MetroCard Fare Hike

I'll be entertaining a lot of out-of-town family members this Spring and Summer, so much of our NYC adventures will have to be well planned. Part of that will deal with which MetroCards to buy. Here are my tips for the recent fare hike:

Unlimited Cards
The "fun pass" @ $7.50 is really not that fun anymore unless you ride 4x within a day. The 7-day pass is $25 (must use 13x per week) and the 30-day is now $81 (must use 41x per month). There's also a new 14-day pass for $47 (must use 24x in 2 weeks). The monthly pass still has the best bang for buck, but 41 uses in a month is pretty high. If you're a regular commuter and you work the full month, that's about 20 rides ($40). If you take one day off and don't go out on weekends, then you'll lose out. The other 2 are even worse. If you buy the 7-day pass, 10 uses for the work week amounts to $20. You have to ride 3 more times for it to be worth the money. For regular commuters, the monthly is the only way to go unless you have a long vacation coming up. The 7-day pass is good for tourists who plan to stay in NYC for a week or so. You'll surely get 13 uses out of it.

Pay-Per-Rides
The base fare remains at $2, but the discount was reduced from 20% to 15%. So if you buy a $10 card, you no longer get the free ride. Instead, you get a $1.50 bonus... an odd balance that forces you to refill the card. A $20 card has a $3 bonus... a free ride + an odd $1 balance. If you don't want to deal with the hassle of refilling cards and dealing with odd balances, then it's best to just spend $40 to get a $6 (3-ride) bonus. This is the card for you if you only use the subway once in a while. Another option is to buy cards from a store or street vendor for $17.39 (10 rides) or $52.17 (30 rides).

DVDeals 3/2 - 3/8

Circuit City Deals
Ong Bak - $5.99
i, Robot - $5.99
Matrix - $5.99
Terminator - $5.99
Die Hard - $5.99
Harold & Kumar - $5.99
Romeo Must Die - $4.99

Best Buy Deals
Blade - $4.99
Bloodsport - $4.99
Space Balls - $4.99

Beowulf: Director's Cut DVD

Story: 7
Action: 8
Acting: 8
FX: 8
Durability: 8
Special Features: 5

The recent, fully animated version of Beowulf was an interesting interpretation of the original. All of the major events happened in sequence, but the characters were connected differently. The original epic poem was more about symbolism and allegory than relation of the characters to each other. In the movie, Hrothgar is connected to Grendel and his mother. Beowulf is connected to the dragon. The dragon is connected to Grendel's mother. Beowulf is connect to Wealthow. All of those relationships were a little strange and some a bit of a stretch, but it goes along with the theme of the "cycle of kings."

The 3-D modeling and animation were both well executed. Beowulf, Unferth, Wiglaf and Grendel's mother were some of the best human 3-D models I've ever seen. The motion was also accurate. They motion captured everything, including the horses!

I was a little disappointed with the special features on this disc. For a movie that was so well-crafted, one would expect a full 2nd disc of features. And there was no commentary track, something I was looking forward to. Usually movies like this have at least 2 commentaries... one for the actors and one for the directors & fx people.

Related: Mr. Hobbs' Beowulf, Official Site

Street Fighter in Sumi-E

Back when I posted E.G.Y., Street Fighter IV was still in its early stages. There were only 2 videos available... a teaser of the opening sequence and a Ryu vs. Ken demo. There were only screenshots of Ryu and Ken, but it looked like something that was never done before. The intro. animation can be described as painting in motion. Each frame looked like a finished oil painting. The hits and fast motion were exaggerated with sumi-e ink splashed.


During gameplay, the characters look like carefully painted sculptures. They were definitely modeled in 3-D, but have a hand-painted quality to them. There must've been a tremendous amount of work put into this because I don't think it was merely 2-D textures mapped into 3-D models. It looks as if each individual frame was colored separately. So if you add this up so far... an oil painting is considered high art... a representation in 2 dimensions. A 3-D model, like a sculpture adds a 3rd dimension. Combining many images viewed in sequence created the illusion of motion and adds the element of time. Then when user inputs control different motions over time, the element of interactivity is added. All of these things could make Street Fighter IV the highest form of art to date!

