Remains of the Day

New apps for the iPhone

Two great apps for the iPhone dropped today. One is Tweetie 2, the second version of my favorite iPhone Twitter client. The original Tweetie cost $2.99 and was well worth it. When it was announced that Tweetie 2 would also cost $2.99 for all users, regardless of whether or not they had purchased the previous version, there were plenty of complaints.

I covered this in a Facebook discussion, but the $2.99 price for Tweetie 2 is well worth it for me. A few points for the grumblers:

• The iPhone app store does not support upgrade pricing, so the developer can't charge one price to owners of the original Tweetie and another price for everyone else. That's Apple's fault, not the developer's.
• One thing there is no shortage of is Twitter clients for the iPhone (or in general). If you don't feel $2.99 is worth it after reading the feature set, you have plenty of alternatives.
• I'm not sure you can buy a single drink for $2.99 at Starbucks.

Interact with customers of any product these days, especially a web-based product, and one realizes that among the industries the internet revolutionized was whining. You can build a product for free with your own sweat and tears, donate blood to raise money to help children with cancer, rescue some elderly people and puppies from a burning building, and someone will still write in complaining that you haven't cured world hunger and oh, why can't they choose f!@$face as a username because damn it, this is America and how dare you censor me!

Tweetie 2 is great. Full persistence and offline mode alone would've been worth the $2.99 for me. If you're a power Twitter user, it's the best client for the iPhone and one of the best iPhone apps period.

Also arriving today in the iPhone app store was Adobe's Photoshop.com app. Cheapskates can't complain about the price of free.

Anyone who has shot any photos with the iPhone knows they don't usually come out of the camera show ready. To date Apple hasn't added in basic photo touchup tools but plenty of apps have filled the void.* The Photoshop.com app with its basic transform and color/exposure adjustment tools is a very worthy addition.

Remember, friends don't subject friends to long pages of unedited crappy photos.

* Some other photo apps for the iPhone that are worthwhile, if not free, are Chase Jarvis' Best Camera and CameraBag.

Miscellany

Google Reader asked some notable folks what their top picks were for Google Reader. Good idea, but I find it a bit offputting that so many folks chose their own website as one of their short list? Their sites are already listed and linked under their names, are we to believe they really spend time reading their own writing in Google Reader?

***

This past weekend, I was driving home on the 405 and saw a massive, odd-looking cloud standing alone in a clear blue sky, like a single head of cauliflower poking its head up through a bed of smog. Then I realized it was smoke from the fires in the San Gabriel mountains. It looked like a scene from 24, as if someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on LA. Here's one tightly-cropped time-lapse video of the smoke from the fires.

To truly appreciate how terrifying it looks, watch this wider-framed time-lapse which will give you a sense of the magnitude of this latest SoCal conflagration.

***

Hitchcock is a storyboarding app for the iPhone that can use photos. You're limited to the fixed focal length lens of the iPhone, but I could see it being a handy tool on set. We were shooting our Alec Baldwin Super Bowl commercial earlier this year in NYC, and the director Peter Berg grabbed my iPhone at one point and used the camera to help us visualize a shot he envisioned. He mentioned offhand that he wouldn't mind having a simple tool on the iPhone for quick previz.

It's $19.99, but there are more specialty tools coming to the iPhone that aren't intended for mass audiences, and those can justify higher prices.

Incidentally, I wish the iPhone app store had a way to put apps on a wishlist, or save them for later view. I often see apps that I think I might want to buy later, and I never have a way to remember them. Like this one cool app I saw last week, what did it do again, it was something about...oh, forget it.

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A BMW concept diesel-hybrid. As with all concept cars, it looks absurdly futuristic, but it's heartening to see higher end manufacturers committing to the sustainability movement. Design can lift up the mundane and make it desirable, and having manufacturers like BMW or Tesla pushing the high end of this market can only help.

***

On Japanese simplicity.

In just over 30 years Hello Kitty has become a multibillion-dollar model of resourceful minimalism within the global juggernaut of Japanese pop culture. From Tokyo to Tehran, her expressionless, barely sketched visage adorns key chains, backpacks, toiletries and even a Hello Kitty-themed airline jet. Late last year an entire maternity hospital with Hello Kitty imagery adorning bedspreads and birth certificates opened to great fanfare in Taiwan.

But why is she mouthless? Because when you look at Hello Kitty, or “Kitty-chan,” as she is affectionately known in Japan, she will feel just like you do. As Japanese anime critic Hideki Ono says: “Your brain projects the missing information, then your imagination fills it in and feels the pleasure of participation.”

The Japanese design aesthetic has a strong influence on my product team as all my designers are either Japanese or very into Japanese culture.

During my trip to Tokyo earlier this year, I couldn't help but notice that the metropolis of over 12 million people was so clean relative to other cities its size and population. Each night, as we walked back to our hotel after a day of sightseeing, several massive street cleaning vehicles would pass us on the road.

It's not that every part of Tokyo is tea gardens and bonsai trees. Any place with the urban density of Tokyo is going to feel overcrowded, and it's important, as many commenters on the article rightly point out, that cleanliness does not equal a low environmental footprint, even if that's the superficial impression.

I watched Miyazaki's Ponyo recently. Though it is on the surface a retelling of The LIttle Mermaid, it is at its core a story about humans trying to come to harmony with the environment and their natural surroundings. When he makes these movies, is he holding the Japanese up as paragons of that, or is he taking shots at them, too? Often his heroes and heroines are children. Is he issuing a call to the next generation to correct the environmental failings of their parents?

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The resurrection of the suburban novel? I never read many suburban novels while growing up in the suburbs, but there is something to the thesis of this article, that the suburbs are about a state of mind as much as they are about a physical place. The post-war generation fled to the suburbs in search of a big house, a big backyard, a more peaceful and fulfilling existence. That they found a spiritual wasteland that filled them with an almost depressing boredom.

That feeling of disappointment or disillusion is one with broad applications and perhaps explains the enduring nature of the concept of suburban dystopia.

Low light digital cameras

Ryan Brenizer and David Pogue highlight new compact cameras meant to perform better in low light situations. These manufacturers have done this by moving down in megapixels rather than up for the first time. This is a good sign. For far too long digital camera manufacturers have continued to release new models that increase megapixels when what most photographers needed was not more "resolution" but more "effective resolution".

The Panasonic LX3 earned a following last year among serious photographers as one of the first compacts focused not on increased megapixels but improved low light performance. I bought one and still use it as my carry-around, though it is not quite as slim as the ultra-compacts many people favor these days.

Of the new cameras announced, the Canon S90 sounds most attractive. It has some great features:

- an f2 lens at the wide end like the LX3, great for those really dim environments, which seem to be most of the ones I'm in when I find myself reaching for a carry around camera.

- a sizeable 3" diagonal LCD screen in back.

- two programmable control rings. I'm old school this way but I hate having to press buttons on compact cameras to select functions, I far far prefer physical controls that can be switched quickly. I switch ISO and aperture constantly on my cameras, even my LX3, and on the LX3 that requires using a little joystick.

- thin profile, small enough that I'd consider it pocketable.

It's smaller than the LX3 in body size, and if I didn't own an LX3 and an iPhone I might buy one of these. I might still get one (it pays to be in my family, you inherit lots of good trickle-down electronics as I succumb to gadget lust or early adopter syndrome).

Nikon 24-70mm f2.8

Ryan Brenizer lauds the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 zoom lens. I agree as it has become my go-to everyday lens on my SLR.

It's not light, in fact it's a bit of a beast, but then again when I bring out my SLR I'm usually not optimizing around weight but around picture quality. If I want a light carry-around camera I either use my phone or my Panasonic LX3.

The Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S Nikkor Zoom Lens is not cheap at about $1,800 each right now, but most beginning photographers make the mistake of spending too much on the camera body and too little on lenses. Two reasons this makes little sense:

• The lens, much more than any of the modern SLR bodies you're likely to buy from Canon or Nikon, is responsible for image quality. SLR bodies from Nikon and Canon have reached a point where you really can't go wrong. But there are still shots you just can't get without the right lens. Now, at the margins, and for specialized uses, for example if you're a professional sports photographer, the SLR body makes a difference. But even there, the most important piece of equipment they own are their fast, top-grade lenses.
• Great lenses, or "good glass" as photographers refer to them, retain or increase in market value, camera bodies start losing resale value the moment they hit the market. Whereas Nikon and Canon will replace an SLR every year or two, roughly, the great lenses in their lines are often around for many years. Some lenses have never been replaced with a suitable equivalent and become highly coveted collectors items selling for thousands of dollars on eBay (for example, try to find a Nikon 58mm f1.2 on eBay, and if you do, it's likely selling for $3K).

The future

MLB.com to stream full games to the iPhone. The first one is the Cubs-Sox game this afternoon.

I always thought this day would come, when I could watch Cubs games live on my phone, but it's still a thrill to have that day upon us.

Kindle book pricing, and the Kindle DX

Short article in Wired a few weeks back about Kindle users protesting prices higher than $9.99 for digital books. It's as if users are valuing the books as just pure digital bits. When you buy books at a bookstore, you have some visual justification for why some books are more expensive than others. The book may be thicker, with more pages, or with glossy heavy stock paper with beautiful photographs, or an expensive leather binding. The varying form factor for books has allowed that industry to get away with much more pricing variation than, say, the music industry, where most CDs and LPs are shaped exactly the same, or the theatrical exhibition industry, where going to the movies costs the same regardless of what movie you're seeing and how much it cost to make (on an absolute basis, the cost variance for producing one movie versus another is much larger than in books and music). To the viewer, many elements of the moviegoing experience are the same regardless of which movie you're seeing: they are about the same length, shown in theaters that are shaped, for the most part, the same, with screens of roughly comparable size. That along with years of uniform pricing have pretty much ensured that the only theaters that can get away with varied pricing are ones offering a unique experience (e.g. a price premium for the massive curved screens of IMAX, or a price discount for the really old movies offered at second-run theaters).

With books for the Kindle, you have few visual cues to distinguish the value of one book from the other. And so it's understandable that users might be inclined to think every digital book should cost the same. In one sense, they're right, as the digital cost of storing one book versus another will not vary by much at all.

What is missing, of course, is the understanding of all that has gone into the production and marketing of that work, or a linkage between the quality of the book and the price. The uniform price that Apple placed on songs in the iTunes music store at launch ($0.99 per track) removed price variance as an element of the shopping decision, for better or worse. That is now a mental anchor, and any deviation seems, well, deviant.

As a retailer, Amazon and Apple have roughly the same costs for whichever digital book or song they sell, so I can understand their interest in standardizing the pricing and encouraging impulse buying with the simplified decision structure. I can also understand why a publisher or music label would prefer pricing variance, to better account for their costs in acquiring and marketing the different books in question.

As for my Kindle 2 , I have owned and used it just about long enough that I am ready to share an overall assessment soon (quick summary is that it's solid but with lots of room for improvement), but not long enough to avoid the disappointment of hearing Amazon announce the Kindle DX today. I've barely had my Kindle 2 for 3 months, and already a replacement has been announced?

I can understand and accept product obsolescence and early adopter risk in technology, in fact I'm well-versed in it what with iPods and iPhones and digital SLRs and laptops getting replaced by newer, higher-performance models every half year to a year, but the Kindle 2 barely started shipping 3 months ago. I feel like Kindle 2 buyers should have either received a heads up that the Kindle DX would be coming or that we should be offered an option for trading in our Kindle 2 for the DX. The Kindle DX seems a bit pricey to me at $489, not a slamdunk purchase, but one of my biggest issues with the current Kindle 2 is its screen size, and I would have liked to have known the DX was coming at this price point back when I was making my Kindle-buying decision back in February.

Amazon rarely disappoints me, but today it did.

An iPhone game about kerning

For you typography geeks: Kern, a $0.99 iPhone game that challenges you to "precisely place a missing letter into a falling word while avoiding any unnecessary ligatures". That description made me smile. Learn more here.

Visible remains

Tyler Cowen:

One advantage of Kindle is that it provides a new tool for mental accounting. Call me irrational but formerly I could not read more than seven or eight books at a time without abandoning some of them midway. Kindle (like Netflix, I might add) gives me a new queue and allows me to have more "hanging," partially unread books at any point in time, yet without disrupting my mental equilibrium.

I have just one book on my Kindle so far, so I have not yet been able to gauge whether Cowen's assessment fits my experience. But it sounds like a reasonable hypothesis, especially considering I have to hurdle a metropolis of partially-read books on the scale of the trash-built apocolypse in Wall-E just to climb into bed.

Give the man his phone

Obama will get to keep his Blackberry after all, albeit one with NSA-approved encryption. Sanity prevails. Not letting the most powerful man in the world capitalize on the efficiencies of modern technology would have been absurd.

Miscellany

Sportswriter Jim Murray once wrote about Rickey Henderson, whose excessive batting crouch helped him to draw lots of walks:

Rickey Henderson's strike zone is smaller than Hitler's heart.

***

A recent New Yorker article in the Food Issue examined the knife-making industry and profiled Kramer Knives of Seattle. Bob Kramer is one of a select group of Master Bladesmiths in America (as credentialed by the American Bladesmith Society); there are only about a hundred. To pass the test, one's knife must undergo a grueling series of tests, from rope cutting to wood chopping to shaving hair.

There is a multi-year waitlist to buy one of Kramer's knives, used by the likes of super chefs like Thomas Keller (I myself am on that waiting list). He has collaborated on a more widely available series of knives that are sold exclusively by Sur La Table. The Chef's Knife from that series is a beauty (if you're looking for a last-minute gift idea that will just dazzle a loved one who loves to cook, that's a great way to go, though my mother always shunned giving knives as gifts because of the Chinese superstition that giving such a gift foretold the severing of that relationship).

Upgrading the dull chef's knife is one of the best investments a home cook can make. Dull knives make cooking a lot of work and leads to injuries when a knife slips. Proper knife technique is the other simple lesson a chef should learn. To properly capitalize on your knife's edge, the blade should be moving horizontally across the food being cut. Too many people just press down, and that's not how a knife is designed to work. Doing so exerts a lot of needless effort and is slow. Think of your arm and knife moving in a continuous elliptical motion, like the horizontal metallic bar on the outside of a train engine car's wheels.

***

I don't recall what things were like four years ago, but it feels to me like there are many more "letters to the President-Elect" in the media this time around, on topics from bailouts and reviving the economy to drugs, food policy, and education. I suspect this is the consequence of having a President we regard as well-read and thoughtful.

***

An old article from The Morning News, as seen back on Reddit today: How do you know if a girl loves you?

If you’re Gael Garcia Bernal: She loves you.

Red announcement

UPDATE: Here's the news. A lot to absorb, but basically, Red is going to turn their entire product line into a modularized model so you can slowly upgrade over time rather than having to buy entirely new cameras over time. The number of sensors from the company is growing like rabbits and will include a 617-sized sensor in the future! Lastly, they're building a Red 3D camera which looks unbelievably cool.

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Tomorrow, Red, the digital cinema company, is announcing something big about their upcoming 3K and 5K cameras, Scarlet and Epic. They've posted a countdown timer on their homepage.

Jim Jannard, company founder, has been building up the announcements in the Red user forums.

We will announce the new Scarlet and Epic programs on Thursday Nov. 13th.

I want to say that no one has any idea how incredible this announcement will be. Call this hype... please. I am quite sure that the announcement will be called a "scam". Should be a lot of fun to hear the reactions. I can't wait.

Jim

Not many companies do a better job of publicizing themselves with no PR department than Red. Jannard's honesty and participation in user forums is refreshing.

It's not the tool, it's the craftsman

Alex Majoli is a Magnum photographer who has shot in China, the Congo, and Iraq, and he has won honors like U.S. National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism Magazine Photographer of the Year Award (boy do they need an acronym).

His tool of choice? A simple Olympus digital point and shoot.

Some of his photos and some elaboration on his techniques here.

The new Macbook Pro

It's hot. I want one.

Apple has posted a video about the creation of the 13" Macbook that features some footage of the elusive Jonathan Ive ("Jony"), one of the current pantheon of design deities. Can't help but love the way the Brits pronounce aluminum, and watching those machines carve the unibody out of a solid 2.5 pound block of aluminum is engineering porn. Someday I would love to work on the design of a physical product.

I was back at Stanford recruiting last week, and I assign Apple all credit and blame for the dozens of product design majors who visited our table.

New Macbook Pros

Daring Fireball has, via Engadget, details on the new Macbook Pros to be announced today (which, to be fair, includes some speculation). I'd be surprised if his report was far off from the truth. Most of the updates are minor and/or cosmetic, like the switch to the Macbook Air-style keyboard, a new single-piece aluminum chassis, and a clickable glass trackpad. The biggest deal, to me, is the inclusion of two Nvidia GPUs, the 9400M and the 9600M GT.

Selfishly, the more people out there with computers with modern, high-powered GPU's, the smoother Hulu videos will play. Some users write in complaining about videos that stutter, and in most cases it's either a computer that can't keep up or problems in the network. The videos, I can assure you, play fine--it's an easy thing for us to test in-house to remove the variable of the network and the computer from the equation to test the underlying video.

HD video from DSLRs

The Nikon D90 and the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (Canon's SLR names are way too convoluted) both shoot HD video in addition to serving as DSLRs.

But one problem of shooting HD video with a CMOS is that since there is no real shutter like on a motion picture camera, each "frame" is captured by simply capturing lots of images per second with that CMOS. If you read it 24 times a second, you get 24 frames.

But if the CMOS doesn't refresh fast enough and the camera moves while the CMOS is refreshing, the bottom of the CMOS might be reading part of the image from a different time than the top of the CMOS, and that rolling shutter produces a bad motion wobble or skew (what Jim Jannard calls "jelly movement") as in this sample video footage from the D90.

Here are some sample unmodified Quicktime movie files from the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Suffice it to say no serious filmmaker will be throwing away a camcorder after purchasing either of these DSLRs (unless that child you're filming doesn't move much; what, little kids run around?).

I'm sure they're fine still cameras, though. So few people make large prints anymore, so digital SLR resolution has been sufficient for their primary purposes: web galleries, 4x6 prints.

Chairlift gets uplift

[via Buzzfeed] Every time a new iPod is introduced, Apple features it in a commercial set with music from some obscure indie band that rides the publicity to newfound fame.

The lucky winner this time around? Chairlift.

View the new iPod nano ad.

Red working on a DSLR competitor

After taking on the motion picture camera industry, Red is now coming after Nikon and Canon with a DSLR replacement targeted for late 2009. They're calling it a DSMC (Digital Still & Motion Camera), which brings to mind the recently announced Nikon D90.

What is the Red DSMC? No one knows yet. Jim Jannard says its the product in their pipeline that he's most excited about.

Intriguing.

New iPod Nano

If the new iPod Nano, supposedly to be unveiled on Sep 9, doesn't look like the pictures on this web page, this 3rd party iPod case manufacturer is going to have a lot of wasted inventory (another leaked photo via Engadget seems to echo the previous photos).

I use my iPod all the time, but it's harder to get excited for every next iPod release. The differences from one iPod Nano to the next aren't that significant anymore; they tend to center on greater storage for the same price. The major form factor benefits have been realized.

Not that there's still not huge revenues and value to be extracted from the iPod line. Google's search ranking algorithms haven't noticeably improved (to my eye) for many years, but they continue to rake in cash because no competitors have been able to leapfrog them.

Digital cameras of note

Trailer for Knowing starring Nicolas Cage. Notable as this movie was shot on the Red One, recently profiled in Wired magazine.

I had a chance to visit Red headquarters last week and play with a couple of Red Ones they had set up with different lenses and configurations. What's amazing about the Red One is that what it allows a filmmaker to do is potentially shoot, edit, and output a 2K resolution movie (the Red One shoots 4K but 2K is close to the resolution of what you see in most movie theaters) all using equipment you can afford and put in your own house. On the price-performance curve, if you plot every camera from your average camcorder you can buy at Best Buy to something like a Panavision 35mm camera or even an IMAX camera, the Red One is an outlier.

The sensor in the Red One can be thought of as similar to the 12 megapixel sensor in your digital SLR, except the Red One can shoot 24 fps (or higher, if you want to overcrank), whereas your SLR shoots maybe 11fps in burst mode and eventually has to stop to clear its buffer.

If you can't afford a Red One, which while cheap is still a $17,500 body, todays specs for the new Nikon D90 should be really intriguing. The D90 follows in the footsteps of other Nikon Digital SLRs, but there's a twist. This 12.3 megapixel SLR can also shoot HD, 720p, 24fps video.

As David Pogue points out, there are some limitations:

• Shooting HD, the max shot length is 5 minutes.
• The audio is mono.
• The camera shoots in .avi file formats that eat up a ton of memory card space.
• Once you start recording video, autofocus no longer works.

The last one was the biggest disappointment to me as it would have been amazing to shoot a fast-moving subject in high dev without having to have an AC (assistant cameraperson). On a professional film shoot, when making a movie, the 1st AC is responsible for pulling focus, or adjusting the focus on the lens during a shot. So there is no autofocus on a professional film shoot, like you have on a prosumer camcorder. But that's by design. Anyone who's watched a consumer home video and watched the focus drift in and out as the camera's autofocus struggles to figure out where you want focus to lie knows that manually controlling focus is one of the professional cinematographer's tools, not a hindrance.

But for the average consumer, shooting their child at a soccer game with their D90, having the full capabilities of the Nikon's autofocus systems to track their child as they spring towards the camera would be amazing.

Still, all that being said, adding HD video capabilities to an SLR is a nifty trick. I don't need a D90, but I'd sure love one. It won't be too long after these are released until we see the first short film shot entirely on the D90.

By the way, you can buy a Nikon mount for the Red One so that it accepts Nikon lenses to shoot with also. Every day, digital SLRs and digital camcorders converge.

Tech product reviews: Kodak Zi6, Microsoft Photosynth

Positive review of the Kodak Zi6, which is the little handheld video camera that's like the Flip except it shoots HD (720p up to 60fps).

I'm curious about the audio quality, but I have a Flip, and if the Zi6 combines the Flip's simplicity of use and portability with HD quality it seems like a handy little gadget. Not even film school students and camera snobs always want to deal with busting out a full-sized camera and pro-level gear.

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Walt Mossberg reviews the upcoming Microsoft Live Labs release of Photosynth (releases this Thursday to the public for free). The demo seems to have floated around for years, and I'd long since given up hope of seeing it in the wild (when's the last time anything from Microsoft Labs made it into the public?). So to hear it will be released as a website for free for anyone to use is a pleasant surprise.

Mossberg has mostly positive things to say. Sadly, the Mac version is not ready yet, so it's Windows only for now.

I've been testing this service for about a week, and while it has its flaws, I believe that Photosynth offers a dramatic new way to use your photos and to share them with others.

Photosynth works within a Web browser, using a small plug-in you install. Currently, it works only in Windows, using Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser or its rival, Firefox. A Macintosh version is in the works, but for now, you can't even view others' synths in the Mac operating system.

When Photosynth works right, the results are wonderfully satisfying. But it takes some skill to get a set of photos the service can match up well, a quality Microsoft calls being "synthy." Ideally, portions of each slice of a 3-D scene should show up in at least three photos, with 50% overlap between them. After you upload your pictures and Photosynth does its best to make them into a 3-D scene, the service assigns them a percentage number that indicates how synthy they were.

Interestingly, you can only run Photosynth on a Mac if it's running Windows XP or Vista via Boot Camp, not via Parallels or VMWare Fusion. The error message if you try to use Photosynth on a Mac:

Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet.

To quote Paris Hilton: "That's hot"

The world's most expensive car, the Aston Martin One-77, a hand-made coupe, will cost $2.3 million. At most 77 will be built.

It's hard to say that any car that costs that much could be worth it, but damn that's a beautiful automobile.

And why is it called Bluetooth anyway?

The director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute warns his staff to limit cell phone use to minimize cancer risk. While no studies have detected a link, that does not necessarily prove that there isn't a link. It reminds me of the Bill James article "Underestimating the Fog" (PDF) in which he noted that just because past studies haven't detected clutch hitting doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Cell phones and bluetooth headsets emit non-ionizing, microwave radiation. That much we know. Do they increase your risk for brain cancer? To conduct a study of that magnitude would take years and years and cost millions of dollars. It's unlikely anyone will fund a study like that.

So we're all part of a real world experiment. Here's how I see it playing out. Some people will get brain cancer 20 years from now from high cell phone use, and they will bring massive lawsuits against the cell phone companies. But one special person will gain superpowers from all that radiation, a sort of slow burn Bruce Banner. But this hero's powers will only be active in large metropolitan areas, will wane when going through tunnels or riding in elevators, and will come with some inexplicable state and local taxes.

One risk from bluetooth headsets that has been confirmed: wearing one will make you look like an idiot.

Related:

• Tips to reduce cell phone radiation exposure
• CNET's list of highest-radiation cell phones.

iPhone 2.0: the hangover

Versus all previous phones, my first generation iPhone was like a supermodel. Now, with the update to 2.0 version of iPhone software, which offers many, but not all, of the benefits of the 3G model, the downsides to dating a supermodel have taken center stage: the petulance, the tantrums, the inability to get ready on time (speaking metaphorically, of course, as my experience with supermodels has been limited).

No one should review a tech product without using it for some period of time, and having used my first generation iPhone with the 2.0 software for a few weeks now, I'm not so sure that the benefits have outweighed the setbacks, a tough thing for an early adopter to admit. I have a high tolerance for the frustration of life on the cutting edge, but in this case it feels like two steps forward, two steps back.

I've experienced many of the problems reported by other 1st-gen and 3G owners after having updated to the 2.0 software. Most noticeable and galling is interface lag. In a touchscreen device, this is deadly, because you tap again and again in frustration, thinking the device is frozen, and then you hit the home button, but when the device finally catches up it issues all your commands in sequence and bounces you out of the application you were in because you hit the home button.

Many more random crashes? Yep, those too.

Over at Signal vs. Noise, David lists a lot of the gremlins that are plaguing the 3G. I wonder if some if this isn't related to memory leak in some of the new applications. What's ironic is that when I jailbroke my iPhone previously and installed some unapproved apps the iPhone still seemed snappy and responsive. Not that I've installed "officially approved" applications built with the iPhone SDK, the phone seems sluggish and unstable.

Another things that bugs me: when any of the apps update, they get bumped to the last page of your home screen, rather than staying in the same place. Imagine if every time one of your Mac applications was updated, it shifted in your dock to the far right. I don't think I'm unique in relying heavily on spatial memory, so this is a bad thing.

Though I had fun installing and trying a ton of applications when the store first opened, none have altered my life. Some, like Facebook or Google, are ones that don't offer much more than what their mobile Safari interfaces do. Others are useful, like Pandora, or fun, like Enigmo, but they are vampires on battery life.

iLounge has a good, comprehensive review of the new iPhone 3G, and they give it a B. Their summary of its pros and cons:

Pros: A faster and more capable version of last year’s breakthrough mobile phone, preserving the world’s best cell phone operating system, a strong combination of voice and data communication features, and iPod-class audio, video, and photo functionality, while adding impressive third-party software expandability and features for business users. Offers enhanced compatibility with international telephone networks, including high-speed towers, as well as keyboard and language support for users in most of the world’s countries. Now includes GPS for limited purposes, and superior sound quality, particularly through its redesigned headphone port.

Cons: Overall cost of ownership is higher than prior model, despite regressing from last year’s stunning design, screen quality, and pack-ins. Battery life for key phone and data features is significantly worse than before, such that users will likely require inconvenient mid-day recharging. Service contracts require additional payment for 3G data services, despite inconsistent or unavailable regional coverage and performance; callers reported certain in-call sound inconsistencies. New model further decreases compatibility with past iPod accessories, including popular ones, while both camera and screen now have noticeable color tints. Defects and battery replacement will likely require Apple Store or other warranty attention during period of use; purchasing and activation can range from simple to confusing or nightmarish depending on your local service provider.

One benefit of the apps is that U.S. users can send free SMS Messages via the AIM app. It's a bit of a hassle, you have to text to a person's phone number, and years of carrying a cell phone means I don't recognize as many phone numbers as I once did, but paying $5 to send 200 text messages is one of those great telecom scams that so endear them to users.

The one positive to come out of this, if there is one, is that I'm glad I didn't wait out in line for a 3G. Supposedly the iPhone 2.1 software update is around the corner, and hopefully that solves some or many of these issues. If not, perhaps it's not the 3G but the real 3rd generation iPhone that I need to wait for.

Purchased song sync via the iPhone

Rock Band 2

A pic of a premium drum kit that will be available for Rock Band 2.

$299, so not exactly a mass market product. Here's a pic of the new Rock Band 2 wireless guitar, from a Kotaku article with some more details about what's new in Rock Band 2:

iPhone 2.0

MacRumors noted that the iPhone 2.0 firmware leaked early this morning. I grabbed it and decided, even if it wasn't official, that it was probably the same as the final release given that it was the day prior to the iPhone 3G's release.

While I waited for the somewhat large download (~250MB) and during the lengthy install process, I grabbed a bunch of apps from the iTunes app store. It was like Christmas.

I'm going to play with these new apps for a while before upgrading to the iPhone 3G. As most of the early reviewers have noted, most of the upgrades this day can be had by iPhone 2G users simply through the software update. GPS and 3G certainly would make many of the apps more snappy and useful in more places--ensuring many of my apps run more quickly more places will be the primary reason I upgrade--but given how much time I spend at the office or at home right now (I can get Wi-Fi in both places), I'm able to get a feel for all these apps and hang on to my cheaper phone plan for the time being. Even though I'm in a new walking boot as of noon today, I wouldn't enjoy standing in it for hours fighting others to get one of the first batch of 3G iPhones.

The first app I paid for is one of my favorite so far: MLB.com's At Bat ($4.99). It allows you to get video highlights from MLB games, even games in progress. On Wi-Fi, the landscape full-screen video quality is very good. It's a fantasy baseball/reality baseball fan's dream come true. Finally we've realized the full potential of mobile video for MLB fans. I only wish that box scores were part of the application; it currently redirects to MLB's WAP site to see that info which seems odd.

Some applications don't seem like huge improvements over their Mobile Safari renditions, but many are huge improvements over their current mobile browser versions. Many new apps take advantage of iPhone's ability to approximate your physical location, one of the great and hitherto unrealized potential benefits of mobile phone computing. Some apps recommend restaurants and other services in the area, while others promise to notify you of where your fellow iPhone-wielding friends are. Tracking/stalking your friends will be so much easier if they're fellow iPhone users.

When you think of the range of data and functionality an app can take advantage of: your address book, your physical location at that moment, the iPhone camera, the Quicktime video player, your calendar, the Accelerometer, multi-touch, the speakers, the microphone, among others, I'm certain we haven't yet seen the mindblowing application that I know is waiting to be written. It's ironic that you can write many apps for my iPhone that you couldn't write for my Macbook Pro.

Beyond MLB.tv's At Bat, other apps I dig so far include Shazam, which, once fired up, can tell you what a song is when you let your iPhone listen to it; the award-winning Twitterific, which seems like the last Twitter client I'll ever need; Urbanspoon, the part slot machine part Magic 8-Ball app that lets you shake your iPhone to get a random restaurant suggestion nearby you, and Exposure, a Flickr photo application that has a Near Me button that shows you photos taken near your physical location.

In the course of this day, I went from one-legged to one-and-a-half legged (the damn hard cast is off, and in its place a soft boot, though I'm not yet ready to ditch the crutches), and it feels like my iPhone took a similar leap in functionality. MobileMe indeed.

