Lone Locust Productions

Author: Eugene Glover

  • Truth in Advertising

    For once, my kids undertook a “project” that resulted in exactly what they said they were going to do.

    They said there were going to turn James’ room into a zoo…

  • Cutter Needs a Cut – Primeval – Series 3 – Episode 1 – Review

    Primeval returns for a third series!

    Synopsis

    The episode starts with a new member of the military (Captain Becker) being added to the ARC team. His job, keep them from getting killed like poor ol’ Steven.

    Meanwhile, at the British Museum, an anomaly appears and a prehistoric crocodilian (Pristichampsus) kills one of the employees. Cutter’s team arrives and meets the new woman on the team, Dr. Sarah Page, who works at the museum. The croc escapes to the Thames with Cutter and Abby in hot pursuit.

    Lester has got his hands full, too. He’s got a new… boss… or liason… or something at the Home Office, named Christine Johnson. He doesn’t like her and there’s even a hint it might once have been romantic. She’s got some secret military stuff going on with fighting the future bat creatures, and a mysterious artifact that they failed to retrieve.

    Conner and Dr. Page investigate the anomaly, which is sealed inside a magnetite Egyptian statue. Not only do they discover that magnetite can somehow trap an anomaly (and move it) but that electricity can somehow “lock” the anomaly down for a period of time.

    After some heroics, the croc returns to the anomaly to go home. For a few moments, it looks like there’s going to be bloodshed, but then Page suggests that they all bow, like the Egyptians would have, and the creature leaves peaceably.

    Cutter realizes that some mythology may have been influenced by anomalies and so Page joins the team to research past anomalies.

    As the episode ends, we learn that Helen Cutter is still out to cause problems, and that she and her crew of clone soldiers retrieved the mysterious artifact and now posses it… even though she doesn’t know what it is. It’s further revealed that the British soldiers that had been trying to retrieve the artifact were operating through an anomaly, somewhere in the future.

    Analysis

    It’s good to have Primeval back on the air. This is a show that a both absolutely love the premise and detest some of the gross gaps in logic in the screenplay. The second series was an absolute train-wreck of illogical plot lines.

    In this, the first episode of series three, there wasn’t much plot, really, and so there wasn’t much to pick on. I’m not sure if I’m pleased or disappointed.

    I do have a few observations: Even if she’s still Jennifer Lewis, it’s good to see the character now back to looking, dressing and acting like the first series’ Claudia Brown. It seems like they might even being trying to bring back Cutter’s romance with her, but of course, work got in the way in this episode. It seems that now she knows about Claudia Brown, whereas in series two, even though Cutter tried telling people, they kept acting like he’d never told them.

    Cutter seriously needs a haircut this year. Perhaps he can lend some to Abby who needs to grow some back.

    It’s good to see that Helen Cutter finally changed her clothes. That half-torn, bust-augmenting jungle gear just didn’t make sense when she’d be back in our time driving cars and such.

    I suppose when they started searching the British Museum at night there was a good reason that Job One wasn’t to turn on the lights? Can’t think of one, though. Most people search for things better in bright light rather than flashlights.

    I’m a little disappointed that, knowing the anomalies are magnetic, they hadn’t tested their responses to simple magnets.

    Conner’s plan to “block off” the anomaly using all those boxes or artifacts at the British Museum was a little cavalier with things which we no doubt fragile and potentially priceless. I can’t see the military tossing them around and stacking them up as the did.

    The dumbest idea may actually have the most interesting concept. Page demonstrates that the Egyptians thought the crocs coming from the anomaly were the god Ammut. The dumb part is that she convinces everyone to bow to the croc because they are no doubt used to being worshipped by the Egyptians. It works, and it leaves them alone. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

    What’s interesting about that idea is the notion that time does not run parallel on either side of the anomaly. It’s been over 3,000 years since the Egyptians were worshipping Ammut, so if time ran parallel 3,000 years would also have elapsed in the Paleocene, too. If that were the case, the crocs wouldn’t be conditioned to people bowing. Of course, that’s no real surprise. We already knew that the “back ends” of the anomalies weren’t fixed, since revealed in Cutter’s first series, non-linear excursions into the Permian era demonstrated.

    Still… it’s good that it back on the air. It’s something to do for the next few weeks.

  • iPhone OS 3.0 – The Press Missed the Boat

    I just watched the Apple presentation on the iPhone OS 3.0 and I was amazed at how lame the reaction of the crowd was.

    While they oohed and aahed over cut-and-paste, the practically slept through the most significant change to the iPhone and maybe even computing as we know it.

