I hold a Ph.D. in Horribleness...

After watching Act II of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I am still hooked with both line and sinker. One thing that you must come to realize is that the music is very good so, sadly, few people will actually be able to sing along.

Anyway, here is a run down of Act II and my thoughts on it [SPOILER Alert]:
Notice I'm not really into actors and such, so I will pretty much just go by character names. The act starts out with a great duet between Dr. Horrible and Penny as they go through shifts in their lives. Dr. Horrible is wandering the streets and secretly monitoring Penny and Captain Hammer as they go on a date. I particularly liked it when Dr. Horrible pretends to be working the soup line and only pours soup back into the container out of which he is ladling it. It's a great scene because it has a kind of funny characteristic to it, but also shows how Dr. Horrible is actually feeling hate build up inside of him for the first time.

The next scene takes place at the Coin Wash laundromat while Penny and "Billy" (Dr. Horrible's alternate identity) are doing their wash together. He does that thing that a lot of gelious guys do and asks her all about a date he already knows about to find out how she "really" feels about the other guy. Also, there is a very awkward metaphor about pie. Unfortunately for him, Penny is really into Captain Hammer and Billy is clearly losing ground with her.

There is a little break in the chronology as Dr. Horrible post a video blog post online and discusses his plans to use the Freeze Ray. After a very enthusiastic statement purpose, the blog cuts to a post where his shop is darker and he explains how the previous post gave him away to the authorities and he botched his whole plan. Even super-villans forget about the ubiquity of the internet sometimes. This part is pretty hilarious overall. :)

At the end of the previous segment, Billy gets a call from Bad Horse (or at least his cowboy posse). It seems his flubbed operation now leaves him with murder as his last chance at getting into the League. He now has to choose who to kill and how.

Back at the laundromat: Just as Billy and Penny get close to an intimate moment, Captain Hammer shows up and Dr. Horrible learns that Captain Hammer is only with Penny to mess with him. He promises a "great time" with Billy's crush later that night.

All of this leave Dr. Horrible with the clear decision to kill Captain Hammer and hope that Penny understands. I think you can probably guess where this is going...only the How? and Where? remain.
[/SPOILER Alert]

This episode was definitely darker than last time and I'm interested to see where it goes from here. Your thoughts?

Dr. Horrible May Be My New Favorite Show!

I was expecting something pretty decent from the first act of Dr. Horrible, but I was COMPLETELY blow away by it. The acting was extremely good, the story is very compelling, and if a regular pilot was as good as this one people would already be wondering about its second season.

My Take (SPOILER Alert):
The main character, Dr. Horrible, is basically a guy who has decided to become a super-villan but is struggling to pull anything reasonably evil together. He has been rejected from the League of Evil several times and has just gotten a letter indicating that he might be showing some promise. His roommate, "Moist," is the horny engineer guy from The Big Bang Theory (another GREAT show, btw) and has the amazing power to make things...unpleasently moist. They mention a few other characters but we may or may not hear more about them. Both guys are clearly in that awkward nerd phase of their 30-something lives. It is way funnier that they are both also comic book-ish evil doers.

The superhero is played by the same guy who played Captain Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) in Firefly. He is perfect for the role and plays the jerkish superhero. It reminds me a bit of Hancock except instead of not caring because he hates his job, he doesn't care because he doesn't have to.

There is a love interest in "Penny" (same as Big Bang Theory...popular name for girls that geeks love), but she has little character development except that she's nice and cares about people.

The action scene was good and I love how they used and iPhone!
[/SPOILER Alert]

Oh and did I mention it's like a kind of musical? Way to merge like 4 genres!

Definitely check it out and see how you like it. I know I'll be waiting with baited breath for the next act. Also, if this doesn't get turned into a show by the sheer love of the fans, I will be very disappointed!

Link to Act II Recap

Corlive: Better Than Email? [Corlive Review]

If ever there were a double-edged sword, it would be "E-mail." How many great conversations, correspondences, or even automated services have you been exposed to through our magical electronic mail system? For free no less? How many millions of SPAM have you gotten? How many weird people have found you and sent you disturbing messages?

Email has been around for quite a while and despite it's obvious benefit to the world, there are a few inherent flaws. For this reason, developers and IT people have been trying to prop it up with spam filters, phishing detectors, and complex organizational controls. Few have been able to come up with any reasonable kind of alternative though. IM requires both parties to be present, as does the phone, voice messages are fought with problems, and microblogging is limited in both features and in length.

Here is a new service, though, that seems to have mulled over the problem and given their best shot at a true email alternative. It's called Corlive and it works by housing everything on an internal system that is best accessed by a URL. Instead of requiring messages to be sent between servers and loaded on to multiple machines, the entire process goes on within Corlive and generally stays in "the cloud." It's kind of like Gmail if every user was a Gmail user and all of the messages just hung out in your online inbox.