It really does go to 11

On this, day 1 of the 2008 Tour de France, I was going through my inbox and found an e-mail from Campagnolo pimping their new groupsets with 11 speeds, up from 10.

I had a bit of the Tour on in the background while cleaning the apartment this morning (picture me hopping around on one leg, sweating in the afternoon sun, trying to work a broom and dustpan with my arms; yes, it's not exactly Melanie Griffith vacuuming in the nude in Working Girl). I'll always associate cycling with my comeback from my ACL tear and a low point in my life, the year of 1998. I have not ridden much in LA. The aggressive drivers in LA are not just annoying but a real danger, and I haven't found many paths I enjoy riding near where I live.

But today, struggling to do household chores with my cast on, I caught a brief montage of highlights from the stage--riders jumping out of their saddle to sprint for intermediate stage points, quick attacks among the early breakaway group on mild climbs, the peloton ripping through the French countryside--and I was filled with a harsh longing to be on my bike, legs in motion. These days I dream of being able to walk, like a bald man dreaming of hair.

I've always ridden Campy on my road bike (speaking of Nikon and Canon, the same binary choice of gear religion exists in road cycling between Campagnolo and Shimano), and just seeing the carbon fibre components of their new gruppos is like a visual cue turning on some Pavlovian instinct inside me. If I could fit my left foot, cast and all, into my road cycling shoes, I'd go out right now, in the night, and ride.

Nikon vs Canon

James Duncan Davidson writes about Nikon's comeback versus Canon in the battle for digital SLR market supremacy. The first salvos were Nikon's release of the D3 and D300, and now it's the D700. And sometime later this year, perhaps the D3X. Meanwhile, after years of seemingly being always a step ahead of Nikon, Canon is suffering a tough year.

The truth is that for the average photographer who has committed to either Nikon or Canon, switching is possible but a hassle, especially with a significant lens investment. You can sell your lenses and camera body on eBay and cross brand lines, but for most people the hassle of doing so and learning new controls would be prohibitive. And on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't really matter.

The biggest advance with the new Nikon FX sensor SLRs is the low-light performance. Not having to use a flash except for fill is life-changing.

iPhone pricing

I thought the new lower prices for the iPhone 3G would apply to new subscribers, but apparently only previous iPhone owners and those who have been with AT&T long enough to have paid of subsidized phones will qualify. All others will have to pay $399 and $499 for the 8GB and 16GB models.

Which tempers my outlook for sales to new customers. I thought the half price would apply to new customers as well, and everywhere you see ads for the new iPhone they tout "Twice as fast. Half the price.*"

The asterisk turned out to be bigger than anticipated. On a positive note, maybe it means shorter lines on July 11 for those who'll be standing out there, being filmed and photographed by local press and people uploading pics and video to Flickr and YouTube.

UPDATE: Oops, as Andy notes, the full price of $399/$499 is just for AT&T customers who don't already have a 2G iPhone and who haven't finished their current contract. Which makes sense since some of the subsidy for the phone is in the 2 year contract that most cellular companies offer. The new iPhone 3G has a subsidy built into the monthly rates, which is why it will be cheaper to buy up front. But this means that if you buy an iPhone 3G, if a new model comes out and you have not completed your 2-year contract, you won't get the subsidized price on that new model.

iPhone 3G pricing

Much has been made about the fact that the new iPhone 3G, while having a retail price much lower than the original iPhone ($199 versus $599 for the original iPhone or $399 price for the current equivalent model), has a monthly data plan rate much higher (I pay $20 a month now for unlimited data and 200 text messages, and the equivalent plan on the new 3G will cost $35 a month).

But the truth is, if Apple's goal is to drive up the volume of unit sales, this pricing scheme is great. People hear $199 and that's what they fixate on, not on the monthly bill which will chip away at their wallet over many months. Lowering the retail price of the handset while jacking up the monthly fees is smart pricing strategy.

I personally haven't decided whether to upgrade to the new model, but I have no doubt that millions of first-time buyers will find the new handset pricing just the reason to jump in. Apple set fire to the Motorola house and shattered some windows at the Blackberry mansion, and now, with this new pricing, they've returned with gasoline and a bazooka.

Bluetooth headsets

With a new law banning cell phone use while driving unless you're using a headset going into effect in California shortly, and with renewed suspicions of the dangers of cell phone radiation on the brain, it's time for me to take the plunge and purchase a Bluetooth headset. I had one early model a few years ago but lost it.

I hate the look of Bluetooth headsets in the ear, they look like props from some bad sci-fi movie, but they're more attractive than being thrown through your own windshield or having a tumor growing out the side of your head.

There are nearly 800 results in Amazon's wireless accessory store if you search "bluetooth headset." So tell me, dear readers, what headset do you recommend?

I think in maybe 10 years I'll short a bunch of cell phone manufacturer stocks as a hedge against brain cancer.

BedUp

A bed like this would've been really useful in NYC, with its cramped apartments.

Bloody Monday

Zooey Deschanel is coming out with an album of tunes with M. Ward. They call themselves She and Him. Indie people everywhere swoon. Stream the songs at this MySpace page, pre-order the album Volume One from Amazon.com. The new Magnetic Fields is streaming on MySpace, too.

I enjoyed the film City of God, and now we have City of Men, with City of God director Fernando Meirelles as producer. View the trailer here. The movie starts a limited run in the US this Friday.

Old school civil rights leaders turn a cold shoulder on Obama.

It's pretty clear Blu-Ray is going to win this high-def DVD format war. The downside, in the near term, is that it's near impossible to get a Blu-Ray DVD from your Netflix queue.

I think it's safe to classify "I drink your milkshake" as a meme now. I saw the movie last week and enjoyed it, and damned if there haven't been some stellar scores this year by folks you think of as rockers first: Jonny Greenwood and Nick Cave. I'm a huge fan of Brahms' Violin Concerto and of Arvo Part, so to put music by both in that movie is almost like cheating.

Technorati Tags: barackobama, bluray, DVD, film, m.ward, movies, music, netflix, obama, politics, video, youtube, zooeydeschanel

Japanese for awesome

All this Japanese text? What it means is this: sweet 4K projector, the Victor DLA-SH4K, with 4096x2400 pixels of resolution, 10,000:1 contrast, and 3,500 lumen brightness. All for the measly sum of 90K Euros.

Extrapolate price reductions out far enough and someday we'll all have these in our living rooms. Most home videos will be shot on 4K and have incredible resolution. Unfortunately they'll still all be as boring as hell.

Rock Band...oh dear

I got my copy of Rock Band for the PS3 on Wednesday, and I had just a few hours to bang on it before packing for my Thanksgiving trip.

The game, in theory, is fantastic. It comes with a guitar, a drum set, and a microphone, and you can play one of the four (the guitar can be used to play lead guitar or bass). I started with the guitar, and for about fifteen minutes, all was good. And then my guitar just stopped working. It seemed as if the keypad was frozen on the up direction. I tried all sorts of things to get it to work again, to no avail. I jumped online immediately and ordered a replacement guitar via the warranty site.

Now come reports that lots of people are running into issues with their Rock Band hardware. The "one of my instruments is broken" thread at the Rock Band tech support forum is long and growing. The problem most people are experiencing is problems with the down strum on the guitar. I didn't even get to play long enough to encounter that issue.

Now, there's a chance that this is just selection bias, that reading a thread specifically opened for hardware problems will only scare you. But to see so many threads on the web about hardware issues is really suspicious.

What could have been a triumphant launch could quickly turn into a disaster for Harmonix. Let's hope there's a recall on the horizon, because otherwise there could be a revolt. I'd love to be able to recommend Rock Band; the drum set still works for me, ditto the microphone, and the music selection is great. It's just a great concept for a game. But the shockingly poor QA on the guitar means I can't recommend the game for anyone until the hardware issues are addressed.

Harmonix needs to address this issue. They can't sweep something like this under the rug in the age of the Internet, or a promising franchise will be doomed from the start. Another question: all these glowing reviews I read of Rock Band, yet not a single reviewer noticed this issue with their review copies?

Finally...internet access at new apt up and running

Akira-like electric motorcycle prototype from Japan. (official website in Japanese)

Moby offers some free music for film students, indie filmmakers, and others for their non-profit film projects.

A cool use of the Hulu.com embed player. Extends the water cooler discussion of great moments in your favorite TV shows to the web, allowing you to not just tell people about the scene but show it to them as well.

Available light photos shot at high ISO on Nikon D3

Via Daring Fireball is this post with some JPEGs of pics shot in available light at high ISO using the new Nikon D3.

It's a bit hard to tell for sure because the photos aren't blown up larger, but even so, compared to previous Nikon digital SLRs, the noise levels at these ISO's are unbelievably low. For photographing weddings, as this lucky photographer did, the D3's high ISO performance will be an unbelievable boon. Concert photography will really benefit, too. Goodness gracious.

Technorati Tags: camera, photo, photography, Nikon

New iPods

New iPods announced (among other things) at the special Apple event today.

Every time I hear about one of these special Apple events, I just wave my credit cards in surrender.

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.

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

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

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

Customer service

I agree with Pogue; my first AT&T iPhone bill is one of the most customer-unfriendly documents ever. Why is it that telephone and cable companies are so awful at customer service? Random ideas that occur to me:

1. They don't make high enough margins to spend a lot on really great customer service or on great product design.
2. In the old days, phone service was so simple and reliable and telephone design was so simple that these companies never built up any customer service or product interface skills. Since then, their oligopoly of the mobile airwaves has prevented companies who are strong in those areas from getting their foot in the door (but Apple is in now, so the product side will improve, I hope).
3. Related to the previous point, perhaps the phone and cable companies are still trying to shake off the complacency brought on during the days before deregulation.
4. The companies were built up through tons of mergers, and the integration of back end systems was so awful that even customer service reps have no idea what is up with your account.

Some of you with more knowledge of phone and cable companies and their origins and/or workings might be able to educate me.

I used to think that any company would obsess over its customers, but after working in a number of industries over the years I've come to realize how naive that notion was. Though it can be an effective strategy, customer obsession or empathy is not a pre-condition to business success. For example, some companies focus intently on product (many luxury brands come to mind) and customers come flocking even if treated badly because the products inspire consumer lust. The desire for profit can result in companies that offer fantastic customer service, but it's not a given.

But much more common is the ease with which customer concerns slip off a company's priority list during day-to-day operations. For any number of reasons, political, personal, and otherwise, the needs of the customer become an afterthought. In some instances, even those who start off focusing on the customer can easily lose their way. I almost believe that part of this is the result of some cognitive bias. For the same reason we act selfishly for the majority of our lives, we struggle to keep the customers' needs at the forefront of our minds.

Technorati Tags: business, iPhone

Thanks to the linear forward motion of time it's Friday

Jim Jannard reports that the Red team has been able to shoot useable footage with the Red One rated at ISO 4000. Pretty amazing.

David Lynch to direct a commercial for Gucci's next perfume.

MIT neuroscientists identified the neuronal mechanics of déjà vu. Much to my disappointment, they have nothing to do with a glitch in the Matrix.

A few sites that I've just started playing with: Swaptree is a site that allows you to swap media products with other people. You pay for postage. I may start listing all my stuff on here since I've since resigned myself to the fact that most of my old DVDs an CDs and books are just about worthless used. Geni is a free website that allows you to build and maintain a family tree. Everyone you add to your tree can then build on it, and in just a week or two my tree has sprouted into something resembling a small shrub.

Technorati Tags: camcorder, camera, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, medicine, commercial, Red, science

Live from the Emerald City

This post broadcast from the Emerald City, where yours truly attended Audrey and Matt's lovely wedding this weekend (some pics here). Seattle's gorgeous summer weather arrived early (for the Pacific Northwest) this year; it's actually warmer here than in Los Angeles. The only problem is that I have one of the worst summer colds I've ever experienced and have been hacking myself awake every night for a few hours. I'm popping decongestants like they're SweeTarts. If this is my last post ever, know that I probably choked to death on my own phlegm in the middle of the night.

***

Telekinesis is an iPhone Remote application that allows you to access files on your computer via your iPhone.

Red is a popular brand name for high end products. Besides the camera, we now have SRAM working on a sub 2000g component group called Red (for those of you who are non-cyclists, a component group is all the stuff that goes on your bike frame (outside of your wheels and pedals and handlebars; components include your cranks and derailleurs and brake levers, stuff like that). Always good to have a bit of competition for the two market leaders, Shimano and Campagnolo.

The rumors are confirmed: Dan Patrick is leaving ESPN. The peak of ESPN's quality was when Patrick and Keith Olbermann hosted The Big Show. He faded from view for me in recent years as he moved over to the radio. I didn't even own a radio in NYC.

Dress like Roger Federer at Wimbledon. You're sure to impress in your all-white blazer and warm-up trousers when you show up for local club match, at least until you pull your hamstring in the third game. That was some final between Federer and Nadal, by the way. Those two epitomize the peak of the modern tennis game now; compare that to, say, footage of an Edberg-Becker final from back in the day and it's a totally different game.

You think you're always waiting a long time for the woman in your life to get ready? Lián Amaris Sifuentes took it to another level. She went through the usual preparations for a date but slowed them down to fill 72 hours, and she performed it in Union Square this weekend (so close to my old apartment!). NYU professor R. Luke Dubois shot the performance on three high-def camcorders and will compress it into a 72 minute video. Dubois has used this technique before, compressing previous Academy Award Best Picture winners into one minute. Some examples are posted here (Amadeus or Titanic, e.g.). That's what it must be like to have one's life flash before one's eyes. Trippy.

Technorati Tags: apple, art, cycling, ESPN, gadgets, iPhone, tennis, software, sports, tech

iNotes

Very little evidence supporting theory that poverty breeds terrorism. I find that reassuring.

In a Q&A about some device called the iPhone, Walt Mossberg says Apple will add Flash support to the iPhone browser through an early software update.

Alessandro Petacchi out of the Tour de France after doping charge. His urine sample after the third of his five stage wins at this year's Giro d'Italia showed an unusually high level of albutamol, an asthma treatment. He holds a therapeutic use exemption for its use, but he exceeded the permitted level of 1,000 nanograms/millileter. Well, there goes the top sprinter in the Tour. I'll still watch, though. I just got back on my bike the other day for the first time in ages, and on the 4th I went with Tory for a climb up Malibu Canyon Road. That climb kicked my butt all over the road but I survived to summit.

Crazy battle at Kruger National Park in Africa, caught on video. Some unlikely twists and turns. I think I caught Jeff Van Gundy in there, hanging onto the leg of a Cape Buffalo. I've seen enough specials to know that Cape Buffalo never leave a man behind (thx to Mark for the referral).

Verizon COO Jack Plating sends internal memo titled iWhatever, throws out some brave talk in the face of the iPhone. He is true in that the network is Verizon's first and most powerful advantage. But Verizon handsets are not impressive at all.

I had lunch with Robert today, and the cafe was broadcasting highlights from Wimbledon. We were talking about Federer's loss in the French Open final to Nadal, and Robert thought that a big problem is that Federer was not extending on his first serve. He was keeping his first serve motion in too close, resulting in his ghastly first serve percentage. You wouldn't be able to tell from the final score, but based on the % of points Federer won on his first serve, he would have won that much had his first serve gone in more. One of these years, Federer will break through against Nadal at the French. He's played well enough to do so in the past, but it just hasn't happened there at Philippe Chatrier.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cycling, economics, gadgets, iPhone, nature, politics, sociology, tech, tennis, terrorism, video, web, youtube

Cloverfield

Before The Transformers opening night showing, a trailer played for a J.J. Abrams movie coming out Jan 18, 2008. There's a teaser website for the movie that consists, right now, of just a single photo. The movie is known right now just by the internal name Cloverfield. The trailer made a brief appearance on YouTube before Paramount launched a lightning bolt of a lawyer and smote it into the ether. It looks to be some monster attack on NYC movie, but shot with handheld camcorders from the perspective of people on the ground. Creative trailer.

So to see the trailer, you have to go sit through The Transformers. I can't in good conscience recommend that, but I do suspect that if the Transformers played a big role in your childhood, you will get some pleasure from watching in the company of fellow Transformer-philes. Otherwise, it will probably strike you as the silliest use of someone else's $150 million.

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People are being deceived by SPF ratings and false labels on sunscreens and getting burned. Sunscreens are tested by applying 2 milligrams per square centimeter of body, so you should apply about two ounces to cover your body. But most people put on much less. A shortcut offered in this article is "Apply about a teaspoon of sunscreen to your face and a shot glass of it to your body."

Here's a list of the best sunscreens. Darn, I guess my Neutrogena Sunblock isn't that hot at UVA protection after all. This stuff is important to me now that I live in the land of perfect weather. It has been about 75 degrees and sunny for nine thousand days straight now.

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T-Mobile is launching a cellphone service in which you can make calls for free when your phone can connect to a T-Mobile wi-fi hot spot. It's a good thing for consumers when data streams start to merge. With this and Apple's entry into the handset market, perhaps the mobile phone industry will get a kick start. It's about time competition improved cell phone devices, services, and prices.

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Whoa! David Pogue, branching out into musical comedy.

Technorati Tags: film, gadgets, health, humor, iPhone, mobile, movies, nytimes, phone, pogue, trailer, video, youtube

Soderbergh endoses the Red

Steven Soderbergh loves the Red One camera:

"This is the camera I've been waiting for my whole career: jaw-dropping imagery recorded onboard a camera light enough to hold with one hand. I don't know how Jim and the RED team did it--and they won't tell me--but I know this: RED is going to change everything." Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh uses the pseudonym Peter Andrews when he's a DP. Shooting the movie you're directing is not something the ASC is a fan of. I went to an ASC even earlier this year, and there was some grumbling about Soderbergh and his ilk, though I can't think of any other prominent directors who shoot their own movies.

There are a whole slew of crazy rules set forth by all the guilds, the DGA, the Writer's Guild, the ASC, and the ACE about what names can appear where. You'd think that the person who does the work should get the credit, but that would be too logical.

Technorati Tags: camcorder, camera, cinematography, filmmaking, movies, Red

An iPhone report

You don't really know someone until you travel with them, right? I've hung out with my iPhone for a weekend now, and we've really hit it off. I'm only the eight thousandth person to throw my thoughts out, but here are some random thoughts on my new baby.

Let's start with the negatives, many of which are missing features:

• The device is a slave, in part, to AT&T. You don't have to search far for the horror stories spawned this weekend as the iPhone forced hundreds of thousands of customers to interact with AT&T.
• Recessed headphone port--noted earlier.
• No GPS which would've made the Maps feature even more killer than it already is. I'm hoping that when GPS is available I can send mine in for a GPS receiver insertion, but I've already set aside a fund for iPhone 2.0. Maybe when GPS is incorporated it can be used for anti-theft tracking so I don't have to stress so much about losing her.
• Mediocre 2MP cell phone camera with no flash--better than the one I have on my Verizon LG phone, but it's not going to replace my Canon SD800 for pics of friends when out and about.
• Volume is a bit soft--maybe I'm going deaf from listening to my iPod at such high volumes the past several years, but my iPhone at max volume is softer than other phones I've owned.
• Speaker is not that loud or clear. Not surprising to me that they can't fit a great speaker with a huge amp in such a tiny device, but if you're wondering about the speaker quality, there you go.
• Can't go to landscape mode in Mail. You really can't screw up typing in the larger keyboard of landscape mode, but that view only appears for the web browser right now.
• Need SpamSieve for the iPhone, or I need to start using my GMail account a lot more to filter out the spam. It's been a long time since I've had to deal with spam one by one, and it's not pretty. So far I haven't found a method to delete a group of e-mails so I've been zapping spams one by one which, as anyone knows, is painful in this day and age of spam overload.
• No copy and paste. I haven't tried that function on devices that don't have physical keyboards, but perhaps there's an elegant way to implement it. I almost think the iPhone could do with an extra button that does different things in various contexts, but I know previous efforts with such all-purpose triggers, like the one they put in BMW cars at one point, have been unsuccessful.
• No Flash or Java for the iPhone implementation of Safari. It's easy to take Flash and Java for granted now, until you lose them and realize that so many Web 2.0 sites rely on them for basic interface functionality.
• Web page rendering is just a hair slow for pages that have loaded already. Even once a web page finished loading, if you scroll down a page quickly, the browser will stop to render the next section of the page, presenting you with a grey and white checkerboard pattern while you're on hold. I've encountered this even if it's just a page of pure text. It's not that bothersome to me, but I'm surprised it occurs even with lightweight web pages.
• No video capability for the camera. I had visions of using the speaker phone with an onboard video camera to do futuristic video phone chats with other iPhone or video iChat-enabled people, and they remain just that, visions.
• No RSS reader.
• No to-do items in the Calendar, something that would help it as a PDA replacement.
• The calendar from your Mac is flattened upon entering the iPhone so all appointments are listed together. When you create items in the iPhone Calendar they can only be sent to one iCal calendar on your Mac.
• One time my iPhone got stuck in this odd state where Maps and iPod kept bouncing me back to the home screen. I finally solved it by turning the device completely off.
• Need to allow more third-party app development for the iPhone. I don't mind Apple's closed loop system in many cases because the solutions are so good, but in general, open systems speed the pace of development. For now, I've created a Bookmarks folder in Safari called iPhone and have been tossing interesting iPhone web apps in there, but I'd prefer to be able to select your own icons for the home screen.
• Can't load your own ringtones. I'm not a huge ringtone person, and I'm proud to say I've never paid money for a ringtone, but I would like to load my own. I guess I'll have to wait a while to use the THX deep bass note as my ringtone.
• No voice dialing or recording.
• Can't use it as an iPod disk drive.
• I haven't found an optimal grip for two-thumb typing.
• No manual management option for the iPod's music, video, and photo content. You have to choose playlists or albums in iTunes and iPhoto for the iPod to sync to automatically. You can be creative in iTunes with smart playlists to manage your music at a finer-grained level, but I don't understand why you can't manually drag songs and videos and and off the iPhone like you can with any other iPod.

A lot of these issues can be addressed by a software update. I'm already giddy at the thought of finding that first iPhone software update available. I've always preferred electronic devices that are software upgradeable; even my home theater pre-amp can be upgraded via software. It's exciting when my PS3 grabs a software update and suddenly can up-res regular DVDs. It's a shame the iPhone doesn't have room for hardware add-ons, like additional memory, but I've never owned a cell phone long enough to make too much use of hardware add-ons anyway.

On to the good:

• AT&T reception in my apartment has improved a lot since the first day I moved in. I don't know how a single person like myself can judge the antenna quality of the iPhone and the network quality of AT&T, so we'll have to wait for more stringent testing to judge this aspect of the phone.
• On the first sync, all my Address Book contacts, e-mail account settings in Mail, and iCal appointments moved right over to the iPhone. I'd never had a phone that could sync its contacts with my computer, so I still have to move phone numbers over from my old phone, but hopefully this will be the last time I ever have to do that.
• Maps is awesome. I don't have one of those GPS screens in my car, but now I won't feel so uninformed when stuck in traffic in my car in LA which is all the time.
• The iPhone feels like a device from the future. I love just flicking my fingers across the screen to scroll the display. Pinching, twirling, tossing--I feel like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
• Speaking of the display, it's gorgeous. Bright colors, solid resolution.
• The glass screen is sturdy and elegant. It does smudge, but you don't see the smudges when the screen is lit up. The device feels like a luxury device with its high quality build and heft.
• Visual voicemail is fantastic. Setting up my voicemail box with screen prompts was so much more enjoyable than setting up past voicemail boxes using audio prompts. Now I just need the feature to automatically encode all voicemails from voice-to-text and I may be able to delete some voicemails without ever having to listen to them.
• When trying to move the cursor to a specific spot in a block of text, you place your finger done roughly where you want it to go and a magnifying glass view pops up to allow for fine-grained control. Some interface specialist can put that on their resume and has a claim to fame for life.
• The YouTube videos encoded via H.264 look better than the YouTube Flash videos on my desktop computer. That's ironic. You know how I hate the Flash video quality of YouTube. It's odd that the onset of the iPhone that's driving YouTube to recode the rest of its videos to H.264. Now when can we choose to view those on YouTube.com as well?
• There's a switch on the side to flip the phone to silent. Why didn't any of my previous phones have this? So convenient.
• Surfing the web via Safari is surprisingly pleasant for a device this small. Double-tap to zoom is intuitive. For many trips, I no longer need to bring along my laptop. For simple tasks--checking e-mail, web-surfing, listening to music--the iPhone works just fine.

Most important of all, the experience of using the iPhone is an enjoyable one. I've owned phones that have had better cameras, the ability to shoot video, and other features the iPhone lacks. But a customer experience does not comprise a list of features. If so, the iPod wouldn't be the runaway market leader. I really enjoy the experience of using the iPhone as it is now, and I can't wait to see how it transforms with its first software update.

At a minimum, the entry of a player like Apple into the market should raise the game for other mobile manufacturers which is something they really needed. Every one will benefit, even those who don't like Apple and its products.

The most annoying thing about the iPhone is the caustic debate between iPhone lovers and haters (a subset of the general Mac and non-Mac religious war). You can't avoid it if you're curious to read evaluations of the device; it spills out and overflows out of every comment thread. Many people who don't want an iPhone feel intent on calling it an overpriced piece of garbage, and iPhone fans are labeled zealots. Reasonable, centrist dialogue has a hard-time seizing the high ground on the web, and the iPhone launch has put a megaphone to the shouting match. No drama, please.

Technorati Tags: Apple, gadgets, iPhone, ipod, phone

Recessed headphone port - curses!

The biggest downer about the iPhone so far is that most third-party headphones don't work with the recessed headphone port. Some folks have found creative solutions to avoid buying the $10 headphone adapter. I'm not sure why the headphone port is recessed. I really hope it wasn't to drive sales of headphone adapters, but I doubt it since Apple doesn't even manufacture the adapter. Many earphone manufacturers are likely scrambling to include an iPhone adapter with their headphones in the near future.

That said, that's one of the few iPhone problems that doesn't seem solvable by a software update. The iPhone is not perfect, but it's such a leap beyond my plain Jane Verizon LG phone that I feel like I'm cheating on my wife with a twenty-something model (just a hypothetical; no I'm not married). I keep finding excuses to fiddle around with my iPhone; the display is just that gorgeous and fun to play with.

There are hundreds of iPhone first impressions on the web. I'll try and add a few of my thoughts later today, when I'm back home for the evening, but it's safe to say that the iPhone is the most addictive new Apple product since the original iPod.

Technorati Tags: Apple, gadgets, phone, iPhone

iPhone

This entry published from my new iPhone. Sweet!

I wasn't planning to get one, but then at about 3pm I got a phone call fr Eleanor. She was in town for a wedding, but more importantly, she was in line at the AT&T store in Westwood for the iPhone. There were only 15 or 20 people in front of her.

I drove out to bring her a chair and to catch up. When they finally let us in, i got my hands on one. Then the clerk said he was holding the last 8GB unit for me. Did I want it?

Well, you know how that story ends.

iPhone--it was who we thought it was

David Pogue publishes the first official iPhone review I've seen yet in the NYTimes. Very comprehensive and worth reading for all who want a balanced report from someone who's tested it firsthand. Some highlights and lowlights:

• the glass screen doesn't scratch easily though it smudges
• the software is fast and beautiful and simple to use
• the phone is fun to use; once you buy the phone, you choose your phone plan at home in iTunes
• call quality is average and dependent on your AT&T signal strength
• e-mail and the web browser are great, and so is the battery life (Pogue suspects you'll recharge once every other day); however, someday the battery loses its charge and will have to be sent to Apple for replacement
• no chat program, voice dialing, or memory card slot
• you can't install programs from anyone other than Apple
• web browser can't handle Java or Flash
• the 2MP camera is good, but only for motionless, well-lit subjects, and it doesn't capture video or send MMS photos (i.e., picture messages). =(
• a biggie: typing on the screen keyboard can be frustrating, and Pogue doesn't see it besting the BlackBerry on that front
• the biggest issue all along for me is confirmed, to my dismay: AT&T's network is lousy
• the EDGE network is super slow; web browsing will be painful

After the crush of hype, it turns out most of what was rumored and suspected about the device turns out to be true. Since I always carry my iPod and cell phone with me, the iPhone is attractive as a way to consolidate gadgets, and it sure would be great to get the real-time traffic reports via Google Maps here in eternally-congested LA. However, I had such a lousy experience with AT&T (in its Cingular guise) that I feel comfortable not waiting in line on Friday. I really wish Apple had found a better partner for this venture.

UPDATE: Walt Mossberg has his review of the iPhone up now as well. Here are some of his thoughts, which confirm my worst fear, that the iPhone is held back by being tethered to AT&T's network (when it isn't connected via wi-fi). Overall, he still liked it, but like Pogue, notes that it isn't a grand slam:

We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.
The Apple phone combines intelligent voice calling, and a full-blown iPod, with a beautiful new interface for music and video playback. It offers the best Web browser we have seen on a smart phone, and robust email software. And it synchronizes easily and well with both Windows and Macintosh computers using Apple’s iTunes software.

It has the largest and highest-resolution screen of any smart phone we’ve seen, and the most internal memory by far. Yet it is one of the thinnest smart phones available and offers impressive battery life, better than its key competitors claim.

It feels solid and comfortable in the hand and the way it displays photos, videos and Web pages on its gorgeous screen makes other smart phones look primitive.

The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.

But the iPhone has a major drawback: the cellphone network it uses. It only works with AT&T (formerly Cingular), won’t come in models that use Verizon or Sprint and can’t use the digital cards (called SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile’s network. So, the phone can be a poor choice unless you are in areas where AT&T’s coverage is good. It does work overseas, but only via an AT&T roaming plan.

In addition, even when you have great AT&T coverage, the iPhone can’t run on AT&T’s fastest cellular data network. Instead, it uses a pokey network called EDGE, which is far slower than the fastest networks from Verizon or Sprint that power many other smart phones. And the initial iPhone model cannot be upgraded to use the faster networks.

The iPhone compensates by being one of the few smart phones that can also use Wi-Fi wireless networks. When you have access to Wi-Fi, the iPhone flies on the Web. Not only that, but the iPhone automatically switches from EDGE to known Wi-Fi networks when it finds them, and pops up a list of new Wi-Fi networks it encounters as you move. Walt was able to log onto paid Wi-Fi networks at Starbucks and airports, and even used a free Wi-Fi network at Fenway Park in Boston to email pictures taken during a Red Sox game.

But this Wi-Fi capability doesn’t fully make up for the lack of a fast cellular data capability, because it is impractical to keep joining and dropping short-range Wi-Fi networks while taking a long walk, or riding in a cab through a city.

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Short interview with Atul Gawande in the Freakonomics blog.

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Today is the day of silence for Pandora and other Internet radio sites to protest the increase in licensing fees for online radio (a move driven in large part by the RIAA). Save Net Radio!

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The Beastie Boys' are on Flickr.

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Paul Shirley, having played with both Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant, assesses the possibility of the two of them playing on the same team:

Having spent a similar amount of time in the semi-intimate company of both men, I can say confidently that two people couldn't be more different. Kevin Garnett is one of the most impressive humans I've ever been around.

Kobe Bryant isn't.

Technorati Tags: Apple, basketball, camera, flickr, gadgets, gawande, medicine, mobile, music, NBA, nytimes, phone, photography, pogue, puppy, radio, review, sports

Links

Orson Welles last movie was the 1986 animated Transformers movie, voicing the planet moon Unicron.

