March of the lemmings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


NY vs SF

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

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

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

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

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

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


Tiger...just did it


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


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


The latest performance enhancer: MaxSight contact lenses

Made by Nike and Bausch & Lomb, they're used by, among others, Brian Roberts who is currently hitting the tar out of the ball in Baltimore.


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


Panasonic AG-HVX200

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

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

Mini reviews


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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




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




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


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




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


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


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


Toyota Prius


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




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


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


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




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


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


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




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


"Defrost!" I commanded.


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


"Hazards on!" I tried.


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


"Next disc?" I ventured.


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


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


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


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


A to Z

Spike Jonze's new ad "Hello Tomorrow" for Adidas
The featured product is the Adidas_1 running shoe, the world's first running shoe with a microchip inside to adjust the cushioning based on how much the shoe compresses at each step. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Adidas running shoes since they sat on my feet during my marathon run last year. The Adidas_1 sold out almost instantly when a limited number of pairs was offered online. I wonder if airport security will flip out when they run a pair of these through the X-ray machine, what with a microchip and motor in its sole.
In case you were wondering what happened to Darius Rucker, he's doing commercials for Burger King
Fantasy baseball contest winner to earn job with San Francisco Giants
FlickrFox, a Firefox sidebar that allows you to browse your Flickr photostream
Gary Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who recently retired, is sick of Vladimir Putin and can't take it anymore so he's running for president against Putin in 2008
We should have invited Korea to do the Superbowl halftime show this year
I'm too old to collect toys anymore, but these figurines are cool
Lord of the Rings the musical?!
If a VJ could scratch like a DJ, the result might look something like this
The West Wing gets will return for a seventh season
I'd be surprised if Jimmy Smits isn't elected president over Alan Alda
Yahoo previews a beta of its blogging service, Yahoo! 360

Yar's Revenge


Chappelle's Show Season 3 held up by writer's block?

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


Alien Loves Predator

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


Lots of music videos, but it's the New Order vids that interest me

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


The Toyota Prius: Joannie and Mike became the first members of our family to join the hybrid revolution

Just carry the key up close to the car and it unlocks, and the ignition is push button so you never actually take the key out of your pocket or purse. Cool. I have to go to Chicago so I can drive their new baby around


MobilePC's top 100 gadgets of all time

Mattell Football II, the football game with the little dashes. Aww, yeah


Order pizza directly from within Everquest by typing /pizza

I can't decide if that's really clever or a sign of extreme sloth


Salon's Audiofile offers an MP3 download of Keren Ann's "Seventeen" from Not Going Anywhere

I really dig this album


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


Brian Berg is building a replica of NYC using playing cards but no glue or tape

His effort will raise money for victims of the tsunami, which is great, but I still think he should've been a surgeon. He admits as much


The world's largest cat is a liger (half lion, half tiger) and weighs about 1 ton

Here kitty kitty, here kitty kitty, here...HOLY CRAP! AAAHH! GET IT OFF ME!!!


Planes, trains, and automobiles


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


There are SUVs, and then there's the CXT


That rogue commercial about the VW Polo featuring the suicide bomber

Not in good taste, sure, but I think the broader and more interesting trend is the emergence of all these consumer-generated advertestimonials (not just ones for Apple)


The newest member of the BMW M-family: the M6 (more images here)

Has a V-10 engine that produce 500 horsepower and 383 lb.-ft. of torque. The M stands for "Mommy, I just wet my pants."


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


The Lexus luxury hybrid and the Ford Escape Hybrid

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


The Aristocrats, et al


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


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


1 in 4 men suffers from trajectile dysfunction


Instant classic: Safin defeats seemingly unbeatable Federer in Aussie Open semis in 4 1/2 hours and five sets

Two of the players with the most game on the men's tour beat the crap out of each other for hours in the Aussie heat


Entourage filmed a scene for season two at Sundance at the Egyptian Theatre

I was there, saw the cameras out front, saw the Queens Boulevard poster outside the Egyptian Theatre entrance, and failed to connect the dots. I'm an idiot.


Black RAZR V3

Sexy


Sign up to be notified when the Kung Fu Hustle DVD is available for sale

I had more fun in that screening at Sundance than any other


The boys of South Park tell the Aristocrats joke (Windows Media File--vulgar and not for the easily offended)

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


How to get reservations at French Laundry


Google and Yahoo are introducing television closed captioning search capability, and Amazon announces block viewing for its A9 Yellow Pages

Still, no search service is able to locate individual missing socks from my laundry, though


$13 Smirnoff beats out premium, higher-priced vodkas in NYTimes taste test

I can now cite this taste test when explaining why I bought Smirnoff instead of Grey Goose for the pre-party. Certainly sounds better than admitting I'm cheap.


