You know you're obsessed...

...with a video game when you start thinking about installing a special utility just so you can get hotkeys to make your gameplay more efficient.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

~CKL

Star Trek in 11 Minutes

As previously mentioned, I did enjoy the new movie, but there are plot holes aplenty. And, like Scalzi said, would it have killed them to get some basic science right?

Spoilers abound in Samuel Bierwagen's Bad Transcript: Star Trek (2009). Enjoy.

~CKL

My New Computer Redux

Just in case you were unclear on how much of a huge geek I am, here's what the back of my new iPhone now looks like:



(Decorations from Star Trek Sticker Book; ClearShield from Agent18.com)

~CKL

Twitterage

On Thursday and Friday, I was an extra (background performer) for episode 204 of Leverage, which is shooting their second season in Portland.* Since there's a lot of waiting around during each day, I thought it would be fun to Twitter a few interesting, spoiler-free remarks about my experience.

That worked out pretty well, and tonight I decided to reformat and post those tweets in a more permanent location and a more readable format. I discovered that no single application exists to do what I want, which is to export a specific subset of my status messages and conversations. (C'mon, Interwebs, this is the one time you don't anticipate my needs? We need to talk.)

Twitter's search interface only exports to a noisy XML feed, and what I really wanted was a simple, denormalized CSV data file which I could slice and dice manually. I found three web apps that claim to do this:

1. TweetDumpr only exports status messages (without timestamps) to a flat text file.
2. Twickie offers several formatting options, but the "Get CSV" link doesn't work.
3. Tweetake is the one that actually worked, but it didn't provide many filtering options.

Of course, Twitter's own filtering abilities are pretty limited. What I really wanted was a custom timeline including all tweets which:

• were posted by me and
• were posted within a specific time window and
• include the hashtag #Leverage and
• include one of the hashtags #extra or #extras; or
• are part of a conversation (replies, retweets, etc.) linked to any tweets matching the above criteria.

I guess I'll be digging into the Twitter API later.

For now, you can see the crappy Excel HTML dump of my tweets from two days of being a #Leverage 204 #extra. Note that all times are GMT; subtract seven hours to get local time in PDX.

And yes, I still refuse to use the unreadable abomination that is LoudTwitter.

~CKL

* You can be an extra too! Here's how.

J.J. Abrams' Awesome Trek Fanfic!

That's my one-line review of the new Star Trek movie.

D and I saw it yesterday, and we both enjoyed it, but I have to be honest here: regardless of its provenance, the story still felt more like fan fiction than actual canon--Trek-flavored, if you will; much better than Enterprise, but still not the real thing.

Before I dive in, a couple of non-spoilery remarks:

• As the end titles started rolling, I thought: "John Cho gets top billing? Represent, brother!" Then I realized the principal cast were listed in alphabetical order (Ben Cross being the second name was a big hint). Oh well. At least Cho's starring in another Harold & Kumar flick next year.
• The score started out perfectly, with a lone French horn, but the overall tone of the theme music was a bit too martial for me. Which leads nicely into my next point...

One of my earliest memories is of standing up in my crib and watching television. The three shows I remember most clearly are Space: 1999, Star Trek, and Bewitched. (I can just imagine some of you nodding and muttering, "That explains a lot.") For me, the thing that always distinguished Star Trek from other shows was its stated mission:

To explore strange new worlds;
To seek out new life and new civilizations;
To boldly go where no one has gone before.

At its core, Trek was all about exploration and discovery. The best stories they ever told, IMHO, involved the crew learning something new, either about the universe or about themselves (ideally both), figuring out how something worked, and--if it was broken--fixing it. It often also pitted personal principles against rules and regulations (e.g., Kirk vs. Prime Directive), and above all, it emphasized that science works. It wasn't always the right answer, and sometimes it was even the cause of the problem, but there was no question that science and research were the key to a greater understanding of our universe and ourselves.

*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***

The new movie gets the characters right, even while tweaking them a little. I agree with screenwriter John Rogers that "[a]lmost every choice was the best possible choice" in that regard. You should go read his excellent analysis of "how what will be the most successful movie of the summer kicks conventional screenwriting 'rules' in the junk." You could also read film critic Anthony Lane's thoughtful review of the new Trek's "recklessly rolling plot... [which] powers along, unheeding of its own absurdity, with drive and confidence," even if he is a bit of a downer.

I have issues with the new Trek's wacky pseudo-science (yes, even wackier than the usual technobabble), multiple deus ex machinas and MacGuffins, and nonsensical villain motivation (hello, Evil Overlord); but, as D said, whenever the story stopped making sense, the filmmakers just threw in a big action scene to distract us. That's one advantage movies have over books, at least in the hand-waving department. They can always flash something shiny--or naked, or explodey--to distract you from a weak story. It's a problem when spectacle overwhelms storytelling (insert Michael Bay joke here), but Abrams understands and respects that balance.

As a longtime fan, I'm still ambivalent about the massive continuity changes wrought by this reboot. The alternate reality angle, even more than the Spock/Uhura 'shipping, makes this seem like fanfic; and though I understand why Abrams and company chose to destroy Israel Vulcan and kill Amanda, it feels to me like The Powers That Be just gave up on trying to deal with that culture. I'm glad they recognized that Spock is an integral part of Trek--you could argue that this is really his movie, not Kirk's--but I think his story was already interesting enough, and obliterating his homeworld just seems mean-spirited.

At this point, a sequel seems inevitable, and maybe the Vulcan diaspora is part of the plan for rewriting the Trek universe: to shift the fundamental balance of power in the galaxy away from Vulcan, which was previously depicted as a highly advanced civilization and one of the governing races in the Federation, and toward Earth. I noticed that while several alien Starfleet officers got screen time in the new movie, very few of them actually had speaking lines: Kirk's obligatory green-skinned honey was little more than a prop, and Scotty's little Ewok friend doesn't actually do anything useful. Um, xenophobic much? Let's not do that, guys.

To end on an "up" note: I did enjoy all the little in-jokes and callbacks to previous Trek incarnations, especially the sound effects and the return of the 47s. It's a sign that the writers were paying attention to at least some of the details, and it gives me hope that this new Trek will respect the history of the franchise while putting an interesting and different spin on it.

(ADDENDUM: My Facebook friends inform me that Abrams previously and independently did the 47 thing in Alias. Guess Paramount picked the right man for this job, then.)

~CKL

My New Computer

I know what you're thinking. But despite the fact that it's called an "iPhone 3G," the telephone is the least useful part of this device for me.

Consider: In the five days I've had this thing, I've spent all of 16 minutes on phone calls, but sent and received almost 25MB of data over the cellular network. That doesn't even include all the surfing I've done over WiFi, both at home and in various cafes and restaurants. If you figure the voice calls at 28.8kbps, 16 minutes would amount to barely 3.4MB, or less than 12% of my cell net bandwidth usage.

I've retired my Sony CLIE, the last PalmPilot I'll ever own, because the iPhone does everything it should have done--especially syncing over the air with my calendar and address book, and running a real, full-featured web browser, not some lobotomized "mobile" version. I've upgraded to the iPhone version of Secret!, the single most useful application I've ever had, and already downloaded a whole slew of free apps, including Twitterrific, Shazam, and Lightsaber. You know, the essentials.

I'll be even happier after this summer's 3.0 update, which promises to add a voice recorder, proper Bluetooth support, and (gasp!) cut and paste. The iPhone's not perfect--the $18 "upgrade fee" for current customers was a bit of an insult, as is the fact that AT&T will still gouge charge me for individual text messages*--but it's pretty damn good for an early-21st-century handheld computer. Now where's my flying car?

~CKL

* Easily avoided using any number of free SMS apps, but still, WTF?

Reasons to Buy a Blu-ray Player

The way I see it, there are only three right now:

1. Pushing Daisies, Season 1
2. Pushing Daisies, Season 2
3. LittleBigPlanet (NSFW)

Because, let's face it, if you're going to spend $400 on a DVD player, you might as well get one that can play some games, too.

~CKL

The Stigma of Self-Publishing, Part 5 (The Last): Flash in the WAN

(Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

It's no secret that I am a writer, and I aspire to be a professional. Since last October, I've been posting a new piece of flash fiction every Friday to 512 Words or Fewer and recording an audio version to podcast.

But wait! Why, you may ask, am I "self-publishing" these stories, when I've just spent the last four days railing against self-publishing? Why am I not submitting them to actual, paying markets so I can start collecting professional credits?

I'm doing 512 Words for three main reasons: practice, pressure, and publicity. Practice, because I'm still working through my million words of crap; pressure, because at least two people will notice and get on my case if I don't meet my deadline every week; and, of course, it's a publicity stunt to get my name out there (a story a week! kinda like Jay Lake! but not really).

Listen, I have no illusions about my "reach" (as marketers would call it). My blogs are essentially newsletters for my family and friends, because nobody else cares what I have to say. I do have longer stories making the rounds at several professional markets (I'm expecting that rejection from The New Yorker any year now), but if short fiction is to writers as the club scene is to independent musicians, flash fiction is my version of busking on a street corner. It gets me out there and doing something, and it keeps me writing. It's just part of the journey.

I also believe, as Tim O'Reilly famously said, that obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. I support the Creative Commons (CC) movement to share cultural works freely (both as in speech and as in beer). I believe more artists should follow the fine example of forward-thinking people like Cory Doctorow and Jonathan Coulton, who release all their work under CC licenses for others to share. Let fans be fans, and they will show you love and support in ways you could never have imagined--or, sometimes, ever wanted to, but that's another story. So this is me, putting my money where my mouth is.

Even if you're a writer who would rather distribute your writings the old-fashioned way--encased in physical objects called "books"--the Internet gives you tons of opportunities to interact with your fans and keep them engaged. You may have heard of Scott Sigler and Seth Harwood, whose novels are published by Crown Publishing (a Random House imprint). Both of these guys do a ton of online self-promotion, including putting free content on Podiobooks.com and selling some crazy merchandise. Clearly you don't have to be as gung ho as these two to succeed as an author, but it certainly couldn't hurt:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxschLOAr-s

Now, some people think it's fun to do all that self-promotion. But that's not writing. More to the point, if you can make others believe in your work, they will help you do all the things you're not so good at. When I get my first book contract, I don't want to comb through all the legalese myself--that's when I'll want an agent. When the book goes to press, I won't want to deal with typesetting and other production issues personally--that's why I'll want an editor and a publisher. And so on. I am willing to relinquish some control for the benefit of having a good team on my side, and I want them to be in it for the duration.

The American dream these days seems to be the get-rich-quick scheme. Every singer wants to be Gloria Gaynor, who built a career out of a single song ("I Will Survive") and is still raking in the royalties. A lot of unpublished writers seem to think they'll be able to write a single Great American Novel^TM which rockets to the top of the bestseller lists and then immediately retire, having secured fame and fortune everlasting.

But no publisher or promoter wants a one-hit wonder. Forget about the lottery-jackpot aspect of this pipe dream; if a reader enjoys one book, she's going to look for more books written by the same person. Publishers want to help dedicated writers build careers as authors. I want to tell lots of good stories, and I want each one to be better than the last. I want my life to be something more than long.

Like the man said, always end on a song:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWYeNlHXk9U

~CKL

The Stigma of Self-Publishing, Part 4: Zines and Thoughtcrimes

(Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Over the last three days, I've discussed why self-publishing is, at best, a huge time sink for writers who should be writing, and at worst a way for scam artists to prey upon those desperate souls and steal their money. As I noted yesterday, there do exist legitimate print on demand (POD) services who don't pretend to provide the editing, advertising, and other services that real publishing houses do, and those companies are a great asset for certain creators. But that's printing, not publishing. There's a difference.

There's a long tradition of people printing their own stuff when no one else would, because they were passionate and wanted to put their work out there. Here in Portland, Oregon, the public library system and Powell's ("The greatest bookstore on the planet," says PNH) both feature entire racks of zines covering a wide variety of interests and topics. They come in all shapes and sizes, many obviously handmade. They serve small, local audiences. They have no pretensions or wider ambitions. This is what they're for. (Science fiction fandom also produces tons of fanzines, but that's a whole other discussion.)

These days, it's trivial for anyone to create their own "e-zine" by setting up a blog or a web site. Of course, just because it's easy for anybody to find your content, it doesn't mean that they'll go looking for it, or that they'll like it. If you build it, they will not always come. And even if they come, they may not stay.

So who gets to be a "real" publisher? These days, short fiction writers can submit their work to a lot of online-only markets. Many of these are little more than blogs, and most don't pay writers a lot (if anything) for their stories. Mac Stone, whom I met at Viable Paradise XII, runs Coyote Wild Magazine out of her own pocket. She doesn't make any money doing it. She does it because she wants to help get good stories out there.

Leonard Richardson and Sumana Harihareswara just released Thoughtcrime Experiments, "a free 2009 anthology of fantasy and science fiction stories and art, published under a Creative Commons license." As Leonard explains in Appendix A: How to Do This and Why, he and Sumana spent $2,300 and nearly 400 person-hours putting together the anthology, and the main reason they did it was so they could find and share stories that suited their own personal tastes. In other words, for fun. They're not making any money off TE; in fact, they're losing money. But they consider it money well spent.

Are Mac and Leonard and Sumana publishers? Sure; they've found content they like and helped present it to a wider audience. Are they professional publishers? No, and they don't pretend to be running a business. They're publishing because they want to give back to the community. They have no illusions about reaping financial gains from these transactions, and that's okay. We all do things for love that we would never do for money.

Tomorrow: the anticlimactic conclusion!

~CKL

In case you were wondering...

...what people do on Facebook all day:



~CKL

The Stigma of Self-Publishing, Part 1: Daemon

You may have read last year's Wired article about the novel Daemon, detailing how three agent rejections discouraged first-time novelist Daniel Suarez so much that he started his own company to publish and market his half-baked techno-thriller.

You may also have seen novelist J. Steven York's deconstruction of Daemon's success--the book was later acquired by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin, and reissued in hardcover (and with the author's name spelled forwards instead of backwards).

