Month: August 2009

M*A*S*H is my favorite TV series of all time and I typically watch the entire series at least a couple of times a year. One of the things that took me a while to notice was how well the DVD menus are. Each season has a different look and most incorporate scenes from the episodes in the episode sub menu. Fonts are different, they sometimes wrap to scene elements and in one case they are backwards.

I am including a couple of screenshots to make my point.

Here we see the menu tacked onto the ring and it almost looks like it should be there

Requiem For A Lightweight

The topic for the episode, exchanging red for blue, is used as the menu. I like how they used both colors.

Change Day

This one is my favorite. In this episode Radar tries his hand at writing. I love how the font is backwards.

The Most Unforgettable Characters

It seems to me this was the promise of DVD but very few movies and TV series really make use of the available media to make each disc unique.

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I finished Shadow Complex last night. For those of you who don’t know Shadow Complex is a 2D Platformer in 3D that uses the Unreal Engine. It’s for the Xbox 360 and available via Xbox Live Arcade. It took me about 10 hours to finish it over three days on normal level.

This is the only game I can remember in a long time that as soon as I finished it I wanted to play it again! Luckily the game rewards this. When you start another game you continue at the level you finished at.

For my second play through I am playing on hardcore level. I am also striving for 100% completion. I had 68% completion on my first play through.

The game costs 1200 points which is about $15. The download size is 800MB. I guess the original 200MB limit is no more.

So if you have a Xbox 360 do yourself a favor and play this game!

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My Favorite Macintosh Applications. In no particular order.

1. Witch
   The task switcher that should have come with OSX.
   http://www.manytricks.com/witch/
2. Path Finder
   Norton Commander for the modern age.
   http://www.cocoatech.com/
3. Transmit/Candybar/Coda/Unison
   File transfer (FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3), Icon management, Web development, News reader.
   http://www.panic.com/
4. Adium
   Multiple IM provider.
   http://adium.im/
5. OmniGraffle Professional
   Visio done right.
   https://www.omnigroup.com/omniGraffle/
6. Yojimbo
   Data management. Passwords, Notes, URLs – all at your fingertips.
   http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/
7. MacPorts
   Source-based package management system for OSX. Bringing a huge variety of UNIX/LINUX applications to the Mac.
   http://www.macports.org/
8. Versions
   A beautiful Subversion client.
   http://versionsapp.com/
9. VoodooPad Pro
   Personal Wiki with the ability to share on the network.
   https://www.voodoopad.com/
10. Acorn
    Photoshop*lite.
    http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
11. Scrivener
    Great note taking and thought organization. Virtual index cards.
    http://www.literatureandlatte.com/
12. Snak
    IRC Client.
    http://www.snak.com/
13. Marsedit
    Blog posting. I wrote this post in it.
    http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/
14. Disco
    Simple, fun CD burning.
    http://www.discoapp.com/

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Well I did it. I quit Facebook today. Some of reasons are trite and some are well reasoned.

Let me first say that I like all my friends and love to hang out with them in the real world. Being connected to them on Facebook wasn’t really real to me. I didn’t feel any closer to them. I didn’t feel like I didn’t need to see them because we are connected on Facebook.

I also didn’t really care what they were doing. Don’t get me wrong I like my friends and am glad I have them but I don’t really want to know the minutia of their lives. When I finally do see them or talk to them there is nothing to say because I know everything!

From my perspective most folks were more interested in playing Mafia Wars and other games like it, taking quizzes or promoting their latest cause.

Things I am interested in:

• Marriages
• Divorces
• New Babies
• New Jobs
• New addresses, phone numbers and email addresses

Other than the list above; I just don’t care. Facebook did give me the above information but lost in a sea of crap.

Some of you might call me a hypocrite because I have a blog and I can accept that however I blog for myself; not caring if anyone else reads it. I think of my blog as a journal or diary. Something to look back on in the future and reflect.

Finally I am not saying Facebook is bad for everyone – just bad for me.

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Today marked the third time I attempted to use the Facebook iPhone app to comment on someone else’s status only to have it fail due to an error and lose my comment.

Golden rule: Don’t lose data!

So I deleted it today. Not worth putting energy into it only to see it flushed. At the very least it should keep the comment around in some sort of draft state so it can be dealt with later but to just lose it is ridiculous.

I am very close to closing my Facebook account anyway since I get no value out of it at all. Zero.

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I upgraded my Windows Vista Ultimate game system to Windows 7 Ultimate this weekend. Overall the system feels faster and I like the new taskbar. I really like the “snaps” feature that allows you easily tile two windows together.

What I didn’t like was they took away the Aurora screen saver – it was my favorite of any platform. Luckily I found it online.

My CPU doesn’t support hardware virtualization so I can’t run XP mode; oh well.

The upgrade took about four hours.

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