Stands for Big Missing Picture

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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

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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!

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Jaguar

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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

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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

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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.