Holy Snapping Turtle!

I did not know turtles were predators.

Indiana Jones and the Gran Torino

This week’s Cutting Room Floor guest stars Matt’s wife Khrysti. It’s a really good show, you should check it out.

And with that, I’m finally caught up with editing these things. You’ll see them come out at a more sedate one per week schedule now.

Three Gee Yes!

I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for one week now (yes, I did buy one on the first day they were available, but I didn’t wait in line for it – the AT&T store here in east-nowhere had plenty) and I’d like to share with you my impressions.

Now I’m not going to go on and on about the faster response due to the hardware, although that is impressive, or the fact that upgrading from a first generation iPhone to anything with 3G and GPS is awesome. Nor will I sing the praises of Copy and Paste, although the inclusion of them is of course the long-awaited cherry on the top of the iPhone Sundae.

No, better people than me have written about all these things.

What I want to talk about are some of the lesser publicized benefits of drinking the 3GS Kool-Aid.

Play It Again

On the Edge version of the iPhone (not sure how this worked on the 3G) if you were listening to music (or, more likely in my case, a podcast) and paused it, probably using the button on the earbuds, there was some period of time during with clicking the earbud button again would un-pause the audio.

I never figured out how long this was, but if you waited too long (definitely 10 or 15 minutes was too long) nothing would happen and you would have to dig the phone out of your pocket, unlock it, go back to the iPod application and hit the play icon to start it up.

With the 3GS, the play/pause functionality on the earbuds seems to have no timeout. This, to me, is the equivalent of your car stereo starting up at the same spot every time you turn on the car, versus resetting to some idle state if the car is off for more than fifteen minutes.

Jam and Edge

It was almost comical, a few months after the iPhone came out, everybody suddently became specifically aware of the noise that GSM signals caused when interfering with audio equipment. I remember sitting in the meeting room at work, with severn or eight people packing iPhones and the conference call speaker phone sputtering the whole time.

The worst part, though, was that I had to put my phone into Airplane Mode whenever hooking it up to the radio in my car. This is probably because the radio (and the car) is somewhat old and doesn’t have the shielding necessary to deal with today’s electronic interference. But still it was a pain.

With the 3GS (and I assume the 3G), this all went away. Sure, I still get some interference, but a) it happens so infrequently and has such short duration that it is easily ignorable and b) the 3G interference noise is so much less offensive than the Edge noise.

The Edge interference noise was usually louder than the volume coming out of the stereo and, at least in the areas I tend to drive through, was “on” more than it was “off”. It was so bad that driving the 3 minutes to my allergy shots from work, I couldn’t leave the phone’s GSM radio on because I wouldn’t be able to listen to anything without the interference killing it.

The 3G interference noise is much quieter, and on some level, it also just sounds like the data is being passed so much quicker, which is probably why it doesn’t last as long. It’s like listening to a 9600KBaud modem connection noise versus a 2400 Kbaud.

I’ve driven to and from work and all around town this week with the 3GS plugged into the car stereo, and the noise has been on the order of a few seconds per day, versus 30+ seconds for every minute on Edge.

And lest you think that I’m an anomaly, I don’t live in a major metropolitan area (proof: right down my street is a place that, until recently, had a sign outside that said “Taxidermist/Beauty Salon”) so my 3G coverage should not be any better than most places around the country.

I’m Ready For My Close-Up Mr. Damille

But the most surprising, and coolest, thing about the 3GS is the camera.

Of course this was a major weakness of the original (and 3G) iPhone. Even though it had 2.0 Megapixels (which, coincidentally, is the same as my decrepit point-and-shoot Canon camera) the tiny optics and lack of exposure and focus control made it only useful because it was the one camera you always had on you. My pictures were consistently blurry and lint-covered. Not to mention over/under-exposed.

The 3GS not only has a 3.0 Megapixel camera, with focus and exposure controls (to some degree) which actually work pretty well, but it adds video capability.