The iPhone rate plans: $59.99 for 450 minutes, $79.99 for 900 minutes, and $99.99 for 1350 minutes, all with unlimited data.

Technorati Tags: apple, film, gadgets, mobile, movies, iPhone

Soderbergh next big name to shoot the Red

I've been at each day of Cinegear Expo this weekend. Friday I was able to convince a few classmates to join me, and the first seminar we attended was the Red seminar where we watched the short that Peter Jackson shot on the Red, a WWI pic titled "Crossing the Line." More on that later, but the latest interesting news is that in addition to being used on the Angelina Jolie-Morgan Freeman movie Wanted, the Red will be used to shoot Steven Soderbergh's movies The Argentine and Guerilla.

Getting such huge names to test and sign off on their cameras is a huge win for Red. Here's a pic of the Red they had at Cinegear:

Technorati Tags: camera, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, movies, Red

2 steps past, 1 step future, or vice versa

The Vladmaster is a movie told through a handmade View-Master reel. Portland-based artist Vladimir photographs dioramas to recreate famous stories. The View-Master was one of my favorite childhood toys. I wish I still had my old red viewer. The View-Master Ultimate Reel List is the IMDb of View-Master reels.

The new Apple iPhone ads. The iPhone drops Jun. 29. I want one, but my last experience with AT&T (or Cingular, as it was then) was awful. Hmmm.

A still from Michel Gondry's new movie Be Kind Rewind. Jack Black stars as Jerry, who accidentally becomes magnetized, erasing all the tapes in the video store where his best friend Mike works (Mike is played by Mos Def). 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. Where does Gondry come up with all those wonderful concepts?

Technorati Tags: Apple, film, gadgets, movies, phone, gondry, toys

Memorial Day weekend

I am really sick: eyes watering, nose running, throat burning. My sinuses and chest are so congested I feel like I'm breathing through one of those coffee straws. A lot of people at school seem to be sick; one professor just canceled a class tomorrow morning. It's odd to see a cold seize hold around school when the weather is 70 degrees and sunny every day.

I have not slept as much or as regularly this quarter, and this weekend was really packed. Perhaps the lack of sleep has compromised my immune system. Whatever the cause, here's a sick day worth's of content.

Saturday I spent as 1st AC (assistant cameraperson) on a classmate's shoot. Since this was a reshoot, we had the luxury of a 2nd AC, and it made life a lot easier. Last quarter we had one AC per shoot, and that's a lot of work for one person. You have to load and download film, take focus measurements, guard the camera, swap lenses, check the gate, clean filters, move the camera into position, swap the camera from sticks to dolly and back, pull focus, keep a camera log, set the T-stop on the lens, run a stopwatch on shots to calculate how much film was run and how much is left, mark and clap the slate, write camera reports, and more. It's a very technical position, but I enjoy it. The day started early, with a 5AM alarm buzzing in my ear. When I got home at the end of the day, I told myself I'd take a quick nap and then head out to meet up with a few friends. I woke up at 5AM the next morning.

Sunday was spent at a wedding in Laguna Beach. I know nothing about the city other than what I'd seen on a few episodes of that MTV show of the same name (that show was shot beautifully on Panasonic Varicams, I believe). I'm not sure the city had any say in the matter, but that show forever cemented that town's image among most of America as the place where wealthy, self-absorbed teenagers ply their Machiavellian schemes to climb the social ladder.

Monday, on a last-minute suggestion from Mark, I attended the last day of the Star Wars convention at the LA convention center (the official title of the event was Star Wars Celebration IV). I consider myself a moderate Star Wars fans (enjoyed eps IV-VI, watched eps I-III out of devotion), but next to the types of fanatics you'd imagine at a gathering like this, I felt like Paris Hilton at a Mensa meeting.

At one T-shirt booth I asked a vendor if she had a particular Boba Fett t-shirt in large.

"Which one?" she barked.

"The second one from the right, top row?" I replied, taken aback by her hostile demeanor. She looked over her shoulder and then back down at some book she was reading.

"That's Jango Fett," she muttered, and paid me no further attention. Oops.

This being the last day of the convention, the schedule was very light on Lucasfilm-generated content. Most things to see were created by vendors or fans, from droids, action figures, and models to fan films and costumes. One room featured dozens of decorated Darth Vader helmets, much like the ubiquitous cows that appeared on city sidewalks a few years back. Darth as Lady Liberty? Or the Unabomber?

At another booth, as I looked over some artwork, a boy of about 8 or 9 years old walked behind me holding a yoda lightsaber, one of the ones that lights up and makes lightsaber sounds when swung through the air. A booth clerk, in his early forties, stopped the boy.

"The yoda lightsaber?" nodded the man in approval. "Strong choice."

"It's my first one," said the boy, beaming.

"That one's very light," the man explained. "Good for people who use a one-handed fighting technique, like me." He proceeded to demonstrate with some shadow-fencing, but one of his parries smacked me in the back of my head.

"Sorry, man," he said.

"Easy there, Jedi," I said, rubbing my head.

I watched a couple of fan films in the screening room. The ones I saw were all 2005 award winners. "One Season More" is an animated short that imagines Luke Skywalker's yearning to leave Tatooine as a musical number. It has the suitable mix of love and satire that characterizes the best of fan homages. It's one portion of Star Wars The Musical. This year's winners and entries can be seen at AtomFilms.

No plans for a new Star Wars movie were unveiled, but one welcome bit of news was the announcement of a new CG series from Lucasfilm Animation: The Clone Wars. Here's a sneak peek. I really enjoyed the last animated series, Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 1 and Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 2. This looks to be in that style.

Tuesday morning and early afternoon I spent at Disneyland with Alan, Sharon, and my two nephews Ryan and Evan. What do Disney and Lucas have in common? Both appropriated stories and built entertainment empires. Lucas took strands of Japanese film and set them in another universe (Lucas was originally supposed to direct Apocalypse Now, and Star Wars is his version of that movie, about how a small force--the Rebels--can overcome a larger force--the Empire--through sheer force of will). Disney took Grimm's fairy tales, which were indeed grim, and gave them happier endings and an animated life.

Since the last time I visited Disneyland, over 10 years ago, the most apparent change is that the price of admission has more than doubled. But seeing it all through my nephew Ryan's eyes helped me to appreciate just how enduring a piece of culture Disney built. He was so excited he was a live wire--no nap needed on this day.

While sitting with my nephew on It's A Small World, he almost jumped out of the boat he was so pumped up. That ride doesn't look like it's been updated one bit since my parents took me on it when I was a child (I thought perhaps we'd see young children in India answering customer service phones, or Chinese kids sewing Nikes, but the ride retains its idyllic view of the world), and yet it still kills with youngsters.

Something I wondered while wandering the park: what happened to the Mickey Mouse Club? Why isn't that show still running? Look at some of the talent that came out of the sixth and seventh seasons of the most recent incarnation of the show, which ended in 1994: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling. That's the pop music equivalent of the 2003 NBA Draft that produced Lebron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh, among others. The Mickey Mouse Club was so competitive that Jessica Simpson and Matt Damon failed to make the cut. I'm not sure why they ceded that space to the likes of American Idol. If Disney doesn't bring back that show, I hope they've at least retained the services of the casting director/talent scout.

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I miss walking the streets of NYC. Google Maps Street View allows me to revisit old favorites. Here's my old apartment.

Microsoft Surface, coming Winter 2007, is one of the early products pointing towards the gesture-manipulated touchscreen interface seen in Minority Report.

An upcoming June software upgrade will allow it you to watch YouTube videos on the AppleTV.

The 2007 Cannes Film Festival winners. From what I've heard from folks who attended, the lineup of movies was very strong this year.

Christopher Nolan is going to shoot some of The Dark Knight in IMAX format. Most features that have been projected in IMAX theatres are simply 35mm films blown up. Since they weren't framed for the IMAX theater, I find many scenes incomprehensible unless you're sitting in the back row. Audiences viewing The Dark Knight at an IMAX theater will see the movie switch aspect ratios from whatever the 35mm aspect ratio is to 1.43 to 1 when the IMAX scenes come on screen.

Based on Gallup Polls, America is willing to elect a black or a woman for president, but if you're gay or an atheist (or both, I presume) your time has not come.

Darren Aronofsky disses the DVD for his movie The Fountain. It doesn't have a commentary, but Aronofsky has said he recorded one himself and will post it online soon so you can listen to it while watching the movie.

as many of you can tell it is light on the extras as compared to my previous dvd releases.

everything at the studio was a struggle.
for instance: they didn't want to do a commentary track cause they felt that it wouldn't help sales.
i didn't have it in me to fight anymore.
whatever.

so:
niko, my friend who did the doc on the dvd came up with a novel idea.
we recorded a commentary track ourselves.
we're gonna post it on a site soon, http coming soon.
you can play it and watch the flick and hopefully you'll enjoy it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cannes, dvd, film, filmmaking, filmschool, microsoft, movies, music, politics, disney, starwars, tech, tv, video, youtube

GIF (Good it's Friday)

Ivan Basso confessed to "attempted doping," and now Bjarne Riis admits that he used EPO during years that include his 1996 Tour de France win. Eric Zabel and Rolf Aldag, who rode for Telekom during the Riis and Ullrich Tour de France wins in the 90's, also fessed up to EPO use. So did Telekom rider Bert Dietz. And Udo Bölts, and Christian Henn. Cycling is detoxing, and it's necessary, though not pretty.

On this the weekend of the Star Wars convention here in LA, psychiatrists have diagnosed Anakin Skywalker, later Darth Vader, of having a personality disorder. It sounds so obvious as to be an Onion headline, but apparently it's not. If you read me this line, I'd swear it was satire:

The diagnosis came to [psychiatrist Eric] Bui, a Star Wars fan, as he watched the series. "I thought to myself, 'That guy is crazy.' But he's not crazy. He's borderline."

Speaking of Star Wars, there's a rumor going around that George Lucas will announce a new Star Wars movie tomorrow at the convention (Saturday).

New ride at the Kennedy Space Center simulates 17,500 mph liftoff of a Space Shuttle. Now that sounds cool.

90% of handset owners believe iPhone is better than their current phone. That's when you know your marketing and brand are strong, when your product hasn't even reached consumers and yet they're crowning it the champ.

Michel Gondry directs Natalie Portman in the video for Paul McCartney's "Dance Tonight." Maybe not as conceptually brilliant as his other videos, but he still is able to pull off his effects in camera. Here's another Michel Gondry video, for Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water," which is built around a supremely clever conceit.

Someday our kids will laugh at us for ever having been impressed with regular old HD resolution. By then they'll be watching Ultra HD, with a resolution of 7680 x 4320 (16X sharper than HDTV), shot on cameras that can capture 4000 fps.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cycling, doping, drugs, gadgets, michelgondry, movies, music, psychiatry, HD, sports, starwars, tech, theonion, video, youtube

Quickies

Economist Bryan Caplan wonders whether or not he should get LASIK. As an economist, he weighs the pros and cons.

Okay, hybrid vehicles' fuel economy ratings have been downgraded to account for more typical driving conditions. I think most people, all things being equal, would swing for a hybrid because who doesn't want to help the environment. But all things are not equal yet, and people aren't willing to make the needed sacrifices. Once auto manufacturers star producing a wider selection of hybrids, in more shapes and sizes, then the hybrid movement will regain momentum. The article mentions the price premium for paying for a hybrid, but the government could neutralize that by increasing the hybrid car tax breaks to match that price premium.

About this time of year, famous people start delivering commencement speeches. It seems like the only ones people remember are the ones by funny guys (Jon Stewart, Will Ferrell, and Conan O'Brien), the fake one by Kurt Vonnegut, and the inspiring one by Steve Jobs (all linked to here in an older post). I haven't caught wind of any additions to the commencement canon this year, but here are links to two other graduation speeches, both by, yes, funny men: Conan O'Brien at Stuyvesant, and Stephen Colbert at Knox College.

Cyclists agree to more stringent testing in order to save the sport from plunging viewership and sponsorships:

Under cycling’s new testing rules, the blood of the top 600 riders will be profiled to provide a baseline to aid in evaluating future test results. A major increase in random, out-of-competition testing has begun, and riders have signed agreements to provide DNA samples in the event of doping disputes. Testing is also done daily during competition, with blood and urine samples drawn from the stage winner, overall race leader and at least one random riders.

Declining revenue is probably what it would take for players and owners in other leagues, like the NBA, MLB, or the NBA, to meet halfway on drug testing also. For all the hubaloo about fans upset with steroids and HGH and the such in baseball, owners listen to the clickety-clack of turnstiles, and they keep turning over in record numbers.

Technorati Tags: baseball, cycling, economics, environment, green, healthcare, hybrid, lasik, eye, sports, surgery

Glimpses of the short Peter Jackson shot on the Red prototypes

Here are some 4K res JPEGs from the short. Here's a short snippet of the short at 1K res (you'll probably have to try one of the mirrors at this point). It's such a short clip that it's hard to draw any sweeping conclusions, but that little bit is pretty sweet. In particular, it has a film-like DOF (Jackson's DP shot using Cooke S4 primes and Angenieux Primo zooms).

Here are some war stories from the shoot itself courtesy of HD For Indies. At this point, I'd sell my car to get one of these Reds, but I don't think that would be enough (literally!).

Technorati Tags: camcorder, camera, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, movies, Red

Spring break's over

Auto porn: a part by part look at the new BMW M3 V8 engine. Featuring brake energy regeneration (reminds of of the old Tiger Woods/BMW joke). Hear the sound of the new V-8 during acceleration. Check out these headers, and imagine them glowing bright red. If Paris were an auto-snob, she'd say, "That's hot."

As one article noted, these images of the BMW engine headers recall Edward Weston's photo of a pepper. Compare:

Arnold Kling on the single-payer health care:

1. People are forced to buy something that they don't seem to want
2. Provided by a monopoly
3. Paid for by higher taxes

Three funny Onion sports headlines:

• Greg Oden On Final Four Appearance: 'I'm Happier Than I've Been In 30 Years'
• Confident Phil Mickelson Guarantees Tiger Woods Will Win Masters
• Tiger Woods Signs $15 Million Deal To Endorse Alex Rodriguez

TigerCinema.com seeks to be a Netflix for Asian DVDs. They state that 95% of their titles have English subtitles and that most are Region 1. Sadly, the search and browse functions are somewhat crude. No browse by country? director? actor? The browse tree for Martial Arts is only one level deep! Good luck delving through 23 pages of results. The selection is decent but not as complete as I'd expect for such a niche-focused site. It's probably not entirely their fault as there are so many editions of many Asian movies, and many editions are out of print or hard to find. They probably can't stock enough copies of certain titles. For now, there's still eBay and HKFlix and YesAsia and sites like that for those willing to buy. Many eBay DVDs are simply burned copies and will not last very long; I treat most of those as disposable copies.

One of the best channels for showing off your high definition TV is Discovery HD Theater. Perhaps the best program to air on that channel yet is Planet Earth which debuted last Sunday. Apparently viewers agreed as the show snared 12 million viewers total over 3 hours and had a 3.6 HH rating, Discovery's third highest ever. I've only watched the first episode, "Pole to Pole," and it was spectacular, all of the footage having been shot in high definition. They say porn is the killer application for any new video technology, but IMHO sports and nature shows are the most desirable types of programming for HD.

Technorati Tags: autos, bmw, cars, economics, hd, healthcare, humor, dvd, sports, theonion

Ovens of desire

Super oven (via Pogue's Posts)! Cooks up to 15x faster than a conventional oven: Roast a 12 lb turkey in 42 minutes, bake a Chicago 12 inch deep dish pizza in 6.5 minutes, and bake a 9 inch apple cranberry pie in 12 minutes. Used by Starbucks and Subway and, for those who want more illustrious names, Charlie Trotter and Gray Kunz, the TurboChef Speedcook oven makes the "time is money" equation as tangible as can be, costing $5,995 for a solo unit and $7,895 if paired with a conventional oven.

For that price, you're within striking distance of a Rational CombiMaster. I saw one during a tour of the kitchen at Per Se, and after hearing about its combination steam and hot air cooking mode, I vowed that someday I'd own one, even if I didn't have the restaurant to house it.

Technorati Tags: gadgets, cooking

Common error for new widescreen TV owners

Something many people forget to do when they first upgrade to a widescreen television is to change the setup of their DVD player and video game consoles so that those components know to output a signal for a widescreen TV instead of a conventional 4x3 aspect ratio TV. It makes a huge difference for screen resolution. Most people assume their DVD player or videogame controller outputs the same type of signal for both widescreen and 4x3 TV's, or that perhaps the two devices will be aware of each other's settings, but unfortunately it's not the case.

Whenever I stay with someone who owns a widescreen TV, I'll try to put in an anamorphic DVD to see what type of picture shows up on screen. To make sure your DVD player is set properly, turn it on without a DVD in the drive and enter the player's settings or setup menu. Different manufacturers have different buttons on the remotes to activate this menu, but usually it's called something like "DVD Setup" or "DVD Player Menu" or "Settings." Enter the menu, then look for a category called video settings, and within that is usually some setting for Screen or Aspect Ratio or TV Type. Go in there and switch from 4:3 to 16:9 or Widescreen. If there is an option for Letterbox and an option for 16:9 or Widescreen, select 16:9 or Widescreen.

The same setting needs to be set properly for most modern video game consoles.

Technorati Tags: dvd, gadgets, hometheater

Apple TV

Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret review the Apple TV:

We've been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it's a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant.

Once it becomes commonplace and simple to stream content from the Internet to the TV, the entertainment world changes. You think you have a lot of channels to choose from now!

There are other solutions already, but having a big, trusted name like Apple enter the arena is important.

Technorati Tags: apple, gadgets, tv

The Big Red One

The Nike+iPod is a fun running accessory, but exercise caution before using it as a serious training tool.

David Pogue offers an overview of Grandcentral, a site that offers to consolidate all your phone numbers under one phone number which will ring all your phones simultaneously when dialed. I signed up during the beta a couple months ago and got a number but never used it. Pogue notes a number of nifty features that have been added since their launch, so perhaps it's time for me to dig that number out.

Neal Gabler recently wrote an op-ed in the LATimes titled "The Movie Magic is Gone." Kristin Thompson finds seven points in Gabler's article and states her case against each.

Another film shot mostly digitally: Zodiac was shot uncompressed with the Viper FilmStream camera in 4:4:4 1920x1080/24p. Here's a thread on cinematography.com discussing the look of the film. Here's the product page for the Viper, and here's an American Cinematographer article in which Paul Cameron discusses his experimentation with the Viper in shooting Collateral.

Right now, the HD video camera receiving the most use at our school is the Panasonic HVX200. The unreleased HD video camera with the most buzz right now is the Red One. Side project of Oakley founder Jim Jannard, the Red One looks more like some powerful weapon from some first person shooter than a video camera. Here's a gallery of video footage shot with the Red One, and here's one massive 4K frame capture down-converted to 8-bit JPG. The big buzz around this camera is its sensor size: 24.4mm x 13.7mm (Super35mm). The camera is intended to offer the same depth of field as 35mm Cine Lenses instead of the higher depth of field that characterizes most video. The Red One will retail for $17,500.

A working editor weighs in on Avid vs. Apple, having recently switched from Avid Media Composer to Apple's Final Cut Pro. I've tinkered with Media Composer but am more familiar with Final Cut Pro. I like some things about Media Composer better, and it is still more the industry standard for big motion pictures, but Final Cut Pro just has more momentum and resources behind it. Most film students can't afford an Avid system and are taught to edit on Final Cut Pro systems. I think Avid needs to make a stronger push to make inroads with the next generation of film editors.

Technorati Tags: Apple, business, camcorder, editing, film, filmmaking, finalcutpro, fitness, gadgets, hd, ipod, movies, phone, avid, running, sports, tech, video

And exhale

Finally, a moment to come up for air. Film production is all-consuming and takes over your life like few other things. But this is just a brief respite, as I have my five classmates' shoots occupying my next five long weekends.

120 Hz TVs, the next step in TV quality after 1080p.

Scientific American investigates the hype around online dating.

NBA experimenting with 3D high-definition imaging. The cameras are the same ones James Cameron has used for some of his 3D IMAX pics. Maybe we're not too far off from the day when we can be like Jeremy Piven in that commercial for the All-Star game, where he freezes Vince Carter mid-air as he prepares to dunk and steps into the picture. You, too, can see Vince Carter's crotch as it soars over your head, all in breathtaking 3-D.

Speaking of high def, most people are down on high definition DVDs because of the HD DVD and Blu-ray format war. Unlike Betamax or VHS, though, I think this one is solvable, either through dual-format players like the LG or through dual-format discs. And now that I've seen a couple Blu-ray DVDs, I've got to admit, the pictures from those are superior to the pictures from regular DVDs, and it's clearly visible to the naked eye.

Technorati Tags: basketball, dvd, electronics, gadgets, HD, hoops, nba, sports, tech, tv, video

Clearing the TiVo of life

This list of cool stuff costing $10 or less is useful if you need a few belated stocking stuffers.

Gosh, I've missed NYC. I'm trying to reserve judgment on LA, but I have no doubts about my adoration for NYC. Being back and strolling the streets, mingling with the people, it's like CPR for the spirit. The weather in LA is fantastic, but it didn't take long for me to realize it's an urban planning disaster with perhaps no solution to come in my lifetime.

I didn't realize how draining my quarter had been until I arrived back in Manhattan the day after my faculty review. The first week, I've had to resort to drinking coffee three times to stay awake (I weened myself off of black gold in 1998), and when I sleep I have the types of vivid, often disturbing dreams I only have when exhausted.

The irony of film school, at least the first year, is that students have little time to actually watch movies. The night after my last final, I wanted to go see a movie, but when I looked up show times I realized it wasn't playing in any theater in the L.A. region anymore. The last time that happened to me was...hmm, I think that's the first time that's ever happened to me.

So among other things, while on break, I will catch up on movies. In fact, this winter break is a chance to catch up on everything that film school forced me to put off until later. I'm clearing out the playlist in my personal life DVR: sleep, good eating, exercise, natural light, movies, music, correspondence with friends and family (but no holiday cards this year, alas), drink, world news, the simple pleasures in life.

I wish the same to all of you. Happy holidays!

Technorati Tags: goods, gadgets, shopping

Sundry

At Broad Nightlight is a small collection of nighttime photos of Berlin, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. What's peculiar about these is how few people are visible.

The upcoming issue of Wholphin will contain Alexander Payne's film school thesis, The Passion of Martin.

10 innovative ad campaigns in Tokyo train stations.

The Amazon plog for the book How Lance Does It contains some interesting points. In one post, author Brad Kearns quotes Dr. Glen Gaesser on how to identify the most talented athletes. Said Glaesser, "Go to a race and stand at the finish line. Then...see who crosses the line first. There is the most talented athlete." Kearns also writes a passionate post defending Lance Armstrong: Why Lance is Clean. But my favorite quote is about Lance's successful approach, and it's on the back cover. "Lance hates losing, but is not afraid of it." That sums up a lot of all-time greats in many sports (remember the Jordan Nike ad "Failure").

A man sold everything he owned, took the cash, and bet it all on one spin of roulette in Las Vegas. This is what happened.

It doesn't appear that this chair is available for purchase yet, but already I want one.

An interview with Eiko Tanaka of Studio4°C, the company in charge of adapting Taiyo Matsumoto's classic manga Tekkon Kinkreet into an animated feature.

Technorati Tags: advertising, animation, anime, Berlin, film, film school, filmmaking, gambling, gaming, goods, HongKong, Lance, manga, movies, photography, products, psychology, marketing, sports, Tokyo, travel

Black Monday

Dry Shampoo. Spray in, wait two minutes, and brush out. What will they think of next? Useful on a film set, or if your livelihood depends on looking good all the time (comme moi), or if you're confined to a bed because some Kathy Bates-like character has gone Misery on you. Or if you are this guy.

The Dragon is the most revered sign of the Chinese zodiac, so Chinese birth rates in Dragon years escalate, leading to crunches in providing schooling, medical services, etc. Some economists conducted a study which debunks this superstition, but I still look for a healthy increase in sales of lingerie, champagne, and roses in China in mid-2011, leading into the next Dragon year in 2012.

In a game that had clearly become a draw, Vladimir Kramnik made a stunning mistake late in his second game versus the computer program Deep Fritz to allow the software to checkmate on the next move.

James Surowiecki on Nintendo and how it has found profitability with products like the Wii while Sony and Microsoft rack up huge losses in their efforst to win the console war. There are many markets that are not "winner takes all." We're #3! We're #3!

In this week's New Yorker, George Saunders can't resist offering his two cents on Borat, and I read it, and it is probably the most trenchant critique of the movie yet. Borat is, as M refers to Bond in the the latest offering, a "blunt instrument." The irony of it all is that Cohen's burgeoning fame is undermining his ability to find gullible targets, forcing him to pick on easier and easier targets (lawsuits notwithstanding) and transforming him from David to Goliath. I laughed at many moments of the movie but was disappointed at all the material recycled straight from the TV show.

Technorati Tags: beauty, business, chess, china, gaming, geek, goods, humor, movies, newyorker, products, georgesaunders, software, video, youtube

Q&A

Thanksgiving stuffing--in the bird or out? Mark Bittman recommends out, in which case it's dressing, not stuffing.

Do you really need a 1080p TV, or will 1080i suffice? You're probably okay with just 1080i, marketing literature notwithstanding.

Does Daisuke Matsuzaka throw the gyroball or not? Will Carroll published a new article (you have to be a subscriber to read it, unfortunately) on Baseball Prospectus today stating that he does believe now that Matsuzaka throw the gyroball, but that he doesn't yet have control over which type he throws. There appear to be two variations that differ based on the tilt of the axis of rotation. If it points up, the ball moves more laterally away from a right-handed batter (all this assumes a right-handed pitcher). If it tilts down, the pitch actually breaks in on a right-handed batter. Carroll pointed to this video of Matsuzaka as having the closest rendition of a pure gyroball:

You know what I enjoy about watching Japanese pitchers? They tend to have long, deliberate motions with high leg kicks, long windups, with hands and feet tracing wide arcs around their bodies (many also have these odd pauses or hitches that mess up the batter's timing). It's old school. Not many pitchers have such motions anymore (as a Cubs fan, Mark Prior and Kerry Wood's super simple deliveries come to mind, in contrast to a guy like Kevin Appier). I love watching old videos of guys like Luis Tiant or Sandy Koufax, with their huge leg kicks. Every pitch looked like a complex series of coordinated motions requiring maximum exertion to pull off correctly.

Technorati Tags: baseball, cooking, electronics, food, gadgets, pitcher, pitching, gyroball, recipe, shopping, thanksgiving, turkey

Daisuke Matsuzaka

Baseball Prospectus examines Daisuke Matsuzaka to see if he's really worth spending $20 to $30 million on, just for the right to even negotiate with him. The answer? He probably is. He might just be the second best starting pitcher in baseball after Johan Santana. I want to see the gyroball.
UPDATE: Rumor has it the Boston Red Sox won the bidding war for negotiation rights with an offer of somewhere between $38 million and $45 million. Wow.

For your next vacation, won't you consider a virtual tour of World of Warcraft with Synthravels, the first online virtual travel agency?

The NanoNuno umbrella dries off with a simple shake. The secret? Nanotechnology. That image on their website makes it seem as if the umbrella emits some kinds of forcefield.

Technorati Tags: baseball, gadgets, geek, MLB, online, pitcher, pitching, gaming, sports, travel

Sonos

My part-time roommate Dave got the Sonos for his house back in Seattle and raved about it. Joel loves it too. Two points make a straight line, right?

Sounds like a nifty solution for those who want to distribute music from their computer to anywhere in the house though it's certainly not cheap.

Technorati Tags: electronics, gadgets, music, wireless

A few geeky links

The Hannibal is one mean DVR/media center thingamajiggy.

This is a really good summary of Amazon's web services strategy. Having been on the web services team when I left Amazon, I'm surprised more people didn't pick up on this sooner.

DivX for Windows 6.4 enables 1080 HD creation, both 1080i and 1080p.

Technorati Tags: divx, DVR, electronics, gadgets, HD, amazon, tech, webservices

Monday

David Remnick profile of post-presidency Bill Clinton in The New Yorker. Clinton is by far the most fascinating president of my lifetime.

UPDATE: Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Clinton's now legendary interview on Fox.

***

Drool. Drool.

***

I've always wondered why the sun made me sneeze, and now I know; photic sneeze reflex.

The condition occurs in 17% to 25% of humans with more common occurrence in Caucasians than other human races. The condition is passed along genetically as an autosomal dominant trait.

***

The September 2006 Stanford Book Salon selection was Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. It's one of my favorites, and the homepage for the Salon (an online book club) has a transcript of an introduction by Nancy Packer as well as links to a reading group guide to the novel and an interview with Wallace Stegner.

***

The Madden cover jinx strikes again. Spooky how consistently it works its evil eye. Fantasy football players were warned not to pick Alexander with their first round pick this year, and the non-superstitious who ignored the advice are now left scrambling to pick up Maurice Morris.

Ray Lewis is perhaps the only player who avoided the curse when he appeared on the 2005 cover, but since he plays on defense he only affected the small portion of fantasy football players who draft individual defensive players.

There is one logical reason why the curse might exist, and that is simply because a player who is featured on the cover is likely coming off a career year, and most players regress after such seasons. Still, many of the regressions were caused by severe injuries...somewhere the ghost of John Madden is screaming, "Boom!" as he sticks a pin in a Shaun Alexander voodoo doll.

A Cingular disappointment

The last four months, I've experienced a sharp and unpleasant shock every time I open my cell phone bill. $498. $677. $525. $798! For some reason, four months ago, Cingular started categorizing every minute of my call time as roaming even though I've been with them on a nationwide plan for years. Every month, I have to call and wait on hold for up to an hour while I'm transferred up the ladder to someone with enough authority to issue a refund. Every month I'm told the problem is fixed, and every month I call back to remind them that no, it's not.

I bit my tongue and waited until I arrived in Los Angeles to dump Cingular. My cell phone had long since stopped sending and receiving text messages, and the recurring billing problems were the last straw.

Verizon doesn't have the fancy phones that other providers offer, but their tagline of "There's only one reason to choose a wireless company: It's the network" makes sense. Cingular's coverage just can't match Verizon's in the last three cities I've lived in (Seattle, New York, and now LA), their base individual plans are the same price, and frankly, whipping out a sexy cell phone wins admiration for the phone, not the owner. Sure, I'd love to still be on GSM and to be able to pop in a SIM card in a foreign country, but it's always proven cheaper to just purchase a local cell phone and SIM card when traveling abroad than to use any of the U.S. providers' overseas plans.

The best deal I found, by the way, was not at a Verizon store but through Amazon.com, which offered an LG VX8300 phone for free after rebate and only required a 181 day rate plan commitment. At the Verizon store, they wanted to charge me $129.99 for the phone with a 1 year contract or $79.99 for the phone with a 2 year contract.

Their commercials can be aggravating, and Verizon is far from perfect, but for now, they're an upgrade. Yes, I can hear you now.

Links

New David Sedaris piece in The New Yorker this week. Also an interesting article on neuroeconomics.

Harold McGee answers some common questions about kitchen science on Chow.com, like what's the difference between pressed and chopped garlic and is it safe to heat food in plastic in the microwave.

50 Years of Janus Films - a 50 DVD box set. Pre-order before October 24 for $650, actually a bargain at $13 a disc. Drool.

