Wuff

web: "where do they find the time?" exposed

2008-05-01T16:58:00.001-07:00

This blogger gets the same response that I do when I tell people about Wikipedia editors, users supporting users, collaborative development, etc.:

Where do they [i.e. those losers] find the time?

First he figures out how much time we're talking about:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

Wow, that's a lot of time devoted by people whom the clueless majority accuse of needing to "get a life". But the key insight is that is dwarfed by TV viewing:

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus

How come TV watchers get a free pass? Then he goes on to talk about if only 1% of the time we waste on mass media (whose attitude is just "How much can you consume?") goes to participatory culture, the change will be dramatic. Do the math, it's 20 Wikipedia-sized projects, every year. So expect more great things!

videogames: prior to GTA IV

2008-04-19T22:23:00.000-07:00

Here are the "explore world" games I've traveled through while waiting for Grand Theft Auto IV.

Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

The first backport from the PSP to the PS2. It has slightly better gameplay than its parent GTA III but is far from the gargantuan mind-bending achievement of GTA: San Andreas. It's one of the weaker story lines, and the music selection isn't very good. However, the DJ dialog and commercials are the best of all GTA games! Someone transcribed a bunch on wikiquote.org; Reni, the transsexual DJ on Flashback FM, is brilliant, his/her lines include:

"Music is life and we snort it until we O.D., again und again"
"At least in the 80s they could play their instruments and there were two ambiguously gay men beating a synthesizer who were up for a go"
"I'm having a flashback... from when I was a man! I still look good in a tie. Now it's ties and titties! These tunes are enough to make me fertile again! I can impregnate myself! That's a talent, no?"

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories

One of the best features of the GTA games is the weather and lighting that puts you in the environment, culminating in San Andreas where every region feels exactly right: foggy San Fierro, smoggy Los Santos, hot bright Las Venturas. But the 80s pastel colors in GTA:VCS are so over the top that it's phony. And the storyline with the loser army AWOL whining at his coked-out brother has little emotional punch. On the upside, the map shows you attempted jumps and rampages, and the business takeovers are an interesting gameplay develoment. Launching an Infernus off a ramp straight into a palm tree for a triple insane stunt bonus never gets old. And Reni Wassulmaier appears as a bisexual studio head!

Bully

An interesting variation, you're a 15 year old juvenile delinquent trying to patch things up at school by beating up all the cliques, recovering your health by kissing girls. It's a fantasy of school hijinks with a fine storyline and good characters, but it's let down by glitches: the load time every time you go in or out of a building is awful, and you can get stuck in places.

Scarface: The World is Yours

This isn't by Rockstar, it's from Radical Games who made the pleasant Simpsons Hit and Run. I've never seen the movie Scarface (I don't like violent movies, too realistic!) but the game is not bad. It has several improvements on GTA:

You have some funny scripted encounters with pedestrians
It's a challenge to intimidate people.
The "balls" mode where you go into a blood-hazed frenzy is nice.
The mechanism of loading up just a few weapons from the trunk of your car is much more realistic than GTA's "machete, revolver, shotgun, machine gun, and rocket launcher" all at once.
Best of all, making a profitable drug run is appropriately complex and rewarding: meet a supplier, fly to the islands, intimidate for a good deal, pilot a boat back, then a wild balls-to-the-wall ride all over the islands trying to distribute it to your fronts as other gangs and the police get increasingly crazy.

But it's somehow a shallow world. Two examples: there's absolutely no fun in driving around to explore with the radio on; you have a huge mansion that you can equip with lots of no-class drug lord knickknacks, but there are no surprises or interesting interactivity in it, unlike the videogames in GTA:SA and Bully.

All these games I played through to 100%, completist that I am.

I dipped a toe in the waters of two other non-Rockstar games by renting them, but passed on both of them:

Destroy All Humans 2: Oh dear. It could be great, an alien flying around 60s San Francisco and London with crazy weapons, psychokinetic powers, and the ability to take over other bodies. But the dialog is deathly dull, and even more so than Scarface, the world feels like a cardboard set. Even though you have a flying saucer you can't jump into a single area where you don't belong. And watching the cut scenes with the laconic alien ... speaking ... his ... lines becomes painful only 4 hours into the game.
The Godfather: Another movie I've never seen (don't people know that violent movies rot your brain?!), another game studio (big bad Electronic Arts) attempting to make a GTA competitor. This has its moments. You feel you're on a movie set of New York and the voice acting is pretty good. I might yet buy it, my hesitation is reviews said that the missions become very repetitive.

Rockstar's San Andreas is a giant compared to any of these games. These recent Rockstar games are all obviously filler while they labored over GTA IV, yet even Rockstar's lesser efforts are enjoyable efforts. It's nice to see other game studios coming close. Meanwhile, I've only 10 days to buy a TV, a surround system, a PS3, and umpteen cables, to play GTA IV. It's already scoring perfect game ratings. Rockstar have made the Birth of a Nation of videogames with Grand Theft Auto:III, the Gone with the Wind of videogames with GTA:VC and the Citizen Kane of videogames with GTA:SA. I believe the hype!

computers: old storage media

2008-04-07T18:00:00.000-07:00

Remember 3.5" floppies? Here are 90 of them, free for the taking.