I have nothing to add to the information presented in those two articles, especially the second one, except to say that the Big Ideas name-checked in Daemon are presented much more completely and plausibly in Charles Stross' Halting State (which opens with a bank heist inside an MMORPG) and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (which delves into actual hacking in great detail; complete text available free online).

I've been programming computers for over twenty years, and I know from personal experience that automation is hard. Maintaining the Internet is a war of attrition. Someone discovers an exploitable flaw in the network--e.g., in TCP/IP or DNS or some other protocol--either by research or accident; then somebody figures out how to fix it; and the security hole gets patched. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I don't care if you're Lex Luthor; there's no way anyone can create a single automated system that can hack the planet for over a year without some human intervention. Also, the repeated threat that the daemon will crash the global economy falls flat, since we've now demonstrated that we can do that pretty well all by ourselves.

Anyway. Skip this nihilistic crapfest and read Stross and Doctorow instead. It's a huge plus that Halting State and Little Brother, in addition to being authored by competent writers with a firm grasp of narrative language, were also vetted by experienced editors who knew from good storytelling and copy-edited by professionals who knew where to put quotation marks and how to join separate phrases together to form actual complete sentences. It's not a coincidence that Halting State was nominated for a Hugo Award last year, and Little Brother is nominated this year.

Finally, speaking of Charlie Stross, here's what he had to say about the continued value of real book publishers in 2007:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApcNzwy9Zas (skip to 46:47)

~CKL

Warren Does Joe

If you want to give your tired old media property a badass reboot, Warren Ellis is clearly the man to call. He helped elevate Ultimate Fantastic Four, and now he's done it again with G.I. Joe: Resolute, the new animated movie that's been airing in installments on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. It's a solid junior techno-thriller.

The final installment airs tonight at midnight. You can also watch the entire show online (or on YouTube, for those outside the USA). It's not perfect--you'll see stormtrooper marksmanship and heroic sacrifice tropes, among others--but I love the science fiction procedural in Parts 3 and 4 (I now have a tiny crush on the new Dial Tone), and the ninja fight in Part 8 is brutal.

I really don't expect this summer's live-action movie to be anywhere near as cool as this.

~CKL

With the Shopping and the Dropping and the Never Stopping

After suffering a variety of unresolved problems with my laptop over the last few months, I will probably never buy a Lenovo machine again. Thinkpads were good, solid hardware when IBM owned the brand, but now they're living down to their reputation as cheap crap from overseas.

Tonight was the last straw. Without warning, my laptop's primary battery failed. The error message was singularly unhelpful: "Battery 1 : A battery error has occurred. The battery cannot be charged. Replace the battery." This was, of course, after the machine suddenly died when my secondary drive-bay battery ran down. The power management software leaves something to be desired.

So I requested support via Lenovo's labyrinthine web site, and got a call back from a very courteous but also unhelpful call center drone. He verified that my battery wasn't included in their recalls, confirmed that my extended warranty did not cover the battery (its warranty expired at the end of January), and offered to sell me a replacement battery for the discounted price of $150 (retail for this thing is $180). I politely declined and went to the Internet to find a better deal.

Amazon matched the $150 for an OEM battery, but there are lots of companies who sell knockoffs for much less. It's just a battery, for crying out loud--get the right voltage and current, mold the plastic case into the appropriate shape, make sure the terminals fit, and you're good to go. And no, I'm not worried about quality, because even OEM batteries catch fire. Roll the bones.

After half an hour of research, I found a replacement battery for $80 (that's 55% off retail) from Level 8 Technology, a Texas company which has gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews on several merchant rating sites. They offer free shipping for orders over $50, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and 1-year warranty. By going through Microsoft's Live Search Cashback program, I'll get an additional 8% rebate, which covers most of the Washington state use tax. And because I used my Discover Card (via PayPal) for the purchase, I'll get another 1% back eventually.

I would have preferred to not spend any money on computer parts tonight, but as consumer object lessons go, this one was pretty inexpensive. Online shopping FTW!

~CKL

Nathan Fillion: King of Castle

Castle gets a lot of things wrong. It wildly misrepresents--or, at best, cherry-picks--the experience of being a bestselling novelist or a New York City detective. But damn that smarmy motherfucker Nathan Fillion. He's just so entertaining to watch.

Also, as Leverage showrunner John Rogers notes, the techie clues have been real smart so far. I still don't buy Stana Katic as murder police, but I'm giving her Kate Beckett character the benefit of the doubt for now. Maybe the writers will come up with an interesting and plausible backstory for her.

The fourth episode was the one that really sold me. Lots of nice little moments, including the uniform searching the dumpster, Castle and his daughter cutting onions, and the closing scene in the bookstore. You can get the full show from iTunes. Here's the Lame TV Preview^TM:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCTj7sPjxTU

Episode three wasn't bad, either. Like everyone else, I really enjoy the father-daughter scenes with Nathan and Molly. And I'm thinking about making my own "You Should Be Writing" screensaver.

~CKL

Physics in Action

Well, what do you know? Light does travel faster than sound!


http://vimeo.com/4171907

Thanks to the Leverage crew for putting on this Tax Day demonstration in downtown Portland. I much prefer exploding cars to teabaggers.

~CKL

Out of work? Start a blog!

This is what my former colleague and IT/security guru Jason Sylvester has done. Is it wrong for me to hope he stays jobless for a while so he'll blog more?

~CKL

Game Theory 123

I can't comment on Peter Sarrett's blog (hello, 500 server error), so I'm posting my remarks on "Puzzle Hunt 123" here:

Wei-Hwa said: "Except for the teams at the top, most teams don't realize when they can be meta-event-ing to increase their fun."

I think what's actually happening is that newbie teams, who are less familiar with how puzzle events run, are more likely to adhere to whatever explicit rules have been given. If there are no rules for something--e.g., how often they can ask for hints--they go by their own prejudices or assumptions about the event.

More experienced teams, on the other hand, know more about what happens behind the scenes, and in some cases may even know the event organizers personally. You're much more likely to call your friend for a hint than to call a total stranger who you know only by his or her imposing title of "Game Control."

Both experienced and newbie teams are following the rules as they understand them; it's just that more experienced teams have a better understanding of the unwritten/unspoken rules. There's no way to eliminate that knowledge gap, but GC can do their best to be explicit with the most important stuff and treat everyone fairly and equally.

There have been times when Team Snout was running a Game, and we had to make up a new policy on the spot to deal with something unexpected. We didn't always make the right call, but we had to stick with our decision until the end of the event to be fair to everyone. It's always tough, because the issues that come up are inevitably ones that players care deeply about (in our case, skipping and scoring). But we didn't decide to run a Game because it was easy.

And now for something completely different. :)

~CKL

Last Night, in Portland

 
 

Yes, we won the on-site lottery for $25 tickets to see Wicked, and that is what we saw from our "limited view" seats. That's the good news.

The bad news is, I seem to have caught the throat cold which I hear is going around Portland. Took a long nap this afternoon and am headed back to bed now. Need to get better so I can go judge a middle school science fair on Friday.

~CKL

OnLive: Behind the Scenes

My friend--let's call him "Kojak"--shared some interesting details about his employer, OnLive, who made a big splash last week at GDC (read more about it: company web site, press conference video, Penny Arcade comic).  Some highlights from his email to me:

Still recovering from several days of stress and almost no sleep, but I'm relieved that our big announcement is over. I wish it had been all smoke and mirrors, but unfortunately it was all live and relied on servers in our Santa Clara datacenter.  This necessitated insane fallback options, including the "Tertiary Contingency," which I can't really go into.  Let's just say we're all very grateful it wasn't necessary, leaving us instead worrying how far Steve [Perlman] would stray from the script.

Most of these facts have been mentioned elsewhere, but some journalists missed the significant bits, so to speak:

Latency

This is of course the big one that everyone's talking about.  A couple of early news articles misinterpreted what Steve said in previous interviews.  All the bloggers picked this up as gospel truth, and distorted it further.  On the morning before the press conference, almost every mention I saw had our total round trip latency being <1ms. Anyone with half a clue pointed out this is completely impossible, and it led many to assume we're just another in a long line of charlatans.

Steve tried to clear this up a bit in the announcement, saying that "encoding latency" means what we add by running it through our proprietary encoding card in the datacenter (this is really our key technology). "Last mile latency" can add anywhere from 5 to 25ms, depending on your ISP and other factors. Improvements in that in recent years are key to making this all possible. The latency from Moscone to our Santa Clara datacenter ~50 miles away is <2ms (I wouldn't have thought that possible a few years ago).

He's also talked about the contribution other sources of latency make, in particular your display. Gamers who switched from CRT to LCD may have added more latency to their experience that we could ever add (assuming worst case LCD and best case network). As you probably know, LCD TVs can be even worse, especially for those who don't know how to turn off the various "pixel shining" features. We literally only found one model of Sharp LCD TV that was really optimal for games (and apparently we bought every one in northern CA). Many people happily play Halo 3 on some of the worst latency TVs without ever knowing the difference. What's great for movies isn't necessarily great for games. Don't even get me started about the latency added by most wireless controllers.

It's expected that certain titles might not really be playable due to latency, but I've been pretty surprised so far (we've all been forced to play lots and lots of games at work!). Mirror's Edge was one I really didn't figure would work, but it's done pretty well.

Bandwidth caps

This is probably the most valid concern I've seen people raise, besides those who don't think they can get a consistent 4-5Mbps in their area from any ISP.  I don't know what the official Comcast monthly limit is in most areas, but Steve has been saying 250GB.  Since you're rarely pushing the peak bandwidth, average use is much less (and varies widely between games and play style, even if everything's running at 720p60). If it's ~2Mb, that gives you 278 hours or 11.6 days of continuous game time per month (assuming you're not using the connection for much else).

We expected the major ISPs to be pretty hostile, but they ended up almost scaring us with their enthusiasm. As long as we're causing a predictable load and we're willing to peer closely with their networks, they don't seem overly concerned (and Steve talked about various bundling possibilities here and in other interviews). So, it's realistic to expect either a special "OnLive" tier from your ISP with no cap, or some other arrangement where our data usage doesn't contribute towards your cap.

That doesn't mean it won't be a rocky upgrade path for some of them.  If this takes off like we hope, they're going to be very busy, and it won't work perfectly in all areas for a while. This is part of the purpose of the Beta.

Target audience

We're targeting all segments of game players, but we don't expect we'll ever satisfy the most discriminating/insane gamers (the ones who shell out $5K/year for a top-of-the-line beast to play first person shooters at one frame/sec faster than their friends).  However, by leading most of our demos with one of the most demanding FPS out there (Crysis), we try to make it clear that we're "good enough" for most who would want to play even the most extreme titles.

We have hopes of eventually combining our MOVA facial capture technology with customized servers to allow experiences beyond anything a console or PC game could offer.  We'd certainly give anyone willing to do an exclusive title access to some interesting technology, though I'm not sure who would buy "Benjamin Button: The Video Game."

As with WebTV and other resource-intensive services, our ideal customer is someone who pays their bill and hardly ever logs in.  Some have said we're ideal for the mythical "casual hard-core gamer"--someone who likes to play the latest high-end games, but only a few hours a month, and thus can't really justify maintaining a PC capable of playing them.

We're also really interested in true casual gamers (people who enjoy Xbox Live Arcade titles more than any of the $60 ones from the store).  As Steve mentions, the hope here is that many of these titles will eventually be able to be "virtualized". This isn't quite as far fetched as it sounds, as Xen already has experimental support for GPU virtualization (so one video card could really be shared between multiple users).

Though Steve touted that we were demonstrating "every type of game from all major publishers," you'll notice one obvious omission: no MMOs. This is not a coincidence. Most of these games would be difficult to virtualize (they're not Crysis, but some are getting closer), and MMO gamers neither sleep nor work, apparently. So even though MMO games work great on our service for several reasons (slightly less demanding of resources and their users are accustomed to poor service), it's hard to imagine any business case that would make sense. Sadly, many of the bloggers that seem most enthusiastic about our service hope to use it exclusively to play MMOs. It could happen, but don't hold your breath.

Streaming

We're not a "streaming" service.  Apparently voice actors now insist on certain clauses in their contracts that refer to streaming.  Thus, we do not "stream" games, but instead provide them in real time, over the Internet. It's easy to see how there might be some confusion here.

Meanwhile, at the demo booth...

Highly skeptical gamer shows up and plays for quite a while. Finally, he says, "I'm an Atheist, but I feel like I've just seen the face of God!"

Someone from the Xbox Live group at Microsoft drops by our booth.  After briefly playing a game, he quickly makes a cell phone call and says, "It works." Then he dashes off.

Thanks, Kojak!

D and I have both signed up to be beta testers, because we may actually be examples of that mythical casual hard-core gamer.  Before buying her last two computers, D literally checked their specs against the system requirements for the current version of The Sims.  And I maxed out my laptop's graphics, memory, and processor speed when I bought it last January so I could use it to play Spore.

I remain skeptical about OnLive, given that we still have trouble with streaming video (Hulu, Netflix, etc.) over a supposed 12Mbps connection, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  I know several people who work there, and they're all pretty smart cookies.  If anyone can make this crazy scheme work, it'll be them.

You're Not Feeling Lucky

On Thursday, my former employer announced another round of layoffs--its third this year. But there were two big differences this time around.

1. A larger number of people was affected: 200 now, versus 100 in January and 40 in February (all numbers approximate).
2. The affected organization was sales and marketing (as opposed to recruiting in January and the radio advertising group in February), which means it's likely that I know some of the departed.

Here's the official word, plus a couple of employee reactions. (You know how much I less than three primary sources.)

My heart goes out to everyone who's been caught up in this. That includes the managers who had to decide whom to let go, and all those left behind. I've been through layoffs at other companies (everyone at AT&T knew what the acronym RIF stood for), and I know it's not easy for anyone.

At times like this, I remember these words:

Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.

Thank you, Joss Whedon.

