My Wushu Blog

Watchmen

This movie was LONG. 3 hours, and most of the time it’s pacing was perfect. Except when it wasn’t. I had decided to start this movie at 11pm, so I finished it around 2am and I was pretty sleepy.

This movie has a lot going on, and I probably would have felt very lost if I had not read the graphic novel (okay, okay, “comic book”). Now, I read that almost 3 years ago (I flipped between that and a Reg Exp book during a very boring LANDesk training class), and from what I remember, the movie is nearly identical to the comic. When I first read there was going to be a Watchmen movie, I didn’t think it would pan out. I also wasn’t even interested in seeing it when it came to the big screen. I decided to buy the movie on a whim, and I’m pretty glad I did.

When I read the comic, I found Rorschach to be the most engaging and interesting character. He is a complete sociopath, hardly a “good guy”, but his unrelenting moral code that he does not budge from is great. He also has some of the best lines in the story. What is very cool about all the characters in the storyis that they are all heroes and villains at the same time. Maybe that is really what a vigilante is, and I think the story goes to great lengths to reinforce that idea, especially if those vigilantes are not kept in check. Hence the phrase “Who will watch the Watchmen?”

Rorschach is the primary detective in the story, he moves everything along. The other main characters, mostly the Night Owl and Lady Jupiter, I found a little boring. I was drifting a bit with their scenes, and I didn’t care for the romance angle.

There was also Dr. Manhattan, who aside from Rorschach, was the other well developed and entertaining character. His complete detachment from humanity proved an interesting contrast to everyone else’s struggle to stop the inevitable mutually assured destruction (remember, this story takes place in the 80′s, where the Cold War scare was rampant… I think, I mean, I’m not THAT old ).

The second disc had 3 bonus features, and I liked those a lot too. One covered real life vigilante’s, and provided multiple angles on how they are viewed in our society. The feature had members of the Guardian Angels, a combat trainer for the FBI, a history professor and a writer. All of them had their own rational for whether self-appointed hero’s were needed or even justified.

Another cool feature was an interview with a Physics Professor as the science consultant of the movie. Which was fantastic, and super nerdy. I thought it was great that even a movie based on a comic was trying to maintain a balance between the story and plausibility. I thought he did a good job.

So, to summarize, I really liked this movie. It was fun, sometimes a little too graphic (it has this hyper-stylized feel to the violence, and it didn’t feel necessary all the time), and it continued to make me think about the story over the week.

David Gilmour

Let’s get this out of the way:

My favorite band is Pink Floyd, and Sir David Gilmour’s guitar work still gives me goose-bumps.

There will be little criticism of this concert, in fact, there will be only high praise. With once exception, there was a TERRIBLE audio delay on the concert disc. That really annoyed me, mostly since I pay very close attention to how he plays the guitar. The show itself was good, it wasn’t the typical Pink Floyd production (no large circular projections screen, crazy laser lights and flying pigs), it was very basic. It also had a really cool guest line-up, including David Bowie during Comfortably Numb. Funny, David Bowie talked about his parents taking him to a PF show when he was about 10… David Gilmour is freakin’ old! My only concern is that I’ll never get to see him in concert (I did at least catch Roger Waters in 99), other than that, his age has no other relevance.

This concert was to promote his solo album, On an Island, which was released on 2006. It’s a decent album, some songs are cheesy, and it always feels like each song is an excuse to belt out a super long guitar solo. Even when he plays the sax, he still treats it like a guitar. This is a contrast from the old Pink Floyd dynamic, where Roger Waters was completely focused on the message, while David seemed to be all about the tone of the music. This is why, in their stride, they worked very well together. Anyway, the first half of the concert was his latest solo album, the second half was a lot of classic PF songs, Echo’s being one of my favorites (I once copied a VHS version of their Pompeii concert, and learned how to play it by watching it over and over again).

The real gem of this Blu Ray concert is the second disc, with all the behind the scenes footage of the entire tour. It was incredible, and I have a new level of respect for the entire team that performed. Here was my favorite part:

a tuner attached to a wine glass

That is a tuner attached to the flute of a wine glass. Why is that cool?

They were at dinner, drinking wine, and they decided to play around with the wine glasses. Cool right? Then it cuts over to a sound check, and David is there with a handful of wine glasses, tuning them, and showing someone else how to play the beginning of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond Part I”, with the wine glasses tuned accordingly.

I think they all made the chords together

Thats the kind of awesomeness I always liked about the band. It gets better, because then in Venice, David stumbles across a street performer who uses wine glasses (and he’s really good, he’s playing Fur Elise with them). He then asks the guy if he would like to play a show with him the following night.. and the guy actually hesitates until Gilmour says “I’ll pay you of course…”

I really enjoyed this box set, from the concert to the bonus footage, and it has further fueled my enjoyment of playing the guitar. It also prompted me to search YouTube, and I came across this recording of “Theres No Way Out of Here”, from his first solo album in 1978:

I like it, even the cheesy chorus is cool with me. I bought that album and have really liked a few songs on it. Him and Roger need to get back together though because it still doesn’t beat “Dark Side of The Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Animals”, etc… Those are some really fascinating albums and I could post a full length post for each album.