Ignore the “2.0 MB” label, these actually store about 1.44 MB. So that stack represents all of 132 MB, or less than a fifth of a CD-ROM. I remember when these first came out for the Mac and cost $10 each.

Those floppies are junk, you can't even give them away. I consolidated the information from them to a few MB on a network drive. Many were backup and transit disks (so-called "sneakernet") with only slight differences between directories and files. I couldn't find a good tool to help me consolidate them. I wanted a split view explorer that would show floppy details (including bootable or not, DOS version, hidden files, etc.) in one pane and in the other pane intelligently search a hard drive for likely matching files and directories. Probably a DOS version of such a tool was on one of the floppies!

Several of them are installation disks for nifty integrated phone answering machine +FAX software like Ring Zero and QuickLink that came with modems. Back then the mental stumbling block was “Your computer can be your telephone,” just as now the stumbling block is “Your computer can be your TV.”

The disk in the IBM sleeve on the left is a 5.25" floppy from 1983 or so that stores 360KB. I have several dozen of those I still need to archive. I also have an 8" floppy with some documents I made on an IBM Displaywriter, plus a 3.5" magneto-optical disk, a Jaz disk, and a Sun 1/4-inch cartridge. Compared with the 80s and 90s, we are in a period of incredible media stability.

computers: relentless storage progress

2008-04-07T17:30:00.000-07:00

Here's the picture from my old storage media post.

That speck on top is a 2GB microSD memory card for my phone.

It holds 1,360 of these floppies, or a stack 15 times taller (4.5 meters—14 feet tall!). Or 5,555 times more than the 5.25" “IBM” floppy in the picture.

When you just switch letter prefixes around you lose sight that 2 gigabytes is an insane number. It's roughly 2000× a megabyte, 2000000× a kilobyte. 2,000,000,000 characters! If you write pure ASCII text, you could never, ever fill it up. But of course the computer industry finds a way to inflate simple sequences of letters. The text of my post on old floppies was only 1,647 characters; Blogger turned into a 16,000 byte web page; it's 100,000 bytes including the two images; it would have been 4,200,000 bytes if I had used the original photos instead of resizing them for the Web. If I had made this a presentation in evil Microsoft PowerPoint it could easily be 1,000,000 bytes. If I had made a video zooming in from the pile of floppies to show just the memory card, it would have hit 100,000,000 bytes. But it wouldn't be 10,000 times more information.

audio: record scanning not a fantasy

2008-03-29T15:25:00.000-07:00

It turns out my armchair fantasy of digitizing my records by visual scanning rather than dragging a stylus through the groove has been done by researchers, including project IRENE, the visualaudio project, and other attempts. Carl Haber at IRENE in a long interesting presentation (80MB! PDF) says

We study the use of new, optical measuring and image processing methods to create a digital representation of the complete record surface, on the computer, and then “play” it with a virtual needle.

He points out in another paper that a 10" side becomes a 300 MB processed image scanned in 2D (so an LP might be a few GB), and, just as I perceived, that “[the process] can archive images for future re-analysis with new algorithms.” Awesome, ship it!

Alas, the sound-to-noise ratio is poor. It's a vital technique for non-destructive archiving of sounds from rotting wax cylinders, cracked shellac transcriptions, and broken 78s, but doesn't come close to top-notch vinyl playback. The Swiss visualaudio researchers comment

Reaching the same quality as with a good 33rpm record played on a modern turntable probably is probably utopic.

Oh noooes, say it ain't so.

audio: thoughts on digitizing vinyl

2008-03-22T17:58:00.000-07:00

I have quite a lot of vinyl records. I play them on a Rega Planar 3, a fairly high-end turntable.

I'm not dogmatic about analog vs. digital. My well-recorded CDs sound great, though the loudness war means many are tiring to listen to. And many of my vinyl records sound fantastic, though some are warped or have irritating pops.

The thing about vinyl playback is the headroom for improvement is vast. Decent CD players sound very similar, but a better turntable solves real engineering problems and sounds much better than lesser turntables.

A big motivation to get a better turntable is to make better digital copies of my albums and singles. The digital library I cart around on music phones and PCs currently only has songs from my CDs

On that subject, I was struck by this review of a super-exotic Rockport Sirius III turntable:

I made two demo CD-Rs of various tracks using the Rockport, to A/B with the LPs in real time. Of course, the "live" LPs creamed the CD-R, which sounded slightly brighter and edgier but less immediate. Nonetheless, the CD-Rs did capture the Rockport's essence.

When I A/B'd the CD-R with the "live" LPs on the Yorke [a merely good turntable], the CD-R topped the LPs in overall presentation, dynamics, and especially solidity.

