many robots

Good artists copy

2010-03-02T20:43:00.000-08:00

This new pedigree ad by TBWA Toronto has been making the rounds

It's a neat idea and dogs look silly in slo-mo.

But I remembered seeing this 4 years ago:

And this is why I'll never work for an ad agency again. The song is way better in the old version too, it's called "Birds" by Vitalic

China's empty city

2009-12-24T09:26:00.001-08:00

This is like something out of a cyberpunk story.

Google's feature creep

2009-12-20T17:58:00.000-08:00

Google's feature creep: "

Google has been adding so many new features to its results page, they are starting to feel like the new Microsoft.

The comments section on the page includes this very good point from one Tom Piamenta:

I always felt that hiring someone to manage your investment portfolio was dumb. In order to justify their commission and existence they have to do s-o-m-e-t-h-i-n-g. They buy, sell, hedge or whatever instead of just clinging to a good portfolio and letting it grow. The result is far less than optimal.

Same for Google.. even if you have an amazing simple product, what will you do with the $#I^loads of designers, programmers and consultants?... How can you just let the product rest?

TLO ROLL CALL!

2009-12-16T23:04:00.001-08:00

This has to be the best-produced youtube diss of all time

Gizmodo jups Godwin's Shark, compares Apple's internal security practices to the actual Gestapo

2009-12-15T15:04:00.000-08:00

Gizmodo resident writer Jesus Diaz makes the single worst blog post I've seen about technology probably ever:
Apple Gestapo: How Apple Hunts Down Leaks [Apple]
Here's some highlights:

No, Tom never lived in Nazi Germany, nor in East Germany with the Stasi, nor in the Soviet Union with the NKVD, nor in Communist China and their secret police. He lives in the United States. For sure, he has never been scared of losing his life nor the ones he loves, like thousands of millions in those countries. But he knows how it feels to be watched, to always be considered guilty of crimes against another kind of state. He knew how it felt to have no privacy whatsoever when he was working right here, in a little Californian town called Cupertino, in a legendary place located in One Infinite Loop.

As Tom was describing all this, my mind was getting back to all I've read about Steve Jobs and Apple, back when he was El Capitán of the brave group of free pirates who created the Macintosh. The Mac was a secret project too, but there was no secret police making sure there were no leaks. After a hard day of work, all the Mac team sometimes played on the beaches of California, careless and happy, confident that this new revolutionary computer would change the world, one desktop at a time. All of them shared information, there were no seeeecrets, and that's why they came up with an 'insanely great' computer, as Steve Jobs himself used to refer to it.

And while I understand that secrecy is paramount to success in today's extremely competitive market—hello, dear marketdrones—now I look at this story on the Worldwide Loyalty Team, and it makes me realize how much Apple has changed. From a hippie happy company, to a company that does KGB-style lockdowns and Gestapo interrogations that end in suicides.

This is like everything wrong with "new media" boiled down into a single sensationalist golden turd of click-whoring. He actually accuses them of murder.

Crunchpad evaporates in a cloud of smug.

2009-11-30T09:56:00.000-08:00

The CrunchPad disappears in a puff of vapor: "

Engadget has the scoop on the death of the CrunchPad, designed by self important blogger to show the hardware industry what they are doing wrong and deliver an affordable, usable tablet computer.

I guess that whole hardware thing is a little trickier than assembling parts from Newegg? People who have never had to deliver an actual physical object to the marketplace always seem to think it's like a software project + 20%.

Pioneer CDJ-2000 and CDJ-900 info leak

2009-09-17T00:06:00.000-07:00

Gizmodo let the CDJ-2000 and CDJ-900 out of the bag a few hours early:

NEW PIONEER CDJ DIGITAL TURNTABLES BRING THE ART OF DJING TO NEW HEIGHTS

CDJ-2000 and CDJ-900 Enable DJs to Access Their Music Directly from the Players

Long Beach, CA (September 17, 2009) – Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. Professional Sound and Visual Division, the leader in Pro DJ products and the innovator of the CD turntable, today launched two multi-format digital turntables, the CDJ-2000 and CDJ-900, with features that put the performance back into the art of DJing and reduce the need for laptops to access music files. DJs of all experience levels can enhance their mixing and scratching capabilities using proprietary technologies such as rekordbox™1 music management, Pro DJ Link, Needle Search and USB and SD card connectivity.

"Understanding the expanding needs of today's evolving DJs, Pioneer's new multi-format digital turntables allow DJs to access, search and control their content directly from the player itself," said Matt Dever, Vice President, Professional Sound and Visual Division. "The new CDJ players provide the same legendary quality standards and playability of the CDJ-1000/800 with the added convenience of native playback of key digital media file formats accessed through a multitude of compatible media, whether it's on CD, DVD, portable hard drive or flash memory device. In addition, both models are HID compatible with today's top DJ performance software, making these players the natural selection for any performance DJ."

Prepared For Any Performance
Adapting to today's variety of media formats, the CDJ-2000 and CDJ-900 enable playback of MP3, AAC, WAV and AIFF audio files from CDs and USB memory devices, and from DVDs and SD cards as well on the CDJ-2000. A USB port located on top of the turntable enables users to quickly connect an external storage device such as a Tonium Pacemaker™ or a hard drive packed with music files, minimizing the need to bring a laptop computer to performances.

Both the CDJ-2000 and CDJ-900 turntables include rekordbox™, Pioneer's proprietary music management software that organizes and catalogs a DJ's entire music library. When music files are imported to rekordbox, the software analyzes each file and prepares them for use specifically with the new CDJ turntables. Key elements of Pioneer's rekordbox software:

* Analyze:
o Beats Per Minute (BPM) Data – BPM / Tempo information for each song is identified and processed into rekordbox for use by the DJ in preparing and performing a set.
o Waveform Data – The waveform of each song is identified and then displayed on the bottom screen for quick data visualization and for use with the needle search function on the CDJ-2000 turntable.
* Customize:
o Tag Info & Artwork – Edit and customize the file information to performance needs.
o Hot Cues, Cue Points, and Loops – Prepare and customize cues and loops as well as create and manage hot cue banks.
o Playlists – Create, edit and manage customized playlists for various performances.
o Beatgrid – Utilizing the new Quantizing feature, cue points and loops can be set perfectly on-beat. The Quantize feature ensures cue points are set accurately and automatically, correcting and synching beats during manual looping or a real-time cueing, preventing off beat mistakes.

Pioneer CDJ-2000 and CDJ-900 page 2

Users can then transfer analyzed music files to their preferred storage media and play them directly from the new CDJ turntables. The software offers song information that can be viewed easily during performances on the CDJs' large displays to quickly search and access content by genre, title, BPM, etc. Also, as analyzed tracks are played through the CDJ products, the turntables automatically create and save a play history enabling users to review past performances on their PCs.

Pro DJ Link

The new turntables feature Pioneer's Pro DJ Link that enables up to four CDJ-2000/900s to be connected via the Link Port to share a single music source, whether it is a hard drive, USB and/or SD memory card. Once linked, users have the ability to quickly find, display and choose the music file from a connected source through the CDJ's built-in display and control knobs. A quick turn of the knob lets users scroll through created files and folders and a push of the knob confirms the song choice.

Advanced Connectivity

The new turntables feature a 24-bit/48 kHz sound card and HID and MIDI control compatibility via USB port. Up to 35 controls on the surface of each player can be used to trigger other devices, such as DJ effecters and software by way of HID and/or MIDI.

The HID controls were implemented into the players for superior interfacing with software, faster communication speed over MIDI, audio/visual streaming and two-way information on displays. HID enables easy, precise and native control of DVS systems such as Serato™ Scratch Live, Native Instruments' Traktor series and MixVibes Cross2 without the need for time-coded discs.

CDJ-2000 Enhancements

* LCD panel and Graphic User Interface – The flagship CDJ-2000 features a large WQVGA 6.1-inch full-color 480 x 234 LCD panel for displaying song titles and jacket art as well as detailed track information so DJs can select songs at a glance. The wave data of each song is also illustrated on screen, showing high and low amplitude to further assist DJs.

* Needle Search – Helps DJs instantaneously get to a specific part of a song with a simple touch of the Needle Search pad. Found directly below the CDJ-2000's high resolution LCD panel, the touchpad lets the DJ "place the needle" and jump quickly to a specific part of a music track.

* Jog Dial – Adjustments for tension were enhanced from previous models allowing the DJ to further customize the feel of the jog dial from a light to heavy sensitivity. Four illuminated areas on the sides of the Jog Dial aid the DJ in finding the desired spot on the plate in dim lighting environments.

CDJ-900 Enhancements

* Slip Mode – When activated, Slip Mode silently continues song playback during a loop, reverse or scratch and continues audible playback at the exact time when the loop, reverse or scratch is ended creating smoother transitions.

* Advanced Auto Beat Loop – The CDJ-900 generates a four-beat loop at a touch of a button creating a customized sound to provide more time for DJs to blend in transitioning music.

The Extras

For more accurate tempo control while mixing, each player is enhanced with increased frame increments of 0.5 frames that allow the DJ to set a cue point or loop point with more precision.

To achieve the highest sound quality, both the CDJ-2000 and CDJ-900 were equipped with the audio industry's highly respected Wolfson DAC processors, delivering a very transparent, accurate audio signal resulting in a highly improved signal-to-noise ratio and increased headroom.

The CDJ-2000 will be available in November 2009 with a suggested retail price of $2,150.

The CDJ-900 will be available in December 2009 with a suggested retail price of $1,600.

Pioneer offers a complete line of professional DJ Equipment through its Professional Sound & Visual Division. Its DJM series of mixers has become an industry standard at clubs, studios, mobile rigs and homes around the world, known for its high quality sound and reliability. For more information, visit www.pioneerprodj.com.

Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. is headquartered in Long Beach, Calif., and its U.S. Web address is www.pioneerelectronics.com. Its parent company, Pioneer Corporation, established in Tokyo in 1938, is a preeminent manufacturer of high-performance audio, video and computer equipment for the home, car and business markets.

1 rekordbox is music file management software developed by Pioneer in cooperation with MixVibes for use in combination with Pioneer products.

2 For more information on the version that improves compatibility when connected with the CDJ-2000, please see the MixVibes website at http://www.mixvibes.com.

Pioneer is a registered trademark of Pioneer Corporation

Rekordbox is a trademark of Pioneer Corporation.

MixVibes and CROSS are trademarks of MixVibes Companies in the United States and other countries.

Pacemaker is a registered trademark of Tonium AB.

SERATO and Scratch LIVE are trademarks of Sigma Audio Research Limited.

