So yeah, I’m still a-buzzin’ from seeing Star Trek this past weekend—read my review—and I can’t wait to see it again. Yeah, it’s really that good, but don’t take my word for it.

Jeffrey Overstreet:

I’m sure some Trekkies will complain about inconsistencies. (One of my friends has already convinced herself that this movie is a total betrayal of the series and refuses to see it.) I’m sure that the lightness and frivolity will cause some to shrug and say “Meh.”

But color me grateful for Abram’s light-heartedness. The trend toward ponderous sci-fi adventures (and [Battlestar Galactica] has been severest of them all) has been rewarding, but it’s also a little wearying. Too many of the franchises that used to be fun are turning grim and despairing. I’m so glad to discover that Star Trek can be this much fun. It’s a perfect summertime franchise flick: Fast. Smart. Fun to watch. Even more fun to listen to. Packed with characters who leave me wanting to spend more time with them.

You know the old slogan. This “New Crew Revue” say they’re going “where no man has gone before.” That’s not true. They’re going somewhere very familiar. But the way they go there… wow!

Steven D. Greydanus:

...compared to any but the most brilliant origin stories—compared to the modest pleasures of Iron Man, say—Star Trek delivers superbly, while opening the door to the possibility of better things yet to come. Where a typical franchise prequel like last week’s Wolverine merely hits the expected numbers, Star Trek surprises and delights. That’s something “Star Trek” hasn’t done in a couple of decades or so. I’ll take it.

Pete Vonder Haar:

I saw the movie with an avowed Trek fanatic. When the lights went up, I asked her what she thought. Her response was that it was good, but it “wasn’t Trek.” Not having paid much attention to the Roddenberryverse since “TNG,” I didn’t have much of a response. But then as I left the theater I thought: “Not Trek? The movie
has gaping plotholes, a skirt-chasing Kirk, time travel, and a bullshit pseudo-scientific resolution to a life-threatening situation…who are you kidding? It’s totally fucking Trek!”

Okay, so I’m slowly coming around to Facebook, luddite that I am. However, that doesn’t mean I like everything about it (though just for the record, the most recent redesign doesn’t bug me at all). For one thing, I find the vast majority of the applications on Facebook—e.g., quizzes, games—rather pointless, if not horribly annoying.

Even though we may be friends, I really couldn’t care less if you’ve just taken a quiz and made some huge self-discovery, such as the type of parenting method that you are, or if you’ve got a new high score on Bejeweled Blast.

Thankfully, Facebook allows you to hide these alerts. Go to your Facebook homepage and scroll down in your news feed until you come across one of those app alerts/announcements from one of your friends. Place your mouse in the upper-right corner of the alert and a little “Hide” button will appear. Click on the button and a menu will appear with two options: you can hide all alerts from that friend or just alerts from that application. (If you click on the “Hide” icon for a “regular” alert in your news feed, you’ll just have the option to hide that friend’s alerts.)

If you want to “un-hide” a person or an app, scroll down to the bottom of your news feed and click on the “Edit Options” link. This will launch a pop-up menu that lists all of the friends, public profiles, and applications that are currently hidden from your news feed. Click on the “Add To News Feed” button next to any items that you want to see back in your news feed and click on the “Close” button when you’re done.

Darren Hughes recently launched version 11 of his blog, Long Pauses—which, in and of itself, is reason enough to celebrate (put simply, it’s a great blog, especially if you’re the slightest bit a cinephile). But what I find particularly interesting is how Hughes has blended together disparate resources for this new version, including Blogger (here, I thought he was using Movable Type all this time), Tumblr, and Twitter.

I’ve always been a fairly simple fellow, and that has translated to the systems I use for web-publishing, whether for myself or for clients. Specifically, I’ve always liked to keep the number of systems used to a bare minimum—which is one of the reasons why I ultimately went with ExpressionEngine and its fairly open-ended, chameleon-like architecture (it can become almost anything I want it to be).

However, the past few years have seen a rise in the number of systems available for people to publish content and personal info onto the Web. These include hosted blogging apps (Blogger, Wordpress), tumblelog apps (Tumblr), micro-blogging apps (Twitter, the soon-to-be-dead Pownce), media-sharing apps (Flickr, YouTube), and of course, social networking sites (Facebook, Virb, MySpace). And, being the web geek that I am, I want to try them all out and see what cool things I can make out of them.

But so far, I’ve been somewhat hesitant to really use these other systems, due in equal parts to lack of need, lack of time and energy, and perception. Put simply, I don’t have a real need to use any of them, due in large part to my current preferred platform (and of course, necessity is the mother of invention… and implementation). Also, I have a hard enough time updating Opus and keeping tabs on the forums I frequent, much less updating my Flickr and Facebook pages (and I’ve yet to publish anything to my YouTube account, despite having hours of concert footage lying around).

