An Open Letter to David Ayer about "Suicide Squad"

David Ayers, I loved Suicide Squad.  Loved, loved, loved it, oh my yes I loved that movie!  Best one of all time, better than Iron Man 1, better than the Avengers, better than Winter Soldier, better than Deadpool (though that's a close one) and you didn't even have an R rating to play to.

But I understand you are feeling unsure about the movie.

The first thing that hit me about it was the perfectly placed, in your face song selections.  Good music selection can make a movie so much more emotionally involving.  I know I'm reacting to the movie, though, not just the music, because if I go listen to those songs by themselves, without the visuals, they are so much less than I thought they would be.  A song might be pretty good on it's own, but when perfectly placed, the visuals and the music are a synergy and far more than either one alone.  And Suicide Squad does this almost perfectly, all the way through.  "Heathens" on the end credits.  K7 and Harley's elevator ride; hilarious!  "The House of the Rising Sun" as we enter Belle Reve.  Awesome!

The filming was wonderful.  The colors, the lights!  All intensely beautiful from the oily rainbow colors on the opening "R" right down to the psychedelic end credits.  Can't imagine better.  Oh my.

The actors!  You can't go wrong with Will Smith and Margot Robbie, but lord, Viola Davis and Jared Leto, Joel Kinnaman and Ike Barinholtz!  And they all got useful parts.  They all work together flawlessly, but the most interesting part to me was that characters that weren't front and center still had strong personalities, like the female guard in Belle Reve, pulling some shade on Captain Boomerang.  It's all wonderful.

The editing!  Down to the bone, man!  So perfect it blew my mind!

So, what was the problem?  Bad reviews?  I'll give you my review, I saw it 8 times in the theater, then bought the blu-ray, and talked it up to my friends like crazy.  But most of them "don't like comic book movies".  Neither do movie critics.

But we loved it.  And we paid soooo much money to show how impressed we were.  Frankly, man, I think that should be enough.  We PAID you.   We don't do that for crap.  Keep going, and take us to new heights, and we will PAY you!  Best we can do man.  Sorry if it's not enough.

Hugh

Project Fi, not for me

I really wanted to use Project Fi.  I'll just admit it: I wanted it to work because it's Google and it's different!  And it is both those things, but that was not quite enough reason to stay with it.

I signed up for Fi about a month ago, and bought a nicely cheap Nexus 5x when they were selling them for $200 with sign up.  I think that promotion is over now; however, I got to keep the phone when I cancelled, and I do like the phone a lot.

The real issue is that I'm not doing a lot of international travel right now, and I have the world's cheapest (as far as I know) plan for (non-family) big-data users, T-Mobile's $30/mo "Walmart" plan*, which only provides 100 minutes of talk but 5 GB of data over LTE/4G (after which you are capped at 3G speeds).  T-Mobile's LTE coverage in the Bay area is fine for me, and I hardly ever need to talk to anyone when WiFi isn't available.   It turns out I use most of that 5 GB every month, which would have given me a monthly bill over twice as high using Fi.

If I was doing a lot of international travel, I might change my mind.  I used T-Mobile's Simple plan when I last went to New Zealand ($70/mo) and it more or less worked in most places, but the data rate cap was sooo slow.  I would have been better off buying a local SIM (and pointing my Google Voice number at it!).  Project Fi uses a 256kbps data rate cap internationally which, although also pretty slow, would have been a big step up!

Generally, I was a little disappointed that Fi seemed to use Sprint a lot more than I expected; given that my T-Mobile coverage is generally good I was expecting to use that more than I did.  And Fi's vaunted high-quality WiFi coverage didn't seem to add much to my experience.

Still, it was kind of cool, and I got a cheap 5x out of the experience.  And if my wife starts dragging me to international destinations in the future, I'll give some thought to trying it again.


* The "Walmart" plan is available at Walmart or online at T-Mobile, but nowhere else.

systemd

I have to admit, I've been kind of pissed for a while about RedHat going with systemd as a replacement for init.  I spent a lot of time becoming fluent with init, and all of that is now defunct on the platform I work with the most.

I've spent some time with systemd now, though, and I have changed my mind.  systemd has some really strong advantages over init:

1. The files are so much simpler!  systemd has the most obvious init functions, like stop, restart, status built-in, so you don't have to come up with shell scripts to do them; you only really have to tell systemd where your binary is and what it should be called.  100+ lines of BASH or SH code can be distilled down to about 7 lines of systemd.

2. It's much safer.  Once again, the files are not scripts, they are simply metadata.  It would be difficult to make systemd do something weird and unsafe.

3. init is still supported, mostly.  Not a bad feature!

So, check me off as a reasonably happy systemd user.

More astrophotography ...

Here's a picture I took of Jupiter with the Samyang 800mm lens.  It is about 100% cropped.  You can see a little color and (just barely) you can see a couple of dark bands running almost vertically.

Very difficult to photograph with the Samyang, but it's still a lot of fun to try!

And here's a pic of Saturn; note the space between the rings and the planet!

Astrophotography with Sony a6000

I'm dipping into doing some astrophotography with my Sony a6000, the replacement for the Sony NEX-7 mirrorless.  It works pretty well; my location isn't great (SF Bay Area), but my camera is, arguably, as good as it gets for an APS-C camera (and it's much less expensive than similar DSLR cameras).  It has very good high ISO performance.

I also bought, kind of on a whim, a Samyang 800 mm lens (plus 2X "barlowe" lens, ~$200 for both!).  The lens is very simple, there are no electronics, so focus is a bit of a challenge with it, and it's not exactly a high-quality lens.  But it works.

Here's an example; a shot of the moon, 2X "barlowe" lens (so 1600 mm equivalent), NO cropping, ISO 3200 and slight contrast enhancement.

The Sony has the option to zoom in while framing and focusing the shot, and as long as your camera is very stationary, it works pretty well.  I've got a fairly heavy-duty tripod, but I wish it was even heavier; the camera still shakes quite a bit while I'm focusing.  I've assigned the electronic zoom to one of the buttons on the camera, and it's very easy to fire it while I'm setting up for the shot.

I always use shutter-priority mode.

I am looking forward to trying it on Jupiter and Saturn.  In a couple of weeks I will try this at Yosemite.  Stay tuned.

dreams

I once dreamed an entire song about a woman I had recently moved in with.  The song was very dark in content; the woman had led a terrible life and we had bonded over music, so this seemed like a very proper response to our relationship.

Are dreams a way to store our feelings in memory, using nonverbal symbols?

It might also be the opposite, that is, you are "storing" a feeling and your brain is building a visual (and in this case, auditory) story around the feeling.  That's kind of art in a nutshell, isn't it?

Using NIS/ypbind with Linuxmint 13 (and probably Ubuntu 13)

I finally got it working, more or less.  I eventually put restart directives for both the ypbind and autofs processes in /etc/rc.local.  It works, as long as I wait about a minute after the machine boots up before trying to log in.  I don't know why it has to be kluged like this; bug reports for problems like this are opened for EVERY Ubuntu release, and no one ever feels any need to fix it.  At least, with Fedora/RHEL, I can be assured that NIS will work out of the box.

Jobs

I'm so, so disappointed by "Jobs". It had nothing in it that I wanted to know about; nothing about the visit to Xerox PARC, nothing about his spiritual journeys, nothing about NeXT. Going by the movie, Jobs was nothing but an ungrateful SOB with no talents and nothing interesting in his life. I thought Kutcher did a fine job with the part, so to speak, but surely there was enough to Steve Jobs' existence to make a movie that was worth seeing other than as an hour and a half impression of him by Ashton Kutcher.

All right, I'm a bit of a fanboi, but you know, there was no other personal computer that made your room a little prettier, a little more interesting, just by being in it. I don't think it's overstating it to say that Jobs played a major part in making computers into household appliances. I was getting ready to enter the world of law in 1989; instead, because my boss had several Macintoshes around the office, I'm in tech instead. And now, I'm taking an iPad to band rehearsals and plugging my guitar into it, and then plugging a keyboard into it. This movie barely gives us a hint as to the good things that he was responsible for. Why?

McCartney at Outside Lands

My God, three hours of McCartney ... he sang lead on every song, and simply kicked ass for three hours straight. He seemed genuinely excited to be in San Francisco (well, who wouldn't be?). The band rocked like mad. OK, the whole show was rocking, but ... after 2 and 1/2 hours, he played the last song and left the stage. You'd think he'd be a little tired, but no, he comes back and does fucking Helter Skelter. And wrecked it. Later he came back for the 2nd encore, and it was the the medley from Abbey Road, starting at "Golden Slumbers". That was just a deeply satisfying show, from beginning to end.

Getting compiz to work on Linuxmint 15

Woo boy, this is getting more and more difficult.  Compiz and especially comizconfig seem to be so spotty right now.

I installed all the compiz packages, but compizconfig would explode whenever I enabled anything until I installed dconf-tools as well.  Now, I can enable things; I have my beloved "Opacity, Brightness and Saturation" working (which means I can make windows transparent with a key-click) and "wobbly windows" (which always amuses me).  However, if I then close compizconfig and open it again I lose all those settings.  It's better than compiz just crashing, but annoying anyway.

I have yet to get the cube working, though.  Working on it ...