    With iPhone OS 3.0, you can attach an iPhone to a third-party device via cable (and other means) and read and control data from it! You know have an actual field computer that can acquire data. Yes, the examples given were a pair of speakers that you can control the equalizer with, a blood pressure measure that tracks you blood pressure and a blood sugar meter for diabetics, and those were rather yawn-inducing.

    But the fact that you can extract data and control a device opens up a whole new universe for the iPhone.

    I’m sure there’ll be limitations, like Apple-approved cables only, but there are so many potential implications where someone could simply “dock” their iPhone with a device for a few moments, collect all the data it has, perhaps update it, do calculations – you know, all the things you can do with a computer.

    The first thought that comes to mind are reading the data ports on automobiles. Yes, you can buy a device that does that already, and you have to buy the right one for you car, and it reads diagnostic codes, extracts MPG performance, emissions and other information.

    Of course, there are data cables to attach that to a laptop, too. But isn’t that technology oh-so-much more accessible on your cell phone?

    It’s a game changer. It’s absolutely the biggest new feature in iPhones OS 3.0

  • Train to Hawaii

    This weekend is the Aloha Festival and, unlike previous years, this year it is being held at the so-called Tempe Beach Park. (Definition of Tempe Beach: a huge cement slab positioned near a horrid man-made lake.)

    Still, the park itself is green, if lacking shade, and large, which easily accompdated the large crowds.

    The park is also a block or so from the Light Rail, which makes it convenient if you want to ride rather than park in downtown Tempe.

    The downside is that it was 53 minutes there from the 19th Ave & Camelback station.

    I like the train, but that is too long on those hard-as-nails seats.

    The festival is alright, but mostly an excuse to get vilovilo chicken, so I’ll just say the chicken was really good and leave it at that.

    It was my first time to disembark at the Mill & 3rd station in Tempe. They need to do some work on that one. Traffic is brought completely to a stop in all directions and yet somehow pedestrians are left stranded on the train platform. This happened both when we arrived and when we were departing.

    By and large the vast majority of people tired of waiting and crossed illegally. The strange part is: there was just no way traffic could have interacted with them, so why the No Walk signal?

    The ride back was worse because I got to stand for nearly the whole trip. Almost made me long for the harder-than-nails seats.

    Perhaps a trip to Tempe is just a bit too far. Next time we’ll use it for a trip to Heritage Square for the Asian Festival. That’s only 27 minutes from station to station.

    Addendum: (3/14/2009) – One advantage to the train ride was I had time to write and publish that post entirely on the train while standing there. But something happened when we arrived at the departure station that makes me ask, “how am I supposed to teach my young children traffic safety when the train seems hellbent on forcing me not to?”

    I mentioned that at the Tempe stop, the lights for the pedestrians were so grossly screwed up that most everyone just jaywalked across the street. It was completely safe, and, had I not had my kids there, I would have crossed and thought nothing more than, “man, what lousy traffic lights.”

    The same happened again at 19th an Camelback. (See illustration, which is, sadly, so out-of-date that neither the park and ride nor the train station are visible.)

    Like most of the stations, it is positioned in the middle of two-way traffic, just off to one side of a major intersection. Access is via the existing crosswalk at the intersection. I’d hazard to say that most of the others have no access at the far end of the station. This station; however, is different because of the park-and-ride. It has a one-side-of-the-street-only crosswalk to get you into the park and ride. The crosswalk has a light to stop traffic – only activated when someone hits the button.

    We got off the train, and several people headed with us towards this backside crosswalk. I was there first, and hit the button. There was no traffic. The light didn’t change. East-bound traffic was completely blocked by the light at the intersection. There was no way traffic could enter the street between the intersection and the crosswalk. Still it didn’t change. More people arrived, they waited a few, observed the situation and walked across the street anyway. I can hardly blame them, but I’m trying to teach my children to obey the traffic laws. (When they’re older, they need to learn a certain amount of discretion, but for now, I want them to err on the side of caution.)

    Still the light didn’t change. More people crossed. This time a couple with a baby in a stroller. We stood at this light fully 4-5 minutes. I watched them walk to their car, pack up their stroller and prepare to leave. Then, the east-bound intersection light changed to green and traffic began to flow.

    Just as it reached the crosswalk, the light turned red and let us cross.

    Whoever setup that traffic light, is an idiot.

    19th and Camelback

  • Train walk

    Took advantage of the glorious weather today (72 degrees) to walk from the train station at 44th St & Washington to the Cofco Chinese Center.

    8 minutes 50 seconds at a determined yet leisurely pace.

