Natural Recorder, currently only for Nokia series 6, does exactly what I need it to. Eric, who has been helping me with my cell phone research, discovered this.
He also mentioned that he'd found fora noting that the audio-recording apps I cited yesterday do not offer the internal-recording feature I need, but can only record ambient sound; thus to record a call, one would have to use the Treo as a speaker phone. I swear I had seen specific feature description for PAR that enabled internal recording, but I have run out of time to do homework.
UPDATE: DO NOT purchase and install Natural Recorder without noting this: "Automatic recording of all phone calls ... No user intervention required." While it (to date) operates successfully in easily, transparently recording calls, the default mode of the program is to record every single call placed or received. Among other things, that means that unless you've scrolled though your contacts and identified them as 'do not record' contacts, you will find yourself with recordings of all of them on your memory card. Not to mention the telemarketers and new contacts who just happen to call.
Oh, this is so maddening. So far, by working the stick on the phone, I saw no global toggle to invert this setting. I'm really hoping there is one. I also found no mention of starting and stopping recording within a call - recording starts at the top of the call, and runs as long as you've configured the app to run, in minutes.
Part of what is so frustrating about this is that the transparency of the UI leads one to expect that the app will work the way you want it and at the same time retain significant user-customizability.
Haven't fixed a one of the other blogs' commenting yet!
I'll pick one to do tonight, I think.
Last night and much of today was devoted to a research frenzy on my chestnut of a topic, cell phones. I presented the problem, albeit with much greater specificity, in May of last year to the same venue with slightly differing results.
The upshot of all this is that I am pretty settled on a Treo 650, with the intent of installing one of several voice-recording software apps on the thing in order to allow an all-in-one replacement for my microcassette recorder, Palm PDA, and recording adapter. The apps under consideration include SoundRec, Audacity, and PAR.
(UPDATE: The preceding may be in error.)
My intended workflow is to record phone interviews to the Treo's SD card. I have SD cards already, for camera use, and so can experiment with the approach before forking out for a large-capacity card.
In discussing this with Viv, I realized that our cell-use pattern is very likely to change when we have two cells in the house, and that therefore it makes sense to set up the new plan as a family plan, so that we can call each other without using time. Viv currently invests about $20 a month, so I can simply add that to my plan estimate. In the end, it does look as though Cingular has plans that will work well for us and our price point.
The problems come in when I try to think about how else I might use the device. It lacks wifi, for example, forcing me to rely on subscription data-access at Cingular, which had pricing that made me quite unhappy enough to simply not consider using the feature. Things got more ridiculous when I tried to set up a Family plan with two different phone models, as Viv doesn't need or want the Treo.
"Cain't get thar fum heah," the pixels on my screen told me. I was unable to reach a Real Person (TM) even at the neighborhood Cingular store to check if the 650 is in stock or if it's possible to get two different phones.
I did reach a real person at Fry's, and he told me they only have the Sprint 650s, and that obtaining an unlocked 650 can only be done over the internet. I looked at Sprint's pricing, and it's crazy.
So as usual, I find myself nearly ready to cell out, but stymied by the bewildering pricing plans and purchasing decisions. I have a secret weapon, though. I know where all the PalmOne stores in the US are. If a plan makes sense, I don't have to rely on the hardware the carrier provides.
That said, I doubt that I'm going to geek out about locked v. unlocked cells; I mean, last night, as I went to bed, I had only the vaguest idea what the hell the term even meant. Convenience and immediacy, given the specific hardware, will surely rule in this instance.
---
Viv and I traipsed about the town today. My vintage car coat is coming undone, so I'm looking for a new one; a couple of weeks ago, I lost my beloved ninteen-sixties Pendelton wool fedora, and my ten-year-old glasses are falling apart. So I dealt with this by clawing through bins of the eyeglasses of what I have always assumed to be the recently dead, pawing though coats intended for sale to the indigent, and conducting a whistlestop tour of the vintage-merchant precincts of Fremont. No promising hats or eyeglasses were found. A fine specimen of car coat was fitted for me from the always-pristine stock at Private Screening, but alas, it proved too small.
---
Right, so: the Oscars are on, and my Oscars feature intended for the mag got cut. So I don't have to sweat bullets about getting things wrong, although I'm gonna be a little chafed about cutting the tie-in to Dr. John Dee's stolen crystal ball. I made as many jokes as I could in 200 words concerning the words "ball," "stone," and "crystal," considered in the light of a piece purporting to predict the Oscars.
Are we done here? Am I caught up? No? I have to cook the salmon? OK.
Sleep tight, my sleep-deprived beauties. The world is in fact accelerating, and yes, its' goal is to sell you more crap faster! Buy in good faith.
Hooray!
All the comments on the other blogs I host are now broken, although I believe that I enabled the default comment templates on each one of them.
Crud, crud, crud.
Alright, closing in here. Christ, my whole frickin' day has been wasted. The problem with flood-control denied comments stemmed from one of the layers of sparmor. It requires the comment to be funnelled through a preview before it will be accepted.
Jerry points out this flight lesson journal, interesting partly becasue it records someone's experiences obtaining their pilot's license via lessons based at Boeing field. The opening entry quotes ballpark rates ranging from an "unrealistically low" $4,000 to a top end of $12,000.
I believe I will get my driver's license first. But after that, who knows?
Argh. I looked at one of the plugins, and found it was easy to install on my main blogsite, but relies on an update to the stored comments templates that I have not applied to any of the additional blogs. So now I need to review the comment templates on the old blogs for design idiosyncrasies. What a pain!
UPDATE: Nice! It's now 2:30. I think everything is in place. Christ, I sure don't want to have to screw around with mod_security stuff at the apache level.
Would-be commenters, please email me if you get a big fat denied or 404. Meanwhile, I need to see a man about a horse.
I receieved a succinct email from the proprietor of daymented.com, to wit: "why??"
She'd attempted to comment on one or another of my recent posts but alas, I, acting in my primary occupational capacity of distracted halfwit, had closed the comments along with the trackbacks the other day.
Comments are once again open but moderated. Talk amongst yourselves. My sincere apologies.
UPDATE: um, never mind. For now. The second I opened comments, the spambot pinned my CPU again. That was about an hour ago, and it took that long to wait for the lag in processing the few clicks needed to pull mt-comments.cgi out of the directory.
Unfortunately, I have Things To Do to day and so I shan't be implementing yet another layer of comment-spam security just this second. Comments are brute-force disabled for now, so sorry for the inconvenience.
Damn I wish MT had just built the stupid local white-listing feature instead of the dumbass centralized key-ID system. It looks as though it builds value, but in the long-term, central user-IDs actually build liability.
'Pol Pot': The Killer's Smile: On Sunday, in the book reviews, William T. Vollmann will review this book.
I read the paper on the back porch in my shirtsleeves yesterday evening under a bright and cloudless sky. In the sun, it must have been seventy degrees.
While Southern California is experiencing an unprecedentedly wet winter (with the concomitant landlslides), we're facing an imminent drought. Twice so far this winter we've experienced long sunny stretches that essentially melted nearly all the snow off of the Olympics, at least as far as I can see them across the sound.
Rainier still has a white mantle this time, though.
I've been thinking about the work schedule for my editor, and while I think it's vital to produce for him, I can't see how it's possible on the schedule we're facing. My day job makes it effectively impossible for me to conduct any business at all but the job itself for about nine to ten hours a day on most days. In order to clear the decks to be accessible for sources, I would need to go to work at about 3 am and get off around noon for at least two weeks of March.
The P-I ran a short interview with Pete Bagge yesterday, apparently the official release date for the Buddy Bradley book I wrote about a few days ago. I had seen this as I read the paper, but Paul Beard was also kind enough to call it to my attention.
Another correspondent, Per Egil Kummervold, the developer of personal fave Chordie, thoughtfully dropped a line.
He has revamped the website and is adding a multiple-instrument chording engine, to allow one to select the particular string voicing one wishes to see the chords for. He pointed out the guitar-based iteration as the initially-deployed incarnation of the tool.
While I'm running down this list, I should note that I ran into official friend of the Donk Patrick Murphy at the bus stop the other day. He looked well, and we exchanged a few words about Ken's recnt visitor. My bus came before I was able to suggest getting a drink, but I feel certain we'll bump into each other again.
And finally!
The amp we picked up the other week lacked a dedicated phono line in, and so I forked out about $20 on ebay for an external, powered phono prre-amp. The results are satisfactory. However, either my hearing is going in the low end, or the amp itself is waaay skewed to treble. The old, non-functional amp had an integrated graphic equalizer and I miss the feature - this one only has three generic audio presets, "jazz," "hall," and "concert," singularly uninformative.
Right. Time to swap the laundry about. Ta-ta!
[map.search.ch] offers a quick-zooming interface presenting satellite photos of Switzerland overlaid with maps. I was able to find my teenage home in Lausanne after one false start, which had me poking around the countryside to the north of the town.
We lived in a ville-radieuse of upper-middle-class apartment block towers, swaddled in Le Corbusier's greensward and literally on the highest point in the city. The basement of the apartment complex, which included about fifteen twenty-story-or-so towers, linked all the buildings atop the shorn and flattened hill. The basement complex had at least five levels, each level equipped with hermetically-sealable blast doors and generous supplies of industrial-sized drums, marked with the Swiss symbol for civil defense. I never did actually find the bottom of the basement complex, as below minus five we never found a light switch. But it was very clear that the complex could house many more persons than the inhabitants of the apartment buildings surmounting it.
Asking my Swiss peers about this remarkable find - even more remarkable for the fact that it was not in any way locked or marked as off limits to the general public or nosy teenagers - yielded bored teen "pffoouh" sounds. Apparently the Swiss building code had required all buildings over a certain size to incorporate fallout shelters and provisions since sometime in the fifties.
The whole of the built-up countryside, then, in my imagination, grew enormous, unmapped complexes of cavernous underground spaces.
Many years later, in Brussels, my sister, her boyfriend, and I went to a secret party, a sort of proto-rave, held in an abandoned industrial building on the outskirts of town. The building, a decrepit mass of brick archwork looming unlit in the night, was host to a conventional nightclub on the main level.
But we squeezed into a sort of crevice in the women's bathroom, which led to a long, narrow hallway. At the end of the hall, a shaven-headed fellow in a leather jacket was collecting vouchers and cash before admitting people to a square-plan spiral stair that went down, and down, and down.
As we descended, music began to be audible, and dust began to make people sneeze.
After a long descent, we emerged into a cavernous space, defined by what I now know are groin vaults and brick columns, towering fifty or sixty feet above our heads. A parachute draped low over a makeshift bar was illuminated by portable halogen lamps.
Flashing strobes from several directions illuminated three separate music stages on which performers strutted and yowled through the haze of gritty dust. The floor was the source of the dust. It was made of fine powdery dirt, possibly sedimental. It was not laid flat, but rose and fell across the vast interior space. The gentle hillocks and hollows combined in some places to entirely occlude lines of sight.
At no point while in that remarkable exile from Piraeus’s Piranesi's prisons did I see an opposite wall.
[argh! stupid Word spellchecker!]
While there, I amused myself by imagining that it was possible - likely, even - that were I to set off into the darkness beyond the lights' reach I would eventually emerge beneath my old apartment atop Lausanne.
Who can say that in another direction I would not have found myself emerging from a cavern in the vicinity of a small town called Lascaux?
Yipes! I just got off the phone with my editor and my next round of contributions will be due in about 30 days. I have not one pitch ready or interview in the can.
Something's gotta give! Internet, you look like the prime candidate.
