Blessed by the Potato

Snarky letter-formatted post aside, I did enjoy Transformers. It was quite a bit different from “Canon”, but is, in its own way, a decent movie.

I did almost puke.

The GM sponsorship was pretty obvious, and I pointed it out to Wayfare:
“They made a deal with GM.”
“Makes sense. Think of how many kids of our generation wanted a Delorian after Back to the Future.”
“I still want a Delorian.”
“Exactly! If they still made them, they’d be the only thing on the road!”

Spoilers follow (skip to the previous post, which is below this one in the default view, which is pretty spoiler-free)
Some nits:

I was really glad they got the same voice for Optimus Prime, and was a little surprised to see the return of the sword/axe for Optimus and the ball & chain for Megatron: weaponry that I don’t think we saw in more than one or two episodes of the cartoon.

PS: IMDB has the stereo decepticon down as Frenzy rather than Soundwave. The old memory’s foggy, but I thought Frenzy was a cassette for Soundwave…

PPS: If you’re playing MOO2 and are trying to find the distance between two stars, the key you’re looking for is F9.

Dear Michael;

I recently saw your latest movie Transformers. I was a huge Transformers fan as a kid, and remain so to this day. I was really worried before the movie that you would turn this into an absolute travesty, a cheap mockery of my childhood memories all to make a quick buck. Those worries were magnified after I watched the teaser trailer, seeing how different your vision of the Transformers was, how the blocky bits of their transformed vehicle had given way to a very busy visual design full of movement and pointy bits. The last year of my life has been filled with dread over what you might do to this franchise.

I’m happy to see that you have done right by the franchise. Yes, you made a number of changes, and it is a different version of the Transformers from what I remember, but the recognizable elements are still there, and most importantly, it was good. There were of course a number of nits I could pick (excellent job on Optimus’ voice, but Megatron could have been better and Soundwave was just… well, what were you thinking? And Soundwave didn’t really need to hump the computer system, that’s just a no. The plot was, well, not expected to be there at all, and it wasn’t bad, but I think for our current times the first season’s plot of a world in an energy crisis and the fight to steal what readily available energy can be raped from our world might have worked better) but I won’t (except parenthetically).

However, I have to ask: are you hard up for cash? Or did you get your cousin (who might be a little slow or have a bad case of the ADHD) to do the camera work? If you need a tripod, ritalin, or a steady cam Michael, I’m here for you. Because this movie was really, really hurt by the insane camera movements and cuts. I play a lot of video games, so I’m usually ok with that sort of thing, even from the Blair Witch Project, but Michael, I nearly puked from your movie. That’s no exaggeration: I had to run out of the theatre and stand in the washrooms until a wave of nausea passed by me. There’s really no exuse for that sort of thing, either. In moderation, a touch of motion blur and a few rapid cuts can confer a sense of action and dynamic intensity. But, to distract myself from the urge to throw up, I started counting how long each cut ran, and for the last 25 minutes, there wasn’t a single cut that lasted more than 5 seconds. Not one solid, stable camera position lasted for more than 3 seconds (though there was one relatively stable and relatively motion blur free dolly shot that lasted 4). Like shadows that can’t exist without the light, the sense of action from those cheap camera and editing techniques is quickly lost when there’s no stability to compare them to. Furthermore, they’re passe, Michael. Blurring your CG and cutting rapidly around the scene is an old technique used to make CG seem more real; it’s a way to hide what’s going on so people don’t see how terrible it is. In your case though, you had very good CG. There were some very good still(ish) shots of the autobots near the middle, and they looked good. Don’t hide them; let them shine.

Of course, that’s what DVD re-edits are for. Work on that for the next few months Michael. Since I suspect most of that motion blur was added in post-processing, you shouldn’t have much work to do to take it out. If you do need to do a few reshoots, I’ll loan you a tripod.

You worked hard to make a Transformers movie we die-hard, old school fans could accept. Let us see it.

I’m really hating these sony vaio notebooks at the moment.

