SteelSkin.net – The Ramblings of Chris Nutt

I purchased the above dongle from ebay.  It is a little usb dongle used to add a mic and headphone jack to just about any PC or Mac. The key thing is that it is driverless and so will be supported by the PS3. The main benefit is in playing a multiplayer game like Uncharted 2, that you have a clear headset and that it’s battery doesn’t run out. I used it with a really nice headset I got for a birthday a few years back. I don’t use the headphone jack, instead I use the headphone out on my 5.1 receiver.

Above is one of my favourite album covers, the space station from ELO’s Out of the Blue. It was painted by Shusei Nagaoka.

James White seems to agree

I went into Avatar with low expectations. I expected the story to be unoriginal and 3D to be annoying. The funny thing I wasn’t wrong. However it turns out if you take off the shelf ideas and mix them together, like a good DJ set, it doesn’t matter. 3D is annoying or rather would be annoying for most films, but for blockbuster Sci-Fi or animated tales it has it’s place. I can happily see myself going to see maybe a film a year in 3D (Tron Legacy in 2010).

Avatar is essentially a gaia anime story combined with Dances with Wolves. It’s what you would get if you got the Macross team (Macross Zero) or Bones (Eureka 7) to develop a Ghibli film (Laputa) for the western market. This is no bad thing as I loved all of the above and frankly if it opens peoples minds enough, maybe a western friendly anime series might *just* get their interest.

3D is not the saviour of Cinema. It is as it was every other time, a gimmick. The 2009/10 version is a more polished gimmick, but it is still what it was before; interesting for a few key niches, but at best unnecessary at worst distracting for anything else. My only worry is that Hollywood will strip mine the 3D Sci-Fi/animated tale blockbusters until even the hint of space or a pixar-like film will have people running for the hills. This could do major damage to genres I enjoy.

As for 3D at home, anyone who invests in that is an idiot of emperors’ new clothes level.

OK, I generally don’t talk work here, but there is so little content on the web for MS CMS 2001 (or MCMS or Microsoft Content Management Server 2001/2002) that I felt I should post this migration tip for those that want to move to another system (it is 8 to 9 years old).

In Site Manager export all you content as a .ROP file. At first this seems like a useless binary file. In reality it is just a .CAB archive. You should select all your resources, channels, folders and templates when you export. The cab will then have your templates in plain text (.AEM), your files loose in the archive and a huge .XML of all of your content. Yay everything packaged up and ready to go.

Good luck with the rest!