8128blog

A Moment

2012-02-09T12:06:00.000-06:00

I had a really nice "father-son moment" last night with my son Aidan, who is turning into quite the talented guitarist.

The musical landscape is a lot different today than it was when I was a kid. For one thing, there's simply a LOT more music out there: one of the promises that the Internet made good on is the widespread distribution of music by any band or musician, no matter how small. When I was a kid circa 1973, the music you were exposed to was largely determined by the local radio stations and your friends. Nowadays that sounds like a bad, restrictive thing, but it made things simpler, and despite the hate that the recording industry gets nowadays, they actually did a reasonably good job of promoting bands that were actually good: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Rush, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Yes, Jethro Tull ... I could go on, but if you were a teen in the 70s, you know what I mean.

(Oh, there were some losers in there, too: I grew up in the midwest and heard waaaaay too much REO Speedwagon and Lynyrd Skynyrd and ... well, maybe it's just a matter of my personal taste)(just reminiscing, one of the first concerts I went to was a big outdoor thing sponsored by a local radio station, the "KSHE Kite-Fly", and the headliner was the Charlie Daniels Band. And opening for them was Rush. Which is hilarious to me today).

But I digress ... when Aidan started playing guitar, I went out and bought him a nice collection of Led Zeppelin and Rush CDs: IMNSHO, these are two of the seminal "classic rock" bands that every teenaged guitar player needs to hear. And my son did indeed listen to them -- but it was only last night that he actually listened them.

My wife and daughter had gone to bed, but somehow I got to talking with Aidan about Rush's _2112_, and he pulled out the CD and we dropped it into the disc player and listened to the Overture and The Temples of Syrinx and he had his guitar and did a pretty decent job of picking up the chords and playing along.

We are the priests
Of the temple of Syrinx.
Our great computers
Fill the hallowed halls.
We are the priests
Of the temple of Syrinx.
All the gifts of life
Are held within our walls.

(I don't think there is a 15yo boy in the entire world who can hear that and not fall in love with it>

And then we pulled out Led Zeppelin IV and listened to Black Dog and Rock and Roll and When The Levee Breaks and it was great fun for all. Well, okay, my daughter was trying to sleep and she was pissed, and I feel a bit badly about that. But it was a truly wonderful moment for me as a father, and I'm pretty sure my son felt the same way.

These events seem to happen so rarely in my life. But that makes me appreciate them and love them all the more.

Interesting Times

2012-01-23T13:51:00.000-06:00

The news has been very "interesting" of late.

I've been a Computer Geek for the vast majority of my life (learned to program when I was 13yo, started using the Internet in 1980, yadda) and as you might surmise, I'm one of those crazy liberal anti-censorship "the internet wants to be free!" kind of people. So I've been watching with interest as the "War For The Internet" heats up, with the (apparently successful) "blackout" protest of SOPA / PIPA:

SOPA / PIPA stalled

Which (I can only hope) may have backfired into the MPAA's face:

Online Petition Targets SOPA Comments from MPAA Chief Chris Dodd on Fox News

(And I'd urge you to join the fun by signing the petition yourself. I like the idea of us "free Internetters" going on the offensive versus simply responding to threats as they appear.)

That said, it looks like the government is fighting back:

MegaUpload raided, founder arrested; Anonymous launches mass DDoS against entertainment companies and US law enforcement

And it's got some people running scared:

Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action

But on the bright side, there's been some good news in the Civil Rights arena:

Supreme Court rules warrant needed for GPS tracking

And there's this not-overly-reported tidbit:

DOJ urges judge to side with plaintiff in Baltimore police taping case

"The right to record police officers while performing duties in a public place as well as the right to be protected from the warrantless seizure and destruction of those recordings, are not only required by the Constitution," Justice Department attorneys wrote in a "statement of interest" filed Jan. 10 in the case. "They are consistent with our fundamental notions of liberty, promote the accountability of our governmental officers, and instill public confidence in the police officers who serve us daily."

Hell yes!

And finally:

US Senator Rand Paul refused a TSA pat-down

I would dearly love to see the TSA get their wrist slapped. Hard.

Alas, SOPA and PIPA are just two of a number of pieces of legislation that threaten the freedom of the 'net. ACTA is yet another, and you could do worse than sign the petition against it. And H.R. 1981, the deceptively-named "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011" is yet another.

But I'm happy to see Things Happening. And some of them are even Good Things. I'm keeping my fingers crossed about the future, it might be bright.

My Favorite iOS Synthesizers

2012-01-20T12:56:00.000-06:00

I've spent a somewhat embarrassing amount of money on music and synthesis apps for my iPad. Not all of them are jewels. I won't name any names here, but I'll warn that it pays to shop carefully, and to look at the app developer: is the app developed by one person who's just kinda futzing around with an idea, or by an actual company? The latter is preferable if you are hoping for any kind of support / bug fixes / feature updates.

The exception is, of course, free or $0.99 apps. For $0.99, who cares if the developer lives in his mom's basement in Belarus? (although it's sad to run across a $0.99 app that's *almost* perfect, which you know will never be updated or fixed).

Having said all that, I'd like to attempt to steer you, dear reader, towards the exceptional synthesizer and sound generator apps that I've encountered. Many of these cost $4.99 and up -- but they're worth it. (note: after one buys an app, it can be a bit difficult to determine the current price of the app -- some of my prices might be off.

Animoog for iPad $9.99 - A subtly seductive little synthesizer that didn't really impress me until I'd noodled with it awhile. It has an interesting synthesis paradigm, kind've like vector synthesis over a set of wavetables -- I suspect Moog will continue to add voices to this and really expand the kinds of sounds it can make. Also of note: it has a really charming kind of retro-Buchla keyboard that (among other things) registers the position of your finger along the length of the key, thus offering another control parameter on a per-note basis.

Animoog for iPhone $0.99 - If you just want to stick your toes in the water first, the iPhone version is cheaper and has all the same featurers, just the misc control panels are organized differently for the smaller form factor. This version also runs on the iPad, BTW.

Alchemy free / $14.99 upgrade to Pro - This offering comes from Camel Audio, who have a very solid reputation in the VST and soft-synth biz. It doesn't look like much at first, but if you start playing with it, it "comes alive". I haven't upgraded to Pro (yet) -- the app has a storefront that you can purchase additional waves / sounds for $4.99 a pop. This may sound like a lot but so far I've been impressed: some very high-quality sound design goes into these voices. Mac/PC/VST versions available.

Sunrizer $4.99 - If you can find a better iOS synthesizer for $4.99 -- buy it! But seriously -- you won't find such a thing. Sunrizer has a really great synth "feel" with great sounds for a great low price -- it's one of the best values on this list.

Addictive Synth $9.99 - A bit pricier than Sunrizer -- think of it as Sunrizer's twin brother who's kept in the attic. Great sounds, great feel.

Sylo Synth free / $3.99 upgrade to Pro - An inexpensive app that uses "granular synthesis" to produce sounds. The free version has advertising and lacks a few features, but it'll give you a taste of what you'll get if you go "pro". Not as nuanced as some of the other synths listed here, but one of the better / simpler implementation of granular synthesis I've seen.

Argon $1.99 - A good basic synth that will surprise you with the number of parameters it offers. Not really my favorite but it's a steal at $1.99.

The apps above are all kind've "standard" in that they have keyboards and relatively low learning curves. The apps listed below are "paradigm breakers" that can make some marvelously twisted, complex sounds, but you need to throw caution to the wind and experiment and *gasp* perhaps even read some documentation before you'll feel comfy with them:

Moog Filtatron $4.99 - If the VCS3 was a synthesizer, then I suppose one can call the Filtatron a synthesizer, too. Maybe. The name doesn't matter -- Filtatron is great for making all manner of "soundscapes" - it's difficult to describe. Musical toy or Pro SFX generator? I think it's both.

Jasuto Pro $4.99 - Here's where we really begin to leave planet Earth. Jasuto is a bit like a modular synth in that it allows you to connect miscellaneous sound functions together in an arbitrary manner ... but then it gets weird. One nice feature is that it connects to a user repository where people share their creations. Not for beginners.
Also available as a VST module.

CrystalSynthXT $4.99 - I'm still not really sure what to think of CrystalSynth. It's got a lot of "standard" synthesizer controls, but the controls can be automated and -- well, in the end, you can make all kinds of cools sounds with it. It also has a "morph" function that allows you to "marry" two different patches and listen to what their children sound like.
Also available as a VST module.

Reactable $9.99 - This one is a bit like Jasuto Pro (above) but a bit easier to comprehend. You build small 'systems' out of samples and oscillators and other components, and then let it play. If you do it right, you can build a system that's interactive, ie, where you really can play it by turning the shapes and moving them around. Also like Jasuto Pro: not for beginners.

So far, these are my favorites. There are many many other music apps out there: MIDI utilities, micro-studios, sequencers, alternative controllers, etc. But today I'm limiting myself to synthesizers and sound generation apps.

SOPA / PIPA Blackout Day

2012-01-18T11:35:00.000-06:00

“The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”

- Voltaire

AJB, 1924 - 2011

2012-01-17T15:36:00.000-06:00

So 2012 has been kinda sucking so far.

Long story short: my father went into the hospital in mid-December and passed away early on new year's eve. Yes, this is Major Suckitude. I -- and my family, and my sister and her family -- loved my Dad a LOT. He had 87 really good years, and over the course of his career he did a lot of good work and had a big influence on many people. So I'm left feeling sad, yes, but also in a strange way, proud of my father. He was a good man. I hope I die as well as him.

Still, it's one helluva cloud under which to start the new year. Work's beginning to start moving, which is something of a relief -- it gives me something to do, something to focus on. But I'm still sleeping a lot more than normal, which I'm going to assume is my own idiosyncratic method for coping with stress / depression. I'll snap out of it, sooner or later. Hopefully sooner.

The rest of my family is, I think, taking it somewhat better than I -- perhaps in part because they stayed in Texas while I hung out with Dad in the hospital in Illinois. This was not an easy decision to make: should I fly my wife and kids out to Illinois? Should my wife drive the kids out? In the end R and the kids stayed home until my father passed, I flew back to Texas, then we all drove back to Illinois for the funeral service. I won't even start to get into all of the thought and argument that went into doing it this way, but we had just visited Dad over Thanksgiving. I wasn't sure there was much value in dragging everyone off to Illinois so they could hang out in an ICU waiting room for 2-3 weeks (Dad agreed, BTW). As it is, through the internet the kids got to talk to Dad, even sent him a video postcard they made, and Aidan played some music for him. It was a tough call, but I think it worked out okay. The kids miss him, and are sad, but not to a pathological degree. Which is, frankly, probably about the way my father would have wanted it.

Yeah, I'm proud of my father, but I miss him a lot. It's going to take some time getting past this -- but isn't that how it's supposed to be?

Love you, Dad.

A Boy And His Moog

2011-12-10T11:02:00.000-06:00

After 4 decades of lust ... I finally have a Moog synthesizer. Woot! I've had many others: Korg, Oberheim, E-mu, even a couple no-names that I designed and built myself. But I've never had a genuine Moog ... until now!

Love it love it love it love it love it!

Our Family Tradition

2011-11-28T12:36:00.002-06:00

So we took another drive to Illinois to spend time with my father for Thanksgiving. I certainly hope that the kids and I inherited whatever genes he has for longevity and vitality: he's 86yo and still has his wits about him, he still drives (safely), builds stuff in his workshop, stays active, etc. A short visit, given the amount of driving, but it was good to see him.

We drove out there in the new minivan, and one of our "family traditions" is that we listen to audio books while on the road. This year we chose Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy: The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay).

Will it surprise you to learn that it's being made into a movie? And that Woody Harrelson is one of the major players? According to the IMDB, the first movie is set for release in (I think) March 2012, the 2nd book in 2015, and the last book in ????.

In case you're unfamiliar with the books, they're "Young Adult" -- which means they get away with stealing plot elements from other sources. The author acknoledges the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur as an influence, but there are a whole lot more that spring to mind without a lot of effort: Shirley Jackson's The Lottery (1948), Stephen King's The Long Walk (1979) and The Running Man (1982), and especially Koushun Takami's Battle Royale (1999). The Hunger Games was first published in 2008. Picasso supposedly said "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" -- I'm not sure I'd call her a "great artist", but I give her credit that she re-fashions that which she steals and makes it her own.

The first and second books are "uneven". When there's action, things move along at a good clip. But one of the books' weaknesses is that the main character / narrator is a fairly clueless teenaged girl ala Bella from Stephenie Meyers' Twilight books. She's deadly with a bow and arrow, but notso-hotso at using words. Or figuring out how she's being manipulated at almost every turn. I don't want to spoil the books for anyone, but there is are some "teen romance" scenes that go on for waaaay too long.

In fairness, though, Collins has a real talent for painting a highly emotional pictures when she wants to. The District 11 'salute' to Katniss, and Katniss' on-stage transformation are the two examples I can think of without spoiling the books. There are others. I found myself wishing I could write well enough to convey the moment and the emotion the way Collins does.

I can see the appeal of making this into a movie. The oppressive Capitol government of Panem is pretty high-tech and seem to have some mastery of antigravity, cloaking, and force-field technology, which will make for some good SFX, and the decadence of the "upper class" should be good for some outrageous design. There's a lot of action and a lot of room for "eye-candy".

I spent a lot of the first two books wondering just why and how such a government as Panem could exist. I was reminded a bit of the Empire of Azad in Iain M Banks' The Player Of Games, where they as much as admit they keep the people oppressed simply because they get off on it. Don't even get me started on the ridiculous "District" scheme, where each district specializes in one commodity (ie, District 4 is seafood, District 11 is vegetables, District 8 is textiles, etc).

My remarks above primarily concern the first two books. We only listened to about 90 minutes of the third book, Mockingjay, before we got home, and from page 1 it violated that most sacrosanct of all rules of writing, that being that "the author shall make the reader care whether the main character lives or dies". Maybe it gets better later on -- I mentioned that the books are "uneven", and it's entirely possible that things will begin to pick up later in the text.

For our next trip, I think we'll listen to Dan Simmons' Hyperion. There's some sex, violence, and bad language, but I think the kids can handle it.

Oh, one last comment on The Hunger Games books: there was no sex and (I think) absolutely no bad language in the text we listened to. Not a single "hell" or "damn". Again, we didn't finish Mockingjay so maybe it ends in a huge foul-mouthed orgy. But I sorta doubt it.

Nekulturny!

2011-11-21T14:43:00.002-06:00

I almost hate to admit it, but my sense of humor has gone "low-brow" recently. When I look at the comedies I've enjoyed of late -- well, none of them are Merchant-Ivory productions:

Yes, I'm man enough to admit that I actually *liked* The Hangover Part 2 (I know lots of people complained that it was basically the first Hangover all over again, but it was still fun). And I was taken completely by surprise by Hot Tub Time Machine, which has a totally stupid premise but still made me laugh out loud many, many times. Rob Corddry has worked his way onto my list of favorite actors. Neil Patrick Harris has worked his way to the top of my list of favorite actors. In fact, let's have another picture of him:

(That's NPH in Starship Troopers. A lot of people were shocked to see Doogie Houser dressed up in fascist regalia. I thought he was awesome, and I wish I looked that good in a trenchcoat.)

I think I still appreciate sophisticated black humor like Dr Strangelove and Eating Raoul. And I don't take illegal drugs and I'm not gay ("not that there's anything wrong with that"). And I'm not a fascist, either. I think maybe I just have a really short attention span anymore.

I guess it will come as no surprise that I'm wishing you all A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas!

Amon Tobin / The Glitch Mob

2011-10-28T10:22:00.001-05:00

Alas, I don't listen to as much music as I used to. I still love music -- I just don't have the time. I don't have the killer home stereo I used to have when I was in college. Today I mostly listen to music in my car, which has an awesome sound system and I can listen to stuff loud, through speakers -- the way God intended it. Those little "earbud" things are the work of the devil.

My tastes are pretty much all over the road, but of late I've been listening to a lot of music by The Glitch Mob and Amon Tobin. I'm not really sure how to classify their music except to say that it's "electronic". I guess at least some of it could be considered "dubstep" (a genre that I like a lot) but -- and this one of the reasons I like them so much -- Amon Tobin and TGM aren't trying to fit into a genre, they're just doing whatever the hell they want and creating their own as-yet-indescribable genre.

Some years ago Frank Zappa once said "Audio tools are available now that enable the artist to control timbre to the point where a psychoacoustical or emotional 'spin' can be placed on any given note or passge". He was right then (and with today's technology, he's even righter), but the sad fact is that even though the capability exists, the vast majority of musicians don't use it. Amon Tobin and The Glitch Mob, in contrast, tend to use it on every single note. I love it.

Now is the time I stop talking about it and let the music speak for itself:

Amon Tobin - Goto 10

The Apple Tree featuring The Glitch Mob

Amon Tobin - Surge [16Bit Remix]

The Glitch Mob - Crush Mode

The Magic Goes Away?

2011-10-06T11:14:00.001-05:00

Steve Jobs is dead. This is but one of probably thousands of "reaction" pieces that will appear in the wake of his passing. Hopefully it's one of the shorter ones, too.

I never knew the man so I don't have any cute stories to relate. And until recently I really wasn't a big fan of Apple products.

Everyone seems to think of him as a Creative Genius, and maybe he was. A fair number of people who knew him also say he was something of a jerk, and maybe he was that, too. What impresses me the most about his career was his ability To Get Things Done. I have some small experience with what it's like to work within a corporation and when I look at some of the things Jobs pulled off, like getting the music companies to cooperate on iTunes, or the iPad -- what makes my jaw drop isn't the technical or creative aspect so much as the fact that he somehow worked his way through what must have been truly unbelievable amounts of politics, red tape, and bullshit and, in the end, hammered out something that a) everyone agreed with that b) was also not a huge steaming pile of compromises. People would joke about his "Reality Distortion Field" but I sometimes wondered if he really did have some kind of mutant Stephen King "push" psychic ability to make people agree with him.

I am saddened by his death for what are, frankly, very selfish reasons: the man was arguably responsible for making the world we live in a lot more fun and interesting. CGI, portable music players, smartphones, the iPad ... we're talking about multiple instances of technology that's had a long-term global impact on human culture. No, he didn't personally invent this stuff, but he was a strong force in making a lot of it happen. Maybe he was done, out of ideas, willing to coast on by on the strength of past glory. Or ... maybe he had a few really good ones left in him. We'll never know what they were, what could have been. And that is what makes me sad.

2084

2011-08-10T10:21:00.003-05:00

Yes, that's a cheesy title for a blog post, but I'm gonna go with it.

Like generations of parents before me, I find that I worry about the world that my children will live in as adults. I know a lot of people who worry about global warming, or nuclear war, or antibiotic-resistant flu. But I'm worried about the government.

I should clarify that I and my family are all legal residents of the United States of America. Which is, as countries go, a pretty good one. We live better than 99.9% of all humans who've ever lived: hot showers, meat 7 days a week if we want it, air conditioning - we daily take for granted thousands of comforts that simply weren't available to even the most powerful of 18th century kings. Even today, living in the USA, we have stuff that you'd need to be stinking rich to have in many parts of the world (cars, computers, plentiful food, etc). An old friend of mine from high school and college used to proclaim "I already won the lottery: I'm a white American male!" It may not be politically correct, but there's a fair amount of truth to that.

But I worry about my country, and the way things appear to be moving. A funny thing about the way laws are made in this country: someone proposes a law, it gets voted on, and it either becomes law or not. That's grossly simplified, I know, but what I see happening is that "bad" laws -- laws that undermine our basic civil liberties, laws that unfairly benefit special interests, laws that take away our privacy -- more and more of these things are becoming law. It's just a consequence of how The System works: a bad law is proposed by someone. With luck it gets voted down. But then the same law or a varient is proposed again. And again. And again. Until it finally passes. It's considered a truism in American politics that if you have enough money and time, you can get a law made.

And the kinds of laws that are being made are just plain scary. Here's a Wall Street Journal article on the growing number of federal criminal laws. What's especially disturbing is that many of these laws don't require the government to prove criminal intent:

Last September, retired race-car champion Bobby Unser told a congressional hearing about his 1996 misdemeanor conviction for accidentally driving a snowmobile onto protected federal land, violating the Wilderness Act, while lost in a snowstorm. Though the judge gave him only a $75 fine, the 77-year-old racing legend got a criminal record.
...
Eddie Leroy Anderson of Craigmont, Idaho, is a retired logger, a former science teacher and now a federal criminal thanks to his arrowhead-collecting hobby.
...
In 2009, Mr. Anderson loaned his son some tools to dig for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs. Unfortunately, they were on federal land. Authorities "notified me to get a lawyer and a damn good one," Mr. Anderson recalls.
...
There is no evidence the Andersons intended to break the law, or even knew the law existed, according to court records and interviews. But the law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn't require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.

