Why are men raping women? I don’t think I understand this. To me, it feels that men are driven by their dick rather than logic. How is that even possible though?

This is not to say that women aren’t raping men, but the vast majority of rapes are carried through by men (I don’t know, but maybe 98% of all rapes?). If the percentage of men vs women raping is so high for men, does this mean that most men (even those who are not rapists) would take advantage of a situation if they can? And if that’s correct, the question is again: why? Why is sex so important to them? Sure, “men have needs”, but so have the women, and yet…

I like sex, and in fact I am usually the initiator of sexual conduct with my husband (yes, Pete, I hid the guns), but I would never force myself on to someone. They would probably die of suffocation anyway…

Nemesea is a very nice rock group from The Netherlands! If you like Evanescence, you will love them too. Listen to their songs at their label’s site, SellABand (their 3 main singles are given away for free after you sign up with them), or purchase their full album from iTunes or CDBaby.

The TV season has started and as any good bored customer, I tried to give a fair chance on most new shows. I don’t know if piracy had any effect on this, but this year’s shows suck. Except “Pushing Daisies” and the very light “Reaper”, everything else sucks royally. The show that has destroyed most expectations is “Bionic Woman”. It’s dull, boring and stupid. “Chuck” is not badly done, but one loses interest in it really fast. The pretty similar in overall concept “Reaper” though fairs better, even if it probably has 1/4 of Chuck’s budget. And then there’s the really horrible stuff, like “Big Shots”, “Dirty Sexy Money”, “Private Practice” and the very mediocre “K-Ville”, “Journeyman”, “Cavemen”, “Cane” and “Moonlight”. I can’t wait for “Terminator” and “Women’s Murder Club” to start too so I can scrutinize them.

By far, the best new series of the season is “Pushing Daisies” (from the creators of “Dead like me”). It’s fresh, it’s clever and it has style. This show can become a classic, but they should also turn it more serialized rather than being so “episodic” as it is now. JBQ says that the show is similar to “Amelie” in many ways, and apparently some agree too. Update: JBQ was right. Amelie was the inspiration for the creator of “Pushing Daisies”!

It’s funny, but I suddenly realized that both JBQ and I call each other with the same name: “sweetie”. Although sometimes we do call each other “baby” instead of “sweetie”. He almost never calls me “Eugenia” and I almost never call him “Jean-Baptiste” — except when we are speaking to others. When we feel more playful, he calls me a “monster” (and rightfully so), and I call him “Baby-One Querubi”. 😉

I received yesterday the front-runner phone for Windows Mobile 6, HTC’s Kaiser. An excellent phone as I have discussed here before, but it sure lacks a normal audio jack and camera flash. The keyboard is not easy to type, while the phone goes bananas if you try to dial while you are in landscape mode. Apple would have never released a phone with such an obvious bug, although on the other hand, Windows Mobile 6 does a whole lot more than the iPhone does.

This is for Mike, who requested a lightsaber video so he can make fun of me. Here you are. I can tell you right now, it’s hard work going frame by frame, so I didn’t do a great job. Special effects will be one reason why movies will never move to 60fps.

Drist‘s guitarist, Brian, passed by today to drop off two music video clips the band shot back in 2001 in LA. Apparently the .mov files still work with Quicktime on the Mac, but not on the PC (audio, but no video). Using VLC instead, I get video but no audio. For a moment there I got pretty scared that I won’t be able to export the files to a youtube-friendly format for usage on DristTV, but Sony Vegas Pro 8 came to the rescue as it was able to recognize and playback the files perfectly. So, I exported to h.264 .mp4 and then uploaded them to YouTube. Two things were unfortunate though: the original .mov files did not have the anamorphic bit set to ON (they were saved as 720×480 in letterbox instead of 873×480-via-anamorphic), and they were saved in a progressive format but without removing interlacing beforehand. So the lower quality and jaggies (even after using Vegas’ forced de-interlace artifact removal option) are unavoidable. Anyways, enjoy!

I just hate it how the same video file looks so different on TV and on a computer screen. After lots of trial and error, I was able to get with Vegas a picture that looks good on my TV (playing h.264 via the Sony PS3), even if it looks weird on the PC screen. Vegas already has a “Computer RGB to Studio RGB” template under its “Color Corrector” plugin, but this was not enough to make my footage look good on our Sharp rear projection CRT TV.

So, you bring up the “Color Corrector” plugin, and you change the following:
Saturation: 1200 to 1250 depending on the scene.
Gain: 0.750
Gamma: 0.950
Offset: 16.0

Basically, you just need to f*ck up the RGB histogram by narrowing it down, and making it look completely unnatural and warm on the PC screen in order to look normal on (my) TV. Your mileage may vary, so you will have to do your own tests.

“Short summary: we are serious about bringing the Firefox experience and technology to mobile devices.”

Blah, blah, blah… Blah, blah, blah… I don’t see why mobile Firefox will work while Minimo has failed. I mean, the thing is a memory hog, with optimizations or without. It’s an architecture and culture issue, and that’s not something that you can change easily in a project/company.

I must say that Christian Sejersen joining the project is a good move though (previously JBQ’s boss). There’s a lot of work ahead of him.

Google’s Mark Pilgrim makes an excellent point that if you want Apple to open up the iPhone platform, stop buying it. However, the other way to achieve the same thing might work as well. The iPhone is so popular, that people simply demand more out of it.

For the first time, cellphone users who previously didn’t even care about buying a PDA or a smartphone, now they want applications on their iPhone. This is a good thing for the industry and the consumer, and no matter how much AT&T and control-freak Steve Jobs himself might push Apple to keep things closed or offering their SDK to their partners only, eventually they will open up.