Entertainment

We Need a New Bubble

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Every now and again, I am reminded that the best journalists on the planet clearly work for The Onion.  Their ability to dive into the heart of a crisis is uncanny.

The Onion: Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In

WASHINGTON—A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.

“What America needs right now is not more talk and long-term strategy, but a concrete way to create more imaginary wealth in the very immediate future,” said Thomas Jenkins, CFO of the Boston-area Jenkins Financial Group, a bubble-based investment firm. “We are in a crisis, and that crisis demands an unviable short-term solution.”

The current economic woes, brought on by the collapse of the so-called “housing bubble,” are considered the worst to hit investors since the equally untenable dot-com bubble burst in 2001. According to investment experts, now that the option of making millions of dollars in a short time with imaginary profits from bad real-estate deals has disappeared, the need for another spontaneous make-believe source of wealth has never been more urgent.

Just wait, it gets better:

“Perhaps the new bubble could have something to do with watching movies on cell phones,” said investment banker Greg Carlisle of the New York firm Carlisle, Shaloe & Graves. “Or, say, medicine, or shipping. Or clouds. The manner of bubble isn’t important—just as long as it creates a hugely overvalued market based on nothing more than whimsical fantasy and saddled with the potential for a long-term accrual of debts that will never be paid back, thereby unleashing a ripple effect that will take nearly a decade to correct.”

“The U.S. economy cannot survive on sound investments alone,” Carlisle added.

There you have it.  Hilarious, if you are into dark, dark, dark humor.

Mandlebrot Set Music Video

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

This is too good not to share, from the same artist who wrote my previous blog favorite, Code Monkey.

This one is called Mandlebrot Set, but the key line, at around 2:05, is “A Bad Ass Fucking Fractal”.  Yes, this is now a PG-13 blog post.

The most interesting thing about Jonathan Coulton‘s work is that he releases his music under the Creative Commons license.  Anyone is free to take it and make music videos from it, as we saw with Code Monkey.

Anyway, check it out.  It’s definitely a keeper for anyone who grew up mathematically in the 80s and appreciates the intricacies of Mandlebrot, complexity & fractals.

Enjoy.

Dan Nye on Fox Business this Morning (LinkedIN)

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Catch it here if you haven’t seen it:

Dan Nye, CEO LinkedIn, on Fox Business this morning.

I’d embed the video, but I don’t think WordPress supports this video type (yet).

Of course, as the product guy, I’m one of the few who notices that they used old screenshots from last year… 🙂 But it was a great interview, and great coverage of LinkedIn.

Update: Here is the post on the official LinkedIn blog.

The Last Cylon is Hungry for Redemption…

/ Adam Nash

Great comment on my original Battlestar Galactica post, from rebelsnoopy:

rebelsnoopy, on June 7th, 2008 at 1:52 am Said:

From reading peoples theories about who the last Cylon is. People always assume that whomever it is will suffer while they are seeking redemption.

Hybrid prophecy/Razor: “And the fifth, though still in the shadow yet clawing for the light, hungry for redemption, that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering”

I suggest that the last cylon wont suffer.

But that someone else in the fleet, and I really think the people in the fleet will suffer. There will be another terrible tragedy and this last Cylon will do something incredible to save the Colonial fleet. Therefore redeeming him/herself.

That is exactly right.

The last cylon isn’t hungry for redemption for something they did wrong… they are hungry for redemption for what the Cylons did by committing genocide against the 12 colonies.

My guess is that these last two episodes of the half season get us to the reveal of the fifth cylon.  I then believe that the last 10 episodes of the final season will be the story arc around Earth & resolution.

Ron Moore Confirms the Obvious: NBC Decision to Pull from iTunes Sucks

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

There is an extended interview with Ron Moore, writer/creator of the new Battlestar Galactica, on Wired.  Definitely worth reading.

One fun snippet:

Wired: You mentioned TiVo. Do you think you benefited from DVD box sets, TiVo timeshifting, the ability for people to go watch all of season one?

Moore: Absolutely. It’s a totally different world, and it plays to our audience. The fans of this genre traditionally lead all these technologies. The early adopters, the people who are very facile with computers and tech, and they will find the show in all these different formats. It absolutely has helped us.

Wired: Even being able to tell the non-fans, look, just go get the box set?

Moore: It’s great. That phenomenon has definitely occurred, too, where people who would not sample the show, who wouldn’t tune into something on Sci Fi Channel, much less called Battlestar Galactica, people would then press on them a DVD. They became fans. That happened a lot. People just put it on their iTunes. I bemoan the loss of NBC Universals relationship with iTunes for this show.

