Snakes on a Cane!
Now, as I blogged before, I loved the movie Snakes on a Plane. It had a great online “cult” presence and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though it was far from being best movie of the year. 
Anyway, I just found out a little while ago that Fox has started a little viral campaign of its own for the fall 2009 season premiere of House, M.D that riffs off of “Snakes on a Plane”. They sent out a bunch of awesome black t-shirts with this logo:
And you can see this same t-shirt on snakesonacane.com. I first read a tweet about this from Kath from Give Me My Remote, and that’s how I found out about the viral site Fox put up. So far it has a countdown clock indicating how much time is left before the season premiere (I presume). Clever! At this moment the premiere is 36 days, 19 hours, and some odd minutes and seconds away. It does get me excited for the season premiere, especially thinking about how last season ended (won’t go into detail so as not to spoil anyone). Why do the TV bloggers get all the cool schwag? Hey Fox PR people, how about throwing me a House t-shirt?
P.S. Hugh Laurie…swoooooooooon… 
Bollywood Hero flash mob: good viral marketing
As I was browsing my Twitter backlog I saw this tweet from Steve Isaacs:
“I’m totally gonna watch the Bollywood Hero mini-series on IFC because of that awesome Times Square stunt. #nyc #win” Then I scrolled down more and saw what he was talking about: “This RULES! Indian dance flash mob in Times Square for Chris Kattan’s “Bollywood Hero” on IFC: http://bit.ly/ZnAN3 #nyc” Great video! And like he said, now I’m interested in watching the show, simply due to this one short video. Good on you, IFC. You guys know how to take advantage of viral marketing in the way it was intended. Now hopefully Bollywood Hero is as entertaining as this video is.Pixel in mid-stretch
Caught thanks to the quick “burst” photos I can shoot with the iPhone 3G. Edited in Photogene and Photo fx before posting. Couldn’t do anything about the blown highlights, but fixed the contrast and color pretty well (at least it looks good on my small screen).
No, I mean tonight, in the building. Suddenly. Into our lives.
For the first time ever, every week/weekend in the month of May features a new movie that the hubby and I want to see. The movie industry is getting plenty of money from us this month. This week brings Terminator Salvation, yeah!
Anyway, last weekend the hubby and I watched Angels and Demons. It was alright. We probably could’ve taken last weekend off and waited to rent the movie. It wasn’t really necessary to see it on the big screen. At least we were able to see it during the afternoon at matinee prices.
Getting to the point of this blog post, we saw that one of the characters in the movie was played by Cosimo Fusco, the actor who played Paolo on Friends, one of my favoritest TV shows ever. When we saw him on screen, I whispered to the hubby, “he’s a huge CRAPWEASEL!”, a famous quote from the show, paraphrased. BTW, if you want to see the scene where Ross tells Paolo this, pull up this video and go to minute 4:45. Well, when I checked out IMDB for Angels and Demons to see the rest of the cast list (I do this a lot), I happened to notice a very funny Friends-related discussion thread on Cosimo Fusco’s IMDB page. Since it requires registration to view it, I took the liberty of screencapping the thread for your viewing pleasure:
Bwahahahaha! It’s not really fair to the actor to only be known to the majority of American audiences as “Paolo” on Friends or as a crap weasel, but the IMDB thread is still frickin’ funny. **sheepish grin**
“I’m mad as hell” movie weekend
The last couple days I’ve been on a rampage about the idiotic moves that the TV networks have been making. My latest rant about the cable companies reminded me of this old movie called Network.
Since it’s a rather old movie, I wasn’t really aware of it until I’d seen the pilot for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and had read reviews comparing the rant in that pilot to the rant in Network. I sort of looked up info about Network and added it to my Netflix queue, but I still haven’t watched it yet. Well, I think I’m going to watch it sometime this weekend, finally. I think it’s fitting, considering the annoyance I have with the TV networks.
Looking up Network in Wikipedia also led me to look up the movie Wall Street, which has nothing to do with the TV networks, but has a fair amount to do with the stupid crap we’re going through with the economy.
