Austin TX entertainment: Puzzles, games, horoscopes, sudoku | Watercooler

Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > February > 27 > Entry

Avoiding Michael Bublé, thinking about tech and ‘Rock Band’

By Omar Gallaga | Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 03:53 PM

Tonight I’m going to a Michael Bublé concert with my wife (weep for me, friends), which is about as un-tech as you can get. Has Bublé even made it over to the 21st century yet? Will I be hearing vocal stylings from 1958, as if through a time-tube?

So I’m trying to cram in as much tech news into my brain as possible in the coming hours so I’ll have plenty rolling around up there while listening to “The Way You Look Tonight.” (Great, incidentally.)

Blu-ray wins, everyone’s happy, right? Not so fast, movie studios. DVDs in general are on the decline and I think the strategy of releasing portable versions of a movie on a DVD will prove too-little, too-late as people migrate toward downloads and other (potentially not legal) means of getting their movie fix.
Adobe has blown minds this week with the release of Air, which uses Flash to create a sort of cloud workspace where your Adobe applications and files can live online and… you know what? I’m not explaining this very well. Read the article. Trust me, this is huge.
It’s a little bare-in-the-cupboard so far, but expect to see a ton of videos related to South by Southwest Interactive on this unofficial site. iJustine has already posted something.
Speaking of South by Southwest, music genius Jonathan Coulton will be at the fest, and, if we all cross our fingers and wish our hardest, he will probably play the “Portal” hit “Still Alive” for us so we can all go, “SQUUEEEEEE!” In the meantime, you can watch a video of just such a performance. The song will be coming to “Rock Band” soon, which is also positive news of the highest order.
One of my big pet peeves is people writing about technology and then getting all the wording wrong. A press release for a political site, “HillarySpeaksforME,” makes mention of a couple of people deciding to create a viral video, which is wrong, wrong, wrong. You cannot create a viral video. Viral means people discover it and pass it on. You can’t generate that. “Video organism,” a phrase the press release also uses to describe a living video thingy that people add to, is probably a lot more accurate.
Local blogger Bill Harris breaks down the potential Electronic Arts/Take Two Interactive deal and it doesn’t sound good for gamers.