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


Drip drop drip drop


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


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


John Hollinger picks his NBA All-Stars


Steve Jobs to deliver Commencement speech at Stanford in 2005

Great...my commencement speaker was William Perry


Google plans to offer a tag that will help bloggers to signal the search engine to ignore links in comments, hopefully neutering comment spam

It will also render eliminate the Googlerank value of legitimate comment URLs, but that's a minor side effect in my mind. I despite comment spammers


Autumn Thunder: 40 Years NFL Films Music

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


Over holiday break, we watched Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy on DVD

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


Ron Burgundy: The Germans discovered it in 1904, and they called it "San Diego", which in German means "whale's vagina".

Veronica Corningstone: No, I don't think that is what it means. No, it doesn't mean that.

Ron Burgundy: I don't know. I was just trying to impress you. I don't think anyone knows what it means anymore. The translation was lost hundreds of years ago.

Veronica Corningstone: Doesn't it mean "Saint Diego"?

Ron Burgundy: ...No. No, that isn't it.

Veronica Corningstone: No, I'm pretty sure that's what it means.

Ron Burgundy: Agree to disagree.


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


Wacky warning labels and past winners

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


Could thousands of people have been saved from the tsunami if notified via cell phones or the Internet?

Interesting question that many probably wondered as they watched news videos of people hanging out while waves began to climb higher and higher up the shores, oblivious to the much deadlier waves racing their direction


3 DJs suggest wedding mixes

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


Dell CEO Kevin Rollins calls iPod a fad like the Sony Walkman

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


Company creates downloadable cards for reprimanding rude cell phone chatterers

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


P.S.


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


Josh Greenman proposes new punctuation: the sarcasm point

It looks like ¡


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


Sin City trailer

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


The New World trailer

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


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


betterPropaganda's staff picks for top downloads of the year

Good site for legal MP3 downloads


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


snowflakes


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


AllofMP3.com to double its rates Jan 15, 2005

This, coming on top of the MTA fare hike in NYC, means my cost-of-living in 2005 is already increasing, and I haven't even finished with 2004


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


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


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


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


Holiday sale--everything must go


Aaaaarrrggghh


Le Viaduc de Millau is freaking gorgeous

It's the highest bridge in the world. I wonder if people are allowed to bike across it.


Apple and Motorola to collaborate on a cellphone

That will certainly help me to resist the siren call of the Moto Razr V3, which I really don't need.


Study links sleep with weight loss

Just remember, the next time I'm sleeping in, I'm actually working out, in a way. So good when happy things correlate.


Another posthumous 2Pac album

Okay, this is really getting creepy. Has anyone been as prolific from the grave?


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


Yahoo! Video Search


Boy band video


EPIC 2014

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


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


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


Battle of the bulge

Odd, this fascination with Republican bulges. First it was the bulge in Bush's back during the debates, and now it's Cheney's bulge. Either it's a wardrobe malfunction and we need to recommend a new tailor for senors Bush and Cheney, or we may have found one of the WMD.
A few years back, I bought Pink Martini's Sympathique and saw them in concert once or twice. That phase passed, and I haven't touched the CD since. They just came out with a new album, Hang on Little Tomato, and you can listen to it in lo-fi in its entirety on their website, through Pink Martini Radio. Time to put them back on the playlist for a bit and reminisce about daydream about travels through South America and Europe.
First was DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, a remix of the Beatles White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album. Now comes the video mash-up, the Grey Video, of the track "Encore" from the Grey Album. Is that John breaking it down? I just got served.
(We crossed some technological and artistic line a while ago and it's the golden age of remixes. iTunes now sells the remix of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On"--the MPG Groove Mix)
I was just thinking, yesterday, about the inadequacies of Mapquest for walkers/subway riders in NYC, and then today I read about HopStop. The site provides combination walking/subway directions. Now they just need to add checkboxes options so you can ensure you see a Chinese guy playing the erhu somewhere along the ride.
K-Mart acquires Sears
One must feel a sense of happiness for the two, the type of relieved joy you feel for two people you never thought would find love.
James sent me a link to the board game our family will be playing this Christmas. Wasn't this in a James Bond movie once? James saw a Hot Dog, Spiderman, and Mister Miyagi playing this at a Halloween party.
Half-Life 2 looks like a lot of fun. Too bad I don't have a PC anymore.
This Room Defender looks really cool. Too bad I'm not a kid anymore.

