Dave Kellam

I didn’t want to find out that Superdrives can heat up and implode using new higher speed media. A fix would probably be nice.

I watched Dark City last night. It’s interesting because I believe that I saw it before the Matrix but don’t remember drawing any parallels between them after watching both. My guess is that the latter is more of cultural phenomenon rather than a cult one. The commentary track by Roger Ebert interests me and might warrant renting the dvd at some point. If you’re watching it for the first time I’d advise skipping the first chapter or so, to around the point that the a character wakes up in a bathtub. It’s a much better movie without the intro narration (something the studio forced Proyaz to put in).

I watched The Bourne Identity this afternoon. I heard some good things about it, so I figured it’d be worth checking out. If you ever enjoyed reading spy novels or if you enjoy spy movies, it’s right up your alley. Suffice it to say, that I grew up reading Follet, Ludlum and the like. I enjoyed the movie but can see how people might find it cliched and so forth. It’s a good spy flick, ranking up there with The Day of the Jackal

I have a graphics course this semester, basically OpenGl/C programming. I don’t have a whole heck of a lot of experience with C. Throw in the fact that I haven’t compiled a C program on a mac yet. At some point I installed the mac developer software but never really started playing with it. I’ve been experimenting a little bit, trying to get things to compile, et al. There’s are really good tutorials at NeHe, they’re worth checking out if you’re interested. It’s aimed at Windows coders, but there’s example code for most platforms. There’s even beginners code for project builder. It’s a learning experience.

On an unrelated note, I was having trouble getting Stuffit to expand some large .rar files. You can find some command line software here, it worked for me just fine.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done much of anything for the site. I guess that’s relatively obvious based on the lack of front page posts. Now that I’ve had my summer hiatus, I should be able to get back on track.

School has started again for me; here we go year three. The last week or two has seen the return of friends and the party life. There has been something going down pretty much night recently, it’s been a lot of fun. I just did a little redesign, I have a template waiting in the wings, but I’m not sure I like it. I’ve gone back to the text only front for awhile, so I can return to the writing.

I have a creative writing course this semester, which should be a lot of fun. It’s basically a group of twenty people who like to write sitting down and discussing each others works. And we all end up with a credit for it. I’m back at Golden Words in the capacity of staff writer. So between that and the writing class, there should be lots of fodder for the written section. There’s a link of for the photo section as well, which I believe is current up to about the end of august.

I’ve been watching a few movies, going to a few concerts; fairly standard. This past week has seen me plow through season three of The Sopranos, attend Danko Jones and The Dears in concert and check out Soderberg’s new flick Full Frontal. My opinions? Season Three was great, I await the new episodes. I enjoyed Danko Jones, it was intense rock-out fun albeit I was a bit tired. The Dears were ok, I’m not a huge fan. But I got to hang out with them afterwards, they seemed pretty cool. I’ve read some bad things about full frontal, I have to disagree. Then again, I enjoy books and movies that are fragmented, self-referential, self-parodies. That’s exactly what it is and I can see why some people probably didn’t like it.

I’ve had a tough time trying to get this one bin/cue vcd image burned. Everytime I tried to mount the image or burn it in Toast, the program would crash. After searching high and low for a solution, I found VCDGear, a great utility for converting between file formats and so on; I converted the bin/cue into an mpg. Unfortunately for any non-Windows clients, the only software available is command line (it’s not really all that difficult to use though). There’s a decent program out there to watch vcds called MacVCD — there’s some places it could use improvement.

With the playing of the VCD down to a science, you’re probably ready to move onto VCD creation. During my search for the clues to extracting video from video cd’s, I came accross two solid VCD/SVCD creation sources: here and here

Ben has a new design/layout up. He makes good pictures. He was around during the Suffocate heyday; another reason I should revive Conform.

The beginnings: a bottle of scotch and the sudden decision to reorganize your room is an interesting combination. It keeps me semi-productive (except for the computer breaks).

Next: Some webdesign feelings are in the air. I’ve rearranged the room, so it’s that sort of mood. I have a semi-finished design sitting on my desktop, waiting for more.

Lastly: There was something else that was the reason for this post but I can’t remember it. Go figure.

It figures that after thinking about it for months, I finally give in and switch over to mac, only to have them release a bunch of new models a month later. For the price I paid three or four weeks ago, I’d have dual processors, ddr ram instead of sdram, another drive bay and the possibility of it holding four harddrives instead of two. Them’s the breaks I guess, it’s a bit of shame though. Regardless, I still love my new computer.

I just finished reading an interesting article on blackjack from Wired. If you’ve ever played at a casino before it’s worth checking out. I played once a couple weeks ago and ended up leaving the table with $70 more dollars than I arrived with. I was quite pleased with myself, although it’s small potatoes in comparison to hundreds of thousands of dollars.