In LA

A grab bag of fun video clips:

• Old Estonian TV Ads (kitsch appeal)
• a Panoramic Video Experiment (very cool effect)
• the 2005 reels of many Motion Graphics companies (amazing and inspiring and full of bland house music)
• an HD camera that records not only color and luminance per pixel, but also depth (finally!)
• a wacky television ad for Baidu, the preeminent Chinese search engine (a bit long, but a nice attempt to stoke anti-foreigner sentiment)
• 30fps video with audio playing on an ancient 4.77MHz IBM 8088 PC (the 8088 is basically the first PC)
• a site full of spec commercials (watch people spend tens of thousands of dollars creating unsolicited fake ads for real products in an attempt to get jobs making real ads)

This is an interesting blog by a New York cab driver who posts about annoying drivers, traffic, accidents, interesting passengers, etc. Lots of nighttime street photos.

A friend of mine is putting together a behind-the-scenes featurette for the DVD of his short film. In his film, he made extensive use of Apple’s Final Cut Pro 5 software for editing and Motion 2 for effects and motion graphics. For his featurette, he wanted to explain the integration, or round-trip, between these two applications. I volunteered to create a Motion project that would demonstrate the basic concept through the use of animated titles. In the featurette, this animated demonstration/title-card will be followed by in-depth real-world examples using his footage and workflow.

The result can be seen here as a QuickTime file. As an aside: That movie is 720×480 resolution, 29.97fps, and 16 seconds long. It is a testament to the capabilities of the QuickTime H.264 codec that the resulting file is only 716k. Unbelievable! If your computer complains and won’t play the file, install QuickTime 7 (mac || windows) and it should play just fine.

If you have Motion 2 on your computer and wish to take a crack at my project — to alter it or see how it was done, the project is here.

Cool, according to an email I received from “Tamra Gregg”, whose email address is apparently, um, my email address (though the email is signed “Maria DeMaria”), I have been approved “for a $402,000 house loan at a 3.45% Fixed R.ate.”

Actually, it’s not cool. I’ve been getting at least one, often two of these emails per day. The subject line is always some variation of “RE: We approved yours loan”. And they say they don’t care about my credit (maybe they’ll just break my legs if I don’t pay?). The whole thing bugs me. The grammar, the idea that anyone might be taken by these shysters who make impossible promises, and the deceptiveness involved at the level of the mail headers no less to fake the email addresses (I promise I have never sent an email under the pseudonym “Tamra Gregg”).

The email included 3 links to ‘bigsaveinc.com’. I did not click them because I don’t want to help these ***holes to think their email campaign is working, but I did head over and check out that website in my web browser.

The website has a picture of a palatial suburban McMansion alongside a form to fill out to apply for a quick loan. The house looked odd to me. I looked at it for a while to figure out why, and then I got it. It just looks eerily like the houses I saw in some new developments in Shanghai. Could they be using stock photos taken in China?

A quick whois search on the domain shows that it was registered at a Chinese domain registrar:

Domain Name: BIGSAVEINC.COM Registrar: XIN NET TECHNOLOGY CORPORATION Whois Server: whois.paycenter.com.cn Referral URL: http://www.paycenter.com.cn Name Server: DNS1.LOWCOSTMART.COM Name Server: DNS2.LOWCOSTMART.COM Status: ACTIVE Updated Date: 21-jan-2006 Creation Date: 21-dec-2005 Expiration Date: 21-dec-2006

A search of the listed whois registrar for that server’s information times out:

whois -h whois.paycenter.com.cn bigsaveinc.com whois: connect(): Operation timed out

So my guess would be that this website and these spam emails are coming straight from China. I wonder if that company can even run credit checks and offer loans to people in this country, you’d think there’d be regulatory hurdles that would be too high for small operators to manage. Maybe they’re just gathering information for some other nefarious purpose.

I’m just tired of receiving these emails. I’d almost be willing to proofread the emails for these spammers if they’d agree to stop sending them to me. It is so annoying to have a mailbox full of “We approved yours loan” messages. But then I’d feel complicit in their evil little game.