You all knew this already. But there is one feature of the video camera that deserves special mention.

How many of us have, when we first got hold of a digital camera that shot video, rotated the camera 90 degrees to capture something in portrait aspect ratio, only to find, upon importing it into the computer, that neither the camera nor the computer could compensate for that, and now you’re stuck with either fixing it in some high-end software like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, or watching what you recorded with your head tilted at a painful angle?

I mean, the cameras are smart enough to rotate still photos 90 degrees, but they don’t seem to understand how to do that with video.

Engineers at Apple must have run into this because they hooked the video camera into the tilt sensor of the phone, so that if you turn it, it still plays back right-side up. This is one of the many touches that make me think that Apple could dominate the camera market if they a) wanted to, and b) hired enough optics experts away from Canon and/or Nikon.

All Is Not Well

There are, however, a few missteps, as there always are, even with Apple.

First of all, the iPhone 3GS does not come with a dock to set it in while charging/syncing. I don’t know if the 3G came with one, but the Edge one did, and I used it daily. Apple charges $29 for one. Is anyone going to pay that much? I’m not.

The next one is probably a fluke, but the power adapter that came with my phone doesn’t work. I did the whole combinatorial testing suite (old adapter, new cable; new adapter, old cable; etc) and came to the undeniable conclusion that my power adapter does not charge.

So I called up the AT&T store, and using the imperfect choices on their menu, got shunted over to Apple’s support line. Apple’s tech support guy took fifteen minutes and a consultation with a “technical specialist” to tell me to go to the AT&T store for a replacement part.

You’re probably smart enought to predict that when I got to the AT&T store, they said I had to go to the Apple store, since AT&T doesn’t stock replacement parts. So now I need to trek over to the Apple store, which is much farther than the AT&T store, to get it replaced.

I haven’t heard any other reports of anyone’s adapter being DOA, so like I said, this is probably just a fluke.

My third complaint is about the shape. The rounded back of the 3GS (and 3G) is problematic. The Edge phone had a nice flat back that remained stable when you pushed the home button while it was on a tabletop.

Not so with the 3G varieties. I understand that they had to increase the thickness of the middle part of the phone due to increased hardware so the tapered the ends give the illusion of thinness, but I’d rather have a slightly thicker phone all the way down than try to type on a weeble-wobble.

My last complaint is perhaps not unique to the 3GS, but I haven’t tested it on any other platform. And it’s sort of one of those “problems you’d love to have” kind of things.

You see, my company operates a Wifi network. I’ve had my Edge iPhone connected to it for at least the past year. It’s nice because when I’m in part of the building where reception is good, bandwidth was noticeably better than Edge speeds.

Now that I have access to the 3G network (such that it is on AT&T), my throughput on 3G anywhere in the building is faster than the best throughput on the corporate Wifi. So, I told my phone to ignore that Wifi network. Done and done.

Or so I thought.

Every time I open up Mail, Safari, or any other net-enabled application, it asks me if I want to join the very network that I told it to ignore. What was the point of ignoring it?

If anyone knows how to stop the phone from asking me to join this network, please let me know. It’s kind of annoying.

Until then, I’ll keep hitting “Cancel” every time it comes up and enjoying my 3GS speed demon.

My Mom Thinks It’s Funny

Karen, Sunday and John join us for this week’s Cutting Room Floor. Your iPod will never be the same.

Calling all collectors and fanatics!

Open Casting Call!

NeoZAZ is currently holding an open casting call for any all collectors. If you have an incredible collection / shrine / or anything dedicated to a movie, TV show, or celebrity, we want to help you show it off to the world in a new documentary currently titled “The Diehards”.

So if you’re diehard fan and would like to share it with the world, we want to hear from you!  Please fill out the form below if you would be willing to spend a few hours with a member of our crew to film your collection and participate in an interview.

Current we’re looking for collectors and fanatics in the Bucks County and Allentown area of Pennsylvania, and Central Florida and Tampa Regions of Florida.  We are also considering surround regions (New Jersey and New York City for PA crew, and Northern Florida and Atlanta GA areas for the FL crew) for any outstanding collections and subject matter.