In other words, a digital recording from a super-exotic turntable sounds better than vinyl playback from a merely good turntable.

So, do I really want a $5,000 turntable? Not when there's someone with the same vinyl who plays it through a cartridge hand-made by the 90-year old sensei, mounted to a gazillion-dollar 1000 kg turntable hand-calibrated by its engineer, in an isolated underground vault, connected to the discontinued $25,000 Boulder phono preamp — I'll take his digital files instead of playing my own records!

The next issue is what kind of digital file to make. MP3 isn't enough, even FLAC lossless is only CD quality. I want future-proof. The consensus is zeroing in on DSD. The latest Absolute Sound has a review of the Korg DSD recorder capturing vinyl playback and makes the points of how close the DSD sounds to the original and how it's the best format for archival. Again, I want someone else's superb digitization of their vinyl. Her archival file will be better than mine.

(This still locks in the playback of the vinyl record on a particular turntable, cartridge, arm, and digitizer. What about future improvements to vinyl reproduction? So my most radical thought is to capture the record and read it in software. It should be possible to make a detailed scan of the record surface itself. Then software can reconstruct the audio waveform without the primitive mechanical operation of dragging a diamond along an undulating spiral valley. As long as the initial scan is high enough resolution, software can do a better job knowing what kind of cutting head made the vinyl, how vinyl deforms when stamped, where best to read the undulations in the walls. I have no idea if a 100 square inch microscopic 2½-D scan is remotely practical.)

Returning to reality, if the record companies were smart (OK, that's still unreality), then they would meet the demand for very high quality digital copies. From a rant

My concern is that we get every possible historical recording archived to DSD as soon as possible, AND that the artists (both performance and recording) can and should make DSD the authoring medium of choice, REGARDLESS of what happens to it subsequently.

Definitely! The DSD file becomes the fabled "master tape" that is the source for every released version of the music. But unlike a reel-to-reel tape, the music's owner can sell me the master DSD file, charging me more than a $0.99 MP3.

Here's Pete Townsend of the Who on DSD, from a great interview about recording music:

Genex DSD [was] what my Mastering Supervisor Jon Astley preferred. I preferred the sound of analog tape (1/2", Dolby SR at 15 ips) but they sounded so close it was almost impossible to tell the difference. ... It’s hard to tell whether going to tape would have produced better sound on CD. A CD is pretty difficult thing to get to sound “warm” (whatever that means, such a hard word to define in audio terms).

So the ultimate sound would be to play Pete Townsend's analog master tape. But even an analog fan like Pete Townsend says the original DSD file sounds fantastic, then gets mucked up when you turn it into a CD. So sell us that master file! 2L is one label offering this, as a test: a DXD file, as well as several lesser formats.

skiing: Advanced Ski Clinic

2008-03-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

I took the Squaw Valley Ski School's recent three-day Advanced Ski Clinic, with Dan Ray, Tim Reeve (the two top instructors with whom we had private lessons last year), and Jim Moore. I kept a lid on the pernicious rumors that I'm a former ski instructor myself; skiing isn't a sport you master, it's a sport in which you progress, and like most skiers expert tuition accelerates my progress. My group of 3-5 skied with Dan Ray. Ahh I remember back when he was a kid hucking technical lines between ski lessons.

Here are the instructors scoping out a steep firm icy chute under Olympic Lady chair (off KT-22) for our video capture.

A big part of the clinic is daily video recording, with review at lunch and further review in the evening. At advanced levels this is incredibly useful, because all skiers need to be more forward yet most skiers think they are pretty forward, until they see incontrovertible video evidence of themselves in the back seat/on the toilet/riding the backs of their skis. At expert level video review is less useful because the focus is on moving your hips and upper body down the hill/into the new turn/across your skis; you don't need video to know you haven't got that subtle complex motion right and you would need an overhead tracking camera to best capture the movement. The video showed my hands rising way up away from the snow instead of a tight reach downhill, I had no idea I was doing this.

Here's Dan on Dead Tree, also off KT-22. Also pretty steep.

I would have liked to ski even harder terrain, such as the entrance to Dead Tree or hike somewhere, but that's a lot of pressure on the instructor—one participant falls and the day is over. Once we reached easier terrain Dan skied ridiculously fast. I could keep up with him for one flat-out run but then the little speedometer in my brain would flash red and I'd scrub off speed. Skiing fast recalibrates your skiing.

Three days with a great skier full of technical expertise who loves to ski, what's not to like?

Even though I didn't master the hip move downhill into the new turn, I improved. My goal was not to shred my skis and while working on other things that problem cleared up.

Squaw Valley: Northern Lights chili

2008-03-19T18:23:00.000-07:00

There aren't many deals in Squaw Valley U.S.A., home of the $9 sandwich. But the $6 chili from Northern Lights in the Olympic House is one of them.

