| Tuesday, January 7, 2003 |
00:17 - Long Day
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Up early this morning to catch the Stevenote, and up to the City this evening for what has to have been the fastest-passing three hours of my life: the dinner with the Bay Area bloggers and others who happen to be in the neighborhood for MacWorld and such.
So I got to meet Mike Silverman, Bill Quick, Stefan Sharkansky, Andrew the Punning Pundit, and a couple of heaping handfuls of other notables whose names eluded me over the course of the steak (which was, by the way, excellent). And it was a blast. The discussions ranged all over, from vegetarianism to Macs to Bush to Simpsons quotes and back. A pretty broad spectrum of opinions were in evidence, and I would have loved to see a transcription of the multitude of threads flowing back and forth across the table, occasionally rising to shrill cries of "That's because you're a fucking socialist!" and "That is the most wrong thing I've ever heard in my entire life!" My most treasusured memory, though, will have to be that whenever one of these good-natured near-explosions about rent control or public transit or welfare or slaughterhouses rocked the table, someone would meekly interject, "So-- how about those Palestinians?" You know, steering it back to a nice safe topic on which we could all agree.
We oughtta do this kind of thing more often.
UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky has posted photos.
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13:15 - "This is why we do the things we do"
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Okay-- so. That was a pretty ballsy keynote, all things considered. Steve evidently noticed as well that the rumor sites had gotten the idea that this would be a lackluster and unsurprising address, and he even joked about that toward the end. Good thing he had a lot of stuff with which to counter that claim.
The biggest news, politically, is the new browser-- Safari. Now, it's absolutely a good thing that Apple has thrown its weight behind creating a browsing experience that's undeniably fast; browsing speed is one of the things Apple has been dinged on many times in benchmarks lately, and while part of that is attributable to the CPU speed itself, a lot more of it has to do with the fact that IE on the Mac is sloooow. Microsoft's MacBU did put together a pretty nice package, but it's always been a bit gawky and non-native-feeling, and it was never properly optimized. And it doesn't help matters that the alternative browsers like OmniWeb tend to be even slower (though they do look and feel a whole lot smoother). I've been using Chimera for a while now, and it's actually a good deal faster than IE in a number of key ways (plus it has that tabbed-browsing feature that I've come to enjoy quite a lot), and on top of that it's Gecko/Mozilla-based, which means largely guaranteed compatibility with everything. But it too is buggy and incomplete, and it's not everything I wish it to be.
So now there's Safari, and its big thing is speed. Thus far I'm impressed on that front. It loads fast, renders fast, and even downloads fast (it's a 3MB archive file). Nice and small and efficient. Plus it looks excellent-- very subtle visual look, with unobtrusive buttons that break away from the mold by refusing to be big picture buttons, instead content to be utilitarian but elegant navigational controls that take up very little space. And the whole thing is in the brushed-metal metaphor, which I find lends an interesting "70s" kind of feel to the whole thing.
There are a lot of pleasant surprises. Bookmarks seem to sort themselves intelligently. Popup windows obey the programmatic values I've coded in the server software on my various sites more predictably than most other browsers I've seen (popup windows with images in them look very, very nice). And it's got unrequested-popup-window blocking, much like in Chimera. Interestingly, Safari is open-source (which works both ways-- Apple will be posting its code to the public domain, if I understand what Steve said correctly); but it's not Gecko-based. Instead it's based on KHTML, the KDE rendering engine used in Konqueror. I wonder what prompted that move? It's potentially a politically charged one. KHTML is a very well-organized engine, but it's not too well tested to date, having existed really only for Linux users. (It also hasn't had full coverage on all compatibility areas.) We'll see how well this works in terms of compatibility; Safari has a handy "submit bug" icon in the upper right, though, so you can send non-compliant URLs to Apple to get them to tweak the engine into proper behavior.
But... well, there are a number of things about Safari that tell me immediately that it's not ready for prime time. It's very buggy. Within the first five minutes of use, I'd noticed that a) many pages don't load all the way, leaving the trick blue progress bar (that overlays on top of the URL) unfinished, and there's no visible activity indicator; b) mousing-over the "Bookmark Library" icon makes it disappear, under certain circumstances; c) the Preferences window opened up with no icons, no window contents, and a debug message about "Please select a button first!"; and d) it crashed while I was testing one of my sites. It has no text focus on drop-down menus, so you can't go directly to an item by typing its text partially (something only IE does "correctly" at this point). It doesn't display the contents of non-parsed-header scripts progressively, which is essential for one of my maintenance tools. And the contextual menus are sparse and non-modal, a far cry from the uber-contextuality of OmniWeb's CM's. Plus it makes my own blog page look like ass. (Crank down the text size a whole bunch and it starts to look a little better, but still.)
Something tells me I'll be using the "submit bug to Apple" function a whole lot in the next few days. If Apple is willing to fire this shot across Microsoft's bow-- one more step in the emancipation-from-Microsoft push that's been going on for a couple of years now-- then they'd better be willing to make Safari into a world-class browser that does everything IE does and more. Being fast isn't good enough... particularly when browser speed is one of those things that's only an issue on the Mac. (Saurabh was watching the keynote over my shoulder; his first reaction to the news that Apple was releasing a browser to compete with IE was "They're out of their minds." Because he didn't realize that web browsing on the Mac is slow. On the Windows side, browsing has long since become so well optimized that launch and render times have vanished into the noise, and browsing speed is bottlenecked only by bandwidth.) Safari has great potential to bolster Apple's ability to direct its own future; but this thing has a long way to go yet. Good thing it's just a Public Beta.
But Safari wasn't the centerpiece of the keynote; there wasn't really a single "centerpiece". There were lots of cool things. Chief among the remaining candidates would have to be the new PowerBook-- all 17 inches of PowerBook. They're calling it "the world's first 17-inch notebook"; that'd better be true, because someone here was saying that Sony already had one. (A quick look through Sony's VAIO page doesn't seem to indicate that they have anything bigger than 16", though.) But even if there's a factual bloop there, this is a pretty sweet package. It's even thinner than the current TiBook (1"); it's got rounded edges, like the iBook; it's got a slot-load SuperDrive standard; it's got a GeForce4 with 64MB of RAM; it's even got a trick back-lit keyboard with ambient light detection so the letters light up when it gets dark. The screen is straight out of the 17" iMac (which is not discontinued, much though that might surprise a whole lot of Slashdot readers who were led to believe that the fact that Apple would no longer be buying 17" widescreen LCDs from LG Electronics meant that the 17" iMac was cancelled, rather than that they were simply switching suppliers because LG wasn't going to be making the screens anymore). Oh, and it's got FireWire 800-- quite a silent little rev there. It needs a different connector than FireWire 400 does; I wonder why that is. (More pins?) No USB 2.0, though; it's certainly not lacking in ports, however. Crikey. Everything from on-board BlueTooth to DVI to line-in to S-Video to USB on both sides is in here.
Plus 802.11g-- er, excuse me: AirPort Extreme. They've gone up to the new 54Mbps standard, the one that's backwards-compatible with 802.11b (802.11a is not). It's a bigger card, which is interesting; no more PCMCIA version, at least not yet. But the new 802.11g Base Station has a whole heap of new features, including automatic bridging, USB printing, and 50 simultaneous real users-- for 2/3 the prior price. It's now down to $200. I'd say there's been a major stair-step here in value. I may in fact have to get one of these monster laptops. Steve did say that one of Apple's explicit goals is to get more people off of desktop computers and onto laptops; that does seem a sound plan, since Apple seems to have a knack for producing kickass laptops that don't have as much potential for attendant derision as their desktops do. It's a market they seem to be a bit better in. Aziz Poonawalla suggested to me in e-mail a while back that Apple might do well to stop making desktops-- or at least de-emphasize them-- and focus their efforts on their laptop line, where they seem to have more of a natural advantage these days. I was skeptical, but Steve appears to have the same idea after all.
