So, I’m home sick from work today and bored as heck.  In an effort to cheer me up my friend Robin pointed me to an Amazon.com link for Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz.

That quite possibly might be the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. Who in their right mind would buy a perishable food item online? Especially considering that with shipping and handling to get the item to your household without spoiling it might cost you as much as 10 times the price of going to your local store.

The best part by far is the product reviews, all 835 (and counting) of them that get a good laugh at the absurdity of the idea.  A worthwhile read.

For knowing exactly how to put it.

That is all

-J

The Prestige was everything a good movie should be. It had everything: thrills, suspense, mystery, heartbreak, humor and romance.

Much applause for Chistopher Nolan who really put together a fine film. I was also floored by the excellent cast and the stellar performances all around.

2006 has been a great year for movies, I’m curious what the holiday season will bring.

Apparently Brandon Flowers, lead singer of The Killers, was a bit annoyed by Green Day’s 2005 DVD ‘Bullet In a Bible’. In particular the performance of American Idiot and how Billie Joe pumps the audience during it.

“I just thought it was really cheap,” he explained. “To go to a place like England or Germany and sing that song - those kids aren’t taking it the same way that he meant it. And he [Billie Joe Armstrong] knew it.”

After reading the article I tend to agree with him. There are parts of ‘Bullet In A Bible’ that kinda struck me as Green Day deliberately missing their own point and playing up anti-American hatred. That said, to get offended is kinda ridiculous if you ask me. What were they supposed to do, not play the song?

That said the phenomenon he’s referring to does bother me. While I was in Ireland in 2004 there were a ton of kids wearing ‘Not My President’ shirts with swastikas drawn on Bush’s forehead. I wore that shirt with pride as an American just as I sing along to American Idiot. With pride in my nation and what it stands for, in civil disagreement of my government’s policies. Not because I hate my nation, but because I love it. Somehow I don’t think those kids in Europe get that. In that sense I agree with Flowers and it scares me.
It’s just a shame it he’s saying it a year too late and for shamless self promotion:

The Killers frontman said he believed that his band’s new album ‘Sam’s Town’ is a much better representation of America.

“People need to see that, really, there are the nicest people in the world here!” he declared. “I don’t know if our album makes you realise that. But I hope it’s from a more positive place.”

(Via Punknews)

I already put this on my del.ico.us but I figured it needed more attention because it was that damn good…. More rotoscoping and compositing! I’m sure you’re thrilled oh fictitious reader.

Special Effects house Buzz Imaging shows off how it made the effects used in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The clip showcases some incredible 3d modeling, rotoscoping and compositing work and makes it almost look easy. Don’t be fooled, this sort of thing takes days, weeks even months to get right. But it’s still incredible.

(Via Daring Fireball)

Wow… this makes my stomach turn but I cannot believe how true it is, this guy is a genius.Why Paris Hilton mattersIt’s incredible, hilarious, but incredible how right on this is. This should be cause for a great deal of thinking. I never imagined that something so superficial and worthless could be such a good model for success.(Via Digg)

So, I’m not really a big anime fan or that much of a video editor
but this blew my mind. I can only imagine how many hours this took to complete.

If you’re completely confused, let me explain. This guy noticed that Japanese cartoons or ‘anime’ tends to have a lot of running scenes and decided to do something with it. He spend hours combing over cartoons, isolating scenes and editing down shots to combine them fluidly and create one project. He wasn’t content with just cutting scenes together. He went into the video and used a process called rotoscoping to isolate individual characters from their shots and lay them out in other ones.

Think Roger Rabbit, Lord of the Rings and Forrest Gump.

Painstaking and time consuming to say the least. Excellent work by this Istiv guy, best of luck to him.

(Via Boing Boing)

So I haven’t updated in a while… sorry about that, I’ll work on it. Not that anyone really reads this but I do eventually plan to work on things and keep it updated regularly, perhaps even come up with a reason to come here.

So, I purchased an X-Box 360 last week and I’m in love all over again. I haven’t been this addicted to anything since I first found Flickr.

Around this time last year, I was really into Halo 2. I even wrote a few blog entries about it on my old site.

Admittedly I was obsessed… I had just purchase Major League Baseball 2K5 and was getting into that and Tony Hawk’s Underground then my optical drive on my X-Box unceremoniously stopped working. I decided it wasn’t worth investing in a new system and that I’d wait till I could get my hands on a 360.

So here I am, I’m back… and I’m addicted all over again. I’ve already upgraded to MLB 2K6 and I’m back on Halo 2 playing tons of maps and playlists that are completely foreign to me.. and I’m loving it.

My addiction though is starting to scare me. I think I have a problem. Since getting back into things I find myself downloading all sorts of X-Box widgets and programs to integrate the features of the system with my Mac.

As far as updating the site this has it’s ups and downs… It’s bad because I’ll have less time to write, good because I’ll have something to write about, and bad because… seriously who wants to read me ranting about xbox? Hmm I’ll have to work on that.

I promise though to work on this more and supply a reason to come here. For starters I plan to bring my old entries over to here and I also plan to integrate the page as much as possible with the other web services I use. You’ll notice on the right you can now find a link to my X-Box Live gamercard and an RSS feed of my latest Halo matches.

I told you I have a problem.

Anyway just posting really to say hello and that I’m not dead. So ‘Hi’

So recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Streetlight Manifesto and the earlier projects of their singer Tomas Kalnoky.

Tomas was the original singer / writer for the uber popular ska act, Catch 22, most notably on their ‘Keasbey Nights’ album which many will argue to be Catch’s best (or only good) album. Well back before Catch, in like 1995 Tomas was in a ‘punk’ band entitled: Gimp.

After Gimp disbanded one song by Tomas on their album, ‘Supernothing,’ was reworked from a slow ‘emo’ esq acoustic song, to a faster more upbeat version that appears on Keasbey Nights. The original really has it’s own merits as a version for being so different and is actually a favorite among many of their fans. Sadly the only copies of this album out on the internet sound like shit as they’ve been taken from tape recordings that it seems were never really good quality to begin with.

Tonight I had a bit of free time and I was playing around with Soundtrack Pro for the first time and decided to throw Supernothing into the program to play with and to see if I could do anything about the quality. I was surprised with the results. I managed to correct the volume problems and remove almost all the tape hiss / noise that was crapping up the song. I’m impressed with Soundtrack and how easy it actually was to do without distorting the audio in the song, and that someone like myself who is virtually tone deaf could manage to do something with it in a matter of minutes.

Anyway I’ll let you be the judge of my work.

You can checkout the original here:
http://skachilles.com/music/gimp/11-Supernothing.mp3

And my cleaned up version:
http://www.subism.com/audio/gimp/supernothing.mp3

The immediate difference is subtle but really evident at loud volumes, through a car stereo or headphones. The original has a strong annoying hiss from the tape and is recorded at a lower volume. Using soundtrack I managed to clean up all the hiss / noise and boost the volume to that of a normal recording which in my opinion makes it vastly more listen-able than before. I’m debating doing more of this type of thing with some other projects, including ‘Rules of the Game’ Catch 22’s pre Keasbey demo that is also only on tape, but I’d like some feedback on how people think this sounds first.