And so we are effectively caught in an ever-tightening skein of bad -- sometimes downright insane -- laws that are progressively limiting or removing our basic liberties and civil rights. It's all done in the name of "anti-terrorism" or "save the children" or "the war against drugs" or whatever. So yeah, here's the part where I quote Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Sadly, I foresee a future America that is a lot more totalitarian than Communist Russia ever was. One that really does bear more than a passing resemblence to Orwell's 1984.

I can see the future, and it's grim. The time will come when:

Use of cash will be illegal. All financial transactions will be electronic and recorded.
Every citizen will have a National ID Card. You'll be required to produce it upon demand by any law enforcement officer or agency.
A national database of everyone's DNA, fingerprints, and other biometric information will be online.
All public areas will be under camera surveillance.
All computers / internet usage is monitored and tied to one's National ID Card.
There will be a publicly-accessible national criminal and arrest database containing information on everyone who has had any kind of brush with the law.
National databases containing all medical and financial information on everyone will be online.
All of the data and databases above will be accessible by any government agency without any requirement for a warrant. And this will (of course) be widely abused.
All computers and encryption schemes must legally provide a government-accessible "back door".
Criticism of politicians or their policies is criminal libel. Ie, the First Amendment is simply ignored.
Possession of hand-guns by private citizens will be illegal.
Everyone will technically be a criminal -- and thus subject to arrest and all that comes with it -- all the time.
"One strike and you're out": all it takes is a single "incident" with authority and you lose your job, your medical insurance, your home, your money -- your life.

Like I said: grim. In short, it's an America where Order comes before Justice and Freedom.

Is it possible to live in such a state and be happy?

I hope I'm wrong. It's been said that American civil rights law has always been a "pendulum", slowly swinging left and right and back again. I hope so. But I'm not sure how we can avoid the seemingly inevitable accretion of bad laws that will occur over the years and the decades. Kids: if you're reading this sometime in the indefinite future, I want you to know that I'm doing what I can, writing to congress about bad laws etc. I don't want you to live in the future I envision -- and I sincerely hope you don't.

iPad Synthesizers: The Next Generation

2011-08-01T18:12:00.000-05:00

As mentioned earlier, I obtained a Korg nanoKEY2 controller and (combined with the iPad Camera Kit USB converter) it's a blast. I confess I was more than a bit nervous about doing it -- going around an plugging random USB devices into an iPad seems like it might lead to heartbreak -- but it seems that almost any controller device that is CoreMIDI Compliant can plug into an iPad via USB. Note the "almost": here's a nice list of devices that are known to work -- or not work with the iPad.

Anyhow, I know I've said before that I wasn't too interested in software synthesizers that run on the iPad -- but this CoreMIDI stuff changes that. It means I can hook my iPad up to my DAW, hook a keyboard up to my iPad -- and then blissfully tickle away at the "ivories", switching between any number of different synthesizer apps.

Addictive Synth ($5.99US) -- A dynamic wavetable synthesizer with a ton of fun real-time control options.

Sunrizer Synth ($4.99US) -- A virtual analog synthesizer that sounds really good.

It's hard to put my finger on it exactly but these two apps seem representative of a new, 2nd generation of iOS synthesizer apps. They seem more solid, extremely responsive, and the sounds they generate are very rich and clean. Other things I've noticed are

An emphasis on tricking out the arpeggiator -- I'm still trying to figure out all of the options, and
Creation of new presets via "morphing", ie, pick a Mommy preset and a Daddy preset and then listen to see how Junior turned out. Repeat as necessary. (and here's a shout-out to Crystal Synth, which I think was one of the early apps to promote this (extremely useful) feature).

Long story short: Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when you and a friend had a late lunch at 2:30pm at McDonalds, and you somehow choked down a quarter-pounder with cheese and fries that had been congealing under the heat lamps since noon? And there was something wrong with the drink machine so it tasted "off"? And you gallantly picked up the check, which came to $11+? You, my friend, need to restore your faith in humanity and the American economy by spending $10.98US on these two apps and reassure yourself that yes, even in these trying economic conditions, you can still buy something Unbelievably Freakin' Cool for $11.

My New MyBook Live 3TB NAS Device / WD 2go

2011-08-01T10:57:00.001-05:00

So I guess I'm kind've a nut about the MyBook Live. As reported earlier, I recently acquired another one, this one being 3TB, and I'm going to use it to back up my 2TB drive.

I kinda got off to a rough start with this new drive: without going into details, it gets hot. Real hot. Make sure you've got lots of free air-space around it.

I didn't realize it when I bought the device, but there are a couple of iOS / Android apps that will work with it: the WD Photo (a photo viewer that I don't have much use for) and WD 2go (which is pretty nifty). WD 2go allows you to access one or more of your MyBook Live devices from inside and outside of your local network. It's a little rusty: the interface could use some polish, I had problems with the PDF viewer, a few other minor things. But it's a good start and also it's free. Using WD 2go requires a firmware upgrade that wipes out the previous MioNet access method, so if you like MioNet (I never used it), it looks like you're stuck at the 1.05.07 firmware level forever. But I like WD 2go and I'm hoping WD will continue to improve it (and, for better or for worse, one of their people wrote that there might be a for-pay version with enhanced capabilities in the near future).

Anyhow -- WD 2go supports a fair number of filetypes: it will stream .MP3, .M4V, .MP4, .MOV, and it'll take a shot at displaying PDF, HTML, MS WORD, PPT, Apple Keynote, and just plain .TXT files. Oh, and the usual image formats. I wasn't crazy about the PDF support; maybe they'll integrate with GoodReader in a future release. The audio and video streaming worked flawlessly at home on my local network. When I tested at the local Tea Lounge, I could still stream MP3s but smooth video just wasn't happening. Natch, this is the kind of thing that depends a lot on one's home ISP connection, the wifi connection at the external location, general Internet topology, and just random luck in general.

I installed the firmware upgrade to both of my MyBook Lives, and doing so wiped out all of the changes I'd made to TwonkyServer. To some extent this is no great loss, since I've got the whole family set up with WD 2go and they can watch video on their iPads without Twonky. But whatever the WD people are using to stream video, it isn't the DLNA protocol, so we still need Twonky to stream to our XBOX 360 and onto the bigscreen teevee. So I'll have to make those mods again.

One (kind've annoying) thing I discovered about the MyBook Live (both versions) is that it continuously runs a little process called "miocrawler", which looks for photos and pre-reduces them in size for mobile device display. I've got less than no need for such a thing, so I (rather inelegantly) disabled it: ssh in and find the file 'miocrawlerd' and make the first two lines read

#!/bin/sh exit 1

And then reboot the drive. Problem solved! (note that the process is different if you haven't upgraded to the 2.00.* version of firmware). (Also, note that miocrawler may be necessary if you want to use the WD Photo app -- I don't know if it's a requirement or not, but it's something to be aware of).

One other thing that comes with the 2.00.* firmware is an auto-backup feature that allows one to backup one MyBook Live to another. I looked at the process tree and yes, this is based on rsync as you might expect, but it has a nice control panel interface. Seems to work okay, although it's not especially fast -- it claims it will take 2+ days to backup my approx 1.2TB of data. It will also automatically keep the backup up-to-date, and I'll give that a try once I get an initial full backup.

All in all, I give it a pretty solid thumbs-up. I'll sleep somewhat better at night knowing that I've got a nice full backup of all of our audio/photo/video data. And did I mention that this 3TB NAS cost less than the 2TB NAS? How low can these prices go?

Christmas In July!

2011-07-26T14:14:00.000-05:00

Numero Uno Son's birthday is in August, so in addition to finding gifts for him, I also took the time to snag a few "un-birthday presents" for his sister and his mom and (of course) his dad.

Since his birthday hasn't arrived yet, I can really only discuss the stuff that I'm getting, namely:

Korg nanoKEY2 Slimline USB keyboard - a "small is beautiful" itty bitty controller for my music rig. I can grab this and my MacBook and some earbuds and head off to The Tea Lounge and get totally wired and make hours and hours of music that no-one will ever want to listen to.
Logitech THX-Certified Speaker System Z623 - a not-so-portable music rig component. I don't really care about the "THX Certification" -- but the 200W bass cube should give me some of that wonderful "the mothership is hovering over the kitchen" deep bass experience I've been lacking.
Western Digital MyBook Live 3TB NAS device - Yes, another one. Well, actually, this one's a bit bigger (3TB). But it'll be a nice backup for our current 2TB unit ("The Big Disk")(I guess we'll have to call this one "The Bigger Disk"). It'll be interesting to see how (more likely "if") two Twonky DLNA media servers work simultaneously on the same network.

This is, BTW, part of my overall vast scheme that I call The Family Darknet. As the years go by, my family's information assets will continue to grow. The kids will leave home for school, and they'll each take a copy of everything with them. We'll set up some kind of system that automagically keeps everyone's copy up-to-date over an encrypted Internet channel, and over time devices will wear out and be replaced, but the data will live on. As other branches of the family become more technically sophisticated, they'll be invited in to participate. It'll be cool: a huge, highly redundant distributed data repository that will hold all manner of data about our family. An "inheritance", if you will, not of money but of information. At first it'll just be videos and audio and photos, but if it lasts 100 years? Who knows what kinds of goodies will be in there? It could be a genealogical dream. It could also have pragmatic benefits, as well -- in the same way that college fraternities will keep files of old exams and papers, it might be nice to have a family repository of wills, deeds, and other documents and contracts that we could benefit from.

Alas, it's important to pay for these goodies, so .. time to get back on my head!

A "Sandman Slim" movie?

2011-07-25T14:54:00.001-05:00

Wikipedia says "The Dino De Laurentiis Company is currently developing Sandman Slim as a feature film." That's all I know, and I don't even know how current that tidbit is. But I'd love to see this happen. I wanna see what a na'at looks like.

Also, the third Sandman Slim novelAloha From Hellis due on 18 October 2011.

Google+

2011-07-24T12:32:00.000-05:00

So Google+ is here at last! Seems to me it's their 4th generation social networking platform (the others being Orkut, Wave, and Buzz), and containing a little bit of each, plus also some pretty strong responses to Facebook.

g+ is currently undergoing some growing pains. What I'm mostly noticing now is that there are tons of people from Second Life or other MMOs who have established identities that have already crept out into the real world in many ways, and (unsurprisingly) the people behind these identities don't want to give them up. Not really a concern of mine, but I still have many many friends in SL who are very up-in-arms over this.

From my own personal and selfish viewpoint, g+ is something I've been waiting for: a simple scheme for sharing content with the rest of my family. g+ hits the target perfectly; all this other stuff about setting up "circles" for work and friends and etc, well ... I think the sad fact is that I'm simply not really a very social kinda guy. If I've got something I want to share with the world, I'll post it here on my blog. Otherwise, all I wanna do is tell the wife and kids that I just stuck the Back To The Future movies up on the /Shared Video/ drive.

It's surprising just how fast g+ has grown, though ... I'd imagine those guys over at Facebook are holding lots of meeting, trying to get a handle on things.

FWIW, I'm now gplus.to/craigbecker.

One last thing: the "Hangout" feature for video chat is pretty sweet. We were playing with it at work the other day, and if they can deliver multi-party video onto computers and mobile devices, it could really be a game-changer.

Science Fiction Movie Round-Up

2011-06-26T17:09:00.006-05:00

I've seen a number of science fiction movies in the past month or so, and (amazingly) some of them have been quite good. And when it comes to SF movies, I'm really hard to please: there's a certain balance between "willing suspension of disbelief" and "good characters / plot / SFX / etc" that most movies can't manage. I mean, I even have serious issues with The Matrix, a movie that many people see as the epitome of SF film-dom (I almost walked out on that scene where *gag* Trinity's love brings Neo back to life). So if fate and Hollywood decide to hand me some material that even I like, I figure I owe it to the world to blog about it (no ego here! And, hopefully, no spoilers either):

Source Code - The worst thing about this movie is the title, which turned me off enough that I almost actively avoided seeing it. But luck was with me and I saw it and to my astonishment found that there is intelligent life in Hollywood. Or, at least, people in Hollywood who can write and film a science fiction movie that doesn't insult its viewers' intelligence. Since a lot of this movie's charm comes from trying to figure out WTF is going on, I won't / can't go into details, but a) I thought it was great and b) they managed to pull off an ending that didn't insult my 4+ decades of science fiction sensibilities. I mean, they really pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Did they drag Greg Egan in as a consultant? If this movie doesn't get at least a nomination for a Hugo award I'll be massively disappointed.

Limitless - Another intelligent SF movie -- is there something weird going on in Hollywood? -- this time about the ultimate nootropic drug. I enjoyed how the movie stuck to the topic and didn't phone in some Reagen-era message about the Evils Of Drug Use. If anything, it pushed the idea that Being Smart is the Ultimate High. The plot had a few holes in it -- it felt like maybe it went through substantial re-editing in post-production? The movie poster itself (above) is almost a metaphor for the movie: kinda chopped up, with no real cohesive center. But parts of this movie (ie, the law school student) were just pure, delightful wish-fulfillment candy. Not exactly a "message" movie, but part of the take-away is that Really Smart can still be Really Stupid. Another movie that deserves a Hugo nomination, losing out only because Source Code was better.

Next up, an "Alien Invasion" triple-feature:

Skyline - There has never been, nor will there ever be, a movie that has more blue lens-flare effects than this. There's an obvious resemblance to Battle Los Angeles (below), but they're both very different movies. I know it got slammed by reviewers, but I liked it anyway. The entire motivation for the alien invasion required considerable suspension of disbelief, but it led to an ending that was rather more imaginative (not to mention gruesome) than I expected. Not a life-changing experience, but the SFX were great and, overall, it was fun.

Battle Los Angeles - I noticed that Roger Ebert really didn't like this movie, and I think that I understand why, but I guess Roger and I have very different standards for this kind of thing. Admittedly, the movie was a bit like "what if the marines in Black Hawk Down were battling aliens instead of Somalians?", characterization was shallow-to-nonexistent, and there was this almost embarrassing "humans / marines uber alles" subtext (I'm positive that John W. Campbell, Jr. would have loved this movie). But for all that, I rather liked it. The SFX were well-done and the battle scenes really got the adrenaline pumping. The sound design was top-notch, too: I liked how the flying drones 'stuttered'. Not a movie that's gonna bowl 'em over at Cannes, but (like Skyline) it was fun.

Falling Skies - Not really a "movie", but TNT showed the first two episodes back-to-back so it was two hours long, so it's "movie-like". The last (and weakest) of the trio. I can imagine this being pitched as "alien invasion with a focus on the human element" or somesuch, but personally I could have done with a lot more alien SFX and a lot less warm Spielbergian fuzzies. The SFX were meh okay -- I'm sure there's some Maya-jockey out there who's made their career by character-rigging the excessively-jointed centaur alien bad-guys -- but, frankly, if I'd watched this in a dark theatre I'd have fallen asleep halfway through. I may continue to watch it just to see if they follow through some hinted-at exposition on the alien conquerors (someone just happened to notice that the aliens have four legs while their robots have two legs, what's up with that?)

Book plug: all of that alien invasion pushed me to re-read the best SF novel on the topic, namely William Barton's When Heaven Fell.

Also, an honorable mention for:

Devil - It seems like it's trendy to run down M. Night Shyamalan (who is only credited with "story", not "writing" or "direction"), but I won't because I found this was a fun way to spend 80 minutes. A simple tale, but well-told and well-acted. I've seen a number of people complain that Shyamalan's movies would be better suited to episodes of The Twilight Zone (and this movie is a case-in-point), but is that so bad?

Family Vacation

2011-06-21T15:26:00.003-05:00

Last week the family and I packed up and spent a week on Galveston with my father. We rented a nice house on the beach and just basically vegged. Alas, it was only a week, so now it's back on my head.

There was no 'net access at the house, which (surprisingly) I was pretty much okay with. I think my kids were about to go crazy, though. Perhaps I'm spoiled by living in Austin, but Galveston as a whole is not very "wired": my father and I visited a coffeehouse and asked about wifi access, and the barista looked puzzled and responded "What's 'wifi'?" That's a true story.

While I didn't have any deep psychological issues with the lack of internet, we all missed its presence. There is, I think, a profound difference between pathologically checking one's email every 5 minutes (mea culpa), and googling to find a decent restaurant. Especially in a place like Galveston, where we found decent restaurants to be in short supply.

Just an odd curiousity: I noticed that vacation expenditures on Galveston Island seemed to come in $50 quanta -- lunch tended to be $50, a tank of gas was $50, groceries were $50, dinner was $100, Roberta took the kids to Moody Gardens and it was $150, etc.

When we weren't doing typical vacation things like swimming or crabbing or spending money, we watched a lot of television (the house had a minimal satellite connection). Specifically, since my father is kind've a news-junkie, we watched a lot of CNN. It's odd how, not even a week later, I feel like I'm writing about ancient history, but last week was the week when Andrew Weiner was 'in the news' -- the press couldn't shut up about the guy. They kept on and on about how Weiner was "under intense political pressure to resign", but from where I was sitting it looked a lot more like "intense media pressure". It was like they were all deeply offended that he had the nerve to lie to Wolf Blitzer about his private affairs.

I guess I'm weird, but whenever I see the press humiliating a public figure about some sexual malfeasance, deep down inside I tend to be rooting for the guy who's catching the heat. And I'm sad when they (almost always) give in to the pressure and resign and apologize. I would have loved to see Weiner hold a press conference and (literally) show the press his middle finger and tell them "screw you all, you scurvy hypocrites, I'm not leaving office until they drag me out!" Which is maybe why Bill Clinton is one of my favorite Presidents.

The hypocrisy of the press never ceases to amaze me. Have these people never heard of "hubris"? Like, am I supposed to believe that none of these media talking heads has ever engaged in sex-chat on the 'net? "Karma's a bitch", so the saying goes -- I would not want to be standing anywhere near a member of the press when Karma comes a'calling.

But ... this is supposed to be a post about vacation. One of the things we tend to do as a family is listen to audio books when driving long distances. This has occasionally proved to be embarrassing -- ref the time Roberta opted for Nyla Goldberg's Bee Season, which contains some surprisingly explicit sexual content that required the use of my highly developed Dad Driving Reflexes to deftly jab at the "off" button while exclaiming "hey, is that a deer?!", all before the reader could get to the 'n' in 'penis'.

But we're older and wiser now. For this trip, we opted for Clive Cussler's White Death, in which the suave, well-muscled NUMA agent Kurt Austin goes up against an evil eskimo mad scientist who plans to unleash giant ill-tempered mutant salmon into the world's oceans and thus gain a world-wide monopoly on the seafood industry. There's also some stuff with a nazi zeppelin and ancient Basque relics. No, seriously, that's really what's in the book. I'm noticing that White Death was published in 2003, while Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery was released in 1997. It's a little hard to imagine that Cussler wasn't "influenced" by another evil scientist's desire for "sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads".

Also -- while I do not know this for certain, White Death makes me wonder if Cussler actually vacationed in the Faroe Islands and elsewhere and then penned the book so he could write the travel off as "research". I can imagine him being audited: "so, you're claiming these airline tickets, hotel, and meal bills as 'research'?" and the author whips out the book and says "read pages 110 through 124!" While I've never read a confession of such, I'm convinced that writers do this. It's difficult to read Gregory McDonald's Carioca Fletch (for example) without wondering if McDonald co-wrote it with his tax attorney after a Brazilian Carnivale blow-out.

Oh, one last comment re audio books: I'm far from his biggest fan, but Orson Scott Card's unabridged Ender's Game is a very good, family-friendly book for a long journey.

Taming The WD MyBook Live And Twonky 5.1.9

2011-06-04T17:20:00.000-05:00

As I posted here last November, I've got my home entertainment center tricked out with a 2TB Western Digital MyBook Live NAS device. I've since had to do some tuning and some tweaking, and this information might be helpful to someone else, so I'm posting about it.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not responsible for any loss of warranty, data, marital consortium, or anything else. Everything below worked for me, but it's your responsibility to decide if you understand things well enough to proceed.

