Viewer discretion is advised...

-
For not having HBO or Cinemax or any of those premium cable channels, I sure seemed to hear a lot of foul language on TV today. You have to listen closely, but there's the occasional expletive to be heard during a college basketball game. I always wondered if the networks cringe or smile when they know that the people at home just heard something that would normally be bleeped out. Then ESPN premiered "A Season on the Brink", the story of Bobby Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers during the 1985-1986 season. Interestingly, ESPN went no-holds-barred on the language on their main network, but offered a simultaneous edited version of the movie on ESPN2. I thought the movie was pretty interesting, but during a commercial my attention was solidly grabbed by the CBS special "9|11". It was by far the best documentary I've seen about last September's attacks, and if you missed it, then hope for a DVD release or at least yearly replays. The documentary was a project that began long before September 11th and followed a new firefighter in the New York fire department. The fateful events of that day turned that project into much more than was ever envisioned, and CBS did a very nice job in airing it with a minimum of interruptions. I'm sure I'll see the rest of "A Season on the Brink" someday, and I wonder if ESPN will take much heat for the language. Given the nature of their broadcast, I'm sure CBS won't (or shouldn't).

Popular posts from this blog

Effects of Handbrake presets and RF quality settings across AV1, H.265, and H.264

-
Image
  "Fantastic!"   Every once in a great while, I dive deep down the rabbit hole of media formats and the codecs 1 that encode and decode them. Sometimes it's photos, sometimes it's audio, and this time it's video. I'm no expert in these things, but rather an enthusiast who (a) likes to create and organize digital media and (b) likes knowing that the formats I'm choosing are going to meet my present and future needs. In the past few months I've been adding Blu-ray movies to my media server. I've relied on H.264/AVC as my video format for a long time (more than a decade, maybe?), but with H.265/HEVC now pretty mainstream and AV1 emerging, I figured it was time to refresh my knowledge and get to know how these different tools might serve me. This is going to be a long post, so I'm going to take a moment here to establish the four considerations I make whenever I'm encoding media, whether it's video, audio, or photos. The four consider
Read more

My Podcast Predilection

-
I think my main modus operandi is to interact with as much information as possible. I read for school, keep track of a couple hundred news feeds in Google Reader, watch documenaries, and follow really smart people on social networks who share good things. It's a full-time job, and I love it. Now that the semester is over, I can try to stay more up-to-date with a growing number of podcasts I follow. Being a PhD student is a very immersive experience, but podcasts are one way I keep myself stretched in more than just one direction. Here's a list of what I watch or listen to on a regular basis: TWiT.tv : I keep up with a ton of technology news and debate by following Leo Laporte and others on his podcasting network. Here are the podcasts I prefer to watch: This Week in Tech  (This is roughly the tech equivalent of "Meet the Press," but far, far less formal) Tech News Today  (Today's their 500th show, and I'm sure I've never missed one) Security Now  (St
Read more

Think before you shoot

-
Here's an interesting story from the Denver Post . Apparently a couple of young males thought it would be fun to go out into the street and shoot their paintball guns at people passing by. Unfortunately, one of the people they shot at was a kid (probably 15 or 16 years old) who was carrying a real handgun. He fired back, hit one of the paintballers in the head, and now their little prank has put somebody into intensive care. Just sad. You can easily find enough blame to spread it around to everybody. I'm left to wonder where the kid with the handgun developed that kind of aim...maybe he just got lucky...or unlucky...
Read more