Zyb - a site to back up your cell phone contact info. The service is free and works with over 200 mobile phones. Useful.

BP's Statistical Review of World Energy 2006.

One of my questions to Gothamist was posted to Ask Gothamist, though unfortunately the response didn't go live until I'd already left NYC. Before I left, I did find this useful list of places in NYC to donate goods of all types.

Trailer for Johnny To's next movie, a spaghetti Western transplanted to macau, Fong Juk or Exiled as it's known in English. Oh, I wish I were at the Toronto International Film Festival. Exiled opened there to strong reviews.

Trailer for the next animated feature from Satoshi Kon, Paprika. If I knew how to read Japanese, I could actually tell you something about the movie. Early buzz, though sparse, is good.

I wasn't a huge fan of Tony Jaa's Tom Yum Goong, but it sounds like the condensed version from the Weinsteins, retitled The Protector, is even worse. Oh well, we can shift our hopes onto Ong Bak 2, which Jaa will direct himself.

Nikon D80

Nikon announced their latest digital SLR, the D80, which will be available in September 2006. 10.2 Megapixel, 3fps, 2.5" LCD, will retail for $999.95 without a lens. Throw in another $300 and you get a very useful kit lens, an AF-S DX 18-135mm F3.5 - F5.6G ED. This SLR looks to be the successor to the D70s. Unlike the D70/D70s, the D80 will be compatible with a vertical grip/battery pack, the MD-80. Just reading the specs, this camera looks pretty sweet, and it may eat into sales of the D200 which costs $700 more. The only bummer from my perspective is that they've shifted to using SD and SDHC cards instead of Compact Flash, so D70, D200, and D2 series Nikon users who grab a D80 will have to purchase yet another set of memory cards.

This review of fans is timely considering the heat wave that has swept across the U.S. this summer. The winner? The Bionaire Metal Tower Fan.

Swimmin' with Dylan

Download the instrumental version of "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley, as well as "Nel Cimitero di Tucson," the spaghetti western track Danger Mouse sampled for Crazy. Something to tide us over while we wait for Paris Hilton's cover.

True height measures the effective height of a basketball player. Good news! Tyrus Thomas measures out as nearly a 7-footer in true height. I'm pumped up for the Bulls upcoming season, though it will still be ugly on offense.

Shina Tsukamoto's horror film novella Haze on Region 2 DVD.

Soundtrack.net has a sneak preview of James Newton Howard's score for Lady in the Water. Oddly enough, the soundtrack includes a bunch of Bob Dylan covers.

Wired Magazine has a profile of banned Tour de France technology. Most are just bikes that fall under the UCI minimum weight limit, though, and for a recreational cyclist that's nothing to get excited about. A few ounces here or there isn't going to turn the average club cyclist into a champ, and trying to descend a long, steep mountain on a featherweight bike is terrifying.

A long-standing conspiracy theory holds that the moon landing was staged, perhaps by Stanley Kubrick. The moon hoax is so popular that NASA had to address it.

Sizzler

I finally had a chance to take my new Macbook Pro out for a spin while in Beijing, and it came through for me, allowing me to edit a wedding toast video in time for the ceremony on Saturday. Compared to my old, ancient Powerbook, the Macbook Pro is much snappier, with better speakers and a stronger wi-fi antenna.

I'm not sure I'd refer to it as a laptop, though, because you can't put the thing on your lap. I didn't think it was possible, but this model runs even hotter than my previous model, and if I left it on my bare legs I'd be peeling skin off the bottom of it in short order.

Perhaps Apple can sell some add-ons to dissipate the heat, like a coffeemaker and a hotplate so you could brew coffee and scramble some eggs while checking your morning e-mail.

Da Da Da

When they come out with that list of 10 worst jobs next year, I think being a defense lawyer for Saddam Hussein has to make the cut.

Why do U.S. doctors continue to misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20% of the time? Perhaps because the current medical system offers no incentives to improve.

A deadly flu from Asia strikes America. There is no cure, and if you catch it, and you have a 10% chance of dying. If you take a vaccine, it will protect you, but there' s a 5% chance the vaccine will kill you. What do you do? The correct answer is to take the vaccine, of course, but patients choose correctly more often if choosing for someone else than for themselves. Not entirely surprising. It's tough to think big picture when you're smack dab in the frame.
UPDATE: Sorry, as one of my readers John points out, I should have said you have a 10% chance of dying. That's not conditional on catching the flu or not. Otherwise you'd need to know what the chances of catching the flu are.

Using similarity scores, Richard Lu rates the NBA prospects coming out from the NCAA this year. At the top of the list? Ronnie Brewer. LaMarcus Aldridge ranked 6, Brandon Roy 8, and Tyrus Thomas 11. Overall, the similarity scores confirm what most people have said, that this is a weak draft.

Yes, Dan Brown is a terrible writer. But one popular indictment of his mega-bestseller is unfair. Referring to Leonardo as "da Vinci" in the title is not the same as referring to Jesus as "of Nazareth" (as explained here by Geoff Nunberg of The Language Log). You don't need a linguistics PhD to know this, though. People refer to me as "da man" all the time, and I'm totally cool with that.

The top 10 ultimate grills. At number one on the list is the gorgeous specimen pictured below:

This backyard set from Lynx Professional Grills has a 42" grill with access doors, double burner, storage drawers, warming drawer, beverage area with outdoor refrigerator, ice machine, and cocktail pro (a bar area with sink and faucet).

Nike + iPod

The Nike + iPod Sport Kit is available for pre-order for $29 and works with iPod Nanos. The website says you have to own or purchase a pair of Nike+ shoes, and Nike's just don't fit my flat, wide feet. They're made for people with skinny feet and normal to high arches. But since the only distinguishing feature of the Nike+ shoes seems to be a pocket under the insole to hold the wireless sensor, it certainly seems possible to hack another pair of running shoes to hold the sensor. I'll need to study a pair of these Nike+ shoes to see what's so special about the sub-insole notch.

HDR

Nathan Myhrvold on the future of digital camera technology. A while back at a wedding, Jeff mentioned to me that he'd returned from a conference at MIT where he'd seen demos of a camera that would take three exposures of every photo, basically automatically bracketing every photo to address exposure problems with scenes of high dynamic range (HDR). That technology hasn't even launched yet, but impatient photographers have leaped ahead with a partial solution, taking multiple exposures manually at different exposures, then blending them in Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix, or both, to create HDR photos. This is despite the fact that HDR displays are too expensive for mass-production.

Having a camera that could bracket shots near simultaneously would solve the issue of trying to handhold for multiple exposures, though you couldn't do it by varying the shutter speed given that you only have one lens. What you'd have to do is have multiple sensors, each with a differing sensitivity. Or you could just have one sensor with a much wider dynamic range. Being able to capture HDR with just one photo would solve the problem with creating HDR pics right now, which is that your subject has to be, for the most part, stationary.

One area where this type of technology would be particularly useful is wedding photography. Trying to capture the brilliant white of a wedding dress and the ebony black of a tuxedo side by side is a photographic challenge. Expose properly for the dress and the groom's tux looks like a solid block of black. Expose for the tux and the bride looks like a face nestled in a blinding explosion of white. Most wedding photographers have switched to shooting digital, and the speed of the digital workflow certainly benefits the photographer. But to my eye, black and white film still does a superior job of capturing the dynamic range of most wedding portraits. If one was to be married this year, I'd recommend asking one of the wedding photographers to shoot medium format film, especially for bride-groom portraits.

I have not played around with HDR much, but last last weekend while in DC visiting my sister I came across some dramatic cloud formations moving with urgency over the Mall. I bracketed a few shots so I could experiment with HDR in Photoshop CS2, clouds being perhaps the most popular element that drives photographers to turn to HDR processing (the texture of clouds disappears when photos are overexposed which is almost always in single exposures since landscapes below tend to be darker). I didn't have a tripod, unfortunately, and so I had to handhold. Not ideal, but I don't enjoy hauling a tripod around when sightseeing.

This one I shot out a window of the Hirshhorn seemed to come out the best, though I still need to play around with the settings in Photoshop and Photomatix to learn how each affects the final output.

Photoshop seems to produce more natural-looking images, while Photomatix can leave you with more saturated and dramatic HDR but also more artificial-looking images. Do a tag search on "HDR" in Flickr (over 25,000 results and rising) and you'll find some truly bizarre-looking HDR photos of images that don't require the effect. The end result often resembles some garish, digitally drawn watercolor.

Here's another one from this past weekend, when I took a visitor out to see The Statue of Liberty.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Google Browser Sync is a Firefox plugin that syncs your Firefox browser settings across all your computers. Useful to me because I'm always bouncing between my desktop and laptop.

Al Qaeda leader Zarqawi is dead, killed in an air strike north of Baghdad.

Jon Stewart vs. Bill Bennett on gay marriage. If you wanted to send someone from the right to match wits with Jon Stewart on this issue, Bill Bennett probably isn't on the shortlist.

The Yoda backpack makes it seem as if Yoda is hanging on your back so you can look like Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. Pair this with a Force FX lightsaber and, well, you might as well lop off your manhood and put it in that backpack because it won't be getting any use.

Speaking of Star Wars, the DVDs for the original, unaltered Star Wars trilogy, Eps IV through VI, are being released in September, and the fans are already killing them with customer reviews on Amazon.com. All three DVDs currently average about 2 out of 5 stars in customer ratings. It's not just that fans are being forced to buy yet another set of Star Wars DVDs but that the original, unaltered movies will be released in non-anamorphic widescreen and will not have a new Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix. Some fans say it's just the original laserdisc transfer (I own those laserdiscs, by the way). Oh, the horror.

An online strategy guide to rock, paper, scissors. There's even a book in print called The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide. I went to a book reading/signing by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner today. It was fun to finally meet them in person. They mentioned that they're going to write a sequel to Freakonomics to be titled SuperFreakonomics. Their talk strayed to the topic of rock, paper, scissors. Phil Gordon is going to throw a $50,000 rock, paper, scissors tournament so Levitt can study the play. It just so happens that Levitt is studying the human ability or inability to randomize. He mentioned some initial studies that indicated that football (I think he meant European football) players are superior strategy randomizers. He's not sure why. If given 4 strategies to employ against each other, the optimal mix is something like 40/20/20/20 (or so Levitt said), and football players do that naturally. Rock, paper, scissors is a good test of that human ability. Gordon believes that some people are gifted randomizers and can consistently win at rock, paper, scissors, but it sounds like Levitt's skeptical since different people make the rock, paper, scissors finals each year.

Chip Kidd is the guest blogger at PowellsBooks this week. Among the his to-do's for the week:

• Design a cover for Christina Garcia's forthcoming novel, A Handbook to Luck.
• Construct and photograph a miniature set for Martin Amis's new novel, House of Meetings. By Thursday morning.
• Redesign a poster for a Pedro Almodovar film festival.
• Do the mechanical for Robert Hughes's Goya, newly in paperback.
• Get an approval on a jacket for a book on the history of relations between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle East (by Zachary Karabell).
• Do research on a poster for Sofia Coppola's upcoming film, Marie Antoinette (I'm so, so behind on this and Sony's being very patient).
• Design a cover for a play by Cormac McCarthy, entitled Sunset Limited.
• Do same for Kim Deitch's new graphic novel, Alias The Cat, which I am also editing. And which rules.
• Reconfigure my design for the Surprise CD by Paul Simon in order to adapt it to, of all things, vinyl.

Even Danny Meyer's wife and kids have to wait in line at the Shake Shack.

A couple links

Two products with cool design: this "blind date" calendar and this lumen tree.

"Nostalgia" by George Saunders.

Yesterday, Golf World's Masters Performance Index predicted a Vijay Singh win at the Masters. That prediction's sitting pretty today, but there's a whole lot of golf left.

Gospel of Judas found. Did Jesus ask Judas to betray him?

Bush authorized Plamegate leak says Scooter Libby.

Victoria

Portable cloaking technology finally a reality?

In search of the mythical pitch called the gyroball, a baseball thrown with the rotation of a football spiral, or a bullet, and nearly unhittable.

Beware the flirtatious IM stranger, especially if you're a college basketball player about to play a big game.

Fastest growing city on Earth: Chongqing. The two times I've been to China, I'm always amazed to travel through towns like Chongqing, that no one has ever heard of, all with populations larger than New York City.

...the planet's population is currently split almost right down the middle: 3.2 billion in the city, 3.2 billion in the countryside. But by the start of 2007, the balance will have tipped decisively away from the fields and towards the skyscrapers.

I predict more men will be asking for jalapenos on their Subway sandwiches.

Tree Hugger

Sony Playstation 3 to launch in November, 2006...this and more news from the PS3 conference. Blu-ray DVD playback, HDMI output, 60GB HDD, full backwards compatibility. No price announced, though.

Set up your Netflix account to default to HD-DVDs. Not sure why they haven't distinguished between HD and Blu-ray, since those are incompatible formats. Not a whole lot of titles on the docket, but you can sign up to be notified when the initial titles release at Amazon's HD DVD store or its Blu-ray DVD store.

Keepvid.com, for preserving those treasured videos from sites like Google Video, YouTube, Vimeo, and others of that ilk.

My sister had to mock up a fake videogame box cover for a class project. Her game was a satire of first person shooters, an eco-terrorism game called Tree Hugger. Yep, that guy who just tossed his empty soda can on the sidewalk is about to be lined up in the crosshairs. Severe? Perhaps. Similar policies in Singapore seem effective. I was taken aback mostly because this is my little sister we're talking about. Yes, we are one crazy family. You can click on the image for a larger view.

You might not be the only one betting on college basketball this week.

Tutorial on simulating tilt-shift photography using Photoshop. So much fun!

Deleted scenes from Star Wars

I hesitate to link to this because it feels like I'd just be speeding its demise, but for all I know these aren't that new anyhow: deleted scenes from Star Wars (Episode IV). Probably of interest only to the hardcore fans, as some of this is just behind the scenes footage.

Based on Gross National Product per capita, what is the 77th richest country in the world, wealthier than India, China, and Bulgaria? EverQuest.

Microsoft's Origami revealed, with a less friendly name of Ultra-Mobile PC. I'd like to see someone wear this on their belt like a cell phone. That is sure to impress the ladies.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web.

On the new revelations surrounding Barry Bonds steroid use, which most people suspected since his physical transformation into a human Bobblehead, the claim that most saddens me is that Bonds started juicing to grab the spotlight back from McGwire and Sosa. It's as if the movie Amadeus had been reversed, and Mozart was the one fuming over Salieri. I feel sorry for Bonds, in a way. For such a gifted player, he's always seemed so bitter and angry, arrogant yet insecure. Well, once the book hits the street, it should serve as a truth serum one way or another. Lance Armstrong always sued anyone who made public accusations that he doped. Despite Bonds's alimony payments, I think he could afford to take legal action if the book made false accusations. Meanwhile, I don't know Bud Selig, but I can't help picturing him with a copy of the book on his desk, a blank and shellshocked look on his face, just like President Logan on 24. He'd turn to his Mike Novick equivalent and plead, "Mike, tell me what to do."

Rakebreak.com

Rakebreak.com allows you to recover some of the rake you pay at many popular online poker playing sites. Many sites will cut Ratebreak.com in a chunk of the rake it takes from you. Then Rakebreak gives most of that back to you, keeping a bit for yourself. Refer friends, and if they accumulate $400 in rake, you get a $50 bonus. [via Thrillist]

What is Microsoft's Origami Project, which is being unveiled this Thursday? The most popular theory seems to be an "ultraportable lifestyle PC," a sort of jack-of-all-trades gadget that combines all your devices into one: digital camera, camcorder, cell phone, MP3 player, PDA, Internet access device, e-mail device, and portable picture display.

The Sony Portable Reader System (PRS-500) is up for sale at SonyStyle.com for $349.99. I'd want to experience the screen resolution of one of these babies in person before plunking down that much cash, but electronic readers do geek me up, and this is the most promising model yet. The first thing Sony needs to do, however, is give this baby a name. PRS-500 is not sexy at all. Hmmm, maybe something like Origami Project, if that's not already taken. [via Engadget]

In the Minnesota Timberwolves game last night, Kevin Garnett tossed a ball into the stands in frustration and hit a fan in the face. Garnett was ejected, and rightfully so (a young girl to his right, perhaps the man's daughter, burst into tears), but my eyes rolled at footage of the fan being wheeled out on a gurney by medical personnel. From being hit in the face by a basketball? A player with a $100 million contract hits you in the nose with a tossed ball, and television cameras all swing around to focus on you--that's the time to bust out your best Oscar performance and get a good lawyer on the phone. But I think the guy probably realized that even the U.S. legal system would have a hard time finding in his favor when you have grade school kids being nailed in the face by hard red rubber dodgeballs every day in P.E. On a positive note, I'm sure the guy will be happy with his parting gift, likely to be some signed paraphernalia by KG.

Hot rumor at the NFL Combine is that Vince Young scored a 6 out of 50 on the Wonderlic test, though the latest news is that the grader may have scored the test wrong, though his score wasn't much better. Wonderlic must have some good lawyers because I couldn't find a complete sample Wonderlic test online anywhere, though ESPN.com once published a sample 15 questions that everyone online is forced to cite when posting about the test. Supposedly, Matt Leinart scored a 35, and the average score for an NFL prospect is about 19. I've never seen any studies that demonstrate any correlation between Wonderlic score and NFL performance, though Young's score would make him the lowest scoring starting QB in the NFL. That score would likely hurt Young's draft stock, not necessarily because his test score means he's unable to grasp an NFL playbook but because like many standardized tests, it's a test of your willingness to study for a defined task. A score of 6 would indicate that Young's preparation for the Combine was spotty, at best. He knew it was coming. So the latest news is that Young retook the test and scored a 16, and that he'll take the test a third time.
[related: Pro Football Weekly published scores for lots of players from last year's NFL draft]
[update: I did manage to find a sample Wonderlic test online]

Duck and dunk

Pop quiz on marriage, one that bursts some common myths.

If you're looking to buy one of the new MacBook Pros that comes out this week, a good place to go is Amazon.com. They're offering a $150 rebate if you buy by Feb 28. Add in the A9 Instant Reward, Free Super Saver Shipping, and no sales tax (for most of you), and that's a healthy financial incentive to buy from Amazon instead of elsewhere. Of course, the only problem is that it's not available yet, so you can't buy it. Buyers should keep an eye on the site this week to see if the Add to Shopping Cart button makes an appearance before Feb. 28.

Nate Robinson is a great athlete, and the Spud Webb hurdle dunk was a lot of fun. But how he won the dunkoff after missing something like 87 dunks in a row is a mystery greater than even the figure skating scoring rules. I guess it's no surprise the sponsor this year was Sprite. The NBA changed the rules this year so that misses don't count against you, which is a good idea to encourage players to try some truly difficult dunks. But c'mon. You have to put some cap on it; this was a scene straight out of Tin Cup. And anyhow, Andre Iguodala made a jump, catch, and dunk from behind the backboard! He jumped so high he hit his head on the backboard the first time and had to duck under it to actually make the dunk (you can see a sequence of photos of the Iguodala dunk here)!? Can we get a Dick Button call on that dunk? They should have a rule that if you make a dunk that's truly spectacular and groundbreaking, you can just win the contest right then and there, outright. Like when Vince Carter jumped from behind the backboard, did a 360 degree spin, windmilled and dunked with one hand. Or when Jason Richardson tossed the ball off the backboard, caught it in mid-air, put the ball through his legs, finished a NYTimes crossword, and dunked. The judge of whether a dunk qualifies for such an outright knockout win would be the number of NBA players on the sidelines who jump out of their seats with and start high-fiving and hugging and giggling and screaming like a band of high school cheerleaders. It should've been over when Iguodala ran off the court and out the tunnel.

Sweet dunk...

...but here's the dunk that should have ended the contest.

The other thing that amazes me about the All-Star game is watching how easily NBA pros can make the half court shot. In that competition with three player teams making a variety of shots around the court, it only took Tony Parker and Kobe Bryant one shot each to nail the half court shot, and it didn't take the other teams much longer to nail it. They should just have a new contest on All-Star weekend, the half-court shooting contest.

The Terrible Triad

I had a terrible flashback when I saw Carson Palmer crumple after suffering a torn ACL and MCL and damage to the media meniscus. That injury is commonly referred to as the terrible triad because they tend to occur together. The knee is just a stubborn joint, it can bend forward until the leg is straight, and it can bend backwards until your foot hits your butt, and that's about the extent of its operation. It's not so good with side to side forces, like a big defensive lineman rolling into it from the side.

The good news is that ACL reconstruction has come a long way. In the old days, they wouldn't even bother repairing the ACL, and athletes would just back out and play with an unstable knee, though it was highly recommended that you strengthen your muscles around the knee. My doctor actually gave me that option, but I didn't want to limit myself to sports requiring only straight-ahead linear motion, like running or cycling. My docs didn't bother repairing my MCL, but they did take a piece of my hamstring to replace my ACL, and they snipped a bit of my torn meniscus out and stapled the remainder together with some biodegradable material that just dissolved after a while. A half year of rehab later, and I was back out and running around, with the added benefit of being able to predict inclement weather with my reconstructed knee.

***

This hard drive is a real brick.

***

Play Windows Media files in your Quicktime player on the Mac.

Bob Loblaw

What foods to buy organic (lots of fruits, meats, and baby food), and what not (seafood).

Analysts guess that Sony's Playstation 3 will cost $499 when it's released, as opposed to the $399 that the Xbox 360 theoretically costs now, though if you want one right at this very moment you'll probably pay a lot more than that on eBay.

Skype 2.0 for Windows offers free video calling. Non-Windows XP users don't get the video calling feature, but that means we get to continue calling in the nude, so we've got that going for us.

Nikon to halt production on all but two of its seven film camera bodies, phasing them out one by one. My old Nikon film camera is already starting to display that healthy antique glow.

No go on running Windows XP on the new MacBook Pro, at least for now, but you can run Vista if you can somehow get your hands on a beta copy.

John Madden Arrested for possession of turhumanheaducken (I've flirted with the turducken for many a Thanksgiving now, so James just had to pass this along to me).

Digi-portraits - Sweet! I want one!

Kobe vs. Lebron tonight, though it's really lame in the NBA that star players almost never guard each other, so it's really more like Lebron and Kobe tonight, on the same basketball court and occasionally within a few feet of each other. John Hollinger compared the two statistically (ESPN Insider subscription required), and to summarize, Lebron won out by the slightest of margins.

Bleaghh

Monday, at the gym, I felt nauseous on the treadmill. I stumbled home, then spent the next 24 hours curled up with a water bucket nearby, hovering on the edge of puking my guts out. I disobeyed two of Anthony Bourdain's precepts from Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly: I ordered seafood on Sunday, and that seafood was in the form of mussels from a chef I did not know personally. Never again. On a positive note, my calorie count was quite low that day.

NBA to create a searchable database of all its video footage. We'll all be able to spin our own highlight reels, depending on how well the footage is indexed.

Before you visit MoMA in NYC, grab some audio tours or podcasts for your iPod. For example, grab an MP3 Acoustiguide about the latest special exhibition, Pixar: 20 Years of Animation. MoMA even encourages you to create your own audio tours of your favorite works of art there, for others to enjoy, complete with images from MoMA's online collection. I'm sure some good ones have been created already; it's on my to-do list now, too.

Microsoft's inability to manufacture more Xbox 360's for their holiday season launch is a huge misstep. They finally got release position on Sony, then failed to press their advantage. Even Steve Ballmer's kids don't have one.

You can buy extensions for your powerstrip to avoid the annoying loss of an extra outlet to a bulky transformer, or you can just purchase a next generation powerstrip like the PowerSquid.

Paris by night, a gorgeous nighttime panoramic shot of the City of Lights (1.8MB file). More visual foie gras here. Damn I miss Paris. [via Me-Fi]

Trailer for Mission Impossible 3, or M:I:3, I guess. No director ever has ever had to utter the words: "With more intensity, Mr. Cruise."

One of those strange ways the world has ceded some privacy online is through WeddingChannel. Every wedding I've attended the past several years has posted all its registries online for the world to discover through a simple name search on bride or groom. You can even look up old registries, as for Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, or those of some ex you're still stalking, to see if they're tying the knot, and if so, what sort of cookware they'll be using in the home they're making with someone else. Fun way to kill a few minutes.

Every release of Firefox justifies a revisit of the most useful Firefox Extensions. SessionSaver is the most useful to me because of the sheer number of tabs I have open at once, and NoScript makes web surfing a much more serene experience, but it's the aggregation of all of my extensions that make Firefox my browser of choice.

First full-length trailer for The Da Vinci Code. There's nothing subtle about this trailer, which basically is the equivalent of a freaky albino monk coming to your front door and dragging you kicking and screaming to the movie theater to turn over your $10.50.

Silly Billy

Panasonic launched a blog called Def Perception to discuss its HDV 24p camcorder the AG-HVX200 and high def filmmaking in general. To request a free instructional DVD on the AG-HVX200 (for U.S. customers only), go here. B&H is pre-selling a kit with the AG-HVX200 and two 8GB P2 cards for $10K.

Wednesday is the day when Michelin releases its New York restaurant star ratings, with the release party that evening at the Guggenheim. Who will receive the coveted three-star ratings? Early favorites include Per Se and Alaine Ducasse. As a way of going long Per Se, I snagged a reservation for mid-November.

Yesterday, I attended a Halloween party with my nephew Ryan, looking as adorable as ever in his deluxe Thomas the Tank Engine costume. The parents association that sponsored the party hired a clown to perform, and I was so busy chasing Ryan with my camcorder that Anita had to point out that the clown was none other than David Friedman, from the Andrew Jarecki documentary Capturing the Friedmans. David was one of Jarecki's original subjects since the documentary began as one about birthday clowns. David seems to have shaken off any stigma from his father's pedophilia conviction and continues to work as the clown magician Silly Billy. Only in NY.

Ken reminded me that Cool Hunting linked to this collage of cassette tapes, many of which the two of us used to purchase by the dozens to dub our music. So many of these images still seem as vividly familiar as if they were sitting on my shelves now. Ah, those days when a metal cassette tape was like gold.

Apps for doing this on a Windows PC have long been available, but now Mac users can treat a GMail account as a hard drive using gDisk.

My old roommate Scott, in an aside, guessed that I'd heard of a movie titled Snakes on a Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Well, I hadn't, so I looked up the plot summary: On board a flight over the Pacific Ocean, an assassin, bent on killing a passenger who's a witness in protective custody, let loose a crate full of deadly snakes. Well, a title doesn't get too much more literal than that, and though it's not due out until 2006, it's already inspired a long and often chuckle-worthy thread of over 100 proposed sequels.

A list of John Peel's most treasured 7-inch singles. The White Stripes are big winners, with an amazing 10 spots on the list.

James forwarded me this little easter egg video of Yoda breakdancing, from the Star Wars, Episode III - Revenge of the Sith DVD, releasing tomorrow.

The new iPod plays video

Video playback capability in the iPod has been rumored for years, and now it's finally a reality. At the same price as the previous generation of iPods, the new models, available in black and white, arrive just a short while after the Nano so as to allow Nano enough time to sell a gazillion units. You can check it the latest iPod in its new television ad featuring U2. I can't imagine watching an entire television show on such a tiny screen, but music videos? Perhaps. If you put the iPod in the dock, you can control it via the new Apple remote control, and the dock allows you to output composite video and RCA audio to a television/receiver/monitor.

You can purchase television shows from iTunes to sync to your iPod, or you can use Quicktime 7 Pro to export your own video content to iTunes for transfer to the iPod. I can see carrying around some footage of my nephews.

More interesting to me was to see what the pricing for video content would be. iTunes is offering music videos and individual episodes of TV shows like Lost for $1.99. The Lost Season 1 DVD, which contains 24 episodes, costs $38.99 from Amazon.com, or about $1.60 an episode. So the Apple TV show pricing feels about right, with a slight premium to the volume pricing of the DVD. You can't burn the shows to DVD or CD. You have to watch them on your computer or an iPod.

The episodes of Lost being offered are the three most recent ones, and future episodes will appear in iTunes a day after they're aired. Is there a window after which these won't be for sale, or will they be available in perpetuity? Also, how much does ABC keep of every $1.99 sale?

Meanwhile, DVR manufacturers are talking about a day not so far in the future when hard drive space is so cheap that DVRs will just tape every hour of TV so you can watch any show on demand, without programming the device. Enterprising geeks already trade television shows through their computer using Bittorrent. Someday soon, all media, from music to movies to television shows, will be available on demand. If the networks and studios band together, they might be the ones collecting on this traffic, but as slow as they move, it seems unlikely. With just five television shows offered in this latest rev of iTunes (Desperate Housewives and Night Stalker are the other two ABC offerings), ABC/Disney is the only studio testing these waters, and they're just dipping their toes in with caution. This meager offering is most certainly the choice of the networks, not of Apple.

Pocket lint

Studies fail to find any link between diet and cancer. If people believe in the cancer-fighting benefits of tomato sauce and antioxidants and fiber and beta carotene, that peace of mind is not without value.

A helpful rundown of all the cases for the iPod nano.

James sent me this link to some crazy-ass breakdancers in the Redbull BC One competition. Too bad the video stream is so choppy.

Fascinating article about the constant influx of Chinese who immigrate to America through NYC and then ship out immediately to some of the more than 36,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S. A few interesting factoids: there are more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger Kings combined. The market price for getting oneself smuggled into the U.S. is upward of $60,000. Those Chinatown buses that offer $15 one-way rides from NYC to Boston or Washington originally sprang up to transport these workers, but now they carry quite a number of non-Chinese looking for cheap transportation.

Economic integration cited as one of the main reasons for improved test scores in Raleigh school district. This is one of the main reasons why some education reformers believe the answer to education woes is not to segregate all the best and/or wealthiest students in their own schools. It's a tough sell to the parents of those kids, though.

Downloadable subway maps for many major cities for your iPod. Great, except New York City's MTA and San Francisco's BART have filed cease-and-desist letters. Some graphic designer just needs to make their own versions for this guy. No reason to wait for them to license it to him. That's just ridiculous. The latest update is that he's making progress on his own version of the NY Subway Map.

How can you tell if a woman loves you?

If you’re Gael Garcia Bernal: She loves you.

If you’re not Gael Garcia Bernal, but you’re willing to sit through a “GGB” marathon and agree for 10 consecutive hours that he is indeed the most beautiful and talented man alive—and so down-to-earth, too!—and afterward agree that his portrayal of Che Guevara would have earned an Oscar nod were it not for the implicit politics, agree that taking Spanish classes is a great idea, or salsa, or tango, whatever, agree, agree, agree, and that night lying in bed after sex that ends with her screaming, “Si! Si!” wonder aloud, “But you’re happy with me, right?”: She loves you, man—no one can compete with that Latin bastard. Forget about it.

Customized colors for your iPod Nano, at a premium of $85

$900 phones, $200 crayons, and a $1.50 sponge

Pre-order the Nokia 8801 from Neiman Marcus for $899(!?!). It's a gorgeous handset, but that price is absurd. Cell phones don't seem to have advanced much in a long time, other than getting skinnier. Still only a half megapixel digital camera in this one. All I want is a cell phone with a slim profile, half-decent digital camera, quad-band capability so I can use it all over the world, the ability to send text messages and photos, and a simple-to-use on-screen interface. I'm not sure I've seen the phone yet that combines all these features. Why are handset mfrs focused on all sorts of other useless features?