    Perfectly acceptable in late February.

    In July = heat death.

  • “Furlough”- Day 2

    Watched games 4 and 5 of the Chappel-Hadley Cup between New Zealand and Australia. The series was a draw (dammit) and Australia retained the cup.

    Went to try Pollo Campero – well, can’t really see what drives the South Americans wild about it, but it wasn’t bad.

    Filled some gaps in the driveway.

    Nice weather.

  • iMovie ’09 – Review

    It’ time to review iMovie ’09, the only other piece (apart from iPhoto) that has much interest for me in iLife.

    In the interest of full disclosure, I made the move to the Macintosh just so that I could use Final Cut Pro. I learned to edit video on an ancient linear U-matic editor. I learned to edit non-linearly on Adobe Premiere and then stepped up to Final Cut Pro. ([1] Final Cut Pro is a huge improvement over Premiere [2] Windows sucks (or at least sucked at the time) as the basis for an editor.)

    I’m no pro. not by a long shot, but I have developed the mindset that goes along with the traditional style of video editing.

    iMovie ’09 is not at all like that… or, I should say it’s a different paradigm.

    iMovie ’09 is the “fixing” of iMovie ’08, the complete new version that introduced the current scrubbing workflow but completely eliminated all the good stuff. For me iMovie ’08 was unusable. ’09 has fixed most of the problems and, once I got my head wrapped around it, works fairly well.

    Today, I took some crap footage from my 2005 trip to Taiwan and began to edit it entirely in iMovie ’09. I started by capturing all three Mini-DV tapes from the trip. iMovie had no problem with the import, and it has a very nice feature in that not only does it read the time code and split the videos out into individual clips, but it also organizes them into daily events alà iPhoto. This makes locating and organizing video clips from a large capture much easier.

    iMovie shines at rough cut edits, which some editors love, but I typically don’t use. I prefer to make each edit as close to the final edit as possible and this caused me some initial grief in iMovie. What it does best is to allow you to select and grab rough sections of your raw footage and toss it onto the timeline.

    That’s great when you’re working at making a sequential piece from disparate clips, like this perhaps: First I toss in a shot of the park, then I grab a picture of my daughter running, then a long shot of a slide, then my daughter climbing a slide, then her sliding down. Makes perfect sense but you’d be surprised at how often you have those clips, but they aren’t in that order, so you’re looking at visual representations of the clips and you scrub a small section as you see them and put them one after the other in the timeline – then you watch and it is painful. The long shot is too long, she takes too long climbing the slide, there’s too much running and she’s facing the opposite direction when she’d climbing the slide.

    Here’s where the precision editor kicks in. In the older version, all the editing had to be done with imprecise broad mouse strokes, with the new version, editing can be done with more precise, fine mouse strokes. Zero in on the transition between two clips and move the edit to the precise frame you want, click and the change is made. That’s a huge improvement over ’08, but they go further.

    Now you have overlays, which can simulate an A-B roll (Final Cut Pro doesn’t use A-B rolls, either, so I’ve gotten used to the overlay system, but it still foxes some people I know.), green screen, Picture in Picture, narration (with automatic ducking) and separate audio control.

    Plugin support for special effects and transitions is missing, so you’re stuck with the provided ones, and there’s still no keyframing mechanism. Keyframing is probably most often used in home movies to rubberband the audio track, although the concept can be applied to application of special effects and other post-production effects. I really miss that, but at least the narration (and other) tracks can be designated to cause other tracks to hide behind them.

    Clearly the engineers at Apple figured out that people shoot lots of “event” footage – trips, birthday parties, weddings, etc. and this package is really geared towards trying to polish the typical turds that people with camcorders usually record.

    They also figured out that, if you look at YouTube, and subtract all the completely pirated and illegal postings of music videos, there’s a massive number of homemade music videos (usually set to pirated and illegally obtained music.) iMovie’s new edit to the beat feature is phenomenally simple. Simply lay down an audio track, play it back, tapping out the beat with your finger, then start dropping video footage into your project. It’s automatically cut on the beat. Even random footage laid down to the beat of music looks great.