To say nothing of the new 12-inch PowerBook. Yikes. Okay, at $1799, it's no iBook-killer; but damn, that's small. They had some pro photographers in the promo video who were talking about how this is exactly what they'd been hoping for: a full-featured, top-end laptop that's really damned small. And the contrast in what's now an extremely well-positioned notebook line is quite a kicker; wait'll you see the new TV ad starring NBA star Yao Ming and Verne Troyer (Mini-Me) on an airplane with their respective PowerBooks. There were about three people in my cubicle when the ad came on; by the time it was over, we had a roaring party of six or seven, attracted by the gales of laughter rolling across the floor. The jubilant MacWorld spirit was in high gear by that point, and even the Mac skeptics here at work were really getting into it. Nicely played, Steve.
So then there's the new "iLife" packaging for the iApps, with new major versions of iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD, as well as the unlocking of cool new stuff in iTunes. This won't be ready until later this month, but judging by the demos, it'll all be well worth waiting for. Microsoft has been making great strides trying to catch up with Apple's "digital hub" stuff, and we've been left to speculate about the "media-based interface" metaphors and concepts that seem to be apparent in the various apps. It's all been speculation, though; but now it's clear that this is where Apple wants to go. Until now, each iApp worked independently; you had to know how to get into iTunes for your music, or iPhoto for your pictures, and only then would your media-specific metaphors become useful. But now, each iApp has visibility and interaction into each of the other iApps; iMovie can list and import your songs and photos directly, iPhoto and iMovie can burn straight to DVD, and so on. There's no no longer the need to rely on the old standby "files and folders" metaphors when you have to take your data out of one context and import it into another. Now you can stay within the media-based context of your task and simply do it, without having to export anything to Quicktime files or create folders full of pictures. This was an essential stepping-stone toward the media-based strategy being comprehensive and genuinely useful, and it looks like they've taken it that last mile now. And once again Apple has taken a clear lead in showing where this market ought to go. I can't wait to get my boxed copy ($50 for all four apps, or a free download for everything except iDVD, which has an ass-load of new transitions which now incorporate your own video into their funky artsy effects). Color me impressed, and impatient at that.
Speaking of video, the first thing Jobs (actually, Schiller) showed off was Final Cut Express: a lite version of FCP whose purpose would appear to be to apply a pincers movement to Premiere. Adobe can't be all that happy with Apple right about now; Premiere has the bottom rung at the $600 slot, FCP comes in mid-range at $1000, and Avid fits at the top-end at $1500 and up. But now that FCE will be sitting below Premiere-- with most of the critical FCP features-- Premiere is going to have a hard time making its case. FCP is already fast amassing an industry all its own, and now there's going to be a low-ball $300 version that will eliminate the price-based reasons to go with Premiere instead of FCP. Adobe will have to counter this move with a "Premiere Elements" or something. Ballsy move by Apple here. No way could they have done this before Photoshop 7 was released.
And then there's Keynote, which I can imagine getting a copy of just to screw around with. It looks so fun. The fact that it has import/export compatibility with PowerPoint is the linchpin, but far more important to me is the fact that we finally now have an app that gleefully shows off all those cool Quartz tricks that were part of all the early Mac OS X demos, but that the standard apps never really took advantage of or gave users control over. Now we see why Jobs touted such things so much: he got to use them all the time, considering that this is the very tool that he's apparently been using to put together these keynote presentations. The text and graphics compositing tools alone look like the stuff with which one can waste days on end, and then there are those insane transitions and themes. At $100, this looks like one of those things that they just thought was too much fun not to release and let everybody play with. Considering the unusually long and loud applause Jobs got when he announced that everybody in attendance at the keynote would get their own free copy on their way out the door, it would seem he called that one pretty much on the mark.
So yeah-- it wasn't by any means a downer of a keynote, and I'm feeling that all-too-familiar tug on my wallet. Yeah, I do need a new laptop. I suppose it would make some sense for me to go drop $3K on a laptop with a bigger screen than my desktop machine here at work. Or at least I can convince myself of that, I'm confident.