Analog versus Digital Multi-track Recording

I have quite a few musician friends who say they like the sound of analog recording better than digital.  Well, yeah, and there's a reason for that, but the price you pay for it is not worth it, in my opinion.

Yes, of course you can hear the difference between digital and analog.  The point to digital is that it doesn't sound like anything; it's supposed to sound exactly like what you put into it, no more, no less.  (how close it gets to that is a different, complicated question, but I think it is not really debatable that analog might be MORE "accurate" than digital).  Whereas, using analog THESE days (when something better is available ;) ) is actually because analog doesn't sound transparent, and doesn't sound like what you put in.  It's the equivalent of turning an amplifier up until it distorts at bit.  Yeah, you might like the sound, but it's distorted just the same.  And once it is distorted, you can't un-distort it.

Also, keep in mind that, unless you are going to listen to your recording on a 90 min cassette or on your old turntable, you are going to be listening to "digital" anyway, or at least a hybrid of analog on backend and digital on the frontend, whether you listen to an mp3, to a CD, or stream a song online.

I contend that it is quite possible, these days, to make a digital recording that sounds "warm" in the way that an analog recording sounds.  Hell, you can make them sound "warm" in any way you like!  Want the "warmth" of a Neve recording desk and an Otari multi-track?  Or maybe you'd prefer SSL and Tascam?  There must be plugins for this, but in any case, it can be done.

And digital has so many other advantages:

   * digital is much cheaper, in every way
   * quick, easy and safe cut and paste of songs.
   * non-destructive post-mixing eq and other manipulation
   * did I say cheaper?  You replace the thousands of dollars in buying and maintaining a recording tape deck and a desk with a few hundred dollars in an analog to digital converter.  You also save the space.
   * your digital recording may last forever, with proper backups.
   * copies of digital sound files are identical to the original.  copies of analog masters are yet another generation removed from the pristine quality of the original.
   * analog recordings degrade EVERY time you play them.  Imagine your turntable needle being pulled through the soft, hot vinyl of a record, or a vinyl tape been pulled over a magenetic tape recorder head, over and over again.  Digital recordings are not degraded by playing them.
   * analog recordings must generally be played back on the same type of machine that created them.  You are out of luck if your tape machine format is no longer manufactured.  Whereas digital data is just bits; converting that data to a new format is just a matter of writing a program to do it.
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The Next Right Wing Anti-Global Warming Meme

The new right wing anti-global warming meme will be (my prediction): it's too late.  That even if we stop with the massive man-made CO2 emissions completely, right now, global temperature will still continue to rise and we will reach many of the "drop dead" temperatures that will lose us many low-lying cities and communities (and sometimes whole countries), and which will cause mass extinctions of vulnerable animal species, etc.

Here's the thing: it's not true.  Technologies exist, right now, to pull unwanted CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it where it can't hurt anything.  But all such technologies will work much better and do less of their own kinds of damage IF they are not competing with increasing CO2 at the same time.  When the time comes, when we are not increasing atmospheric CO2, we WILL be able to clean the current over-enriched CO2 out of the atmosphere.

WE CAN FIX THIS.

AS LONG AS WE DON'T GIVE UP.  AS LONG AS WE DON'T ALLOW VESTED ENERGY INTERESTS TO CONTROL THE DEBATE.

If you believe in God, you must believe in a Woman's Right to Choose

Do you believe in God?  God put women in charge of their babies, right from conception until birth (and, arguably, afterwards; try taking a woman's baby away from her!).  If a woman wants to kill her baby she can do it, even if it comes down to suicide and both dying, it's still all in her hands.  If you believe in God and the perfection of "his" designs, then you have to believe that women are in charge of the zygotes, fetuses and babies, because God put them INSIDE of her.  That's all there is to it.

Google Earth 7.x on 64-bit Fedora 18

I finally got Google Earth 7.0 Free to work decently in Fedora 18 running on my Mac, running the proprietary catalyst drivers


kmod-catalyst-13.1-2.fc18.4.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-13.1-1.fc18.x86_64

The error was:


libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
libGL error: Try again with LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose for more details.


Info:

1. Despite the fact that I installed the 64-bit version of the Google Earth RPM, it's actually 32-bit and needs 32 bit OpenGL drivers
2. With the proprietary ATi drivers installed, the default libGL.so library (/usr/lib/libGL.so.1) is incompatible with the display, yet this seems to be what GE is trying to use.
3. GE will use anything in it's own directory FIRST, evidently
   /opt/google/earth/free

So, I ended up copying /usr/lib/fglrx/fglrx-libGL.so.1.2 to /opt/google/earth/free, and made symlinks to it as libGL..so.1.2, libGL.so.1 and libGL.so in the same directory.  Now it works.

I really, really wish that Google would get their shit together with the 64-bit versions of Google Earth.  I'm running fast, clean 3D graphics on this workstation every day, and no other programs ever seem to have problems like this.  Why in god's name does it have to be so picky about where everything is located, and, well, who runs 32-bit anymore?

Bandaids

When washing your hands, there is no way to avoid soaking the bandaid on your finger, so don't try. I think that's a lesson for life.

Rush Limbaugh's Job

Rush Limbaugh's job is to convince ignorant xenophobes that the world and it's browner people is complicated and scary not because they themselves are cowards, with shrunken little hearts, too lazy to do their homework, but because of conspiracy; it is all someone else's fault.  It must be quite a relief.

Benghazi is the anti-Bin Laden

Ah, I finally get the right-wing freakout about Benghazi. Remember, it's always been the strategy of Karl Rove and his horrible acolytes that, if your foe is heroic in some way, you don't avoid that, you attack it, you reverse it. So war hero John Kerry becomes, through swift-boating, a coward.

President Obama got Osama Bin Laden. How do you counter that? Why, Obama must be responsible for Americans killed at an embassy in the Middle East! And lied about! It's perfect.

Bio science ... eww.

I really ought to get over my aversion to biological science. It's the next frontier; we're going to learn so much in the next century! The science of living things is so much more sophisticated than our current technology that ... we don't even know how much more sophisticated it is. That's how much more sophisticated it is.

 Still ... ewww.

The Romney Campaign (not)

I have to admit I have found Romney's campaign mystifying, but I think I have it sussed: he campaign's exactly like he does business, there's no strategy involved, it's all for short term gain.  Just like during his time at Bain Capital, where he changed the business model completely to leveraged buyouts because they paid off faster, so does he pivot to the sensibilities of whoever he's talking to at the time.  If he needs conservatives, as in the primaries, he's "severely conservative"; if he needs crossover voters, as in the debates, he's a moderate who sometimes even agrees with the President on policy.

I couldn't wrap my head around the long term game he was running, but that because he wasn't running one.  After all, the people he's really working for, the people who finance him and use their influence for him, already know exactly what he is; they found out in boardrooms, or on the golf course.  He doesn't need to convince them of anything, and he doesn't bother.

The ACA and political "cover"

(quoted from my own post on Facebook, regarding the political process at the beginning of the Obama presidency)

 The ACA is, in fact, a good example of the whole process. No one, not even conservative Republicans, believe that the American health system is in good shape. Even Republicans that believe that our health system is "the best in the world" (it's not) know, if they bother to read the projections, that the system is not sustainable in the long run. Almost no one believes it shouldn't change. So, Obama and the Democrats took a CONSERVATIVE healthcare insurance proposal (Mitt Romney's own, in fact, which was originally a Heritage Foundation counter proposal to the Clinton's health care proposals) which was actually written to make necessary changes while avoiding even a whiff of "socialism", and tried to get bipartisan support for it. The Republicans would have none of it, even though guys like Romney and Bill O'Reilly now say that much of it will need to be re-implemented after it is repealed (evidently the main problem with it is that it is Obama's). So, the Democrats in the Senate passed it, and then the House used that passage to pass it themselves with a bit of budget trickery, and the Democrats and the President took complete responsibility for it, despite the incredible political danger of it, because it HAD to be done. And now, we will cover a much larger group of people, and save a lot of money in the long run, in SPITE of the Republicans, but Obama might lose the election largely because of the ACA (which people hate, until you describe the things it actually does for them, and they find that they like all those things).

 Do you see now why Obama (and Reid and Pelosi) didn't just try ram a lot of stuff through when they had the votes? But now we know they should have, because the Republicans put politics above what is good for the country, to an extreme never seen before. about a minute ago · Like

Iran and Us; kiss and make up pt. 1

All: Iran has no nuclear bomb and isn't working on one , according to both US and ISRAELI intelligence. Also, historically, Iran doesn't start wars. We are mad at them for the hostage crisis, which was a reaction to our deposing of their democratically elected leader, and saddling them with a US supported dictator fOR 3 DECADES. For God’s sake use your heads.

Iran and the US; kiss and make up, pt. 2

I'm going to go farther out on my Iran versus US limb: if the United States made peace with Iran (and we should, we're the ones that deposed their elected government and both made them an enemy and set back their democracy by at least six decades) then Israel would probably, if not gain a friend, at least lose a large and powerful enemy in the Near East. Iran doesn't care about Palestine; Iranians don't particularly care for Arabs. The Iranians are enemies of Israel because Israel is OUR friend. It's absolutely insane to pressuring Iran for the sake of Israel; Israel would be much better off if we left Iran the hell ALONE.

