If we were to liken the various smartphone platforms to wives, this is what we would probably get:

– The iPhone
The iPhone wife is a very beautiful one. She’s tall, and she’s always taking care of herself. She’s the perfect woman to go out with and show off. She’s an accomplished professional, and a good house-keeper too. However, she won’t let you do everything you want to do: she won’t allow you poker nights with your friends, and won’t allow you to share anything with others. She’s very controlling, but after 3 years of marriage you are already addicted to that control. There’s a way to get her give you more freedom by occasionally shouting at her, but this can attract the wrath of your mother in law. Not recommended.

– The Android
The Android wife is a versatile wife. She’s able to accomplish a lot of things, she’s smart, she’s open to all kinds of discussions, and she’s good in bed — a cool gal overall. Problem is, she’s pretty ugly, and most of all, she’s messy. The only way to get past the situation is to think of your wife — and introduce her to your friends — as one of the dudes. Then the pain gets easier.

– The Windows Mobile
The Windows Mobile wife is one ugly cougar. She’s married to a 25 year old, and he’s her virtual slave. He stays with her because she’s rich, she has connections, and a lot of amenities at her huge house. He has even developed a blind-folding fetish because it was the only way to not look at her while having sex. He can’t wait for the day she dies.

– The WebOS
The WebOS wife is a handsome wife, almost as good-looking as the iPhone wife. However, she’s retarded. She can’t do much by herself, and when you need something of her, you need to talk to her like you are talking to a child. Every time you go out with the iPhone wife and her husband, the WebOS wife keeps reaching and touching the iPhone’s wife shiny dress. The iPhone wife pulls back, but the WebOS wife gets all close to her again. A very uncomfortable situation to be in for a husband. Not to mention that the iPhone wife will keep boasting about her accomplishments over dinner, while your own wife still keeps drooling over the shiny dress and laughs when no one else is. Doctors say that there’s potential for intellectual growth there, but it might take time. Hang on in there.

– The Blackberry
The Blackberry wife is a very religious wife. She brings the most money in the house with her two jobs. She takes care of the house, the paperwork, the cars, the children. At first glance she sounds ideal, but then you will have to put up with her ideals, her need to donate thousands of dollars per year to the church, and the fact that she will only have sex with you only once or twice a month since she’s tired most of the time. Sometimes you ask yourself why you put up with her bullshit, but on the other hand, having everything taken care of is pretty nice too.

– The Symbian S60
The Symbian wife is a middle-aged wife that’s never happy with her appearance. She has had nose jobs, and boob jobs, and lip jobs. You keep telling her that she’s fine the way she is for her age, but she keeps wanting change — a change that’s usually for the worse. Every time she comes back from one of these surgeries she forgets stuff. She forgets all your history together, she even forgets how to cook, how to do the bed, how to give a good blow-job. Her identity crisis is what makes you consider getting a divorce, but she gains you back by saying that her next surgery will make everything alright, with minimal fuss.

Editor’s note: My husband says that I am an Android wife. 😉

The new District 9 movie which has taken the critics by storm is a lesson at multiple levels. Not only for its social commentary, but also for its filmmaking style. The movie was shot with a Red One, and almost 2/3s of it is in documentary style shooting and grading (or lack thereof):

There’s no shallow depth of field, cropping, or aggressive color grading. It’s just a run and gun movie, and it works. The magic is all in the story, apparently.

When I saw the “Eviction” clip showing the guy pictured above I smiled, because the look is exactly like Canon’s “Cinemode” — a look easily acquired by a consumer camera. That scene looked like it was shot with my HV20, and this was a great feeling.

The real funny thing is though that a lot of people shoot in cinemode because the heard that this is how they will achieve the movie look, and then they are unhappy because cinemode looks so flat. But it’s that the beauty of cinemode: in its low contrast, low saturation look.

I was just viewing an image online from a devoted “Christian” car. He/she had written on the car “First God, then people…”.

