Over the past several years Toothpaste For Dinner and Married To The Sea have been two of my favorite webcomics. I was very surprised when a couple weeks ago I found out that the author of those two comics has had a third webcomic since 2006, Superpoop. A few favorites (Warning: Some of these are NSFW):
03-27-08 - Kids Look Away
04-05-08 - Chicken Wing
04-10-08 - Rob Zombie Ribs
07-21-08 - Painter Of Balls
09-25-08 - American Financial System
09-26-08 - Abstinence Only State
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Shirley Manson - Samson And Delilah
As I noted in my previous post, last night's season premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles featured an awesome cover of "Samson And Delilah" sung by Shirley Manson.
As far as I know the song is not available commercially anywhere, so I made an mp3 of the song directly from the episode. The mp3 includes some sound effects from the episode, most of which are near the end of the song, so it's not perfect.
While looking for the song last night, I found a lot of posts from people asking when the song was going to be available. It reminds me of the situation with Bear McCreary (who also produced this song) & BT4's version of "All Along The Watchtower" from the Season 3 finale of Battlestar Galactica. The episode aired in March, but the soundtrack wasn't released until October. The wait for the official release was made easier with a ripped from the episode version of the song, which included a fair amount of dialogue. As far as I know these postings of the episode version of the song didn't induce the ire of those who made it, so I've decided to post a download link for the episode version of "Samson And Delilah" by Shirley Manson.
I will remove the link as soon as the song is commercially available, which hopefully is very soon, or as soon as I hear that it's not ok to post it here like this. Anyway, here's the download link:
Shirley Manson - Samson And Delilah (Rapidshare)
As far as I know the song is not available commercially anywhere, so I made an mp3 of the song directly from the episode. The mp3 includes some sound effects from the episode, most of which are near the end of the song, so it's not perfect.
While looking for the song last night, I found a lot of posts from people asking when the song was going to be available. It reminds me of the situation with Bear McCreary (who also produced this song) & BT4's version of "All Along The Watchtower" from the Season 3 finale of Battlestar Galactica. The episode aired in March, but the soundtrack wasn't released until October. The wait for the official release was made easier with a ripped from the episode version of the song, which included a fair amount of dialogue. As far as I know these postings of the episode version of the song didn't induce the ire of those who made it, so I've decided to post a download link for the episode version of "Samson And Delilah" by Shirley Manson.
I will remove the link as soon as the song is commercially available, which hopefully is very soon, or as soon as I hear that it's not ok to post it here like this. Anyway, here's the download link:
Shirley Manson - Samson And Delilah (Rapidshare)
Monday, September 8, 2008
Tonight's season premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Season 1 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a disappointment overall in that while it had some good moments, it never seemed to reach its potential.
Tonight's season 2 premiere continued this pattern.
*Spoilers ahead.*
The first 5 minutes or so of the episode was probably the best action sequence the show's ever done, over which played a beautiful rendition of "Samson & Delilah" sung by Shirley Manson. It's already been over 3 years since Garbage's last album (yikes!), so it was really nice to hear her singing again.
This show is definitely at its best during the action sequences, and I would love it if the producers of the show took a cue from this old xkcd comic and just made every episode one long action sequence.
But only 15 minutes or so of the episode was action, and the rest ranged from OK to ridiculous. In the bathroom scene at the end, at first I thought that the T-1000 had morphed into the urinal to spy on her employees or something (could it still hear in the shape of a urinal?), but watching the scene again I was relieved to see that after it reformed the urinal was still there so it just passed through the wall.
eta: After watching this scene a third time, it looks like the T-1000 was indeed in the bathroom eavesdropping on the two guys, in the form of a thin film spread over the urinal and wall. WTF? Why would a T-1000 spy on a dissenter and then when he calls her a name get angry and kill him? Isn't her mission much more important than her AI team leader, who's presumably one of the best in the world at what he does, not liking a managerial decision she made?
One thing that puzzles me is that last season I thought the Turk was the big computer in that guy's closet. But this season it looks like a small hard drive array with 4 hard drives, presumably meaning the Turk is just software. By far the most ridiculous thing in the episode was when John successefully fixed Cameron's neural net processor using a knife and a rag.
After season 1 ended, I told myself that if the show didn't get better in the first few episodes of season 2 I'd stop watching it. The season 2 premiere didn't really change this, although I did get my hopes up a little bit after the awesome beginning. If every episode has an awesome sequence like that, and/or features a song sung by Shirley Manson, then I'll keep watching for sure, but that seems unlikely. We'll see.
Tonight's season 2 premiere continued this pattern.
*Spoilers ahead.*
The first 5 minutes or so of the episode was probably the best action sequence the show's ever done, over which played a beautiful rendition of "Samson & Delilah" sung by Shirley Manson. It's already been over 3 years since Garbage's last album (yikes!), so it was really nice to hear her singing again.
This show is definitely at its best during the action sequences, and I would love it if the producers of the show took a cue from this old xkcd comic and just made every episode one long action sequence.
But only 15 minutes or so of the episode was action, and the rest ranged from OK to ridiculous. In the bathroom scene at the end, at first I thought that the T-1000 had morphed into the urinal to spy on her employees or something (could it still hear in the shape of a urinal?), but watching the scene again I was relieved to see that after it reformed the urinal was still there so it just passed through the wall.
eta: After watching this scene a third time, it looks like the T-1000 was indeed in the bathroom eavesdropping on the two guys, in the form of a thin film spread over the urinal and wall. WTF? Why would a T-1000 spy on a dissenter and then when he calls her a name get angry and kill him? Isn't her mission much more important than her AI team leader, who's presumably one of the best in the world at what he does, not liking a managerial decision she made?