TRAKTOR is a trademark of Native Instruments.

Wolfson is a registered trademark of Wolfson Microelectronics.

I'm sure this is top-notch gear but the prices are kind of a joke given the prices of DVS systems.

More links

DJ TechTools

The Watts Myth

2009-05-01T13:54:00.000-07:00

Audioholics gives a good breakdown of how many "watts" your sound system/speakers really output [warning, there's formulas and shit!]:

I have a set of computer speakers that are rated at 480W PMPO (yes - four hundred and eighty Watts). I have measured them at less than 5W each before clipping. There is no rhyme or reason that can explain such a difference, except ....

Like megapixels in cameras, consumers look to a number they can use as a scalar to determine quality or capabilities of technology. In a related note the newest, best generation of home cordless phones [remember those?] actually operates at 1900 MHz but the standards body has chosen to market it using the name it "DECT 6.0" in America so that consumers won't think that the 5.8 GHz phones are superior.

"Fiscal responsibility" in action

2009-04-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

So yeah there's that whole swine flu thing going on now.

Rove's argument was picked up by House and Senate Republicans, who made it an essential message in their attacks on the legislation. Even as Rove and his compatriots argued that a stimulus bill should include initiatives designed to shore-up and maintain any recovery, they consistently, and loudly, objected to spending money to address the potentially devastating economic impact of a major public health emergency.

The attack on pandemic preparation became so central to the GOP strategies that AP reported in February: "Republicans, meanwhile, plan to push for broader and deeper tax cuts, to trim major spending provisions that support Democrats' longer-term policy goals, and to try to knock out what they consider questionable spending items, such as $870 million to combat the flu and $400 million to slow the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases."

Famously, Maine Senator Collins, the supposedly moderate Republican who demanded cuts in health care spending in exchange for her support of a watered-down version of the stimulus, fumed about the pandemic funding: "Does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill No, we should not."

Even now, Collins continues to use her official website to highlight the fact that she led the fight to strip the pandemic preparedness money out of the Senate's version of the stimulus measure.

All I'm going to post about the "Tea Parties"

2009-04-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

Two things:

Has nobody behind these protests ever heard of the alternate definition of "teabagging"?

This:
"She said she retired on disability from M&T Bank three years ago after undergoing knee replacement and back surgeries. She lives on her Social Security and disability benefits. Last year, she petitioned the bankruptcy court for protection from creditors.

She said she did not have to pay federal income taxes last year because her income was too low.

"I don't want to see this country turn into a welfare, nanny state, where we stand in line for groceries, and we're in welfare lines, and in socialized medicine lines," Wilder said.

Knife Crime // Carrot Shank

2009-03-21T18:31:00.001-07:00

7-1/2 years for a spork

The 50 Dollar Logo Experiment

2009-02-24T15:58:00.001-08:00

Jim Walls investigates the discount offshore logo business.

Me:

Abina-

Upon further consideration, I feel that you guys have really missed the religious connotation in my company’s name, and we really want to play this up. Is there a way to emphasize this connection? Specifically, when you redesign the various cheeses, is there a way to approximate DaVinci’s “Last Supper”? I do think the Swiss cheese could be positioned roughly where Jesus is located, since Swiss is a very prominent cheese.

Thanks for your continued hard work. We’re close!

—

50DollarLogo:

Dear Jim,

Thank you for the email.

We have informed our designers about your request. We aim to send you the improved logos within 2 working days.

We are happy to provide you as many numbers of revisions as you want. We strive to make our customer fully satisfied.

Thank you,
Abina

Found via Dave Shea's Mezzoblue

Site of the day - All American Driving School

2009-01-09T12:39:00.000-08:00

There's nothing more American than driving and there's no driving school more American than the All American Driving School.

While not quite to the level of some other more famous websites the magic isn't limited to the home page, oh no. Make sure to check out the whole site for a dose of patriotism injected directly into your EYE

And the name? There's a story behind that too:

Ways to become the "ALL AMERICAN" driver:

A - "Always" fasten your seatbelts and lock doors.
Only dummies don't!

L - "Learn" to control emotions when behind the wheel.
Good driving requires concentration.

L - "Look" out for the other guy.
Be alert for potential hazards and conflicts.

A - "Adjust" your speed, following distance and driving maneuvers to roadway conditions.

M - "Make" predictions of the worst that could happen so that you are prepared if it does.

E - "Evaluate" your driving periodically - find ways to improve your skills and techniques.

R - "Respect" the laws and rules of the road.
They are for your safety and protection.

I - "Inspect" your car inside and out before driving.
Keep your car well maintained.

C - "Cooperate" with and be "courteous" to other drivers.
Avoid eye contact with anyone who appears to be enraged.

A - "Approach" intersections cautiously.
More than 40% of accidents occur here.

N - "Never" drink and drive or ride with someone under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Stuff you didn't know you needed vol. 4 - The Nugebox

2008-12-10T16:40:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to present the Nugebox

The Nugebox is the best way I've found to imbue your garage with the spirit of the wild. I mean it's written right on the front! As far as I can tell [Snap-on's site sucks] this is only about $1500 more expensive than a plain old tool box not imbued with the Motor City Madman's wango tango or whatever.

Breath testing politicians, is it time?

2008-12-05T10:45:00.000-08:00

The Aussies have their pants [do they use it that way or is it just Brits?] in a twist over some drunken legislative action:

CANBERRA (Reuters) – Politicians in Australia's most populous state could be breath-tested for alcohol before voting on laws after a series of late-night incidents that have embarrassed the center-left government.

New South Wales state lawmaker Andrew Fraser resigned from his conservative opposition frontbench role after shoving a female colleague in the wake of Christmas party celebrations.

"Breath test this mob," said a front page headline in Sydney's mass-selling Daily Telegraph newspaper. State police minister Matt Brown was dumped from his portfolio in September after allegedly "dirty" dancing in his underwear over the chest of a female colleague after a drunken post-budget office party.

Conservative Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell said he would support alcohol breath tests for drunkenness for lawmakers before they entered parliament, while Green MPs John Kaye and Lee Rhiannon also backed the plan, along with the parliament's speaker.

"Honestly, if you are going to have breathalyzers for people driving cranes you should have breathalyzers for people writing laws," Kaye told the Telegraph.

That last sentence really does bring up a good point. I'm sure some truly inspired politics have happened over a three Martini lunch now and again but this does sound dangerous. Inhibited decision making due to intoxication by a politician can have far more devastating negative impact than just about any other job. Maybe we should start drug testing them too...

Michael Crighton sucked but Wikipedia brings the truth

2008-11-05T10:46:00.000-08:00

Seen for a very brief time on Wikipedia:

Michael Crichton has died on November 5, 2008 after a long, private battle with a velociraptor.

Fox News: Fair and balanced

2008-10-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

Why I'm not asleep yet: Hobnox Audiotool

2008-10-19T23:54:00.000-07:00

Hobnox Audiotool is an awesome emulation system for some classic old synths and drum machines and a mess of effects. I was curious if a Flash version of ReBirth existed and this thing definitely exceeded my expectations. Things can get pretty sophisticated, this is the Drum & Bass preset:

This site requires Flash 10 so you might be asked to upgrade.

OK I lied I'm also not asleep because Star Wars is on TV.

Here's what I think of McCain campaign's smear campaign on ACORN

2008-10-17T15:26:00.001-07:00

You can donate on behalf of anybody you like like your mom, a family pet, that nice guy at your corner store, etc.:

Motorcycle Boy - She Comes

2008-10-13T20:23:00.001-07:00

This is a song I spent almost a decade looking for. This was a Steve Masters Modern Mix favorite on Live 105 back in the early 90s. I managed to snag a pretty good quality MP3 of this back in the Napster days. Hard to believe this is almost 2 decades old nowadays.

The next level in nutz technology

2008-10-06T19:54:00.000-07:00

This is it people, until someone manages to cram a tiny TV into them* we have reached the zenith of nutz:

Behold Brakenutz! For only $49.99 plus shipping you can have glowing testes on your truck! There's a video available too.

*If you do this cut me in on a piece of the action

Small Town Values

2008-10-04T09:40:00.000-07:00

Awful Forums member "iw" puts together some stats from when Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasalia, AK

1998 Wasilla rates per 100,000 vs. National average vs. average for towns under 10,000:

Assault (aggravated & all others)
National: 702.5
Wasilla: 1750
Small Towns: 789.3

Burglary
National: 125.5
Wasilla: 1950
Small Towns: 135.8

DWI
National: 521
Wasilla: 2816
Small Towns: 818.2

Drugs
National: 596.2
Wasilla: 850
Small Towns: 537.2

Larceny:
National: 505.6
Wasilla: 3566.0
Small Towns: 574.3

Robbery:
National: 46.9
Wasilla: 116.6
Small Towns: 25.2

Sexual Assault (forcible rape + "sex offenses")
National: 47.3
Wasilla: 166.6
Small Towns: 42.4

Looks like Joe Six Pack has a taste for check fraud and meth.

Stuff you didn't know you needed, vol. 3

2008-09-27T09:17:00.001-07:00

I have learned of the wonders of DuraCoat. It's a colored coating developed for firearms that can turn your boring old gun into something super-boss like this:

But don't get fixated on boring old camo, DuraCoat comes in many colors so let your imagination run wild!

But don't let the boys have all the fun!

So check out Jim's Gun Supply for more info and a picture of an alligator trying to drink beer

John McCain's plan for your healthcare

2008-09-20T15:27:00.000-07:00

From Paul Krugman's blog:
Here’s what John McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:

"Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."

What could possibly go wrong, right? Healthcare companies are too big to fail and it's all that pesky regulation that's been holding them back!

FIX PUSH

2008-09-12T23:57:00.001-07:00

Anyone who's been to the Mission in the last two years knows what this is about. I'd write more but I can't stop laughing.

New InCase Paul Rodriguez Overnight Bag

2008-09-09T22:16:00.000-07:00

Incase has a new bag coming that looks like a good replacement for my slowly decaying Jansport Modus Convertible .

No dimensions yet, it definitely looks carry-on sized I'd be more concerned about it being too small.

Ean Golden reviews the Vestax VCI-300

2008-09-02T10:04:00.000-07:00

Ean Golden, DJ, "controllerist" and guy behind DJ Tech Tools has the first review I've seen of the Vestax VCI-300 for Remix magazine. He seems to like it but misses all the tweakability of his preferred Traktor/VCI-100 setup. No real surprises, this thing has been in production so long I think people know how it's going to work. As far as the thing most people care about:

Now for the question I get most, “Can you really scratch with it?” Yes, the VCI-300 takes a big leap forward in this department. The combination of the high-resolution performance and a lot of fine tuning in the software mean that the VCI-300 and Itch provide better scratch performance than any out-of-the-box MIDI controller I have tested so far.

