Seagal’s Movie Titles Tell A Story

From DreadCentral.com :

[ Also, in case you missed it, a while ago I blogged about how all of Seagal’s movie titles told a story. I have updated it especially for this occasion and present it to you now in its entirety!

Steven Seagal was ABOVE THE LAW, but he was too HARD TO KILL, so now he’s been MARKED FOR DEATH by Haitians who are OUT FOR JUSTICE. Can he live while UNDER SIEGE? Could you survive while UNDER SIEGE 2? It was time to make an EXECUTIVE DECISION about THE GLIMMER MAN. There’s a FIRE DOWN BELOW and only Seagal, THE PATRIOT, can heal the EXIT WOUNDS left in his TICKER. Despite being HALF PAST DEAD, THE FOREINGER who was OUT TO KILL Seagal emerged from THE BELLY OF THE BEAST. His name was CLEMENTINE. Safety was OUT OF REACH for Seagal, but still he walked INTO THE SUN until he was SUBMERGED into the Pacific Ocean by a threat unknown. TODAY YOU DIE yelled Clementine as THE BLACK DAWN rose. But Steven is a MERCENARY FOR JUSTICE, a SHADOW MAN, an ATTACK FORCE all his own! His FLIGHT OF FURY would unleash some cold hard URBAN JUSTICE as he PISTOL WHIPPED the man whose true motivation was to stop filming of THE ONION MOVIE. At this KILLING POINT Seagal prevailed, proving that he is still — THE PRINCE OF PISTOLS! It was then that he finally flipped the KILLSWITCH. A midget named RUSLAN was his next target, and tonight would be the little man’s LAST NIGHT on earth if he didn’t comply peacefully. Seagal was to be THE KEEPER of his tiny destiny. Together they would both have to fight AGAINST THE DARK!

To be continued.

– Uncle Creepy ]

New Star Trek Trailer

I’ve got to admit that the space scenes are very impressive, but I don’t know if I like the new “vision.” And what’s up with that bridge design? It looks like a set from Galaxy Quest; a parody of a Star Trek set. It’s just too bright, and has too many damn lamps! I’m still going to reserve judgement until I’ve actually seen the movie. I’ll give it a chance. What really concerns me though is that Star Trek is first a TV show, and then a movie second. I just can’t see how a movie franchise alone can keep Star Trek alive. It might look like Star Trek, but it won’t BE Star Trek without it being a television series.

Halloween Ambience

I put together this audio file using Garageband and iMovie. I plan to use it Friday night for spooky ambience. You can use it too if you like.

Download it HERE.

Yet Another Time Warner HD Complaint

Last night I rented Speed Racer in HD from Time Warner’s Movies on Demand service. In simple terms, it’s unwatchable. Since Speed Racer was made to look like a cartoon, it has a limited color palette. This coupled with fast action sequences creates compression artifacts so noticeable that the “HD” version of the movie I rented becomes so distorted I can’t watch it. It’s just too annoying. The details I should be enjoying for the tracks and cars are totally distorted thanks to Time Warner’s over-compression of their HD content for streaming. Time Warner, you’ve really got to step it up if you really want to play in the HD sandbox. I’m starting to wonder if satellite’s any better…

Jing – A QA Guy’s Best Friend?

This post is for my QA brethren. At my current job I have been introduced to a great free screen capture tool called Jing which allows you perform screen captures, crop them, annotate them, draw on them, and then upload the image as a jpeg to Screencast where it’s hosted. (Jing also does video too, but I won’t get into that here.)

What’s so great about that you ask? Well, you know how difficult it can be to describe exactly what you’ve seen during testing, especially if your talking about UI elements. “Is it a title bar? A menu bar? A window group? Oh hell, here’s a screenshot.” What’s great about Jing is that you don’t have to fill up your defect repository database with images. If you have a large testing team, all those uploaded screen shots can start taking their toll on drive space, and may even slow down your defect tracking tool. (Bugzilla for instance.)

When using Jing the image is uploaded, and then the URL to the hosted image is placed in your clipboard. You can then simply paste the URL into the description field of your defect. This allows the developer on the receiving end of the defect to just click the link, and see the screenshot you took.

Now the downside to this is that your company might not like screenshots of its intellectual property being stored on an external server. Something that might give your employer a “warm fuzzy” is the fact that ScreenCast takes your company’s ownership of the content you uploaded very seriously and has processes in place to report violations of your company’s copyrights. (The service agreement also states that you retain all ownership rights of the content you upload.)

So if you need a good screen capture tool give Jing a shot.