with me.

I thought the first episode was amazing, but after a while the telling stories through flashbacks thing got about as cliche as using separate on-screen boxes to show action in 24.

But the biggest problem is that they named the show Lost. The second biggest is that they aired it in the US. Lost indicates that if they ever really get off the island, the show's over. And while the BBC would be happy with a show with a beginning, middle, and conclusion at the end of 22 episodes, US networks are going to milk it as long as they can. So they keep adding elements that make no sense at all until you just don't care about the characters, mysteries, or anything really.

Re: Mari Goes Moto

Brad Linder — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 13:28:27 -0000

Yes, I fully expect ZNF to become a fount of "leaked" secrets regarding Motorola and Sling Media products. :)

Congratulations Mari!

Re: HP scythe away media centre chaff

Brad Linder — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 18:50:26 -0000

I'm not sure how risky this is, really. These were always high end devices, and I doubt they sold that many of them in the first place. It's great that HP was a major innovator in this space, but I can't blame them for pulling out of a niche market.

Re: UNEASYGiveaway: We Are Giving Away Another Wii

Brad Linder — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:06:28 -0000

I wrote a post on my blog about the contest here:

http://bradlinder.blogspot....

Re: Axim Axed

Brad Linder — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 21:58:30 -0000

While Dell hasn't released a new Axim in nearly 2 years, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better standalone PDA. The top of the line X51v and X50v series units have 624MHz processors, VGA screens, WiFi, and Bluetooth.

And unlike Smartphone/PDAs, you got all of that for a one-time price of $300-$400. No need to buy an expensive monthly data plan on top of your home internet access just to use the device you've already paid for.

Sure, I guess you COULD buy a Blackjack or a Treo without activating the phone service, but the truth is the newer devices are designed to be phones, not personal digital assistants/handheld computers.

Re: KFC & The Mosquito

Brad Linder — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:49:04 -0000

I don't get it. I heard the sound, but it's just an annoying beep. It doesn't seem to ad anything to the commercial, and definitely doesn't make me want to buy fried chicken.

Re: Slinging With CBS

Brad Linder — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 11:03:53 -0000

Thanks for posting this. It helped me spot a typo in my original post, which is now fixed. :)

Re: My email conversation with Jason Calacanis

Brad Linder — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:00:13 -0000

As a journalist, I can tell you most reporters have a policy of not letting people see their questions before they ask them. There are a few reasons for this.

First, you don't want to limit yourself. If I tell you I've got five questions, and then I want to ask a few follow-ups based on answers you've given, how do I know you won't get upset.

But more importantly, if I show you the questions now and then interview you later, I don't know if you're really answering honestly or if you've taken time to think about the answers you think you should give.

In this case, nothing would have prevented Calacanis for sending the questions off to Arrington for review and then sending Vogelstein Arrington's answers.

So no, I don't blame Vogelstein for trying to explain why he wouldn't do an email interview. To be honest, his first email to Calacanis was probably a bit too informal, and it elicited a very brief response that Calacanis probably thought was casual. But to Vogelstein it would have set off some alarms, and so he responded with a detailed email explaining why he'd rather speak on the phone.

Re: Interview questions: don’t ask “how do you feel?”

Brad Linder — Fri, 04 May 2007 13:59:02 -0000

A good one I picked up form CBC radio guru David Candow: What do you do differently now as a result of your experiences?

Re: Top 5 TiVo Hacks (for non-hackers)

Brad Linder — Thu, 10 May 2007 21:25:36 -0000

Great list! It would be nice if none of these required hacks. I mean seriously, why bother building a 30-second skip code into your remote controls and then not publishing that code in the user manual?

Re: Moving online journalism to Linux: Top 5 programs

Brad Linder — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:09:08 -0000

You might also want to check out Ubuntu Studio. It's as version of Ubuntu specifically designed for multimedia creation, and comes with audio, video and graphics applications pre-installed, including Cinelerra, Audacity, Ardour, and The Gimp.

The distribution has been in the works for a while now, and it was released yesterday. It's based on the latest version of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn.

Re: Another typing test, I'm faster than you!

Brad Linder — Sun, 13 May 2007 20:27:30 -0000

Wow, I hit 125 wpm and 542 cpm. But I think the test is really way too short to be accurate. Give me more text to write and I inevitably type slower because I make more errors that I need to go back and fix.

Re: TiVo’s Q1 Call: Series3 Lite, Comcast Rollout, Down Under

Brad Linder — Thu, 31 May 2007 08:35:21 -0000

Thing is, you can pick up a Series3 for just over $400 after rebate from Amazon right now. I don't know if TiVo or Amazon are losing money on this deal, but if not, why not just drop the price of the standard unit rather than releasing a $300 or $400 box? Of course, if when Rogers says "lower-priced" he means sub-$200, you wouldn't hear me complain.

Re: Time Out for a Little RSS Reading

Brad Linder — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:12:56 -0000

I'm still a big fan of Mobipocket if you've got a PDA. It does a great job of pulling in full articles from RSS feeds, not just the brief snippets many sites include.

