Remains of the Day

On iTunes Music Store's birthday, AllofMP3.com is the true belle

iTunes version 4.5 released as Apple celebrated the anniversary of its iTunes Music Store. As part of the anniversary festivities, Apple is releasing a free song every day for a week.

Good idea, if it actually worked. I've tried to download two of the three free songs and have encountered nothing but error messages. I return later to find the free songs are $0.99 each just a day later. Good one, Apple.

iTunes is a slick application, no doubt the best of the software music jukeboxes. But is the iTunes Music Store all that revolutionary? No, it isn't. Like the iPod, it took an idea that had been done many times by others and simply executed it better. Nothing wrong with that, there are plenty of successful businesses built on that mantra. Just don't call it a revolution.

The songs are still locked up by DRM, the songs aren't all that cheap at $0.99 each (given that most used CDs can be purchased off of Amazon for a few bucks, you pay a steep premium for immediacy), the library is still missing a ton of titles, and the encoding is still low fidelity. I play iTunes Music Store downloads over regular-sized speakers and they sound like crap. Good luck if somehow you lose the song off of your hard drive: you'll have to pay $0.99 for another copy.

In contrast, AllofMP3.com is a true step function forward, if it works. I paid for a GB or two of downloads but the site is going through technical difficulties right now, probably scaling problems considering what a sweet value proposition the site launched with. The option to encode in all sorts of formats, DRM-free, is awesome. With disk space so cheap and broadband so prevalent among the technorati, why not offer to let customers download songs at true CD-quality? Once you've purchased a song, you're allowed to download it at anytime from their servers. Since you're paying for bandwidth, AllofMP3.com doesn't care if you download a song once or a hundred times.

I, for one, hope they succeed.

A new home for my weblog

I'm moving over to Movable Type, so my weblog is in transition. This will be the new address for my weblog. Most of my entries survived the import though some of the older entries will have odd-looking titles. Perhaps someday, if I'm ambitious and/or bored, I'll go back and fix them.

The surroundings are a bit drab for now (this is the Plain Jane default MT template), but I'll hang some artwork, buy some furniture, and have this place looking like home in the next week or two (i.e., I need to roll up my sleeves and tinker with the stylesheets and templates).

Review: Stuck On You

Everyone praised the Farrelly brothers for toning down their gross-out humor in this movie, but it tastes like fat-free ice cream to me. Please unleash the Brothers Grimm, er, Gross.

Wally Zoolander

Sitting out Tuesday night's game after breaking three of his vertebrae in the previous game, Wally Szczerbiak looked like Derek Zoolander, wearing designer shades indoors.

Charles Barkley the broadcaster is a hoot. After the game ended, he fired some of his usual priceless commentary.

After the Nuggets failed to tie the game, Latrell Sprewell turned and started shouting at the Nuggets' bench, causing Jon Barry to go face to face with him to drop a dozen or so f-bombs. Charles: "Aww, why he got to go shoutin' at the bench. And who's that jackass with him [talking about some guy walking with Sprewell]?"

Some fans threw cups and drinks at Sprewell as he walked off the court. Charles: "See, that's my pet peeve. You should be able to go after one fan in the stands each game and beat the crap out of him."

Jayson Williams was quite the comedian as well, but his current situation is no laughing matter. That leaves Charles as the clown prince of the NBA.

Someone actually saw Casshern

Someone actually saw Casshern, and they cried three times while viewing it (in a good way).

The first time I saw the trailer, I thought the movie, "What a weird ass movie." Now I've heard the plot explained, and I still think the same.

HS students' ignorance of American history a myth

According to professor Sam Wineburg. Or perhaps the larger point is that multiple choice tests that rely purely on one's memory of facts is more a gauge of how well-read someone is than how intelligent they are.

Jason turns something north of 19

Jamie organized a surprise party for Jason's birthday Saturday. She invited North 19 to play on the deck, and they were awesome. I've got to admit, the electric banjo is pretty tight. Kenny and Shelly flew up to surprise Jason, and they brought along six week old Kevin Patrick and even graced us with a few tunes. The weather cooperated (what a mellow Seattle spring it's been, and I mean that in the best way).

Young and Kathy gave Jason a quesadilla maker, which is like handing a pack of Marlboro's to a chain smoker. Well, it's too late to rescue him from his culinary straitjacket, but there's still hope for Sadie.

Lang Lang, RiverRun, Petrouchka

Friday night, Lang Lang performed with the Seattle Symphony. He played Chopin's 1st Piano Concerto (really Chopin's second, as his first was named his second, but who's counting?).

Lang Lang is technically virtuostic, and he comes straight from the Yo Yo Ma school of demonstrative physical expressionism. My first encounter with him left me thinking that he plays the crowd better than he plays the piano. Some of his phrasings frustrated me, though there's no doubt he makes the extremely difficult look effortless.

The audience, as expected, ate him up and showered him with raucous applause, whistles, and shouts of "bravo!"

The opening piece was the opening movement of Stephen Albert's Symphony RiverRun, titled Rain Music. An older couple sitting behind me whispered during the performance, "That doesn't sound like rain to me." Do we lose our sense of metaphor as we age?

Albert won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Symphony RiverRun. Albert found inspiration for the symphony in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. I loved Rain Music and will have to find a copy of the full symphony to listen to.

The closing piece was Stravinsky's Petrouchka, a piece I played when I was in junior high or high school and have loved ever since. It's a piece that ends quietly, and when it concluded half the audience sat there quietly, not sure if the piece was over. The SSOs audience doesn't seem to enjoy modern music. They love their classics, the old favorites, and they love their virtuostic soloists. It's unfortunate they won't let their symphony grow up, but I suppose someday I'll actively wrap myself in the comforts of nostalgia as well.

Homework

With my newfound free time, I finally finished reading a Sunday NYTimes. It took me three weeks, but I finally made it through every section.

It's a full-time job just keeping up with magazines and newspapers. I have this strange compulsion to peruse every article of a magazine before throwing it out. A warped echo of my mother's admonition to finish every item on my dinner plate, perhaps. Do they sell patches for this condition? Just stick one under your ear and it feeds random news articles into your brain.

Testing the notion that "I don't care if I ever get back..."

Losing a massive post like this to a browser crash is brutal. Just brutal. Here goes again, with condensed text and more photos, since the picture to word information ratio is said to be 1000:1.

Monday night, Eric and Christina took me to the Mariners game. They scored Eric's manager's sweet seats, just a few rows behind the visiting A's dugout.

It afforded us a great view of the A's players...

...and the batter's box. I could admire Edgar's swing up close and personal, and it does share some qualities of some of my favorite swings in baseball (it's sad that I've learned more about the baseball swing studying books these past two years than I did in several years of Little League as a child).

Safeco offered its usual lineup of sights, including Ichiro, Freddy, Johnny O, and the ball-in-hat scoreboard game..

But this game had a few tricks up its sleeves, and long sleeves they were. 14 innings long.

For example, the concessions stand now offers low-carb pizza. What is that? Do they just hand you an empty cardboard box with a few dabs of spaghetti sauce and cheese in it?

We also got a view of new Mariners LOOGY Mike Myers. He is a novelty in that he throws both overhand and submarine with about equal frequency. If his arm doesn't fall off, he'll be making decent cash for years. Want your son to earn a good living? Teach him to throw lefty and sidearm. In about twenty years he'll be getting the call to come in to retire a 60 year old Barry Bonds.

Another momentous occurrence, courtesy of our advantageous positioning: Christina could run up to the railing between innings to plead for a ball from the A's coaches and players. Is there a more win-win form of charity than the donation of baseball from professional player to fan? Never has more happiness been created than when a pro baseball player discards a baseball by tossing it to a fan. I saw a grown adult dive over two seats to try and snag a foul ball, bloodying his nose on a seat back in the process. All this over a dirty sphere of leather and yarn that costs $5 in the pro shop.

