I awoke this morning to discover that Conan O'Brien had announced a 30 city tour of North America. I also discovered that he was coming to Vancouver. I immediately went to the Ticketmaster site to see if tickets were still available. Tickets were indeed still available. I must have been still in a sleepy stupor because I was given two tickets in row 12 (or was it 15?) and then released them because I wasn't sure if I really wanted to go.
I proceeded to spend the next 40 minutes trying to get seats that were just as good once I realized what a moron I was. At one point, I settled for some pretty decent seats but had the Canadian Ticketmaster web site crash on me. I had to quickly switch over to the US site before finally getting two tickets in the 19th row. The seats are decent but not spectacular. Well, at least I get to see the show. I'm excited! Some people go see bands live, I see talk show hosts. After seeing Letterman two years ago, this will be a great follow-up!
Did you know the Honey Badger has been labeled as the world's most fearless animal and the most fearsome land mammal on the planet?
This carnivore is well-known for its fierce fighting skills and adept hunting methods. Honey Badgers have an amazing ability to kill snakes, even poisonous ones, for food. They have also been known to take on larger animals, such as lions, tigers, and bears, coming out victorious in glorious nature battle.
Though purely an urban myth, there are stories of man-eating badgers that roam around the Middle East.
It's a good thing Honey Badgers are not native to North America.
A lot of video games feature Hollywood talent, either for the voices, models for in-game characters, or both. Until skate 3, none of the games I've worked on had a well-known actor attached to it.
With skate 3, we're proud to have partnered up with actor and former pro skaterboarder, Jason Lee. In our game, he extends his "Coach Frank" character which you can see in the above video. "Coach Frank" is the guy who tells you what to do in the tutorial section of the game.
I'd love to say it was a blast having Jason Lee around the studio but the truth is, he stayed in LA. We went down to him to get his voice recordings done. A select few of my coworkers actually got to work with him in person but I certainly was not among that group.
In any case, I've always enjoyed Jason Lee's work and his "Coach Frank" character is awesome. If having a Hollywood actor associated with our game sells a few more copies, then I'm ok with that.
A few weeks back, I wrote about my desire to update the look of this blog by choosing a new template. The current template you see here is derived from a standard template that was available to the public from around 2002. I've made my own modifications to it since then and you can bet your ass she'll make point five past lightspeed.
I was still in the process of looking at new templates when I received an e-mail from Blogger, the blogging service I use (who are owned by Google). It turns out Blogger is removing the option to do FTP publication for blogs after May 1. If you're curious as to what "FTP publication" means, I'll let you in on how this little dog and pony show works. When I want to write a post, I log into Blogger and then type my grade school vocabulary words into my browser. I then hit the "publish" button. That causes files over at Blogger to be created and then those files are transferred over via File Transfer Protocol to my own web server. The great thing about this is that all my posts and my blog files are stored on my own server. Should anything happen to Blogger or Google, I have all the files in my control.
Blogger is now going to remove the option to do FTP publication. Instead, they want to publish all blog files to their own servers. Some of you may have seen blogs hosted on the blogspot.com domain. This is where Blogger wants me to put my blog now. All blog files going forward will now be stored on a server that I don't have any control over. Also, I'd have to go through some hoops so that blog.erwintang.com would still direct you to my blog. As you can see, there are some drawbacks to this development.
At this point, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I have two choices. First, I can go ahead with the Blogger migration and move my blog over to their servers and try to make the change as transparent as possible for my readers. Even if it is transparent to you, my loyal readers, I still don't like the idea of my blog files being stored elsewhere. My second option is to move my blog to another blog service which allows me to retain full control over my blog. This sounds great in theory but the change over requires a bit of effort. I'd have to setup up my new blog and also ensure that my old blog is still accessible. Ideally, I could convert all my old posts into the new format. If I were to go this route, WordPress would be the likely candidate for my new service.
I need more time to explore each of those options and weigh the pros and cons. Thanks for your patience. In the coming weeks, you might see some interesting changes around here.
I usually don't watch the Academy Awards on TV but I tuned in tonight for final two awards. Those awards were "Best Director" and "Best Picture". The reason I decided to see who won those awards was because I wanted to be sure that James Cameron didn't win either.
Yeah, it's a pretty crappy thing to do, not wanting someone to win something but let me explain. There is no doubt Cameron is a truly talented and visionary director. I will always be in his debt for bringing to the world Terminator 2 and Aliens, both of which are among my favourite movies. Unfortunately, Cameron acts like such a dumbass sometimes. When he accepted the "Best Director" award for Titanic, he proclaimed himself "king of the world". Dude, for starters, don't try to shoehorn specific lines from your movie into your acceptance speech. Also, don't proclaim yourself better than everyone, because everyone already understands that. You just got the damn "Best Director" award, we get it, you're the best director for that year. Last but certainly not least, proclaiming yourself the king of world because you made a movie about hundreds of people losing their lives tragically is a douchebag way of going about things.
Ok, so maybe that was a long time ago and perhaps we can forgive Cameron for that. Whoops. Cameron just had to spice up his acceptance speech at the 2010 Golden Globes with a quote using his made up Navi language from his movie Avatar. That was dumb. It just makes him seems self-absorbed with his own creations. Things like that prevent people from taking fantasy and sci-fi films seriously. Consider this. How many times did Peter Jackson drop some Elvish lines the multiple times he went on stage for the Lord of the Rings trilogy? That's right, none. Is it coincidence that The Return of the King won "Best Picture"?
In the end tonight, Kathryn Bigelow and her movie, The Hurt Locker won "Best Director" and "Best Picture" respectively. This made me quite pleased. To be clear, I haven't seen either Locker nor Avatar but the fact that we didn't have to hear Cameron yammering on stage was good enough for me. Plus, she beat out her ex-husband at the very thing that he is so passionate about. Ha!
To be fair, I think Bigelow is a very talented director and her win tonight stands on her own, with or without the Cameron subtext. One last thing, if anyone can figure out how, at the age of 58, she manages to look like she's still in her late 30s, please let me know.
