Anniversary.
Friday, December 9th, 2005
I’d just like to commemorate that 16 years ago today it was a cold north Georgia Saturday, with snow falling intermittently… and a lot of special people in our lives traveled from the midwest, from California, from Seattle, from North Carolina to hold hands and watch Sammy and I exchange some important promises in our living room—and then we went to an art gallery in Buckhead and listened to Bob Page play the piano and talked and laughed and toasted and danced into the night.
And then we locked ourselves out of our house and had to pound on a sleeping Tom Burton’s door to get our spare key.
We’re lucky to still have most of those friends and family in our lives, and we’re very fortunate to have each other.
Unhigh definition.
Friday, December 9th, 2005
According to this article which quotes this Scientific-Atlanta survey, apparently half of all High Definition Television (HDTV) owners don’t actually use the HD capabilities of their set, and nearly a quarter think they are watching high definition video when they actually haven’t set it up correctly.
This reminds me of the research I heard about years ago back in the dawn of ‘bugs’—the translucent (or not) logos in the corner that identify what channel you’re watching. Many people who were asked thought that their TVs made that little CNN, just like the TV put up the big green letters that say ‘mute’.
This more recent survey said that 25%-ish admitted “they thought they were watching HD video because, after all, the programs said at the beginning that they were broadcast in HDTV”…!
Now I’m thinking they ought to super “broadcast via brainwaves directly into your cerebellum” at the beginning of shows.
And don’t even get me started on the number of 16 x 9 TVs in public places showing 4 x 3 channels stretched grotesquely to fill the space. It’s become a small obsession of mine to reset them or, barring that, switch them off.
Mull over this.
Monday, November 7th, 2005
CNN, in what seems to be an approach straight out of the old parse-the-tea-leaves-at-the-Kremlin days, announced the departure of Aaron Brown by not announcing it…they issued a release describing Anderson Cooper’s new schedule and Wolf Blitzer’s new schedule and if you put all of that through the parse-o-matic and divide the number of anchor chairs by the number of available anchors, well, you’d find one name missing.
And so Aaron Brown, smart guy anchor, fellow college dropout and world champion muller, moves on. I lift my ABC World News Now coffee tea and soup mug in his general direction (doubly ironic, since his replacement, the guy CNN has placed its bets on, is of course, also an alumnus of the wacky ABC late night news show.)
I’ll admit it, I want smart people reporting the news. I want people with depth who aren’t afraid to use that depth when putting complex subjects into context. My pride in being associated with CNN (way back at the dawn of time) is way diminished with each broadcast of The Situation Room (Keith Olbermann: “Wolf, we get it, you own a lot of TVs.”), along with the accumulated vapidity of Paula, Kyra, and Daryn and the turgid Lou Dobbs. Nowadays, when CNN carries a brief hour or so of CNN International, it’s as close as I can get to the network of old: a 24 hour news channel dedicated to news of the world.
Aaron brought his intelligence to work, along with (occasionally) some other emotional baggage. In the modern era where television newspeople of substance are becoming a threatened species, his writing skills and on-air processing of complexity were most welcome.
Some other voices:
Harry Shearer: ‘The most trusted Name in what, again?’
Don Imus: “Which means there will be, very soon, ‘The Aaron Brown Report’ here on MSNBC [he’s kidding], because the MO for MSNBC is [that] anybody at either Fox or CNN who can’t get it done, they hire ‘em here, thinking I don’t know what… A television insider recently described MSNBC as ‘an elephants’ graveyard.'”
And there’s an online petition, but, y’know, why bother?
Map wars.
Thursday, November 3rd, 2005
Okay, this just in, the do-no-evil pioneers of Google Maps has been joined in cartographic battle by the feisty newcomer Yahoo Maps!