Lo and behold, Christina finally received one from an A's coach, the ball the A's infielders had used to take grounders after taking the field in the bottom of an inning. Christina, usually underwhelmed and collected, jumped up and down screaming for a good two minutes. Compare her reaction to that of the young boy with a glove sitting in the front row. He received some seven or eight baseball purely by the virtue of his youth, yet he regarded each with the same jaded, gluttonous gleam in his eye. Not endearing in a nine year old, and I contemplated assaulting him outside the stadium and robbing him of his collection just to teach him to appreciate his bounty, but the game went on so long I forgot my plans.

New Mariners closer "Everyday" Eddie Guadardo came in in the 9th to preserve the 1-0 lead, promptly serving up a home run to Jermaine Dye to send us into extra frames.

Things got weird. A's CF Mark Kotsay got tossed for arguing balls and strikes, so the A's moved All-Star third baseman Eric Chavez to left field. The Mariners got men to third with less than two outs twice in extra frames, causing the A's to then bring Chavez back to third base to give the A's a five infielder, two outfielder alignment. The M's failed to capitalize.

Eric, Christina, and I made it onto the jumbo scoreboard three times. The one time I was able to get my camera pointed quickly enough to fire off one shot, I made the cardinal rookie mistake of looking up to see myself, causing me to move enough to cut off Christina's head. The dreaded digital camera shutter lag also caused me to take the one shot where all three of our faces were obscured. It takes skill to fire off a photo this poor.

By the 14th inning, Rich, who was sitting about ten rows in back of me with some clients of his, was struggling to stay interested.

Most seats had emptied out, but staying to the bitter end of an extra innings game is a matter of pride.

Finally, mercifully, pitcher Justin Duchscherer of the A's balked in the winning run in the bottom of the 14th inning. Some 4 hours, 47 minutes after the first pitch, perhaps Duchscherer simply needed to get some sleep. Maybe that Mexican lunch he had was knock knock knockin' on heaven's door.

The remaining fans, all seventeen of us, staggered out into the cold Seattle night.

Cool house, err, Koolhaas

An e-mail from Ken reminded me of the new Seattle Public Library downtown. As he notes, Chicago gets the new Trump Tower monstrosity while Seattle receives the latest Koolhaas...

I've driven by it a few times, and it's a massive improvement over the previous building.

I must go visit after it opens in late May, if nothing but to visit the reading room at the top floor, with views of Puget Sound.

Slide show here.

Love at first sight

I lost my compact digital camera, a Minolta, while down in Miami for James's bachelor party. I've begun searching for a replacement because a compact digital camera that fits in your pocket is just too precious to live without in this day and age.

My main pet peeve with digital cameras is lag time. Digital cameras can be slow to turn on, slow to focus, slow to snap. Not endearing when what you're seeking to capture is often a fleeting moment in time.

Then came the Casio Exilim Pro P600...

Fairly compact, the specs that caught my eye were the 1.5 second startup time and .01 second shutter release time. Throw in the ability to snap 3 frames per second in burst mode, decent battery life, 4X optical zoom, exposure bracketing, and up to 6 megapixels in resolution, and I'm out looking for the engagement ring.

Review: The Return

It's difficult to imagine Andrey Zvyagintsev's remarkable debut movie The Return springing from a country other than Russia. It contains that spare yet bewildering psychological and spiritual depth that is a hallmark of Russian mysticism and which uniquely identifies their literature (e.g. any novel by Dostoyevsky) and film.

After over eleven years, a father returns to his wife and two sons, Andrey and Vanya. He immediately takes his boys on a fishing trip, giving the boys the opportunity to meet the father figure they never had. The journey they take across the sparse Russian landscape is symbolic, of course, and the entire movie has a mythic feel, yet the performances by each actor create characters that feel specific and real. The long continuous shots and iconic framing of images such as the son's first view of their father asleep in bed bestows upon the movie the elusive and haunting quality of a Biblical fable rendered in human terms. The Russians have always found in their daily lives a spiritual significance foreign to those like myself who have grown up with a more secular worldview.

