Remains of the Day

The last part of summer

Big day today - the first 25 Red cameras shipped. From Jim Jannard:

Just so you know, I am here at 1:09am with the RED team personally reviewing each camera of the 1st 25. We are calibrating each camera and my job is to check the files in RED Alert! that Jarred is shooting. We are shooting ISO 320, 1000 and 2000. There are about 20 people here getting ready for tomorrow. It really is a memorable night. About a year and a half ago this was just a dream. Tonight the dream has become a reality.

I want to thank all those that believed in RED from the beginning.

Jim

And all around the world, high end digital video camera profit margins shrink.

***

Dancing with the Stars…it’s a lot about the casting. I’ve only ever seen clips, but the talent they’ve convinced to grasp at that last of their 15 minutes of fame has been impressive. Among the cast for the upcoming season:

• Mark Cuban
• Floyd Mayweather Jr.
• Wayne Newton
• Scary Spice (Melanie Brown)
• Helio Castroneves
• Jenni Garth
• Josie Maran
• Marie Osmond
• Jane Seymour

Mark Cuban isn't making some last clutch at fame, I think it's more about brand bolstering for him. Generating constant publicity for himself is just part of who he is. Mayweather is in the tail of his career, and I'm surprised to see him on the list. The The rest all make sense.

***

Farecast lauches hotel search in beta. It’s both similar and different to their airfare service which lets you know whether fares are likely to go up or down and thus whether to buy now or wait. Their hotel service, called Hotel Rate Key, lets you know whether a hotel’s rates are a bargain or not relative to that hotel’s historical rates.

***

What the residents of Dunder Mifflin did on their summer vacation:

***

Tom Wolfe reviews Entourage

But there is hope in this moxie wasteland of moviemakers. Johnny Drama draws not my ire. Here is the bravado-laden torch of the past, its fire fueled by protein shakes and casting off the nearly forgotten aroma of desire. His ginseng-toned body twisting and gyrating with anxiety and self-doubt, he’s a New Age Neal Cassady, passed up here for a Lifetime movie, there for a Hallmark Channel special—the Houghton Mifflin and HarperCollins of the television world. Johnny Drama is no mere muzzled bus driver, however. He is a symbol of irony, that word now recognized only by the literati. Played by Kevin Dillon, Sancho Panza to real-life brother Matt, this role oozes the true Hollywood pathos of silver-screen heartbreak. If watch Entourage you must, then watch it for Drama.

***

Indexed - lots of fun. I have a hard time picking my favorite.

***

Gorilla movie - [via Daring Fireball via Fresh Signals via AdFreak]

Two posts that seem like action and reaction

Time on the internet to surpass time watching TV for the average US household. I passed that point long ago.

TorrentSpy blocks US searches.

George Saunders, again

The second Amazon blog post from George Saunders.

Apologies for being such an incompetent blogger. Apparently, real bloggers blog every day, and sometimes even several times during the day, whenever anything interesting happens. I will try to do better. I will hope that more interesting things happen to me. I will go out right now and befriend some angry junkies and when they steal all my money I will rob a bank and sail to the Azores, where I will accidentally eat some hallucenogenic mushrooms and go on a big mind-expanding trip.

Whoa. I just did it. It was awesome.

Pinkberry

The dessert chain Pinkberry is all the rage in Southern California. They serve "frozen yogurt" in a clean, minimalist store with Philippe Starck furniture and sell designer accessories like $60 dog bowls.

I put quote around frozen yogurt because the Pinkberry Wikipedia page links to a now pay-blocked archive article in the LA Times in which they sent samples of Pinkberry to a lab that found that it did not contain enough bacterial cultures per gram to qualify to call their product "frozen yogurt" with all its attendant health benefits.

I think it tastes fresh, with more of that sour true yogurt taste than stuff like TCBY's in the 80's, but at $5 for a medium (8 oz) 3 topping yogurt, it ain't cheap, and the lines at the stores during peak hours are more than it's worth.

I don't know which store inspired which, but a whole host of frozen yogurt competitors have sprouted up, all clustering around similar sounding names. Besides Pinkberry, there's Red Mango, Kiwiberri, Snowberry, Yogurberry, IceBerry, and Berri Good. Straight from Korea to LA, it's the frozen yogurt revival.

Eric and I have discussed opening a business selling toppings right next door to Pinkberry locations. Customers could save the $0.95 they charge per topping by ordering their yogurt plain and then walking next door to choose from our even larger and cheaper selection of toppings. $0.95 for a teaspoon of Fruity Pebbles?

I smell a rat

Ratatouille on Blu-ray Nov. 6. That should be a good format on which to appreciate the gorgeous animation, but almost every title coming out is only on one HD format or the other, so these "exclusive to Blu-ray" or "exclusive to HD-DVD" announcements don't excite me.

This is an example that the pursuit of individual interests within a group of sellers does not always lead to a global maximum. The studios are killing sales of both formats because the average consumer will not buy two DVD players just to watch their hi-def discs (well, okay, maybe I will, but only because I'm a video quality fiend). With both camps trying to carve out the biggest piece of the pie for themselves, they've shrunk the entire pie.

Famous title sequences

A YouTube compilation here.

Technorati Tags: art, design, movies, video, youtube

The Groucho Letters

The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx was featured recently in one of the four million e-mail newsletters I receive. I think it was Very Short List. I'm so behind on personal e-mail right now it's silly.

Anyhow, I checked out a page or two via Amazon's Look Inside the Book feature and found this book to be a delight. Here's one famous excerpt, from a letter Groucho wrote to Warner Bros. when they came after him and his brothers for attempting to make a movie called A Night in Casablanca because Warner Bros. had made Casablanca five years earlier:

You claim to own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without your permission. What about "Warner Brothers?" Do you own that, too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the sticks as The Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor's eye, and even before us there had been other brothers--the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit; and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (This was originally "Brothers, Can You Spare a Dime?" but this was spreading a dime pretty thin, so they threw out one brother gave all the money to the other one and whittled it down to, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx

Technorati Tags: book, humor

Heima

Here's the trailer for the Sigur Ros movie Heima. I have no idea what it's about, but if ever there was a band whose music could inspire a new Qatsi trilogy for this age, it's Sigur Ros.

Tiger Woods imitating Charles Barkley's golf swing

Seven soldiers

7 soldiers just back from a tour of duty in Iraq write an op-ed in the NYTimes about the state of the counterinsurgency. Their assessment:

To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

And more:

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

D3...serious hotness

Workaround for sending MMS messages using your iPhone. The iPhone camera isn't that hot, but sometimes you just want to send a photo to someone on the spot. Being able to send a photo of decent quality to someone instantaneously using whatever you used to snap the photo is one of those things I would have thought would be commonplace by now, but it's not. Some people have camera phones, but the photo quality is terrible. Others have decent phone cameras, but then the recipient can't view the photo in high resolution. Or you have a digital camera that doesn't have wireless access and a keyboard for typing in contacts.

Speaking of cameras, Nikon and Canon continue to pound the living daylights out of each other on the digital SLR cage fight. Canon introduced the EOS 1DS Mark III, with a 21-megapixel full frame sensor. Today, Nikon came back with the D3, with a near full-frame sensor (a first for Nikon in its digital SLR line), but more importantly, a max ISO rating of 25,600, or "64X what was commonly regarded as high-speed film." It shoots up to 9 frames per second with Autofocus tracking and up to 11fps without.

ISO 25,600? Criminy, that thing will see in the dark. 11 fps? HDMI video output? A virtual horizon function which lets you know when the camera is perfectly level? a 920K dot LCD?!

Once you start collecting some lenses by either Nikon or Canon, it's tough to justify switching, and both are close enough in performance that there's no reason to. But I'd been jealous of Canon's full-frame sensors on its digital SLRs. When Canon announced the 21MP 1DS MKIII, I was a bit envious, but the features on the D3 are much more exciting to me than the 21MP's. That ISO setting, if it's actually usable, may mean leaving your flash at home for so many more situations. Even if it relies on some digital voodoo like the D2X required to reach ISO 1600, the D3 has a still impressive 6,400 top end ISO if you don't resort to digital shenanigans.

Also, the Canon 1DS MKIII costs a jaw-dropping $8,000. Yes, it may perform at medium format quality levels, but at that price you could just buy a medium format camera.

Check out the DPReview preview of the D3 which streets in November. Here's Ken Rockwell's preview.

I wet my pants reading about the D3. All I can say is me...want...now. If I get one, I'm going to set it next to my iPhone in the hopes they mate and spawn some of the sexiest gadgets ever.

Also among the Nikon announcements: an AF-S 14-24mm f2.8 lens. I want one of those, too, as Nikon has really been lacking in the wide-angle lens category for its digital SLRs because of the multiplication factor on its previous sensors.

Shine a Light trailer

Martin Scorsese has a Rolling Stones documentary called Shine a Light coming out, well, I think in 2008 sometime. Here's the trailer in Quicktime 480p and smaller if you're scared to see the crevices in Keith Richards' face with too much clarity. The trailer is good, energetic.

I've always been partial to Scorsese's musical docs. The Last Waltz is fantastic.

UPDATE: Ken asked that I add a warning about the graphic footage of Mick Jagger grinding up against "young-enough-to-be-his-grandaughter (or at least a fifth girlfriend)" Christina Aguilera. Instead of a May-December, this is more March-December. I was just surprised to discover the two had sung together in concert.

A new pair of glasses for the web

Adobe announces Moviestar, a new version their web video Adobe Flash Player 9, with support for H.264. It also includes a new audio codec called High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC).

So we may not have to put up with the low quality Flash video at YouTube for much longer. Though it is one of the better codecs for producing high quality video at low file sizes, H.264 is not a magic bullet. But used well, it can offer "good enough" quality for full-screen viewing on a computer without crazy download times.

Adobe has posted one demo. Viewed at full screen, i wouldn't call it high def, but it's sufficient for standard def for today's bandwidths. You can retain the minimal latency of today's Flash video while adding a welcome boost in video quality.

I used to think such intermediate forms of video quality wouldn't be needed for long if Internet bandwidth to homes continued to increase at the rates predicted by Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth. But I feel like Internet bandwidth to the home hasn't improved much for me in the past several years. I'm actually putting up with slower bandwidth here in LA (DSL) than I had a few years ago in Seattle through a cable modem.

True streaming high def over the web is not yet a reality. Someday, but not today.

Silver Lining

I didn't get a chance to listen to all of Rilo Kiley's new album Under the Blacklight at their MySpace page before they pulled most of the tracks down. What tracks I did hear are sure to elicit some gagging from a subset of their diehard fans upset with their move over to a major label and a more mainstream pop sound.

I like "Silver Lining" a lot, though--it's a sweet little tune (that one is still up at their MySpace page). And since I, like many in the indie music world, heart Jenny Lewis, I'll be trying to catch them on their new album tour.

A good place to start, if you want to delve into the Rilo Kiley most of us have known and dug up until now, is with their earlier album Execution of All Things.

Field Notes brand notebooks available for order

Those Field Notes Brand notebooks I mentioned a while back are available for pre-order. I ordered two sets to test out as companions to my Moleskines for note-taking.

I filled about 7 Moleskines taking notes for class last year, and I was refining my system for using them as I went, adding page numbers and an index to important content in the front.

For sheer portability and durability, a paper notebook still bests a laptop. I'm getting old and need to write down more and more.

The Big Parade and Born to Be Bad

I caught up with a film school classmate last night by attending a double bill of King Vidor's The Big Parade (2nd highest grossing silent film of all time after The Birth of a Nation) and Nicholas Ray's Born to Be Bad (a sort of All About Eve starring the lovely Joan Fontaine). You might ask what links these two movies (shortly after asking "What movies?"). You might ask because I did, shortly after my friend suggested the double bill.

It turns out that the what links the two movies is that they are rare pieces from the UCLA Film Archive, not to be found on DVD or at your local megaplex or as a torrent on the high seas of Internet piracy, and both are black and white.

Together they loomed as a formidable opponent to my attention span on a Friday night after a long week at work. I laugh now to think that I initially asked if I should leave work earlier than normal in order to buy tickets in advance. I must have been thinking of Superbad, that movie showcasing those new film technologies known as color and sync sound. No, even in the most ardent film appreciation city in the world, I doubt a back-to-back showing of a 2 hr 20 min silent film and a 1 hr 30 minute black and white from the 1950's would sell out.

When we strolled into the very new Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, I spied a die-hard audience of about 8 people, most of them old enough to have been Billy Wilder contemporaries. I was no longer nervous that I'd pass out and start snoring loudly as it was likely that a few of the other filmgoers might do so as well, out of sheer age. One seat in the theater, right on the aisle, is a different color than all the others. Supposedly it was actually Billy Wilder's chair from some long gone age; unfortunately they chose to model all the other seats in the theater on that one instead of opting for more comfortable and modern furnishings. I felt like I was sitting in a coach seat of a 737. My friend's knees were wedged against the seat in front of her. Not a promising sign for what promised to be about four hours of viewing.

Some man had the audacity to sit in Billy Wilder's chair despite the preponderance of empty seats. I thought of approaching and reproaching him on his impudence, but a second glance gave rise to a second plausible theory that perhaps he was simply too old to notice which seat he had occupied.

A pianist played en electronic keyboard to accompany the entirety of King Vidor's silent film. That guy had a good memory and a good sense of timing. In part because I'd just finished Discover Your Inner Economist, I had promised myself that if at any time the movie bored me I'd walk out and do something more productive with my time, like play keep away from the dozens of hobos wandering the streets of Westwood.

After a somewhat disturbing first act, the movie increased in watchability, and I found myself unexpectedly moved by several moments in the movie. Spanning the period from just before the start of WWI to just after its conclusion, the movie follows the story of Jim Apperson, a lazy son of a wealthy businessman who comes of age when he enlists in the army. His character arc mirrors that of the nation, from idleness to patriotic fervor to disillusionment with the war, and his personal triumphs and tragedies are those of America.

While in France, he falls in love with a French woman named Melisande, and their first date is a staple of that romantic comedy genre classic, the meeting between two people who are in love but don't speak the same language. They trade a French-English dictionary back and forth, and their resulting meet-cute dialogue is genuinely touching and romantic.

Many people think of silent film and think of Chaplin or Keaton and keystone cops and those sorts of physical capers, but many of them, like Intolerance and this Vidor film, work in modes other than comedy and offer great depth and complexity. The acting may not impress a modern audience, but there's stronger story and heaps more emotional heft in The Big Parade than in The Transformers.

Born to Be Bad is some good melodrama. You'll either laugh at that old school sass (that the movie is hard to find on video is the only explanation I'll accept for why IMDb has no memorable quotes listed) or chuckle at the old school syrup, with Joan Fontaine being pulled into about twenty to twenty-five passionate kisses to the accompaniment of strings soaring to a crescendo.

I'll also confess to thinking Joan Fontaine is a stone cold fox who looks ravishing in this movie. Younger sister of Olivia de Havilland, Joan was not just a pretty face. According to her IMDb bio, "Joan Fontaine has been a licensed pilot, a champion ballonist, an expert rider, a prize-winning tuna fisherman, and a hole-in-one golfer, a Cordon Bleu chef and is also a licensed interior decorator." She's the only actor to win an Oscar in a Hitchcock film, and "Howard Hughes, who dated her sister Olivia de Havilland for awhile, proposed to Joan many times." And that, as we all know, is as foolproof an endorsement of a woman's hotness as existed in that age.

Technorati Tags: film, movies

Oddly worded insult

Finally, Marco Materazi reveals what he said to Zidane to provoke the most famous head-butt in sports history: "I prefer the whore that is your sister."

Is that a translation of what Materazzi said on television in Italian or is that what he actually said in English? If he said that to me in English I'd have to pause for a second to contemplate the bizarre syntax before head-butting him in the face.

