Tag Archives: South Park

More thoughts on AppleTV

I’ve worked out how to take a typical AVI file download (generic MPEG-4 with MP3 audio, such as XviD) and convert it to something the Apple TV should be able to play without re-encoding all the video.

There’s also the elgato turbo.264, which approximately quadruples the speed of encoding video for AppleTV.

I tried re-encoding a good quality downloaded show that’s unavailable in the USA, using the QuickTime AppleTV preset. The result was indistinguishable from the original. So I’m really seriously considering AppleTV now.

So, how does AppleTV stack up as a way of replacing cable or satellite?

Mythbusters: $50 (30 episodes)
South Park: $24 (14 episodes)
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: $20 (13 episodes)
Venture Brothers: $20 (13 episodes)
Reno 911: $21 (14 episodes)
The Soup: $6 (per 8 episodes)

If we imagine Dr Who and Torchwood were also available at similar prices, that’d be about a year’s TV for maybe $200, or about 4 months of cable or satellite bills.

This ignores the option of watching shows by renting the DVDs from Netflix. Do that, and it’s an even more cost-effective option.

I’d be inclined to spend some of the freed-up money on “This American Life”, Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit”, and other shows that I currently don’t get to see.

Mostly for Dan

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health analyzed nicotine yield of cigarettes sold in Massachusetts from 1997 to 2005. The result: cigarette manufacturers have been gradually boosting the level of addictive nicotine by an average of 1.6% per year, or 11% over the 7 year period studied.

Something to bear in mind while watching re-runs of the South Park episode “Butt Out“, in which Parker and Stone bravely defend the cigarette corporations for providing a little harmless pleasure to people, who after all smoke of their own free will.

Wii otter be skeptical

With the latest South Park being a time-travel story about Nintendo Wii, atheism, and sea otters, I must admit I did momentarily consider the possibility that either Trey Parker or Matt Stone had been reading my web site.

However, it’s quite common that people think that TV episodes contain coded messages specifically for them, and 99.9% of the time it just means they stopped taking their medications. So unless there’s an upcoming episode with a squirrel named Frida, I’m going to assume it’s a coincidence.

But that Allied Atheist Alliance logo with the otter head was pretty cool…

À la carte TV myths

The controversy over à la carte cable and satellite programming keeps resurfacing. The basic problem is that cable prices keep rising, to the point where the basic level of digital cable is over $50 a month in many places. Prices have risen 40% in the last decade.

(As an aside, I’m amazed at the whiners in the UK who complain about paying £126.50 a year for a TV license that gets them the best premium programming from the US, as well as UK TV. I pay $588 a year to get a similar selection.)

Viewers find it galling to pay for a hundred channels when there are only a handful they watch on a regular basis. Hence there has been a campaign to get the FCC to rule that cable and satellite providers must offer the option of à la carte programming, where you can choose to subscribe to only the channels you actually want.

The cable and satellite companies don’t want to see that happen, as it would eat into their fat profits. Since the same companies own a lot of the mainstream media outlets, I’m constantly seeing astroturf coverage explaining why à la carte programming is impossible, would make your cable bills skyrocket, is tantamount to Communism, and so on.

This is my attempt to cut through a lot of the common bullshit spouted on the subject.

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Vegas Day 4: Xmas Eve

At this point, we’d had three very active days with lots of walking. We were both pretty tired, it was Christmas Eve, and we were supposedly on vacation. It was time to slow things down a little and relax more.

We start off with breakfast at Krispy Kreme. I pick out three doughnuts for myself—one chocolate glazed with cream filling, one “classic” glazed fresh from the cooling rack, and one festive donut with red, white and green Xmas sprinkles.

The chocolate frosted cream doughnut is light and fluffy, and the Xmas donut has the added crunchiness of sprinkles… but it’s the classic KK frosted plain doughnut that is of legendary perfection. Sweet but not too sweet, and so light and fluffy you can hardly believe you’re eating it. It makes Dunkin Donuts’ best efforts seem like a Clif Bar. Krispy Kreme’s coffee is good too—rich, with no trace of bitterness. It’s good enough to drink black, which is something I wouldn’t advise trying with Dunkin Donuts’ coffee.

