Harv’s World

I figure I’ll join everybody else in remembering Michael Jackson. Some of the younger people out there only remember him for his kinda wierd acts the last decade or so. But anyone who grew up in the 80s and early 90s has a bit of a different view.

I can’t think of anyone in recent memory that was such an ICON like Michael Jackson was. Not Britney, nor Justin, nor Fergie, nor Angelina, nor Tom. Not Christian, nor Denzel. Michael was *everywhere*. Kids at school wore his red jacket. Or the white gloves (admit it). Everybody did his dance moves like the moonwalk or pelvic thrust. I know people who use the pelvic thrust on the dance floor -to this day!- (Chris, I’m looking at you buddy).

His influence lives on even today. Go back and look at his dance videos and you see the start of popping/locking, the “slide” that chris brown does now, tuttin (or however it’s spelled) which is the isolated hand movements. And let us not forget who made the suit & fedora hat look absolutely pimp. I just brought this up a few days ago while watching So You Think You Can Dance with the Teenager. One of the dance routines featured the fedora hats, and she wanted to know why. I told her she’d understand after watching the dance video Smooth Criminal.

With that, I leave you with a couple of you tube vids. The first is Smooth Criminal music video, and the other is a live performance of Dangerous (remixed?).

Lot’s of goodies here today.

Zombieland

The Zombieland trailer is available over at Apple’s Movie Trailer site. Looks to be interesting (doesn’t mean I’m going to watch it though), with Woody Harrelson as an expert zombie killer. The trailer is pretty fun, showing what I can only guess is a “zombie kill of the week” feature where you can show off how you killed a zombie… and the winner is an old lady dropping a piano on one. Click the image to see some stills from the movie via AICN.

2012

The first trailer asked the question “How would the governments of our planet prepare 6 billion people for the end of the world? ……… they wouldn’t” as a tidal wave swept over some mountains (yeah, think about that).

The newest trailer (from Yahoo!) goes into some more detail about the plot. Looks like the world **really* bites it. Everything is falling apart, collapsing, burning, drowning, sinking, etc. Some really good visuals here. The trailer shows some “ships” and animals being loaded up (two by two anyone?) and of course a mad stampede of people trying to get in. The “ships” look pretty slick, not like boats at all. I would even go so far as to say they look like spaceships. Then I saw somewhere (can’t recall where) that another planet pops into near Earth orbit which is what causes all the destruction. Leads me to think these “ships” might take us to the other planet. Who knows…

Virtuality

This is a pilot from Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica) to air on Fox on June 26th (next friday). If all goes well, it will become a series. Otherwise, this is a one shot deal. The idea behind it is pretty good. A mision to another planet is launched. There is a virtual reality system to keep everyone from getting bored while on the journey. Turns out the VR might be buggy, and the reason for their journey might not be “just” for exploration, since it seems that the governments of the world just announced that Earth has 100 years before it ends (or something like that). Check out a really long 12min trailer. From AICN.

Enjoy the weekend folks!

Thanks Geoff for the link…

Rick’s Custom Squirrels.

The name says it all.

Perusing the forums this morning I came across this quote.

There are two half full glasses, but they are incompatible. I would have preferred one full glass.

Which made me chuckle. If you don’t get it… think about it for a minute.

The discusion was here at the top of page 5 on a thread comparing the merits of the existing i7 and the upcoming chip from Intel (nicknamed i5, but that may or may not be it’s real name at launch). The i5 will launch at similar prices to the current low-end (low being relative here) i7 920 and i7 940. The socket is new, so you can’t put an i5 chip in an i7 socket or vice-versa. Performance is comparable to an i7 in most things, but since the platform (motherboard, RAM) is cheaper you can get a very comparable system for just a bit less than an i7.

The big question is what happens to the 920 and 940? In particular the i7 920 is fantastic. It overclocks easily into the mid 3Ghz range, and 4Ghz is semi-common. Retail price is about $280, but Microcenter usually has it available for $230 and even had it on sale at one point for $199! If it’s going to go away, I want one before it does

Can’t spend too long on it but…

DC United beat the New York Red Bulls 2-0. A tight game, to be sure. But DC was the better team on the night. Once again, we didn’t finish enough of our chances. On days like that where we control the game, we *have* to get goals out of it. On several opportunities, NYRB could have gottena  goal and that would have tied the game up or just made things really hairy by the end of the match. That killer instinct is missing. But on the whole, a good lineup, very mobile and enthusiastic.

