Corporate Sponsorship. Heh heh

I decided it was time to do some restructuring on the Anti Spam Website at Virtu Software. That thing has been around almost as long as the VS site itself, and has never had any redesign work to improve the original layout.

So I rebuilt it from scratch yesterday.

And the title of this blog post is "Corporate Sponsorship. Heh heh", because of this silly piece of writing I added to the Spam site:

Corporate Sponsorship

Enjoy.

Good Will Ends At The Canadian Border

So, I was up late last night (big surprise, right?) and happened to catch some political advertisements and discussions. You know me. There's not much I dislike more than politics. Well, I dislike spam more than politics, but that's about it. (And if you combine politics and spam don't even get me started on that!

Anyway. Back on topic. The topic under discussion was the Racino in Washington County.

Someone said: "Yes, slot machines will make two or three people rich. But it will steal the livelihood from so many moms and pops right here in Washington county."

Now, if I was trying to defend the Racino, I think I would have said something like: "There's no stealing involved! The moms and the pops choose to put their money down." Or maybe: "Stealing their livelihood? One quarter at a time? If they have enough time to lose their livelihood one quarter at a time, they obviously don't have jobs, which means they don't have much livelihood to lose!" Or, possibly: "Only someone as numb as a pounded thumb doesn't realize that in order to turn a profit, the odds have to be against them. So it's their own fault if they waste their money."

Those are the best I could come up with.

But the folks who really were trying to defend the Racino came up with something much better. Here it is: "Statistics show that it won't be the moms and pops here in Washington county who lose their livelihood. It'll be thousands of visitors from over the border in Canada."

So. There you have it. Let's care about the moms and pops right here in Maine, but all pretense of good will and concern ends at the border.

Canadians - fend for yourselves! :D

This message has been brought to you by the CFTPOPTOTSOTB: "Campaign For The Protection Of Pounded Thumbs On This Side Of The Border"

Norton 360: 360 Degrees of Nothing

You may recall I spent an entire day installing Norton 360 (internet security software) on my computer. If you don't recall that, click here: Norton 360 fiasco.

I suppose I'm a bit of an optimist, because even after all that, I still hoped the software would work well.

HA HA HA HA!

Aside from the fact that my computer now runs as slowly as molasses going uphill in summer (note: people say "in winter", but I always figure, in summer its uphill velocity is even greater in the negative direction, so that's a better expression), Norton 360 has this nasty habit of - without warning - shutting itself off.

I'll be browsing the internet when all of a sudden a bright red message will appear at the top of my screen: Browsing not safe: Auto-Protect off. So from here one of two things happen:

1. I double click the Norton 360 icon in my system tray, and it says: "PC Security: Secured" And no matter what I do, Norton continues to give me two contradictory messages: "Your computer is secured" and "Your computer is not secured".

2. I double click the Norton 360 icon in my system tray, and it says: "PC Security: Not Secure" Of course, when it says that, there's a link to FIX the problem. So I click that. And nothing happens. And I click it again. And, once again, nothing happens.

In either case, there is only one solution to the problem.

Reboot the computer.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to reboot my computer. :P

Hiking Table Rock and Baldpate

Well, in case you didn't know, Ben and Bobby and I hiked Table Rock, West Baldpate, and Baldpate yesterday. It was an unusual hike...lots of fun and a bit of excitement thrown in. In all, about seven hours of hiking between Rte 26 in Newry, and East B Hill Road in Andover. (although that wasn't the end of the hike, since Ben made the mistake of parking his truck at the Appalachian Trail, thinking it was a different trail head, about 2.5 miles away. Yeah, that's right...when we got to the "end" of our hike, we weren't anywhere near the vehicle!)

Anyway, there's something I wrote about the hike here: October Climb, and something else here: Hike Report: Table Rock, West Baldpate, Baldpate.

One very strange and eerie part of the day was standing near the peak of West Baldpate and seeing this:



What makes it so eerie is that fact that directly in front of me as I'm taking that picture there is a mountain peak. I know it's there, but all I can see is clouds, like a blanket of white all around me.

By the way, if you look at the pictures I posted with the hike report, you'll see quite an amazing difference in climate, between the peak and the waterfall...strange to think those two pictures were taken on the same day, less than three miles apart!

Television = The New Movies

The movie industry is in serious trouble. It's gradually being replaced, and most people don't even realize it.

This summer I went to the movie theater pretty much every weekend. That's quite a bit of movie-going for me. I'd get home from a week of camp, and have a day before I needed to head out again, and I never really felt like doing much "social". Sitting in a half-empty movie theater watching a movie was about the level of social involvement I craved: none of the actors ever wanted anything from me.

None of the movies I watched this summer really knocked my socks off, and some were huge disappointments.

Take the movie Transformers, for example.