Since my previous post, more of the characters have been developed. If you want to see what Ryu, Ken, Chun Li, Guile, Honda, Dhalsim, Zangief and Blanka look like, check out IGN. At least we know the original 8 world warriors will be back in #4. I can't wait to see Sagat. He's the one I'm always most interested in because he's one of the largest video game sprites.

DVDeals 2/24 - 3/1

New Releases
Beowulf gets released this Tuesday! It's an unrated director's cut too. Hopefully that means more action and not additional footage of the naked wrestling match with Grendel. Circuit City wins the prize again, offering this title for $13.99 along with an exclusive feature showcasing the dragon. Target is offering it with an exclusive comic, but for $16.99... so you can go with that if you think the comic is worth the $3 extra. Best Buy has exclusive trading cards for the 1st 39 customers, but for $14.99.

Circuit City Deals
Superman: Brainiac Attacks - $4.99
Justice League Unlimited - $4.99
Justice League: Justice on Trial - $4.99
Justice League: The Brave & The Bold - $4.99
Willow - $6.99
Troy - $6.99
Forrest Gump (Collector's) - $6.99
Saving Private Ryan - $6.99
Rocky - $6.99

Zipping Through the Ages

Original Dates: 1995-1997

I spent a good part of the afternoon reorganizing the hardware of my primary desktop system. That might sound strange, but believe me, it takes that long because there are tons of peripherals connected to this thing. I reassessed which devices were being used and decided to remove 2 things... a cradle for a Handspring Visor Pro that I no longer sync with this system... and an Iomega Firewire Zip 250. The Zip drive has always been on my main system in one form or another since 1995. Since I haven't really used it much in over 2 years, I finally removed it. With flash drives, portable 2.5" drives and DVR+Rs, the Zip is pretty much obsolete now. Here's a flashback to the Zip's glory days:

Speedy SCSI
The first model I owned was the SCSI Zip 100 (I still have this and it still works). We mostly used Mac systems in class, so we had no choice but to go with the less common SCSI interface. I had to buy a SCSI card for my PC at home. It was a little more expensive (than the Parallel Port Zip), but worth the money as the SCSI version was much faster. Like my classmates, I carried the drive around every day, connecting and disconnecting several times from my system and the school's computers. It was always reliable and never broke.

Dethroning the Champ
Before the Zip drive, people were using the bulky Syquest drives... which eventually evolved into the smaller EZDrive. The Zip quickly dethroned this competitor mainly because of the way it was constructed. The Zip was made mostly out of cheap plastic, but cleverly constructed in such a way that made it hard to break. The EZDrive basically tried to take a hard drive and recontruct it so that the "disc" portion would be removable. This resulted in a hi-speed, hi-capacity drive that would spin itself to death. They also couldn't take the shock of being in a backpack while walking because there were heavy metal parts enclosed by plastic.

Taking Over
After college, I converted my dad's office from using the clunky Iomega Bernoulli drives to the much more portable zips. Pretty much all of my friends had these too. Before CD-R's dropped in price, Zips really became a standard. I also upgraded to a Firewire Zip 250 when I got my new system. That was useful for transferring files from the office and backing up my work.

10 years later and we're now carrying GB thumb drives. In another 10 years, it's probably going to be even tinier TB drives!