Behold! (if you will), the javascript spittle flying in all directions! Behold the similar errors on both sites (since they use Navteq and Teleatlas for the data)…like Atlanta’s Interstate 285 perimeter referred to as only ‘state route 407’. Behold a stunningly sililar color scheme, although the further you zoom out on Yahoo, the crunkier the type looks. And behold the odd floating-ish navigator thingie that I bet Yahoo is quite proud of. Behold Yahoo’s live traffic! Behold Google’s satellite imagery! Behold twin APIs…that is, the Application Programming Interface where other developers can mess and mash and come up with odd mutant varients on these maps to their heart’s content!
For a kid (like me) who used to dream in longitude and latitude, this is almost an embarrassment of riches—that is, of course, until the massive coordination between browser, javascript, and server breaks in a fiesta of AJAX-y failure. Or, you simply move out of range of your broadband connection.
In the future, as long as you’re online, life is good. And you know where you stand. Down to a couple of meters or so.
Pod sveltosity.
Thursday, November 3rd, 2005
From iLounge’s Flickr page, a look at iPod generations. Mine’s on the far left. Right now, my lovely 20GB iPod does a great job of playing sounds and music, although it likes to be left plugged in as long as possible because its battery’s charge tends to dribble away. So we pamper it, a bit. We keep it warm in its protective case. I try not to drop it too often.
Just like any venerable piece of electronics, I guess.
So am I tempted by any of these newer upstarts? Well, if you’d asked me before the release of the latest one with video out, I would have been unequivocal, but now, maybe I do need one to take up some of the slack. And yeah, output photos and video. Maybe. If you’ll excuse me, I need to tuck the wool blanket around our old pod.
Made possible by downloaders like you.
Sunday, October 30th, 2005
Sammy and I took a look at the new iPods up at Lenox last week, and they’re cute, cool, all of that…although at this point not quite cool and cute enough to compel me to reach walletward. If our venerable first-generation iPod suddenly died, I would buy with gusto, but until then, I’m treating our geezerPod with all the gingerness and TLC that I am our Powerbook, which is considerably more on-its-last-legs.
But the model of a la carte TV show purchasing Steve Jobs and company introduced along with those new iPods really is (for me) the seed of something way more interesting…a way to move away from the tyranny of ad support and somewhat closer to those who want the content (no more and no fewer) paying the freight.
Nathan Alderman on teevee.org does some very interesting math:
Suppose Fox announces that it’s cancelling Arrested Development. Now suppose that Apple and the show’s producers put up a whole new season on iTunes for preorder, promising to crank out the episodes if enough folks pay up to see it. Say the same 2 million or so folks who watch Arrested each week sign up for a 22-episode season at $35 a pop. If Apple gets, oh, 25 percent of that, it still works out to roughly $2.3 million an episode for producers to crank out the further adventures of the Bluth clan. (A quick Google search suggests the show currently costs $1.5 million an episode to produce. Does anyone else hear cash registers?) If those episodes also air on TV, the ad revenue would kick in even more to the budget. And even more money would trickle in over months and years as new folks discovered the show and signed up to download the newly made episodes.
This could be big. This could be Veronica Mars never getting cancelled big. In my sad, sad little dreams, this could even be new episodes of Firefly or Farscape big.
That sound you hear is several thousand die-hard fans rushing to their keyboards, looking for someone, anyone to bombard with e-mails. Be afraid. Or excited. Or possibly both.
Now, of course, the supposition that stands out here begging to be challenged is that the “same 2 million or so” folks have access to broadband, the iTunes store and a way to play the videos. I’m quite sure that at this moment that’s not the case, but I’m also comfortable envisioning a day when that might be the way the world works. So I’m very happy that two big’ol’corps like Apple and Disney/ABC are testing the waters. And I hope they’re happy with what they’re seeing this early in the model.
Update:Apple today announced that its iTunes Music Store has sold more than one million videos since it began selling them on on October 12. That’d pay for an episode or two of Firefly…
It’s a start.
Friday, October 28th, 2005
I remember sitting in my high school newspaper office in 1973, learning about exactly how serious obstruction of justice is. Misdeeds are bad, lying about them under oath is worse. It’s that simple. Now, another generation has a chance to read and learn.