I don’t know about other religions, but I have a good understanding of Christianity, since I studied it both in school and church, like any other good Greek would do early in life. And at least for Orthodox Christians (and for most Catholics too), the New Testament is the *main* book of Christianity. Meaning, that while both the Old and the New Testament are accepted, the New Testament is exactly that: “a new deal between God and Man”. And as every new deal and contract, it has new rules. New rules that Jesus put forth for his believers that overwrote the old rules that were put forth by a jealous, revengeful, self-centric God. That’s why Jesus’ cult became so popular in the first place: because the new rules made more sense to people who have been asking for a humanitarian-based religion, in a world ravaged by war.

The new rules are these: love, forgiveness, love your neighbor as you love yourself, etc etc. Christianity aims to make the living world a better place. And this can only be done if you put people first, not God. If you put God first you end up being a mujahid, not a true Christian. If you put God first, you are missing the whole point of Christianity. This is no different than idolizing the never-present school board for giving out the rules on how to behave in the school playground, instead of actually enjoy playing with the other kids, and be nice to them in the process. Putting God first makes no freaking sense.

As I have written in the past, I am not a believer anymore, but I do consider myself an “atheist humanist”. The way I live my life is not different than what I was taught by the Church. If I can help a fellow man, I will. It’s just that I don’t believe in the supernatural, and I don’t do things because of fear of a being called “God”. When I’ll die (and I feel it might be sooner rather than later), I will just die. The end. This blog will be the only thing that’s left of me for those who choose to remember me. This is why I get so personal some times in public.

But one thing is for sure, even in my deathbed, when I will probably start praying despite being an atheist (part of the human nature, I guess), I will still not put God first. If he exists, he should feel free to put my praying requests at the bottom of his queue if I am on the wrong about my priorities.

What the hell? Is this the worst day of my digital life?

I had enrolled for the “automatic refills” payment option with AT&T’s “Pay As You Go” plan last February. The auto-refill worked once in May, and when it was supposed to refill my account last week automatically, it DIDN’T!!!! What the hell is going on here? You setup the fucking thing to automatically refill $25 per 3 months, and it does that correctly once, and then it doesn’t??? How do you even make something like this work only once?

I will be calling them tomorrow morning, because right now they are closed (IMO, they should be having support people 24 hours a day, but hey).

Worst shit ever. I am really pissed off these last two days. Between Apple, AT&T, and Vegas crashing all the time on a time-critical project, I just feel that I want to head for the mountains and never come back to “civilization”. I hate its guts. I feel like when having PMS, times 100.

Update: AT&T doesn’t know what the hell happened. I show up as auto-refill on their computer, and then I am not. Their rep has no idea what happened, but I have my suspicions. Judging from their pay web site, I smell that they now require an SSN number to accept your credit card, while it wasn’t the deal before. The problem is, there are a lot of people in the US without SSN, because US has run out of supported numbers (US now gives SSNs to new residents only when it absolutely has to). AT&T never sent me an email, SMS, or called to let me know of the new requirements. They just stopped auto-refilling my account, while I thought they were doing so. And because of that, I lost all of my roll-over balance that my account had (about $14). Conspiracy theory anyone?

So today I got an unlocked iPhone 3Gs, from a Canadian store (that was for a unit agreed to get acquired a month ago btw, before my decision to stop my Apple purchases a week ago). It came with firmware 3.0.0, and I went ahead to upgrade to 3.0.1. I wasn’t afraid of activation, since my iPhone 2G works just fine with my AT&T prepaid SIM card (the voice part at least). So when I got it, I simply put it on iTunes to update its firmware, and when it would ask me for a SIM card, I would just put in my AT&T one.

Well, things didn’t exactly went as planned. The iPhone 3Gs got activated all by itself, and I was wondering why. Well, when opened the SIM tray there was another fucking SIM card in there!!!! The Canadian store forgot their FIDO sim card in! The Fido sim card didn’t work in the US, so I really thought that this was just a bare iPhone that I received. But it wasn’t. The Fido SIM activated the iPhone with the Fido network, with a SIM that doesn’t really work anyway (at least in the US)!