Recommended Firefox Plugins

Here are my favorite Firefox plugins for developers & designers:

Download Status Bar
This reduces the clutter of popup status windows for downloads and displays just as much information. It's also very configurable... and that's what you like... otherwise you wouldn't be using Firefox in the first place!
- Description
- Developer's Site
- Install Now

Dummy Lipsum
This mini application lets you instantly generate the dummy pseudo-Latin commonly used for mockups and placeholder text.
- Description
- Developer's Site
- Install Now

Tab to Window
I wish this one was built-in to Firefox because I keep wanting to do it! This is like being able to pull a tab out into a new window, almost like the Photoshop palettes.
- Description
- Developer's Site
- Install Now

Link Checker
This is a great way to check page links quickly, especially when you have hundreds of links on the page.
- Description
- Developer's Site
- Install Now

Related: Firefox Add-ons, Robin's Favorites

Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight

Story: 8
Action: 7
Acting: 7
FX: 6
Durability: 7

As a kid, this was my favorite novel/series. People will probably think it's blasphemy when I say that the Dragonlance Chronicles are better than the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Since I put this story on such a high pedestal, I thought there was no way this animation could be good. The stills I saw looked like 2 different artistic styles. While this movie had no chance of being better than any of the Lord of the Rings movies, I was not disappointed. The finished product looked a lot better than expected.

The story was accurate but a bit rushed. It was very loyal to the book and even included some of the memorable details like Tas pickpocketing Flint's dagger. The book had so much content, so I can't really hold the pace of the movie against the creators. It could easily have been a full season TV series.

It was interesting to see the personalities of the characters take substance on the big screen. They acted just as I used to imagine them... a playful Tas, slightly grumpy Flint, a torn Tanis, etc. Voices were played by a talented cast that included Keifer Sutherland as Raistlin and Lucy Lawless as Goldmoon.

I didn't think the dual animation style was necessary though. They used 2-D for the human characters and 3-D for the dragons and draconians. They did a good job integrating the two, but it wasn't really seamless. The 3-D was sort of dumbed down, but still looked like 3-D.

As a fan of the novel, I will definitely watch this one over and over as it has also inspired me to reread the books again. I hope that Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons or Spring Dawning are in the works.

DVDeals 2/17 - 2/23

New Releases
Finally, there's something good on DVD Tuesday. It's American Gangster and Bourne Ultimatum this week. For American Gangster, the lowset price on the 2-Disc edition is at Circuit City for $13.99. The 3-Disc edition is $24.99 pretty much everywhere. Bourne Ultimatum is also cheapest at Circuit City... $13.99 ($15.99+ elsewhere).

Circuit City Deals
Scarface - $6.99
Good Fellas - $6.99
Ocean's Eleven - $6.99
Ocean's Twelve - $6.99
Italian Job - $6.99

Best Buy Deals
Casino - $4.99
Ultimate Avengers - $3.99
Ultimate Avengers 2 - $3.99
Punisher - $3.99
Running Man - $3.99
Iron Man - $3.99
TMNT Vol. 2 - $3.99

Ms. Khafif's AP Art History

Original Dates: Fall 1991- Summer 1992

A couple of weeks ago, I uploaded some of my old vacation photos to Frommers.com. As I was writing the captions, I was surprised that I used words like oculus, coffers, bas relief, frieze, dolmens and megaliths all in one day. Where did this come from? Well, it started way back in the early 90's. My first period class during my junior year in high school was AP Art History with Ms. Khafif... another major turning point in my life.

The class began as a normal sized one... maybe 15 people. It quickly became 6, as students dropped it out of intimidation. That's the smallest class I've ever been in... 6! It was great because we all became close and had a lot of personal attention from Ms. Khafif. This was the most difficult and intense academic class I've ever taken. I'm glad I had it in high school because it gave me the proper conditioning to do as well as I did in college. We had to read around 50 pages per night and I believe chapter outlines were required. Luckily I had that experience from junior high science with Mr. Root. We had 10-page term papers during long vacations and then the college level AP test at the end of the year. During and after this class, I didn't have lower than an A- in any other class from my junior year on. In college, I never had below an A- in any academic class. And I attribute that streak to this high school AP Art History class. It wasn't just the grades though. This class helped gain interest in all other classes. Before, I put in very little effort. If I worked as hard as I did during my freshman and sophomore years, I could've gotten close to a valedictorian GPA.