• I wish I could live in a world where oatmeal cookies didn’t have raisins in them
• Weird Al made a VERY cool announcement during the week, that he’d be releasing a new single online this coming Tuesday (10/7). He’d already talked about changing the way he did stuff, moving away from strict album productions to more timely single releases online. This’ll be the first of that new release model, and I look forward to a more constant stream of great material from Al.
• So, looks like Christopher Nolan and the rest of the gang are on board for the next Batman film. Expectations will be insanely high, but I think they can pull it off, or at least come close enough to success. Here’s hoping that Nolan can push for more IMAX shooting, or perhaps entirely IMAX shooting…
• On the subject of Batman, you aren’t gonna believe what The CW just put into production: The Graysons. Yes, as in The Boy Wonder. All odds will be against that show to not completely suck.
• In semi-related DC universe news, the house where Siegel & Shuster created Superman has been saved by the fans thanks to an auction to raise the money to preserve the historic residence.
• Here’s a very cool collection of photos from Chicago’s 1893 Colombian Exposition, which was only a couple decades after the great Chicago fire. You’ve likely never seen these photos before.
• Looks like Iron Man had no trouble entering the high def record books
• The surprisingly great single season series Moonlight from last season has gotten the official DVD announcement.
• For those wondering how the average consumer was going to start blowing past Comcast’s bandwidth cap crap
• Looks like Sprint is looking to finally sell off their terrible mistake of buying out Nextel. Man, what a mess that became.
• Here’s a particularly funny approach to sticking it to the TSA folks at the airports. Not sure I’d wanna be the one doing it, through.
• Spore goes to show the real outcome of truly evil forms of DRM (they are all evil, but ones like this are from the seventh level).
• Lastly, it’s sad to see Beverly Hills Chihuahua open at nearly $30 million dollars in 1st place…
• More movie reviews to come tomorrow.

OK, ladies and gents, I think I’m back on the net for good now. As of this afternoon, I’m an active AT&T U-Verse customer. The rest of the story has been added to the Comcast Sucks page.

This blog, and my broadband connection at the house, is finally back online. I’m going to have a flood of stuff posting here during the rest of this week, including a long rant against Comcast. For now, suffice it to say that Comcast sucks. More to come soon.

• RIP: Alexander Courage
• RIP: Robert H. Justman
• (sad week for us Trek fans with both of those passings)
• RIP: Earle Hagen
• Add to that the fact that Kelsey Grammer had a minor heart attack
• This is a compilation of some amazing pool shots
• Security camera and camera phone angles of one insane cube-farm worker meltdown
• Surely y’all have seen coverage of the fire at Universal Studios by now
• Here’s some cool stuff - magnetic fields, visualized
• Hold strong, NewzBin…
• Must…Stay…Awake…
• Good grief. A terrorism pitch meeting.
• Could it be? Comcast might actually put the correct system in place for their bandwidth woes? This is what they SHOULD be doing, not the other retarded stuff they’ve been doing so far.
• Thinking of taking up a musical instrument? Try one of these.
• The Simpsons has gotten their official pickup for next season, which will give the show a historic 20th season, and tie it with Gunsmoke’s 20-year primetime record.
• Breaking news: people don’t read manuals
• Windows Desktop Search 4.0 has gone final
• Could you repeat that? Classic stuff.
• Talk about an overly aggressive security screening
• Coolness. As a Get Smart fan, I’m gonna have to keep my eyes peeled for references to the series.
• Shuffle up and deal. Or, uh, perhaps not.
• Don’t quite agree with that ticket the cop just gave you?
• Google Finance has gone real-time with quotes
• A poetic ending
• That’s just wrong

• Man, I’m realizing that Speed Racer is quickly becoming one of those movies I’m gonna spend my life defending. The audience seems to be completely split on this one, either loving or hating it. And I guess I can understand that, cause it’s definitely a movie that you have to get into the right mindset for. It’s not a realistic movie, intentionally so, and many people just have trouble engaging it on the right wavelength. For my part, I completely love it. I’ve seen it 3 times now, in IMAX, DLP and on standard 35mm film. It looks awesome in all three forms, but the IMAX and DLP presentations are truly breathtaking to see. I’m sad that so many people are going to miss the opportunity to see it theatrically, seeing as it’s completely crashing and burning at the box office. It’s my favorite movie of the year so far, though we’ll see how Indy 4 holds up to it tomorrow night.
• WOO HOO! The replacement for Russell T. Davies as show runner/head writer of Doctor Who has been announced. And it’s none other than Steven Moffat. If I were able to chose anyone on the face of the Earth to give that job to, it would be Moffat. I’d been hoping he’d be the one to get the job for a while now. The episodes he’s written for the relaunched series have been some of my favorite episodes. His episode titled “Blink” from last year is my favorite episode of the relaunched show, and a contender for my favorite episode of the entire run of the series. His other episodes, “The Empty Child,” “The Doctor Dances” and “The Girl In The Fireplace” are all right up near the top of the list as well. And he’s somebody that really knows his classic Who. The show couldn’t possibly be put into better hands. As Moffat says in the press release, “My entire career has been a Secret Plan to get this job. I applied before but I got knocked back ‘cos the BBC wanted someone else. Also I was seven.”
• So how are users of NetFlix’s new streaming system going to get past the retards at Comcast who randomly apply bandwidth rules to their connections?
• A hilarious string of vending machine notes. Actually, that whole site is worth browsing around. Funny stuff. (some of the others come with a language warning)
• “Monkey on a goat on a cup on a tight rope” - a perfect title
• Here’s a pretty cool idea: YouTomb
• Yet more evidence of Sprint’s wonderful customer service.
• Here’s a staggeringly massive forum thread about the also-massive Burj Dubai skyscraper. It’s a thread full of cool photos and info. What an insane city.
• If you liked the HDR wallpaper from InterfaceLIFT.com I linked to in yesterday’s post, you’ll also like this one