If you have an iPad: install either Media Link Player Lite and / or LivingMediaPlayer (aka "MLPlayer" and "LMPlayer". Both were free the last time I checked) and you can use the MyBook's built-in Twonky server to stream media wirelessly to your iPad via your home wireless router.

To enable ssh (ie, command-line) access to your MyBook, use the backdoor:

http://myMyBookIPAddress/UI/ssh

This enables ssh and tells you that the root pw is initially welc0me. This is hard-coded into the page, so if you change the password, it'll still say the password is welc0me. So if you change the password, don't forget it!

http://myMyBookIPAddress/UI

has a "Media" page that lets you turn TwonkyServer on and off.

http://myMyBookIPAddress:9000/

is the TwonkyServer control panel. Click the wrench icon to get to the good stuff. Note that the "Sharing" page doesn't seem to work.

Your MyBook Live runs a version of Linux called Debian "lenny". Twonky is located in the directory

/usr/local/twonkymedia-5

Your vanilla twonkymedia-server.default.ini file probably looks something like this:

contentbase=/shares contentdir=+A|/Public followlinks=0 radio=0 readdbondemand=0 scantime=-1 friendlyname=%HOSTNAME%-Twonky ignoredir=AppleDouble,AppleDB,AppleDesktop,TemporaryItems,SmartWare suppressmenu=mediafeeds,transcoding,divAutoShare,network startupmb=1 disablelocalssdp=1 streambuffer=131072 dbdir=/CacheVolume/twonkymedia cachedir=/CacheVolume/twonkymedia nicrestart=1 uploadenabled=1 uploadmusicdir=/shares/Public/Shared Music uploadpicturedir=/shares/Public/Shared Pictures uploadvideodir=/shares/Public/Shared Videos maxidletime=0

Note that I have a single share named Public. It contains the following subdirectories:

/Public/Craig /Public/Miranda /Public/Roberta /Public/Aidan /Public/Shared Books /Public/Shared Music /Public/Shared Pictures /Public/Shared Video

The vanilla .ini file is problematic: it indexes everything (all videos, pictures, and music), which takes a loooong time -- and there's something wrong with Twonky's supposed ability to notice when new content is added and thus I must re-index frequently -- and causes Twonky's DB to grow very large. Which appears to make Twonky less reliable. We are a simple family, with simple needs: we just want to stream videos. So I modified the file to this:

contentbase=/shares contentdir=+V|/Public followlinks=0 radio=0 readdbondemand=0 scantime=-1 friendlyname=%HOSTNAME%-Twonky ignoredir=AppleDouble,AppleDB,AppleDesktop,TemporaryItems,SmartWare,Craig,Miranda,Roberta,Aidan,Shared Books,Shared Music,Shared Pictures suppressmenu=mediafeeds,transcoding,divAutoShare,network startupmb=1 disablelocalssdp=1 streambuffer=131072 dbdir=/CacheVolume/twonkymedia cachedir=/CacheVolume/twonkymedia nicrestart=1 uploadenabled=1 uploadmusicdir=/shares/Public/Shared Videos uploadpicturedir=/shares/Public/Shared Videos uploadvideodir=/shares/Public/Shared Videos maxidletime=0

Note 1: It's a good idea to save a copy of the old file before you modify it:

cp twonkymedia-server-default.ini twonkymedia-server-default.ini.save

Note 2: I added the names of directories I didn't want to scan (Craig, Miranda, etc) to the ignoredir line.

Note 3: I changed the contentdir line from '+A|/Public' to '+V|/Public', which makes Twonky search only for videos. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to play with comma-separating different combinations of + and - and M, P, V, and A to target content more precisely (ie, "+V|/Public,-A|/Public/Shared Music,+P|/Public/Shared Pictures").

Note 4: I had some trouble getting Twonky to recognize my tweaked .ini file, so I resorted to the following process:

Stop TwonkyServer via the "Media" page at http://myMyBookIPAddress/UI
At your Linux command line, type cd /CacheVolume/twonkymedia
Your command line prompt should read
MyBookLive:/CacheVolume/twonkymedia#
Okay -- I know this is a gutsy move, but -- delete the entire contents of your current directory (ie /CacheVolume/twonkymedia)
Re-start TwonkyServer via the "Media" page at http://myMyBookIPAddress/UI
Go to http://myMyBookIPAddress:9000/ and check to see that you're up and running.

Note 5: The process outlined in Note 4 above will also fix Twonky if you try to access the web control panel at http://myMyBookIPAddress:9000/ and get "page not found". I mention this because Google tells me this is a not-uncommon problem.

Note 6: I changed uploadmusicdir, uploadpicturedir, and uploadvideodir so they all pointed at the /Public/Shared Videos directory. I'm not sure if this was necessary or not.

Hacking WD MyBook World Ed has lots of interesting information on the MyBook Live.

The Number ...

2011-05-26T12:07:00.001-05:00

... 8128

I have an affinity for the number 8128. Sometimes people ask me why. I apologize in advance for the self-aggrandizing nature of this post.

Back when I was a skinny, sports-averse lad of 12 or 13 years old, I read a lot of books. Reading was a lot more fun than standing out in left field praying that nobody would hit a softball in my direction, and then when it happened, acting like I was trying to catch it when, in fact, I really just wanted to get out of the way and avoid getting beaned or worse.

I read a lot of science fiction. I mean, a lot of it. I also read other things, including books about math. Not math textbooks, but things like George Gamow's One Two Three ... Infinity and the like. I don't remember which book specifically brought up the concept of "Perfect Numbers", but the concept resonated with me. For whatever reason, any book I found only listed the first 3 numbers in the series: 6, 28, 496, ... . I found this maddening -- what's the 4th number?!

You have to recall that this was circa 1973: we had a rotary phone, there was no internet or WWW, I was too young to drive so getting to the library took some effort, I lived in podunk where there were no bookstores, much less bookstores that had a "Computers" section, etc. I was pretty much on my own.

But at about this time I also got interested in computer programming. My family lived near a branch of Southern Illinois University, which had recently acquired a Control Data Corp Cyber mainframe, and was using it as a timeshare system. Through a friend I got access -- actually, people were extremely casual about usernames and passwords and you could find them written on abandoned punch-cards etc, I eventually had quite a collection. I realize that nowadays this is frowned upon, even illegal, but back then it was considered "cute". Before you condemn me, know that I had certain ethics about it, and I never deleted people's files or caused any kind of trouble. Mostly what I did at first was play games -- things like the old BASIC Star Trek game.

But eventually I wanted to know more, so I asked the wonderful lady (Mrs. Whelan) at the public library if she could find me some books on "basic computer programming". And in about a week she had a couple of books for me with titles like "Learning BASIC". I ate 'em up.

Yes, I was a serious geek as a boy. Geekitude was not popular in the small midwestern town in which I lived; the other kids gave me hell, I was "weird" and so forth. Today, it seems like "geek" is simply one of many accepted sub-cultures (like "jock", "goth", "rocker", "preppie", "skater", etc) that kids may identify with. I'm happy about this -- I think of myself as an "early adopter". But back in 1973, reading science fiction and writing computer programs just got you sucker-punched.

Anyway, long story short (and you can probably see where this is heading), one of the first things I did when I learned to program was write a program to generate the 4th Perfect Number. It was not especially efficient, but it chugged along and popped out 6, then 28, then 496, and then ... after a pregnant pause ... 8128!

Natch, first thing I did was rewrite the program to spit out the factors so that I could check the answer -- hey, it was an early effort! -- but 8128 checked out.

I went on to learn a whole bunch of different languages like FORTRAN and SNOBOL and LISP and APL (where, since I didn't have APL keyboards, the operators were all represented as escaped digraph "symbols" like $UP$ -- some things are too tedious even for an obsessed 13yo), and wrote a number of programs to play Conway's Life and several Turing Machine emulators and other nerdy delights. And this led to going to college and getting a couple of degrees in Computer Science, which have been "beddy beddy good" to me.

But at the beginning of it all was that 4th Perfect Number, 8128. Which, lest I sound too impressed with myself, I note that the Wikipedia article on Perfect Numbers says:

These first four perfect numbers were the only ones known to early Greek mathematics, and the mathematician Nicomachus had noted 8,128 as early as 100 AD.

Then, in 1456, an unknown mathematician recorded the earliest reference to a fifth perfect number, with 33,550,336 being correctly identified for the first time.

So it's not like I was blazing new trails on the frontiers of mathematics. But still, I've sort've 'adopted' the number and tend to use it in places where I need a handy integer. Like, for instance, a blog name. Although for obvious reasons I never use it for passwords or pin-codes or anything like that.

Anyhow, love it or hate it, that's the story.

Asshole Crime

2011-05-23T12:57:00.005-05:00

So, the trial of Dharun Ravi is moving along. Ravi, you'll recall, is accused of driving his college roommate, Tyler Clementi, to suicide after he used a webcam to spy on Clementi having a homosexual encounter. Ravi also twittered about it and allegedly live-streamed a portion of the encounter out to his twitter followers (who must be a real classy group, I'm sure). So now as a result he's being charged with 15 counts including bias intimidation, invasion of privacy, witness and evidence tampering, and other stuff that nobody seems to want to list. The "bias intimidation" charges carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

The entire situation sucks. Even as a parent myself, I can only imagine the nightmare that Clementi's parents are living in. I'm sure Dharin Ravi's family is going through some tough times, too (I really know nothing about them, maybe they're rich and it's no big deal -- or maybe not, and they're mortgaging the house / tapping into their retirement nest-egg to pay legal expenses). It seems like many in the gay community want to see Ravi hang.

This is just me, but, having carefully considered all of the facts available to me, I've concluded that Ravi is guilty of being a Big Asshole. Additionally, while I don't have perfect knowledge of the events, it seems unlikely to me that Ravi could have predicted that Clementi would commit suicide.

Keeping that in mind, 10 years in prison seems excessive. I mean, here's a guy in New Jersey who got 4.5 to eight years for driving drunk and killing a 13yo girl. And apparently this is considered a tougher-than-average sentence for such a crime. Don't get me wrong, I'm not shrugging it off as "oh, kids do that stuff", I believe Ravi deserves some kind of punishment. But -- 10 years? What kind of justice is being done here?

This kind of thing comes up again and again and again in the news: Asshole Crime. Some asshole -- okay, let's be polite and call them a "Jerk" -- some Jerk gets somebody else hurt or killed, and DA goes through the statutes with a magnifying glass to come up with a set of charges that a jury might buy. I mean, "bias intimidation"? I'm not sure I even know what that means, much less that there's apparently a law against it (in NJ, at least). I think this is a waste of the justice system and taxpayer money. Perhaps it's the engineer in me, but I don't see any value in locking a jerk in prison (save "punishment for punishment's sake"), but I think society would be better served if the jerk could learn to change their ways and become a non-jerk. And for this, I have two suggestions, one "real", the other "imaginative". I'll use the Ravi / Clemente case as an example, but I'm sure you can think of any number of other examples that qualify.

First up is the Civil Suit. Ie, the Clementi family sues Dharin Ravi for driving Tyler to suicide. The jury awards damages as they feel appropriate. It's neat and simple, and even the worst of jerks hates getting hit in the wallet. Getting sued and paying damages can be a serious "learning experience".

Second, and more fun: what I really think this country needs is a Federal Asshole Registry (sorry, "Federal Jerk Registry"). The idea is, somebody does something jerk-ish, they get their name etc in the Registry for a given amount of time. And during that time, they have to go around and introduce themselves as a Registered Jerk to their neighbors (just like sex offenders). Potential employers would use it for background checks, etc.

Actually, we more-or-less sort've have a de-facto version of that right now, with Google: Search on someone's name and if they've committed any serious jerkery they'll often come up. But a genuine government-sponsored Jerk Registry would be better: it'd be harder to "game", plus it'd contain info on jerks who are deserving of the name, but somehow managed to avoid local or national news coverage, or are buried so deep in the search results list that nobody ever notices them.

Admittedly, this still leaves the problem of just how do decide who deserves a place in the Jerk Registry, and for how long. That'll take some pondering, and so I'll leave it for a future entry.

From Agents To Apps

2011-05-20T21:03:00.000-05:00

"According to IDC, smartphone manufacturers shipped 100.9 million devices in the fourth quarter of 2010, while PC manufacturers shipped 92.1 million units worldwide. Or, more simply put, smartphones just outsold PCs for the first time ever." (source: New York Times, 8 February 2011)

And also:

"Amazon ... is claiming that Kindle e-books are outselling hardcover and paperback print books on its Website." (source: eWeek.com, 19 May 2011)

So, call me Captain Obvious, but this mobile computing stuff really seems to have caught on. And hey, I'm a fan. For all of its deficiencies (dropped calls, poor reception, yaddayadda) the cellphone has made the world a safer, more efficient place. 15 years ago, if your car crapped out on you at 3am in some strange place, you had a "situation". Nowadays help is literally a phone call away. Which is why I get irate when my wife and kids go out and don't take their cellphones with them -- I mean, why are we paying for these things anyway?!

One of my favorite writers put it thus:

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal ... was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need.

There were (true) stories of people falling off cliffs and the terminal relaying their scream in time for a Hub unit to switch to that terminal's camera, realize what was happening and displace a drone to catch the faller in midair; there were other stories about terminals recording the severing of their owner's head from their body in an accident, and summoning a medical drone in time to save the brain, leaving the de-bodied person with no more a problem than finding ways to pass the months it took to grow a new body.

A terminal was safety.

--- The Player Of Games by Iain M Banks

But I digress. The real reason I'm writing this is to comment on how personal computing today varies from how people thought it would be twenty-odd years ago.

Once upon a time, everyone thought The Future was going to be "agent technology" -- that is, we'd all have one or more personal 'software entities' (ie 'agents') that would go out and do things for us. You'd say "I need to meet with Steve Jobs -- set up a meeting, book a flight and a hotel room and a car, and oh yeah Billy's birthday is next week so buy him that home chemistry set he's been wanting". And your Agent would go do all that stuff for you.

You can see how this hasn't exactly worked out. For one thing, the idea of buying a home chemistry set scares the bejeezus out of people for fear of getting flagged by Homeland Security or the DEA. But more to the point -- think about how someone today would go about executing on the tasks given above:

First off you'd pull out your smartphone and look up Steve Job's phone number in your smartphone's Contacts list. Then you'd give him a call and set up the meeting, and then put the meeting into your smartphone's Calendar, then you'd set up the flight, hotel, and car, either by using your smartphone's web browser or, more likely, "there's an app for that". That settled, you'd use the Amazon app to browse for chemistry sets, select one, buy it and arrange to have it shipped. And you can do all this while you're sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office.

The point I'm trying to make is that apps have supplanted agents as the future's way of getting things done. Or, to look at it another way, instead of telling an agent what we want, we interact with a smartphone plus apps to get things done. Which, if you think about it, is probably a superior way to do most things: given the current state of the art in artificial intelligence, it's unlikely that anyone would trust a piece of software to set up a business trip for them. Smartphone apps hit the "sweet spot": they allow people to perform tasks both trivial and difficult, but they keep the human in the loop just enough to ensure desired results. AI deficiencies aside, this probably also makes people feel more secure, knowing that they've supervised the job enough that they're confident they'll achieve the results they want and expect. It's a "trust thing": you had no idea that some chemistry sets are priced at over $200, and so you're pleased that you were involved in the purchase and picked the one that cost $35.

For sure, agent technology might someday arrive. But I think there's going to be a significant "human factor" that will need to be surmounted. I guess if I were a rich fart or a corporate executive who was comfortable with handing out short, imprecise orders to my staff or my secretary, an agent would be a natural, easy thing to work with. When and if we ever get usable agents, I suspect that they will be highly personalized to 'fit' the person they work with -- sort've like how a travel agency keeps track of whether a client prefers smoking or non-smoking, window / middle / aisle seating, etc -- but in a lot more detail. And these personal databases, full of random and extremely personal trivia about an individual, will need to be very, very secure. I mean, imagine that business trip above except the command ends with "and book me some entertainment while I'm out there" and the agent helpfully sets up an appointment with a call-girl, knowing that you prefer short blondes with a C-cup. Now imagine that a newspaper reporter or your wife gets hold of that database.

So what does the future hold for smartphone / app technology? My guess for the relative near future is that smartphone devices will be given more latitude to wake up and notify us of events of interest. An example I like to use is: you're at your hotel, resting up for the big meeting with Steve Jobs the next morning, when you're jarred awake by alarms -- the hotel is on fire! You're on the 10th floor, and you need to get out, fast. So you grab your smart phone and turn it on and bring up your Hotel Fire Escape App, which uses GPS and other techniques to guide you to the exit.

Well, okay, not quite -- most people are going to at most grab their pants and head out the door. But imagine that instead your smartphone wakes up with the alarm, sounding it's own alarm to make it easier for you to locate it, and runs the Escape App automatically. You grab the phone and it's got big green flashing arrow directing you out the door, down the hall, and to the stairs. This is example is admittedly contrived, but I think we'll be seeing more and more of this kind of thing in the next few years: our smartphones will become more "context-aware" and will initiate user interaction when appropriate.

(You may think the hotel fire rescue app is silly, but I'm told that navigating dark, smoke-filled rooms and hallways is not easy. A number of hotels are moving emergency exit signs down to near floor level, where they can be more easily seen if (God forbid) the smoke is so thick you find yourself crawling on your hands and knees to keep out of the smoke. If a smartphone app can help people survive that kind of dangerous situation, more power to it!).

My Talented Kids

2011-05-13T18:04:00.000-05:00

You may want to skip this one if you're not a relative of mine -- this is just Dad taking a moment to crow about his talented kids.

For his final art project, my son Aidan took one of his guitars apart and sanded down the body and "swirl-painted" it. His first attempt, so it's not a perfect "swirl" but the result is still pretty gosh-darn cool. Yes, he got an A.

(oil paints on wood)

These are a couple of freehand drawings by my daughter Miranda:

(pencil on paper)

(ink on paper)

(Alas, not the best digitization of those past two images; I'm a bit loathe to run them through our scanner for fear of destroying the original).

I'm pretty happy that both of them are very creative (although in very different ways). I hope it's something that stays with them their entire life.

Goodbye SETI

2011-04-27T12:40:00.003-05:00

The SETI Institute has fallen on hard times:

In an April 22, 2011 email ... SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson described in detail the recent decision by U.C. Berkeley ... to reduce operations of the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (and thus the Allen Telescope Array) to a hibernation state effective this month. NSF University Radio Observatory funding to Berkeley for HCRO operations has been reduced to approximately one-tenth of its former level and, concurrently, growing State of California budget shortfalls have severely reduced the amount of state funds available for support of the HCRO site.

This makes me sad. I know that in the past I've expressed some rather pessimistic views on the topic, but I've got no problem with passive scanning: it's safe and cheap, and (even though it's admittedly a long-shot) it has the potential to change humanity's outlook on the universe forever. I mean, can you imagine waking up one morning to see a headline like

INTELLIGENT ALIEN LIFE CONFIRMED!
We Are Not Alone!
(film at 11)

But maybe some eccentric millionaire will save the day. Ex-MS honcho Paul Allen has already given them $30 million to fund the initial array of telescopes. "In for a penny, in for a pound" -- maybe he'll pull out the seat-cushions on his sofa and dig around and find an extra $5 million to keep SETI running for a couple more years. I really hope so.

$5 million, though ... it's like pocket lint compared to the, what, $6+ billion that's been spent on the Large Hadron Collider? And SETI is a whole lot easier to explain to the average tax-payer. Although maybe that's a problem and not an advantage. Cynic that I am, if you tell Joe Citizen that "SETI is the search for intelligent life out in space", what he hears is "SETI wants $5 million to hunt for flying saucers." Which is probably not helpful.

On the other hand, if you tell him "The Large Hadron Collider will address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing the understanding of the deepest laws of nature" ... well, hell, I'm not sure what the average person thinks of that. Probably something like "I dunno what it is, but all these science guys are backing it, so it must be a winner." The nice thing about basic pure research is that you never really know what's going to come out of it. So when people ask you questions, you can say pretty much anything you want: "it could lead to unlimited free energy", "it could solve global warming", "it could lead to new medical techniques", etc etc and so forth.