    A lot has been said about the new automatic image stabilization feature, which analyzes more of that turd footage and makes it look steady. I’m not so enamored of this feature. In a camcorder, digital image stabilization (as opposed to the good stuff: optical stabilization) has been around for years. It’s a cheat. What it does is capture a larger area (or shrinks your available image area) and then essentially moves the image around based on an algorithm that tries to identify objects that ought to be “fixed”.

    iMovie is doing the same thing, only it has no choice except to shrink your original footage to give itself room to work with. In other words, it’s applying digital zoom to your recorded images. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – turn off digital zoom on your camcorders. It makes the pictures look like crap (not just turds). Depending on how unstable your footage is, iMovie has to zoom in enough to compensate. Jerky footage rapidly looses image quality. That said, it does work nicely for slightly unstable footage, although it does make the occasional digital foobar with the image for no apparent reason. Best suggestion, buy a tripod or learn some tricks to stabilize your camera when shooting.

    The other digital effects work well. The filters, the speed controls, the titles and transitions all worked smoothly.

    It’s not without bugs, though. One bug in particular is nasty. Sometimes when making edits to clips that are already in the timeline, they don’t seem to take, and then the audio starts acting weird, and you can’t undo the changes. After fighting with this for some time, I discovered that if you close iMovie and restart it, the problem goes away and your change is probably still there – but not always.

    All-in-all, it should be simple and easy to use for most home users, and once the bug fix is out it should be less frustrating.

  • First day of furlough

    Wednesday was day 1 of 18 without pay.

    Luckily, I had some side computer work that netted me about 1 day’s pay.

    Got a haircut. Got some business calling cards. Treated myself to an ice cream cone.

    Didn’t play Wii at all during the day. Somehow I thought that’s all I’d be doing on these days.

    Configured a jboss development environment in Eclipse on my wife’s computer.

    While I was out of the office, they had a “reduction in force” of about 20% of our staff.

    In terms of manpower we have now moved past “cutting to the quick” and have amputated up to the knuckles.

  • England – Fading on the Horizon

    The shoe finally fell tonight.

    We’ve known for weeks approximately what was going to happen, but we’ve been in a holding pattern to see what form it would take.

    The State of Arizona, like all the states is experiencing a drastic turn-down in tax revenue. Like many governments, Arizona spends its tax money before it receives it. In fact, for all the hype you hear from politicians claiming we ought to “live within our means” – none of them seem to be willing to spend money after it has been collected. The budgeting process is a complex system based entirely on tax forecasts, which as anyone with half a semester of economics can tell you is (eventually) a recipe for disaster.

    Arizona; however, is facing the largest percentage shortfall of any state, and they’ve known a storm was blowing for months. We’ve been on a hiring freeze for the better part of a year. They stopped collecting our garbage save for twice a week, the turn up and/or down the thermostats and they disconnected half the light bulbs in our building. As we’ve scampered to save every penny we can, they’ve swept it away to try to float the ship. We’ve been siphoned down past the level of safe blood-letting.

    The budget crisis has been in limbo for months because the Republican controlled state legislature didn’t want to negotiate with the (outgoing) Democratic Governor. Knowing that she was going to work for President Obama and that the next-in-line for Governor was a rank-and-file Republican, they waited. Every day they waited, the deficit gets harder to overcome.

    The legislature is overwhelmingly ideologically in goose-step opposition to raising taxes for any reason and so, at last, a brutal budget has been hashed out (mostly behind closed doors, of course) and they’ve slashed across the board without regard to individual agencies’ existing funds, requirements, mandates, whatever. “Just give us 10%” of your annual budget back.”

    That might not sound so bad except, 10% of the annual means effectively over 20% for the remainder of the year, and, since many of an agency’s expenses are paid in advance, or are contractually obligated by law, for a small agency like ours, it’s closer to 35%. And since they’d already taken anything we’d saved and eliminated any purchases we might have had budgeted, there’s precious little left except personnel costs.

    Today we got the word, for starters, all staff will be on unpaid leave for 18 days in the next 18 weeks. Effectively a 20% pay cut for the next 5 months. With the job market being what it is, that’s a whole lot better than being unemployed, but it isn’t a picnic.

    The Administration Department laid off all the building maintenance workers for our building last week. Today, we didn’t have toilet paper in our bathrooms. Do they still print Sears & Roebuck catalogs?

    I’m not saying that some almost-miraculous circumstances might not pop up, but unless they day, it seems very unlikely that we’ll be going to England this year, despite missing taking Michelle to see the Museum of Natural History that she so dearly wants to see and missing an almost once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the World Twenty20 Cup final.

    Perhaps airfare will plummet to under a $500 a person, and we can squeak out 4 days, just enough time to got to the museum, see the game, have some good fish & chips and kebobs and come back?

  • Green Snake, White Snake, BIG Snake!

    From AZ Central =>

    Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.

    Oh what I wouldn’t give for a way to go back in time and see all the colossal and bizarre life that has existed on this planet! (That and an M1 Tank.)