I’ve been digging through the old archives and found this, my December 1988 review of the Sylvester McCoy story, The Happiness Patrol, published originally in the TARDIS Index File. I’ve resisted the urge to edit it.
General
The Nose Knows?
The View from Taiwan => A Pinch of Fate Never let it be said that I passed up an opportunity to mock another culture… Every time I pinch my wife’s cute little nose she says, “Don’t! My nose will get longer!†Never mind that she’s a college graduate with an above average intelligence, this is … Read more
Hope (and Spring) springs eternal
After the devastatingly cold winter freeze we had, both Michelle and James’ trees appeared to have been wiped out. Recently, though, Michelle’s tree has been showing a strong surge of new growth. I’ve tried pruning some of the old, dead branches off and am really unsure if I should finish cleaning up the top area. … Read more
Return of the Pony Express
With our upcoming trip to Taiwan planned for June, I decided it was time to upgrade our secondary camera. Normally I use my Canon DSLR for most of my photography, but that’s just not always convenient to haul around. Chu-Wan’s got our old Sony Cybershot, which is a lot more portable, but it’s now 6 … Read more
Life on Mars becomes Ashes to Ashes
Life on Mars is gone. The final episode aired this week. It’s past 2 in the morning and I’m wide wake. I’m wide awake partly because of how disturbed I am about the final episode. I did not like it and I will say no more about it so as not to spoil it for … Read more
New MacBook Battery, At Last
After a particularly short battery-run on my MacBook monday morning, I decided that there was nothing left but a call to AppleCare. Surely they’d replace my faulty battery.
First Weekend with Apple TV
My family and I have given the Apple TV a heavy weekend of testing, here’s what we’ve discovered.
Doctor Who – Smith and Jones – Review
Doctor Who
Smith and Jones
by Russell T. Davies
starring David Tennant as the Doctor
and Freema Agyeman
Is a smarter, more analytical companion going to ask the Doctor a lot more tough questions about the holes in Russell T. Davies’ scripts?
Apple TV – Now I’ve kicked one around a bit
Just in time for the Big Day, March 31, I bought an Apple TV.
While I’m really enjoying the convenience, my experiences have not been as glowing as most of the other reviews I’ve read. I’ll explain more later, but first, a bit of background…
Xgrid to the Rescue!
In the lead-up to today’s grand experiment, yesterday I was conducting some preliminary experiments using Xgrid.
I’ve got a lot of video I’ve recorded digitally that I would now like to have in an iTunes-friendly H.264. VisualHub, which is the program I generally use for conversion does a nice job of it. Further, it does it rather fast (at least on my MacBook), rendering down 30 minutes of video in around 20 minutes.
One of the things that’s always intrigued me about VisualHub is that it is Xgrid-enabled. Xgrid is a nifty little Apple technology that clusters OSX computers into a distributed computing platform. I’ve completely ignored this feature of VisualHub because everybody knows you need an OSX Server to control an Xgrid cluster, don’t they?