This is not to say that pure basic research is easy to fund -- just look at the poor Superconducting Supercollider that lost its funding in 1993. But SETI has connotations of "flying saucers" and "little green men"; The LHC is all about "the God Particle" and "Baryonic Matter" and cool impressive terms like that. Even Conan O'Brien couldn't make a good joke about Baryonic Matter. (The best I've ever managed involved the "Mushroom Mattar" at the local Indian buffet).

*sigh* Five million dollars. It seems like a trivial sum in some contexts, but I know from practical experience that It's Hard To Make Five Million Dollars. "Well, duh!" you say. But ... my day job involves working for a very large international corporation, one that grosses billions of dollars in revenue every year. A few years ago I was sent to South Korea to assist on a project, one that I can't talk about except to say that it was a very small piece of a much larger project that involved building a new city. My project had an estimated cost of $5 million USD. I met all kinds of VIPs and bigshots, was shown all manner of plans and forecasts and models and whatnot. There was a *lot* of money involved. I figured it was a no-brainer that my measley $5 million project would get approved -- probably rubber-stamped by some junior assistant project approval guy in a basement cubicle.

Boy was I wrong. There were endless meetings, demos, justifications, presentations. And every day the project team grew -- I never figured out what role 3/4s of them were supposed to be doing (although I had been forewarned by someone with prior experience: "Korea? Oh man ... you're gonna love the way they manage to squeeze in all of their cousins and uncles and friends on every deal" and as near as I could tell, he was totally (if not politically) correct).

Anyhow -- in the end, the project never happened. I was surprised: I thought that billion dollar corporate entities would trade off "minor" million dollar projects like pocket change. There's a classic sales principle wherein you attempt to sell the big dollar item first -- a $2000 suit, for instance, and then hit the customer up with $50 cufflinks, a $75 cravat pin, etc, which somehow seems less expensive in the wake of the two grand you just dropped. But that didn't seem to happen here.

In truth, I never did figure out what happened to kill the project. When I was over there, I saw a museum quality scale model of the proposed city, complete with lights and working bridges and cranes and such, it was about 15 meters long and probably cost at least a million bucks. So someone was throwing money around. Maybe my team just never met Daddy Warbucks. There was, frankly, a lot of stuff I never quite figured out: the Korean language is composed of about 5% English "loanwords", which means that if I listened very carefully, I could almost kinda get the feeling that maybe I understood about 1/20th of what people were talking about.

All in all, a most educational experience, I learned much. I learned that I could drink most Koreans under the table, and that I don't like Korean food. But the most important lesson I learned was: It's Hard To Make Five Million Dollars.

Good luck, SETI.

And now for something completely different: while Googling for something else I randomly encountered this gem: The Aesthetics Of Science Fiction Spaceship Design, which is the Master's thesis of one Kate Kinnear at U Waterloo. It's a 26MB PDF but fairly easy reading, and the topic is Pure Fun. It must be nice to have a Master's Thesis that other people will actually want to read. I stuck a $10 bill in my (paper) thesis back in 1985 and 4 years later I came back and checked and it was still there. It's probably there now.

Cyberpunk at the Movies

2011-04-10T15:46:00.001-05:00

What do the following four movies have in common?

If you said Jason Statham, you're 3/4s correct (Statham didn't appear in Death Race 2, which is a prequel to Death Race).

If you're into movie soundtracks you might guess "all four movies were scored by Paul Haslinger (ex-Tangerine Dream)". And despite impressing me, you'd still only be 3/4s correct -- Haslinger did brilliant scores for Crank and the Death Race movies, but Crank 2 was scored by the one and only Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More). Which was a good choice given the amount of over-the-top mayhem in the film.

This is admittedly a highly-subjective appraisal, but I would submit that these are four of the best cyberpunk movies to come out of the studios in recent years.

"Cyberpunk?" you say, incredulously. Yes, cyberpunk. Here's a few selection lines from the Wikipedia article on the topic:

Giant, multinational corporations have for the most part replaced governments as centers of political, economic, and even military power.

... many cyberpunk protagonists are manipulated, placed in situations where they have little or no choice, and although they might see things through, they do not necessarily come out any further ahead than they previously were. These anti-heroes--"criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits" call to mind the private eye of detective novels. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents is the "punk" component of cyberpunk.

The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to be marked by extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators ("the street finds its own uses for things"). Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction.

Of course, I am (what fun!) picking and choosing and ignoring certain elements like direct neural connection into a mutual hallucination (ie, "cyberspace") and god-like Artificial Intelligences who manipulate humans for their own unknowable ends. But cyberpunk isn't a hard, fast set of rules; it's a set of (highly engaging) tropes that tend to pull us into the struggle of the "little man" against The System, and (we hope) allows us to share as he ultimately raises a defiant middle finger to the Powers That Be.

It's good stuff. And while I don't want to give away any spoilers, every one of these four movies tips its hat in one way or another to William Gibson (Neuromancer), Richard Kadrey (Metrophage), and Neil Stephenson (Snow Crash). Street culture, "grunge" technology, a manipulated anti-hero who nonetheless manages to "win" in some manner -- it's all there.

Crank 2 -- arguably the most outrageous of the four films, features a great musical score plus a number of cameos by some interesting figures in the music industry, namely Maynard James Keenan (Tool, A Perfect Circle), Danny Lohner (Nine Inch Nails), and Chester Bennington (Linkin Park).

It's just nice to see cyberpunk done right. It's been attempted before -- Vin Diesel's Babylon A. D. (2008) comes to mind, and the post-apocalytic Eastern Europe in the first half was quite well-done. But once the action shifted to New York, things quickly slid downhill.

Finally -- while we're on the topic of cyberpunk -- it's strange to me to hear people refer to Bladerunner as a "cyberpunk masterpiece". The Syd Mead production design gave the movie a dark, noir-ish texture that had something of a cyberpunk "feel" to it, no argument there. But the actual plot of the movie itself was basically "cop tracks down bad guys". And -- maybe this is just me -- the first time I saw it, I found myself hoping that Rutger Hauer would kick Harrison Ford's ass.

I've noticed this tendency of late for high school english teachers to put Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on student reading lists, and it makes me wonder if there is a sad "group-think" dynamic going on here. Dick wrote a lot of books, and DADoES is most certainly not one of his better works; it's simply (thanks to Bladerunner) his most well-known book. He's written much, much better: A Maze of Death and UBIK come to mind, as does A Scanner Darkly, which is a dark, serious book about Dick's life in the 70's drug culture that carries an anti-drug message about as strong as Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream -- yet I fear that most people won't read the entire book and thus miss the point. It reminds me of that time in 1999 when David Howard, aide to the mayor of Washington, D. C., used the word "niggardly" while discussing a budget.

Of course, no discussion of cyberpunk in the movies would be complete without a mention of The Matrix.

I can't resist a final comment: if you like cyberpunk or the Death Race or Crank movies, you owe it to yourself to check out Richard Kadrey's novel Sandman Slim:

“The most hard-boiled piece of supernatural fiction I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. … all confident and energetic and fresh and angry. I loved this book and all its screwed-up people.” (Cory Doctorow)

“The best B movie I’ve read in at least twenty years. An addictively satisfying, deeply amusing, dirty-ass masterpiece, Sandman Slim swerves hell-bent through our culture’s impacted gridlock of genres…it’s like watching Sergio Leone and Clive Barker co-direct from a script by Jim Thompson and S. Clay Wilson.” (William Gibson)

Terms of Enrampagement

2011-03-27T20:47:00.000-05:00

I've grown to be a huge fan of Archer (Thursdays at 10pmEST) on FX. It's an animated show about secret agent Sterling Archer and -- well, you just have to watch it yourself. It's raunchy, foul-mouthed, twisted, and hilarious. The two-part "Stage Two" and "Placebo Effect" that aired recently were amazing; "Placebo Effect" had some jaw-droppingly outrageous over-the-edge writing: Archer (who is fighting breast cancer) finds that criminals have been replacing cancer treatment drugs with sugar pills and Zima, and the result is non-stop violence and ethnic slurs and medical marijuana as he "rampages" his way to the top of the criminal hierarchy. Interrogating criminals by pretending to play Family Feud and blowing out their kneecaps with a shotgun probably doesn't sound like a recipe for comedy gold-- but it had me rolling on the floor. That's only a small part of the extremely "non-PC" frolics that the show pulls off, ending with a warm homage to one of the most memorable Magnum, P. I. episodes ever. Some of the very best television I've seen this year.

It sure ain't Little House on the Prairie. It may not work for you. But if you like television that pushes the boundaries, you really need to check out Archer.

On Aliens

2011-03-05T16:17:00.009-06:00

First things first: I definitely believe that there is other intelligent life in the universe. The universe is just too damn big for it to be just us humans. I guess it's kinda funny, I have a lot of faith in this, probably the kind of faith that Christians are supposed to have in Jesus. But I'll probably die without ever knowing for sure.

This does not mean I believe in UFOs. I'll concede that it's possible that Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials sometime in the past 4+ billion years. I even have my private suspicions that life on Earth may have started from some extraterrestrial "seed" -- some kind of spores or chemical precursors that floated through the void for a long time until they came to the Earth and somehow flourished and after a million or billion years became a thriving concern. Where did that seed come from? Who knows -- in one or more places life arose "naturally" and -- as living things are prone to do -- spread itself everywhere it could. I could be wrong and life really did arise spontaneously on Earth. I'm not complaining.

But people bring up the Fermi Paradox -- if life exists elsewhere in the universe, how come we haven't met them yet? There are many possible reasons for this:

We really are alone.
Intelligent life exists but it's uncommon.
There's a whole galactic Internet out there -- but it uses some kind of technology that we can't detect.
Etc.

I have my own thoughts on this. Part of the Fermi Paradox is the assumption that any intelligent species will completely colonize the galaxy in just a few million years, because they'll inevitably colonize nearby systems, and those colonies will eventually send out colonies, etc. It's a big self-replicating system that grows and grows until life is everywhere.

This may not be an original thought --and I have no evidence to support this, it's simply an idea -- but what if we are one of those colonies? Referencing the aforementioned "spore" idea, maybe we're part of the outwardly spreading wave, not yet at the point of sending out our own 'child' colonies.

Which still doesn't answer the question "where is everybody?". Strictly speaking, it's "improbable" that we would be the most advanced technological race in the neighborhood. But somebody has to be first, and it's not impossible that it's us. Just unlikely.

One theory -- one that I find easy to believe even though it scares the hell out of me -- is that advanced civilizations tend to be really, really quiet. Not because their communications technology is uber-efficient (although that won't hurt), but because It's A Jungle Out There.

The Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev came up with Kardashev Scale, which is one way of thinking about the sophistication of hypothetical civilizations throughout the universe:

A Type I civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet.
A Type II civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its primary star and associated planets.
A Type III civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its entire galaxy.

Neat, mind-expanding stuff, but one thing to take away from it is that civilizations use resources. Given that the universe contains a limited number of resources, some forward-thinking civilizations, recognizing that they are growing larger and larger, might decide that any competitors for resources are a Bad Thing.

I trust you can see where I'm going with this. The Great Big Silence In The Sky may be due to a combination of a) smart civilizations keeping themselves hidden and b) not-so-smart civilizations getting wiped out by other civilizations who want to eliminate the competition.

This is one reason why Alien Invasion movies drive me crazy. Sure, it's possible that the aliens want to "enslave" us for some unknowable reason. But I'll bet you a dollar that we don't have much to offer any civilization that's capable of interstellar travel -- except for our resources. Practically speaking, it'd be a lot easier to simply wipe us out and mine our system at leisure.

And believe me, we'd be easy to wipe out. I've been reading science fiction for over forty years and there's no shortage of ideas on how to kill off the human race, and that's just from writers trying to earn three cents per word. Imagine an advanced race who really put some serious thinking into the matter.

And forget Independence Day. Probably the simplest, cheapest, most pragmatic technique would involve dropping a big rock on us. Or a bunch of little rocks -- traveling at relativistic velocities. They wouldn't even need to leave their home system -- just put some kind of drive / navigation units on the rocks and point 'em at Sol and let 'em rip. When they get close enough they target Earth and *boom* it's Game Over for the human race.

I'm admittedly making a fair number of assumptions here: that interstellar travel is difficult and there's no way to travel faster than light, that advanced civilizations aren't necessarily peaceful and there's no magic way to create energy and matter (ie, resources) from nothing. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on any of these points.

Let's put all that aside for the moment, though, and assume that aliens don't want to kill us outright. Why won't they talk to us?

One thought I've had is that the aliens are out there -- and they don't want to talk to us. Either because we have nothing to offer them, or -- maybe -- because we scare the hell out of them.

Not that we're in any position to wage interstellar war at this point. But let's be honest: we are an aggressive, warring, intolerant species. Even our entertainment is full of violence, conflict, and an unspoken assumption that the human race is somehow superior. If we made radio contact with another race that was just like us, we'd be terrified.

A well-worn cliche in science fiction is that war-like races like us inevitably wipe ourselves out -- to the grateful relief of the peaceful races of the universe. What if that's true? Maybe they're out there just waiting for us to commit racial suicide.

One final thought on this topic: maybe it's quiet because everybody moved?

I'm serious. There's a passage from Carl Sagan's novel Contact that's always stuck with me.

"If we're figuring out ways to extend our lifespans, think of what those creatures on Vega must have done. They probably are immortal, or close enough. I'm a practical person, and I've thought a lot now about immortality. I've probably thought longer and more seriously about it than anybody else. And I can tell you one thing for sure about immortals: They're very careful. They don't leave things to chance. They've invested too much effort in becoming immortal. I don't know what they look like, I don't know what they want from you, but if you ever get to see them, this is the only piece of practical advice I have for you: Something you think is dead cinch safe, they'll consider an unacceptable risk."

One of the things that I think that most science fiction has gotten wrong, from square one, is the unspoken assumption that all life lives on planets. Planets are relatively unsafe places to live: you have to deal with earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroid impacts, and other things that make death easy and immortality difficult. I suspect that truly advanced civilizations -- who may indeed have achieved some form of immortality -- will live in nice, controlled, predictable, and secure space colonies. And these space colonies may not be located anywhere near a star. Stars are great energy sources but sometimes they act up and turn into supernovas and gamma ray bursters (from the Wikipedia article: "It has been hypothesized that a gamma-ray burst in the Milky Way could cause a mass extinction on Earth.") -- which can also be problematic for immortals.

So maybe they moved ... to some nice quiet safe place in the vast gulfs between galaxies. Which means they're very very far away, and also very hard to detect. What do they use for energy and other resources? I don't know -- maybe they took some black holes with them and use those for energy. Maybe they have a vast automated industrial pipeline, tens of thousands of light years long, that ferries in resources from neighboring galaxies. It's just a guess -- but if you're looking for total security, safety, and control over your environment -- it's hard to think of a better place to live than those dark, empty, and uneventful spaces that separate the galaxies.

Obligatory iPad 2 Post

2011-03-03T10:59:00.000-06:00

So the iPad 2 is out! Well, okay, not until March 11th, but now we know all about it: front-and-back cameras, dual core processor, thinner, lighter, chock-full of extra goodness -- at the same price. I confess that I enjoyed watching Mr. Jobs and his friends showing it off and rubbing some of their success in the competition's face: 100M iBooks downloads, 200M Apple accounts, 100M iPhones, and there was a killer line about iPad pricing: "ask our competition what they think of our pricing now".

I wonder if the iPad 2 will also emit the same mysterious energy rays that apparently turned me into a Fanboi.

As nice as the iPad 2 is, I don't think I'm going to jump in and buy 4 of them for my family. Or even 1 of them just for me. If I were filthy rich, I would ... but I'm not filthy rich. It's a little hard to justify dropping that kind of money again, with rumors of an iPad 3 in 4Q 2011.

It leads me to speculate on Apple's overall biz plan. I don't think I'm the only Happy iPad Owner who isn't going to mindlessly upgrade. Maybe the iPad 2 is targetted at all of those people who last year said "the iPad looks nice, but I'm going to wait until they release one with a camera". Surprise! To misquote Roy Batty: it's "time to buy".

I might change my mind and decide to buy one, but even if I do, I'm going to wait until after March 11 to see what the public consensus is. Just me being paranoid. If iPad 2 turns out to have some design flaw -- using FaceTalk too much makes it explode, say -- I'd rather read about it than experience it. If iPad 2 really is "a completely new design", then they completely new designed it awfully damn fast. Short product cycles make me nervous.

I have high hopes for iPad 3 (which is, I know, rumor-ware at best). But (again, speculating about what Apple marketing is thinking) I'm guessing the iPad 3 will be the one that's intended to make iPad 1 owners switch. My best guess is that it'll have a Retina display -- which would be totally awesome but it's the kind of change that ripples down into each and every little subcomponent and will probably raise the price. But I'd almost certainly pay for it. And I would rather wait for it to be done correctly than settle for a bugged-up rush job.

All that said, the part of the announcement that got me really excited was towards the end, which can be summarized as "iMovie for iPad: $4.99; Garage Band for iPad: $4.99".

Glee / Tool

2011-02-22T20:12:00.001-06:00

So I'm sitting here watching Glee (not because I really want to) and, for an episode that's supposed to be on an anti-alcohol theme, so far they've sung "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" and Pat Travers' "Snortin' Whiskey, Drinkin' Cocaine" ... okay, I'm lying about that last one. But it would have been awesome. Actually -- I think the writers maybe had some trouble finding a reasonable "alcohol is bad" song -- God knows I'm having a difficult time thinking of one myself except for Tool's "Sober" ... be still my heart, would the Glee gang cover Maynard and the gang? Oh please please please please yes!!!!

Naw, it'll never happen. But it's fun to think it might.

[Update: for some reason Comments don't seem to be working right. That said, I've had someone point out that Pink's "Sober" and Mike Cross's "I Don't Need Another Hit" are songs with "booze is bad" messages. Frank Zappa's "Cozmik Debris" is another (and, like the Tool song, it's another one I'd love to hear the Glee kids attack, but it'll never ever happen), and Googling about I guess there's an entire musical genre called "straight edge" that promotes a no drugs / no alcohol lifestyle. Here's a Yahoo Answers page that goes deep into it.

I guess I was not surprised to read that last night's episode of Glee was not well-received by a number of viewers -- the consensus being that showing the main characters using alcohol with no dire consequences is "against the rules". As near as I can tell, they thought the show needed to end with everyone tearfully singing at a funeral. I guess at one time it really was against the rules, back when the Reagans started their "Just Say No" program and (so the stoary goes) Hollywood and television were given strict 'guidelines' about how drug abuse must always be portrayed in a negative light, etc. Strange that today it's "edgy" to do a show that tries to portray the less-than-lethal aftereffects of (moderately responsible) alcohol consumption.

Personally, I don't drink -- which oddly enough seems to make many people think I'm an alcoholic. Go figure]

iPad Music Round-Up

2011-02-09T19:21:00.008-06:00

I spent some quality time this weekend with my Mac and my iPad and lots and lots of music and synthesis software -- my goal, modest though it be, is to drive a software synthesizer from my iPad. I succeeded, but not really in the manner that I expected. I started naively with an Apple Camera Connection Kit, which I figured would give me USB/MIDI out from my iPad that I could plug into my Macbook Pro.

Alas, things aren't that simple.

On the plus side, the iPad / CCK will drive a hardware synthesizer through a cheap USB MIDI converter cable (given that the iPad app is written to output MIDI). And I can drive my Macbook from a hardware MIDI controller device (via the same USB MIDI converter cable).

But it appears that currently the only way to drive a softsynth from an iPad is via wifi MIDI or wifi OSC -- call me weird but I'd kinda rather be able to do it via a cable connection. Also / of course, the app has to be written to output MIDI or OSC, and you'll need some kind of server on your computer to 'catch' the MIDI or OSC messages and route them to your softsynth. In case you're looking to do this, it appears that at this time you basically need two additional pieces of software: DSMI Server (for MIDI) and OSCulator (for OSC). Once you've got those up and running, you can run your favorite VST Host or DAW and go happily on your way. At least that seems to be how it's working for me; I'm still learning a lot of stuff and so I reserve the right to come back here and revise any errors I may have made.

