I’ll be offline for a bit this next while — we’re moving on Sunday, and we won’t be able to get internet set up until Tuesday. And since they’ve told me that on Tuesday I should just be able to plug in the modem and everything should work, hopefully I’ll have internet sometime before the end of the year. I’ve learnt to never be optimistic about internet hookups, especially when they tell me I can hook it up myself. Twice, now, “instant activation” has taken over a week.

Okay, I usually ignore these dorky things, but:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Damn straight.

Happy Canada Day, everyone!

- Aaron and Caitlin

About once every two years I decide I should learn a bit of Flash. There are a lot of reasons to learn it:

1. It’s capable of a lot of interesting interactivity that’s otherwise impossible on the web.
2. It has strong video capabilities, which makes it interesting to a motion designer. Not as strong as Silverlight, but, well, we’ll just not go there.
3. Clients ask for it.

But then, I remember why I always give up.

1. AS3 is a hellish mixture of everything bad and nothing good from various languages.
2. I just spent two days trying to make an image rotate in 3D space. And failed.

You know things have gone horribly wrong the moment Silverlight is starting to look damn appealing.

Since the car was unceremoniously destroyed several weeks ago, we’ve talked a lot about exactly what we’re going to do about it. It’s a wreck, and on Monday morning we’re going to say goodbye to it for good. We’re getting $1400 for it — half of what I originally paid for it, and ~$600 short of enough money to actually replace it. So, we’re going to do without.

Yes, we’re going to try to survive without a car. When you live an hour and a half from the city, it’s not a decision made lightly. It’s going to be extremely limiting in some ways, but Vancouver has a fantastic transit system (a horrible transit system, if you ask a Vancouver native, but a transit system designed by God himself and implemented by an army of cherubs if you grew up in Winnipeg). We’ve registered with ZipCar, so if we really need a vehicle at least it’s fairly easy to rent one. Though all the ZipCar locations are pretty much downtown, so we’ll see how useful it really is.

A quick note on Call of Pripyat, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel I’ve been playing: so far, I’m totally infatuated with it. It’s everything that was amazing about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (man, that’s still a pain to type) with everything that didn’t quite work from the first game fixed. Best moment so far: having to seek shelter during an emission (a random event where a radiation bursts runs across the land), then going to the kitchen (in real life) and making myself a cup of tea. Then, staring out the window at the ravaged landscape, sipping tea, waiting for things to blow over. And just for a moment, it really felt like I was sitting there, sipping tea, waiting for things to blow over. Just like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the atmosphere pulls me in completely.

Some interesting thoughts on copyright issues and Glee from the blog Balkinization:

In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna’s Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying Madonna’s original? up to $150,000). Just a few episodes later, a video of Sue dancing to Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 hit Physical is posted online (damages for recording the entirety of Physical on Sue’s camcorder: up to $300,000). And let’s not forget the glee club’s many mash-ups — songs created by mixing together two other musical pieces. Each mash-up is a “preparation of a derivative work” of the original two songs’ compositions – an action for which there is no compulsory license available, meaning (in plain English) that if the Glee kids were a real group of teenagers, they could not feasibly ask for — or hope to get — the copyright permissions they would need to make their songs, and their actions, legal under copyright law. Punishment for making each mash-up? Up to another $150,000 — times two.

The absence of any mention of copyright law in Glee illustrates a painful tension in American culture. While copyright holders assert that copyright violators are “stealing” their “property,” people everywhere are remixing and recreating artistic works for the very same reasons the Glee kids do — to learn about themselves, to become better musicians, to build relationships with friends, and to pay homage to the artists who came before them. Glee’s protagonists — and the writers who created them — see so little wrong with this behavior that the word ‘copyright’ is never even uttered.

Really interesting, especially since a new copyright bill was just tabled in Canada.

Is there some sort of usability guideline for air quotes? What’s the proper method for air-quoting a large paragraph? I always have an urge to air quote every word, but it seems like it makes more sense to air quote just at the start and end. What do you do with your hands in the meantime, though?

Another alternative: starting the air quote (fingers down), reciting the paragraph, and then ending the quote (fingers up). Seems kind of needlessly hard on the fingers, though.

There’s a new trailer for Scott Pilgrim out, which further solidifies my opinion that this is going to be the greatest movie in the history of mankind. Edgar Wright directing Bryan Lee O’Malley? A match made in geek heaven. I’ve always been a little on the fence about casting Cera as Scott, but the more I see the more I like — and Edgar Wright has never made a bad decision in his life.

With the new computer up and running, I finally got around to hooking my tablet back up. I opened a random image in Photoshop and scribbled on it to show Caitlin how it worked. The result was neither interesting nor aesthetically pleasing. Which leaves the reason for posting it to the realm of speculation.

I’m pretty excited today: the final part of our new computer should be arriving today. Our computer’s been dying a slow, slow death, and it’s gotten to the point where you can’t get any work done without something glitching or crashing. So, it’s getting a full rebuild. The specs:

• Intel i5 750 2.66GHZ Quad Core CPU
• MSI P55-CD53 P55 motherboard (which includes 10 USB ports, 2 eSATA ports, and support for USB3 and SATA3)
• 8GB DDR3 RAM (bought as a 2×4GB set, so theoretically we could go to 16GB at some point if we really, really wanted to)
• MSI GeForce GTX 260 Twin Frozr OC video card (the mainstream equivalent of the Quadro FX 4800, the card of choice for Adobe products — hopefully it’ll eat Photoshop and After Effects alive)
• ~4TB of storage (you’d be shocked at how quickly Caitlin’s photography fills our drives — she’ll easily burn through 250gb in a semester, and if I’m working on anything in HD, terabytes disappear in an instant)

All this means that Caitlin can work on her photography quickly and smoothly, and I can get back to doing some motion graphics work at home. Oh, and I also picked up Call of Pripyat in anticipation of the ability to play PC games again. Who says you shouldn’t mix work and pleasure?

Warner’s been quietly releasing short previews of each Hex episode. Four episodes are out already, with three left to go. Reviews have been really positive — we’re sitting at 4.5 / 5 on iTunes in both Canada and the US. Here’s the preview they just put out for episode 4: