Remains of the Day

Onward into 2009

There's this shot in The Wrestler, a steadicam shot behind Mickey Rourke as he walks through the back offices of a grocery store out to the deli counter. It echoes many other shots in the movie, from better times for Randy "The Ram" Robinson, and the visual reference is unmistakeable and poignant.

But just in case you're oblivious, the sound designer slowly mixes in the sounds of a raucous wrestling crowd chanting his name, just as he hears it when he prepares to walk out through the curtains at a wrestling event. It rises to a crescendo just as he's about to walk through the hanging plastic flaps out to the deli counter.

I wish they'd had the restraint to leave the shot as is and leave out the audio clue. What was an understated and lyrical moment is transformed into something overly sentimental, and I felt that way about many instances of the score in the movie which is otherwise shot in an unfussy, documentary style.

Besides that, though, it's a very moving film. You don't just feel for Randy "The Ram" Robinson but for Mickey Rourke who is nearly unrecognizable, at least to me. This is the guy from Diner and 9 1/2 Weeks?

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The Israel Consulate is using Twitter to manage their message during this military campaign against Hamas. It's a challenge, trying to communicate complex messages with a 140 character limit, as many organizations are learning while trying to use Twitter for unmediated communication with users. Lots of URL shorteners and common online abbreviations are used, lending an oddly casual air to what are serious messages.

Two perhaps adventitious consequences of this medium: the character limit forces a concise and often more forceful statement of a message, and users who write you are forced to adhere to the character limit also, so it's a level playing ground.

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Jay-Z crossed with Radiohead = Jaydiohead (from DJ Minty Fresh Beats)

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A movie trailer that is just one scene, perhaps not truncated or edited down from what appears in the movie itself? Effective.

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Given NYC's economic dependence on the finance industry, you'd expect Manhattan real estate to have taken a disproportionate beating in this recession.

In fact, New York's real estate market is proving more resilient in this downturn than that of other U.S. cities.

Today’s Case-Shiller housing price figures indicate that New York City’s prices dropped 7.5 percent in the last year, while prices in Los Angeles declined 27.9 percent. Nationwide prices dropped 18 percent. New York is the only major metropolitan area with prices that are still 90 percent above prices in January 2000. According to National Association of Realtors data, New York is the only city in the continental United States, outside of San Francisco Bay, where median sales prices remain north of $500,000.

Despite Wall Street’s suffering, the New York area’s unemployment rate, 5.6 percent in the latest figures, is lower than that in many other major cities. The comparable unemployment rate for Los Angeles is 8.2 percent. The comparable number for Chicago is 6.4 percent.

What's going on? Economist Edward Glaeser attributes it to faith in the city's talented citizens and concentration of said people.

New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.

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The first album of 2009 that's gathering critical buzz and mp3 blog lust: Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion

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The statistics behind the B.C.S. are not just inscrutable but fundamentally flawed.

Statistically, the system is such an abomination that at least one expert — Hal S. Stern, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Irvine — advocated that no self-respecting statistician should have anything to do with it. In an article published in The Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports two years ago, he wrote that the B.C.S. computer rankings serve as little more than a confirmation of the results of the two opinion polls the system also uses to create its rankings. The people who run the computer rankings, he noted, have never been given any clear objective criteria to design their programs, and they are not allowed to use the score or site of a game in their calculations. Stern urged a boycott, a refusal by the community of statisticians to lend credibility to a system he regards as scientifically bankrupt.

In the end, it comes down to money.

“The six big conferences don’t want to share money with the smaller conferences,” Stern said. “That to me is the story that people don’t tell.”

I've never understood the fascination with college football. The quality of play is noticeably inferior to that in the NFL, the BCS system encourage Division I powerhouses to pad their non-conference schedules with patsies, most players on teams are complete unknowns so the individual storylines have no range, the concept of the student-athlete is a farce at many schools in football, and the B.C.S. system, as noted above, doesn't clarify anything at season's end.

It feels like college football fans watch in part to try to reclaim some bygone university solidarity.

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According to CNET News, one of six sure things for 2009 is that Hulu will start its own porn site.

The Wi-Fi High Club

This post is being written from 30,000+ feet on a Virgin America flight from NYC to LA. The PA announcement was fuzzy, but I think it noted that this was one of 3 Virgin America planes outfitted with a wi-fi service they've dubbed GoGo.