I look at today’s indictment of the Vice-President’s chief of staff as some sort of start toward a more complete national discussion of how the current administration imperiled the core values of our democracy by authorizing secrecy without accountability, torture without limits, and tacit campaigns against anyone who threatened to expose the lack of reasons to go to war and sacrifice 2000 Americans and countless others.
Read the indictment (PDF) and the prosecutor’s statement (PDF) for yourself. (Thanks, CNN. I tried to find them, as advertised, on the Department of Justice website, but I guess the attorney general didn’t want to make it too easy.)
Our muffled outrage is beginning to be heard.
Cool music.
Saturday, October 1st, 2005
I guess since people have been leaking pictures of the other “iTunes Everywhere” initiative products, from Windows Mobile to PSPs to even a specially enhanced Apple Newton, I can share with you a unit we’ve been beta-testing for an unnamed Cupertino-based computer company for a couple of months now. Based on a 1989 Frigidaire side-by-side refrigerator, this low-temperature-tolerant flat-panel display and integrated iTunes interface is powered by G5-style liquid heat-exchange coils grafted into the refrigeration system, replacing much of the icemaker assembly.
(Click on the image at right to see a larger version.)
The smart playlists feature comes preset with ambient music selected to match the temperature in the compartment—by special arrangment with the artists, the unit comes bundled with 15 selections from Zero 7 to get you started.
The iFridge can send notifications via a clever integration of Delicious Library and iCal when the number of eggs available drops below a certain level or the expire date on certain products in its UPC database is nearing or has been reached.
We’ve learned a lot during the test period…for example, ketchup bottles and other “tall” leftovers can really take a toll on the system’s ease-of-use. And, of course, it’s best to have your music choices in mind before you open the door.
The entire unit is designed to sleep when the door is closed…we think.
Window into WebKitLand.
Thursday, September 29th, 2005
There’s a window open to a world largely alien to me on my desktop—it’s a Colloquy window hooked up to an IRC channel, and this one (at this moment) is populated by chatting people hard at work on a fundamental part of the Mac OS X experience you may take for granted. In fact, if you’re using Safari, you’re using it right now. You’re soaking in it!
WebKit is Apple’s underlying framework for displaying web-based content—not just in a browser window, but in an email, or text editor—anywhere within the OS. By making the underlying engine a common one with common ways to access it, and by basing WebKit and thus Safari on an open-source framework common to Unix/Linux systems, many different applications end up with a powerful engine that benefits from open-source collaboration and the synergy that comes from a lot of folks contributing their energies to smash bugs and figure out better ways to do this or that.
Of course if Apple had simply made use of the open framework but then moved further development inside their cloak of secrecy, they (and others) would have lost that synergistic power…and that’s just what happened at first. But then this last June, Apple “did the right thing” and released WebKit as an open source project, and in a sense opened the curtain, allowing anyone to look at the source code, report bugs, and (anyone with actual coding skills) contribute patches and new chunks of code.
One of the benefits of all of this is that you could, if you want, download the source code (there’s a ton of it) and the appropriate free developer tools and build your own, absolutely-up-to-date version of WebKit and thus Safari every day…which I’ve done several times. (As changes are made, the collection of code is updated, and there are ways to just get the new stuff—every hour or so, if you want.) It’s an amazingly geeky command-line process that is all the more amazing because it really “just works” like most of the rest of the Mac experience.
Or, more simply, you could download the latest nightly version (that’s the actual disk image link) of Webkit, which really looks like a slightly newer, faster Safari. It is, again, a constantly changing work in progress, some nights the build (that’s the term for a compiled bunch of source code—in other words—the actual application you run) is more buggy than others. This build, by the way, is cobbled together and posted by a guy in New Zealand—just one more selfless contribution to the community at large.