I'm beginning to notice that iPad music apps are tending to fall into natural categories:

Sound Generators - There are a lot of these: mini-synthesizers with keyboards or other controls, "drum machines" that play sequences of sampled sounds, etc. These tend to be self-contained systems that may (but probably don't) function as MIDI / OSC controllers (and may or may not accept MIDI / OSC commands as input).
Mini-Studios - Basically a "Sound Generator" on steroids, it may also include a sequencer, sampler, FX, recorder, and other goodies to allow you to actually create songs. Probably attractive to musicians who tend to have long commutes -- also relatively inexpensive compared to a notebook / desktop computer DAW setup.
Alternative Controllers - New or unusual systems that allow one to make music via non-traditional controls; MorphWiz, Mugician, and iJammer (below) are fine examples of these. Sometimes they'll output MIDI / OSC to an external synthesizer (a trend I would like to encourage). In any event, these are intended as serious interfaces and not simplified "musical toys".
Musical "Experiments" - Amos (see below) is one of these: it generates music or sounds according to certain principles, probably has on-board sound capabilities but may also offer MIDI / OSC -- there are probably parameters you can adjust and then you let it run and it makes "music".

That said, I've acquired a number of samples from each category -- and I find that I'm drawn to the Alternative Controllers. Yes, you can make an iPad generate some really cool sounds, but compared to the multitude of VST software synthesizers out there, the iPad really can't compete.

Below is a round-up of some of the more interesting items I looked at this weekend. It's by no means comprehensive and my comments are based on what I read on the iTunes and developer's websites (ie, I did not buy all of these). I hope this will prove informative / interesting to anyone who's just starting to get into iPad music.

Hardware

prices may have changed by the time you read this

Alesis IODock: unknown
More info
Comments:I think this is gonna be big. Really big. Especially as iPad 2.0 comes out, and a lot of musicians will find themselves using the 2.0 for FaceTime and so forth, while the "old" iPad gets pressed into semi-permanent duty as a music device.

USB MIDI Music Cable Converter Keyboard Interface Cable Adaptor Keyboard to PC Support XP/Vista/MAC: $2.71
More info
Comments:It works as described above. I've seen music stores selling these things for $30+, so if you're looking to buy, go online.

Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit: $29.00
More info
Comments:You know it and love it (or not).

Line6 MIDI Mobilizer: $69.99
More info
Comments:A dedicated MIDI output for iPad. People seem to like it, but apparently your app has to be written to talk to Line 6's library for it to work. Currently it seems like something of a gamble as to whether or not it will become a de-facto standard.

GuitarJack: $149.00 (!)
More info
Comments:A handy (and pricey!) device that definitely fills a niche. I don't see it catching on unless the price falls dramatically.

Article of Interest

How To Use MIDI To Make An iPad More Musically Connected

iPad Software

prices may have changed by the time you read this

touchOSC: $4.99
iTunes page :Developer's page
Comments:Allows one to build custom layouts of controls that output OSC signals over wifi.

Midi Touch: $17.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Appears to be much like touchOSC (above) but for MIDI instead of OSC. Ie, you can build custom layouts of control buttons and sliders and whatnot, and use them to transmit MIDI messages.

Expression Pad: $4.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:An alternative controller that outputs wifi MIDI.

Everyday Looper: $5.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Allows one to record several samples, then loop them and mix them.

Funkbox: $2.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A "retro-style" drum machine.

Beatwave: free
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A simple, graphically-oriented sequencer.

Moog's Filtatron: $4.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:This is a weird one. It's awfully nice looking, and, well, basically, it makes odd sounds.

MorphWiz: $9.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:An alternative controller that, like the Mugician (below) aspires to be a real musical instrument. The only downside is that it lacks any kind of MIDI or OSC output, and thus you're limited to the built-in sounds.

Korg's iMS-20: $32.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A faithful recreation of the Korg MS-20 analog synthesizer, on the iPad. Can be controlled via MIDI over the Apple Camera Connection Kit.

BeatMaker 2: $19.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:
Very popular mini-studio / sample tweaker / groove sequencer.

Crystal XT: $4.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A dedicated synthesizer that can be controlled via MIDI over the Apple Camera Connector Kit. This is probably pretty cool (there's a free Crystal VST synth that makes some amazing sounds) but using the iPad as a sound generator just doesn't really work for me.

OMGuitar: $14.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Appears to be a reasonably serious attempt to emulate a guitar (with strumming) on the iPad. Kinda expensive. The demo video is cute.

Jasuto: $4.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:An idiosyncratic synthesizer that can be controlled by OSC.

nanostudio: $8.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Extremely popular mini-studio with many, many features. I'll probably buy this in a weak moment.

StepPolyArp: $11.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A sequencer / arpeggiator that talks MIDI either wirelessly or through the Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer.

MIDI Monitor: free
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Requires an Apple Camera Connection Kit -- basically a "MIDI Sniffer" tool that lets you capture and inspect MIDI messages on the wire.

MIDIVision: $3.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Requires a Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer -- basically a "MIDI Sniffer" tool that lets you capture and inspect MIDI messages on the wire.

S1 MIDI Trigger: $2.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A user-customizable MIDI controller that supports wired / wireless MIDI.

AC-7 Core: $7.99
iTunes page : Developer's pagefor DAWs
Comments:A DAW controller that appears to work with most major PC / Mac-based DAW software. Looks really cool.

Molten: $9.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A drum sequencer that appears to support wired / wireless MIDI.

Soundprism: $2.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:"Simplified" alternative controller that's designed so it's hard to play a "wrong" note. No apparent MIDI / OSC.

Musix: $.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A "hexagonal isomorphic keyboard". Inexpensive and claims to output MID / OSC.

Amos: $2.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Think of it as "MIDI wind-chimes". Neat toy that looks ultra-snazzy.

Pianist Pro: $9.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A bit pricey but also one of the few iPad keyboard controllers that outputs OSC and MIDI, wired or wireless. Has an arpeggiator and a drum machine. I may end up forking over the $$$ for this one.

OSCemote: $4.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Appears to be a general-purpose OSC controller. They advise reading the documentation before buying, and I believe them.

Retronyms Synth: $.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Polyphonic sampling synth (no MIDI *sigh*)

iSequence: $14.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:16 step pattern sequencer / studio.

iSample: $9.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Appears to be a six-channel sampler / recorder / looper.

MegaSynth: $4.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:5-note polyphonic synthesizer with sequencer and recorder.

Argon: $1.99
iTunes page : Developer's pagemonophonic virtual analog synth
Comments:Monophonic analog synthesizer plus sequencer, very pretty.

Euno: $2.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Some kind of synthesizer with controls laid out by a graphic designer.

Dopplerpad: $9.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A synthesizer with some kind of loop-based scheme for building songs. It might be lots of fun, but I can't make heads nor tails out of it.

Aurora Sound Studio HD: $39.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Not sure what to think of this (except yeesh that's an expensive app. It appears to be based on theYamaha Tenori-On system, which I know nothing about.

iJammer: $4.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A WiFi-based MIDI controller (that supports two independent MIDI channels (!)). "The layout is based on the 'Hayden-Wicki' system, with independent mirror image keyboards for the left and right hands. Supports up to 10-note polyphony." Sounds neat, but it also sounds like it would take some effort to learn to play it.

AirPipes: $4.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A WiFi-based MIDI Irish Bagpipes / Flute / Whistle control surface for the iPad. It also supports two independent MIDI channels. Might be somewhat easier to play than the iJammer (above).

Peavey AmpKit: $19.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A neat concept, but somewhat spoiled when I read that the app functions as a storefront that allows you to purchase additional effects boxes and pedals.

Xewton Music Studio: $14.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:"Music Studio is the only complete music production environment for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.It combines a piano keyboard, 73 studio-quality instruments, a 128-track sequencer, a piano roll editor, real-time effects and much more on a user-friendly interface." Appears to be a pretty serious attempt at an all-in-one studio.

iHolophone: $.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Very pretty, but it appears to be mostly a toy.

MendelSynth: $2.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Uses some kind of genetic algorithm to generate sounds. I generally love this kind of thing but $2.99 is a bit steep.

Slice Free: free
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:More "toy" than "instrument", it offers a novel way to slice up samples to build "grooves".

Bebot: $1.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:This appears to be kind've a "toy" version of MorphWiz (above).

Mugician for iPad: free
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A very serious attempt at an Alternative Controller; alas, it doesn't do MIDI or OSC. But it's fun (not easy) to play, and you can't beat the price. Check out one of the videos to see / hear it in action.

Curtis for iPad: $9.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Supposed to be some kind of granular synthesizer; personally I can't make heads or tails of it. I think granular is a really neat concept, but the results just don't sound very musical to me.

Synthpond: $1.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:A "Musical Experiment" app; I like that it outputs OSC.

Konkreet Performer: $24.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:The demo video looks impressive, but they're fooling themselves if they think they can sell this for $24.99 a pop. I predict a price drop soon.

SunVox 1.6: $4.99
iTunes page : Developer's page
Comments:Looks to be a very sophisticated mini-studio (for a very nice low price).

The Joys of Parenthood (and MIDI)

2011-01-19T14:36:00.000-06:00

One of the fun things about being a parent is that, on occasion, your child will become interested in a topic that you yourself love. I've been especially lucky in this respect: my daughter loves spicy food, my son is becoming a talented guitarist, and other things.

But the other day Number One Daughter has decided she's going to build an alternative music instrument controller as a science project. I won't / can't go into any details, but I've been a nut about synthesizers and such since I was 11yo, and I spent a lot of time in graduate school tinkering around with digital electronics, so it is with the utmost restraint that I'm keeping myself from being an obnoxious parent and taking over the project. I'm only providing support, advice, and (of course) $$$ to finance the effort. And, of course, the benefit of my vast experience. But as a dad, the kids both get that all the time. Not that they listen ... but I digress.

And so I placed an order last night and in a few days we'll be discovering the wonderful world of the Arduino. I'm jazzed. Cool stuff like this simply did not exist when I was a kid. I'm soooo excited (and so proud) about this. And I'm hoping that Number One Son will get involved, as well.

Good Speech / Bad Speech

2011-01-13T17:06:00.000-06:00

I didn't care much for Obama's "memorial" speech last night. I had originally written something that went into details, but I'm trashing that and just providing a table and some minimal commentary. See how you feel Obama compares to a few other American Presidents:

President	Occasion / Video Link	Word Count / Transcript Link	Duration
Ronald Reagan	Challenger Disaster	652	4m10s
George W. Bush	Columbia Disaster	375	3m20s
George W. Bush	9 / 11 Attacks	599	4m20s
Bill Clinton	Oklahoma City Bombing	916	9m10s
Barack Obama	Tucson Shooting	2762	33m30s

(Durations are approximate, based upon youtube videos of the speeches in question. Word counts were done with wc and thus may be slightly off due to punctuation).

Note that Obama's speech used more that 4x the words that Ronald Reagan used when he spoke to the nation about the Challenger disaster. More than 4x the words that George W. Bush used when he addressed the country on 9/11/2001. More than 3x the words (and time) that Bill Clinton used in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing.

In short, Obama seems incapable of using one word when he can use four.

When the President of the United States addresses the nation in the wake of a tragedy is when the President is really working hard for his paycheck. Failure is not an option: his words must be a comfort to those who grieve; they must work to heal those who are wounded; they must reassure the country that despite this awful event, we will not give up; they must promise justice if appropriate. The President's speech must be heroic, memorable, timeless, even poetic, and sombre in the gravity of the event.

Ultimately, the question of whether or not Obama's speech achieved those objectives is a matter of opinion. My opinion is no, it did not.

If you've got the time, I'd seriously urge you to watch the videos of the Reagan and Bush speeches. Reagan and GWB are both in the Top 5 on my List of Least-Favorite Presidents, but I have to give them credit: when their country needed them, they delivered, speech-wise.

(GWB's Columbia speech is surprising -- he uses few words, but the man is obviously affected by the tragedy. I don't think he's good enough of an actor to fake it).

Obama's not likely to start attending Toastmasters to bone up on his speaking skills just because of me. But I really wish he would. I'd like to be proud of the President's statesmanship. I do not know it for a fact but I suspect that GWB got some professional speech-coaching, and while it didn't make him less of a jerk, it seemed like over time his skill at addressing the nation visibly improved.

Maybe the saddest thing about Obama's speaking skills is that he doesn't realize he has a problem.

All:	We are the mediocre presidents. You won't find our faces on dollars or on cents! There's Taylor, there's Tyler, There's Fillmore and there's Hayes. There's William Henry Harrison,
Harrison:	I died in thirty days!
All:	We... are... the... Adequate, forgettable, Occasionally regrettable Caretaker presidents of the U-S-A!

iPad Music Apps: A Non-Comprehensive Overview

2011-01-10T15:10:00.000-06:00

I still love my iPad -- to quote a friend who'd probably just as soon not have me mention her name, "it's the first thing I touch in the morning and the last thing I touch before I fall asleep", and that's as true for me as it is for her.

I have this fondness for "musical toys", and the iPad is probably the best platform for such things that's ever existed. Seriously. I mean, a PC is pretty good, but you add in the touch-screen and the light-weight hands-on aspect of the device, and it's just amazing. In fact, my plan is to use my current 32GB iPad as a dedicated music device when I upgrade to the iPad 2.0 (presumably) sometime later this year. 32GB will hold a lot of samples.

So I've spent a semi-embarrassing amount of money on music apps, and some of them are fun, but to date I've only found one, maybe two, that I'd really consider "musical instruments". There are a lot of "keyboard synthesizers" out there like minisythn PRO ($8.99), Pro Keys ($2.99), and NLogFree (free), and they're fun but just drawing a keyboard on the screen doesn't necessarily make it "musically useful". Thereminator ($2.99) scratched my Theremin itch, and Soundrop (free) is an entertaining and unique toy, almost a game: you draw lines on the screen and little dots drop down and make sounds as they bounce about.

TOPLAPapp (free) and iGendyn (free), both by experimental music pioneer Nick Collins will create some very "unique" sounds, based on some very interesting principles:

TOPLAPapp is ... a virtual machine for sound synthesis. This machine accepts a few valid instructions ... The machine rushes through the instruction set to create output sounds, which are usually of a somewhat noisy character, hopefully interestingly so. The historical antecedents include instruction synthesis as pioneered at the Institute of Sonology in the 1970s, and the live coding movement, of modifying a running program as it acts.

Cool, huh? I've had fun with it but it makes my wife leave the room, usually in a very bad mood. I'm not making this up.

MorphWiz ($9.99) comes close to being a real musical instrument. Jordan Rudess, who's the keyboard player for Dream Theatre, is one of the developers. It's more or less an iPad implementation of the Haken Continuum Fingerboard and it's fun to noodle around with -- but until they add MIDI output and / or the ability to load your own samples, it's sort've limited.

There are many "groove generator" apps out there, and I'm sure some of them are awesome -- but the few I've looked at tend to be a) very complicated and b) very poorly documented, with c) questionable levels of support. I won't single anyone out, but one thing you have to watch for in this space before you spend $9.99 or more is that no matter how spiffy it looks, the app itself may well be the creation of a single individual -- who may run off chasing another brilliant idea instead of releasing a new version with bug fixes.

All that having been said, the one app I've found so far that I consider to be a seriously useful musical tool is Reactable Mobile ($9.99). That's a screenshot of it at the top of this post, and here's the Reactable website with more video, pictures, and other information.

$9.99 is a little steep for an app, but IMHO, Reactable Mobile is worth every penny. It's a "smaller" version of an actual physical table device that costs about $10K:

I think I've actually played with one of these for a few minutes at SIGGRAPH, but the environment was so noisy that it really didn't make an impression on me. Suffice it to say that the concept maps really well onto the iPad, and that it's well documented, fun, easy to use, and full of features -- for instance, it has a built-in HTTP server that allows you to load your own samples. They have a moderately actively user community and a forum where people can share their compositions -- and the app includes a function to automagically upload shared compositions from the 'net. The basic concept is that you have little icons that represent samples, oscillators, filters, and other synthesis objects, and you connect them together on the screen -- it's kind've like a visual programming language for something like SuperCollider, although I'm not sure if that's really a helpful description.

I love it, but it's probably not for everyone. You need to understand a little bit about how a synthesizer works, and the musical results tend to be either "grooves" or "ambient soundscapes". You can interact in real-time with the modules but really the system seems to promote improvisation more than repeatability. Again -- and speaking purely for myself -- I love it.

If you're curious, here are a few snippets I concocted with Reactable, none of which are destined to "make the charts, with a bullet!" But I had fun, and these days, the only reason I make music is to have fun doing it.

Krell 1 (1MB MP3)

Spooky 1 (672KB MP3)

Spooky 2 (602KB MP3)

[if you listened to these, especially the Krell sample, you'll hear one of the outstanding bugs in the system: it has a function that records the generated audio and renders it as a .WAV file, and for some reason it tends to be "noisy". I'm hoping they'll fix that soon. On the plus side, the Reactable developers seem to be interested in providing support for the app versus running off chasing butterflies].

Soundtracks

2011-01-10T11:21:00.000-06:00

Something I've noticed about my music collection over the past decade or so is how much of it is *cough* composed of movie soundtracks. I don't mean John Williams' theme for Star Wars. But there is a lot of exceptionally good music out there that was written for the movies by some very talented people. It almost seems like an evolved version of the "patronage system" of yore, but the patron is movie studio, not a king. It's interesting to speculate that, centuries from now, musicologists may look back on the movie music of our time as the "serious" music of our era, dismissively relegating The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, etc to the category of "pop music".

And while I guess that a lot of people keep current on the latest music via Pandora or last.fm, I seem to pick up on new music from movies and television shows. Like, the other night, Number One Son and I were watching Death Race and about 15 minutes in I'm like "so is it just me, or does this soundtrack kick butt?"

But I digress -- here are some examples. I'm not attempting to be comprehensive (some of these people have scored hundreds of films, I'm not going to list them all here or pretend that I've seen most of them) -- these are just the ones I like and / or own:

James Horner - Braveheart, Titanic, Aliens

Jerry Goldsmith - Alien, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Danny Elfman - The Simpsons, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, Beetlejuice, Futurama, Edward Scissorhands

John Williams - the Harry Potter movies, television shows Lost In Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land Of The Giants (Williams has been milking the Star Wars franchise for many years, and I am not a fan -- but the man has a serious CV)

Thomas Newman - The Green Mile, American Beauty, The Shawshank Redemption, Meet Joe Black

David Newman - Serenity, Anastasia, Heathers

(The Newman family alone is probably worth a post -- you've got Lionel, Alfred, Thomas, David, and Randy Newman, who, between them, have scored a list of movies that reads like "A Comprehensive List of Every Hollywood Movie You Ever Heard Of").

The above are all "established" names -- and I'm only scratching the surface, there's an entire ecosystem of popular film music composers. And then there are the some names you really don't expect to see on a soundtrack:

Toto - David Lynch's Dune (Brian Eno wrote / performed the "Prophecy Theme")

Daft Punk - TRON: Legacy

Wang Chung - To Live And Die In L.A.

Tangerine Dream - Risky Business, Miracle Mile, Firestarter

Paul Haslinger (ex-Tangerine Dream) - Death Race, Crank, Underworld

Mark Mothersbaugh - Big Love (2006 season)

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - The Social Network, (upcoming) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Jed and Joss Whedon - Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

I could go on.

I have to wonder just how some of these matchups came to be. How did William Friedkin decide "hey, let's get these Wang Chung boys in here". Or when Hugh Hudson was directing Chariots of Fire, did he tell people "yeah, Vangelis Papathanasiou -- you know, the Aphrodite's Child 666 guy"?

Finally -- since I surf the web and watch the occasional short video, and also occasionally request some of the lesser-known titles from Netflix, I've lucked onto some not especially well-known (but still quite talented) composers -- people like Rob Simonsen, Ian Dorsch, and Scott Glasgow. Sometimes their websites will have lovely free downloads of their music.

Experts Agree: Emperor Google is Naked

2011-01-04T14:12:00.000-06:00

In case you were wondering, no, you're not alone: a lot of people are becoming unhappy with the amount of "spam" in Google's search results (see this article on Metafilter today). During the holiday gift-buying season (ie, the last couple of months) my wife and I wondered aloud just what was going on: we'd try to find information on, say, bicycles, and Google would give us pages and pages of junk. Was it just us?

Apparently not -- I'll trust that you can click the link and read the Metafilter article and associated links on your own that speculate on details about why this is happening (summary: spammers and "search engine optimizers" are getting too good at gaming Google). I'm not happy that this is happening, but in a small way, it's nice to know that it's not just us.

