that ring of confidence

I'm tired and Shia LaBeouf is blackmailing someone

these last few days I've just been feeling really tired. Part of it is trying to squeeze in time to do my freelance writing and part of it is that I've just not had any chance to slow down since Las Vegas. Granted also staying up past one in the morning playing Rock Band with Nathan also contributed a bit to it [jks].

Today is a day off, but it's also a day that I'm going to be up late at a drive-in movie. At least that's the plan. Drive-ins used to be a fairly regular thing for my family, well maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. They were still special occasions, but when we were young and lived in Edmonton I'd go to sleep early then get up and my parents would take us to the Drive-In. The only movie that I know I watched there was Gremlins, but since they're generally double features there must have been more than that one.

Lydia and I went last year to the Twilight Drive-In in Langley, the one we're going to again tonight, and saw The Departed and Beerfest. The Departed was first and it was great. If you've not had a chance to see it go out and rent it. That's right, stop reading this go and rent it and this will still be here to read once you've done watching the movie.

Beerfest was okay, though I think by that point we were both too tired to really enjoy it.

Tonight we're going to see Ghost Town and Eagle Eye. Ghost Town should be good, since anything with Ricky Gervais in it tends to be quite funny. This is his first staring role in a film, and the first major thing he's done that he hasn't had a role in writing so we'll see how he does as just being an actor.

Eagle Eye is the newest film with Shia LaBeouf in it. He's the kid from Transformers and he was in the latest Indiana Jones movie as Indy's son. He must have some dirty photos of Steven Spielberg because Spielberg produced Transformers and Eagle Eye and of course Indiana Jones is Spielberg and George Lucas' pet project with Lucas producing and Spielberg directing.

Without Steven LaBeouf might not be getting any work, so blackmail is the obvious answer.

Once in a lifetime

i love the Talking Heads, and one of their best songs is "Once In A Lifetime". The first time I heard the song however was not as sung by David Byrne and group but rather one Kermit the Frog as part of the relaunched Muppet Show. The show didn't really last, but the cover of the song by Kermitt was one of the great moments in Muppets history. I was reminded of this last night when Lydia revealled that she had never seen any of the Muppet movies, and only seemed familiar with The Muppet Babies cartoon.

What the heck? At the very least The Muppet Movie is now on our list of things we've got to watch to get her up to speed. The girl has never even seen Jaws.

Yup, there's a lot of work before the wedding.

A tale of two Nick Furys

for those comic fans like me the arrival of Samuel L. Jackson at the end of this summer's Iron Man movie was nerd-tastic [jks]. Jackson was face of Ultimate Nick Fury when Marvel relaunched the Avengers in the Ultimate Universe. Which is geek speak, but as long as you know that having Samuel L. Jackson show up wearing the eye patch was very cool you'll be alright.

When Marvel redesigned Nick Fury for their new Ultimate line they wanted someone who was the height of cool, and in the early 2000s that was Samuel L. Jackson. Nick Fury though has traditionally been a white guy with greying hair. Originally he was one of Marvel's war characters that were created during the Second World War to fight the Nazis in comics while the soldiers were fighting the Nazis in Europe. With the end of one war and the start of a Cold War he became a James Bond like spy and sort of the super cop for the Marvel Universe.

Though he's had his own book, he's mostly a supporting characater showing up in other people's books, so the fact that there had never been a movie about him did not surprise me. One would not expect there to be a Robin movie, nor an Alfred the Butler movie no matter how popular Batman got.

However there was in fact a movie in 1998, written by David Goyer whose most well known for writing Batman Begins and Batman: The Dark Knight. The most likely filmed in Toronto or Vancouver made-for-TV movie is based on the original Nick Fury and not the more recent revamp and it stars... wait for it.... wait for it... David Hasselhoff [wp]. Aren't you glad you waited for it. The two clips below are a study of the different movie Nick Furys. And boy am I glad Hasselhoff wasn't cast in Iron Man.

Michael Bay's Rejected Batman script

Alright, I don't usually just make a short post to highlight something I found on the web, mostly because I'm trying to keep my blog a level above the Facebook news feed, but I thought I'd pass this on because it amused me so much.  Ideally Delme will read this, though maybe I should send it on to him.

The item that has me amused is a fake Michael Bay script for Batman The Dark Knight [ms].  Best line so far in the script, and Darring Fireball also quoted this one is:

We pan to a beautiful woman: platinum blonde with a huge rack.  She is the hottest woman in the world, but she wears glasses because she is also the smartest woman in the world.