Or, of course, you can just wait for updates to Safari distributed by Apple the old-fashioned way. But you get a lot more by downloading these new versions and monitoring the weblog and wiki and listening/chatting on the IRC channel (#WebKit) where these developers—some key Apple people, many more just coders from around the world—chat and try to work out the problems and talk a bit about their lives and express frustration and get inspired. It’s a 24-hour-a-day worldwide conversation (40-50 people are “there” at any one time) to listen in on—sometimes just hugely technical and opaque—sometimes just silly…and sometimes, I even have something useful to contribute and I’ve been impressed and grateful that these folks are largely free of the “what a pointless newbie question” attitude I’ve seen in some other places where developers and ordinary users get together.
And some of what they’ve been working on—like dramatically better JavaScript implementation and integrating SVG—Scalable Vector Graphics—a wonderful, XMLy, standards based way of drawing stuff on the screen—right into the core of the browser—actually, right into the core of the framework, so again, SVG stuff will one day be painlessly displayed without plugins in Mail, RSS readers, and so on—is really exciting.
Yeah, I do think this is a big thing! And it’s certainly an (ongoing) education to me.
Special fall preview issue.
Monday, September 19th, 2005
I think we’ve come a long way from the days of the special TV Guide fall preview issue and everyone settling down more-or-less simultaneously to sample the wonders of the new TV season…at least as offered to us by the networks..uh, I mean ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX. And yeah, that WB thing, and UP..uh..see what a slippery slope this becomes?
Sam and I sat down with a nice beverage and tried to give one or two of the new non-reality-based shows (comedies, ok, sitcoms) a try.
We watched the season premiere of Arrested Development and witnessed a quirky show in fine form, jumped into Kitchen Confidential for a moment or two and weren’t hooked, and witnessed the birth of How I Met Your Mother, and kinda said ehh, it just doesn’t quite hang together…but then enjoyed the twist at the end in the sense of “behold, writers yanking you in a new direction!” Also, we watched their attempt to use some of the Arrested Development components (gimmicks?) such as the wacky-straight narrator and jarring shifts in time and space to demonstrate, well, that more than one show can do that.
Finally, we watched Out of Practice which was kind of like going to see a Broadway play with actors you admire (for me, that may be limited to Stockard Channing and Paula Marshall) and they’re working hard up there and there are moments and…well.
That’s the theater for you.
Aching for improvement.
Friday, September 16th, 2005
My aunt, uncle, and cousins live on the part of the coast of North Carolina that is now being pounded by Ophelia, and although we haven’t heard from them since landfall, we chatted before and my aunt said that they made the kind of preparations that you’ve got to make when you live on the coast.
And we’re two weeks plus from the awful march of Katrina, and the more awful aftermath, the consequences of a tone-deaf, class-bound government that can’t conceive of citizens who can’t drive away from any disaster.
It’s about half past midnight, and CNN is replaying George Bush’s speech from Jackson Square, his most clear-cut attempt at an apology yet. It’s a moment of engineered Rovean theater, complete with dramatic lighting on the buildings and Jackson’s statue, and a boom-shot down from the trees to the strolling President and I’ll try not to say much more about it, because I do think there’s a germ of “we screwed up, we have to do better” in their orchestrations. Better late than ever? Oh, I don’t know. Too late, I think, for many, for this time.
So I hope that Ophelia doesn’t give George a chance for version 2.0 of his administration’s efforts.
I remember how Hurricane Hugo in 1989 slashed through Charleston South Carolina and the miles of coast north from that colonial city, and months later, Sammy and I visited a town that was a cacophony of hammers and power tools and a riot of blue tarps. Multiply that a hundredfold, and I think I have an idea of what the rebuilding of New Orleans will look like, if the government’s promises mean anything.
It’s huge.
Good. Evil. Corporate.
Wednesday, September 14th, 2005
It seems increasingly the fashion to talk about modern technology-based firms in extreme terms. Google is “good.” Microsoft is “evil.” The founders of Google swear to do no evil. Steve Jobs is the antichrist…or is he our saviour?