Proprietor Alan serving his delicious concoction.

superbad Tiuke Tuipulotu to the fro

2008-03-06T15:15:00.000-08:00

When and if Seth, Evan, and Fogell grow up, this guy is the one they want to be.

He has to make it big at football so we get more photos.

I love Lyle Workman's soundtrack. Time for a 70s revival!

eco: solar wind photonic membrane evaporator

2008-03-05T22:49:00.000-08:00

I wrote about having both kinds of solar panels. (Quick update: The solar heat panels do heat our domestic hot water, but our overall heating system is still a busted inefficient disaster...)

I neglected to mention our third solar system, a proven hybrid technology that takes advantage of wind power as well. Here's a picture of one end of this engineering marvel:

Unlike our other solar systems that cost many thousands of dollars, this cost about $25, and a ham-handed DIY disaster was able to install it in an hour. All the parts are available on dusty shelves at Ace Hardware: clothesline cord, two special reels, two hooks, and a nifty line tensioner. And it worked perfectly. Anyone who doesn't install one of these is throwing money away. (Update: Some people don't understand: this is a clothes line so you can dry your clothes for free without running an energy-consuming appliance.)

Despite its excellent technical features, it didn't fit in with our garden landscaping. (We still have a miniaturized version strung across our utility room.) Here's an early look at its replacement:

Two laundry tree sculptures by Kris Borchardt, in the process of installation.

snow: lots

2008-02-27T18:18:00.000-08:00

There was a lot of snow in January and February.
This is a second floor window, those icicles are over 5 meters long!
Tall snow banks, they got even taller.

house: interior feel

2008-02-26T19:13:00.000-08:00

I don't have pictures of the inside of our house great enough to do it justice, but people keep asking and something is better than nothing. (You can read all my posts labeled "house" to read this together with other pictures.)

To get your bearings, once again here's the picture of the front of the house from my general post about the remodel.
The front window on the right is the office area (here's a close-up of the office). Note how the roof is hipped rather than an upright gable.

From the inside, here's a picture looking from the kitchen past our (messy) kitchen island towards that office window. Ignore the bulthaup system 25 kitchen details for now and focus on the space above. Our old house had a double-height living space with a barrel vault ceiling over it, and we told Markoff-Fullerton Architects we liked it. So they and our structural engineer Mike Kaszpurenko of Structural Engineers Collaborative blew up most of the attic, removing all the rafters and beams, and under the roof created a rhythm of folded panels. You can see 2 ½ panels in that picture, the one closest to the window is lower to fit under the hipped roof. There's something about "space above" that is immensely satisfying, this house would be less with just 9-foot ceilings throughout. Initially I wasn't sure about Markoff-Fullerton's relatively complex handling of the ceiling, but without it the second floor would feel like a white barn (not that there's anything wrong with that); this design is substantially richer.

When you remove the roof beams, your house falls down, so that black steel beam in the picture is just part of the elaborate engineering to brace the house. (The silvery thing that seems to meet it is simply a fluorescent light hanging over the kitchen.) The office window has an up-down Hunter-Douglas Duette shade, in the picture its top is lowered to let light in while preserving privacy.

Here's a view the other way, from the office through to the kitchen, with the dining area and then the living room visible beyond.

As you can see, this side of the house is a a straight uninterrupted shot from front to back: office-kitchen-dining area-living room, with no interior walls (requiring more structural engineering effort). The second-floor flooring is bamboo ply throughout. As always happens, the absence of walls makes spaces feel smaller than they really are.

The kitchen cabinets form a backwards 'L' shape around the kitchen island, and the part of the 'L' in the foreground forms a "pass-through" from the office to the kitchen. Its sides are two bulthaup appliance hutches with rolltop covers. Steve and Kai from bulthaup-SF at Limn did a great job working with M-F to design the kitchen, they spent two hours just finessing the problem of the corner where the casings meet in the 'L'. As the kitchen grew (the island is 10 feet long!) it shrank the office but it's the literal and figurative center of the house.

My post love handles has a close-up of the black stained oak of the kitchen and its immaculate handles. The gorgeous nordic blue kitchen counter material here and on the island is laminate. We read up extensively on the pros and cons of marble, granite, tile, sandstone, concrete, aggregate, terrazo, stainless, unobtainium, ... and laminate is definitely our favorite and most practical material. (That decision led to major "you can't be serious" attitude from superficial jerks at deluxe kitchen showrooms whose tiny minds can't disentangle wealth from marble counter tops.)

Unfortunately you can't see any of the folded ceiling panels in this picture. After the four variable-height folded ceiling panels over the office and kitchen you can see the ceiling drops down to a flat ceiling over the small dining area, punctuated by exposed bulbs and an access hatch to attic space above it. (All five segments are the same width—Markoff-Fullerton get details right) This is the lowest ceiling on the second floor and makes the dining area feel cozy despite being surrounded by space.

