"That's Interesting"

common meanings in conversational use

1. that's interesting
2. that's not interesting
3. you're full of shit

RealPlayer Sucks

Unuseably bad. Fails at its core function, miserably. Just tried to watch a Gary Taubes lecture at Berkeley last year. I let the entire 1hr48min lecture load up before starting because I did not want to be interrupted by buffering. I'd downloaded the latest RealPlayer for OSX. Lots of artifacts from the get go. Audio occasionally dropped out. Before it had gone even 30 minutes, long sections of audio were dropping out completely. The video turned into almost all-artifact viewing, then dropped to maybe 1 frame per minute. There was no network traffic -- this was all entirely cached on my machine, a speedy laptop with gobs of memory. CPU was not loaded, memory was not overused, no network activity. Unbelievable. RealPlayer is shit.

Aperture vs. Depth of Field

For a fun demonstration with the boys, I took some photos showing the relationship between aperture and depth of field. They also show I badly need a tripod. I arranged some books on a table, staggered near left to far right, focused on the middle one and snapped at 1.4, 2.8, and 4.0.

More George (& Bill)

Thanks to Joe for the tip about George Carlin very recently talking about human rights. For selfish reasons, I wish Bill "The Prophet" Hicks would've stuck around to age 71 ("As long as we're making shit up, go hog wild"). Regarding heckler management, George and Bill certainly had a similar approach.

Stig + Ferrari

Vicarious thrills masterpiece on BBC's topgear site:  behind the wheel for a lap. You'll want the sound all the way up for this one.

Fun With Color and ICC Profiles

The latest firefox has added color mgmt. Load this in your browser and see what it looks like. Unfortunately, mozilla has color management turned off by default, and it's not settable via preferences. To set it, type about:config in the address bar, and then toggle gfx.color_management.enabled.

I tested Safari and, naturally, it already works out of the box.

The Key To Happiness

Low expectations.

Features: The Bane Of Good Software

Remember when PDF used to be a really great thing for read-only documents that would be viewable anywhere?  Since those days, Abode (still one of the very best software makers) keeps compulsively feature-bloating. Is this a virus originally spread from microsoft? Do you want more features on your car, or do you want it to perform better? Do you want your kitchen to be well laid-out and highly functional, or are you making it "better" by filling it with goofy appliances you'll never use? Adobe keeps adding salad-shooters to Acrobat. 

More Recent George Carlin

Shame that so few people in the UK had heard of George Carlin. Especially odd since Bill Hicks is so well known here (better than in the US I think). Sure, every obit focused on the "7 words", but when I think of Carlin, I think not only of the Class Clown era ("...but then it crosses the international date line!!"), not only the funny-because-true observations ("Everyone who drives slower than me is an idiot, everyone who drives faster than me is a maniac"), but also the guy who remained crotchety (in a smart way, not a get-off-my-lawn way) right to the end, such as George talking about bullshit, and the American Dream. 

Captain Helpful: rechargeable batteries

Last year I got serious about using rechargeable batteries at home and it's working out really well. The key is a good charger, one that won't cook your batteries. I'm using a charger from Ansmann (one with a fan to cool the batteries for fast charging, and has a switch to handle either NiCd or NiMH), and Ansmann NiMH batteries as well (2700 mAh AAs and 1000 mAh AAAs). For all our remotes, game controllers, etc, we go through these quite a lot. I'm working my way up now to replace flashlight batteries with rechargeables, trying to get to 100%.

There Will Be Blo--hey, whatever happened to Daniel Day Lewis?

I can't bring myself to watch There Will Be Blood, even though I might like it. On a recent flight, it was described in the in-flight magazine as "Daniel Day Lewis puts on an acting masterclass [....]" Which is exactly why I don't want to see it. An acting masterclass? Really? To me that means he's demonstrating rather than acting. In the trailers, he certainly seems to be thespianizing like there's no tomorrow, spewing out mannerisms and stylized flourishes like the most precocious freshman on the speech team. I'm not sure I want to see someone ACTING so damn hard for two hours. Is he playing a character or a caricature? Is he the only actor that started out great and slides a little with every performance? I hope I'm wrong. If this movie is worth seeing, let me know and I'll give it a shot.

Big Earl

Irrational exuberance in the household today since I discovered the old Sega game, Toejam & Earl, is available as a virtual console game on the Wii. Funky! I should go warn the boys about Earl being especially susceptible to the hula peril.