~CKL

Quote of the Day

"This is the thing about the new landscape that drives everyone crazy: you can’t see inside the cow; you can only build one, feed it music, and wait for it to poop."
-- Jonathan Coulton

The good news? When it does poop, that cow poops money. Or, as some in the music industry might call it...

...moolah.

Thank you! Thank you very much.

~CKL

"The Website Is Down"

My new favorite web video series. (Thanks @feliciaday!) For best results, expand to full screen so you can actually read the various windows:





~CKL

TV Unplugged

Having watched the Academy Awards on Sunday over the air--for free, with a $15 UHF antenna--and having read Saturday's Consumerist post about How To Cancel Cable Without Losing Your Favorite Shows, I felt it was a good time to review our family's own TV watching arrangements.

But before I get into that, I'd like to remind everyone that even though you can follow John Scalzi's example and Amuse Yourself Completely (and Legally) for $100 a Month, it doesn't have to cost nearly that much. Your nearest public library is likely to have enough reading material to suit your tastes and keep you busy for months, if not years. If you're not sure how to find something, go talk to a librarian. They're nice people.

Back to TV. First of all, even though we do have a theoretical 12MB/s connection to TEH INTARWUBS, streaming video still sucks. I'm not sure who to blame; all I know is that even short YouTube videos work better when I pause first and wait for the play buffer to fill. Anything that won't let me do that (I'm giving you the stink-eye, Hulu and Netflix) is useless.

So let's talk about downloading. I'm only going to talk about legal methods for purchasing content. If you're looking for BitTorrent info, look elsewhere. I won't encourage you to do anything illegal, and I certainly can't tell you to download utorrent, or visit The Pirate Bay/tvrss.net/feedmytorrents.com, or even watch the howto video presented as evidence in the spectrial. No sir, you won't find any of that here.

Why not watch the "free" (ad-supported) full episodes available on various TV networks' web sites? Well, first of all, it's streaming video, which sucks (see above). Second, and perhaps more importantly, the writers don't get paid for those viewings. I know, most people couldn't care less about this, but even if the WGA negotiated a bad deal at the end of last year's strike, you can still do the right thing. None of that advertising money is contractually owed to the writers, but they do get a cut of your EST (electronic sell-through) dollars.

The good news is, there are only two major players in the online TV market, which means only two crappy applications you need to download and install: Apple iTunes and Amazon Unbox (recently rebranded as "Video On Demand"). Amazon also allows you to watch on their web site, using a Flash plugin, but again: Streaming. Sucks.

Both services charge about $2 an episode. Apple also offers HD versions for $3 a pop, if you really crave those extra pixels.

Both services offer "season passes" (Amazon calls them "TV passes") for most shows. Amazon is better, because they give a 10-cent-per episode discount on TV passes, and they'll offer a pass before the whole season is out. iTunes doesn't always offer a season pass if they don't know how many episodes will be in the season (e.g., for new shows), because they do package pricing, not per-episode billing like Amazon.

However, iTunes does offer "multi-passes" for some shows--The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, for example--which get you the next sixteen episodes (four full weeks; they don't air on Fridays) and an option to renew after that. Amazon only offers their standard TV pass, which continues until an entire season ends; if you cancel in the middle of the season and want to restart later, you'll have to buy individual episodes. If, like me, you never actually watched every single episode of The Daily Show, the iTunes multi-pass is a better deal.

[Aside: I have lately been weaned off the Stewart/Colbert teats by free downloads of The Rachel Maddow Show podcast from MSNBC. I've got the Internet; I don't really need to watch news on TV, but every now and then I like a little commentary. Also, Go Cardinal!]

Finally, both services allow you to export video to portable devices; Apple supports iPods, iPhones, and such, and Amazon works with Creative Zen, Archos, and some cell phones as well as TiVos, Xbox 360s, and Media Center PCs.

If you have a Mac or PS3 or some other considered-exotic hardware, I'm told you can install TVersity or Rivet or similar third-party software to transcode your video for those devices. And, of course, if you've already paid for the content, there's no ethical problem with downloading a non-DRM'd version from the wild when the craptastic DRM mechanism inevitably fails. But I would never tell you to do that.

ADDENDUM: We used to pay over $80 a month for satellite TV. Now that we're only paying for the shows we actually watch, we spend less than $20 a month.

(EDIT: Both services can be slow to release new episodes, sometimes lagging a day or two after broadcast. In general, iTunes seems to be better than Amazon at getting shows out faster.)

~CKL

DIY Oscar Party Kit

Every year, D and I host an Academy Awards viewing party at our home, and we amassed a bit of a following in the bay area over the last decade. Now that we've moved away, our friends Ken & Jerry are carrying on the tradition down there. The following materials are for them, and anyone else hosting an Oscar Party tomorrow, to use freely!

Acceptance Speech BINGO
http://www.snout.org/Movies/OAS_BINGO/

Reload the "generate card" link and print without headers or footers on card stock. It's always good to do a quick visual check before printing each card, to make sure you don't have any wacky words on there--the Perl script that sifts the word list is far from perfect.

Trivia Slides
View Online / Download PowerPoint File (2.4MB)

We used to print these out and mount them on colored cardboard before taping them to the walls, but lately we've just been running the slide show on one of our laptops. If you download the PPT file, it's already set to kiosk mode with a 20-second delay. If you don't have PowerPoint, you can download the viewer for free.

Printable Ballot
Download PDF (833KB) from Oscars.com

See if your guests can predict the winners! Thanks to TiVo, we can pause the show right before the first award to make sure we've got everyone's completed ballots. I also print my answer key on a plastic transparency slide so it's easier to "grade" the ballots.

Assembling prizes is left as an exercise for the reader. We usually get small tchotchkes and sweets from OTC or the local party store and throw a handful of those into gift bags for BINGO prizes, then make a gift basket (with one trinket related to each of the Best Picture nominees) for the "predict the winners" grand prize. And I gotta tell you, it was tough finding something for Milk.

~CKL

Happy Presidents Day

Check out the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and marvel at how far we've come since then.

~CKL

Two Years Until Retirement

(The anticlimactic conclusion to the laptop repair saga!)

We drove back to Northwest Computer Support this afternoon to pick up my laptop. Desiree, the technician working on it, had called me yesterday to say that she couldn't figure out what was causing the problem (networking dies after returning from standby or hibernate), and recommended a full factory restore of Windows. I said I could do that myself, and there was data I'd want to get off the drive first anyway. I could be mistaken, but I think she sounded a bit relieved that I was taking it off her hands.

It's ironic, I suppose, because I've been watching The IT Crowd. (Although so far, the show isn't really that much about IT, or even work. But that's another story...)

Anyway, after we got home, of course I had to spend the entire afternoon mucking with the laptop myself. I couldn't change the "deep sleep" setting that Jessen recommended, because my T61p doesn't have the same hardware as his T60 did. But I did update my networking drivers again (Desiree had rolled them back to the ones that came with XP), cleaned up the registry a bit, and left Lenovo's Access Connections software uninstalled because it doesn't play well with the latest networking drivers.

At this point, I probably won't do a factory restore, because the inconvenience of not being to put my laptop on standy or hibernate is less than the inconvenience of reinstalling every damn piece of software I've loaded on it over the last year.* If things get worse, I might consider it. And you better believe I'm doing regular offsite backups. (Yes, Mozy, I said select all! We're paying $57 a month for broadband; I might as well get my money's worth.)

The title of this post refers to the fact that on Tuesday, I shelled out $130 to extend my laptop warranty through the end of January, 2011. I didn't expect Northwest Computer Support to be able to fix this standby issue, but they did a great job replacing the main system board when that failed, and I'd much rather have someone else dealing with hardware issues. I don't mind getting my hands dirty, but I'd prefer not to pay $800 the next time I need a new motherboard.

I don't know when I'll get another laptop after this. I'm not interested in a "netbook"--I tried out an OLPC XO last year and was not impressed; for writing, I'd prefer to pick up an AlphaSmart Neo, which is only $219 and boots up in less than two minutes.

I will be getting a new, quad-band mobile before our trip to Europe this June, and that device is likely to be the Jesus phone or something similar. We'll see.

~CKL

* Besides, without knowing the cause of the problem, I have no guarantee that it won't resurface after I've wiped the disk and reinstalled everything. And then I'll have wasted a lot of time for nothing, won't I?

Lost and Lost

The bad news: On Sunday, I misplaced $400 worth of electronics.
The good news: I hadn't actually paid for any of it myself.

The items in question were a Creative Zen portable media player ($100) and a pair of Shure sound-isolating earphones ($300). I got the former from my previous employer as a bonus gift, and won the latter in a drawing at Coverville 500. I'm unhappy about losing them, but not heartbroken. Mostly, I'm confused, because I'm not sure how it happened.

Here's what I do know: On Saturday night, I watched an episode of Stargate Atlantis on the Zen--in bed, before I went to sleep. On Sunday morning, I took the Zen and the earphones from the nightstand and put them in my jacket. Then D and went out to breakfast and a movie. When I went to look for the Zen on Sunday night, it wasn't in my jacket.

The jacket in question was a SCOTTEVEST ("SeV") garment. I've owned three different SeV jackets and loved all of them--as a geek, I love to carry around a lot of gadgets. (Even in high school, I would go everywhere with a backpack and a messenger bag.) This jacket has nearly 30 pockets and storage compartments, and all but three of those are zippered, velcroed, or otherwise secured shut: the two pen holder slots, and this one:



Yeah. Guess where I had put the now-missing items? That's right, in the only pocket without some kind of closure. 'cause I'm smart. S-M-R-T.

To be fair to myself, I've been wearing this jacket since last summer, and I had carried stuff in that pocket throughout five months of Travels With Our Cats. It's an interior pouch, and nothing has ever fallen out before. I still don't know for sure that's what happened, but it seems the most likely of all the unlikely scenarios I've imagined.

I won't be using that pocket anymore. And if you have one of these jackets, you shouldn't, either.



Like I said, I'm not too broken up about losing the stuff. I'm just frustrated that I don't know what happened. I suppose I'm like House that way--I need to know the answer. I hate losing objects, but I hate losing information even more.

~CKL

A New Laptop Sticker

(Previously, on CKL's HotSheet... "Languishing Laptop." And now, the continuation!)

 

I picked up my repaired laptop from Northwest Computer Support yesterday afternoon. That's their work order number sticker on the corner of the lid. They replaced the main board under warranty, so I didn't have to pay anything, and the good news is that it now boots up properly and works as before. The bad news is that coming back from standy/hibernate still kills the wireless networking.

After updating my NIC drivers to the latest from the manufacturer's web site, I now have yet another icon in my XP system tray (Intel's PROSet/Wireless WiFi Connection Utility, which so far seems to be playing nicely with Lenovo's Access Connections--knock on wood), but still no solution to the problem.

I'm very happy with Northwest Computer Support's service. They called me as soon as they started the repair, and were done with it just two days later. I'm so happy, in fact, that I'm taking my laptop back in on Monday so they can investigate this standby/hibernate issue.

Having done my own research on the web and found many other reports of the same problem, I'm not optimistic that they'll be able to fix it. But I might as well get my money's worth out of this warranty before it expires on the 30th.

~CKL

Back to the Future

Read it now!
FREEFALL: No Fate
Chapter 7: We Happy Few

When I was in college, I started writing a series of science fiction stories collectively titled FREEFALL. They were set in a semi-parallel universe, where a family named Quinn (and yes, they are mighty) turns a textile business into a powerful multi-national conglomerate. By the mid-21st century, the company now named "Quintex" actually has enough power to challenge the United Nations of Earth when violence erupts in the mining colonies of "the Torus"--the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

I had a lot of fun writing those stories. And when I put them online in the mid-1990s, it was one of the few pieces of science fiction available on the Internet. I got fan email from people all over the country, and even one from Australia. I even made it onto Sergey Brin's booklist.

But I stopped writing FREEFALL. Like the song says, life is what happens when you're making other plans. I have no regrets about working my ass off, doing some good, and collecting some money during the dot-com bubble, but now, I'm doing my best to honor my true calling. I never forgot how much I love writing. I just didn't remember to make it a priority.

I recently dug out a bunch of my old notes and outlines for FREEFALL stories. I was surprised to find that one of the outlines, Tail of Night, bore more than a passing resemblance to my second NaNoWriMo novel, Waypoint Kangaroo. Both involve the hijacking of a large spacegoing object by someone who tries to turn that object into a deadly projectile. In Night, it's Halley's Comet; in Kangaroo, it's an interplanetary cruise ship. A lot of years, and 9/11, passed between that outline and this novel, but I guess some ideas just grab hold of you and don't let go.

I was in the middle of a twelve-part story titled No Fate when I abandoned FREEFALL. I just finished Chapter 7, "We Happy Few." I'll post an update here whenever I publish a new chapter, which will be once a month between now and the end of May.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I should go write back to that guy who emailed me in 2005 wanting to "catch up with the end of the story." Better late than never, right?

~CKL

You know, going FTL does imply time travel

Back in the 20th century, I got into my head this crazy idea to make a mockumentary about how my friend Bryan had invented faster-than-light travel. It was based on an offhanded comment he made once, about how he wanted to change the world by doing something really big, and which he now denies. WHATEVS. It was a good excuse for me to spend $2,000 on new toys.

So I got D to help me produce it, and his wife Karin helped us rope a bunch of his friends into giving fake interviews, looking back on the historic event--because this documentary was, after all, being shot in the far future: 2004! We didn't tell Bryan about it, because it was a surprise birthday present for him. We also didn't finish it in time for his birthday party, but we did manage to put together a 90-second trailer:



After that, it was a simple matter of dealing with Windows 98 crashes (remember those?), Adobe Premiere crashes, Pinnacle video capture hardware problems, and a gigantic 10GB RAID array. Did I mention this was 1999?

