Our Family Tradition

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!

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:

• Get Him To The Greek
  
• Half Baked
  
• Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
  
• Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay
  
• Hot Tub Time Machine
  
• The Hangover
  
• The Hangover Part 2
  

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

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?

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

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

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

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?