Garfield Minus Garfield

Hilarious. Check the site for a whole collection of these.

Garfield Minus Garfield

Who would have guessed that when you photoshop Garfield out of Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

Hulu.com Review / Preview

If you’ve kept up with the whole NBC vs. Apple battle you’ve probably heard of Hulu.com - the NBC Universal & News Corp venture which aims to provide a YouTube like viral online distribution model while allowing them to still generate ad revenue.

The general opinion of Hulu.com seems to think of it as just another joke of a big corporation completely misunderstanding their audience. Based on what I’ve heard about it, I somewhat shared that opinion.

Well, today I got my private invite to the Hulu so I could try it out myself.

Conclusion?

Hulu.com rocks!

Selection

Hulu.com offers full episodes of a variety of television shows and even some movies. Some shows are current (Heroes, The Office, Scrubs, The Family Guy) and others are older classics (Arrested Development, 24, Firefly, Doogie Howser, The A-Team) and of course, there are many clips from SNL. The selection is somewht scattered with some shows offering only the most recent seasons and others all seasons (24 oddly only offers season 1 and season 6… perhaps there are different rights across seasons?).

The search seems to work decently and browsing is simple enough. Similiar to YouTube there is a Popular section, both for episodes and simply for episode clips. There is also a simple commenting which is unobtrusive for those that don’t care much for it (such as myself - it drives me crazy that half of the YouTube videos I see have comments laced with swearing and/or spamming). The flash based browser is a pain in the butt to browse Saturday Night Live clips, however, as it only shows you 5 episodes/clips at a time (SNL has 404 available).

Advertising

The advertising is the bit that most people seem to complain about the most when hearing about Hulu.com… honestly the ads are unobtrusive enough that it was not a real bother.

Clips:

There is a small video ad following the clip, not required to watch. There also is a 15/20 second ad that I saw about once every 4 or 5 clips, I believe these are based on overall viewing time, not base don the number of viewed clips.

Episodes:

There is a short 6 second “sponsored by” clip preceding playback, then there are short 15-30 second ads every 20ish minutes - much better than live TV and so short they didn’t bother me much at all

Banner Ads:

There is a banner ad at the top of the screen which, frankly, is standard fare for any website and doesn’t even affect anything when you go full screen.

Sharing

One of the other big reasons for Hulu.com is to capture the viral aspect that YouTube has. They were smart to include an easily accessible “embed” link for every episode or every clip. In addition to this is the ability to add a custom clip, just select an episode and Hulu will allow you to select a start and end time to your video embed.

The only part that stinks about the embedding is, like Youtube embedded videos, it does not allow for full-screen, which is one of my big pet peeves. When Hulu.com comes out of beta and goes public with version 1.0, hopefully these embedded links will have a “See this video on Hulu.com” link to allow access to full-screen.

Quality

YouTube video quality is crap. It is insane to me that I have a super high speed connection and yet ever-time some cool video is going around, its been posted to youtube and when I bump it to full-screen to watch, the pixels are bigger than Skittles, it’s ridiculous.

Hulu.com video is much needed and desired improvement. It’s flash video so I’m not 100% sure of the native resolution, but using a quick (and slightly imprecise) pixel counting trick it looks to be roughly 540x340. Not quite standard definition, but close enough to be a pleasant viewing experience.

High Definition

The Hulu Blog has a nice post reflecting their desire to provide HD content via Hulu, even detailing some of the ways they intend to do so.

Thanks to the efficient compression of the H.264 video codec, that day may be coming sooner than anticipated. Today we’re excited to launch an HD Gallery featuring a selection of High Definition video clips at 1280 x 720 resolution. Those of you with a fast internet connection of 2,400 Kbps or higher, the latest build of Adobe Flash Player 9, and a fast computer (check out our system requirements) can stream these High Definition clips and preview the future. We realize the requirements are still fairly hefty, but we know and empathize with those of you who like to stay on the cutting edge and wanted to give you a sneak peek of streaming high definition video.

The current HD Gallery consists of just a couple of shorts and movie trailers, but it is a start and I’m excited for the future potential here.

Downloadable Content

Simple. There is none.

Nada.

Nothing

Nosirree.

Hulu.com is a great online video streaming service, but it does not replace what the iTunes Music Store offered — downloadable video content available at a moments notice (with or without an internet connection) on your computer, iPod, iPhone, or (when combined with an Apple TV or iPod/iPhone AV cable) on your television.

Conclusions

Hulu.com is a huge step forward for online video and for television networks evolving to the new TiVo/Torrent world — viewing media when we want it, not when they supply it. The video quality is a huge improvement and the ability to embed entire episodes (though with small ads) to your blog, myspace, or wherever is a surprising and happily accepted move. It is not a replacement for the iTunes distribution previously had and I hope that a deal with NBC and Apple can be resolved. But that said I highly regard Hulu.com and am considering jerry-rigging up my Mac Mini to the TV so I can watch this great cntent with my wife from the comfort of our couch.