Here's a picture of that dining area.
It's a simple orderly space within the progression. The print on the wall is by Mark Stock, the tiny encaustic of the four spoons on the left is by Kelly Luscombe. Since this picture we switched back to a glass tabletop.

I've already shown pictures of the living room in stereo on and great media storage.

This is only one side of the second floor. The other side (bedroom-bathroom-stairs) is different and equally stimulating. It's hard to do the design justice in pictures, and they can't capture the changes as the sun moves and we adjust the shades and lighting.

music: pirating early Joanna Newsom albums

2008-02-12T16:53:00.000-08:00

Joanna Newsom's bio on Drag City lists "Walnut Whales" (2002) and "Yarn and Glue" (2003) both self-released CDs. These home-made albums are no longer sold.

Bizarrely, stupidly, and short-sightedly, these songs aren't purchaseable as MP3 downloads from Amazon, even though this is exactly the sort of long-tail, low cost, make-fans-happy monetary transaction that the Internet should enable. I'll gladly pay for these songs, but can't. Probably her record company contract forbids her to release her own records.

Anyway, where legit business fails to meet a demand, the pirates step in.

Google for "Joanna Newsom" "Walnut City"
One of the results hits is for Mininova's tracker of a BitTorrent file. BitTorrent is a protocol for sharing files piece by piece among computers. A fan has digitized the tracks from both early CDs, and taken pictures of the covers, and included an excellent early interview.
What should happen next:
- Click to download the .torrent file, it opens in the BitTorrent client which downloads the file from peers, and a few minutes later I play the songs in my music player

What actually happened:

click to download the .torrent file, BitTorrent client starts, nothing happens. After contacting the tracker, zero download activity, 0.0 kilobits per second.
kill all the other inactive BitTorrent downloads, quit BitTorrent and restart, still nothing.
download and install latest BitTorrent client. It reopens the torrent, shows its contents, finds 5 other members of "the swarm" but no download, no activity
suddenly I can't access the internet at all (a coincidence?), so power off cable modem and router.
tinker with the Firewall settings for BitTorrent in my P.O.S. Norton 360. It has a rule to allow some incoming and all outgoing. Just replace that with Allow all.
new BitTorrent client displays a neat warning icon in its status line: "No incoming connections... could be your network". Double-clicking that leads to a dialog with a neat [Test if port is forwarded properly] button, which takes me to a neat web page that tests and says "Error! Port 6881 does not appear to be open" with a link that takes me to a neat port configuration guide.
Indeed, my port forwarding settings are out-of-date since my Vista laptop slog, so I update my router to forward to new IP addresses
the web page test now works, the warning icon goes away, but still no download activity
disable Norton 360 Firewall altogether
then a computer in Sweden starts handing me pieces of the file. Estimated time to download: 31 hours.
the warning icon comes back, the web page test fails, yet the little-computer-that-could in Sweden is still slowly passing me pieces of the file
20 minutes into this two other computers join in, one handing me pieces at a rapid clip.
After another 24 minutes I have the entire download on my computer
The anonymous uploader had converted the CD tracks to Free Lossless Audio Codec format. The key is "lossless", these are shrunken files to save disk space and time but they don't use audio compression like MP3 or AAC files.
FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations.
But Apple with their monopolistic bullshit not-invented-here "We'll only work with open source when there's a business case to do so" attitude doesn't support .flac files, so I can't play them in iTunes.
bitch yet again about this on Apple's feedback form
try to find the obscure music player I used last time to play flac files. Nope, not Media Player Classic, it's VideoLAN VLC music player with some Xiph codec bundle.
play Joanna Newsom's tracks.

I feel I deserve a merit badge for getting it to work, but it is wrong. It's definitely not stealing, but it is piracy as in "copyright infringer." Alas, the Fairtunes site built by two Canadians in a dorm room that let you voluntarily donate money to artists when you rip them off went defunct years ago. Even during the Napster boom when millions of people were downloading billions of songs, they only received a few tens of thousands of dollars.

Joanna Newsom, I owe you $7.80 (13 songs at .60 cents). What's your PayPal account?

food: vegetables arranged to have IQ of 142

2008-02-04T23:00:00.000-08:00

Back to Millennium Restaurant. Interesting to compare and contrast with an earlier visit. No single standout ingredient like the mushrooms to end all mushrooms.

Start simpleRoasted BeetsThen move to Cauliflower & Cipollini Onion Pakora
spicy coconut & cilantro chutney, cardamom scented pear-curry leaf relishyummy, creamy, delicious fusion food but you could imagine other restaurants like Tangerine getting lucky and delivering this.

Now main course, read very very carefully
Smoked Cherry Chard & French Lentil Roulade
crisp olive oil crust, black chanterelle & merlot reduction, Meyer lemon & rosemary roasted artichoke & potato gratin, fried capers, grilled endive & blood orangeAny good restaurant would be overjoyed just to come up with the artichoke and potato gratin. Greens Restaurant, fine though they are, would have put the chard and roulade (a slice of a roll) together with the fried capers and been well satisfied. But Eric Tucker's kitchen is taking your mouth places you didn't know existed. The endive is so tart and bitter it's close to a wincing bite of grapefruit. It makes you return to the other elements to experience them anew. The blood orange is another taste juxtaposed with the rest.