I'm sure I'll get to discuss all this in person tonight at the blogger bash in San Francisco. I hope to get to match up some faces with well-known opinions; and there'll be plenty to talk about, even without such things as international terrorism to occupy the conversation.
Whew.
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| Monday, January 6, 2003 |
20:21 - Open your QuickTime and say your prayers, 'cause Stevie Jobs comes tonight...
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Tomorrow morning's the keynote, and it's anybody's guess what treats it will bring. The rumor sites have been pretty quiet for a while-- well, maybe quiet isn't the word. Perhaps confused. there's nothing substantive to be heard. Whether it's wireless keyboards, new iApps (or new versions of old iApps, some of which are indeed due), new iPod-type stuff, or a revamp of the TiBook (also due), nobody seems to really know.
There are new versions of iCal and iSync posted already, though, so those aren't going to be big keynote surprises. I'm kinda inclined to see this as a good thing; if these are being "silently" released the day before the keynote, then in order for the keynote to have any substance it's going to have to center on other stuff. (It'd have to do so anyway; iCal is much faster now, and iSync is much smoother, but neither of those are keynote material.) So there's likely to be something big on the way. No massive day-by-day appetite-whetting like they gave us last year in anticipation of the iMac's release, but that means nothing historically either. So, we'll see.
In any case, it means I'll be up at 9AM to catch the live feed. Last year, our annual sales conference occurred on Keynote Day, so we could only catch the first half-hour or so (which saw the iMac's unveiling and the first few minutes of iPhoto) before they packed us up onto buses and drove us into the hill resorts to hobnob with the international sales force. But this time, the conference isn't till next week; so we'll get to see the whole thing.
Chances are that it'll be obvious within the first twenty minutes or so whether this will be an upper or a downer of a keynote. (This time around, it's not quite so cut-and-dried; the CPU situation in particular has got a lot of us feeling a bit bleak.) I'll have to come up with some cutesy superstitious things to do in order to ensure a bountiful harvest.
Fingers crossed...
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| Sunday, January 5, 2003 |
01:10 - Shut up, Brian
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You know how they tend to create names for literary genres by taking a word that describes what makes up a genre and adding "a"-- like "erotica", "Americana", "Judaica", and so on?
I think they should have one of those genres for autobiographies, diaries, personal journals, and the like.
They could call it "diarya".
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01:03 - Jar Jar Blix
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/01/Negotiations.shtml
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I didn't get a chance to post this brief response to Steven Den Beste's groundwork-laying post regarding the principles of negotiations and deterrence while I was sequestered in the Land of No Blogging, but I'd been reading that post on the plane (having loaded it up while connected via AirPort in the MPLS C terminal), and couldn't keep the following observation out of my head even after a weekend of diversion.
The primary proponents of this new way of doing things are Europeans (and sympathetic academics), who believe that they have now transcended the brutal international order of the past, where all nations were armed to the teeth and where negotiations often involved the threat of war, or happened over the sound of battle. European diplomats believe that there should be an international court where nations could take their grievances for binding arbitration, and hope to institute an international system where all nations feel as if they should actually concede their grievances if arbitration goes against them. The idea is that nations would cede considerable amounts of sovereignty to some international authority, and live as "citizens of the world".
It is a worthwhile dream. It represents a better way. If it were in effect, far fewer people would suffer. Unfortunately, though I wish it could be made to happen, I don't believe it can be. It is inherently unstable; even if it could be instituted, it would fall apart.
It discounts the possibility of bad faith; it ignores both the "Prisoner's dilemma" and "the Tragedy of the Commons". If a cheater ends up in conflict with an honorable nation, the cheater may agree to arbitration. If the arbitrator rules in favor of the cheater, the honorable nation will concede and the cheater wins. But if the arbitrator rules the other way, the cheater can ignore him and continue to pursue the point. There's everything to be gained from arbitration, but nothing whatever to lose. And thus cheating is an advantage when most of the world is honorable, leading directly to the tragedy of the commons. Even if such a system could be established, there would be an incentive for at least some to break the rules, for doing so would be to their advantage.