The only problem is I don't want my full feed list on my PDA unless I'm going on a very very long trip. So I just subscribe to my top news feeds with MobiPocket. Google Gears would be great for reading all of my blogs and news sites without having to transfer my OPML file to Mobipocket Reader.

Re: Uncensored+Free+Image+Hosting+From+The+Pirate%26nbsp%3BBay

Brad Linder — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 09:24:36 -0000

They updated their attribution of the quote. It now reads "You might have heard that old quote by Evelyn Beatrice Hall..."

Re: Online Publishers Need To Set Their Own Editorial Standards And Stick To Them

Brad Linder — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 09:44:28 -0000

Coming from the world of journalism, this is one of the things that scared me most about blogging. Traditional news organizations have a long history of maintaining separate departments responsible for advertising and editorial content. Sure, you can look at many magazines and television programs these days that don't seem to have gotten the memo. But at most news organizations the reporters will never speak directly to the business managers.

Most bloggers don't have that background, and more importantly, they don't have those resources. If you're running a company of one, or even a company of 5 or 10, you probably can't afford to hire someone to handle the business while you crank out content.

Services like Google AdSense are great because they take most of the control out of your hands. You're not picking and choosing your advertisers, and there's no real pressure to write positive reviews of any particular product, because you never really know what's going to be advertised on your site.

But once you get into campaigns like the "People Ready" one, you're seeing bloggers taking an active role in advertising. And once that happens, you'll never know if you can really trust that blogger's words in the future, or if they're making sponsored endorsements. In fact, probably the best thing about the Federated Media campaign is that it was so blatantly obvious. It highlighted who some of these bloggers are.

I respect Om Malik, Mike Arrington and the others, so I doubt I'll stop reading their blogs. But this incident might make me pause to think a bit more about what exactly it is that I'm reading.

Re: 2007/07/19/yahoo-answers/

Brad Linder — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:24:37 -0000

Wow, they're basically just a commercial for GMC with little bits of other information thrown in for good measure. The spots are not funny, and not particularly informative.

Re: The Free and Open Source PC

Brad Linder — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:37:09 -0000

That's strange. I'm using AVG Free right now and I don't get any upgrade notices.

Re: Digital Media Bytes: Brad Linder Edition

Brad Linder — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:33:55 -0000

Well when you put it that way, it looks like I've been busy or something!

Re: Dave Dumps Vista

Brad Linder — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 10:24:34 -0000

I feel your pain. I'm running Vista on my notebook because that's what it came with. And I made the mistake of "upgrading" my HTPC when Acer sent me the upgade discs. Unfortunately I don't have a downgrade or XP install disc.

I don't hate Vista enough to go out and pay for an XP license. But every time I run across a program that used to run perfectly and no longer does, I wonder how cool desktop effects are supposed to make up for it.

Re: DivX To The Left Of Me, Windows To The Right, Here I Am Stuck In The Mpeg With You

Brad Linder — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 04:23:38 -0000

I'd take a look at some of the frontends for FFMPEG and Mencoder.

I've found MeWIG to be a little finicky, but it supports DivX, Xvid, WMV, and a whole slew of other formats.

http://sourceforge.net/proj...

Gui4ffmpeg has been good to me, but it doesn't support WMV.

http://sourceforge.net/proj...

While neither application has a batch processing mode, they both let you spit out command line instructions, which makes it pretty easy to create a batch processing job using a program like BeyondTV Alternate Compressor (BeyondTV not required... this program was designed to let you monitor a folder for new recordings and schedule regular file conversions. But it works just as well without BeyondTV).

http://forums.snapstream.co...

Re: I Saw Bionic Woman (and I’m not impressed)

Brad Linder — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 15:50:01 -0000

I'm still lobbying for Journeyman to change its name to Quantum Leap: TNG.

The show's intriguing, but a bit annoying in that I don't like any of the characters, so I'm not sure I'm rooting for anyone.

Bionic Woman on the other hand seems like it would have done well squeezed between Xena and Cleopatra 2525 on Saturday mornings.

Needless to say, I'll be recording the first few episodes of both shows this season. I'm a sucker for pretty much any new science fiction show. And now that I'm living with a digital antenna and no cable, I'm stuck with network fare unless I like a show enough to pay for downloads.

Re: Custom Icons for Google Maps

Brad Linder — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:10:00 -0000

Unfortunately when you go to print the map, your pretty new icons don't show up. You get a bunch of boring looking balloons. At least, that's what happened when I tried printing a custom map the other day.

Re: TiVo Has Hard Drive Failure - "Hooks Up" With Pay Per Post

Brad Linder — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 10:14:24 -0000

Ethics aside, I'm not sure TiVo's getting their money's worth. Most of these videos border on unwatchable.

Re: Mythbuntu Released From Beta

Brad Linder — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:54:01 -0000

No problem, I swiped the image from the Mythbuntu homepage. :)