Some people suggest using alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo or Blekko, and Blekko's "slashtags" seem like an interesting idea.

I've seen complaints that it's hard to break the Google habit because it's become second-nature for many of us to use Google, but I'm noticing that Firefox's searchbar defaults to Google but also allows one to add / manage additional search engines. So maybe I'll add Blekko and see how it goes.

One of the Metafilter commenters ponders that it'd be nice if Google would allow one to permanently remove a given website from search results, and then (on the Google end) analyze that information to push trash results to the bottom, thus leveraging crowdsourcing to beat the spam invasion. Sounds like a good idea (actually, I've had the same idea myself); I wonder how well it would work?

While I'm bitching about spam: I'm getting really tired of ads that try to trick me with fake "download" or "begin" buttons. Case in point, here's what I got this morning when I went to http://speedtest.net:

Note that there are buttons / links for "Start Scan Now", "Test PC Speed", "Start Test", "Begin Test", "Start PC speed test", "Free PC Speed Test", and something that may or may not be a button labeled "Pingtest.net". Mea culpa, I know that I'm part of the problem, that my goldfish-like attention span pushes me to attempt to speed-read the page. But I've been seeing this "technique" popping up more and more lately, and it's annoying.

Happy 2011!

2010-12-31T19:18:00.001-06:00

Another new year's eve, another year. I don't drink or "party" or do much to celebrate the new year; it's actually something of a sad time for me, as it means that a) my next birthday is in a couple of days and b) that my holiday vacation time is coming to an end. Ah, well -- in truth I should be happy that I've got a good job to go back to.

That said, and on a totally different topic altogether, for awhile I've been thinking of some "interesting" follow-ons to some popular culture media that I'd like to see -- follow-ons that will very likely never happen unless I write them myself and publish them as anonymous fan-fiction (highly unlikely). Still, I'd like to make a note of them here:

Star Wars: The Droid Liberation Wars - Ever since the first Star Wars movie, I've been bugged at how the droids -- who for the most part seem as sentient as any of the organic characters -- are very much "second class citizens". Remember that scene in the Mos Eisley cantina where the bartender says "Your droids. They'll have to wait outside. We don't want them here."? I wondered if Lucas might move the series towards "droid liberation", in the end leaving the Empire to be more or less on par with Iain M Banks' Culture. To the best of my knowledge -- I'm not a big Star Wars fan -- this has not happened. But I'd sure like to see it.
Harry Potter and the Wizard-Muggle War - I mean, haven't you ever wondered? It'd sure be interesting if J. K. Rowling and Jack Clancy collaborated on something like this. Rowling has shown she's not afraid of getting very dark -- all-out us-or-them genocidal warfare could get very very very dark indeed.
Sookie Stackhouse: Dead During Wartime aka True Blood: The Human / Vampire Wars - As with the Harry Potter concept above, this could get really dark and "interesting". I mean: homo sapiens encounters a superior apex predator ... this is a situation that's gonna go downhill fast.
Invaders of Gor - Earth takes on the Kurii, Priest Kings, and alternative (and highly non-PC) human cultures of John Norman's Counter-Earth as described in his Gor series of novels (I think he's up to #30, God help us all). You may laugh, but seriously, this could be rather interesting. The non-human Kurii have this habit of kidnapping humans from Earth and transplanting them to Counter-Earth, so there could be a nice X-Files vibe to this.

I once wrote up a short teaser on the concept (which reads rather like a mashup of Gor with Vinge's Marooned In Realtime); I may wake up in the morning regretting this, but here it is:
Jessica Qin was born in 1960AD on Earth in a small town in a province called Illinois, located in the United States of America.

Advances in medical technology -- especially the Big Breakthrough in the mid-21st century -- have kept her youthful and fit. Despite what you may think of her appearance, in 23rd century America, she blends in with the crowd. But in 2235AD, bored with life, she opted for a century-long solo mission to the star Wolf 359, 7.7 light years away.

Arriving in the Wolf system 47 years later, Qin emerged from stasis to find herself under fire by unknown entities. With 80% of her defense capability down and drive severely compromised, she found herself free-falling on a tight hyperbolic path around an object that appeared to be a Tipler Cylinder. With no drive capacity, she had no choice but to bobble up herself and her remaining resources into stasis and go for a ride.

Emerging from stasis, Qin found herself with good news and bad news: the good news was that she was on the fringes of Sol system's Oort cloud, rich in raw materials and just half a light year from Earth. The bad news was that the closed time-like curve she'd traveled had displaced her 277 years into the past, back to 2005AD.

After her ship self-repaired, she headed back to the inner system, where she was amazed to find Counter-Earth, which at first glance seemed an ideal place to stay completely out of the light-cone of Earth for the next 277 years.

Then she became acquainted with the local customs and the political situation.

Shocked and appalled by what she saw, she thought long and hard and concluded that her most fruitful course of action would be to align herself with the Priest-Kings in their war against the Others, repairing and in some cases augmenting their decaying technology -- Ship engineering AI de-briefs on recovered Priest-King technologies invariably included terms like "idiosyncratic", "baroque", and "paper-clips and silly-putty" -- in return for concessions that would soften the harsher aspects of Gorean human culture.

By necessity feared more than she is loved by humans and aliens alike, she is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. And yet unswervingly faithful to those few she considers her true friends. She has an unpopular cause but near-infinite time and resources to devote to it.

And Jessica Qin is an extremely patient woman . . .

The scary and difficult thing about writing this would be the necessity of having to ingest (and take notes on!) the 30 volumes of "reference" material in the existing Gor novels. I once inadvisably read all 6 volumes of Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant over the course of a weekend and made myself sick. 30 volumes of purple-prose propaganda urging women to accept their place as loving slave to their Master ... that might kill me.

So there you have it. I notice that these all involve some kind of war. So be it -- most interesting narrative involves some kind of conflict, and war is about as big and in-yer-face as conflict gets. There's also a pronounced "what if God and Superman got into a fight?" flavor to the last three -- but That's Entertainment.

Holiday Movie Wrap-Up

2010-12-29T12:30:00.000-06:00

For some reason I've seen a lot of new movies these past few weeks. Some capsule reviews:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 - It seems as if each successive Harry Potter movie is darker than the last. I expect that for Deathly Hallows Part 2 they'll finally push the saturation knob all the way down to 0 and it'll effectively be an audiobook that you listen to in the dark. Aside from that -- frankly, this was the most boring, angsty Harry Potter movie I've seen so far. I think that breaking the final book of the series up into "Part 1" and "Part 2" is a rather obvious effort on the part of the studio to extract every last possible penny from our pockets. Also -- I'd strongly advise not seeing this unless you have at least a passing familiarity with the rest of the books. My family made the mistake of taking my father to see this while he was visiting, and he didn't know what the hell was going on (and I was a bit fuzzy on some of the plot details myself).
Night of the Demons - Any movie that uses Concrete Blonde's Bloodletting as the background soundtrack to scenes of New Orleans debauchery automatically gets a +1 from me. But the rest of this movie was just pointless. It failed at least half of the rules Mark Twain laid out in Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, primarily the one that mandates that the reader / viewer care whether the characters live or die.
TRON: Legacy - An expensive disappointment. And by "expensive", I mean I dropped $56 to take the family to see this in "Real3D DX" and it really wasn't very good. Frankly, it was like watching the original TRON re-rendered at 8x the resolution with .25x the plot. The Daft Punk soundtrack (and their brief cameos) were the real standouts. Visually, it looked like a Syd Mead wet-dream -- but somehow it still managed to be trite and forgettable.
Predators - As with Night of the Demons above, this was pretty much pointless from the beginning and totally lacking in sympathetic characters. There's a "surprising plot twist" near the end that I'm sure anyone with an IQ over 100 figured out 15 minutes in. There's one cool part where this Yakuza guy takes on a Predator with a samurai sword, but beyond that, there's pretty much nothing of interest here. Disappointing. I sure hope Machette is better than this.
Get Him to the Greek and Forgetting Sarah Marshall - I really enjoyed these movies (perhaps because I had low expectations). Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a pretty basic "boy loses girl" plot but I found myself actually liking the characters, and I enjoyed the quirky humor (for instance, Sarah is the star of the television show "Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime"). Also, I cannot lie, it was also nice to see Kristen Bell wearing a lot less than she ever wore on Veronica Mars. Get Him to the Greek is something of a spin-off, based loosely on My Favorite Year with Russell Brand's unflappable, burnt-out rock star "Aldous Snow" playing the part of Peter O'Toole's "Alan Swann" -- but with a lot more sex and drugs. Again, a lot of quirky humor (and a fun little cameo from Metallica's Lars Ulrich) and likeable characters. But beware: you don't wanna watch either of these movies with the kids.
The Ring - Again, I'm one of the last people in the world to see this. And I know a lot of people think this was just an awesome horror film. But it left me with a big "meh".
Scott Pilgrim vs The World - One of -- maybe the best -- movie I've seen this holiday season. And, oddly enough, my teenage kids enjoyed it too, and I had fun watching it with them. My only criticism is that they could have trimmed 15 minutes. But don't let that put you off of seeing this gem. I've seen a lot of movies that are based on comics--errr "graphic novels"-- but this is the only movie I've ever seen that managed to successfully pull off "graphic novel look-and-feel" in a manner that was fresh and original throughout the entire film. A fast-paced movie that's fun and sweet at the same time.
The Box -I'd read the short story and also seen the Twilight Zone version. The movie succeeded in taking a simple concept and making it, well, sorta stupid. It's the kind of movie where you get hooked watching it, trying to figure out WTF is happening -- and then at the end, it's like "oh". Visually, I'll give the movie points for capturing a genuine 1976 look-and-feel, and some scenes were a very effective homage to the whole 1950's Cold War / Bodysnatchers kind of alien paranoia (I assume this was on purpose).

So I guess I'm kinda hard to please. I could go on -- I've been working my way through a number of lists of "most disturbing films ever made" (which probably deserves a post of its own -- I'm finding myself surprisingly un-disturbable)(although Martyrs certainly left an impression) and also watching some mindless-but-fun action movies (2 Fast 2 Furious, District B13, the Transporter movies and some horror classics like Final Destination and Hellraiser).

That said, I watched a few trailers last night for upcoming 2011 features that look somewhat interesting:

Guns! Guns! Guns!

2010-12-15T17:52:00.000-06:00

So you want to know what kind of gun Wayne Newton used in The Adventures of Ford Fairlain? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the astoundingly comprehensive Internet Movie Firearms Database.

Inception

2010-12-14T16:51:00.000-06:00

I was probably the only person in America who hadn't seen Inception, but Amazon delivered the modestly-priced "triple pack" (includes blu-ray, regular DVD, and "downloadable digital" versions) yesterday and so I figured It Was Time.

All-in-all, it's a pretty kick-ass movie. One that begs to be played *loud*, too: the soundtrack is quite a lot of what makes it all work, and Hans Zimmer, the composer, borrowed freely from Holst's Saturn and Don Davis's Matrix soundtrack for lots of those big, in-yer-face "brass explosions" and the result is pretty awesome.

Surprisingly, when I looked around for critiques and reviews of the movie, I was rather surprised that most people -- even people who professed to like the movie a lot -- seemed to find Inception a rather shallow piece of work. Which left me scratching my head; when the Matrix movies came out, there were all kinds of deep, philosophical discussions about the nature of reality, I remember someone put together an annotated transcript of the dialogue between Neo and The Architect in Matrix Reloaded, references were made to Plato's The Cave, etc. Some really deep shit.

I've been a big Philip K Dick fan for decades, so having characters moving willy-nilly between realities, sometimes losing track of what's really "real", is something I'm pretty comfortable with. And while the Matrix films had some awesome action / fighting sequences, Inception beats Matrix hands-down for plot and consistent world-building. So I was kinda surprised to see people talking about how Inception was really a metaphor for movie-making (say what!?). Personally I think there's rather a lot more there that Matrix-meets-Sunset-Blvd.

There appears to be some disagreement on what really happened at the end: some people seem to think it was all wrapped up neatly, with Dom Cobb returning to reality and they all lived happily ever-after. I've only seen the movie once, but I'm of the opinion (and I find it just generally more attractive to think) that it's more complex than that. Dom claimed that he knew inception was possible because he'd done it to his wife Mal when they were trapped in Limbo, persuading her that they weren't living in reality. Well -- what if Mal implanted a memory in Dom to convince him that they were living in reality? In other words: maybe Mal was right?

I know the totem is supposed to indicate whether or not one is currently in reality -- but the totem concept was Mal's idea, and Dom even uses Mal's totem after her death. I don't think it's impossible to wonder if totems -- or, at least, Dom's totem -- aren't as reliable an indicator as they're made out to be.

Ah well. Everyone's got an opinion, and mine isn't set in stone. But I guess I'm just not a fan of movies that wrap up too neatly at the end. I prefer a little ambiguity or subtlety in my narratives, where I have to apply some thought to "what it all means" versus being hit over the head with "the answers".

Neat iPad / Stanza / epub feature

2010-12-08T17:35:00.000-06:00

If you install the free Stanza e-reader app, and then someone emails you a book in epub format as an attachment, touch and hold the icon until the attachment is fully loaded -- you'll then see a prompt asking if you want to open the book in Stanza. Indicate in the affirmative and happy reading! (depending on the apps you have installed, you may be prompted with several choices of apps to "open" the book -- I had GoodReader as one of my choices, and it seemed like it tried to open the book as a PDF. FAIL. So make sure you choose Stanza to open an epub book). Oh, and yes, you can delete the email after you open the book in Stanza -- Stanza saves it in its Downloads area.I've only tried this with non-DRMed epub; it may work with MOBI or other formats but I don't know. Anyhow, this is a nice trick for loading a book onto someone's iPad without going through iTunes.

My Home Video Odyssey

2010-12-06T12:11:00.000-06:00

originally published 15 November 2010

So I've had this dream for quite awhile of having a totally digital home theatre system with no moving parts. I'm happy to say that I made a significant step towards that goal this weekend -- I set up an audio / video "tank" -- think of it as a "digital jukebox" -- that holds all of my family's music, pictures, and videos, including about 350 (legally) ripped DVDs. All accessible via remote control on our television / home theatre system (and, also, on our iPhones, iPads, and computers).

If you're curious, here are the results of the research I did this weekend, and what I finally settled on:

First off, I had a few loosely-defined requirements:

It needs an on / off switch or extremely low power sleep mode when not in use. You'd think this is a no-brainer but the early Apple TV units were powered on 24 / 7 / 365 and supposedly got quite hot and weren't power-efficient.
Also -- instant-on or a very short power-on / boot time.
1080p support.
No dedicated computer required. I don't want to boot a computer just to watch a movie, nor do I want to leave a computer running all the time.
Wide format support, including mp4 / m4v (which is how most of my video assets are formatted).
DLNA support (so it'll play content directly off of a NAS).
"Nice" UI, preferably based on something open source like Boxee or XBMC. Ie, I want something that wasn't just hacked together.
HDMI output -- I think this is the only thing that was available on everything I looked at.
Support for Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and any other 'net-based content delivery.
NAS functionality, so we don't have to pass USB drives around to share content.

All that in mind, I hit Google hard and pretty quickly came up with the Major Players in this area. The following list of devices, pros and cons is not at all comprehensive, it's primarily the features or problems that stuck out enough that I remember them from Saturday:

Apple TV -
Pros: the latest 4th gen version is low-power, and the device seems fairly reliable. This last is a not-insignificant feature considering all of the reliability complaints I saw about the other devices. Neat iPhone / iPad controller apps. Neat picture / slideshow features.
Cons: it really doesn't do what I want it to do -- it seems to be mostly oriented towards allowing one to rent movies and television shows from the iTunes store. The latest version won't take an add-on external storage device, and while there's an external storage hack for older versions, it's apparently like a roach hotel for videos: they go in, but they can't come out (ie, no NAS functionality). Finally, and surprisingly: it's only 720p.
(I also considered buying a Mac Mini and running something like Boxee software on it -- but the Mini is kinda pricey ($700US) and for that kinda money, it should read blu-ray discs. But it doesn't)
Google TV -
Pros: 1080p and it's got Netflix and a variety of other media sources. Also, it lets you browse the web while you watch television, neat iPhone / iPad controller.
Cons: so many it almost makes me cry: it's expensive ($299 and up), saw many many complaints about reliability and failures, some odd android fluke allows you to connect an external drive of up to 869GB (?), formatted as FAT32 (?!), many complaints about how the browser was painful to use, and the "remote control" is a full-sized keyboard (although you can buy an extra tiny keyboard controller for $130 or go with Sony's implementation which starts at $400), television networks seem to be lining up to block Google TV (FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC, and SyFy block it). Basically, at this point Google TV is pretty much a new "improved" implementation of WebTV from 1996.
Roku -
Pros: cheap ($99), supports Netflix and a variety of other sources (Hulu "coming soon"), lots of built-in codecs, neat iPhone / iPad controller app.
Cons: reliability issues, they recently stopped supporting PlayOn (an interesting content source that I may subscribe to in the future), I couldn't tell if the thing would function as a NAS or not. No DLNA support, so I'll need to buy a couple of terabytes of storage ($200) just for videos and I may or may not be able to use it as a NAS device.
WD TV -
Pros: cheap ($99), NAS capability (sorta), Netflix support.
Cons: can't connect to Windows 7 as NAS device (my wife's computer runs Win7), reliability issues, there's an iPhone / iPad app controller but it's not very good, I'll still need to buy a couple of terabytes of storage ($200).
Boxee -
Pros: nice GUI (maybe - there were mixed opinions on this), Netflix and Hulu "coming soon" (but they still claim lots and lots of sources of media content), nice iPhone / iPad controller app.
Cons: kind've expensive ($199 plus the cost of 2TB of extra storage), long-ish power-on time, reliability issues (and I haven't had good experiences with D-Link products in the past). No NAS support (I think).
Popcorn Hour C-200 -
Pros: lots of keen features.
Cons: expensive ($299 plus cost of extra 2TB of disk), notso hotso iPhone / iPad remote. Many, many, many complaints about reliability and support. Not sure about NAS capability.

So those are "big names" in this field. There are a number of lesser-known players out there and I suppose it's possible that I overlooked a device that would have been absolutely perfect. But I tend to think that if something truly awesome was out there, I would have encountered numerous mentions of it while I was researching these others.

To summarize: nothing I looked at did everything I wanted. Apple TV and Google TV just weren't what I wanted at all -- Google TV was especially disappointing. The Popcorn Hour box has great specs but there were many comments from buyers who had significant problems, I kinda got the feeling that they promised more than they really delivered. Similarly, the Roku, WD TV, and Boxee weren't quite "there". My overall impression is that there's currently quite a lot of churn in this market and it's going to take time for everything to settle down to where this technology is commoditized and reliable like, say, a CDROM drive.

And so ... I basically consigned myself to waiting 6 months or so and then surveying the field again. Although I decided that now would not be a bad time to "prepare the way" by buying a NAS device. And during the course of researching NAS I learned more about DLNA, and how well it works with the XBox 360 -- which is the device my family already uses to access Netflix.

Woot!

And so I hustled down to my local Fry's and bought a Western Digital MyBook Live NAS device, which includes a very nice little DLNA media server called TwonkyServer.

It works like a dream.

And I have objective evidence for this: my wife and kids actually love it and use it (which is sadly not true of every high-tech gadget I've set up at home). There's currently no iPhone / iPad controller for the XBox -- but my wife's Harmony universal remote works great with XBox, and the XBox controllers themselves aren't bad.

I've got all of our videos, mp3s and pictures up on the NAS, and they're all accessible via the XBox 360's (arguably somewhat eccentric) UI. It's one of those things you have to experience to really get "teh awesome" of it.

It actually works better than I had hoped, because DLNA / Twonky allows us to stream videos onto our iPads -- there are several for-pay apps and one free one called MLPlayer Lite. And the XBox controllers themselves aren't bad -- they're RF, not IR, so I don't have to aim it.

So ... I'm almost there. I still have some moving parts, most notably the NAS disk drives. I'm not sure how long it'll be before SSDs are down to about $100 / terabyte, but it's probably just a matter of time. I'll probably never really get it down to no moving parts: switches and speakers will be with us always, I think, and also it's going to take quite awhile before the media industry switches from rotating disks to tiny cheap SSDs and / or totally network-based distribution of content. But this was a pretty significant step forwards.

