Jay McGavren's Journal

You are currently reading the blog of my company’s newest SENIOR Programmer Analyst. :) Not bad after one year.

People used to go half a decade without a promotion in this department. I am very lucky to have joined in the year the logjam broke.

I had a dream last night that Diana and I had another child, and we offered up his first name for corporate sponsorship.

“Hi, I’m Jay, this is my wife Diana, and this is little FedEx…”

SNES game music is back in my playlist. I’m revisiting SPC plugins for Winamp, and they’re actually really well-integrated now; you can edit a track’s info and even rate it in the Library. Currently stuck in my head are tracks from Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 2, and SoulBlazer.

I’m also starting to catch the podcasting wave. With so much IT news out there to review, the ability to cram it into my 1.5 hours of otherwise-wasted commute time each day is verrry tempting. There aren’t many quality ‘casts right now, but a notable exception is Slashdot Review. Instead of a stream of uhs, ums, and ers as they try to think up what to talk about next, SR simply takes major Slashdot stories from the day and summarizes them in an audio format. Simple and useful. Now if only there were similar feeds for GizModo, GameSpot, and Yahoo! News…

Just grabbed Portable Thunderbird and installed it on the beat-up USB flash drive in my pocket. It looks like it will finally see some use now. I can walk up to any Windows PC with a USB port, plug in the drive, and run Thunderbird with no installation whatsoever. It even saves my articles back to flash, without ever touching the hard drive. I don’t trust the drive enough to handle my actual e-mail, but it’s perfect for reading RSS news.

On a related note, this Gizmodo article discusses a flash drive sold with Portable Firefox and Thunderbird pre-loaded. Now THAT’s simple enough for Aunt Tillie to use.

Hmmm, wonder if I could make a Portable Perl?

3D movies...

mr_mooph sent us this article on film directors like George Lucas wanting to go back and remaster their films in 3D. I’m betting a 3D image based on 2D film looks ridiculous.

But this gets me thinking about a good point… Why aren’t new films being shot in 3D? Sure, we don’t have the means to display them right now, but we will someday. You could just publish in 2D for now, and then when 3D projection technology is ready, the footage will be too. There wouldn’t be much additional cost - you’d just need cameras with two lenses, and CG models could be used as-is.

It would be like having a chance to film in color during the black-and-white era. We’re missing a cheap opportunity to future-proof our movies here, and we should be taking it.