"Bike Friendly"

is a social attribute of a city, not a physical one.

P.S. Bike lanes suck.

The Bourne UltraShakyCam

Finally saw the 3rd Bourne movie. I don't get how pointing a camera at a stationary car bumper and waggling it back and forth is supposed to depict an exciting motorcycle chase. It's pretty amazing that in 3 movies the car chases went from thrilling to tiring to nauseating.

And he should've died at the end. Talk about pulling your punches. Waste of time.

Doctor Who & Captain Slow

The next Dr. Who assistant should be James May.  And I want an entire episode in which James lays out his dissatisfaction with the sonic screwdriver.

Good Riddance Day

Happy 4th

I Surrender to the Smart Car Hype

I give up. Farhad Manjoo in today's Salon enthusiastically exclaims, "the Smart is perhaps the first modern, street-legal car small enough to completely upend your relationship with the city." It's not the first (it's not even new), it's one of many to the rest of the world (Londoners have been driving cute little urban teacups-on-wheels for over 40 years). But I can't keep ranting about small cars in big cities and the US repeatedly missing the boat. I predict that in 2011, Manhattan will discover scooters.

"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.