USA beat Honduras 2-1 at Soldier Field in Chicago. Much better game all around, but *again* we got bitten by an early goal by the opponent. Dempsey made a silly giveaway at midfield and the defense was unbalanced and gave up a goal. Dempsey has not played well in the last two matches. The defense was much more solid, the two outside defenders (Bornstein and Spector) actually defended this time. And Casey worked very well with Altidore, I thought. He should get more looks. So should Kenny Cooper for that matter. Indeed a pairing of Cooper and Casey would be kinda interesting don’t you think?

What a week for soccer. DC United lost on Saturday to the NE Revolution, and then the US natioanl team lost last night to Costa Rica.

First, DC United. For the second week in a row, they played against a really negative team (Real Salt Lake was the week before). A team that chooses to bunker with numbers behind the ball and then just hope and pray they score a goal somehow. This tactic is shockingly effectively against us, overall.

I would like to say that Soehn learned his lesson from the RSL match and that’s why he didn’t put Gomez, Moreno, and Emelio on the field at the same time. 3 Guys who, while skillful, have very little mobility. A static offense is an epic FAIL against an entrenched defense. Oh, and Quaranta is still not a good winger in a 352. I’ll ignore the fact that Gomez was out with injury. The lineup Soehn put out was active and creative. And it showed with a goal, and two shots ringing off the post. But, a one goal lead against a team that doesn’t give up a lot of goals, and at any second can score a goal from absolutely nothing (because that’s what they do), and in a season where we have made a habit of giving up goals at the strangest times, is not enough of a lead.

Sure enough, the second half was a disaster and coupled with some REALLY shaky calls by the ref, NE walked away with a victory.

I can be mad at the ref all day long, but the reality is if DC had finished their chances in the first half, it would have beena  moot point. And, oh by the way, it will take a long time for me to be able to respect Taylor Twellman again after not only a shockingly bad dive, but the chutzpah to sit on the ground with his hands in the air, ala Cuatemoc Blanco, looking for a PK. I have long thought of Twellman as a hard-working stand-up (literally) player who gave 100% all the time and was above all that flopping and diving. And I’m not even talking about those cases where an attacker “goes down lightly”, the play in question was a blatant dive that players like Blanco do. Note that Twellman was the only yokel asking for a PK, everybody else was following the play upfield.

Highlights available here from dcunited.com.

The US National Team. Boy did they lay an egg down there in Saprissa. They were spanked 3-1 by Costa Rica. We were lucky they didn’t tack on a few more. I missed the first few minutes, and I fell asleep somewhere in the second half. The parts I did watch though, especially in the first half, showed Costa Rica consistently winning 1st and 2nd balls. And I saw a lot of poor defending. Players would dive-in when they should have just contained, they contained when they should have dove-in. The US team looked like they had never seen a give-and-go before in their lives.

There was a point though, closing out the 1st half, where I thought the pace had slowed a little because Costa Rica had run themselves out. I figured, the US is usually in better shape than the other teams in CONCACAF, so maybe this would be where they could exploit something. Especially with Altidore and Donovan on the field. But nope, nothing ever came of it. Torres got yanked for Kljestan, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Kljestan is more of a central midfielder, and he’s slower, effectively giving the US 3 central mids and conceding the flanks (not like Dempsey is a true winger either). I don’t know, it just didn’t seem to add anything other than change just for the sake of change.

I think a better option may have been bringing in Davies and then moving Donovan back into midfield. You can still take out Torres if you want, but I probably would have taken Dempsey out instead. Another choice could have been to bring in Bornstein (not sure if he’s really fit though, coming back from injury) and move Wynn up ito midfield. Wynn was having a lot of defensive troubles, and that would have made Costa Rica at least have to go chase him down (good luck with that…).

Here’s hoping we can rebound and leave the week on a high note. DC United play tonite against the NY Red Bulls, and the US Nats play against Honduras on Saturday.

AnandTech has a preview of the new Intel chips coming out this fall, codenamed Lynnfield (some are referring to it as the i5).

There is quite a bit of uproar on tech forums regarding this new chip. Where does it fit into the current Intel lineup? If they are priced as rumored, what happens to the i7? the Core2Quads? What about the motherboards?