A long time ago, my dad was a loyal Dell customer, then we had 2 laptops in a row crap out in rapid succession, and we were stuck with a desktop that had weird proprietary parts and was nigh impossible to upgrade. From there, we went to Toshiba for notebooks (and bought one HP desktop for my sister, primarily because it had an attractive moulded plastic case, and I built my own desktop). They served us well: they were functional, ergonomic, stylish, and delivered decent power for the money. Then my dad was in the Sony store buying a TV or something and they sold him on a computer. It was fairly stylish, light, and extremely quiet (especially compared to my roaring Toshiba with its desktop processor) but not particularly powerful for the money. Since then he’s bought 3 more (4 total in the family now), the latest one coming pre-loaded with Vista.

That one though is just an ugly brick. It is quiet and cool, but it has no style. It’s heavy, with square corners and I find the keyboard isn’t placed quite right to be comfortable… the power brick has a pretty short set of cords, and they’re asymmetrical so that the bit between the brick and the wall isn’t long enough to keep the brick on top of a desk, if so desired. Of course, the biggest problem is that it came pre-loaded with Vista. After discussing the options with my dad, we decided reformatting to XP is the way to go for him, since he’s not very computer savvy and will have to switch to other XP systems constantly and doesn’t want to get confused (that and there’s no guarantee that all his software would work). The effort should be worthwhile since it would be easier for me to support him (I can’t help him troubleshoot an OS I don’t know) and it would save having to buy new versions of Office, Quicken, etc. There was the risk that some of the proprietary Sony stuff wouldn’t work (I figured the battery monitor and the memory stick reader in particular) but it should still basically function for what he needs.

So, after installing XP… nothing works. The ethernet, the wireless, the graphics acceleration, the sound, just nothing works. I figured Sony would have drivers on their website, but they’re Vista-only. I tried installing them anyway, but the installer says it’s for XP and instantly quits, without giving me the option of trying. To get around that, I tried grabbing the XP drivers for similar Sony laptops (same, or similar components), and in that case the installer says it’s not designed for my notebook and quits. It’s too smart for its own good! So now I’ve spent hours scouring the web and trolling forums to find out what each component is and getting 3rd party (or component manufacturer) drivers for everything. I still haven’t got the wireless working, which is pretty essential for my dad, but at least I’ve got the regular ethernet finally, so I can start the long process of patching windows.

And, of course, there’s no going back. Not only did it not come with a proper Windows Vista CD (when was the last time a computer did?), but it didn’t even come with one of those lame “restore” CDs. There was a “restore” partition on the hard drive (which always seemed like a waste to me — like constantly carrying around your restore CDs), but once I installed XP, I lost access to that partition, and don’t know why (though I suspect a weird Vista-only hard drive driver may be at fault). I’ve poured over 10 hours into this now, and have only one or two roads left to try to get the wireless working, and if that doesn’t work I guess I’m going to have to borrow (or download) a Vista disk to reinstall. Hopefully the paranoid authentication process will let me use the OEM activation code again…

Update: After spending another four hours on this (hey, my scan time went into the crapper and I was all set for an all-nighter anyway) I finally got the essentials working. The third Realtek sound driver I tried (from Realtek — none of the Sony ones worked) eventually worked. Once that worked the modem drivers worked too. I suppose I should have realized that earlier, but a software modem I guess needs some kind of audio processor. (In fact in the device manager, it even mentions the modem is attached to the sound card).

The wireless was the worst motherfucker of them all. I think my biggest problem is the exceptionally generic “LAN-Express” name Sony gave it. Everywhere I looked indicated that that name was used by Sony for various Atheros chips. I tried at least a dozen different Atheros utilities and drivers, from all over the internet (I got a wise-extractor to rip the drivers out of the other Sony packages to bypass the “too smart for its own good” factor, and tried the same trick on various HP drivers that were supposed to be for the same Atheros chips) — which was unfortunately necessary because Atheros itself doesn’t seem to have a drivers section. Finally, finally I found a site that told me the VGN-N250E doesn’t have an Atheros chip at all, but rather an Intel 3945ABG PRO/Wireless card. Bangarang, I was in (and having had to get Intel drivers before, I didn’t think their site was all that good… but now after trying for all these other drivers, I’ve got to say they’re one of the best).

There’s a lot that still doesn’t work: the keyboard controls for screen brightness don’t work; the memorystick reader doesn’t work (not a big issue, my dad never uses it), the touchpad works, but doesn’t have any of the advanced functions (the scrolling by sliding along the edges, or a way to turn it off when typing a lot or using a mouse). I think those are all compromises my dad will live with to spare him having to learn another operating system.