Read the whole thing here.

Freestyle 101: Gift Of Gab

2008-08-25T19:25:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted a video in a while, this one's a goodie. Gab kills it. Also it's remarkable because it's something seemingly worthwhile on G4. Who knew?

Guide to valuing your stock options

2008-08-14T21:48:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for the forums, but I figured I'd post it here too since it's probably the single longest thing I've written in months...

Since it's far more likely you'll work for one or more startups before starting your own I'll explain in plain terms what it means when you agree to a lower salary and stupid hours in exchange for theoretical future money.

Options have a vesting schedule typically of 2-5 years. The most common one is a 4-year schedule where you get 25% vested after 12 months and then vest monthly from then on. There's also frequently clauses that accelerate your vesting in the event of a buyout or other "liquidity event". This means that you'll probably quit or be let go before being fully vested so adjust accordingly.

The number of shares is irrelevant until you know the total number of outstanding shares. If a recruiter tells you they'll "have to look into it" that typically means that there's a lot.

Taxes are a bitch, especially when you get into AMT territory.

Keep in mind that your stock is worth nothing until you can actually sell it. There's rare exceptions like Facebook founders but you're not going to work at the next Facebook.

So let's say the next hot microvlogging site wants to give you a job. They offer you 5000 shares! sounds rad, right? Work hard, get in nerf wars at the office, make "fuck you money!"

So let's do some math:

You get 5000 shares for $0.10 each but there's 10 million outstanding. That means you "own" 0.05% of the company. But hey, maybe Google will buy you guys for a billion dollars! That means you'll still get half a million dollars aka "fudge you money".

Google wasn't interested. But Microsoft is very bound and determined to throw their money in a hole so they start sniffing around. Everyone goes into crunch time to spit-shine everything and sign some deals. The douchey sales guy has nothing but awesome graphs to show at the all-hands, all the arrows are going up. This is "the push". Something's going to go down this year though but you've got an acceleration clause so if you make it to 12 months you get 50%. That's $250k, aka "Most of a studio condo in Palo Alto money".

Microsoft has decided that scent-based interfaces are the next big thing and decide to pass. The CEO is increasingly manic and has a habit of cruising around the office at 9pm to see who's a "team player". Fortunately Yahoo's new board is looking to inject some excitement into the brand. That new release coming soon will be what pushes them over the edge. You're sleeping under to office pool table. The sales aren't quite meeting projections but they are OK, you just need a little more runway to make it happen. The company gets $5 million in series B which means a 40% dilution. That's still $150k, aka "Porsche 911 [but maybe not a GT3] money".

Success! Yahoo took the bait but they negotiated down to $500 million. The VCs, already $20 million deep decide to go for it. The CEO, VP of sales and the CEO's assistant have a coke orgy with each other in the office bathroom. Suspiciously cheap bottles of champagne are popped, people who you didn't know worked there are at some parties. You've still got $75k coming which is "A BMW and that trip around the world you always wanted to take money".

You get $75k in Yahoo stock. Party time! Oh wait, Carl Icahn posts a drunken rant on his blog and the stock drops 20% before your exercise date. We're down to $60k or "A Lexus and a timeshare in Cabo money".

OK, time to sell! Whoops! Short-term capital gains tax is a bitch. After taxes and accountants you're left with almost $40k or "fully loaded Honda Accord and a Pioneer Kuro money".

And all you had to give up was a year of your social life, the 25 pounds you gained from raiding the office snack cabinet and 4 months of weekends. And you've got some "tin handcuffs" of a retention bonus that keeps you working at Yahoo until you get laid off when MS finally picks up the pieces at a fire sale 2 years later.

Is this that "redneck engineering" I keep hearing about?

2008-08-02T19:38:00.001-07:00

Overheard at work

2008-07-22T16:57:00.000-07:00

Said to a co-worker who is going to be a father very soon:

You know, for the next two years my cat is going to be smarter than your baby.

No, being bought by News Corp hasn't had any effect on the Wall Street Journal

2008-07-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

Critical business reporting from America's financial paper of record:

Along the way, legions of retail grads have spent countless hours neatly folding T-shirts and jeans and stacking them on tables and shelves. Now, their peculiar idea of perfection is straining marriages and leading to bizarre behavior ranging from buying clothes based on an item's foldability to straightening up sloppy displays while shopping.

Next week: People who used to work cash registers less likely to be mouthy jackesses when shopping

Wikipedia gold

2008-07-07T21:14:00.001-07:00

Wikipedia editors on the ball:

Click for big

Sage advice from a fashion expert

2008-06-29T21:55:00.001-07:00

And yes, Utilikilts are covered by this chart.

Design Coding

2008-06-29T14:49:00.001-07:00

Now the brilliance of this is not the subject matter it's the fact that he's actually current and up to date. The part about tables killed me.

Please read this every time you think about politics

2008-06-19T22:07:00.000-07:00

Some wisdom from good old Ike Eisenhower:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

Just a little pre-weekend stuff to make you think.

So delicious it could only have happened by accident

2008-06-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

Someone submitted this awesome headline pair from the Washington Post's website to Wonkette:

Conclusive evidence that journalism is 100% dead.

2008-06-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

I have no words...

Political activists planning protest rallies at the upcoming Democratic Convention in Denver have their stomachs in knots over a rumor about a crowd control weapon - known as the “crap cannon” - that might be unleashed against them.

Is this what we've become? Is it? I'm not just trying to post "Fox News more like Faux News LOL!" here, these idiots are supposed to be the Fourth Estate. Our shield against tyranny.

My brain just broke.

update: Wisdom from Awful Forums poster mofolotopo:

actually it would be really fun to just go there with some huge speakers and play a really low note to see how many of them shit themselves because of the placebo effect

CNN's Top 10 kung fu movies

2008-05-09T00:13:00.000-07:00

Here's why I try to avoid contact with CNN, the following was featured in their "Screening Room" as their top 10 kung fu films.

Enter the Dragon - This is a decent start, it's not my favorite kung fu movie but it's a great flick and had a huge impact on the movie industry.
Ong-bak - First of all there's no kung fu in this movie. The fight direction is a blast and in a world of CGI it's refreshing to see someone take on the old "no wires, no stuntmen" Jackie Chan challenge but there's little in this that hasn't been done better elsewhere.
Wong Fei Hung (Once Upon a Time in China) - I guess the author of this article decided he needed a Tsui Hark movie and decided to just pick the one he'd heard of the most.
Kill Bill 1 & 2 - I think there's about 9 minutes of total martial arts between both movies, nearly all of it supplied by Gordon Liu who doesn't have a single movie he starred in on this list.
Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) - This isn't even the best wire-fu movie of the last 5 years but I guess lots of people saw it so that makes it worthy of this list.
The Karate Kid - Again, no kung fu in this. Weak martial arts but decent acting and 80s camp value win the day for this one.
Ging chaat goo si (Police Story) - Jackie Chan has been in almost 100 movies and at least half of them are honest-to-god kung fu movies. Police Story is not. I love Police Story but to have that be the only Jackie Chan movie on this list is almost criminal.
Shogun Assassin - I'm beginning to wonder if this guy [who isn't credited by name] knows the difference between China, Japan and Thailand. This film is a blast but it's not a kung fu movie.
Siu lam juk kau (Shaolin Soccer) - They could have at least picked Kung Fu Hustle for this one since it's, ya know, mostly a kung fu movie.
The Matrix - None of the "new" fighting effects/direction in this movie hadn't been done by Yuen Woo Ping in another movie. Again, there's under 10 minutes of martial arts total in this.

Zero Shaw Bros. movies. No movies starring Gordon Liu. No movies starring Donnie Yen. No Sammo Hung at all. The only Jackie Chan movie is Police Story. Here's my 10-minute list of 10 movies better than almost everything on this list:

Shaolin Master Killer
Drunken Master II
Five Deadly Venoms
Fist of Legend
Iron Monkey
Pedicab Driver
8 Diagram Pole Fighter
Wing Chun
Chinese Super Ninjas
Fearless

Note to CNN's editors: typing "kung fu movie" into Google doesn't count as writing.

Emergency Party Button

2008-05-08T11:11:00.001-07:00

Further adventures in a new category I'm calling "Automated Party Technology". This is more of a brute force solution than the International Dance Party.

Ongoing anime Democratic primary battle

2008-05-07T12:54:00.001-07:00

Thanks to greatn on the Something Awful forums for a follow-up to his brilliant analysis of the March primaries.

TIMES TEN!

Obama did just that last night in Nc and kicked Hillary(Vegeta's) ass.

But then she went Oozaru mode and turned into a giant ape, inceasing her power level by 20 to try and beat him in Indiana. But high black turnout(Yajirobe) cut off her tail and with the spirit bomb it was essentially a tie and she barely escaped with her life.

Now Obama has to train in 100 times gravity(Kentucky and West Virginia) but he's the nominee basically.

Egregious misuse of scientific equipment

2008-05-05T09:29:00.001-07:00

I'm just impressed the thing didn't burst into flames...

Nutz update: SAVE THE NUTZ!

2008-04-22T13:13:00.000-07:00

The Tallahassee Democrat brings word of a grave threat to our patriotic ability to display camouflage yellow-ribboned testicles on our collective tow hitches:

The Florida Senate on Thursday passed an amendment to impose a $60 fine on Truck Nutz, one brand name for the novelty item on vehicle trailer hitches that resemble the dangling southern end of a northbound bull.

Is there anything quainter than the phrase "the dangling southern end of a northbound bull"? There's more gold here:

Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville, said he had a set on one of his vehicles, which he described as "all pimped out." They are no more than "an expression of truckliness," he said, although he'd acceded to his wife's request to take them off.

"An expression of truckliness" should be engraved in stone somewhere for future archaeologists to discover and puzzle over the meaning of. Maybe it's my latte-sipping, public television watching elitist upbringing or something but I really do find this fascinating.

Found on Wonkette

Stuff you didn't know you needed, vol. 2

2008-04-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

You've probably heard of truck nuts by now, if not actually seen them in the wild. What I'd like to share with you today is a bold new innovation by truck nuts pioneers YourNutz.com. I'll let the picture and marketing material speak for themselves

We’ve Respectfully placed the Yellow Ribbon designating Support the Troops on our Exclusive 8” Customized Desert Scheme Camo Nutz. Your participation in this endeavor will make possible a $10.00 donation to www.supportthetroops.org Thank You for your support. These Camo Nutz Are 8" Tall and are Colored with a base of flat sand with two layers of flat light brown and a top layer of flat medium brown.