Why do Conservatives Hate Social Security?

Republicans and conservatives hate Social Security because of the word "Social".
"Social", to them, means Socialism. This is why some of the more disingenuous on the right tend to compare Liberalism with Nazism, simply because the Nazis used the word "Socialist" in their party name. And "Socialism" means "Communism", in their minds. The Republicans are literally still fighting the Cold War. They're like the Japanese soldiers from WWII who were never told about the end of the war and kept fighting decades later. And they believe that everyone except their own leaders are secretly commies themselves, but in reality their leaders are capitalists, and it's in their financial best interests to keep the "war" going, so they never tell their troops to stand down.
This is why the George W. Bush administration was taken by surprise on 9/11; they were still only concerned about the "Rooskis"! Condoleeza Rice was supposed to make a report on the defense of the United States on 9/12. She never got to make it, obviously, but the content of that report has never been released. Those who have seen it, though, tell us that there was nothing about terrorism in it; it was all about Russia as a nuclear power and Star Wars.
But let's be fair to Condi; she wasn't quite as ignorant as all that; she'd hedged her bet. After the Al Queda-coordinated bombings at our embassies in Africa Clinton had decided to destroy Al-Queda. He asked Richard Clarke to come up with the plan for this. The plan was ready to go just before Clinton left office, but rather than hand Bush a war they decided to give the plan to the Bush administration and let them handle it. Rice was impressed with the plan, and with Clarke, and kept him on the new administration and slowly, very slowly, went over the plan and moved it up the ladder towards the President's signature. After 9 months, the plan had finally been approved by the last group before the President would see it; that was on September 4, already far too late to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
Do you remember Condi Rice ever telling us about the Al Queda threat? Neither do I.

The 10th Floor

I decided to go to college at the last minute, and went to Oakland University in Michigan because they had a “commercial” music program, which I figured would be as close to rock and roll as college could get, and because they offered a scholarship. Since it so late in the season, most of the dormitories were full. The only rooms available were in a 10 floor building. I asked for the 10th floor, because I always want to be on the top, and because “shit rolls downhill” as they say. What I didn’t know was that the 10th floor was an unofficial athletic special interest floor, which had been 90% booked by athletes. The booker didn’t know that either. So, I roomed with Pete, on the 10th floor, surrounded by 6 foot plus, 200 plus pound guys; I was a little intimidated, but the guys were all pretty nice to me. The 9th and 8th floors were all women; it was explained to me that they were “athlete” special interest floors, the 8 floor being women who didn’t have the seniority of those on the 9th. They were also very nice to me, if a little taken aback by my presence on the 10th. On my second day up there my roommate told me I should get involved in some of the 10th floor activities. That night we went through one of the yearly rituals, this one to introduce ourselves to the ladies on the lower floors. This consisted of stripping down to our underpants, pulling our undies up into our butt cracks, and then going from door to door on the lower floors until the ladies came out and said hi. Kind of exciting, really.

Let's Improvise Some Guitar!

Shall we improvise some guitar?

The bass player is playing a low G; what shall we play? We could play a D; that would leave the third undefined, and the listeners' minds would fill in the blanks with whatever they feel right now. Or we could play an F; down low or up high it would create a tension, suggest moving to a comfortable C along a bluesy highway.

We could play a B flat, take it minor, make it a little sad. Or a B natural, move it to a positive feeling, if that's called for. Or an A; the tempered A is a little out of tune to the natural A, but it's still clear enough to suggest harmonic movement. Or an A flat, which would create an almost unbearable tension, and suggest an incompetent punk or a masochistic free jazzer.

But let's keep it simple, and also play a G. Reinforce the bass note, up an octave or two. The note becomes more powerful; perhaps we're rocking out a bit. We could play the open G string: the lowest of the unwound strings, it has the most complex audible harmonics, and might suggest a folky flavor. It sounds almost comical compared to the other open strings. Or we could play the G on the fifth fret on the D string: it's wound, and has a very different sound than the open string, darker, blending better. Or even the G on the A string at the 10th fret; towards the middle of the string, it is full of odd harmonics, and emphatically more bassy, taking us towards a jazzy feel. Or we couFOR GODS SAKE SOMEONE HAND ME A COWBELL!

Don't Bother

I'll bet you don't care about my chronic ambivalence.

Rush versus Women

I've been seeing a lot of right wing chatter comparing Rush Limbaugh's attack on Sandra Fluke to, for example, Bill Maher calling Sarah Palin a "twat".

No, it's not the same thing at all.  You can't take Maher's statement and infer that Maher thinks all women are "twats".  But Rush wasn't talking about Sandra Fluke, really; he was talking about all women who use contraception.  He was calling all of them "sluts".  He doesn't understand how contraception works, and in his opinion, if those women would just keep their legs closed, they wouldn't need someone else's money for their contraception.  It's one of the most heinous anti-woman statements I've ever heard in public media.

Libertarianism, Amen

The thing that bothers me most about Randites, and Libertarians in general, is that they state some things that really seem to be truths, about personal responsibility, the importance of creativity, that the government that governs best governs least, etc. And then they ruin it by making a religion out of it.

 To paraphrase Ambassador Spock in Star Trek VI, these things are the beginning of wisdom, not the end. The only thing that really differentiates us from other animals is a feeling of responsibility for the greater good; if we don't have that, we are monkeys, at best.

 (Actually, the thing that bothers me most about Ayn Rand is that she was a sociopath. A charismatic one, sure, but still just a human being damaged by her upbringing. Instead of trying to fix herself, she created a religion out of her damaged personality. Which is probably not that uncommon, really.)

The Beginning of My Atheism

(This is not an anti-religious rant. It's just what I consider a funny story). I clearly remember where my atheism started. I was about 8, and sitting in church with my mother (for some reason I was in the big people's church and not in Sunday school, as usual). I was thinking that I knew I couldn't always control my thoughts and that they would go places that weren't appropriate for church. And I knew that God knew everything and could do anything he wanted to, and so I was frightened; what if I thought something really bad that would make God mad? And it occurred to me, the ONE thought I must never think was (remember I was 8): "Poopy Jesus". And started thinking it over and over again. At which point I started looking around wildly wondering how many people knew the horrible thing I had just thought and whether lightning would come all the way down from the sky for me, or if it would start just below the ceiling and therefore not set fire to the church which was, after all, God's house.

The Silliness of the "Double Taxation" Argument

Economic conservatives like to argue that capital gains, that is, income from investments, shouldn't be taxed because it amounts to "double taxation", that is, the person with the investments worked to earn that money, and it was taxed when he received it. The argument is baloney. Let's say you've saved a chunk of money, say $100,000, and now have that money invested in an interest-bearing account (this analogy also works for investments in stocks, etc). You are, indeed, taxed again, but only on any PROFITS that you have made from that investment. In other words, you are not taxed again on that initial $100,000, and in fact if you don't make any more money from it you won't be taxed on it. You are only taxed on any PROFITS you make off of the investment; this is self-evidently money that you have never had before; it is NEW money to you. So it makes no sense at all to say that you are being doubly-taxed on income from investments.

Me and Steve Jobs

No, I never met the man, but like so many of us he changed my life, several times in fact.

I've always been an Apple user (with a timeout in the mid-80s when the Mac became the Mac II and I couldn't come close to affording it, going with a Commodore Amiga instead).

True stories: 1) in the very late 70s I heard and fell in love with the Fairlight sampling synthesizer, as used on records (records!) by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. But I couldn't afford a $30,000 Australian computer/keyboard. The closest I could get was a keyboard/computer card combo for the Apple II called the Alpha Syntauri. It was a strange and clumsy system, and it didn't sound that good (it was 8-bit and sample length was limited to about 1 second), but it taught me so much about computers and sound. In fact, it forced me to learn about both in the GEEKIEST WAY POSSIBLE, and had me doing things like walking around making recordings of strange noises and then isolating single waveforms from a short samples, or building sounds additively by combining sine or more complex waves. And most of the time I'd just get something that sounded like a short in my audio cable. Fourier transforms anyone? Perhaps you'd like to play with a light-pen?

But ... having this machine allowed me to get my very first full time paying job in music, when I was hired to play keyboards(!) in Michigan's premier 60s cover band (my boss, Steve King, being almost as tech-obsessed as I was). And that job gave me the experience and $$ to record my first album. The rest is history (however obscure, it still happened in the past).

2) In the late 80s I realized I needed my nights free to work on and perform my own music, so I quit my cover band and pursued the profession of my fathers, that is, being a lawyer. But I thought I'd try such a seemingly-boring profession out before committing, so I got a paralegal certificate (this was when paralegals were a very new thing) and got a job as a legel secretary in a firm in Birmingham, Michigan. We were a group of legal secs that contracted work for various area lawyers. We used PCs running DOS; Windows 3.0 had just come out and I was very excited, I could actually fool programs like WordPerfect into running in a multitasking, graphical environment. But anyway ... I happened to impress one of the lawyers we did work for, and he was ramping up his Workers Comp practice and needed someone to work full time. So I went to work for Vern Leopold. Vern liked his computers (although he knew little about them) and decided to get the best, so he bought Macintoshes. He is still the only lawyer I've ever seen who maintained a Mac-based office. And those things were beautiful, elegant machines. I spent hours playing with the colors (up to 60K!) and writing form generation programs using Filemaker Pro. I finally realized that working with these wonderful machines was going to be my career, and since 1994 I've only done computer work.