Well, in a nutshell, this new chip uses a new socket LGA-1156 instead of the i7 socket which is LGA-1366. It also uses a new, more mainstream chipset in the P55 instead of the X58 for the i7. There are a few other differences in the way that it handles video and memory, but really the article does a better job of explaining it than I can. They are similar in it has the same 4 cores, the same cache, same architecture. Some of the models will have Hyper-Threading (HT) enabled, others won’t.

Performance-wise, this falls right smack-dab in the middle of the i7’s performance numbers (depending on the model) for many of the benchmarks. So what does that mean for us, the consumers?

Author Anand Lal Shimpi says it best in his article when he says (emphasis mine):

Why would anyone want a LGA-1366 system then? I believe there are three major advantages to the LGA-1366 platform for single-socket desktops:

1. Support for Gulftown. You can only get 6-cores from the LGA-1366 platform in 1H 2010, Intel currently doesn’t have any 6-core LGA-1156 parts planned.
2. More overclockable CPUs. The best yielding Nehalems (and highest clocked Nehalems) will be LGA-1366 processors. I wouldn’t expect any 1GHz+ overclocks from LGA-1156 CPUs.
3. More bandwidth to PCIe slots. I don’t see this as a huge advantage today, but there may come a time when having as much bandwidth to your GPUs as possible is important. I’m thinking general purpose GPU computing, DX11, OpenCL sort of stuff. But we’re not there yet.

So if you want/need the extra performance, you’re going to go with an i7. I think, as Nvidia’s CUDA becomes more mainstream there will probably be additional reasons to put multiple GPUs on a motherboard, especially for very specific and high end applications. Also, there are some areas where the i7 just really kicks-arse like in video encoding, 3D rendering and other multi-threaded applications. In particular if you’re comparing a non-HT enabled Lynnfield (why would you bother) with an HT enabled i7. Games and other consumer level software on the other hand (which is usually what people buy these chips for anyway) might be better off with the Lynnfield. Intel is probably A’OK with that.

The Lynnfield prices are expected to be about the same as the lower i7s are right now. But, when you couple that with a vastly cheaper motherboard (prices expected around the same levels as P45 based boards today), the entire platform becomes a whole lot cheaper. At least $100 right off the bat, really more since you’ll be buying DDR3 in pairs instead of triples (i.e. 4GB instead of 6GB) and you’ll get very similar performance in the applications that matter to most consumers. This then positions the i7 as the real “high-end” CPU.

Anand quotes himself from a previous article, which I will quote here.

“The breakdown seems pretty simple: if you’re the type of person who bought the Q6600/Q9300, then Lynnfield may be the Nehalem for you. If you spent a bit more on your CPU or are more of an enthusiast overclocker, the current Core i7 seems like the path Intel wants you to take.”

The people who may actually come out ahead in this scenario are those who got an i7 920 ($200-$300) paired with a less expensive (I can’t say “cheaper” since they are all high-end boards) motherboard around $200. All told spending around $400-500 for a really high-end system, and (hopefully) a motherboard that will see them through the next iteration of LGA-1366 CPUs including 6-core+HT in the coming year.

It’s been a long time baby…

First up, Christian Gomez is out this game with a toe bruise. And that’s a good thing. Shalrie Joseph completely envelopes Gomez when they play. Joseph not only has his number, he has his home address and stalks him. Gomez isn’t mobile enough to get away from joseph and ends up making it an easy night for the NE defender. If Joseph doesn’t mark him out, then Larentowicz will. So not having Gomez means we can put another more mobile midfielder in the center like Quaranta or Ponius or even Barklage. Even if they aren’t as good as Gomez is, they’ll at least make the NE midfield have to work chasing them around.

No Ben Olsen either, but we’re used to that. And Paul Tenorio says he saw Milos Kocic in travel gear, so he’s supposing that once again Luis Crayton does not make the travel roster leaving Kocic and Wicks as options for GK on tonite.

I haven’t seen a travel roster yet, so it’s a little difficult to say who starts this match. The defense is usually pretty set with Namoff, Jakovic and Burch. However with Avery John getting called up for national team duty, I’m not sure if that means we start him while we can… or why bother starting him if he’s gone for 2 weeks. If he does get the start, does he just replace Burch? Namoff is in dire need of a break, so maybe another possiblity is push jakovic over to the right, Janicki enters into the middle, and John starts out left. Even though NE’s forwards have been inept ths season, I’m not sure you want to field a lineup that has never worked together before. So likely John just comes in for Burch, or no change at all.