You’ve spent time, money, and energy gathering these testaments to your fandom, and we want to immortalize it on film!

Please fill out all the section below for initial consideration or participation in “The Diehards”

Note: All responses to submissions will be answers from “castingcall [at symbol] neozaz.com”. Please be sure to check you junk and/or spam filter if you haven’t seen a reply.

DNA = Tentacles

We suffered through ninety minutes of Bai Ling in leather corsets for you, our dear listeners. Go check out the latest Cutting Room Floor.

The Spectacular Incredible “Untitled”!

Now that Perfect Ending is over (“it’s finally over”) it’s time to move on to new projects to continue to hone our skills and increase our hands on experience in the wonderful world of no-budget filmmaking.

First up is the Untitled documentary project starting a just a couple of weeks. Untitled because we keep getting good leads that related to the central theme of the original idea but don’t quite match our original intention. But, instead of passing up these great opportunities, it seems better to constantly adjust the unifying theme of the documentary rather than saying “no” to people gracious enough to let us in to there homes and share their time with us.

So, here’s a run down of the evolution so far on “Untitled”:

First working title: “In the Original Box”
Concept: A documentary about toy collectors that have meticulously kept their collections neat and tide in their original boxes. Documentary would include tour or the collection and candid interviews with the collectors and their close friends and family.

Second working title: “Don’t Call Them Toys”
Reason for the title change: We found too many good collections and willing collectors that featured toys and collectables out of their original boxes to stick with the “original box” theme.
Concept: A documentary about toy collectors, mainly Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Superhero. Documentary would include tour or the collection and candid interviews with the collectors and their close friends and family.

Third working title: “Fanaticism”
Reason for title change: We found 2 “things”, I don’t know what you’d even call them, that aren’t toys but are a collection of sorts and would be fascinating to film.
Concept: Uh… I’ll get back to you.

Forth working title: Untitled
Reason for title change: Found even more indescribable collections/homage/I don’t know what to call them, so until I have all the interviews and tour scheduled, I’m not committing to a title.

Oddly enough during the course of these changes, the questions we’ve been tossing around to ask the collectors and the friends and family don’t need that much adjusting, they’re still applicable, at least with some minor tweaking. Good thing I haven’t actually written down any questions yet.

WTF? Snow? Really?!

It’s 80 degrees out, has been for a while now. So imagine my surprise that on my way home from work – after a pretty bitchin’ thunderstorm – I see what looks like snow on the side of the road. Good-sized clumps of it, no less. How does this happen?

Guns Are Good, Penises Are Bad

Due to a fortunate accident with a wormhole, I was able to crank out another episode of the Cutting Room Floor this weekend. Enjoy.

Star Wars Planet of the Hoojibs

In one of the many incarnations of the numerous versions of the Fan Film The Series episode 1 script, there was a sequence of shots where my character was to be research some odd extend universe material about the original trilogy. The ideas were a shot of reading “Splinter in the minds eye”, playing the original Star Wars arcade game, spinning the wheels on a Star Wars slot machine, and paging through the read-a-long book “Planet of the Hoojibs.” I had the Arcade game, I was in Vegas 2000 times that years so I got a couple shots at the slot machine, and I have a copy of Splinter floating around somewhere, but the one thing I was missing was “Planet of the Hoojibs”. Well, thanks to eBay, I found a copy for 99 cents. I figured it was too cheap to pass up and even if I didn’t use it I’d have an interesting collectable that maybe worth $1.50 in 10 years or so. So I bought it. Ultimately that scene never made it in the final re-writes of the scripts we filmed for Episode 1 (all 4 versions), so it never got to be experienced in all it’s glory. It’s time to rectify that. So, here is “Star Wars, Planet of the Hoojibs” in all its glory. Enjoy this action packed story, that’s still better than the prequel storylines:

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