Technorati Tags: football, soccer, sports

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

In this summer of one mind-numbing sequel after another, one which hasn't gotten much attention but which I have been waiting for a long time is the sequel to Elizabeth titled Elizabeth, Part Deux. Or actually Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Here's the oh-so-pretty Quicktime trailer. Featuring the contrasting acting styles of Cate Blanchett, method actor, and Clive Owen, "I'm Clive Owen, you're not" actor.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer

TGIS

An unlikely hand of no-limit hold-em poker.

Trailer for Judd Apatow's next movie (he's kinda prolific right now) Walk Hard, a spoof of musical biopics like Walk the Line and Ray. It's a genre deserving of a comic jab, but the trailer is long. It should either be shorter or much longer. When I watch spoof movies I usually wish I could fast forward through the dead spots in between jokes. The ideal would be to watch a half hour version of the movie with that dead space all edited out.

A dream team creates a new transfer for the upcoming Criterion Collection DVD for Days of Heaven. They tried to achieve a more natural look for the landscape. I'm really curious to see how it will look compared to the previous DVD.

The Atlantic identifies quirk as the "ruling sensibility of today's Gen-X indie culture", putting in the suspect lineup, among others, This American Life, Arrested Development, the movies of Wes Anderson, anything Miranda July, Napoleon Dynamite, and Flight of the Conchords. The Atlantic is tired of quirk for quirk's sake; I don't think quirk ages well. But if the quirk has a spine to hang its hat on, then it can serve as the parmesan cheese and pepper.

Guilt by Association: Indie bands cover guilty pleasures. Guilt By Association the album comes out in September. Related: Mandy Moore covers Rihanna's ridiculously catchy "Umbrella":

George Saunders interviews himself at Amazon.com. If you don't know who he is, just buy his book Civil War Land in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella and read it. Brilliant.

Technorati Tags: book, dvd, film, movies, music, poker, video

Some links, some involving Jason Bourne

Ben Affleck hoping Jason Bourne has sidekick in next movie.

Trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling. Clever premise.

Scary view into the C.I.A.'s interrogation techniques. Scary stuff, especially the details on the interrogation technique called waterboarding. I'd say we need to call Jason Bourne to expose these practices, but the public already knows what's going on.

Gruesome death: man bitten by his pet black widow spider and then eaten by his other pet lizards and insects. Is this story true? Those generic photos make me skeptical.

A poster of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, produced entirely using the text of the script. From a company called L.A. Pop Art which specializes in using this technique called micrography to produce such prints. The pieces they have for sale don't interest me as consumer products, but I'd love to see the technique generalized so that you could order a custom print of any picture generated entirely from the text of your choice.

A popular article that circulated among the technorati a few weeks ago: In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich. Hard to feel sorry for people who have a couple million and still feel poor.

Technorati Tags: film, humor, movies, newyorker, tech, trailer

More on Bergman and Antonioni

Woody Allen pays tribute to Bergman. Martin Scorsese pays tribute to Antonioni.

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that in hindsight, Bergman's star may be inflated (article locked behind NYTimes pay-wall, which is too bad considering how much discussion it has generated; there's no better way to attract lightning than to stand on a tall building and wave a metal flagpole over your head, though I think he was sincere in his feelings). A full summary of Bergman coverage at the NYTimes is here. David Bordwell re-examines both Bergman and Antonioni in light of all the autopsies of their careers and theorizes that perhaps one's feelings towards each may be influenced by when one came of age.

Technorati Tags: film, movies

Connor nearly dozing off

Here's a short Quicktime clip (I had to remove the embedded link because of the bandwidth hit anytime this page loaded) of my nephew Connor nearly dozing off while Joannie burps him. I guess feeding requires a ton of energy at his age (4 weeks old) so usually after a feeding Connor teeters on the edge of food coma. His eyes roll back, his eyelids start to sag, and if Joannie wasn't holding his head up he'd probably topple over like a drunk.

In this case, we laughed and woke him up again.

Technorati Tags: connor, video

Concept art from Ratatouille, Imogen Heap

Hmm, an old post I forgot to post from a few weeks back...

You can see the goodness here. At the time I wrote this, I hadn't seen Ratatouille yet. Every one seemed to have seen it by the time I decided I couldn't wait any longer, so one night I just drank a Coke and caught the late showing one night after work. It was all that and then some. The animation was stunning.

***

Via FreshArrival, here's a WMV file of a live performance by Imogen Heap at the studios of Indie 103.1 here in LA back a . A friend from Starbucks got my a pass to go see her perform at the Starbucks music lounge at Sundance in 2006. Watching her work was intriguing because she used a series of gadgets, including a Macbook Pro, all of which she demonstrated to us before she played her set. She's one person but with all that gear she can sing with herself. The video gives you an idea of how she creates that big sound. Here are a few of my pics from the show at Sundance.

Technorati Tags: animation, art, music

Nephews and birthdays

Happy birthday to my little sis Karen. She left LA and went to Chicago just before I headed to LA from NYC, and now she's making the move to NYC. I suspect she's avoiding me. The other possibility is that the country isn't big enough for all of us Wei kids so we're constantly whirling around the country in a geographic pas de trois.

I flew out to DC this past weekend to visit my nephew Connor. My timing was good as my flights out and in were sandwiched around an air-traffic-crippling computer outage at LAX.

Connor was just over 3 weeks old when I met him. He's a tiny thing, between 7 and 8 pounds. My iPhone is taller than his head right now.

His mode of communication is binary at this point. He's either crying or he isn't, and our goal at all times was to get simple: if he was crying, we did everything in our power to get him to a state of non-crying, and if he wasn't crying, we tried to keep him in that state. He likes to be patted on the back all the time. If I so much as stopped doing so for a few seconds, usually because I'd fallen asleep, he'd let me know with an ear-splitting wail.

