Few creatures of the night have captured our imagination like vampires…
What explains our enduring fascination with vampires?
What is it about the vampire myth that explains our interest?
Is it the overtones of sexual lust, power, control…
Or is it a fascination with the immortality of the undead?
And what dark and hidden parts of our psyche are aroused and captivated
By the legends of the undead

– Vampires, Godsmack

I remember when vampires were awesome.  Whether it’s a book by Anne Rice, the Lost Boys, pretty much any RPG, or Dracula himself — Vampires are to be feared.  As suggested, vampires have always had a “sexiness” to them but first and foremost, they were creatures to be feared.

No more.

I suppose it started with Blade making vampires “cool”.  Then Kate Beckinsale made them ridiculously hot.  Finally, Stephenie Meyer emasculated them.  The so-called “next J.K. Rowling” has turned vampires as ordinary teenagers experiencing overly dramatic romanticism.  Now vampires are cropping up everywhere but almost universally as a love interest as opposed to, you know, a terrifying force of evil.

Thankfully, a fellow supernatural undead, the zombie, is also riding a huge upswell up popularity.  When it comes to the undead, zombies have always been perceived as the plebs to the vampires patricians.  Unlike vampires however, zombies haven’t had to resort to teen angst for their popularity.  Left 4 Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Plants vs Zombies, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil 5, and the upcoming ZombieLand… zombies are riding high.

The mysteries of the undead will continue to fascinate the living.

– Vampires, Godsmack

Though Glee surprised me, Community is the new show that I was actually anticipating.  I don’t know if people are going to get into yet another “witty” sitcom but the pilot was pretty funny and well-cast.  Chevy Chase + John Oliver?  Absolutely.

Every TV season, there seems to be at least one new show that comes out of nowhere and becomes the talk of the town.  If the early returns are any indication this season, that show is Glee.  Starting with your standard high-school sitcom foundation, they added on quite a bit of American Idol and High School Musical, a hefty chuck of So You Think Can Dance, and the quirkiness of Pushing Daisies to create a show providing a little something for everyone.

Surprisingly, they mostly succeeded.  It is generally quite funny and for those without a sense of humor, the bits of music & dance will entertain.  Christina is particularly enamored with the show and I have put it into the TiVo Season Pass rotation.

If you missed it, you can watch it on Hulu.

The general quality of TV shows is so abysmally low that when a good and/or critically-acclaimed show is cancelled, it’s heartbreaking for those viewers who had invested some time into it.  Worse, certain shows that need to fail will find an audience and continue on indefinitely.   (That last link is particularly mind-boggling — One great CSI (Las Vegas), one good CSI (NY), and somehow the god-awful, torturous waste of time known as CSI:Miami, becomes the most popular show in the world?!).  Regardless, the networks are in the business to make money and they continue to churn out new episodes of popular shows until the quality degrades far enough that the viewership drops below their “not-renew” cutoff line.  The end-result is that good television series are kept on the air long after they should have been cancelled, often ruining the show as they try to eke out the last bit of profit from the series.

That’s why I like when I see the networks try to develop mini-series that are designed to run for a set number of episodes and that’s -it-.  Lost would have been much more interesting if it had been done in this format… then we wouldn’t have had the rambling mess that it became sometime in the 2nd & 3rd seasons.  A similar idea, telenovelas, are extremely popular in Mexico.  Christina and I were able to get into the recently concluded series Harper’s Island, an otherwise modest murder-horror-mystery series, due to the nature of the series — we knew the plot had been developed from start-to-finish with a cohesive storyline and it was the better for it.  (Though the last 30 minutes or so were … disappointing). One of the better fantasy book series out there, A Song of Ice & Fire, is being developed by HBO in this format and I have high expectations.  I hope more networks try this approach.

My two visits to the movie theaters the past few days couldn’t have been more different.  Last time I was in Vegas, we happened by Caesars where they were filming some movie we had never heard of called the “Hangover”.  Well, that movie came out a few weeks ago, Brian, Christina, and I saw it last Saturday, and it was hilarious — Highly recommend it.   Then last night, Christina and I joined her parents for Earth, an abridged for-film version of the Planet Earth series.  While I loved the James Earl Jones voiceover in the film, do yourself a favor and watch the Planet Earth series, in HD if you can.  Amazing stuff.