Europe has been trying to set an example by being internationally active in diplomacy, while at the same time having no ability to project military force. And it hasn't been working at all well. As a general principle, if all you have are carrots, or only feeble and laughable sticks, then you don't have any way to make "reject" unpalatable, so the only way you can make "accept" more palatable is to pile lots more carrots on the scale than you would really like to, and in fact in some cases the Europeans have found themselves having to give away the farm in order to get an agreement.
Worse, they're finding that in some cases they have no carrots to offer, and also have no sticks, and as a result their intended negotiating partner refuses to even talk to them. (EU's Solana believes he knows how to settle the problem between the Israelis and Palestinians, but the solution he proposes involves major concessions by Israel. Solana has nothing to offer Israel which it thinks would offset that cost, so quite naturally Israel refuses to deal with him.)
When Europe has faced cases where it has no adequate carrots with which it is willing to part, and no sticks to apply, and wants an agreement anyway, the only remaining solution is whining, which has been notably unsuccessful.
It sounds to me as though the only way for the UN to achieve its goals would be for someone to build them a Grand Clone Army.
Whatever else may be true about the new Star Wars prequels, George Lucas does seem to have hit on a very realistic simulation of what would happen under a centralized, hierarchical governmental system that attempts to overarch many widely disparate cultures and political systems. The only way it possibly can work is for the governing power to actually be "world government", not just some kind of "advisory body" or a roomful of representatives who glower at each other and dicker over semantics. More particularly, they'd need real power... and not just a token army, but a power which dwarfed the individual power of any member body. Rather than the "peacekeeping forces" that the UN seems to have at its disposal today, it would have to attain absolute supremacy-- in terms of technology, ability to produce, and sheer numbers of troops-- over all member states' armies, including our own.
Because, as Den Beste illustrates, any governing power that doesn't actually have the "ultimate stick" to wield, in actuality has no power to impose its will on any member body.
As the Star Wars movies are illustrating in so timely a manner, with such pretty and chewy and spoon-fed parables, any centralized "world government" would have to be something with the power to crush organized separatism. Which means, naturally, that it would have to be something with the means and the penchant to become the Empire.
Is that what we want? Is that the only way this can go? I certainly don't see how the UN as it currently exists can keep up its charade of potency much longer, with each new week bringing another example of some nation invoking the UN with one hand as a shield against other nations' aggression, while with the other hand blatantly ignoring the rules of the selfsame UN. Right now the UN is serving only as a political Dremel tool-- adaptable to any political purpose you choose, but you can always turn it off and put it back in the drawer when you have no more use for it.
Maybe the coexistence of individual nations, as we have now, is something that can last. I don't know. But it's a question that will have to be addressed in short order, because it's likely to become the Next Big Question, in clear need of answering after all the dust has finally cleared over the War on Terror.
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00:41 - The story behind that enigmatic half-joke after these messages...
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/01/05/2025254.shtml?tid=113
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It seems I've been Slashdotted.
A real, honest-to-goodness Slashdotting of one of my posts from a couple of weeks ago-- the one about MSIE and TCP/IP. As I type this, it's up to 759 comments, which CapLion assures me is on the high side.
I fear to read them; that's why I don't know whether the comments are positive or negative. The very first comment, however, makes note of the fact that having the post linked at Slashdot brought this server to its knees almost instantly. Which I believe means I'd better hop right on the task of making it a non-CPU/database-intensive procedure to link to an individual post, rather than the load-the-post-and-the-entire-prior-week that it does now. I'd never really thought that it would be tested to quite this level of acidity; silly security-through-obscurity me.
Anyway, the overload has been temporarily taken care of with a static page for the article and an Apache redirect. But that won't scale. Either I've got to stop posting things that people on Slashdot might find interesting, or... hmm.