NEXT: (I do not know when this will happen) will be the integration of some kind of recording ability into the setup, so that I can record and timeshift television shows onto the NAS and bypass the (rather unfriendly) DISH Network PVR. But that's a big topic and I'm not going to go into even my preliminary thoughts here.

Pad People

2010-12-06T12:10:00.000-06:00

originally published 4 April 2010

So ... Mr. UPS showed up with the iPad at 11am on Saturday. I'd pre-ordered the 32GB Wifi version for my wife's birthday.

By 1pm I'm on the phone to the local Apple store: "So, if I came down there and wanted to buy an iPad, would you have one to sell me?" The person on the other end was somewhat amused: "there's a line, but probably so."

Long story short, I got a couple of the 16GB units for my kids and a 32GB unit for me. This took a certain amount of dedication on my part, as they had a "2 units per person" policy, and so I had to stand in line twice.

By now you're thinking "he's gone insane"[1] and / or "this guy obviously has too much disposable income"[2]. But you'd be justified in asking why I would do such a thing. And don't be mistaken: I'm not an Apple Fanboi by any means. Not since that PoS Apple ][e+ I bought when I was 19.

I think the watershed moment for me was when my wife used the iBooks store to download the (free) Complete Works of Shakespeare. She flipped to "Hamlet" (act III, scene 1) and held her finger over the word "bodkin" and a popup window gave her the dictionary definition[3]. It's not 100% -- it failed on "hurleyburleys" (although it offered Google and Wikipedia lookups). Shakespeare really doesn't get easier than this.[4] The iPad has the potential to be an educational device like something out of a science fiction novel (see below). My daughter picked up Gray's Anatomy, in color, for $0.99.

Also, I knew there'd never be any peace in the household until everyone had their own unit.

Oh, it's not perfect:

It doesn't charge while it's plugged into my notebook computer's USB port. And (like the iPhone) you really need a case of some sort to make it easier to hold on to. I think it was the C|Net review that noted that it's about the size and weight of a book -- but when the book costs $700 and is made of glass, you treat it a lot differently than a traditional book. And I miss being able to mount the device as an external filesystem like I can with my iPhone and iPod. And of course everyone is waiting for v2.0 that will have a camera so we can all (theoretically) videoconference with it. Oh, and if there is a Razzie Award for bad software UI design, iTunes wins hands-down.

But it's still pretty darned good. Comparing the iPad to the Amazon Kindle or the B&N Nook reminds me of the early days of the web, when there were many hard-line HTML experts who held that "HTML is a formatting language for displaying text and images on an arbitrary viewer", who would dismiss anyone who wanted to actually attempt to control the look / layout of the page. The Kindle is great for displaying books, sure. But the iPad let's you redefine the cncept of "book" to be something different and better. For instance, take a look at The Elements for iPad (an app which has been getting a lot of PR).

"This is the version you check out from the Hogwarts library," creator Theo Gray told BoingBoing. "Everything in it is alive in some way." Or, if you're a Neal Stephenson fan, it's like the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age.

No, most iPad books aren't this elaborate. Yet. But I can see an entire new "magic books" industry forming, dedicated to writing and programming "books plus" for this platform.

I suppose time will tell, but so far, battery life has not been an issue.

I'm also excited by the musical possibilities of this device. Create Digital Music has a really wonderful overview of some of the available and upcoming music apps. And I've got my fingers crossed that the JazzMutant people will adopt iPad as a platform.

I could go on and on -- all of the free news and media apps. NetFlix streaming. Cisco has a (free, as yet untested by me) WebEx app for the iPad, too. You've heard it all before.

Late breaking news: Apple iPad Already Jailbroken

But having played with one for the past 24 hours, I feel I can safely say: this thing rocks.

[1] My family thinks I'm reasonably sane. YMMV.
[2] None of your business.
[3] A needle, more or less.
[4] It strikes me that Scientologists (who I'm told are big on knowing the exact definition of every word they read) are gonna love the iPad. I bet it won't be long before Dianetics and Battlefield Earth appear in the iBook store.

Why Did That Man Call You "Jessica", Daddy?

2010-12-06T12:08:00.000-06:00

originally published 17 March 2009

Something people wonder about (but don't always get up the nerve to ask me) is: "why do you have a female avatar?"

If you've spent any time in a virtual world -- heck, if you've spent any time on the Internet -- the entire phenomenon of RL males appearing as female (or RL females as male) probably doesn't even raise an eyebrow. With an AV in virtual space it's a bit more in-your-face -- it's a visual medium, so it's not just a name, you see them, too -- but gender-swapping is certainly nothing new.

But people who aren't used to it can find it a bit disconcerting. And -- let's be completely blunt -- people sometimes wonder if the RL person is gay or transgendered or if they have "gender issues", etc[1]. But in my experience, that's not always -- not even often -- the cause for the gender-swap.

Everyone has their own reasons for choosing their AV gender. For me, it was a few things all rolled into one:

The biggest reason is, simply, that I'm really bad at making male AVs. When I started out with all of this virtual worlds stuff 4+ years ago, I had a male AV. He looked awful. I received lots of independent confirmation of this. And I confess that I am vain enough that I want to look good, especially in a medium where creativity is so highly valued.

The problem is that I'm a guy and I don't know what makes a guy good-looking. And I've talked to enough other men about this to know that this is a "guy thing" and it's not just me. I can make guesses and general observations ("he's nicely groomed (+1) and has a strong jaw (+1), but his eyes are too close together (-1) ..."), but I can spend all day looking at pictures of Brad Pitt, Heath Ledger, Mel Gibson, Sean Connery, and James Brolin, and I still don't know how to adjust the sliders or paint the skin to make a handsome face. Heck, the only reason I know Brad and Heath and Mel and so forth are handsome is because people have told me they are.

But tens of thousands of years of evolution and decades of real-time programming have gone into the development of a neural net in my brain that allows me to appraise female attractiveness in under a second. This makes the entire "code / compile / test" cycle so astoundingly short that I can easily build an attractive female face simply by moving the sliders around and it's obvious what "works" and what doesn't. And so it turns out that having a female AV allows me to get in better touch with both my "feminine side" and my innate Male Chauvinist Pig-osity.[2]
I've always been curious about what it must be like to be female. If you think about it, all over the world, women and men are raised very differently and treated very differently from each other. Not that playing a female AV in SecondLife is going to give me the full authentic experience of blossoming into womanhood. But it can give me a small taste of it. For instance: the first time a male AV tried to chat me up for a date was a serious eye-opener. Get a clue, guys!
This has changed over time, but back in 2005, options for male AV clothing and accessories were abysmally few; jeans and a black t-shirt was "state of the art" and it was very hard to find prim hair for guys. It was simply easier and more fun to dress up a female AV. Although my fashion sense is still rather spotty: someone once told me that I dressed like a comic-book superheroine. Not a conscious decision on my part, but -- I think they got it right.
This is more a reason why I've kept my female AV: as mentioned in an earlier post, name and reputation and identity are all tightly intertwined. And over time, Jessica has developed a nice reputation as a good builder and scripter. I don't want to simply abandon all of that by moving to a new male AV with a different name.

All of that said, in the end I cannot lie: I like designing female AVs. It's fun and I seem to have a knack for it. It takes time but over the years I've developed about 35 different looks for Jessica, and I'll wear different ones as the mood takes me. Which drives some of my friends crazy, but oh well.

In the past I've done a little bit of static 3D AV work with DAZ and, while the resolution is much higher, the results seem simply lifeless. But the virtual world is a dynamic medium that allows for movement and interaction. It's more than just achieving "the look"; it's finding just the right walk, or just the right stand anim that makes her toss her flexi-prim hair just so. If you do it right, it's as if your AV comes alive on the screen. There is genuinely nothing else like it on Earth.

All of this is preface to the fact that I'm starting a new experiment: a magick faery plonked me on the nose and I now have a new AV named Jesse Qin, who will be my male aspect in-world. At least, that's the plan. I've only barely started working on him yet -- but I've learned a few things over the years plus I know the right people to ask for professional help. So I'm optimistic. *fingers crossed* I don't see myself ever giving up Jessica -- she is just too much a part of me now. But the future is certainly beginning to look interesting.

Jesse v0.1 alpha and Jessica -- I've got a lot of work to do

[1] And I'd like to add that I'm happy I work for a company that has a longstanding, established policy that such things don't matter.
[2] This is a generalization based on personal observation and unsupported by any real data that I am aware of: men seem to have more "agreement" on what constitutes feminine beauty, while women tend to have a wider, more individualized range of different traits that they like in men. A psychiatrist friend of mine who has some personal experience with all of this tells me, simply, "women tend to be attracted to men that they perceive to be kind". But still, "kindness" is an ill-defined attribute. The only practical angle I can work out of this is that Smiling is a Good Thing. So I'm going to put some effort into making Jesse a smilin' kind of guy. This goes against the grain in SecondLife, where the vast majority of male AVs seem to go for that stoic, rugged, tough-guy image ala Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales.

"World Builder"

2010-12-06T12:00:00.000-06:00

originally published 9 March 2009

I really love Bruce Branit's World Builder video. So instead of simply enjoying it, I'm gonna get all pedantic on it and ask: "so what the heck was going on there, anyway?"

I mean, why did the guy have only 60 minutes to build? Why did he hide from the girl? Why did the girl have only (apparently) a few minutes to experience the build? I mean, what's up with the girl, anyway? And why did the build go away after she left? Have these people never heard of archiving? (although to be fair, Linden Lab's never heard of it, either).

I know, I know: "willing suspension of disbelief". I loved it, holes and all.

One thing that I would like to point out, though, is that this is not, strictly speaking, a "holodeck". The Star Trek holodeck somehow managed to rez stuff in real Reality (and bend space and all kinds of other neat, impossible stuff -- the holodeck was built by aliens and if you watched the show it was pretty obvious that Picard and friends could use it but they really didn't have a clue how the thing worked, and neither do I).

The technology in World Builder is more like The Matrix -- or, at least, the direct neural interface technology that was used in the Matrix movies. I mean, the girl was (apparently) in a coma -- I do not see any way within the logical framework of the narrative that she got up out of bed and started wandering through the scene. It was all in her head. And his head, too. And if you haven't seen the video, you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, so you really need to watch it.

And while we're on the topic: one of the subtler things in the Matrix movies -- in The Matrix Reloaded, in particular -- was that awesome lovely clean and white Zion Control room.

Okay, this isn't something the Wachowski brothers called me up and told me about, but it seems obvious that it wasn't a "real" place -- it was a virtual world construct of some kind. Pretty cool -- I mean, if we really had direct neural interfaces, we'd for certain be using them like that.

Some Random Thoughts on Identity, Names, and Reputation

2010-12-06T11:56:00.000-06:00

originally published 22 March 2009

Anyone who's spent some time in SecondLife (or any other 'social' virtual world) will tell you that having an avatar will twist your mind around a bit. Once you buy into the entire paradigm of having a visual proxy of yourself that's "somewhere else", you begin to identify with your AV ... and that's when things can get a little weird.

But not necessarily in a bad way. In the same way that the advent of the Internet expanded our minds and made many of us aware of the richness of the world, having an AV can be a positive, educational experience: I've heard people talk about how it can be a chance to 'start all over again'. And it can be that: our AVs may be tougher, or more sensitive, or more masculine, or feminine, than our real-world selves. And our RL selves can learn from the experience. I myself have more than once asked myself "what would Jessica do?" -- and sometimes her response is better than my 'natural' response would have been.

Alas, I know there are also people who have a few issues with their alter-ego, and take to dressing up like furries when they pop by the grocery store and other assorted whackiness. But I'll submit to you that there will always be people who can be pushed over the edge by anything: yes, there's a problem, but it's deeper than just identifying with cute anthropomorphic animals. Or heavy metal music. Or television violence.

But I digress.

One odd thing about identity is how tightly it is associated with something as simple and insubstantial as a Name. Names are tightly associated with Reputation -- and Reputation is one of the most valuable things in the world. This is just as true in Real Life as it is in virtual spaces. Here's a gedanken experiment: offer a RL celebrity the chance to start all over again from scratch at age 18, with a healthy young body and a different name. L$5 says they turn you down flat.

I think that Stephen King learned about the importance of Name and Reputation years ago with his "Richard Bachman" books: he had several short novels published under the pseudonym "Richard Bachman". They weren't half-bad -- but they didn't sell well until someone (the publisher? nawww, couldn't be!) leaked that Bachman was really Stephen King. Then they started to sell.

An interesting aspect of virtual worlds is that you really can start all over again from scratch. But even though you can create a new AV and tell people "Hi, I'm Robert Cinchring but I used to be " (and not get carried off to the loony bin) it's still very difficult. And it sounds pitiful, too. Offhand I can only think of one person who's ever pulled it off, when the sculptor Starax Statosky came back into SL as Light Waves.

In the course of my job, I've been involved in a number of large internal events that have been held in SecondLife, some of them large and involving Big Names. And one thing I've noticed is that people demand the use of their real names during real business events. Doubly so if they're a 'mover & shaker' with a Big Name and a Big Reputation. They'd also like for their AVs to look exactly like their RL selves[1], too -- but The Name is the important part. And I can't fault 'em for that -- it's simply The Way Things Are.

Thankfully, this is becoming easier and easier. Virtual spaces like OpenSim, Metaverse, and Forterra already allow the use of real-world names, and the new Nebraska "SecondLife in a box" units do, too. So -- no more screwy titler attachments (and good riddance to them).

Having said all that -- there are those of us who are simply more comfortable with their avatar name and identity. I'm one, and I know there are others. Perhaps my career would be a lot further along if more people knew me as "Craig" than as "Jessica". I'll never know -- I simply prefer to be Jessica when I'm inside of a virtual space[2].

[1] For certain values of "exactly", of course. A more accurate statement might be "... to look exactly like their RL selves -- but younger, slimmer, and with better hair". This is why building "realistic" avatars is currently more of an Art than a Science.
[2] And the whole topic of "Why do I have a female AV?" I will leave to a future post.

For The Kids, Silly

2010-12-06T11:53:00.000-06:00

originally posted 20 January 2006

Not long ago, Roberta asked me "why do you keep that blog, anyway?" It's a good question. I don't get a lot of hits here. I'm not looking to make money with advertising, and I don't wanna be a pundit: in addition to lacking the Sports Gene, I also lack the Fame Gene, or whatever it is that makes people want to get on teevee or have newspaper articles written about them. And I know a pundit. He tells me it mostly sucks.

I think my answer surprised her. I do have stuff here for 'ego' and also because I like to think that sometimes I can offer something fun or helpful -- Stuart's comment on my Constructing A Custom Fortune Cookie post seriously brightened my day.

But most of why I do this -- at least in the last year or so -- is for my kids. And their kids. And their kids. And so on down the line.

Hi y'all :)

Barring disaster, I'm pretty much certain that all this stuff I put out here on the 'net will be archived somewhere and future generations are going to data-mine all this content for information about their ancestors. As a computer geek, I find it fascinating to imagine what kind of software will be developed to do this, and how subtle it may be. Will it pull out any obtuse Skinny Puppy lyric references? Will it tell you which pundit I know, and figure out oblique references I make to other people?¹ Will it put things in historical context -- for instance, you there in 2100AD reading my Hope You Die, Denny Crane post may think I'm a barbarian -- but right now we don't have any effective treatment for psycho murderers or child rapists, and they scare the hell out of us, and this is the best we can do. You may or may not have one up the road, either (but I hope you do).

Do you still have fortune cookies?

Actually, a better question might be "is there anyone out there reading this?"² I dunno. But genealogy is more than a passing fad, and who knows, maybe part of my family tree will turn Mormon. In all seriousness, if one of my descendents reads this and manages to pull me back to life several hundred years from now -- I'll owe you one, bigtime. Really.

But I'm not blogging in hopes of resurrection someday. I'm doing this mostly because I want Miranda and Aidan to know a little bit more about me than they do. Hi kids :) I love you more than you know. I hate to admit this, but as I write this I'm going through things in life where I am not the most loving and responsive father. I'm trying to snap out of it. I hope you'll go easy on me when you remember me. At this point I only have vague notions of what kind of people you'll be when you grow up, but I'm extremely proud of both of you now, and that pride shows no signs of diminishing. I'm sometimes tougher on you than I should be, Aidan -- some people tell me this isn't uncommon, that boy kids are 'harder' than girl kids -- but I want you to know that I love you every bit as much as I love your sister.

I hope you guys both get something out of this. The first order impression you get from reading anything here is usually probably mostly correct -- but if your software sometimes hints at something else going on, it's probably right -- I'm not always as happy or funny or intellectual or honest or good as I may try to portray myself. Please remember I'm human.

The thing I'd like to ask you to do is to remember this stuff over the course of your lives (oh, and tell your children about it when they're ready for it, too. Hi there, little ones. I love you, too; right now it's sort've abstract, I know, but I hope I'm around long enough to love you in the real) and reflect upon it at different times. One of the big things you start to notice about your parents is how you understand them more and more over the years.

I don't know if I'm ever going to be this direct again about talking to you via this channel. But I'll always be aware that you're there. If the software flags something as a reference that may relate to you, then there's a good chance it does.

I love you all.

[1] And God there's at least one that I'm hugely embarrassed about. Yeah, your software probably has it flagged with a huge blinking "99+%" or something like that. That's the one. *sigh*.
[2] And ya know, if you really think about the concept of eternity -- which, hey, some entity reading this might really have before them -- there is the very real possibility that they may at some point decide to crunch through every single piece of data they can get hold of. Including what they're reading right now[3].
[3] In which case -- pleased to meetcha! And, I gotta tellya, that resurrection thing is sounding more and more attractive the more I think about it, so if you've got nothing better to do for the next billion or so years . . .

PLAY | FUTURESTATES

2010-12-06T11:48:00.000-06:00

originally published 29 March 2010

These FUTURESTATES videos are surprisingly good, kind've like Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, and with high production values. The central theme is the future of the United States -- a topic that I'm extremely interested in, but there don't seem to be many people thinking about it these days. Play (above)is really good -- strange, but good. Also Mister Green, Tent City, TIa & Marco, and PIA (all done in more of a traditional narrative form) are worth a watch.

I find Tent City is especially thought provoking, perhaps because I'm a father: would I have the courage to make that decision for my child?

"Hope You Die. Denny Crane"

2010-12-06T11:40:00.000-06:00

originally published 9 November 2009

People who know me tell me I have a pretty good sense of humor. And this pleases me and I hope it's true, because we all like to think we have a good sense of humor, just like we all like to think we're honest, good drivers, have good people skills, &c.

But it's pretty hard to make me laugh. Sure, I'm prey to Robert Cialdini's "click, whirr" of Social Validation via other people's laughter at a comedy club, and I'm not superhuman: sitcom laugh tracks still work reasonably well on me. But if you can stand there and tell me a joke and genuinely make me laugh out loud -- you're Damn Good. Television and movies -- of the non-laugh track variety -- are the same.

Which doesn't mean that I am not often amused. And David Kelley's latest legal fantasy Boston Legal quite often amuses me, which is why I watch it whenever I can. But last night's episode had that rare magic moment that actually made me laugh out loud:

If you saw the show you will undoubtedly remember the scene, but here's a small amount of setup: William Shatner, playing the Alzheimer-addled but still brilliant Denny Crane[1], is summoned to represent an indigent defendant, a vile scumbag who raped and killed a 13yo girl. Crane is extremely unhappy about this. While interviewing said scumbag at the courthouse, after scumbag opines that he "saved the girl a lot of suffering" by killing her because he has AIDS and he "really worked her over, if you know what I mean", Denny responds with something like "well, there are a number of defenses available to us, then ..." as he opens his briefcase, pulls out a .45, and cranks out two bullets, one into each of scumbag's kneecaps[2].

To be truthful, I did not so much as laugh but cackle madly.

I know, I know -- it's merely a dark revenge fantasy, writ across the small screen. If I'm dumb for enjoying that so much, then mea culpa. But, while I believe in karma, it's often difficult to deal with being wronged by someone and never knowing how or if they ever truly get the payback they so richly deserve. So . . . maybe I laughed because seeing Denny shoot that child rapist / killer satisfied some deep-seated psychological need I've had to really see someone wail on a sicko like that. There really do seem to be people like that out there in the world, we've all been hearing about them and their crimes for years, and even when animals like this are caught, convicted, and executed -- there is very little sense of catharsis for those of us in the population at large. Public executions aren't a completely bad idea, ya know . . . yeah, there'd be people who'd probably wanna jerk off to 'em or something, and that's just -- ick. But I think there is something valid to the notion of catharsis as a part of justice.