The Hangover seems to be the “breakout” comedy of the year.  While I’ve heard good things about Paul Blart: Mall Cop (seriously) and, of course, Up and Monsters vs. Aliens were also hilarious, The Hangover seems to be catching the most people off-guard on how funny it is.  Several of the film sites out there seems shocked that a film could be this funny without any “big names”.  They contrast it with the disappointment/bombs of the “made” comedy stars (Seth Rogen in Observe & Report, Will Ferrell in Land of the Lost, and Jack Black/Michael Cera in Year One) and wonder why it succeeded instead of the others.   I can’t speak for others but I can watch the trailers for Mall Cop and The Hangover and say, hey, those look funny while the others all looked … well, not.

Nor do I understand why the big names like Will Ferrell and Jack Black are supposed to carry more weight than Kevin James and Ed Helms — The latter two are significantly more entertaining.  I can appreciate Will Ferrell & Jack Black but give me Ed Helms on the Office and his Daily Show work anyday of the week.

The NFL draft officially ends the coverage of sports I usually care about watching.  Shortly thereafter, most of the regular tv shows have their finales and go on break for the summer. The end result is normally a severe lack of compelling television content.  I don’t watch all that much television anyway but I’ve found myself watching random sporting events, including bits and pieces of the NBA playoffs, NASCAR, golf, ping pong, tennis.  I even went to a baseball game (though I would have to be extremely bored to sit through a game on tv).   The lack of decent tv coverage of soccer is particularly galling during the summer as that would certainly fill in nicely.  That said, the most captivating thing I’ve watched so far is the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee.  I can’t even fully explain it beyond that it’s nice to see kids idolized for being smart.  Not to mention the coolest kid I’ve ever seen in Kennyi Aouad:

I’m a convert. On the recommendation of a friend after conveying how obsessed I was about the Spelling Bee, I added Spellbound to my Netflix queue. Supposedly, it’s Wordplay for spelling bees and if so, I’m sold.

This past weekend was the NFL Draft, a a relatively boring process in principal that has turned into a two-day media blitz. I TiVo’d the draft thinking I would fly through it and get an overview of how things shook out but ended up watching 3.5 hours of the first round.  It’s amazing how much analysis goes into the nuances of a player (and how oddly wrong some of it is) and the repercussions of a given pick on a certain team.   I tend to think of everything I do and see in the same analytical style and found the draft much more compelling than I thought I would.

Along the same lines, I’m the sort of person that finds reading the game recaps online much more interesting in general than watching the games live.  So Saturday night before bed, I brought up Sports Illustrated and ESPN to read their draft summaries of the first & second rounds.   For two companies that usually take the lead in adopting technology into their coverage, they really need to get rid of one really annoying and out-of-date feature they have on their pages:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”120″ />

For those who aren’t programming nerds like me, that little tag in the head section of an HTML page forces the page to refresh the page every 2 minutes (120 seconds). It’s very difficult to read down through a page when the page refreshes and moves back to the top every X seconds. Both SI and ESPN have this annoyance turned on.

I want my content to be as fresh and updated as possible but that’s why years ago, people started using XMLHttpRequest — it allows you to load the content dynamically without forcing a page refresh. Then, use a little styling and coloring to indicate updated content. Easy enough.

SI, you’re behind the times. You too, ESPN. End Web Developer Rant.

Hollywood and DC have always had a curious relationship, typically involving actors or directors spouting unsolicited opinions about the current state of affairs.  On occasion however, some thespians take the next step and actively get involved in the political process.  Hollywood is typically considered left-leaning but surprisingly, the arguably most famous and successful of these actor-turned-politicians are two conservatives, Reagan and Schwarzenegger.

Christina added “House” to our regular rotation of shows awhile back.  It’s pretty entertaining even though it tends to have the same general storyline every episode.   The show from this week was a bit different and seems to have been developed “on-the-fly”.   Kal Penn, aka Kumar, aka Taj, played Dr. Kutner in House up until this week when he unceremoniously shot himself.  No rhyme or reason as far as the plot of House goes but apparently the star of stoner movies has decided to take his talents elsewhere.   More specifically, to his new job as Associate Director in the Office of Public Liaison for the Obama administration.  I suppose it’s no weirder a job transition than Schwarzenegger’s path from body-builder to action star to Gubernator but it’s definitely odd.