Next we head to the middle of the strip to visit the Venetian, the Bellagio and the Mirage. The Bellagio is across from Paris—which, of course, has a large replica of the Eiffel Tower. It’s a cheat, though—the real Eiffel Tower has diagonal elevators which climb the legs, whereas the replica just has a conventional vertical elevator.

The Bellagio is known for its amazing water fountain shows. We catch a surprisingly moving aquatic interpretation of the US national anthem; the majestic towers of water really do seem to add something, and in the noonday winter sun they form a beautiful rainbow too.

The fountains have over 1,200 nozzles, which shoot water up to 75m into the sky. It’s truly amazing to see. They somehow get the water to look as if it’s a curtain of standing columns, then suddenly the entire structure collapses into mist.

The inside of the Bellagio is beautiful as well; it turns out to be decked out for Christmas. One giant hall has a small pine forest in it, with topiary reindeer and giant Christmas baubles, plus a small snow machine scattering occasional drifts of fake snow over the guests. Plastic icicles decorate the trees.

The Venetian’s decor is slightly more austere; in fact, it’s minimalist by Vegas standards. Marble floors and painted ceilings. Oh, and an indoor reproduction of a Venetian canal, with bridges across and shops on either side. Painted skies look remarkably convincing as gondoliers serenade their passengers.

The external architecture is quite Italian-looking as well, if you overlook the giant video screens which seem to be ubiquitous in Vegas. The canals emerge into the piazza outside the hotel.

In the evening, we head downtown. This is the “original” Vegas, containing the casinos you see James Bond speed past in “Diamonds Are Forever”. Nowadays most of Fremont Street has been closed to traffic and turned into a giant pedestrianized mall, with the world’s largest LED screen overhead as a roof.

“World class topless girls” are on offer, from “exotic locations” such as Cleveland, Ohio. There are also endless stores filled with cheap trinkets, so if you’re ever in Vegas and need to get small gifts for everyone this is a good place to do it.

We decide against taking our photo outside The Four Queens, and the famous Golden Nugget doesn’t have the neon to compete with its neighbors, so here we are in front of the Horseshoe.

Some old neon signs have been preserved as a kind of “museum of neon”. Most are still in working order.

As far as food goes, the cuisine on offer seems rather limited, so we decide to head back to our end of the strip to find food.

We drop in at the Tropicana, which James Bond namechecks in “Diamonds are Forever” (although the location shooting for the film took place at the Hilton). The Tropicana has made no attempt to become anything more than a casino with hotel, and pretty much still targets the James Bond market—its main attractions being things like topless showgirls and blackjack tables in the swimming pool. The food choices are decidedly unimpressive, so we end up eating at the Luxor again.

When we get back to the room, we channel surf until we end up watching “America’s Funniest (Holiday) Videos”. A clip of a kid trying out his new snowboard and sliding face first into a bush leaves me in fits of laughter.

“I can’t help it,” I gasp, “I’m a bad person, I always laugh at the ones where the little kids get smacked in the face.”“That’s why I love you,” replies sara, laughing.

After that we flip channels and end up watching a documentary about Mormons. Ever since that highly educational South Park episode, we’ve been wanting to know more…

Vegas Day 2: The Strip

We wake up early, partly because of the 3 hour time zone shift, and partly because our room faces south and gets a spectacular view of the sun rising over the desert hills. We find the café on the casino level: Starbucks coffee, and the biggest bearclaws I’ve ever seen. Once we’re awake we return to the hotel room to get ready for the day. Sara turns on the TV to find the Weather Channel, and the first thing it blares out is that erotic movies are available on demand. We collapse into laughter. The weather turns out to be moderately warm, and the hotel gleams golden in the sunlight.

The big casino hotels are nearly all located along Las Vegas Boulevard, colloquially known as The Strip. The old Las Vegas downtown district is at the north end of the strip. Mandalay Bay is one of three hotels on The Strip which are owned by the same company, and linked by a monorail. We travel to The Luxor, which is a large Egyptian-themed casino hotel shaped like a huge black pyramid with a sphinx on the front.

The main pyramid is filled with hotel rooms; all have windows on the outside of the pyramid, and doors which open onto balconies which overlook the enormous open space inside the building. The casino is on the ground floor, and on top are some assorted buildings and an obelisk “carved” with glowing heiroglyphics which shift and pulsate.

