Can $2.04 buy me a search box?

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Netflix waited until late in the afternoon on a Friday to notify me of an impending price hike from $19.95 per month to $21.99 per month. This is like having your girlfriend inform you while on the doorstep of her parents' house that her father is Robert De Niro, but not the grim father De Niro from Meet the Parents but the psychopath from Cape Fear. Still, perhaps an extra $2.04 per month isn't enough to drive me off.
But heavens to Betsy, will someone at Netflix with an iota of sense please put a friggin' search box on the Queue page? It drives me nuts that we still have to put up with such blatant interface flaws so many years down the road. The entire Netflix website could be simply a queue page with a search box and that would be fine with me; the rest of the site means nothing. All Netflix should worry about is adding more titles, building more distribution centers, and lowering prices. If they offered a discount for doing so, I'd use a command-line interface to access Netflix's distribution centers.

Russians with long last names

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Tonight, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra played Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphonies in E and D minor, respectively. That's the symphonic programming equivalent of a home run contest between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, or, in today's age, between Barry Bonds and, say, Adam Dunn or Richie Sexson. Throw in special guest conductor Mstislav Rostropovich (hey, let's have Pedro as the honorary home run contest pitcher) and what with audience grade inflation rampant and it was two guaranteed standing ovations.
That the Orchestra played as well as I've heard it all season made it all worthwhile. They've sounded erratic or uninspired at times this year. Rostropovich was, as always, a character, walking around the stage to personally shake the hand of soloists. He's the warm-hearted musical genius of a grandfather we all never had.
I looked around tonight and couldn't help but wonder at the fate of orchestras and classical music. I'm not a kid anymore, but I was the youngest person by about thirty or forty years within 20 rows. No disrespect, but at intermission, if I'd suffered a bout of short-term memory loss, I'd have thought I was at a retirement home bingo social. When this older generation passes, who will be purchasing tickets to the symphony, and will orchestras still be playing Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphonies, and will the audience still give a nominal standing ovation to performances of each, and will musical scholars still puzzle over whether Shostakovich was a devoted member of the Communist Party or a secret dissident who encoded irony into his putatively patriotic symphonies such as the Fifth?

Amazon launches A9

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Amazon launched A9 today. It's a new search engine built on top of Google, but with frosting on top. Time was I could be an internal beta tester of such releases, but those days are over so I'm going to play around with it just like Joe Q. Public.
Because it is literally built on top of Google, when I signed in with my Amazon password, archives of my Google searches appeared immediately. I use Safari or Omniweb on the Mac for browsing so I can't try out the A9 Toolbar, but there is one for IE 5.5 and above users, and it includes a pop-up blocker, diary (allows you to attach annotations to websites), and other features which are account-based. That is, since you log in to use A9, you can log in from any computer and pull up your search history, web diary, etc.
Congrats to Bean and others I know who worked hard to get this out the door. I'll have to give it a whirl this week.
Ah, search. It's the saloon that's attracting all the best gunfighters in town. Can't wait for high noon.

Jack

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I watched Something's Gotta Give over the weekend. Not the most profound of movies, but it's nearly always a pleasure to watch Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton work, and the movie has its charms as a broad comedy.
Is it possible that Jack is underrated? When I watch his early work, such as Five Easy Pieces, I think it may be so. If I were to make a list of five people I'd like to spend a weekend hanging out with, Jack would have to be on the list.
I was about to return the movie to Netflix when I decided on a whim to glance at the Special Features menu. Turns out Jack did a commentary for the movie. I brought it up to my computer and turned that commentary on to listen to in the background while I wrote, and two hours later I'd watched the entire movie over again. Jack's commentary is really good. I don't often have the patience to listen to commentaries all the way through, but this was worth it, not just to hear Jack talk about the rocket in his pocket after Amanda Peet jumps off of him in one scene clothed in merely a bra and panties, but also to hear his commentary on comedic acting. He's an astute student of acting and film, and his self-assurance, generosity, and sense of humor shine through. It's clear why he's the most popular actor in Hollywood.

