Psych techniques

I was watching part of the "Weekend Warriors" episode of Psych last night. I enjoy the show and its low-key humor, along with the rest of America. (Every time it's on, I consistently see it at the #1 spot on DirecTV's What's Hot* list.)

One other thing that stands out to me about Psych is the CGI used to indicate Shawn's skill of rapidly observing his surroundings. The technique: a closeup of Shawn's face followed by a quick camera zoom-in of whatever he's looking at. The special effects come into play when the surroundings dim and the key on-screen element is highlighted briefly with a white glow. There is also an accompanying audio "hook" to grab the audience's attention, and a sound effect as he absorbs each crucial piece of information. It's well done -- the rapid editing, the effects and the audio all convey Shawn's quick mental abilities and photographic memory.

The camera techniques used to such great effect in Psych reminded me of how badly it was done on UPN's The Sentinel (back in the late 90's). In that show, Jim Ellison was supposed to have heightened senses as well. Whenever Jim spotted some small detail at a crime scene, they used a dramatic (but agonizingly slow) camera zoom-in. Unfortunately, the overall effect was that it made Jim was pretty slow himself. My friend Ronald and I used to joke that Jim's heightened senses compensated for his pathetic police work and barely brought him up to the level of a normal detective.

The Sentinel shows how a good premise can be ruined by bad execution. Psych manages to deftly avoid all the same mistakes; it conveys visually what you expect from Shawn's character, and the result really enhances the storytelling.

* In case you don't know about the What's Hot feature, tune to one of the mix stations (like channel 104's Sports Mix) and wait for a few seconds. A prompt will appear at the bottom of the screen telling you to hit the red button on your remote for the What's Hot list.

More on OSCON

I left a comment on Steven's blog recently regarding his own post on OSCON 2006. I thought OSCON should have the opportunity for open, birds-of-a-feather type sessions at the beginning of the day to give folks with common interests more time to interact.

Well, what do you know? I just listened to O'Reilly's Summer at the Seaside podcast and realized that the BoF sessions I was talking about were called OSCamp. The OSCamp talks were already going on while Steven and I were there sitting in the regular sessions. OSCamp's purpose wasn't well advertised; I seem to remember many of the talks dealing with management topics, and so I didn't give it any more thought at the time. Apparently anyone can post any topic on the board and host their own free-form session. Sounds fun.

A win for Python?

Jeremy Zawodny seems to imply that he's sticking with learning Python instead of Ruby (for the time being at least).

James Bennett's comment on Jeremy's original post ("how does your brain work?") seems to have struck a chord with several folks, including myself. Ian Bicking and Steven Wilcox offer technical reasons for choosing one language over the other (although Steven leans toward some aesthetic reasons as well).

del.icio.us flaw?

If someone that's in my network on del.icio.us posts a bookmark to an interesting article, I find that I simply read it without bookmarking it myself. Frankly, the del.icio.us tagging process (even as spartan as it is) is still too much of an excise tax. Knowing that the bookmark is already in my network means I'll be able to find it again if I need to. This form of "laziness" certainly defeats the recommendation aspect of bookmarking that del.icio.us is trying to cultivate.

Do we need an even quicker way to bookmark an article that a fellow user has linked to? Maybe a "copy bookmark" button that copies the bookmark verbatim, tags and all ...

OSCON 2006

This was my first OSCON, and I have to say: it was definitely more about connecting with the folks than learning from the sessions or the tutorials. I really enjoyed connecting with the ActiveState guys, Shane Caraveo and Jeff Griffiths, who I've only known through mailing lists up to this point. It was also interesting meeting other Python guys like David Mertz (author of Text Processing in Python) and Robin Dunn (co-author of wxPython in Action). Seeing and hearing from other Python greats like Jim Huginin, Raymond Hettinger, Alex Mertelli, and Guido van Rossum was also a kick.

[humor]Best of all, though, was meeting up with Steven Wilcox, creator of the Pumpkinvine blogging system. It was hard enough to believe that we actually ran into one another at the conference, but we immediately hit it off like old friends. Not only did we get to talk Python and Ruby programming informally, but he invited me along to many of the same sessions he was attending. He also asked me to go to lunch and an afternoon hike with one of his good buddies who lives in Portland. We ended up taking a tour of the Rose Garden and got to see a wonderful view of Mt. Hood. Thanks for a great time, Steven! [/humor]

I probably got to see more of the area than most of the other attendees. Somehow I wasn't able to get a Residence Inn room in the Portland area, so I drove in from the Residence Inn in Vancouver, WA. Let me just say, Portland has some serious traffic issues.

As much as I enjoyed the time out in Oregon, it was nice to get back to the Baltimore area. Wish I hadn't brought the high temperatures with me though!