So as you can see, without the work and integrity of Steve Jobs my life would have gone in a very different direction, at least twice. Tonight, I spent a couple of hours recording original music on my current Macbook Pro using the most elegant hardware and OS available, MacOSX, and now I'm writing this blog post on that machine.

Goodbye Steve. All my respect and admiration are yours, forever.

Hugh

Presidents and TV

I'm getting kinda tired of people complaining that Presidents have to be TV stars. Of course they have to be TV stars; every Presidential candidate must work well on the media of the day. Lincoln made good "stump" speeches; that's how candidates connected to the greatest number of people in his day. FDR, Truman and Eisenhower were all great on the radio.

Let's look backwards a bit at people's ability to talk on TV: Obama = great; GW Bush = not great (but better than Kerry or Gore); Clinton = very good; GHW Bush = better than Dukakis, not as nearly as good as Clinton; Reagan = great; Jimmy Carter = better than Ford ; Nixon = started out terrible on TV, hired experts and got MUCH BETTER. Are we seeing a pattern here? The ability to connect to people on TV is extremely important, and before the Democrats nominate another Kerry or Gore or Dukakis, they really need to keep this in mind.

It'll be interesting to see who can capitalize on Internet exposure in the future, although Obama does that quite well too.

Colin Powell

I wonder why Colin Powell never ran for President? I'll bet the Bush administration left a really bad taste in his mouth. And I mean that metaphor in the meanest possible sense ...

Blown

Very interesting article about quantum effects on the macro level in the June Scientific American. Some of the possibilities are very interesting: bird migration might be a quantum effect; photosynthesis might achieve it's near perfect efficiency due to quantum entanglement. Most interesting: gravity itself might not be a "force" in the sense that electromagnetism and the strong force are, but might be an emergent property of quantum mechanics at the macro (universe) level.

A mind is never happier than when it's blown.

Beautiful evening in Mérida

It's just lovely in Mérida tonight. It was scorching hot and humid most of the day. El and I took a bus tour around the city, and got off the bus at the anthropology museum. We walked back from there, after which I retired to the mini-pool. El then went for another long walk to the grocery store (in 100+ degree weather). This completely wiped her out and she fell dead asleep at 9 PM, leaving me to enjoy the cool night breezes as I type this note out on the veranda. I think it's a veranda. Anyway, it reminds me of those evenings after Michigan summer days; warm and pleasantly humid. I think our hominid ancestors developed in weather like this. It just feels.... Comfortable. And right.https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151256785593630&set=a.10151256785568630.484122.529188629&type=3&src=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-snc6%2F665283_10151256785593630_1367561125_o.jpg&smallsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fsphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fhphotos-snc6%2F259982_10151256785593630_1367561125_n.jpg&size=2048%2C464

Happy Birthday to Me!

You know, I was planning to feel kind of bad about being 50, but I'm still mobile, I'm losing weight, I'm married to a hot, smart lady 10 years younger than I am (and I love all my in-laws), I've made over 50K a year since 1997, I've made 3 decent pop albums all by myself and been involved in at least 3 more with friends, my condo has a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, I'm a MENSA member, I have at least 9 children, and I'm throwing a grand party for myself, my wife, her brother and my sister in law today at which I will be dancing to a live 70s soul and funk band and wearing a kilt.

Nah.

An Open Letter to Al Gore regarding Global Warming

Mr. Vice President:

First off, I'd like to thank you for all your selfless efforts to deal with climate change issues. (I'd also like to personally thank you for your early support of the Internet; I think it will go down as the most important thing that happened in the 20th Century).

That said ...

I understand from reading the recent book Super Freakonomics that, when asked what you thought about ideas from scientists about who want to take positive action against global warming (such as ideas from Nathan Myrvold's think tank about harnessing sulphur pollution from coal burning power plants and putting it into the upper atmosphere) you reacted with an unequivocal "no", based entirely on your extreme discomfort at the thought of putting more "pollutants" into the atmosphere.

Mr. Vice President, in my opinion, you cannot both believe that global warming is the most important problem facing the planet AND dismiss scientific methods of dealing with it offhand like that. If global warming is a problem (and I know it is) and if you think it is affecting us even now (and it is) then you must be open to any possible method of dealing with it. Pollution reduction and efficiency in power generation are very important, and in the long run they almost certainly must be our best defense against global warming, but any number of things may happen to prevent action on them from being successful in the short term, and in fact, they already are unsuccessful in the sort term. Ask the polar bears.

If you and your organizations are going to be the voice of reason (and not just the voice of the "Greens"), then you must deal with the situation as it is ... we could, with (relatively) very small amounts of money and time, start to deal with global warming in any number of ways with science; using these methods might very well give us the time to do the right thing in the long run without losing too much more precious wildlife and real estate. Are you the voice of reason, Mr. Vice President? Or are you only the voice of one very long and expensive (and possibly politically undoable) method of dealing with the problem?

Sorry to bring out the cliches yet again, but the polar bears need our help now, not 20 years from now. The low-lying islands in the Pacific need help now. Cities (especially poor ones) on the oceans need help NOW. Mr. Vice President, please use your mind and not just your emotions, and put some real thought into this. We have scientifiic methods to deal with this problem RIGHT NOW; can we afford to ignore them through simple distaste?

Hugh Caley
Albany, CA

A translation of George Harrison's "Something"

I have a hot chick;
she shakes it and she's classy.

I don't need another lover at the moment
and she knows it.

Will it become more than lust? No idea.

Those slutty dresses are hot, guess we'll
stay together for a while.

Zombie Zen

Zombie Zen: "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him and eat him."

Mission of Honor

Mission of Honor by David Weber

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I'm a sucker for space opera, from E.E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" series, to the very weird "Night's Dawn Trilogy" series by Peter F. Hamilton. David Weber's "Honorverse" books are very much in that vein; larger than life heroic characters, space battles, kind of "pulpy" writing. I don't think anyone does the space battle thing better. If you like this sort of thing then you will really enjoy this entire series; with 12 books it has provided me with a lot of pleasure.



View all my reviews

I heart my subwoofer

In the summer of 2010 I had some money in my pocket from the recent deceasing of a relative, and I thought, "My car stereo sounds like crap; I'm going to upgrade it". Keep in mind, please, that I am a musician and a sound engineer; I'm very sensitive to bad sound; I listen to my own music in the car all the time for editing purposes.

I thought the sound in my '95 Previa was hopeless, really, but I gave it a little thought and realized that my main problem was lack of bass. Any attempt to add any bass to the sound would immediately lead to speaker farts. And the sounds was harsh, without being crisp; there was no presence to the music at all.

I went to the car audio store, and of course they sold me a much more expensive subwoofer than I was planning on.

It sounds ... wonderful. And amazingly, it clears up all the sound problems I had. My stereo was already subwoofer capable, and once I added the subwoofer and removed the low frequencies from the regular speakers, the sound opened up in an incredible way. I have lots of bass, sure; I can now be as annoying as anyone driving down city streets. But the high end is 100% better as well; it sounds like the musicians are in the car with me. What a difference.

Transcendence

FINALLY, a couple of those moments with the choir where everyone knows the music well enough that we can become one with the director. In moments like that the ego dissolves, along with fear, and I get to transcend my normal limitations. No feeling like it. I don't even crave that feeling anymore, it happens so seldom, but it's such a pure joy when it does happen.

Better than iPhone

My Nexus One is better than an iPhone. Why?

1. Not locked into Apple
2. Easy to hack
3. Physically larger screen
4. I just upgraded it from 16 to 32 GB for music for $90
5. plays OGG and FLAC files
6. Strong integration with Google services (I use the damn services EVERYWHERE)
7. T-Mobile kicks AT&T's ass in download speeds.

I am, indeed, VERY happy with this phone.

An Idea for MSNBC

I've been kicking this idea around for a while: NBC should buy McClatchy, and McClatchy would become the source for the news that MSNBC broadcasts. That way, McClatchy gets TV money to keep going, and MSNBC doubles down on both good news reporting and on friendliness to liberal takes on news. Win/win; McClatchy, which must be suffering as all print news services do, gets to greatly expand their audience, while MSNBC gets to compete both with CNN as a news operation and with Fox as a partisan operation, since their news reporting would be better than both Fox and CNN AND have the strong liberal partisan flavor they are obviously going for.

American Politics

Does the state of American politics surprise and dismay you? How many really stupid people do you personally know? Now, think about this: their votes count just as much as yours.

Am I getting old?

When did it become unacceptable to reach behind a heavy and precariously balanced pile of expensive equipment on tiptoe to turn off a lamp? Am I getting old?

Bill O'Reilly is not Independent

Bill O'Reilly speaking with Jon Stewart. O'Reilly (seriously) brings out every republican talking point and cliche. Instructive.

