Episode II on IMAX

I went to see Star Wars Episode II on IMAX with some high school friends yesterday. I wish I could say that it was even better on The Big Screen, but it actually wasn’t.

For starters, several scenes were cut from the film, though most of them weren’t crucial to the film as a whole (such as the Anakin & Amidala meadow scene). As best as I Can recall, about four or five scenes were cut.

More than that, the super-large size of the screen made it hard to follow some of the action. Because of their size, many of the intricate lightsaber battles just resembled flashes of blue and red light. Battle scenes such as those were really more appropriate for the Medium Screen.

I will say that the level of detail was astounding. At that size and resolution, I could clearly see the makeup on Natalie Portman’s face (and Hayden Christensen’s face as well). The detail did make the film more enjoyable (though, unfortunately, not enjoyable enough to offset the not-made-for-IMAX sizing problems).

The detail also gave me new appreciation for the CG work on Yoda. Most of the time, the CG modeling held up well (though some CG lighting problems became evident during full-screen close-ups).

In all, I had a good time. However, it was more of a novelty than anything else. If you’re really in the mood for watching Episode II again, you're probably best off just buying the DVD.

Wifi / 802.11b Hotspots and Maps

I’ll be in the Dallas and Pittsburgh airports over the next few days, so I was curious if either of those airports had 802.11b access. I had a hard time finding information on this, but I eventually crafted the the right search terms to come up with these sites:

Outfoxing TiVo

TiVo has a suggestions system where, if you have extra free space on the drive, it records shows that it thinks you might like (based on previous shows you’ve recorded). This, however, creeps some people out:

Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described “straightest guy on earth,” he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other “guy stuff.”

“The problem was, I overcompensated,” he says. “It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich.” […]

(Link from ObscureStore)