We only managed to output three-quarters of the movie we wanted, because we couldn't get the finished project to render completely unless we removed one of the sections. But after months of dealing with computer issues, both D and I were just about ready to re-enact a scene from Office Space, and we had to stop. (Now, I have a Mac. HO HO HO)

The world premiere of Superluminary: The Notorious BHB took place on April 1, 1999, which seemed like an appropriate date. It also aired on public access cable in Palo Alto a few times, and now, you can watch the whole thing online. Be warned, it's 25 minutes of inside baseball:



(Trivia: The entire film was supposed to be widescreen, like the trailer, and we composed all the shots that way; but it was taking way too long to render the edited video with the cropping effect, so we scrapped it. You can see the microphone at the top of the screen during my interview, and probably some other things here and there.)

I still have all the raw footage on VHS, and I'm toying with the idea of putting together a "special edition" for the 10th anniversary. But only if I can include an interview with Bryan. He's a busy guy, you know.

~CKL

Backhanded Compliment of the Day

"It takes about three days to get used to [the Kindle] -- during which you wonder what chimp engineer designed it so every surface a normal human would use to hold the device is actually a button -- but after that you can't live without it."

- John Rogers, co-creator of Leverage

Languishing Laptop

This is my Lenovo ThinkPad T61p. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I bought it last January, and it's survived five months of road trip, including a few good tumbles--while we were packing up our house in Mountain View, it actually slipped off our bed and hit the wood floor hard enough to dislodge the CD drive from its slot. (That incident may have been feline-related.) It was actually powered up and running at the time, and amazingly, didn't show any ill effects.

Later on, though, it started glitching, perhaps due to the cumulative knocks and rattles of being repeatedly moved between car and hotel room. I got a couple of non-repeating MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION blue screens*, and a few months ago, it started killing both wired and wireless networking interfaces when coming back from standby or hibernate.

That I could work around (and did), but this morning, when I went to boot up the machine, all I got was one long and two short beeps, and a blank LCD. According to the Lenovo support web site, that's either a problem with the system board, the LCD assembly, or the DIMM. I tried reseating and swapping out the memory, to no effect. Maybe whatever hardware issue caused the blue screens finally got worse.

The good news is, it's still under warranty, and this removes the burden of deciding whether I should take it in for service. It's not that I don't trust Northwest Computer Support (the only local repair shop which responded to my email inquiries in November); I just don't know them, and I'm always wary of people touching My Stuff. But now I really don't have a choice.

I'll be dropping off my laptop tomorrow. My biggest worry is that the problem is in the LCD and they'll have to junk the entire lid, which is why I took plenty of pictures of my sticker-customized case, as shown above. I'm hoping it'll be a simple matter of replacing some bad hardware. Knock on wood.

This seems to be the month for writers to have problems with their laptops.

~CKL

* For the curious, and search engines, the specific STOP addresses were:
0x0000009C
0x00000000
0xBA344050
0xB2000040
0x00000800

Daily Routine, Part 2

(The long-awaited conclusion to Part 1!)

As promised, here's a breakdown of my writing habits. D will have to speak for herself. And, ironically, today is a very atypical day--we got up at eight in the morning, at least two hours before I usually stir, so we could let the cleaners in at 8:40 AM. They're earning their pay right now.

I've committed to writing a new flash fiction story every week until at least October, 2009; those appear every Friday at 512 Words or Fewer. I usually spend most of Thursday--or Wednesday, if we have other plans for Thursday, as we do this week--writing that story and recording the audio. Best case, it takes me an hour or two to do the writing, half an hour to record myself reading it, and another half hour to find intro/outro music and do the audio editing. Most weeks, I'll spend Monday and Tuesday mulling over my story idea until I can get a handle on it. Writing is as much about critical thinking as it is about stringing words together.

Since I get bored quickly and am easily distracted, I've taken to using full-screen text editors: WriteRoom on the Mac, and DarkRoom Q10 on the PC. I suppose if I had more self-control, I wouldn't need to clear my screen to keep from playing on the Internet when I should be writing, but the green-on-black display is also comforting and nostalgic. Besides, it's still easy to hit F9 or Alt-Tab, respectively, when I need to look something up in Wikipedia.

I save my current works-in-progress on a 4GB thumb drive. Since they're all text files (UTF-8, thankyouverymuch), I can easily move them between my Mac (which is user friendly), my desktop PC (which has MS Office), and my laptop (which also has Office, and is portable). I know, I could use Google Docs or DropBox or something to sync files, but it's like Scotty said: "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." I just need one frickin' text file, okay?

And yes, I do have emacs installed on all my computers. Fear my elite skill set.

I often listen to music while I write. Usually it's a film score, because lyrics can be distracting; "Weird Al" Yankovic songs demand too much cognitive focus to be background. I'm not looking for noise--just something that's different enough to be orthogonal to my primary task, but ideally complementary to it. For example, Hans Zimmer's scores are great for writing action scenes.

When I know what I'm going to write, I can produce about 1,000 words an hour of first draft. (I type pretty quickly.) My problem, as I told Jim MacDonald at Viable Paradise, is not putting words down on paper; it's putting the right words on the paper. ("Ah!" he replied. "You have achieved enlightenment.")

Backups are important. I copy finished files from my thumb drive to my desktop PC, where they'll get automatically uploaded to Mozy every seven days. All my computers run MozyHome for offsite backups, and though I haven't needed to restore anything yet, I've lived through two complete hard drive failures in the past, and I'm willing to pay $5 per computer each month to avoid a third massive-data-loss ordeal.

I've started using Duotrope's Digest to track my short story submissions. One of my goals for this year is to get two(2) pieces published in professional or semi-pro markets... but I'll talk about all that in a separate post later this week.

~CKL

Psych!

Hey, Mac users! I'll bet you were all excited about today's announcement that Google was releasing its Picasa photo software for the Mac, weren't you? Well, so was I! Until I discovered the bad news--it only works on Intel CPUs. PSYCH! So it's no good for our humans' vintage 2005 Mac mini, which runs on a PowerPC G4. LAME! I mean the new Picasa is lame, not our Mac mini. Macs are cool!

I guess Mac users who like Picasa are stuck with the iPhoto uploader, which works okay, but you still have to deal with crappy iPhoto. Macs are cool, but their software isn't always so great. We use Picasa on Windows to organize photos, and fortunately, PCs outnumber Macs 4:1 in our house. Because you can play more games on a PC! We love games! One of the humans bought a new Vista box just so she could play The Sims! But we're not going to buy a new Mac so it can run Picasa. That would be pretty silly.

What will you do with all that extra time?

Eager to say goodbye to the worst economic year since the Great Depression? You'll have to wait a second.

That's because the custodians of time are preparing to tack a "leap second" onto the clock on Wednesday to account for the minute slowing of the Earth's rotation — meaning champagne toasts and Auld Lang Synes will have to come a second late.

-- The Associated Press: Scientists prolong gloom of 2008

Just the facts: the first leap second was added in 1972, and the most recent one was in 2005. More info (and less editorializing) at timeanddate.com.

~CKL

The Day After

A selection of this morning's Twitter messages:

Damn it, I have a headache! I thought electing Obama would FIX THINGS!
-- John Scalzi (eater of Schadenfreude Pie)

Prop 8 passed. Goddammit. I will continue to fight for equality for all people, and stand up against bigotry.
-- Wil Wheaton

and at least 4 was defeated. Abortions for all, miniature American flags for others!
-- Michaela Schlocker

Everyone on the subway is making eye contact and grinning. But there's also this look of shock, like none of us trust the fortune.
-- Mary Robinette Kowal

To recontextualize a phrase: AMERICA: FUCK YEAH!!!
-- Chang Terhune

Michael Crichton died?! :(
-- Felicia Day

On a related note, I will continue to buck the growing trend of using LoudTwitter to feed one's LiveJournal. A bunch of text messages strung together is no substitute for a coherent sequence of sentences, paragraphs, and ideas. Better to let your fields lie fallow than sow them with salt.

And my friend Ammy has some encouraging thoughts on The Battle, Not the War.

~CKL

Charity Begins at Reading the Fine Print

While preparing myself for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I browsed the nanowrimo.org web site and saw a "Get Sponsored!" link. Intrigued, I clicked, and was initially pretty happy:

You can get friends and family to sponsor your novel-writing month through Firstgiving.com. All proceeds from sponsorships go to NaNoWriMo's parent 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Office of Letters and Light to pay for this year's Young Writers Program and adult main program.

Cool, right? Then I went over to firstgiving.com to see how this sponsorship thing works, and got one page into the signup process before hitting disappointment.

Now, I've talked about online donation services in the past, and I don't want to get any more hate mail than necessary. So let me just quote part of firstgiving.com's Terms and Conditions (my emphasis below):

Firstgiving will (i) be paid and process on-line donations (“On-Line Donations”) made by individuals or entities (“Donors”) through the Firstgiving Service; (ii) comply with the Privacy Policy in the form set forth at http://www.firstgiving.com, (iii) hold the funds received through On-line Donations in a non-operating bank account; (iv) remit funds to the designated non-profit or by check or electronically to the bank account the On-Line Donations, less (A) a service fee of 7.50% of on-line donations collected via the Firstgiving service, (B) 3.3% for fees collected for all online event registrations processed through our system (only applies if Firstgiving’s Paid Event Registration module is used). These fees above are inclusive of all credit card processing and banking fees; these fees are subject to change at any time at the discretion of Firstgiving...

I understand that any service like this needs to charge a fee. They need to pay for web hosting, staff, credit card and bank fees, and so on. But seven and a half percent? That's more than twice what most credit card processing fees run (around 3%). That's more than the sales tax in some states. Maybe it really is the least they can charge and still get by as a business. But knowing that only $18.50 of a $20 donation will actually make it to the charity still rubs me the wrong way.

So please, if you're thinking of giving any money to NaNoWriMo, just write them a check. It'll only cost you a postage stamp and an envelope, and they'll get every cent of what you donate. And don't forget, it's tax deductible.

~CKL

Closing the Tabs

Installed a new Firefox extension today (RetailMeNot, if you must know), so it's time for a restart. And I might as well clean up these tabs while I'm at it:

Stanford Magazine and the Interstitial Arts Foundation are both looking for short stories to publish--up to 2,500 words by November 5th and 4,000-10,000 words by December 2nd, respectively. I probably have a better shot at the latter, which is likely to more receptive to genre (rather than "literary") fiction.

I really shouldn't be spending more money right now, but these Gamestop coupons are awfully tempting.

A fellow Viable Paradise graduate's (not my class, but still my tribe) short story "Chrono-Girl Vs. Kid Vampire" has been published online.

The latest issue of ACM Queue is online. Probably my last, since I didn't renew my membership for next year.

GrooveLily has posted "The Flash Point," another demo track from their new show Long Story Short.

Courtesy of Lifehacker, links to two things that sound cool but I don't really need: Windows registry hacking and a utility that clears all the "Recently Used" lists in Windows.

Viable Paradise linkage: Jim McDonald's recommended Emergency Kits and Elizabeth Bear et al.'s seriously serious Criminal Minds fanfic, Shadow Unit.

We need some kind of toy hammock to keep things from falling behind the corner bookshelf in the living room.

More things I really don't need: USBCell rechargeable AA batteries, a $50 Stargate mirror, and a $40 print of Serenity Valley.

I don't remember why I was looking at the Superstruct Game.

Another VP alum got her poem published online at Expanded Horizons.

A great collection of photos from VPXII--thanks, Alberto!

Charity art project to fight malaria, co-sponsored by open-source screenwriting software Celtx.

Writing links from VPXII.

Researching uses for our ancient WiFi access point: Avaya/Lucent/Orinoco RG-1000 Residential Gateway notes and WDS page from Wikipedia.

More from VPXII: Preditors and Editors™ and First Lines from Famous Books.

Read Free Star Trek Comics Online!

Last but not least, Writer's Digest reveals 28 Agents Who Want Your Work. But that list was published in August, so they're probably swamped with queries at this point.

~CKL

Short Answer: NO

Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten's September 21st piece, titled "Illiterature: Can a computer judge fiction?", includes 385 words of custom-built slush. An excerpt:

JASMINE AND LAURENCE

By Gene Weingarten

The two lovers writhed as one, entwined and moist, like a spool of twine that had been dropped in the toilet.

"Oh, Laurence," Jasmine moaned, her breath the color of warm air.

Jasmine had a very complex character arc. Actually, it wasn't an arc so much as a parabola that could be expressed in Cartesian coordinates as an asymptote with polynomial coefficients, viz., y2 = 4ax, x2 = 4ay. In short, Jasmine was really hard to fathom, the way it's hard to fathom why you sometimes have to type "www" to access a Web site, but usually you don't. Also, she had very perky breasts...

Ow. Ow. My brain hurts.

The point of this exercise was to test a software product--advertised on craigslist, natch--which promises to "electronically analyze the quality and commercial viability of a work of fiction and prompt changes that will make it better." The software, of course, proclaimed that the above text showed "emotional depth," "motivational punch," and "resonance."

Riiight.

I don't even trust the grammar and spell checkers in Microsoft Word. I have absolutely no confidence that editorial judgment, a much more complex undertaking, can be automated. Unless, of course, we're talking post-singularity, and then all bets are off.

In the meantime, I'll stick with good ol' human critiques of my work. Because when I get published, they're going to be the ones buying my books.

~CKL

Spore-22

Twenty-two is probably about the total number of hours (so far) that I've spent playing Spore or fiddling with the Creature Creator. I also felt like I was living a Catch-22 paradox this afternoon, when I ran into a crash-to-desktop bug several times. D and I have played our first creature up to the Space stage, but now every time our homeworld gets attacked (which is way too much--a different gripe, see below), after we fend off the invaders and try to save the game, CRASH.

Now there's probably bad code there, but there are also two big design flaws: no auto-save option anywhere in the game, and no way to save the game while you're in a planet's atmosphere. You have to go into orbit before you can save, which means switching view modes, and that's when the crash occurs. You can't save without going into orbit, you can't go into orbit without crashing the game. Grr. Arg.