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/our_picks/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/09/23/stewart_bill_oreilly

The Sony NEX-3 is NOT a DSLR

I recently purchased a Sony NEX-3 camera, which puts an APS-C sensor (the kind low and midrange DSLRs use) in a much smaller form factor. They do this by removing the complicated mirrors that allow DSLR users to look through the lens as they are framing the photo. To me, the DSLR mechanism is just too old-school; I don't want to see what the lens sees, I want to see what the SENSOR sees. I would have preferred an electronic viewfinder over the ubiquitous swiveling LCD screen, but as a space saving measure I guess that makes some sense. The LCD is very high resolution and quality, at any rate.

They also make the camera smaller by creating a brand new lens system, what Sony calls the "E" mount. It seems to work well; the NEX-3 is even smaller than comparable Four-Thirds cameras, whereas since the APS-C sensor is larger than the Four-Thirds sensor, physics would seem to require a larger camera and lens to handle it! Well done Sony!

For me the important things were:

1) new and exciting form factor, which they did
2) very high ISO, which they also did; I defy you to find another camera under $1000 (with a lens) that can make usable pictures at 12800 ISO!

The user interface is practically guaranteed to offend DSLR users ;) This is exemplified by the review in dpreview. The review is typically thorough, but they conclude at the end that the user interface "falls down", evidently because it takes a few button presses and dial rotations to do things like change the ISO setting. I think, though, that they pretty much review the camera from a DSLR user's perspective, whereas I think they should have done it from the perspective of the user that is moving up from a point and shoot camera (like me); I like the interface; if you are not all that familiar with the arcane incantations involved in taking good photos with a high-end camera the interface makes a lot of sense; it's like a Mac camera versus a UNIX camera ;)

However, I agree whole-heartedly that it makes little sense to have a camera that can take good pictures at down to at least 3200/6400 ISO and then not allow these ISO settings to be used in full auto mode. That definitely needs a fix, Sony!

Unfortunate Allies

Those Libertarians who may be thinking about supporting social conservatives just to get a conservative into office, you might want to give some thought to, I don't know, maybe ... Iran? Where intellectuals and business leaders allied with fundamentalists in order to oust the Shah? Worked out great for them, didn't it?

Music Synchronization, Android and MacOSX

I've got a problem; I've been a strong and relatively happy user of iTunes since it came out, since I'm also a strong and relatively happy user of MacOSX. Things have changed, though, especially since I no longer use an iPhone (for reasons stated in earlier posts) and my current phone, a "Google Phone" (Nexus One), running a 3rd party ROM, can play the free music file types OGG and FLAC. I no longer want to use proprietary music formats, such as Apple's lossless format ALAC or even MP3, so I need a method of music synchronization that can handle OGG and FLAC.

Now, I've been successfully using Salling Media Sync up to this point, as it seamlessly integrates Android phones and both iTunes and iPhoto. If you just want iTunes sync then I highly recommend it. It even handles OGG, since you can use plugins to get OGG to work in iTunes.

But for my current needs, I've tried:

1. Songbird
2. Banshee
3. Doubletwist

Banshee is quite a long way from usefulness on MacOSX; it's a Linux project being ported. Songbird is just not quite there yet; you have to edit raw XML to get it to handle FLAC for my phone at this point, and I just couldn't get it to work properly. And even without FLAC, it failed on an awful lot of files, even with the lastest MacOSX beta version.

Doubletwist seems to work. Basically an iTunes clone, it handles OGG on my phone natively and handles FLAC by converting it to OGG on the fly, which is not the perfect solution but it's certainly better than nothing. I've been told that it will soon have a feature to defeat all media conversion and just copy the files, which would be perfect for me. In the meantime, it's a little buggy and slow, but it's free and it works.

EVIL

Evil doers never think they are doing EVIL. The great ones, the ones that kill a lot of people, always think they are doing RIGHTEOUS GOOD. If you think you are doing RIGHTEOUS GOOD, that is the time that you must really question your motives and your actions.

The Stock Market

The stock market confuses and horrifies me. Not that it is terribly complicated, or I don't understand how to use it, but it really seems to have no good purpose. Or, actually, it has one purpose which no one seems to talk about ...

I mean, if I buy, say, a share of Apple stock, who profits from this? Apple stock doesn't pay dividends; I make no money from that share of stock unless I sell it again for a price higher than I bought it. And Apple makes no money from the purchase of this stock other than during the initial offering.

So, as far as I can tell (and counting only stock that doesn't pay dividends, which is the majority), what we're basically trying to do here is transfer money from the dumber stock investors to the smarter ones ...

Oh wait ... forget I said anything!

Drill baby, Drill!

Fun U.S. Government Facts

1. The Federal Income Tax as we now know it was implemented in 1913. Soon after we were involved in winning WW1.

2. FDR's social programs and corresponding governmental expansions were implemented in the early 1930's; soon after that we won WWII and became the most powerful country in the world.

3. The top marginal tax rate in the mid to late 50's was 91%; the current top rate is 36%, which will rise to 39% when G.W. Bush's tax cuts expire; soon after that Armageddon begins.

Hadrian's Wall

Very cool that they lit up Hadrian's Wall for the first time in 1600 years. However, isn't that also a big "Fuck you Scotland!" ?

The Problem with The Lord of the Rings

I love the movie trilogy, but sometimes I hate it.

I think the problem is that Peter Jackson, a great director, hired the best artists, the best craftsmen, the actors and musicians, and then got his wife and her friend to write the screenplay.

Nexus One versus Nokia N900 versus T-Mobile G1 versus iPhone 3G

This will be sort of a run-off between the last 4 smartphones I've owned. Let's go backwards and start with the conclusion:

Conclusion: I prefer the Nexus One to any of the other phones. It's fast, it's pretty, has a lovely screen, sounds good through headphones, feels good in my hand, and most importantly, it can easily be operated with one hand (but maybe not for the reason you think if you know me ;) ) The trackball, larger than on the G1, is useful and not too inaccurate.

Evidently the Google way is to emphasize one-handed operation, and I find that this is really important to me. The phone can sit in my pocket and I can control the volume with the external volume rocker switch without even pulling it out, and I can pause, play, skip a song or answer the phone with the buttons on the headphones. I can do most operations on it with one hand and the trackball. All of these are totally important on my bicycle, or even if I'm doing some serious walking.

Also, although the Nexus One doesn't come out of the box ready for hacking, it's pretty easy to set it up for that and maintain it that way. At least Google doesn't try very hard to prevent you from doing it.

Sounds quality is important to me as a musician; the Nexus One isn't the very best sounding device, but it's within shouting distance of the Nokia. It plays Ogg files out of the box, and I expect it to play FLAC files any day now.

Other phones:
I love the Apple iPhone 3G. I especially like the well-stocked app store, but I have various problems with it, mostly having to do with Apple's attitude towards people that want to open up the phone a bit, documented here.

I won't go back to the iPhone unless this changes. Ironically, I like MacOSX on computers best because it so succesfully straddles the proprietary and open source worlds. Too bad they are so very afraid of openness on the phone.

The T-Mobile G1 was never meant to be my permanent phone, it was basically a placeholder until I could pick up a Nokia N900 something better in the Android world. It is ... OK. It has a truly terrible sound chip and it really sounds bad with headphones, and it doesn't have a headphone jack, you have to use an adapter with its USB connector to use headphones, which is clumsy and unpleasant at best. The trackball was useful, but so tiny and inaccurate it was difficult to use. On the other hand, it was fairly easy to "root" (the equivalent of jailbreaking an iPhone, which is a real pain to do and maintain) and made me familiar with the Android OS, which I got to like a lot. I recently dropped it in my jacuzzi, which gave me a good excuse to get something better.

Then there's the unique Nokia N900. Lots of fun, but it's simple not made to be operated one-handed at all, other than in phone mode. I kept sitting down at a desk and playing with it, and having fun, but then thinking that if was going to be sitting down with a computer I'd much rather do it with my laptop. The N900 seems heavy and bulky, and although it definitely has the best web browser of any of these phones (it even has Flash!), I found myself wishing I could access my Google online apps in mobile mode; a 3.7 inch screen is very small for normal web pages with my elderly eyes.

BTW, I was not going to use anything other than a GSM-type phone so I can take it on my irregular international excursions, so the Droid was not an option.

I gave my iPhone to my wife, who loves it an has no ambitions to hack it. The G1 was not that expensive. I certainly can't afford both the Nokia N900 and the Nexus One at once, but the price of the unlocked phones comes out to be less than you'd pay for them if you bought them subsidized by T-Mobile (and you can't do that with the Nokia anyway) over the span of a two-year contract. I have 30 days to return the Nexus One if I don't like it, and I got the N900 for a special price from Dell which is no longer available; I should be able to sell it for most of what I paid for it.

Final Report: G1 versus iPhone

This will likely be my final blog about the G1; I'm enjoying the thing and it does the job, but it's not exactly an exciting device in itself.

eReader has released a client for their ebook service; it's actually my favorite and now I'm happily reading "The Golden Compass" on the G1.

It is pretty noisy; the noise floor when listening to music is barely tolerable, although the music itself seems to sound pretty good. They must have used a really cheap D/A converter in this thing. I bought a pair of Skullcandy earbuds to use with it, and they work and feel fine.