Only $38.00!

I'll leave my personal thoughts on the truck nuts phenomenon to Achewood for now.

Stuff you didn't know you needed vol. I

2008-04-13T12:23:00.001-07:00

What's the best thing about the internet? Why quaintly specific e-commerce sites of course! Todays subject is the delightfully literally-named Chocolate Deities.

Need a chocolate Ganesh? No problem. Buddha? They've got 3 different kinds! Need a gift for that special crystal loving lady in your life? How about a Goddess of Willendorf?

I'm going to keep hunting for more of these.

What Rich People have to say about mixed martial arts

2008-04-09T23:00:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting bit of "fish out of water" journalism from Condé Nast Portfolio Magazine:

Give Liddell a pocket calculator and sit him behind an office desk, and he becomes as tightly wound as a sofa spring. "When I'm figuring out my personal finances, I try to keep things as simple as possible so that the Feds won't be interested in me," says the former Ultimate Fighting Championship light-heavyweight champion. "They probably would be, if I still did my own taxes."

...
An accountant, of course, is someone who solves a problem you didn't know you had. Liddell solved Couture in the 2005 rematch by knocking him senseless in the opening round, and in the 2006 rubber match, a second-round KO.

When Liddell doesn't have numbers to crunch, he looks for skulls.

#1 Party robot rewards you for getting down

2008-03-25T18:52:00.000-07:00

The International Dance Party is an automated system to bring fun to what appears to be people in ironic sunglasses. I consider it a robot because I consider most things robots.

Politics even the kids can understand

2008-03-04T12:13:00.000-08:00

Wisdom from the mind of Something Awful forums member "greatn"

It's basically this.

Hillary Clinton is Freiza.

After Goku(Obama), together with help from Piccolo(Edwards) was able to defeat her(Iowa), she revealed her final true form and was too powerful for the two of them(New Hampshire). As last ditch effort Goku used the Spirit Bomb(Nevada) and barely defeated Frieza, or so he though but Frieza was still alive. A bunch of minor characters were then killed off, including Krillin(Kucinich). Goku got so angry he went Super Saiyan(Super Tuesday), and began to outfight Frieza. His power level was off the charts(everything post Super Tuesday). Then Frieza decided if she couldn't win nobody could(scorched earth campaign), and threw her most powerful blast at the planet Namek(Democratic party), ensuring its destruction because Frieza can breath in space and Goku could not. Goku continued to defeat her though(Wisconsin), and Frieza decided to unleash her full 100% power(today). Gan Goku the Super Saiyan defeat Frieza and save the planet Namek?

History tells us yes.

Howard Dean back on Earth will gather the dragon balls and wish the planet Namek(Democratic party) back. Obama will make it back to Earth in time for the general elections, though Hillary will return in some Cyborg form... to be destroyed by Mitt Romney's son from the future?

Basically, that's how it is.

I'm speechless.

I guess the democratic primaries just got more interesting...

2008-02-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

My current dream is to start a class action lawsuit for Fox's misleading use of the word "News" in the name of their TV channel. They'd probably just go all "FNC" though like the Colonel did.*

Bonus "typo" from a little while back:

*KFC has returned to its roots of spelling out its name.

And you all thought it was an urban legend

2008-02-08T12:58:00.000-08:00

From The Hindu:

KATHMANDU: A day after his arrest in Nepal, the Indian government has requested the deportation of the alleged kingpin in the kidney racket, Amit Kumar, to India.

Talking to The Hindu, Indian Embassy spokesperson Gopal Bagle said, “We are requesting the authorities in Nepal to deport Dr. Kumar.” He said he was not sure how long the process would take.

Nepal police presented Dr. Kumar before the media here on Friday and said it would take him to the Revenue Investigation Department on Sunday and seek remand for further investigations.

other links: Al-Jazeera, Hindustan Times

OK so it's not exactly forcibly removing them from some drugged sailor on shore leave or jet-lagged businessman but it's still pretty disturbing. If only we lived in a Gibsonian future of vat-grown organs...

Cursor*10 Flash game

2008-01-03T20:34:00.000-08:00

This is some seriously clever stuff and I encourage all of you to try it. It took me 3 tries to finally get but that was under 10 minutes.

Outlook UI Annoyances vol. 1: Unread Items

2008-01-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

Like many "knowledge workers" in the world I am chained to the Microsoft Outlook at work for my email and calendaring purposes. My own personal thoughts on email as a collaboration tool aside [that's for another day and perhaps its own startup] there's somethings about it that drive me absolutely batty. Today's annoyance:

Notification of unread items

There's so many things wrong with this that it's not even funny. In Outlook the following things count as "Unread Mail":

Deleted mail you haven't "read", including ones that you use the pop-up notifications to resolve

auto-saved drafts of mail messages that are still being composed

This is only what appears as the number of unread messages in Outlook's folder list. As far as deleted items go, I can almost understand where they were coming from with this one. A user might have accidentally "missed" the item they were trying to delete or got a little too aggressive with the Delete key.*

The "Unread Mail" folder itself

Being used to Apple Mail and Thunderbird this one spooks me out a lot. The items that appear in the Unread Mail view are never updated until you manually refresh by viewing something else. Mail and Thunderbird both do this with things that you read and leave in your inbox but not with filed or deleted mail. So in Outlook if you read a message and delete it it stays in your unread folder. If you read a message and file it in another folder it stays in your unread messages folder. It's like they want you to navigate around the product or something.

In something that I can't tell if it's ironic or not if you have an empty mailbox selected and mail comes into it it will mark it as read because it autoselects it. This can be solved by turning off "mark as read after X time" function but I don't know how you could live without that [set to 0 seconds]. I certainly can't.

*Another annoyance is Microsoft's hatred of the backspace key being used to delete anything that's not text and instead having it actually navigate away from what you're looking at.

New Years' Resolution

2008-01-01T17:07:00.000-08:00

Post to blog at least twice a week for six months.

One Legged Pants

2007-12-05T14:15:00.001-08:00

OK so I'm about to have an old man moment here, bear with me. Earlier today I was browsing Hot Topic's website looking for a pair of stupid pants to email to a friend of mine who asked me what was appropriate to wear to an opera matinee. Among the usual selection of ugly black cargo pants with superfluous zippers I encountered the following:

Tripp Black One Legged Pants

Now there's a few things wrong with this:

It's a skirt. Not that there's anything wrong with guys wearing skirts. Back when I was Hot Topic-aged [and Kurt Kobain was still alive] one of my good friends may or may not have worn a skirt from time to time. This, however, is simply false advertising. These are not pants.
It's not really "pants", is it? I mean it's not a pair of pants really. It might be a pant but it's certainly not plural. Stuff like this is why lit majors are 41% more likely to suffer from migranes* Puzzle this one out:
I have a pair of one-legged pants

Is there blood coming out of your nose yet?
They cost the same as the equivalent pair of two-legged pants. Clothing prices, at least in theory are supposed to be determined by the materials and labor [and marketing] costs involved. Since a one-legged skirt uses both less fabric and less seams to sew it seems like things are a little off-kilter.

Anyway, I'm sure whoever buys these pants will suffer the exact amount of anger from jocks, feigned shock from "squares" and disappointment from their parents that these are intended to provide but we're still left with some troubling grammatical and economic questions unanswered.

*I made this up but I do know a lit major [Lit Masters' technically] who suffers from migranes.

Tokyo Gear Round-Up

2007-05-28T22:51:00.000-07:00

In my last post I promised a report on the stuff I got. So here goes:

Royal Robbins Nox Jeans - I actually like these as jeans. They have an interesting wash, they fit me all right and I like the feel of the fabric. What seems to have happened though when they made the fabric is that adding the coolmax or whatever they used to make them more breathable made them warmer than any pair of jeans I've owned. Since it was pretty warm when I wore them in Tokyo I was hotter in them than the more travel-oriented pants I took. I'm going to keep wearing them but for how much bulkier they are than my other pants I don't think they've earned a permanent place in my bag.

Platypus 1L water bottle - Since I went to a place where there's either a vending machine or convenience store within 30 feet of any location I didn't use it much in town but I did enjoy it in the airport on both ends. The 1L size was hard to get any more than halfway full using a drinking fountain or bathroom sink so I might trade down to the 500mL version.
Joby Gorillapod - This one was kind of a wash. I didn't use it much. The pictures I took with it [examples coming soon] are good enough but there's a few issues with it. First of all it's tough to get the camera straight. Second, the act of pushing the shutter release usually does oe or both of the following things:
1. Moves the camera, either skewing or tilting it a little bit.
2. Makes the camera vibrate, thereby eliminating the advantage of using the tripod functionality.
I wanted to like this thing, I really did. I just found it difficult to frame shots and difficult to take them. I think I'm going to give it another shot though, it seems like with some adjustment it could work quite well.

Sleep gear for the plane - A total bust. I'll admit I was slightly more comfortable than other times I've flown but I got maybe 3 hours of sleep total in 19 hours of flying and for the bulk [especially of the pillow which is fairly big even when deflated] it's just not worth it for me.

The best new thing I used on that trip was actually something I bought there which is a AC-to-USB charging device I bought at Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara. With the addition of a couple handy cables I'll be able to charge my iPod, DS and phone anywhere in the world using only one charger and a couple cheap plug adaptors. They had one with 2 ports also, I kind of wish I'd bought it instead. Maybe I'll look for it on eBay.

New trip, new gadgets

2007-05-06T22:50:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things about traveling is that it's an excuse to go shopping and buy some new stuff. This time I'm off to Tokyo, Japan and I got a few new goodies to try out.

Royal Robbins Nox Jeans - Jeans have always been considered terrible travel clothing but there's a part of me that just can't do the whole zip-off nylon travel thing, especially somewhere like Tokyo. These are high-tech wicking techno-jeans and they don't look like old-person jeans. Slightly spendy but that's what REI coupons are for.

Platypus 1L water bottle - I'll be damned if I'm going to pay three dollars for a bottle of water once you get past the security checkpoint. This way I can refill whenever and wherever but it won't take up space when it's empty. I don't know much about Tokyo tap water though so we'll see. I'm a little interested in how easy it is to drink from too.

Joby Gorillapod - I picked this thing up due to some very sub-par low-light photography I took in Paris. I've seen mixed reviews about it online but I have a light camera and I really want to get some of those cool night pictures of the city.

Sleep gear for the plane - I've been cursed with what appears to be a total inability to sleep on airplanes. I've tried staying up all night the night before, Tylenol PM, alcohol, eating, not eating, whatever. For the first time though I'm going to check out the whole neck pillow, eye mask and earplugs deal.

I also got a few miscellaneous things like CoolMax socks and one of those memory cards with a built-in USB adaptor. I'll report back when I'm done.

My First

2007-05-04T17:04:00.000-07:00

I'm finally done interviewing for new jobs and signed an offer to start at an exciting new place. It's going to be nice working on a real design team again, at my last couple positions I've been the sole usability resource and that's a bad place to be in. I recently read this post by Mark Hurst and it brought back some memories.

I was actually the UI designer for Evite when that version of the invite launched way back in fall of 2000. It was my first UI-related job title. Yes, its basic structure is six years old save for about 2/3 of the ad units. Of course back then it also seemed like a good idea to employ 70 people to make it happen and that's what led to the company being sold to Ticketmaster and basically put in maintenance mode from a product development perspective.

I'm not ashamed of it, it was a great challenge to try to deliver good design weighed against the need for customization by the user and a need for more advertising and our whole design and PM team worked very hard to make it happen. It just fails to incorporate the last half-decade of good user experience thinking. Sadly we had an entire new structure for creating the invitations based on a lot of customer feedback and user research but we never got to launch it.

Evite was the first place I ever worked that gathered feedback directly from users instead of through surveys, third-party focus groups, overpriced usability consultants and the other traditional market research. We made imagemaps out of screen comps as prototypes. We used to monitor usability tests with a VGA splitter and a Speakerphone so we could watch the users screen actions on a projector in the next room. We tested multiple versions of new screens to portions of our users. We used to invite expert users over and feed them pizza in exchange for the ability to pick their brains. These were the days before "Don't Make Me Think!" and most people still thought you needed an expensive, monolithic testing cycle to get valuable feedback. As unsuccessful as it was as an independent business it was a great place to work and we did some very interesting work. And a lot of the people I worked with there have gone on to do some very interesting things.

My favorite bag is back! [kind of]

2007-02-04T23:01:00.000-08:00

After reading the excellent OneBag web site before my trip to Paris last year I set out on a quest for a lightweight "convertible" carry-on with no wheels. There's a lot of bags in this category including the Rick Steves Convertible, the Tom Bihn Aeronaut, the Red Oxx Air Boss and more. At that time Jansport was closing out most of their product from the Modus line so I ended up with the Modus Soft Convertible Carry-On for $50.

I've taken it on 4 trips so far and with a couple exceptions it's perfect. I love the "book style" opening, it eliminates the need for any packing cubes or stuff like that [all I use is one Eagle Creek compression bag] and even completely packed with stuff I've never had to check it. The only things I don't like are that the "quick access" zipper into the main compartment isn't lockable [curiously the main zipper next to it is] and the shoulder strap is a bit of a pain to adjust. Otherwise it's been fantastic and several people have asked me where to get one.

Until recently I had to say "yeah, they don't make this any more." Now it's back in the form of the JanSport Euro Sak. The main differences are minor and seem to be mostly cosmetic and if it's anything like its dead older brother it should be a great piece of luggage. I'm going to check it out the next time I'm in REI.

The ultimate Moleskine pen?

2007-01-01T19:41:00.000-08:00

In the 'hood rich, LA-styled fabulousness of the new section of the Westfield San Francisco Center [did this city really need another Banana Republic, H&M or Juicy Couture?] there are a couple redeeming qualities. The eclairs at Beard Papa are one [BYO blood glucose meter] and MaiDo stationery is another. They're a Japanese stationery store with all the usual papers, odd notebooks like a series of officially licensed Pantone pads, erasers shaped like Japanese food items and a vast array of pens and pencils ranging from the luxurious to the weird.

I was in there today enjoying the lack of holiday shopping crush that's plagued the neighborhood for the last six weeks and happened upon what I think may be the ultimate Moleskine-compatible pen. Behold, the Pilot HI-TEC-C couleur 04: [click for big]

OK, it's not like I'm revealing an Apple cell phone here but this thing rules. It's small but not so tiny, it has great roller-ball action, the clip fits in the notebook's spine and it even matches my 2007 red weekly planner. This is something I've seen discussed at great length elsewhere and opinions are varied and passionate. I bought it in the hope that I'd use my notebook more this year if I didn't have to worry about having a pen when I wasn't carrying a bag so we'll see.

Here's the rest of the pictures. Yes, my camera's close-up focus sucks.

Edward Tufte is smarter than you

2006-11-02T15:37:00.000-08:00

Information design smartyman Edward Tufte on the recent leaked PowerPoint slide trying to summarize the current situation in Iraq. I've quoted the whole thing because his site doesn't have anchor tags. My highlights in green.

Here are some preliminary comments on the slide "Iraq: I&W of Civil Conflict." My previous
one-word critique ('lousy") wasn't very thoughtful, and here's another try at an analysis.

It appears that "I&W" means "Indications and Warnings." Replacing the acronym in the slide title does pep up meaning to outsiders: "Iraq: Indications and Warnings of Civil Conflict," but maybe it wouldn't fit on the slide.

Only this single slide was leaked (by the military? by DoD?), and so maybe some of the analytical problems are better handled on accompanying slides. Maybe.
Doing competent political analysis, epidemiology, nation-building, and war planning (all of which they're trying to do) in a chaotic situation is impossible, and not much good social science and epidemiology can be expected in chaos and from a military entangled in Iraq. In real-time chaotic situations, the data-collection is going to be sloppy because people have more important things to do. (Recall, for example, the gross errors in counts of 9/11 deaths, as the count went from 6,000 to 2,800 in a few weeks.) And what's taking place is in profoundly different cultures and in different languages from those of the non-local military in Iraq. But sloppy data does not justify analytical sloppiness in reporting. In fact, sloppy data requires greater analytical precision of thought.
The slide reports performance data--a list of phrases, with each phrase accompanied by a measure of performance. This is what the tables in the sports section, mutual fund page, and weather page of newspapers do very well. Those designs are much better for reporting performance data than the slide format here. In sports and stock market tables, each phrase is accompanied by multiple measures of performance, often over varying time-periods. All that won't fit on the slide; this suggests that we should use better reporting method than PP, instead of abbreviating the evidence to fit the slide. As the millions of readers of sports tables each day demonstrate, people can easily manage large tables of information. Thus those being briefed in the military should ask: Why are our presentations operating at 2% of the data richness of routine tables found in the sports section? Let the viewers read and explore through a range of material; different eyes will search for different things in the evidence. The metaphor should be the cognitive style of the sports section (or weather or financial newspaper pages) not the cognitive style of PowerPoint.
There is no cloud of uncertainty or error history associated with the editorializing color. At times, such color codings suggest an excess of certainty.
The Iraq slide above provides some relevant but thin and overly short-run time-comparisons: 2 arrows on the left showing "change since last week," and the "Index of Civil Conflict (Assessed)", which sort of compares "Pre-Samarra" with "Last week" and "Current". And there's a potent time-comparison in words: ". . . violence at all-time high, spreading geographically."
To get more time comparisons on the 14 "Reads" and "Additional Indicators," 14 sparkline time-line histories for the last year (week by week, if available) would be useful as a overall but detailed summary. This would reduce the snapshot tone of the 14 reads and indicators. In our thread Sparklines: theory and practice, there are (at the top of the thread) data tables with sparklines that report daily and longterm financial data; one such table shows 14,000 numbers, many of them accurate to only 2 digits (not much for financial data) under the philosophy of "Try to be approximately right rather than exactly wrong." The short-run weekly jitters and non-reports need to be smoothed out to see (and compare with)the long-run trends. Weekly data cooperate with the notorious recency bias, whereby way too much weight is given to the most recent piece of data, just because it is recent. These weekly reports should be in the context of longer run information to reduce the chances that analysis will be dancing around only with today's news.
The list style, surely one damn thing after another here, is merely descriptive and thus preliminary to policy analysis. That analysis might have been done on the other slides or maybe this report is merely meant as a scorecard. If it is a scorecard, it is grossly impoverished compared to sports, weather, and financial tables.
The current fashion (it, too, shall pass) in government is the stoplight style (green, yellow, red), which tends to dequantify data. With categories of this sort, there's always a concern with how the breaks among categories are chosen and with the meanings of the categories. It will often be better to provide some evidence or numbers, and then an editorial-judgmental color about the number.
The slide contains odd uses of the color-words: for example, a green dot indicating "routine" next to the exciting phrase "unorganized spontaneous mass civil conflict". Shouldn't "routine unorganized spontaneous mass civil conflict" be red-critical? After Hiroshima, would Nagasaki get the routine green dot for nothing different than what happened three days earlier? It looks like weekly wiggles get too much attention, and longrun levels of seriousness too little attention on this slide, as chaos becomes routine week by week and bit by bit. Monthly rather then the sketchy weekly reports might be better for policy analysis. Or at least provide a monthly aggregations over a period of many months (even the entire war) in a scorecard along with the weekly incidents.
The leaking of the slide makes a point about the differences between the government's secret analysis and the public reports by the Administration, a common theme of the insider books on Iraq policy-making (most recently Colin Powell's book). At some time, "reality must take precedence over public relations," as Richard Feynman remarked about the shuttle Challenger accident.
A good many comments by our contributors are on-point but are not taken into account here.
Our thread PowerPoint does rocket science--and better techniques for technical papers has many contributions that are relevant to the Iraq slide. In particular, note the measurements, definitions, and comparisons to standards in the customer scorecard in the "Report of the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority" (near the end of the long thread).
Finally, the over-riding metaphor of all this--"the war on terror"--is a big conceptual problem. Once it's a war, then it almost necessarily invokes large-scale military action and searching for a locale (some place, any place, Iraq) for large-scale military action. But terrorists are more like the Mafia or gangs than they are like armies. Perhaps a better metaphor is that terrorism is largely a law-enforcement problem (requiring focused and clandestine local action, informants, endless detective work, detailed knowledge of the local languages and cultures).
Among the grand truths about human behavior, surely the principles of "the unintended consequences of purposive social action" and "it's more complicated than that" are among the top five. Sometimes unintended consequences are largely virtuous or benign (as in market allocation of goods and services if externalities are mitigated) and sometimes the unintended consequences are appalling. That's because it's more complicated than that.