The movie is layered with mystery. On one level, his sons wonder why their father is taking them on this long fishing trip, and the intentions of his quest are hidden from the audience as well. At another level, Andrey and Vanya wonder why he left in the first place, why he returned, and whether he truly loves them. This is not a Hollywood movie, so the answers to each are not clear cut, though the ending is stunning.

I missed The Return at Sundance and was glad to catch it in its penultimate day on screen in Seattle. Recommended if it is available on a screen near you.

Footnote: Tragically, a few weeks after the movie wrapped filming, 15 year old actor Vladimir Garin, who plays Andrey, drowned while swimming across the lake where much of the movie was shot.

Invincible Pole Fighter

After hosting a Kill Bill movie fest this weekend, I had to go back and revisit the Shaw Brothers' Invincible Pole Fighter, starring Gordon Liu (who plays Johnny Mo in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and Pai Mei in Vol. 2). The movie is dated, without a doubt, but the fight choreography, especially in the last two fight scenes, is remarkably exciting. Gordon Liu was the man.

I had forgotten about the attack technique in which the Shaolin monks in the movie use their poles to forcibly remove the teeth of their opponents. Very strange and amusing.

Do I look fat in this?

Cycling is one of the best sports for equipment geeks, any when the NYTimes publishes an article titled "Overhauling Armstrong", cycling geeks get geeked up. Unfortunately, the article is fluffy and doesn't mention anything new at all.

So much ado about Nike's Swift Spin suits, but how do us mere mortals get our hands on one (answer: we can't, unless we conduct a panty raid of the USPS team hotel rooms)? And more importantly, do the suits make our butts look smaller?

What exactly is a Boardroom experience?

Bid on a Boardroom Experience with George and Carolyn.

Sounds kinda kinky. Can Melania come? She has such Boardroom eyes.

Meanwhile, can we have a reality TV show in which Donald Trump and Mark Cuban compete to see who makes the bigger fool of themselves?

Cuban in his post to Trump (I'm sure Trump has Cuban's blog bookmarked): "After leaving your office, I promised myself that if I ever got liquid and had an obscene amount of money in the bank, I would make a point not to remind myself and everyone else around me of it every minute of every day — unlike you."

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black...oh oh, I should stay away from that phrase, Omarosa might kick my ass.

Yahoo paid over $1 billion for that piece of turd company Broadcast.com. Amazing. Well, at least the Mavs will get bounced, yet again, in the snoozefest that is the first round of the NBA playoffs.

Kill Bill, Vol. 2 flotsam

• The book that Esteban Vihaio (Michael Parks) is reading in the whorehouse is titled The Carrucan's [some word I can't remember] by Jasmine Yuen. I assume it's a reference to second assistant camera operator Jasmine Yuen Carrucan and not an actual book.
• I did a Google search for "black mamba gargantuan" to see if Elle (Daryl Hannah) really did find out about the black mamba from the Internet. Apparently she did, if slightly paraphrased. "Black mamba neurotoxic venom is one of nature's most efficient poisons, acting on the nervous system...the amounts delivered in a bite can be gargantuan: 100 to 400 milligrams, when 10 to 15 milligrams are fatal for a human being."
• Loved Daryl Hannah's pantsuit.
• Tarantino's voice dub for Pai Mei is his best acting job ever.

Can $2.04 buy me a search box?

Netflix waited until late in the afternoon on a Friday to notify me of an impending price hike from $19.95 per month to $21.99 per month. This is like having your girlfriend inform you while on the doorstep of her parents' house that her father is Robert De Niro, but not the grim father De Niro from Meet the Parents but the psychopath from Cape Fear. Still, perhaps an extra $2.04 per month isn't enough to drive me off.

But heavens to Betsy, will someone at Netflix with an iota of sense please put a friggin' search box on the Queue page? It drives me nuts that we still have to put up with such blatant interface flaws so many years down the road. The entire Netflix website could be simply a queue page with a search box and that would be fine with me; the rest of the site means nothing. All Netflix should worry about is adding more titles, building more distribution centers, and lowering prices. If they offered a discount for doing so, I'd use a command-line interface to access Netflix's distribution centers.

