New Fox show – Joe Millionaire

Metafilter makes mention of a new show on Fox, Joe Millionaire. There's a bit of a spoiler below, so stop reading now if you don’t want to hear it (granted, it’s a spoiler that will probably be widely known by the audience watching the show).

“Joe” features 20 single women who fly to France in order to win the affection of a hand-some American they believe to be worth $50 million. The twist: The as-yet unidentified man is actually a construction worker with an annual income of $19,000. […]

As a fan of “reality tv”, this could be interesting.

Proposal for Easier Photo Printing

PC World reports that various camera makers are working on a standard to ease photo printing.

A group of six digital still camera makers and printer vendors, including Sony and Hewlett-Packard, have jointly proposed a new industry standard that allows images recorded by a digital still camera to be printed out without using a computer, they announced on Monday.

The DPS standard—which is a name, not an acronym—is being proposed by Canon, Sony, HP, Fuji Photo Film, Olympus Optical, and Seiko Epson. […]

I’m pleased to hear that, though if I buy a new digicam within the next couple weeks (which is currently the plan), I suppose it won’t have that feature. C'est la vie.

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: