The Occasional Blog of Jonah Weiland

Okay, so I’m a bachelor and never cook for myself. I eat out or bring food in most of the time. I LOVESSSSS the Chinese and Thai food, so I end up getting a lot of Fortune Cookies. One thing I’ve noticed is that for the most part the fortune inside are more regularly definitive statements, rather than fortunes. Or, they’re just dumb. So, from here on out, I’ll reprint all my fortune cookies. Why? Because it’s incrediblly stupid and I like stupid things.

Fortune Cookie Say: “Keep you activities low-key when you are feeling blue.”

Yes, it says “you activities.”

VERY bad movie: “Hulk”

VERY good movie: “Capturing The Friedman’s”

Go see good movies only, please.

Bradley Sutton wrote a letter to the LA Times in defense of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. His belief is that Sterling isn’t smoking crack and has actually made some good business decisions whilst owner of the Clippers.

Uhhhh, yeah. Then why have there only been three appearances in the playoffs since the Clippers moved to Los Angeles? If Sterling’s not the problem, then it has to be their General Manager, Elgin Baylor. At this point if you were to fire all the upper staff and let the players coach themselves, shit, they’d probably play better as a team than with them.

Good news is that the Clippers have been meeting with coach Mike Dunleavy about taking over the team. I’m not a huge Dunleavy fan, but he’s a hell of a lot better than most of their other coachs since 1990 (Larry Brown being the exception).

As if I wasn’t looking forward to the upcoming “Return of the King” (the final installment of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy) enough, this article about the computer power being used by the digital effects company handling the CGI for the film is pretty amazing.

“Peter Jackson’s special-effects company Weta Digital is reaching deep into its chest of high-tech sword and sorcery to complete the final instalment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King.

“It has just taken delivery of 588 IBM blade servers, each with two 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors…

“…the seven racks of blade servers, when added to Weta’s existing 15-rack server cluster, would make up the largest Intel-based high- performance computer site in the world with more than 2000 linked processors.

“The cluster is used to render the frames drawn by the animators, adding texture and colour and meshing it in with the live footage.”

Let’s see if I can put this into any sort of perspective. Hrmmm. Fuck it, I can’t. It’s much faster than the piece of shit you’re typing on now.

When I was in the UK a couple of weeks back I picked up the DVD of BBC’s “The Office.” Anyone who’s read this blog more than once knows of my love for this BBC program. So far only the first series of “The Office” has been shown in the states with no word on when the second and final series will be played. Good news, for me, is that the second series of “The Office” on DVD is to be released in Britain this October.

For those of you who don’t know, every DVD has programmed into it a region code. The United States and Canada are region 1. England is region 2. And so on. A DVD player purchased in the States will play region 1 DVDs, but not region 2. The DVD of “The Office” I bought is region 2 format and would not play on my 4 year old DVD player. So, it was time to do some shopping.

When I got back to the states I checked out eBay to see if there were any affordable multi-region (also known as region-free) DVD players available. Just a few years ago production model multi-region DVD players were quite expensive. There were a few cheaper models – including one from Apex that became quite popular – that could be modified somewhat easily, but often times they’d have troubles playing certain PAL format discs. On eBay I found numerous multi-region players available at a very affordable price. I decided to pick up the Korean made Daewoo S150. At a closing price of $49, I felt I couldn’t go wrong.

From what I can tell the Daewoo S150 was designed to be used in multiple regions around the world to support multiple formats, but it’s not shipped region free, but programmed for the specific region it’s being shipped to. It came with a manual that included english instructions and has english menuing. It works perfectly fine with my system and is in fact leagues better than my five+ year old, $200 DVD player I had been using. The Daewoo supports VCD, DVD-R, CDR, MP3s (with a nifty playback menu system), etc … all formats that my old DVD player did not support. It plays my US DVDs just fine as well as the single Region 2 DVD I own. The player was shipped in Region 1 playback mode, but by typing in a very simple code with the remote control, a “hidden” menu was revealed that allowed me to choose what region I’d like the player to be. I chose “region free” so I don’t have to change it ever again.

