Comic Picks for 4/3/08

ACTION COMICS #864 $2.99
BLUE BEETLE #26 $3.50
DC UNIVERSE ZERO $0.50
GREEN LANTERN #30 $2.99
JSA CLASSIFIED #37 $2.99
TEEN TITANS #58 $2.99
TEEN TITANS YEAR ONE #4 (OF 6) $2.99
GREEN LAMA MAN OF STRENGTH #1 $6.95
LOCAL #11 (OF 12) (RES) (MR) $2.99
WIZARD MAGAZINE #200 PLATINUM 200 GREATEST CHAR CVR $5.99
NEW GODS DARKSEID ACTION FIGURE
NEW GODS LIGHTRAY ACTION FIGURE
NEW GODS ORION ACTION FIGURE

According to Diamond Comics Shipping List

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Wii Mario Kart

Went over to friend Jeff's house at lunch to play the new Wii Mario Kart. I even brought my own plate and rubber bands to make myself a makeshift wheel. The makeshift wheel worked pretty well. But using the wheel gets tiring, so after the first game, I switched to the classic controller.

Overall I'm afraid i have to say that I liked the downloadable N64 version better. The battle mode has really been changed for the Wii release. No longer can you just play as 4 friends. You now all have to play with 8 additional Robot AI karts. Wherein the N64 version you get to chase down your friends-- in this version human players are outnumbered 2-to-1 by the AI players, so you almost never get to attack your friends carts directly.

Also it's not a free-for-all, they force you to be on two teams, since there are 4 AI players on each team, it's actually possible for the human players to get 0s and yet if the AI's do well their team can still win. At times it felt like, why bother playing at all? Just leave it up to the AIs.

Same with the race, with 8 additional AI's most of the game, the human players don't even always break the top 5.

As to the graphics, some maps are nice, but others are dizzing as the extra blurred/shaded backgrounds can get abit much at times.

Overall, I like the N64 version way better, and it seems weird that Nintendo removed all that original player vs. player game play.

Update 4/29/08: 4:52pm: Jeff was reading more online about the game, and it looks like you may be able to turn off all those extra AI drivers. That would certainly make sense, and it seemed very odd to me when he said you couldn't, but normally Jeff knows these things and I don't question his expertise in these matters. It would certainly help things to get rid of all those extra AI players. But I still want Free-for-all Battle play instead of Team Battle only and I think I still like the simplicity of the graphics on the N64 version. But there you go. More details as things develop ;)

Update 5/1/08: 7:06am: Friend Jeff read the manual. You can turn off the Robot AI's afterall. Played it again last night. It makes a big big difference in the game. They do not have free-for-all battle though-- you have to play teams. I'm still a little torn between the two versions-- once you play Wii Mario Kart and then go back to the N64 version, the N64 version does feels very sluggish, and then of course there are dozens upon dozens of maps on the Wii version, many of which are cool-- if often very big. Also the single player version of the game looks very impressive. So I suppose, for Casual Kart fans, download the N64 version. If you want to invest some serious time into single cart or online cart play, go for the new Wii Mario Kart.

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Happy Tuesday!

I really need to get some more pictures on this blog, there have been way too many paragraphs of text lately.

Next couple days should be busy. I have some leftovers to work on today from yesterday’s work. I’m going to do a 4 day weekend. So that always requires a little extra hussle.

Today at lunch, I’m going over to Jeff’s to play the New Mario Kart. Hooray for midday Wii-break.

Anyway, that’s my excitement planned for the day.

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Random Non-Sequiters

Busy week at work again last week, therefore, lighter blogging.

» Whole month seems a little lighter on the blogging side than normal I suppose. Chalk some of that up to the work I've been doing on Adam and Comfort's The Uniques website as well as talking in their forum. Twittering has been absorbing a little of my internet attention of late too. Since the Twitters are being integrated into my blog via RSS-- they drop off slowly as new RSS Twitters are put in place. At first I was going to add some programming to my blog to permanently copy over the tweets into my own database, but lately I've found some charm in letting my twitters drop off one by one. In a world of internet permanence I like that there is that part of the blog that is transient.