Russians with long last names

Tonight, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra played Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphonies in E and D minor, respectively. That's the symphonic programming equivalent of a home run contest between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, or, in today's age, between Barry Bonds and, say, Adam Dunn or Richie Sexson. Throw in special guest conductor Mstislav Rostropovich (hey, let's have Pedro as the honorary home run contest pitcher) and what with audience grade inflation rampant and it was two guaranteed standing ovations.

That the Orchestra played as well as I've heard it all season made it all worthwhile. They've sounded erratic or uninspired at times this year. Rostropovich was, as always, a character, walking around the stage to personally shake the hand of soloists. He's the warm-hearted musical genius of a grandfather we all never had.

I looked around tonight and couldn't help but wonder at the fate of orchestras and classical music. I'm not a kid anymore, but I was the youngest person by about thirty or forty years within 20 rows. No disrespect, but at intermission, if I'd suffered a bout of short-term memory loss, I'd have thought I was at a retirement home bingo social. When this older generation passes, who will be purchasing tickets to the symphony, and will orchestras still be playing Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphonies, and will the audience still give a nominal standing ovation to performances of each, and will musical scholars still puzzle over whether Shostakovich was a devoted member of the Communist Party or a secret dissident who encoded irony into his putatively patriotic symphonies such as the Fifth?

Sushi is frozen fish

Dasani is just tap water, most sushi is simply frozen fish, thawed. It's like learning that Santa doesn't exist.

Oh well, it's better than getting the worms.

Amazon launches A9

Amazon launched A9 today. It's a new search engine built on top of Google, but with frosting on top. Time was I could be an internal beta tester of such releases, but those days are over so I'm going to play around with it just like Joe Q. Public.

Because it is literally built on top of Google, when I signed in with my Amazon password, archives of my Google searches appeared immediately. I use Safari or Omniweb on the Mac for browsing so I can't try out the A9 Toolbar, but there is one for IE 5.5 and above users, and it includes a pop-up blocker, diary (allows you to attach annotations to websites), and other features which are account-based. That is, since you log in to use A9, you can log in from any computer and pull up your search history, web diary, etc.

Congrats to Bean and others I know who worked hard to get this out the door. I'll have to give it a whirl this week.

Ah, search. It's the saloon that's attracting all the best gunfighters in town. Can't wait for high noon.

Jack

I watched Something's Gotta Give over the weekend. Not the most profound of movies, but it's nearly always a pleasure to watch Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton work, and the movie has its charms as a broad comedy.

Is it possible that Jack is underrated? When I watch his early work, such as Five Easy Pieces, I think it may be so. If I were to make a list of five people I'd like to spend a weekend hanging out with, Jack would have to be on the list.

I was about to return the movie to Netflix when I decided on a whim to glance at the Special Features menu. Turns out Jack did a commentary for the movie. I brought it up to my computer and turned that commentary on to listen to in the background while I wrote, and two hours later I'd watched the entire movie over again. Jack's commentary is really good. I don't often have the patience to listen to commentaries all the way through, but this was worth it, not just to hear Jack talk about the rocket in his pocket after Amanda Peet jumps off of him in one scene clothed in merely a bra and panties, but also to hear his commentary on comedic acting. He's an astute student of acting and film, and his self-assurance, generosity, and sense of humor shine through. It's clear why he's the most popular actor in Hollywood.

Easter egg hunt

Dave and Karen hosted a fabulous Easter brunch Sunday. The food was really good, the weather was gorgeous, and we concluded with an Easter Egg Hunt.

I never participated in an Easter egg hunt as a child, at least not that I can recall. What is the origin of the game? A giant bunny hides chicken eggs...very peculiar. Perhaps my visual dictionary is too colored by pop culture, but when I free associate with large bunnies I think Donnie Darko.

I do feel that Dave and Karen exorcised some latent childhood privation. It may have headed off an ugly incident a few decades down the road, in which a bitter old man, upon spying some children on an Easter egg hunt, suddenly felt a deep urge welling up inside, causing him to rush out and shoulder aside children in an effort to gather as many colored eggs as possible, like Homer Simpson fighting his way to the front of the ice cream truck line.