The only drawbacks to this player is that it doesn’t have any sort of display on the front of the player and the remote control must be pretty much right in front of the DVD player to work. Not having a display isn’t a big deal for me as it’s only really useful for CD playback, which I rarely do. As for the remote, I simply programmed my Sony Commander universal remote and that works just fine. Another plus to this DVD player is it’s half the size of my old DVD player. If you like all your equipment to be the same size width wise, then you won’t like this player, but seeing as how most of my equipment is odd sized (my TiVo box is smaller than my Amp or VCR), it doesn’t bother me at all.

The sound quality seems just fine, at least in league with my old player. While I have a nice sound system set-up, my amp is five years old and doesn’t have all the surround sound digital bells and whistles you’ll find on new systems. That being said, I played a couple of CDs and DVDs loudly the other day and everything sounded crystal clear. Also, the video playback is actually a bit better than my old DVD player. I compared the film “Run Lola Run” on my old DVD player to the new Daewoo and it’s actually quite a bit crisper on the new machine.

Now, you ask, why would you go out and buy a multi-region DVD player for only one DVD? Well, I’m not stopping with just one. Rich Johnston gave me a laundry list of British television series I need to check out and I’ve already got one disc on order. These are all programs that will NEVER be made available in the states and may not even air, even on BBC America. Plus, often times movies and US Television programs are released on DVD in the UK well before the US. Good examples of this are the TV show “The West Wing.” The first two seasons are available in the UK on DVD, but it’s no where near being released in the US. The movie “28 Days Later,” which hasn’t even opened in the US yet, is just now available on DVD in the UK (I’m considering ordering this based on the positive reviews). “Bowling for Columbine” is another example, yet it will be available in the states in a few short months.

If you’re a big time DVD file then you probably should look into a region free DVD player. If you’re looking for an affordable player, I’m quite satisfied with my Daewoo S-150.

Perusing the news today I was surprised to learn that VW has been making the original Beetle still today. No, not the modern VW Beetle with it’s reminiscent lines and on-board flower vase. I’m talking about the original Beetle, the one built under direct orders of Hitler in an effort to create an affordable car the masses can afford. According to this article from the BBC the original Beetle has been constantly in production since 1930, although the number of new original Beetle’s has declined to as few as 30,000 production models last year. VW has decided to finally kill the entire line, currently only being built in Mexico. And while the original VW Beetle is one of the most popular vehicles ever made with over 21 Million cars produced, the Guardian points out that the Beetle is no longer the best selling car they’ve made. As of last year the VW Golf holds that recorded with over 22 Million cars sold.

Leading up to the war with Iraq and throughout the War one of the most popular places to access news about the war was the blog Dear Raed by author Salam Pax, a resident of Baghdad who kept a journal that gave readers an insight into what it was like to live in a country on the verge of war, then in a country at war, and finally a country in chaos because of said war. Throughout the entire time he kept a journal there was one question posed by everyone, was Salam for real, or was he simply a propoganda tool, the most skeptical thinking it could be a set-up by the US or British governments. He was very critical of the Iraqi regime, but he was none-to-kind in his feelings about the invading forces. No one really knew who he was. He defended his identity agressively as he had real reason to fear for his life. It was definitely a fascinating read.

Starting Wednesday Salam will be a regular columnist with London’s Guardian Newspapaer. A bit more about Salam and the work he’ll be doing can be found here.

Tuesday afternoon as I was driving around running errands I was listening to The World on local station KCRW. They did a piece on Salam, who he is, how the Guardian tracked him down, and how in fact Salam was not only blogging for the world, but was working as an interpreter for US journalist Peter Maass, who had no idea that the man working with him was secretly blogging to the world on the side. The clip from The World is now available online. Go to this page then click on the audio link for “Blog report.” It’s just shy of four minutes and a very entertaining read.

So, I get home and without any knowledge of the program I had just listened to, Jacob sends me this story by Peter Maass himself wherein he describes how he discovered, quite by accident, that Salam was the same man he worked with in Iraq all that time.

There have been many cases of Internet celebrity since it skyrocketed in popularity back in 1996, but this one is probably the most interesting and inspiring. Well done Salam. You’ve very much arrived.