Whoo boy, you take a year off the writins and it sho do show. I pledge greater vigilance on my part toward the grievous sins of run-on-sentencery, typos (especially if conjunctions) which dramatically decrease the apparent sensibility of a sentence, and of course multiple-post generating revisions.

Buzzcocks soundtrack for AARP ad. When viewed in the context of a particularly grim Battlestar Galactica, it's enough to give me the willies. Torture! Suicide! 30-year-old music written by teenagers used to sell retirement planning to 60-year olds! Divorce! Adultery! Heart-numbing use of the drink!

I suppose, given the episodes' topics of faith, loyalty, love and betrayal, a better choice than “Everybody's Happy Nowadays,” (employed, I suppose, in the faint hope of erasing the crystalline irony of the title - a quote from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World - or possibly in a fit of truly profound cluelessness) would have been “Ever Fallen in Love.”

Over the past few mumfs, I have been running experiments regarding media convergence in our home. I have a Mac Mini set up as a primary media server, connected to an eyeHome breakout box that runs media from the Mini over vanilla GB ethernet out to a variety of media, including a surround receiver via optical and to that projector I dumpstered a couple of years ago.

The Mini, a 1.42 mhz G4 with 1GB ram, is the second-most powerful computer in the house, after my main laptop, and has done a great job running the media streams. We've watched feature films and entire series, both legitimately converted from DVD formats and downloaded via miscellaneous services via the eyeHome.

However, after analyzing the amount of time needed to obtain and view film and television media online, offline on DVD and converted, and so forth, I had come to the conclusion that the quality degradation inherent in the uncertainty of the illegitemate downloads, in combination with the length of time required to download the assets, weighted the balance in favor of legitimate content downloads, but not in favor of legitimate content conversion Ripping a personal DVD up to the Mini for online playback and access, for example, can take four to eight hours of supervised computer activity. Downloading from filesharing networks may take days and days of calendar time but very little supervised time; I would guesstimate something on the order of 3 minutes per four hours of content downloaded.

The downside of the filesharing downloads is that the quality of the material may vary widely - I have seen what are called 'cams,' in which a videocamera was used to capture a public screening of a current film, DVD conversions of widely varying quality, from captures that preserve the full 5.1 surround to ones in which the mono audio capture is out of sync with the action on screen to ones in which the last few minutes of a television show simply is cut off.

Identifying and correcting these content-quality deficiencies is MUCH more time-consuming than the acts of capturing your own DVD content. Therefore, if one wishes to obtain quality assured content for computer-based playback, I reasoned, it would make sense to fork over the dough and save the time.

Guess what? The video content I purchased and downloaded from Apple a) is limited to the display resolution of the Video iPod, at 320x240 b) suffered a catastrophic download failure on my initial download attempt that resulted in the local copy of the file disappearing from the hard drive as iTunes attempted to finalize the transaction just as Qwest's DSL service failed c) including the initial attempt, took nearly eight days to download and, as I learned tonight, d) WILL NOT PLAY BACK ON THE MINI.

Instead, I'm treated to a delightful slideshow of approximately one frame for each FIVE MINUTES OF SCREEN TIME. The assets being under the vigilant protection of FairPlay is also limited by design to play back only within the loving, and in my experience otherwise quite snappy, confines of QuickTime Player and iTunes, meaning it's impossible to troubleshoot the slow-play source by examining the asset under to hood, as it were.

Naturally, such securely swaddled content is not legitimately enabled for playback via eyeHome, either.

In light of this, it's clear to me that DRM represents as huge a marketing misstep as anything ever slapped ass-wise on the face of this good Earth. The sales and pricing logic are clearly in place to drive busy consumers toward legitimately-provided content; but when the acknowledged wizard of the burgeoning direct-media market cannot successfully deliver useful content to an informed and technically-ept consumer, piracy can only be regarded as a public duty in defense of family values, democracy, and the marketplace. Of course, saying so in a public forum is a statutory violation of acts lately passed with the intent of making it illegal to provide support for terrorists, so make of my speech what you will.

Thank you, and good night.

League of Intoxicated Gentlemen January 2007 Ballard Meeting, courtesy Manuel.

I was EXTREMELY locquacious Friday night. As Manuel took this pic, I was channelling the Deadwood character E. B. Farnham for reasons absolutely unknown to myself even at he time. By the end of my disquisition, I even had William Henderson's unmistakable speech pattern and accent down.

Also, for whatever reason, the fezzes were incredible chick magnets, as attested to by the magic of photography. As all Brethren in attendance that night are spoken for with the exception of our youngest member, we spent a great deal of the evening genteelly directing the attention of the ladies toward him.

Additional fantastickall events unveiled themselves in the course of the evening. I enthusiastically narrated of a series of absurdly improbable events, including but not limited to the tale of the Hurlothrumbo, how a celebrated Capitol Hill mansion was built on a turn of the century pyramid scheme before playing host to some sort of pre-new-age White Russian crackpottery, and , I think, something else (oh yes, it was the tale of the Oddfellows bustout a decade ago in my beloved Capitol Hill). The spontaneous invention of a fezzification ritual which explains why our fezzes are betassled also occurred. We were witness to the narration of a member's single-handed campaign to combat the scourge of pr0nography, a campaign that engendered no mean quantity of incredulity. Most importantly, we obtained valuable fez wisdom in the form of the crucial information shared with us by a fellow-denizen of The Smoke Shop that our fezzes were, that night, “just like the Admiral's panties.” Said ethanol philosopher then quite refused to elaborate the source and meaning of the remark, but as the Smoke Shop is the final remaining fisherman's bar in Oulde Ballard, there's a real probability that the remark encapsulates some hidden or forbidden seaman's lore.