Little Sundancers all growed up

I'm starting to finally appreciate the mystique of the Sundance Film Festival, several months after finally popping my Park City cherry. So many of the movies screened at the festival are opening to wide acclaim. At the time, reading through the synopses in the program, it was difficult to ascertain the quality of the movies. Surely not all of the movies could live up to the surely biased write-ups by Sundance programmers?

Maybe they can. If critics are to be believed, the programmers chose a great lineup, and I hope to return again next year and catch more movies.

Some of the Sundance babies making waves:

• The Return - Rave reviews; I'm going to see it this week. I missed a screening but Dave took my pass off my hands and gave it a thumbs up.


• Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring - The trailer is serenity.


• Super Size Me - winner of the Sundance Documentary award, this movie was shot by a guy who ate nothing but fast food from McDonalds for a month. Predictably, he gains a lot of weight and comments on the obesity epidemic in America. I'm interested in seeing it for the comedy. As a social gadfly, it's lacking. After all, what's surprising about the fact that he gained weight eating nothing but Big Macs? If there are Americans who still believe that fast food is healthy, they sure don't earn my sympathy.


• The Corporation - the other Sundance doc that buzzed. Based on the book The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, this documentary examines that strange entity we know as the corporation as a person, putting it through diagnostic tests used to assess human personalities. Not surprisingly, corporations are found "self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful." Having worked at a corporation for nearly seven years, the results don't surprise me, but I do think this realization has profound implications for our analysis of topics like offshoring. Our laws treat corporations as humans, and in doing so we may have granted them too much power, perhaps pointing to a future long predicted by science fiction writers like Gibson and depicted in anime movies set in the future, when corporations and not governments run the world. But that's a topic for another day.

Camel spiders

I was the latest to be infected by the camel spider e-mail passing around the Internet. A quick Google on "camel spider" quickly debunks any of the myths traveling the Internet along with the photo below depicting two of the suckers. For example, contrary to Internet rumors, camel spiders don't jump on camels and eat their stomachs.

And they don't eat human flesh, either.

Still, would you want to be locked up in a plastic box with a couple dozen of these crawling all over you on an episode of Fear Factor? And do people who live in desert areas have to take care of these around the house?!

"Ahhhhhh!! Honey, can you kill this spider for me! It's humongous!"

"Oh, jiminy cricket, how many times do I have to tell you, they can't hurt you." Husband grabs a slipper and goes into the bathroom where his wife is standing on the toilet screaming and pointing at the corner. "Alright, alright, let's see this giant spider you're shouting about...oh good God!"

Sony Grand Wega LCD DLP HDTVs

Sometimes I just get the feeling that a new technology has hit a pricing sweet spot and is poised to go mainstream. My tech-spidey sense is tingling after seeing the new Sony Grand Wega LCD DLP rear-projection HDTVs. They're less than half the price of comparably sized plasma TVs, and while they might not be quite as nice a picture or quite as thin, they're close enough in all respects that it's difficult to justify climbing the price ladder for the plasma. And while other manufacturers have already jumped into this market segment with comparably priced models (e.g. Samsung), the Sony brand name carries greater sway with the mainstream home electronic shopper.

These things are going to sell like hotcakes. The 70" retails for $6999.99, the 60" for $3999.99, the 50" for $3299.99, and the 42", likely to be the most popular model, for $2799.99.

Perhaps finally, the HDTV revolution in the U.S. is poised to gain momentum. When people tell me they're ready to upgrade to HDTVs in the next six months, I'll probably point most of them to this product line.

Phil's first major, in the key of CBS-sharp

I watched Mickelson's final nine holes in the Masters Sunday. What a final day--hole in ones within moments of each other on the same hole, Choi holing out from the fairway, Ernie and Phil destroying the back nine. And, from a presentatiopn perspective, CBS HD rocked. I hadn't watched the Masters in high-def before, and I'm never going back. I felt like I was there in the crowd on that last putt, and I was jumping around in my basement when Phil's Titleist Pro V1 reached out and grabbed the left edge of the cup with its arms and pulled itself in head first.