Easter egg hunt

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Dave and Karen hosted a fabulous Easter brunch Sunday. The food was really good, the weather was gorgeous, and we concluded with an Easter Egg Hunt.
I never participated in an Easter egg hunt as a child, at least not that I can recall. What is the origin of the game? A giant bunny hides chicken eggs...very peculiar. Perhaps my visual dictionary is too colored by pop culture, but when I free associate with large bunnies I think Donnie Darko.
I do feel that Dave and Karen exorcised some latent childhood privation. It may have headed off an ugly incident a few decades down the road, in which a bitter old man, upon spying some children on an Easter egg hunt, suddenly felt a deep urge welling up inside, causing him to rush out and shoulder aside children in an effort to gather as many colored eggs as possible, like Homer Simpson fighting his way to the front of the ice cream truck line.

Little Sundancers all growed up

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I'm starting to finally appreciate the mystique of the Sundance Film Festival, several months after finally popping my Park City cherry. So many of the movies screened at the festival are opening to wide acclaim. At the time, reading through the synopses in the program, it was difficult to ascertain the quality of the movies. Surely not all of the movies could live up to the surely biased write-ups by Sundance programmers?
Maybe they can. If critics are to be believed, the programmers chose a great lineup, and I hope to return again next year and catch more movies.
Some of the Sundance babies making waves:

  • The Return - Rave reviews; I'm going to see it this week. I missed a screening but Dave took my pass off my hands and gave it a thumbs up.

  • Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring - The trailer is serenity.

  • Super Size Me - winner of the Sundance Documentary award, this movie was shot by a guy who ate nothing but fast food from McDonalds for a month. Predictably, he gains a lot of weight and comments on the obesity epidemic in America. I'm interested in seeing it for the comedy. As a social gadfly, it's lacking. After all, what's surprising about the fact that he gained weight eating nothing but Big Macs? If there are Americans who still believe that fast food is healthy, they sure don't earn my sympathy.

  • The Corporation - the other Sundance doc that buzzed. Based on the book The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, this documentary examines that strange entity we know as the corporation as a person, putting it through diagnostic tests used to assess human personalities. Not surprisingly, corporations are found "self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful." Having worked at a corporation for nearly seven years, the results don't surprise me, but I do think this realization has profound implications for our analysis of topics like offshoring. Our laws treat corporations as humans, and in doing so we may have granted them too much power, perhaps pointing to a future long predicted by science fiction writers like Gibson and depicted in anime movies set in the future, when corporations and not governments run the world. But that's a topic for another day.


Camel spiders

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I was the latest to be infected by the camel spider e-mail passing around the Internet. A quick Google on "camel spider" quickly debunks any of the myths traveling the Internet along with the photo below depicting two of the suckers. For example, contrary to Internet rumors, camel spiders don't jump on camels and eat their stomachs.

And they don't eat human flesh, either.
Still, would you want to be locked up in a plastic box with a couple dozen of these crawling all over you on an episode of Fear Factor? And do people who live in desert areas have to take care of these around the house?!
"Ahhhhhh!! Honey, can you kill this spider for me! It's humongous!"
"Oh, jiminy cricket, how many times do I have to tell you, they can't hurt you." Husband grabs a slipper and goes into the bathroom where his wife is standing on the toilet screaming and pointing at the corner. "Alright, alright, let's see this giant spider you're shouting about...oh good God!"

Sony Grand Wega LCD DLP HDTVs

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Sometimes I just get the feeling that a new technology has hit a pricing sweet spot and is poised to go mainstream. My tech-spidey sense is tingling after seeing the new Sony Grand Wega LCD DLP rear-projection HDTVs. They're less than half the price of comparably sized plasma TVs, and while they might not be quite as nice a picture or quite as thin, they're close enough in all respects that it's difficult to justify climbing the price ladder for the plasma. And while other manufacturers have already jumped into this market segment with comparably priced models (e.g. Samsung), the Sony brand name carries greater sway with the mainstream home electronic shopper.

These things are going to sell like hotcakes. The 70" retails for $6999.99, the 60" for $3999.99, the 50" for $3299.99, and the 42", likely to be the most popular model, for $2799.99.
Perhaps finally, the HDTV revolution in the U.S. is poised to gain momentum. When people tell me they're ready to upgrade to HDTVs in the next six months, I'll probably point most of them to this product line.