The debugger in me is curious about what's actually causing this problem--one forum poster thought it might be a bloated graphics cache file, but further experiments disproved that hypothesis. Other suggested workarounds include turning all the graphics quality settings to LOW, or performing a very specific sequence of actions after an attack. None of them seems reliably successful.

The gamer in me is annoyed that EA might have rushed this thing to market and forced its biggest fans to become beta testers. I know it's a complex simulation and all, but Half-Life 2 and Portal never crashed on me once. Not once. Maybe I should just stick to waiting two or three years before trying a game, so I know my hardware will exceed the system requirements. Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

All that said, Spore really is a remarkable achievement. D and I still have problems with the twitchy camera and movement controls, and the Space stage requires way too much micro-management, but overall, it's amazing how much fun the game is. When it's not crashing.

~CKL

Understanding Google Chrome

Can't wait to download the new web browser from the big G? Pass the time by reading the Google Chrome comic book by Scott McCloud (author of the seminal Understanding Comics), which summarizes a lot of technical detail very well. I also know a few of the people featured in the comic, and it's a kick to see their line-art alter egos.

I'm a big believer in using comics to communicate difficult concepts. I love Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guide series, and I even used his Cartoon Guide to Statistics as a reference for one of my first projects at Google. Hey, I'm an engineer, not a mathematician.

In my last year at Google, I started an internal company blog called "Googley Comics," featuring humorous illustrations which employees would often email around--fake propaganda posters, Google-centric parodies of other art, etc. Most of the stuff was pretty esoteric or inside baseball, as you might expect, but they were fascinating cultural documents, and I thought it would be nice to have a central archive collected and annotated somewhere. I wonder if anyone's still maintaining that blog.

Here's one of my own Dinosaur Comics knock-offs:



~CKL

Blog Proliferation

Yes, I am now on MySpace. When you're done weeping, please add me as your friend.

Confused about where to read my stuff? Not to fret. All my blogs are always available in a single Yahoo! Pipe, which you can add to Google Reader for a nice ironic effect. See below for a sample.

~CKL

Grooving the Lily

Get your fill of GrooveLily songs at the band's new WordPress-based web site! If that page reminds of Jonathan Coulton's MP3 Store, well, it's a good thing. I think all musicians should post free listening samples online, and offer DRM-free downloads for purchase at a reasonable price.

In fact, that's a good strategy for any independent artist these days. Repeat after me: "The Internet is my friend. Obscurity is worse than piracy. Fans are not the enemy." All other things being equal, I am far more likely to buy your product if you treat me with respect.

~CKL

Denvention Has Begun

One of the many sights we saw today at the 66th WorldCon:

From Denvention 3

(I'm not convinced it was an actual stargate. The wormhole was definitely open for more than thirty-eight minutes, and I didn't see any singularities nearby.)

For more photos and details, click on over to Travels With Our Cats!

~CKL

Stephanie Lenz, Copyright Hero

In case you haven't seen the news, Stephanie Lenz is the woman who is suing Universal Music Corp for issuing a takedown notice against this video of her kids, which happens to have Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" playing in the background:



From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The issue in Stephanie Lenz's lawsuit against Universal is whether the owner of the rights to a creative work that's being used without permission can order the Web host to remove it without first considering whether the infringement was actually a legal fair use - a small or innocuous replication that couldn't affect the market for the original work.

Lenz's lawyers, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say her 29-second video, with fuzzy camerawork and unclear sound, was such an obvious noncommercial fair use that Universal should have to reimburse her for the costs of taking it out of circulation for more than a month last year.

Back in December of last year, when The Richter Scales' "Here Comes Another Bubble" music video also ran afoul of a YouTube takedown notice, there was a lot of hand-wringing discussion within the group about how to respond. We actually consulted with EFF and other lawyers, but in the end decided that the potential downside of inviting legal action was too big. (The video currently on YouTube is "version 1.1," with the single controversial image removed.)

I'm definitely rooting for Lenz and EFF in this case. While the nuances are different from the "Bubble" situation, the basic premise is the same: the DMCA and other copyright laws are routinely abused, "fair use" is not well defined, and all of that needs to change.

~CKL

The Last of Dr. Horrible...FOR NOW

All three parts of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog are now online! Watch it for free and risk slashdotting their site again, or buy it from iTunes for a paltry four dollars. C'mon, skip the Starbucks for one day and do the right thing.

Just in case you've been living under a rock and have no idea what I'm talking about, I refer you to Penny Arcade's Tycho, who describes Dr. Horrible as "a supervillain musical written by Joss Whedon, starring a bunch of awesome motherfuckers. Why are you still here."



~CKL

Not Horrible At All

After being predictably slashdotted this morning, Act I of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is once again available for your viewing (and listening) pleasure. It's quite delightful.



If you hate streaming video as much as I do--and, more importantly, if you want to support the artists--I encourage you to buy the complete saga (parts 2 and 3 coming later this week) for a measly $4 from iTunes.

In related news, I also ponied up for a Daily Show multi-pass today--16 new episodes for $10, no commercials, auto-downloaded, and the writers get paid. Me likey. We haven't been watching for the past few months, but has John Stewart gone a lot more gray recently, or is it just me?

So far, our TV-over-Internet experience has been pretty good. We finished watching the most recent seasons of Reaper and House, and we've got My Name is Earl cued up. We don't really have a lot of free time while we're traveling, but after we settle down in Portland I'll probably shell out for Burn Notice and The Middleman (recommended by my friend Raj).

I haven't done the math yet, but I suspect paying for individual shows will also be more economical than cable or satellite. We were paying almost $80 a month with DirecTV, including HBO and TiVo fees, and even if iTunes or Unbox season passes are $40 a pop, we wouldn't have time to watch 24 shows a year--even if we could find that many programs we liked.

It's a little annoying that we can't download Medium and probably won't be able to get True Blood in a timely manner*, but we can always wait for DVD. Or make some new friends in Portland.

~CKL

* Get with the program already, HBO!

The Great Experiment

I am nothing if not malleable. Barely three weeks after complaining that I couldn't buy and download the TV shows I want to watch on my computer, I'm trying out the available options to see if I can live with them. So far, I've bought five episodes of Reaper from iTunes, and D and I have watched two of them. After this, it'll be House from Amazon Unbox.

So far, it's been pretty convenient, and I'm more than willing to pay $2 for an episode of a show I love--especially because it's a purchase, not a rental, and I get to keep the file for as long as I want. True, there's still crappy DRM attached, but it is the least of the associated evils.

Why don't I just use BitTorrent? Well, it's not terribly convenient, for one. I'm not a big fan of hunting down the right torrent and hoping that the download actually finishes. (Before you post your pollyanna comment: I'm glad it works for you. It rarely works for me.) Reliability is also a problem--especially at the moment, when we're dependent on hotel broadband that is usually sketchy and often throttles even streaming video traffic.

Another big issue is quality. True, iTunes video is nothing to write home about, and you can find HD content via torrents, but there's also a lot of low-quality, truncated, or simply mislabeled stuff out there. Given the choice between a data set that oscillates wildly between very good and very bad, and one that stays flatlined at pretty good, I'll take the linear fit, thank you.

Finally, I'm voting with my wallet. I have never been part of a Nielsen family (or even known any--have you?), and even when I'm using TiVo, I have very little confidence that the networks will pay any attention to my viewing habits, because they consider me a thief.* But if I'm actually giving them my money, and that money-giving is clearly attached to a particular program--well, I sincerely hope that even corporate executives are not that stupid. Besides, I can feel good that I'm directly contributing to the writers' residual payments, even if it's only a couple of pennies for each episode I buy.

* Yeah, treat your customers like criminals. That's a great business plan.

~CKL

What to Watch

You've got one more week to catch live coverage of the STS-124 mission on NASA TV, being transmitted from the Space Shuttle and International Space Station in Earth orbit. Seriously, there is nothing better on television right now. My favorite part is Karen Nyberg's zero-gee ponytail, which is a more awesome hairstyle than anything Hollywood can produce.

~CKL

Live on Mars

If you watch CNN, you've already seen the first super badass awesome image of the Phoenix lander descending to the surface of Mars. Here's a followup:



That's another shot, also taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, of the Phoenix lander, this time falling about 12 miles in front of the 6-mile wide crater "Heimdall."

Why is this so cool? Well, aside from the fact that we landed a spacecraft on Mars, both of those objects were moving at ridiculous speeds when the photos were taken. You're basically looking at "a speeding bullet photographed by a speeding bullet."

~CKL

Netflix Living Up to Their Name

Earlier this week, the Netflix Player set-top box launched. The Roku hardware costs $100, and the minimum subscription plan that lets you stream content is $9 a month. This would have been awesome, except for three serious deficiencies:

1. Limited selection - currently, only older movies and TV shows are available for streaming--less than 10% of Netflix's total catalog
2. No HD output - highest resolution is 480p.
3. As D says: "Streaming sucks."

Don't get me wrong. I think it's definitely a step in the right direction, and I'm glad to see Apple TV getting some competition, even if it's an orange. At least it's not a lemon. What's that about bad puns? I can't hear you, I've got a banana in my ear!

~CKL

TV or Not TV?

That's a rhetorical question.

We've been on the road for a month now, with poor access to broadcast TV, and I started thinking about ditching cable/satellite altogether when we settle down in Portland and putting the money into faster broadband instead. (Kind of like what my friend steadof is doing.) It's easy enough to pipe video from my laptop to my HDTV, and why pay for a bloated channel package that subsidizes sports, country music, and shopping channels I'll never watch, when I can just order exactly the episodes I want?

But I've done some research, and there are two big problems with that plan:

1. Convenience. There's no single place to stream or buy TV online. Every network has its own crappy web site and its own crappy, DRM-crippled video player, both of which circumstances annoy me to no end. Hulu seems like a good idea, but their selection is spotty, and streaming is always problematic.

I'm willing to pay for my shows, but I'd still have to go to at least two different vendors for the content--iTunes and Amazon Unbox. It's annoying, and there's no good reason for it. I'd much rather deal with a single Season Pass list on one TiVo.

2. Speed. I'm glad the writer's strike is over, but I have to agree with Harlan Ellison on the final WGA deal. The new contract states that for 17 days after the initial broadcast of a TV program, the writers receive no residual payments for free, ad-supported online viewing. It's even worse for new shows--for the entire first season, the no-residual period is 24 days. (Page 32. No joke.)

And you know what? The networks tend to take down their streaming episodes after a few weeks. That's a long time to wait, and a pretty brief window of opportunity, to watch a new episode of a show you love. Of course, there's no such time restriction on electronic sell-through (EST), but then we're back to problem #1.

There's a saying: "Fast, cheap, good. Pick two." Well, in this case, it's pick one, and it can't be "good."

We packed up our DirecTivo (an HR10-250) when we moved out of the bay area, but since it won't receive the new MPEG-4 channels, we may just switch to cable (and a shiny new Series3 HD Tivo) when we settle down in Portland. It's pretty clear that unless we want to deprive ourselves of a lot of the entertainment to which we've become accustomed (Good Eats! MythBusters! The Daily Show!), we'll have to pony up for some kind of cable TV.

I can't wait for the day when I can subscribe and download all the TV I want to watch, whenever I want, on any device I like, without any hassles or commercials. But that day is not today.

~CKL

Dr. HotSync or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Outlook

Regular readers of this blog will recall that I was disappointed a few days ago by the lack of non-sucky ways for my to sync my PalmPilot's calendar with my Google Calendar. You'll be happy, I'm sure, to know that I've found a solution. It's a bit kludgey, and has so far cost me $50 and a few hours to install and configure, but it works.

Short answer: I bought Chapura's PocketMirror Professional, which converts between Outlook's and Palm's data formats during a HotSync, and then re-installed Palm Desktop and configured it to sync my handheld with Outlook instead.

Long answer: As a bonus, I was also able to add a couple of Internet Calendars (RSS feeds from Google Calendar) to Outlook, so I can now view those on my handheld as well. That feature is what convinced me to switch to Outlook and shell out for PocketMirror Professional, instead of the Standard version which can only sync with a single, default Outlook calendar.

There's only one catch--well, two. The first is that PocketMirror Pro allows me to mark those other calendars from Outlook with different categories when I import them into my PalmPilot, so I can tell which calendar each event came from. Unfortunately, the default Palm Datebook application on my antique Sony CLIE (vintage 2003) doesn't support categories. It'll show me all the events, but I can't view or edit categories.

Now, PocketMirror did create their own Calendar app for Palm, but it's very bare-bones (and even older than Sony's app--made in 2001). I think they just took the original reference code and added a single pull-down menu to switch between categories. Honestly? It's pretty naff.

So now I'm trying out DateBk6, and even though the full array of options is somewhat dizzying, it is nice. I like being able to assign icons to each datebook category, so I can see at a glance which events came from which online calendar, and if I end up getting addicted to some of its other features, I may just shell out the $28 to buy it.

The second catch is that PocketMirror won't synchronize some multi-day appointments from Outlook. Note that I said won't, not can't: Chapura makes another product called KeySuite which has additional features and support for more types of Palm data, including email. Right now, I'm just getting a few HotSync error messages for old events because they were repeating appointments which spanned multiple days. It's not really a big deal, but if I end up using my calendar more because it's, well, usable again, I may just pay for the damn upgrade.

Bottom line: I probably should have taken the time to sort this out months ago. And, as usual, trying to save a little money and not choosing the most deluxe option is probably going to end up annoying me. We'll see. At the moment, $100 feels like a lot to spend just to fix something that shouldn't be broken in the first place, but 28 days later, I may be singing a different tune.

And you know, Outlook isn't all bad. I used it for a good four years when I was at AT&T Labs, because nothing else would talk to the Exchange mail server (which was actually pure evil). At least Microsoft didn't go completely extreme makeover apeshit on the Outlook UI in Office 2007, like they did for Word and Excel. I'm getting used to the crazy blue panels and hidden sub-menus, but I can't say I like it.

~CKL

Disappointment

So I was all excited earlier this year when I heard about Google Calendar Sync, which would not only export my calendar data, but actually sync it with another application. Unfortunately, it only syncs with Microsoft Outlook, and I use Palm Desktop (with my Sony CLIE PEG-NX70V. Long story. Don't get me started).