The only thing that could make it better if is this was a real Michael Bay script.  Expected the usual conventions of any Bay film in the script, such as the fact that the world's most beautiful and smartest woman is also mechanically inclined thanks to her father.  There's also a lot of meetings between various high level military peoples.

It is gold.

Twittering for directions and David Cross in China

I went to Matt and Oana's place tonight as they resurrected their (nearly) weekly movie night.  Or if they did not resurrect it, then I've been able to finally make amends for whatever social mistakes I might have made the last time I was at their movie night, and got another invite.  The last time I was there we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, and this time it was The Vice Guide to Travel which was a compilation of short travel films by Vice Magazine featuring the sort of trips you'd never take to the places that no sane person would ever go.

Getting to their place was a bit of adventure [mbv], but thanks to Twitter I managed to find my way.  You might have seen my Tweets asking for help on my blog here.  I got lost and not having Matt and Oana's phone number, nor Ryan Cousineau's [wc] who was also going to be at the party, I had to Twitter from my phone asking for help.  A few minutes later a stranger called me and using Google Maps we managed to find my way there.

So Mark Hamilton, thanks for the help.

Above is one of the bonus features on the DVD, which shows David Cross (Mr. Show, Arrested Development) exploring China.  My favourite point of the video is when he's trying to buy bootleg DVDs of his shows and his travelling companion claims that Cross was in Scary Movie 3, to which Cross indignantly replied "Scary Movie 2".

Hey Vancouver, win a free trip to the movies

Fellow Metroblogging Vancouver author Rebecca, known far-and-wide as Miss 604, is having a contest on her personal blog for free movie tickets for Get Smart and The Love Guru [m604]. Since I'm 1/1 on Miss 604 contests I figure I'll enter this one, because I'm for sure going to be going to see Get Smart, and Love Guru is a flick that I'd see for free but probably wouldn't pay for more Austin Powers style humour.

Personally I'm hoping to win Get Smart tickets.  As for you, well you'd better not enter, because that'll just make my own victory that much harder.  However you could enter, but if you win you do have to buy my book [jks].  For reals, it's one of the contest rules. 

It's the circle of life my friend.  You get a free movie.  I sell my book and Rebecca gets a better Technorati rank.  Everyone wins!  Well everyone except for people who haven't bought my book, they lose a little bit of potential joy every day.

Iron Man bleu my mind aweigh and now I can't spell

Since getting back into comics during university I've always been a fan of Iron Man.  Tony Stark on the face of it seems like a high tech imitation of Batman, a rich man with fancy gadgets fighting crime, but there was always elements that separated the two. 

Batman's a much darker character, and yet oddly far more perfect.  Stark's lighter, more fun loving and while Bruce Wayne's demon is the death of his parents, Tony's is with his own weapons manufacturing corporate empire and alcoholism.

Apart from the cool toys Stark's wounded heart was always something that interested me, having grown up with my own heart condition.  In the earlier Iron Man books it was somewhat ridiculous as a plot point, with Stark keeping his injury a secret he kept having to rush home to plug a large chest plate into a wall socket otherwise he'd have a heart attack.  Later on they streamlined this so it wasn't such a clunky piece of plot business, to the point now that it's not even something that's really mentioned.

Needless to say I was pretty excited for the Iron Man live action movie staring Robert Downey Jr.  Such excitement though can be a double-edged sword, because sometimes nothing can be as good as your expectations.  I think that the last three Star Wars movies suffered from that, though they had their own problems as well.  How could a movie ever match the one I'd already made in my mind?

It's hard to believe it, but they managed.  Robert Downey Jr is Iron Man, and I don't think I'll be able to look at the comic without imaging him in the role.  I wouldn't be surprised if in a few months the artists started drawing Tony Stark like Downey, the way they now seem to draw Charles Xavier as Patrick Stewart.  The movie mixed comedy with the serious adventure elements, and all in all it was probably my favorite comic book movie ever.  Certainly it was comparable in quality to the first Superman movie, though clearly the onscreen visual effects were better now than in the laste 70s. 

Even Lydia who I don't think has ever read an Iron Man comic liked it [iatl].  I'm already planning on going again, and again, and again.  Maybe even tonight, though I do have some Grand Theft Auto IV that needs playing.  It's a tough call.  If I know you, and you live within about 100 kilometres of me chances are I'm going to try to drag you to this movie at some point this summer.  It's your duty as my friends, my readers or random Google search arrivals to oblige me.

