Black Coffee (Deprecated)

Zero Hour is near

What great timing for EA Games to come out with an expansion pack for Command and Conquer: Generals....

...Finally after I figure out how to reliably sieze the battlefield tempo from a Brutal GLA army on any map, this new expansion pack comes out.

Beyond just adding new units, they're bragging about its improved skirmish AI:

We've also spent a lot of time making the skirmish AI much better and a more fun opponent. We have three difficulty settings, but hard is very much a challenge for good players. It is vastly improved, nearly worth the price tag alone, if you are a big skirmish player

Probably the biggest change will be the allocation of three general's "profiles" to each country. A profile basically changes configurations and balance to favor one sort of strategy over another... Turtling, air-centric, laser-centric, hordes, etc.

GameSpy has a great overview of the profiles for China and the USA. Still waiting on GLA. I play the USA almost exclusively, and reading through the profiles it's not clear to me which profile I'd want to play -- the turtling option sucks, the laser general option sounds queer (although maybe a good wildcard against someone who hasn't fought against it). I guess air-general is the most fitting for me. I do drool over the idea of sorties of Combat Chinooks inserting forces behind enemy lines and then firing their way out. Would like if there was more special-forces single-unit stuff.

For further amusement, check out the movie trailers over at EA Games. They make it sound so much like a movie that you almost start believing normal people would think you were cool to be playing it. Almost.

If you only watch one trailer, make it the politically incorrect GLA video, nearly overtly Arab. I nearly spit up laughing when it concludes w/ a Arab-accented voice saying, "All your base are belong to us."

The expansion pack is out Sept 22nd (in the USA at least).

Peets Coffee Part 2

So after I complained about the excessive shipping cost to get Peets Coffee in Singapore, I sent an email to Peets describing my plight.

A day later, Ruby@peets responded:

Hi Michael, The beans themselves are sealed by nitrogen flushing the bags they come in, so the freshness factor only comes into play once the bags are open. Our beans have a shelf life of 90 days. So please check out our website to place your order. www.peets.com. If there is anything else I may help you with, please let me know. Thanks again and have a nice day.

Regular international shipping costs 11.68$ and a pound of nice, fragrant Blend101 costs $10.95 = $22.63! So it looks like I will get to indulge myself after all.

*The peets website is pretty bad... The layout is typical lame ecommerce shoppe site, but the real problem is that it is incredibly slow, and often pages fail to load. It's really quite poor. Their human customer service, however, is good.

London Trip

I've got to go to London for two weeks this Saturday. The trip is for business, so not much free time, but however much I can steal away for, I plan on spending at least some of that time helping to torment David Blaine.

In the Digital Darkroom nothing is easy

Back in June, I publicly denounced myself for Bad Framing of photographs. I even published the very regrettable Foot-Chopped-Nun.

I was again annoyed looking through my photos from Outback Australia. Some of the image framing was a slightly off. But I asked myself, "Why? My Canon EOS 1v has a 100% viewfinder -- everything that shows up on the film I can see through the viewfinder." There shouldn't be such a problem anymore unless I am being exceptionally sloppy in my work.

I had a tiny epiphany yesterday, one that made me vaguely nauseous. I didn't have the guts to check it until today, and now I don't know what to think...

The slide mounts themselves are obscuring part of the image

Maybe it's totally obvious to everyone else, but it wasn't to me. I mean, doesn't that sound stupid? Shouldn't the mount be 100%?

I decided to check for myself using a photo from Tokyo. First I scanned the mounted slide with the SF-200 multi-slide feeder. Then I took the film out of the mounting and scanned it with the FH-3/MA-20 cominbation that holds and scan strips of unmounted film.

See for yourself....

There is a substantial amount of image data obscured by the slide mounting itself!

So hell... If I went back and checked, my Chopped Nun photo might actually be totally fine and unchopped! (note: I checked--even at 100%, the nun's foot is chopped) Many other photos I've taken and scanned might look better.

What are the ramifications and advice that comes out of this?

Some web research shows that the normal slide frames show anywhere from 94% to 97% of the slide image only. You have to buy special 'Full-frame slide mounts' to see all 100%. They're more expensive and less common.

I did check the raw negative and confirmed that the Coolscan 4000 scanned 100% of the film image.

