Posted on by lhl

The CD MAP Settlement is soliciting claims online right now. The payout will be $5-20 if you bought any CDs from retailers between 1995-2000. There’s a little catch:

If the number of claims filed would result in refunds of less than $5.00 per claimant, there will be no cash distribution to individual consumers. Rather, the cash portion of the Settlement shall be distributed to not-for-profit, charitable, governmental or public entities to be used for music-related purposes or programs for the benefit of consumers who purchased Music Products.

Coming out of a cash payment totalling $67,375,000, that means if more than 13,475,000 people sign up… Interestingly, the settlement also includes $75,700,000 worth of prerecorded music compact discs. Why do I get the feeling that means tens of millions of bad boy band records that have been taking up warehouse space?

Posted on by lhl

Recently I started doing some DIVX encoding again. After figuring out a codec error, I have to say that the new versions of Gordian Knot really do make it a much more straightforward process, virtually automating the whole thing. Especially nice is the queuing, which lets you load up a bunch of jobs up for overnight encoding. 2-pass encoding goes at about 1/3 realtime on my 1800+XP. Much faster than the stuff I was doing on my old Celeron, or even my old T-Bird, but still not something you’d want to necessarily sit through.

Related: removing noise: techniques for animation versus live action, high quality anime ripping, SMP and DVD2SVCD, New smart sharpening filter

Posted on by lhl

Most of the Calvin and Hobbes sites on the net have really dried up. The only site I’ve seen that’s sorta still kickin’ is Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn’s (at least the forum is) and the Calvin and Hobbes Resurrection. I did find some fun stuff though, Dave’s Calvin and Hobbes Index is an automatically generated index that tracks the comics that have been republished at the official site. There’s even a search engine. Way cool.

Posted on by lhl

Thursday I went and saw a screening of Star Trek: Nemesis at the Paramount Lot. If you haven’t seen it yet, then I’d recommend you don’t it’s not very good, either as a movie or as Star Trek. I could pick it apart, but I’d be here way too long. I was a huge TNG fan back in the day and I’m truly disappointed in how shallow and fantastically bad the TNG movies have been (I haven’t seen Insurrection, but from what I’ve heard that would only strengthen this argument), especially in comparison to how great the episodes were. Compare, All Good Things, the last TNG episode, to Nemesis, the ‘last’ TNG movie.

My biggest disappointment had nothing to do with how fantastically bad the plot is (we could be be here for days if one were to pick it apart, but it wouldn’t be worthwhile), or the crappy way the action set-pieces were edited and strung together (or how ridiculous the actual fighting was), but more with the lack of real character development, and the complete ‘untrekkiness’ of it all (and not in a good way either).

A few questions…

  • When did Picard turn into a braindead ‘action hero’ Captain?
  • Why does every movie seem to center around him, with a stupid subplot revolving around Data and the rest of the crew used either to move the ‘plot’ along or as comic relief?
  • Does every movie have to take a really interesting enemy and completely redefine them into something boring and stupid?
  • Remember when Star Trek used to say something?

Actually, there is one possible explanation…

Posted on by lhl

Went to the AMD Extreme Performance Project 2. It was actually rather amazingly lame. Not very close to a reality check at all. Things that should have been cool were instead pretty bad. For the Battle of the Boxes quiz ‘competition’, most of the questions were about AMD esoterica and corporate history (!?!). Give me a f’in break. Someone needs a reality check, that’s for sure. All in all, not exciting or fun at all despite the fact that free stuff was being given away. I came out liking AMD less after attending the event then I did going in. That is not, as I understand it, how these things are supposed to work.

Completely unrelated: the Imaging Resource Photography Lessons have some pretty fun tutorials, the lighting setups being especially fun.