Also on the upper level inside the pyramid is the museum of King Tutenkhamen’s tomb. It contains painstakingly crafted replicas of items found in the real tomb; to add to the appearance of authenticity, they’re presented in glass cases as if in a museum.

This is why Umberto Eco loves Vegas—we’re touring a fake museum in a fake Egyptian pyramid, looking at fake artifacts. Still, the presentation is nice, and the objects look very ornate. In fact, they look rather more impressive than the real things, which as I recall are in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The gift shop is quite tasteful too. As well as the obligatory Luxor T-shirts and ankh baseball caps, there are genuinely scholarly offerings such as a serious book on Egyptian heiroglyphics. There is also the “Girls of RA” calendar, “RA” being the Luxor’s nightclub, which apparently attracts women who like to take their clothes off. Still, I daresay Tut wouldn’t have tut-tutted over a few tats and titties…

Which brings me on to the subject of breasts. They seem to be a major source of fascination in Las Vegas. You take an otherwise tired concept like a bunch of women dancing on stage, add a sprinkling of tits, and magically you have compelling entertainment.

I notice that one of the shows has two versions. During the day you can see the clothed edition, which is billed as suitable for children of 5 and up. In the evening, there’s the topless version of the exact same show, which you need to be 16 to see. From this I deduce that young American children will be traumatized if exposed to the sight of human breasts; presumably they are all bottle-fed, which would also explain their later fascination with watching Vegas showgirls.

The other strange entertainment in Las Vegas is inserting money into metal boxes. The boxes have various lights which flash, and sometimes reels which rotate. Every now and again they eject a small portion of the money you’ve inserted, slowing the process somewhat. People find these machines endlessly fascinating.

I guess gambling is one of those things that you either get or you don’t. I don’t. I’m too much of a mathematician; I understand the statistics involved. It strikes me that there’s probably a link between gambling and smoking—in both cases, the people doing it are convinced that they can beat the odds.

We walk through to the third casino in the family, Excalibur, featured in a recent episode of “South Park”. It has a vaguely medieval theme, and is obviously aimed much more at families with children than the other two. My donut radar goes off, and I walk around a couple of blind corners and find myself outside a Krispy Kreme. I file away the location for later.

We emerge blinking into the sunlight. It’s now a beautiful warm sunny day, and I realize the fleece jacket was totally unnecessary. We continue up the strip to New York New York, the next casino complex on this side of the street.

I’m still not sure how much of the skyline is actual buildings (presumably hotel rooms), and how much is fake. The replica Brooklyn Bridge is a nice touch. Nobody attempts to sell it to us, but a friendly woman does try to interest us in a timeshare. They’ll give us free tickets for a show if we attend a presentation. It sounds quite tempting until they reveal that it’s a 2 hour presentation! Ridiculous. I do my best to skip any presentation over an hour at work, so I’m damned if I’m going to spend a couple of hours of valuable vacation time plus transit listening to something I think it’s very unlikely I’ll have any interest in.

Further still, we find a Moroccan bazaar, or at least something which would be a reasonable facsimile if Moroccan bazaars had Gucci stores. For lunch, I have a strange salad of field greens, walnuts, strawberries, goat cheese, salmon, and raspberry vinaigrette. Somehow it works.

As we head further north, we start to see older, cheesier establishments amidst the glitz. I suppose you might call this the “real Vegas”, if that’s not an oxymoron.

I get a look at the kind of cheap motel we’ve stayed at in other cities. Not this time, thankfully; once again I think good thoughts about the luxurious bath waiting to ease my tired muscles when we get back.

The older casinos look just like you’d expect: darkened rooms, deep red carpeting, faded gold decor, stained and frosted glass, and old people sitting around faded green baize tables, chain-smoking as they play card games.

The Fashion Show Mall has an Apple Store; I buy a replacement for my stolen iPod cable. The mall has Christmas decorations with a Vegas showgirl theme.

We attempt to get a bus back down the strip to our hotel. The traffic is completely insane; it seems obvious to me that what the city really needs to do is build a big monorail that goes all the way up and down Las Vegas Boulevard in a big loop. However, Nevada is one of those states that believes in the magic of the free market, to the extent of having minimal property taxes and no income tax. So the bus is expensive when it eventually arrives ($2), and we sit in traffic for 45 minutes.

