theMediaman.com

In spite of the title, microbrews in Toronto and elsewhere around South Central Ontario don’t tend to disappint me.  Just yesterday I had a Tank House Ale (Mill St. Brewery) while on a patio in the Distillery District, and it was one of the tastiest beers I’ve had in a while.

My issue is with the cost of beer.  At the Queens in Barrie, a ten-spot could buy you three bottles of Canadian. In Waterloo, a ‘premium’ beer would usually go for around $4.75 (give or take 50 cents depending on how reputable the place was). As soon as I moved to Toronto in 1999, I was upset to find pints for over 5 bucks, and over 6 for premiums. I probably wouldn’t have as much of an issue with it if the “domestics” weren’t always the same Golden 4… Canadian, Blue, Coors Light and Bud. A “premium” beer includes Rickards Red and Alexander Keiths.

It took me a loooong time to get used to six dollar pints. For many years I was always on the lookout for places that had it cheaper… even by half a dollar. Usually such places served highly carbonated beers, or were notorious for recycling beer.

When the beers are poured the same everywhere, I am offended by such pricing schemes. In 98% of the establishments with taps throughout the GTA, if you order a beer for $3 or $6, you usually get the same crappy pour - opening the tap with the glass underneath, leaving large bubbles on top, and when the glass overflows there is no effort - NO EFFORT - in cleaning off the sides.

Participate in some (but by no means all) of the steps for pulling a perfect pint of Stella.

In spite of my gross disappointment with 98% of bartenders in this city, after eight years of living in Toronto (and the GTA), I’ve finally decided I’m ready to be comfortable paying six bucks for a premium pint…

…sometime recently they’ve moved to $7.

Six-ninety-nine, six ninety-five, seven even, whatever. I’ve only just adjusted to paying that previously unearned value and they’ve raised it again. Why must they mock me?

Simone, Michelle and I went to the Pickel Barrel Grande at Yonge/Dundas Saturday night. The pints were once again, seven bucks for a 20 oz. pint of “premium” Keiths. Since the ‘fancy’ drinks were the same price, I figured that I’d make them work for their seven bucks.

I ordered a Toronto Margarita. Whatever connection that has to Toronto I haven’t figured yet, but it was the least sweet and sugary drink on the menu. Basically, it was Gold tequila, triple sec, lime juice, and some other crap. Very tasty, and I felt so content in making them work for the money that I didn’t care that I had ordered a girly drink.

One of - if not my absolute favourite drinking holes is still The Gem. When Simone used to live right around the corner, we would often drop in. I’d order a pint of whatever of two or three beers were on tap (usually microbrews or Amsterdam discount beer), and Simone would get a glass of wine. The beers were poured to the brim, and the wine would be served in a drinking glass, again filled almost to the brim. The whole cost after taxes would come to $10 even.

Still, by the city as a whole, I feel cheated.  $7 for a pint is too damned much, unless you earn it.

A couple posts ago I had fun at “WAR”s expense. It looked like a “put big star A with big star B and a fight scene at the end and we make $$$” type of film. I have to admit after watching it last night it was actually pretty darn good… as a Hong Kong action movie.

Let me explain. There was only one fight scene between Jet Li and Jason Statham. It wasn’t very good, and it happened in the last five minutes of the movie. I think I’ll watch “The One” again just to see a good fight sequence between these two. Most fight scenes were reminiscent of the Crazy 88’s fight scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1, where many goons died in horribly bloody ways. Actually, with all the broken limbs, it had a bit of classic Steven Seagal in there too. When it all got too over-the-top, I actually started laughing.

The fight scene to watch for is a sword battle that Jet Li has in the climax of the film (NOT with Jason Statham!). Freakin’ beautiful.

There was a whole lot of talking in this movie.  As it turns out, that’s because there was a very deep, involved plot. Every action of Jet Li’s character, “Rogue”, has an obvious meaning. If you watch carefully, you’ll find that they all have a deeper significance as well. There are suspected plot holes, character outline flaws and storyline twists that eventually work out to be red herrings in advance of a great finish to the story.

There’s no “OMG Ah HA!” moment, but definitely an “oooOOOOOooooh! Now I get it!” and everything falls into place. In fact, looking back on the film, it really doesn’t feel like a Hollywood film at all. It is in almost every way a Hong Kong film. If you watch Infernal Affairs (precursor to Scorsese’s Oscar winning The Departed), or any other grey-market DVD you can get your hands on you’ll see where WAR gets its influence.