H. L. Mencken, in his essay The Penalty of Death [3], writes:

The same thing precisely takes place on a larger scale when there is a crime which destroys a whole community's sense of security. Every law-abiding citizen feels menaced and frustrated until the criminals have been struck down - until the communal capacity to get even with them, and more than even, has been dramatically demonstrated. Here, manifestly, the business of deterring others is no more than an afterthought. The main thing is to destroy the concrete scoundrels whose act has alarmed everyone, and thus made everyone unhappy. Until they are brought to book that unhappiness continues; when the law has been executed upon them there is a sigh of relief. In other words, there is katharsis.

He has a real point. The problem today is that the community -- ie, the country at large -- isn't really getting a whole lot of that good cathartic feeling when genuine monsters are brought to justice. And what little we get is delayed by years of legal wrangling.

Finally -- through my home biz I have a lot of experience with a lot of law firms, and I know a lot of attorneys and other people who work with them. Which is why I call Boston Legal a "legal fantasy". As are I think every one of Kelley's 'law firm' teevee shows. Entertaining, yes -- realistic, no. You want a realistic taste of life in a big law firm, check out Opinionista's blog. Which may well not exist at the time you are reading this (if she's finally been outed and fired)(if you can, check out some of her older posts, from before she started getting a lot of attention).

Having said that, the one element of last night's show I did not find fantastic was Denny's ability to smuggle a .45 auto past security into the courthouse. In my experience, attorneys -- those who frequent the courthouse and are familiar to the security folks -- quite frequently get waved on past without a thought.

[1] IMHO it is Denny Crane, not James Tiberius Kirk, that is the defining role of Shatner's life.
[2] Of course, deputies come busting in immediately, guns drawn, but Denny has thrown down his pistol and has his hands in the air, saying (very calmy, with a look of utter wide-eyed innocence that only Shatner could pull off) "self-defense -- he attacked me" as scumbag painfully writhes on the floor.
[3] Please click the link and read it -- Mencken is one of the greatest writers in all of history. And funny as hell, too.

"Only"

2010-12-06T11:36:00.000-06:00

originally published 7 December 2004

One of my big pet peeves is when, in a financial transaction, someone attempts to slime a few extra $$$s out of the deal with an additional fee, and when I call 'em on it they say "but it's only ten dollars". Or five dollars. Or whatever -- the amount doesn't really matter. It's the "only" part that makes me crazy.

I have a variety of colorful responses to this remark, but they tend to boil down to one of the following:

"Okay, then give me ten dollars right now." As you might expect, this does not often result in the production of a ten dollar bill. But if nothing else it can be entertaining to push the point: "Oh, so if it's my money it's only ten dollars, but if it's your money, it's a big deal, huh? Why is that?"
"Oh, so it won't be difficult to waive this fee, then? Since it's only ten dollars?" Believe it or not, I once got a bank to stand down over an interest rate dispute with this approach (they made a mistake calculating the rate, which would have added "only" an additional $35 to the cost of the loan. No thanks).

If you're reading this thinking "wow, he's a real cheapskate", well, think what you want. But the truth is that I'm not cheap. What I am is an engineer[1]: my goal is to spend money as efficiently as possible, maximizing the bang per buck on everything I buy. If you see me standing in the aisle at the grocery store staring at the ice cream, no, I'm not stoned and admiring the "colors"; I'm doing math in my head figuring out the best deal. Which, if you've shopped for ice cream recently, you may have noticed is not as easy as it used to be, given the creative packaging techniques employed by many manufacturers.

And sliding in lower-cost items after an expensive item has got to be about the oldest sales trick known to man: for whatever reason, fifty dollar cufflinks don't seem like much when you're dropping $2500 on a suit. "They're a real steal at only fifty dollars."

Or sometimes when you buy a car, your perspective shifts even further: "It's only a hundred dollars."

But hey -- if you agree that it's only ten dollars, then do me a favor? Give that ten dollars to the next homeless person you see. 'Cause it's not much money to you -- but even given the lousy state of the dollar on the world market these days, ten dollars will still buy most people a pretty nice lunch with enough left over for a bottle of ripple.

[1] Scott Adams had it right, I think, when he wrote 'Engineers are notoriously frugal. This is not because of cheapness or mean spirit; it is simply because every spending situation is simply a problem in optimization, that is, "How can I escape this situation while retaining the greatest amount of cash?"'

Constructing a Custom Fortune Cookie

2010-12-03T16:49:00.000-06:00

originally published 2002-09-17 13:26:37

People often ask me: "Craig, how do you build a custom fortune cookie?" Granted, there are places out there which, for a few hundred dollars, will make you a batch of 300 or so fortune cookies with your choice of fortunes loaded in them. But that's a lot of money if you only need one.

So I set about doing it myself. It's something of a challenge to do it well, and it's not something one can typically do overnight. Engineer that I am, the tasks break down to:

Making the fortune
Putting the fortune inside of a cookie
The cellophane wrapper

Here are the details:

Making the fortune is easy: fire up Photoshop and put the words of your choice on an area 2'7/8" by 2/3" -- these measurements are available from the US National Bureau of Standards, where they've kept a prototype fortune cookie sealed under glass at 72F in a helium atmosphere since 1946. For authenticity, it's nice to put a yin-yang or some chinese characters down in the center as a watermark. For extra credit, do a double-sided print with some witty "lucky" numbers (I used my cellphone number grouped in double digits, ie: 51 24 26 etc) on the other side. Every fortune I've ever seen uses an Arial font, but there's no reason not to be creative. The one thing I haven't figured out is where to find that neat slick paper they use, but your standard white bond works just fine.
Putting the fortune inside of the cookie -- and dealing with the wrapper -- are both like that old SNL gag about the Change Bank of New York: "How do we do it? Volume!" The trick is to go out to lunch at least once a week to a chinese restaurant. When the cookies arrive, grab yours and instead of opening it, stick it in your pocket or your purse and take it back to the office. After not too long you build up a pile of cookies to work with.

I guess a purist would say "hey, just make a fortune cookie! There are lots of recipes on the web!" And there's something to be said for that. But I simply went through all of my stolen-from-lunch cookies and found a candidate cookie that had a 'gap' wide enough that I could slide my own fortune into it. It was pretty much impossible to slide the custom fortune in from the side -- you sorta had to grab the ends of the fortune and slide the long edge into the cookie's center gap.
The cellophane wrapper was the trickiest part, and the part most dependent on <cue vox="Kevin Nealon"> "volume!" </cue>. Basically it involved attempting to pull apart a number of the wrappers along the "longitudinal" seam, ie, if you imagine the cookie wrapper has seams like this: |-|, you attempt to gently and oh-so-carefully pull open the "-" seam that runs from sealed end to sealed end. I've found that about 1 in 4 will pull open smoothly and without tearing. Extract the cookie, replace with the "loaded" cookie, and then seal with (and this took a bit of research) a thin line of superglue -- if you can find something that works better, I'd like to hear about it: I tried a number of different glues and nothing worked as well. In any event, the cellophane doesn't have to seal airtight, anyway.

And that's about it. For that extra-special touch, wrap the custom cookie in tissue paper and place it in a beautiful piece of antique Westmoreland milk-glass, and then have it delivered on That Special Someone's birthday. Then just sit back and await the restraining order.

Having done this once in the past for, ummm, "serious" reasons, it occurs to me that there are a lot of comic possibilities here -- given that I eat chinese weekly with my work friends, I've been wondering about palming a custom cookie onto the little check tray . . . oooh, evil person that I am, I have many, many ideas . . .

How about you?

I hate football

2010-12-03T16:41:00.000-06:00

originally published 2004-09-18 01:46:44

aka My Modest Proposal To Make Football Interesting Without Having To Eat A Single Baby
I'm told it's football season. I was born without the Sports Gene, which is tragic. Or so people tell me; I really couldn't care less. When I bother to think about it, I'd guess that being a Sports Fan is something like being a Music Fan:

	Sports	Music
Events:	You go to games.	You go to concerts.
Bullshit Media "News":	"So coach, how do you think your team will play tomorrow?"	"So Jimmy, what's this tour going to be like?"
Paraphernalia:	T-shirts with team logos, bumper stickers, etc.	T-shirts with band logos, bumper stickers, yadda.
Drugs:	Beer, steriods and other performance-enhancement drugs.	Beer, marijuana, Ecstacy, LSD, cocaine, heroin, glue-huffing, the list goes on and on.
Sex:	Yes, and lots of it. Women tend to be in good shape.	Yes, and lots of it. Less fitness but more variety, extra freakiness in bed.
Fan Talk:	"Didja hear that Toledo is trading Namath to the Utah Packers?"	"Didja hear that the NumbNutz are auditioning for a new guitarist because Joey Numb OD'ed?"
I Wanna Be Like Ike[1]:	Form team, play in company league.	Form band, play for free in shitty bars.
Practice Sessions:	Go to back yard, toss the ball around a little, hope girls notice.	Go to garage, power up amps, jam, hope girls notice.
Economic Potential:	Mega $$$$$s - if you're talented AND the Magick Sports Faery touches you with her enchanted logo-emblazoned teevee network microphone.	Mega $$$$$s - if you're talented AND you suck on the Magick Musik Fairy's enchanted "wand".

So I think I kinda got a handle on the sports thing: it's just like music but with fewer drugs. Although I actually like music. Whereas few things will make me leave a room faster than someone flipping on the teevee "to watch a little football".

But I have an idea for how to make football[2] interesting to me and others like me[3]: I propose the addition of a new player position called the Rifleback. I don't care if it's Defensive or Offensive, the fun part is that the Rifleback gets a .22 caliber rifle and a single .22 cal round per game, to be used whenever / however it is deemed necessary. It certainly would bring a bit of drama back to a sport that today is oft referred to as "a bunch of pampered millionaires running around on Astroturf".

In practice, I honestly don't think there'd be much in the line of bullet wounds to contend with -- I suspect that part of each and every play would consist of "taking down the guy with the gun". And even if someone takes a bullet, the damage from a .22 round in the bicep pales in comparison to a compound fracture (even I've heard about that Joe Theisman fellow's "snap heard 'round the world"). And hell, the players are probably already wearing Kevlar armor out there. Kevlar is "trendy".

So there you have it: my Modest Proposal To Make Football Interesting Without Having To Eat A Single Baby.

Whaddya say, America?

[1] Or whoever the fuck it was in that stupid slogan.
[2] American football, that is. Although this concept could arguably be adapted to any sport. Golf, for instance.
[3] And the simple fact that the Internet exists is all the proof I need to know I'm not alone.

What is a book?

2010-12-03T15:00:00.000-06:00

originally published 19 August 2010

A friend shared an interesting link with me today:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/tools-toys/the-ipad-the-kindle-and-the-immutable-laws-of-the-marketplace

It's a comparison of e-readers. I'm not sure why they didn't include a Sony and at least one current Kindle in the list -- cynic that I am, I think that sometimes magazine writers will purposefully write a 'flawed' article in order to generate lots of comments and discussion.

Still ... just the picture of all of the devices together is interesting, you can make a quick assessment of some of the trends and commonalities that are coming forth. Like: a dual e-paper/LCD display. Frankly, it sounds like an atrocious idea to me, but the Nook and the Alex e-readers both get high marks. So maybe it's one of those things you've gotta use to appreciate it.

I'm sort've finding myself drawn to the really small e-readers (like the Cybook Opus)("Finally, an e-reader that really is the size of a paperback") because as much as I love my iPad, it's heavy and even after decades of reading thick hardback books one-handed, my arm still gets tired holding the iPad. I can't wait until these things get down to like $39.95.

This is a great time to be alive.

"We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations -- books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them."We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too who leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here -- though I can no longer tell you where -- no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a [woman] might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other."

-- Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

Death Comes To Visit

2010-12-03T14:33:00.000-06:00

Originally posted 2004-06-15 14:45:37

Some of you might think this is tasteless. Feel free to bitch at me for it -- but please do me a favor and don't clutter my blog with any 'sympathy' postings. I don't want anyone to feel sorry or alarmed for me or my family. We're coping with it all, and I'm reasonably sure I don't suffer from any pathological attention-craving disorders. And I'm also pretty sure I'm not one of those people who never have anything to talk about but their latest tragedy. But I feel motivated to write about this 'experience' because it's just so much different and stranger than my typical, relatively boring daily life.

It begins: -- Monday afternoon (yesterday) there's a knock on the door, my wife Roberta answers and comes to tell me "it's the police, they want to talk to you". This has happened before, but I've been reasonably law-abiding these past weeks so it was with only a soupcon of caution that I opened the door. A couple of officers are standing there and I ask ask "what's this about?" and they say "do you know John and Bertha B_____?" I looked puzzled and said "yes, they're my in-laws". They live in Arizona and in fact they were due to arrive in a couple of hours for a week-long visit. And the one officer says "I'm sorry to tell you that they were both killed this morning in a traffic accident in New Mexico."

Wow. This is like something out of a bad Lifetime channel movie.

Without going into sickening detail, it was a two-vehicle accident, a high-speed head-on collision: the other driver crossed into the oncoming lane. And apparently got away with only cuts and bruises while my in-laws were killed instantly. Do the vector sum 60mph + 60mph and it's like they hit a brick wall at 120mph. There is some possibility that drugs were involved, and so one of my attorney friends put us in touch with MADD. At this point no-one knows if the accident was the result of intoxicated driving, or simple human stupidity. I have to tell you: the amount of satisfaction we're deriving from the notion of possibly "nailing a goddam drunk driver" is like zero, nada, none, nothing. The situation just sucks, and I guess it would be nice to let some kind of 'vengeance attitude' take over. But it's not happening.

Some of you are aware of the fact that I did not get along well with my in-laws. Tasteless though it is, I keep flashing on a scene from one of The Simpson's Halloween episodes -- the one that's based on Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound Of Thunder, I'm sure you've all seen it -- where Lisa asks Homer "Are we taking the new Lexus to Aunt Patty and Selma's funeral today?" When this happens in real life it is, alas, not so fun. To quote a certain toy dinosaur: "Now I have guilt!" No, that's not really true; it's just that I'm in this 'uncomfortable spot' where no, they weren't my favorite people, but -- they weren't Nazis, either, and for all their faults, they at least loved my kids. I sure didn't want them to die. Jesus.

And so I've been Doing The Good Thing, being helpful and supportive and making all of the arrangements and just generally trying to 'drive' this entire affair through to completion.

Having spent the entire day speaking to medical examiners, funeral home directors, highway patrolmen, insurance agents, and persons of the cloth, there's really not a lot that spotlights the pointlessness of existence any more then going to Target to look at DVDs. But the need was felt for a little "shopping therapy" after dinner. Seeing the latest, biggest Hollywood blockbusters in all of their gaudy, eye-catching color and glory, with all the Big Big Stars on the covers, smiling or looking tough or sexy, really brings home the meaninglessness of it all. It's like: these are but amusements that we use in vain to try to help us put death out of mind.

If you're planning to die, here's some advice:

a) Don't. Or

b) If you really have to do it, don't leave a corpse. It complicates things for the people you left behind. There are advantages to being vaporized, or lost at sea, or dissolving after falling into a vat of H2SO4, I think. Just make sure all of your financial stuff is nicely organized and up-to-date and easy to find, thanks. But if you've got to be difficult and leave a body, then

c) Do it at home. The logistics of dealing with a probably totalled van full of valuables 800 miles away -- that's probably being pilfered at this very moment by the tow-lot people[1] -- plus arranging disposition of remains and transport of said remains to Arizona, plus arranging flights and lodging for family, is more than you want to inflict on your kin. Unless you wanted to piss 'em off, in which case feel free to contact me for further thoughts on the matter. I've been discussing this with people and it appears that the ultimate might be to expire in a highly bureaucratic foreign land where very few people speak English. China, for instance.

Right now it looks like I'm going to have to drive out to Roswell, New Mexico, to deal with the van contents. In other circumstances this could be a nice getaway: I'd love to ride Kitten out there. I've even got a very nice four-wheeled BMW I hardly ever drive; spend a little time burning some music CDs and it could be a fine road-trip. But instead it looks like I'll have to take the minivan, so I'll have room to carry stuff back. Yeah, I can just feel the vast waves of sympathy from y'all over this. But that's 1200 miles total in a vehicle that handles (and kinda looks) like a soviet tuna trawler. And I get to look forward to unpacking what I can of my in-laws wrecked van, while wretching constantly and freaking out over finding any 'bits' that the ambulance crew may have missed.

And I won't lie: it spooks me considerably that I'll be driving on the same road where my in-laws met their end.

In working to make "arrangements" I've learned some interesting things. One is that yes, you can email cremated remains (aka "cremains") via the US Postal Service. Somebody has to sign for them on the receiving end, but I was rather surprised: I thought for sure that this would be highly regulated and that only licensed entities would be able to take possession. But apparently not. I feel sure that there are some very, very sick jokers out there who could somehow use this to pull some very, very sick jokes. I'm trying not to think about it.

But perhaps people are, on the large, more decent than I had thought. One positive thing I can report about this experience has been the incredibly small (read: zero) number of Mean People I've encountered. I've talked to about 30 people today, and every single one of them has been sympathetic and helpful.

Another thing I've learned is that this is not the fast, streamlined process I had imagined it would be. The medical examiner came right out and told me "take all the time you need". The fellow at the funeral home was cautiously optimistic: if we got all of the paperwork filled out right away, we just might be able to get the remains to Arizona by the weekend.

I envy the kids -- within the span of two weeks they've lost their dog and a set of grandparents, and yet they're hangin' in there. For better or for worse -- and I'm not sure which -- they have an unquestioning, rock-solid belief in Heaven: it's as real as Disneyland or school, and that's where Jet-dog is, and that's where grandma and grandpa are. And no, despite my own personal lack-of-faith in these matters, I am not motivated to try to "enlighten" them. In fact, I'll punch the lights out of anyone who might try.

In case you're wondering: yes, all of this is costing lots of money. And just thinking about life insurance, wills, assets, inheritance, all that stuff -- my wife simply doesn't want to deal with it right now. I can't blame her. But this is going to run many thousands of dollars in travel and other expenditures, so I'm hoping and praying real hard that we'll at least manage to get all of that back. At this time it's all a big unknown. I'm not sitting here with my fingers crossed going "Please, please, just enough for an Aston-Martin! And a Dodge Viper!" But I cannot lie: I will be extremely happy if the kids' college funds get a good strong shot in the arm out of all this.

Oh -- in case you're curious: the cost may vary quite a bit depending on who you deal with, but it looks like cremation, including all licensing and postage, will run about $1000 per.

As I alluded earlier: I don't have any great faith in any kind of afterlife. I sometimes wish I did -- but I want to know the truth. But the "truth" I've arrived at -- that there is nothing after this life -- does not make times like this easier. The only thing that gives me hope is the thought of something like James Tipler's Omega Point theory -- that at some point in the far future, the existing intelligences of that era will 'reconstruct' every being who ever lived, essentially building Heaven from scratch at a time not long before the Big Crunch. As far out as this sounds, I can't help but hope for it to come to pass. Surely I am not the only entity who is disappointed -- or downright pissed off might be a better phrasing -- to consider that all of the lives, all of the experiences, of every entity that ever lived, is all nothing but "tears in rain". Given the frequency of new cosmological theories these days, I find myself subconsciously cheering for any that support the Omega Point. And I boo the ones that don't.

Is it too much to ask, after the insane horror that life inflicts on so many, that everyone and everything that has ever lived, suffered, and died might one day find themselves happy, and loved, and at peace?

My 'net access will be somewhat limited over the next week, so in closing, all I can say is this: hug everyone close to you whenever you can.

[1] What little experience I've had with people involved in the towing industry has not lead me to believe that they are individuals of exceptional integrity.

First Post (sorta)

2010-12-03T13:27:00.000-06:00

I've been blogging off and on since 1999 or so. In the past couple of years, I've mostly restricted myself to blogging on the internal blogs at my day-job -- but I've been growing increasingly dissatisfied with that system and the way it ignores my formatting and also the low, low numbers of people who bother to read blogs there.

And so I'm taking a cue from my friend Suzy and setting up an external blog here. I'm not above recycling some of my older material here that I never felt really got much exposure -- but for the most part this will be all new stuff.