Both of these movies had popular quotes that show up from time to time in US pop culture. Network had, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” While Wall Street had, “Greed is good.” I think it’ll be cathartic to watch these movies this weekend. Join me, won’t you?
All we know is that he’s called The Stig…
AWESOME!
After years & years of wishing there were season box sets of Top Gear available to purchase here in the US, I just now found out that iTunes has Top Gear, series 10 available for purchase! I can’t wait to see more seasons show up for sale. Very cool. The Stig approves.
More TV premieres this week!
Hi, Kids!
Quick TV programming note for this week: both Heroes and The Office are coming back! Heroes’ premiere is tomorrow at 8PM Central time. The Office’s premiere is on Thursday at 8PM Central. Get your DVRs ready!
Yeah, Wargames!
So excited! Tonight we are going to see Wargames (the original 80′s movie, Ladies and Gents) on the big screen. I love this movie. It’s one of the movies that influenced my love of computers and technology, even though I was already leaning that way. We’d seen some commercials before a couple of the movies we saw recently about Fathom Events showing Wargames in theatres for one day, supposedly in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the movie. I think it’s more to pimp the straight-to-DVD release of the 2008 sequel to Wargames. I am really not that interested in the sequel at all; I can’t imagine that they could’ve done a good job with it. I am grateful that they’re re-showing Wargames on the big screen anyway. I never got to see it in the theatre. By the time I’d seen it, it was on HBO. Of course, with many movies that I saw on HBO, I watched it several times, whenever it was on.
Anyway, I don’t know how widespread this Wargames screening is, but I highly recommend going to Fathom Event’s site to see if it’s showing near you.
Sony Rolly does NiN
I love the Sony Rolly. It’s such a cute little, “Aibo meets mp3 player” kind of robot toy. When I first heard about it and saw videos demoing its functionality, it reminded me of the old Sony — the Sony that made really awesome gadgety stuff, whether or not it made sense as a mainstream product. They made tons of different electronic devices in strange form factors, and dominated the consumer electronics world. Unfortunately, that Sony has been replaced with “is it good for the shareholders?” Sony — a Sony that still makes some really lovely hardware, but has enough financial issues that they can no longer afford to make devices like the Clié (the absolute best line of Palm OS PDAs, closely followed by the Tapwave Zodiac) or the cute line of Aibos. When I saw the Rolly, I saw the old Sony taking a peek out from behind the stodgy, “bottom line is king”, new Sony. Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of innovative (and expensive) products coming out of Sony, like that super-thin, OLED TV that they are selling now, their interesting take on digital SLRs, the Sony Reader, and their fun line of phones, several of which I’m enamored with. I just miss all the fun, “What am I going to do with this?” products they used to have.
Anyway, this rambling is just an introduction to a video I put together recently. I was surprised to see the Sony Rolly displayed at the Sony Style store in Woodfield, so I busted out my phone to take a video of it in action. Too bad I didn’t have the N95-3 with me; I could’ve Qik’ed it… Oh well! The original song it was bopping to was “Love Song” by Sara Bareille (IIRC), but I forgot that I turned off the audio recording. The audio probably wouldn’t have turned out so well anyway, since there was some other music blaring in another part of the store. Luckily I was able to find a good replacement song that still fits with the Rolly’s dance moves. Strangely it’s quite a different song from the original tune that played — “Discipline” by Nine Inch Nails. Thanks, Trent Reznor, for Creative Commons licensed songs! I converted the video from the original 3GP format and added the song as the backing track in iMovie, quite a painless process. I was all smiles while I was watching the Rolly dance in the Sony Style, and I was still all smiles when I watched it dance to NiN. Pretty funny contradiction between a cutesy, mp3-playing robot toy and an angsty (but dancey) NiN song. See it for yourself!