Surely, I thought, there must be a better solution! I knew lots of companies make third-party conduits for syncing various data sources with Palm OS devices, so I finally went looking tonight, and sure enough, CompanionLink makes a product to sync directly between Google Calendar and Palm Desktop. I immediately downloaded the 14-day trial, and while waiting for the file, read their setup guide. It all seemed pretty standard until this part:

For Password, fill in your password. (NOTE: This must contain only alphanumeric (A through z and 0 through 9) characters. If it contains anything else, then you will not be able to use CompanionLink for Google Calendar at this time.)

What. The. FUCK.

I'm not giving anything away when I tell you that I include punctuation in my passwords. You're telling me that in order for me to use your product, I have to change my password? And not only that, I have to change my password to something less secure? Are you out of your mind?

I really can't think of a single good reason why they couldn't support non-alphanumeric characters in passwords. It can't be a transmission issue; hell, HTML includes escape codes for any damn character you want, and a whole bunch more you probably don't. Are they lazy? Incompetent? Or just uncaring? In any case, I'm not wasting my time or money on them.

So I'm still looking for a good way to sync my Google Calendar with my PalmPilot (yes, I still call it that, and yes, I'm going to keep using it until it dies). I may just break down and use the Google utility to sync to Outlook, then buy PocketMirror or Intellisync to sync Outlook with Palm Desktop. It'll be kludgey, but still less offensive than the alternative.

~CKL

Trash, Treasure, and Trade

THDI, a term coined by my friend Jeff, stands for "Trash Heap Development Index." Remember that for later.

Two weekends ago, as part of the process of moving out of our house, D and I sorted all our worldly possessions into keep/sell/junk piles. The "sell" pile (a.k.a. the "free" pile) turned out to be quite large, since we had a lot of things that could be easily replaced, and it would have cost more to store them while we travel around the country than to just buy new things later.

We rented a U-Haul truck to take all our "keep" stuff to the ABF terminal, where it would be packed into a 6'x7'x8' storage container, and also to haul the "sell" stuff to a group garage sale. (We called the Junk General to take away all the "junk" stuff.)

There was so much "sell" stuff, we weren't actually sure it would fit into the ten-foot-long U-Haul truck. Our friend Elena, who was helping us with the move, had a brilliant idea: She made a "FREE STUFF" sign and put it on the truck while we loaded it. Within minutes, cars were stopping as they drove down our street and random people were taking all sorts of crap stuff off our hands. It was great.

But the best was yet to come. After we'd gotten most of the furniture out onto the curb, a car screeched to a halt next to our U-Haul, and the African woman driving pointed to the sign and asked, "Free? Everything?"

"Yup! All free!" Elena said.

"Take down the sign! I take it all!" the woman said.

We thought she was joking, especially since she immediately drove her car past the truck and down the street. But it turns out she was just finding a parking spot. She walked back to the stuff piled on the curb, chattering on her cell phone in what sounded like French.

"You can take down the sign," she repeated, and went on to explain that she was calling her friend to come help her haul all the stuff away, and they also had a truck coming.

Her friend showed up, and they loaded a coffee table into the back of her station wagon. We weren't sure how they intended to take the rest of stuff--trust me, there was a lot of it--until the truck showed up. It wasn't a pickup truck like we had thought. It was a seventeen-foot-long cargo truck they had rented from Budget, being driven by three Mexicanos:



And then I recognized the woman and remembered where I'd seen her before. Earlier that day, she had come into the U-Haul store while D and I were picking up our truck, looking for a 17' truck. U-Haul only had a 14-footer available. As we were leaving in our puny 10' truck, we had seen the woman talking to the three Mexicanos, who were waiting outside in the shade.

As it turns out, the woman and her friend were from Senegal, and they were trolling garage sales and such for things to send back to Africa. I didn't talk to them myself, but my understanding is that they had a shipping container which they intended to load up with whatever stuff they could find in the bay area.

They did literally take everything. At one point, as they were loading a broken laser printer, our friend Sean pointed out its non-functional state and asked if they really wanted to haul that all the way across the ocean. The women waved their hands and said, "It doesn't matter. We Africans will find a use for it."

Remember Jeff's Trash Heap Development Index (THDI)? I'll let him explain, in his own words:

The way people handle trash in the developing world is interesting. Everywhere, the trash can is implemented not in metal or plastic, but by gravity (a perfect developing world technology substitution: it is simpler, cheaper, and available everywhere). If you don't need something, you drop it. It falls to the ground and that's it...

The problem with the gravity system of waste management is that the trash ends up everywhere, especially places where the wind blows it, or water washes it. So every morning, everywhere in the world from Guatemala to Indonesia (and probably all the places I haven't yet seen) the women carefully sweep their property and ensure that all the garbage is in little piles at the edge. Sometimes they light the piles on fire to reduce them to ash. An interesting detail in French colonies is that in intersections, they push the trash into the middle, making little trashpile rond-points (roundabouts). The drivers then carefully pass the rond-point à la droite, and a little bit of civility is restored to a place where dogs and pigs have the right of way everywhere else.

But the THDI is not about where the piles are, or what other function they serve. It is about what's in the piles.

The first morning I woke up in Chad I was restless and I wanted to go out and see the city. The safe area for walking alone in N'Djamena is measured in meters, so I pretty quickly exhausted the possibilities for sightseeing. The embassy of Saudi Arabia's back door was kind of interesting, and the gardener cutting the bouganvilla taught me some Arabic (he certainly wasn't speaking French), and finally the children helped me practice the conjugation of donner (to give). "Dons-moi un biscuit. Dons-moi du argent. Dons-moi un bonbon." After a bit, I became interested in the trash that had been pushed to the end of the street by the women that morning, and that had washed into the drainage ditch over the years. There was some good stuff in there! Empty cans of powdered milk (Nido, from Nestle), broken flip-flops, a tangle of wire that used to be a tire before it burned, and the tail of a goat. As I contemplated the trash, I realized Chad was a much richer country than I was used to working in, and that I'd have to take that into consideration as a new log.

You see, in Liberia, the trash piles have the things with absolutely no remaining value. There are flip flops, but they have already had little foam wheels for children's toys punched out of them. There are powered milk cans, but they are rusted from being put over too many fires to heat water, and they are from a cheap Dutch brand of milk, not Nestle Nido. The smallest useful scrap of metal wire is already in service holding some rusting taxi together.

The THDI of Congo is closer to Liberia, but certainly not quite as low. For instance, Congolese in the east have access to Uganda and Kenya, where they can buy raw materials like steel and wire. They fix their old motorcycles with new parts that arrive on boats in Mombasa and come across on good trucks on good roads. The THDI, then, seems to be related to the transit system and your proximity to rich countries.

I haven't been home for a while, so I am starting to forget... perhaps you can go take a look at your trash and see what your THDI is. What does it say about your life? Did my new metric make you want to "improve" your THDI?

D and I feel pretty good about our THDI at the moment. We gave away a lot of our usable stuff to friends who would get good use out of it, and most of the rest of it is on its way to Senegal right now, where it will either be used in its existing form or stripped down for parts--I'm not sure what they'll do with all the 3.5" floppy disks, but I'm sure it would be interesting to see.

It is a little weird to think that a lot of our stuff was actually manufactured in Asia, shipped to America where we bought it, and is now being shipped back to Africa, where some pieces will see more use than they ever did in our house. But it also seems serendipitious that the women were from Senegal, which is one of the first places Jeff visited when he began preparing for his new life as an MSF logistician. It's a small world, and we're all connected in some way. Good to remember that.

~CKL

Google Causes Global Warming!

Dr. Robert Zubrin visited Authors@Google last Monday to talk about his latest book, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil.

Skip to the 40-minute mark in the video below to see the controversial slide which prompts an inevitable flood of pointed questions from the audience. As the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing:



The complete, in-context quote from Dr. Zubrin is: "The same argument could be made that Google causes global warming... by your spreading of information, which contributes to economic growth... and, in fact, much more global warming than the corn ethanol program, I daresay."

I'm currently reading Fifty Degrees Below, the second book in Kim Stanley Robinson's "climate trilogy," and though I'm enjoying it, the information seems even more densely packed than in his science-packed Mars trilogy. Maybe that's because the "climate" books are set closer to the present day, and therefore all the political and social situations resonate and feel that much more real. Every detail implies a multitude of other things I'm already familiar with, instead of causing me to speculate on what a future society might be like.

~CKL

"DRM is not actually doing anything to prevent piracy"

Finally, people are getting it: DRM doesn't work. The title of this post is a direct quote from Madeline McIntosh, a senior vice president at the Random House Audio Group, who was quoted in "Publishers Phase Out Piracy Protection on Audio Books" (New York Times, 03 Mar 2008):

In a letter sent to its industry partners last month, Random House, the world’s largest publisher, announced it would offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 files beginning this month, unless retail partners or authors specified otherwise.

Penguin Group, the second-largest publisher in the United States behind Random House, now appears set to follow suit...

Mr. Heffernan said the company changed its mind partly after watching the major music labels, like Warner Brothers and Sony BMG, abandon D.R.M. on the digital music they sell on Amazon.com. “I’m looking at this as a test,” he said. “But I do believe the audio book market without D.R.M. is going to be the future.”

Other major book publishers seem to agree. Chris Lynch, executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Audio, said the company would make 150 titles available for download in an unprotected digital format in “the next couple of months.”

"High Tech Noon"

Totally awesome. It's like TOS meets Firefly...



The sad thing is, this is pretty much what the "special editions" of the original Star Wars trilogy were. Except that George Lucas wasn't having a laugh--he had simply gone insane. Absolute power and all that, y'know.

(from darrylgold.com, via the flick filosopher)

~CKL

"An expensive way to smell poo"

I generally find the product reviews on Amazon.com very helpful. Sort them with the lowest ratings at the top and you'll see if there are common complaints about a product, or if people are just blowing off steam for some other reason. But every now and then, in addition to being useful, a review will be entertaining in the sublime.

N A Cat Lover's review of the CatGenie is just such a review. D found it while researching cat supplies--in particular, litter boxes--for our upcoming road trip, and it is now my distinct pleasure to share this information with you.

Here's an excerpt:

Cat Genie takes the small unpleasantness of daily cleaning the litter and it saves it up and releases that unpleasantness as one big unscheduled, unpleasant inconvenience every week or two. Advanced monitors will ensure that the device failure will occur during the workday, as you prepare for your important meeting with your prospective client. Nothing like cleaning out wet cat poo in your nicest suit. Or, you may be pleasantly awoken in the middle of the night by the repeating three beeps of "there's poo and hair in the hopper." You will become more familiar with your cat's feces every day as the cat genie gently fills your home with the aroma of baking excrement.

Follow the link above to read more. Was this review helpful to me? Oh yes. Oh hell yes.

~CKL

Goodbye to Google

(Pop quiz: Does the title of this post make you think of the Carpenters' "Goodbye to Love," Michelle Branch's "Goodbye to You," or another song? Leave your answer in a comment below!)

After more than four years, Friday was my last day at the 'plex. My feelings about leaving mirror Nathan Stoll's and Kevin Fox's. I still believe it's a great place to work, but it's time for me to try something completely different. More on that later.

Unlike some other bloggers, I've purposefully avoided mentioning my employer or talking much about work. That was not to be coy or mysterious; if you care at all, you can find my complete employment history on LinkedIn. It was just my way of avoiding any perceived or actual impropriety with respect to the disclosure of company information. Now that I'm no longer an employee, it will be less of a concern, but don't expect this place to suddenly become all-Google-all-the-time. It's a great company, but it was never my life.

So what am I doing now? I'm taking the next three years off to do some writing. D and I are planning to move up to Portland later this year, where most things are a heck of a lot cheaper than here in the bay area, and I'm applying to Clarion. We're also going to do some traveling. You'll be able to read all about it right here on the HotSheet.

You might think I'm crazy to walk away from such an insanely successful company, but I've been working in Silicon Valley for twelve years, and this was never what I really wanted to do with my life. It's just something I happened to be passably good at, at a time when people were paying well for those skills. Now that I have the opportunity to chase my dreams, I'd be crazy not to go for it.

I'll end with this bit of NSFW philosophy from xkcd:

Phrase of the Week

Courtesy of BoingBoing:

Browsing the web from Guatemala is always an adventure. Works okay when there's electricity, which hasn't been very steady while I've been down here over the last few weeks (there have been some big blackouts here related to a sketchy power grid, and unusually intense windstorms). What sucks worse than the lights dimming, or DSL or sat bombing out? Constant Google cockblocking.

Read the complete post and further discussion at "(Guatemala) Google is sorry."

In related news, I was a bit surprised that the San Francisco Chronicle would choose to bleep out "cock" in Tim Goodman's TV Talk Machine podcast, but allow the compound "cockblocking" to remain uncensored.

Of course, former US President Jimmy Carter would never resort to using such crude language. He is much more eloquent than that.

I Got What America Needs Right Here

Sometimes I'm a little stupid, maybe, a little slow in the head, so I'm wondering if you can help me get something straight....

Gmail Pwn4g3

I'm not sure, but I think this might be bad...



What do you mean, you don't get it? Sigh.

"That's worth going to jail for. That's worth anything."

Those are the final words of Cory Doctorow's short story "Printcrime," and I didn't spoil anything by telling you that. But you should read the story--it's short, less than 750 words--before you read about the RepRap, an actual, open-source product being developed in England.

The View from My Parents' House

D and I spent the week between Xmas and New Year's with my parents, who live in Rancho Palos Verdes. Here's the view from their back window, looking north toward downtown Los Angeles:



It's even more spectacular at night, when you can see the city lights twinkling all around. And we saw at least three different fireworks shows on New Year's Eve.

A word on creating panoramic photos:

I always knew there was software to do this, but had never researched it until this week. If you're interested, the short answer is Autostitch--free for non-commercial use, fully automated, and made in Canada. That's what I used to create the image shown above.