So I go ahead, and I do what I have to do: jailbreak and unlock the phone. The jailbreakiness and unlockiness of the 3.0.1 firmware worked, and my AT&T card was recognized. So now, I thought, if I restore the firmware again, and not keep any data, it should default back to the AT&T network and won’t be locked to Fido anymore. I thought, I would be able to use the iPhone 3Gs as I do with my iPhone 2G, which doesn’t require special activation as long as I am on AT&T.

But this is not how it works.

Once you have activated an iPhone ONCE, then the iPhone’s “default clean slate” is not “clean slate” anymore. It’s now FOREVER locked to the FIDO network, and it now requires jailbreak/unlock EVERY TIME you upgrade the firmware. If the Canadian store had not made the mistake to put the FIDO sim in there, then I would have activated the iPhone with the AT&T sim card for the first time, and so it would be “locked” to the AT&T network instead (which is what I wanted). Every time there would be a new OS version out, it would just work.

Don’t get confused. There are TWO kinds of SIM locks on the iPhone. One kind is the “easy” lock, which is what the hackers are hacking at, the one that lets you use any SIM. But the other lock, is the REAL fucking lock, which is NOT MODIFIABLE once you have activated the iPhone with a certain network. That lock is much more lower level, and part of the baseband/radio firmware, and not the OS firmware. And that’s a part that no hacking tool can touch, except Apple’s own tools that are not freely available (unless you know of one that can really flash the actual baseband firmware of the iPhone, and not the OS part).

So basically, between the stupidity of the Canadian store to leave their fucking SIM into the phone, the stupidity of Apple to lock things in such a way, and my laziness to put my SIM in the phone immediately after arriving instead of waiting for the firmware upgrade, I am now left with an iPhone that can only be used with the jailbreak/unlock combination. Each time Apple releases a new firmware, I have to jailbreak/unlock the phone manually, and honestly, I rather not since I shouldn’t have to (since I use an AT&T sim, and AT&T doesn’t really mind). I am simply against jailbreaking because it’s just not safe. But now, I have to fucking use it in order to be able to use the phone. And no, don’t suggest to me to buy an iPhone with a full AT&T contract, because I simply don’t need such a contract — I barely do 5 phone calls a month. But I still want an iPhone, and I still want my prepaid sim. This should have worked.

I put the biggest blame on this situation on Apple, because locking phones this way SUCKS GOATS. I hope someone taps Apple’s ass, to feel how good a locking really is. Apple is THE ONLY company that could have bring REVOLUTION to the industry by saying “no” to the carrier-manufacturer phone locks. Apple is successful and big enough to give the FINGER to any carrier that demands locked phones (at least starting with iPhone 3G). But noooooo! Apple WANTS its EXTRA BUCK that it gets from the carriers by locking the phones like that. So instead of bringing revolution, Apple brings me headaches instead.

I used the HV20 (60i) and the Canon SX200 IS digicam (30p) yesterday for the wedding I shot. The big surprise came to me from the SX200 IS (review). While it has lower resolution than the HV20, the overall look it produced was so amazingly filmic (low contrast, low saturation) that I still can’t believe that I can get that look with a $300 camera!

Of course, the camera’s color settings were tweaked, as mentioned in the picture above. With these settings, the picture looked like watching a real film movie! Even when tried to turn all these color settings OFF on the HV20 (and enabling Cinemode), the picture produced was still not as cinematic as the SX200’s! People were still “red-ish”, while with the SX200 I would get the beautiful yellow-ish cast on skin tones, as on most films! The groom’s suit is all contrasty-black with no details on the HV20 footage, while on the SX200 footage you can perfectly see details/folds on the suit — like a film would do so!

My JBQ says that the image produced by the HV20 is more accurate (his Canon 5D also produced a similar contrasty look like the HV20’s), but the reality is, who cares, when the SX200 IS looks so much better to my eyes? Like 24p, the film look is a habitual thing that people get used to and have associated it subconsciously to movies. I wish I could show you some better frame grabs to compare the HV20’s and the SX200’s skin tones and contrast (in order to see what I mean), but I have no image releases, so these pics should suffice.

