Monday, September 17, 2007

back to the gym

I haven't been in the gym since around the end of July last year. That's when I had my odd ankle injury that had me limping around for two months last year, which finally culminated in arthroscopic surgery about a month ago. In the mean time I've gained somewhere around 12 lbs, all around the mid-section. I am not a happy cookie.

Thankfully on my last visit to the orthopedist, he suggested that getting on an excericise bike a couple times a week would help regain strength and flexability in my ankle. I didn't actually go until today. Why? After more than a year away it's just difficult to go back. It's hard to get up those extra thirty minutes in the morning to get in to the gym. But once you do, you settle right in.

Twenty minutes this morning of relatively light intervals on the excersize bike. Tomorrow night I'll go back to restart the weight training. Hopefully by this time next month I'll progress back up to the elliptical with my old pattern of high intensity interval training. With any luck, I'll be back down to about 155 by the time vacation comes right after Thanksgiving.

Monday, September 10, 2007

$400 PS3?

From Ars Techinica.

This is exactly the direction that Sony SHOULD be headed in. Which could be it's bogus.

If it's real, it could be the move which finally results in a PS3 in my living room. Anna gave the thumbs up to the Sony Credit Card deal if I wanted to do it, but I wasn't really comfortable with that. I don't like the idea of opening a credit card just for a purchase discount... especially when it's not so much a discount, it's a credit issued to your card sometime after the purchase. Maybe it wasn't so bad... I'm just uncomfortable with it.

But $400 retail? We'll likely have a 10% off card for Target floating around, bringing it to only $360, plus a free copy of Spider-man 3 on Blu Ray. Good enough for me.

I know, if the report is correct, it'll only be a 40GB HD. I'm not much fussed over that. I've barely used the 20 gigs on my 360 after 4-5 months, and by all accounts it's very easy to switch out a drive on the PS3. And yeah, it'll be an emotion engine-less unit, but again it matters very little to me.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

In response to a response: HD Format War

Contrary to what a friend's reponse to my post on HD media says, I did not indicate that things might be looking up. Rather, I posed a question. Last I checked posing a question does not equate to indicating anything is. However, I will certainly endeavor to explain my rationale for acceptance of combo players, especially in light of the extremely sparse nature of my original comments which elicited a fairly impassioned and detailed response.

The main flaw I find in Alan's argument is that he apparently believes that there's only one way for the format war to end: for one format to be taken off the market. Would I rather have a single format? Certainly. Which one would I prefer? Blu-ray, hands down. But at this point, I want the war over by any means necessary. If HD players migrate to being by and large combo players then the end result is the same. Why? Because consumers want to buy one player and know they aren't screwed out of material only found on a competing format.

Is there some branding confusion? Sure. I hate to tell him though, HD in general presents a number of confusion issues to the general consumer. An alarming number think anything on an HDTV is automatically in HD - this has been documented in numerous customer surveys and articles as insane as it sounds to us. Thankfully recent studies have demonstrated an understanding of the need for special programming to have risen from somewhere around 50% last year to apparently about 86% this year. Also, all too many think regular DVDs are already HD. And even many of those who understand the difference don't feel like HD discs are enough of an upgrade over DVD to care. And therein lies the only real problem.

People don't care. It's not customer confusion creating problems, it's customer apathy. Alan mentions consumer apathy, but he directs only towards combo players when it really should be directed at HD disc formats in general. Alan cites the failure of SACD and DVD-Audio as an example of consumer confusion killing two competing formats, but it's a bad analogy. It's hard to be confused about something when no one even knows what the bloody hell your talking about. Take a poll on the street, take a poll of your family. Unless they're audiophiles (and audiophiles make up a very very small part of the consumer base), they aren't going to know what SACD or DVD-Audio is. I know what they are and I never cared. That's why those formats failed. Not confusion, apathy. For the vast majority of people CD quality is good enough. Hell, for most people lossy MP3s are good enough.

However, HD media have at least two big advantages over both SACD and DVD-Audio. One, it's much easier for the average consumer to see a difference in picture quality than it is for them to hear the difference in audio quality of a music recording over what is currently available. Two, it has an entry route that is finding it's way into consumer's homes whether they like it or not. While many people still don't have a reasonable understanding of HD, the numbers of sets sold are increasing all the time, simply by virtue of the fact that very few standard def sets are even sold now. As the technology becomes more universal, understanding too will come with time, and as discussed above, we're already seeing improvements from even a year ago. With that level of understanding, so comes a proliferation of HD programming entering people's homes through cable and satellite. And after they get used to watching a season of Lost or Heroes in HD... they have a hard time going back to standard def DVDs and at that point they start to care. The hook has been set. Now they are ready for HD disc formats, when before they didn't see it as big of a deal.

And that is a BIG key here. The whole HD migration is taking time, but it is happening. It's bound to take time, and the HD disc adoption isn't going to be a nearly over-night revolution like DVD was. The expense to change over isn't minimal, but it's coming down all the time, as technology is want to do. But we're still in the early adopter phase here.