Ironically, I found Autostitch by searching for "picasa panorama," thinking that maybe the big G had, you know, thrown that feature in just for fun. They hadn't, but the search results included a news article about photo software, which linked to the Autostitch page. (My initial search, "photo panorama," hit three commercial products at the top of the list, all of which were more cumbersome to download or use than Autostitch, and one of which crashed on me.)

Ich bin ein bassist?

It may just be a faulty translation, but I'm amused that the Vanksen|Culture-buzz blog calls me a "bassist" for The Richter Scales. The post is, of course, about our wildly popular "Here Comes Another Bubble" music video--over 600,000 views on YouTube and counting!

In other news, my friend Jeff bemoans the similarity of his name to many others on LinkedIn. This inspired me to do a Google search for my own name, which showed up on a list of Sergey Brin's favorite books. Who knew?

The "professional 'headline'" on my LinkedIn profile is Polymath. I didn't choose that just to use obscure teminology, or to show off my vocabulary; it really is what I aspire to be. And none of the possible synonyms has the right connotation: "Renaissance Man" is a bit of a cliche thanks to overuse, and the even more esoteric "Homo universalis" is just asking for a beatdown.

I will be the first to admit that I'm not the best at anything I do. I'm not the best singer in the Richter Scales; I'm not the best writer in any forum; I'm not the best programmer at work. But I will argue that I am more well-rounded than many other people--and the distinction is that I don't just like a lot of different things, I do a lot of different things.

The Mighty Pencil

Best. Strike Video. Ever So Far.



See many, many more at United Hollywood, or all over YouTube.

I have to admit, this is my favorite part of the WGA strike. Who needs TV when you've got all this free entertainment on the Internet?

Reality Bites

(EDIT: added screenshot below)

The latest Nielsen ReelResearch Survey (which I signed up for the last time I was in Las Vegas, and which has been a source of intermittent entertainment) contains a portion asking me which of these reality shows I would be most likely to watch, should the current writers' strike continue beyond January.



I want to emphasize that I am not making up any of this. I've only added links below for editorializing:

Million Dollar Password – A modernized take on the original game show. Regis Philbin will host

Moment of Truth – Contestants will answer personal questions while being connected to a polygraph machine

Duel – This game show has contestants going “head-to-head” for the opportunity to win a big jackpot

Clash of the Choirs – Celebrities go back to their home towns to establish an amateur singing group and these choirs compete live

My Dad is Better than Your Dad – Dads lead their families in fun competitions against other fathers and their families

American Gladiators – Hosted by Hulk Hogan, this show follows four women and four men as they take on contestants

Do You Trust Me? – Tucker Carlson hosts. Contestants who are strangers wager how much they trust one another

Dance War: Bruno vs. Carey Ann – The choreographer judges from “Dancing With the Stars” coach their own dance teams through a routine each week

Oprah Winfrey’s The Big Give – This show centers on the competition, drama and emotion as millions of dollars are given away to make a difference in people’s lives

Baby Borrowers – Five young couples ages 16-19 must set up a home and take on various stages of parenthood

When Women Rule the World – Participants are brought to a remote island where women have the opportunity to rule as they build a newly formed society

Amne$ia – In this game show contestants must answer questions from their own lives for money and prizes. Hosted by Dennis Miller

You want another reason to end the writers' strike? I give you twelve. (Thirteen, if you count "American Gladiators" and Hulk Hogan separately.)

Please, show your support for the WGA--go buy some pencils or something.

It's real simple: WGA==Right, AMPTP==Wrong.

It really is that simple, folks. The good news is, the AMPTP has agreed to re-open negotiations with the WGA on November 26th, the Monday after Thanksgiving. And I'm encouraged by all the pro-WGA, positive press that's been hitting the mainstream in the last week.

As Mark Harris notes in his "Why the Striking Writers Are Right" piece for Entertainment Weekly, the WGA took a lot longer than it should have to get its message out--quite frankly, it wasn't nearly as prepared for its own strike as the other side was. But now that the writers are speaking out, in newspapers and magazines and on the Internet, their message is loud and clear.

Here's my favorite rebuttal from Harris' article:

The AMPTP's first response to this [proposal] was to waste weeks by advocating a complete abolition of the residual system. Why, they argued, should writers get paid anything for their work after it's released? Studio chiefs who are smart enough to know better even hauled out a tired old maxim attributed to the late MCA titan Lew Wasserman -- "My plumber doesn't charge me every time I flush the toilet" -- and repeated it in perfect Karl Rove everybody-stay-on-message lockstep.

Ugh. Lines like that give you a taste of what the entertainment world will be like if management ends up doing its own writing. Not to belabor an already disgusting analogy, but writers -- and directors and actors, who have their own renegotiations coming up -- aren't the plumber: They're the water. Without them, nothing goes anywhere, and you end up with a toilet full of...well, let's just say "reruns."

Zing! Long story short: WGA==Right. AMPTP==Wrong. It's that simple. Spread the word.

The Lie Is Also A Lie: Primary Sources

It's the second week of the Writers Guild strike, and things are just starting to get ugly. Yesterday, the AMPTP went Godwin and dropped the word "blacklist" into a press release. The WGA responded with a concise and focused message:

Mr. Counter's charge is as offensive as it is untrue. To accuse the Writers Guild of America of blacklisting, when it was we who suffered the most from it in the past, is simply Mr. Counter's desperate attempt to divert attention from the fact that it was he who walked out of the negotiations, and it is he who refuses every day to return to the table. The WGA has an offer on the table and is ready and willing to meet with the AMPTP any day, anywhere.

If this was an Internet forum, the producers would already have lost the argument. But in the world of old media, the corporations that employ the producers also employ the newspapers, and it's unclear where public support currently lies.

I'm not going to tell you what to think. I'm just going to tell you what the writers and producers each want, in their own words. New Media Residuals are the main sticking point in this strike, so let's focus on that.

(Aside: it's probably not a coincidence that the WGA makes their contract proposals easy to read, in a plain text web page, while the AMPTP hides all their contracts inside PDF documents.)

Here's what the WGA wants, according to their Contract 2007 Proposals:

Non-Traditional Media Residuals

WGA Proposal: We propose all TV and theatrical content earn a residual payment of 2.5% of the distributor’s gross for re-use on non-traditional media, including the Internet, cellular technology and any other delivery system not already covered in the MBA [Minimum Basic Agreement].

Let's do the math: that means, for a $1.99 iTunes download of a House episode, the writer would get less than five cents. Surely that seems reasonable? I mean, you wouldn't have any content if someone didn't write it; and if you're making money from that content, it seems fair to give the people who created it a little piece of the action.

Well, the AMPTP disagrees. Here's their proposal, as described in the Comprehensive Package they presented during negotiations on October 25, 2007:

11. Residual Payments for Theatrical and Television Motion Pictures...

(C) Add a provision to the MBA stating that there shall be no residual payments for the exhibition or distribution of theatrical and television motion pictures, whether in whole or in part, in new media (other than as set forth in the “Sideletter on Exhibition of Motion Pictures Transmitted Via the Internet”). For this purpose, the term “new media” means any digital distribution platform now known or which is hereafter developed during the term of the 2007 Writers Guild of America Theatrical and Television Basic Agreement, including, but not limited to, digital video on demand, alternative digital broadcast channels, Internet exhibition, PDAs, broadband and cell phones.

Translation: the corporations want to pay nothing in residuals. Zero, zilch, nada.

They want to turn the clock back to the 1950s, when they could buy a show like I Love Lucy--which is still running today--and play it over and over again without ever paying the writers another penny. Viacom has been milking that cash cow for over fifty years, but the writers have gotten absolutely nothing.

Does that seem right to you?

The Cake is a Lie

The pie, on the other hand, is quite delicious.

(Graphics by Adam Levermore-Rich)

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike began yesterday. The title of this post comes from John Rogers, who enjoys cake as well as the video game Portal, and has a lot to say about why the strike happened and what should be done to end it. I mean, a lot. All you really need to know is the tiger bit. (Maybe the clip from The Daily Show. It is, after all, the last new episode you're going to see for a while.)

Another John, Mr. August to you, is tagging his strike-related blog posts for easy reading. Over at Artful Writer, Craig Mazin and Ted Elliott are doing the same.

Elsewhere, Brian K. Vaughn and Ken Levine also discuss the situation which led to the strike. Jane Espenson and Lisa Klink talk about being on the picket lines.

Many others are posting at United Hollywood.

Last, but not least, here's the "Pencils Down" full-page ad in which dozens of showrunners pledge not to write during the strike.

I'm only a pair of eyeballs in all this, but the major issues seem pretty clear-cut. When the writer of a show only gets paid .3% for DVD residuals (royalties)--that's less than a third of one percent--something is hideously broken.

If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage. And now it ain't on the page. Deal with that, Hollywood.

I'm not your "pal"

Q: Why should I use the PayPal Security Key?
A: You shouldn't, really.
- my version of the PayPal Security Key FAQ

So I'm checking my PayPal account balance today, because I was supposed to get a refund from a merchant who couldn't ship a Halloween costume accessory in time, and I notice a sidebar image ad for the PayPal Security Key. It looks a lot like a VPN token card, so I click on the ad to read more about it. Yup, that's exactly what it is.

Just in case you've never had to deal with one of these things before: a VPN token is used for authenticating users to a secure network. The token is initialized by a network admin and displays a six-digit number which changes every so often. The same sequence of numbers is being generated inside the network, and changes in sync with your token card. When you try to connect to the network, you need to provide the current authentication token to prove that you're an authorized user.

But here's the thing. VPN tokens are annoying. They're chunky, they get lost easily, they're yet another piece of hardware you need to carry around. My company stopped using them altogether earlier this year, and life has never been better. (I'm only half-joking.) And PayPal actually wants their users to pay FIVE DOLLARS for the privilege of having to deal with this hassle? What kind of message does that send? "Hey, uh, so, our security is pretty good, but it's not, y'know, great, so maybe you want to add another security feature to your account? And, hey, it would be great if you could, like, chip in for that. Yeah."

To quote Dr. Evil: Riiiiight. Not gonna happen, sorry. And stop annoying me with those damn interstitial advertisements after I log in. Seriously. Just stop it.

Woman On Fire

Did someone say synchronicity? I just read the first TPB collection of Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman run a few days ago, and now a huge swath of southern California is on fire.

Here's what the Flash and Diana had to say about fighting wildfires in Wonder Woman #197:

WONDER WOMAN: Let it burn.

FLASH: What?

WW: The forest needs this fire, Flash. It's how it grows, it's how it stays healthy. If you pull the air from it, you will seve nothing but the now to the pain of the future. The next fire will be worse.

F: Do you hear yourself, Diana? This isn't a new age seminar, it's a damn forest fire! We're wasting time--

WW: No, Flash. Let it burn.

Just to be clear, Wonder Woman is saying they should protect the homes, but let the forest burn itself out. This is a pretty standard firefighting approach, but I'm sure it still freaks people out to see huge fires burning within sight of their homes. My thoughts are with all the victims--which, thankfully, don't include my parents or my sister, who are nowhere near the actual burning.

Instant Heroes

NetFlix should seriously be advertising the heck out of this: You can watch new episodes of Heroes via their "Watch Instantly" service, the same week they air. No DVR or advance planning required. Hooray for convenience! (The bad news is coming. Wait for it.)

The service had piss-poor selection when it launched earlier this year, but it's looking much nicer now. Unfortunately, and here's the bad news, the other problems still exist: you have to use Windows XP and IE6, deal with Microsoft's crappy DRM, and you have to stream the episodes--no downloading for later offline viewing. So Web 1.0. Are they gonna get a sock puppet mascot too?

But it's still marginally better than Amazon Unbox, which forces you to install additional software to manage their own proprietary DRM. Also, you don't have to pay-per-view for each show or movie on NetFlix; you get as many hours of viewing per month as the number of dollars you pay for your subscription.

In my case, that's seventeen hours, and much more than my actual free time per month. But it's nice to know that I could go online, fire up a browser, and watch Pan's Labyrinth or Time Bandits whenever I want. It's not perfect, but I've got to admit, it's getting better.

13 Years Over, to be Exact

My hand stamp from tonight's They Might Be Giants concert at The Fillmore. They are getting more like a "normal" band as they age, and I do miss the days when it was just two Johns and a bunch of electronics, but they still put on a great show.

D and I also saw In the Shadow of the Moon earlier today. It's a great documentary, even if you already know the Apollo program inside and out; it's not so much about giving new information as it is about seeing and hearing the astronauts themselves talk about it.

I was born after the last humans walked on the Moon, and I'm hoping I don't die before we go back.

 

It Belongs in a Museum!

Specifically, the NASA Ames Exploration Center. I've been living in the bay area for over a decade, and this was the first time I'd visited. What's wrong with me?

(In case you're wondering, the button rotates the SOFIA telescope array in a model airplane.)

 

Advantage: Amazon

Earlier this week, Amazon.com launched their MP3 Music Store. In the three days since then, I've bought two complete albums from them--that's as many as I've ever bought from the iTunes Store, in more than three years. And I'm going to end up buying a lot more music from Amazon. You know why? Because they don't treat me like a criminal.

I hate DRM. I hated it when I first succumbed to the lure of the iTunes Store (convenient! fast!), but I had a good reason--I just couldn't wait to get the Avenue Q soundtrack. Note that I also bought the physical CD later, from Amazon, because I wanted a copy of the music that I could easily transfer to other devices later.

I hate that I can't burn more than seven copies of an iTunes-purchased song to a mix CD. I also hate that iTunes slaps me in the face with a pop-up dialog after the first few copies, but primarily, I hate the arbitrary restrictions.

Like this one: I can't "authorize" more than five computers at a time for my iTunes account, and I can only reset the list once per year. Why does Apple care how many computers I have? More to the point, if I have a dozen different machines, why doesn't Apple want me to use iTunes on all of them? Shouldn't they make it easier, not harder, for me to buy their stuff? Do they want my business or not?