Of course, the SX200 has its problems: it sucks under low light, it’s full of grain/noise. The kind of good footage it can shoot can only be produced outdoors, or with very strong artificial lights. And it has no manual controls to speak off other than color manipulation, exposure compensation/locking, manual white balance, and manual focus/locking (few controls compared to a good camcorder, but more video controls compared to other cheap digicams). But if your footage is shot outdoors, and you tweak its settings as shown above, you will get amazing results.

And judging from this example, the SX200 IS shoots more cinematic footage than the 5D Mark-II (image/color look-wise, not depth-of-field and detail-wise of course). For some weird reason, most of the 5D footage I have seen, is super-contrasty, even when tweaked down.

“The Outpost” is the second script I’ve written for the purpose of a short movie. I had the idea about it a few days ago. Right-click to download from here, I think you would enjoy the twist at the end (a’la “Lost”). Unfortunately, I won’t be shooting it (mostly because I live in a highly populated area), so I am giving it away under the liberal Creative Commons “BY” 3.0 license. Exactly because it’s so short and easy to shoot, some new filmmakers might want to take on its challenge for practicing reasons. If you do, don’t forget to story-board it btw, in order to plan each shot and get a better result. The only “difficult” shot in the whole script is the last shot, which can easily be done if you treat the sky as a green screen (which means that the heroes should not wear blue color clothes). Enjoy!

I can’t understand some people. They just make no sense whatsoever to me.

Case in point, two forum threads over at HV20.com. One thread about the “Condition:Human” web series, and one about the “Manifest Destiny” short movie.

These are two examples of some of the most complex and involved HV20/30-related projects ever shot. There is a lot of work put into these shorts, much more than the usual wanna-be who gets a camera and shoots a “short movie” of complete and utter bullshit, handheld no less. In the case of Condition:Human there was a lot of preparation going on, changing the director’s living room into a green screen, shooting a various locations, and on top of that, implementing complex CGI too. And in the case of Manifect Destiny the sound was superb, the props were superb, the editing more so. Heck, even the sci-fi news site IO9.com wrote an article about the short! And the readers there, loved it! It’s only some HV20.com “I am a better filmmaker than you are” readers who “didn’t like it”.

Some of the HV20.com residents found it “cheesiest, dumbest short”, or said “color me unimpressed”. What the hell? These shorts are more involved and complex AND well-done than your average travel video posted on that forum. How do these people actually compare the god-damn thing? Comparing it to the latest Oscar-winning movie, or to the rest of the amateur filmmaking community? Because, if they are comparing it against the latest Spielberg flick, they should obviously shit on top of 99% of the HV20.com videos too, and not just nitpick the most evolved ones.

Are these films perfect? No, definitely not. But they are BETTER than the rest in that HV20/30 community. Everything is relative in this world, and these guys simply can’t keep perspective. Instead of being HAPPY that someone was able to pull off such a complex project with a $500 camera and no budget to speak of, they nitpick it to death. The better the project actually is, the MORE nitpicking they do! I would agree with the nitpicking only if the filmmakers were boasting that their movie is better than Hollywood’s. But they aren’t. And no, this is not a case of personal likes and dislikes. This is a case of being objective about something. Heck, I can nitpick Condition:Human’s sound problems all day long for example, but I also recognize that the project overall is way too impressive to ignore.

My JBQ also notes: “When stuff is shot with better equipment, jealous people will just say ‘well of course it’s better, they have better equipment’. But when it’s shot with the same equipment, they have to nitpick because they can’t admit that the result is better than what they get with the same equipment. Ken Rockwell said it best about ‘Equipment Measurbators'”.

This is no different than having a genius kid in the first grade class, able to solve the most complex math than any of the other kids, and then having that kid sitting on the chair next to him, who’s terrible with math no less, saying “eh, you’re no Einstein. Not impressed“.

Well, go fuck yourself. Bully. Motherfucking jealous bully.

JBQ: I am sorry I woke you up this morning, I just wanted to kiss you and tell you that I love you before I leave for work.
Eugenia: Oh, I don’t remember waking up, just very faintly… What did I do?
JBQ: You kissed back, and you told me that you love me too.
Eugenia: Hmm… I didn’t call you Eric or anything, did I?
JBQ: No…
Eugenia: Good.
JBQ: …