The word-count totals are actually really pretty doable. The problem is sourcing - it's about ten short pieces, of which only two are feasible without input. Since I have to do this on weekends and after work from the West Coast, this makes my life considerably more complicated than it might otherwise be.
Ah well, I didn't start doing this because I thought it would be easy, exactly. Well, maybe a little.
Ask MetaFilter: What's the best screenwriting software?
the verdict: Final Draft. An occasional blogreader will find this of interest, I think. eBay shows the product to be moving at well under $200 for new, unencumbered product.
MT Approval 1.1.0 is a product of the not-obviously identified blogger at jayseae.cxliv.org, who also has a load of other bloggy goodies on offer. If you squint, you can see the outilines of the antispam solution Which Must Not Be Named.
I've closed old entries to trackback, which bums me out. If TB had the same UI and publish-only-on-approval setup that comments under MT 3.x and MT-Blacklist offer, I would not have had to do that. I bums me out, actually.
Ruiners!
MT-Close2 is a plugin to close old entries to comments and trackback.
Via this useful site, which includes a host of other promising links such as a trackback-script-name randomizer. So far, I have not found links to references about an approach which an unnamed smart person shared with me sometime last month. I think of it as the spam-fighting tactic Which Must Not Be Named.
Learning Movable Type, the site that hosts the resource page above, looks interesting to poke around.
For best effect imagine me waving my hands around as you read the next sentence
But dang, I don't have time to dink around with this stuff anymore!
This morning's spectacular time-waster was an accidental DDOS attack, which was probably intended to be a comprehensive trackback-spam attack. The designers of the attack actually weren't even hammering the box nearly as hard as an intentional DDOS attack would have - it appeared that there were about four IPs involved, and the actual frequency of post requests sent to tb.cgi was under five per minute.
What they couldn't know is what happens to perl on my creaky old antique here when even one page-rebuild request hits MT. The processor pins for about 30 seconds; so for each request sent that actually got through, the estimated time to completion is greater than 30 seconds. As the requests piled up, the machine began to buckle, with GUI input crawling and eventually displaying lag of up to four minutes from click to event and shell commands queueing up for a similar wait time.
Initially I began disabling sites and web-side apps that I regarded as unlikely suspects just to get them out of the way, but as soon as I looks at the MT apache logs I could see what was going on. I eventually just physically removed the comment and trackback scripts from the served directory, which immediately removed the load on perl and eventually allowed the server to settle down.
So, I guess, tonight I look for a widget to allow me to deal with trackback more effectively. The best solution would be to globally turn off trackback and then turn it on for a few appropriate entries. Setting expiry on old posts would also be great.
Any of you out there with MT3.x who have implemented some kind of trackback control mechanism, feel free to, uh, email me.
Comments should be restored and operational this evening.
My server is undergoing what appears to be a comment-spam variety DOS attack. I've turned off comments and just noticed that MT 3 appears to have no global on-off switch for trackback. I don't have time to do the hard work this morning (I'm already 2 hours late for work). More info as I learn it.
UPDATE: it is a DDOS, probably accidental as the requests are only about 4 times a minute, against the MT trackback cgi. I yanked both the comments script and the trackback script and that seems to have helped. Off to work (3 hours late, now).
Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself
ASPEN, Colo. - Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," fatally shot himself Sunday night at his home, his son said. He was 67."Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News.
Well, this makes me really quite angry. It's absurd of me, but honestly, HST's seventies material is a source of constant inspiration. I wish I could say it was a source of constant influence, but judged on the effects alone, my demons are clearly less affecting than his.
F***.
(Paul hipped me to the passing via IM.)
Lessee now.
What got done today? Not that much.
I did pick up a cheap amplifier, but declined to wrestle the octopus of my A/V stack tonight. I discovered a friend had recently Switched, and left him a message of congrats. I also found that another old friend (an old friend from Seattle, mind you) is a MeFite. Here's hoping he comes to the March 5 meetup. I also learned another old friend is having a wingding on the 5, but think that it's unlikely that I'll be able to combine the MeFi thing with the other event, which is really a shame.
I goggled to see an article in the NYT of a web-meme parodying "The Gates." Not so much that the times would cover a quirky response to Christo's work. Christo's stuff nearly always provokes someone to imitate him in an ironic way; the imitations generally reinforce the success of the project they are intended to deflate or lampoon. What is striking is that it's the first time I can recall the Times covering a web meme at the time of the meme's rise (which, predictably, came as the large-scale Gates were unveiled last week).
Last night, Viv and I watched two well-reviewed films from 2004 on DVD. Our double feature opened with Shaun of the Dead and closed with Garden State. I didn't really know what to expect - both films have been so appreciatively mentioned by both pros and acquaintances, I suppose I expected a letdown from one or the other.
Shaun is noticeably the tighter of the two; what a script! The film is almost in appropriately well-constructed. It stands out among its' shambling forebears by its' really quite remarkable slickness, from cinematography to story. I was amused to note that our double feature apparently self-organized around writer-performers; Shaun is played by the film's co-writer, Simon Pegg.
Garden State stars the film's writer (and director), Zach Braff opposite Natalie Portman. At first I was a bit put off by the classic first-movie story base. He's an actor, estranged from the folks, who comes home for his mother's funeral. Then as the film picks up the pace, which mirrors the lead character emerging from a haze of antidepressant meds, I was more and more involved with the film. Portman, in particular, is a strongly engaging on screen.
Viv was unaware that Braff, who also stars, had both written and directed the film. She liked both films very much.