Fall 2007 TV show premiere dates (US)
UPDATE: If you’re looking for fall 2008 season premieres, CLICK HERE
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I’ve been seeing a lot of people getting to my blog via searches for “house md premiere” or some similar search keywords. Well, just to make things a little easier, here’s a link to epguide.com’s complete list of season premieres for this fall. I admit that I have some TV show premiere dates marked down in my Google Calendar so that I don’t forget them. *sheepish grin* Though, with all the anticipation we have for some premieres, I have it kind of burned into my brain that next week and the week after are big premiere weeks for a bunch of shows (all times below are Central Daylight Savings Time):
- Chuck – Sept. 24, 7PM
- Heroes – Sept. 24, 8PM
- Journeyman – Sept. 24, 9PM
- House, M.D. – Sept. 25, 8PM
- Bionic Woman – Sept. 26, 8PM
- Dexter – Sept. 30, 8PM
- Life – Sept. 26, 9PM
- The Office – Sept. 27, 8PM
- Cavemen – Oct. 2, 7PM
- Pushing Daisies – Oct. 3, 8PM
There are quite a few freshman TV shows on my list, but I haven’t heard one way or another if any of them are supposed to be good. Since I still have to wait until next year before Lost and Battlestar Galactica start again, I have some time to try out new shows. Of the older shows, I’m particularly excited for Heroes, House, and The Office to start back up again.
How about you? Any upcoming shows I should check out?
Powered by ScribeFire.
Hello, Flickr.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that everytime you visit your Flickr homepage, they show you a different way of saying hello in a foreign language (reminds me of old school Wired magazine covers…IIRC they did the same thing. Either “hello” or “Wired” in different languages. Now I can’t remember. 
). I just happened to see the following just a few minutes ago:
Just a cute thing I happened upon that I had to blog. Excuse my indulgence. Powered by ScribeFire.
The Weekend is Almost Here…
Hey, Kids! Just whiling away a bit of time here before the 3-day weekend. I’m looking forward to a lot of relaxing. How about y’all?
Have fun and be safe!
ShoZu
Enjoy the view
Tag, I’m it…
Leave it to Sumocat to tag me for “Meme of the Week”… Just kidding, it’s fun. Here are my 8 random things:
1. I’m going to a 12:01 AM showing of Harry Potter tonight and am very excited about it!
2. I just cut my own hair last weekend because I was fed up w/ how long & easily tangled it got.
3. Even though I still would love to have an iPhone, I’m perfectly happy w/ my Nokia N95. It is super awesome.
4. My summer TV watching has been dominated by DVDs of season 2 of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer & The Office (US version). The rest of my summer TV line up consists of recordings of Mythbusters & Cash Cab.
5. I just bought a bunch of cool t-shirts from Threadless.com to help fill out my pathetic wardrobe. Up next, jeans!
6. I’m having trouble thinking up other random things to write about…
7. I’ve really been into taking Polaroid pictures lately (yes, film!). I am in the middle of scanning in my July 4th fireworks pictures, duds and all, for posting on Flickr.
8. In keeping w/ number 7, I recently bought a Polaroid 680 from eBay, and it is sitting on my porch right now, having been delivered a couple hours ago. I wish I could go home now & get it out of the heat & humidity!
Well, that’s my 8. I don’t think I know anyone else who hasn’t already been tagged! Sad… *sheepish grin*
What tech did you GIVE this Christmas?
Lots of tech blogs out there asked what techie goodness you got for Christmas, which is always fun to ask, but I thought I’d ask what tech did you give this year?
I bought a good amount of techie stuff for other people this year, despite what I said in a previous blog post, about how I was hesitant to buy tech gifts because other people probably wouldn’t enjoy them as much as I would. Luckily, it seems that most of my techie gifts were hits.
1. For the hubby, I got a Pioneer Inno portable XM receiver/mp3 player and a car kit, from XMFanStore.com. Their pricing was the best, with the total for both items being less than the receiver itself from Circuit City. I had to make sure not to use the joint credit card so that the hubby wouldn’t see the purchase in our online statement! He hasn’t tried out the mp3 player part of it yet, but we got tons of use out of the receiver for piping Christmas music through our home theatre speakers. He’s going to have to redo his custom stereo setup in his car to accommodate the new receiver. He had originally taken apart an XM boom box cradle and created a custom setup in the car since he never listens to regular radio or CDs. I think the easiest thing he could do now is to put back the original factory stereo in his car and get an aux input adapter for the car kit cradle.