We watched The Cutting Edge - The Magic of Movie Editing in class. Very similar in content to Edge Codes.com: The Art of Motion Picture Editing, which we saw the previous week. I prefer the former, and it has the added benefit of being on DVD now.

Yes, Barneys Baby New York has just what that newborn needs, a $200 crayon set. Or you can go with the classic Crayola box of 64 for $5.49, and it comes with a built-in sharpener, too.

When you stay with someone and they give you towels, do you really have to have a hand towel and washcloth?

Watch a webcast of an operation before you undergo one.

The coolest household cleaning product since the Swiffer is the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. Just soak the sponge in water, and proceed to clean bathroom and kitchen surfaces with a bit of light scrubbing. I have no idea how it works, but I suspect dark arts. Whatever, my stovetop is clean, and that's all that matters.

A great interview with Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew in which he presents an incisive view of China's future on the global stage, among other topics.

Tomorrow's technology today: fusion and nanotechnology, in consumable goods form

Banana Nutrament has an MP3 of David Bowie and Arcade Fire singing "Wake Up" together. Bowie vocals on one of my favorite songs of the last year...cool. I'm going to see Arcade Fire on Central Park Summerstage Thursday evening. It will be my first Central Park concert.

How efficient is the Red Cross? Is there a better charity to donate to when crises like Hurricane Katrina strike? It's the most linked to charity for donating to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, but someone expressed reservations about how efficiently the Red Cross channeled those funds to aiding victims. I don't know the answer, but I found this evaluation in which the Red Cross online earned a four star rating (out of four). Not sure how objective or accurate this evaluation is, though I was hoping more knowledgeable folks had already done the legwork on this. The president and CEO, Marsha Evans, does indeed make a really generous salary ($450K a year, according to this site), though overall program expenses seem reasonable at around 5.6% of revenues.

The new iPod Nano is cool (the ROKR is not), most people agree, but while I love my iPod(s), I really hope the quality control on this new edition is better than that on previous editions. I don't know anyone who's purchased an iPod who hasn't had to bring it in for repairs at some point. Ironically, my most reliable is my first one, the first generation iPod. My other iPod, the Shuffle, is temperamental, like a crazy girlfriend.

Stream the new Sigur Ros CD Takk

Yet another Godfather novel on tap for next year. Sounds like this one weaves the Corleone saga with the Kennedy assassination.

Xbox 360 has a launch date: Nov. 22

Gillette unveils yet another razor, the successor to the Mach 3: Fusion. This baby has an enhanced indicator lubristrip, 5 blades, and a precision trimmer blade for side burns and shaping your goatee.

Heather Havrilesky rates the fall television comedies. Those that rate well on her scale are Ricky Gervais's HBO series "Extras," Chris Rock's UPN series "Everybody Hates Chris," and, to a lesser degree, NBC's "My Name is Earl" and Fox's "Kitchen Confidential." "Extras" premieres Sunday, Sept 25, at 10:30pm. That's the one I'll be tuning into for sure, along with every other fanatical devotee of "The Office."

Red Sox outfielder Gape Kapler ruptures his Achilles tendon running around second base after a teammate hit a home run

Canon jumps into the HDV camcorder fray this week with the XL H1. It will cost $8999 and ship in November. Cool looking camcorder, but surprisingly, Canon won't offer 24P or 720P recording, only 1080i in HDV mode. Whether or not they believe 24P is useful or not, it's clear many users do, and the user is king. Panasonic will offer that in their HVX200, and they'll take market share because of it.

March of the lemmings

Wolfram Tones: Create music based on Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Download them as ring tones if you like. Many of them do sound like ring tones, actually. It reminds me of GarageBand with a random music generator. Not stuff I'd listen to all the time, but it's interesting to click on the various music genre buttons to see how much it resembles what you think of as country or r&b or classical. Someday perhaps there will be a Computer Idol competition. On a somewhat related note, the ideas in A New Kind of Science (NKS) seem to have relevance to the current evolution vs. intelligent design debate. NKS is online, so you can read, for example, this chapter: "Intelligence in the Universe."

The UCI, cycling's governing body, exonerates Lance Armstrong of doping charges and criticizes the accusers. L'Equipe to respond saturday. One thing is certain; this whole bitter fight is no help to the sport, as doping has once again, as in 1998.

Derek and Ken were in town for Labor Day Weekend. I always learn something when I spend time with those guys. One of my learnings this past weekend was that lemmings do not commit mass suicide. It's a myth perpetuated by a Disney documentary in which the filmmakers ran lemmings off of the side of a cliff to create the myth of their suicidal tendencies. Looks like that Disney documentary is available from Amazon.com on VHS. I'm not sure how the lemming myth took hold of me, but I suspect it was Gary Larson and his Far Side comics. I remember one depicted a whole flock of lemmings headed for the edge of a cliff to jump into the ocean, but one is shown wearing an inner tube with a sly grin. Another showed a family of lemmings in a car, headed off on vacation. The mother and father lemming sit in the front seat while two lemming children are in back. The mother is shown shouting at the kids, "Hey! I told you kids to knock it off back there!... or so help me I'll just take this car and drive it off the first cliff I come to!" I miss The Far Side. Larson went out on top.

Meet the F**kers (Windows Media), a Daily Show video clip that provides some satiric catharsis for any anger you might feel towards the Bush administration for their slow reactions to Hurricane Katrina. I hadn't seen the footage of Mike Myers' reaction to Kanye West's outburst until watching this clip, or Michael Brown's disastrous interviews, or the Larry King interview with Celine Dion. Memorable.

Colin Powell regrets his statements to the United Nations in February of 2003. I was aboard a ferry from the north island of New Zealand to the south island when he gave his testimony, and I watched it on CNN. Little did I know it would be downhill from there for someone who seemingly everyone thought would make a perfect presidential candidate.

I'm going to join Bill Simmons on the Bears bandwagon. Really good young defense, and if Kyle Orton surprises (and sometimes new starting QBs do) then perhaps they can win a bunch of low-scoring rumbles. It all depends on what that offense looks like after they take off the bandages.

Vincent Cerf is the new "Chief Internet evangelist" at Google. I look forward to hearing about this Internet thing. It sounds cool. As an aside, based on my years of working in the Internet biz, anyone who has "evangelist" in their job title has a cushy job.

The Nokia 8800 is one gorgeous cell phone. Though China isn't listed as one of the countries where you can buy one, I saw them in several stores in Beijing and Shanghai. The slider resistance is firm but silky smooth. I held it, fondled it, drooled over it, but left my credit card sheathed. $800, which is roughly what they were charging, is a lot to pay for technological sex appeal.

NY vs SF

Andy Roddick bounced in the first round of the U.S. Open in 3 straight tiebreak sets
Where is Andy's mojo indeed?

New York vs. San Francisco
Written with tongue-in-cheek, but humorous reading for anyone who's lived in both cities before.

The first of a multi-part series on The Game, the thinking man's scavenger hunt
While living in Seattle, I heard so many stories about it from participants. Always wanted to play but never pulled a team together. It sounds awesome, though.

Laser-sighted slingshot
A video shows it splitting pencils. If only they had this when I was a kid.

A though experiment by George Saunders
"But dropping the idea that your actions are Evil, and that you are Monstrous, I enter a new moral space, in which the emphasis is on seeing with clarity, rather than judging; on acting in the most effective way (that is, the way that most radically and permanently protects my chickens), rather than on constructing and punishing a Monster."

The Evian Water Bra
Fill it with cold water to keep your breasts cool. Someone signed off on some Evian summer intern's project without reading the proposal.

Tiger...just did it

Finally got my copy of Mac OS X Tiger from Amazon but haven't played with it much. My first thought is that it includes a lot of functionality I used to get from third party shareware. Spotlight takes the place of LaunchBar, and the Dashboard includes a weather widget that replaces WeatherPop. And multi-person video conferencing sounds cool, in concept, though who would I use that with?

Huffington Post launches, with blogs from a diverse group of 250 people from Mike Nichols, Ellen DeGeneres, John Cusack, and Warren Beatty to David Mamet, Norman Mailer, and Walter Cronkite.

The latest performance enhancer: MaxSight contact lenses
Made by Nike and Bausch & Lomb, they're used by, among others, Brian Roberts who is currently hitting the tar out of the ball in Baltimore.

Seattle's Space Needle to be converted into a giant wi-fi antenna [via Boing Boing]

Panasonic AG-HVX200

The camcorder that combines a lot of the features amateur filmmakers and videographers have been looking for--HDV, 16:9 CCDs, 24p, 1080p/720p--has been announced. It uses solid-state P2 memory cards as HD media rather than tape, and while it will improve quality, the cost of the camera with two 8GB P2 cards will be just under $10,000!

The exclamation point reflects amazement in both directions. The camera is cheap for what it can do, but my eyes (and wallet) are bleeding already. JVC also announced a new HDV camcorder at NAB. Can Canon be far behind?

Mini reviews

I consume and accumulate more media (DVR, Netflix, Amazon.com, RSS, e-mail newsletters, movie theatres, concerts, plays, the Sunday NYTimes, magazines) than I can write about, so perhaps a few impressions or mini-reviews will prove a more manageable format to clear the logjam in my head.

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The Interpreter is cool to the touch, much as I imagine Nicole Kidman's porcelain skin feels. She has a unique beauty, but it is a distancing type of beauty. The camera gazes at her in this movie from up close. She hides behind her bangs (so much so that it becomes a distraction), but even without the bangs, no camera can penetrate her statuesque features.

Sean Penn's character is given a needlessly tragic back story. An actor of Penn's skill is quick to expose such plot contrivances; it's like giving a Yo Yo Ma a metronome for a live performance. His furrowed brow makes for a nice visual contrast to Kidman's flawless complexion, and some of the most interesting scenes are those in which the two of them converse.

The trailer ruins the movie's centerpiece, a cat and mouse game that ends on a New York city bus. Anyone who has seen the trailer knows how it ends. It's a serious movie, with righteous indignation, tears, and impassioned speeches about the dream that was the United Nations. What I wanted more of was Catherine Keener's FBI agent. She receives two lines of note in the movie, and both are zingers.

If The Interpreter had been made by Hitchcock with, say, Cary Grant as the FBI agent and Grace Kelly as the interpreter, sparks would have flown by movie's end. It wasn't, and they don't. The most that Kidman grants Penn is a hug, and that's what the movie gives its audience, a polite hug when we want a hot kiss or a slap in the face.

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In the first Fenway Park scene in Fever Pitch, mannequins are clearly visible in the upper right of the screen in the crowd. Not enough extras willing to volunteer to sit at Fenway? Perhaps Red Sox diehards were too appalled at the idea of Jimmy Fallon playing one of them to lend their support. Were my eyes fooling me? Did anyone else see those?

Fallon's line readings, as with his on Saturday Night Live, seem effortless. Not in a good way. He never seems to try all that hard, and it comes across as a rehearsal. Contrast that with Drew Barrymore, who enunciates her thoughts in romantic comedies with the measured deliberation of someone reading a difficult foreign language exercise, as if the precision of her wording is critical to the incantation that will transform one of the many doofuses cast opposite her into an adult. Now that Meg Ryan has been face lifted into oblivion, Drew is America's new movie sweetheart, with her forgiving smile and child-like wonder (see, I've never met her and we're already on a first name basis). Her charm is the opposite of that of a Nicole Kidman. Drew is one of the very few actresses who can be cast opposite a gawky guy like Jimmy Fallon or Adam Sandler and make the audience believe she could actually fall for them. For a while Jennifer Aniston encroached on this territory, but then in real life she married Brad Pitt instead of Tom Green.

The movie has some clever meet-cute banter, and the Red Sox fandom caricatures are tolerable in doses. When the movie makes Fallon's love of the Red Sox the centerpiece of their conflict, though, it's such a reach that I lost all interest. The fans in Fallon's section of Fenway don't feel like real people. They're almost as much mannequins as the actual mannequins I saw on screen, there to recite some expository dialogue for non sports fans who aren't aware of the Red Sox's tragic history.

Of course, the movie would have been far more poetic had the Red Sox actually lost the World Series last year, but me thinks that Red Sox nation will hang on to their memories and kick the movie to the curb.

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Last last last Sunday, Ken took me to the concluding game of the Washington Nationals (formerly the Montreal Expos) opening series at RFK Stadium, against the Diamondbacks. RFK Stadium is not going to win any design or aesthetic awards--it's in the vein of Busch Memorial and other concrete flying saucer stadiums built before HOK came along with its red brick "old is new" aesthetic--but it's perfectly suitable for watching baseball. We sat down the first base line, giving us a good view across the stadium at the seats behind third base. When the Nationals rallied to take the lead, the fans in that section started jumping up and down, and that section of the stadium visibly bounced. Why I don't know (temporary bleachers set up in the conversion from football to baseball stadium?) but it's cool.

One of the downsides of the stadium's construction is that the outfield seats are way up above ground level. Most home run balls will fall into uninhabited space behind the outfield wall instead of into a fans' hands.

The stadium wasn't full. It seats over 56,000, so I suspect that good seats will always be available. I don't have any feel for D.C.'s appetite for baseball, but I can't imagine it will be worse than that of the Montreal faithful (though to be fair, much of the blame should be pinned on the old ownership).

My one game there has me suspecting that home runs will be at a premium. A few balls that looked to be crushed died short of the warning track. That's unfortunate for one of my fantasy baseball teams that counts Vidro and Wilkerson among its starters.

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Since moving into an apartment with paper-thin walls, I've had to keep the volume on my stereo system down. That means most music I listen to now is piped in from my iPod, whether I'm listening at home on my computer or strolling around town. The Apple earbuds that come with their iPods are nothing special, and they don't fit my ears. For all these reasons and others, I felt justified in investing in Shure E3c Sound Isolating Earphones.

No regrets so far. The E3c's sound a whole lot better than the Apple earbuds and my old over-the-head sports headphones. They're not noise canceling, but they do an amazing job of sealing my ears from external noise, of which there is an abundance in NYC. When I saunter down the sidewalk with the E3c's on and music blasting, all of NYC seems like a massive music video playing out just for me (in which the citizens of NYC shoot condescending stares my way for daring to saunter).

Search the web; lots of online stores carry E3c's, and good deals can be found. No need to buy direct from Shure at full retail price.

et al

This really is an iron chef

Cool photos from the Hubble Telescope linked off this article

How to beat a speeding ticket
Wow, that's a lot of work. Another option is just to show up, and if the cop doesn't appear and you plead not guilty, you get off automatically. That's how I got off of my first speeding ticket.

How to sanitize your cooking sponge

Toyota Prius

I visited Mike and Joannie for a week and a half in early March. During my visit, I experienced their new Toyota Prius hybrid firsthand.

There are a number of hybrids on the market, but Toyota has sold more than all other automakers combined. The Prius engine consists of two systems, one a gas engine and the other an electric motor. The electric motor operates when engine demand is low, usually at low speeds. Coming out of the garage, the car was dead silent, as if Yoda were pulling it out with a wave of his hand.

At higher speeds, the gas engine powers the car and also recharges the batteries. When you pump the gas hard for greater acceleration, the gas engine and electric motor work together for added kick.

I know much of this because the display screen on the center of the Prius dashboard displays a schematic indicating which system is in play while you're driving (everytime you turn the car on, you have to click to agree to a waiver form that frees Toyota of liability if you crash while driving because you were engrossed by the graphics on the display). This schematic also indicates your current fuel consumption/gas mileage.

The geek in me couldn't stop trying to boost my gas mileage. The first time I drove the Prius to pick up Mike and Joannie from work, I played around with the car to see how I could achieve optimum gas mileage. The goal was to achieve something over 50mpg.

I never reached that figure. Their Prius is new, and the cold weather in Chicago didn't help. However, I did become skilled at emphasizing use of the electric motor over the gas engine in order to maximize gas mileage. The optimal driving method for minimizing gas consumption in a hybrid is not unlike that with a traditional internal combustion engine. Accelerate, coast to a stop, repeat. Obviously, you can't drive like that on city streets, so what I did was accelerate to a crusing speed, then coast until the gas engine turned off, then used the electric motor to maintain velocity. It takes a gentle foot, and with a longer drive and less stop and go, I think I could have achieved 50mpg. Regardless, driving was fun again, and next time I'm in Chicago I'm shooting for 60mpg.

Other fun things about the car--instead of inserting a key to turn on the engine, you simply need to have the car key on you when you depress a starter button. Like powering on a stereo.

Mike and Joannie's Prius came with select voice-activated commands. Hit a button on the steering wheel, and the car will mute the radio and listen for a voice command. I did not have the glossary of all the commands, and like any typical male, I skipped the instruction book and instead barked random instructions as I drove.

"Defrost!" I commanded.

"Track...up," the serene female computer voice responded.

"Hazards on!" I tried.

"Changing...temperature...to 69 degrees."

"Next disc?" I ventured.

"Disc 5," the Prius computer cooed. Bingo. Like any newlywed couples, we merely needed some time to work out our communications issues.

I hope the Toyota engineers insert some Easter egg voice commands in the next gen Prius, or offer different computer voices to choose from. On a long nighttime road trip, who wouldn't appreciate some Michael Knight/K.I.T.T.-like conversation with their automobile? And, upon failing to successfully merge into traffic from an on-ramp, what driver couldn't use a tongue-lashing/motivation speech from Alec Baldwin?

"But the engine is too weak?" you'd protest.

"The engine is weak? The effin' engine is weak?! YOU'RE WEAK," Alec Baldwin would respond. "I've been driving since I was twelve..."

A to Z

Spike Jonze's new ad "Hello Tomorrow" for Adidas
The featured product is the Adidas_1 running shoe, the world's first running shoe with a microchip inside to adjust the cushioning based on how much the shoe compresses at each step. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Adidas running shoes since they sat on my feet during my marathon run last year. The Adidas_1 sold out almost instantly when a limited number of pairs was offered online. I wonder if airport security will flip out when they run a pair of these through the X-ray machine, what with a microchip and motor in its sole.

In case you were wondering what happened to Darius Rucker, he's doing commercials for Burger King

Fantasy baseball contest winner to earn job with San Francisco Giants

FlickrFox, a Firefox sidebar that allows you to browse your Flickr photostream

Gary Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who recently retired, is sick of Vladimir Putin and can't take it anymore so he's running for president against Putin in 2008

We should have invited Korea to do the Superbowl halftime show this year

I'm too old to collect toys anymore, but these figurines are cool

Lord of the Rings the musical?!

If a VJ could scratch like a DJ, the result might look something like this

The West Wing gets will return for a seventh season
I'd be surprised if Jimmy Smits isn't elected president over Alan Alda

Yahoo previews a beta of its blogging service, Yahoo! 360�

HD trailer for Legend of Zelda videogame
Videogames become more and more like movies, and as with movies, the trailers are usually superior to the games

Yar's Revenge

Chappelle's Show Season 3 held up by writer's block?
$50 million in the stomach can drain the blood from one's brain, or so I've heard. I wonder if, when Comedy Central execs call Dave and ask him when the first episode will be ready, he just screams into the phone, "I'm Rick James, b****!"

Alien Loves Predator
Humorous online comic strip about NYC life. The fact that the characters are all Aliens or Predators is not essential to the storyline

Lots of music videos, but it's the New Order vids that interest me
When I was in high school, tracking down rare New Order videos was an obsession. Nowadays, with the Internet, such things are trivial. Jonathan Demme-directed video for The Perfect Kiss is one of my favorite music videos of all time, though unfortunately it's only available in abbreviated form here. This page has some videos I haven't seen before

The Toyota Prius: Joannie and Mike became the first members of our family to join the hybrid revolution
Just carry the key up close to the car and it unlocks, and the ignition is push button so you never actually take the key out of your pocket or purse. Cool. I have to go to Chicago so I can drive their new baby around

MobilePC's top 100 gadgets of all time
Mattell Football II, the football game with the little dashes. Aww, yeah

Order pizza directly from within Everquest by typing /pizza
I can't decide if that's really clever or a sign of extreme sloth

Salon's Audiofile offers an MP3 download of Keren Ann's "Seventeen" from Not Going Anywhere
I really dig this album

Torrent of the advance of Spoon's new album Gimme Fiction

Brian Berg is building a replica of NYC using playing cards but no glue or tape
His effort will raise money for victims of the tsunami, which is great, but I still think he should've been a surgeon. He admits as much

The world's largest cat is a liger (half lion, half tiger) and weighs about 1 ton
Here kitty kitty, here kitty kitty, here...HOLY CRAP! AAAHH! GET IT OFF ME!!!

Planes, trains, and automobiles

edisoncarter from the Grand Theft Auto Forums discovered all sorts of cheat codes for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas by wiring a PS2 controller to his PC's parallel port and having his computer try a multitude of key combinations at high speed. So a series of monkeys given typewriters might not produce Shakespeare, but perhaps they can become really good at video games

There are SUVs, and then there's the CXT

That rogue commercial about the VW Polo featuring the suicide bomber
Not in good taste, sure, but I think the broader and more interesting trend is the emergence of all these consumer-generated advertestimonials (not just ones for Apple)

The newest member of the BMW M-family: the M6 (more images here)
Has a V-10 engine that produce 500 horsepower and 383 lb.-ft. of torque. The M stands for "Mommy, I just wet my pants."

Of course, you have to admit, when Bond moved from an Aston Martin Vanquish to a BMW, it was a step down

The Lexus luxury hybrid and the Ford Escape Hybrid
Are these guilty pleasures for greenies or vehicles to assuage the conscience of big car lovers? After rising gas prices, former SUV owners will discover they're paying the same amount for gasoline, the improved gas mileage offsetting rising gas prices

The Aristocrats, et al

The opening text crawl from Star Wars Episode III has been released on the starwars.com

Ouch--apparently widescreen MGM DVDs sold b/t Dec 1, 1998 and Sept 8, 2003 were actually just pan-and-scan DVDs with the tops and bottoms cropped out. A class action lawsuit has been brought against MGM, and you have until March 31, 2005 to submit a claim form. If the suit is settled, you can either exchange each of the DVDs for $7.10 or a new, correctly framed copy

1 in 4 men suffers from trajectile dysfunction

Instant classic: Safin defeats seemingly unbeatable Federer in Aussie Open semis in 4 1/2 hours and five sets
Two of the players with the most game on the men's tour beat the crap out of each other for hours in the Aussie heat

Entourage filmed a scene for season two at Sundance at the Egyptian Theatre
I was there, saw the cameras out front, saw the Queens Boulevard poster outside the Egyptian Theatre entrance, and failed to connect the dots. I'm an idiot.

Black RAZR V3
Sexy

Sign up to be notified when the Kung Fu Hustle DVD is available for sale
I had more fun in that screening at Sundance than any other

The boys of South Park tell the Aristocrats joke (Windows Media File--vulgar and not for the easily offended)
One of the movies screening at Sundance was The Aristocrats, a documentary in which Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) and Paul Provenza follow 100 comedians doing their version of the joke. I didn't see it, but after reading the synposis, I was certainly curious about what the joke was about. The joke seems to be like Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto for violinists, a rite of passage for comics to prove their mettle.

How to get reservations at French Laundry

Google and Yahoo are introducing television closed captioning search capability, and Amazon announces block viewing for its A9 Yellow Pages
Still, no search service is able to locate individual missing socks from my laundry, though

$13 Smirnoff beats out premium, higher-priced vodkas in NYTimes taste test
I can now cite this taste test when explaining why I bought Smirnoff instead of Grey Goose for the pre-party. Certainly sounds better than admitting I'm cheap.

For the first time ever, cancer has passed heart disease as the #1 killer of Americans under the age of 85

Drip drop drip drop

The radiator in the apartment upstairs sprung a leak, so I this week I had to put buckets and towels out to collect the dripping water through my ceiling. What started as a tiny, spherical water stain slowly spread and morphed into a giant, unsightly, urine-colored drip painting. The upstairs tenant was out of town, and the super didn't have a key. All night, I listened to the metronomic plip...plop...plip...plop of drops of water cliff diving into my bucket. I felt like Hitomi from Hideo Nakata's Dark Water (or Jennifer Connelly from the upcoming remake).

Next installment of JibJab: [Bush's] Second Term

John Hollinger picks his NBA All-Stars

Steve Jobs to deliver Commencement speech at Stanford in 2005
Great...my commencement speaker was William Perry

Google plans to offer a tag that will help bloggers to signal the search engine to ignore links in comments, hopefully neutering comment spam
It will also render eliminate the Googlerank value of legitimate comment URLs, but that's a minor side effect in my mind. I despite comment spammers

Autumn Thunder: 40 Years NFL Films Music
A 10 CD box set featuring the martial tunes from NFL Films. Great background music for that Superbowl party with your buddies. All that's missing is narration by Steve Sabol and Harry Kalas

Over holiday break, we watched Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy on DVD
That will surprise no one who knows of me and my unhealthy love for Will Ferrell. Now, Anchorman is by no means a classic or even a good movie (I'm not going to bother reviewing it), but no true devotee of Ferrell's oeuvre would miss it. Without seeing it, I wouldn't understand the subtext and nuance of half the things my brother James says, and now the same can be said for people who speak to me. I do think it's cheesy that the studio forces you to buy a more expensive DVD giftset in order to get the Wake Up, Ron Burgundy supplemental disc that contains Burgundy's other two interviews from the MTV Movie Awards (Burt Reynolds and Jim Caviezel--"Tell me, Jesus, do you ever use your superpowers in games of chance?"). The video of Will and the gang covering Afternoon Delight by Starland Vocal Band (excerpt)...well, let's just say, if you don't think it's good, I will fight you. Anchorman was also geographically relevant to our family vacation, the movie being set in San Diego.

Ron Burgundy: The Germans discovered it in 1904, and they called it "San Diego", which in German means "whale's vagina".
Veronica Corningstone: No, I don't think that is what it means. No, it doesn't mean that.
Ron Burgundy: I don't know. I was just trying to impress you. I don't think anyone knows what it means anymore. The translation was lost hundreds of years ago.
Veronica Corningstone: Doesn't it mean "Saint Diego"?
Ron Burgundy: ...No. No, that isn't it.
Veronica Corningstone: No, I'm pretty sure that's what it means.
Ron Burgundy: Agree to disagree.

To distract free throw shooters of the visiting team at a basketball game, wave your thundersticks in unison, rather than randomly (maybe)

Wacky warning labels and past winners
Warning on can of self-defense pepper spray "May irritate eyes" and a waring on a fireplace log warns "Caution - Risk of Fire"

Could thousands of people have been saved from the tsunami if notified via cell phones or the Internet?
Interesting question that many probably wondered as they watched news videos of people hanging out while waves began to climb higher and higher up the shores, oblivious to the much deadlier waves racing their direction

3 DJs suggest wedding mixes
One of them opened one wedding with "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division, I hope as a joke. Dan Finnerty lists "Making Love out of Nothing at All" as the most inappropriate song for a wedding.

Dell CEO Kevin Rollins calls iPod a fad like the Sony Walkman
Rollins needs to rethink his business analogies. The Walkman was one of the most successful consumer products in history, and just because Sony couldn't recognize when portable music players morphed from Discmans to portable MP3 players doesn't mean Apple will make the same mistake

Company creates downloadable cards for reprimanding rude cell phone chatterers
New Yorkers have a simpler method. At the U.S. Open last year, a man took a business call during a semifinal match. When it was clear he didn't plan to either leave the stadium or cut the conversation short, several other fans stood up and shouted at him with a menacing glare, "Hey, shut the f***ing cellphone off!"

P.S.

Can't link directly to it, so I'll just copy and paste from IMDb News: Golden Globe-winning comic Ricky Gervais has fulfilled his lifetime's ambition - he is writing an episode of The Simpsons. The British Office star will also voice a character in the popular animation show, which will be made next year, although he is keeping the episode's plot a secret.

Josh Greenman proposes new punctuation: the sarcasm point
It looks like ¡

Mash-ups of the Beastie Boys and the Beatles: The Beastles

Sin City trailer
Robert Rodriguez has managed to remain faithful to the look of the comic book, and, umm, Jessica Alba, umm, yeah

The New World trailer
Hey, another Terence Malick-directed movie. The opening music and video had me wondering if I was watching The Thin Red Line again

Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first?

betterPropaganda's staff picks for top downloads of the year
Good site for legal MP3 downloads

Brian Whitman of MIT's Media Lab fed Christmas classics into his program Eigenradio, which extracts the most important frequencies and beats from music, to create the conceptual album A Singular Christmas

snowflakes

Cool little adventure cam for recording sporting events from a 1st-person perspective

AllofMP3.com to double its rates Jan 15, 2005
This, coming on top of the MTA fare hike in NYC, means my cost-of-living in 2005 is already increasing, and I haven't even finished with 2004

On your honeymoon, why not treat your wife to a breast enlargement and botox at the same time?

Gamer spends $26,500 on a virtual land in computer role-playing game

"Earlier this year economists calculated that these massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have a gross economic impact equivalent to the GDP of the African nation of Namibia"

I finally watched the finale of The Apprentice stashed on my DVR. Really long, and not too suspenseful; everyone knew Kelly would win. If you're one of the final two contestants and Trump sends George along to follow you instead of Carolyn, you're screwed. The most interesting moment came when Trumps COO Matthew Calamari (like the appetizer?) stood up to advise Trump on which contestant to choose and choked up under the pressure of the moment, stuttering incoherently for a bit before Regis mercifully sat him back down. I really wanted Trump to fire Calamari on the spot, it would have been awesome, but alas, the show concluded conventionally.

Holiday sale--everything must go

Aaaaarrrggghh

Le Viaduc de Millau is freaking gorgeous
It's the highest bridge in the world. I wonder if people are allowed to bike across it.

Apple and Motorola to collaborate on a cellphone
That will certainly help me to resist the siren call of the Moto Razr V3, which I really don't need.

Study links sleep with weight loss
Just remember, the next time I'm sleeping in, I'm actually working out, in a way. So good when happy things correlate.

Another posthumous 2Pac album
Okay, this is really getting creepy. Has anyone been as prolific from the grave?

I'm still catching up from the weekend. Last week, TiVo stepped up efforts to crack down on "misuse" of it's brand name. It's probably a futile effort. Customers own a company's brand to a greater extent than most companies realize, and enforcing grammatical use of your brand name is not going to alter their perceptions. The best thing TiVo can do is to focus on what it does control, namely its pricing, feature set, etc. It's quite sad that a company of its stature doesn't recognize that. TiVo still has the best interface of any DVR on the market (I'm stuck with a lousy Time Warner Cable High Def DVR interface that sometimes makes me cry), but I have severe misgivings about the company's future given how many other companies are simply integrating TiVo-like (oops) similar functionality into other products, e.g. set-top boxes. Meanwhile, TiVo seems to be focused on innovation on behalf of advertisers and networks instead of end users, completely the wrong way to innovate when you're a consumer products company.

Yahoo! Video Search

Boy band video

EPIC 2014
All fairly familiar but interesting until the name Googlezon is brought up. That's just ridiculous.

Thomas Bartlett offers up his top 10 albums, singles, and 25 free downloads of 2004.

Did anyone else notice the Evanescence debacle at the Billboard Music awards last week? Eric and Christina caught it on television while I was out searching for poker chips in Whistler village, but it was replayed when I returned to our ski lodge. Amy Lee performed My Immortal live, with an orchestra backing her. To make life easy, she sang in a lower key, and the orchestra played accordingly. At the end, however, when the band joined in, they were playing in the normal key. Cacaphony ensued. Amy Lee couldn't stop shaking her head, struggling to hear the right key, and at song's end, she just looked at her band, shook her head, and said, "Wow." How does something like that happen?