Phil seems to have crossed some barrier. He was locked in that last nine--I've never seen him play better. Right now, Tiger has two formidable competitors in Phil and Ernie, and Vijay is just a notch below.

I'd love to get my handicap down to the next level this year which makes this finger injury all the more frustrating.

Mallet finger

Saturday I played hoops in the morning at the gym. This tall, overweight, balding, middle-aged brute who I'd played against once before showed up to give us four on four. The last time I played against him, he played dirty, grabbing my arm on picks, elbowing me to get position, and body checking me hard whenever I tried to drive past him. He also raked me across the face, and a few weeks later I still have a scar between my eyebrows.

This time, I asked to guard him again, because life is just a whole lot more fun with a nemesis. He of course, posted me up every time, taking advantage of his 6 inch and 80 pound advantage, and I either shot over him from the perimeter or put the ball on the court and went by him. Everytime I went by him, he beat the crap out of me.

What does the Oracle's bodyguard say in The Matrix: Reloaded about only knowing someone by fighting them? I can't attest to that, but I think that matching up against an opponent in basketball is a great proxy. When someone wants to marry my sister, I won't take the guy out to a bar for drinks. No, I'll take him to play pickup hoops, and I'll leanr all I need to know about him.

About an hour in, on one of my forays to the hoop, dirty-old-guy (DOG) swiped my hand hard, fouling me to prevent the bucket. I felt a sharp pain in my right pinky finger, as if I had jammed it. I kept playing the next half hour but had trouble gripping the ball.

When I arrived home, I looked at my finger because it had gone numb. The top joint was bent down and towards my ring finger, and I couldn't straighten it or move it. It looked deformed, but it didn't really hurt, so I left it alone Saturday. Alan told me to get it checked out, though, and then Gavin told me if I didn't get it splinted it might end up frozen at that grotesque angle. Sunday morning Colin looked at it, protruding awkwardly from the side of a cheap drugstore splint I had purchased and told me it didn't look natural. Sunday night I called my doc, and he agreed: I needed to have it examined.

I relented and went to the ER last night. I hate visiting the ER off-hours or during the graveyard shift. It's a long, protracted, depressing visit to the waiting room of the afterlife, filled with the elderly and youth who look like drug addicts. I waited nearly two and a half hours just to get an x-ray and a diagnosis.

DOG had torn the tendon in my right pinky, the one that straightens it and holds it in alignment. I now have to wear a splint on the finger for the next six weeks. The printout the nurse handed me reads: "You may end up with a permanent deformity if the end joint of the finger bends at any time before healing is complete." I'm vain enough to admit that the words "permanent" and "deformity" are enough to frighten me anytime they appear in the same sentence.

Basketball is probably out, golf will be exceedingly challenging, but worst of all, it's now really, really difficult to type. It's extremely frustrating. I can't cleanly type the letter P, the right shift key (much more important than the left shift key), an apostrophe, zero, or a question mark. I'm learning how to compensate with my ring finger instead, but it's still like being shouldered into bumper to bumper traffic after having coasted in the HOV lane for hours.

Is there a blogging disabled list? Put me on the 45-day DL.

Star Wars: Clone Wars

Star Wars: Clone Wars, a series of short episodes aired on The Cartoon Network and available to watch online, covers events between Episode II and Episode III. It's entertaining, more so than the last two Star Wars movies, truth be told, and good viewing for Star Wars fanatics and completists.

Gondry's Steriogram video

Michel Gondry's newest music video (for Steriogram's Walkie Talkie Man) is another feather in his cap.

The end is nigh

Tomorrow, my Amazon career comes to a close. It's been looming on the horizon for some time, but when such personally momentous events are scheduled in my future, they always seem to sneak up on me. No massive buildup of tension or anticipation, just life as usual for days on end and then suddenly the next day it arrives. I've been so busy I haven't even had time to stop to ponder the significance, though last night, for the first time, I had trouble sleeping.