I wonder if their domain name can be shut down due to the inaccessibility of the site’s whois information.

Two other candidates that I’m less enamored of, “The Mumble” and “The Screed”, don’t appear to be taken. I’m basing this assertion on whether or not google searches for these phrases in quotes turn up any blogs or online publications with the same exact name. Amusingly, the name closest to “The Screed” is a web page entitled “Linkthing’s Screed” that features an equal mix of (very) left-wing political news (there’d probably be some minor overlap between my site and theirs on that) and some sky-is-falling “scientific” paranoia, including links to an extremely sincere article full of dubious assertions about Hidden Hazards of Microwave Cooking that ends with:

The use of artificial microwave transmissions for subliminal psychological control, a.k.a. “brainwashing”, has also been proven.

That makes my day! I’ll write more when I can stop laughing.

I just arrived home after a long nighttime bike journey (a highly recommended experience), and noticed that Showtime was airing the film Hero in HD. I honestly did not love this film when I saw it in the theater — I like my kung fu films with less computer graphics, more fun, and less emotional artifice — but I figured I could watch it and maybe brush up on my Mandarin. And maybe I’d enjoy it, my expectations were probably too high for the film the first time around.

But even though this film played an extremely successful theatrical run in the United States in Mandarin with English subtitles, Showtime has deigned to show the film dubbed into English. I watched a few minutes, and it is horrific. If I weren’t so annoyed, I’d be laughing every time the Emperor King of Qin opened his mouth. The voice work is distractingly bad.

A word to Showtime — show films in their original language. Dubbed films are like a bizarre puppet show.

I started thinking about the names of old newspapers. “The Examiner”, “The Monitor”, “The Onion”, etc.

This line of thinking inspired a couple of possible names, and I ran some searches. “The Eggplant” is taken not once but twice. “The Golem”, which I think is a fine name for an automaton that sits on the net and returns http queries (i.e. my web server), appears to be somewhat available. There does exist a website entitled www.thegolem.com, but it doesn’t appear to be about anything. It amuses me to think the headline of each of this blog’s categories could look like “The Deals Golem”, “The Design Golem”, etc.

A search for “the dybbuk”, which is far too evil and heavy a name to really consider for this blog but a logical extension of an interest in a name like “the golem” led to this wikipedia entry on a popular Japanese pop star/idol named Gackt who claims to be a vampire born in the year 1540 and once wrote a song called Dybbuk.

Because I haven’t written much specifically about LA, and because I’m leaving LA soon, I was thinking of changing the name of this blog to something more general. “The Ramble” came to mind. A general-purpose name like that both describes the fact that I’ve been writing about a bunch of seemingly disconnected topics, and also can be used in the names of each category page in a way that makes sense “The Chinese Language Ramble”, “The Judaica Ramble”, etc.

I figured I’d better do a quick google search first to see if there exist any other blogs out there called “The Ramble”. Sure enough, there does.

This reminds me of the early days of the web, when it quickly became impossible to register practically any word or combination of words that is in the dictionary because they were all already taken. Are we quickly headed in that direction here in the blogosphere–

Hey, who are you? What are you doing here? Get out of my apartment and put that katana away!

Who am I? You sent me. Just listen to this recording:“If I ever use the word blogosphere, please just kill me.” Sound familiar?

argh, you’re right. Not only did I just use the word “blogosphere”, but I actually believe the name of a blog is important, as if I’m marketing some product. Please get this over with quickly.

Let’s get on with it then. Snicker-snack!

These are some pretty nice violent knitting projects. I wonder where they come from, the page doesn’t list any attribution. There’s another gallery of the projects here.

We’ve all received and been annoyed or amused by the ubiquitous Nigerian scam emails. But it appears that deceptive business practices don’t just travel in one direction. People in Botswana are getting annoyed with an “American scam” that has hit their turf.

There’s less irony to be had here than meets the eye. Botswana and Nigeria are pretty distant from one another in many ways. Out of all the countries in Africa, Nigeria was rated most corrupt and Botswana the least (according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2004). For all I know, Botswana’s citizens get pummelled by Nigerian scam emails too.