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Exxon runs up record $36B profit

Filling up my little Escort, an “economy” car, I put in $34 on Sunday night. That’s just topping up the three-quarters of a tank that was void of precious fuel.

This is a weekly thing, and all I can think is, “I can’t wait until I commuting on TTC and only paying $100 per month”. Just on saved gasoline, the TTC pass is going to pay for itself.

Those who know me, know how uncomfortable I am in crowds. Some would think that pining for a ride on the TTC, an hour each way, every day is against my character. I have to admit, a large part of my feelings is due to a “grass is always greener” line of thinking. However, I only tend to read novels when I commute on transit, and I haven’t read much of anything over the last few years.

Also, it gives me a good reason to buy a PSP. Or a morality-bending digital media player.

One quick DoubleThink… “Yeah, we’re bigger than Wal-mart, but that doesn’t mean we have any control over the price of oil or gas“.

I feel ashamed. I’ve only updated one other time this month. Given the news in my life (wait for my next posting), it seems silly. My lunchhours have usually been non-specific (nibble something here, break there, waiting for content there) or non-existant. It has been an unfortunate circumstance for my blogging hobby.

On the weekend I finished up a little side project I’ve had going for a while. The original plan was to dump a copy of the theatrical cut of Blade Runner onto DVD so I would have a copy of it to watch for many years. Ridley Scott really hated the version he released in theatres, so the only digital copy available is The Directors Cut. I however, prefer the original version; sans unicorn dream, and including the lame voiceovers and happy ending. Here’s a great page on the variations of Blade Runner.

Ridley Scott releasing the Theatrical Cut to DVD is less likely than George Lucas releasing the original cut of Star Wars to DVD. So I took it upon myself to do the work.

The project snowballed. Once I had the VHS digitized (into a 25 GB file), I was disappointed by how washed out the blacks were. I did some brightness and contrast balancing, and found that the VHS artifacting was even more prevailant. I ran a filter to clean out the noise, and compared it to running the correction after doing the noise reduction.

Once I had video quality I was happy with, I set out to correct the aspect ratio. Even though it was cropped down from the widescreen, there was some vertical stretching in order to get more film on the TV screen. It was subtle, but after the hours I had been looking at this footage, the long faces were getting on my nerves. After some adjustment, I found the perfect ratio and exported the final video.

Determined to find small DVD authoring projects to practise on, I decided to use the opportunity to design and animate a series of chapter menus. Nothing elaborate, but something you’d see on the early MGM DVDs that listed “Animated Menus” as a feature.

After I drop in some soundtrack audio, it will be complete… of course, there’s still the disc and case labels to design.

Despite all my hard work, I briefly considered starting from scratch when I found that there was a laserdisc version of the original cut. The resolution of a laserdisc version is about 560×400 (although a lot of what I’ve read states different vertical resolutions) vs. what VHS supplies, which is around 320×240. That gives me nearly 3x better quality picture. And from what I’ve found, a laserdisc player on eBay is almost as cheap as a VCR.

However, I’m not sure how I would extract the digital audio and keep it pure. I decided to finish the menu system and simply look for the laserdisc option if I ever wanted to give myself a real challenge.

If I manage to find a copy of the original edition, Japanese Star Wars laserdiscs, I’m definitely buying a laserdisc player, no matter the cost!

I just watched the 24 Season 5 “Prequel”. For the record, a “Prequel” is a story that happens before - but is released after - a particular episode. In this case, it’s really a “preview”, or actually, a commercial.

The ten minute video was only released on DVD (but can be downloaded here last month, as a teaser to last night’s two-hour premiere. Because it’s “Sponsored by Toyota”, both Jack and Chloe are driving Toyotas. The bad guys are driving BMWs, which is funny because the second half, it takes on a distinctive short-film-commercial feel that was first introduced through BMW’s “The Hire” series.

The only point made more clearly by this film than the fact that dangerous people know that Jack is still alive, is that a Toyota Avalon has much better handling than a BMW 3-series.

Last night’s premiere reinforced the point that “Good Guys Drive Toyotas”. This didn’t entirely conflict with the lesson over the last two years that “Good Guys Drive Fords”, because there were three principle Ford cars used last night. However, they were an Econoline E150, a second generation Taurus, and a first generation Taurus… The first two of which were used initially by the bad guys.

They were hardly comparable to the sleek, black Explorers used in the last two seasons, or the Mustang Jack used to escape with Ramon Salazar. Maybe they need a ZX2 for an upcoming episode… I’ve already proven that mine can look pretty damn good onscreen.