One thing that puzzles me is that last season I thought the Turk was the big computer in that guy's closet. But this season it looks like a small hard drive array with 4 hard drives, presumably meaning the Turk is just software. By far the most ridiculous thing in the episode was when John successefully fixed Cameron's neural net processor using a knife and a rag.
After season 1 ended, I told myself that if the show didn't get better in the first few episodes of season 2 I'd stop watching it. The season 2 premiere didn't really change this, although I did get my hopes up a little bit after the awesome beginning. If every episode has an awesome sequence like that, and/or features a song sung by Shirley Manson, then I'll keep watching for sure, but that seems unlikely. We'll see.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Google Chrome: First Impressions
1. It seems like it makes light use of system resources - at first. Whereas my Firefox 3 with 9 add-ons uses about 60MB RAM on open, and 100MB after using it for a while, Google Chrome starts at about 20 MB and goes to about 40 MB after browsing awhile. But then I noticed that, with just 1 Chrome window open, in Task Manager under processes it has 4 instances of chrome.exe listed, using a total of about 92MB currently. So 8MB less than my tricked out Firefox 3, while offering much less functionality.
2. I love how you can drag a tab to make a new browser window. I tried doing this with Firefox and it merely makes a shortcut icon to that page. Hopefully the Mozilla team makes this feature available in a future version of Firefox.
3. The way the default home page / new tab page displays thumbnails of your most visited sites seems really cool. This feature seems a lot less cool, though, after you realize the thumbnails are screenshots of the pages when you last visited them, and are not updated unless you visit them again.
4. There aren't really any options for customizing the user interface, and the arrangement of the bookmarks toolbar, address bar, tab row, and icons. I don't like how the tab row is the top thing, then the address bar, then the bookmark toolbar at the bottom. In fact, this is the exact opposite order that I use in Firefox 3. The one exception to this lack of customizability is the "other bookmarks" button, which you can choose to hide if you want. I see no reason why you'd want to hide this unless you have all your bookmarks on the toolbar, since without the button there's no way to access the rest of your bookmarks. When you click the other bookmarks button, you get a scrollable list, with no option to change it to the more useful sidebar Firefox (and even IE7 & IE8) uses.
5. If you click the tool icon you can view your history and downloads, both of which open in their own tab. Again, the sidebar Firefox uses for viewing your history, and the small separate window for your downloads is much more convenient since you can view a web page at the same time.
6. About the memory usage, I just found that if you right click above the tabs, one of the options is task manager, which turns out to be a report on Chrome's memory usage, including each process. It lists 5 processes now, confirmed with Windows task manager: 1 for the browser, 1 for Shockwave, and 3 for tabs. It also lists a summary of Firefox 3's memory usage (I'm writing this in Firefox), which is currently using a nearly identical amount of RAM: 76,303k for Chrome, 76,204k for Firefox. That's actually pretty cool that it has a separate process for the browser and each tab and plugin. That way if one of them crashes, you don't lose the whole shebang.
7. The lack of add-ons is a dealbreaker. After using Firefox for the past few years, and the luxury of add-ons existing for just about anything you'd want your browser to do, I don't think I could ever switch to a browser without similar options. This is only made worse by Chrome's lack of built-in user interface customization options.
Overall, Google Chrome is disappointing. It seems like it's somewhere inbetween Internet Explorer and Firefox, and a lot closer to the IE side. I normally use Firefox for just about all my browsing, and usually only use IE to get updates to XP, so I don't think I'd ever have a reason to use Chrome.
2. I love how you can drag a tab to make a new browser window. I tried doing this with Firefox and it merely makes a shortcut icon to that page. Hopefully the Mozilla team makes this feature available in a future version of Firefox.
3. The way the default home page / new tab page displays thumbnails of your most visited sites seems really cool. This feature seems a lot less cool, though, after you realize the thumbnails are screenshots of the pages when you last visited them, and are not updated unless you visit them again.
4. There aren't really any options for customizing the user interface, and the arrangement of the bookmarks toolbar, address bar, tab row, and icons. I don't like how the tab row is the top thing, then the address bar, then the bookmark toolbar at the bottom. In fact, this is the exact opposite order that I use in Firefox 3. The one exception to this lack of customizability is the "other bookmarks" button, which you can choose to hide if you want. I see no reason why you'd want to hide this unless you have all your bookmarks on the toolbar, since without the button there's no way to access the rest of your bookmarks. When you click the other bookmarks button, you get a scrollable list, with no option to change it to the more useful sidebar Firefox (and even IE7 & IE8) uses.
5. If you click the tool icon you can view your history and downloads, both of which open in their own tab. Again, the sidebar Firefox uses for viewing your history, and the small separate window for your downloads is much more convenient since you can view a web page at the same time.
6. About the memory usage, I just found that if you right click above the tabs, one of the options is task manager, which turns out to be a report on Chrome's memory usage, including each process. It lists 5 processes now, confirmed with Windows task manager: 1 for the browser, 1 for Shockwave, and 3 for tabs. It also lists a summary of Firefox 3's memory usage (I'm writing this in Firefox), which is currently using a nearly identical amount of RAM: 76,303k for Chrome, 76,204k for Firefox. That's actually pretty cool that it has a separate process for the browser and each tab and plugin. That way if one of them crashes, you don't lose the whole shebang.
7. The lack of add-ons is a dealbreaker. After using Firefox for the past few years, and the luxury of add-ons existing for just about anything you'd want your browser to do, I don't think I could ever switch to a browser without similar options. This is only made worse by Chrome's lack of built-in user interface customization options.
Overall, Google Chrome is disappointing. It seems like it's somewhere inbetween Internet Explorer and Firefox, and a lot closer to the IE side. I normally use Firefox for just about all my browsing, and usually only use IE to get updates to XP, so I don't think I'd ever have a reason to use Chrome.
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