• My lack of much posting activity this week, as well as the continued delay in my 2007 retrospective list, are the result of some moron hacking a number of my online accounts somehow. I’ve been playing clean-up with my online identity, including changing tons of passwords. Thankfully, the idiot didn’t get at my financial site accounts. My E-Bay and Google accounts were part of it, though, so I’ve been having fun coordinating with their support folks to get things squared away. For the record, the retard that was doing this was using the e-mail address of elee777@gmail.com when changing contact info. Here’s hoping I can help contribute to spam heading his (or her, I suppose, however unlikely) way. Anyway, I’ll resume some more posting over the weekend, now that I have things back under control.
• On the plus side, I had a business card from Comcast left on the door of the house. I called the sales guy that left it. Turns out Comcast has just launched a newer speed package in the area, featuring 16mb download speeds and 2mb upload speeds, named Blast. After signing up for the upgraded service, it took all of 15 minutes for the change to kick in. I now have some really blazing fast speed, which is tres cool. Below is a pic of my speed test I just did. I tried a couple other speed test locations, a few of which did peak out at 2mb uplink. Most stayed at the advertised 16mb, but a few went as high as the pic below would indicate.

• Not particularly spoilery (if you’ve seen Razor, that is), here’s a brief set of interviews about the upcoming season 4 of Battlestar.
• So I guess one of my major reasons for jumping from my DSL connection to Comcast a couple months ago has been confirmed. They are going to be rolling out the new DOCSIS 3 services next year. I sure hope I’ll be in one of their earlier markets. My brains begin bleeding out my ears in happiness at the idea of 160 MB speeds…
• Christian Bale has been officialy confirmed as John Connor in the upcoming Terminator 4 film. Excellent to hear the rumor as final. That’s a great bit of casting.
• Major milestone in the history of Activision: they are merging with Vivendi’s Blizzard game company to form (wait for it…) Activision Blizzard.
• The next step in the evolution of Google Apps has been previewed, based on JotSpot.

• While I may not be a fan of bands like Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails, they are my current heroes in the music realm. Their recent snubbing of the recording conglomerates was absolutely fantastic. This article also touches upon some wonderful statements by Yahoo’s music chief to the “big 4.” Folks like Yahoo and Amazon have begun paving the way for the future of the music industry. Said industry has been dragged through the mud time and time again in recent years, most deservedly so, and it’s moves like this from very high profile performers like Radiohead & NIN that could be the spark to ignite the real fire. Here’s hoping that the music industry is set ablaze by the resulting inferno. Doubtlessly a disco inferno. As a film score fan, I’d be more than happy to see some of the specialty labels like Varese Sarabande, Intrada, Film Score Monthly, La-La Land, Prometheus and others continue their move towards limited release efforts. Intrada in particular has gone full guns on that approach, and the results to date have been more than pleasing. Personally, I still prefer to have a physical CD as opposed to a download, if for no other reason than the fine packaging design the score labels put forth, and for the quality improvements. Still, regardless of how things adapt, odds are extraordinarily slim that the end result of the music industry getting bottomed out could possibly result in things getting any more annoying or worse than their current utter mismanagement of the situation. My two cents.
• Speaking of score label La-La Land, here’s a first listen preview of their upcoming Battlestar Galactica: Season 3 CD. It’s due out 2 weeks from today, on the 23rd. I’m an impatient little imp waiting for this one. Composer Bear McCreary continues to out-due himself for this series.
• Speaking of Galactica, Sci-Fi has begun posting the mini-episodes that lead up to November’s Razor tele-movie event online (one new one each Friday). These aren’t just scenes from Razor, but extra little snippets they shot to lead into that narrative.
• Now here’s an NCM Fathom event that I’ll actually drag myself out to see - Star Trek: The Original Series’ restored episode The Menagerie.
• Shots of the packaging for Shout Factory’s sure-to-be-great new release of My So-Called Life on DVD. As somebody who went through the Another Universe special lunchbox edition debacle back in the day (yes, I actually got one), I’m looking forward to a company that can actually do a great job with the deserving series.
• Speaking of under appreciated shows getting DVD releases, it looks like A&E is going to start releasing the overlooked cable series adaptation of Weird Science on DVD. Neato.
• Fox has released the first trailer for the interesting looking new film Jumper. It’s directed by the very talented Doug Liman, so I have high hopes. If nothing else, it’ll hopefully provide for another great music score from composer John Powell (though I’m not sure if he’s been attached to the project yet - but given his work on both Bourne and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I’d kinda assume he’ll get the gig).
• I haven’t yet watched the few episodes since the pilot for Gossip Girl (but will by this weekend). However, the series has earned the distinction of being the first of the new season to pick up a full season order.
• A 75-year-old woman has done what a great many of Comcast’s subscribers have dreamed of.
• Check out the video of the truly nifty door
• So, not only is McG rumored to be directing Terminator 4, but Vin Diesel is the rumored star. Hmmm. I guess he’d work pretty good in the role.
• SNL has been on a roll lately. Here’s an amusing skit about K-Fed as the #1 parent.
• For those of you lucky enough to have gotten in on Google’s stock when it was still a decent deal, you’re surely happy that it made its first crossing of the $600 a share barrier.