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By far, the worst movie Kevin Smith's made ((Well, at least that I can think of off the top of my head.)).

The best part was seeing Elizabeth Banks in a classic blue Penguins jersey. Maybe she should try out for them - they couldn't get much worse lately ((They'll pull through the slump.)).

I only paid $2 to see it, but it wasn't worth that.

JPG Magazine is closing its doors. The website isn't even going to last a week - it closes January 5, 2008.

The last issue I got was issue 19. I'm a paid subscriber through issue 31. Neither the website nor the form letter I got tells me that I'm going to be reimbursed for my subscriptions. Here's to hoping that's just because it's so early.

I just renewed for another year on December 24. I received a gift subscription, which I gave to a pal named Dan. He gave me an iTunes Gift Certificate to say thanks. Fortunately I've not yet spent it, and I'll talk with Dan to see how I might make things right with him.

Of course, we'd both rather have the magazine than our money back, but that's not happening. I'll give JPG time to figure out how it's going to reimburse everyone, too.

I've got a Really Right Stuff camera plate for the Canon 5D for sale. It's the B5D model and I used it all of, oh, about once before replacing it with the L-bracket.

Any reasonable offers accepted (ideally within the U.S.).

Following yesterday's post, I've resolved to do the third option: "limited edition" type releases in very small number. I'll post three desktops (most months) on the first day of each month. They'll be available that month and that month alone.

For January, I've posted six - the "best of," if you will so that everyone has one last chance to get them. Click Desktops above or, well, right there.

Come February 1, they'll be gone, and three new desktops will take their place.

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Though the Desktops I offer were initially well-received, they've not exactly been downloaded at a steady clip. Some aren't downloaded at all, and even the "popular" ones have tailed off dramatically.

I haven't been promoting them much, and after the initial batch, I only refreshed the listing once. That, no doubt, led to some of the stagnation.

Thing is, I don't really want to close it up. The script is still probably valuable to someone and I still like showing off a few photos. Though I can (and do) also do that at my photoblog, those images are capped at 950 pixels in width and are unsuitable as desktop pictures.

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Literally a sign! I took this picture at my local bank, a National City branch on 26th Street. We were there to close out a mortgage line (we're consolidating) and noticed this sign. National City was recently bought out by PNC - the final approvals just occurred, as far as I know, and many of the local branches will have to shut down. Frankly, we don't mind so much as customers simply because our nearest branch will likely be the PNC on Interchange Road.

Anyway, the quote is particularly… I don't know… appropriate?

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Great attitude!

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Anyone else out there have Animal Crossing: City Folk? I'm looking to add some friends.

I'll post my friend code as soon as my wife gets off the game. She's already logged about 10 hours (with assistance from the gift's recipient). 🙂

Update: Here it is. Don't you just love my little Apple shirt? Oh, and the town name? QTVille. Wife and kiddo picked it…

Over at 37 Signals I read about a guy who says every one of his Macs has failed.

I've had my own computers - always Macs and almost always two to three at a time - and, knock on wood, every single one of them has worked without any sort of "failure." The worst I've had it was my ATI card acting funny earlier this year, and that was replaced by Apple.

In fact, my kiddo just played some Web things on the 12" PowerBook and, as of right now, we've got no less than four Macs all running smoothly. Again, knock on wood.

By far, one of my favorite things about the holidays are chocolate covered cherries. And peppermint ice cream, but less so.

For $0.99, you can pick up some truly awful chocolate covered cherries, but even those are good in limited quantities. The really good ones you pay for, naturally.

I have but one question, though: why are chocolate covered cherries a holiday treat? I know you could probably find them at chocolate stores year-round, but you certainly won't find them sitting out year-round at the stores that carry them during the holidays.

Yes, like last year, I put the Alien Bee 400s in the living room and took photos of the present-opening. I haven't gone through the images from this year yet, but I should have re-read last year's settings: f/4 at ISO 200. I think most of the shots from this year were at ISO 200 and f/5.6, which means I was throwing out about 2x as much light as last year.

Next year I hope to pop the Alien Bees with Pocket Wizards attached to a Canon 5D Mark II. 🙂

I think I might like to try my hand at learning to ride a unicycle. It can't hurt anything and it might be kind of fun.

When we moved into this house back at the end of May 2005, the one thing we knew was that we'd be painting virtually every room and taking down every bit of wallpaper.

We started in one bedroom, painting it a bright green. Next we painted the master suite: bathroom and bedroom. Then we moved on to the kitchen (sagey green), the bathroom downstairs (earthy brown), the living room (beige with one darker accent wall), the upstairs bathroom (Pepto-Bismol pink), and finally the downstairs playroom/craft room.

This past Saturday and Sunday Carey and I painted the last room that still had wallpaper or a wallpaper border (one I'd ripped intentionally within a few months of moving in): my office. Aside from the downstairs foyer, stairs, and upstairs hallway it was also the last room to be "painted" white.

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A project I'm going to be working on in the next few months will require the use of video online. The videos will be accessible only to certain people, and I'd like to do my normal amount ((My normal amount stems from the fact that I've never cared to expend a bunch of energy to thwart hackers, thiefs, crackers, etc. People can generally be trusted, and so if I can spend only a little time to come up with a solution that works for 95% of people, that's the one I go with. Engaging in a never-ending arms race against the aforementioned groups wastes too much time. I've written more about this topic here and here.)) to protect them from being downloaded and shared. Hosting (i.e. putting the video on YouTube or another video sharing site, hidden in some way from the general public) solutions probably won't work due to two things: a) the inability or difficulty in truly hiding the video, and b) the branding that most sites overlay on the video. On the plus side, such solutions would save us the bandwidth.

I have the suspicion that we'll likely go the route of embedded FLV files (essentially "Flash Video" like on YouTube and Vimeo), but I was wondering if there were any other problems, issues, solutions, or really anything at all that merited consideration in solving this problem.

Any and all thoughts appreciated.

P.S. ffmpegX seems to be a bit long in the tooth, and VisualHub is now gone. What's the preferred tool to create .flv files if that's the way to go?

Scorecard 1.5.1 for Mac OS X and Windows is now available. Download demo copies or updates at http://cynicalpeak.com/scorecard/.

The biggest feature in this release is syncing with a companion iPhone (and iPod Touch) application. You can now download this, for free, from the AppStore here. And we went with the next-to-last icon, btw.

P.S. Nice to see you can always count on the jerks to lack common decency. We already have a comment decrying the need for this app to be used with the ($30) desktop app. This is a free companion application.