Until his belly button is healed up, he can't be immersed in water, so for now he has wipedowns instead of baths, like army baby-wipe showers. He's really not a fan. He's highly sensitive to how he's being held. Sometimes he wants to bee lying facedown on your chest. At other times, he prefers to on his back, cradled in your arms. At other times he wants to be held against your shoulder and walked around. Finding which position was preferred at any point in time was a matter of trial and error. He'd let us know when we were off.

After eating, he loves to crane his head back and throw his arms up in a cat stretch. In general, he loves to tilt his head back or to the side as far as possible. Mike is worried he'll develop some strange reverse hunchback posture; I think it's adorable.

When he was well-fed, I'd try and burp him, and then I'd sit on the sofa and rest him on my chest. It's the greatest. His little arms flail around, his motor skills being fairly limited for now. He has that fresh new baby smell, which ranks above new car smell on the list of magical, transitory scents. His little body is a furnace, and feeling his body heat against your chest is pure magic. When awake and excited, he pants or breathes heavily, and he strains to swing his head from side to side as if in search of something. Holding him is like cradling a hummingbird.

He can't quite seem to focus his eyes on anything yet, but I think we made momentary eye contact a handful of times over the weekend. And while his facial expressions are still a cipher when he's not crying, I remember three times when it appeared he was smiling. Joannie thinks he just had gas, but I like to imagine that he thought of something funny, like "boy are you in for a surprise the next time you change my diaper."

It's a good thing newborns are so cute, because they're so helpless. Or maybe they're cute because they're so helpless? I'm exhausted from just the short visit--I have no idea how Joannie or new mothers deal with sleeping a few hours at a time--but I'd trade sleep for some quality time with Connor anytime.

I shot a bit of video of Connor and will post a short clip as soon as I have a moment to digitize and transcode.

Technorati Tags: connor

Esquire's 2007 Sexiest Woman Alive

UPDATE: A reader writes in with a convincing case that the below is wrong, and I think the reader's right. Spoiler alert still applies, but it applies to the name you see in the first comment on this post.

Spoiler alert--don't read on if you don't want to know the identity of Esquire's Sexiest Woman Alive. It's an annual ritual to guess who has earned the honor before several issues of photographic and textual clues are released.

Mike was the one who nailed it. We were sitting around playing with Connor, and I asked if they had any ideas. Neither he nor Ken had seen the first photo clue, so we pulled it up and perused it like forensic scientists. This, by the way, is a pose that I myself often strike for the camera.

All we knew was that it was some blond that's likely in the news (as past winners Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson, and Jessica Biel haven't exactly been anonymous).

The clue that gave it away for Mike was the hint that she's often mistaken for Ashley Judd (all the first installment clues are here).

Katherine Heigl.

The person giving the clues in the interview must be her Grey's Anatomy co-star T.R. Knight. Another clue that fits the bill, according to a Google search, is the fact that she's an animal lover. Having come off a lead in Knocked Up, she fulfills the requirement for being somewhat in the entertainment zeitgeist.

Technorati Tags: esquire, magazine, woman

Ads, ads, ads

A trailer for the movie version of Kite Runner, posted by Yahoo alongside a video ad for The Bourne Ultimatum (at least it was last I checked) that plays at the same time, obscuring the audio of the trailer. Two ads fighting for control of your speakers. Yahoo must be hurting.

Another case of advertising gone wrong: this QSOL print ad. Sex and servers: sounds like a trashy novel set in the Bay Area.

Technorati Tags: advertising, movies, tech, trailer

The beggar and the hot dog guy

Freakonomics, now wrapped in the folds of the Grey Lady, asks several notable people a question:

You are walking down the street in New York City with $10 of disposable income in your pocket. You come to a corner with a hot dog vendor on one side and a beggar on the other. The beggar looks like he’s been drinking; the hot dog vendor looks like an upstanding citizen. How, if at all, do you distribute the $10 in your pocket, and why?

This is how Arthur Brooks, Tyler Cowen, Mark Cuban, Barbara Ehrenreich, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Stephen Dubner, and Roland Fryer responded.

Tyler Cowen is currently popular-economics' big star with the release of his new book Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist. I read half of it on the flight out to DC today and wholeheartedly recommend it. Cowen has a distinct voice, very assured and direct, but his interest in food and art and popular culture give his writing a mass appeal that some of his peers don't tap (a conscious choice on the part of many of them, I'm sure).

Technorati Tags: book, economics, nytimes

.Mac still sucks

I scrolled through a recap of Tuesday's big Apple product unveiling, waiting for the .Mac announcement that would blow me away, and it never came. The feelings of the large contingent of disappointed .Mac users is reflected well here. I end up paying $99 a year to sync all my Macs and backup some files.

I wouldn't care so much if it were cheaper, say $19.99 a year. Or, if you keep it at $19.99, up the storage space to 100GB or some non-trivial number that would allow for full backup of all my music files and documents.

Macs themselves are as hot as ever, though. I'm slowly steering everyone in my family to Macs. The last time I was visiting my parents I spent a good hour trying to speed up their Windows desktop. It had slowed to a crawl, and it's been so long since I've worked on a Windows computer that it took me a long time to decipher all the random software that had leeched onto the system like mold. You can only re-install the operating system and start fresh so many times before you just recommend they dump the thing for something lower maintenance. I see one of the new iMacs in their future.