» I did not get to see Friday's Battlestar Galactica yet, as I'm waiting for A&C to get back from Pittsburgh Comicon and I'm going to watch it with them. They are down at Pittsburgh right now, they got to meet the Chief there. I'll let them tell the story on their blog when they get back-- it being their story and all :)

» Grey's Anatomy returned this past week. Not a show I blog about here too much, generally I talk that one over with a couple girls at work, this week I also twittered back and forth on the topic a little- so since I have a bunch of random bits typed up, my side of that twittering conversation is below, I'll keep it in a nice little textbox so as to not overpower the folk that come to this blog for comic, action figure and more traditional expressions of geekness:

...anyway, good that Grey's is back.

» Just noticed that my # links at the top of my posts by the date/header haven't been working on the "current blog" page since I re-coded the site to integrate the twitter and flickr posts automatically into the scroll. doh! It's all fixed now.

» In other tech news, I think I'm going to drop my Vonage Home phone at the end of the month. I never use it and pretty much never have in the 2 to 3 years I've had it. I'm going to switch over all those businesses and such that you have to give a phone number, to my Grand Central number. So if for some reason the number with "04" on the end is the only number you have of mine. Email me and I'll send you the Grand Central one, or just keep using the cell like everyone else.

One of the reasons I kept the Vonage for so long, is that I wanted a back-up phone in case I ever lost the cell. But with Skype now installed on my EeePC, and disposable cell phones so easy to get in a jiffy (like at Meijer open 24 hours even)-- should I lose my cellphone, it shouldn't be too hard to go that route. I'll save $20 a month, which ain't alot, but why keep spending the $20?

» I had been getting most of my Web2.0 site info from eHub but I just added Techcrunch to my RSS feed. I've seen articles linked from Digg and such before, but I never stopped to look at their focus before. Nice site.

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Brightkite

» Someone give me an invite to Brightkite this morning. Brightkite is a SMS cellphone centric social service similiar to Twitter. However, whereby Twitter is mostly focussed on: "What are you doing?" Brightkite is focused on "Where are you at?"

You "check-in" with Brightkite telling it where you are from your cellphone, and it will tell your Brightkite friends or even complete strangers that are also nearby "where you are". As far I can tell, you have to check in manually. I don't see any built-in tracking thing. I'd actually find built-in tracking sortof interesting. It's inherently a creepy idea, but I think it would be novel to see my daily path traced out on a google map someday. Brightkite doesn't do anything that interesting yet. But the potential is there.

The other downside to Brightkite is that it would seem at first glance to be more useful if you are on a college campus or in another environment with alot of close together people who have the abillity to organize very spontaneously. Most of the people I know are not very spontaneous, they're generally people with their whole week planned out-- so I'm not sure their noticing I'm sitting in a coffee shop, at the mall, or at a restaurant down the street, is going to lend itself to them altering their already tightly planned out days.

There's still the other angle of the service that you could meet total strangers. Here's how that's supposed to work-- near as I can figure:
1. Another random Brightkite user near you updates their location.
2. You, being nearby, get a notification of that Brightkite person's nearness.
3. You look up that person and see their picture/profile on Brightkite.
4. They seem interesting, you find them nearby and start-up a conversation with them.

I think the above could work, but having to manually update your location is sortof the weak link in that scenario. If it was automatically tracking and updating your location and matching you up with people in realspace, then yeah that could catch on.

That's coming soon I think. Someone is going to work that out and partner with a cellphone service to make that happen. It's the sortof thing that seems possibile to be a killer app for Google's Android platform.

Anyway, Brightkite seems interesting and I might play with it for awhile.

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Gin, Television and the Social Surplus

Clay Shirky conference talk-- Gin, Television and the Social Surplus. This is one of the most insightful articles I've read in some time.