M3Power

No, not that M3, though it's pretty powerful. This one. James gave me one and vouched for its effectiveness, and I must admit, it's sweet. A battery allows the razor head to vibrate while you shave, leading to a smooth, close shave. I'm addicted, though it's somewhat wasted on a guy who'd take six years to grow a beard. Makes a great stocking stuffer.

Battle of the bulge

Odd, this fascination with Republican bulges. First it was the bulge in Bush's back during the debates, and now it's Cheney's bulge. Either it's a wardrobe malfunction and we need to recommend a new tailor for senors Bush and Cheney, or we may have found one of the WMD.

A few years back, I bought Pink Martini's Sympathique and saw them in concert once or twice. That phase passed, and I haven't touched the CD since. They just came out with a new album, Hang on Little Tomato, and you can listen to it in lo-fi in its entirety on their website, through Pink Martini Radio. Time to put them back on the playlist for a bit and reminisce about daydream about travels through South America and Europe.

First was DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, a remix of the Beatles White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album. Now comes the video mash-up, the Grey Video, of the track "Encore" from the Grey Album. Is that John breaking it down? I just got served.
(We crossed some technological and artistic line a while ago and it's the golden age of remixes. iTunes now sells the remix of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On"--the MPG Groove Mix)

I was just thinking, yesterday, about the inadequacies of Mapquest for walkers/subway riders in NYC, and then today I read about HopStop. The site provides combination walking/subway directions. Now they just need to add checkboxes options so you can ensure you see a Chinese guy playing the erhu somewhere along the ride.

K-Mart acquires Sears
One must feel a sense of happiness for the two, the type of relieved joy you feel for two people you never thought would find love.

James sent me a link to the board game our family will be playing this Christmas. Wasn't this in a James Bond movie once? James saw a Hot Dog, Spiderman, and Mister Miyagi playing this at a Halloween party.

Half-Life 2 looks like a lot of fun. Too bad I don't have a PC anymore.

This Room Defender looks really cool. Too bad I'm not a kid anymore.

Hey, what's this iPod thing everyone's fussing over?

Everyone knows by now that Apple released two new iPods today. One is the 20GB black U2 Special Edition iPod with the red clickwheel:

Black is the new white. Consumer electronics recycle through the same pool of finishes, and each is cool in inverse proportion to its ubiquity. There's glossy black, matte black, white, black with wood trim, several varieties of metallic from chrome to brushed chrome to titanium to aluminum, sport yellow, and gold. Black combined with bright red, though, is something I haven't seen before except on Air Jordans. Looks sharp.

The U2 designation is for the engraved signatures of the 4 band members on the back of the iPod, a $50 gift certificate off the The Complete U2, a digital box set collecting over 400 U2 songs, and a U2 poster. Personally, I'd rather just have the option to customize the color of my iPod and its clickwheel. And what's a digital box set?! That term should be reserved for music that comes in a really cool physical package.

The other new iPod is the iPod Photo. Here is a photo of a photo on the iPod, umm, Photo:

The 40GB version costs $499, the 60GB version $599. Steve Jobs said photos and music on the iPod make much more sense than video and music on the iPod, and I agree. However, the iPod Photo is slightly lacking.

The main problem? The only way to get my photos from my digital camera onto the iPod Photo is to first transfer the pics to my Mac laptop or desktop and then push them across via iTunes/iPhoto. I'm sure some third parties will introduce some media card readers, but I already have a gazillion media card readers and cables. I want less of those, not more. I would have preferred either a USB port for direct photo transfer or a media card slot (or both; I'm leaving wireless out at this point b/c it's probably too much to ask for). Then I could leave my laptop at home while traveling and simply xfer photos from my digital camera onto my iPod, using it as both portable music player and portable photo hard drive. While traveling, I could share photos in slide show format on the iPod or on a television without having to bust out a massive laptop.

The iPod Photo is cool, but only in an evolutionary, not a revolutionary sense. I'd love one, but with those price and feature set coordinates, I'm not in heat. I do need to put my 1st generation antique brick of an iPod on life support, though. During my twenty mile long run, the fully charged iPod went dead at mile 20, and so did my legs. My iPod can barely reach 3 hours on a full charge now; it needs some iPod viagra.

Delicious Library, on the other hand, sounds awesome, especially since it supports iSight scanning. Arrives in 13 days. Can't wait.

Mary Meeker's report titled Update on the Digital World is available as a PDF. I'm a Meeker fan and happy to see her research available for free online instead of available only to wealthy Morgan Stanley clients.

Finally, something to listen to on that iPod of yours, whatever its generation. My Nov. issue of Wired arrived yesterday with a Creative Commons CD inside. Cool track list. Those who don't have a subscription and are too cheap to buy a copy of the newstand can download the tracks online at a variety of sites. For example, here's the CD in 320 kbps MP3 form as a BitTorrent, or as 192kbps MP3s from Nixlog.

The Talent Myth

The Talent Myth is the ChangeThis manifesto by Malcolm Gladwell. ChangeThis is a site seeking to spread ideas, though unfortunately all manifestos are only available in PDF form. In this case, what's unfortunate is that this is just the duplicate of an article Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker a while back. Good article, though ChangeThis seems to pass it off as a new essay.

Free Reach Access Daily Flosser!

GOOGL B(E) 10003

Google SMS. Keen.

B to the E power?! B(E)? I can just see shouting this over heavy techno music to a bartender at a club.
"Can I have a B(E)?"
"What kind of beer?"
"NO, A B(E)!"
"A BEER? I KNOW! WHAT KIND?"
"A B TO THE E!"

Firefox extensions for BugMeNot.com.

They don't have GMail Drive shell extension for Mac users, but I've been using my GMail account like that all along. I don't really receive any e-mail at my gmail account. I just forward files and messages there for storage and easy search/retrieval later.

Kerry is trailing again in the Electoral Vote Predictor, 264 to 270. These debates do seem to matter, though it's just a guess on my part. Bush started out like a shrill screamer again, but he hung in and landed several effective blows in debate #2.

I AM LEARN is a weblog written by a Perl script.

Carl Lewis vs. William Shatner in the celebrity-turned-musician category. Advantage Captain Kirk. Seriously, he has Ben Folds in his corner as guest producer, he did a cover of Pulp's "Common People", so he has taste, and guest appearances include Aimee Mann, Joe Jackson, and Henry Rollins.

Mark Cuban passes on "the handjobber."

Humorous exchanges between pilots and air traffic control towers.

Tricks of the Trade continues on in weblog format.

The saying "You want to have your cake and eat it too" makes no sense. If it's my cake, why can't I eat it? It makes more sense as "You can't eat your cake and have it too."

While I was in France and the UK this summer, I saw the new Smart Car Roadster and Roadster-Coupe. They looked smart. Now the Smart Car is coming to the U.S., with an American-friendly SUV among the optional models. Chouette!

The next Pixar short is Boundin'.

Okay, this is fairly stale, but it's still the best suggestion I've seen yet about how to cure the ills of USA Basketball.

Marathon toys

One thing I do enjoy about taking up new sports, even ones as painful as marathon training, is examining new gadgets. I thought that a simple sport like running would be immune to gadget excess, and for the most part it is, but not completely. For the runner without a budget:

• Experimental injections of PPARdelta - turns mice into marathon mice
• Hypoxic tent - oxygen deprivation increases body's red blood cell count, though it's unlikely to impress the ladies
• Adidas 1 running shoe - computer chip continually adjusts the shoes cushioning
• Curved running track - strengthens running muscles by forcing you to run fast enough so that centrifugal force keeps you on the track.
• Vibration plate machine - strengthens the bones. There are several such machines on the market.
• Avacore CoreControl powered by Rapid Thermal eXchange (RTX) technology - keep your core body temperature low even on the hottest of days.

The only real gadget I've used is the Timex Bodylink System (I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Bean bought me a stick of Bodyglide, and that's been a lifesaver also; it sounds vaguely kinky but protects against distinctively unsexy running maladies). The Timex Bodylink System consists of a watch, a GPS unit you wear on your upper arm, and a heart rate strap. When it works (which is when the GPS unit has a decent line of sight to the sky), it's great. It provides your mile pace and total distance covered, and it can be set to record mile splits automatically. My first month and a half of marathon training, I didn't run a long run in the same city twice, so having a device just track my distance allowed me to just focus on running and enjoying the views.

I ran in Seattle around Greenlake a couple times, then to the base of Golden Gate Bridge from Bean's place in Nob Hill, then through Stanford campus (including a pass by The Dish), then along Manhattan Beach near my sister Karen's new apartment, and finally all over Central Park in Manhattan. I love the view of the city skyline at night from the north end of the Reservoir.

The variety and often stunning views really helped, because otherwise I find running to be slow and painful. If I were Kenyan gliding across the land at a five minute mile pace, I'm sure I'd feel differently. Others speak of runner's high and of how they can't wait to get a run in. I just don't feel that way about the sport. In fact, with the marathon just a month away, I'm realizing that marathon refers to the training, which seems interminable. My knees ache, and this tendon that runs under the big bone on my ankle throbs all the time. Laura said she had tendinitis there also, and hearing that helped, because I wasn't sure there were any tendons in that part of my foot. When I run, it seems like everyone and their mother and their grandmother blows past me. So frustrating for someone prone to overcompetitiveness.

Can you tell I'm dragging a bit?

I am looking forward to the marathon itself. I'm ready for that day to be here.

Gourmet, August 2004

I don’t usually purchase cooking magazines (correction: Gourmet bills itself as “the magazine of good living”, a broader lifestyle claim, though it is grouped with the cooking magazines at the bookstore, rather than with, say, The Robb Report or Cigar Aficionado) though I do subscribe to Cook’s Illustrated (the cooking magazine for gadget geeks, what with its scientific-method laboratory tests of cooking methodologies, kitchen tools, and foods). Cooking magazines are dangerous for a pack rat like myself. I can’t bring myself to throw out magazines that contain useful information I might someday need or use, however remote the possibility. By that definition, cooking magazines are almost never disposable, filled as they are with recipes and articles on various foodstuffs and magical cooking techniques and secrets. However, I purchased the August 2004 issue of Gourmet because it included an essay by David Foster Wallace.

I go out of my way to collect magazines with essays by Wallace or Malcolm Gladwell or short fiction by Tobias Wolff (in the case of Gladwell and Wolff, nearly always the occasional issue of The New Yorker). I enjoy Foster Wallace’s fiction (okay, let’s abbreviate to DFW, as his fans refer to him), but I adore his essays. His essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is, in my opinion, his finest work. It is in his essays that DFW's odd writing tic of inserting copious footnotes throughout his writing (to a shallow inspection, it’s the habit that most identifies him as a sui generis of the writing world) is most effective and endearing rather than ponderous, as it can be in his fiction. I admit to a similar tendency (one could argue that it’s a symptom of being a writing pack rat, unable to jettison the least relevant train of thought), albeit in HTML my digressive train of thought manifests itself in an abundance of parentheticals due to laziness (creating footnotes in HTML is a hassle, and for longer works not broken up into separate web pages, anchor links are necessary to prevent the reader from having to scroll back and forth vertically, an action which, if performed multiple times in succession, might lead to repetitive stress injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome).

DFW’s essay for Gourmet is a paragon of the DFW essay style. What makes him such an unique and engaging journalists is not just his cool, perceptive, and almost clinical eye, or his flat and just slightly satirical, acerbic tone, but his complete disinterest in writing a conventional half-investigative, half-advertorial piece that most travelogues or celebrity interviews turn out to be. Gourmet commissioned a piece on the Maine Lobster Festival. A third of the way into his essay, DFW abruptly shifts gears from a straightforward overview of the logistics of the Maine Lobster Festival and the taxonomical and culinary history of the lobster itself to raise the real topic of his essay:

”Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”

It’s a question DFW spends the rest of his essay attempting to answer with his usual cubist mind. But enough on DFW and his essay. His work is nearly impossible to describe simply through a few excerpts. The footnote-laden style demands a journey to the source material.

This issue of Gourmet also contains another article that fascinated me, one that investigates whether or not wine glasses, particularly Riedel wine glasses, actually make a difference in how wine tastes. It’s particularly relevant in light of the recent news that Riedel purchased Spiegelau, creating the world's largest wineglass producer.

The article recounts how Riedel claims that their glasses improve the flavor and aroma of wine. How do they do this? At a Riedel-sponsored seminar, a Riedel representative explains that their glasses are engineered to deliver the wine to precise areas of the tongue, taking advantage of the "tongue map" which charts which regions of the tongue experience which tastes (e.g. sweet, acid, bitter, salt). Riedel has glasses for just about every variation of wine you've heard of, and many you haven't.

There's only one problem. The tongue map is a myth. It's one I was taught in grade school health class, and even I hadn't heard that it had been debunked until reading this article.

Furthermore, the article points to all sorts of scientific studies that have not only shown that in blind taste tests, the type and brand of glass makes little to no difference. It also cites one famous experiment in which wine experts were fooled into thinking a white wine with food coloring and another in which wine experts pooh poohed a mass market wine while praising a luxury wine to the heavens, only to discover that the testers had reversed the two wines.

Wine has always been a front in class struggles, bolding otherwise imperceptible lines between the highbrow and lowbrow. Non-wine snobs always suspect that they’re being bamboozled, victims of an elaborate hoax, and perhaps they’re right. Price disparity of wines is high, and objective measures are lacking. I often find myself in the wine aisle of the supermarket or a wine store, baffled by the selection of wines, the hundreds of brands, all priced seemingly randomly.

On the other hand, as the article concludes, expectations can have a huge impact on one's enjoyment of an experience or product. If you believe that paying more for a bottle of wine will buy you a better wine, or if you believe that a $40 Riedel glass will improve the taste of that Pinot Noir, that belief may indeed improve that bottle for you. Certainly Riedel wineglasses are more aesthetically pleasing than a Dixie paper cup or your average wineglass from Target. Disentangling form and function altogether in assessing a product is counter to how we experience them in everyday life. Despite the fact that most golfers would be better served by spending their money on lessons, sometimes it helps to spend it on a fancy new driver that they believe will improve their drives. If you feel more confident with a certain club in your hands, that can translate to better swings. Mind over matter.

Many people wish to affirm their purchases after the fact, like reading a Pauline Kael review after seeing a movie in the hopes of finding her in agreement with your opinion. After reading this article, I won't feel quite so bad snickering at the wine snob at the next party I attend. There's always one.

Related: Ordering lobsters online
Kinky sex secrets of the lobster (in which Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters, debunks DFW's Gourmet article)

What's yours is yours

Poker great Johnny Chan. "It doesn't matter to me if I'm dealt two aces or a three and a five," he says later. "In fact, I don't need any cards. I just play the person."

Breakable: A few days ago, someone in Bike Forums broke the story, so to speak, of how to unlock a U-Lock using a plastic ballpoint pen. Now the NYTimes has picked up on the story, writing that "Many cyclists erupted in disbelief and anger this week after videos were posted on the Internet showing how a few seconds of work could pick many of the most expensive and common U-shaped locks, including several models made by Kryptonite, the most recognized brand." After having two bikes stolen in college, both secured with U-Locks, I long ago recognized that U-Locks were nothing but an inconvenience for bike thieves, a way to slow them down. It's hard to believe many cyclists would still think a U-Lock is some foolproof security mechanism. The best security for your bike is to keep it next to you indoors or to own a bike so awful you wouldn't feel any sorrow if someone stole it. Here are links to the videos.

Stunning animation from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, opening this weekend.

The Law of Large Numbers: Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.

The predominant ideology of our age: anti-Americanism?

Nikon announces a new professional digital SLR, the D2X. The specs are sweet, but unfortunately it doesn't hit dealers until winter 2005, so this is all premature elation.

Amazon takes A9 out of beta; new search engine amalgamates results from a variety of sources, including Google and Gurunet. Bookmarks are a handy way to drag in potential winners from a search for future reference.

Google Accounts. Bwahahahahaha (maniacal laugh of Google emperor as his plans for world domination several years down the line continue to gel).

Sony's new prosumer high-def camcorder

Sony finally unveiled their upcoming prosumer high-definition camcorder, the HDR-FX1. It's a mixed bag of good (3 CCDs with 16x9 pixels, manual controls, strong low-light performance, support by Apple and Adobe) and disappointing (no 24p and/or progressive scan).

and so on and so forth

Trailers for movies from some hip directors:

• Trailer for Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, starring Bill Murray and Owen Wilson. Can't say anything bad about a trailer that uses classic New Order (Temptation, I think)
• I Heart Huckabees is the new movie from David O. Russell. Russell is also finishing a documentary on the Iraqi War which will play prior to screenings of a rerelease of Russell's Three Kings this fall.

Sports nicknames that sound dirty, some vaguely, and some not: The Big Unit (Randy Johnson), The Thorpedo (Ian Thorpe), Horny (Jeff Hornacek), Mordecai "Three Fingers" Brown, Hammerin' Hank Aaron, The Splendid Splinter (Ted Williams), Walter "Big Train" Johnson, The Big Red Machine, Harvey's Wallbangers, Monsters of the Midway, The Italian Stallion (Rocky Balboa), The Chicoutimi Cucumber (Georges Vezina), and any nickname involving the word Rocket. Sexual euphemisms that won't catch on.

Qualia, Sony's new super high-end line of electronics, all identified simply by three digit codes. The minimalist (okay, empty and pretentious) website reminds me of the first Nissan Infiniti commercials which showed ocean water crashing on beaches, or fields of trees, but no cars.

Stuff to listen to on your new Qualia system: music from Iceland, much of it not available on CD in the US. However, you can order direct from Bad Taste.

A new study shows that one's inability to express a concept in language may limit one's ability to understand that concept. Is it a good or bad thing that most of us only learn a few dirty words in foreign languages?

Money can buy happiness, and some sweet earbuds

[via kottke via Peter Kaminski]

Robert Frank writes that money can buy increased happiness if spent not on more expensive goods like bigger houses or more expensive cars but instead on inconspicuous goods, like more time to travel or hang out with friends and family.

Considerable evidence suggests that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods�such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job�then the evidence paints a very different picture. The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we can devote to family and friends, to exercise, sleep, travel, and other restorative activities. On the best available evidence, reallocating our time and money in these and similar ways would result in healthier, longer� and happier�lives.

Sounds about right to me. Travel is the one indulgence which always seems worthwhile to me.

Of course, I suspect that purchasing a pair of Ultimate Ears earbuds would make me really happy. They'd better, considering they can cost $900 for a pair (not including the cost of getting an impression made of your ear), but how can you argue with this client list? I tried running with my iPod yesterday and my Sony earbuds kept falling out. Seriously, why are earbuds round? Who has ears shaped like that? I may have to resort to taping my earbuds into my ears. What I need are Penultimate Ears.

This week's NY Times Magazine

Lots of good articles and photos in this week's NY Times Magazine, focused on Olympic swimmers.

A slideshow of a few of the high tech items used by Olympians to shave precious hundreds of seconds off their times in various sports, including some hot looking sprinter's shoes.

Another profile (and a good one) of Michael Phelps, one that states that Phelps is the best swimmer in the world.

Slideshow of some US Olympic swimmers in the water.

Another slideshow of the swimmers.

Photographic collage (Flash plugin required)

What is the ideal Olympic athlete? If the early Greeks are to be followed, the ideal is more like the egotistical, self-promoting, self-interested Achilles portrayed by Brad Pitt in Troy than the friendly sportsmen proffered by the media.

Finally, an Olympic-level vacuum cleaner, the Dyson vacuum, whose primary selling point may be that it showcases all the nasty gunk it sucks up out of your carpet with its 100,000 g of centrifugal force, in the process convincing you of its efficacy and indispensability. Reminiscent of the Biore nose strip, which shows you the results of its deforestation of your nose in a display both disgusting and satisfying. Needless to say, if I had $500 to spend on a vacuum, this is the one I'd buy. Available at Amazon.com.

My, you've got a purty face

Them new Apple Cinema Displays are hot. I'm going to have to have a difficult conversation with an arm and a leg.

Motorola V600

I've had the Motorola V600 cell phone for a few months now, and I love it. Bluetooth, integrated VGA camera, vivid color screen, polyphonic speaker, sleek metallic look, and a strong antenna. It's available now for just $99.99 after rebates from Cingular, which acquired AT&T Wireless a few months back. While I travel around, my phone often reads Cingular now instead of AT&T. One would hope the merger of their two networks would improve overall coverage, and thus far it seems to have fulfilled that to a minor degree.

The v600 handles the basic functions of a cell phone well, and that's most critical to me. I've also decided after using all the various form factors that I prefer flip phones. Sure, Verizon probably provides the best nationwide coverage, but why do their cell phones have to be so damned unattractive?

Dial 4811

The 4811, the $15 starter thong of choice. Ah, the miracle that is the thong, occupying that fine line between G-string and panty.

StubHub, an alternative to eBay for swapping tickets to shows, sporting events, etc. Somewhere along the line, though, Ticketmaster will rob someone.

Butch Harmon, Tiger Woods' ex-coach, supposedly told Sky Sports: "Tiger Woods is not playing well, he is not working on the right things in his golf swing although obviously Tiger thinks he is. He should have felt 'I could win this tournament by six, seven, eight shots.' That was the old Tiger Woods. But for him to stand there at every one of his interviews and say 'I am close, I feel really good about what I am doing', I think it might be a bit of denial." Ouch. I was hoping they'd reunite, but knowing Tiger, statements like that make that a long shot.

As cool as every side of the pillow

The Chillow is a decidedly low-tech soporific: an insert to keep your pillow cool all night. The manufacturer cites a study that claims that subjects using the Chillow fell asleep 68% faster and spent 21% more time in REM sleep. Of course, they only used 20 subjects and the differences were a matter of just a few minutes.

I do love a cool sleeping environment, though. When I travel, I crank up the A/C in hotels to counter the stimulating effects of the strange environment. I may just have to try this Chillow. Wired Gadget Lab gave it a 10 out of 10.

I could also sleep naked, lounging around on furs, like Brad Pitt in Troy. Usually I just catch a cold when I try that.

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.

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.

Three CCDs for the price of one

A Jake Ludington newsletter bought this to my attention. A mini DV camcorder with 3 CCDs has broken the $700 price point: the $699 Panasonic PVGS120. This is huge. Is there any nother 3CCD camcorder even close to the $1000 price point? Not that I'm aware of.

This deserves to be a big seller for your average camcorder shopper looking for the best model for the buck. I'm personally more excited about the prospect of Sony's 3CCD HD Camcorder, but that will be a sub-$5000 camcorder. The Panasonic is within reach of the masses. Their home videos will still be dull and shaky, but at least the picture will be sharp.

Video PDAs

A new video iPod is on its way from Apple, and Microsoft has announced a video-playing PDA to debut in Europe. People tout convergence as a wonderful thing, but what if it just means all our devices converge so that we end up carrying around a dozen devices that all do the same exact thing?

VIM

Alan and Sharon, my parents, Jeff, and now James all have webcams. Once Apple released an iChat beta that was compatible with AOL IM on Windows PCs, I could no longer be the family holdout. I recently purchased an iSight. Video and audio chats over broadband? Surprisingly clear.

Now we just need to get Joannie, Mike, and Karen hooked up and get into the same time zone so we can hold family conferences online. The novelty of this old, old technology hasn't worn off yet, so if you're webcam and AOL IM enabled, ping me.

UPDATE: If you need a webcam, this one is pretty sexy.

Beware the cellphone company that comes bearing gifts

I recently received postcards from AT&T informing me they'd be mailing me a free cellphone, the Sony T226, to replace the Sony Ericsson T68i I've been using for over a year and a half. Very suspicious--when's the last time the phone company did anything out of kindness? Not that I love my T68i. It has certain usability problems which I've lived with b/c I purchased it with a generous rebate and because sinking money into new cellphones is a waste of money.

I knew there was a catch, though, and Engadget exposed it. The replacement phones are compatible with the newer 850 Mhz spectrum in which AT&T Wireless is building out its GSM network, and the phones they're replacing are not. Perhaps this explains all of the complaints about AT&T Wireless's coverage in the Seattle area. The Sony T226 I'm receiving shortly will be less functional than my T68i and won't offer the Bluetooth compatibility needed for my headset.

That's evil, and it means I'll have to call and use my big, mean voice on some customer service rep shortly.

We have cellphones that shoot lousy photos, offer games, surf the web, play MP3s, change channels, and yet I've still not found a cellphone/service plan combination that excels at all of the features I desire most: compact form factor, long battery life, an awesome antenna, a usable interface for storing and finding phone numbers, and an affordable nationwide calling plan. Perhaps that's why I've been such a conservative cellphone buyer. I've owned only four cellphones in my life, and two were replacements for one I lost and one I crushed in a snowboarding incident in a half-pipe. Am I jealous of those around me who flip to new phones seemingly every 8 months? A bit, though the cost that people sink into new cellphones is ridiculous (you either pay for it in the phone or, if the phone is free after rebates, in the long-term plans they lock you into).

Nokia's phones have impressed me the most, though their antennas haven't blown me away and their feature set usually lags the competition. But Nokia's on-screen interface is the most usable. Motorola has strong antennas but lousy battery life and a terrible on-screen interface. As cellphone functionality has broadened, the user interfaces have suffered. With my T68i on its last legs, though, it's time to dip back into the marketplace. I can even switch service providers with no penalty as I've been month-to-month with AT&T Wireless for quite some time now.

Has anyone had a good experience with a nationwide cellphone plan?

The best dental floss

Amazon now carries my favorite dental floss.

6

The new BMW 6 Series, complete with heads-up display, tilting glass panorama roof, active cruise control, and a six speed sequential manual gearbox.

8 is a lucky number

The first half of 2004 looks to be the coming out party for the 8 megapixel sensor. Already, cameras using this chip are on their way to consumers from Canon, Nikon, and Sony.

Yet my Epson 2200 photo printer still doesn't have a driver for Mac OS X Panther. Shame on Epson.

Bad, bad little flash

Compact digital camera flashes are terrible. I wish I could default my Minolta digital camera to always have the flash turned off. I don't think I've ever taken a good photo with that camera with the flash turned on.

Hottest new digital camera: Sony DSC-T1

I wish I needed a new compact digital camera, because if I did, I'd buy the Sony DSC-T1. It's nice and compact, yet it has a 2.5" LCD screen and 5 megapixel resolution. Ooh la la.

Cell phone bad manners

A few jokes by Seinfeld in his standup show [he noted that common behavior these days for two people meeting up is to place their cell phones on the table, as if drawing guns at a gunfight, seeing who will be first to receive a phone call and break the appointment for a more interesting social engagement] and an article in this week's NYTimes Sunday Styles reminded me of some of the behavior of cell phone users that drive me nuts. I've been guilty of some of these from time to time and have made a conscious effort to cut it all off.

• People who constantly check their cell phone when they're out with you. Yeah, I get it, you're so damn popular. Do you want to be here or not? If you don't want to be here, then why don't you just leave? And can't you set your cell phone to vibrate or ring so you know when you have messages? Why are you looking at it every 10 minutes? Don't you know how to use your phone?


• The most annoying two types of people who are constantly checking their cell phones: quasi-big shots whose constant cell phone monitoring reminds you that they're much more important than you are and could abandon you for more important company at any time, and those people who are not all that popular or important but who monitor their cell phone as if they are.


• People who make time to see you and then spend half that time on the phone talking to other people. Yes, I'm having a lot of fun sitting here listening to one half of your conversation. Why don't you get out of here and join them and then call me on the cell phone so I can multi-task while you waste someone else's time?


• A particularly irritating variant of the previous is the person who has to call their significant other every half hour to give updates on where they are. My mom used to yell at me for gabbing on the phone with friends I was going to see in person soon. Now I understand why. Couples like this need to just marry off and then spend all their time under the same house talking to each other. No one expects to hear from married couples anyway.

Besides, true playas don't have to carry cell phones. They have assistants that run important messages to them, and you can't reach them simply by dialing their cell. You have to go through their cadre of foot soldiers and minions to prove yourself worthy of their time first. The ratio of time you spend trying to get in front of them to the amount of their time you actually receive is in inverse proportion to your relative statuses in the world.

[The only people I don't resent for their cell phone usage are those who are on call. You can see the weary resignation with which they gaze upon these homing beacons which constantly circumscribe them in an invisible cage.]

Randomly strumming my imagination

I like to set my iPod to play all of the hundreds of songs in its brain at random, put my headphones on, hit play, and see where it takes me. My DJ is some randomizing function, and he/she is quite good. Sometimes DJ Random plays songs I never even knew I owned.

13.7 megapixel digital SLR

First comprehensive review I've seen of the Kodak Pro 14n, a 13.7 megapixel digital SLR. This one's a big deal for Nikon SLR users since it's the first 10+ megapixel SLR compatible with Nikon F-mount lenses and the first obvious Nikon-compatible competitor to Canon's EOS-1DS 11.4 megapixel SLR (the Kodak's $3000 cheaper, too, at $4999).

I'm still holding out for Nikon to come out with its own 10+ megapixel digital SLR. A year away? Let's hope so.

Until then, though, I think I'm going to give in and get an ultracompact digital camera, for those times when carrying a giant SLR body and lens is uncool and/or inconvenient. Like a night out at a club in Rio de Janeiro, or something like that. Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm looking for something compact, that will fit in a pocket, with good low-light performance, but with enough manual exposure controls that I don't feel at the mercy of the camera's automatic exposure software. Also, exposure bracketing at preferably .3EV stops.

This Minolta Dimage F300 looks pretty sweet.

By the way, if you have a digital camera that uses AA batteries, you have to get one of these MAHA MH-C204F200 Smart Charger Combo Kits including four 2000mAH POWEREX AA batteries. Don't ask, just do it.

Global roaming

This announcement by AT&T sounds promising, though I'll reserve hope for a bit. I just bought a new global cellphone, an Ericsson T68i, and my service is with AT&T. Given the amount of overseas travel I'm doing this year, being able to just pop in a new sim card into my cellphone like all the Aussies were doing in New Zealand would be awesome and preferable to renting a cellphone. The U.S. doesn't just stand alone in its desire to run over Iraq with military force, it stands alone in the wireless standards arena and thus we marvel over features our international brethren have enjoyed for years.

The main reason I bought the new phone, though, is to allow use of a Bluetooth headset. Rumor has it that everyone at Motorola uses headsets, and until more conclusive results are in, I'd just as soon stop radiating my brain or groin.

The T68i is a pretty nice phone. Reception on AT&T's GSM network has been fine thus far, though I have yet to test its limits. Perhaps this Thursday if I head out to Spokane to see Stanford in the first round of the NCAA's. The phone's buttons are a bit small, a problem with most such compact phones, but so far everything else has worked like a charm. I'm anxious to get voice dialing set up and to try out my Bluetooth headset, though I'll hold off on WAP and the digital camera attachment functionality until it proves economical.

The sad state of HD

Another area where the U.S. lags the rest of the world is in HDTV standards and programming. I finally got my HD (high definition) dish installed and it added a whopping three DirecTV HD channels to my lineup, Mark Cuban's HDNet, a pay-per-view HD channel, and an HBO HD channel.

That's not enough of a reason to buy an HD receiver. A few other reasons I upgraded: one, the availability of a moderate amount of HD programming from the majors, including NBC, Fox, ABC, and CBS, all accessible by connecting a $25 terrestrial antenna like one from Winegard to your HD receiver. The Oscars will be broadcast in HD this year, and quite a few sporting events as well. Some of the major sitcoms are in HD, and on a widescreen HDTV set the A/V experience in HD is a huge improvement. Secondly, now I can watch a program while taping another on my Tivo, an option which would have saved me some difficult choices during the past several months.