Technorati Tags: apple, Mac, tech, web

TSA

Bruce Schneier interviews Kip Hawley, head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Good read as neither party pulls any punches. To Hawley's credit, he sought out Schneier to see how the TSA could improve its image on the web. I can't tell if security is improving or not--so much of what Hawley cites he cannot share. But that he's willing to engage Schneier on some difficult questions makes me feel a little safer. Even if that doesn't actually make air travel safer for me, there is an economic benefit to the slight boost in peace of mind.

I still do hate taking off my shoes and all that crap, though. Someone should follow that shoe bomber guy around and make him take off his shoes and put them back on every five seconds for the rest of his life.

Technorati Tags: flying, travel

Team Discovery Channel to disband

Fresh off a victory in the Tour de France, Team Discovery Channel will disband at season's end (their previous sponsor was the USPS). Even with cycling's troubles, I would have thought someone would want to step in and sponsor such a successful team. I wonder what the operating budget of a cycling team is for a year--$25 to $30 million? You probably can't turn a profit, and with the taint of drugs hanging over the sport, even the soft profits from brand association are gone. Still, if I were extremely wealthy, I'd sink money into it just to be close to the sport, to travel around to races in Europe. The announcement makes it seem as if they could have found sponsorship but have chosen to disband anyhow. If so, it's a blow to a sport already staggering.

Though I'll always think of Lance Armstrong first when I think of the team, the team had survived his departure and continued its success. The next image that leaps to mind is Sports Director Johan Brunyeel barking in several languages into his radio to encourage his riders, and the third would be George Hincapie and his Oakley racing jackets, out front at the bottom of the final climb, trying to launch his team captain for the stage win.

I met a few members of the team staff the last year I went to the Tour. In a sport notable for its turnover, the team seemed to be a tight-knit group. It's a sad day for this cycling fan, capping what has been a dark year for the sport.

Technorati Tags: cycling

Virgin America

I can't remember the last time I thought an airline was cool. That's just not an association one has with an airline brand except if flying first or business class internationally. But Richard Branson's new Virgin America sounds pretty sweet. Two 110-volt power outlets for every three seats! USB connectors! Wi-fi and Ethernet internet access on the plane (eventually)! Nerds everywhere excitedly rush onto Twitter to announce their in-flight status. Such is the technological prowess of their airplane that they earned a writeup in Wired's Gadget Blog.

What will the in-flight chat rooms turn into? I find most flights to be grim affairs, the social atmosphere rising at most to a level of quiet courtesy born from solidarity of suffering. Will users be identified by their seat number, or name? Or will they be anonymous? If it's the latter, I see a swarm of anonymous complaints arising when there's a screaming baby on board.

I tried booking a flight through their website and ran into a lot of problems (my session kept resetting), so they may still have some kinks to work out. But they fly out of LA to SF and DC, and they've done enough brand differentiation so that they'll be my airline of choice for those flights.

Technorati Tags: airline, flying, travel

Gen 4 M3

How's the latest M3 coupe rate out? Pretty damn well.

Everyone should test drive one at least once, just to experience what it feels like to have 8000 rpm of torque compressing you into your seat as you corner on rails, the engine growling like a dog baring its teeth. It's pure joy.

Technorati Tags: autos, cars

Wired to Win: Surviving the Tour de France

How did I not hear about this movie sooner? Maybe being a film student has really insulated me from the world.

This IMAX movie, five years in the making, follows riders Jimmy Caspar and Baden Cooke in the 2003 Tour de France. But instead of focusing only on cycling or the Tour, the movie uses the two riders experiences to study brain science. I'm interested mainly in seeing IMAX footage from inside the race. The images of cyclists flying through the French countryside will no doubt evoke in me a near spiritual ache to be back in France, crawling up the side of an Alpine mountain like an ant on roller skates. I felt a related longing recently when the "camera" rose up over a rooftop to reveal Paris laid out before me (Ratatouille).

The movie's website includes a podcast you can download and listen to on your portable music player in the movie theater though how many viewers will watch the movie a second time to take advantage of that?

Technorati Tags: cycling, film, movies, science, sports

So that's how it works!

Funny link [Via Pogue's Posts].

Make sure to move your mouse around a bit or you may find it cryptic and uninteresting.

Technorati Tags: humor, web

Be Kind Rewind trailer

The trailer for the next Michel Gondry movie Be Kind Rewind is here (in Quicktime HD if you can handle it). I previously mentioned the movie in June. The concept: Jack Black stars as Jerry, who accidentally becomes magnetized, erasing all the tapes in the video store where his best friend Mike (Mos Def) works. To retain the store's best customer, an old lady who might be going cuckoo, Jerry and Mike decide to re-enact and film every movie she chooses to rent. Among the movie they remake, supposedly, are Ghostbuster, Rush Hour 2, Back to the Future, The Lion King, and Robocop.

I would give my left hand just for the discarded scraps of ideas that are in the trash bin of Gondry's brain.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer, video

Earthquake?

I think I may have just experienced my first LA earthquake, but I'm not sure. It felt like a giant just leaned against the outside of my apartment and shook it the same way I'd shake a vending machine if my bag of chips failed to drop down into the receiving bay.

UPDATE: Not the most intuitive map, but I see a big red square on this earthquake map indicating seismic activity in the last hour. Judging by eye it looks like around a 4.0 magnitude earthquake. Ah, wait...here it is: a 4.5 earthquake at 12:58AM.

