Their time is not worth your time

What I do when writing a letter to someone like a busy Hollywood agent is, I spend several times more writing it than usual.

So, if this agent earns 10 times what I do, and it normally takes 15 minutes to write an email, I spend 2 and a half hours on the email to this agent.

Does this sound crazy? Well, did I get results? Yes! The agent replied and asked me to send in a script.

Option me, option me!

I've published a compilation of short stories, with 50 stories to option. This is the second coming of Philip K.Dick, so don't delay, buy or option today!

http://www.lulu.com/content/hardcover-book/ssb---short-story-book/6875465

I'm trying to get them to reduce the shipping cost.

Making your own Geffen Pictures logo

Take a single Malteser, scratch out a G on it, then rotate slowly.

Geffen = spaceballs?

The animated Geffen Pictures logo (seen on Last Boy Scout, Interview with the Vampire, etc) looks just like the ship in Mel Brooks' film Spaceballs.

That is all.

CIA Glasses

In the film Spy Game, everyone has these little 1991 mini-spectacles that are oval.

Then in walks the Head of the CIA, an authority figure, and he has HUGE glasses.

The moral of this story? Try and wear big glasses for management jobs. And, Hollywood, get your chronology right.

How Flash has an unfair advantage over other Web mediums

When playing DVDs or DIVX video files in Windows, sometimes the DVD player complains "Cannot get overlay surface".

What?

I thought nothing of it, and a Google search revealed nothing.

So I learned bits and pieces about these 'overlay surfaces':

*Only one overlay surface is available, and if a program has claimed it, another program can't use it (eg, a web browser claimed it, so my DVD player complains). Sometimes it gets 'trapped' and DxDiag has to be run (run the Display tests) to reset it.

*When it's not available, DIVX doesn't complain like my DVD player, but it's easy to see what happens without it: The video is pixellated and unwatchable (and jerky).

*Therefore, the overlay surface performs 2 functions: One is to smooth out the video, and the other is to speed up rendering.

So what?

Well, I noticed Flash looks slicker in a browser window than a GIF or JPEG. But GIFs are not lossy! So why is Flash visibly Flash?

Duh? Best guess - it's the overlay surface! Flash, being a natively-compiled browser plugin (not Javascript or Java, etc) cheats by grabbing the overlay surface for itself, just in the Flash window in the browser.

Is this fair? No! It means other video players in the browser look blocky in comparison. The browser graphics look blocky in comparison.

So the solution? Simple - give every browser window an overlay surface via DirectX. The difference in resolution and animation speed will be immediately visible.
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Postscript: Someone from Hacker News pointed out: It's not a overlay surface, it's a deblocking filter. But the same complaint: That Flash has a deblocking filter in the browser window when the HTML pages don't - stands.

Left-handedness and wristwatches

I noticed that left-handed people (like myself) wear their wrist watch on the right wrist. Right-handed people wear it on the left. Therefore, you can tell, from the position of the watch (in real life or in movies), the handed-ness. Bruce Willis is left-handed.