Oh and we're staying until the end of the credits.  Why?  Well it's a comic book movie, there's always something after the jump.

Counting the hours until Iron Man

I'll admit that I'm a huge comic nerd, and so I tend to try to see all of the major comic book movies in the theatre as soon as possible.  I've even seen the terrible ones like Ghost Rider in the theatres, and apart from looking through my Uncle Greg's old comic books years ago, I've never read a Ghost Rider comic book.

So it's a no-brainer that with Iron Man opening today I'd be buzzing with excitment.  Along with the X-Men, Iron Man is one of my favorite characters and I think probably along with Spider-Man has one of the better origin stories of the Marvel characters.

I'm just counting down the hours, tickets in my pocket waiting for work to finish and the film to begin.  It'll be nerd-tacular.

The fact that it's happening the same week as Free Comic Book Day [mbv] is perfect.

The epic poem of my life

I'm trying very hard to come up with something to blog at this point.  Following the Mr. Rawson school of forced free writing never ends up with anything readable, and certainly nothing that you want to submit to a(n) (potential) audiance of millions.  In fact during the ten minutes of free writing every class I tended to just fill my workbook with the phrase, "I am free.  I am being forced to write."  It was meant to be ironic, in that way that we can achieve irony at 17.

I suppose to make this a better blog I need some drama or adventure in my life.  Another trip, for example, to compete with last year's travel to Europe.  Something quite facinating and new so I can dazzle you with photographs and tales of eating weird food in dodgey resturants.  Instead I have pictures of the inside of the Skytrain, as I commute to and from Metrotown every day.

Which is not to say that life is boring, or dull.  I watched Bee Movie last night and it was pretty good.  However the fact that you're reading about me watching Bee Movie is a sign that perhaps I'm not leading the sort of heroic life that is worthy of great study.  Perhaps I should join Jason and search after the Golden Fleece [wp].  I'm sure such a journey would provide many chances for good pictures and many meals of weird food in dodgey resturants.  At the very least Mysia should be interesting.

Photo credit

• Photo by: Jeffery Simpson
• What: Arc de Triomphe, Paris France
• Date Taken: May 15th, 2007
• Camera: Sony Ericsson K790i

I win a contest and clean my deck

Trevor says: Have you entered the Miss604 contest yet?
Originally uploaded by miss604.

First up I won a contest on Miss604 [m604], the blog of fellow Metroblogger Rebbecca.  I only entered for the awesome retro Trevor Linden figure, but the rest of the swag is going to be fairly awesome.  So what all did I win?  I'll let Rebbecca describe it, by copying and pasting from her site.

- A limited edition, not sold in stores, collector, uncut sheet of 2007/2008 Vancouver Giants hockey cards

- A Canucks carabiner, keychain thingy

- Two tickets to this Saturday’s Everett Silvertips

- Two tickets to the BC Rockies vs Canucks Alumni hockey fundraiser game on March 22nd

- A McFarlane, in-package, mint, collector, Trevor Linden action figure

- A coveted Miss604 sticker as seen at Northern Voice or…

- You can also chose a limited edition solid-colour Miss604 sticker

You can watch the tension packed drawing of my name at her site [m604].

Meanwhile I woke up early on Tuesday and spent about two hours cleaning off my deck.  I've never really used my deck because when I moved in it was filthy and I always knew it was going to take the sacrifice of a mop to get it clean.  I had bought the kamakazi mop a few months ago, but it had been hiding in my closet wanting to live.

After the cleaning Lydia came over and we went to get some food and then watch Once on my AppleTV.  I've had the soundtrack for Once for a few months now but the movie is a still worth watching.  It's not quite a romantic flick, but it's certainly sweet-hearted and good natured.

The final thing is that I applied for a job I want to get, and now have an interview (almost) lined up.  Which should be good and exciting.  To make it more exciting I'm planning on bringing a car full of fire ants and emptying them down my shirt's neck five minutes before the interview so that for the entire talk I'm trying not to scratch my arm pits or yell out in pain.

Never say that I do things the easy way.

On the edge of a new frontier

I love Darwyn Cooke's comic mini-series The New Frontier [wp]. Frankly it's by far my favorite thing that DC comics has ever published, unless you're going to pedantic and force me to include their Vertigo line with titles like Y: The Last Man. Still The New Frontier is to me the perfect imagining of the DC super hero universe, far better in my opinion than Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns [wp] which gets all the fanboy love for making Batman crazy and having Ronald Reagan in it.

