2005 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Films

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Dori’s got a very handy list of this year’s Sci-Fi and Fantasy films that are likely to be potential Hugo Award nominees. Some I’ve seen, most I’ve heard of, but there were a few listed that I didn’t know about — including a new Terry Gilliam film!

…I started thinking about the sheer number of F & SF films that will be/have been released in 2005, and thereby eligible for the 2006 Hugo awards (yes, we’ll be there, and yes, we’ll be voting). Here’s the list I’ve come up with:

Note that this isn’t a list of all the genre films that are being released this year, just a list of those that I suspect have a fanbase that will want their movie nominated. Given that only five can make the cut, it’s going to be difficult. If I missed your fave, or I misunderstood the rules (I’m not quite sure how foreign films fit), let me know.

Lots of interesting looking stuff showing up in the next six months or so. Going over that list, I…

Not a bad lineup at all, from the looks of it.

Apple and Intel

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There’s a lot of rumbling in the Mac world today thanks to a Wall Street Journal article reporting rumors of Apple talking to Intel about using their chips.

Apple Computer Inc. has been in talks that could lead to a decision soon to use Intel Corp. chips in its Macintosh computer line, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The report, citing two industry executives with knowledge of recent discussions between the companies, said Apple will agree to use Intel chips.

Neither company would confirm the report and an Apple spokeswoman told the Journal she would characterize it as “rumor and speculation.”

This, of course, has led to the usual fooferal about whether Apple may be looking at either moving away from the Power PC chip and onto X86 chips, or possibly simply releasing a version of Mac OS X for Intel processors.

Personally, I think a few of the Slashdot crowd have a better grasp of what’s probably going on here.

/ASCII: My guess is they really are planning on using Intel chips – just not processors. Remember, Intel produces wireless chips, Flash memory, Ethernet chips, and Salt and Vinegar chips.

Halo1: The gigabit ethernet chip in my old G4/400 in fact is an Intel chip.

arloguthrie: Most notably, the XServe Raid runs on an Intel processor. There are tons of reasons Apple would be meeting with Intel. One day, perhaps “the news” will actually be news and not gossip based on “a friend-of-a-friend told me…”

(via /. and many other sites this morning…)

Recap

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Still alive, still here, just haven’t been very talkative. Quick weekend recap, though:

Saturday was a jaunt to the University District Street Fair for a few hours. Quite enjoyable, with a couple very entertaining shows by street performers, two of which are fairly well documented in this photoset from the day.

On the way to the fair I spent some time wandering through Westlake Plaza, tracking down all of the various plaques that make up the Westlake Kids Walk public art project. I’d been walking over them for a few years, now, and it was kind of fun to actually see if I could find them all. I think I did…

Sunday was spent at home, cleaning up the apartment a little bit. As I’d spent much of the past month battling a cold, over-stressed from long days at work, or both, things around here had fallen into a pretty sad state. It’s by no means spic-and-span now, but at least I won’t be completely embarrassed should someone show up — as, if all works out well, my mom will be on Wednesday! She’s in the midst of a trip to see friends down here in the states and has about a twelve hour layover here in Seattle, so she should be taking advantage of my proximity to downtown and the bus lines to rest for a few hours during the latter half of the work day, and then we’ll have some time to visit in the evening before she has to return to the airport. Yay!

Rick stopped by for a few hours yesterday also, and ended up leaving with the first two Harry Potter books. He’s not read them yet, and has finally had enough people tell him that he should that he’d decided it was time. He mentioned this and that he was planning on buying them “at some point” — I decided that this wasn’t good enough, and handed him my copies of the first two to borrow to get him started.

Other than that, not much to report. I really do intend to write a bit more about Star Wars Episode III (though it’s rapidly becoming more of a moot point as more and more people see it for themselves), and I’m sadly behind on sending stuff to Seattlest. My one-to-two posts a week completely disappeared last week, and I need to get back into gear on that — last week, I was a few days behind on my daily reading, and every time I saw something that I thought would make a good post, someone else more on-the-ball than I had beat me to it. I’ve got one post that I’m stalled on, too…last week just wasn’t my best for actually prying anything out of my brain.