...But at any rate. Several people have sent me (encouraging, to my pleasant surprise) e-mails to the effect that they'd found their way here via the Slashdotting, and might well stay if I remain halfway interesting. So, to any and all newcomers, welcome! I still feel like a guy trying to host an impromptu state dinner in a two-room apartment, but that's nothing new, so I'd better learn to cope...
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00:30 - I'm back
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Well, that weekend went pretty well. A few random notes...
Because of the recent weird weather patterns we've been having around here, planes taking off from San Jose International have been taking a southerly flight path rather than the usual northerly one. This means that when we took off on Thursday, on the steep power-climb out of the airport, we banked almost directly over my South San Jose neighborhood. From what must have been about 4,000 feet, I could clearly see my little circular street-- and not only could I make out my house, I could make out my car. Quite an unexpected treat.
On both legs of the journey eastward, there were what I believe to have been federal air marshals. I don't know what I was expecting-- presumably some guys in white shirts, pressed slacks, and dark glasses with those little curly wires coming out from behind their ears. But these guys on the flights I was on looked distinctly... military. Shaved heads. Green uniforms with large gold "US" lapel pins. No more than about 19 years of age, from the look of them. And considering that the guy on the second leg (MPLS to Atlanta), who sat next to me, spent the flight time writing love notes to his girlfriend and sleeping, I'd say that they're still working out the kinks in the system. (In addition to the guy next to me, there were two others who sat further up the plane, on opposite sides of the aisle, and looked decidedly more alert.)
So then there was Atlanta, which was a lot of fun. Friday morning I dropped off my brother Mike at his job at 7:30 (a part of the clock I haven't seen in years, in any time zone), and took his car off east of the city, parked it, and went bounding up Stone Mountain to catch the tail-end of a protracted overcast-baffled sunrise. Quite a place, that-- it's the "Mount Rushmore of the South", with images of all the Confederate heroes carved into the granite rock face. There's a gondola to the top, where ATLA is painted in huge yellow letters along with a giant yellow arrow pointing in the direction of the Atlanta skyline. (It must have been put there like in the 30s; it's not exactly a mystery to pilots today where Atlanta might be.)
Saturday we (Mike, his wife Julie, and I) went up to Tallulah Gorge, where they filmed the sniper scene from Deliverance. It had what has to have been the most studly trail I've ever been on: the top part is edged with boards, and the actual trail surface is made of a rubber mat recycled from old tires and molded to look sort of like pine needles. The result is a surface that's springy to walk on, and very clean-looking. Then, below one of the upper overlooks, there's a huge long staircase section-- some 1500 steps or so-- down to the bottom of the gorge. (There's a massively overengineered suspension footbridge in the middle, which I'll post some pictures of as soon as Mike gets them developed; more fool me for forgetting my digital camera!) The stairs are all very new and sturdy; the only problem is getting back up them after you've descended the thousand feet into the gorge...
Then we went to the Mall of Georgia (not really competition for the Mall of America, don't worry-- pretty cool nonetheless) to see The Lion King in IMAX. Not much to say here, except that... well, you know. Maybe I'll expand further on that subject at some other date.
And today we spent some time driving around downtown Atlanta, Piedmont Park, and related environs (where for the price of a run-down Sunnyvale bungalow, one can buy the biggest mansion in Mansionland); the flight home was air-marshal-less, but it did get me stuck in Detroit where it was freezing-rain conditions and we had to trudge thr plane through the de-icing pad, where they doused us with detergent, making us an hour late getting back into San Jose. But hey, I'm not complaining, right? I'm back home now, and all's well again.
...OR IS IT?
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| Thursday, January 2, 2003 |
16:00 - <clap clap clap>
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Just bloggin' from the Minneapolis airport, because I had to make a note of the fact that the connecting Northwest flight to Columbus, Ohio has flight number... 1492.
Cute... very cute.
Oh, and the airport has an observation deck tower. Yeah, this place is pretty nice indeed.