This movie was such a huge disaster that it gives an entirely new meaning to the phrase "distaster movie". When I got half-way through the movie, I suddenly realized, I cared so little about any of the characters that I really couldn't have cared less how the movie ended.

I kid you not. They could have blown up all the transformers, and all the main characters, and I would have thought it was a satisfactory ending.

Who do you blame that on? Do you blame it on the actors? The script writer? The director? Maybe a little bit of each of those.

Well, yesterday I stumbled on an interview with one of the visual effects guys - an interview in which he talked about the upcoming sequel NOOOOOO! And the interview made it quite apparent that they have no idea what made the first movie so very bad. Which means they're going to make all of his mistakes all over again...

He was bragging about how the next Transformers movie is going to be more "ambitious", and here are a couple things he said:

"they're going to raise the tight-wire walker a little bit higher next time"

Here's a clue for you...the problem with the first movie was not the special effects. In fact, it would be nice if you paid as much attention to creating believable, interesting characters as you paid to having high action, clever special effects. After watching a Transformer transform in a truck for the seventeen millionth time, some of us would like to see something that makes us care about those trucks.

And here's the other comment, that just raised the goosebumps on my arm: "And so they want to really keep the characters rich"

Did you catch that? They want to keep the characters rich. Implication being...they think the characters were rich in the first place. They think they succeeded in creating deep, believable, rich characters in the first movie. So they have no intention of doing anything different in the second movie.

In other words, they're all excited about cranking out another appallingly bad movie!

The title of this post is Television = The New Movies, and I started out by saying the movie industry is in serious trouble. Let me explain what I mean by that.

For the last couple years I've been making a prediction that eventually the movie industry is going to get replaced by high quality television shows.

Why? There are a few reasons for this...

High profile, talented actors are not afraid to settle into television shows any more. In the past, the well known actors wouldn't touch a television series. Now that seems to be changing; actors who are already known to us because of movies are willing to cross the great divide and join a TV show cast.

Television shows are now able to produce an acceptable quality of visual effects within their budgets. In addition, since television has always run on a tighter budget than movies, they've never had the luxury of falling into the "Transformers" trap of thinking that their show has to be about special effects. In a television show, the special effects, no matter how good or bad, are rarely the focus of the show.

It used to be that people said "you can do more in a movie, because you have more time to develop plot, character, etc." But somewhere along the line, someone realized, in fact, that is simply not true. Because while a single television show is limited to forty-five minutes, a season can have twenty to twenty-five episodes. And if you get a writer/writers talented enough to create a single, carefully planned plotline, then you can do far more with television than you can with a movie.

Which brings me to another key point about television: talented writers are joining the shift to television, along with the talented actors. Based on what I've seen in the last year, if you want quality, you need to stay in your living room, and not head out to the movie theaters.

Television is now producing shows which have enormous plotlines, complete with all the character development and exciting plots that movies used to have, but no longer do.

When you have shows like Lost, 24 and (to a lesser degree) Smallville, on nights those shows are on, people are far more likely to sit at home and watch a set of characters they've grown to love and care about, than to spend $10 to watch a bunch of special effects and a handful of characters they don't know, and who will be in and out of their lives in less than two hours.

These shows I've mentioned (particularly Lost and 24) are essentially one enormous movie. 24 is a series in which each season is essentially an 18 hour movie with one single, carefully planned plotline. Lost still maintains a bit of the episodic quality of older television shows, but it is clear that they have a single cohesive idea and goal that is going to play itself out over several seasons. Smallville is very definitely episodic in nature, but it is clear (even though I've only watched two seasons) that with Clark and Lex starting out as good friends, the writers have some sort of long range plan to "unresolve" this complex friendship. (I think the Clark-Lex friendship is one of the things that makes this show work as well as it does - far more than the silly teen romances. We start out with the knowledge that Clark and Lex end up as arch-enemies, and we come back week after week to find out how in the world they get from where they are to where we know they'll end up)

Of course, the fact that Television is becoming the New Movies, raises an interesting question...

Is this a good thing?

The upside is that now if I want to be entertained, I don't have to spend $10.00 to go out.

The downside is that now if I want to be entertained, I don't have to spend $10.00 to go out.

Heh heh...bet you didn't see that coming. :)

Unfortunately, it is far too easy to get "addicted" to one of these television shows. And if you get addicted to many of them, you're frittering away far too much of your life in front of a television.

If you like analogies, here's one for you:

Movie is to Television as Arcade game is to X-Box.

When I was growing up, most people who wanted to play computer games had to get together a sizeable stack of quarters and take a trip to the mall. Now you don't have to even leave the comfort of your own home to waste an entire day playing games.

The entertainment industry, is making it easier and easier all the time for us to waste our lives. And that's not a good thing.