Which film is more ambitious? It's hard to say. Both appear to be restricted by genre. In the case of Shaun, a good part of the film's charm derives from the postmodern way the film frustrates zombie-movie conventions. It does so with a knowing wink at the audience, and as such, it's hugely enjoyable. But the film's finely-honed structure, which unfolds with the precision of a Stoppard play, is deeply at odds with the traditional shambolic nature of zombie films. You can get quite drunk while watching Romero's Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead and you'll effectively miss nothing, including the biting social satire that drives both of Romero's seminal zombie flicks. But if you try that with Shaun of the Dead for a first or second viewing - well, you might at times find yourself as overwhelmed as the titular hero is by his day-to-day life before the zombies.
Garden State is affecting, and yet sort of, well... cute. The careful imposition of a structure on the garden-variety prodigal's return does successfully distinguish this from other indie films about our culture's absurdly extended adoration of adolescence, and the performances are uniformly fine. But despite my having enjoyed the film, the (possibly intentional) emotional blankness of the film left it somewhat less resonant than I suspect the filmmaker hoped for. Portman's performance is what made the difference, lifting this film from okay to good.
Last night at practice Karel was talking about a certain kind of old-timey sound that features rough vocals. Greg and I started telling him about the Delta blues and so forth, and mentioning artists I have on vinyl. I jumped up to play some records - and then I realized that my stereo amp has been DOA for nearly six months.
But no more! This weekend is the weekend we pick up a new one. I mentioned I needed to make a list of what I want to Viv, so, this blog entry serves that purpose. I'm looking to get the cheapest one on sale that matches my feature needs.
The amplifier will be used for movies and TV as well as CDs and records (and video and audio tapes). Therefore some surround-sound would be nice, but I'm not buying a bunch of new speakers or anything so it needs to be able to support what I believe is known as 4.1 in addition to whatever absurd high speaker count surround sound befuddlers they use to jack the price up.
An onboard AM / FM radio.
I'm not an audiophile or hardware snob; I just want something reliable.
- Three or four A/V input-output pairs:
- one for the VCR (s-video not required, coax)
- one for the dish box (s-video optional, coax)
- one for the DVD player (s-video, coax)
- one for a camera (s-video, coax not req)
- Three or four stereo RCA input-output pairs:
- one for the turntable (only input required, I hear this is rare)
- one for ad hoc devices (I plug an RCA pair into these and run them to the front of the stack)
- one for a future tape deck
- one for digital audio input
The primary video output needs to support both coax out and s-video because depending on where the video is being routed I might need either or both. I have an inline rgb-to-digital firewire bridge obtained long ago to digitize old VHS stuff, so it's quite conceivable to imagine running two TVs off the stack when I finish frankensteining it all together for capturing stuff.
I do not anticipate attempting to jury rig a home-made DVR into this batch of gear.
The busted amp came with a remote, which I mocked without mercy and then began to use instead of all the other remotes. I imagine that this is basically a standard feature these days.
I currently maintain a series of hand drawn maps of the wiring of the current stack. I began to use OmniGraffle to map the connections as though they were a LAN, but the default clip art unaccountably lacked audio and video components.
I made vague gestures toward googling an online tool for developing and maintaining these diagrams, but my google-fu proved sorely lacking and I fell back against the pillowy cushions of the daybed in a swoon.
Murray! Murray! Bring me my bacon!
I Want To Kern in Bold And Light, And Typeset Every Day | MetaFilter links to rockrage's music fonts collection. Let the rocking commence.
Andy links to a high-quality copy of the new Hitchhiker's Guide Trailer - one stamped 'Do not duplicate.' He believes it to be a workprint for the final trailer, released in lo-fi on Amazon and embedded in craptastic flash. This is the tradition for studio-promo sites and online stuff, for reasons that are understandable, if totally wrong. Looks like our man Arthur is played by the actor who portrayed Tim on the BBC version of 'The Office.'
Additionally, no matter how good or bad the released film is, allow me to state that it will certainly be better than the quite terrible BBC-TV adaptation from 1981, which is memorable only for the on-screen segments depicting the actual GUI and data from the legendary Guide itself.
After a mouthwatering discussion of Chinese food with one PF concerning wok hay and ancillary concerns (partially inspired by the recent NYT article, "The Well-Tempered Wok," unavailable for linking as I write this), I dragged Viv down the block to my favorite Chinese place in Capitol Hill, the Broadway Wok and Grill.
Located at the northern end of Broadway, more or less across the street from the Deluxe, I always enjoy eating here immensely for two big reasons. First, some of the dishes they serve remind me closely of the Chinese food I first tasted as a pre-schooler, prepared under the supervision of one Harry Liu.
Second, the interior of the restaurant is divided into bays, and at the end of the 'public' space, someone whom I take to be the proprietor has turned one of the bays into his office, and he holds court in front of a 12" TV/DVD player combo all night. His pals drift in and out, everyone has a couple of drinks, and they animatedly discuss real estate prices in the Seattle metro region, who is in the hospital, who is opening what new place, gambling, basketball, and for all I know, the price of rice in China in an excited, blurry mixture of Chinese dialects and English, with English strongly predominating. It's a very down-homey kind of thing, the pot-belly stove and the cracker-barrel transmuted like lead into a higher, slightly stranger substance.
Harry was the black sheep of a distinguished family of restaurateurs. The family's flagship operation was a joint on the river Mystic in Boston, called "Peking on the Mystic." Harry split after a dispute with his old man and didn't return until after his dad had died, as I understand it. My family ate in Harry's restaurant as long as we lived nearby, probably for five or six years, and he taught me how to use chopsticks.
Harry's place featured hundreds and hundreds of items on the menu, most listed in Chinese and with a western-alphabet phonetic rendering on the same line. I still have a copy of the menu somewhere amidist my treasured remnants of early childhood. Some items also recieved a translation, but not all. The dishes I recall most clearly were moo shu pork, steamed dumplings (more commonly known on the west coast as potstickers), and a dessert which was almond-based gelatin cubes and mandarin orange slices in a light syrup, the name of which escapes me. To this day I seek out places whose potstickers or moo shu remind me of Harry's. The Broadway Wok and Grill has a fine moo shu which is similar in my memory to that which I first tasted, learning how to use chopsticks, and maybe a thing or two about ethnicity, culture, and emigration.