In my opinion, House has struggled a bit recently.  The suicide episode from this week was almost completely devoid of any humor (fittingly, perhaps) but I don’t watch House for the drama; I watch it to catch House’s latest one-liners.  These have been few and far between recently and the removal of Kutner from House is not going to help.  Kutner was probably the most entertaining character other than House himself.

Hulu was almost universally mocked when it came into existence.  News Corp and NBC building an online video site?  Everyone knew it was going to be a laughable, worthless waste of our time.  It would be poor quality, poor selection, built using some proprietary plugin (probably Windows only), wrapped in DRM, and short-lived.

But then, a funny thing happened.  Hulu rocked.  Lots of content, perfectly watchable quality, and built-on top of Flash, a more or less universally accepted plugin.   The ads seemed like a great compromise – present but not overwhelming like on TV.  By all accounts, Hulu was a win for both content providers and users.

One of the best features of Boxee is its integration with Hulu.  On-demand access to any of the Hulu content integrated into a media center interface, Boxee was at the forefront of a media revolution.  A unified media center interface aggregating my local media content with internet content is quite simply exactly what I’ve wanted since I first got an HDTV.

As typical consumers become more savvy, they too will become more and more of an on-demand viewer.  The idea of being tied to a TV at a given time became passe as soon as TiVo came into existence.  The inferior, generic DVRs pushed out by the cable companies at low cost, only reinforced the idea of video on-demand to a wider market.  The next logical step is on-demand video delivered over the internet.  Despite all expectations typical with a product delived by “big media”, Hulu looked set to become the de facto standard for exactly that sort of thing.  

Alas, Hulu announced yesterday that it was blocking access from Boxee.  Instantly, Hulu went from media darling to online pariah.  This act is a perfect example of why big media still doesn’t get it.  Even more galling, no explanation was given other than some “content providers” requested that access be removed.    It’s hard to even fathom a reason why they would make this move.  The content displayed within Boxee was not different in any way from the content displayed on the website.  The ads, so important to those content providers, were still present.  All Boxee did was provide an integration; if anything, further expanding the audience of potential viewers.

Hopefully, Hulu will get their act together.  It’s unlikely that the tiny demographic of Boxee users will have any influence whatsoever in fixing this wrong though the large internet outcry does bode well.  Still, it’s unlikely Hulu will backtrack anytime soon and it will probably continue to do just fine for many users.  It will, however, have lost one user.

… is not to be found at Cox. My long awaited TiVo HD arrived last Friday and I quickly scheduled an appointment to have them come out to install the CableCARD necessary to get their encrypted HD channels. I was pleasantly surprised that they were extremely accommodating and friendly on the phone and they promised to send a technician out Saturday evening. Sure enough, the tech came out and installed the CableCARDs — two as they decided to give me two SingleStream cards instead of one MultiStream card… a bit odd but it seemed to work just fine.

My good fortune lasted until I tried to watch ESPNHD the next day. For some reason, only one of my tuners could capture HD video from the non-broadcast channels. Ah! The well-known issues of CableCARDs that I had hoped to avoid had decided to haunt me as well. I called Cox and they tried to diagnose over the phone, gave up, and promised to send another technician out Monday evening. I assumed he was coming out to “fix” the problem but I suppose I was a bit optimistic. The tech came out, confirmed I had a faulty CableCARD (um, yeah, I knew that — thanks!) and promised to send yes, another tech out to fix it. He couldn’t do anything because he didn’t have any CableCARDs.   Why a technician would schedule an appointment to come fix a CableCARD issue without a spare CableCARD is beyond me.

The tech promised another tech would come out from 7-9 Wednesday.  In addition, I got a call from Cox telling me they had to send a technician out for field line testing or some such, as mandated by the FCC.  Whatever.  That appointment was scheduled from 5-7 on Wednesday.  Needless to say, nothing happened until 8:50pm on Wednesday.  Finally, my technician arrived and I was relieved to know my CableCARD issue would soon be resolved.  However, it was not to be;  the tech that showed up was NOT the CableCARD tech, he was the field line test guy — running just a wee bit late.  At this point, I can honestly say I was not very surprised when the night passed without any CableCARD guy showing up.   

For what its worth, the phone service has been extremely helpful.  Once you get past the useless automated menus and speak to a representative, they’ve been pretty gracious and apologetic.  As nice as they have been, I simply wish I didn’t have to deal with them quite so often.  My fourth (and hopefully final) appointment is set for tomorrow.