By the time we get back to the hotel I’m exhausted. The huge bath is worth every penny, and I sleep like the dead.

Three obsessive audio edits

The movie South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut is a work of genius, and probably one of the best musicals ever. It also works well as audio. I’ve ripped the DVD and edited it into MP3s, with all the songs separated from the linking dialog, so we can either listen to the whole thing or just the music. I did something similar editing to MiniDisc a year or two ago, and we rather unwisely listened to it while traveling to Montreal, resulting in “Blame Canada” being in my head the whole time.

Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells was originally supposed to have a different ending. Oldfield and Vivian Stanshall had gone to the pub one night and staggered back to The Manor paralytically drunk. They set up microphones, and Oldfield proceeded to stomp around the rooms playing the Sailor’s Hornpipe on guitar while Stanshall gave an eccentric drunken guided tour of the building. Richard Branson felt that this was a bit strange to be part of his record label’s first release, and it was replaced with the rather dull synthesizer performance of the Hornpipe that most Tubular Bells fans are familiar with. However, the original ending was released on Boxed, and I like it far better than the official one… so I extracted it from there and re-edited it back into the latest 20 bit remastered edition of Tubular Bells.

Another movie masterpiece is Koyaanisqatsi. Unfortunately, the soundtrack CDs only ever include the Philip Glass bits, and usually in abbreviated form. The wonderful ambient linking sections and the final musique concrete tape assembly are skipped. So again, it was time to rip the DVD…

Trip report, day 1

In retrospect, it was my own damn fault. I should have gone for the peppermint. But no, I chose the raspberry Earl Grey, which is apparently full of caffeine. That, combined with worrying about the day to come, meant that I only got around four hours of actual sleep on Saturday night.

Sunday morning, the taxi didn’t quite turn up. In spite of the fact that I had spelled out the street name, somehow the house number had been omitted again. I walked up the street with my cases and got in the taxi.

This was not the usual taxi company. The usual taxi company had been uncontactable, because like an idiot I’d put off calling to arrange a taxi until ten on Saturday night. This taxi looked like it was about thirty years old. There was no traffic on the streets at 07:30, so obviously the driver charged me the standard rate instead of running the meter. I’m sure when I get back and have to sit in traffic, the meter will be running.

I got to the airport, and took a quick look at the queues. There were several hundred IBM people travelling that morning, and it certainly looked like it. I’d read the small print, however, and knew that since I had an e-ticket, I could check in curbside. The queue there only had two people ahead of me. The downside, of course, was having to stand outside in -14C weather, but I was wearing my serious winter coat and hat.

Security was no problem, and I found myself with over an hour before boarding time. Time for food. Time for next problem. The “restaurants” were only serving breakfast food until 11:00, but I’d be on the plane by then, and the cheap-ass bastards at American Airlines didn’t intend to serve any food, even though the flight was over lunchtime. I ended up picking a Burger King “Croissanwich” and “French Toast Sticks” as the most edible and lunch-like option.

I was starting to feel a little cranky by now, so I listened to Bill Hicks’ “Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1” to recalibrate my crankiness meter. While I was doing so, someone bearing a remarkable resemblance to Timmy from South Park arrived in the departure area with his two companions. His vocabulary was more limited than Timmy’s, in that he could only say “Uuuurrrrrrgh”, but he seemed to be compensating by really putting all his energy into it. I wondered if he was going to be sitting next to me on the plane.

As it turned out, he wasn’t. Sitting next to me instead were two teenage girls, students, probably on their way down to Florida for Spring Break. They wanted to sit by the window, which suited me fine, so I swapped seats with them. Eavesdropping on their conversation before takeoff was mind-numbing; it seemed to be all about one of their friends, her fashion faux-pas, and how she’d really let herself go and should ease off on the french fries if she had any respect for herself at all. I amused myself by wondering if they’d be appearing in the next “Girls Gone Wild” video.

The plane looked to be about as old as the taxi. It did take off, however, and once it was airborne I stuck in some earplugs and tried to get some sleep. Lunch was an organic low-fat energy bar, one of the selection I’d brought with me. I’ve been to these events before and know that skipping proper meals is an inevitability, even without the airlines and airports conspiring to keep me hungry.

Several hours of intermittent napping later, the plane touched down in Orlando. As I was leaving, I was amazed to hear the family behind me talking about their pet skunk! I seriously considered trying to get an invite to meet it, but what would you think if some stranger on a plane showed an unnatural obsession with your household pet?