Maybe it's because I'm a history nut, and The New Frontier just reeks of the 1950s' and '60s, its very title is a reference to a speech by John F. Kennedy which is quoted in the comic. And though I'm a Marvel fan at heart, I've always enjoyed DC's animated efforts more than Marvel's. The Paul Dini / Bruce Timm partnership which spawned the Batman animated series in the 1990s' and lead to the Justice League: Unlimited show set the bar for how comic books should be adapted to animation.

Thus I'm ridiculously excited for the animated DVD of the series that's coming out next year. The collected Absolute Edition sits on my living room table, and I'm hoping that they can capture the feeling of reading the book to the television screen.

The Simpsons' movie and the coming of HD

I was watching some trailers at Apple's Quicktime trailer website [qt] and was impressed by the quality of the HD content. The Simpsons trailers looked incredible, and even the new Fantastic Four movie got me excited when I could watch the Silver Surfer in all its highly defined glory.

Now this won't make the movies any better, but oh my the Simpsons have never looked so good as they do in these trailers. I'm excited for the day that all television is filmed for HD and all television are HD. A few shows, Hockey Night in Canada and the CSIs for instance, are already HD with my Shaw box but not enough is. When it is it's very pretty.

Now all I need is a better television. One of these days.

*Note the Youtube version of The Simpsons' trailer is not nearly as beautiful as the HD one on the Quicktime site. Go watch it if you can.

The truth about what was real in the Borat movie

After seeing Borat with Nathan and Krista we were trying to figure out how much of the movie was real, how much of it was staged and how much the people appearing in it knew during the filming of the show.  The online magazine Salon has done an article examining most of the sequences in the film and explaining the truth behind them.

Their article "What's real in Borat" is online here [sal].  You do have to sit through an ad before you get to the main article, but it's painless and it's well worth the two minute wait.  I won't reveal what is what but I will say I was right about the prostitute.

Another celeb encounter

So after the excitment of having one of the Dahle brothers come into the store [jks] I had another quasi-celebrity encounter.  A fellow was in and the way he was talking I figured he had to be in the entertainment industry and so a quick Wikipedia search later and it's discovered that he's a member of 3 Deep [wp].

Typically it's not a connection I would have made had he not been talking about that, and he certainly was not someone I recognized.  I had thought that maybe he was a standup comedian or something, but nope boy band.

My first Vancouver celeb story and it's not even that filled with sex, drugs or Scientology

mg1
Originally uploaded by kid_eh.

My brother Neal used to work at the Virgin Megastore on Robson Street. (It's since closed down and re-opened as an HMV.) He always had lots of really interesting stories about the famous people who would come into the store and buy things. Beck, David Duchovny and other names would pass through the store and that's not counting the on-site performances they'd do (like Sarah Vowell was there once).

Other people at stores I've worked with have served Canucks, including the Sedin twins and others. The closest I've ever come to someone famous was a Hamilton Tiger-Cat I sold a phone to a few weeks back when they were in town and I didn't even recognize him until I did a Google search on his name because I figured there weren't too many large African American men living in Hamilton and travelling around Canada. So I suspected he was a Ti-Cat but was not sure at the time.

Today though finally someone who I recognized came in, Ryan Dahle whose been in Age of Electric, Limblifter and played guitars on tour with Matthew Good [mg]. He was nice enough, but was looking for a different store so there wasn't much I could do for him other than point towards Georgia and say "That way."

Nowhere near as interesting as Neal's run in with Beck which including talking about the Coreys that used to rule the theatres in the 1980s.

The one where I'm looking for a bathroom on the set of a Mark Wahlberg movie

997BGN_Mark_Wahlberg_022, originally uploaded by doodanny.

So one of our stores, the one that used to be on Pender, was moved to a new location on the corner of Robson and Seymour.  Since it's now in a high traffic area they're keeping the store open on the weekends, whereas before it was just the old M through to F for the corporate customers.  Anyway given the extra hours they're needing someone to cover the shifts on the weekend and being the guy who gets all the dirty work I ended up getting sent there for this weekend.

The store doesn't have any bathrooms in it, so we have to go into the office tower that the store is located in, and go up to the fifth floor to pee.  We have a keycard for access to the building on the weekend when it's locked up.  Trouble is that the card which is supposed to grant access to the fifth floor only grants access to the fourth floor where they're filming Shooter [imdb].  Shooter is staring that thespian of our age Mark Wahlberg, who I suppose won some cred with Boogie Nights and then lost it all with The Big Hit.