NBC’s decision to basically thumb their nose at their customers, their fans, around a theoretical strategic positioning on digital delivery is doomed to failure.  Not sure if the current management at NBC will get it, or whether they’ll have to be replaced (ala Disney/Pixar) to heal this one.  They have forgotten that the alternative to Apple’s rich ecosystem is widespread, DRM-free piracy.

They’ll figure it out soon enough.

Starbuck is NOT the Fifth Cylon

/ Adam Nash / 7 Comments

This is the problem with getting busy and not posting for two weeks.  What was an insightful and debatable claim is now fairly obvious.

Still, I felt I had to write this post, given all the excitement two weeks ago about someone “cracking” the Entertainment Weekly “Last Supper” photo from earlier in the year.  You can read about the detailed analysis here (which would actually make Dan Brown proud ala “The Da Vinci Code”), but at the end of the day, the conclusion is wrong.

Starbuck is not the final Cylon.

True, she’s the “Harbinger of Doom” and she will lead the humans “to their end”, but she’s not a cylon.  Sorry, not dice.  Fact is, she doesn’t fit any of the known clues left about the fifth cylon, and Moore has basically gone on record stating that she is not a cylon, but something else.

Since, I’m on the topic, let’s cover what I’ve been pondering lately: the comments from the “First Hybrid” in the Razor movie, and the recent episode from Friday, “Faith”:

  • From the episode “Faith” that aired on Friday:

    It’s at this moment that the Hybrid grabs Kara and communicates a semi-vague, yet straightforward message:

    – The dying leader will discover the truth about the Opera House.
    – The missing 3 will be used to find the Final 5.
    – The final 5 come from the home of the 13th tribe.
    – Starbuck is the harbinger of death that will take them all to their end.

  • From the movie, “Razor”:

    At last, they’ve come for me. I feel their lives, their destinies spilling out before me. The denial of the one true path, played out on a world not their own, will end soon enough. Soon there will be four, glorious in awakening, struggling with the knowledge of their true selves, the pain of revelation bringing new clarity, and in the midst of confusion, he will find her. Enemies brought together by impossible longing, enemies now joined as one. The way forward at once unthinkable, yet inevitable. And the fifth, still in shadow, will claw toward the light, hungering for redemption that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering. I can see them all. The seven, now six, self-described machines who believe themselves without sin, but in time, it is sin that will consume them. They will know enmity, bitterness, the wrenching agony of the one splintering into the many, and then they will join the promised-land, gathered on the wings of an angel. Not an end, but a beginning.

So this brings me to my current thinking – everything the First Hybrid said is coming true, so there are likely more clues there.  Note the reference to “the wings of an angel”, which Kara Thrace was described as in this last episode.

The hardest part for me to rationalize in the current “four cylons” is Colonel Tigh.  Adama has known him for 40 years, since his youth.  That means Tigh got old… I didn’t know cylons could age.  But humanoid cylons didn’t come into being until well after the first Cylon war, so he can’t actually be a cylon… unless he either pre-dates the Cylons.  The quote from the hybrid suggests he is not a cylon per se, but from Earth.  Thats confirmation that cylons were not invented by the colonies recently, but may have existed long before.

That ties in with the them that “all of this has happened before, and all this will happen again”.

My favorite comment on my blog posts has been the ones that theorize that this is all some sort of elaborate simulation… somewhat like in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The Cylons killed their human masters long ago, and they repeatedly seed and build the colonies to repeat history and try to learn from it.

I doubt that will be the answer, but there is definitely a strong theme here that says that the Cylon/human issue has dated back well before cylons were “theoretically created” by the colonies.

The only non-linear hint here is that “Adama is a Cylon”.  Given the recently leaked backstory for the new series “Caprica”, it seems that a humanoid Cylon was made for the Adama family to replace Bill Adama’s lost sister… if his sister was Cylon, is it possible he is also?  Or that he had a model made to replace Zak?

We’ll see.

Can You Upgrade An AppleTV Past 250GB?

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

Last year, I wrote about upgrading the AppleTV from 40GB to 160GB.  As I’ve starting converting my entire video library to MP4, I’ve quickly run out of space on the AppleTV again. The software on the AppleTV continues to be a generation ahead of the software included on Mac OS X (10.5), so I was thinking about how to upgrade the AppleTV.

You can now find 250GB, 320GB, and soon, 500GB SATA 2.5″ drives on the market.  Unfortunately, it seems that only Western Digital is making an ATA-6 drive above 160GB, and the biggest drive they are selling is 250GB.  Not going to cut it, as my iTunes movie library is now over 350GB and growing.

I was curious whether anyone out there knew whether or not ATA-6 was effectively dead for 2.5″ drives?  If so, why?

Assuming you can’t get the AppleTV hard drive above 250GB, then I’m going to be left with replacing the  AppleTV with a Mac Mini, my current solution for the family room.  Not perfect, of course, because the current version of FrontRow:

  • Can’t do iTunes Rentals (not sure I care about this at all)
  • Can’t organize movies by genre (big problem when you have 200+ movies)

I guess it stands to reason that Apple will upgrade the FrontRow software shortly to match the features of AppleTV 2.0.

