Gears talk

I haven't talked enough about how cool a game Gears of War is. I'm not very far on it, but even so it's been incredibly impressive. Multiplayer is great fun, having someone come in and help me with co-op via Live is a huge boon, and the graphics and gameplay are both top-notch. I'd type more but I've come down with a cold, possibly related to my staying up way too late playing Gears of War...

Bruce Fraser dies

Bruce Fraser was an expert in the area of color management. Way back when I dealt a lot more with color management than I do today, his articles were the ones that brought me up to speed with color spaces, gamuts, why sRGB sucked as a color space, and why other spaces were preferable.

I read today in TidBITS that he passed away after a losing battle with lung cancer. It's a sad loss for the Mac community and the creative arts community.

Article on Fraser in TidBITS.

Some of Bruce Fraser's publications and articles.

Morricone to get honorary Oscar

Woke up this morning and finally read some good news... Ennio Morricone will be receiving an honorary Oscar this year for his years of creating incredible music for the movies. Of course, for this movie fan, the epitome of his work will always be what he created with Sergio Leone: the Dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West.

Italian composer Morricone to get honorary Oscar

Customer service kudos

I meant to mention these a while back. They were two experiences with products or services where I was particularly struck by how well things worked.

#1: We had an ant problem in our kitchen. "Little damn ants, buddy!" (Boy, now THERE'S an obscure quote.) It was so bad, the kids would be doing their homework on the counter, and it would be write write write SLAM write write write SLAM (the slams being them swatting an ant crawling across their pages.)

We have a pest control service, and they came in no less than four times, to no avail. Still with the ants.

Then we happened to be at the neighborhood hardware store, and at the register they had a product called Terro, the liquid ant killer. Hey, only $3, why not give it a shot, said I. You put these little puddles of the stuff down on some cardboard discs included with the tube, and the ants think its yummy yummy maple syrup, when instead it's good old boric acid. They bring it back to the colony and everyone's dead. And it bleeping WORKS. Ants all gone in two days. Worth every penny and then some.

#2: Target. I bought a videogame there for Theo for Christmas, then in usual kid fashion, he decided to change his Xmas list and wanted a different game. I'd lost the receipt and was not looking forward to the experience with returning it for credit. Little did I know, you just bring the item, they scan it, scan your card, and bingo, instant credit. Damn.

Guest blogger

I've been out of touch for a bit due to massive work overload. Luckily, my new Xbox 360 is perfectly capable of blogging on its own...

My Xbox 360's blog

By the way, I noticed that my previous post complained about the serious launch snags with downloadable HD movies on the Xbox 360 Live marketplace. Well, I am happy to report that I tried again and all worked smooth as silk. The download was surprisingly fast, and the quality seemed equal to the handful of HD-DVDs I've seen (at least on my ancient HDTV). I decided to download Swordfish, not because it's a good movie (it most certainly isn't) but because I could then check out Halle Berry's spectacular... acting abilities in HD.