Excerpt:

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

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Apparitions Robbery/Shooting

A friend of mine sent me a link to WoodTV about a robbery/shooting at Apparitions last night. I found the above video on Fox17, but didn't see a good way to link to it.

The article, says that an employee got shot, but didn't have any more details. What kind of person robs an independent comic book store? That's incredibly F-cked up. If anyone has more details, leave a message or link in the comments.

Update: 4/26/08 5:14pm Additional information on MLive.com

Update: 4/28/08 8:53am A fundraising drive has been set up to help Dave with Medical bills etc.

Update: 4/28/08 1:50pm Coverage on The Beat

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Comic Picks for 4/23/08

BATMAN #675 $2.99
BIRDS OF PREY #117 $2.99
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 1 $2.99
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #20 $2.99
SUPERMAN BATMAN #47 $2.99
AVENGERS INVADERS SKETCHBOOK
AND of course the best NEW comic pick of this week: The Uniques #2 99¢ Digital and $5 Printed.
According to the Diamond Shipping List on I can't wait for Wednesday

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He IS IRON MAN-- and the T-Shirt is nice... too

A friend at work sent me a link to the above video of Robert Downey Jr. doing press for Iron man on an Australian Talk Show (Rove).

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That's What She Said

BTW that last 30 seconds is one of my favorite seens of the series.

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Do roughs like Greg Land* with this Fotosketcher freeware.

*not that there's anything wrong with that. I actually like alot of his stuff and he gets a bit of a bum rap for being more on the commercial side as opposed to fine artist cartoonist side sometimes.

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• Frank Miller's The Spirit Trailer. It certainly looks good, but I'm not sure if I like it better than Darwyn Cooke's comic version.

• Newsaramma is getting all Entertainment Tonight-like with videos now - here's one with Dan Didio about the Kids line, including a new Supergirl book.

• Not too sure about Storm Shadow or the Baroness. These photos don't look as good as Snake-eyes or Scarlett did.

• Lots of Action figure news out of NYCC -- New Mattel DC Action Figures - There's a Lobo, SDCC exclusive, but I'd get it just for the Dawg. Cyborg, Ares and Despero - There's a good DCD Despero coming out so that will probably be a pass, the other two are possibillities though. Eradicator Superman - I don't have the DCD, so I might get this one. Suit coat Riddler, might pass. Current JLA Black Lightning Just got the DCD one, so this will prob be a pass. Batman Beyond and a couple of Captain Atoms, BB for sure, not sure about the CA's. Artemis Wonder Woman - eh. Ray Palmer Atom Only because Gil Kane was a God. A pretty wicked looking Metallo, BAF, fig looks nice, might convince me to get the other figures. There's an Amazo, Babs Batgirl, Azreal, Orion and Lightray too. Will probably pass on all those since also done by DCD already.

Other cool news, Mattel might get an online store... that will be helpful.

DCD Kirby Wave II Figures Barda, Supes, Kalibak and Metron - no, no, yes and yes. Silk Spectre and Ozymawhateverhisnameis-- eh. Classic comic ones would have been better for these.

13" Sinestro in Sinestro Corp Suit. I might pass on this, as I'm a fan of the classic costume, and these are pricey.

Lots of Legends Sam J Nick Fury, Grey, Planet and Son of Hulks, Wendigo, Underwater Mission Spider-man whu huh? and More Legends 2 shield agents and a white Nick Fury... Will get bunches of the generics. Forge, generic Kree Warrior (bunches of him) Union Jack, Spiral, Warlock, Red Hulk, Doc Samson, X-force Black Suit Wolverine, Black Spidey, White dress She-hulk Silver Savage(?), Fing Fang Foom BAF, Bi-Beast, Titanium Man, Blue? War-Machine(?), Captain America Iron man, Shocker

Y'know this action figure thing ain't slowing down, but they are getting more and more obscure.

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Youtubes and flashes and slow page load oh, my

My blog page can be kindof slow to load. There are a few reasons for that.

Reason 1, I like to keep all my entries for the month in one giant scroll. Toward the end of a month or after a couple Action Figure posts that can get kindof large.

