My biggest fan (well, my wife that is) advises that I should have more humor in my column. Most people who know me realize that I actually have little humor myself, except a certain, small, dry humor. And it's getting harder and harder to take a witty stand about our lovely area when faced with some of the local issues. How can I joke when tripping over the mysterious rocks that appeared on the Oak Island beach - we all know why they are there, where they came from, and who put them there. Haha does not describe how I feel about the grid-locked new intersection at 211 and Long Beach Road. I just have barrels of laughs thinking about the recently identified need to widen 211, when the DOT just put a huge sum (and a huge inconvenience to us) to repaint part of it without widening critical areas - and now we can do it again.
And the biggest gulp goes to the Southport waterfront and marina - losing exactly those small fishing town attributes that people wanted to move here for. Oh, and I did I mention the new Port?
But, I digress.
I thought I saw a ghost, an echo of times gone by this month. Back in the early days of PCs and before the Internet and YouTube, print media were the only form of news and advertisement. There were a number of PC magazines - Byte, PC Magazine, PC World - which were huge. At one point in time, PC Magazine was so big that they went to a semi-monthly format.
But the biggest and king of them all was Computer Shopper. Originally started as a cheaply printed swap rag, it grew to a monthly of truely staggering proportions. It was printed in the old, Life Magazine size, and was well over one inch thick. Lots of copies used to be delivered to the IBM sites where I worked, and the poor postman probably got many a backache carrying them. The advertising rates (and it was mostly advertising) were so cheap that every mom and pop PC shop in the country could afford to advertise their wares. CS was in my mind the primary driving force for the legitimization of the PC world.
But with the introduction of the Internet and online news feeds, RSS, blogs, etc. the print media rags have faded badly and are only a shadow of their former selves. But I read something this week that made me think that perhaps in one small way the old times were back.
Many of these magazines, and also other techie stuff like ham radio magazines, would often print a tongue-in-cheek April Fools column or review. These would describe some lame, fake product or technology with just enough real buzzwords to give you pause - or lead the novice down a yellow brick road. My friends and I always used to enjoy these spoofs.
So, what did I see in the April Computer Shopper? A review of software called CyberLink MagicSports 3.5. It purported to be software that could analyze video of an entire game, and produce a highlights video just showing, well, the highlights. I have written many programs, and designing a program to do that is certainly a stretch. What does it look for? How does it determine legitimate action from just the camera moving around? Surely this was a spoof.
Further proof: It was version 3.5, and I had never heard of version 1.0. And, it says, it only supports baseball, soccer and Sumo wresting. Sumo wresting! This has got to be a joke, right? I rolled on the floor.
So, I wanted to write a column about the return of humor to PC magazines, and as any good journalist I checked my sources. But what did I find? There IS in fact a program called CyberLink MagicSports 3.5, and it really does purport to analyze video. And, yes, it does support Sumo wrestling! The company authors a number of DVD and video related programs, including the PowerDVD program that I have purchased to watch DVDs on my PC.
It seems the joke is on me or perhaps not a joke as the case may be. I will have to go back to finding humor here in the Southport area. Or take up Sumo wrestling.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)