Nearly seven years of my life I spent as an Amazonian. Long enough to get a PhD (and I guess I did, in Amazon 101: we made up the curriculum as we went along, my professors had names like Bezos, and we were graded on cash flow...it was cheaper than business school), and more time than I've ever spent at any institution, including Little League baseball, elementary school, and college. I ate at Andaluca just the other week, and I remembered that I'd stayed at the Mayflower Park Hotel when I flew out for my interview with Amazon. Never did I imagine at that time that if I got the job that seven years later that Amazon and I would end up where we are now. The ups, the downs, the ups, the downs, and now Amazon is all grown up, a GAAP-profitable, card-carrying member of the Fortune 500. Soon after I started, we issued debt, and it was classified as junk. Now we're generating enough cash to retire a lot of that debt. Sometimes one man's junk is that same man's treasure.

It's difficult to tease apart the emotions at a time like this. My head and heart are a jumble of Brownian motion: sorrow, exhilaration, nostalgia, fear, gratitude, uncertainty, nervous energy, intermittent resolve. I've always tried to edge up and to the right on the average daily life happiness and satisfaction chart, though, and my internal compass points in this direction, even though the map doesn't list any roads this way. I've never not taken a marked interstate, but rumor has it that it's not so bad if you have a stomach for adventure. We oldest children sometimes need a little prodding to leave the interstate, even if in this case, the foot kicking the seat of my pants is my own.

And so off I go. Who's coming with me besides Flipper here?

We cool? Yeah, we cool

I finally ticked last week's episode of The Apprentice off of the Tivo List. I thought the way Troy and Kwame handled the Boardroom confrontation, even if it contained a few too many fist slaps and hugs, was pretty damn cool. They were buds, but that didn't stop them from expressing in a straightforward manner their honest opinion of each other's strengths and weaknesses. I've been in the business world nearly a decade and it's rare to find managers who can do that in the real world! I agreed with what both of them said, too: Kwame said Troy wouldn't be great as a CFO but would do well in sales, and Troy said Kwame hadn't stepped up to lead enough. Compare that with Katrina and Ereka covering for each other in the Boardroom. [Random sidenote: I was in Miami for James's bachelor party this weekend, and a party at one of the clubs in South Beach was hosted by none other than "Katrina and Ereka, The Apprentice Girls!!!" Fourteen minutes and counting, you two. We passed.]

They didn't let Trump or any of his minions turn them against each other (Trump goaded Kwame, "Your buddy screwed you" and Kwame replied without hesitation: "Not at all."), and when all was said and done, they shook hands and wished each other luck. They handled it with a maturity that none of the other contestants have exercised in the boardroom (no more capitalizing "boardroom." I mean, really, it's the cheesiest looking boardroom set ever), especially the fireballs like Omarosa, Jessie, and Ereka. My favorite exchange was their last before their boardroom showdown:

Troy: "I'm gonna cut you quick and fast."

Kwame: "That's it, that's it."

I thought Troy should've stayed, but really, after the classy way they dealt with a really difficult situation, I would've been sad to see either of them go. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. This was genuine nobility in the treacherous world of reality television, like two gunfighters in a John Woo movie, evacuating innocent bystanders and then sliding guns over to each other to initiate a fair showdown.

The Idaho Dynamo is going to be okay.

Lest we think too much class had entered the show, however, tomorrow's episode features the return of Omarosa. Sweet.

iCal and Outlook play nice?

Now that I'm about to leave work, I've been forwarding all sorts of calendar events from Outlook at work to my personal e-mail account as a reminder to place the events into iCal on my Mac at home.

I forwarded one event from Outlook 2003 to my home e-mail account, and I was surprised to open the e-mail and find that it asked if I wanted to place the event on my iCal calendar. Outlook 2003 and iCal speak the same meeting language! I was surprised, in a pleasant way.

Free Culture lives up to its name

Lawrence Lessig's latest book Free Culture is temporarily available as a free PDF download at Amazon.