Unfortunately my power outlet isn't working, so my online time may be limited. But for now, I've got wi-fi on my laptop, ESPN on Dish Network on my seatback entertainment system. Just connect my cellphone and my overstimulation is complete.

Google Calendar finally supports iCal

Google now supports the CalDAV protocol, so you can more easily sync Apple iCal with Google Calendar.

Now if only iCal would sync with Exchange. Stupid protocol incompatibilities.

The risks of being an early adopter

Great, my assistant is quitting on Dec. 8. You'd think in a recession she'd be grateful for the work. I guess I wasn't paying her enough. The truth is, I never paid her a dime, but then again, she never asked. Well, it was fun, and useful, while it lasted. Maybe someone can revive the service as iwantjoanholloway.com?

Pownce is closing shop, too, and this before I ever posted a single thing to my account. Aping Twitter's service and adding some just midly useful accoutrements didn't do it for them, no surprise.

Yes, in times of recession, some sort of revenue model matters.

Guided bullets

Maybe the crazy bullet-bending reality of the movie Wanted isn't so far-fetched.

Like a Wii OS

A video demo of a Minority-Report-like interface.

In the near-term, for us classical music aficionados, I'd love a Rock Band-like game for the Wii or another console that allows me to control an orchestra by waving a baton-controller. True, it would be a niche game, but I'd pay a premium for that.

The sacrifices of office

One casualty of Obama's victory in the Election: e-mail and his Blackberry.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

How crazy is it that the most important leader in the country can't use e-mail?

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.

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.

Fake celeb Twitter accounts

The use of Twitter for basic info, where you are, what you're doing, is not nearly as amusing as using it as a new comedic form, among which one of the more amusing niches is fake celebrity tweeting.

You know of Fake Sarah Palin by now, but one order higher on the complexity scale of humor is interaction between fake celebrity Twitter accounts.

Here's Fake Megan Fox replying to Fake Michael Bay:

@michael_bay has a saying: "I turn things from boring to awesome. Then I turn them from awesome to Bay."

My favorite fake Michael Bay tweet:

If Im groggy in the am I get a triple venti espresso from starbucks and dump it on the first homeless person I see in downtown LA. It works.

Every character on Mad Men seems to have their own Twitter accounts, though they don't quite do it for me. Part of the charm of those characters is their entrenchment in that time and the inscrutability of their inner lives, so the self-conscious and reflective nature of a Twitter account doesn't fit (AMC briefly had Twitter take them down, though they've since been restored).

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.

Geek references in Oscar Wao

The Amazon users' verdict on Spore: DRM bad

The restrictive DRM of Spore is one of the primary reasons it currently receives an average rating of 1 star at Amazon. That's across 2,123 reviews at last count, spurred on in part by the organizing power of the web, where DRM is a dirtier word than most four-letter words.

What is Spore's DRM? From what I've read, you have to connect to the web to activate the game the first time you install it, and you can only install the game on three computers before you have to call EA for permission to install it again. I have an old copy of Movie Magic Screenwriter that I bought years ago that had a similar DRM model, and I have to concede it's been a real hassle over the years. You have to be very careful to retire a computer from your installation count when you get a new computer or install a new operating system or have a hard drive fail on you, and you're stuck keeping that box of software around forever.

I hate DRM, it never thwarts the people it's focused on. Take iTunes. I buy a song on iTunes on one computer, and getting it to another computer is a hassle. If I copy the song to my iPod or iPhone, I can't pull it back down to my other laptop, even if both are computers I register among the 5 that I authorize to play those songs. I can never remember which computer my iPhone is synced to, but keeping my music in sync between all my Macs is way too difficult. This is probably due in great part to pressure from the music labels, but regardless of whose fault it is, the honest consumer suffers.

On gaming platforms, DRM is a tough pill to swallow when the competition from consoles is so stiff.

Meanwhile, Metacritic gives Spore an average review of 86 out of 100. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle as the web tends to attract polarized opinions. I haven't played Spore, but I doubt it's a 1-star game if you consider just gameplay. But as a form of mass protest, this is an effective one. If you're Electronic Arts, you sure as hell better listen and respond. Brands are meaning, and those meanings are written by more than just Will Wright and the employees at EA. And if you're on the fence about buying this game, you're going to hesitate when you see the following user review distribution.

