Superstar USA

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I’ve been seeing commercials for a new ‘American Idol’ like show on the WB called ‘Superstar USA’. Apparently they are holding additions like American Idol, but instead of booting the bad and keeping the good, they are booting the good and keeping the bad. The worse the singer, the more praise they get. Apparently it’s all just a big joke. They are pumping these people up… tellng them how great they are, promising fame and fortune. They even have rigged audiences for the ‘real’ performances. When it’s all over they will say… ha, ha you suck.

I think this is terrible. I feel really bad for these people. I don’t care for (or watch) American Idol, but given the choice, I would much rather have a show like that on TV, than one that is just cruel. I hope no one watches, and it’s gets cancelled immediatly.

Cannes Celebrates iMovie Film

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“The surprise hit of the Cannes film festival is a movie made by a first-time director with a budget of precisely $218.32,” reports Charlotte Higgins for The Guardian. “Tarnation was created by 31-year-old jobbing actor Jonathan Caouette, using the Apple Macintosh package iMovie. It is a touching and often disturbing family history pieced together via photographs, home movie images from the 1970s and 80s, and interviews by Caouette with his mother and grandparents.” [May 20]
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iTunes: Software Newcomer of the Year

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iTunes for Windows

— from PC World’s ‘Best of 2004’
Apple makes Windows apps about as often as Microsoft ships bug-free products, and if iTunes for Windows (free) is any indication, that’s a crying shame. The iTunes media player works on PCs the same way it does on Macs, right down to the handy feature that lets you share your music library with other PC or Mac iTunes users on your network. It looks great, it’s easy to use, and it has a surprising number of useful features, like the abilities to generate rules-based Smart Playlists and to trim individual tracks.

Meanwhile, Apple’s complementary iTunes Music Store (99 cents per track, album prices vary) started the party last year on subscription-free digital tunes, pioneering the 99-cents-per-track model that most online music stores now use. With easy navigation, an impressive exclusive track selection, and such innovative offerings as audiobooks and radio show archives, iTunes Music Store is going strong. Competitors like RealPlayer Music Store made this a tough choice, but it’s hard to beat a store that’s built into the best media player software around. We do have one major complaint: iTunes tracks are incompatible with digital audio players other than Apple’s own IPod. How selfish!

Microsoft Entourage 2004

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Microsoft Entourage 2004

Last night I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2004. Overall it seems like a good upgrade, but I am having some oddities in Entourage…

The insertion point for my signature is set to precede the quoted message in a reply email. But if I have a default signature set for a given email address then the settings get changed to insert the signature after the quoted text. Why would I want the signature to be at the bottom of the quoted original rather than my reply? The only way around this is to NOT set a default signature. you must select it with each new email.

Printing certain emails results in a dot pattern covering the entire page. It’s as if it were trying to print an extremely light, solid gray background. It only seems to happen on some emails though.

Entourage seems to be occasionally drawing the wrong font in its interface elements. Sometimes all text fields within Entourage turn to right-justified, and slightly larger than the fields capacity (top & bottom). Sometimes the fields also show up as empty unless you click on them. I’ve seen this in some of the pull-down elements as well.

I spoke with Microsoft tech support this morning and they were unaware of any issues and could not offer any suggestions.

Love Me if You Dare

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love me if you dare

2 Stars

Last night anne marie and I went to see Love Me if You Dare. It’s a French Film (sub-titles) by writer / director Yann Samuell that received rave reviews at the San Francisco Film Festival. I thought parts of it were quite interesting, visually. But I don’t think I would recommend this one. As the movie went on, I cared less and less about what happened to the characters. I actually started to dislike them. Without giving anything away, the ending is confusing to say the least.

Shrek 2

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Shrek 2

5 Stars

anne marie and I went to see Shrek 2 last Saturday night. It was awesome, I highly recommend it. In addition to being a very funny and entertaining movie, Dreamworks Seems to have perfected the texturing of the characters. They look even better than the first movie. There did seem to be a slight syncing problem at times with some of the characters voices though. I give it 5 stars.

hello world!

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This is my very first post, on my very first ‘blog’. I don’t know exactly what I will be doing with this site. I was just curious about the world of blogging, and learning more about building & maintaining dynamic sites (php, mySQL, CSS, etc…). I hope people enjoy whatever ends up going here. ~ p a u l