Technorati Tags: earthquake, LA

Remains of a long day

You want a proxy for the state of Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD? Sales of 300 on Amazon offer a good proxy. The movie was available on both formats. On Blu-Ray the sales rank is currently #5 on Amazon.com. On HD-DVD? It's Amazon sales rank is 12. Slight edge Blu-Ray. Of course, none of this matters because so few titles are available on either format, let alone both formats. In fact, most titles that are available on Blu-Ray are not available on HD-DVD and vice versa.

A brief history of shoegazing, a genre of music I should have been listening to in high school to express those oh so hidden depths of soul and heartfelt yearnings behind my otherwise shy facade.

NYTimes doing away with TimesSelect soon? Let's hope so.

Two new Nokia phones, the 7500 and 7900, look like...well, the analogy I'd us is that these new phones are to old Nokia candybar phones as Bizarro Superman was to Superman in the looks department. Cubist, or maybe crystallized?

Facebook is all the rage. I held out until I realized how many of my classmates were using it to communicate. I've now had a few months to fiddle around with it. It's a huge step up from the loud mess that was MySpace and the cleanest designed social networking site to date. It also did a smart thing in opening up for application development by third parties. But I have a lot of thoughts on how the site could improve and where it's vulnerable. I'm not sold on its longevity. Those thoughts will have to wait for another day, when I have more time. In the meantime, this article is a good read.

Technorati Tags: amazon, dvd, gadgets, mobile, music, nytimes, phones, facebook

Robert Ludlum titles for the 20th-century music lover...

...courtesy of Alex Ross. I like The Reich Reich and The Scarlatti Inheritance.

If I were to contribute to the list, I'd add The Ligeti Project. Oh wait, that is a title already.

In another humorous post, Ross reflects on the fact that everything is dead: classical music is dead, rock is dead, and so is hip-hop, jazz, cinema, newspapers, and of course blogging. Also, the United States of America is dead. James Brown Is Dead. Microsoft is dead. Sinbad is dead...is dead. Actually, I never even heard he was dead, so Sinbad is dead is dead is also dead. Dead is Dead.

This post is dead.

Technorati Tags: humor, music

Some old notes and links

VMWare's Fusion may top even Parallels and Bootcamp as a way to run Windows apps on your Mac.

After downloading the first iPhone software update, I've found the iPhone to be generally more stable. Mobile Safari was crashing a lot just before the update. Now? Not as much.

Why are U.S. health care costs so high relative to the rest of the world? Perhaps because American doctors make so much more than their international peers and because of the way they are paid--by the procedure. I'm not sure the right answer is to put doctors on a salary. If the services American doctors provide are superior or more specialized, it may be worth the money. Arnold Kling blames a different issue for soaring healthcare costs, arguing that what we have in the U.S. is more health care insulation than insurance.

Baseball Prospectus posted an interview with Dr. Alan Nathan, physics professor and also chairman of the Science and Baseball committee of SABR. In response to a question about counterintuitive baseball truths as related to physics, he offered three, the last running counter to a baseball axiom:

One example is that the grip the batter has on the bat does not play a role in the ball-bat collision. That is, a batter could just as well let go of the bat an instant before contact, and it would not make a bit of difference to what happens to the ball. Most people tend to be very skeptical of this conclusion, since they believe a batter "muscles" the ball when it is in contact with the bat. But, that is not what happens, as shown not only "theoretically" but also experimentally.

Another example has to do with the ability of the batter to track the incoming pitch. In fact, it is really impossible to do so. So, just like my previous example, the batter could just as well close his eyes when the ball is halfway to home plate and it won’t affect the outcome of the swing.

A final example: Can a batter get to first base quicker by running through the base or in a head-first slide? Most people believe the former. I believe the latter. The essential physics is that by sliding with outstretched arms, the batter reaches the bag before his center of gravity reaches it, whereas those two times more or less coincide when running through the bag.

Technorati Tags: apple, baseball, economics, iPhone, Mac, software, tech

TGI...oh shoot, it's Sunday night

Amazon Flexible Payments Service launches. That was the last product I worked on before leaving Amazon. After finishing a product definition and filing for a patent or two for the payment web service, I left for NYC and the film world. It had been so long since I'd heard anything about it that I though it had been killed, but I'm glad to see it make it to market. Just glancing at some of the service highlights, it seems to be have retained almost all of the cool features we envisioned for it, especially the flexible instructions. In the next year or so, some people are going to build some really cool payment apps using this service. There isn't the option for free person-to-person bank debit transfers, however, which, though it wouldn't make any money for Amazon, would enable some cool consumer apps.

GMailSecure is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that forces GMail to use https.

Meemix is another one of those Internet radio sites like Pandora or Last.fm that tries to serve up music that you'll like. I've played with the beta a bit and it seems to be choosing songs well. But goodness gracious that is one confusing interface. Whoever designed that page did Meemix a huge disservice. There are all sorts of non-standard icons everywhere, the majority of which might as well be hieroglyphics. You cannot underestimate the importance of a clear, simple interface for a new product like this, especially one fighting for mindshare in an already crowded space. Pandora, iLike, Last.fm, The Filter, and on and on. I don't track the stock market and venture capital space enough to say whether or not we're in the midst of another bubble, but there are definitely plenty of markets that are overcrowded. They can't all survive. If they truly intend on treating this as a beta that they'll learn from, they better clean up that interface pronto.