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

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

Black is the new white. Consumer electronics recycle through the same pool of finishes, and each is cool in inverse proportion to its ubiquity. There's glossy black, matte black, white, black with wood trim, several varieties of metallic from chrome to brushed chrome to titanium to aluminum, sport yellow, and gold. Black combined with bright red, though, is something I haven't seen before except on Air Jordans. Looks sharp.
The U2 designation is for the engraved signatures of the 4 band members on the back of the iPod, a $50 gift certificate off the The Complete U2, a digital box set collecting over 400 U2 songs, and a U2 poster. Personally, I'd rather just have the option to customize the color of my iPod and its clickwheel. And what's a digital box set?! That term should be reserved for music that comes in a really cool physical package.
The other new iPod is the iPod Photo. Here is a photo of a photo on the iPod, umm, Photo:

The 40GB version costs $499, the 60GB version $599. Steve Jobs said photos and music on the iPod make much more sense than video and music on the iPod, and I agree. However, the iPod Photo is slightly lacking.
The main problem? The only way to get my photos from my digital camera onto the iPod Photo is to first transfer the pics to my Mac laptop or desktop and then push them across via iTunes/iPhoto. I'm sure some third parties will introduce some media card readers, but I already have a gazillion media card readers and cables. I want less of those, not more. I would have preferred either a USB port for direct photo transfer or a media card slot (or both; I'm leaving wireless out at this point b/c it's probably too much to ask for). Then I could leave my laptop at home while traveling and simply xfer photos from my digital camera onto my iPod, using it as both portable music player and portable photo hard drive. While traveling, I could share photos in slide show format on the iPod or on a television without having to bust out a massive laptop.
The iPod Photo is cool, but only in an evolutionary, not a revolutionary sense. I'd love one, but with those price and feature set coordinates, I'm not in heat. I do need to put my 1st generation antique brick of an iPod on life support, though. During my twenty mile long run, the fully charged iPod went dead at mile 20, and so did my legs. My iPod can barely reach 3 hours on a full charge now; it needs some iPod viagra.
Delicious Library, on the other hand, sounds awesome, especially since it supports iSight scanning. Arrives in 13 days. Can't wait.
Mary Meeker's report titled Update on the Digital World is available as a PDF. I'm a Meeker fan and happy to see her research available for free online instead of available only to wealthy Morgan Stanley clients.
Finally, something to listen to on that iPod of yours, whatever its generation. My Nov. issue of Wired arrived yesterday with a Creative Commons CD inside. Cool track list. Those who don't have a subscription and are too cheap to buy a copy of the newstand can download the tracks online at a variety of sites. For example, here's the CD in 320 kbps MP3 form as a BitTorrent, or as 192kbps MP3s from Nixlog.

The Talent Myth

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

GOOGL B(E) 10003

Google SMS. Keen.
B to the E power?! B(E)? I can just see shouting this over heavy techno music to a bartender at a club.
"Can I have a B(E)?"
"What kind of beer?"
"NO, A B(E)!"
"A BEER? I KNOW! WHAT KIND?"
"A B TO THE E!"
Firefox extensions for BugMeNot.com.
They don't have GMail Drive shell extension for Mac users, but I've been using my GMail account like that all along. I don't really receive any e-mail at my gmail account. I just forward files and messages there for storage and easy search/retrieval later.
Kerry is trailing again in the Electoral Vote Predictor, 264 to 270. These debates do seem to matter, though it's just a guess on my part. Bush started out like a shrill screamer again, but he hung in and landed several effective blows in debate #2.
I AM LEARN is a weblog written by a Perl script.
Carl Lewis vs. William Shatner in the celebrity-turned-musician category. Advantage Captain Kirk. Seriously, he has Ben Folds in his corner as guest producer, he did a cover of Pulp's "Common People", so he has taste, and guest appearances include Aimee Mann, Joe Jackson, and Henry Rollins.
Mark Cuban passes on "the handjobber."
Humorous exchanges between pilots and air traffic control towers.
Tricks of the Trade continues on in weblog format.
The saying "You want to have your cake and eat it too" makes no sense. If it's my cake, why can't I eat it? It makes more sense as "You can't eat your cake and have it too."
While I was in France and the UK this summer, I saw the new Smart Car Roadster and Roadster-Coupe. They looked smart. Now the Smart Car is coming to the U.S., with an American-friendly SUV among the optional models. Chouette!
The next Pixar short is Boundin'.
Okay, this is fairly stale, but it's still the best suggestion I've seen yet about how to cure the ills of USA Basketball.