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.