Additionally, we resolved to investigate the doins of E Clampus Vitus at first hand.

This blog has now officially entered post-apartment-dwelling life. Viv and I are welcoming Rocky, a 10-month old border-collie mix, into his new home with us tonight. Poupou offers some helpful links.

Rocky was the very spirit of good behavior last night as we hosted Chris, Sabrina, and Cooper as the boys narrated their Antarctic adventure over the Christmas holidays. A 10-month old dog that barely makes a sound! What a wonder.

Learning about the trip was wonderful as well, as both gents produced compelling imagery. A bonus thrill was the ease with which we were able to route their computers into our household LAN and thence upstream to the projector and A/V amplification center. Given Chris, Coops, and my own interest in technology I was reasonably concerned that the attempt to present pictures and movies digitally via the LCD projector would degenerate into hours of attempting to route around ill-documented and competing media asset standards. But NO! It was really quite smooth and effortless, all things considered.

We were so enjoying our direct conversation with our guests that we failed to rise from table until nearly 11:00pm, and the slide show ran far into the wee hours of the night as a consequence.

Said guests were slated to spend the day pursuing the fabled snow goose in the environs of the lovely Skagit river valley. As today was a stunningly clear day with temperatures in the low fifties, I am sorry that it was the better part of prudence and canine management responsibilities to decline their kind offer to participate in the birding.

Driving up Aurora at 6:00 tonight we pulled off just before crossing the high bridge to gape at the massive and mysterious firework show flaring over Lake Union and cracking booms into the night sky. It was quite a show; wonder what the heck it was for?

As the prez describes his enemies I have to remark that his delineation of an implacable enemy of liberty, driven by a narrow and inflexible ideology which celebrates the sacrifice of humanitarian value in the pursuit of an hegemonic dominance under the banner of a fundamentalist creed, I hearken to what appears to me a thoughtful self-portrait of the worldview that hears these words and agrees with the president.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I swear I just heard that incompetent fuckwit propose to solve the US health care crisis by making employer-provided health-care insurance into a FUCKING TAXABLE INCOME ASSET!

Visor: “A Quake-style drop-down Terminal.”

Viv and I went to see Cuaron's Children of Men last night, and I fervently insist most of you, save those in New Orleans, rush forth to see it. I don't have anything detailed to add to the positive critical opinion already made copiously available, save noting that I very much enjoyed the subtle use of editing and slapstick use of script elements to add resonant depth to the tale.

The flick adapts the satisfying dystopian visual language I first encountered in Spanish and European graphic novels of the 1980s to the screen with visceral urgency. Because of my familiarity with the visual sources, I had the distinctly pleasant experience of feeling nostalgia as I watched this blackly humorous riff on dystopian apocalyptic satire.

I found the film hilarious, laughing repeatedly in sequences that had the audience hushed and leading my wife to occasionally smack me gently. I should note that I did not find it funny in the manner of a terrible and misguided film; rather, I have more or less seen the world the film depicts as the only likely outcome of Western civilization, and happily, I have been mostly incorrect for the past forty years.

Which brings me to my assertion that denizens of the Crescent City may wish to avoid the film at present. The film depicts a profoundly, dysfunctionally stratified society marked by incomprehensible violence and gunpoint segregation. It does so with virtuoso set design and cinematography. I was not counting cuts, but an extended gunfight sequence is only distinguishable from Sarajevan or Beiruti or Fallujan documentary footage by virtue of the length of time the cameraman appears to avoid being shot and the regrettably-overused-in-this-decade desaturated color palette.

The last thing my New Orleanian friends need at this time is to cogitate on the intersection of filmmaking and gunplay in a postapocalyptic urban setting. The rest of you, get a ticket and take the entertaining warnings provided by this wild-eyed old hippy of a film to heart.

Somehow Bart's feed fell off my feedreader and when I dug up b.rox.com this evening I was horrified by what I read. My deepest sympathies to everyone affected by this.

I am so digging king-fm's broadcast of Alan Hovaness' Guitar Concerto, Op.325 (performers currently unknown by me). I'm just starting a non-fiction bio about the American West, circa 1840-1880 and the contrast between the solo guitar and the lush symphonic passages, and the loose timing of the solo parts contrasting with the slightly serialist framework of the orchestra make it an evocative soundtrack.

That, and my sweet kitty's quiet, happy snoring.

(Update - I may very well have linked to the performance I just heard as the recording cited featured the concerto and additionally the composer's Symphony No. 60, as this Naxos release does.)

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Diabetes - interesting blog by a computer guy who has type 1 diabetes and has brought technophilic gadgetrism to his experience of the disease. I'm interested to see he's using a continuous meter/pump combination; I had thought continuous meters were still a few years out.