Maybe the Democrats need to spread rumors that McCain and Palin come with DRM.

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.

The world's most powerful copying machine

Transcript of a great lecture by Cory Doctorow on the Internet and copyright law. Besides covering DRM and copyright law, Doctorow touches on some of the same points Clay Shirky raises in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, about the implications of the lowered costs of collaboration using the Internet.

Adium 1.3

The new version now adds Facebook chat connectivity.

New Firebug

Firebug 1.2 out today.

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.

Into the uncanny valley

I still don't think "Emily" has crossed the uncanny valley--in fact, she may just have gone deeper into it--but there's no doubt she's a big improvement over previous efforts towards realistic human facial expressions in digital animation. There's still something not quite right, especially with her eyes. But it's a visible step forward.

8 short notes on the day of Phelps' 8th gold medal

You wouldn't think a man would have much leisure time in a race in which he sets a new world record of 9.69 seconds, but Usain Bolt had enough of a lead at the end of the men's 100-meter dash to blow out finger pistols, flash Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella triangle hand sign, and check his watch.

If I were racing against him, I'd be intimidated just seeing "Bolt" on the back of his jersey.

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I thought I saw Michael Phelps ride across the pool to his last medal ceremony standing on the backs of two dolphins, holding a trident.

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I was wondering about something at dinner yesterday and saw that someone else had asked Marginal Revolution the same thing: for such a populous country, why has India won so few Olympic medals?

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Visual evidence that Nikon has made a huge comeback against Canon in the professional sports photography market. Look at the lenses in this shot of the press photography area at the Olympics.

Black lenses are likely Nikon's mounted on D3's, while the light gray lenses are the Canons that used to dominate.

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Is it worth carrying an airline-mile credit card? Probably not unless you are a big-spending, high-flying, elite status traveler. I ditched mine several years ago in favor of various cashback cards.

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Is it really possible Anthony Lane didn't know right away which actor was playing Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder? From his review:

He is a doughy, balding monster with big spectacles and even wider hand gestures, all his power distilled into profanity: a grotesque update, if you will, on the movie executive with the shock of white-hot hair, brought to life by Rod Steiger, in “The Big Knife,” more than fifty years ago. It took me half the running time to realize who was playing this new beast, and it was only his voice that triggered the recognition; I suspect that there will be gasps during the end credits, as people see his name and find themselves rethinking the whole movie, marvelling at what could have inspired so stiff an actor to unfurl and bounce around.

Roger Ebert also thinks some people will not recognize the actor behind this cameo:

The movie is a send-up of Hollywood, actors, acting, agents, directors, writers, rappers, trailers and egos, much enhanced by several cameo roles, the best of which I will not even mention. You’ll know the one, although you may have to wait for the credits to figure it out.

Really? I think most every person in the theater will know who it is right away.

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As if it wasn't already hard enough to tell what people really look like from their carefully chosen and touched-up Facebook profile photos, soon we may all have access to software that can automatically enhance facial attractiveness. This SIGGRAPH paper discusses the technique and shows some results which were validated by independent ratings.

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Ah, only in Texas.

Nibblets

Facebook's profile updates are rendered in an odd tense, in a very Facebook-centric view of the world. You change your profile to married, and instead of writing, "Scott changed his relationship status to married" it reads "Scott is now married." Never mind that he may have been married for years; in the Facebook world, nothing is so until you declare it so in your profile.

What happens if you change your sex? "Fred is no longer male"? Your birthday? "Susan is no longer born July 7, 1978"?

I am going to change my relationship status to king so it reads "Eugene is now king."

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As of Friday morning rehab, I am sans crutches. This is a big moment for me, and an even bigger moment for my armpits.

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To the person who came to my website via the Google search "eugene wei the dark knight" yesterday: yes, I am Batman.

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Speaking of Batman and my crutches, I didn't buy Harvey Dent's conversion in The Dark Knight. But I can empathize with the personality-transforming power of physical injuries or deformities. Having one bad leg, not being able to exercise, has definitely made me grumpier these past two or three months.

I walk by a homeless guy, and I flip a coin. Heads, I give the guy the coin. Tails, I kick him with my walking boot.