-- Edward Tufte, November 1, 2006

When Powerpoint attacks

2006-11-01T15:45:00.000-08:00

So it seems that at least some of the folks in our government don't think everything in Iraq is going great as the people most willing to stand up aren't waiting for us to stand down.

In a Many Robots exclusive I've received from an anonymous source the Presidential summary edition of this slide as included in his daily intelligence briefings.

Taking the "bullshot" to another level

2006-09-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

As coined last september by Penny Arcade, a "bullshot" is a screenshot, that, while it may use actual assets from the product, is hand-polished by whatever thankless production intern is currently the marcom deparment's bitch.

Microsoft launched their shiny [and ugly but that's another post] Zune player today. It's about what everyone expected and looks like the FCC pictures that came out a while back.

On to my specific point. The Zune has a 320 x 240 screen. That's this big:

Microsoft has press shots on their website that show the screen like this:

Now I may be a simple country hyperchicken but it seems to me that this here is a wee bit deceptive. If Microsoft's scaling algorithms were as good as Adobe's [they're not] it would look somewhat like this:

Of course I'm complaining about this in the middle of the biggest journalism meltdown in history where press releases count as stories, press conferences count as TV programming and most actual "news" comes from only a dwindling handful of sources.

And before you ask, yes, the Cupertino Fruit Company is guilty of this is well.

Tales of the Office Fridge

2006-08-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

Inspired by this Slashdot article I'm reminded of a tale from my heady dot-com days when working 60 hours a week with a 2 hour commute somehow seemed like a good idea.

I was working at AltaVista in mid-1999, and while there are many tales of woe regarding that whole saga I'll stick to this one for now. Like many offices, ours had a little problem with people eating food and drinking drinks that didn't necessarily belong to them. At the time I was coming off of my growing years but maintaining the diet of a 15-year-old. After a bit of "personal growth" in the horizontal sense I decided to try to be healthier in my dietary habits and started buying skim milk from the Trader Joe's across the street to drink during the day. As an aside, I'm aware that milk has a lot of calories but to me I just assumed it was "healthy" and it's still probably ten times better than Mountain Dew.

The refrigerator in the break room was the same one that we kept the half and half for the coffee in and this being Northern California skim milk next to half and half is like, well, sushi next to a Fillet O' Fish. So people started using my milk. At first a quart would last me three days, then two, then finally it would be gone in under 24 hours. I wrote my name on the carton in increasingly elaborate and obvious fashion. I tried out various scripts, colors and placement of "James' Milk: DO NOT DRINK" but nothing seemed to work. In a fit of inspired desperation I tried to use psychological warfare. I made a sign that said the following:

"To the person or persons who have decided to drink my milk:

Please be aware that I drink straight from the carton!

-James"

In my mind I had won. I had created a message that would probably gross out the squeamish and perhaps the humor would win the rest over. All was well for the next 2 days or so and a couple people had actually commented on how funny the sign was. I was not to have the last laugh though because once as I came back from a meeting I saw the following written hastily in ball-point pen beneath my stern warning:

"So do I"

Flashy New Sony mylo wifi IM web media thingy.

2006-08-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

I guess this is a Gizmodo exclusive for now but this thing looks pretty neat:

[click for super-huge PR shot with obviously doctored screenshots]

The media player does MPEG-4, digital audio, and pictures. But it also has a WiFi connection and a QWERTY keyboard, for chatting on Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger (No AIM support, sorry.) Wait, wait, wait! It also works as a wireless Skype phone! And it has an Opera browser. And it can wirelessly stream music to other mylo owners in the area, ala iTunes. Without cellular connectivity, its not going to best a Hiptop, but we love the open standard support.

The mylo has 1GB of flash memory, backed by a Memory Stick Pro Duo slot. Its screen is a 320 by 240 pixel 2.4-inch LCD. It'll retail for $350 when it hits the shelves in September.

There's a Youtube video showing a bit of it in action. It's actually smaller than it looks.

After using a Nokia 770 at 800 x 480 a 320 x 240 screen is a bit tiny but this thing looks pretty cool. I hope they manage AIM support at some point. This looks like a decent Sidekick replacement except for the pretty glaring Bluetooth omission for mobile phone pairing and high price.

It's been interesting watching the handheld space change, it seems like they're punctuated by a lot of false starts followed by a lot of iterative time when people refine good ideas. The design, like most handheld devices will be one of those "gotta hold it to see" things but I think it's a good look and layout. I'm not wild about the 'mylo' [no caps] name but it beats the crap out of Creative-too-many-names-syndrome or iRiver-not letter-number-disease which is refreshing. Finally I am issuing it the Needs More Jog Wheel Award for having what is pretty much the best small UI widget around for dealing with lists and scrolling. It's probably thanks to Apple's dubious patent on jog wheels for portable media devices.

90s Music Video Series #2 "Mindphaser" by Front Line Assembly

2006-08-01T22:25:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because I've been re-reading William Gibson's Sprawl Series lately but I've been in a cyberpunk sort of mood. Most of the sci-fi footage is from the Japanese TV show "Gunhead".

Convenient, central location for learning why Bose sucks

2006-07-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

First Adopter collects and compiles resources detailing why the speaker company that spends 70% of its annual budget on marketing just might not have the best products at any price point.

The good news nowadays is that there's good alternatives like Orb Audio and B & W who deliver great looks and great sound at a lower cost than Bose.

I've been consistently disappointed by the way that audio and video products are marketed to consumers. They depend on ignorance and laziness to sell people poorly performing products at inflated prices. In a day and age where a $35 T-Amp and a pair of $150 speakers can measurably outperform a $1200 Bose system people get dazzled by the tiny speakers and controlled demos that Bose runs and pay out the nose.

I definitely think a sizeable market niche exists for high quality audio components that are elegantly designed. Whether they can compete with the 800 lb juggernauts at retail is a tough one though.

90s Music Video Series: #1 "Wicked" by Ice Cube

2006-06-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

So this is "Wicked" off of Ice Cube's "The Predator" album and features the Red Hot Chili Peppers breaking things and Ice Cube getting mugged by an old woman. Sadly will never appear on MTV again due to guns and violent imagery. Because guns are bad but 18-year-olds getting so drunk they hurt themselves is cool...

Youtube is the ultimate resource for music videos from my high school days.

Wisdom on premium cables from the archives (literally)

2006-03-30T15:11:00.000-08:00

I was pointed to this by someone on the Something Awful Forums, it's one I'd been searching for for a while. I'm going to quote the whole thing here because the color scheme on the original page is painful and disturbing.

The point is an important one, namely that wire is really, really cheap to make and the selling of it is modern-day snake oil. No, that $45 dollar component cable is not "cheap". This one at $3 is cheap. And it will perform exactly the same.

Calm down Mrs. Crawford, yes, through a wire hanger... It'll work just fine...

Ok,

So if any of you followed the digital wire wars a while back you may recall that some people maintained that you absolutely, positively, NEEDED a 75 ohm digital cable to connect your DVD player to your pre/pro... Nothing else will do... Anything else, and you risk errors in the bitstream so bad, that they are not only uncorrectable but you will also lose that "smooth airiness on the highs; open and more believeable soundstage; (insert your favorite audiophile tripe here)" and that basically the more money you spend on a digital cable, the more likely you are to achieve a sonic nirvana.

And you may or may not remember that after some rumblings and an e-mail from Jon Wenger, I built "The Finest Digital Transfer Wire In-the-WORLD!"® by taking two blue painted wire hangers and cutting an old, cheap, ugly green rca patch cord in two, soldering the ends onto the wire hangers.

You may remember my initial listening tests between that, a cheap, ugly yellow patch cord, a proper RG-6, 75 ohm cable with gold rca's, and the optical tos-link for comparison, yielded no discernable results, BUT there were too many other factors, like my ears may not be as golden or magical as someone else's, or that the toslink was shoddy anyway, etc.

Well, with Jon's help, I have now finished lab testing the cable.

For the dvd player, we used a professional version of the Sony 7000 reference player. It's actually model number DVP-S7000TP, serial # 2023. This is a pretty cool player... it has a nice gray matte, professional looking face, with a really cool rotary region selection switch near the headphone jack! For the processor we used a Dolby Labs model number DP562 multichannel ac-3 decoder, serial # 500280. The very cool feature, which is very necessary for our scientific experiment (since my pedestrian ears can't be trusted to be refined enough for the audiophiles whose heads travel in extra rarified air,) of this Dolby produced decoder is that it will do a bit error rate count... Yup, it will count each and every error it sees... Which is crc (cyclic redundancy check) protected which means the odds of having multiple errors such that the crc check passes an error in the data stream, is almost impossible. The output of the dvd player is an rca coax connector, and the input to the decoder is an XLR balanced connector. Jon normally has a Canare XLR to rca wire connecting the two.

I brought all my wires in case the number of errors that the wire hanger wire rolled was so great, that we would want to try the others and tabulate results... If you would like to see a picture of the wires (including the Sky-Blue/Lime-Green model of "The Finest Digital Transfer Wire In-the-WORLD!"®) go to: See a photo of the wire on my main Home Theater page.

Now we initially had a little problem with the hookup because we planned on using an rca female to female adapter and putting the test wire right between the Sony 7000 and the Canare cable, BUT we could not find the female to female... Not wanting to give up without giving it the old college try, Jon found two wires with alligator clips on them, so we used those.

So just to recap this thing to death, we had: The professional Sony S7000TP reference dvd player, going to a 20 year old, ugly green, rca patch cord which was cut in two. On one side of the green rca I soldered a blue painted wire hanger to the shield and another to the center conductor. I soldered the other ends of the wire hangers to the other half of the ugly green rca patch cord. We then clipped the alligator clips with thin wire to the centers and shields of the rca connectors of my cable and of the Canare cable, and then plugged the other XLR-balanced side of the Canare into the Dolby Labs decoder. I honestly did not know how badly we would be rolling errors on this one... and with open, scientific minds, we played a dvd...

Are you all sitting down? Good. We played the King Crimson Deja VROOM dvd for over fifteen minutes with this configuration and not only did it sound good, but the Dolby Decoder reported ZERO errors... Did you all get that ok? ZERO, nadda, nihil, zippo, nothing, none... error-free. Given that, there was not much point in trying the higher quality cables I had brought with me.

Conclusion: IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT YOU USE FOR YOUR DIGITAL CABLE CONNECTION BETWEEN YOUR DVD PLAYER AND YOUR PROCESSOR... YOU CAN BASICALLY USE ANYTHING THAT LOOKS ELECTRICALLY LIKE METAL. IT WILL WORK JUST FINE. (Between the coax connectors that is... I have not successfully used the wire hangers on the tos-link optical connectors... yet...) If you like you can hook the shield on one side to one of your Rodan bronze statues, and the other shield to somewhere else on the statue, and then hook the center conductors to another Rodan bronze, and it will work JUST FINE. The sonic clarity will be stunning, as well as visually pleasing.

