Google Pixel 2 Phone, Pixel Buds bluetooth headphones

Edit: 2018-03-21: I do like the Ear Buds, but my criticisms of the sound quality and the lack of noise cancellation stand.  It's fun to walk with them, but not in high-noise environments. 

I have a Pixel 2, and the Pixel Ear Buds, and I'm definitely of two minds about them.  I think it's time Google put some serious money into design.

I don't like IOS, although I'm an Apple fan most ways, so an iPhone X is out of the question for me.  Nevertheless, I wish my Pixel looked like that.  I wish it was interesting looking in any way!  It's just bland.

Bland wouldn't be so bad; the phone is, at least, small and smooth and pleasant to hold and use.  And it looks OK.  However, for some unknown reason, about a quarter of the back is covered in a chunk of extremely thin glass.  Hey, it looks and feels kinda nice, but I had the phone not more than three days when it slid out of my pocket at a theater, not more than 15 inches off the carpeted floor, and shattered.  Obviously you CANNOT use this phone without some kind of box around it, which completely destroys the nice look and feel of it.  And this is a premium phone, most definitely in price.  Why should I have to wrap my $700 phone in a cheap box just so that I can dare to take it somewhere?

And they've removed the analog headphone jack, which means to use my headphones I need to use a clumsy adapter.  And the adapter/phone interface needs some work; the phone doesn't always recognize when the adapter is plugged in.  That generally requires rebooting the phone.  And it will take another clumsy and expensive adapter to be able to charge the phone while I'm playing music on it.  Which isn't even out yet.

(BTW, wouldn't it make sense to have TWO USB-C jacks on the thing?  Wouldn't that be unique among phones, a reasonable "premium" feature, and since the circuitry for the single port is already there, still save some space in the phone?)

I'm a musician; I really do want high fidelity sound from my device, and the lack of an analog headphone port means I must really use bluetooth, which has NO real hi-fi codecs available, at least not yet.  Even the best of them, aptX, only promises "nearly CD quality sound".

Which brings me to the buds.  They don't sound good.  The bass is OK, but subtle high frequency stuff, like maracas, tend to disappear.  I've certainly heard decent sounding bluetooth headphones; my old Sony SBH-50 sounds a lot better than these things.  On the plus side, once you have them adjusted, they are quite comfortable and stay in your ears.  But I'm not sure I want to live without noise cancellation in my headphones anymore.  At least the touch controls work pretty well.

Google, I have to admit, you are making me look longingly at the iPhone X and the Samsung and LG phones.  For a premium price I'd much rather see a premium design.  I'm not sure how much I want to trade groovy looks and sound for the most up to date version of Android.

Jack Reacher in the Movies, An open letter to Tom Cruise

An open letter to Tom Cruise:

Gentlemen:

The first Jack Reacher movie was really good.  We were introduced to the character of Jack Reacher, the ultimate stoic man.  Excellent action movie, awesome fight scenes.

The second movie had a good cast.  The original novel was a lot of fun.  The problem is, it is way too early in the process of adapting the books to movies to do this one.  The ultimate stoic macho guy Jack Reacher can't handle a teenaged girl!  Hilarious!  Except ... we've only met him once before.  It's way too early to tear him down like this for comedy's sake.  You really should have done another one that showed Reacher interacting with his environment and being his awesome male self in a strange environment (somewhere in America!). ;) . Those sorts of stories are, of course, the real point to Reacher's appeal.

Just a thought guys.  Loved all the books, loved the first movie despite Mr. Cruise's much different physique.  He carried it all well.  Hoping another movie will be more in the real Jack Reacher vein.

Alesis Crimson Mesh Kit Mini-Review

For those of you into drums, I’m very impressed by the Alesis Crimson Mesh Kit.  I bought one for my wife at Guitar Center recently, and it was around $800.  

It looks nice from the get-go; red “shells”, black mesh “heads”, and heavy-duty chromed hardware.   Unlike previous electronic kits I’ve used, it seems much less like a toy and much more like a real kit.

The mesh heads feel sooo much better than the hard pads on our earlier Alesis DM-5.  They feel slightly loose, or maybe a little “gooey”, but not bad; you can certainly do a roll on them comfortably.  

One of the really cool things about them is that most of the pads have more than one sensor.  You seem to have 4 “drums”, a snare and 3 toms, but each of them can play a different sound on the rim.  When emulating acoustic drums the rim sounds are samples of actual rims, but when using the crazier kits, like the 808 or latin kits, each rim can be a completely different sound, so the kit is actually much more flexible than you’d realize.  Beyond that, sounds can be mixed on a single pad and playable at different impact levels, so you can actually get 3 sounds from one head!  And the dynamic range feels pretty natural to me.

To sum up, this kit is suitably priced and feels much more “professional” than other inexpensive electronic kits.  I thinks it’s easily comparable to Roland kits costing twice as much.

http://www.alesis.com/products/view2/crimson-mesh-kit

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