Relative to the rest of the world and what it could be, the options are sparse, disappointing. Until the U.S. can agree on a standard and push it, we'll be limited to the slim pickings out there. It's a shame, because HD done right is gorgeous.

True digital darkroom

On a more positive technological note, I've finally had the chance to try out the Epson Stylus 2200, generating some prints based on scans of slides from my trips to New Zealand.

Wow.

I have no idea what I'm doing, and I still managed a few gorgeous prints at 8 x 10. Even at that size the print quality rivals that you'd get from a photo lab, and the inks in the Stylus 2200 are archival, meaning they'll last long after you're dead. The digital workflow isn't exactly fast, given that each high quality scan takes me about 15 minutes, including image adjustments in Photoshop. Still, the control you have in Photoshop to manipulate photos is intoxicating. You can easily change color photos to black and white, or vice versa. You can sharpen or soften photos, turn them into watercolors, correct exposure errors, and so much more. I still don't own a digital camera, but most of the other elements of my digital darkroom are falling into place.

I have a lot to learn about color management and Photoshop, but the book Mastering Digital Printing promises to move me far along the learning curve.

Animatrix

This is going to be cool. Can't wait.

Can't wait?

Peace out

Not officially my last day at work today, but next Monday and Tuesday are just wrap up. Most e-mails I received at the office today were ones I could just delete without reading. It was a fairly uneventful day, really. Just like any other.

They do a couple things well to encourage you to return to work. They leave your office up, let you keep your e-mail address and phone number. It's very smart, actually, because the act of packing things up gives the whole event a finality, creating a psychological barrier.

I feel like I'm letting out for summer break.

The man formerly known as Rich

Went to a drink night at Brasa to toast Rich and Christina on their engagement. As more and more of the boys get engaged or become fathers, I realize the meaning and importance of the term "boys night out." You really have to grab those moments when you get them. Maybe it's because I'm following along the whole way there, but I really have no idea when they flip. They still seem the same, but suddenly there's this whole other side to their personality, the sensitive side they keep hidden away while in the company of men.

Those rings must be like the ring in Lord of the Rings. Everyone claims to want to go toss it into the cracks of Mt. Doom to destroy it, but then it seizes hold of their minds and drives them crazy so they put it on and get married.

Please, please, people. I'm just joking. On the positive side, I look forward to several kickin' bachelor parties this year.

Cast Away

Went out with Scott and the boys to dinner last night. He was back from his cross-country bike ride and had a beard that he'd grown during the trip. He looked like this.

Drob-nee-yax

Peja Drobnjak of the Seattle Supersonics has his own web page. The NBA must be getting desperate. Who will they market next?

Top 10 lists

Everyone's publishing their top 10 movie lists. I would, too, except I still haven't seen a lot of movies that qualify as 2002 releases. Harry Knowles' list ranks Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance at the top. Interesting. I passed on seeing it at the Seattle International Film Festival. Too bad. Film fests are all a crapshoot. I wish they'd let you watch trailers for all the movies before you fill out your film festival ticket requests.

Ebert's top 10 list puts Minority Report at the top. Good movie, but best of the year? Ebert's getting soft.

A.O. Scott, Stephen Holden, Elvis Mitchell, and Dave Kehr of the NYTimes all published their lists a short while ago. The only movie in common among all four of them? Talk to Her.

Has anyone seen it yet? I've spoken to lots of women who didn't enjoy it, which is really surprising for a Pedro movie.

Hi-def miniDV camcorder

Supposedly, JVC is coming out with a hi-def mini DVD camcorder! No model # listed, though. I'm itching to get myself a Panasonic DVX1000, but if the rumors are true, and if the camera shot in true 16 x 9, then I'd be tempted to wait.

Antwone Fisher

"Who will cry for the little boy, lost and all alone?
Who will cry for the little boy, abandoned without his own?
Who will cry for the little boy? He cried himself to sleep.
Who will cry for the little boy? He never had for keeps.
Who will cry for the little boy? He walked the burning sand.
Who will cry for the little boy? The boy inside the man.
Who will cry for the little boy? Who knows well hurt and pain.
Who will cry for the little boy? He died and died again.
Who will cry for the little boy? A good boy he tried to be.
Who will cry for the little boy, who cries inside of me?"
- Antwone Fisher

Hi-def TIVO

Hi-def TIVO would be sweet, though I'll believe it once I see it. My first PVR was a ReplayTV which didn't work quite right. It was a free sample, though, so I can't complain. Then I bought a modified TIVO (didn't want to pay TIVO's monthly subscription so I bought one with a paid lifetime subscription) and modified it by adding a huge hard drive to give myself more recording space.

I hear people say that the reason PVR's don't sell well is that they're hard to explain to people. Well, those people aren't very bright.

Jim Ford's listening room

Thursday evening I got a treat. Jim Ford invited me to his house in Bellevue to test out his new listening room. I first met Jim on a project a few years back. He's a search software engineer, and we worked together on Amazon.com's movie showtimes site. Working with him was something I'll always remember because he was the consummate professional. Just did his job and did it well. Amazon's such a young company, and sometimes over the past five and a half years I've just taken for granted that co-workers may be occasionally moody, political, lazy, or high maintenance. Then I'll work with someone like Jim and remember the type of person we should all aspire to surround ourselves with.

Before Jim earned his Master's in computer science at the University of Illinois in Urbana, he was a music teacher. Now he's a successful software engineer, but he hasn't lost his love for music. He plays the upright bass, and over the past two years he's designed and built a music listening room as an addition to his house. It's the most impressive music room in someone's house that I've ever been to, and it rivals the best studio demo rooms I've been in. He worked with acousting engineers to design every last bit of it.

The room has all the essential qualities of an ideal listening room. It's dimensions are 15 x 20 feet, approximately, which is a good ratio. Of course the room is perfectly rectangular. He has sliding sound panels at the front and sides of the room, and they can be positioned to cancel standing waves and to optimize for different types of listening or playing. The ceiling is sloped so as not to reflect music back down on the listener. Hardwood floors all around. The back wall is the most interesting thing. It was custom designed using a series of cedar wood boards turned sideways and jutting out at different lengths. Each set of sixteen boards, each about an inch thick from the side, jut out in a varied series of lenghts which scatter the sound waves which hit the back wall. The door to the room is double hinged and is as thick as a bank vault door. When closed, a switch on the side drops a rubber lining to the bottom of the floor to prevent sound from escaping through the space beneath the door.

The entire back wall is a series of five doors. The first leads to a side entrance where musician friends can enter and exit the listening room. The next two doors open to the room which holds some storage space and his musical components, all of which are made by Musical Fidelity. The next door reveals a series of Boltz USA CD racks which are mounted on sliding rails. The last door leads to the rest of the house.

And then there are the speakers. B&W 802s (same as mine! great minds hear alike), a pair of them, at the front of the room, toed in to face the two sofa chairs seated side by side about two-thirds of the way back in the room. The entire feel of the room is spare and clean.

What was left but to pour ourselves a glass of Pinot Noir from the vineyards of New Zealand (where I'll be in about two weeks) and sit ourselves down for some listening. I brought some of my favorite CDs, and Jim had compiled a selection of recordings which would show off his system properly. I let Jim do the honors, as you never touch another man's home theater components (it's like driving another man's car without asking permission), and he started us off by loading Diana Krall's Love Scenes. I knew it would be a good night. Not only does Krall have a great voice, but she knows how to use it and her CD's are always impeccably engineered. She's a darling among audiophiles.

If you've never tested someone's listening room, all you really do is bring your favorite CDs and take turns suggesting tracks to listen to. Then you just sit back in the chair and close your eyes and listen to music. Afterwards you chat about the quality of the recording and the qualities of the sound in the performance. It sounds goofy, but if the listening room is engineered well, it's heaven.

Closing your eyes allows you to focus all your senses on the sound, and if everything comes together, then suddenly Diana Krall is standing on a stage about 10 feet away, singing tunes just for you. And there she was. The sound came through as transparent as can be, and that's the highest compliment you can pay an audio system.

Next came the grand daddy of classical showpieces, a track which has been copied in just about every sci-fi space movie soundtrack ever: Mars from Gustav Holtz's The Planets. The most acclaimed recording, and the one we used, is the recording by Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. You know that Memorex print ad where the guy sitting in the sofa is being literally blown away by music from the stereo in front of him? That was me.

Jim and his wife Kathy enjoy classical and jazz, so that's where we focused our evening's lineup. We moved next to Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suites, as played by Yo Yo Ma. This time we chose his earlier recording from 1983. It's been a long time since I've heard this piece, and the recording I own is the one by Janos Starker. Ma's interpretation is quite good, and the rich sound of his cello expanded to fill the room. I have to make a note to myself to get a copy of this recording.

And so it went. Jim and Kathy and I, just sitting in this soundproof (to the outside world) vault, with our eyes closed, just listening to one CD after another. Time started to slide away as my consciousness narrowed to just listen. It has been many months since I can remember feeling so relaxed, so at peace. I definitely think I've had too many demands and stimuli in my life this past year, and it has made me anxious, jittery, and impatient. In Jim's listening room, every CD sounded like a live performance, and I was content to reduce myself to a pair of appreciative ears. My pulse must have dropped below 40.

Among other fantastic recordings we sampled from, all of which I highly recommend for the audiophiles among you or those just looking to add a few great jazz and classical CDs to your collection:
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack by Tan Dun and featuring Yo-Yo Ma
'58 Sessions by the Miles Davis Sextet with Bill Evans
Waltz for Debby by the Bill Evans Trio
From the Age of Swing by Dick Hyman
Lush Life by John Coltrane
Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus

I left Jim's place with a sudden desire to buy my own house and build my own listening room the very next day. You can't buy a house and hope to find a room ready made like this. My home theater is nice, but the odd shape of my room, the carpet, and the dimensions mean that it is pretty challenging acoustically. I don't find myself listening to CDs as much as I would in the past and had forgotten how transporting that can be, how amazing the B&W 802s can sound.

Three hours went by just like that. Jim finally opened the front door to his house and released me back into society. I stood in his driveway, slightly dazed.

Post-modern spam

I got a spam e-mail today with the subject line, "Tired of deleting spam e-mail?"

Best Buy PCs

I love my Mac Powerbook, but if I were to buy a Windows laptop I'd seriously consider the vpr Matrix 200A5 from Best Buy. Yeah, that's right, Best Buy! Who knew. Two Firewire ports? Sweet sweet.

Dwindling iPod batteries

Anytime a device has a rechargeable battery that can't be replaced, you worry about diminishing battery life. Looks like the iPod, great as it is, may suffer from the same problem. Bummer.

Tip for you TIVO users

BigMarv posts a TIVO easter egg that allows you to get 30 second commercial skip, like on the now defunct ReplayTV. God bless America.

They came bearing gifts

There are people who claim to not like receiving presents. When their birthdays come around, they ask you not to bring gifts to parties they host. If you ask them what they want for their birthday, or for Xmas, they say that your company is present enough.

What's wrong with these people?

I love getting presents. Things wrapped in colored paper. Cards, hand-written notes. Sometime later, after reading this, you may suddenly feel, "Gosh, that Eugene, he's a swell guy. When's the last time I showed him how much I love him? I need to get him something."

You'll want to act on this impulse. Trust your heart.

But instead of getting me something, what would really make me happy is if you'd make a donation to the American Cancer Society. Everytime someone I know loses someone to cancer, or someone I know passes away after a long battle from cancer, I think to myself that cancer is the most cruel teachers of the randomness of tragedy and suffering in this mortal sphere. Not as sudden as a heart attack or a fatal car accident, but longer, slower acting, more painful to the ones you love. it's not a sudden shock to your system. It begins as a shock to the system, then it's followed up by a series of emotional setbacks, then one final loss that you're almost numb to but aren't because you've convinced yourself that anyone that hangs on that long will pull through somehow. Physical and emotional attrition. All the time, you can hear the question being asked: do you still believe?

Music from a dream

The music in the new Two Towers trailer is from Requiem for a Dream. Good soundtrack, that was. You hear the music in this context and think it was from an action or adventure movie, but no, it's from an ensemble epiphany (think Magnolia) where a whole bunch of drug addicts are suffering from all sorts of horrific trauma.

Google Viewer

Can anyone get this Google Viewer to work? I just get a whole bunch of Javascript errors.

Google Labs are constantly cranking out wacky new services, like Google Webquotes. Must be a fun group to work in.

Hasselblad H1

So yes, I've slowly lost patience over the past few years. So the part of me that used to relish scanning negatives and slides and editing the images in Photoshop and then posting the images to web pages? It's dying. For a gadget freak, I've been very patient in holding out on the whole digital camera craze. The quality just hasn't been what I'd want yet. But cameras like the new Hasselblad H1 are oh so tempting. Fortunately this one would cost eighteen grand with a Kodak digital back so it's not as tempting as it could be.

Motorcycle wearable airbag

Saw this in slashdot today: a wearable motorcycle airbag vest. I've got to get one of these to wear during snowboarding! If I had one of these, who knows what sort of crazy things I'd be launching myself off of in the mountains.

As a motorcycle safety device? Well, I'm not sure how much good it would do. You'd bounce into the street and lay there like a giant bubble before a semi truck would run you over.

My Xmas gift to you, part II: Thwart telemarketers

Along the lines of my Google toolbar reco, here's another free gift to my loyal readers.

You can buy one of these devices to deter telemarketers or you can emulate it the low-tech way. Record the three tones you get when you dial a number that's out of service, add it to the front of your answering machine message. Computer assisted dialers will assume the number is dead and drop it off of their lists, while regular friends and family will hear your message afterwards and see how clever you are. I get a ton of telemarketing calls during the day and so my answering machine gets most of them. I plan on doing this over the holiday season. You can download the ring tones here.

My friend Oprah

Having the TV on is like having someone who really wants you to like him or her sitting in the room with you. When you're lonely, he or she will chat with you (the sex of the TV depends on the channel--Oprah is your emotionally honest aunt, ESPN your consummate sports buddy), and when you need some alone time he just sits in the corner, mumbling quietly to himself. I don't understand people who don't own TVs. They must not be as socially maladjusted as I am.

Joshua Malina and Danny Wuerffel

Finally caught up with all the West Wing episodes on the Tivo (sweeps month on the networks is a busy time for TV junkies). Looks like Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) is on the way out for sure now, and he's being replaced by Aaron Sorkin favorite Joshua Malina as Will Bailey. Malina has been in lots of other Sorkin productions (Sports Night, The American President). Sorkin likes to use the same people over and over again--hell, half of the West Wing seems to have stayed in the White House after The American President, with Martin Sheen moving from chief of staff up to president. I think it's because Sorkin prefers a certain snappy delivery of his dialogue and veterans of his shows have got it down pat. It's like David Mamet and his repeated use of people like Ricky Jay and his wife Rebecca Pidgeon, or Steve Spurrier and his loyalty towards lackeys like QBs Danny Wuerffel and Shane Matthews, the only ones who can tolerate his incessant criticism.

Netflix stays nimble

Okay, Netflix has responded to some gripes I've aired in the past (well, they didn't respond directly to me, but when you write something and then something happens shortly thereafter, you intuit causality, and given my vanity I attribute all positive changes to my inestimable influence). Almost all the DVDs in my rental queue are available immediately whereas many used to be listed with "long wait". Looks like they bought up. Secondly, they built a couple more shipping centers around the country so I can now mail a DVD back and receive the next one in my queue in about 4 days. It's noticeably faster.

Good thing, because they're getting some competition. There are a whole bunch of new online DVD rental services, and two big players, Blockbuster and Wal-Mart, have begun offering services of their own. Blockbuster's service is lousy--you still have to go pick up the movies and return them to a store--but in the end it's not a difficult business model to emulate. You don't have to buy lots of inventory, and the software is pretty straightforward. The types of changes Netflix is making are the ones they have to make, the no-brainers. The switching costs are very low.

The positive which should come out of all of this is lowered monthly rental subscription fees.

The good, the bad, the ugly

Good: TV shows which are letterboxed or widescreen.
Bad: My computer fan suddenly started whirring in a loud pulsing pattern, like it has a throbbing headache. Shut up!
Ugly: David Eckstein's throwing motion from shortstop.

The Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Edition

Watched the new extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring on DVD for Thanksgiving. Most extended editions or deleted scenes are, as DVD aficionados know, simply like high school yearbook photos of supermodels, or actors before makeup. They're the before pictures of movies before an editing room diet. Unattractive, unnecessary. We pay good money for the editing, supermodels pay good money for boob jobs, for a reason.

But the extended version of LOTR: FOTR is excellent. The 30 minutes or so of additional footage add to the depth of the story and the characters, enhancing your understanding of the regular edition of the movie. It's the best "director's cut" I've seen.

Vice

I was getting my hair cut tonight and picked up a copy of Vice magazine (I didn't feel like chatting with the lady cutting my hair; I always feel pressure to be social with the person cutting my hair, I don't know why). Funny stuff, this Vice magazine. First encountered it in NYC at an urban clothing store. It was free and lying in a stack by the front door.

There's an article in this month's issue evaluating 13 methods of "finding yourself." They're ranked on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being most effective.

Backpacking in Europe? Rates merely a 4.

Getting slutty with it? Rates the top score of 10. This one applies only to girls. It means sleeping around with men for the hell of it, and bossing them around. Hmm.

Then there's "the magic four." This is a method for guys only to find themselves and become a man. The magic four are: "1) break someone's heart; 2) have your heart broken; 3) get the shit beaten out of you; and 4) beat the shit out of someone. That means: 1) she has to be so f###ed up she almost kills herself. Like, doesn't eat for three days and falls down the stairs drunk; 2) you are so f***ed up you have to punch yourself in the head to stop thinking about her; 3) you end up in the hospital with a severaly broken nose and some sort of permanent facial scar; and 4) he's not really moving at the end. You're kind of kicking a blob." This rates a 9 on the finding yourself scale.

This one in particular caused my ears to perk up (well, not really, since my ears can't perk) because one of them is on my 30 before 30 list and I've accomplished 3 of the 4 already. I'm not telling you which is on my 30 before 30 list, or whether I accomplished it yet, or which 3 of the 4 I've checked off yet. If all of you got together, maybe you could piece it together. Wouldn't that be fun.

Cocaine rated a 3.5. Acid and mushrooms rated a 3. Ecstasy rated a 7.5. Maybe I should take some tonight before the Sigur Ros concert. They sing in a language they invented. It's called Hopelandic. I guess it's some derivative of Icelandic, though really I have no idea, like whether or not Julia Stiles is attractive.

Speaking of Vice, Grand Theft Auto III, the prequel to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, grossed $350 million. That's more than movies like The Matrix and Gladiator, and if it were a movie it would rank 7th all time domestically, behind Jurassic Park and ahead of Forrest Gump. Amazing. Geeks may not be filthy rich as in the late 90's, but the ones at Rockstar are still lording it over Hollywood. The interactivity of video games make them superior diversionary entertainment to all but the most engrossing of movies. Watching a bad movie is like being strapped to a dolly and wheeled around like Hannibal Lecter. Just got Splinter Cell tonight. Can't wait to try it out.

Speaking of being trapped, I was walking up to the front door of the gym tonight, and passing by the window I couldn't but think, as I stared at row after row of people dripping with sweat, working their arms and legs around spastically on elliptical cycles, stairmasters, and treadmills, all under the artificial blue glow of fluorescent lamps, that if you brought someone from 100 years ago here into the present and allowed them to look into this health club facility and observe the people in there, they'd think it was some form of slavery or imprisonment. If I were to make a movie like Baraka, I'd juxtapose this shot of people working out at the gym with a shot of Charlton Heston and his slave buddies rowing in the stomach of a Roman galley in Ben Hur. Seriously, going to the gym is torture, the supreme manifestation of our society's vanity. If I didn't have to rehab my shoulder after my bike accident I'd cancel my membership.

While watching Die Another Day this weekend, I saw the trailer for the new J. Lo movie Maid in Manhattan. Yep, J. Lo plays a hotel maid who gets discovered by some rich dude played by Ralph Fiennes. It's a variant of the Pretty Woman hooker with a heart of gold story, only with a maid instead of a hooker because J. Lo ain't no trashy ho, despite being ready to move onto husband number 82, the bland Ben Affleck. I could barely contain an evil cackle as I saw faces of boyfriends and husbands throughout the theater blanche at the thought of having to attend this movie with their girlfriends or spouses. Has a British accent done more for anyone than it has for Ralph Fiennes? On that alone, some people consider him some gifted thespian. Give me a break. He's not that much better than that guy who plays Furio on The Sopranos this season (that guy, whoever he is, is one reason the show is a bit flat this season).

On the way back from a play at the Seattle Rep this weekend, I looked down at my radio and instead of a station number the display flashed a series of words. It was an ad for an upcoming concert, listing some of the artists and a phone number to call for tickets. Strange. Then, when a song came on, the radio displayed the title and artist. I didn't realize radio stations could broadcast that info now. Of course, sometime soon I'll probably be looking down for the title of some catchy tune and drive into the trunk of the guy in front of me.

I didn't join Rachael in an effort to scalp tickets to "Legends of Hip Hop" last night. My mistake. Turns out she got a seat from someone whose friend failed to show. Damn.

I really hate it when other people have power over me. My mood. My state of mind.

What am I ranting about?

Marge's boob job

The Simpsons were in rare form tonight. Marge got an inadvertent boob job and everyone started treating her extra special. She's driving back from the plastic surgery clinic with Maggie in the passenger seat, and Who Let the Dogs Out is playing on the radio. And next week, the Simpsons spoof The Osbournes and reality TV.

BTW, the best new TV title sequence music is from Michael Mann's Robbery Homicide Division.

I've been exhausted all weekend. It doesn't take much to throw off my sleep cycle anymore, and it takes a lot to get it back. Still, I did manage to catch up with lots of people this weekend as I slowly crawl out of hermit status.

Holiday shopper's guide Part 1

Some ideas for things to get those special people in your life this holiday season, because being a classy gift-giver requires simply some sage guidance and a Visa. Some of this I've read about, some is just personal opinion. I think all this stuff is available online--I refuse to fight for holiday parking anymore and neither should you. Spend that time with those special people instead.

• A lobster dinner for two (or more), Fed Ex'd from Maine. Accompanied by a bottle of quality champagne like Clicquot.


• An Apple iPod, in 5-gigabytes, 10-gigabytes, or 20 gigabytes.
• DVDs: The Lord of the Rings - the Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Extended Edition), Band of Brothers
, Glengarry Glen Ross Special Edition (need I say it? better than a set of steak knives).

• For the Xbox gamer in your family, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. It's Metal Gear Solid, the next generation.
• Cashmere socks offer a unique touch of lux. Cashmere scarves are too common a gift.
• Ericsson T68i world cell phone and a Jabra FreeSpeak Bluetooth headset to go with it, b/c who wants loved ones to get brain cancer? The Bluetooth means you can synch it with Outlook on your Mac or PC.
• For the friend who has to take a long plane flight to see you for the holiday's, the perfect airplane page-turner, Michael Crichton's new novel about nanotechnology, Prey. For your med-school friend, Atul Gawande's Complications.
• For the guy who still carries the same wallet he's had since college, held together by duct tape: a monogrammed money clip and card holder.
• For your totally normal, well-adjusted friend who seeks a sniff of urban chic by emulating bad boy hip hop rapper Eminem: a knit cap (in cashmere, because even bad kids like to be pampered).


• A first print novel. Start your search at the ABAA.
• For the dog lover who spares no expense for his or her canine best friend, the Bowlingual, which translates a dog's barks into words and illustrations, charts the dog's emotions, even analyzes its gestures.
• Some spirits for your more spirited friends: Veuve Clicquot La Grand Dame (if you're extremely wealthy, grab a bottle of 1990 Rose Malette for $2000, and please send me a bottle as well), Redbreast 12 year old Irish whiskey (new to the U.S., and thus hip enough for your veteran alcoholic friends), Fonseca 20 Year Tawny port (a classic brand for your high falutin friends), Pearl vodka (for your lady friend's next fruity drink, this is the latest hot vodka being served at a cool bar or restaurant near you), or Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit Barrel Straight Bourbon (for your writer friend, like me).

What do you all suggest as good gifts for this holiday season? Help educate so that we all end up with stuff that doesn't need to be returned, which means driving to a store, depleting fossil fuels and polluting the environment.

Ah, I can't wait for the holidays, when the mouths of my friends and family are filled with pretty lies and their arms bear gifts.

What's better

That's a question, not a statement. I was glad to see Large Marge (scary trucker lady face from Pee Wee's Big Adventure) kicking Kroger's butt.

Sniff, sniff--"Hey, do you smell something burning?"

What does it say about bloggers and their sense of humor that 3 of the top 10 most linked to stories in weblogs today were about this guy who burned his, umm, member with a laptop. Let me note that I write this on my laptop which is resting on my lap, but with a protective piece of cardboard to separate titanium from skin.

Random thoughts

New fiction editor at The New Yorker. A good thing, I think. The fiction there needs some more crackle.

The Sopranos isn't as good this year. Too many random story threads that don't move along quickly enough.

The West Wing hasn't been stellar either, though the last episode was good. After a while I wish Sorkin would put some flesh and blood in his liberal puppets. Let Seaborn hook up with Leo's daughter. Have Josh fall prey to Donna's charms one late night at the office.

Woody speaks out agains the war. Woody! When I think Woody, I think of Indecent Proposal, where he is holding that brick, giving a lecture on architecture, John Barry's lush score rising to a crest of emotion as Woody proclaims, "Even a brick wants to be more than a brick." Woody?

Any concert with a big name that's worth seeing in Seattle sells out instantly. If you're not ready to redial Ticketmaster on Saturday morning like a spastic 13 year old girl trying to get N'Sync concert tickets, you're totally out of luck. When you get through, you'll be put on hold for about half an hour, at which point some Ticketmaster agent will try to upsell you on four different Ticketmaster magazines and two different overpriced Ticketmaster services before giving you two tickets in a section you don't want to sit, and they'll charge you $8.25 per ticket as a handling charge. Someone break down this handling charge for me--I'm sorry, is Gisele Bundchen going to hand deliver my tickets, because that bored phone rep on the other end of the line sure isn't lifting a finger, judging from the passion in her reading of the sales script in front of her. Dealing with Ticketmaster is like being forced to watch Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood or Riding Cars with Boys in a shitty movie theater with unhinged seats covered in gum from viewers from a few months back. Anyway, back to the point of this whole thing...if Beck brings the Flaming Lips to Benaroya and I miss out, I am moving.

A very sweet Dell customer service representative with a Southern accent agreed to offer me a refund on the RAM which Dell convinced me to purchase and which failed to work in my computer because of some strange limitation in the way Rambus RAM has to be configured. That was the highlight of my day. PCNation.com, on the other hand, still hasn't shipped my photo printer and has no idea where it is. It's been three months now.

A start

Last Saturday afternoon, I dropped my car off for a repair, and they told me they needed to keep it longer than expected. So there I was, stranded without wheels for five hours. I could have taken the shuttle home, but I had my laptop with me, and in a moment which in a movie would be one of those subtle and crucial turning points in a character's development.

I climb into the car dealer shuttle, and the driver asks me where I want to go. Home, I almost say. The office, I should respond. But after weeks of living in Amazon headquarters all day, and after a morning of working through bug lists on e-mail, I need a break. My brain is cooked.

I could head downtown and shop, buy myself something. But it's a habit I distrust, this self-indulgence after spurts of industriousness. Strikes me as weakness--after all, I want the freedom to get something when I need it, whenever that may be.

Take me downtown, I say. I realize I need to take my watch in for a new battery, so I can start with that, deferring my decision for a bit. Besides, I have my laptop with me, and an idea is sprouting in the corner of my mind.

People everywhere downtown. When I first came to Seattle, it was pretty desolate downtown on the weekends for a big city. Now, with Pacific Place's parking lot (the most crucial cog in the revival of Seattle's downtown commerce in all the time I've been here) and all the big shops lining 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th St., people stream up and down the veins of downtown like they do in the heart of any bustling metropolis. Just being outside, everyone all around, gives me energy.

Four hours to kill. I know what I have to do. I've said it before, so I must take some of my own medicine. I find the nearest Starbucks (in Seattle, that means I just turn around), walk in, pop out my laptop and plug it into the wall, pull out my iPod and pop in my headphones, crank up the tunes, and start writing.

I have this germ of an idea for a screenplay, and some source material with me. So I pull that out of my bag and begin jotting out an outline. Three acts. No wait, it feels more like four. Non-conventional, but when you're in draft mode anything goes. I can always pare it back later.

Back in school, I'd do this once a week, or whenever the mood struck. This outlining. That way I always had skeletons or crude sketches of all sorts of stories in my pocket at any point in time. Finish one story, and instead of reading it, I'd move on to some other story skeleton and give it some flesh and guts. Then, later, I'd pull the completed story back out and re-read it with a critical eye.

I can't always write to music, but the the joy of the iPod is that it stores a gazillion songs and provides just enough noise to drown out the sound of the espresso machine and all the strangers around me. Four hours later, I have a 6 page outline. Four acts of about 21 scenes each. Obviously too long, this is more like a two part miniseries, but always better to have a mind pregnant with ideas than to engage in a staring contest with a solid block of whitespace.

It's been a long time since I've written. It feels good. I know I've got a long night ahead at the office, but I'm flush with writer's high, the satisfaction of the artist who has just surfaced from a long swim in the depths of his craft. Maybe that's too florid a description. But then, writing is not always that fluid and enjoyable a process, so those chances I get to romanticize it? I grab them. Later when I'm struggling I can look back and remind myself that good times lie ahead.

No. 40 is No. 1

If money was no object, this would be the brains of your home theater. I demo'd one, and it was unreal.

It should only set you back $30,000 or so.

Shock jocks

Mornings right now are brutal because my right shoulder, which I separated in the bike accident, is so stiff after a long night of inactivity. I never realized how important the shoulder is in so many movements until now. I was lying there trying to roll myself over and up out of bed without using my right arm; basically, I was stuck.

On popped my radio alarm clock, and it was some shock jock engaged in a heated debate with some caller. And, I'm not making any of this up, this is the conversation they were having:

Jock (shouting): Next time I see a cyclist in the road, I'm running him over! GET OUT OF THE ROAD! I'm so sick of these damn cyclists!

Caller: Cyclists should be treated like cars. You should wait until it's clear to pass.

Jock (shouting): Cyclists are two-wheeled wimps. They are not the same as cars. Get on the sidewalk. Get out of the road. I'm so sick of cyclists while driving in Capitol Hill.

Caller: You're stupid.

Jock (shouting): I'm stupid?! I'm stupid?! You're an idiot. I see you on the road, I'm running you over.

Caller: How about I come over there and beat you up.

Jock (shouting): You want to come beat me up? Come on in. I'll kick your ass.

I'm not sure what radio station it was, but it was the same guy I've listened to on the radio every morning since I got to Seattle. Basically, with my cheap clock radio, I'm relegated to leaving it on the one radio station I get good reception on, or using the BEEP-BEEP-BEEP heart-attack-inducing siren that all alarm clocks are loaded with at the factory. This guy is a moron (so was the caller, but given my bike incident, I was locked on the DJ). I wanted to head over to the radio station and throttle the guy with his headphone cord.

