The Web Presence of Brady Alleman

With the quickly approaching release of Star Trek XI to DVD and Blu-Ray, I’ve finally completed the current iteration of my HD project.  I had been putting off doing anything with Blu-Ray due to the lack of support for it in MythTV and other open-source projects.  Since it seems that such things will lack such support for the foreseeable future, the remaining options consisted of building an HTPC that could be booted into Windows for video playback, buying a standalone Blu-Ray player, or a PS3.  Reading CNET and other reviews on Blu-Ray players, the general sentiment seemed to be that the PS3 was as good as, or better than, standalone players in the same price range.  As a result, I now have a PS3 Slim.  This is the first Sony product I can remember buying, and also the first “game console” I’ve owned since I sold my Atari 2600.  Naturally one downside to the PS3 is a lack of IR remote control support, necessitating the purchase of a Logitech Bluetooth/IR bridge to allow the use of a Harmony remote.  Fortunately this product works very well.

For now, the only Blu-Ray title I’ve watched on it is Dark Knight. The IMAX sequences in 1080p are unbeatable, pushing my LCD to the point where some of its weaknesses can be observed.  Amazingly sharp visuals.  The non-IMAX portions of Dark Knight look substantially better than DVD, and a clear but sometimes subtle improvement over recorded 720p content.  It does seem that film fuzziness is actually visible at the 1080p resolution.  One complaint (and I’m not sure where this should really be addressed) is the slowness in transitioning between the special feature menus and the special feature content.  The menu seems to be an overlay on the main feature playback, which is presented in 1080p24, while the special content is in 1080i60.  The LCD will lose and reacquire signal with the PS3 during the mode switch, and there is a several second lag overall.  The Blu-ray menu interface is much cleaner and sharper than DVD – but then again considering how much of a hack DVD menus are, this shouldn’t be surprising.

It remains to be seen whether the PS3 will drag me into gaming.  I’m sure it could handle such things much better than my PC at this point.

Me, my sister, and a high school friend of mine have just booked our trip to Florida to see the liftoff of Space Shuttle Atlantis‘ STS-129 mission.  We’ve scheduled a 5 night / 6 day stay to hopefully accommodate any brief delays encountered in the shuttle launch schedule.  We all had really wanted to see a shuttle launch before the program is discontinued, which is quickly approaching.  It’s hard to think that there will be such an amazing vehicle used again within our lifetimes, but we can always hope.  Even if we don’t get to see a launch, we’ll still get to be in Florida for a few days in the winter, so who can argue with that?

Chris and I went on a weekend expedition to northwest PA this past weekend.  The first stop was Parker Dam State Park on the way north.  Nothing spectacular here, but it is a nice state park about halfway on the trip.  Next was the Kinzua Dam at the end of the Allegheny Reservoir – A very impressive structure, with water thundering through the gates.  We then walked around the Seneca Pumped Storage Reservoir that is located on the mountain above the dam.  We didn’t notice any change in water levels while there, but the huge concrete bowl is pretty cool.

We camped at Chapman State Park, but didn’t really explore there at all.  It was a somewhat central location to branch out from, and had a nice modern campground.

Much of Saturday was spent at Oil Creek State Park and the surrounding area.  We toured a few of the sites there, but it seems that biking would be the best way to explore here.  There is a paved bike trail that follows the Oil Creek.  There are slight remains of the several oil boom towns in the area and many oil wells scattered throughout the park, and a few still seem to be active.  You can sometimes tell there is a nearby well by the smell.  Later we went to the Tionesta Dam and its lake, then hiked to some overlooks back around Kinzua Dam, and drove up into New York, circling the Allegheny Reservoir. Probably should have looked for a tax-free gas station in the Seneca Nation, but didn’t read about that until afterwards.  Did get to see the United Refinery in Warren, PA while driving by.  Pretty impressive looking plumbing!

I could easily spend a week or more exploring that area, but we did OK with the time we had.  Might have to plan something in that area again.

Just some random thoughts I’m posting instead of trying to sleep, or do anything else useful.  These probably aren’t anything new, but I at least think I’ve thought of them independently.

“I’m bad at self-deprecation.”  I actually thought that to myself for awhile before realizing there were some logical issues with that.  Maybe it’s just that I’m bad at non-self-self-deprecation, or external-self-deprecation, or however you might term it.  Drat – by posting that here, it’s also got logical problems.  Regardless, I should try to take myself a bit less seriously… unless I just did.

Consider the interview question “What are your weaknesses?”  Too bad I didn’t think of something like a deadpan “I have difficulty taking silly interview questions seriously.”  Not that it’s a bad interview question from the interviewer’s perspective, but as an interviewee, what are you supposed to say to that?  An uncensored catalog of your self-perceived weaknesses (even if limited in scope to work-related stuff)  seems an ill-advised thing to launch into – and stumbling around the question seems kind of disingenuous itself.  Would anyone not trip on that question?  Tripping on it didn’t cause me anything more than mental grief, luckily.  Personally, I think that if an interview is to consist of a written script of questions, it would be worthwhile to give the interviewee an advance copy.  I’ve found conversational interviews to be far more comfortable, at least as the interviewee.  They’re probably more insightful, but less comparable between candidates for the interviewer, I would guess.

