Month: October 2010

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Assorted Bob Boobtube Bob Zombie Bob

Getting back to zombie basics

Slate’s Tim Cavanaugh comes out firmly in favor of a fundamentalist approach to zombies in his review of IFC’s Dead Set and AMC’s The Walking Dead..

I couldn’t agree more.

Cavanaugh argues that zombie films have shuffled away from some of their core values, including, most importantly, that “zombies need to chow down on raw human flesh.”

And the more gruesome the munchies, the better.

Quoting Cavanaugh:

“I realize that few will concur in my opinion that recent films such as Zombieland, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead were not bloody enough. But none of these movies featured what Romero calls “the banquet,” the scene wherein flesh-eating zombies, having won control of the battlefield, eat with relish the inner organs of the living. True zombiephiles won’t be satisfied with a few fingers or a severed lower leg. We want ribcages ripped apart, strings of intestines devoured by hungry freaks, characters we have gotten to know over the course of the movie being quartered into steaming pieces by the hunched, hungry hordes.”

Bring it.

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Assorted Bob Dog Bob

Ozzy at rest …

Ozzy snoozing

Ozzy crashes after a day of running around the mountains with his buddy Barlow. Barlow is a card-carrying hound. He reminds me immensely of Gilligan, which makes me love him that much more.

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Assorted Bob Media Bob Movie Bob Music Bob Techno Bob Uncategorized

Liberating my iTunes library

Our home had become a disconnected, cacophonous jumble of music-playing gadgets that was making me crazy (or, more accurately, crazier).

We have three full stereo systems (living room, TV room, workout room), a Bose radio knockoff on the porch and an Ubuntu-driven  computer playing Internet radio  in the dining room.

What I wanted: A network that would allow me to play all of the music on my half-terabyte hard drive in the loft throughout the house, including Internet radio. A critical component of this is the ability to control what’s playing from anywhere in the house. That turned out to be the tough part.

I first downloaded the Rowmote app from the iTunes store. Good little app, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t allow you to pick songs, choose radio stations, etc. After searching around a bit, I stumbled across the much pricier ($24.95) Signal app. They let you try it free (the demo version is fully functional, but “please register” appears for every third title in your media library).

In installed it on the server in the loft that runs my music library. It provides an address on my local network that I can point iPhone, iPad and computer browsers to so they can control the library.

It worked really well. So well that I paid for the app and am happily using it. I’ve bookmarked the address on our phones, computers and iPad to make it easy to call up the control, which is an HTML driven interface that looks like an iPhone. Pretty easy to use. A bit kludgy at times. But coupled with a few AirPort Express Base Stations (about $99 each) I can let my iTunes media library roam the house freely. If I want to listen to something different, my phone, computer or iPad works as a remote to let me sift through my music collection and pick something new.

The main drawback: It won’t allow me to pick the speaker source in the iTunes library in the loft. I have to go up there to dictate which speakers are playing. I solved that by having iTunes play to all the speakers in the house. Since the stereos are off if I’m not listening to them, it really doesn’t matter that the music is being output to all of them. I hear it only on the stereo that’s powered up.

Better living through geekery …