Reason 2, I often have alot of flash players on the page. So many that often my page will crash in some browsers toward the end of the month when the number of video players gets numerous.

Reason 3, Some of those flash widgets in the sidebar (Utterz, Google and Youtube), I think might not be playing well together.

Here's what you might notice is changing:

I think that should start helping.

I'm not going to change the one giant monthly scroll though, I like that part.

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Brush your shoulders off

Nice Barrack Obama response to Tuesday night's debate. (Funny).

Oh and if you don't get the joke... here's the reference...

B to the O, Hippest potential President ever.

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Certainly not Alan Moore Approved

These Watchmen Action Figures look very nice. Hopefully that's young Nite Owl though.

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New Comic Picks for 4/16/08

BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS #6 $2.99
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #12 $2.99
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 2 $2.99
FLASH #239 $2.99
ROBIN #173 $2.99
SALVATION RUN #6 (OF 7) $2.99
SUPERMAN #675 $3.99
TANGENT SUPERMANS REIGN #2 (OF 12) $2.99
Local #11

According to Diamond Comics Shipping List except Local that's according to Brian Woods' blog.

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I saw this on a Twitter friends' blog. It's from Gaping Void which is an interesting web comic, that in alot of ways pre-dates what we would think of as webcomics. I used to follow this site years ago. Not really sure why I dropped off... It was something I followed pre-rss, when you could actually forget to follow a site.

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DC Direct for December 2008

New DC Direct Toy Solicitations!

Green Lantern Box Set - Will get because I'm a sucker for GL stuff. It's nice to finally get an Abin Sur. Doesn't hurt to have a second Tomar, Not sure where they are going with the destroyed Manhunter. I have three of those but I suppose a destroyed one will make an interesting addition. Not sure about the shorts on this GL. They look a little odd to me.

Justice League International. I think I'll lose count of how many Black Canary's I'll have after this one. Ice! Hooray, Whut up with the Disco Cape Batman- pass, Gnort! Gnort! Gnort! Now you know this is going to be my favorite figure of 2008.

Alos of note: Movie Spirit 12" Action Figure. First look I've seen at the Movie Spirit Costume and it looks good!

DC Comics for July 2008 - Books of note: Millennium Trade, Invasion Trade (not sure anyone wants that one.) Ambush Bug: Year None by Keith Giffen, sign me up.

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What kind of geek are you?
Nice Wired article pic
(Most geeks are a mix of many of the above, but still... nice picture.)

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Let's Go Surfing

» Custom Con 19 Valiant Legends

» Venture Bros. New Season begins June 1st

» Google Docs now allows you to export your Presentations to Microsoft Powerpoint.

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Friend Dan put together this highlight reel of his Halo 3 Lan party from a couple weeks ago. It was a fun night!

(PS I'm driving the buggy in that extreme air shot at the end.)

Dan's Blog

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New Comic Picks for 4/9/08

BOOSTER GOLD #8 $2.99
GREEN ARROW BLACK CANARY #7 $2.99
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #23 $2.99
JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #14 $2.99
TINY TITANS #3 $2.25
WONDER WOMAN #19 $2.99
DC Direct: Ra's al Ghul Action Figure

According to Diamond Comics Shipping List

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Flickering Flickrs

Flickr now allows Paid users to upload 90 second videos. Videos show up along side photos. More about it on Tech Crunch.

I guess Flickr wanted-in on the dogs riding skateboards action.

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1s 0s and the Binary Brain

A lot of time you encounter a binary brain-- a brain that can only label any given idea as good or bad.

Often that binary brain labels sources of ideas as good or bad.

Once a source is labeled bad, then to the binary brain: all ideas from that source automatically must be bad, unless later the same idea is put forth by a source labeled: good.

The binary brain has no choice, bad can only produce bad-- good can not come from bad.

That's just the way the binary brain works.

I don't lament the binary brain though, it's not bad, it just is, and because it is-- when I encounter a binary brain, I just deal with it.