My date had a similar tongue overdrive.Seared Emerald Rice Cake
sauté of jerked seitan, crisp plantains, brassicas, baby erbette chard, ginger scented coconut & winter squash puree, Seville orange & habanero coulisThe moist chewy rice sits in repose at the center of a solar system of tastes and ingredients, and all the planets align. Anyone else would have focused on the habanero, but here it's just a slight harmonic. I re-read the menu over and over to make sense of all the ingredients.

It was so stimulating that I circled back for another starterGrilled Maitake Mushroom Flatbread
seared baby onions, fava greens, pine nuts, cashew garlic cream, bitter green saladUnlike the main courses this dish wasn't smarter than its eater, it was almost a pizza. But the bitter, peppery green salad brought each mouthful to life, and the touch of cashew garlic cream was soft, warm, unbelievable.

You're a vegetable, you're a vegetable
Still they hate you, you're a vegetable
You're just a buffet, you're a vegetable
They eat off of you, you're a vegetable

-- Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' Michael Jackson off Thriller (25 years old)

art: Decotora! Decotora! Decotora!

2008-02-04T22:48:00.000-08:00

== "Decorated trucks" Makes me homesick for Japan, a place I've only been for 14 days. The obsessive impulse of the "Proud and lonely".

I'd love to see those hurtling over California's I-80 at night through the snow.

Read PingMag's interview with the author of the “Decotora” photo book, Masaru Tatsuki.

snow fun

2008-01-23T23:00:00.000-08:00

At night, cold tired and aching after a day mining powder all over the mountain, shredding my skis in the deep. The little black dog is dancing on her hind legs trying to bite fluffy snowflakes. Which is a guarantee of more of the same tomorrow.

Another peak moment for the databank. I almost whipped out a camera to re-stage it, but as John Mayer wrote in his only great lyric so far Today I finally overcame tryin' to fit the world inside a picture frame. Reaching back to 70s cliché:

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.

cellphone: bought the wrong phone (Sanyo Katana DLX)

2008-01-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

After 3 1/2 years with the Samsung sph-i500, the smallest and best and only PalmOS-based flip phone PDA, I knocked it into the bath[**]. I've wanted to replace it for 2 years, now I must. All I want is

flip phone so I don't wreck the screen walking into things while it's in my pocket
a phone dial pad, not a teeny-weeny typewriter keyboard
touchscreen and handwriting recognition
music player
extendable applications
quality cameraphone
infra-red so I can use it as a backup remote control e.g. with Novii remote

For a device that does all that I'll willingly pay a thousand dollars, but it's not manufactured. The Nokia N93i comes really close, with a great camera and everything but a touch screen, but Nokia doesn't have a store in the Bay Area so it's only sold by dodgy gray marketers. Other candidates:

iPhone has a vulnerable screen, no physical dial pad and no movie recording (yet)
Treo 755p has a vulnerable screen and a typewriter keyboard

So while I wait for Nokia to show up and Apple to introduce more iPhone features (and Google Android to disrupt the market), I'll just buy whatever is the best ordinary flip phone Sprint sells. That turns out to be the Sanyo Katana DLX. But in several ways it's worse than the Sanyo MM-9000 I got for my partner exactly 2 years ago: smaller screen, lower-resolution camera, worse speaker and speakerphone. It does have slightly better UI, Bluetooth, and SDHC capacity (when 2 billion bytes of memory aren't enough), and the charger and cable from the MM-9000 are compatible.

The Katana DLX is only $80 after rebates and getting chained to Sprint for another two years, but it's not what I want. I bought the wrong camera a month ago to capture photos and videos of Jhane Barnes, now I bought the wrong phone.

My other choice was to buy another Samsung sph-i500. Both it and the Sanyo MM-9000 have loyal dwindling fan bases that hoard backup phones.

[**] I read BBC news and various planet.* aggregators of my favorite blogs on my phone everywhere I go, including bathtime. (Your phone has a browser in it! Figure out how to use it, or better yet install Opera Mini and use that!)

politics: the real security threats and how to diss your boss Bush

2008-01-22T14:34:00.000-08:00

9/11 was a stunning attack on the USA, but are a bunch of puny terrorist cells really the biggest threat to the USA necessitating an endless Global War on Terror? Here's Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker posing the question to Bush's s Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell.

I asked McConnell if he believed that Al Qaeda was really the greatest threat America faces.
“No, no, no, not at all,” he said. “Terrorism can kill a lot of people, but it can’t fundamentally challenge the ability of the nation to exist. Fascism could have done that. Communism could have. I think our issue going forward is more engagement with the world in terms of keeping it on a reasonable path, so another ism doesn't come along and drive it to one extreme or the other. And we have to have some balance in terms of equitable distribution of wealth, containment of contagious disease, access to energy supplies, and development of free markets. There are national-security ramifications to global warming.”

