I rented Destroy All Humans! from Gamefly (the Xbox version). I liked it but it's incredibily short (and I don't usually knock games for shortness). Put it this way - I received it Wednesday (and Karin and I went out Wednesday night so I only got to play it about an hour), and sent it back on Saturday, after finishing this story mode. It's fun, and some of the dialog is great, but I'm hard pressed to put a ringing endorsement on a game that only had about 7-8 hours of play. I'd certainly be upset if I paid $40 or $50 for it. It's worth renting, but I'd have to recommend a pass on buying until it hits $20 or so. And that's even with only playing about an hour on Friday - as I spent most of Friday rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in preparation for the release of the new one. I like the new Harry Potter a great deal - more than Order of the Phoenix. Without getting into spoiler territory Harry is still a teenager but he's moved past the whining and complaining and general snottiness that dominated a lot of volume 5. I read #6 entirely yesterday which I did not mean to do but it is a real page-turner. I'm not sure if I think it's as good as the first or second books - the tone of the series has developed and changed so much that they are sort of apples and oranges. It's much darker and grimmer - which is good for most fiction but has this weird feeling of . . . meanness when applied to what was once seen as a children's story. I'm not sure that's the right word but a lot has happened and people have changed quite a bit from a Harry that couldn't quite believe that magic was real and was excited by Chocolate Frogs and Every Flavor Beans. It does make me impatient for volume seven, but I imagine that's a way off. I should have a book on the shelves before seven hits. :-)

The Guardian is running a fabulous contest. The gist is that it's known that some major character dies in the new Harry Potter book and the popular favorite is Dumbledore. So they are having a contest for people writing Dumbledore's death scene in the style of various authors. I'm partial to the Scooby Doo, Douglas Adams, and Stephen Fry/Terry Prachett entries, myself. (I found it from Making Light.)

So everybody knew all along that transitioning to all digital TV in 2006 was crazy talk. But now it looks like the broadcasters are buying into 2009, with some caveats and restrictions. So the sticky widget is this - 15% of American households apparently use antennas to receive programming (as opposed to satellite or cable). In some of these households it would be an issue to buy a $50 box to convert the digital signal to analog so old sets could keep receiving programming. There's an aside about some households having cable or satellite and having a set somewhere in the house that still has a pair of rabbit ears on it. In the meantime the broadcasters have more spectrum than they should because they have both an analog AND a digital frequency. The disturbing side of this is that emergency services need new spectrum and the likely source is the analog freqs. So here's the part I don't get. Broadcast TV is advertiser supported (OK - PBS is a slight exception, but moving on.) So the concern here is broadcasting wanting to reach a set where the consumer is either unable or unwilling (and apparently part of the debate in Congress is whether to subsidize both categories or just the unable) to spend $50. Why do the advertisers even care about reaching this consumer? What's the disposable income of this market segment anyway? I mean OK if you produce a family that is so poor that they can't afford the $50 for their one TV and will lose all access to programming . . . I'll concede that is a very sad case. But don't they have bigger problems than whether or not they can continue to watch American Idol? I mean - even if you're going to give them $50 is it reasonable to spend that money on television? I just don't see why the advertisers care, and thus why the broadcasters care. Of course, I don't think advertising has ever adapted to HD. Back when I first got HD it was common for the commercial breaks to just show a network logo - they simply could not get enough commercials to fill the time. Even now - Karin and I just finished watching Battlestar Galactica in HD (on the Universal HD channel) and each episode was several minutes short because the commercial breaks were noticeably shorter. Now by all I understand the HD consumer is self-selected to be a desirable consumer demographic, right? I mean back in 2000 you could say that everyone who could receive HD programming had spent at least $500 on that capability. (That's what I paid for my first HD receiver and it was notable for being the cheapest HD receiver available then.) If you incorporate the TV set costs it's even higher - although that's trickier. I bought my current set for watching DVD's and playing videogames on. The fact that we watch TV on it is fairly incidental to me. But it's always mystified me why people ignore the fact there is particular HD advertising space available.

And today was going so well up until then . . . . Here's the deal - last week was non-productive for yours truly and not for any great reasons. Monday was holiday hijinks so that's understandable and Thursday got a little broken up by taking Schrodinger to the vet (no big deal - just annual checkup and booster shot), but I just never got a groove rolling on last week. Which means I roll into this week with a few leftover items - two in particular were that I need to backup the Mac (which I take very seriously these days :-)) and the monthly update to the linux box which hosts hiddenjester.com. On the writing front I wanted to do my final grammar edit on Chapter Four of Playing Cops & Robots and I had a brain flash - all three of these tasks can run in parallel because they use different CPUS and displays. The laptop has it's own screen, the linux box can grab the shared CRT & keyboard and once I have them both cranking I'll take the hardcopy of Chapter Four and my red pen into the living room or outside depending on temperature. Swell, flip the display over to the linux box - and it's all screwy. It looks like it's got a loose connection, but tracing all of that seems solid. Eventually I decide to reboot the box and see what happens. What happens is a black screen. Oh joyousness. OK, pull the box out and crack it open. Well there's a bunch of cat fur and dust inside it of course, but I expect that. After cleaning that out I can see there's a fan on the motherboard that isn't spinning. But that shouldn't prevent booting. I mean there's no POST beeps, there's no nothing. The DVD and the HD briefly access and then nothing. To cut the long story shorter that fan isn't working but that doesn't seem critical. Still I get to go to Fry's today. Yay. What was really broken is the GeForce 2 video card seems to have just crapped out. No real explanation - it just won't boot with that installed anymore. Fine - I've got an old ATI Mach 64 card lying about. It's PCI but I don't really care about the graphics performance of my linux box. Next - XWindows (the graphical system for Linux) won't start. Don't know why - the configuration looks good but the screen doesn't start successfully. The system itself is running - the web and mail server are up but the system update I wanted to do is now a graphical program - I don't think there is a character equivalent in Fedora Core 3 anymore. I finally punted on this - XWindows has one odd/cool feature in that you can run the display on a different computer. So I fired up X11 (another name for XWindows) on my Mac, logged into my linux box and ran the updater. I'm watching it reboot post updates now and assuming that goes well I'll post this. And drive to Fry's to replace the frackin' fan. But I'm going to spend at least two or three hours on this exercise today (more if I want to actually fix the graphics problem - but I'll probably see what a cheap AGP graphics card runs at Fry's) - and I still haven't looked at the Chapter Four edit - or started the backup on Kool-Aid. UPDATE I tried some hacking about and it's great comedy. Apparently the older card won't support 32 bit color (That doesn't sound right to me - but that's what it says in the log.) and the ATI driver won't support 16 bit color. Nice.

Statler and Waldorf (the Muppet balcony guys) are doing movie reviews now - go here I'm not sure how I feel about this - there are some funny lines in this episode, but these two don't like anything - so doing positive movie reviews is inevitably out of character. Yet the fundamental goal of the website is to drive movie traffic - so it seems like a bit of a conflict. In the first episode they give a pass to one movie and then savage another. (shrug) It seems to work OK, so my initial review is cautious optimism, with a healthy dash of "let's wait and see".