Like the following:
Stir, and you get what’s known in Brooklyn as an “Egg Cream.” Mine end up resembling fizzy Yoo-Hoos with a superior flavor. That and they don’t have the rest of the stuff that’s in a Yoo-Hoo.
Is a movie based on a musical based on a movie which centers around a fictional play named “Springtime for Hitler.” Got it?
The movie came out Christmas of last year, and if you didn’t see it, you missed something special. You can rectify that by picking up the DVD at your local retailer. I managed to see it Christmas Day and it was good fun for everyone in the theatre. All eight of us.
It’s a Mel Brooks comedy, but it is also a love letter to the movie musicals of bygone eras. You’re looking at dance numbers, dress changes for no apparent reason, fancy lighting, and people bursting into song at the appropriate moments.
Not a dry minute, either.
When a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of. . . Building a new machine.
I have no idea what I would do with it. I started out thinking about just upgrading the motherboard, processor and video card.
But then I thought, “Well, then I’d have this perfectly good motherboard, processor and video card not doing anything.”
Then I priced a case. Then I remembered I had a gigabyte of spare RAM laying around. And a hard drive. So I priced a DVD-Rom drive, because they’re really cheap nowadays.
At some psychological root level, I just want to build one.
I enjoy building machines because it is something physical, something tangible. I have spent over two decades shifting bits, tiny ones and zeros. Insignificant and yet immeasurably significant to our daily lives.
I have seen it come full circle in terms of transferring information. I used to bring plastic magnetized disks to a friend’s house. After that, it was dialing up to an electronic bulletin board. Suddenly it was over wires to a server. Then the wires were gone.
Now, I carry it around on a disk no bigger than a stick of gum that I bring over to my friend’s house.
On off on off. It’s so silly and incomprehensible and magical at the same time.
I do not even pretend to understand how it all works—I merely believe.
Which is why I enjoy building new machines. It is a time to ground myself and put all the parts together. It’s a time to set master slave, to connect a power source, to firmly seat RAM, to connect wires, to screw a motherboard into a case with brass fittings (although not necessarily in that order) and finally end up with a computer that boots up and passes POST.
At the end of every workday I produce no tangible “product.” For me, producing a physical manifestation of my trade is very satisfying.
That, and it can serve as a home theater PC.
That would be totally awesome.
Hey, it’s the PS3 pricing announcement. There are two models of PS3, $499 and $599. Let’s look at the differences between the two, based on the press release.
The $500 version is missing more than just hard drive space. Additionally, here’s what you don’t get:
The WiFi thing is odd to me because implementing WiFi is pretty cheap. At $250, the PSP has WiFi. Hell, at $130 the DS Lite has WiFi. But I guess you could get a USB wireless adapter. Currently this is how the Xbox 360 handles WiFi. Not a big deal here.
No memory card reader, also not a big deal. In theory, you can plug in a USB reader to the PS3 and have it read your media. Unless, they do something to their hardware to make it proprietary. Which would be completely out of character for SONY. All I ask here is that you can use them to save your games. Is that too much?
The no HDMI is going to make some people angry when they try to play a next generation DVD but can’t, because only HDMI supports the crazy ass DRM that the movie houses demanded be on blu-ray. Of course, this is a non issue since most televisions right now don’t even have HDMI connections.
So, if you don’t care about any of these things, sure. I guess it’s worth half a grand. On the other hand, an extra hundred dollars gets you the additional functionality. I’m thinking that all of these bells and whistles are a tad excessive for something that is supposed to be playing games.
And to be honest, I haven’t seen anything that makes me want to spend half a grand on the system just yet. We’ll see how things shake down in the next couple of days of E3.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Now I have to wait for the MicroSoft and Nintendo announcements.
Once upon a time, in a far off western kingdom, there lived a boy.
Now the boy, through no fault of his own, had an offsite backup copy of Episode IV on Betamax. He watched that movie repeatedly until his VCR died. This made the boy sad, because he really enjoyed Episode IV. Even if, midway through the movie, a “flip laserdisc” notice interrupted Luke’s training sequence on the Millenium Falcon. Right before Han dismissed the force as a “hokey religion.”
Then, the boy moved east to seek his fortune and met other people who enjoyed Episode IV as much as he did. They reveled in the remastered theatrical releases, and spontaneously quoted the movie to each other whilst in the theater, much to the dismay of the three people that were watching it for the first time.
Suddenly George Lucas decided to “fix” the movies. It is important to note that at this time, they were not broken. Many people were angered, including the boy.
The boy resorted to watching divx copies of the original versions of the story, ripped from laserdisc editions not available in the United States. He had heard that many people distributed them illegally, but he wouldn’t have known anything about that. Nothing at all.
Then, George Lucas’s handlers decided that maybe they should listen to the people (make more money) and give them what they wanted in the first place, which was digitally remastered copies of the original theatrical releases.
The boy, and everyone else rejoiced—until they remembered Episodes I, II, and III.