Maybe it’s just because we’ve entered a time where the higher-ups at these huge, otherwise undefinable firms project personalities that are caricatures of themselves…they bely the white bread calm that most actually must embody in order to run a behemoth of the corporate world. In the age of really white-bread guys like IBM’s Thomas Watson, it takes a lot of stretching to declare a company so inertially “there” as embodying all that is great about our selves, or the worst qualities of man, tucked behind a Paul Rand logo.
Or maybe it’s just because it gives people something to write about when Google ends up doing something “evil”, or Microsoft is unexpectedly angelic. Not that..uh..it happens that often. The web this morning was filled with mocking at Microsoft for developing ‘Gadgets‘ (Steve Jobs originally announced this term for what are now known as Dashboard ‘Widgets‘, which of course is what Konfabulator called these little javascript confections before Apple usurped the (un-trademarked?) name.
And I know that’s what the web was filled with because good ol’ (evil ol’) Google introduced Google Blog Search, which apparently checks feeds very, very often for new ruminations, and you know the one thing we need in life these days is fresh ruminations…right out of the oven. Heck, maybe even half-baked ruminations can be satisfying.
They even have an RSS feed available for the results of a particular search. What this does, by the way, is to add more capability, to turn a good RSS Reader like NetNewsWire into something about as close to a newsroom system like the pros use as you can get for, well, mostly free. So when four different stories break (Roberts!! Blackout! New Orleans! We’re eating more beets!) you have your own desktop Situation Room, minus all that pesky Blitzerage.
Gooood.
This was not “unimaginable.”
Thursday, September 1st, 2005
The sad reality of New Orleans is turning into a story of how governments make decisions now…and it’s not the way that the United States used to do business.
But governments—state, local, national—knew a lot of what to expect. Check out the study done at LSU—two years into a five-year study using New Orleans as a test case—and it was dead on in most of its predictions.
The Times Picayune covered this extensively back in 2002-2003.
Folks who were in a position to keep an eye on these things had this information—and made decisions that diverted funds from preparedness and levee reinforcement and other decisions that will make a difference.
“It’s possible to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane,” said a Corps of Engineers guy in this 2004 article. “But we’ve got to start. To do nothing is tantamount to negligence.”
Yes, it is.
Katrina and…well, you know.
Monday, August 29th, 2005
It’s Monday evening, and Hurricane Katrina has plowed through New Orleans, leaving lots of broken stuff in its wake. At dinner time, it’s in northern Mississippi—and it’s still at hurricane strength.
Now, we get the leavings—thunderstorms, tornadoes perhaps, and more. because of the news buildup on this storm, and because I’ve never accumulated any really good hurricane imagery, I set my g5 to suck down (using curl and a quick cron script) all kinds of radars and sat images every 20 minutes, and tossed the stacks of jpegs into After Effects to make some quick timelapses. The results were very cool.
Now, let’s just hope it’s a relatively quiet night here…I feel for the folks to our west—they’ve got some mighty cleanup to do.
Early August linkettes.
Wednesday, August 10th, 2005
My sister is going on Jeopardy a second time…wish her luck!
* * * * *
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Peter Hartlaub talks about how today’s effects-laden are leaving audiences with more of a feeling of numbness than wonder. In it, he quotes a legend of another era:
“I’ve always felt that the miraculous image was very unique in the 1950s. To see something like the Cyclops was a novelty. Now today you see so many strange things in a 30-second commercial. There’s no longer the amazement of the amazing things.”
legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen in an NPR interview
Yep.
* * * * *
I’ve always been a bit twitchy watching television, but I think it’s safe to say that with the advent of watching content online, my options have expanded. Like sitting in a nonlinear edit bay, I find myself jumping around within a single piece of content. It goes way beyond jumping past commercials, of course…you can basically “flip through” a movie file in a way not unlike skimming a newspaper article. Others watch this way too.