(Again, I only agree with buying bootleg DVDs of movies that simply aren’t available for distribution in Canada. Distribution in Canada of imported movies is a very small business and the people working in that branch of the industry tend to be nice guys and will buy you beer if you let them.)

The similarities between WAR and generic HK action flicks are many: Cool twist ending, Triads, Yakuza, dishonour = decapitation, motorcycles, and Jet Li as a hired assassin.  I wanted to giggle every time he said “I have no master”.  It’s like his version of “I’ll be back”.

In conclusion, if you like HK action movies, go see WAR. Aside from the illogical scenes of Chinese ex-pats speaking English to each other with great difficulty, it will look exactly like a HK movie (right down to the Filmed In Vancouver credits).

If you’re not really familiar with the genre, then it probably won’t be the kind of movie you’ll enjoy unless you like creative and very, very bloody battles involving simultaneous use of swords and gunplay…

…in which case you should probably see a psychiatrist.

I was obviously upset to find that I could not log on to the DNS server at work with our two, newest, fastest laptops just because they were running Windows Vista Home Edition (Premium).

As with many purchases, the decision to get two new laptops for the events coming up was made very late. The rush was to get laptops that had as many features we wanted as possible, for the cheapest price (under $1000 ea.), and to have them delivered within hours of the purchase.

We found two Lenovo’s that were far more powerful than the price would normally allow. The only down side was that they were running Windows Vista Home Premium, which doesn’t let us connect to the local network as a workgroup computer.

I don’t put the ownership of this limit on Microsoft. They came out with different price-points so that users wouldn’t have to pay for features they would never use.  However, manymost logistics companies (i.e. Dell, Lenovo, HP) don’t let you access the full range of Windows versions. Our option for these laptops was Vista Home Premium and that was it. 

To Microsoft’s credit, they allow you to upgrade using the same install DVD-ROM, and buying an upgrade serial number from them.  However, there is no option for a “sideways-grade”.  Home Premium and Business Edition are nearly the same price. I didn’t need the features in Home Premium, and Business Edition wasn’t available from Lenovo for that laptop. In order to get the benefit of Business Edition, I need to upgrade to Vista Ultimate, which is a full $180 more!

So much for keeping the cost of these laptops under $1G.

How to Access a Domain in Windows Vista Home Premium

Now, the following may work in Home Lite, I don’t know. However, my main concern was to get the laptop to connect to the Active Projects folder where all of our key files are stored.  Copying all relevant presentation files to USB stick on a separate desktop, then transferring them to the laptop is ridiculous when we’ve already spent good money for an OS.

My search on the web for a solution gave few hints, and even one stupid “you should just pay for the version you need”. I agree that circumventing blocked features in order to keep money away from software engineers and Mr. Gates is bad form. However, when the system builders aren’t giving us those options, then I don’t see why I should be penalized $180.

While logging into a domain enables many features, the most important one is accessing shared directories.  First, make sure you’re connected to the network by testing to see if the Internet is working.  Usually, some features like that will be available automatically.

1. Click on Start (or Windows icon, as it is ‘called’ now) -> Network
2. If the computers on the Domain don’t show up, try typing backslash-backslash (\\) computerName for one of the computers you want to access into the Address Bar. If it still doesn’t work, try \\Domainname\computername\foldername. If that doesn’t work, then try creating a mapped network drive and doing the same thing.
3. When queried for a username type in Domain/username, and just your password as normal.

Hopefully that works. If it doesn’t, then ask a more local IT guy, and try emailing Mr. Gates and asking him to bug Lenovo (or whoever sold you a version of Vista that wasn’t right for you) into delivering what the customer wants, rather than what their profit margins need.

Simone won tickets through Eye Weekly for the new Jet Li/Jason Statham action movie, WAR. In spite of my modified poster below, it doesn’t have anything to do with the card game. However, as a game, watch the trailer and see if you can spot the CN cargo trains in the background.

Instead, the plot looks to promise a level of depth and sophistication not seen since Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever… hopefully WAR’s script had a second pass in order to write some decent dialogue.

So far, Simone and I have won tickets to WAR, The Hitcher, and I won tix to The Punisher a few years ago - all from Eye Magazine or 102.1 The Edge. We also won tickets to the Douglas Coupland-penned Everything’s Gone Green (aka. “Vancouverphile Porn”), but that hardly makes up for the other stinkers.