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It's the Attention Economy Stupid

Everything is so plentiful, in America anyway, the primary thing that is going to have value (beyond natural beauty) is attention. Rich or poor, everyone only has 24 hours in a day, and they have far less time than that, they can be attentive to consuming or producing; spending or generating income.

From Wikipedia:

Herbert Simon was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention economics when he wrote:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

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Hold onto your hats fanboys! Here's a fun one:

Mike Manley, the lead artist for Brave and the Bold animated ain't no Bruce Timm, that's for sure-- from his blog:

One of the things I enjoy about this new Batman cartoon is the fact we are going back to a kinder, friendlier Batman. A Dick Sprang version, which is the guiding design principle we are working from and there still is a slight echo of the BT styling, which is a nice break from the grim and gritty. Let's face it, these cartoons are for children, young children 5-10,12 years old. Cereal eating, fruit rollup snacking, toy buying kids, not 30-something, 40-something bitter bee babymen who want these characters in adult situations. The message boards are already full of babymen angst about the show, how they hate the art, the idea of a kid friendly Batman and I have to just laugh at the rediculous comments. IMO one of the biggest resons comics suck ass and have since the 80's is the rise and overtaking of the biz by the Babyman fan and the loss of kids reading comics as a hobby. Now we are stuck with an aginging fanbase with limited taste, long memories, a twisted taste where the comic heroes have to be dark, gritty, sexy, adult...REAL! Humor, the most popular form of comic in the world is the least popular form of comic in the direct market. Fans don't realize what an aberation the direct market has become and how out of step it is with the rest of the comic reading world. I include it all, strips, manga, you name it, but superheroes are a niche with the smallest fanbase. The top books crack, what 100K? Try having a TV show with that number.

I loved the Batman comics as kid, I love the Batman TV show, the funny, corny Adam West, and millions did too. I think you can only darken these concepts to a degree and for a certain amount of time before you play them out, and face it, these concepts have really been played out anyway. 70 years of these characters pumped at you in every medium by the big corporations means there is little fresh that can be done.

Fans also forget the only reason any of this stuff exists is for $$$. The show exists to sell ads and toys and such, and for no other reason.

Mike Manley's blog entry where the above comes from and here's another interesting post of his on the same topic (The second post link in particular is a very interesting condemnation of comic fan culture overall)

Gotta give him credit for that "Bitter Bee Babymen" crack though, that's got some "Nattering Nabombs of Negativity" type phrase coinage going on.

Double irony score since it's coming from a guy named Manley focussed on drawing children's cartoons for a living. (Manley also edit's Draw Magazine which *is* a really good read)

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So Speaks Doom!

There's a badly written, by Bendis, Doom panel floating around the internets causing a stir based on it's uncharacteristic lowbrow style. Mike Sterling over at Progressive Ruin handily shows how a classic Doctor Doom berating featuring oft handed off the cuff language worthy of double and triple letter scores should be handled.

Now insolent imbecile click on the erstwhile link if you dare pray believe your ears capable of standing the onslaught of the mighty words of Doom!

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Do you listen to any audio podcasts?

Here are the audio podcasts I've been listening to:

Please reccomend some more AUDIO podcasts to me. My MP3 player is hungry for more content.

Note you can reccomend them, but I'm not currently listening to any Comic Book--Marvel/DC type podcasts, I'm so far behind on my weekly stack-- we're talking months here-- that I would just get way too spoiler alert overload to listen to any of those.

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Random Non-Sequiters Audio Ed. 4/6/08

I babble on about blogging, the internet, Facebook and what not. Warning, I talk very even and at times somewhat monotone, it can be difficult to make out what I’m saying occasionally throughout. Seriously it’s 27 minutes long…

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Let's Go Surfing

» Knight Rider to become a show this fall, just not necessarily a good show. Ben Silverman, NBC's head of programming explains:

People need to escape. Ben [Silverman, NBC's head of programming]'s programming strategy is to find some shows where people can tune in and then mentally tune out. That's his directive, and I think you'll see that reflected in the programs.