Oh, and his potstickers? The number on the menu by which they were known was "182."
Paper, Glue, Scissors is the title of this MonkeyFilter link to The Toymaker, whom we sincerely hope is not affiliated in any way with the Child Catcher.
The site offers relatively simple papercraft, including the best paper helmets I have ever encountered.
Viv is listening to one of our too-few classical music CDs and I idly googled for free sources of more classical performances, with interesting results that inspired a Metafilter post:
Classic Cat describes itself as "the free classical music directory," and offers links to 3rd-party-hosted downloadable recordings, sliced and diced by hits, composer, performer, and more. There are active fora. Given the old-school look of the site, I was surprised not to find it in my repost search.
Seattle (n)ice, in the Sunday Seattle Times magazine, explores the curious Seattle habit that combines polite public social interaction with a distinct reluctance to engage with others in what is otherwise a typically American, friendly fashion. It's something that drives newcomers up the wall and which is a constant topic of conversation even among long-time residents.
As it happens, I referred to this in yesterday's post about Buddy Does Seattle, glancingly. Last night, Viv and I went to a co-worker's housewarming party and as we were meeting various folks that her co-worker knew and counted as friends, this topic came up yet again. It's a puzzling thing, but as I said yesterday, the people that stay seem to like it. I know that I treasure the privilege of being able to indulge my antisocial tendencies.
The article makes glancing reference to the use of online resources to plan social events, presenting it as some sort of antidote or solution. It seems to me that that's an inaccurate positioning - using online social interactions (meetups, blogs, craigslist) to plan offline interactions actually reinforces the tendency toward intermediated, distanced socialization.
Anyway, the article reminded me that it's probably time to throw up the Mefi signal yet again for an early March wingding. Maybe we can check in with astruc about the whole Seattle (n)ice thing. As previously hinted, I'm thinking the Big Time this time.
Two-Finger-Scrolling with pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks implies that the new Powerbook trackpad feature has been a part of the older powerbook hardware for a while now.
I am curious to compare this to SideTrack, which I have found to be so-so, although I do use the feature a great deal. The microsecond delay before it accepts scrolling input combined with the (still!) mysterious mouse gestures in Firefox make it less than the smooth and upholstered ride I'm used to.
After all, I'd hate it if a bump in the road caused me to, say, spill a martini into the keyboard.
Another possible widget is uControl.
UPDATE: As of February 13, the site linked above is down. I was able to download and install the new driver and find that, yes, it sure is better than Sidetrack. I will be continuing to try it out for the next few days.
I moved to Seattle in 1990, the year Pete Bagge and Fantagraphics started publishing "Hate," one of the all-time record holders for right-place, right-time synchronicity. I bought nearly every issue at the late, lamented Fallout Records and Comics and read them, snickering, on the way up the hill to my home, wondering where the insane parties, nut-case postadolescents, and drunken debauchery was. Pete inflicted this on Buddy Bradley, his hapless alter ego, with such verve and accuracy that I passed the decade of the 1990s convinced that these activities existed not only in my past, Pete's past, and the comic book, but also in the streets and shared-unit rental homes of Seattle.
A few years older and wiser, I know now that actually, everyone who moved here between 1990 and 1998 moved here at least partially beacuse they love the reserved social expressions that characterize interactions here. In fact, although Pete may have lived the experiences so memorably depicted in "Hate," the more egregious events are more accurately understood as picture of American subculture in the 1980s than as a mirror held up to the time and place of grunge and dotcoms. I did, at any rate, and at that time rather than here during the '90s.
That never really stopped me from party hopping in Seattle, rolling from artist's loft standoff to basement ammonia fiasco searching for the chemical agape I had once known. Meanwhile, Pete was pouring his considerable anomie into these stories with verve and the lack of self-restraint for which is so widely, and deservedly, admired.
Fifteen years later, what do we have to show for it?
Well, most recently, Fanta issued "Buddy Does Seattle," and I have been chortling my way through every page of the review copy they so kindly sent along. If you ever fell in love with the media idea of Seattle as some kind of bohemeian paradise, or found yourself here, observing the hoopla and yet, of course, unable to locate the source of the fuss, you really owe it to yourself to track this weighty, fifteen-dollar snortfest down.
Pete will probably appreciate any money that eventually appears whenever Fanta pays him for the material. But all the same, he kinda hates the turn toward graphic novels in alternacomix of late. He thinks it's a reflection of a kind of snooty image-consciousness that privileges the social construction of reading comics in public. Everybody's trying to look smart, he's told me.
Well, I think that's a debatable thesis. But I do know that Bagge's plenty smart, and these stories have, if anything, improved with age. If you ever wondered what it would be like when a Jersey boy collided with Seattle, Pete's got the news for you, still up-to-date after fifteen years.
Paul and Ken lost their friend, Mike Wolf, last night. pf.org: So Long, My Friend is Paul's post on the topic. Ken is thus far mum has an appreciation up as well. Condolences to all affected.
I did not know Mike, nor did I read his stuff, despite both of these gents urging me to do so. Today I learn he loved Elvis Costello, as do I. I'll think of Mike the next time I butcher "Alison." It may not be "Battered Old Bird," but it's what I got.
As it happens, Mr. McManus once performed a tune with lyrics penned by one Wm Shakspur. Forgive me for quoting it.