Rooting the G1 was initially pretty scary, but now that it's done it's a cakewalk. I'm using the images from http://cyanogenmod.com ; I can now tether with the phone and can use my SD card for application storage by just putting a Linux-compatible (ext2, 3 or 4) partition on the card after the FAT32 partition. I can do a quick backup of my currently running system to the SD card at any time using Nandroid (which comes with the image) so trying new versions isn't a problem; I can always revert the phone.

Salling Media Sync does quite a good job of syncing my phone with iTunes. I'd rather give iTunes a pass altogether, but for now I need it. Hoping Banshee will work on the Mac soon.

In conclusion, the G1 is doing the job for me. I'm happy with the switch.

Why I stopped using the iPhone

I recently switched from an iPhone 3G on AT&T to a T-Mobile G1 running Google's Android. There were several reasons for this:

1. I'm not very impressed with AT&T's 3G service. I've had a lot of problems with it; I've had to call AT&T 3 times in the last year to report bad 3G performance at my work place. In every case it was a problem on their end, but I had to fight my way through probably 45 minutes to 2 hours of reboots and network settings resets before I could convince them of this. Also, AT&T's service is quite a bit more expensive than T-Mobile's or Sprint's. But this is the least important of my concerns.

2. The iPhone hardware is very closed. You can't replace the battery yourself, you can't use your own memory card. It seems like planned obsolescence to me. However, given the beauty of the iPhone hardware, this isn't the major concern either.

3. Apple's hamfisted control of their software was really pissing me off. If I want a better mp3 player than iTunes I should damn well be able to pay for it and get it, not be stopped by app store policies against apps that "duplicate" functionality.

4. The iPhone OS is very unsophisticated. Looks kinda pretty, right? But the paradigm is pretty much Windows 3.1; colored icons in neat rows which you have very little control over.

Worse, no multitasking. Frankly, I think this is unforgivable. The machine is a computer running UNIX, for God's sake. And why can't I use a USB or wireless keyboard with the iPhone? And why can't I mount the phone's storage on a computer and store some documents to carry around with me? And why can't I play OGG or FLAC files? Or videos other than a very narrow range of MPEG 4 types?

5. The OS issues in item 4 could be easily solved by third party developers, and in fact, they mostly have been. But ... Apple doesn't want you to be able to make changes to the low-level OS, however much you want them, and however much you have paid for the damn phone. Some long-suffering developers have figured out various clumsy solutions to get around this, but it's difficult to do, and every time they work out a way to do it, Apple comes up with a "fix" that breaks it. It got to be really painful to "jailbreak" the phone over and over again.

Screw that.

Android has it's own problems, and is not as slick as the iPhone OS yet (I hesitate to call the iPhone OS "MacOSX" when it can't even multitask!). But Google and the Open Handset Alliance are not nearly as closed to third-party development at the OS level as Apple is, and modified OS installs are easily available. And updates to the OS are not going to cause me to have to wipe my phone and start over every time.

Also, switching to T-Mobile is an investment in both money (cheaper) and freedom, since T-Mobile's 3G implementation is more compatible with European standards than AT&Ts. I'll have more options in phones, in other words. Kinda lusting after the Nokia N900, to tell the truth, which will run 100% on T-Mobile.

Debt

Debt is not an evil, it is a tool.

With a chainsaw, you might cut your own hand off. You also can cut some firewood.

The Dan!

Just saw Steely Dan in San Francisco, with my long time friend and music fanatic Jim Pire. They performed the entire "Royal Scam" album plus some favorites at the end. The show was great! Fagin and Becker were both lively and fun; Fagin seemed to be very excited and rolled around on his piano bench, looking something like an old grey Stevie Wonder.

At one point, during a between-song lull, someone called out "Freebird" and Fagin called him an asshole, which certainly seemed like a reasonable thing to say in context.

The backup band was wonderful. The lead guitar player knew all the famous licks perfectly, and his own improvs were tasty and very much too the point. The drummer was strong, always on the beat and understated except where, such as during the solo in "Aja", he needed to be showy. And the trombone player, of all people, really got people going whenever he had a solo. The three female backup singers sang strongly and got their own solo vocals, taking the normally male leads in "Dirty Work".

Very cool the hear the entire album; it was played strongly and with great fidelity to the original. All except for "Everything You Did", which was always the weakest song on the album. Evidently "The Dan" felt so too, and gave the song sort of an island beat, which certainly made it a bit more pleasant to listen to.

40th Anniversary Edition of Red by King Crimson

I am deeply enjoying the experience of listening to the 40th anniversary edition of Red, by King Crimson, one of my top 10 albums of all time.

Much as i loved the original, I had two complaints:

1. The title track was flat sounding, like they recorded it in a fairly flat sounding room and did nothing to liven it up.

Well, this problem is fixed handily in the 5.1 mix; separation increases the fidelity of each instrument and the performance comes to life in a way that needs to be heard.

2. Providence, the first song on side two, was long and unlistenable. It was certainly unlistenable to me; I wanted more pounding, screeching prog rock and providence was several (too many) minutes of unnecessary noodling to my ears.

But in the 5.1 mix the clarity of each instrument is increased, and somehow the creepiness of the improvised, "concrete" performance is emphasized to the point where it becomes a new treasure, to me, and that means a big piece of this already wonderful album is now accessible to me for the first time. Bravo, gentlemen.

It also contains a CD version, versions in 96Khz 24-bit stereo, several unreleased tracks of varying interest, and some VERY well recorded videos from French television of what evidently seems to the be "Starless and Bible Black" era band performing songs like Lament and LTIA pt II, and very well.

I give it a good *****, it's wonderful, and certainly not more expensive than it needs to be.

http://www.king-crimson.com/album/red

More G1 Impressions

I bought a white phone; why are the headphone and adapter cables black? Ick.

I thought it would be nice having a hardware camera button, but pressing it moves the phone, making photos more blurry. In broad daylight it'll probably be more useful.

The included headphones are comfortable enough, but pretty much unusable on my bicycle as they seem to amplify the noise of air rushing by my ears.

The trackball is not all that accurate, but with that and the keyboard I don't accumulate fingerprints on the screen nearly as quickly as on the iPhone.

Ah, multi-tasking. How is it the iPhone runs MacOSX but can only run one app at a time? Works great on the G1.

The software keyboard is comparable to the iPhones, if not quite as accurate. But, I have a G1, I don't need to use the software keyboard if I don't want to. I have a choice. Yay.

The software in the Android Market is definitely more crude than the iPhone stuff, on average. However, except for commercial stuff such as ebook and audible apps, I've been able to find apps to do everything I used to do in the iPhone and do it well. For similar money or for free. I'm impressed.

An Open Letter to Apple

Dear Steve:

Re Apple Lossless versus FLAC: screw you guys. Really.

Love, Hugh

T-Mobile G1 versus iPhone 3G, first impressions

So I'm going to migrate off of iPhone 3G/AT&T (that's a subject for a different blog entry). 2 days ago I purchased a T-Mobile G1 phone and the associated phone and data plans. This entry is going to give my first impressions of the new phone and compare it with the iPhone 3G.

The G1 is definitely a sidegrade; there are better iPhones and Android phones available now. However, the G1 is probably a placeholder until I get a better phone (the Nokia N900 might eventually fill the bill), and many new Android phones are on their way, so I went with a lower priced option (with a physical keyboard).

First off, the G1 has already become a much better phone in the two days since I bought it. That's because, overnight, it upgraded itself from firmware version 1.1 to 1.6, without which it frankly wasn't really on the playing field with the iPhone. It makes a big difference, in mostly small ways; for instance, the camera, nothing to write home about even now, was pretty much unusable before the upgrade, and it can now shoot video. Also, several applications that I tried out in the store (on demo phones with higher firmare versions than mine) were not available before the upgrade. There was no software keyboard until the upgrade. But now, it's a pretty damn good smartphone.

When you look at pictures of the phones the G1 looks much larger, but it really isn't. It's X and Y sizes are about identical to the iPhone and it's Z axis is as much deeper as you'd expect from having a physical keyboard available. With the keyboard the G1 doesn't feel quite as solid as the iPhone, but the keyboard foldout mechanism itself seems about as robust as it could be. It feels damn good, really. All other things being equal, they physical keyboard adds a lot to the phone; using an SSH terminal emulator is a piece of cake now, and typing in notes is much more pleasant than on the iPhone.

The screens are about the same size, and the colors seem good on both. Can't complain about the new one.

The lack of a dedicated analog headphone jack on the G1 is not a problem as long as I have the included dongle. I'm sure I'll feel differently when I misplace it for the first time ;)

Battery life before the upgrade was poor; now it's fair, or actually pretty close to the iPhone. I can deal with it, but a better battery would have been nice on both phones.

The web browser seems similar on both phones, which makes sense since they are both based on Webkit. I don't see much difference between them, although it is very nice to be able to type in URLs with the physical keyboard.

It's very nice to be able mount the G1's formatted smart card on my Mac and copy files to it directly.

This is a very tentative impression, but I think the phone service quality is a little better on the G1. People I talked to long distance sounded better to me than they do on the iPhone, and the people I talked to thought my own voice was very clear.