I hate to see my AppleTV so limited by storage, though.  If you have any ideas, pointers, or tips on how to add more storage to an AppleTV, please let me know.   I’d love to be able to take it up to 320GB or more.

I’m really not sure why Apple’s streaming solution for the AppleTV isn’t working for me – I would think Apple would just cache the first 10 minutes of each movie on the AppleTV, and then stream in the rest of the movie when I select one.  160GB would be an extremely effective cache for my iTunes library, since it’s effectively 1/3 the size of the library.  Maybe I’ve configured something wrong here, but when I tell the AppleTV to synch “all” of my movies, a vast majority don’t show up on the AppleTV.

Update (4/27/08): OK, I’ve found a huge amount of info on great hacks for the AppleTV.  Here is an AppleTV archive on Hackszine.com.  Here is the site AppleTVHacks.net.  Well known hacks include ability to use external drives, SSH support, RSS, etc.  Lots of very cool stuff to check out.

Update (4/27/08): Last comment.  Here is a wiki at AwkwardTV.org that gives step by step instructions on how to install SSH on your AppleTV Take 2, and then add USB Hard Drive support.  It’s not trivial.

Battlestar Galactica: Episode 4.3 “The Ties that Bind”

/ Adam Nash / 8 Comments

If you don’t like spoilers, stop reading now.  Seriously.  I don’t want any whiny complaints.  You are lucky I didn’t put more in my title.

There is a very good write-up on BuddyTV.  It’s worth reading.

Let’s summarize what was great about the third episode of this season:

  1. Cylon civil war heats up. This could be going in a couple directions.  Pretty obvious issue with giving the Centurion’s access to higher-level thinking.  Hello?  Rebellion against the humanoid cylons.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  Like the rebellion 40 years ago against the human colonists?  Also having the Cylons self-destruct helps lead us towards some sort of human victory – there has to be some form of Cylon destruction – right now, the Cylons are too powerful and eventually they will crush the humans unless they either (1) find help or (2) self-destruct.  Not sure which it will be yet, but the current thread opens up (2) as an options.  Last note: are we going to see the emergence of true individual behavior in the Cylons, as a virus?  Happened with Baltar’s 6, now the Boomer 8.  Not good for the robots.  Not good at all.
  2. Some of the “final four” are definitely acting Cylon.  Tory is starting to act like the new Number 6, before she went soft.   Sex with Baltar, flirt with Tyrol, kill Callie?  Not bad for three episodes.
  3. Cally dies. Nice to see that Battlestar hasn’t lost its guts yet.  Of course, they could wuss out and make Callie the final cylon…  of course, they’d have to explain the Tyrol-Callie baby at that point, since it would be Cylon/Cylon.  Let’s hope they don’t.  Let’s hope they had the guts to kill an empathetic character, cruelly, and without remorse.   Battlestar has to stay dark to stay true to its roots.

Other cool stuff, of course, but had to comment.   Add yours below.  I’ve really been enjoying the comment stream on the previous fifth cylon posts here and here.  Check them out, I’m getting two or three new comments there every day.

Can’t wait until Friday…

Welcome Back to Battlestar Galactica. Now About That Fifth Cylon…

/ Adam Nash / 19 Comments

It’s just so great to have Battlestar Galactica back again. The first episode of the fourth and final season aired on Friday. Lots of fun too, since it picked up immediately on the two biggest character developments of the end of season three: the return of Starbuck, seemingly from the dead, and the continued realization of the outed “four” who are coming to terms with not being human.

It’s a little sad too, the way that this last season of “The Wire” was sad. Sad because yet another great TV show is ending, and it’s tough to see what might take it’s place.

If you haven’t been reading the spoilers and potential plot summaries about the upcoming BSG spinoff “Caprica”, another one is up on SyFy Portal. Check out this portion of the plot concept:

William Adama, who will be 9 years old in the series, actually had a sister. But both his mother and sister are killed in a suicide bombing that also took out Zoe, the daughter of Daniel Graystone, a wealthy computer engineer and designer who is trying to build an “intelligent robot.” The terrorist attack bring together Daniel and Joseph, but Daniel grieves in a different way. He discovers that Zoe had a far better understanding of robotics and computers than even he did, and uses that technology to help build the first Cylon … with Zoe’s personality.

Joseph ends up helping Daniel to create robotic versions of not just Zoe, but of his own daughter, Tamara, as well. Unlike Daniel Graystone, however, Joseph changes his mind about having Tamara created in robot form, and eventually reveals to his son William that their name is not Adams, but instead is Adama.