HK AVR 254

It is no secret that I love watching movies in the comfort of my own living room. I get to eat what I want, drink and not have to worry about driving, and most of the time I’m by myself so I don’t have to worry about shushing people. What can I say, its a great way for me to recharge and get lost for a few hours.

Since I upgraded my HTPC to playback the new high definition formats, Blu Ray and HD DVD, I’ve come across a few little hiccups and had to re-think how I was going to get the most out of my setup. Some hiccups are just part of the new format, like decoding Dolby TrueHD/Dolby Digital Plus/DTS HD/DTS HD Master, the whole “trusted path” for the audio and video (HDMI output). Others were limitations of my equipment and what others were willing to put up with (both Michele and Caralyne did not welcome using a computer to playback movies). So as I started refining things, I new I needed and wanted a few things:

• HDMI Switch for both the HD DVD stand-alone player, and for the HTPC
• HDMI 1.3a support
• A working remote (my old Pioneer remote is busted, in pieces)
• Support for decoding the new HD audio formats
• A working FM receiver (Michele’s request, the pioneer was never able to pick up a FM station)
• Multi Channel analog inputs (for uncompressed LPCM audio from the HTPC)

So for the last few months, I’ve started to read up on the very helpful avsforum.com forum (yet another redundant statement, I’m getting good at these), looking at current receivers, and all of the quirks. Since every consumer electronic device now is a computer with its own embedded OS, we now have to be concerned with our alarm clock panic’ing, or our TV’s seg faulting. Receivers are no longer an exception to this. They used to amplify speakers and transmit analog, then there was bitstream decoding, and now we have complicated HDMI switching and handshaking, high res audio formats, auto-eq features and full screen menu’s. So I was not surprised to see a 200+ page thread dedicated to the HK AVR x54′s problems. Some of them were terrifying, with audio popping, black HDMI screens, all the stuff I was not interested in. There has been a new firmware update though, and that seemed to fix a lot of the issues, and while there were a lot of posts describing these issues, there were a lot of happy Harman Kardon owners. I’d like to add myself to that list, because so far everything has worked GREAT.

My Environment

Here is a quick rundown of the hardware and software I’m using

hardware

• Samsung HLR5067W DLP TV (720p/1080i)
• Toshiba HDA3 HD DVD player
• HTPC
  • Intel DP35DP Motherboard (Intel P35 Chipset)
  • Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66Ghz
  • 2GB DDR2 memory
  • 1x160GB Samsung SATA drive
  • ATI 4550 PCI-E with HDMI out and Realtek HD Audio
  • LG HG20 Blu Ray/HD DVD combo drive
• HK AVR 254 (that is obvious at this point) w/firmware 0.49.1.1 , 16-05-2008
• Klipsch Speakers
  • RC-3 Center Channel
  • RF-3 Floorstanding Speakers
  • RS-3 Surround Speakers (white, and they show every fingerprint I’ve made on them)
  • KSW-12 Subwoofer (AKA the “coffee table”)

Software

• Windows Vista 32bit SP1 (I “greatly dislike” Vista, but it was free and it works)
• PowerDVD 9
• Realtek ATI HDMI Audio Driver version 2.18
• ATI – 9.3 Catalyst,/8.59 Driver
• AnyDVD HD version 6.5.3.1

Lets get to the fun stuff, I picked up the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, so I’ll get a screen in of that.

The Tools!

I have to use a mirror and a flashlight, its pretty tight quarters in the entertainment center. the large pair of dikes there, well.. lets check out the rats nest behind the TV and it will become obvious.

I think I see a skeleton in there...

I find the add’s for HDMI equipment very funny:

marketting awesomeness

Its all so easy, this one cable replaces at least 5 -6 other cables. Its true, it does replace the separate video and audio cables. Of course, when you have a computer, an XBOX, a DVR, a DVD player, and a reciever, they all need their own power, video/audio cable, network connection (yeah, everything now needs to be online) not to mention the 5.1 surround sound cables. It would be great not to have all this mess, in the end, I’m too darn lazy to really clean it up. Just don’t look behind there…

Back to the environment:

The other half of the AV setup.

So there is the HDA3, the Xbox 360, and the HTPC. All of them are now connected to th reciever. The HTPC and DVD player are native HDMI devices, but the Xbox is component. So, I configured the reciever to transcode the YPbPr signal to a digital 1080i signal. Sweet!

Me blogging about the device while I use the device... Its like an MC Escher painting

This is the output of the HTPC, I’m very satisfied with the image quality. The camera makes it look worse, its hard to capture the detail there.

Now for a coloring Break:

Caralyne and I drew some some pictures

She is very proud of her landscape drawing, and her rainbow

Okay, with it now late enough in the evening, I can watch a movie…

A random scene in Quantum of Solace

It sounded great, nice and punchy, and I got my subwoofer cable fixed again so I can rattle the windows again (and I really mean my neighbors windows). I’ll hold of on the firmware update, if I don’t encounter an issue, I’ll leave it alone.