Hmm, the emphasis bits sure don't sound like any part of the Bush doctrine I've ever heard. Next time a Democrat is attacked on national security, I hope he or she quotes this guy.

non-support: Symantec can't help itself

2008-01-17T00:21:00.000-08:00

I ran Cygwin setup, which contacts the Internet to update this fine free collection of UNIX utilities for Windows.

Norton 360's firewall pops up an alert "A program is attempting to access the internet", which is fine. The bug is that the Alert said "Name: NCH Swift Sound Setup". I don't have any such program. Norton's signature database or algorithm is mis-identifying the Cygwin setup program.

So I contact Symantec Technical Support and say "Please pass on this BUG in Norton 360 to its engineering manager"

But company tech support can't handle that. They only know how to help customers, they're incapable of helping the company. So the first reply I get from "Solomon.S" is this issue might occur if your PC is infected with virus or virus-like programs. I reply that my virus scan is fine and "I am trying to help Symantec improve Norton 360 by informing you of this bug in your program." I get another reply from Solomon.S telling me how to change the status as "Allow" in firewall settings for NCH Swift Sound.exe.

Here's my third message.

You still don't get it and I am angry and frustrated that Symantec as an organization is too stupid to accept my bug report. I am *BEGGING* you to file the following BUG against Norton 360 in your internal bugbase: "Customer reports that Norton 360's Internet firewall alert mis-identifies the setup.exe program from the Cygwin product as NCH Swift Sound Setup." How can I be any clearer? I don't need help, Symantec needs help. How can you stand your job when you have no ability to improve the quality of Symantec's products?

Open source: experienced users like me get a bug login and file a bug against the project; other users can find the bug and comment on it. Eventually someone with QA or engineering ability looks at the bug and the project gets better. Commercial product: the support organization is a barrier to improving the product.

eco: global climate change in one picture

2008-01-15T16:38:00.000-08:00

I spend (waste) time on blogs contesting global warming denialists.

The simple meta-fact is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports on global warming are the scientific consensus (as in "the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned", not a never-gonna-happen "unanimity"). Every nation on earth, including the Bush administration in the USA, plus 40 national science academies, endorses the consensus. Fine, 18% of climate scientists think things aren't so bad or the conclusions. But that leaves 82% agreeing with the conclusions or thinking things are worse. And since IPCC 4th report came out we've seen more worrying effects.

Here's the science.

The greenhouse gas effect is simple physics (sunlight comes in, but the greenhouse gases block infrared radiation back out).
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations going up from 280ppm to 370ppm at an ever-increasing rate during the industrial age is undeniable, and billions more of us burning more and more shit at the same time is undeniable.

The effects of that on overall climate can only be understood with a climate model, so you need a scientist (not a politician, not a columnist). Climate models disagree, so the rest of us need the IPCC.

So denialists take other tacks. It's solar variation. It's methane from cow farts. There's less soot (damn environmentalists) so more sunlight. There's something else going on!

This is all true. Climate is hella complex.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/ is a simple summary page with a fantastic chart that shows NASA's understanding of what forces climate.

At the left is CO2, the big one. But there's also methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N20) and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), also greenhouse gases that man pumps out.

Denialists like to offer solar variation as another explanation for temperature rise, but as you can see its effect is much smaller and besides, solar output has gone down in the late 90s (here's a graph and more debunking).

Denialists like to say water is the biggest greenhouse gas. This is true. Lots of things change along with climate, like water vapor, but don't make it change, hence water isn't in the NASA chart. As it gets warmer H2O in the air increases, making it worse; but we can't measurably affect the concentration of water vapor in the air.

Denialists also like to point out anomalies a long time ago, that CO2 concentration in ice cores lags temperature changes, that there have been ice ages, that it was hot (actually in Europe only) in the middle ages. All true, and understanding these helps improve climate models. But here's the chart of CO2 in industrial times. Ask your local denialist: If CO2 causing global warming is bogus now, then what's the effect of that continuing to go up and up?

music: finally buying unprotected songs

2008-01-12T14:29:00.000-08:00

I wrote about our multimedia phone:

The big downside so far is there's no way to play protected music files ... This is why DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is evil!

I've been jotting down a list of songs I like but not enough to buy the artist's "Greatest Hits" CD. iTunes announced iTunes Plus where you pay $0.30 more to get an unprotected track that plays anywhere; I've been meaning to put my money where my mouth is but the iTunes Store doesn't make it easy to search only for unprotected music.