No, not really. But not being able to run or work off occasional frustration has left me snippier. I'm like Harvey Two-Leg.

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Lebron vs. Yao Ming in the Coke ad "Unity" from Smith&Foulkes for W+K Portland.

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One of the restaurants I wish I ate at before moving from NYC is Blue Hill at Stone Barns. This glowing review with its gorgeous photos is like a megaphone for that regret.

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Cleverly written commercials for dandruff shampoo that could be done by any one who knows After Effects.

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Why read The Watchmen, which has spiked in popularity now that the non-geek masses have seen The Watchmen trailer playing before The Dark Knight? Bryan Caplan says: "The Watchmen is the Best... Utilitarian Parable... Ever."

I've never thought of it that way, but having read that graphic novel probably five times in my life, I'd have to say it makes sense.

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"Tarantino's Mind" (short film)

Steve Jobs calls Joe Nocera

Rising the charts at the NYTimes most blogged articles is "Apple's Culture of Secrecy" by Joe Nocera.

On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I’d gotten my final “Steve’s health is a private matter” — and much to my amazement — Mr. Jobs called me. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.” After that rather arresting opening, he went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record. I tried to argue him out of it, but he said he wouldn’t talk if I insisted on an on-the-record conversation. So I agreed.

Because the conversation was off the record, I cannot disclose what Mr. Jobs told me. Suffice it to say that I didn’t hear anything that contradicted the reporting that John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than “a common bug,” they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer. After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money.

You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not.

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.

Watchmen comics set in motion

Watchmen comics set in motion: chapter one now available for free at the Apple store.

Purchased song sync via the iPhone

Important science

Scientific American interviews an expert in kinesiology and neuroscience to ask if someone could really be Batman. The conclusion was that it might be possible, but only for a short while before your body broke down.

Was this really a deep question people needed scientific verification for?

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.

Rock Band 2

Rock Band 2 is coming in September, exclusively on the XBox 360, then on to other platforms later in the year. More music, new peripherals, new online modes, but backwards compatibility for DLC and previous instruments.

Exclusive on the XBox 360 at launch? I guess that's just too bad for me and my PS3 version of the game.

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.

Tweet

Sometimes honesty is the best policy. Actually, more often than companies think, honesty is the best policy when it comes to problems. As in this post from a Twitter engineer about their downtime problems. The web is a giant rumor mill, and the longer companies hide the truth, the more people pile on, and at some point the web is both so vast and interconnected that it's like an echo chamber in which you can't control a story once it's picked up steam.

I signed up for Twitter early on, then ignored it for months as I didn't get much out of it, but I've come around to the idea of it as a really focused, stripped-down social networking application, albeit one that has not scaled gracefully.

Some have turned tweets into a comic art form:

New curse: "May Ry Cooder discover your people's traditional music."

More tweet goodness here.

***

Orson Scott Card rips J.K. Rowling for her lawsuit against a small publisher for their book The Harry Potter Lexicon.

To the victor go the spoils

Joel Spolsky, at the end of his recent "Architecture Astronauts Take Over":

Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

Now that's a business strategy I hadn't thought of: using your vast financial resources to essentially corner the market on programming talent. Hah.

I don't know what Microsoft and Google have all their developers working on, but there's no doubt that it's a great time to be a developer. After English, or perhaps before it, the most valuable language for a kid to learn is a programming language.

In all seriousness, it's more than money that makes Google such a formidable recruiter of technical talent. There's a mythology, and feeding into it is the 20% time, the foosball, the free meals, all of that. The same mystique attaches to a company like Pixar. It's not cheap, and the companies invest heavily in it, but it pays back in recruiting efficiency.

And it helps, of course, to be the market leader.

More current songs

I wish Rock Band would add some more genres of music to its downloadable song lineups. There are too many heavy metal and classic rock tunes for my taste. Judas Priest? Boston? Do people in Rock Band's core demographic really know how to sing these tunes? I sure don't, and neither do my friends.

What do you see?

One of yesterday's hot Internet stories was this photo from the White House website which appeared to show Dick Cheney leering at a nude female sunbather.