Come Away, Death (Harle/Shakespeare)Come away, come away, death
And in sad Cyprus let me be laid
Fie away, fie away, breath
I am slain by a fair cruel maid
My shroud of white stuck all with you
O prepare it
My part of death no one so true
Did share itCome away, come away, death
Not a flower, not a flower, sweet
On my black coffin let there be strewn
Not a friend, not a friend, greet
My poor corpse where my bones shall be thrown
A thousand thousand sighs to say
Lay me over
Sad true lover never find my grave
To weep thereCome away, come away, death
World of Warcraft Keeps Growing, Even as Players Test Its Limits [NYT]:
[On Nov. 23,] Blizzard had arranged for producers and designers to sign copies of the game at midnight at a hangar-size Fry's Electronics outlet in Fountain Valley, not far from Blizzard's base in Irvine, 40 miles south of Los Angeles. The company had set up a similar signing for an earlier strategy game, Warcraft III, and about 700 people showed up. Planning optimistically, the company had about 2,500 copies of World of Warcraft on hand."So I planned to roll over there around 11 p.m., and as I tried to get off the freeway I look over and I see this gigantic, dark, surging mass around Fry's, and I'm like, 'What in the world is that?' " said Paul Sams, 34, Blizzard's senior vice president for business operations. It turned out that the pulsing was more than 5,000 people.
"The cars were backed up on the off-ramp," he said. "I parked like a mile away, and when I get there the line is looped around the building, and then looped around the parking lot. It was like a football tailgate, with the R.V.'s and barbecues in the lot and everything."
By the end of that first day, about 240,000 copies of the game had sold across North America, Australia and New Zealand, the product's initial markets. The game has now sold almost 700,000 copies in those markets, and at peak hours about 250,000 people from those areas are playing the game simultaneously.
Interesting, detailed article on the unexpected success of World of Warcraft. As the game was in beta last fall I recall coming across multiple references to the game's addictive qualities in various locales.
One point the article does not address is what numbers the releasing company, Blizzard, was expecting to support. For instance, what are the numbers that the competition supports in EverQuest and EverQuest II? The underlying thrust of the article is simply that the success of the game caught the company by surprise. However, in order to really unravel the story behind the customer-support problems that unexpected growth has caused, it would be best to be able to report numbers.
That's hard data to pry out of a company though, so I'm quibbling. The guy they quote in the excerpt above says they met their first year's sales projections in less than a week. Elsewhere "two of five" community liasons are quoted. Five community liasons for over 250,000 subscribers. That seems a bit thin to me, but of course I haven't the faintest idea what a best-practices number might be.
Anyway, interesting article. I wonder what Blizzard will do with all that money.
Apparently, even passive tech-no-geeks realize the genius of the minutemen. Ah, fuck. We really did lose something.
It seems I was not alone in my admiration for the Puppy Bowl, and the MeFi Jr. Detectives League is on the case, attempting to determine if the Puppy Bowl was a production from the same folks that memorably pitched "The Puppy Channel," as heard on This American Life.
Last night, Spence, Viv, and I attended the first of four Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount this month. The film was F. W. Murnau's Sunrise. The film's plot tells of a married village couple. The husband is tempted into an affair by a seductress from The City, and she encourages him to murder his wife. He sets out to do so, but doesn't carry through the plot, and they are reconciled.
The film was, for me, odd. There are passages of great beauty and innovation throughout the picture. Overall though, as much as I admire Murnau's filmmaking, a particular clunkiness that affects nearly all of his work remained present.
Over the past few years, the Paramount's silent series has really done a great job bringing Murnau's best-known films to the screen, and I have seen, I think, every one that they have chosen to exhibit. Each one displays great visual inventiveness and distinctly underdeveloped, nearly symbolic characters. These ciphers are generally deployed in order to propel plots that can more accurately be described as theories about the human condition.
I'm too ignorant about the context of this style of drama to speak knowledgeably about it, but I suppoes, to an extent, it's what we mean when we use the word 'melodrama.'
At any rate, it was worth seeing.
On the way to Draginfish to meet Viv, I passed a young woman sporting a striped scarf and white iPod headphones who I think was Samantha. She was walking toward the Market, directly facing the setting sun, and so I would have appeared as one of a host of anonymous silohouettes.
Also worthy of note was the amazing service we recieved at the bar at Dragonfish - the funny, middle-aged man tending the facilities appeared to place our orders via telepathy, so swiftly were they placed and filled.
As I recently noted, we had the opportunity to see The Aviator last month, and I came away a bit let down overall. Despite my disappointment in the film, I was very interested in its' subject. Since childhood, stories of Howard Hughes' days as depicted in the film have fascinated and amused me. In part, of course, I was curious how it was that an accomplished, ambitious person could be responsible for not only breaking aviation speed records and founding an important aerospace contracting company and also for such things as Jane Russell's bra, the largest airplane ever built until the advent of the 747 or the A101 (depending on how you count these things.). How could such an energetic and imaginative figure become the ghostlike reincarnation of Fu Manchu that I recall from my childhood, wizened and bearded, clutching Kleenex in the place of silks from atop his aerie in Las Vegas?
I was never able to connect the two, although I did go through a period of fascination with the reclusive, insane Hughes. Most recently I read Michael Drosnin's Citizen Hughes, which came to me courtesy of devoted reader Alice Dee. It depicts, from what is apparently primary source material, an isolated and conniving man bent on affecting American politics though force of capital, solely out of self-interest and with no apparent sense of responsibility, morality, or community. It also depicts those around him working hard to slow or stop his more outrageous fever dreams. It's fascinating, as a case study, and terrifying, if one considers the inherent opportunities available to capital on Hughes' scale today, in the holographically fragmented and deregulated American political arena.
As alluded to in The Aviator, Hughes sought to "buy" a politician, in the person of Richard M. Nixon, via $100,000 given to the slush fund that led directly to Watergate. As recounted in Citizen Hughes, Hughes explicitly understood the donations as a purchase. For his part, Nixon appears to have expertly avoided promising the recluse anyhing in exchange for the money, and Hughes seems not to have been aware of the effect his money would eventually have on American politics.