Hopefully that’s over with, though. At the very least, there’s some nice bright sunshine outside of my window, it looks to be a good day (I hope work doesn’t muck that up too much), and I finally managed to catch up with my reading last night. If all goes well, I’ll be back on the ball this week.

And with that, the day begins…

iTunes “Bitter End” by Sister Machine Gun from the album Metropolis (1997, 5:20).

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

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I’ve got to get to bed soon, but first off, while it’s all still fresh in my mind…

…finally.

That was worth watching.

In brief and spoiler-free: I know Episode I stank, and Episode II was better, but still nowhere near what we’d all been hoping for. Episode III, while not perfect (it definitely still has its kludgy moments), is far better than either of the prior two prequels, and — believe it or not — stands as a worthy addition to the series.

I’ll come back and expand on this later, I think — I’d actually love to now, but it’s edging close to 2am, and I’ve got to work tomorrow — but at the moment, I’m just happy to have walked out of a new Star Wars film that I actually enjoyed.

iTunes “Main Title” by London Symphony Orchestra, The/Williams, John from the album Star Wars Trilogy: The Original Soundtrack Anthology (1977, 5:25).

Feed types

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Looking at the Google AdSense for Feeds announcement, Scoble takes a moment to rank the various basic types of feeds that can be produced now:

Here, let’s rank RSS feeds from worst (least useful for readers) to best.

  • Worst: headline only feeds with ads.
  • Almost worst: partial text feeds with ads.
  • Barely passable: partial text feeds without ads.
  • Better: Full text feeds with ads.
  • Best: Full text feeds with no ads.

I’ll only subscribe to the bottom three kinds of feeds and if your content isn’t really “must read” (the New York Times, for instance) then you better stick with the bottom two.

Again, when I subscribe to an RSS feed that means I want a long-term relationship. Think about what that means. How abusive of me do you want to be? On the readership side we get to decide how much abuse we’ll put up with. You might find that your readers won’t put up with much. In which case you’ll have to decide if a few extra bucks is worth a decreased readership.

Dead-on, I’d say.

The first two — ‘worst’ and ‘almost worst’ — would guarantee that I would stop reading that site if that were all they offered. At that point, I’d feel that I’m being treated as a consumer, rather than a reader.

I’ve got a few ‘barely passable’ feeds in my newsreader, but I try to make them as rare as possible. If I try to subscribe to a site and the default feed is partial-text, the first thing I’ll do is peek into the source code to see if I can find a full-text feed. Even if I do subscribe to a partial-text feed, those sites get far less readership from me than others do, as it’s rare that the provided summaries catch my interest enough to bring me to the site.

(And a quick aside here — if you’re determined to do a partial-text feed, would you at least take a moment to actually write summaries for your posts that the feed can use? The default “first 20 words” snippet is virtually pointless. Give me a reason to read everything you write, don’t just assume that I’ll automatically stop by anytime something new pops up…with 300+ feeds in my newsreader, I just don’t have time for that.)

Once we get up into the two ‘best’ options — full-text feeds, either with or without ads — the ads don’t bother me quite as much, for two reasons. Firstly, the text of the post is generally longer than the ad and the ad can be easily ignored if I’m so inclined; and secondly, with Google’s targeting technology that picks which ads to run based on content, it’s more likely that an ad will be topic-appropriate (and, therefore, more likely to potentially catch my eye) with a full-text feed.

Me, I’m still going to stay ad-less in my feed. Advertising just isn’t that big of a deal to me — I signed up for Google AdSense out of curiosity, and so far, there’s no reason to get rid of it. I limit the ads to a single spot (below the first post on my index page, and between the post and the comments on my individual pages) so they’re visible but not intrusive (at least, that’s the intent), and every few months I get a little bit of money from Google. Not much — about $300 a year — but these days, every little penny helps.

I do also participate in the Amazon Associates program and the iTunes Affiliates program, but neither of those has netted me much of anything. I think I’ve gotten about $10-$15 from Amazon in the past few years, and I haven’t seen squat from iTunes yet. I just don’t have the readership numbers for these programs to be really profitable…but then, that’s not exactly something I worry about this. If I’d gotten into this whole blogging thing for the money, I’d have gotten out of it years ago.

