GI Joost

Sometimes an email that crosses through my inbox that really catches my attention. A recent example of this phenomenon:

“Joost beta is not available for Mac”

So I opened it up thinking that for some reason the Joost guys had dumped Apple completely. Turns out the “not” was supposed to read “now” which pretty much means the exact opposite. I figured having invested two seconds into this so far that I may as well sign up. A few minutes later I got the beta acceptable email and downloaded the client. It didn’t take long to find this…

Yep, that’s full screen GI Joe right on the old laptop. This got me thinking:

Grant (right now): Wow, I don’t remember them bending reality so much on this show as a kid. I guess the thought of a giant teleporter machine that runs on red crystals, water, and dirt seemed scientifically reasonable back then.

Grant (as a kid): No way I’m ever going to be able to watch EVERY SINGLE AWESOME EPISODE on a computer. And a computer that has NO WIRES attached to it, yeah right.

The software itself worked fine except when it didn’t. (How’s that for profound?) It’s been a long time since I’ve written used software that a kill -9 didn’t stop. That only happened once though, the other times kill -9 worked great.

The one kind of strange thing is how it handles commercials. I’m thinking that the 1980’s animators didn’t really have distributed network video delivery in mind when they wrote the shows, so a commercial would sometimes randomly start right in the middle of the action. On the bright side, the commercials worked as well as TV commercials in that I have little recollection of what products were being pushed. All I remember is that LaDanian Thomlinson ran around in one and there was one of a dude that was painted silver. I’ll have to pay more attention next time, but I’m not currently in the market for a running back or silver paint so it probably just didn’t resonate with me.

Nitpicks aside, I give it a solid: