• OK, I’m getting things back under control. Postings will be resuming over the next few days, including a handful of overdue movie reviews (5 or so, I think). For now, lets get a ponderings posting going to kick things back off again.
• Had one of my bi-monthly cravings for crab the other day, so I had dinner at Red Lobster (my usual haunt when the crab fixation strikes). The waiter I had was basically Jack McFarland in real life. At least, unlike the fictional McFarland, he was a good waiter. Heck, he recognized the comic I was reading as a Buffy comic, so that’s enough points in and of itself.
• Galactica 1980 coming to DVD? Well, as horrible as the show was in general, it’ll be great to get The Return Of Starbuck.
• Speaking of Galactica, looks like you folks that watch the show via iTunes might be having some trouble doing so in the future.
• Also speaking of Battlestar, here’s the rather neato packaging for the HD-DVD release of season 1. It’s a nice wink to the production design within the show (the missing corners).
• Speaking of HD-DVD, I’m now a user of both HD disc formats. I got a deal on the X-Box 360 HD-DVD drive. I don’t have a 360, but these drives work beautifully for use as a PC HD-DVD drive in either XP or Vista. Thanks to the idiocracies of HDCP, I’m using a fantastic little app called AnyDVD HD. Both my projector and my gorgeous 24″ Dell flat panel screen are not HDCP compliant, and Blu-Ray & HD-DVD won’t play back via digital connections to either. So far, AnyDVD has gotten around that for everything I’ve thrown at it. Using Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra for playback. All things considered, playback is fantastic on the machine. It’s far better on XP than Vista. Heck, Vista wouldn’t let any digital audio streams out the digital output when playing things back. Works beautifully on XP, though. I must say, the HD versions on some of these discs are breathtaking. Final Fantasy is stunning on Blu-Ray. Kong is fantastic on HD-DVD. I’ve picked up a number of other discs, and have been very impressed so far.
• Speaking of XP and Vista, I’ve downgraded my main machine at the house from Vista to XP again. This time, it’ll be a change that’ll last a while. Vista is a horrible OS for multimedia and file system performance. I’ve only been using the machine with XP for a day or two again, but man, what a breath of fresh air. The more I use Vista, the less I like the thing. I love Office 2007, but Vista is getting a bigger thumb down every month I use it. For every great change they made, they made 10 horrible ones.
• The Google Earth flight sim. Neato.
• Spirit & Opportunity begin to emerge from their crazy storm. Man, those little guys sure are tough little troupers.
• Sony’s at the rootkit fun again…
• OK, that’s enough for today to get things started again.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Ponderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.