(That said…would it kill you to go shopping every so often? “)

iTunes “Real, The” by Davis, Don/Tech Itch from the album Animatrix: The Album (2003, 8:02).

Hi there!

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It’s raining pretty decently right now, so I ducked into the Convention Center on my way home for lunch. Walking past the lower level shops on my way to the elevator, I spotted a girl in the beauty salon sitting with a pomeranian propped up in her lap.

It was cute, so I grinned. She looked up and saw me, smiled back, and shook one of her dog’s paws at me, to wave “hello!”

iTunes “Deed, The” by Kickshaw from the album Superstar (1999, 5:06).

May Meetup

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Had a good time at the Webloggers Meetup last night. There were a few new faces in attendance, and lots of kids, which was fun — Jon and his wife Joy brought their three kiddos (Jon got a really nice profile shot of me, too), and Eric was there with his really cute little boy.

Some time ago at one of the Jason Webley concerts, a girl had come up to me and told me that I was apparently a doppelganger for her husband. Turns out that she and her husband were there last night, and after the story was told, a few of the people around us agreed that yes, there’s definitely a resemblance. Apparently it’s not quite as close as it was a while ago — I’ve let my hair grow out, and he’s shaved off his face fuzz — but if I’m going to have a twin running around town, I could certainly do worse than Matt May.

Much of the fun of the evening came not from those of us gathered for the Meetup, though, but instead from across the street where the hardcore Star Wars fans were lining up for that evening’s 12:01am first showing of Episode III. We’d all keep our eye on the crowd as we chatted, and occasionally the cry would go up — “Stormtrooper costume!” or “There’s Chewbacca!” or “Jawas!” — and a few of us would grab our cameras and head over to grab a few shots.

Best moment of the night, though?

Walking past the line of Star Wars fans, and having a kid in jeans, sweatshirt, and Darth Vader helmet point at my kilt and laugh.

Amused me to no end, that did…

iTunes “Rock the Casbah (Hot Tracks)” by Clash, The from the album Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1997, 6:36).

Back again…

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No clue why, but for some reason my DSL modem apparently froze up somewhere around 3pm this afternoon. I’ve reset it and we’re back up and running, but it looks like my site was effectively down for about two hours.

I’m sure the 30 people who might have tried to stop by were heartbroken.

iTunes “Revolution Rock” by Clash, The from the album London Calling (Legacy Edition) (1979, 3:51).

Top 12 Things A Klingon Programmer Would Say

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  1. Specifications are for the weak and timid!
  2. This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual processors if I am to do battle with this code!
  3. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you’ve read it in the original Klingon.
  4. Indentation?! — I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
  5. What is this talk of ‘release’? Klingons do not make software ‘releases’. Our software ‘escapes’ leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
  6. Klingon function calls do not have ‘parameters’ — they have ‘arguments’ — and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
  7. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
  8. I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest. They will not concern us again.
  9. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
  10. By filing this SCR you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
  11. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
  12. Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it, and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Seeing as how old school programmers think like Klingon programmers, I believe that it can be reasonably assumed that all old programmers are Klingon.

(Found on /.)

AdSense for Feeds

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Looks like the inevitable intrusion of advertising into RSS feeds just gained a major player, as Google‘s Adsense for Feeds program has just been announced.

On the one hand, I can kind of see where quite a few people might be happy about this. As more and more people read their news through RSS feeds, fewer people are as likely to visit a website and see their ads, and revenue drops.

At the same time — hey, that’s one of the things I like about RSS feeds. While I’ve not yet unsubscribed from a feed because it started carrying advertising, it is a little bit annoying. Not very, at this stage, as so far all the ads are at the tail end of each post and can easily be ignored, but I’d still be happier without ads.

So, while I do use Google’s AdSense program on my site (as unobtrusively as possible while still allowing for the occasional check to hit my mailbox), I’ll not be dropping ads into any of my RSS feeds. The way I figure it, the miniscule amount of extra revenue it might generate isn’t at all offset by the annoyance it could cause my readers (and since the ads annoy me, I’ll work on the assumption that they probably annoy others, too).

iTunes “Lords of the Rhymes (Kool-Aid Brothers)” by Lords of the Rhymes (2003, 5:03).