Well, I took some time tonight to do some work with the various computers around here. My dad bought a new laptop a few weeks ago and I’m supposed to set that up for him, but just haven’t had the time to even take it out of the box until tonight. It came pre-loaded with Vista, and we’re trying to decide if its worth the effort of nuking it and going back to XP. I think it is, particularly since he’s old and crotchety and doesn’t like learning new things, especially when he’ll be shuffling back and forth between the new system with Vista and the old one with XP pretty regularly. Of course, since it’s a laptop that means he’ll lose all the proprietary preinstalled programs like the battery meter. Poking around I haven’t seen much to recommend or damn Vista. I don’t really care for the new start menu, but then I’ve hated the changes posed by every incarnation of Windoze to date, so why should Vista be any different? I found it odd when I went to shut down and didn’t get a prompt for hibernate, reset, or shut down… I hit the button in the start menu, and it was off.

My laptop has been driving me mad as it passes 3 years of age here. It is still pretty powerful, has a nice display, and basically does what I want it to… except for the fact that there’s a loose connection in the AC power, so I have to constantly jiggle it when I’m using the computer.

A friend also had some computer troubles with strange lines and poor colour fidelity in his display. I had him bring the computer over and we quickly found out that his Radeon 9800 Pro had died. My computer, fortunately, had exactly the same card, so I just sold him mine, thinking I would get a new one in the morning. (It also saved him having to get new drivers!) Of course, now I haven’t been keeping pace with developments in graphics cards, so I have no idea what to get, or what a good price for that would be. I do know that the pace of acceleration seems to have slowed down (or that 9800 pro was a real gem) since it’s been going strong for over 3 years now with no sign of being unable to run a game. So, I figured this could be an opportunity to upgrade before I faced the grim spectre of obsolescence. However, I have no idea what to buy. I know that ATI went from their 4-digit numbering scheme to X-### quite some time ago, and figured that pretty much any X-series card would be an upgrade. Looking into it more though, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, it looks like you’ve got to go pretty high up into the X-series to equal the old 9800 Pro. I’m hesitant to get a nVidia card after the steaming turd that was my TNT2, but I’m told they’re much better now. Of course, I have no clue how their naming scheme works, or what level I need… so it looks like it’s going to involve a bit more research than just popping into the computer store down the block and grabbing a card…

Wow, was that a long weekend. Scans every day, finishing off with 14 consecutive hours in the MRI suite on holiday monday. Imagine the overtime I’d get if I was actually employed!

It was getting pretty rough there, with no breaks to go eat, so I had a cooler bag with lunch and dinner. I had a cancellation right around lunch, which was kind of good in a way, since I was starting to fall behind in my schedule, and it gave me about a half hour to run to Timmy’s to stock up on donuts and get some more ice for the cooler bag. I got home last night just absolutely exhausted, and did not sleep at all well. Now I’m getting ready to go back for more scans tonight. It never stops!

About halfway into the afternoon, an orderly came by and dropped a patient (as in, an actual sick person in a wheelchair) at the door of the MRI, and ran off even though I was yelling at him (I couldn’t leave the console for another 10 minutes or so). Finally I get a chance to go up to this poor woman and ask her what she’s here for, and if I can help her (hoping that she’s not going to say “I’m here for an MRI”). She’s here for “a scan”. I ask if she knows what kind of scan, if its an emergency case, and if she knew whether they paged someone to come in and take care of her because I’m not a doctor… she says the only thing she knows is she has to get an injection. Well that, at least, tells me that nobody’s expecting me to give her an emergency MRI. I start searching the mostly lights-out nuclear medicine department for someone that might know what to do. Finally, hidden way in back around the corner in one of the treatment rooms I find one of the nuc med techs, who had been called in to help this woman and knew exactly what to do (and was also confused as to why she was dropped off at the MRI).

So, crisis averted, it was back to scanning for me. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped. We have two machines networked together to run the MRI. Basically, one is supposed to be running the scans, and the images are instantly sent to the other one for backing up to CD-R and viewing. Unfortunately, the hard drive on the other one filled up sometime on Friday, and noone who knew how to properly back it up and clear it off came in, which meant a lot of intense multitasking for me to make sure I got all my stuff backed up without having to spend an extra 7 hours at the end of the day to get it done. I was worried the same would happen to the main console itself, as it topped 90% yesterday…

So, a long weekend.