MSFT + AOL = ?

Last night I was chopshopping my old Dell XPS 410 and scavenging memory to put in my current desktop (upgraded from  4GB to 6GB woo hoo) and I looked at the “old” harddrive. I pulled it out completely and decided not to reformat it to try to sell it in the bundle with my XPS; sometimes trying to clean & wipe an old harddrive is more trouble than just yanking it out and letting someone else figure out how to replace it…

… which brings me to these Microsoft buying AOL  rumors today. 

Why would Microsoft buy AOL? Lots of reasons, some good, some bad, but let’s not pretend we’re CEOs and major stockholders, but let’s think about what it would mean to the average user.

If you remember, I was looking into hotmail  in an early post a few weeks back and part of my reasoning is that my yahoo mail is potentially a part of a sinking ship. Google’s dominance in search and now email, plus the continuous discontinuation of services at Yahoo (I believe photos and personals are two of the biggest examples of “someone is doing it far better, so let’s cut our losses”) means that Yahoo, like AOL, doesn’t have much to offer that you can’t get elsewhere, better.

With one personal exception for me:

Mapquest.

I have personally been a victim of Google Maps  on many occassions. Usually, Google Maps did a great job, and I jinxed it by swearing about how many times it gave me great directions.  However, over the past year, I have crashed head on into botched maps and navigation on almost every other trip. Mapquest? Much more reliable. 

So if you’re an AOL user, your email accounts that you’ve had for 10 years would be much safer and secure under the corporate umbrella of Microsoft. Keep in mind, AOL is worth about $2 Billion, Microsoft about $200 Billion.  Your AOL stuff would probably be migrated or offered to convert to hotmail, bing, and other Microsoft Services.  

I don’t know anyone who used AOL for online access in recent years, but at this point if you’ve still kept it, I’m sure you use it the same way I use Yahoo: it’s the email you always kept around, and it was too much trouble and effort to convert to something new.  So maybe if you’re not into cleaning out your old harddrives and reformatting them like me, maybe AOL being bought by Microsoft isn’t such a bad idea on paper.

Then again, sometimes packing up the Family Truckster for a trip to Wally World isn’t a bad idea either, on paper.

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The line must be drawn HERE!

Ahh class critiques tonight.

It’s that wonderful time when people shit on provide feedback on your projects up for public display. My 3 hours of Flash experience showed, but class was very nice. In the end, I was glad I didn’t bite off more than I could chew, and I saw how using the shape tweens was a better choice than the motion tweens, which we’ll be learning and using in our next Flash project.

Some really great projects tonight, including a great animation of a vector drawn deer running through a photo of a forest. The guy who made it actually hand carved the trees in the photo to insert fore, middle, and background, and it was very very very cool. I’m starting to like Flash a lot, but wondering if it’s worth the $180 for a student discount license for the software on my home PC.

Hopefully, in the next project or two I can import some screen caps of some good old comic folks, maybe the Black Terror or Sky Man to make some low grade animations, like those old Marvel cartoons.  These were great, comic panels with limited animation and dialog:

I’m partial to Iron Man’s intro myself…

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Critiques and upgrades

Tonight in class we have our project critiques. Not a big deal, usually a pretty dull class whenever I’ve had them. I can’t wait to hear what the pros in class have done for their projects.

In the meantime, I’ve become concerned about plugins after a Silverlight popup told me my work PC wasn’t up to date. Here’s a handy site for checking lots of your plugins, courtesy of the folks at Mozilla:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/plugincheck/

I’ve also been staring at my “old” Dell XPS 410 and think I missed the narrow window when I could have made a good return on ebay with it. At this point, the best move is to upgrade my existing PC memory with the Dell’s boards, and then strip out the Dell mobo, sell that and the case separately.

And finally,

I still can’t find a *current* copy of Flash for much cheaper than the $170-180 student discount.  Maybe it’s time to suck it up and buy it. Or maybe it’s time to decide if this is really something I want to do long term.

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Cambridge. Library. Digital. AHOY!

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/

Well I’ve been reading “The Historian” by Elizabeth Kostova and as the nerdly professors and geeks make vast pilgrimmages to across the globe to… read and take notes… I saw today the following (Thank you, Telegraph, and thank you to my News Alerts for all things Stephen Hawking)

June 4 (Telegraph) — Thousands of rare books and
manuscripts at Camrbidge University Library – including
handwritten notes by Sir Isaac Newton – are to be made available
on line thanks to a £1.5m donation.
The gift from the former businessman Dr Leonard Polonsky
will be used to start the Digital Library for the 21st Century
create an infrastructure capable of digitising the vast
collection housed at the 600-year-old institution.
Digitisation will be completed in stages, with the first
collections to be called “The Foundations of Faith” and “The
Foundations of Science”.
Among the Library’s religious collections are some of the
world’s most ancient Qur’ans and an eighth century copy of the
Surat al-Anfal, the Qur’an’s eighth chapter.
Judaism is represented by the Taylor-Schechter Genizah
Collection containing 193,000 fragments of manuscripts as
significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Very exciting. If you’re a nerd, historian, or bookworm. Which I am. Books are the best and safest method of time travel next to a Tardis.