Back in 2000, publisher Jim Baen started the Baen Free Library, a web site featuring free downloads of complete novels by various science fiction and fantasy authors. One of those authors, Eric Flint, wrote the introduction on the home page. An excerpt:

I'm not worried about [piracy], however, basically for two reasons.

The first is a simple truth which Jim Baen is fond of pointing out: most people would rather be honest than dishonest.

He's absolutely right about that. One of the things about the online debate over e-piracy that particularly galled me was the blithe assumption by some of my opponents that the human race is a pack of slavering would-be thieves held (barely) in check by the fear of prison sentences...

The only time that mass scale petty thievery becomes a problem is when the perception spreads, among broad layers of the population, that a given product is priced artificially high due to monopolistic practices and/or draconian legislation designed to protect those practices. But so long as the "gap" between the price of a legal product and a stolen one remains both small and, in the eyes of most people, a legitimate cost rather than gouging, 99% of them will prefer the legal product.

I've probably quoted this bit before, and I'm sure I'll do it again. It's a great argument against the very principle of DRM, and I wish it would get more play in the mainstream media.

The "price" of buying music in a digital format--whether it's MP3, OGG, or (preferably unprotected) AAC--includes ease of use. The whole point of having an MP3 collection is that it's easier to manage than a CD collection--easier to make copies for backup purposes or for sharing with friends, easier to search for specific songs and make playlists.

And the people who want to do all those things love music. We're not Sunday listeners; we're walking around with iPods and blogging about our favorite bands. We respect the people who make music, and we don't want to steal from them.

Amazon is doing more than offering a great new service; they're building goodwill. I'm already happy to fork over $80 a year for "Amazon Prime" (free 2-day shipping on most items), and in a world where brand loyalty is getting rarer every day, that's saying a lot. I trust them. And I like that they trust me.

Quote of the Day

"I can't believe NBC is promoting Bionic Woman like this. What a terrible idea."
- snarky comment on Boing Boing: MIT student arrested for entering Boston airport with "fake bomb"

Yeah, That's Fair

74%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Take the quiz: How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

"Mandelbrot Set" Music Video

"This next one is a song about math. [crowd cheers] Wow, this is probably the only place in the world where that would get applause."
- Jonathan Coulton at PAX



(You can hear the complete song at Coulton's web site.)

Dollars and Sense

"$5 an episode?" asks screenwriter Alex Epstein on his blog. That's what NBC wanted to charge for their TV shows in the iTunes store, which Apple refused to do, preferring to stick with their current $2-per-episode price.

(Not to say I told you so, but I talked about this distribution method in my 2001 "Pay for TV" post. It's really only a matter of time before blind broadcasting--i.e., spewing content into the ether without knowing if anyone's actually watching--is a thing of the past.)

I'd love to pick a side here, but both Apple and NBC are being pretty boneheaded. I'm guessing NBC is already trying to figure out how to build their own online video store, but even if they do, it will suck. On the other hand, Apple needs to think about broadening its pricing horizons.

$5 an episode is too much, but Alex makes some good points about how consumers would be willing to pay a little more for the newest shows, and would be more willing to buy reruns if they were a little cheaper. You wouldn't sell stale bread at the same price as a fresh loaf; treat content the same way.

Look. If your show is any good at all, you're going to make money. We want to watch TV. We'll even pay for it. But don't get greedy! Push the price up too far, or make it too annoying to deal with your idiotic DRM crap, and people will just flock to BitTorrent.

UPDATE 2007-09-05: NBC is going with Amazon Unbox. No word yet on exactly what their packaging/pricing scheme will be, but hopefully Amazon can talk some sense into the peacock.

If Business Meetings Were Like Internet Comments

Thanks to Bryan for the link. As he says: "I love the attempts at spam that are stopped by captchas."

Dyson's Fear

From my friend Jeff:

"The next word, but not the last word, in our little ongoing feud about climate change comes from Freeman Dyson: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf"

I don't agree with all his points, but he does set a good example by asking all scientists to remain skeptical and avoid politics. Unfortunately, he doesn't do himself any favors by repeatedly calling himself a "heretic," which makes it sound like he's looking to be a martyr.

With apologies to Sir Donald Wolfit: Dying is easy. Science is hard.

And speaking of food...

We saw Ratatouille tonight, and it did not disappoint. D didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did, because--in her words--"It's a rat!" Which I found amusing, because she and the protagonist rodent both enjoy heightened olfactory senses. She can often identify the ingredients in a dish by taste, and she can distinguish Coca-Cola from Pepsi by smell. I'm not even kidding here.

Anyway, Brad Bird is becoming one of my favorite writer/directors (as the French might say, an auteur). I didn't think The Iron Giant was all that great, but that was based on Ted Hughes' book anyway; The Incredibles and Ratatouille are masterpieces. Granted, both of those films were produced by the Disney/Pixar juggernaut, but that dedication to story and character is sorely lacking in most movies.

I wonder how (and what) Bird might do at another studio. The sad truth is, animated features still exist in a Hollywood ghetto, even though live-action films are using more and more computer animated visual effects. Consider: there were only one or two physical robot models built for Transformers, the horribly unnecessary Underdog is the demon spawn of Babe's talking animals, and just about everything in the last three Star Wars movies was (wait for it) animated. Except for the acting. (Zing!)

On that note, I also enjoyed the retro logo at the end of Ratatouille's credits proclaiming that the movie was made using "100% Genuine Animation! No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film." That's how it should be. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Robert "cast of Tron doing bad Shakespeare" Zemeckis! I'm talking to you!

Wikipedia Blows My Mind

Okay, I admit I'm not a hardware guy, and I got a B in the only EE class I took in college. Maybe I should have known this tidbit already, and maybe Wikipedia is lying to me (perish the thought!), but this was my mind-expanding moment for the day:

"The magnetic force is actually due to the finite speed (the speed of light) of a disturbance of the electric field which gives rise to forces that appear to be acting along a line at right angles to the charges. In effect, the magnetic force is the portion of the electric force directed to where the charge used to be. For this reason magnetism can be considered to be basically an electric force that is a direct consequence of relativity."

- Magnetism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

~CKL

Oh, so NOW you want Linux?

Blogged today on CNET: "According to Novell ads, Linux is a cute girl who needs a haircut." Novell, which sells machines pre-installed with SUSE Linux, has created their own ads parodying Apple's brilliant "Mac vs. PC" TV spots.

The Novell ad is nothing special, but the other links from the blog post are fascinating--especially the 1996 comparison of PC and Mac users (denim shirt? really?) and the international versions of Apple's ads. For example, compare the UK/Ireland "Network" spot (page 1, far right) to the American version (page 4, third from the right); the premise is the same, but the execution and tone are substantially different. Romance may be universal, but comedy isn't always so.

And for the record, I don't think Linux needs a haircut.

~CKL

Film Baby

The people responsible for CD Baby have branched out into video with Film Baby, and I'm happy to see that they haven't changed their customer service policies.

Here's the confirmation email for my order:

You have chosen to risk life and limb to order the Ask A Ninja Volume 1 DVD. You have earned Film Baby's eternal respect for your obvious bravery.

A messenger just tip-toe'd over to the Ninja's office and whispered to him in his sweetest voice that you'd REALLY like one of his DVDs. He said to tell you that he'll send it to you, and he looks forward to killing you soon. And then he killed the messenger.

Provided the Ninja doesn't kill US first, we'll ship your DVD right away. We'll send you another email to WARN you that a NINJA is on its way to your house....

And the shipping notification:

We have good news and bad news. The good news is that your order of Ask A Ninja Vol 1. DVD was shipped out today. The bad news is that there is also a real, live Ninja on his way to your house. Use extreme caution when opening your mailbox in the next few days. Just before we sealed the box, our packing master thought he heard a whisper saying "I am looking forward to killing CKL soon". We can't be sure. It was either that or "what the hell... why are you stuffing me in the in this..." and the rest was muffled.

Please rest assured that we've taken great care in the shipping of your DVD. We hold true to an ancient DVD shipping tradition passed down for over 5000 years. This very intensive practice is only achieved after years of training, meditation, and purity of mind, and sadly' some accidental killings (we're looking for a new intern, if you know anyone...). After a rigorous 17 step process of verifying the authenticity of your DVD, we donned silk gloves and placed it into a sacred box made of magic and lined with Unicorn fur, tied the box with a strand of Gypsy hair, and wrapped the whole thing in a snazzy looking faux gold leaf paper, with elm leaf inlay from Costco. Unfortunately, by the time it gets to you, all of that fancy stuff will likely have been picked clean by the greedy postal service employees. Please don't be surprised to see just a plain cardboard box.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Ask a Ninja is out on DVD? Because it is. And that's cool too.

I really wish that CD Baby and Film Baby had larger catalogs, because I actively want to buy stuff from them. Sure, Amazon.com is convenient, and the free two-day shipping with Amazon Prime is nice, but I feel no loyalty toward them. If they have something I'm looking for, and it's cheaper than I can find it elsewhere (which it often is), I'll buy it, but my motivation is purely mercenary.

I don't enjoy browsing or searching on Amazon, because both features suck. Every once in a while I'll find an interesting, user-created list, but the gift guides are worthless, and what do you mean I can't refine my search by price or seller? I'm not going to waste my time paging through bad content posted by third-party sellers. That's not why I buy from Amazon; I want complete product information, including photos, so I know what I'm getting. And I want my free shipping, dammit, since I've already paid my $80 for the year, and the service is worthless if I can't use it.

Anyway. I wish Amazon would stop trying to be eBay, because they're really not very good at it. And speaking of eBay, I still don't understand this new Express thing, and their explanation doesn't help at all. Seriously, don't make me do extra work to decide whether or not to give you my money. Because I won't waste my time.

~CKL

Hot Under the Collar

Since jra doesn't allow comments on his blog, I'm using this post to respond to his "Another theory of climate change" post. Blogwar!

Actually, this is not so much a rebuttal as an encouragement to read the original Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report attackedreferenced in the Times Online article which prompted jra's post. Unless you failed high school science, the Summary for Policymakers (1.3MB PDF) shouldn't take you more than half an hour to get through. (Thanks to The Science Creative Quarterly for providing an actual link, which Times Online cleverly omitted.) The complete report will be published this summer by Cambridge University Press.

And, just to be fair, here's a link to the dissenter's publications: Henrik Svensmark has written several papers on his cloud-cover-and-cosmic-rays theory since 1997. I'll also point out that Svensmark's own 1997 article references the 1992 IPCC report, and even he does not deny the role of human activity in global climate change--he merely questions whether other, natural factors have a greater effect, and if so, how much greater?

There's no question that the discussion of global warming has become politicized and polarized, and that is unfortunate as well as inconvenient. While it's true that our best science is still lacking--the IPCC itself admits that their understanding of solar irradiance and how it affects global climate is low (see figure SPM-2 on page 4 of the Summary for Policymakers)--it's still science.

I have no problem with "considering all the possibilities," as jra says, but that should include all the possibilities--including the prevailing view that greenhouse gases are a major cause of global warming--and should mean judging each hypothesis on its scientific merits, and not whether or not you think people have been brainwashed into believing it.

If you don't buy the science behind how to determine the causes of radiative forcing, fine. Just make sure you're questioning the science, not the politics.

~CKL

United States Patent Application: 0060259306

It's titled "Business method protecting jokes" and was granted on November 16, 2006. Bonus meta points for repeatedly using "homoproprietary" to describe itself. Do you really need further proof that the U.S. patent system is broken?

4x4-Letter Reviews

It's been a while since I reviewed things, so here are four quick capsules for things that, coincidentally, all have four-letter names:

SPIN, the Hugo Award-winning novel by Robert Charles Wilson: I stayed up until three or four in the morning to finish reading this book. So did D, the following night. I wouldn't call it "gripping" in a traditional, suspense-thriller way, but it's engaging, and Wilson balances and connects all his disparate themes elegantly. Combining a Big Idea with intimate human drama is difficult, but he makes it sing.

BURN, the Nebula Award-nominated novella by James Patrick Kelly: Tachyon published this in a compact hardcover edition, which I borrowed from my local library, and there's definitely something to be said for the tactile experience of a real book. The story is also compact, but the landscape is dense--not in a Kim Stanley Robinson deep-society way, or an Ursula LeGuin alien-culture way, but it's just as thoughtful and soulful in its own way.

ROME, the TV series co-produced by HBO and the BBC: D and I watched four episodes in a row last Friday, and so far, the second season is just as great as the first. There is plenty of sex and violence, but none of it is gratuitous, nor is any of that why we watch. I'm constantly impressed by how real the show feels, while at the same time being completely foreign to our modern experience of life and politics--like a well-written fantasy epic, but grounded in historical truth.

CORY, as in Doctorow: A seriously cool dude. D gave me his new book, Overclocked, as a gift while she was on a business trip two weeks ago. At first, I was a little confused, because she sent it directly from Amazon, and I had added the book to my own shopping cart a few days earlier but not ordered it yet. Anyway, it's a great collection of short stories, all of which you can download for free from the author's web site. (I also asked him a silly question on yesterday's interactive podcast, which audio will probably be online at some point.)

~CKL

This is why I don't "use IE"

Trebek, you liar!

Will installing Flash cause any harm to my computer?
There are no known issues associated with installing Flash.

-- Jeopardy! Online Test FAQs

Oh, you meant aside from the annoying animated ads that you'll now see on every other goddamn web site? And other than the fact that you'll be annoyed to no end by promotional and marketing sites which think it's K3WL to hide all their content in Flash, so none of it can be indexed by search engines, and you can't actually use your known-good browser interface to view the site, and instead have to navigate through whatever hideously unintuitive scheme their overpaid script kiddies crazy-glued together after smoking up all weekend?

No, no known issues at all.

~CKL

A conversation between headlines

Slashdot ponders:
"Why Software Sucks, And Can Something Be Done About It?"

Digg asserts:
"Once Again JavaScript is the Problem"

Uncanny, innit?