2. For my brother, I got a Zune home AV kit so he can watch videos and pipe music through his TV. This was a hit, since he’s currently very enthusiastic about his Zune right now. It’s a little cheesy because all it does is basically output the Zune’s display to the TV instead of displaying a custom kiosk display that is more TV-friendly, but it does the job, and he’s happy with it.
3. For my parents I got a couple techie things that I hope will actually be used. They each got an iPod shuffle (my bro bought my dad’s, and I bought my mom’s) which we filled with music that they like, so all they have to do is put it in shuffle mode and hit play. I also bought them an Epson Picturemate Snap inkjet printer. My mom bought herself a Fuji A500 digital camera (which I bought a 1GB xD card for), and I thought it’d be nice for them to have this nice printer around the house to save a trip out to Target or wherever to get prints of digital pictures they take. The criteria for both techie gifts were mainly to be drop-dead easy to use, and not require a PC for operation. Yes, both the iPod shuffle and the printer can be used with a PC, but since my parents are not computer savvy, we were going for PC-less operation. While I think they’ll probably use the shuffles a good deal, I’m hoping the printer doesn’t just fall by the wayside. They were very impressed by its performance when I showed them how to print out pictures and used a few pics I took during our gift exchange as examples, but we’ll have to see if they feel comfortable enough printing out their own pics. I wanted to get them a digital photo frame that I could connect up to the Net to get updates from my Flickr account or something, but they don’t have broadband, and amazingly enough, there are no WiFi access points around their neighborhood that I could have the digiframe piggyback on. *smirk* I’m not just talking open WiFi, but any WiFi APs, period. It’s really baffling… Anyway, the ‘rents were happy for those gifts. The in-laws also got the same printer, but the hubby’s dad is more computer savvy, so we’re sure they’ll get some good use out of it.
In the less techie realm of gifts…
4. The hubby also got the trio of Burger King Xbox 360 games — Sneak King, Pocket Bike Racer, and Big Bumpin’. I actually bought these from one of the many sellers on eBay selling the whole set. Then after I bought them, I saw that BK was offering the whole set for sale without having to buy a value meal and paying an extra $4 for one of the games. I’m actually very impressed by the quality of these games. The premise of each one is very fun, and the graphics are top-notch. Controls are easy and intuitive, and the replay factor is high. Great for casual gamers.
5. Last, but not least, we got the hubby’s brother and wife a Senseo coffee maker. Not terribly techie, especially compared to the newer version that has an LCD display on it, but a welcome gift for new parents needing their caffeine boost.
There were lots of “supplementary” gifts given to our family members, like books and DVDs and such, but I thought I’d talk about the techie stuff we bought, considering my blog has been pretty tech-oriented for the most part. Feel free to post what sort of techie stuff you gave this year; it might be a good idea for someone else to use next year, or for an upcoming birthday. I’ll post later about the techie stuff I got, besides the good ol’ P1610.
I’m a C-list Blogger!
*smirk*
I’m actually surprised I’m not D-list…
Original link to the “bloglebrity” tool from JKOntheRun.
House, M.D. season premiere tonight!
As evidenced in a previous blog posting, House is one of my absolute favorite shows. Hugh Laurie does an awesome job of portraying the grouchy, but brilliant, diagnostician. The 3rd season premiere is tonight, so in celebration, I must repost this screen capture from one of the episodes in the first season (IIRC):
(It’s only funny and awesome if you’ve seen this particular episode, so hopefully this can be an impetus for you all to acquire the DVDs for the previous 2 seasons. )
"That was evil!”
Hacking the Staples “Easy Button”
Ha! We bought some of these Easy Buttons with the intent of giving them away as funny stocking stuffers last Christmas, but never got around to distributing them. Might have to do some tweaking before giving them as presents this year!
Awesomest Ringtone Idea EVAH!