Which, bewilderingly, is why Alan feels screwed now. Yes yes, he has a Blu-Ray player in the form of a PS3, and he feels like he's getting screwed by recent deals such as that made between Toshiba and several studios. This shouldn't really surprise him, though - we all know early adopters always get screwed. Just ask iPhone owners. But Alan's the kind of guy who already understands this, even if he is not outwardly accepting of it. Again, this is even something he touches on early in his article, but by the end he's brushing it off when it affects him directly. I'm sorry if he has to end up buying another player. I would have thought he would be expecting to in the next couple of years anyway.

When we move OUT of early adopter phase, and people start caring as discussed above, then the market needs to be ready with a winner. If that means combo players are the norm, and people walk into a showroom and the dealer says, "this plays all HD media available" then that's good enough.

Again, I certainly agree a single format would be the best outcome, and my personal choice would be Blu-Ray. But pragmatically, that may not be in the cards. The next best solution is for dual format players to become the norm. I ask you, how do we all lose if multi-format players become the norm? We don't. When dual format players are the norm, we are completely unrestricted in our choices. I don't call complete freedom of choice being screwed.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Things looking up for HD formats?

Took a quick peak into a few blogs before going to bed. EngadgetHD is running stories today about new combo players from both LG and Samsung, and will debut at CEDIA this week. As much as I would prefer to have one prevailing format, I'll be reasonably satisfied with dual format players becoming the norm. It's looking more and more like the eventual outcome. Will the two formats be eventually be merged in the minds of consumers if not in specifications? I wouldn't be at all surprised. Then we can get rid of those ridiculous Blu-Ray and HD-DVD cases.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Teen Titans #50: Back in the list

I've made no secret of my opinion that Teen Titans has lost it's way. Johns and McKone's issues are some of my favorite Titans books ever, but it really got off track during Infinite Crisis, and simply couldn't recover with the Death of Conner (Superboy) and the removal of Bart (Kid Flash) for the artificial aging to adulthood and subsequent death barely more than a year later.

Sean McKeever appears to have a solid grounding for the characters. Issue #50 gives me hope that this run of Titans isn't going to die. I've been on and off with the Titans since the A Lonely Place of Dying crossover arc with Batman in the late 80's. A lot of Titans teams have come and gone since then and the four who graduated from Young Justice were one of my favorites. It's been a sad slow decline in enthusiasm for me since the afore-mentioned sundering of that team but in #50 McKeever makes me think I could come to love these newer characters as much as those we've lost. It's always been about the interpersonal relationships for the Titans. If he can concentrate on that aspect of the book while keeping firmly within superhero adventure, then he'll have me for a long time.

The only doubt I have is the chosen artist for the new run. Ale Garza is a very talented artist, don't get me wrong. But I have a firm belief that even supremely talented artists are not the right fit for any story merely based on their talent. Art style has to match well to the tone of the story. Comics are a blending of two halves which only work when one dissolves into another and makes a whole. Personally I don't feel Garza's style works well on superheros. A fantastic artist, but in my opinion, the wrong artist for the job.

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Dennou Coil

I started doing some catchup work on some spring anime series. My new favorite is Dennou Coil. The show is incredibly refreshing. There was a time when nearly every anime show had a distinct look but for much of the 2000's there has been a trend towards homogenization of styles in TV anime. Dennou Coil is at the forefront of a number of programs bucking that trend. It seems to draw more from Studio Ghibli than anything from television, and manages to evoke that feeling without copying styles outright.

It takes place in a future world, sometime in the 2020's, where humans use a special system of cybernetic glasses to interact with a world of data around them - it's a world of augmented reality where virtual object exist as overlays in the real world. The exact nature of this world of virtual objects is unclear, but I'm only up to episode three myself - fortunately the mysteries feel less like mystery for mystery's sake and is more a natural evolution of the story introducing the viewer into the strange world in which humans now live. The main character is an 11 year old girl who moves with her family to the town of Daikoku where the government has, as of late, been introducing upgrades and new technology to the spaces (short for cyberspaces, the virtual 3-d areas overlaid onto the real world and seen only through visors/glasses). Shortly after arriving in town, her cyberpet dog Densuke is infected with an Illegal (a virtual organism comparable to a computer virus) and this begins her decent into an underground youth culture of Daikoku and membership in a children's detective agency armed with powerful virtual objects and metatags (bits of virtual world code given form as long post-it like notes which bestow abilities, properties, and markers to both virtual and real objects).

Dennou Coil is a real keeper. Interesting concepts mixed with a fantastically fun and original style that breaks away from the rest. Check it out if you get the chance.

On a more general note, I've added a list of the anime I'm currently watching on the side. It's a short list right now, as I've lost interest in a lot of the shows I was watching earlier in the year. Bleach and Naruto came back strong from fillers, but both went back to old tricks far too soon. As interesting stylisticly Moonlight Mile was, it just didn't hold my attention. I might try it again as the show has finished it's run and is available in whole. Given that it's getting a second season already, it probably deserves a second shot. Gurren Lagann, while a favorite, was licensed very quickly, and so I've just decided to wait for the domestic release. Claymore was always a treat, but for some reason I always dreaded starting to watch a new episode, and eventually let it fall by the way side. My mind is an odd one.

There are very few shows coming up in the fall season that I'm looking forward to. Gundam 00 is the main one, but it's a new Gundam show so that's a given. I'd probably be REALLY into seeing Genshiken Season 2, if I'd ever got around to seeing Season 1. A few others here and there I might look into, but nothing worth really mentioning till I see them....