The way it works is each user who wants to recieve mail creates a nickname on Corlive.com. A bit of advice: almost every nickname is available right now so if you want to make sure you get the one you want, I'd grab it now. Registering creates a simple online inbox that you can can check for messages. The account holder can then distribute a link that takes anyone, registered or not, directly to a message entry form. The link can have several attributes (based on a simple syntax) that will either autogenerate a specific subject for the message or (in the future) send the message to a specific user folder.

Try it out: click this link to send me a message. I need to test it out, so really, say hello!

If you want to be notified when you have new messages, there is a small background app that can alert you from the system tray. So far it seems to be small and useful.

This closed system (in the sense that it is internalized, not that it is restricted to certain people) has a lot of advantages as well as some potential disadvantages. I plan on writing a detailed analysis for MakeUseOf.com, but I'll share of my initial thoughts with you here:

Advantages:

• Messages will always get from the sender to the recipient (unless all of Corlive is down)
• Spam is apparently impossible because robots can't use Corlive - I'm talking with Corlive about this and will update it with how they specifically prevent bots. Update: From the Corlive Admin, "Every user after sending more than x messages in 24 hours will see a captcha and will be required to answer it. So 'normal' users won't be bothered, and spamers or bots will be."
• The system is simple, compared to some of the crazy email systems out there
• It works a lot more like a social network identity than an email system
• Links can be filled with information by the recipient user - Corlive might even be able to build an app to generate custom URLs easily
• You don't have to wait until it is very popular to start using it
  

Disadvantages:

• As of right now, very few features
• A great deal of dependance on Corlive's servers
• There may be scalability issues - case in point: Twitter
• It isn't incredibly secure at the moment
• There is no API, interoperability with other services, mobile version, or even many profile options - a beta in the true sense of the word
  

All the doom and gloom aside, it's pretty good at what it's advertised to do. I like it so much that I've actually added it to my left-hand navigation bar as my primary contact method (aside from social networks, which are more fun). The link above adds a specific subject line, but the permanent one leaves that part blank. I'm excited to see what they decide to do with it in the future. Are you?

[Email diagram from Wikipedia under GNU-FDL]

Dr. Horrible Could Be Awesome or Could Be...Well, You Know

Joss Wedon has come out with another project and as the Firefly-loving fanboy that I am, I will blindly post his widget and hope it comes out amazingly. Two days till launch!


For more info, check out the Official Site as well as the Fan Site.

Iran's Press Corp Doctors Missile Test Image

Iran's Sepah News, the Revolutionary Guard's media organization, posted this picture last week. It is apparently of four missiles shooting up into the sky during one of their aggressive missile tests. The picture was carried on the front page of "The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites" according to the New York Times.

As it turns out, this image has been doctored. It's not obvious, but some clever people on the internet checked out the contrast and noticed where one missile had obviously been copied and made into two. Also, the clouds of smoke under the "new" missile are borrowed from yet another missile.

Original pic below:

Here is the analysis:

Good job Iran! We're not really sure why having 3 missiles is much worse than having 4, but clearly you felt it was worth the risk of looking foolish to every blogger on the internet.

[New York Times via Geeks are Sexy]

Off The Beat - Two New Articles

Hey Readers,

Since I usually plug my own stuff on here shamelessly, I figured I might as well group those links together in clumps so you can either read um or not. I'm calling it "Off The Beat," as in "off Mason Tech Beat." You know you like it.

This week I published two new articles on MakeUseOf.com. I can always use Diggs and Stumbles! Check um out:

• IrFanView Blows Windows Viewer Out of the Water
• Revo Uninstaller Will Hunt Down Your Bloatware

Also, I have been posting a ton of stuff to iPhoneFreak.com this week because of the big launch, so feel free to look at the recent posts on there too.

Have a great week!

iPhone Update Servers Are Down Internationally [Update]

Well this morning has been a bit not-fun for me...to say the least...

First of all, when I got up this morning to connect my iPhone to my computer, I got a nasty "Cannot Connect" error. I've seen this one before, but I couldn't remember what to do. After repairing my connection (which didn't want to do things like load web pages), I finally found the culprit was the dock. For some reason iTunes can be finicky about routing things through the dock and a direct USB connection is the only cure.

I dugg out another iPhone cable (I have quite a collection now) and got it to sync. Shortly after this I was downloading the giant file that is the iPhone 2.0 firmware. It took 15 minutes to download and another 10 to install, but I finally had it. Or so I though...

When iTunes tried to activate my "new" phone, I got an error about my connection. After reading the news, I discovered that I, like many others, was now trapped in the iBrick stage of firmware installation. Apple's international iPhone activation servers are down. I don't mean slow or sketchy, I mean down with a capital D. There are some weird suggestions to get on, but it seems that the system is completely FUBAR.

I just wrote this up on iPhoneFreak if you want a (slightly) more professional take on Apple's server explosion.

[Image via Gizmodo]

Update: The authorization servers seem to be back up and running now. I got my iPhone re-activated and the new Apps are amazing. More to come on them in the future!