Roy of Superior Art Creations archive
Date : September 2008

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Star Trek, The Experience is Gone!

Categories: Personal, Video
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Published on: September 22, 2008

You heard correctly, Star Trek – The Experience is gone … where no Star Trek Experience has gone before …?? into oblivion. I just returned from Las Vegas today.?? I was at the Hilton Las Vegas yesterday and shocked to see that the Star Trek Experience is now closed, not for maintenance, updates, NO … FOREVER!!! It is actually closed already since September 1, 2008. WTF? Okay, I did the Experience already four times (or five, I am not 100% sure). I did it the first time in 2002 (or was it 2001?),?? when there was only the Klingon Encounter and then several times more, after they expanded the Experience with the Borg Invasion (4D) ride in early 2004 (I always liked the old Klingon ride much more, but then I also liked only the Original Series and Next Generation and never got into DS9, Voyager or Enterprise). What a loss! … and probably only because some greedy bastards could not agree on how to share the profits. The Experience wasn’t cheap (about $25 until 2004 and $40 or so, after they launched the second ride. Okay a bit less than that, one or a few bucks, but that does not matter anymore), plus the revenue from the gift shop and the overpriced “Quarks” restaurant that served TGI Friday’s kind of food for twice the price and half the quality. Not being profitable could not have been the reason for shutting it down after over 11 years of operation. It’s[…]

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Kooza DVD and Cirque C&D Letter

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Published on: September 17, 2008

This is my first post, using the Windows Live Writer application. It’s a free tool by Microsoft to make blog posts, supporting various blogging platforms beyond Windows Live Spaces. It was able to determine the blog layout and I can now see right when I type this, how it will probably look on the site. Another important feature, which made me giving Live Writer a shot, is the nice image upload feature via FTP. If all goes well, images that I insert here into the editor should be transferred over to my web server and the post in Blogger should refer to the images web URL instead of the local file on my hard-drive. Lets see how it works out :). They have a dedicated web site, an open SDK?? and a gallery with already 97 plug-ins available for download and use with the new Writer tool. I was able to configure the Writer for this blog (using classic Blogger with FTP to push to my servers), with SearchEngineJournal.com (WordPress), but not with ReveNews.com. I think that the problem with ReveNews.com has not to do with the Writer, but the configuration of the ReveNews.com blog itself, which is also using WordPress, like SEJ, where it worked instantly. Post Reason No. 1 Okay, but this is not the reason for my post. There are actually two much more significant reasons. Lets start with the first, which is much simpler and explained in no time, compared with reason number two. I got[…]

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Major YouTube Upgrade

Categories: Tools, Video
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Published on: September 9, 2008

I cannot recall when YouTube was as much unavailable for as long as it is today. Something major is cooking. There cannot be any other reason for this significant outage. You can see the following message on all pages on the YouTube website at this moment. “We are currently performing site maintenance. Be cool – we’ll be back 100% in a bit.” The user profile pages are not accessible. You can log-in and log-out and see a bit about your subscriptions, but that is pretty much all that you can do at your account area. You cannot access your videos (for updates), upload new videos, access ratings, messages or account settings.You can access videos via direct URL and play them, but there is no interactivity possible, such as video ratings, adding comments or adding a video to your favorites or a play list.It also seems that videos embedded in other websites are not working. I noticed problem with that already last night, which means that this update is going on for way over 16-17 hours already. Again, the same video on the YouTube site itself still works.Image caption: screen shot of video embed in this blog when I tried to play it.Comments on YouTube SiteOkay, I admit, the user interface of YouTube sucked. They tried to improve things here and there, but it kept on sucking. A major overhaul of it would be great.Google Video seems to be up, no sign of any upgrades there, although I had some issues[…]

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What is ASCII Art? What is ANSI? and more!

Categories: ANSI, Artscene, ASCII, history
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Published on: September 7, 2008

I added a significant amount of content to my ASCII Art Academy page on my site. I answered there in short what things are. I explain all this stuff in detail in various articles, but I think it is good to have a short and straight forward version on the main Academy home page as well. Here are some examples:What is ASCII Art?ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is a text format standard for computers. ASCII art is text art that was created on computers who use this ASCII standard. The text art created on the IBM PC, which use text characters beyond the ASCII standard are also called ASCII, even though it is technically incorrect. The IBM PC become the most widely used computer in the world and people called things ASCII, even if they were not. There is no sense to debate about it, because it won’t change what already happened. What is 7-Bit ASCII?The difference between 7-bit and 8-bit ASCII is pretty simple, assuming that you have a keyboard with the latin alphabet. 7-bit only uses characters that you can find on the keyboard. 8-bit uses additional characters that you cannot find on your keyboard, but which exist in “text mode” of the old MS DOS operating system. MS DOS hat 256 characters for text mode. Some of them are control characters and not visible, such as Carriage Return, Line Feed (Line Break), the Tab character or the Escape character. The standard US-ASCII[…]

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The Berlin Wall History – Lessons Learned … Again

Categories: Politics, Video
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Published on: September 4, 2008

I did a long and detailed post about the Berlin Wall in June, titled “The Berlin Wall and the Walls between Us“. It also included a 13 minutes extended edition of my video “Berlin Wall – Lessons Learned“. It was already version 3 of the video (Here are the links to version 2 and version 1 of the video as well, just for the sake of completeness). Why the different versions? Well, there are multiple reasons. First, I improved my editing skills and was able to do things better where I was unhappy about in a previous version of the video. I also got access to new or sometimes just better quality sources. One of the latest discoveries was a high quality video version of the episode “The Berlin Wall” from the National Geographic TV series “Turning Points Of History”. That 45 minutes documentary virtually contained the video snippets of all my video sources about the 1950-1970s that I already had from elsewhere (stock footage, public domain etc.), but in much better quality. I spent the last few days on version 4.0 of my video. This time I did re-created it entirely from scratch. It’s not just an edit of the previous version. I even re-cut, re-edited and re-sorted the sources again. This version is a whopping 30 min (almost) long. Note: Google Video messed something up. It shows only the first 5:41 minutes of the video. I will re-upload it again and try to figure out what the problem[…]

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