Of course I’m going anyway. Lots of movie martial artists can’t act their way out of a Chinese Finger Trap, but at least we never have to see Jet Li try.

(I think I just made 1.3 billion enemies)

Well, not so much a review. I’ve only been using the player for a few days - less time than it took for the delivery. Tiger Direct updated my billing address, but not the shipping address, so I needed to phone UPS no less than three times to get the shipment redirected. To criticize Tiger Direct would be a waste of time. I’ve rarely had a purchase from them that went seamlessly, and I had prepared myself in advance for something going wrong.

The reason I chose to buy from them was that they had the best DVD/DivX player for the best price. Brand name, card reader, decent online reviews, and reads DivX movies from DVD-R. That last point is good because you can fit an entire season of a TV series on one disc. It also supports HDMI and I’ve read that it is excellent at upscaling footage to HDTV formats. Two features I won’t be using until my 6/49 investments pan out.

Lately, Simone and I have taken to watching HBO and Showtime TV shows. Since they can take many months to show up on TMN in Canada, we’ve been forced chosen to download them. I realize this is taking ad dollars away from the people who deserve it, but I refuse to play the game while the RIAA, MPAA and the Canadian counterparts are squabbling over distribution rights. Season 2 of Stargate: Atlantis was finished in Canada before half the episodes showed south of the border. It then played all the way through season 3 in the US before even starting broadcast here. It’s petty, but I just can’t forgive them for that.

Since Simone’s laptop isn’t equipped with a video-out (only VGA out) I figured it was worth picking up a proper DivX player in order to watch it on my big screen 27″ CRT with stereo surround sound. I’ve done a test of the player’s compatibility with different file formats, but I’ll be leaving a more comprehensive test for a later time.

One of my favourite features doesn’t even have anything to do with the packaged product. My television is RCA and so is my VCR (yes, I still have it hooked up) and they both use the exact same remote. It’s supposed to be a Universal Remote, but except for one model of digital cable box I’ve never had it work properly with any other devices. The new DVD remote is pretty ugly and the buttons are small - the complete antithesis of all prior RCA remotes.

Luckily, nearly all DVD functions are available and work by default from my old television universal remote. It’s missing the Title Menu function and the skip-chapter button, but everything else is on there. If I do need those other functions then I’ll just grab the fugly remote that was packaged with the player.

I loaded four episodes of Entourage that Simone and I hadn’t seen yet. Two worked, two didn’t. Of the two that didn’t work, one was at a resolution higher than 720×480 and simply wouldn’t display.  The other problematic file I suspect was partially corrupted, but I haven’t tested it much.

The player handles .AVI, .DIVX, .MP4 and even .OGM containers for video. It supports multiple languages and subtitles as external text files. The MP4 support seems the most limited, which is unfortunate. I haven’t tested any formal podcasts yet, but I found that the 480×272 PSP-formatted MP4s did not work. It’s not too much of a problem since most shows I watch on my PSP are just transcoded from some other video format.

When you put in a disc with video files instead of a DVD movie (or switch over to the card reader) then a file browser pops up. It looks very pretty, and displays JPEGs as thumbnails when you select them, but there’s not much else nice to say about it. It only supports about 13 characters, so when you burn discs, name your files with this in mind. The original file of “Entourage_S04E05….avi” would only display “ENTOURAGE_S04″. If you have multiple episodes, they would all show as “ENTOURAGE_S04″.

Removing the thumbnail pane would give the interface more space for more letters, but I don’t think that’s relevant. My guess is that this is just a limitation of the player’s firmware. Probably the most disappointing thing about the player.

What I assumed I would be most disappointed with was the load time, or the limited file support. I was happily surprised when I saw that the player loads the disc quickly, and that it even supports OGM, subtitles and multiple audio tracks (something I don’t think is even documented).

I’m calling the player “Murdoch 2.0″. Even though I didn’t build it, the player is a final replacement for my custom-built case I made from an old Pentium 200 with a Sigma Designs Xcard to play back DivX movies on my television. The final product was more complete than the above link shows, but that page was more to test out what CSS can do than show off Murdoch. That project met with limited success, but was mostly a hobby to keep trying new things to turn old, useless computer parts into a machine that could rival the newest Windows Media Centre PCs.

I’ll post more technical mumbo-jumbo later after I document the results of the DivXTest CD.