The midfield is a big question mark too. I’m sure Wallace returns to the starting lineup at left mid. Fred probably starts at right. Simms always starts (he hasn’t had a really great year, but I don’t think anyone is better than him right now). So that leaves the other two central slots up for grabs. Best candidates are Jacobsen, Pontius, and Quaranta. Jacobsen is a little more defensive, so if I were Soehn, I’d start Pontius in Olsen’s spot and Quaranta in Gomez’ spot. But if I were me (haha!) I’d actually do that AND start Jacobsen in Simms role. NE doesn’t have much in the way of dangerous players coming from midfield. And all three of those guys could interchange very nicely and be very mobile. All three can shoot from distance, and all three have the endurance to run for 90mins. And all of them (Quaranta less so) can rotate defensively. If I were the coach, that’s where I’d go. Match NE’s physicality in the midfield, but up them in skill and creativity.

Forwards. Likely Jaime and Emelio get the start, unless one or the other is tired and needs a break. Moreno might, against RSL he looked like his boots were filled with concrete. He’s had a full week of rest though, and as long as he’s the only one that’s immobile out there, I’d lean towards giving him the start. N’Silu is a good option as well and give us some much needed speed up front. Moreno is also better at coming off the bench, whereas N’Silu isn’t so that might factor in as well.

Here’s to hoping that whatever lineup Soehn chooses, when he makes subs, it doesn’t require 5 people having to shift position to accomodate.

Winding up my catching up for the week….

AICN reports that there is going to be an Alien remake/reboot. Ugh. That is a VERY high standard, and unless they can somehow make it better (which I doubt) they should just leave well enough alone. It will be really hard to re-create that creepy “there’s something behind you” feeling of the original. Never has silence sounded so creepy. Did I mention it was creepy? I did? Well, did I mention I am such a chicken that it took me about a dozen attempts and ten years before I could finally watch it straight through?

Look, over there. It’s not the Transformers, it’s not the Terminator. It’s the TRANSFORMINATORS. Great mash-up by video trailers, worthy of your time.

From ScreenRant. Dennis Quaid is in a new sci-fi/horror flick called Pandorum. Watch the trailer and see a few images here at ScreenRant. Creepy. Reminds me of that video game that just came out not too long ago called Dead Space, and the accompanying anime mini-movie (I forget the name). Quaid is in some sort of cryo-sleep with another crewmember. They wake up, alone, lost and confused. The other crew member starts exploring the ship while Quaid stands by. Other guy finds some survivors and it is revealed that “something” has happened to the crew. They are now some sort of creatures that will hunt and kill you. Oh yeah, they’re really fast, really deadly. And now, you’re turning into one too! Argh!!!!!

Bruce Willis for President. I’m only half joking. Bruce has got a robotic heart in there somewhere, I’m sure of it. The 5th Element, 12 Monkeys, and here in this new movie it looks like he’s got another stellar character. Check the Surrogates trailer (from Myspace via AICN). At some point in the future, every person has a “surrogate” robotic body. Basically a throw-away body, that you can control remotely. You experience everything the surrogate does like touch, sight, smell, etc and you get to stay at home while the surrogate (who looks just like you, btw) leads your life in the “real” world. The trailer shows people jumping off of buildings, so presumably you experience the rush of the fall and the crash, but you don’t die… you just get another surrogate. So there is no more fear of death (especially if you never leave home). Only, now, people are dying while connected to a surrogate. Bruce is called in to investigate. And pretty soon it’s apparent that you can’t be connected to a surrogate (you know because you’ll die) so for the first time in years Bruce has to actually put his own body in danger. Looks like a really good flick.

And, last but not least… Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Starring Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes (wait a second, weren’t they in Ghost Rider?), Xzibit, and Val Kilmer. I know thats a pretty strange combination, but check out the trailer it looks pretty interesting, if a bit odd…

Meh.

AICN has what appears to be a clip hosted on MTV.com. From the previous trailers, I guess this is what happens right before the Eiffel tower melts. Other than a hot Baroness, there isn’t much to this clip. It has a real B movie feel to it. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it will be bad……. the rest of the clips/trailers have me thinking it will be bad.

Watch the embed below, or click here.