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The first two minutes of this video are lame, but the energy contained in the sequence of shootout attempts is electric.

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As I did last year, here are the results of my 2007 blogging.

                 2007  2006   2005   2004   2003   2002
                 ----  ----   ----   ----   ----   ----
Posts             493   560    940    993   1335     68
Comments         2961  2832   4956   7104   5491      9
Ratio            6.01  5.06   5.27   7.15   4.11   0.13

Comments         2961  2832   4956   7104   5491      9
My Comments       362   459    545    749    639      0
Ratio            0.12  0.16   0.11   0.11   0.12   0.00

Avg. Length       994   925    824   1023   1195   1836

So, I blogged and commented less frequently in 2007 than in 2006, but I wrote more per post and received more comments. In general, that could mean I posted more thoughtful content. Or maybe the switch to WordPress late last year made it easier for people to comment.

Jason Kottke writes about his break-up with Guitar Hero 3, and mine is awfully similar. I've even got an excuse, what with my bent pinkies and all.

I've beat "Easy" mode with five stars on all the songs. I don't think I've ever played a song perfectly, but I simply lack the desire to do so. Once I get five stars and move on, I don't go back and play much.

I have no interest in earning more money to buy more characters or guitars because, hell, I never see them, so who cares what they look like? I'm too busy looking at the fretboard.

I don't even particularly like the music. Something tells me the "80s" version of Guitar Hero would have appealed to me more. The only songs I really like are Barracuda, Welcome to the Jungle, Rock You Like a Hurricane, Slow Ride, one of the Bonus songs by some French pop group (fun patterns to play), and a few others.

Does anyone want to buy a barely-used copy of the game from me, complete with a guitar and the original box, instructions, etc.? It's for the Wii.

Post your best and worst of 2007 in the comments. Limit yourself to one or put 20 items down for each - I don't care ((Though if you're doing the latter, why don't you have a blog of your own?))!

Here's to hoping everyone has it great in 2008.

My lists will appear in the extended entry. They'll have some blanks for awhile as I consider the possibilities.

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If you have an Xbox 360 and a Mac, and are interested in beta testing an application that, uhhh, "connects" them, please leave some contact information in the comments ((Or just leave a comment like "I want to beta test!" and supply a valid email address.)). Thanks.

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Lost in the hype of the Patriots "perfect season" is the simple fact that they're proven cheats.

Perfect season my ass.

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The XML file iTunes produces has one fatal flaw: it doesn't tell you which song is checked and which is not. Unfortunately, Brad and I need to get the "checked or not" information as well. Does anyone know the fastest and/or "best" way to do so?

P.S. We're doing the parsing in straight C, currently, but would take a solution via any compatible language or method.

Simple question: is there any way for Numbers to display this data with the data spread out accordingly? The dates and times aren't evenly spaced, but I'd like them to be.

Ideally I'd also like to plot the high and low values (perhaps as a box) and then connect the averages with a line.

So the ideal graph would have boxes containing all the values, appropriately spaced apart relative to calendar time and not even intervals, with a line connecting the averages.

I can make a spreadsheet of all of this in Numbers (or Excel) quite easily. I've got the date and time, I've got the hi/lo columns, I've got the averages column… I just don't think I can graph it with appropriate spacing let alone with the hi/lo boxes.

Anyone know what I can do? Even if I have to use Excel instead?

I've never really allowed anonymous comments. This pretty much sums it up.

Christmas 2K7 is now in the past.

• The Alton Brown prime rib went over really, really well. Unfortunately, someone suggested it would take only an hour to cook eight pounds of meat at 200°, and deferring to her 40+ years in the kitchen, I started cooking it at 3:30. Suffice to say we were finally able to eat just short of 9… But the meat was worth the wait and we now know how long it takes. Mmmmmmmmmm.
• I'm probably one of the few people in the world who wired the living room with wireless strobes and reflective umbrellas for capturing the best Christmas pictures. 😛 I used the 24-70L exclusively and started at ISO 400 and f/5.6, but later switched to ISO 200 and f/4. The latter produced better pictures which blurred the tree but left the person in front of the tree very sharp. I'm very pleased with how the images turned out and will likely do the same for future holidays.
• The Wii saw lots of action, all of it in Wii sports. I'm convinced someone could buy a Wii, never buy another game, and be pretty happy with it as a family fun machine. SceneIt on the Xbox 360 also saw some action. Despite my brother-in-law's (and his wife's) smack talk, I beat them both down. 😀
• You know how, as a kid, you got so many presents that you got tired of opening them and wanted to stop? Yeah, uhhh, me either.

So, Holiday season 2K7 is just about in the books, and thus far it's been a success.

Chuq wrote a little about Aperture today and points out that it's been a year that Aperture has basically sat still, not moving. He links to an article from nearly a year ago that mentions things like auto HDR and panorama stitching, the use of Photoshop filters, and possibly licensing glass filters as effects in Aperture.

Aside from the bugs I hope Apple fixes, my wishlist remains the same: improved performance, an API for plugins, improved stack handling, an improved spot/stamp/clone tool, something like Lightroom's "Targeted Adjustment Tool," something like Lightroom's "Sync" feature, background tasks, and masking of some sort. I could probably throw in Chuq's suggestions re: keywords, too.

May everyone get what they need and not what they want tomorrow, regardless of whether they're celebrating Christmas.

MacSanta is now offering 20% discounts on Cynical Peak software, including Cyndicate and Scorecard. To get your 20% off, use the coupon code "MACSANTA07" at checkout.

This deal is good today, December 23, only. A 10% discount is offered the rest of December with the coupon code "MACSANTA07TEN."

Just now I noticed that I'm no longer able to adjust the brightness of my display (a 23" Cinema hooked up to a Radeon X1900 XT). Mac Pro, quad 3.0 GHz, 10.5.1.

When I open the Displays preferences, there's simply no brightness slider. When I press the buttons on my keyboard (F1/F2), nothing happens. When I press buttons on the side of the display, nothing happens.

I've logged in as other accounts and they exhibit the same problems. WTF?

P.S. Console spits this out:
12/22/07 10:16:08 pm [0x0-0x193193].com.apple.systempreferences[9914] objc[9914]: Class O3Panel is implemented in both /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/ Authorization.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/Authorization and /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/ TVOptions.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/TVOptions. Using implementation from /System/Library/MonitorPanels/AppleDisplay.monitorPanels/Contents/Resources/ TVOptions.monitorPanel/Contents/MacOS/TVOptions.
This leads me to wonder if this isn't a Leopard bug I've just not noticed until now.

Update: I found the solution here. Simply put, you should have the display's USB cable plugged in. The console errors even vanish. Lame.

Warp allows you to move your mouse to the edge of your screen in order to switch spaces. The default 0.75 seconds seems just about perfect, and I think the app will come in handy those times when I'm not really using the keyboard.

It's also another example of the kind of functionality "power users" wish Apple would give. It'd be one less thing to update, one less piece of "extra" software to run, one more thing to take up more memory than necessary, etc. I'm quite happy with the way my system is set up, but then I look at the number of "extra" tweaks I have installed or hidden prefs I've enabled and modified and I'm surprised. And that's without skinning, changing icons, or reverting to haxies.