Okay, probably not, but I sure like this particular idea. I heard something at work that reminded me of the tones that David recorded to thwart the lock on that clinic they temporarily held him in. Then I thought that those simple tones would be an awesome, geeky ringtone. I don’t have a touch-tone landline that could simulate the tones, but I can just bust out my Wargames DVD and record the sound. But don’t tell anyone, else the MPAA come knocking on my door… *rolling eyes*
DOH…Missed out on the Pong clock!
Darn, the run of 400 units of this Pong clock is already sold out. 
The last I had read about this was that the maker was under fire for some copyright issues (???) and that it might not be able to be sold, but I guess that somehow got worked out.
Here’s hoping another run will be made (maybe with a bigger screen? It seems like these units are around the size of a UMPC…see it compared to an iMac display at the link below). It’d be a nice companion for my Galaga machine.
P.S. I’m testing out posting from the Flock browser, so if you see any weirdness in this post, please let me know.
Ink Blogging w/GE
Just saw this link on Lifehacker (although I may have seen this site before) about a collaborative whiteboard website hosted by GE. As you can see the ink is not refined, but it is an interesting concept.
Editor’s note (since it was kind of slow going to ink on that website): I couldn’t find a good way to save off the drawing once it was done. The way GE implemented the “send this drawing to a friend” option was to e-mail a link to a site that would replay the ink strokes used to make the drawing, not an actual picture file, which was interesting, but not helpful for saving an ink blog post. So I had to resort to the trusty Snipping Tool on my tablet. Also, the website gives you an ink “quota”, presumably since the drawings are shared via animations, not straight jpg/gif files. And there wasn’t an easy way to erase; you just had to use the undo button. But there were very fun drawing tools, like the stamper, and different ink types like feathered, or chaos (random scribbling), or halftone. It’s a fun doodling site.
Yawn…TGIF
(Click on the image to enlarge)
Man am I drowsy! I haven’t been getting to bed early enough this week, and now I think it’s catching up to me. *yawn*
Tonight the hubby and I will be seeing A Scanner Darkly. Ever since we saw the trailer for it and figured out it would be rotoscoped like the movie Waking Life, we have been anticipating its release. I read a couple reviews of it and so far it sounds like the critics are positive about it. I saw a couple articles mention some animation production problems that the movie had, but hopefully that didn’t negatively impact the movie that much. I love how Waking Life’s animation helped enhance the conversations in the movie; I’m very interested to see how the rotoscoping enhances A Scanner Darkly.
In case I don’t blog again before tomorrow, have a good weekend, Kids!
Fun with Letters
Aww yeah, Scrabble is teh fun. For the last couple nights, instead of half-watching TV (nowadays usually some DVD box set of a show we want to catch up on, now that our shows are in hiatus…in this case we’ve been watching the season 1 DVDs for Quantum Leap) while surfing or whatever, the hubby and I have been playing Scrabble. And so far the series is 2 – 0, in favor of yours truly. Neither of us had played Scrabble in quite a while, so it was fun to revisit the game. We sort of “cheated” by using Merriam-Webster’s to help us strategize word placement for maximum points, but it wasn’t like we were plugging in our letters into anagram generator; it was more like if we had a possible word in mind, we checked it to see if it was valid. I suggested that the next time we play (probably tomorrow ), we just use the dictionary for word challenges and stick to our own vocab.
So last night, I trounced on the hubby (heh heh), with a score of 322 to 243, thanks to a well-placed word here and there (Gazan earned me 45 points!):
Tonight’s game was a lot closer. I only won by 2, 286 to 284. But this time we remembered to count any penalty/reward points due to unused letter tiles (I used up all my letters):
I was down by 6 when I was up for my last turn, and I only had an i and an o. Luckily I was able to form the word “bio”, with “it” as the “bonus word”, which put me up by 1. The hubby was able to use one last letter to form “rut”, which would’ve won him the game, but because I used all my letters, the sum of his remaining letters would be added to my score and subtracted from his score, so I won by two. Actually, I would’ve won by more since he technically was not allowed to form another word after I finished my tiles, but whatever.
Sure, it’s no World of Warcraft, Halo 2, or whatever, but Scrabble’s a pretty good game (FPS games give me a headache anyway!). I wonder if there’s a Scrabble game for the DS? That’d be awesome!
