theMediaman.com

Two things I learned yesterday.

Lesson: Europe’s Daylight Savings Time starts the first Sunday of Spring, which is not aligned with North American DST.
How I Learned This: The webcast we did on Monday, included a clock animation I built on Friday. When I built the clock so that Europe’s time was six hours ahead, it was correct. On Monday when we played it, Europe’s time was seven hours ahead.
More Info on DST: Simple list of DST locations, or country-by-country.

Lesson: Don’t play Wipeout:Pure for PSP in Tournament mode while riding the subway.
How I Learned This: After completing the four track circuit on my way to Sheppard station, I looked up and saw I had passed it nearly ten minutes earlier and was now at Finch.
More Info on Game Addiction: Good, but largely tongue-in-cheek details at Gamer Widow. There’s also no-joke On-Line Gamers Annonymous, but it isn’t really for me. I hate the idea of paying $30 for a game, then having to shell out another $20 each month until they arbitrarily decide the online world is no longer profitable and shut it down, making your investment worthless… but that’s a rant for another time involving Mplayer’s sale to GameSpy, and the subsequent end of online Terminal Velocity.

GlobalTV’s irritating practise of gobbling up all the American syndicated TV shows has bit them back over the last few years. Starting with getting the distribution for the simultaneously-cast “Survivor” and “Friends”, located on seperate networks in the US, they’ve started screwing with the broadcast times. “Friends”, for example, was specially broadcast before primetime at 7:30.

More recently, they’ve moved “24″, the only show during the week that I HAVE to see, to 10:00 so they can accomodate the broadcast of “The Apprentice”. Luckily, the FOX feed comes in from Buffalo, completely virgin… no gratuitous Global bumpers that - since they’ve changed the format - sounds like a subway train arriving… “Ding! Ding!” Get two or three of these bumpers in a row and you’re ready to shoot the television.

I love Canadian television commercials. I think that, on average, they’re far more creative and entertaining (and effective) than the American ones. However, the US campaigns have $$$, which shows when I see what is probably the funniest ad I’ve seen since the MacGuyver MasterCard ad. In this one, an American Express ad, we get to see a confusing M. Night Shyamalan short film. It was funnier when I watched it the first time, only somewhat sure that I knew who it was.

Why do we get stuck with the lame Robert Deniro version? Even the Kate Winslet commercial for the “My Life, My Card” campaign is better. I’m curious why the only commercial from this campaign (besides Ellen’s) to make it into Canada is the one that’s so dependant on an emotional connection to a particular city; one that’s not even Canadian. Why aren’t they playing the Mike Lazaridis ad? I’m sure it’s playing somewhere, but I don’t see it nearly as much as Deniro’s constipated frown.

Hopefully Global will keep the 10:00 slot for “24″ throughout the rest of the season. Since they routinely screw up the commercial feed for football games, this only seems like compensation.

Zombie flicks have historically been my least favourite horror sub-genre. Probably because it terrifies me the most. The evil lurking in the shadows striking without notice (except for a predictable crescendo in music with five seconds of silence and a *sigh* of relief from the soon-to-be-decapitated) doesn’t frighten me as much as an ever-present force, forever moving closer and closer. Any nightmares I have usually involve zombies. They really scare the bejeezus out of me.

When Dawn of the Dead came out, I just had to see it. Besides being filmed in an abandoned mall that I passed on my daily commute, it was also the mall where Simone spent many of her formative years. Since then (”28 Days Later”, to be more precise), there have been countless zombie flicks over the last few years, including what is probably the biggest variety of the sub-genre ever. There’s action-zombie flicks, drama-zombie flicks, comedy-zombie flicks, and remake-zombie flicks.

The similarly ever-closing-in element of Japanese suspense-horror has narrowed my horror viewing to those two subgenres. I’ve seen nearly every version of The Ring and it’s sequels, and I was so creeped out by The Grudge that my heartrate rises every time I take the stairs at work.

Surprisingly rare are B-movie-zombie flicks… truly low budget, independent horror movies. Last night I watched “Undead“, which I believed at first to be a loose remake of pioneer George Romero’s “The Crazies“. However there was no mention of Thanks that I could see in the credits. Odd, since I think every zombie horror movie should at least have to pay some homage to him.

A lot of really B-movie material here. Budget was clearly low (and apparently financed by the directors and the cast) but the whole time I couldn’t help but think, “This still isn’t as bad as House of the Dead” (see any of my rants on Uwe Boll). There’s a lot of references to other zombie subgenres, including the recent popularity of action-zombie flicks.

