Kevin Purdy

Once you get there, you’ll feel just as immortal as the Elves.

I really dig this idea (courtesy of BoingBoing) of using a trek taken by fictional questing hero-types to set a personal goal for yourself, be it walking, running or maybe even miles you want to travel on weekend “one-tank trips.”

Geeky? Yes. Slim figure, super pulse rate drop and sense of accomplishment from walking 1,625 miles? Uber-cool.

My secret shame is that I’ve never actually read Tolkien’s masterpiece; the (great) movies obviously condense the sense of travel. So I’d have to adapt a few noble journeys from my own mental mythology. A sample:

• “Stumble through Sergio Leone’s Desert”: Admittedly, it’s a terrible idea to dehydrate, suffer third-degree sunburns and be continually beaten and whipped through the desert by a depraved Mexican gangster. But even though you’d end up looking like this, you’d be able to say, “Eh, Clint Eastwood, not so tough” and be able to back it up … kind of.
• “Laugh annoyingly across Pee Wee Herman’s America”: Giant plastic dinosaurs! Historic Texan landmarks lacking subterranean living spaces! San Antonio, Hollywood and chance encounters with an undead trucker! Say what you will about Mr. Reubens, he keeps a trim figure.
• “Run and run (and run) to Maniac Magee’s Buffalo Pen”: Running continually between the East and West sides of a city can attract unwanted attention, but a steady diet of pizza, spaghetti and whatever food’s available at the local YMCA, combined with a nearly endless day of running, would have to have results.

Tags:   exercise · geekeryNo Comments.

How come the kid representing Linux has the unkempt hair?

To say the least, Microsoft’s varied efforts at stonewalling or segmenting the Linux market have gotten markedly different receptions in the U.S. and Europe.

Take, for example, this report in the Sept. 20 issue of The Economist, which summarizes the findings by a trial court for the European Union in upholding an antitrust ruling against Microsoft:

(The EU) argued, for instance, that withholding information that is needed for PCs and servers to work together constitutes an abuse of a dominant position if it keeps others from developing rival software for which there is potential consumer demand. In such cases, the information cannot be refused even if it is protected by intellectual-property rights, as Microsoft had argued.

In other words, because Microsoft’s utter domination of the business desktop market has led it to stonewall efforts by non-Microsoft server suppliers to play nice, the EU could force the Redmond giant to hand over the source code for Windows.

Over here in the U.S., it’s, well, different. The networking company Novell, which announced in November 2006 that it would partner with Microsoft to make its own Linux products play nice, is apparently glad it did so, to the tune of a 250% jump in business. [Link via /.]

[Novell director of marketing Justin Steinman] said part of its growth was directly related to the Microsoft deal, adding that Novell has billed more than US$100 million in business through its Microsoft relationship. He added that the growth was also due to the halo effect of the arrangement.

Sounds great for Novell. Note, however, that Microsoft agreed to give away a total of $240 million in vouchers for Novell-provided support as part of the deal, and Novell has cashed in 44 percent of them, according to Computer Business Review — coincidentally, that’s about $105 million.

Regardless of whose books the boost is recorded on, it’s interesting to see how Microsoft’s firm stance on “inter-operability” generates source code demands in Europe, but invoices in the U.S.

Tags:   analysis · Linux · MicrosoftNo Comments.

Slate posted an insightful article Friday looking at the latest move by networks to retain the kind of big, multi-demographic audiences they once took for granted. The short version is that dramas with big, big casts — Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, almost every recent HBO series and, yes, even this blogger’s all-time favorite, The Wire, get mentions — are a triple threat of viewer retention:

• Smorgasboard of relatability: The odds are stacked against even the most cynical of TV critics to not find somebody to like. Even if, like me, you stopped caring about Lost’s Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangular affair 10 episodes ago, you’ve got at least two more noble/tragic heroes, couples like Jin and Sun or Claire and Charlie to empathize with/root for, and lots of peripheral conflicts.
• Logistical safety net: If Masi Oka suddenly feels like his salary needs a 300% upgrade (not that he seems like that type, just as a what-if) and NBC disagreed, Heroes wouldn’t necessarily be ruined. Writers have lots of other characters and plotlines to both shift the weight onto and use to explain the disappearance of said ornery instigator.
• Corpses give good water cooler: Need a sure-fire way to get TV guide, Entertainment Weekly and TV-savvy blogs all atwitter about your series? Off a character nobody expects to go, or maybe perform some Darwinian cast adjustment by showing less-liked figures out with a somber burial scene.

But, as Slate points out, only a few shows are agile enough to make shows with big casts feel like big drama instead of thinned-out soap operas.

Nearly all of the women I live and work with have expressed dismay at how Grey’s got a little too “shocking development” for its own good. If you constantly toy with and reinvent every single character with unexpected negative traits, who does that leave to empathize with or, well, like?

How The Wire pulls this off is its own post, but I’ll say quickly that while the series benefits as a whole from long character development arcs, each episode can stand as a self-sustained entity against a clearly-drawn Baltimore backdrop.

Watching Lost, however, has occasionally felt like trying to find a file piled somewhere in the corner of a mountainous desk. I find myself forgetting entire aspects of characters that haven’t been brought to the fore in a while, or else questioning why characters are acting so strangely (”Wait, why is Hurley suddenly fine with The Numbers, but used to be crazy-scared of ‘the curse’ before?”). Trying to reconcile those kinds of thoughts in my head while the show plays, of course, somewhat lessens the sheer sense of fun I found early in the series.

Tags:   analysis · Lost · television · The WireNo Comments.

I’ve posted up some news-type clips and a little video work I’ve dabbled in over in the next two tabs, and I rounded out the About section with contact information.

To do: Make the sidebar a bit more interesting, give my friend and like-minded blogs some love in the blogroll, and, uh, post about something other than my blog.

Tags:   announcements · navel gazingNo Comments.

This is the first post on my new, blog-driven, Wordpress-powered personal Web site.

Basically, I’m trading the pride of being able to display the Made with Notepad badge, like on my old site, for a slicker look and ability to update without searching through 300+ lines of HTML.

Articles, projects and even multimedia stuff coming soon. I might also import some of the faux-Merlin-Mann posts from my other, mostly abandoned blog.

See you again real soon, I hope.
~ Purdman

Tags:   announcementsNo Comments.