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This is Ground Control to Major Youtube

Ground Control to Jackalope. Ground Control to Jackalope.
I made my first animation, so put your helmet on.
Ground Control to Jackalope, commencing countdown, uploading now.
Check youtube and please upload my flash animation project.

This is Ground Control to Jackowick, I’m trying to get a grade
and the papers want to know why my shockwave file isn’t uploaded.
Now it’s time to google “convert .swf to .avi” if you dare.

This is Jackalope to Ground Control, I’m frustrated at my desk.
And I’m typing in a most peculiar way and the websites look very different today.
For here am I sitting in a shitty Staples chair, far from community college.
My screen is turing blue and there’s nothing I can do.

THIS IS JACKALOPE TO GROUND CONTROL…. I DID IT…

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Moratorium and Time Travel Ahoy!

This has nothing to do with my regular blog topic, but I felt it was of the utmost importance to make a list of

SONGS THAT DESERVE A 10 YEAR MORATORIUM.

Yes, these songs should all be packed up, removed from airplay,  not licensed for commercials or ringtones and put on ice for 10 years to preserve them.

Dream On- Aerosmith

This song is really really sad and really fucked up, like Steven Tyler had his own Tardis and saw what his life over the 80s was going to turn into. But dammit, I don’t need to hear it at 12:30 on lunch break on the local classic rock station while I’m in a cubicle.

Me and Booby McGee

“Booooo hisssss” I bet you’re saying. Well suck it up, Bobby McGee got a job a wife and kids and now he just wants to settle down. We should let him.

You Shook me All Night Long (Back in Black closing in…)

AC/DC fans should hate this song by now. It’s a “phone it in” song for cover bands who want to let their bassist sing lead once a night. There’s nothing sexy about the “poppiest” song from AC/DC. And Back in Black is becoming the “Born to be Wild” for a new generation… music your dad thought was tough.

Paradise City

It PAINS me as a Guns and Roses fan, but my God, this is a long song.  You could make toast before Axl even begins the first verse.  I can’t wait for this to be in an Activia commercial when Axl is low on cash.

Brick House

Imagine a wedding reception. Now imagine that one sassy Aunt Cougar who is out doing really creepy dancing with the ring bearer to the Commodores. Moratorium.

What I Got (aka “let’s scream ‘POT'” song)

We get it. You smoke pot, and you love to scream the line about mom smoking pot. But it’s now about as edgy and personal as Lucy in the Sky is to the old hippies. Trust me, put this song on ice from all the radio formats that play it, and in 10 years you’ll see what a beautiful bittersweet tribute to being alive this song really is.

Pour Some Sugar on Me

When Aunt Cougar pulls out of the wedding reception in her Monte Carlo buzzed on white zinfindel, I assure you, this is the first song on her mix tape. This song used to kick ass. Now it’s about as dangerous as a one armed guy with a bow and arrow. Or drum kit.

Money by Pink Floyd (since I can’t pick the entirity of Dark Side of the Moon)

Clap to this: one two three four one two three four one two three four.

Now this: one two three four fix six sev ONE two three four five six sev ONE two three four five six sev.

That’s Money. It’s in 7/4 time signature which is why it never feels quite right on a road trip, or when some old has been puts it on the juke box at Bill’s Olde Tavern on a Friday night. And the lyrics? Kind of a downer. Not a party song. Musically very interesting, but seriously, you don’t watch Twin Peaks every night, your brain will burn out. That’s why shows like Two and a Half Men do so well.  And to leave no good deed unpunished, let’s put the whole of Dark Side of the Moon into orbit for 10 years. Then we’ll go back and listen as it was intended, a full album.

Better Man by Pearl Jam

I was at a frat party and heard a group of girls having a singalong to this song about a wifebeater.  Yeah.

Now I do like these songs (well except Money) but they really are some of the most overplayed and worn out records that come to my mind. But more importantly, there is one song, nay, one artist, who’s entire catalog can get locked into a public storage unit full of cannibalistic radioactive zombies and never see daylight again. When your band’s nickname is “The Delaware Destroyers”, you are about as badass as Stephen Hawking in a drive by shooting. 

So please, George Thorogood, hang it up.

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Atoman is my new crack.

I’m fascinated with these old Golden Age heroes. Like Atoman here.  Poor guy really has some run of the mill superpowers:

Super strength
Flight
Speed
Invulnerability
“Atomic vision”
Body generated heat to manipulate metal

I mean, if this doesn’t scream “Superman”, what does? Oh I know, he’s public domain. That means he’s up for grabs if someone wants to write a screenplay, more or less. So if you have a great Superman script you can’t sell in Hollywood, why wouldn’t you pitch Atoman? The cost savings from licensing alone should offset the reduced box office.  And, since he ran for a whopping 2 issues, you know he’s got more appeal than my boy the Atomic Thunderbolt.

I hear crickets. Maybe because it’s late and I can’t sleep. Or maybe it’s the silence of all 45 of Atoman’s fans lying in their graves. 

Or maybe it’s the sound of ideas being generated…

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