The most rough-around-the-edges character, a chubby, bearded fisherman with an obsession for guns and conspiracy theories, pulls off coriagraphed moves that would impress Milla Jovovich. Conversely, many of the other characters fill their stereotypes to an irritating degree, but no one character fills the screen for too long so that it becomes overwhelming. The protagonist usually is too terrified to speak, so it’s hard to believe at the end that she’s “the strongest”

The Spierig Brothers (as they credit themselves) clearly love the zombie genre, as the action and over-the-top violence bordered on comical at times. Unfortunately, it misses that societal commentary subtext that only George Romero himself seems to be able to pull off. The editing was uneven, as they would repeat the same shot only moments later. Other scenes, like when they reach a quarantine wall, were impressive for the budget of the film. Overall, I think the loose ends could be forgiven seeing as it was coming from first time filmmakers. I would hope that others will do the same to me once I make a feature-length film.

Certainly a bad waste of time for someone who doesn’t like zombie movies, but as someone who has started paying more attention to independent movies (excluding the boring talky-talky ones) and previously avoided zombie flicks, it was a good waste of time.

After the movie, I watched Big Love… a new HBO show. I’m still looking for something to replace the void left by Six Feet Under and Dead Like Me (although I’ve just got access to the full first season of Wonderfalls). Since it’s a series, I’ll write about that show once I’ve got a better idea of the series.

Unfortunately, when I look at Bill Paxton, I always seem to think of Wyatt’s older brother in “Weird Science“.

Last two weeks have been overly busy at work, rarely lending itself to letting me steal a lunchhour, much-less be calm enough to write in my Blog. When things were calm enough, the Internet connection has been down. We’re currently in on our second IT guy of-the-year, and he’s only supposed to be here for a month. I’ve never liked doing Network Administration work, but I’ve been taking on a number of duties out of pure necessity. Considering our IT department’s turnover has averaged 250% annually over the last five years (including myself as a statistic in that count), it’s not surprising when a web site goes down without explanation.

Back on to happier things. My birthday was a huge success! I recommend everyone have a landmark birthday every year. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. For my 30th, I treated a dozen or so friends to The Pink Panther at the Varsity Cinemas at Bay and Bloor. Once you get past the fact that no one could ever surpass Peter Sellers in the role that he created, it’s easy to enjoy Steve Martin in the part.

Afterwards, we went to the Duke of Gloucester on Yonge, just south of Bloor… and right across the street from the Church of Scientology. I warned my friends to be aware of Hubbardsians offering free stress tests on the way to the pub. We spent the remainder of the night there, as another fella was celebrating his 60th birthday. I had claimed one corner, while he had the remainder of the pub filled with his friends, and it was comforting to see that my circle of friends will likely increase over the next 30 years. I’m just hoping my waistline stays the same.

Earlier in the day, I was treated to two surprises. The first was a Sony PSP from Simone. I’ve since been playing Wipeout Pure and Star Wars Battlefront II for most of my free time, leaving my homework, dirty laundry and phone calls to my mom on my To Do list. What a wonderful time-waster!

For dinner, she took me to the Casey’s at Front and Bay, where Dave, Ali, Erin and Freddy were all waiting. The following weekend I had to spend with my whole gang, but there was a twinge of regret at not spending my actual birthday weekend with family. It was a nice surprise, accented with a 1 gig iPod Nano! The bad news is that I had to install iTunes on my computer (I feel so dirty), but for the first time in many years, I’m all gadget’ed up!

One of the songs that made it onto my iPod was “One Hand In My Pocket” by Alanis Morissette… to which I started singing, “I’ve Got One Gig In My iPod, And Another Is In My PSP”.

That reminds me… I’ve gotta buy a 1 GB card for my PSP. The 32 meg card is enough to hold savegames and a few extra levels downloaded for the games, but I need more so I can watch movies on it… the main reason I was considering buying one. The screen is HUGE. I placed the Nano on the screen length-wise, and the screen was slightly wider than the Nano is high, and more than twice as high as the Nano is wide. Eff’in eh!

I’ve also just reinstalled the television recording software for my All In Wonder (a gadget that Simone bought me last year!) so I can record TV shows that I don’t always get to see, like The Daily Show (saving $9.99/mo. over buying them online), and Daily Planet.

I’d also like to convert some of my old VHS anime before I sell my collection. The low resolution of VHS wouldn’t make it feasable to convert and burn to DVD, but the lower filesize requirements of a 480×272 H.264 AVC video means I can probably fit a whole season on a 4 GB DVD disc, ready for transfer and playback.

All this distraction is certainly welcome, though. I’ve been feeling a lot of irrational stress from all sides of my life. I can’t even be so prophetic as to say it’s because I’ve turned ‘30′. That fact either hasn’t sunk in, or it really doesn’t bother me as much as I had expected it to. Still, I feel that there’s some unbalance in my life that I’m working against.

At least I’ve almost unlocked the Flash class in Wipeout Pure.