As ususal, the Wikipedia has a fine biographical entry on the man, covering both parts of Hughes' life (and it should be noted that contrary to the film, Hughes remained creatively active in business for at least a decade beyond the flight of the Spruce Goose). Rotten.com, of all places, also has an informative, brief overview. PBS took a look at the man as well.
Regarding Hell's Angels, the WWI air combat pic that opens The Aviator, I was surprised to find scant airplane-geek commentary on the film. I've read copious online commentary on other films from the interwar era, which often is devoted to a painstaking analysis of which planes seen onscreen are the genuine artice and which are creatively redressed ringers. After the war, large quantities of American-made airplanes were made available as surplus for cheap, while production halted altogether for the German planes. Thus in these films it's much more common for German planes to be redressed US-made planes, a phenomenon which is glancingly referred to in the term "Wichita Fokker," a nickname for a postwar Travelair. This Travelair shared a number of design features with the Fokker D-VII and was used extensively as an on-camera double, including, according to this list, on Hell's Angels. This article covers some of the backgound on the stunt-flyer industry of the time.
TCM recently screened the film; unfortunately I missed it.
Looking at the other fascinating planes seen onscreen, it's clearly the H-1 that has the best screen presence in The Aviator. In 1995, Smithsonian magazine took a look at the plane, which is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. There was at least one flying replica of the silver beauty, built by Jim Wright of Cottage Grove, Oregon. The plane set a world speed record in 2002. On August 4, 2003, the plane was destroyed and the builder killed when he attempted an emergency landing at Yellowstone National Park on his way back home from an airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Wright's plane had been scouted for use in The Aviator, and my impression is that had it not been destroyed, it would have appeared in the film.
According to this radio-controlled flight forum, the planes seen onscreen are both a full-scale shooting prop and a flying radio-controlled model. The same forum states that the Spruce Goose seen in flight was a model that was flown in Long Beach harbor. I'm uncertain about this, as I felt that the Goose's flight sequences were among the problematic uses of CGI in the film. Specifically, the behavior of the water under the taxi-ing hull is what keyed my attention. I freely admit that I could be wrong about this.
There certainly are large, flying radio-controlled models of the H-4; but for whatever reason, on this day my Google-fu fails to expose their linktraces.
Finally, Northwesterners, you should know that the airplane, which long languished at Long Beach harbor before moving to public display in 1980, moved again in the 1990's to Oregon, where it is the centerpiece of the Evergeen Aviation Museum, at the southern end of the wine-making Wilamette Valley in McMinnville. This summer, there are plans afoot to combine another Oscar-favorite's subject, wine-tasting, with a visit to the big bird.
The Puppy Bowl joins the Glutton Bowl as my favorite improbable tv show ever. Bowl Cam!
Build Your Own DIY LCD Video Projector, from Lumenlab, via Manuel. My buddy Karel has been tinkering with this for a couple of months, but I don't think he has these instructions.
Whatever was screwing up Safari's ability to load many websites seems largely abated. Viv was noting it too on her machine, but she largely uses IE still, so it's possible that there was something affecting my ISP's pipes. At any rate, even while the slowdown was in effect, Firefox was able to successfully load even the most problematic web pages.
Following
However, an oddity in the application is driving me batty - although no extensions are reported as being installed, and I have been unable to find comprehensive documentation, it appears that mouse gestures are built in to the version of the browser I'm using. This is interesting and nice and all, but
- I'm using a laptop with Sidetrack experimentally installed
- the apparent lack of documentation makes the gestures undiscoverable
Taken together that means that as I attempt to use the trackpad to do one thing or another, in resposnse to apparently random input, the browser jumps back one or two pages in the cache or forward to uncertainly trageted pages. It's easy enough to correct, but when you're filling out a text-form field and you leap back a page or two it's highly disconcerting.
I will likely disable Sidetrack for a day or so to see if that enables me to isolate the gestures. Additionally, I really need to read the developer notes on the G4 builds.
Viv and I watched Napoleon Dynamite tonight. It inspires four comments:
- It seems likely that I went to high school with the person who scored the movie.
- Speaking of scores, the music that plays immediately following Napoleon's big dance triumph is Music for a Found Harmonium, which is a tune that has been a part of my (and Greg's and Karel's) repertoire since we recorded this version of it with the Bare Knuckle Boxers several years ago.
- As we watched the film, Danelope sent me a link to Dancing, by Matt Harding.
- I am afraid I found Napoleon Dynamite very, very boring. Sorry, Napsters!
Dear friend Spencer Sundell, who of late has taken to squirrelling away tins of obscure 8mm film rarities, dropped by an earlier entry to update us on the works of Georges Méliès.
I myself remain locked in my tower of Google research on a couple of posts, and so this much juicy gum-flappin' begs to be promoted from comment to guest post. Hope you don't mind, Spanky!
In my (much) earlier comment, I stated I thought the aforementioned print of Méliès' "Conquest of the Pole" was complete. I was mistaken.
(Another correction is warranted: "Conquest of the Pole" [Á la Conquête du Pôle] was actually released in 1912, one of four he produced that year (three of which survive).
In fact, my Super 8 print is the US version which, while the most commonly seen, is indeed shorter than that originally released by Mssr. Méliès.
True Méliès geeks will be interested, if not jubilantly astonished, to learn that a tinted and toned 31 minute print (!!) with German intertitles was discovered ca. 2000 at the Filmarchiv Austria. This is far and away the most lengthy and, certainly, authoritative print of "Conquest of the Pole" known to exist. Alas, the chances of seeing this print are pretty slim for us common folk. (It will also be joyous news that still more prints of films hitherto thought lost were discovered in 1999 at Moscows Gosfilmofond. This means that about 40 percent of Méliès' 510 films have been recovered -- a true miracle given that Méliès himself burned all of his negatives in a fit of depression and anger ca. 1924, not to mention that 80 percent of all silent films are believed lost. For more info, see here. )
But there is a so-called "French version" that is more available that includes an additional 2-3 minutes of footage not seen in the US version. The longest sequence shows several other polar craft being wheeled out for our viewing pleasure. A few of these craft are then shown attempting to begin the voyage to the Pole, all crashing, exploding, and failing spectacularly. There are a few other additional shots scattered throughout, most notably a slightly extended treatment of the man who clings to the rope attached to an ascending balloon (from which he falls only to explode after being impaled on a church steeple -- a bit that survives in the US version). A few additional shots are also included the actual journey to the Pole.