After almost 8 years of working at Ship in one capacity or another, I’m moving on.  My last day will be 8/19.  I’ve taken a position with Tapestry Technologies and start there on 8/24.  I still might be a student at Ship in the future, though.

The process of leaving Ship has made me more aware of how much of my self-concept is currently tied to my job.  I really need to make a more concerted effort to change that.

I just finished reading Brian Hayes’ Infrastructure:  The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape.  It’s a long, but picture-filled read that’s intended to serve the same function for the infrastructure enthusiast as a field guide does for the bird watcher.  I wish this book had been around when I was a kid!  Strongly recommended for anyone interested in how the industrial aspects of their world works.

After having been embarrased by seeing Windows Media Center have thumbnails of all video content, I found this script to populate the thumbails in MythVideo from within the video.  A lot more useful for me than the manual IMDB lookup process that I think MythVideo has natively.  Definetly spruces up the MythTV box!

I just finished reading Gene Kranz’s Failure is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond.  It’s an exciting read, structured around missions and other significant events.  More so than my recollection of Lost Moon / Apollo 13, Kranz delves into some of the organizational structure of NASA, discussing the rapid promotion of people as the organization developed, followed by the slowdown at the conclusion of Apollo.  It really makes one appreciate the experience these folks had and the sacrifices they made in support of this endeavor.  I also was rewatching parts of From the Earth to the Moon while reading the book.  I highly recommend all of these.  I’d like to read more about the development of the MSFN – the global comms network that supported the Apollo era – so if anyone out there has book/link suggestions, please send share them.

I’ve had a Logitech Harmony 550 for a few months now, but I’ve only used it to replace the remote for the TV and receiver up to this point.  More recently, but still awhile ago, I bought a serial IR receiver (yeah, should have make it myself, but was lazy).  This evening I finally put the pieces together and got MythTV working with it.  Fortunately, someone already has a decent remote template and config files for the Harmony which I put to use.  Between the Harmony and the receiver, it works at almost any angle, so I’m not losing as much flexibiltiy from my RF-USB remote as I thought.

I’ve seen Star Trek twice now, and might see it yet again in the theater.  It was certainly a lot better than Nemesis.

When I first heard the general plot outline – something to the effect of “Kirk fights Romulans on Pike’s Enterprise” I was sortof astounded that those few words contained two cannon inconsistencies that me, someone who has not really watched every TOS episode more than once, could immediately pick out.  Kirk explicitly states that he met Pike when Pike was promoted to Fleet Captain and Kirk took command of the Enterprise, “The Menagerie, Part I” (TOS 1×15, about 90 seconds from the start).  And in “Balance of Terror” (TOS 1×08, 5 minutes in) it is stated that “no Human, Romulan, or ally has seen the other.”  The several ENT episodes dealing with Romulans were very careful that this stayed consistent.  How would they have a movie in which the enemy Romulan wasn’t seen by the Enterprise crew?

How does JJ fix this?  Well, they create a divergent timeline at approximately the moment of Kirk’s birth with the appearance of a Romulan ship from the Trek universe that we know and love.  They’re pretty explicit about explaining this in the movie, and the amount of confusion this and the appearance of old Spock from the established universe must have been deemed a necessary pandering to the fans at the expense of the general audience the movie intended to capture.  Personally, I think it’s not a bad idea.  A lot of fans hated the idea of a “reboot” and yet JJ rebooted without really destroying what came before (in fact, he added some to it).  There could still be a continuation of the original universe, while this one continues in parallel.  In a way, it’s totally consistent with Trek precedent.  The Mirror Universe spanned three of the five Star Trek TV series.  Honestly, I skipped watching the DS9 mirror universe episodes  – since they mattered little to the highly serial DS9 storylines.  I’m looking forward to the next installment of Star Trek 2009’s Universe (which Memory Alpha is currently terming the Alternate Reality).  One interesting fact about the point of divergence is that, in theory, ST:ENT is canonical for both realities, as reinforced by Scotty’s comment about Admiral Archer’s beagle.

The movie’s soundtrack was good, but very repetitive, and used the TOS theme directly at points instead of the much more impressive (and modern) theme developed by Jerry Goldsmith for ST:TMP.

I found the heavy quoting of Starfleet Regulations to be offputting during my first viewing, but more tolerable on the second.  Not that regulations aren’t quoted in Star Trek, it just seemed that more than usual were in this movie.

There seemed to be a conscious effort to avoid general use of technobabble which though noticeable, wasn’t really missing because the movie spent much more screentime showing things rather than talking about them, as is more typical of Trek.  One counterexample is Scotty’s Transwarp Beaming, which almost has to be a cannon violation as old Spock is providing it from the original universe, and there’s no indication of this existing in the original universe.

Anyway.  Overall very pleased and looking forward to the DVD/Blu-Ray release, and sequels!