At this point, there's just not that much difference between the two hardware platforms for me. The difference is mainly in the software. I've been able to find a decent SSH client for the G1, and there's a Facebook client, but it's not nearly as powerful as Facebook on the iPhone (yet). But I haven't been able to find a good book-reading piece of software for the G1 yet, similar to the eReader or Kindle apps. However, I know eReader is working on a client for their ebooks for the G1 which should come out this year. I certainly hope there will be Kindle app on G1; the G1 uses the Amazon MP3 store as their version of iTunes, it makes sense that they might also collaborate on ebook sales, but I haven't even heard any rumors about them doing it.

The point being, the Android App Market is not nearly as well stocked at the iPhone's, but it it is still far more open, and now that Android phones are proliferating I think this will change; I think it may be time for Apple to rethink it's really restrictive app store policies. But I'm not holding my breath.

More later.

I miss my little girl cat.

I miss my Olive. She was a good girl.

Olive, I tried to give you as good a life as possible. Not a life of luxury and apathy, but one of interest and inclusion. The goal was that you would not become one of those fat, uninterested cats that everyone ignores in the back of their houses, with kitty-alzheimer's. I did what I could to keep your life interesting, in the limits of our home and lifestyle and what your Mom and I could stand to do.

We put up with your endless chatter and energy, your jealousy and your very low sense of humor, your gastric problems. We played with you when we didn't feel like it, protected you from psycho-cat as much as we could, and I took you as far afield as you would go.

It was so worth it; we got back endless playfulness, intelligence and love. And even though you were afraid of psycho-cat, you still loved her; she was like an alcoholic mother, dangerous and annoying, but still Mom.

I think we did what we could for you, and you had a good life. This takes some of the sharpness out of the pain of losing you, but we still miss you.

meow-meow

The Baader Meinhoff Complex (Movie)

Fascinating stuff. Strangely, I first came across a reference to Baader-Meinhoff in a Monty Python book and I've always wanted to know more about it; we in the US are taught so little about about European history after WWII (or before WWI for that matter).

The actors and characters in the movie are all well played, especially Martina Gedeck as Ulrike Meinhof and Johanna Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin. The characters are portrayed as interesting, complex people and shown with little sympathy except for Meinhoff, an extreme left-wing journalist who is seduced by the thought of taking action for her beliefs and gives up her young twin daughters for the cause (according to the film, she almost has them sent to a Jordanian orphanage before they are rescued by her ex-husband).

The film also strongly shows the utter lunacy of the position of some current right wing commentators that Nazi Germany was some kind of "socialist" state (evidently because the word "socialist" is in the name of the party) when the Baader-Meinhoff gang and the movement they were part of (which per the movie evidently had strong sympathy from the German public) was clearly a reaction to the corporatism and "my country right or wrong" attitudes of the Facist Nazis and the population that supported them. Pull the other one, gentlemen and ladies.

Highly recommended, though if you are seeing it at the theater in Berkeley you might want to check and see if their air conditioning is working again; 2 1/2 hours of violence in a hot, dark room got a little bit unpleasant ;)

Context

A few months ago I went down to the jacuzzi to sooth my aching back. I was startled to hear beautiful, ethereal music coming out of it. A couple of (young) teenage girls were singing a song in harmony, with a strong, beautiful melody and unisons, thirds, fifths and sixths weaving in and out, evidently making use of the natural reverb of the concrete and tile. I couldn't quite make out the words. It was exquisite. They stopped as soon as they saw me, unfortunately. I've never heard anything quite like it again.

Turns out it was a Beyonce song, something I wouldn't spend two seconds on if I heard it on the radio.

Context is important.

Let Us consider Heinlein again ...

I'm on a SF kick these days. I sorely miss Heinlein. Of these great 40s Sci-Fi writers (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Bester), Heinlein and Bester were as smart as any of them but a lot less wooden in their prose. Their characterizations were powerful, flawed but interesting heroes in really novel situations (Bester similar, if Heilein had smoked an awful lot of opium).

His most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, released in 1961 is perhaps the least similar to the rest of his catalog, and a coincidental response to the hippie movement of the time, he basically shows thoae hip kids how it would really work if they were smart enough and had time enough for Love. In a way a retelling of the story of Jesus, giving his life to lift his people up.

But his best novel is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a look at a thrown=together group of diverse and ordinary people making their way and their own rules and what they would do confronted by choosing between slavery and certain eventual death or revolution on the moon. Good stuff about politics, relationships, and how people react in extremis.

He was interested in war, although not a warmonger, I think. Rather, as most men of that time he feared for his country in a world that would soon have atomic bombs by the score and not a few ill-feelings for the US. Read his essays written in 1945 calling for the creating of a stronger UN that could control all the nukes and armies and prevent war everywhere. Can you imagine something like that from our own warmongering neocon chickenhawks. Self-evidently Heinlein would have little use for such as these.

And he was sexist. In those days many were (J. R. R. Tolkien was a famous one as well). Women were led, women were not very important, women were seen and not heard. To give credit where it was due, this was changing in Heinlein's work. Female characters got stronger in his later works, with some books written from a female point of view. And an entire book on the difficulties and joys of being a woman, set out carefully, fairly and lovingly in his later book I Will Fear No Evil, about a dying billionaire whose brain is transferred to the body of a young woman who he loved, and so he wished to continue the life of her exquisite body properly.

Check him out. Some of his notions about technology seem a little dated, especially in the older books, but you'll never find better war stories set in the future, or better thoughts on how we would deal with the future.

It's a Sci-Fi World

A few years ago I was doing tech support at a genetics company, and the sensor on the robotic arm of our tape library burned out. I thought: "It's an interesting world where I have to call the wife and tell her I'm going to be late for dinner because my robot has gone blind.".

Bill O'Reilly is not entirely responsible for the murder of Dr. Tillman

Please mentions this whenever you talk or comment about the murder of Dr. Tillman. It's completely true, and only fair.

from xkcd

Mrs. John Smith (the former Ann Coulter)

Mrs. John Smith (the former Ann Coulter) at home in the kind of society she advocates. Mrs. Smith is a good woman who knows her place, cannot read, and does not clamor for voting rights like those homely, mannish suffragettes. Shown here with little Martha Smith, her 11th child.

The iPhone, Halfway There

UPDATE: It's really the developer community that makes the iPhone so cool. I complain below about the lack of multitasking, and then I found out that a third party developer has implemented putting running tasks in the background independently of Apple! Very cool. You still need to jailbreak the phone to get this working, and Apple makes it way too difficult to do that (and shouldn't make you need to do it in the first place).

I've had my iPhone 3G for a few months now, and I think I've finally put my finger on what's wrong with it.

Please understand, it's the best phone I've ever had; definitely a step up from my Treo. It does the phone things well enough, and much more besides. It's probably the most beautiful piece of tech I've ever seen. However, it has intensely frustrated me, and it's taken me a while to figure out why.

Everything it does it only does halfway. For instance:

* It surfs the internet. However, it doesn't play flash, and although it does a pretty good job of rendering large, complicated pages that wouldn't normally be useful on a device of this size, it's still extremely painful to access those types of pages.
* I can type on it, but it's not pleasant to do so. I could easily operate my Treo with one hand; it's much more difficult to do that on the iPhone. So, since the iPhone supports Bluetooth (and USB, I think), it seems the perfect candidate for an external keyboard, but there are none.
* It plays music, and pretty well. However, the music has to be synchronized by iTunes from your computer, and even then it is limited to Apple-vetted formats. Even iTunes on the Mac can use plugins for Ogg, FLAC, etc., but those won't help you on the iPhone.
* It plays movies, beautifully (for a device of this size), but again, only Apple's vetted formats. Even if you want to play an mpeg4 movie file that plays fine on your Mac it probably won't play on the iPhone. And you have to sync the movies to the iPhone through iTunes. I don't want to keep all my movies in iTunes; it's a pain in the butt.
* iTunes on the Mac can play Internet radio streams. iTunes on the iPhone cannot, which leads me to:
* MacOSX can multitask, so why can't the iPhone? On my Treo I could listen to Internet radio in the background while I did other things, but not on the iPhone. Only a few official Apple apps can run in the background on the iPhone; what a waste!
* The iPhone has wonderful networking capabilities, and the UNIX operating system; as a UNIX geek, these things were the reasons I finally made the purchase of the iPhone. All the pieces are there for me to have a portable, networked UNIX computer, and yet Apple goes out of it's way to not only not support that sort of use, but to block others that try to add it. I don't get it.

I could go on and on. Every single feature is implemented well, but with about half of the possible. As an engineer of sorts, it really drives me nuts. Are all of these limitations due to commercial concerns? Sometimes business practices are really painful.

Strange and Fishy

I haven't seen this before; evidently with the thaw yesterday a lot of the fish in the pond swam to the top of the ice and then couldn't get back under before they froze. There were several of these fishy lineups. Very strange.

After the Lord of the Rings

This post is dedicated to those that have read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and perhaps the Hobbit, and wish to dig a little deeper into Middle-Earth. Tolkien's fiction is unique in it's depth and lends itself well to further reading, but where do you start?

Tolkien's son Christopher, a professor of English Literature in his own right, has released many books relating to, editing and sometimes even finishing his father's works. The obvious first choices are The Silmarilion and The Children of Hurin. The are both indispensable, in my opinion; in particular, the Silmarillion has much of interest to LotR fans, including the origins of Sauron, an explanation of what a Balrog is, where dragons came from, and so much more, including a retelling of the creation and early history of the world, from the point of view of Tolkien's elves! It ends with the history of the events leading up to the War of the Ring itself. However, at best, it is a much more difficult read than LotR or the Hobbit, since Tolkien never meant it to be a linear story, and much of it is written in an archaic style of English.