The NYTimes outs Fake Steve Jobs: he's played by Daniel Lyons, senior editor at Forbes. Thanks, NYTimes, for now shaving in half the fun that we all had reading Fake Steve Jobs' blog.

Gilbert Arenas is the Microsoft of the NBA. He got outed for stealing someone's joke about shark attacks and posting it to his blog as his own, and after some folks called him on it, he responded on his blog.

Let’s not forget, “Hibachi” was stolen too. Brendan Haywood used to say it before me. But I recognize good stuff and make it popular. Now “Hibachi” is patented by Agent Zero, son.

I’m not a thief, I just reused it.

Know who is a thief? The guy that is trying to sell the domain name of GilbertArenas.com to me. It’s my name! I have to buy it back from him. Now that’s stealing, borrowing, whatever you want to call it.

Technorati Tags: amazon, Apple, email, Firefox, google, music, stevejobs, web, webservice

Reinventing the Wheel

Reinventing the Wheel : A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition was formerly named Code Name Ginger, a reference to the working name for what would eventually launch to the world as the Segway.

It's a rare firsthand behind-the-scenes account of the launch of a high profile tech device, and perhaps of more interest, of the man behind the legend that is Dean Kamen. It's rare because the captains of industry, e.g. Gates, Jobs, Bezos, have little to benefit from allowing a reporter unfettered access to their lives. The image we have of these people is received, for the most part, through the filter of Public Relations. It is akin to always seeing actors with their makeup on.

Author Steve Kemper was invited to document the creation of Ginger by Kamen himself, and he had near unfettered access for a large chunk of the Segway's development. But when the product leaked to the press with details only available through Kemper's book proposal (the retributive deed of a jilted editor at one of the publishers?), he was booted from Kamen's good graces and from the offices of the Ginger team before the product launched to the world. And so the momentum of the book comes crashing to a halt near the end, but what remains is a good read.

I've ridden a Segway. It's a lot of fun, something that needs to be experienced to be appreciated, but against most standards--the pre-launch hype (hysteria?), the expectations of Kamen the Ginger team, the expectations of investors like John Doerr and Kleiner Perkins--the device has been a disappointment.

There are a few reasons the device failed to meet expectations. One is that it's expensive, a couple thousand dollars. I can buy a cruiser bike here in LA for $300. The second is that they fit into a very strange niche: they're useful for covering distances in between those short enough to talk and long enough that you'd drive. If I had one, the main use would be to commute to work. But LA's sidewalk network is not extensive. If I took a Segway onto the road here in LA I'd be roadkill about five minutes after merging into traffic. In NYC, pedestrians would pull you off your Segway and beat you up if you tried to jockey with them for space on the sidewalk. For longer distances, getting one down into the subway system and onto a subway car would be so difficult as to be impractical.

Where do you park your Segway? I wouldn't feel comfortable leaving it outside, even if no one could ride the thing away. If I had a couple bags of groceries, how would I carry them? When a geek contemplates the Segway, they see a device so cool and revolutionary that it will change the world. When the average person sees the Segway, they see an expensive device that doesn't fit into the world they live in. What are the problems it solves? Being kinder to the environment is not a sufficient purchase driver. People do not vote for green with their pocketbooks unless the impact to their lives is neutral.

What is the market for the device? A great product without a market is in trouble, whereas a lousy product with a great market may survive until it improves or until superior products flood the space.

Another reason for the Segway's disappointing sales, and one I think is underestimated, especially by the geek set, is the mortification you feel when riding around on one. I think a lot of people would be embarrassed to be seen riding around on one in public. Some of it has to do with pop culture and how it was quickly depicted in shows like Arrested Development as a visual gag. But more damaging is that when I see someone on a Segway in public, wearing a bucket of a helmet, rolling along, my first impulse is laughter. Though the perception is unfair, riders seem like people who are too lazy to walk. Perhaps it's because people on Segways don't appear to be moving very quickly, or because they seem so still when standing on the device, gripping the handlebars. I don't think of that person as using the Segway in lieu of a trip in the car. I think of them as using the Segway instead of walking or biking.

A more desired reaction would be to think that the rider was aiding the environment, that they were hip, an early adopter, a trendsetter, the first on the block to get the hot new toy. Do other people think that, or am I the only one who would be a bit hesitant to subject his public image to scrutiny by riding one of these around town? It may seem like a minor branding issue, but it's hugely important.

Compare that to my iPhone. The first week I owned it, every time I pulled it out I felt like a celebrity nipple, so great was the attention it attracted. The Segway is really sexy from a geeky standpoint, but really geeky (in the bad way) from a consumer image standpoint.

Maybe it was ahead of its time. Given the elevated stature of the environment in recent months, perhaps the device would have had a greater success if it had launched a year or so ago as a powerful volley against pollution and global warming. If, at the same time An Inconvenient Truth came out, Al Gore and Leonardo Dicaprio appeared on every TV show possible, riding around on Segways, pushing them as one way to prevent impending environmental apocalypse; if every high profile celebrity in LA and NYC were given one and were seen riding around town on one; then maybe, just maybe, the device might have launched to greater sales and momentum. Not the type of sales predicted by some of the early investors, but stronger than the ones seen to date. Riders might have the sense of pride that Prius owners feel when passing each other on the road.

I also suspect that he devices best bet for catching on lies somewhere outside the U.S. Americans love their cars, and the country is built around them. Overcoming that requires not just solving practical problems but surmounting cultural inertia.

Reinventing the Wheel : A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition

Technorati Tags: book, gadgets, science, tech