T5 Arrival

Terminal 5 isn't bad... for Heathrow. The one thing that did work really well, at least this once, was baggage reclaim. But overall, I think the people who designed it must not really use airports. Arrival seemed designed to create as many bottlenecks as possible. Get off plane, go down 3 escalators, take train to main building (can I walk?  even Atlanta, the Dumbest Airport Ever, lets you walk if you really want to instead of using their train), take a few escalators back up, and queue up in long passport lines. (Speaking of passport lines, the Iris retina-scanners they've introduced are too damn slow. Takes about 30 seconds per person. In Hong Kong, they use fingerprint scanner + entered code, takes less than 10 seconds per person and takes up less space. On the other hand, the Iris machines often fail to correctly detect height, which creates the comical site of adults having the stoop way down, as if peering into a bucket of tadpoles, to get their eyes scanned.)

The British Steak Problem

The British know how to raise beef, hang it, and butcher it. Fantastic stuff. So why does it all go wrong in so many kitchens? British restaurants are, as a rule, incapable of cooking steaks. Almost any restaurant in France can do a reasonable job of pan-frying a steak with inferior quality meat. Why restaurants in Britain can't is a mystery. Places such as the Hawksmoor that have tried grilling haven't gotten it right, either. It's now big news that there is one restaurant in London, the newest shouty jumped-up Gordon offering, that has an american-style proper commerical broiler. We'll see. It's a shame, because the best steaks I've ever had have been British beef. Anyone who's only eaten British beef in British restaurants thinks I'm nuts when I say that. Cooks, get with it, you're letting down the side! Farmers and butchers, have a quiet word with 'em and sort it, please.

Solving the World's Problems

Today apparently 30 Nobel Prize winners are meeting in Jordan to try to solve some of the world's big problems (energy, food, that sort of thing). Many years ago, Steve laid out this fundamental rule for IT which is also applicable here: you can't solve management problems with technology. I'm not sure what the brainiacs are going to come up with, but the problems of the world are fairly simple. Simple doesn't mean tractable, unfortunately. It's almost entirely management problems.

Comets, Catfish, and Carp

Speaking of hobbies, we've setup 3 fishtanks this year. Started with a small coldwater tank and a larger freshwater tropical tank. Had to upgrade the "goldfish" [does not contain any actual goldfish] tank, and the little tank now has a plant and a small pleco in it. Each tank has a resident pleco. I love the prehistoric look of them. The one in the warm tank is almost big enough to eat now. The surprise for me was how much I enjoy the coldwater fish. The warmwater fish are nice to look at, and I especially like the cherry barbs, but they lack the personality of the comets and carp. They are really entertaining -- active, congenial, comical. A lot of fun. They seem smarter than the other fish, too. Maybe I'm imagining that.

(Although for sheer surprise, the snail in the warm tank takes the cake. He is more active than many of the fish. He moves really, really quickly when no one is looking. I sometimes catch him perched on top of a reedy plant. Imagine a bison hunched atop a tall sapling.)

Hobby Hobbyist

I've realized that I might be a meta hobbyist. I enjoy collecting hobbies, developing a working knowledge of a subject then adopting another one rather than focusing on single-subject expertise.

Heathrow Terminal 5

Flew out of it for the first time. Underwhelming. Lots of self-congratulatory copy about it in pamphlets and magazines and posters. A major theme is how BIG it is. Why do I care how big the building is? I think they could have done a much better job. Disappointing. They built it from scratch, after other successful airport renovations have taken place recently. So why couldn't they try to do better? It falls far short of Hong Kong, for example.

Some specific things that annoyed me:

• I hate the default polished-concrete tile floor or whatever that stuff is. Why not wood? Bamboo? Something warm and inviting and calming.
• Lifts. Elevators. I like being able to take stairs or escalators as a viable option. Here, I didn't see a good way to get from train to departures without using the lifts.
• Upon entering departures, presented with a confusing array of check-in kiosks. Signage wasn't clear (maybe I'm dim, but I had a hard time seeing where first check-in, business check-in, security queues, etc. all were). I noticed people queuing up for "fast" bag drop desks on one side of the building, while other attended bag drop desks farther away went unused.
• Exiting security (security was actually pretty efficient), I was looking into the BA lounge. To get there, I had to go down an escalator, backtrack under where I just was, and go up another escalator. The guy at the desk when I checked in was actually laughing when he gave me directions on how to find the lounge, because he knew it sounded ridiculous.
• Oh, hey, terminal 5 is more than one building. Seems like a lot of flights leave from the "B" and "C" gates, which are in a different building -- the building with almost no restaurants or shops. To get there, you have to go underground, take a little train, and pop back up. Not only that, there are dire warnings about not attempting this journey unless you are certain your gate is a B/C gate, as "the return trip will take 40 minutes" if you need to come back to the main building 40 minutes! Worst case, they should've put some funky moving walkways as with United terminal at ORD. Best case, they should've come up with a better design. Seems really inefficient, expensive, and inelegant.
• Sound. Why can't they get sound right? See, if they'd put in wood floors, some nice rugs here and there, calm, incandescentish-lamps, maybe some plants, I bet the sound would've been easier to get right.

Oh well.

Ireland Says No to EU, Yes to Irony

To be fair, all attempted EU constitutions have been terrible documents. Overly complex, convoluted, inelegant. After an earlier attempted constitution was voted down in France and the Netherlands, an eloquently chagrined EU-backing Tony Blair said,

"We locked ourselves in a room at the top of the tower and debated things no ordinary citizen could understand. And yet I remind you the Constitution was launched under the title of 'Bringing Europe closer to its citizens'."

That said, I thought the Irish had a better sense of irony. They forget, in their gleeful rejection, that Ireland has been one of the biggest economic beneficiaries of the EU. More hilariously, some analysts suggested part of the "No" coalition was driven by the Irish being tired of immigrant labor!

Lush Hackney

Hackney can be surprisingly beautiful, especially on the rare summer day. Terraces in London often hide dense pockets of trees, shrubs, and various wildlife. Here's the view from my back window. I love that mock orange.

Veto This

It's a cheap laugh, but still funny when McCain promises to "veto every beer" . Vetoing beer is a dangerous strategy. The only time I remember the Indiana populice ever getting riled up about anything involving politics and government was in the late 80s when there was a proposed change to the beer distribution laws. A shocking display of educated non-apathy from the voting public put the kibosh on it. So McCain should tread carefully.

And it's a nice touch to wield the veto pen at the end. Who pulled that before? Reagan? Dole? Looks familiar. Is McCain running against Bush now?

Angry Bill

Just when he seemed to be transitioning into awesomeness as a true Elder Statesman, former POTUS Clinton started freebasing testosterone or something and went apeshit on the campaign trail. Why is he so angry? Seriously, what is his problem? Hard to figure, really. I think, and I really believe this, that no matter what he says or wants to believe about himself, the root cause was that he just didn't want Hillary to be president.

Monetizing the Rapture

Thanks to Rick for tipping me off to this gem of Christian niche marketing. After browsing the long-winded sample "documents", what really caught my eye was this bit from the why section: 

In the encrypted portion of your account you can give them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, and powers of attorneys' (you won't be needing them any more, and the gift will drive home the message of love). There won't be any bodies, so probate court will take 7 years to clear your assets to your next of Kin. 7 years of course is all the time that will be left. So, basically the Government of the AntiChrist gets your stuff, unless you make it available in another way. 

Is this a nice bit of social engineering to collect identities and financials from credulous rapture hobbyists? Even if it's on the up and up, there might be an untapped market for financial services here. I'm thinking something along the lines of reverse mortgages to start. Ready for the rapture? Sign over everything to me (including clothes!) and I'll let you continue to use it for a limited time. Next up, derivates: rapture futures and options, maybe a rapture index and apocalypse-linked notes.

Delusional House Pricing

A couple in my neighborhood bought a house 16 months ago for 585. They put about 130 into renovating it and just recently put it on the market for... 975! After a few weeks they lowered this to 925 (looking for bargain hunters I guess). I wonder if they'll find anyone stupid enough to pay anywhere near their asking price. If so, I'll likely put my place on the market to see if there's more than one sucker out there. I suspect they'd struggle to sell it at 715.  It's a row house on a nice block.  The previous high-water mark for the entire block was, yes, when they paid 585 for their house less than a year and a half ago. There really are no buyers out there. Market's still trending downward and likely is not at bottom. Anyway, folks, good luck with that!