Now remember, this new series is being created by the people who know exactly who the fifth cylon is, and largely how BSG is going to wrap up. In some ways, this is like the Monty Hall problem in statistics – Monty knows which door has the Cadillac behind it, so his choice is not truly independent.

There are some who think the fifth cylon is Roslin, Baltar, or even Admiral Adama. All of these possibilities are contradicted by the clue from the Entertainment Weekly article – none of the humans in the picture is a cylon. There are others who vote for Gaeta, since he’s been suspiciously close to the action the entire series… kind of like Wedge Antilles in Star Wars. I’ve seen votes for the Tom Zarak, Dee, or even Starbuck.

It’s hard to be certain, of course, but I’d say that the plot summary for Caprica raises some questions… like whether or not humanoid cylons actually pre-date the Cylon war. The idea that there effectively was a proto-Cylon “Adama” raises some possibilities.

I just wonder if we’re going to start seeing more references to Zak Adama in this fourth season…  there was that statement that, “Adama is a Cylon”.

Anyway, we’ve got at least eight or nine weeks of great TV ahead of us. Actually, right now, with “John Adams” on HBO, it’s promising to be a good April.

Update (4/22/2008): New post on Episode 3 of the 4th Season: Ties That Bind.

Update (11/26/2008): New post on Final Five Candidates for the Fifth Cylon (Possible Spoilers).

An Adam Nash Murder Case

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Sometimes, Google Alerts can freak you out.  I have a Google Alert for “adam nash”, to capture all the press mentions and news that pop up with my name in it.  This article came through today, from “The Daily Gleaner” in Canada:

Nash Guilty of Second Degree Murder

Just to clarify, this is not me.  Some content from the piece:

The jury in the Adam Wade Nash murder trial deliberated for a little more than six hours before returning and finding the accused guilty of second-degree murder.

Nash, 40, shot his 49-year-old brother Gordon Nash twice in the head Oct. 31, 2006, shortly after the two had been in a physical altercation.

At issue at trial and in the jury’s deliberations wasn’t whether Nash committed the murder, but his state of mind at the time.

The prosecution argued that it was a planned (though poorly) and deliberate killing, making the crime one of first-degree murder.

The defence’s case was that Nash was too drunk and tired to plan a murder and that the act of shooting his brother was an impulsive one driven by anger.

Freaky.

How to Convert FLAC to Apple Lossless (MP4) on Mac OS X

/ Adam Nash / 22 Comments

Another helpful file conversion tip.

FLAC is a lossless audio codec that is very popular on Linux and on Windows.  However, it’s virtually non-existant on the Mac, which is a problem if you have a library of music that you have encoded in FLAC and you want to upload to your iTunes library.

There are various command-line solutions out there on Windows, but very few available for Mac OS X.

XLD is the answer.

The “X Lossless Decoder” offers super fast conversion of various lossless formats on the Mac, with a decent GUI, and better yet, drag-and-drop conversion.

XLD supports the following formats:

Other formats supported by Libsndfile are also decodable. XLD uses not decoder frontend but library to decode, so no intermediate files are generated. All of the supported formats can be directly split with the cue sheet. XLD also supports so-called ’embedded’ or ‘internal’ cue sheet.

Currently you can choose output format from WAVE,AIFF and Raw PCM. In addition, you can choose Ogg Vorbis (aoTuV), MPEG-4 AAC (QuickTime/CoreAudio), MP3 (LAME), Apple Lossless, FLAC and HE-AAC (aacPlus v1/v2) in the GUI version.

Hope this helps you audiophiles out there converting to the Mac.  I converted entire albums from FLAC to Apple Lossless in just minutes on a PowerMac G5.

Battlestar Galactica, Season 4, Caprica, and the Movie

/ Adam Nash / 5 Comments

Can you hear it….?  That distant rumbling….?  That’s the sound of the best show on television coming in for a new season.

April 4th.  10:00PM.  Sci-Fi Channel.

Some news tidbits from Buddy TV, which covered the Battlestar Galactica news conference:

  • We get 10 episodes.  The last 10 episodes will likely be in 2009.  (Writer’s strike)
  • Shows will be on scifi.com at noon that day for early viewing.  Nothing specific on iTunes.
  • Greenlight to the prequel TV series pilot, “Caprica”, which will focus on a time, 50 years before the show, before the first Cylon war.  Will be a 2-hour movie in the fall.
  • No vote on the movie of Battlestar Galactica post-season 4.

As the article closes:

The cast just received their first post-strike script and will resume production next week. Moore stated that, in writing the final season, his primary goal is simply to bring everything home and do justice to the series he has created. When asked about possibly expanding to a Battlestar Galactica film after it’s over, Moore’s answer was a definite “No,” claiming the series would not translate well to the big screen.

Can’t wait.