Seriously, 95% of radio station shock jocks are simple-minded monkeys intended to boost radio interest through their controversial, inflammatory rhetoric. Like sports radio hosts who don't know the first thing about sports. They sit in the studios, behind the glass, insulated from all human contact like a circus freak, shouting at callers through microphones from their cells, making prank phone calls to random people for kicks. Why do we have to put up with these idiots?

On my way home from work late tonight, a prostitute was standing in the road near the intersection of Massachusetts and Rainier. I stopped because I thought she was crossing the street, but she didn't move. Instead, she made hand gestures and asked if she could get in the car. I waved her off and drove around her, and she started cursing at me using language not suitable for my PG-13 blog.

Fortunately, in between the morning and the evening, I was at the office where most of my coworkers were sane.

Segway

I saw my first Segway rider in public today. Some guy cruised by as I drove to work this morning. It was a rough neighborhood, too. I guess he wasn't too worried about getting Segway-jacked in broad daylight.

I look forward to the day when a healthy Segway after-market of parts and modifications exist so that people can lower their Segways, add chrome hubs, neon highlights, and 400 watt subwoofers. Well, I don't look forward to it, but you know what I mean...never mind.

Digital cameras--is it their time?

Luminous Landscape has done a field test on the new Canon EOS 1Ds 11 megapixel digital camera. Exciting results, as it appears that digital is making huge inroads on film. Of course, some people will continue to raise the flag of analog, much as some people refuse to buy CDs while hanging on to their LP collections for dear life.

At some point, though, the cost equation will work out such that digital is more economical. Perhaps not at the price of this Canon (currently list price is $8,999!) but very soon. I really wish Nikon would come out with a high end body with this type of resolution soon. Even more exciting, these new digital cameras will shoot full-frame, without any magnification factor. It's a huge leap forward in the digital camera arena.

This, added up with the fact that you can preview digital photos, change the ISO on the fly, never have to worry about what type of film you have in the body (color or B&W) or carry two camera bodies, and avoid the delay and cost of film processing and scaning means I'll be in the market for the next high end Nikon digital camera body if I can afford it (the Kodak DCS Pro 14n is based on a Nikon body and promises 14 megapixels, but I haven't read any reviews of it yet).

I...love...football on TV

Sometime over the weekend, maybe it was last week, the intro to Sportscenter consisted of a spoof of those Coors Light football commercials. You know, the ones that go, "I...love...football on TV...shots of Gena Lee...and those twins." Or, whatever it is they say. Anyone, some news anchor clearly spent a lot of time writing up that intro, and I just want to applaud his creativity. I wish I had it on tape. Anyway, instead of those blond twins, the anchor substituted the Minnesota Twins.

All the underdogs have won in the baseball playoffs so far. The perfect rebuke to Bud Selig and his pronouncements of doom.

Go Twinkies.

Super size it

Addendum to my Fall TV recommendations. Purchase a TIVO, open it up, and stick in a humongous hard drive. Not hard to find instructions and kits for sale on the web. Or pay someone else to do it for you. Never miss another television show in your life. I have several full seasons of TV shows on my TIVO, and no idea when I'll ever watch any of it. But it feels good, like a chipmunk hoarding walnuts months before winter hits. The only thing the TIVO needs is the ability to tape AC-3 signals off of a satellite feed, or a DVD. Besides that, I can't complain.

Exchange

We migrated to Microsoft Exchange at work. So Microsoft Outlook now governs my life. The calendaring function works fine enough. But for e-mail, for some strange reason, the program isn't smart enough to ask people which of my e-mail addresses to use when they send me messages. Somehow, probably because I sent someone at work a message from my home e-mail, I now receive all sorts of work e-mail at my home e-mail address.

I could configure Outlook to pull my personal e-mail into a separate account at work, but I like to keep my two worlds separate. You get home, thinking you'll get an hour to eat dinner, read the day's mail, and then sit on my sofa and drool for an hour before passing out. Then you open your e-mail and find, much to your dismay, ten work e-mail messages, some with the dreaded red exclamation point! Worlds are colliding!

Calling the raise

Saddam came back with a very smart political counter--he granted U.N. inspectors unconditional access to Iraq. Not much to do except take his word on it and send the inspection crews back in. Any grumbling from Washington, and there's been some, will undermine the multilateral support the Bush administration has just managed to muster in the past week. Bush and his team have to think on the fly.

Safety, and boredom, in numbers

I'm at the age where some truths become quite evident. At the top of that list right now, or at least at the top of my mind, is how boring your friends become when they enter a relationship. Infinitely interesting to each other, mind-numbingly dull to the rest of us.

Every now and then one of them gets a night off from their other half, so they look you up for something, and you spend the whole time listening to them discuss their fairly uninteresting relationship.

I give up on asking anyone in a relationship to do anything other than bring their mate out to other events with other couples. It's a lousy investment of time--they rarely come through. It's like giving the ball to Chris Webber with the clock running down and your team down by one. He'll either call a timeout or toss the ball to someone else. Sorry, too many sports references. Mmm, how about: it's like asking Winona Ryder not to date malnourished male lead singers.

I need an editor.

I'm offending many readers, and I'll receive a few well-written pleas of innocence, but the rest of you know who you are. This is one of those generalizations that you laugh off with your friends in the early twenties, and then suddenly you realize you're the last one laughing and everyone else is sitting there stone silent or looking off sheepishly (a scene which only happens in TV sitcoms, yes, but you get the point). Then they look at their watch, mutter something under their breath, and slink off to look at carpet or see My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

P.S.: Yes, some single people are dull, too, but that's because they're dull to begin with. The tragedy of the 1+1=0 couple is that usually they were actually charismatic before they hooked up. We need a name for this syndrome, and it should be the name of some dull couple.

P.P.S: Sorry, I take it all back, I love all my friends who are in relationships, or married, or have kids. It must be the long hours at the office talking. Sometimes I read some of my old entries and think, "What a santimonious ass." I need a mood indicator on my website, and right now it would be red--cantankerous and sarcastic.

Please please tell me about My Big Fat Greek Wedding, because I haven't seen it yet.

In addition to an editor, I think I need a therapist. A Dr. Melfi. It's like a high school counselor for wealthy people. I can't afford one. Sometimes in conversation I just feel like throwing in, "My therapist thinks I should..." It's just a great line to insert in conversation.

Fits and starts

A stretch of two weeks with little sleep, lots of stress, and no time on the bike has left me ragged. I can tell when I'm red-lining by the quality of my sleep. I meant to sleep in this morning as it was a Saturday, but despite rolling around in bed until 3 in the morning, I got up at 8:00 feeling tired and sleepy but unable to achieve REM. I hate this inability to sleep in on Saturday mornings. There must be some sort of remedy--maybe I need to do a long ride on Friday night.

I passed out on the sofa at noon and had a nightmare in which a friend and I were under attack by the U.S. army. We were hiding out in some house across the street from a gas station, out in the middle of nowhere, and an entire legion of tanks, helicopters, and soldiers were putting us under heavy fire. Fortunately, there was a gigantic, mounted machine gun (the kind you see on battleships, with a cockpit) and I was sitting in it returning fire, blowing helicopters out of the sky, shredding soldiers with gunfire like they were cardboard targets. Then I threw about four grenades across the street at the gas station and my friend and I sprinted into the house as the whole world blew up behind us. In the garage, we located a gold Camry with keys in the ignition. I told my friend (can't remember who it was) to get the car started and rushed back into the house to pick up some weapons for the road. We were fugitives now.

Up the stairs and into the bedroom where I begin throwing weapons into a duffel bag. Voices behind me. The door shatters inwards and a whole bunch of soldiers in riot gear rush in, jump me, and begin beating me with their feet and rifle butts. I wake up with my heart going double time.

It's one of those dreams which I knew immediately was about work in a way that only the dreamer can interpret in a way that's more than intuition. It's that direct channel to the subconscious.

The few times I save an evening or a few hours for myself, it feels like I'm coming up for air after a long time underwater. Big heaving gulps, blinded by sunlight, look around to get bearings, and then down below again. Hard to keep much of a social calendar when all the desirable hours are blocked off. Cancel an appointment with someone and my next open spot is two weeks later. Since I'm not a restaurant, that's nothing to be proud of.

Why don't they just make the phone out of that stuff

Late in the office one night last week, I heard a cell phone going off in the office next door to mine. At the same time, the picture on my monitor began vibrating with each ring, producing a buzzing noise at the same time. I'm used to seeing that type of disturbance when my own cell phone goes off, but this phone was ringing on the other side of a wall! Frightening.

Maybe I need to fly to Europe next year and purchase a pair of these.

Speaking of design, is there any lower quality product than the plastic CD jewel case? Just about one out of two CDs I receive in the mail arrives in a cracked jewel case. You would think after decades of study in the field of plastics that they could design a CD case that wouldn't crack if dropped on the ground. Music labels probably contract out for the lowest grade plastic available to maximize their already ridiculous profit margins on each CD sold. In a day and age when most people with computers have CD burners and can buy blank CD-Rs in bulk for next to nothing, the continued existence of $14.99 price points on new CDs is an affront to consumer intelligence.

Stands for Big Missing Picture

Didn't realize that .bmp files, which most websites seem to use for their photos, don't show up in the Mac version of IE. I think I realized this once before, when browsing my own website from my Mac, but I always forget. Must be because sites don't want their pictures easily copied and used on other sites, but it's kind of a pain. When I save pictures on my Windows PC, many are in BMP format. If I don't bother converting them into JPGs then Mac browsers just see a bunch of empty spaces on my site.

Downloadable surround sound

This is pretty cool. You can download a Dolby Digital or DTS file to your computer, burn it to a CD-R as an audio CD, and play it in surround sound on your home theater. Of course, you need a surround sound set-up in your home. II'll give it a try tonight.

Ah! There it is!

Who says electronic equipment doesn't need breaking in. After a week of usage and endless tinkering, and after I finally got my DVD player back from the shop with the upgrade to a progressive scan processor, the picture on my new TV is now finally officially gorgeous. It's a combination of things--feeding it a pristing progressive 480p signal from my Proceed's new PVP card, and the sharp, bright picture from the TV's three 7" CRTs. No more scan lines, bold and beautiful colors with neutral skin tones, a smooth and soft film-like picture as opposed to the harsh video-like picture of most televisions.

What's more, my DVD player can take any video signal from my receiver and de-interlace it before feeding it to my TV as 480p. The TV has the ability to de-interlace as well, but my DVD player does a much better job of doing so. I could sit here and watch movies on it all day (which is pretty much what I've been doing most evenings this weekend).

Any day now I should get my receiver back with its upgraded DSP circuitry and support for higher resolution audio. Can't wait. It may be enough to warrant purchasing an SACD player. Some people buy a house and then decide what room they might use to put a home theater. If/when I start house-hunting, I'll be the first person to look for a house that will fit around my home theater, because the next major upgrade to my home theater is a perfectly symmetrical rectangular room with harder floors and walls with particular reflective qualities.

Yes, I know, I shouldn't derive so much pleasure from material goods, but the quest for audio/video perfection is no different for me than a runner's quest for the perfect race, or a photographer's yearning for that perfect shot. You're never done, and you're having fun the whole way through.

It's time to revive movie night. I have a schedule in mind already. And a format, adopted from Flicks at Stanford. Every movie night begins with a short, and then the main feature. And relevant food, if possible.

Chinese editing style

Watching What Time is it There, the most recent movie by Tsai Ming Liang, and got to wondering why it is that so many directors from the Taiwan New Wave use such long takes without cutting while the Average American film can't go more than a few seconds without jumping to a new shot; it can't just be the influence of MTV and the fact that so many American directors got their start directing commercials...or can it? Maybe the American movie industry got its hands on so many toys and big budgets early on and fell in love with them and their endless possibilities, or maybe the Chinese camera eye is simply more patient, less intrusive; this might be seen as a very Chinese New Wave type of blog, with long, uninterrupted sentences, continuous flowing thoughts.

Tsai Ming Liang films also don't really have much action or even a soundtrack, which, along with the motionless camera shots, give the viewer a sense of quiet.

Shimano XTR 2003

MTB fans everywhere await the new Shimano XTR components with bated breath. This will be the third generation of these legendary top-of-the-line MTB component set.

Two things catch my eye. The new disc brakes weigh only 557 grams in front. That's not much more than the XTR V-brakes at 484 grams. The new XTR disc brakes are reputed to be the best disc brakes on the market, with significantly more stopping power. This probably is the end of linear pull on MTB bikes. I'll need to upgrade!

Also, the shifters have taken a page from the road bike world and reduced shifting down to one lever. To move from one chainring to the other, you flick the brake lever up or down. Same for the rear derailleur. It's a pretty radical shift (pun intended) and will surely draw a lot of polarized opinion.

Other than that, there are the requisite weight savings almost across the board. Can't wait to test some of this stuff out.

Good interview mind teaser

How many traffic signals in Manhattan?

Heaven

Finally, that trailer for Heaven, the movie I mentioned in an earlier post.

The Kid Stays in the Picture

Engrossing documentary about a fascinating ego. I see a story like this and it scratches an itch I can't reach because I'm wearing a cast.

The movie leads with a quote: "There are three sides to each story. My side, your side and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently."

And so Robert Evans gives advance notice that he'll be narrating his side of the story, and that's fine. He knows it will be biased, but honestly so. Frankly, it's loads more entertaining because it is his point of view. Who doesn't want to hear directly from a guy who produced The Godfather, Marathon Man, Love Story, and Rosemary's Baby; married Ali Macgraw, then lost her to Steve McQueen; got caught in a cocaine sting by the DEA; was a suspect in the murder of an associate; committed himself to a mental hospital for fear he'd kill himself; and all the while, bedded most every gorgeous model and actress in Hollywood?

Back in black

My car is finally back from the shop. Man, I missed it. Days when things don't work out, when you get behind the wheel, it's great to know that everything works exactly the way you want it to when you put your foot down and turn the steering wheel.

At the same time, I read an article in The New Yorker about traffic, and how it's getting steadily worse all across the country. So I think, perhaps I'll take public transportation.

But yesterday, some kid hijacked a bus in Seattle, drove it at insane speeds down a local city street, demolishing a few cars, sending a few people to the hospital, finally crashing on a sidewalk just down the street from my house. Ironically, without knowing what had happened, I was hitching a ride back home from Amy and we were discussing a bus accident in Seattle many years earlier. Then, the bus in question was the one I usually took home. Some guy shot the driver, shot himself, and the bus ran across a few lanes on the Aurora bridge, smashed through the side rail, and plummeted head first down through a few floors of an apartment down below.

So maybe I'll bike? No, the office won't let me bring my bike up to my office. I've had three bikes stolen in my life, I'm not going through that heartache again. All offices should allow employees to bring bikes up to their office. Ours allows dogs but not bikes. Hmm.

Valuable real estate

Today, across the country, lots of readers receive their weekly copy of The New Yorker by mail. First thing you do with a magazine like The New Yorker is flip to the table of contents. It used to always be on the first page after the cover, on the backside (which is the left page if you have the magazine laid open). Now it's occasionally one or two pages in, after a few ads. Not as good as the old days, but not quite as bad as Vanity Fair or GQ where you spend ten minutes searching for a table of contents amidst ten or twenty pages of pouty models sporting clothes they look terribly bored to be wearing.

Anyway, next to the table of contents, in the left-hand gutter, is always a vertical pillar of adspace. Usually, it's for a book. Today's featured book? You Are Not a Stranger Here. The first rave review excerpt reads:

"A genuinely heartbreaking work of staggering genius."

Obviously an appeal to the hundreds of thousands of readers of Dave Eggers book of that title.

The next review? By Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections:

"A wonderful rarity: an old-fashioned young storyteller with something urgent and fresh and fiercely intelligent to say."

An appeal to the millions of readers of Franzen's novel.

Intrigued, I visited Amazon to check out the book. Only then did I find out, after reading a few customer reviews, that it was a collection of short stories, not a novel. Not just that, it was the #9 best seller in the bookstore.

Had to be the New Yorker ad. I've never even heard of that book. Makes me thing that was a darn good ad, and that the table of contents page in The New Yorker is one damn valuable piece of real estate. It's pretty hard to navigate the New Yorker without checking out the table of contents, one of the best in any magazine. Because people use it, and because it's very spare (author, page, title, subtitle, and a one-line fragment about the subject of the article), the ad space next to it jumps out at thousands of readers every Thursday.

If I ever publish a book, I'll know I've made it if my publisher buys that ad space.

A collection of short stories in the top 10! That never happens.

Jaguar, iPod

Jaguar: faster, definitely, than OS X 10.1.5; still good-looking; stable; great developer tools; overpriced, because lots of the bundled apps are available for free from Apple already, especially overpriced if you already bought an earlier version of OS X.

iPod: beautifully functional; great asset for creative professionals, because the proper soundtrack for life is always at hand; not good for jogging or working out, because it's a hard drive, and those are inherently delicate.

Boy!

Sharon's having a boy! Alan saw his "boy part" on the ultrasound.

The audience is listening

Cool Slashdot thread about burning AC-3 CD-R's.

What I'll miss watching in baseball

If players go on strike, here are a few things I'll miss watching:

• Kevin Brown torquing his body to throw some of the filthiest pitches around, sinkers that drop down and sideways like lead buzzsaws.
• Andruw Jones, the human web gem, chasing, or really gliding, down flyballs in center field
• Roy Oswalt pitching. His stuff and his attitude are filthy. All sharp, hard, severe, from his pitching motion to his pitches. Contrast that to...
• Greg Maddux pitching. Smooth, subtle, watercolor painting both sides of the plate with pitches that are fluid and always in motion. Contrast that to...
• Curt Schilling pitching. Once he got control of his power pitches, he became that rarest of breeds, the power-control pitcher, like Roger Clemens. Or Pedro Martinez. All 3 have so many weapons that when they're on it's really unfair for hitters. A 96 mph fastball with location is mean enough, but if you follow that up with a splitter just above knees that drops into the dirt or a slider on the outside lower corner of the plate that looks like a fastball until it takes a hard turn down and left, that's cruel and unusual.
• Barry Zito's overhand curve, especially when there's a pair of knees buckling on the other end.
• Barry Bonds at bat. I've never seen anyone so locked in at the plate for such an extended period of time. If you throw a bad pitch anywhere near the strike zone Barry will hit a home run. He has, late in his career, adopted more of an upper cut type of swing to produce more fly balls, but it's not a long, loopy uppercut. It's a compact, uppercut swing with massive torque generated by keeping his weight back and opening up his hips hard and rotating his upper body off an axis from his head down his front leg. Kerry Wood versus Barry Bonds was the most exciting at bat of the year. Wood went after him with several 99mph fastballs, and then punched him out with an unhittable 12 to 6 overhand curve. Second most exciting at bat was Randy Johnson striking out Todd Helton to end a game. He blew him away with three straight fastballs of 100mph, 101mph, and 102mph.
• Vladimir Guerrero firing a cannon out of deep right field to nail a runner at the plate. The most exciting player in baseball.

Maybe the owners and players don't enjoy those things as much as I do, because apparently billions of dollars aren't enough to keep all that going.

Oh well, thank goodness for football. I just participated in my first ever rotisserie football draft, so I'm all ready for Sunday pigskin action.

Z4

The new BMW Z4 roadster.

Roadsters scream mid-life crisis, or pampered wife. They're glorified go-carts.

Tube job

End of an era. My faithful Pioneer 1009W has moved next door with Scott, and a new Pioneer 720HD has moved in to serve as my faithful entertainment companion. Man, I loved that 1009W. After it was calibrated, it just put out an awesome movie picture. The 720HD has a ways to go to achieve that. It needs breaking in and lots of calibration. But it can handle progressive scan and high-def signals, and it was high time for me to join that world. Now I just need my receiver back and I'll be ready to begin hosting movie nights all over again.

PunchDrunkLove

When Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Hard Eight, Magnolia) said he was making a movie starring Adam Sandler, it seemed like the kind of brash declaration he'd absolutely follow up on. After all, what greater challenge for an acclaimed director than taking an actor that everyone considers a low-brow comedian and directing him to critical acclaim? Sounded exactly like something PTA would try. Well, now there's proof.

The trailer(s) are out. Click on Punch, Drunk, and Love to see each of the three. Can't wait for this movie!

Norah sings Crazy

Music (RealAudio) to surf by.

Seven's a lucky number

Fashionistas think of jeans, but cyclists know Seven stands for one of the hottest custom bikes you can buy. Italians make great looking bikes--Bianchi, Colnago--but Americans make the most technically advanced custom titanium bikes--Serotta, Merlin, Litespeed, and the aforementioned Seven. If they could just combine the two--a custom ti frame with the European race colors of a Colnago--you'd have a metallic babe with brains. Or, um, something like that.

New trailer for The Ring

The American adaptation of the Japanese horror classic--Quicktime trailer in high res. I have a hard time believing this adaption will match the original in creepiness, but it does star the talented Naomi Watts. If it's successful, prepare for a wave of adaptations because there's an entire library of good, low-budget Japanese horror films for Hollywood to mine (and ruin).

For the love of *&^$%#

Okay, it's the 21st century. Can someone please invent a vending machine that dispenses the item you selected successfully 100% of the time? You reach in your pocket, miraculously cobble together a half pound of nickels and dimes that just adds up perfectly to the cost of a bag of pretzels or chips or cookies, and then you press the button and the metal coils turn, and your bag is pushed forward from with a mechanical whir, and then....it hovers there in space, like a bag of Doritos trying to commit suicide by jumping from the 8th story of its vending apartment.

I'm not sure what burns me more, not getting my chips or the thought of someone else getting two bags of chips. I want a tax deduction.

9 minutes

I think I read this in a Sports Guy mailbag column, and it came to mind this morning. I've been getting up at 5:30 am every morning this week--I'm still on French time. My alarm goes off at 6 am, and I hit the snooze button.

9 minute later, the alarm is back on. Some ensemble morning talk show hosts babbling on with energy and enthusiasm that is superhuman considering the time of day. Inevitably, once a week, the host has to chew out a caller who's dying to hear himself live, "Please turn off the radio, Bob." Where was I? Oh yeah. 9 minutes. Why are all alarm clock snoozes set at 9 minutes? Someone has to tell me. Is there some scientific axiom that 9 minutes is just enough time for you to pass out again, but not deeply enough to achieve REM sleep? Maybe one company in the world has a monopoly on making the snooze chip for alarm clocks globally, and they're too stingy to change their production process to accomodate alternate snooze intervals.

I should have tried it with the hotel alarm clocks in France. They still measure time in minutes, but maybe the metric system means you have to multiply the 9 minutes by 1.67 or something like that so their snoozes are 15 minutes. Actually, they probably have 30 minute snooze increments considering dinner out in Europe lasts about 4 hours. How can you have faith in the European economy if they don't understand that the more people you cycle through a restaurant, the more money you make?

The damn Air France air baggage handlers were on strike in Paris when I flew over for my Tour de France camp, so my bags were stranded there for days as I flew on to Marseilles. Then on the way home, the KLM pilots were on strike so I was stranded a day in Amsterdam. They have laws limiting work weeks to 35 hours in France, and they still strike. And they complain about Lance Armstrong, an American, winning their race year after year. They should stop striking and get to work.

Chicago

RealOne trailer for the new movie adaptation of the musical Chicago. Click on the link that reads "haute resolution" for the high-res version, or "moyenne resolution" for you lower bandwidth users. Catherine Zeta Jones is barely recognizable in costume. Of course, so was Michael Douglas when she fell for him (there's no other explanation), and then BAM! He stops using makeup and ages 50 years on her in a day. Yikes, that must have been a tough morning when she woke up to that. Talk about scary morning faces.

Airline security in Europe

European airports do their carry-on baggage security x-ray screening at each gate, rather than en masse before you enter the terminal. It's a superior system. Costs more because you have to buy more of those x-ray machines and hire more security staff, but it means less time in line for passengers, and if there's a security breach or delay, only a subset of passengers is affected.

Schizo TIVO

My hacked Tivo device (it has two giant hard drives patched into it for 305 hours of recording time) has some algorithm for selecting random programs to record as suggested viewing. I think it's supposed to be based on other programs I've instructed it to record, but the algorithm isn't very good. Much to my horror, one of the shows it selected was Nash Bridges.

Little pink coffin

Yet another company has announced a tool for fighting spam (unsolicited e-mail, not the mysterious canned meat). Cloudmark's tool is called SpamNet.

The idea is that this add-on software places an extra folder in your e-mail program. When you receive spam, you can click on it and add it to your spam folder, where it gets reported back to a central server somewhere. If you report spam properly, your future reports are taken more seriously. The idea is that there are just as many, probably a lot more, people reading e-mail and receiving spam as there are sending spam. Of course, each spam mailer sends out a ton more e-mail than the average recipient. However, if the entire e-mail community begins to report spam, you have an entire army fighting the problem instead of relying on a small central group to track it.

Clever idea, and one of the more promising approaches I've heard.

SpamNet only works for Windows computers running Outlook. If you qualify, I encourage you to download it. Since it derives its power from the size and participation of its community (like Napster, or SETI@Home), it will only be effective if a critical mass of users adopt it. You'll feel like you're contributing to better the world of e-mail for everyone--think of it as volunteer work.

What they really need is to have support for Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, whose accounts tend to be spammed mercilessly because spammers can just guess at usernames to attach to @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com. My home e-mail account is actually fairly immune to spam so far. Or someone like Microsoft or some standards board should encourage its integration directly into Outlook and other popular e-mail programs as a standard.

Electronica

Odd convergences. Cleaning out my e-mail at work today and found an old link from James to the video for Dirty Vegas' Days Go By. You know this song, even though the title may not be familiar. It's the one in the Mitsubishi Eclipse commercial, where three young'uns are driving at night, seemingly to a rave, and this song comes on, and the girl in the passenger seat starts grooving.

Cool commercial. Cool tune. Same day, I read an article in Salon about the influence of electronic music on the American music scene, and it mentions this song and the commercial a couple times.

Oh yeah, cool video. Go check it out. I couldn't get the Quicktime link to work, but the Windows Media link came up just fine. I may use a few of those moves next time out on the dance floor.

What the $#@*&!

The fifth leading votegetter for an NL outfield spot in the 2002 MLB All-star game is Tsuyoshi Shinjo, ahead of Andruw Jones, Larry Walker, Jim Edmonds. What, can people not tell the difference between Japanese outfielders and think he's Ichiro? Actually, Armando Rios of Pittsburgh has more votes than Andruw Jones or Larry Walker. I have no idea how that happened.

Creative Comments, er, Commons

Another interesting interview with Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford and the public figure most known for trying to get the folks in D.C. to understand the world of technology and how law might best apply in that world. I agree with him on the principles which he titles end-to-end, which says that you should keep the network simple, placing intelligence at the edges. The Internet is a good example. TCP/IP is fairly simple--it moves data. Computers at the edges of the network are smart and can do all sorts of fancy things like play movies or music, create web pages, process spreadsheets, etc. The principle allows networks to evolve quickly, without requiring the coordination of multiple parties.

Open Source Software

Joel has a theory on why various companies are pursuing open source software.

Quicktime

Quicktime rules.

Will it cause tumors in your ear

Now this would be a cool, a phone that is planted in your tooth and which you hear through your earbone. Someone could be whispering in my ear. All they'd need is a video feed to see what I'd be seeing and a panel of experts could be informing me of people's names, jokes, and random facts which would make me the toast of every cocktail party.

Of course, it would exacerbate the problem now where people talk into earpieces connected to their phones and I mistakenly think they're talking to me.

"Hello?" they'll say.

"Uh, hi," I respond.

(ignoring me) "Hey honey! How are you? Hey listen..." they chatter.

(small black cloud over an embarrassed yours truly)

Neato

Navigate to the Bang and Olufsen homepage and then to
International > Products > Telephones > BeoCom2

That is the coolest looking phone I've ever seen. Too bad it's not available in North America. Forget tiny cellphones with buttons you can barely press--sometimes bigger is better.

Also, you can hear a low bitrate RealAudio or Windows Media Player sample of Coldplay's new single In My Place from their upcoming album (titled A Rush of Blood to the Head). Catchy, happy BritPop. Go to Coldplay's homepage, then navigate to Audio/Video, then to Singles, and scroll down to the bottom. Rumor has it the band's breaking up after their next album, which would be unfortunate.

These two examples, by the way, illustrate the problem with entirely Flash-driven websites. You can't deep-link to content within them.

Kangaroo shoes

Most people are familiar with the comfort of a pair of true leather shoes which have stretched out to fit the contours of their feet. Adidas looked for a material that had even more give than the leather from cows and found it in kangaroo skin, used in their new top-of-the-line soccer shoe, The Adidas Predator (the shoe worn by the English
national hero, David Beckham, midfielder for Manchester United and loving husband of one former Posh Spice).

I would bemoan the use of kangaroos in such a manner but it turns out kangaroos have few natural predators anymore and are in no danger of extinction.

I'm surprised there are still any animals left which the fashion industry hasn't already exploited in some way. I wonder if we'll be wearing kangaroo leather pants and kangaroo dress shoes in a few years.

Broadband

If you still surf the web on some narrowband connection like a 56K modem but have alternatives, you should really consider trying them.

I couldn't live without my cable modem at home. My home Internet connection and PC are faster than the ones I use at work, which is an odd experience.

Jaguar

The next release of Mac OSX, code named Jaguar, looks pretty cool.

What else is cool? The new Ti notebook G4. So cool. Already my Ti notebook looks outdated.

And the Apple Cinema HD Display. Too cool.

I'm a lifelong Windows PC user, but I've got to admit, Apple is winning me over with its latest set of products. The design is beautiful, and Windows XP just doesn't really excite me at all. Neither does Office XP. Not that Office isn't a great application, but it's so good that every next release has to promise quantum improvements to justify hundreds of dollars in upgrade costs, and neither Windows XP of Office XP does it for me.

SUV for those who least need one

Porsche is finally pulling back the curtains on their entry in the SUV market, the Cayenne.

The turbo version goes from 0 to 62mph in 5.6 seconds. That's flat out ridiculous. Seriously, who needs that kind of power in an SUV? Gas-guzzling, environmentally unfriendly, pretentious SUV for people whose closest encounter with offroad driving is when their teenager runs over their lawn on their first attempt to learn to drive. Totally preposterous.

I want one.

Getting good buzz

A positive shout from Time about Episode II. Looks like they bagged the early mainstream media exclusive with Lucas and company on this one.

JetBlue--the next Southwest? I've heard about its leather seats and its cheap fares to New York.

Nikon D1X. I don't have a digital camera yet, but if I did, this is the one I'd want.

Random fame

On the web, it doesn't take much to get a massive infusion of traffic to your site. Make sure your computer has its sound turned up.

Fashion forward

Juli, my fashion consultant, helped me to pick out a pair of glasses on Saturday down at Marketplace Optical. As Susannah, the lady who worked there, explained, Marketplace specializes in frames that are "fashion forward." That basically means glasses that don't make you look like a geek.

Juli is a graphic designer, an illustrator, and one of the most stylish dressers I know. I highly recommend that you get to know someone like that to help you pick out clothes, glasses, artwork and furniture, etc. If I were wealthy and famous, I'd probably have names of people like that in my Rolodex (er, Palm Pilot, perhaps, in this day and age? that might be passe now also) for all occasions. I'm not, but I still have Juli, and thank heavens for that. Shopping will never be the same again.

I've never really worn glasses, but I'm a big fan. I can't wait to get my specs and transform into, mmm, someone else. Not quite me. Someone I'd like to be. A better me. Clark Kent.