So you can use the rca cables they throw in for free into your component boxes that you've been meaning to throw away for months because they offend your sensibilities, or you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Rodan Bronzes and use those, or anything in between... but please do not tell me that it sounds "warmer, cleaner, more open" or anything like that BECAUSE of the WIRE... It may sound different to you or to others... There are lots of reasons why it MAY sound different, not ALL of which are in your head... If it in fact IS different, then this difference is NOT due to the $800 wire you just swapped in. It may be that your player or decoder are somehow defective, or not designed very robustly (i.e. - if there is a difference that is NOT your imagination, then something is broken and you should not be wondering about the wire... you need to look elsewhere for the answer...)

Lastly, if you remember, my original preliminary offer was to sell this cable - "The Finest Digital Transfer Wire In-the-WORLD!"® to whomever wanted one, for a check or money order for $750.00 and two soiled shirts and I would send you the cable, in your choice of designer sky blue with lime green ends, or designer bone shell white with banana yellow ends, and your shirts laundered... However, in light of the new lab-tested/hand-made nature of the cable, I am going to have to bump up the price. Yes, you guys had your chance, I am going to have to raise the price to $1249.00 and two soiled shirts. Keep in mind that this is for an error-free, lab-tested on official Dolby lab's equipment, cable. (Don't worry Jon, I'll split the profits with you for an occasional, over the weekend testing session!)

I've pretty much completed this experiment to my satisfaction, and believe I have beaten the proverbial dead horse to a bloody pulp... If someone thinks I may have overlooked something however, my mind is not closed on this topic, and I would be happy to address any serious scientific hypothesis regarding this or other results... Thanks for paying attention... It's been real... Remember, do have fun with your hobby... you are doing this for fun aren't you?

-al

Web 7.0

2006-02-17T10:07:00.000-08:00

Jeff Zeldman says what a lot of us have been thinking for the last year or so in A List Apart. My favorite quote:

Steven, a young web wiz, has just celebrated his bar mitzvah. He received a dozen gifts and must write a dozen thank-you notes. Being webbish, he creates an on-line "Thank-You Note Generator." Steven shows the site to his friends, who show it to their friends, and soon the site is getting traffic from recipients of all sorts of gifts, not just bar mitzvah stuff.

If Steven created the site with CGI and Perl and used tables for layout, this is the story of a boy who made a website for his own amusement, perhaps gaining social points in the process. He might even contribute to a SXSW Interactive panel.

But if Steven used AJAX and Ruby on Rails, Yahoo will pay millions and Tim O'’Reilly will beg him to keynote.

What myself and thousands of other people who lived through the first "bubble" know is that the problem wasn't ever lack of talent. It was lack of wisdom. Wisdom about sustainable business models, wisdom about staffing, wisdom about branding, marketing, usability, customer service and wisdom about due diligencence. When some of the newer startups started getting real traction a couple years ago I thought, "Great, people proving that web businesses can be small, efficient and useful!" Sadly, in a process eerily similar to 1998-era times a bunch of people who don't know anything about the web, useful software and the intersection of the two exclaim, "Holy shit! Myspace sold for $580 million. I gotta call up my broker and tell him to get me some of that web 2.0 action and quick!". And the people who came out of the last bust with some name recognition, credibility and extra stacks of dubloons realized that the real money isn't in having a startup, it's in taking other people's money to fund them.

Tim O'Reily has a company that has a deserved reputation for high-quality technical books. He also runs a venture capital fund. He also hypes the entire "Web 2.0" phenomenon more than just about anybody. Much like stock analysts became media figures in the late 90s, the "tech veterans" of today with their fingers and investment dollars in innumerable pies are the ones who get called up for quotes.

Is this a vast conspiracy? No, it's some dorks trying to crash the usual Wall Street fratboy circlejerk. We'll just have to see who ends up eating the soggy cookie this time around.

My big prediction round-up

2006-01-18T16:15:00.000-08:00

In my first real post here I made a bold prediction that not only would Nintendgs outsell the Xbox 360, it would be the "it" item for the 2005 holiday [yeah, I said it] season. Here's how it's broken down.

I sure was right on the numbers, in the US alone Nintendogs sold 1.465 million copies between when it was released and the end of December. The Xbox 360 sold 607,000 units between launch and Dec. 31 in the US. Of course I may be right for the wrong reasons, as supply problems are causing major headaches for Microsoft but I'll take 'em where I can get 'em. Sadly I don't have any numbers for the total number of 360 games sold but I do know that only 2 of them broke 100,000 units in December. And they're both by EA.

I was dead wrong about the 360 not being the hot holiday item. Wrongity wrong wrong wrong. Perhaps I overestimated the decision-making ability of the zombielike holiday shopper. Perhaps I overestimated how price-sensitive the American consumer is. Either way though my Microsoft still not having systems available they're quickly extinguishing the "pent-up demand" [not my words] for the system. But hey, there's hardly any new games coming out right now anyway.

My comments about Nintendo's "get the non-gamers" strategy have been accurate. Well, they have in Japan where the DS, along with "non-games" [oh lord do I hate that term, more on that later] like Nintendogs, Brain Training and Animal Crossing created a run on the DS that I couldn't have seen coming. We'll see if they can continue this with the Revolution.

So I really was only 1/3 right which is slightly worse than guessing at random. Fortunately there's no one reading this so my shame can remain hidden.

This donut's got skills

2006-01-03T22:53:00.000-08:00

This has to been seen to be believed. NWS audio, should be office-friendly with headphones except you *will* bust out laughing. Having been to several MC battles I would have killed to see this.

Silent but Deadly - the PS3 Strikes Back?

2005-12-20T21:02:00.000-08:00

Between CES and E3 I think a lot of things are going to sort themselves out. How, exactly, that ends up happening isn't something I'm going to predict. My take on it is that if your goal is to play games the PS2 has a whole lot of life left in it, the DS finally got a real library this fall/winter, the PSP seems to be picking up on the game front and the Gamecube and XBox have boatlods of great games available cheap. The woes of the early adopter have been well-documented since the SNES days, the only real difference is that the amounts of money have increased and the amount of time before the library really gets cranking has become longer.

That said, there's a chance that the 360 might end up "caught in the middle" so to speak with the Revolution being cheaper and the PS3 being more powerful. All I know is that Microsoft needs to start daily beatings at Bungie until Halo 3 comes out if they really want their head start to count. DOA4 might help in Japan a bit but they're climbing uphill.

Trip Report: The Future Primitive Sound Session 10th Anniversary

2005-12-19T12:12:00.000-08:00

This was last night at Mighty in SF and was the best one I've been to in probably 2 years. Because FPS has been trying to gain steam as a label we've been subjected to a lot of Azeem and Daly Situations which is not a good thing of you've ever heard them. This one was all DJs [with some other stuff I'll mention later].

The lineup:
DJ Willow "The Gaslamp Killer" - this guy was kind of weird, he can scratch like a motherfucker but it took him a long time to get set up on each one and it seemed like he was trying to show off his psychedelic rock collection. He was also really into his bugged-out dancing and effects box.

Arts in Motion - A string quartet who plays with hip-hop instrumentals [usually from a laptop]. They were involved in DJ Radar's "Scratch Concerto" project and played between and during acts. Far more interesting than I was expecting.

Romanowski - He didn't play his album cuts! Seriously, I've probably seen him 5 times in the last 3 years and this was the first time he didn't. Good set, a lot of dancehall/dub.

Faust & Shortee - Best set of the night IMO, I've seen them a bunch of times and they have this habit of stealing the show from the headliners. Super-tight, nearly flawless and mega-energy like always. They are typically higher tempo than most turntablism sets, too bad it was getting too crowded to dance.

At this point the club became so crowded is was basically impossible to move. Once Radar and Z-Trip came on people started crowding towards the stage and it was generally stupid. Z-Trip seems to have almost made the crossover thing happen so there was a lot of douchey yuppies and hipster cokeheads.

Radar and Z-Trip - It's hard to form a full opinion of this set without mentioning the crowd. Seriously 95% of the people were standing still with drinks in their hands. Anyway, they started out doing sort of a cover of the infamous "volume 2" mixtape, but then went off on their own. Right at the beginning of the set Radar did the illest 1-deck beat-juggle I've ever seen in my life for like a minute and most of the people there didn't seem to notice. The set was refreshingly light on Z-Trip's classic rock collection but was still a great mix of hip-hop, rock, dub/dancehall and other weird shit. At this point it was last call and since they hadn't played "magic carpet ride" or anything from z-trip's album the lamers started leaving. Then Arts in Motion came out again and they did a bit from the "Turntable Concerto", it was pretty abstract and if I didn't already know he was scratching in key with the music I would have been pretty lost too. Then they started mixing in drum beats and stuff and it got a lot more entertaining. Then Z-Trip did a lot of his typical routine with Steve Miller, Steppenwolf, etc. I love the 2-DJ setup so much because if they're on there's never a slow point in the routine. Right at the end they did the "Mad Mountain King" routine made famous in the movie "Scratch" except they brought out the violins again and had them play the song live which was awesome. Plus at that point most of the fratboys had gone home.

Then things got really good, all the DJs who performed and a couple extras showed up and freestyle tag-teamed the decks for about an hour. It was sloppier than the previous sets but it made up for it with crazy skills all over the place. Overall it's not the best FPS I've been to but it was the best one since I saw Kid Koala back in 2004. I'd give the music a 9/10 and the club a 5/10 [waaay too crowded, didn't have the will call list and made everyone stand in the cold for half an hour]

Video game cannibalism target of federal investigation

2005-11-30T15:26:00.000-08:00

So I happened upon this earlier today and nearly had a brain aneurysm. Seriously.

WASHINGTON - Video games glamorizing guns and violence have long drawn the ire of media watchdog groups. This holiday season, they say they have found a bloody new wrinkle to hate: cannibalism.
...
"It's just the worst kind of message to kids," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who joined institute officials at a press conference announcing the group's 10th annual video game report card. "They can be dangerous to your children's health."