Plot Outline: A marksman (Wahlberg) living in exile is coaxed back into action after learning of a plot to kill the president. Ultimately double-crossed and framed for the attempt, he goes on the run to track the real killer and find out who exactly set him up, and why.

Sounds wicked cool, right?  Anyway the story goes like this, the card only let me onto the fourth floor so the door opens and I figure I'll find a washroom somewhere on the floor.  I go and find a door marked "Department of Justice - Federal Bureau of Investigation" just like a real office.  So I went onto the set and wandered around looking for a place to pee, and never did find anything.  Eventually I had to go down Robson and ask to pee at a gyro resturant a few doors down.

Tomorrow I might go back with a camera and take some snaps, I switched back to my BlackBerry so I didn't have a camera on my phone when I needed it most.  Which in itself might lay the moral of the story.

Star Trek as Canadian politics

This post will also be mirrored at Vancouver's Metroblogging site [mbv] though it will appear here first.

I've been dwelling on the fact that Conservative leader Stephen Harper has come out of the closet, so to speak, and has been revealed as a Star Trek fan [mbv]. Former Canadian University Press President and all around Trek fan Don Iveson finds the revelation surprising given Trek fans' general lefty slant [di]. He points out an article on Salon.com [sal] that argues convincingly that Star Trek is the for egalitarians while it's Star Wars that is the franchise for rugged individualists.

The differences at first seem superficial. One saga has an air force motif (tiny fighters) while the other appears naval. In "Star Trek," the big ship is heroic and the cooperative effort required to maintain it is depicted as honorable. Indeed, "Star Trek" sees technology as useful and essentially friendly -- if at times also dangerous. Education is a great emancipator of the humble (e.g. Starfleet Academy). Futuristic institutions are basically good-natured (the Federation), though of course one must fight outbreaks of incompetence and corruption. Professionalism is respected, lesser characters make a difference and henchmen often become brave whistle-blowers -- as they do in America today.

In "Star Trek," when authorities are defied, it is in order to overcome their mistakes or expose particular villains, not to portray all institutions as inherently hopeless. Good cops sometimes come when you call for help. Ironically, this image fosters useful criticism of authority, because it suggests that any of us can gain access to our flawed institutions, if we are determined enough -- and perhaps even fix them with fierce tools of citizenship.

So Trek sounds more like some kind of left wing NDP show doesn't it?

Well I got to thinking, Harper only likes the original Trek. Maybe that's a clue since the original Star Trek was much less focused on the Federation and Star Fleet as a whole, Kirk and the like didn't become good public servants until the movies and even then they were court-martialed for being too awesome. In reality there are so many Star Trek series and thus faces of Trek that each can relate to a Canadian political party. Thus here it is, the definitve Canadian Election 2006: the Star Trek Edition.

The Liberal Party = Star Trek: the Original Series

Despite the fact that the original is Stephen Harper's favorite it's the show that best fits the Liberals since it's vaugely left leaning without actually being that way. The Liberals might have legalized gay marriage but they certainly didn't seem happy to have done it, similiarly Kirk may have kissed Uhura (in television's first inter-racial kiss) but he had to be mind-controlled into doing it.

Similiarly both the Liberals and the first Trek have mixed up views on war. On one hand we're still in Afghanistan despite the fact that we've got no real plan there other than to be targets in place of American soldiers who had to go in Iraq [cbc]. Our being there is enabling the American occupation of Iraq. In Trek Kirk was always good about avoiding war with the Klingons, but would be happy to whomp on the Romulans if they got uppity. Like the Liberals he might make friends with a planet of Native Americans but he certainly wasn't going to give them warp drive.

Kirk and crew tried to be good enviromentalists, they saved the whales and created a new fertile planet with the Genesis Device, but they generally did it out of only when forced to by aliens probes, Kahn or needing to court the NDP. Speaking of Khan Noonien Singh a Conservative show would have put him to death for his crimes on Earth, an NDP show would have tried to rehabilitate him, only a Liberal show would have taken the useless middle ground of sticking him in a rocket and shooting him into space [st].

As much as Kirk wanted to use time travel to alter the future and save his one true love Edith Keeler's life he had to realize that messing with the past was dangerous and so he watched her die before his eyes [st]. Paul Martin wasn't so smart when he decided to fool with the past and opened the Gomery Equiry which lead us to this election.

Star Trek's first series was meant to be a five year mission, but was cancelled after three years. Martin's government should have had four years, but alas it won't even make three.

More nerd politics after the break. Just click on read more and go to the rest of Canada's political parties.