Another option is to have my slide film left in uncut, unmounted roll form. Then I scan it using an expensive roll film attachment for the Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 ED, Nikon SA-30 35mm Roll film Adapter

Yuk. Such a mess -- I already spent a lot of money on the SF-200 slide feeder and I've got binders and binders full of slide-mounted film. Maybe the simple solution is keep mounting the damn things and only manually process them for 100% coverage in special circumstances. Son of a bitch.

Saturday Night at the Movies

A couple years ago Matt, Adam, and I went on a KAP/4wd drive trip through the Mojave desert and Arizona. When we got back to California, it was Christmas, so they went back to Pennsylvania, Ling was in Singapore, and I was unemployed. Consequently I had a very quiet and secluded week utterly by myself.

One of the things I did that week was play with a Microsoft utility, Windows Movie Maker, and patched together some video fragments into a short movie about our desert KAP trips.

By my calculations, it took one hour of work for every minute of final footage produced. The process was arduous. I had an old, slow computer. Windows Movie Maker 1.0 was buggy and implemented poorly. One particularly annoying problem was the inability to mix multiple audio tracks.

Now fast forward three years. I've just returned from a two week KAP/4wd trip through Outback Australia. I came back with cool photos and some amusing video footage. One of the last times I updated Windows, it included a download of Windows Movie Maker version 2.0.

Well, I figured this time the software might be better. Plus, I have a much more powerful computer these days. So tonight I gave it a shot.

The first forty-five minutes were infuriating. Everytime I tried to type in a title, the system crashed. It was really gross. When I searched Google, I became severely disheartened. This does not appear to be a robust application. (it is 'free' from Microsoft -- it's even too shameful for them to charge you for it) Everyone has these crashing problems.

Fortunately I found an enthusiast with a page addressing WMM crashes. I started working through his list of corrections. Only after I disabled a particular codec, divax.af, did the program quit crashing. The other fixes, like turning down my hardware acceleration didn't help at all.

So after that frustration was over, I played with WMM. It seems otherwise stable and sufficiently simple. I once tried to use an Adobe video editing program and it was way, way too complicated for my needs. WMM 2.0 has a bit more functionality, makes it easier to do title sheets and captions, and also appears to support multiple audio tracks (though I haven't confirmed this).

Anyway, after an evening's work I managed to produce a three-minute long, 7MB, movie about KAP'g in Central Australia.

Blog Disease

A few months ago I had a spate of meaningless comments added to some of my blog entries. They always included the url for some stupid Zipcodesdwnload website. I deleted the comments and banned the ip.

Well today, I got the same goddamned sort of comment again.

It must be that someone has written a perl script that knows how to add comments to MoveableType blogs. I wonder why it had the restraint to not add comments to every single blog item?

The two ip's I've banned so far have been:

217.132.20.19
219.95.2.151

Peets Coffee

When 31die came over a few weeks ago I had him bring a few pounds of Peets Coffee. It's still the best -- oily, black beans that have great taste, great aroma. Really head-and-shoulders better than anything else available in Singapore.

When I got down to only a pound left, I reflected how nice it would be to regularly have Peets, and how maybe I could indulge myself in the extavagance of having a pound sent to me a few times per month.

So I checked out Peets and saw that they did in fact send internationally. However, to see how much their 'expedited international' rate was, I had to start ordering--provide cc details, etc.

Too much work, so I just sent them an email instead.

To their credit, they responded in eight hours.

To their discredit, the shipping is damn expensive.

Hi Michael, Thanks for the e-mail. We can ship worldwide, for one pound, the cost of shipping is $26.50. This is for 3 - 7 business days. Please visit our website at www.peets.com to check out the listing of our coffees and teas. You may place your order online, call us at 800.99.2132, or mail in your order with a check. Online might be your best bet though because you can see the correct shipping charges when you're checking out. If there is anything else I may help you with, please let me know. Thanks again and have a nice day.

Ruby
Customer Service Representative
Peet's Coffee and Tea
800.999.2132
webmail@peets.com

I mean, I might have convinced myself to pay 10$/pound shipping (turning $10 bag of coffee beans into a $20 bag) but the 3x mark-up is just too rich.

I don't actually think they are trying to rip me off -- FedEX and the like aren't cheap -- and they do have to go through the aggro of mailing it to me, etc, but at least right now even I, with my considerable powers of self-persuasion, can't be paying $100USD each month for three pounds of coffee....