Phil's first major, in the key of CBS-sharp

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I watched Mickelson's final nine holes in the Masters Sunday. What a final day--hole in ones within moments of each other on the same hole, Choi holing out from the fairway, Ernie and Phil destroying the back nine. And, from a presentatiopn perspective, CBS HD rocked. I hadn't watched the Masters in high-def before, and I'm never going back. I felt like I was there in the crowd on that last putt, and I was jumping around in my basement when Phil's Titleist Pro V1 reached out and grabbed the left edge of the cup with its arms and pulled itself in head first.

Phil seems to have crossed some barrier. He was locked in that last nine--I've never seen him play better. Right now, Tiger has two formidable competitors in Phil and Ernie, and Vijay is just a notch below.
I'd love to get my handicap down to the next level this year which makes this finger injury all the more frustrating.

Mallet finger

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Saturday I played hoops in the morning at the gym. This tall, overweight, balding, middle-aged brute who I'd played against once before showed up to give us four on four. The last time I played against him, he played dirty, grabbing my arm on picks, elbowing me to get position, and body checking me hard whenever I tried to drive past him. He also raked me across the face, and a few weeks later I still have a scar between my eyebrows.
This time, I asked to guard him again, because life is just a whole lot more fun with a nemesis. He of course, posted me up every time, taking advantage of his 6 inch and 80 pound advantage, and I either shot over him from the perimeter or put the ball on the court and went by him. Everytime I went by him, he beat the crap out of me.
What does the Oracle's bodyguard say in The Matrix: Reloaded about only knowing someone by fighting them? I can't attest to that, but I think that matching up against an opponent in basketball is a great proxy. When someone wants to marry my sister, I won't take the guy out to a bar for drinks. No, I'll take him to play pickup hoops, and I'll leanr all I need to know about him.
About an hour in, on one of my forays to the hoop, dirty-old-guy (DOG) swiped my hand hard, fouling me to prevent the bucket. I felt a sharp pain in my right pinky finger, as if I had jammed it. I kept playing the next half hour but had trouble gripping the ball.
When I arrived home, I looked at my finger because it had gone numb. The top joint was bent down and towards my ring finger, and I couldn't straighten it or move it. It looked deformed, but it didn't really hurt, so I left it alone Saturday. Alan told me to get it checked out, though, and then Gavin told me if I didn't get it splinted it might end up frozen at that grotesque angle. Sunday morning Colin looked at it, protruding awkwardly from the side of a cheap drugstore splint I had purchased and told me it didn't look natural. Sunday night I called my doc, and he agreed: I needed to have it examined.
I relented and went to the ER last night. I hate visiting the ER off-hours or during the graveyard shift. It's a long, protracted, depressing visit to the waiting room of the afterlife, filled with the elderly and youth who look like drug addicts. I waited nearly two and a half hours just to get an x-ray and a diagnosis.
DOG had torn the tendon in my right pinky, the one that straightens it and holds it in alignment. I now have to wear a splint on the finger for the next six weeks. The printout the nurse handed me reads: "You may end up with a permanent deformity if the end joint of the finger bends at any time before healing is complete." I'm vain enough to admit that the words "permanent" and "deformity" are enough to frighten me anytime they appear in the same sentence.
Basketball is probably out, golf will be exceedingly challenging, but worst of all, it's now really, really difficult to type. It's extremely frustrating. I can't cleanly type the letter P, the right shift key (much more important than the left shift key), an apostrophe, zero, or a question mark. I'm learning how to compensate with my ring finger instead, but it's still like being shouldered into bumper to bumper traffic after having coasted in the HOV lane for hours.
Is there a blogging disabled list? Put me on the 45-day DL.