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| Wednesday, January 1, 2003 |
03:45 - Back on Sunday
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I'll be flying to Georgia tomorrow morning to visit my brother and his wife, conveying the last straggling remnants of Christmas that keep me from being able to pack up the wrapping paper for another year into the Deep South. I understand they have electricity and telly-o-phone down there these days; however, I don't foresee that I'll have any ability to blog until I'm back on Sunday.
(Ow! Ow! Sorry! I was kidding!)
Anyway, see y'all then.
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03:39 - A little EyeTV Notable
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This kind of thing gives me warm fuzzies:
If you minimize one of EyeTV's viewer windows into the Dock, it keeps playing. Magnify it to watch interesting bits. Keep it small so you can leave it in the corner of your eye while you do other stuff that uses up desktop space.
Ah, the World of Tomorrow™.
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16:36 - De Beers Summarized in 29 Kilobytes
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(Originally posted on Fark, sent via Marcus.)
Lance says this needs to be made into a poster.
Now do pardon me; there's a sunset to go and watch.
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04:10 - Good night, moon; good night, stars; good night, police sirens
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Well, once more the big shiny ball has dropped more or less without incident; no terrorist attacks, no massive computer glitches, no ball getting stuck, and certainly no actual dropping of the ball from the specified height at the precise moment when gravity would cause it to reach bottom in free-fall right at the tickover point. (Didn't they used to do it that way? What happened, did someone sue Discover and the Times because dropping the ball according to the laws of nature and science was insensitive to the beliefs of the platygaeists, or that the "apple" imagery cruelly drove millions of helpless innocents to gorge themselves on fast food and become enormous flesh-bags, or to buy computers they didn't need and couldn't afford but looked cool in the den?)
Yeah, pretty low-key New Year's, overall-- maybe it's because I spent the four-hour time chunk straddling midnight watching the Adult Swim marathon and playing with my new EyeTV. (Think TiVo for the Mac; it's a soft DTR system, of which I'm sure there are examples for the PC. A little plastic box takes RF or RCA input from cable or antenna, encodes it to MPEG on the fly, and streams it over USB to the machine's hard drive, where it can be accessed directly and interacted with via actual integrated software, instead of having to deal with the set-top middleman. Seems to work pretty well, barring a few glitches-- not least of which is the moronicity of MPEG and its inability to be properly demuxed for editing, like any sane movie format would be. But the whole direct-control-of-live-TV-through-an-onscreen-floater-remote thing is pretty neato.)
Incidentally, on an unrelated note, it's been "Encore Week" on Fresh Air on NPR, and the other day they re-aired the infamous Gene Simmons interview in which the tongue man cut loose with all his frankness on Terry Gross, unleashing both barrels of his I-slept-with-4,600-women-and-you-too-could-be-one-of-them, in which Terry came off as a good deal less sure of herself and capable of handling the reins of the interview than Gene did. But one thing I thought was interesting was that Gene, for all his Howard Stern-esque lewdness and arrogance, has some very strict personal observances and limits, and they're self-imposed rather than derived from some non-corporeal power (which would have been a good excuse, considering that he had attended Yeshiva as a kid and was well on his way to becoming a rabbi). He's so vehemently anti-drug and anti-smoking that, as he said, the most beautiful and seductive woman in the world could be lying right on his bed-- but if he smelled that dirt-under-the-bleachers smell on her breath, she'd find herself chucked right out the door, if not the window. Gene said he's never been drunk-- and with the exception of a few valiant attempts at taking a sip here and there during toasts (in order to be polite), he's never been capable of drinking alcohol. "I might be cursed with some kind of freakish one-in-a-million defect," he said, "but the very smell of alcohol makes me gag. And I'd say that makes me very, very lucky." So whatever else might be true about the guy, I guess I can say that at least he's not the only one to "suffer" from that particular malady.
So while I listen to the police chase down late-night carousers out in the neighborhood at the edge of hearing, I'll take my leave of the good blog-posting page and curl up with my new "The Art of Spirited Away" book and be glad I'm not out in it.
Happy New Year, and to all a good night.
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Brian Tiemann
