theMediaman.com

Wow. My brain hurts.

But all that spare time spent learning about DVD capabilites, learning MPEG-2 compression technology, reading Blu-ray engineering whitepapers, and researching specs has paid off.  The crash-course I had today in preparing a DVD would NOT have been productive had I only ever experienced DVD authoring through Encore.

Tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Still, around 3 o’clock I was getting pretty sleepy. It might have been the load of information, or the lunch I had from Burrito Boys…

Oh yeah, and every Wednesday, Juice Productions buys everyone lunch and we just sit around and shoot the shit for half an hour.  Sweet.  It’s a very large group of people who like movies, but I had to hold back on displaying my full wealth of nerdy trivia knowledge in order to keep from sounding like, well, a movie trivia nerd.

Still, I was able to identify Seth Rogen as the actor they were describing, and I also gave a brief outline of a Canadian film based off the same story as “21“… I might have gone overboard with that particular innane piece of trivia.

Tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Dressed in khakis and one of my short-sleeve button-up shirts, I was woefully overdressed.  The only person as dressed up (and only just as “dressed up”) was one of the two partners. The other one - yep, shorts and a t-shirt. Tomorrow I think I’ll wear jeans.  However, I still haven’t gotten my gut down to a point where I feel comfortable in a t-shirt.

All the way to work I was feeling like it was the first day of school.  Simone had to reassure me that the other kids weren’t going to make fun of me.

I’m not kidding. Ask her.

The view is stunning, as it faces the downtown core from Adelaide and Peter with an unobstructed view.  I have to take a photo and post it.  This is definitely my new “favourite view” of Toronto following the obfuscation of my former favourite by all the new condos.

The trip home took 40 minutes. A far cry from the old time of 75-90 minutes. In fact, it takes an hour and a half just to walk the distance from work to my apartment.

Now I need sleep. My brain started slowing down today, and I need to keep my speed up. I have a little over a week before I leave for my honeymoon so I need to soak up as much valuable info as I can.

And tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Playing with the random entry link, I found this post I made a while ago. I’ve noticed that my last several posts have numbered between two and three billion words each (or so it feels if you’re reading them), and postitioned once every week or two. So I’m going to try to return to making more innane comments on stuff I see around me… more frequently and under 100 words or so.

Damn. I think I’m already closing in on 100… well, here’s my comment then:

Edward Norton is a good actor, but thoroughly unconvincing as a “smart guy“.

I’ve made a couple of modifications to the web site. First, I replaced the header graphic with something that actually is interesting.  I’m fully aware that my logo is really only interesting to me and my imaginary friends, but I didn’t want to stick one static graphic in there.

Instead I have a random image, haphazardly touched up to keep in the visual style of the page. The only problem is, the script that I use accesses the directory where I store my images and gets a file-listing every time the page loads.  Low administration is great (just add a new header graphic and it automatically is put into the queue). However, long load times for every page on my site is not good. I’m going to have to modify the script in order to pull from an updated text file or something.

The other big update comes from the horrifying realization that my pre-2007 entries (run by Blogger) are no longer catalogued in Google, Live Search, Yahoo!, or much of any other search engine!  I used to have the number 4 spot on Google for the most common misspelling of “Buddism”, now none of those pages show up even when directly addressed.

I asked my resident SEO expert (Simone) if I should recode the pages so they look like they’re being regularly updated, but she said that will drag the relevancy of my entire site down.

Instead, I’ve used some WordPress feature that lets you import Blogger. I backed up the current theMediaman.com site, and ran the program.  BOOM. Several hundred posts suddenly part of my WordPress weblog. 

Now I have a new problem… well, it’s more like an old problem I ignored but is now compounded. I haven’t really been using the “tags” feature of WordPress, and opting instead just to focus on “Categories”. Now I have four to five hundred posts that need to be categorized, tagged, and many of them even lack formal post titles. However, all posts are now searchable, which helps when I’m trying to reference one of my earlier postings in a self-congratulatory back-patting upon confirmation of one of my predictions.

Of course, it’s also easier for all of you to find when I’ve been wrong.

Last night Simone and Mini-Ben pulled me out to play dodgeball.  It’s a Toronto Parks & Rec thing, so it takes place in a public school gymnasium.  The freshly mopped bathroom reaked of urine and there was discarded food containers in the corners of the hallway. Basically, it looked how you’d expect a Toronto public school to look if CityTV’s exposés are to be believed.

After only a few matches, those parts of my lungs that haven’t seen much use since I cancelled my gym membership started loosening up and reminded me that I treat my body with the same care as a smoker. By the end of the night, my legs were moving a little slow (sort of like when you click on a link and two seconds later the page actually responds).

My lungs are heathy and pink enough that they were able to handle the workout, but my thighs took the worst of it.  They’re muscles that I never use unless climbing stairs or, apparently, dodging balls. So I’ve been feeling fine most of today until I start climbing stairs and the underworked muscles come back to haunt me.