And finally, so many of these systems have struck me, perhaps wrongly, as fairly superfluous, and not conducive to real, substantial conversation, whatever that might be (Twitter being the prime example). But as I’ve been exposed to these non-Opus systems more and more, and slowly found myself using them (specifically Facebook), I have found myself trying to figure out ways to integrate them into some type of unified workflow for publishing online.

With that in mind, I found this portion of Hughes’ announcement particularly interesting:

The variety of communications tools would be overwhelming but for the fact that my friends and I are engaged in what is essentially a single, extended conversation. It’s all come to feel perfectly natural. I suppose some tools (forums, long-form blogs) are more suitable for, say, serious debate than others, while Twitter is obviously more immediate and superficial. And Facebook—wonderful, addictive Facebook—is so damn good at social networking that it’s changed the way I use the Internet (despite my long-held resistance to it). Perhaps we could draw an analogy between these tools and the various types of conversations we have with local friends when we go out together for a long dinner, sit side-by-side at a book club meeting, or run into each other at the grocery store.

And therein, perhaps, lies the rub: this confluence of tools has been created and shaped by an already existing use. Hughes and his friends are simply using the tools at hand to facilitate what is already happening between them organically, as opposed to picking the tools and then trying to build the interactions (which sounds absurd, but believe me, it happens—and fails—all the time).

All of which reminds me of this 37signals-esque mantra: “it’s not about the tools”. This is something that I continually need to remind myself of, that I’m much better served trying to figure out the interactions that are already taking place and then picking and shaping the technology I use to fit them, which is a much more organic and enjoyable process than building something and hoping someone joins in.

Tinkering with new technology is fine—which is why I have (relatively unused) accounts on Virb, MySpace, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.—but going beyond that becomes a waste of time and energy, and distracts from the principle goal: publishing honest, thoughtful, and solid content.

Let’s say you have a friend who has several thousand CDs, a couple hundred DVDs, a bunch of books, and more than a handful of video games, and they’re the anal type who wants to be able to easily keep track of them all. What would you recommend they use, and why?

Start your week off right with this deleted scene from Enter The Dragon TV commercial for the limited edition Bruce Lee Nokia N96 phone. Via

Earlier this month, my external hard drive—which contained, among other things, my entire iTunes library—died. I tried rescuing what I could when it became obvious that the drive was on its last legs, but I was unable to rescue everything, including my iTunes library.

Fortunately, a lot of the songs in my library also existed on my iPod. By default, however, you can’t copy music files from an iPod to your computer. A quick Google search turned up plenty of methods for getting around this limitation, and I finally chose to go with Senuti.

Senuti says that it’s a simple application that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod to your computer. And to put it simply, it worked like a charm. There were some features, such as transferring playlists over, that I didn’t use. However, the core functionality worked just fine, and was quite easy to do, to boot.

I still have some work to do with rebuilding my iTunes library, but I’m much better off than before, thanks to Senuti. (You can find a more thorough review over on AppScount.)

Yeah, the new MacBook and MacBook Pro are pretty cool, what with the souped up graphics, solid aluminum construction, and other nifty features.

But what really got me drooling is the new 24” LED Cinema Display. My immediate thoughts were somewhere along the lines of “I wonder how this would look sitting next to my iMac?” But apparently, it’s only for MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro systems with Mini DisplayPort, according to the specs page.

It’s not enough to make me want to get rid of my desktop, but it’s still awfully purty.

From the Wikipedia entry:

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is a comedy series, released in 2004, that lampoons 1980s television drama, particularly horror, sci-fi, and “the rampant egotism of self-appointed ‘mastermind’ authors.” The show presents Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace as though it were a real, budget television series, produced in the 1980s, and now getting its first screening; this hoax is the basis of the show’s fictional frame. Darkplace’s fictional show-within-a-show includes deliberately poor production and special effects, sub-par acting, and storylines that are “severely flawed and open-ended”, this is interspersed with ‘present-day interviews’ with the ‘cast’.

The series’ fictional premise is that some time in the 1980s, best-selling horror author Garth Marenghi and his publisher/publicist, Dean Learner, made their own low-budget television series with a single intent: “to change the evolutionary course of Man over a series of half-hour episodes.” Set in Darkplace Hospital, “over the very gates of Hell,” in Romford, East London, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace shows the adventures of Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D., as he fights the forces of darkness while simultaneously coping with the pressures of day to day admin. Within this fictional context, Marenghi wrote 63 teleplays from which 50 shows were produced; however, Channel 4 was eventually forced to reject the show due to its “radicality.” Though, Marenghi also cites possible government suppression: “MI8, which is actually three levels above MI6, pulled the plug. And they did it because I knew the truth.”

In 2004, due to the “worst artistic drought in broadcast history”, Channel 4 decided to air six of the original episodes.

If the above video melts your mind—and it should, it really should—you can continue watching episode #1 here and here.

Thanks to Mr. Elastic for the 411.