NBC, the network for people who want to "mentally tune out". Must drool TV.

» A Wolverine Drawing Every Day!

A new drawing of Wolverine every day, for some reason that I haven't figured out yet.

Well I've figured it out, it's an attempt to draw attention from and capitalize on an existing fanbase that would otherwise probably not know who the artist is. Not that I have an issue with that, and they are very interesting and varied illustrations, so it's all good.

» Interesting Creator-Owned vs. Marvel DC Work For Hire commentary from Warren Ellis.

The first odd thing happened after the first issue came out. Now, remember, I’d been doing mostly original material for the previous few years, and doing fine. But I was suddenly flooded with email from kids — teenagers — who had never heard of me before. What was happening, it turned out, was that I was reaching seven or eight hundred stores at maximum, and there was anything up to a couple of thousand stores who just weren’t ordering my stuff. I remember talking this over with people at Marvel and particularly DC, and it turned out that this was in fact the case — that two thirds of comics stores really don’t order much other than superhero comics and a few licensed books. And in those years of doing my own thing, the audience had turned over to the point where there were people who’d never read a thing by me. It hadn’t been all that long ago that I’d been selling 200,000 copies of DV8 and 150,000 copies of WOLVERINE, I thought…

» Bill and Ted Movie Remake Bogus dude.

» Smallville Creators jump ship about four or five years too late if you ask me.

» Heroes Action figures at Toys R Us in June.

» Funny xkcd comic Punchline: Summer Glau.

» Batman Brave and the Bold Cartoon will be in the same Friday Night block as Star Wars Clone Wars Cartoon. There's also a relaunched Ben 10 show. (Never seen more than a couple episodes of Ben 10, but it's always looked like a good show to me.) Intriguing block of shows for the DVR on Fridays.

» The Eee PC, the best little thing to happen to Linux in a couple years has also temporarily saved Windows XP. Spiffy.

» John McCain's wife is a Beer Company Heiress, y'don't say. Well that answers America's question on which candidate they'd probably most like to have a beer with.

» Star Trek the Motion Picture Kirk and Spock Action figures. Never been a fan of all that grey.

» NBC 2008-2009 Fall shows there plan is to have Family Friendly shows at 8pm, blockbusters at 9pm and dramas at 10pm.

Lineup Includes:

» Hellboy II movie trailer opens July 11, 2008-- looks fun.

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1924-2008

Charlton Heston. Whatever else can be said, that guy was the very pinnacle definition of a Hollywood Movie Star.

"Damn Dirty Apes!"

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Random Non-Sequiters

» So I rolled all my RSS feeds into a FriendFeed and here's the RSS for the FriendFeed.

On the one hand, I get the FriendFeed concept. With everyone starting to have multiple services like Blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube etc. etc., it makes sense to roll them all up into one Single Feed. On the other hand, you end up with 'one more service' to update and yet another venue to track comments down on, as FriendFeed will let users comment on posts within the FriendFeed service instead of directing comments back to my blog or Flickr or Youtube etc. The introduction of multiple comment streams is not a desirable feature of the FriendFeed concept to me. It's not a huge issue since there aren't alot of comments on my various services, but it still seems sloppy.

» Speaking of sloppy. You may notice that I've also changed this blog page in an attempt to make it less sloppy. I've completely integrated the Mobile Twitter and Flickr portion into the main roll. Basically I'm pulling the Twitter and Flickr RSS feeds and combining them with the Blog Entries pulled from my database, then I sort them by date and add the comment links onto each one.

It's actually some mildy scary looking code I've cobbled together but It appears to look like it's working for the time being. The only downside is the Twitter and Flickr portions might just occasionally just disappear. I'm going to solve this problem in the near future by importing the Flickr and Twitter feeds into my own database, but until then, the autoposted Flickr and Twitter feeds might be a little flakey. Oh and should I get crazy Digg/Slashdot levels of traffic to the newest blog page it could posibly flake too. I'm going to solve that by coding in some cacheing soon as well.

