Earth Hour 2008

8:00 pm March 29, 2008

what happen?

as was my custom, i got to the room half an hour early and mentally prepared for the class by staring blankly at the wall.

about 20 minutes later, she plopped down into the seat beside me, a seat which was normally occupied by someone else; i felt a twinge of resentment because i was a big fan of the person who normally sat next to me. but wait, you say, girls don't plop; they alight gracefully into their seats and do not burp or fart or commit any bodily function that is unbecoming. actually, i know girls who burp and fart and they can do it pretty darn well. she plopped down into the seat; she was the perennially tired-for-class type of person. for sitting beside me, you get a brief nod of acknowledgment, so that was what i gave her.

she pulled out a soup.

"ugh, the line up downstairs was so long." it was the begining of a story. i like stories; it meant that i did not have to contribute much to the conversation.

"it was weird. there were two pots of soup: barley and beef; and vegetable. the barley and beef one was almost down to nothing, but the vegetable one was almost completely full."

"and you got the vegetable one because there was more?"

"no, i got the vegetable one because i love vegetables!" i must have made a face because she followed that up with, "don't tell me, you're one of those people that don't like vegetables..."

i shrugged and made the conscious decision to make a face. "no, not really," as in, i don't like vegetables.

she shook her head and gave a sigh of exasperation.

"ugh, herman! we have nothing in common!" this was a baffling statement; i wondered how i was supposed to interpret it.

"i like potatoes?" was all i could offer while my upper mental faculties spun up their engines to decipher what she was talking about.

she did not speak to me for the rest of the class.

if life were like this, you wouldn't need a Visa

under the right conditions, your mind can wander to exotic places and ponder irrelevant things ad nauseum and ad infinitum, like at the top of mountains, where nothing happens. in such meditative states, we often ask the questions that would stump the common man. we reserve them for God, who being the Creator, knows all things down to the finest detail. in His infinite wisdom, God sometimes answers immediately. it is in these moments that we encounter the sublime and the ineffable.

speaking of ineffable, what would you consider the most ineffable animal? by this i mean, when you see a baby of this species, you think, how'd they do that? what are the logistics? the angles? the procedures?

the animal that comes to my mind is the porcupine; porcupines look pretty ineffable. and one day, at the top of a mountain, i asked this very question, to which i was provided an immediate answer. here's a more thorough answer.

and now you know too, and can share this powerful knowledge with your friends.

D-War: Dragon Wars

ancient dragons fighting each other in LA? how did i miss hearing about this movie completely?!

TRAILER

yes, i embedded the higher quality mp4 version; you need to add '&ap=%2526fmt%3D18' to the src url in the embed code, but only '&fmt=18' if you're going directly to the url.

this is the biggest blockbuster movie to come out of South Korea since My Sassy Girl. of course, it flopped this side of the Pacific, and flopped hard; it might have had something to do with the inane plot and the overuse of CGI. if that is the case, why do Michael Bay movies make money? can you answer me that?
perhaps it should have been a cartoon instead. looks like Darryl (Craig Robinson) from the Office is in it! here's a clip from the final showdown in the movie. i think i lost about 3500 brain cells just from watching it. make video game please.

EDIT:
i've gone and done you all a solid on this one: i watched the movie to spare you the tremendous suck. the acting was substandard and the writing seemed to have been written by a grade 10 student (i.e. Eragon level). the dialogue was worse than Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and nearly put this movie out of the B range and into a solid C (for crap). the sole redeeming quality of the movie was the action, the most noteworthy of which was the final battle between Good Dragon vs. Bad Dragon. yes, it was obvious and cliched to a fault, but it was well executed by whoever choreographed the CGI. see for yourself:

background: every 500 years, a heavenly power is incarnated into a girl who, at the age of twenty, must be presented to an imugi (proto-dragon) for it to ascend to full dragon status (and power). the girl has been assigned a protector who is to ensure she does not fall into the wrong hands, i.e. the Bad imugi. Throughout the entire movie, the Bad Imugi and his army of Lord of the Rings rejects has been tailing her, sowing mayhem and destruction about. to make a long story short, they catch up with her, strap her down to an altar for the Bad Imugi to eat and the Good Imugi finally shows up in the last 10 minutes of the movie, only to get OWNED but good. in this scene, incompetant-Protector and Girl are facing down Bad Imugi, who has just knocked out Good Imugi, now lying on the ground. i totally called the ending, down to the finish. i totally did not expect the KO to be so awesome though. you don't have to watch past 3:20. it is reminiscent of WarGreymon vs. Metal Seadramon (but i could only find it in Spanish).

no more squinting

in case you missed the memo, YouTube has been testing out higher quality videos.

just append a video link with '&fmt=6' or '&fmt=18' and you will see a significant increase in video quality, provided that the source video was of greater quality than the standard flash video quality that YouTube uses.

regular: 320 x 240, audio sample rate: 22050 Hz

&fmt=6: 448 x 336, audio sample rate: 44100 Hz

&fmt=18: 480 x 360, H264 video encoding (MP4), AAC audio encoding

this means that the higher quality videos (&fmt=6) carry twice the information (which also at least doubles the filesize and download time). &fmt=18 uses video and audio encoding that is significantly more efficient, so for nearly the same file size, they can pack in more than twice the information. this is the same encoding being used on YouTube videos that are being converted for viewing on iPhones and iPod Touches.

however, audio is still being converted to mono (single channel), even if videos are recorded in stereo (multi-channel). uploaders can circumvent this restriction by converting their files into flash video at the correct resolution (and in stereo) before uploading so YouTube will forgo the conversion process. not every video has been converted for higher quality yet; recent .wmv uploads seem to be the first batch. if a video does not have an HQ version, all you will see is the black loading screen.

Sample Video: regular; higher quality; MP4. it's easy to see the difference in video game videos.