* * * * *
What else catches my eye online these days? I see a growth in videoblogs and the applications to make viewing them and sharing them easy. I’m reading up on VOiP and trying apps like this to replace our second phone line…you know, the one with the number my brother used to have. Yeah, I’ll miss the number, but not equal to $27 a month. And no, we’re not getting a cell phone anytime soon. I’m also trying to make use of the Google Maps API (that means Application Programming Interface) to have my own custom maps that show important things in my life in convenient Google Map form. Stay tuned for examples.
Stay curious.
Tuesday, August 9th, 2005
Peter Jennings died late Sunday evening, and I’ve never heard the word “curiosity” mentioned so many times by so many different people in an attempt to capture a person’s essence.
Stripped of all its outputs, journalism starts with curiosity. And without an outlet for that digested curiosity, you have no journalism. I went to school to become a journalist, and I find myself with the curiosity and the tools to acquire the information (thank you, o internet), but without the outlet—and no, no particular burning desire to have one, I can’t make any claims to practice journalism.
That is, unless you think this document is read worldwide.
But I was inspired by Jennings. I admired his work. I admired his attempts to get Americans to think about issues that we seem to turn away from—like health care and centuries-old cultural conflicts. He represented for me the best of what Americans could be in relations with our fellow global citizens. (Ironic, of course.) Jennings told Charlie Rose that he indeed believed to be a journalist is to be a citizen of the world, and I’d rather be a member of any global community than a cheerleader for the home team that hates its opponents. Actively participating in this internet thing feels global, even if I am communicating mostly in English to mostly fellow pasty white guys. It’s a step in the right direction. And it’s a great way to satisfy my unabated curiosity.
I got the news of Jennings’ death sometime after midnight, in further irony, not from television, but on Google News, and I was able in a matter of a few clicks, an hour or so after the announcement, to read, listen to, and watch lots of the ABC News anchor’s colleagues, peers, critics, and hangers-on mourn his loss and delineate his legacy. I read about Charlie Gibson sorrowfully but professionally making the announcement—I didn’t see it live. I watched Aaron Brown’s obituary for his colleague, but I went to cnn.com to do it.
It’s interesting to me that scant little is being said about Jennings’ second incarnation as ABC anchor—his role in the tripartite successor to the Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters fiasco. Sometime in 1978, ABC Sports head-turned-news-head Roone Arledge conceived of World News Tonight—that was the first time the name was used—as a round-robin of the world, with not one but three anchors: stalwart, too-conservative-for-my-taste Frank Reynolds in Washington, urban Max Robinson in Chicago, and urbane Peter Jennings in London.
This was a tour-de-force of technology more than an innovation in content, and was ABC’s attempt to overcome the sheer gravitational force of Walter Cronkite by pulling on his ratings numbers from multiple locations. It didn’t work for most people, apparently because “a network needs a single voice”, but it did for me, because if nothing else it established a clear mandate to cover both international news and heartland-of-America news on a regular basis. Breadth of coverage is something that’s falling by the wayside (television news’s massive pile of wayside detritus is starting to block out the sun). Watching WNT in the late 70s, I was hopeful that this indeed meant all of our news didn’t have to come from white guys in New York or Washington. I knew when Jennings’ face appeared that we’d be hearing about places that were important to understand, even when I understood precious little. When the world appeared in my living room, I wanted to go there and learn more. Broadcast curiosity begats curiosity.
(It’s funny now that there’s not much trace on the internet of Robinson and Reynolds. And Reynolds, with Jules Bergman, did a great job of covering the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo flights for ABC. Try to find references to that, or to Bergman at all.)
Jennings, Robinson, Reynolds, Arledge are all gone now.
So you’ve read plenty about how this closes the book on the Jennings/Rather/Brokaw generation of news anchoring. Here’s hoping it isn’t an invitation for Roger Ailes to drag us further down the path to, well, wherever chapter he’s writing.