In a bit of PR control, and perhaps as evidence that we see what we want to see, the powers that be released a larger version of the photo which reveals that the reflection in his sunglasses was nothing more than a hand holding a fishing rod. [via popurls]

***

A plug to watch Arrested Development on Hulu via Airbag's Longboard: "Thanks to Hulu, the world no longer has an excuse for not watching Arrested Development. Sometimes the Internet just gives and gives and gives."

Another fun place I found a Hulu embedded video: in Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker blog.

***

PicLens, a cool browser plugin I often use to show people photos on Flickr, has a beta version that supports YouTube video browsing in Firefox, including Firefox 3b5, and IE. I couldn't get any videos to actually start playing, but I saw it working in a demo. Select a video and it starts playing right there within PicLens' 3-D wall.

Firefox 3 versus Safari 3

John Gruber with a great comparison of Firefox 3 and Safari 3 beta browsers for the Mac. His preference is for Safari 3, though he notes that Firefox has some important advantages.

I've been using these two browsers (Firefox 3 b5) for a few weeks now as well. I prefer Firefox 3, for a few reasons. As Gruber notes, Safari is a memory hog, and given the number of applications I have open at once, Firefox's efficient memory usage makes a difference. I hate that Safari doesn't offer that option to open up with the tabs from your last session. Such a simple fix, I have no idea why they haven't added that after so many generations now.

And, of course, there's Firebug. Indispensable, and even better now that version 1.2 is in alpha. The Web Dev Toolbar is another useful plugin, and I use FoxiPod just about every day.

But Gruber is also right in that both are a step up from the previous generation: faster, more powerful and functional.

UPDATE: According to ZDNet, Firefox 3.0 b5 holds a slight speed edge on Safari 3.1, though both are faster than their previous versions, Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Safari 3.0.4.

Shout out from Gruber

Hulu got a nice little review from John Gruber at Daring Fireball today. It's always a bit more exciting to read about your work at a site you frequent in your own day-to-day life, and Daring Fireball is a daily read for me.

Hulu, the NBC-and-Fox-spearheaded free online video service, is out of beta, and it’s pretty sweet. The video quality is good, the selection is good, and the advertising is remarkably minimal — two mid-show ads of 15 or 30 seconds for a 22-minute show, for example. Individual skits from Saturday Night Live, like this one from Saturday’s show, are commercial-free. Real movies, like The Big Lebowski and The Usual Suspects have just two or three minutes of commercials — and are uncensored. They even have good URLs.

No download option, alas, so there’s no supported way to watch these things on your TV, but it’s pretty damn cool overall.

Some really cool free things

Work has been so busy recently I haven't had time to pass along some great free Internet services I've been using for a while now.

Sandy, the virtual assistant. I don't have a real-life assistant of my own, but Sandy sometimes makes it feel as if I do. I have a fondness for command-line interfaces, and being able to fire off a quick e-mail to Sandy saying "Remind me to pick up dry cleaning at 9am tomorrow" and having "her" e-mail and text me at that time the next day is very handy. Besides the simplicity of the service, the other thing I enjoy is the pseudo-personalized nature of Sandy's replies. I asked her to remind me of something earlier, and Sandy began her reply, "Wow! You're up late!"

Tripit - Where Sandy's abilities end, TripIt takes over. Most people I know book their travel online, and in the process receive all those oddly formatted travel confirmation e-mails. Then you have to sit there and enter the information into your calendar. It's a pain in the butt, and don't ever do it again. Instead, just forward those e-mails to plans@tripit.com, and TripIt merges all of them into a master itinerary, adding maps and driving directions and weather and all sorts of other useful information. You can print it, send it to your calendar, send it to your phone, forward it to friends and family, or even enhance it with custom information. Ingenious.

Instapaper - Like many people who've grown up with the web, I exhibit symptoms of Internet-attention-deficit-disorder. I regularly have 20+ tabs open in my browser, and I've long searched for a simple way to save a tab to read later so I can close it out for the time being. Instapaper is the simplest solution yet. Add a simple Read Later bookmarklet to your browser, click it when you want to save the web page to read later, and you're done. Visit Instapaper later and all your saved articles are there to read.

Fortune

We (Hulu) got a write-up in Fortune today. It's one of the more detailed profiles of the company so far.

Liftoff

Tonight's episode of Mythbusters settled, among other things, that long-standing Internet debate about whether or not an airplane on a conveyor belt moving backwards (like a treadmill) at a speed equal to the airplane's normal ground speed during takeoff would lift off or not.