The US and "French" versions of the entire sequence at the Pole itself does seem to be roughly the same (despite some odd jump cuts that may or may not be due to damage incurred in the decades since the film's release). However, the French version includes a slightly longer version of the expedition's triumphant return, very much harkening to Méliès' "A Trip to the Moon" made some 10 years prior.
For those who may wish to see the surviving "French version," I suggest seeking out the excellent home video anthology, "Ballerinas in Hell" (Unknown Video), which also includes the only home video editions of several other landmark Méliès films. It was originally released on VHS, but can be found from a few purveyors in a DVD edition -- get 'em while you can!
For those interested in renting or owning a 16mm print of the French version, visit the EmGee Film Library/Glenn Photo Supply at http://emgee.freeyellow.com/ -- but activate your pop-up blocker before you do. Carpe diem -- word has it the place is going out of business sooner rather than later. A tragic thing: EmGee/Glenn has the largest and widest-ranging 16mm film rental/purchasing library on Earth. They seriously rock.
(And no, I get no kickbacks on any of that -- I'm just a film geek like you.)
If anyone cares to read about Georges Méliès, I recommend the following books:
"Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès" by John Frazier (G.K. Hall & Co., 1979). The grail. Hopelessly rare, but absolutely superlative. It never even shows up at Bookfinder.com (which is saying something), and I only found a copy thanks to the Univ. of Washington graduate library. The first half or so is finely written bio-history. But the real treasure is the last half-plus, which consists of a film-by-film chronology of dang near every film he made, providing detailed scenarios, production details, and even info about which film archives have the surviving prints. Amply illustrated throughout. +/- 240 pp.
"A Trip to the Movies. Georges Méliès, Filmmaker and Magician (1861 - 1938)" by Paolo Cherchi Usai (International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1991). Hideously expensive if you can find it (especially since it's only 185pp.). But Signore Usai is one of the foremost silent film scholars in the world. As in Senior Curator of the Motion Picture Dept. at the George Eastman House. That said: I've never actually held one of these in my hands. So okay, caveat emptor.
"Marvellous Méliès" by Paul Hammond (St. Martin's Press, 1975). Despite some weaknesses, probably the best of the more-available (and affordable) Méliès books, it is a somewhat rambling bio/history of Méliès and his works. Includes a selected (though extensive) filmography (albeit with titles and years only). Does include some misconceptions resolved by later scholarship, though that's not really the author's fault. Extensively illustrated throughout.
"'Georges Méliès, Mage' et 'Mes Memoires par Méliès'" by Maurice Bessy and Lo Duca (Prisma Editions, 1945). Another expensive one, alas, but the other grail for Méliès freaks. Published only en Francais, it consists of writings by the aforementioned authors, as well as lengthy excerpts from Méliès' own memoir. Fortunately fer us dum Inglish talkerz, it is profusely illustrated throughout with stills, very rare original sketches by Méliès, and other fine treasures -- which is what makes it worth the steep price you're likely to find. The editions I see around online are all very expensive (tho lovely) hardbounds, but I know a softcover was published (because I've seen in the Univ. of Washington library).
FWIW, I do not recommend the recent Elizabeth Ezra book, "Georges Méliès: Birth of the Auteur" -- unless you really like ponderous, Masters-thesis-type film crit yammer.
Okay. Enough. Go outside and play.
-- Spencer Sundell
The Google search 'gmail "Your session has expired. Please sign in again." ' reveals that a number of folks have experienced a broken cookie problem with Firefox 1.0 and gmail, but no evidence of it affecting Safari users.
Sadly, that means I am up a creek. Maybe Firefox has gotten speedier than the last time I used it.
UPDATE: It's fixed itself, it seems. I'm still gonna check out Firefox again, as suggested by Mr. Harpel.
When the Sous-Chef Is an Inkjet:
But the sushi made by Mr. Cantu, the 28-year-old executive chef at Moto in Chicago, often contains no fish. It is prepared on a Canon i560 inkjet printer rather than a cutting board. He prints images of maki on pieces of edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch, using organic, food-based inks of his own concoction.
All of which would be fine with me, if the accompanying pictures of the 'sushi' didn't make it clear that this stuff is butt-ugly. The items shown feature tiny, icon-sized pictured of sushi, rather than being crafted to resemble sushi itself. The food looks like bits of color-xeroxed menu.
After all, it's not hard to find a more elegant approach.
Today was the day that my expansive Aviator post was to flow. The bane of life, television, has interfered. Damn the tube, I say. Damn it to the depths of hell.
Somehow, synchronicity arranged that the distraction would be the Tom Hanks flick The Terminal, where one supposes the aviator would spend some time.
The film introduces an interesting, slightly throwaway plot element: Hanks' character has come to New York in search of the autograph of one Benny Golson, a man pictured in a famous portrait taken in 1958 in Harlem.
There is a wonderful hyperlinked exploration of the image itself, known as "Jazz Portrait, Harlem, 1958." The shot was taken by Art Kane, and yes, Benny Golson is the man cited in the film.
Mark Vidler's Go Home Productions notes a new video mashup of Paperback Believer. Called to my attn. Courtesy Mr. Frankenstein.
AxMe covers bluegrass and oldtimey music, with streamer suggestions. Aaaah.
Skot just lost a friend after losing touch and is unhappy. Bring a hanky; it's sad, and moving.