My real suggestions are a little more off the beaten track:

1. Unfinished Tales It contains several stories and other works relating to Middle-Earth, from what Tolkien refers to as the First, Second and Third ages. This is by far my favorite of Christopher Tolkien's works on his father. For an LotR fan it has many special treasures, including:
   
   
   
   • unpublished essays on the wizards (such as Gandalf and Saruman) and the Palantiri (the far-seeing crystal balls)
     
   • a compilation of several unfinished essays on the origins and history of Galadriel and Celeborn of Lothlorien
     
   • a "historical" essay about the Ringwraithes' hunt for the ring in the Shire and elsewhere
     
   • an unpublished story of the history of the Hobbit, from Gandalf's point of view!
     
   • much more
     
   
   
2. Professor Tom Shippey's non-fiction book The Road to Middle Earth. Professor Shippey more or less followed in Tolkien's footsteps in academia, and has much interesting information about the inspirations for Tolkien's work in ancient English history and literature. I find this sort of thing terribly interesting. There must have been a mythology available to the Germanic inhabitants of post-Roman England, equivalent to that of the old Norse, but we only have tantalizing hints about these, evidently due to the lack of writing by the pre-literate English and also because of active suppression, first by the church and later by the Normans after the invasion of 1066. Professor Shippey shows us many of these hints and how Tolkien developed them into a new "English" mythology. Wonderful stuff.
   

I'd also like to mention a work with a hidden treasure, The War of the Ring, Part 3. A slim book in the series of Christopher Tolkien's books about his father's writings, it has one truly outstanding piece, Tolkien's original Epilogue to the Lord of the Rings, a sweet story from the life of Sam Gamgee in the Shire AFTER Frodo and Bilbo sail into the west.

Tweak!

Gen. Eric Shinsecki as Secretary of Veteran's Affairs; take that, Bushies!

Suggestion to the Car Companies

I don't want to see the car companies fail; I think the fallout would be terrible. But I do believe that there should be MAJOR conditions attached to bailing them out, including the ousting of all the current management.

However, I'd like to make a suggestion to the car companies, something that they should do without being forced to, something terribly symbolic of what their attitudes should be going forward: no more lobbyists. Fire them all, and promise to never again attempt to turn public policy in their interests.

If you think about it, the car companies have run themselves into the ground by their own inflexibility; they opposed all safety and environmental regulations and ended up making their recent money by exploiting a loophole in the current regulations, the one that allowed SUVs to exist. If car companies no longer lobbied, they would be tacitly committing to deal with the world as it is, rather than as they'd like to see it. I think that would be wonderful symbolic gesture, and car manufacturers, wouldn't that make your jobs more interesting? ;)

Mini Review of the Sanyo Xacti HD1000

This isn't meant to be a comprehensive review, but I really enjoy this device and would like to share my thoughts about it.

To begin with, I've now owned three Xacti devices, and although I always enjoyed the sensation I would cause when I pulled one out, I had been rather disappointed by the performance of the cameras.

The HD1000 is another kettle of fish entirely; I am very pleased with almost all aspects of the performance of the device. Now, you shouldn't expect a $700 device to have the performance of a $3K pro HD camcorder, but I am very happy with the quality of the video. In any kind of decent light it is very nice looking and very HD. However, unlike earlier Xactis, it is not totally useless in low light; the picture degrades in a pleasant way and is still quite watchable.

The HD1000 has compromised still picture size for better HD movie quality (rightly, IMHO). However, even though the stills are limited to 4 MP, I am quite pleased with the way they look, especially the colors. If 4 MP is large enough for your needs (and I never need to blow up beyond 8x10, so I'm fine with it) I think you will be pleased with the still quality of this little camcorder.

The audio sounds good. I recorded a bunch of video at a rock show and the camcorder was able to handle the sound pressure level nicely.

I was unable to test HDMI output, but the component output from the camera dock works very well. I wish the camera had some kind of digital audio out to go with the component video (it has stereo analog only), but that's a nit pick, really; I'm out of HD inputs on my receiver and it's a pain to switch an input to analog just for plugging in the camcorder.

The PS3 is able to play the videos directly from the SD card, or from the internal hard drive. A DVD is evidently too slow; they'll play, but it'll be choppy.

If you are interested in buying a Xacti-style camcorder, you are probably (like me) going for form over function a little bit. However, you will probably be quite pleased with the HD1000.

Naughty

I blush to admit how much pleasure I get from making naughty passwords and typing them in over and over again.

Tony Blankley, Oh My God

I'm not sure I can listen to Left, Right and Center anymore. I never agree with anything Tony Blankley says, but at least I can usually listen to him; he speaks well and never becomes outraged and hateful like so many other conservative commentators. But a couple of days ago he went on NPR and did an editorial where he said that the CIA throwing away the tapes of waterboarding of prisoners, a clearly illegal act, was exactly the right thing to do because if those tapes ever got out they would make our lies about waterboarding less plausible to the Islamic world.

He also said this on Left, Right and Center, and followed it up by stating that the national interest clearly outweighed the law in cases like this.

I wish there was a nice Facisistic state Tony could go and live in, rather than trying to destroy mine.

Whipsawed

Listening to random songs in my car. First up: "Larks Tongues in Aspic Pt. II" by King Crimson (live version by the "double trio"). The power, masculinity, intellect and sheer fun of the music makes me pound my steering wheel with my fists as I wait at a light.

Next up: "Polegnala E Todora (Love Song)" by Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgare, to me pretty much the epitome of the beauty, gentleness and (since I don't know the language) mystery of femininity.

Whipsawed by humanity, I cried a little. Sue me.

iPhone, good God

I played with one over the weekend, and it is perhaps the most beautiful and intuitive piece of tech I have ever seen. Too many downsides for me to switch now, though: no tethering (using the phone as a modem for my laptop), no ebooks, no 3G, no overseas use. And iTunes is too limited for the various music file formats I want to use, as well as video formats.

Apple has really screwed up doing the exclusivity contract with AT&T, though. Stuff like this:
$4800 iPhone Bill

iPhone Bill Surprisingly Huge

is inexcusable, and really does damage to the brand.

Why a War "Czar"?

There has been a lot of speculation as to why the President wants to appoint someone to be in charge of prosecuting the war in Iraq (the so-called "War Czar"). As many have suggested, doesn't the Commander in Chief already hold that position?

I don't actually mean this as a "snark", or sarcastic comment, and I don't really even mean it in a cynical way, but I think this might actually be close to the truth: the President is sick of dealing with Iraq, and probably overrode Karl Rove (despite the political problems such a move would cause) to make this happen. He has a history of getting into business situations and failing at them, and then either bailing or getting someone (like his father or his father's friends) to fix the situation for him. This is just true; read anything you like about the history of Bush's business dealings.

Isn't this the most likely reason for such an odd and politically risky move?

The new Plasmabat album is now available!

The new Plasmabat album is now available!

http://cdbaby.com/cd/plasmabat2

It is an album of mostly delicate guitar instrumentals, all composed and performed by me (with a little help from my friends Lynda and Serge)

I hope you like it! I've also updated the Plasmabat Myspace page:

http://myspace.com/plasmabat

If you feel like it, do me a big favor and review it!

Hugh

Hooray for the New Congress

This is the first time since I've been old enough to know that I have been proud of my Congress. I don't care about the pork, I don't care about the fact that the Prez promised to veto the war spending bill before they even drafted it.

This Congress took a principled stand on the most important issue of the day, and used all the tools they had to make it happen. I'm proud of them.

I am, however, confused about the reaction of the mainstream press. Every story I've read or heard about regarding the bill seems to make the assumption that the President's anticipated veto is not only inevitable but is somehow the Congress' responsibility. That somehow they should have crafted a bill that would both satisfy the public that elected them and the President, without any kind of compromise on his part.

But as far as I remember, the Legislative and the Executive branch are equals, so why doesn't the President have to compromise and the Congress does? The entire country (no, the entire world) know that the President was wrong in his execution of the supposed "war", and yet when the Congress finally expresses the will of the people of the United States, as they should, they are excoriated by our own press.

This is the main stream media that went along with the personal destruction of President Clinton by his political enemies, and the one that allowed George Bush to push his reactionary and constitution-weakening agenda without fear of criticism.

I'm damn sick of it.

It would be a joy

It would be such a joy to travel to 17th century Leipzig and tell the harried J. S. Bach that today he is arguably considered the greatest composer of all time and that his music is probably heard by someone every second of every day (just like I'll be performing his Mass in B Minor this weekend).

Or to tell William Shakespear that he is the greatest playwrite who ever lived to people in the 21st century and that even people who have never seen one of his plays may have seen "West Side Story" or "Ran" or even "Shakespear in Love" or used a phrase like "in my mind's eye" or "a rose by any other name ...".

Elvis probably knew how important he was. But it's not too late to let Chuck Berry and Fats Domino know.

It's too late to tell John Lennon. I'm sure Paul McCartney knows. But tell him anyway ;)