I’ve embedded the pilot episode of Arrested Development as a quick test and to introduce anyone who’s never seen this great show to give it a try. My wife introduced it to me and I absolutely love it… I can now share in the frustration of so many others over its cancellation. Enjoy.

Burnout Paradise Demo

I just wanted to rave a little bit about a new demo that’s been released on the Xbox 360 - Burnout Paradise.

Burnout is a longstanding racing franchise that is known for it’s adrenaline pumping action and chaotic destruction. I’ve played previous games in the series a bit but never really got into it, Paradise has changed up the formula and I really like the new feel.

Though open-ended environments have ruined some games in the past (Need For Speed Underground 2), it happens to work really well in my favorite Xbox 360 game, Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Burnout Paradise feels like it takes NFS:MW to the next level with beautiful graphics, tons of stunt-style action, a plethora of exploration bonuses, and a destruction model that trumps anything else out there.

The crashes just have to be seen to be believed.

Not everyone agrees with the franchise change to an open-world environment… Matt Brett sums it up with:

Burnout Paradise, A Great Franchise Ruined

If this demo is any indication of what’s in store for the final game (and it mostly like is since the game ships in just over a month), Burnout Paradise suuucks!

I can see some of his concerns but I think the demo simply has a learning curve.

(...my comment on mattbrett.com)

My initial play-through left me pretty much with the same opinion, even though I have never owned a previous Burnout game (nor played one for more than 10 minutes). However, being obsessed with destruction as I am, I played it far longer than I would have just to watch my car beautifully explode in several different ways.

Eventually I got bored with that (sort of) but but that point had actually learned a bit of the map and wanted to try out some of the events. The events again left me with somewhat of a stale taste in my mouth, the “Stunts” mode I ended up with a similarly low score of something like 4,000 points to the 50,000 required. However after trying all these events over you begin to catch the knack required and at a certain point the events “click.”

Another thing that I think the demo fails to illustrate well is that there are events EVERYWHERE in the game. You don’t notice them much as most of them are disabled in the demo, but basically every single stoplight in the game is an event of some sort.

I definitely agree that the lack of a “restart event” option is sorely lacking, but I absolutely love the open sandbox environment and really see this as the only big down-side, the rest being more of sharp learning curve.

And as for the “stunts” mode… the key is to know how to add multipliers to your score (big air, smashing billboards, corkscrews, etc) and knowing how to chain stuff together. It is simple to chain as you cruise from one ramp-rich area to another simply by tapping the turbo button and keeping an eye on the little count-down clock (which tells you when a combo chain is about to be broken). After a few tries I’ve gotten combo scores of close to 200,000 points without too much effort.

And as others have mentioned… this game is gorgeous and the crashed and wrecks are a sight to be seen.

Be sure to download it and let me know what you think. And if you love it as I do, make sure to let Matt Brett know just how wrong he is. ;)

NetNewsWire Review

Shawn Blanc posted a great, in-depth review of NetNewsWire, a popular RSS Reader for Mac.

I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite basically since I first started following blogs via RSS and since I first made the big “switch” to Mac — i.e. about 4 years. I recently shelled out a small sum of cash and upgraded from NetNewsWire Lite to the full-featured NetNewsWire and have been highly enjoying the ability to sync my feeds across several computers via NetNewsWire’s NewsGator feed syncing. In fact, I’ve ditched Google Reader completely as NewsGator’s iPhone interface far surpassed Google (although I’ve heard Google Reader’s iPhone interface has improved) and it now syncs with my favorite RSS program.

The best feature of NetNewsWire is it’s simple [ spacebar ] navigation. Simply hit space to go to the next unread article, then ht space again to page down in that article… once you’ve reached the end simple hit space to move onto the next. It makes catching up on your favorite feeds a cinch.

Make sure to check out Shawn’s highly detailed review for more.

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Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 Announced

Most-played game of 2007 for me and pretty much all of my friends… let’s hope the sequel brings the same magic with some revamped Terrorist Hunt modes.

And the wait is only until March 2008… if that release date holds.

Team Rainbow Returns to Celebrate 10th Anniversary of Rainbow Six Franchise in Sin City in 2008

San Francisco — November 20, 2007 – Today Ubisoft, one of the world’s largest video game publishers, announced that it is developing Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® Vegas 2 for next-generation consoles and PC. Developed at Ubisoft Montreal by the same team that created the award-winning Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas, the highly anticipated sequel is scheduled for a March 2008 release. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is the sixth iteration in the wildly successful Rainbow Six franchise which celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2008 with more than 16 million units sold worldwide to date.

“Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas took the gaming world by storm in 2006 thanks to its technological advances and gameplay innovations,” said Yves Guillemot, president and chief executive officer at Ubisoft. “We are convinced that Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 will remain a pioneer in the highly competitive first person shooter genre, bringing more of what Rainbow Six fans love to the table.”

The highly anticipated sequel to the winner of numerous awards, including IGN’s 2006 Best First Person Shooter and Best Online Game, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 will push the franchise to new heights by adding new gameplay features and even more stunning visuals. Players will encounter an intense solo campaign that uses new tactical possibilities in various locations around Sin City. As expected with one of the pioneer franchises for online multiplayer Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 will also break new ground in both co-op and adversarial modes, while providing unprecedented interaction between the solo and multiplayer modes.

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‘Tis The Season To Design

So, as you may have noticed… I have not launched the new site design I first mentioned a month and a half ago. I have been working on it — a lot actually. The problem is I’m also attempting to do a complete redesign of my church’s website, learn and become deeply familiar with some new web technologies (ExpressionEngine, and BluePrint CSS, learn and become deeply familiar with me new wife, and work a full time job.

Needless to say, things are not going along as quickly as I’d hoped, especially with the church website having a tentative January due date and with the incoming holiday season. We shall see.

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REVIEW: Future Of Forestry - Twilight

5 / 5 stars

About 6 months ago ago I was in some christian book store with my wife (then fiance) and decided I wanted to find some new christian band to listen to.  I really enjoyed the album artwork on Future Of Forestry’s Twilight (which was actually released January 23, 2007) and on a whim picked it up. Boy, did I score big.

Somehow these guys just have not gotten enough press because I had never heard of them before and have still not heard anything about them since picking up Twilight. It is truly a crime that they haven’t gotten any publicity because this album is fantastic! Future Of Forestry has a very diverse but unique sound that really needs to be heard by the world. There are splashes of U2 and Switchfoot but with some of the more emotion-evoking mood-driven sound that you would expect from indie rockers like Snow Patrol or Death Cab For Cutie. Future of Forestry even has a taste of (the amazing) Sigur Ros in the way they paint their songs with an almost film score-esque ambient undertone.

I couldn’t recommend an album much higher than this so if you get a chance, go pick it up (or buy it on iTunes — Twilight is available as a DRM-free “iTunes Plus” purchase).

01 Open Wide

4 / 5 stars
Great opening track, with soaring vocals and guitars that lead a great melody. Fans of Switchfoot will enjoy this track and is one of the more traditional-style tracks of the album.

02 All I Want

5 / 5 stars
Heck yeah… here is where FoF starts to stand out. They do a great job of evoking mood through their music and this song is a great example of such. I absolutely love the guitars in the verse that are almost seemingly random string plucks (harmonics?) that really give that eerie feeling of mystery. Not to mention the lyrics which are that of a worship song that I would love the worship team at my church to do sometime. This song rocks.

03 Twilight

4 / 5 stars
As this melodious laid-back groove plays you begin to realize how special the Twilight album truly is. Three tracks into the album and you’ve gotten three very different styles of music, all done very well and amazingly with enough of a sound to unite them — keeping the band from feeling like a jack of all trades/master of none. Future Of Forestry certainly knows who they are as a band, identifies what their sound is, and is fully aware of their ability to very their style skillfully. Also, the super simple drum track in this song is fantastic — I find myself drumming the unique pattern on my steering wheel whenever cruising to this song.

04 Speak To Me Gently

5 / 5 stars
My favorite song on the album — beautiful. This song amazes me with how absolutely simple it is, and how it just tugs on the emotion and gently demands to be heard. I love the high harmonies in the second verse, not overdone but just enough to let the song progress. The lyrics are so simple yet so beautiful, this song just masters beauty in simplicity.

I’m searching the stars, in desperate hours, bound to find meaning

God shows a face, in this desolate place, and tenderness meets me

05 Thinking Of You

3 / 5 stars
This tracks reminds me a bit of Snow Patrol, though I don’t think they quite hit it as well as I would’ve liked. A good track but lacking the emotion and mood evoked from previous tracks.

06 Sunrising

5 / 5 stars
These guys are amazing! I still can’t believe I’ve never seen them mentioned anywhere and got them in a random “this album cover looks cool” purchase. Here are some more of their signature soaring vocals and guitars with some really nice subtle piano played under the leading sounds. This song has an epic feeling that builds with such precision, it feels like it could make a great score. This might be my second favorite track on the album.

07 Sacred Place

4 / 5 stars
I love the sweeping sound of this song, it’s a great worship song that weaves between a joyful mood in praise and a softer more ominous and mysterious emotion. And the female background vocals are add a really cool touch.

