"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.