Slightly Not Canceled

“Hello, my name is Elivorio Montoya. Somebody killed my father. You guys wanna’ get some beers?”

[Before you point out the “typo” in panel 3, you must remember that in the HEniverse, people usually have 4 fingers per hand… except for when they don’t.]

I’ve never seen ABC’s Defying Gravity, so I can’t really comment on it’s potential uncancelation-non-demise. I’ve heard of it described as “LOST… in space” [thanks to @teacher_geek and @timbond for inspiring Josh’s words in panel 1], and “Grey’s Anatomy in Space.” I don’t know about you, but those comparisons are on very opposite ends of the geek spectrum as far as I’m concerned. While one is a delicious geeky worm dangling precariously on the end of a gleaming sci-fi hook, and the other is just the hook. Possibly with a piece of poo on it.

I have, however, seen The Princess Bride at least 150 times. 6 times or so in the last couple of months thanks to TNT-HD, which explains my recent preoccupation with it. It’s my wife’s favorite film and certainly holds a spot in my top 10. It is also one of my many “stop everything and watch this when it comes on TV especially if it’s in HD” movies, along with Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and any movie with “Back To the Future” in the title.

BOOK UPDATE: The print proof arrived today. The colors look great and there are only a few things that need to be changed before all 1000 units are built, or hewn or whatever they do with books.

BACK UPDATE: Many of you have emailed, commented and Twittered with concern for my back pain issues. I’m happy to report that 3 weeks of rest, stretches and time spent on the Infernal Machine have brought me back to roughly 85% or so of normal operating spinal capacity. I don’t feel great, but I can get up and around with relatively little pain. Thank you all for the kind words and advice.

OK… But I Could Set The Internet On Fire

[reddit-me]Hello, IE6. Whaaaat’s happening?
We have sort of a problem here.
Yeeeah. You apparently stopped rendering webpages correctly in 2001.
Mmm yeah. Ya see we’re rendering valid html correctly from now on… did you SEE the memo?
If you could just do that from now on that would be great.
And I’ll make sure you get another copy of that memo.

YouTube phasing out support for IE6 unfortunately, most IE6 users simply can’t upgrade

IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On

Call it a going away present

Back up in your ass with the resurrection.

Back when things really started to look bleak for Toshiba and HD-DVD I said I had always been rooting for them, but I really didn’t care who won as long as there was a clear winner and we could stop all this foolishness. Well, finally the troops are pulling out and coming home. The war is officially over.

I’m still not ready to buy a Blu-Ray player. Let’s pretend this format war never happened and consider this to be the day High Definition optical media is first released. Essentially it is, because the war stifled the format adoption, market growth, title availability, etc for the last 2 years. We would probably be looking at sub $300 Blu-Ray players and $15-17 Discs by now if not for the unforgivable stupidity of the movie and technology industries. Instead we are looking at the PS3 being the only Blu-Ray player worth buying (t’s firmware upgradable and has the online connectivity that most other current players do not offer) and $25-30 for new titles at big box retailers.

The price drops we saw from the HD-DVD camp around November and December of 2007 were false so they don’t count. By that I mean they were slashing retail prices for players WAY below the cost to produce them in the hopes early adopters would flock in and secure their position as the de facto HiDef disc. Instead of a viable consumer install base they now have about a half a million angry Wal-Mart customers that want to beat them to death with their shiny, obsolete “Ayche-Dee-DeeBeeDee” boxes.

Josh said, “I don’t care! I want to watch beautiful moving pictures on my new giant HD-TV!” and bought a decent sized library of HD-DVD’s. He contends that the are still playable, no matter who won. I contend that his choice was bad and he should feel bad. Those of you in the same predicament may want to consider converting your HD-DVD collection to Blu-Ray. All you need is a bunch of money, nearly unlimited time, and a master’s degree in computer science. You could also just pretend it was a fancy DVD player and play like it never happened.

I can’t think too hard about the contestants and the outcome, because Blu-Ray winning makes no fucking sense. HD-DVD was cheaper to produce, cheaper to buy, higher capacity (at first), region free, more interactive right out of the gate, and posessed the foresight to give their product a LOGICAL name people could understand. If we are looking for a replacement for sandwiches and the contenders are “Sandwich-2” and “Purple Explosion Ninja” I am certainly going to be curious about the PEN format but I’m also not going to immediately recognize it as something tasty and nutritious for my lunch time enjoyment.

The thing that really bugs the shit out of me is the fact that Sony actually won a format war. God damnit.