But Amazon now sells MP3 downloads! Since that's all they sell, there's no will-it, won't-it work uncertainty. They're often cheaper ($0.89) than protected iTunes, let alone iTunes Plus. The quality may not be as good, but these are just pop songs. I'm going through my list:

Search Amazon's MP3 Downloads category for artist name
buy (Amazon Downloader puts it in iTunes library)
search google for lyrics artist name fragment of lyrics, select and copy the lyrics
Tip: To avoid the ads all over lyric sites, Get Firefox (try FF 3 beta, it's even better!) and install Adblock Plus
while the MP3 downloads, search YouTube for the artist and title and watch the music video
in iTunes' "Recently Added" playlist, right-click on song, Get Info > Lyrics, paste in lyrics
back up your "My Music" folder (c'mon, you know you should)

I don't like having all my music ratings and lyrics tied up in Apple's proprietary iTunes software, so some day I'll switch to a different player than iTunes, maybe Amarok when KDE4 works on Windows.

Folks, your phone plays music files! (A friend got a Sanyo M-1 phone; she was stunned when I dragged a few songs onto it.) As I predicted, everything is a music player now. Digital photo frames, cars, phones, toys... if it's got speakers it'll probably play unprotected MP3 and AAC files.

Electronic downloads are instant gratification candy , but it doesn't feel right. I still have an archaic connection with the physical object of music—I was playing 12-inch 45RPM disco singles from my true library before transferring these 1s and 0s.

art: Erik van Lieshout has one approach

2008-01-06T00:50:00.000-08:00

On my Minneapolis trip to the Walker Art Center, amongst all the craziness of post-millenium yammering in the Brave New Worlds exhibition, the Homeland Security video by Erik van Lieshout and his cameraman Core was stupid smart.

They visit Jerusalem and Gaza but rather than overtly comment on injustice, struggle, and war they talk about drinking, stomach trouble, and whatever else pops in their heads, while zooming in on female soldiers' boobs and whatever. They're sweaty, bored, confused, rambling. It's Beavis and Butthead do religio-political trouble spots. Yet it makes you see the places freshly. I think their challenge to the viewer is "Could you really do any better? Can you make a difference? Because we know we sure as hell can't!"

art: Minneapolis excellopolis

2008-01-05T21:16:00.000-08:00

Went to Mpls, real snow in gray landscapes.

The Herzog & de Meuron add-on to the Walker Art Center is... OK, in the same way their new de Young in San Francisco is OK. Interesting shapes, modern textures. The off-white plaster with jagged cut-outs inside is just strange, and the logic of two towers escapes me. I didn't know where I was as I walked around.
From the right angle the windows cut into the new square tower make it look exactly like a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot. Rarrrr!

The new Guthrie Theater by starchitect Jean Nouvel is anything but just OK. Phallic endless bridge poking out over the Mississipi, theaters way up off the ground, midnight blue color, ultracool pink and dark lounge colors inside. Completely over the top but fun and excellent.

Inside the Walker had YAFF (yet another fine Frida) exhibit, nothing new to see. Elemental, their Minimalist collection, had a nifty piece by Carl Andre, Aisle, just squat oblong logs of rough wood forming a procession. A simple idea made. And a museum guard singing "This is propaganda; you know, you know. This is propaganda", a conceptual piece by some Italian.

They also had Brave New Worlds: "this groundbreaking exhibition offers bold and creative approaches to questions about the artist's responsibility to the world in times of adversity." Blah blah, globalism, videos, installations, multimedia. But the scale of it, 24 artists, drives you to engage with their concerns. SFMOMA's polite presentations of a handful of contemporary artists are seriously weak, dude, by comparison.

house: garden lift-off

2007-12-08T00:54:00.000-08:00

Here are the three reactor cores with the dilithium crystals that regulate the matter-antimatter conversion set to max.

No, it's a water fountain, see the lower-left corner.

Rene, Alma Hecht of Second Nature Design, and Louis of Louis Devereux Landscapes working hard just a few days earlier. (Two weeks ago there was nothing here at all.)

fashion: Jhane Barnes in person

2007-12-06T04:25:00.000-08:00

A store opened up in Walnut Creek in Northern California carrying a treasure trove of Jhane Barnes menswear designs, and Jhane was there in person!

Jhane with the "Infrastructure" shirt I bought, which she signed.

She was gracious and obviously a huge enthusiast of the textile processes and craftspeople that bring her designs to life; she spent a lot of time talking about design and weaving and tailoring with everyone. She wears her artistry lightly, it's running a business with a global supply chain that's a struggle.

That Bartlett Baron store has so many items, it's an art gallery where you can and should touch and examine the artworks, often while worn by other customers ("Mind if I feel your shirt?"). Even with interactive pan and zoom, viewing the clothing on a web site doesn't come close to their physical manifestation. Despite all the on-screen software (PhotoShop and custom pattern software and loom programming) in their creation, they're tailored surfaces with a 3D structure.

I keep saying, her art is so cheap it's a steal, and you can wear it; I should forget about closets and just hang everything on the wall. The gentlemen below own something like 3,000 pieces between them.