Post previous to this one: September 16, 2005
This post: October 14, 2005

Man, you people are going to start thinking this is my Xanga if I let this happen again. I’ll try to be better about posting from now on. Wow.

Of course, the issue now is that all the ideas I had for updates in the past month are all outdated now. I’ll see if I can remember anything I wanted to say.

Classes are going well enough, I suppose. For some reason, the workload seems a lot harder than last semester’s did. I don’t know if the classes are harder, or it’s because I’m actually at school for more hours with no breaks, or what. At any rate, I’m already looking forward to December when the semester is over.

And of course, a big part of that is that in December I finally get to go see my Michelle. I bought my plane ticket last night; I’m leaving December 29th, and coming back on January 4th. I’m excited. Only 76 more days to go. It can’t come soon enough.

I had planned on doing a Serenity update (hence the post title) after I saw it opening weekend, but I guess it’s a little late for that. Oh well, this is my blog, so I’m going to do it anyway.

If you’re planning on seeing Serenity, chances are you’ve already seen it. I honestly haven’t been paying attention to how much money it’s taken in, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume it’s far less than it deserves to have made. Serenity is quite probably the best movie I’ve seen all year. I was pretty late to the Firefly party; I bought the DVDs over the summer, and only watched them all the week before the movie came out, but I got hooked instantly. Unlike some other science fiction sagas which I won’t name (but if I did, I’d probably say Star Wars), the characters in Firefly were nothing short of outstanding. After the first episode I almost felt like I was right there on the ship with them.

Somehow, Joss Whedon was able to translate the entire Firefly experience onto the big screen without losing a great deal. I thought the beginning of the movie was a bit slow, but it picked up very quickly. I gasped out loud when I realized the big plot twist in the middle, and I was on my seat for almost the entire movie. In the end, was Serenity worth it? God, was it ever. I’m really hoping the movie takes in enough that we can have more tales in the Serenity universe; ideally, the return of Firefly on TV, but I’ll take another movie any day of the week.

I’m going to go back to the first (real) post on this blog and talk about Apple now. Yesterday, the “One more thing…” announcement was made. The video iPod. People had been talking about it for what seems like forever, so while it wasn’t a shock that they announced it, I was surprised by how much I like it. Not just the unit itself, but the whole package.

iTunes 6. Five weeks ago we got iTunes 5, and now they’ve gone and jumped an entire version. I understand the marketing behind it—releasing the next generation of what is really Apple’s flagship product looks a lot better if it seems like you’re getting a whole new version of its companion software. (Would iTunes 5.1 have gone alongside the new iPods as well as iTunes 6? I doubt it.) iTunes has been able to play videos for some time now, but with iTunes 6, they’re much more prominently displayed; the “Videos” item in the Source list, and the video section of the iTMS. Where am I going with this? I’m going here.

What the original iPod did for portable music, the 5G iPod is going to do for portable video.

How do I know? Two words: content delivery.

Let’s look at the facts, shall we?

Portable media players with video capability are nothing new. There are a ton of them on the market. They all play a myriad of formats. Even the PSP, which Sony is touting as an iPod killer, plays videos and music. However, none of these devices have a standardized way of getting media onto the player. And no, UMD movies don’t count. I don’t care how many Sony claims have been sold; the format is worthless.

On the other hand, Apple has that means to an end. They’ve always had it; it’s just been updated. $1.99 for an episode of Lost seems a bit expensive on the surface. However, the first season of the show was 25 episodes. 25 episodes at $1.99 each works out to $49.75, and they offer the entire first season as a package for $34.99, which is cheaper than the first season DVD box set on Amazon ($38.99). And because they offer the new episodes as well, if you miss an episode, or you just don’t have time for TV, you can download the newest one and watch it on your lunch break or something.

The technology is there. We’ll see where it goes.

I’m ending this update here because it’s getting longer than I’d like. With any luck, I’ll remember to update more often, and then you’ll get a lot of shorter updates instead of one long one. So yeah, tune in soon. I hope.