umdesch4's Semi-random Stuff

Went and saw Hero last night. The first thing I'll say is that it was beautiful on the big screen, and I'm glad I finally got to see it that way. But...

They subtly altered everything about it. I didn't time it, but I think it was a solid 10-15 minutes shorter than the original theatrical version, which was achieved almost entirely by chopping 2 or 3 second bits out, which made the scene cuts a little unnaturally fast, especially during dialog. It was weird, and almost subliminal, but I've seen the original enough times to notice.

They changed the opening and closing text, to where it's pretty far from the literal translations I've seen online previously, and most of the subtitles were changed too. Sometimes it worked well, more of a 'meaning' than 'literal' translation...but sometimes at the cost of very lengthy and wordy sentences that took so long to read you didn't get a chance to look at the beautiful scenes. And sometimes they changed the meaning of the situation so profoundly that it would have killed the emotional impact of the scene if I didn't know what was 'really' said.

Then there were the visuals. I read somewhere that they computer enhanced the colour saturation, and I believe it...but I liked the overall look of it. Visual purists would probably cringe.

The sound was very different. Sometimes they swapped out sound effects with cooler ones (IMHO), but sometimes, something that was originally a subtle sound became a sharp in-your-face sound effect that made people jump, and me say 'what the...??!!' Of course, the music didn't 'dance' with the visuals as cohesively as in the original, because it fell out of perfect synch from all those 2 second edits I was talking about before. Ah well!

All those things aside, I'd still highly recommend it. If you're willing to bear in mind that it's been dumbed down for an American audience, and altered to resonate more with western ideology, most of the altering is in the subtitles, and the beautiful cinematography is mostly intact. You'll have to take my word for it that there's a heart-wrenchingly beautiful story in there to go with it too!

umdesch4.

Those of you who know where my personal webpage is (the one served up from the Apache server on my PC), go check it out. I've put up a sub-page with mp3s of some of the stuff I worked on while I was at Columbia Academy. I don't know if I'm just too close to these songs because I spent so many hours working on them, but hearing them again just blew me away.

Anyway, just thought I'd share.

Enjoy!
umdesch4

Check this out!
100 Terabyte 3.5-inch Optical Storage

Here's some math to give you an idea of what we're talking about here:
100 TB * 1024^2 MB/TB = 104857600 MB
104957600 MB / 10 MB/Min = 10485760 minutes of CD quality audio data.

Now, this can be expressed a couple of ways:
10485760 min / 74 min/CD = 141699 CDs
or
10485760 min / (60 min/hour * 24 hour/day * 365 days/year) = 19.95 years

So, you could fit about 20 years worth of CD quality audio data on one of these little disks.

Holy crap!
umdesch4

This is too hilarious:
Bush - Tribal Sovereignty.mp3

Enjoy!
umdesch4

A hydrogen explosion occurred at Ballard last night, so our building was evacuated. Apparently nobody was hurt except for some minor injuries on the part of the hydrogen truck driver.

As far as I know, there were no problems at HQ as a result, except for ESC and IT Ops running remotely until further notice.

Chris.

Ok, here's something worth sharing. Go to BlackViper and check out his sections on Windows (XP or 2000) service configurations. Do a bit of digging, and you'll find a registry patch to reconfigure your services and speed up your machine. I just tried his 'safe' mode version, and it seems to make a significant difference. I'll keep you posted.

Note: don't try this unless you read everything and know what you're doing!

Cheers!
umdesch4