Sadly, even being lazy hurts. Rather than playing tennis, baseball, boxing or even a light game of bowling, Simone and I have bought a Wii (and justified the purchase as an engagement gift to ourselves). The first night we had it, Simone brought some work home with her and did that while I hit home runs and bowled turkeys. It was a full two hours before she took over the controller.  During that time I didn’t necessarily play vigourously, but I did have my right arm up and swinging for the entire stretch.

The next two days were full of stress and pain in every muscle in my arm. From the bicep to the balancing muscles and my fingers holding the controller, everything was sore. It seems that the “Revolution” of new controllers simply exchange the malady of Nintendo Thumb with Wii Arm.

The whole thing was agrivated by whipping around dodgeballs last night.  However, I’m worried my right arm is going to become much stronger than the left. Thinking of ways to overcome this, I’m considering playing Super Mario Galaxy with my right hand, but committing to Wii Sports as a southpaw.

Another alternative is to play a lot of Wii Boxing (the only game I have so far that give equal time to the right-hand controller and the left-hand ‘nunchuck’). While this alone doesn’t burn a lot of calories, I figure a couple wrist-weights might increase the effort, and the challenge of the game.

Also coming soon is a game called WiiFit.  It looks like most of the ’games’ are Yoga or fitness style, but there looks to be at least a few high-intensity activities like pushups. A study (admittingly funded by Nintendo UK’s own marketing team) found a difference in calories burned between a session of gaming on the Wii and a sit-down racing game on an Xbox360. But “156% more energy burned” than sitting on your ass and watching TV is like multiplying 156 x 0.

And any game that Miyamoto is excited about, I’m excited about.  For those who don’t know video games, it’s like hearing that Spielberg is particularly excited about a movie, or Barry Bonds is excited about a new brand of steroid.

I wonder what the Wii equivalent of steroids is.  Ideas?

Whenever I think of my summer holidays, the song I seem to get in my head is Fresh Prince’s “Summertime“. I’m not sure why, when there are so many good songs, but it seems to resonate. Add your favourite song to my comments section below.

Right now I’m on my lunch break at work following a full week of vacation up at the cottage. I didn’t get as much windsurfing done as I hoped, but my niece and nephew were up there so there were lots of activities to keep us busy.

I also got some colour on my torso… the first time in about four years. Mind you, the colour is a distinctive “pink”, but it’s colour nonetheless.  Two years ago I spent two weeks at the cottage and came home as porcelin white as when I left. Not even burning caused concern that has been somehow averted with my new colour. A little twisted, but it somehow settled my mind.

Speaking of burning, while at David’s 40th birthday bash, I managed to lean up against a tealight candle and catch myself on fire.  It was right in the center of my back. Imagine an itch you can’t reach to scratch, and instead of an ‘itch’ you have ‘out-of-control fire’. The burn didn’t get past my undershirt, so my skin was fine, save for one blister on the hand that I used to pat it out. My pride was the only thing truly sore and as David said, “it’s big enough to handle a little brusing”.

While on vacation, I bought three DVD’s I’m quite proud of. The first is Once Upon A Time In The West - one of the greatest films ever made, and I found a two-disc DVD in the $6.99 bin.  It felt like a crime to leave it there beside “Hard To Kill”. I also finally picked up the 4-disc edition of LotR:The Two Towers for twenty bucks (rounding out the collection) and a mislabeled Jurassic Park Trilogy for only seventeen (regular $20).

Simone picked up Batman Begins and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I haven’t watched Priscilla since it was almost new, and Hugo Weaving wasn’t yet Agent Smith, Lord Elrond, V, nor Megatron. After watching him become probably the sternest man in film since James Woods, it’ll be a laugh to watch him again in drag.

That reminds me, I’ll put in my vote against Transformers. I finally saw it and was disappointed. I can safely say that I went in with a clean slate, as my expectations were heightened by the fact that it’s a high-budget remake of childhood icons, but balanced out by my low expectations of Michael Bay. In the end, Michael Bay won. The writing was almost an insult. Dialogue was plain and obvious, and the plot holes were gaping and rife with coincidence. The “it’s a summer blockbuster” doesn’t work as an argument for the movie. There are many such movies this year and even Spider-man 3 lived up to the high expectations I had for it.

I won’t go into more details because I don’t want to write spoilers (you’ll need all the entertainment value you can muster from this movie). However, I will say that on Flixster I rated the movie 1.5 stars out of 5. I figure it gets one star for the impressive (yet fleeting) special effects. Not much new, and the shots were short and close up, rather than letting us enjoy a nice long fistfight. The half-star is for Michael Bay’s use of long shots.  His action sequences have used quicker and quicker cuts until many scenes have over 100 cuts in a sixty second shot. His use of longer shots helped create the best car chase scene he’s made since The Rock. Mind you, when you’ve got a Hummer and a Ferrari racing through San Francisco it’s impossible not to make it a cool scene.

Don’t forget to add your favourite summer song to the Comments section of this post.