08 You And I

3 / 5 stars
An okay song which is masked by an awful instrumental-riff/interlude thing which starts off the song and shows up once more to hurt the song. Other than that, this song is decent, though a disappointment when compared to the rest of the album. If it weren’t for the horrible whiny intro I probably wouldn’t skip this track whenever it came up.

09 Sanctitatis

5 / 5 stars
I can’t speak enough of the beauty this band has, and this song is more of a testament of that than any other. The lyrics are simply a few strings of latin which speak to the holiness of God and they are sung with pure passion on more soaring vocals. This is the sort of track you just close your eyes to and let the music just fill you. This song has, on several occasions, brought my wife and I to silence while driving as we try take it all in. Absolute Beauty.

Vere Sanctus es, Domine Fons omnis sanctitatis, Domine

10 If You Find Her

4 / 5 stars
A sweet simple acoustic song about a girl. The kind of song you would hear at an “open mic night” and be enamored with, super catchy and easy to hum along with.

11 Gazing

4 / 5 stars
Fantastic song, the most likely candidate for a future worship set at my church. If this band had gotten more acknowledgment, I would imagine this to be a single that would have gotten them far in the CCM market.

12 Stay Beside Me

3 / 5 stars
Though it is probably one of my least listened to tracks, Stay Beside Me is actually a good worship song that could also easily be worked into a Sunday morning worship set. I’ve neglected this song being at the end of the album and not super exciting, but I think I’m going to have to pay it some more attention as it truly is a great worship song.

13 Hidden Track

4 / 5 stars
A nice worship ballad to end the song. They excel in creating an the ethereal dreamy landscape once again overlayed with the haunting repeating lyric:

There is nothing like You, there is nothing else.

Leopard Counts Pixels

By now you’ve seen all the amazing cool little updates that Apple’s OS X Leopard brings to the table for all of us Apple users. And, if you’re smart, you’ve updated already. Seriously, Leopard bring so much to the table it would be a crime to not upgrade.

One feature I have not seen mentioned anywhere that I just noticed is a small but useful little tweak done to OS X’s little screenshot utility. There are 2 ways of accessing this — if you’re a keyboard shortcuts kinda guy such as myself, you can simply press CMD-SHIFT-4 to give yourself a selection cursor for selecting a portion of the screen you would like to take a screenshot. Simply select a target and Boom, a PNG is created and placed on your desktop.

That feature is not new.

What is new however is a nifty little addition to that selection cursor — a readout of current screen pixel location via X / Y coordinates (I’d show the evidence of this but, for obvious reasons, I wasn’t able to secure a screenshot.). Now I can easily see that the os x menu-bar has a height of 21 pixels. Pretty neat. One potential downside is that OS X considers the top-left-most pixel to be 0,0 rather than 1,1.

If you aren’t a keyboard shortcut kinda guy you can also get this with the application Grab which is located in your ~/Applications/Utilities folder, though (oddly) this gives a slightly different cursor which includes a yellow tooltip-ish background behind the pixel count.

Additionally, CMD-SHIFT-3 does a fullscreen screen capture.

Redesigning (again)

Yes, I’m working on another redesign… at this point I’ve finished my initial photoshop mockup design and am now looking at figuring out some of the code end of things. It will likely be awhile before this design sees the light of day as I’m also going to try to shift from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine. This should allow some flexibility for what I’m trying to do.

Design Goals

The main goal for this redesign is to highlight my design/art/photography without taking away from the blog aspects I have currently. I don’t want to lose anything I have currently but I want it to look cleaner and really let my creations shine. Because of this the design will be mostly grey and much more toned down than I am used to doing, I’m hoping this will allow the art to really pop.

Worship - A Rant

I want to mini-rant a little bit about something. It’s not a really big deal but I just saw yet one more post about the “misuse” of the word worship in churches today.

It seems to be a really popular thing these days to rant about using “worship” to describe music in church services and how that’s a bad thing. That worship should be in everything we do, in all things all the time we should be in worship. How we shouldn’t call them the worship team but rather just the music team, because all the church staff should be known as part of the worship team.

Maybe it’s just me, but that is just plain stupid.

We call the musical portion of church service the worship because that is precisely what it is, in all intent and purpose. I don’t know the bible super well but I’m pretty sure there’s a verse that says something like ‘worship in all things...” I can’t remember what it is. The point here is in other things worship is possible… we serve others and that can be worship, we give our tithe and that can be worship, we work and that can be worship, etc.

The difference being that Sunday morning when we sing, we are singing exclusively for the purpose of praising and worshiping our God. We’re laying everything else aside and saying “God, we praise You and love You for all You’ve done for us, You are so good that we want to take this time to lay everything aside and focus completely on only You.”

And that is why on Sunday mornings we call it worship.