The answer? The plane does take off. The thurst of the airplane engines acts on air, not on the ground through the wheels.

Technorati Tags: mythbusters, science, tv

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

Some random links perused over the holidays

Tyler Cowen lists policy areas in which his views are uncertain. It's refreshing that even an economist of his stature can admit that he is uncertain on so many issues. Cowen links to Arnold Kling's list of what he is certain about.

Vladimir Putin is Time's Man of the Year? Interesting.

RIP Borat, RIP Ali G. May you live on through the annoying and lousy impersonations of thousands of young males across the world.

Google, without asking permission, decides to share all your shared items in Google Reader with all of your GMail contacts.

Warner joins the DRM-free movement at Amazon's MP3 store.

M. Night Shyamalan has another of those twist movies in the works, releasing next June: The Happening.

Sleeveface is the art of augmenting the art on a record sleeve with your own body. You can't do that with a CD cover, unless, of course, you are a really small person.

Firefox - always in front

Annoying and now frequent bug nagging me on my Mac: my Firefox browser window suddenly decides it always deserves to be in front, no matter what. The only way to get move it out of the way is to minimize it or close it. Does anyone have a fix for that?

Plugins like Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar make it the browser of choice for work, but shoving its way to the front at all times makes Firefox a rather rude houseguest.

Firefox 2.0.0.9, Mac OS X 10.5.1

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.

Luxilon

Peter Bodo has an interesting post over at Tennis.com about the impact of the tennis racket string technology on the modern game which I hadn't considered when discussing Federer and the evolution of tennis the other day. Federer agrees that at some point, passing shots and returns became far easier to hit, lowering the effectiveness of the net game, but he attributes it to racket strings:

I mean, I used to play obviously much different at the age like Djokovic. I would chip and charge, serve and volley a little bit, play like my idols basically: Becker, Edberg, Sampras. They all did it, so for me it was like I got to play the same way.

Then I realized things were slowing down. The new string generation came along where returning and passing shots was made easier. It was harder to attack in some ways, you know.

Tennis Warehouse has a list of ATP Top 500 players who use Luxilon strings. Roger Federer isn't listed (he's a Wilson guy), but the Wilson strings he does use are actually a combination of Luxilon ALU Power Rough and Natural Gut.

Federer is reputed to have been as fanatical about the development of his racket (the Wilson K Factor KSix-One Tour 90) as, say, Lance Armstrong was about the specifications of his bike. Of course, most professionals are probably meticulous about the tools of their trade, but it's not surprise that the only ones we hear about are those at the top of their sports. You give me Federer's racket and and put a wet spaghetti noodle in his hand and he still probably beats me love and love.

Traditionalists in sports like golf and tennis like to complain about technology and its impact on their sports, but all I care about is that advances in technology continue to reward those with the best fundamentals and skills, that we continue to see beautiful game rise to the top. Far better for tennis fans to enjoy the awe-inspiring virtuosity of Federer on the court than pure bangers like Richard Krajicek who just served their opponents out of the stadium. Tiger Woods can hit the ball a country mile, yes, but he has a near fundamentally perfect golf swing and mental fortitude and work habits that are legendary. If they changed golf ball technology or golf clubs, would Woods suddenly fall back to the pack? I doubt it.

Interesting trivia about Federer and the men's professional game in general: what % of points did Federer win in his US Open Final against Djokovic?

The answer is 119 of 222 points, or 53.6%. For the entire year, Federer has won something like 56% of the points he's played. You'd expect the number to be higher for someone who's probably the greatest tennis player of all time, but that's the sport. A few points here and there make all the difference.

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.

A new pair of glasses for the web

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

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

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

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

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

Some links, some involving Jason Bourne

Ben Affleck hoping Jason Bourne has sidekick in next movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ads, ads, ads

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

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

Technorati Tags: advertising, movies, tech, trailer

.Mac still sucks

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

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

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

Technorati Tags: apple, Mac, tech, web

So that's how it works!

Funny link [Via Pogue's Posts].

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

Technorati Tags: humor, web

Some old notes and links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not a thief, I just reused it.

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

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

Reinventing the Wheel

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the market for the device? A great product without a market is in trouble, whereas a lousy produc