The end is nigh

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Tomorrow, my Amazon career comes to a close. It's been looming on the horizon for some time, but when such personally momentous events are scheduled in my future, they always seem to sneak up on me. No massive buildup of tension or anticipation, just life as usual for days on end and then suddenly the next day it arrives. I've been so busy I haven't even had time to stop to ponder the significance, though last night, for the first time, I had trouble sleeping.
Nearly seven years of my life I spent as an Amazonian. Long enough to get a PhD (and I guess I did, in Amazon 101: we made up the curriculum as we went along, my professors had names like Bezos, and we were graded on cash flow...it was cheaper than business school), and more time than I've ever spent at any institution, including Little League baseball, elementary school, and college. I ate at Andaluca just the other week, and I remembered that I'd stayed at the Mayflower Park Hotel when I flew out for my interview with Amazon. Never did I imagine at that time that if I got the job that seven years later that Amazon and I would end up where we are now. The ups, the downs, the ups, the downs, and now Amazon is all grown up, a GAAP-profitable, card-carrying member of the Fortune 500. Soon after I started, we issued debt, and it was classified as junk. Now we're generating enough cash to retire a lot of that debt. Sometimes one man's junk is that same man's treasure.
It's difficult to tease apart the emotions at a time like this. My head and heart are a jumble of Brownian motion: sorrow, exhilaration, nostalgia, fear, gratitude, uncertainty, nervous energy, intermittent resolve. I've always tried to edge up and to the right on the average daily life happiness and satisfaction chart, though, and my internal compass points in this direction, even though the map doesn't list any roads this way. I've never not taken a marked interstate, but rumor has it that it's not so bad if you have a stomach for adventure. We oldest children sometimes need a little prodding to leave the interstate, even if in this case, the foot kicking the seat of my pants is my own.
And so off I go. Who's coming with me besides Flipper here?

We cool? Yeah, we cool

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I finally ticked last week's episode of The Apprentice off of the Tivo List. I thought the way Troy and Kwame handled the Boardroom confrontation, even if it contained a few too many fist slaps and hugs, was pretty damn cool. They were buds, but that didn't stop them from expressing in a straightforward manner their honest opinion of each other's strengths and weaknesses. I've been in the business world nearly a decade and it's rare to find managers who can do that in the real world! I agreed with what both of them said, too: Kwame said Troy wouldn't be great as a CFO but would do well in sales, and Troy said Kwame hadn't stepped up to lead enough. Compare that with Katrina and Ereka covering for each other in the Boardroom. [Random sidenote: I was in Miami for James's bachelor party this weekend, and a party at one of the clubs in South Beach was hosted by none other than "Katrina and Ereka, The Apprentice Girls!!!" Fourteen minutes and counting, you two. We passed.]
They didn't let Trump or any of his minions turn them against each other (Trump goaded Kwame, "Your buddy screwed you" and Kwame replied without hesitation: "Not at all."), and when all was said and done, they shook hands and wished each other luck. They handled it with a maturity that none of the other contestants have exercised in the boardroom (no more capitalizing "boardroom." I mean, really, it's the cheesiest looking boardroom set ever), especially the fireballs like Omarosa, Jessie, and Ereka. My favorite exchange was their last before their boardroom showdown:
Troy: "I'm gonna cut you quick and fast."
Kwame: "That's it, that's it."
I thought Troy should've stayed, but really, after the classy way they dealt with a really difficult situation, I would've been sad to see either of them go. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. This was genuine nobility in the treacherous world of reality television, like two gunfighters in a John Woo movie, evacuating innocent bystanders and then sliding guns over to each other to initiate a fair showdown.
The Idaho Dynamo is going to be okay.
Lest we think too much class had entered the show, however, tomorrow's episode features the return of Omarosa. Sweet.

iCal and Outlook play nice?

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Now that I'm about to leave work, I've been forwarding all sorts of calendar events from Outlook at work to my personal e-mail account as a reminder to place the events into iCal on my Mac at home.
I forwarded one event from Outlook 2003 to my home e-mail account, and I was surprised to open the e-mail and find that it asked if I wanted to place the event on my iCal calendar. Outlook 2003 and iCal speak the same meeting language! I was surprised, in a pleasant way.

Three CCDs for the price of one

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A Jake Ludington newsletter bought this to my attention. A mini DV camcorder with 3 CCDs has broken the $700 price point: the $699 Panasonic PVGS120. This is huge. Is there any nother 3CCD camcorder even close to the $1000 price point? Not that I'm aware of.
This deserves to be a big seller for your average camcorder shopper looking for the best model for the buck. I'm personally more excited about the prospect of Sony's 3CCD HD Camcorder, but that will be a sub-$5000 camcorder. The Panasonic is within reach of the masses. Their home videos will still be dull and shaky, but at least the picture will be sharp.