Now there is some interesting research surrounding violent media and its effect upon the behavior of young people. This isn't something I'm going to argue as I haven't had PsychLit access in years. There are two things very, very wrong about this that I'll list now:

There are things directly linked to violence we're not doing anything about. Domestic violence, abuse, neglect, racism, substance abuse [by parents and kids], poverty, poor educations and shoddy parenting are already strongly correlated with youth violence. We don't need more research, we don't need public interest groups feeding press releases to politicians and we don't need an advisory committee on this. We know these things and instead of addressing them are simply punishing one of the few growth industries that the US has left and trampling all over the first amendment in the process. Even if you're convinced that violent video games are bad for young people there's no successful argument that can convince me that this time, money and public awareness wouldn't be more productive applied to some of the many social ills we have that are incontrovertibly linked to violence by young people.

We're at war at the moment. Remember that? We're on track to pass the mega-ironic statistic of having more Americans die in Iraq and Afghanistan than did on September 11 long before we leave. The administration's cronyism, incompetence and deception is lying out there, like a turd in the punch bowl that no one is willing to adknowlege while our people die in dusty streets in the middle of nowhere. Joe Lieberman's not new to this game but I have nothing to say but "shame on you" for this whole fiasco. Hilary Clinton too. You guys are Democrats, why in God's name are you buddying up to people like Rick Santorum to push an agenda that no one except religious-oriented ["family" my ass] lobbying organizations and douchebag ambulance chasers actually wants? You don't think if Joe makes another stab at the presidency his comments about the serious nature of video game zombie violence aren't going to come back to haunt him?

Between this and the Democrats' constant buddying up with the MPAA and RIAA I'm done with them. I'm going to do something. It's not much but it will easy my conscience. All the money [admittedly not a tremendous amount] that I used to give to the DNC and various other Democratic fundraising groups is now going to the EFF and ACLU. I'm wiritng letters to all my elected representatives telling them that. And I'm not going to vote for them anymore.

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland

2005-10-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

One of the goals in this game requires you to jump over a shark. It even happens in slow motion and the gap name for it is "the Fonzie". I'm going to be positive about things and say that that is some sort of signal from the no doubt overworked THPS team at Neversoft. They're telling us "we understand what you're going through, just hang on".

It is practically heroic to have released a hit game every year for the last seven years but a part of me wonders if it was the right thing to do. Maybe Neversoft's buyout deal with Activision included a certain number of Tony Hawk titles and the last couple years have been their "contractual obligation-filling double album" phase. I hope so.

All other things aside the true appeal of Tony Hawk games has always been a certain refinement in the gameplay. THPS games always felt "natural" to play. Even when the content got exceedingly stupid and "Jackass"-focused the sweet, sweet satisfaction of nailing a long special over a gap or lining up a rail transfer perfectly remained. But they took it too far. At any point on any level you can just alternate between pressing x and triangle and do a lengthy combo. You can do a 720 or 900 off every quarter pipe. since every button is mapped to something at all times you frequently Bert Slide while trying to walk or start flips or rolls just while ollieing. THere's only six levels in classic mode [there's 8 if you buy the $60 limited edition], they didn't even bother making Classic goals for the main levels in the game.

It's still a Tony Hawk game and it's still fun to cruise around at high speed [fater than ever] and just try things. But in a lot of ways it just feels too raw and unfinished.

Like I said about SSX On Tour if this was the first THPS game ever it would be an achievement. The problem is that we've become accustomed to them being achievements every single time so now that it's not we can't help but feel disappointed.

SSX On Tour

2005-10-13T14:55:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of torn on this game. The level design is quite good and if nothing else I'll get my money's worth just freeriding. The rest is, well, sort of a mess.

The interface sucks and that's not even counting the SUPER MEGA ROCK MONSTER graphic design of it. The game autosaves if you've changed NOTHING but merely looked at an options screen or store. If you turn that off you get asked at least once every 30 seconds and sometimes twice in a row. And you can't just cancel out with triangle like before you have to actually choose "no". The "mixtapes" don't work on the menu screens.

There's no real sense of progression, you just sort of cruise along until you get sponsored and then keep going until you hit semi-pro, etc. without any real idea when it's going to happen again. The board pricing is bizarre, there can be a huge difference between 2 boards that cost almost the same or almost non between ones with $30k difference. There's many fewer clothes and accessories.

I miss the personalities of the riders, all your opponents are just genero-weenies like you. Even though a lot of the voice work has been over the top [especially in Tricky] in the past it at least gave it some personality.

The reduced trick options are a bit of disappointment as well but not a huge one for me. I like racing/freeriding much better anyway. THe only thing I don't like is that you need to do boardpress spam at all times to get your combo multiplier high enougn.

There are definitely improvements, bouncing off an invisible wall is actually preferable to the all too frequent "out of bounds" in SSX3. I like the fact that boosting actually makes a significant difference in speed unlike 3. I'm not sorry I bought this game at all and I'll probably play a lot more but it just feels sort of unfinished.

Basically, if this was the very first SSX game ever I'd love it. The fact is that they've done pretty much every thing better in another previous game which is weird.

The reason why

2005-09-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

The iPod will be one of those business school examples of what to do right for the forseeable future. It is successful for reasons that trancsend engineering, design and marketing. It's a well-made product that beat its competitors on basically every level except price.

Compared to what was out at the time:

- It was smaller than anything else on the market because Apple was the first company to take on using Toshiba's 1.8-inch hard drive. This made it more expensive but it's a tradeoff Apple correctly predicted people would be willing to pay the difference for [see also: iPod mini bing the best-selling model until last week].

- Apple spent extra money for quality control, packaging and materials in the manufacturing not just to make it look better but to make it feel better to use. Early MP3 players had flimsy buttons, flexing plastic, bad seams, high defect rates, cheap boxes and manuals, etc. People commented how solid and well-made it felt. Again, spending more money made people more willing to spend money.

- They gave it a good interface. The current one is much better than the original but even then it far outclassed anything else on the market. This was a result of a decision that seems to rile up the nerdiest of people the most, namely ignoring file name and directory structure and using a centralazed database of ID3 information. They also put a damn wheel on the thing [and patented it] which in my opinion is still one of their primary advantages.

- They gave it an entirely distinctive look. This is part of what created the 'mystique' about it and is something that an entirely engineering-oriented company would never do. And even since, no company is willing to "go all the way" on a look, always deciding to offer a range or mix an accent color with a neutral.

You have plenty of people who will always think "oh, it's just trendy" or "oh, it's the marketing". It never was and it never will be.

What's wrong with the PSP?

2005-09-02T16:12:00.000-07:00

Like a couple other million people in the world I own a PSP. I bought one on impulse after I got a bonus at work a few months ago. I've had a wonderful time playing Wipeout Pure, Hot Shots Golf and Metal Gear Ac!d [I'm one of those weirdos who likes card games]. It's a great system. The screen is amazing, the controls, graphics and sound are good, the form factor and battery life are decent and the multimedia capabilities are interesting.

So where are all the games?

It seems like every system since the Playstation has a "post-partum slump" when the games that didn't make it for launch are tweaked a bit. With the PSP it's getting a bit ridiculous though. Not that I'm not completely stoked about "You Got Served" on UMD but I bought a game system to play games on. So my questions are this: why are there so few games for the PSP? Given that I'm not entirely sure if anyone's ever even looked at this blog I'll propose a few theories on my own.

The development environment sucks. Maybe the thing is a pain to code for because of PSP-specific things like load times and battery life.

Sony is rejecting good game ideas. This is a popular one on game bulletin boards. Sony is so eager to show off their new system that they're rejecting anything that doesn't look good enough. This meme began thanks to SCEA rejecting some 2D games early in the Playstation's lifespan. The fact that Megaman Legends is being ported intact [it's even 4:3] and that there's an entirely new 2D Ghosts & Goblins game coming out is another way this seems unlikely

The Dreamcast Memorial Death Cycle. Low units moved leading to lowered developer interest leading to fewer consoles in the hands of gamers. It could happen but the timing right now seems more like publishers are doing the "wait and see" thing instead of rejecting it.

Publishers can't figure out where to slot the games. This is my personal favorite. Basically right now we have 2 kinds of games on the PSP: ones that are on the level existing generation console games complete with great graphics, a full licensed soundtrack, cutscenes, etc. and ones that are based more on the tradition handheld game market. The big shiny games are attractive to developers because they can re-use assets and charge more [up to $50] for them. THe smaller games are cheaper to produce but I think publishers are afraid that the games won't be seen as advanced enough to warrant a purchase. Basically publishers can't find a balance of cost, production value and pricing.

I actually bought a Nintendo DS last week, thanks to Advance Wars, Nintendogs and the promise of a new Mario & Luigi RPG. I still don't like the form factor, ergonomics and bulk of it but like all things about all consoles it all boils down to games.

Nintendogs vs. the XBox 360

2005-08-23T22:40:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of conjectural rants that I'll probably be totally wrong about.

It's not like Nintendo has been trying to keep its newest puppy simulator under wraps or anything but I'm ready to call it the "big thing" of the 2005 holiday season. Yes, there's some other new system coming out but to be honest Microsoft's "next big thing" doesn't to me represent as compelling of a story. It's more, bigger, faster, etc. and it will probably be pretty successful [I'll reserve my comments on the price point and 2-SKU strategy for another time] but if you look at this winter's games it's kind of a rundown of what we saw on the Xbox. Lots of shooters, a DOA game, Project Gotham, a few EA ports and a Rare platformer which if you'd asked me 4 years ago I'd say was the next big thing but again that's another issue. What we have then is a lineup that, while it will probably look great really doesn't represent anything we haven't seen before.

On the other hand we have puppies. Adorable, well animated puppies that you can talk to and play tug of war with. They never get old, they don't run away and, well, they're going to rule Christmas 2005. It's obvious from looking at the 2 different websites that these two products are targeted towards different markets. The difference is in what in music is called "crossover appeal". Simply put, not a whole lot of 12-year-old girls are going to plunk down $300-500 for an XBox 360. On the other hand a lot of the coveted 16-35 male with disposable income demographic has been starving for DS games all year. A lot of people didn't get it when Nintendo started talking about going after "non-gamers". Well, this is it and the first time you hear that woman with all the stuffed animals in her cubicle at work talking about Nintendogs with your sysadmin at the coffee machine you'll understand why.

So yeah, I'm calling it. Nintendogs will sell better than the XBox 360 will this holiday season.

Up and running

2005-08-21T20:57:00.000-07:00

This isn't going to say much for a bit as I tweak the template and such. I'm trying to figure out a good home for image hosting long term.

So who the hell am I? No one special.

Why should you listen to me? You probably shouldn't.

Why do I bother? Because I'm an opinionated jerk who's decided that ranting on the internet about design, marketing, technology and games isn't as harmful to my sex life as talking about these things with people in the real world.