On the plane I’d seen some newspaper headlines about the peace rally in DC. I wished I could have been there. On the bus to the hotel I used the phone to check how CNN and the New York Times were reporting the event.

The Wyndham Palace seems to be a more upscale hotel than the Swan and Dolphin. Unfortunately as Team IBM arrived, all the hotel’s computers crashed. The hotel clearly has some serious failover issues—without the computers online they can’t issue room keys, check people in or out, or do much of anything really. We stood around for quarter of an hour while someone coaxed the Windows server back into life. The salesmen did what salesmen do in that kind of situation, which is find out from the staff what kind of computers they are using, what kind of database, and so on. (Not IBM, happily.)

The room turned out to be a reasonable size. It’s on the 21st floor, and looks out over Epcot. The desk has a Hermann Miller Aeron chair. (Which is comfortable enough, but not worth the outrageous price.) I found what was allegedly an ethernet port, but it didn’t work. The TV remote didn’t work either. I reported the problems and went to find a shuttle bus so I could check in for the conference.

The woman at the front desk told me the shuttle buses were leaving from the Conference Center on level 1. I went to level one and looked around. There were a bunch of signs telling me that the Conference Center was on level 3. I went up to level 3 in the elevator, and found myself back in reception. I repeated the process via a different route, in case I had missed something. Frustrated, I returned to reception. This time, a different woman told me to go to the conference center on level 1. I pointed out that I’d just been to level 1, and the signs there had told me the conference center was on level 3.

At that point, finally, she let me in on the secret. See if you can guess what it is before reading on.

Think you’ve got it? Well, here it is: There are two different level 1s. The level 1 you can get to from reception is the hotel level 1, which isn’t connected to the conference center level 1. You can only move between the two on level 3, which is why the signs direct you there. To add to the amusement value, the conference center wing of the building isn’t shown on the floor plans. She told me how to get there—along two corridors and down some escalators. I did my best to appear grateful rather than angry, and wandered off.

The bus took me to the Swan and Dolphin hotels, where the main conference is. I registered, and was given an attendee badge. So far, so good—except I’m an exhibitor. I asked about this and was directed to an exceptions booth. The woman at the exceptions booth asked me what my pedestal number was for the exhibition hall. I had no idea, as someone else had dealt with all those details, and hadn’t thought to tell me. She checked a list of names, and found that I wasn’t on it. She checked the list of pedestals, and said she couldn’t find ours listed there either.

I was pretty skeptical of this last claim, as I’d seen a photo of the pedestal at the previous iteration of the event, held in Spain last week. I asked if I could at least pick up the uniform shirt we’re supposed to wear. I was told that there was no way I could be given anything, even information. Apparently they must have some major problems with unauthorized people maliciously showing up and demonstrating products.

I checked my watch. I was due at a team meeting with the head of software sales in about 20 minutes, and really didn’t have time to argue. I was also tired, and getting distinctly cranky again.

I picked up two Krispy Kreme donuts on the way to the meeting. One of the advantages of having been to half a dozen previous shows at Disney World is that I know the secret location of the cafeteria that has the cheap food and Krispy Kreme donuts. It really is almost like Mission Impossible—down two unmarked corridors, along a third, I’d never have found it if I hadn’t been desperate for affordable vegetarian food at a previous event.

Damn, those were fine donuts.

The meeting was soon over. The person responsible for arranging the pedestals arrived late and stood around by the door, and tried to run away as soon as possible, but I ran after her and caught her. Before long she’d vouched for me and I’d been issued an Exhibitor badge.

I returned to the Wyndham Palace Hotel, exhausted. I picked a restaurant by the simple method of finding the one that was actually open. It had what was allegedly an Australian outback theme—the waiters were dressed like Steve Irwin, only with full length trousers instead of shorts. The decor was eccentrically inaccurate; I’m pretty sure they don’t have gorillas in the Australian outback. The food was cheaper than Disney, which meant I managed to get my first proper meal of the day and not exceed the IBM per diem expenses limit of $32. The food was pretty good, the bread was fresh, and the butter was shaped like a kangaroo. I took a photo of it.

I returned to my room, crashed into bed, and slept for ten hours.