» I watched the Season 4 Opening Episode of Battlestar Galactica last night. Great Great Episode. Already can't wait for next week.

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Batman the Brave and the Bold Animated. Hmm... not alot of info out there but this does not look very promising. Of course I'm generally biased against over-kidification of DC or Marvel characters in massmedia, so that's where I'm coming from.

On a related note. Last week I watched the first two episodes of Spectacular Spider-man Animated. It was pretty good. Certainly SS is skewed toward a younger audience but the large arc they seem to be building is interesting in the way they are tieing everything together is pretty cool.

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Comic Picks for 4/2/08

ACTION COMICS #863 $2.99
ALL NEW ATOM #22 $2.99
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 4 $2.99
DC SPECIAL RAVEN #2 (OF 5) $2.99
DETECTIVE COMICS #843 $2.99
METAL MEN #7 ( OF 8 ) $2.99
NIGHTWING #143 $2.99
SUPERGIRL #28 $2.99
TRIALS OF SHAZAM #12 (OF 12) $3.50
SECRET INVASION #1 ( OF 8 ) $3.99
KICK ASS #2 (MR) $2.99
TWELVE #4 (OF 12) $2.99
PROJECT SUPERPOWERS #2 (OF 6) $2.99

According to Diamond Comics Shipping List

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Energizer Bunny of automobiles.

No onomatopoeia for this story.

Some minor Escort drama today. This morning I went out to my car and the battery was completely dead. Bummer. I had left the headlights on all night. No worries, I have one of those little portable jumpers, I hooked it up and in 3 minutes I was on the road.

Went and got comics at lunch... no problems. Was completely empty on gas though, so after work I filled up the gas tank. Full tank of gas and on the road-- about a half mile from the gas station the Escort engine stopped and it wouldn't start. I pulled it over to a side street in a nice little quiet suburban area, popped the hood, and did the guy staring at the engine routine.

Tried to start the car a couple more times, it *almost* acted like it wanted to start, but then nothing.

I thought maybe the battery was bad, it was a couple years old, we just ended winter, and I really ran it to nothing last night with 13 or 14 hours of being on.

Fortunately a friend of mine lives close by and was able to take me up to get a new battery. I also keep various wrenches etc in the trunk, so I was able to change the battery pretty easy. New battery in, I started up the car, but nothing. Still sounds like it almost wants to start but it won't commit to running.

Bummer.

I said thanks to my friend and then I called for the tow truck. Tow truck comes out and the tow-guy tried to start the car. Doesn't work for him either, so the tow guy starts to put the car onto the trailer. As he's doing it, the tow guy asks me "You didn't hit a pothole before the car stopped running did you?"

"Yeah, right before it stopped, I *did* hit a small pot hole. Do you think I might have knocked something loose?" I replied.

"Y'know, it my be your fuel injection shutoff switch." he said.

"Really?"

"Yeah, sometimes when you hit a pot hole the car can think you were in an accident and switch off the Fuel Injection."

"Really?!"

We went to the trunk and I popped off the little access cover-- I actually knew where that was because my Dad years ago had mentioned that if I was in an accident you should go back there and switch that off-- anyway I pushed a red button and then I was able to start the car right up!

Hooray... nothing wrong with the car! It was just the frakin' pothole triggering the emergency fuel injection switch off.

Sure I paid for a new battery-- but I probably needed that anyway. And the towtruck call cost $50, but it was a happy thing that I didn't have to have the car towed to or put into the dealership. And the Escort rolls on.

It's the little car that can!

Postscript to the above story. While I was waiting for the tow truck, the guy whose house I was sitting in front of came out to ask if I needed any help. I told him I had a tow truck coming out and I should be fine. Then he asked me what year my car was. I told him, and then he said his daughter had the same car a year older than mine. He said that hers was rusting out a little bit, but his daughter's car just keeps going and going.

That made me smile-- especially after it turned out to just be a fuel injection switchoff button I had to push.

I want to hear your