"But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not." - Alan Bean

I was never a child who had a fantasy about being an astronaut.  Despite the lie we tell children that if they work hard enough they can be anything they want to be it was always pretty obvious that I would never be a candidate to be shot into space, astronauts are the peak of physical health and I never have been even near the base camp of physical health.  So I spent my time wanting to be a spy, a great lover, a pirate or any of the other things that I'll never be, but never an astronaut.

Still when I went to watch a 3-D IMAX film on sharks a month or so ago at Canada Place, I was interested by the trailer for the then upcoming Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3-D produced and narrated by Tom Hanks.  First off I was wondering how they could film the movie, since it's probably hard enough to drop the giant IMAX cameras into the sea to follow sharks, sending them back in time to the 1970s when man last was on the moon seemed to me to present an insurmountable obstacle to the project.  Secondly walking on the moon still just sounds kind of cool.

So Sunday night after work I went back to Canada Place and hit the 7 pm show.  It was a nice relaxing way to spend about 45 minutes, especially since IMAX audiences are almost always better behaved than regular audiences unless you hit a show that's filled with kids on a field trip (something that the Sunday night shows don't really have that often I imagine).  The walking on the moon footage is all a mix of live in studio stuff and CGI, much like the original moon landing (I joke).  There is some archival footage, but that's not 3-D.  The 3-D, like all IMAX 3-D, is awesome really.  I once watched Jaws III in 3-D at the Uptown years ago and it was horrible, gave me a headache and mybe me sick, but IMAX films have solved the problems that regular theatres have with the third dimension and it's really cool here.

If you've got an hour to spare one day and want to see some really cool moon stuff, check this movie out.  It's probably the most engaging IMAX film I've seen for a long time, surpassed probably only by one about movie special effects I saw in Seattle years ago with footage from the original Star Wars films in 3-D.

Metroblogging and Handbraking

It seems like the multi-city blog site Metroblogging is about to launch their Vancouver site.  About a month ago I posted about trying to find people who wanted to blog about what was going on in Vancouver because they want to get about ten people before they launch the city site.  If you're interested they're still looking for a few more people but after getting on their author mail lists it seems like we're ready to go, or almost.

I wish I knew more bloggers in Vancouver, so I could poke and prod them into joining because I think it's going to be a really cool site once it's up and going.  Their original LA site in particular is wicked good and has Wil Wheaton as an author.  On my next day off I'm going to spend sometime grabbing photos of Vancouver to go on the group's Flickr site for use in the page's title bar.

-----

I managed to encode the Battlestar Galactica mini-series with Handbrake and then drop the whole three hour program into my video iPod.  I watched about twenty minutes of it last night in bed and aside from having to wear a pair of headphones, which sucks while laying on a pillow, the experiance is actually pretty good.  One of the nice things about the iPod screen is it's got a very forgiving viewing angle, meaning you can basically be looking at it from any angle and still see the picture fine.

I would still perfer to use the PSP for video but the fact is getting a big enough Sony Memory Stick Pro is too expensive and the iPod is a much nicer size.  It's fairly unobtrusive when I was watching the Digg.com video podcast today on the Skytrain as opposed to the few times I've seen people with PSPs on public transit.

Got my hands on the video iPod

A while ago I talked about the new video iPod and finally today I got mine in the mail.  I downloaded a few music videos from the iTunes music store including "Do The Evolution" by Pearl Jam (directed by comic book artist Todd McFarlane).  It's by far my favorite video of all time, though sadly McFarlane followed it up by making crappy Korn videos.  I also picked up a few U2 tracks and "Weapon" by Matthew Good. 

Right now I'm using a program called Handbrake to transfer a few DVDs to iTunes and then, hopefully, onto the iPod.  It's a long process to rip DVDs into the proper formatt for iTunes.  It's about 1:1 speed so an hour and a half movie takes about an hour and a half.  It's also still not as easy as it should be and the fact that you have to use a third party application rather than an Apple app is going to keep people from adopting the iPod as a video viewer in a big way.

The screen is actually not as bad of a size as I was expecting.  It's a bit hard to imagine the dimensions based on the older iPods, but the screen is definitly fine for watching short shows on.  I could see watching up to about an hour on it, but I doubt I'd really wanting to watch a full movie on it.  If I tried I'd assume I'd get some nasty eyestrain.

Speaking of which I'd best be off.  I'm hoping to catch a film after I get my comics today and I'm a bit behind schedual.  Take care of yourselves.