May 2008 Archives

A comment recently appeared over on my "Speaking of TED" post. I approved it, posted a reply, and didn't think much of it. Then I noticed another had gotten caught in my spam filter. Today, a third comment showed up. All of the comments have been about Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk and her new book, "My Stroke of Insight." My mention of Ms. Taylor in the original post was very brief, so it struck me as a little odd that someone was making the effort to comment on my obscure little blog about something I'd barely mentioned.

So I did a little googling and discovered that the same comments are showing up on weblogs all over the place, often posted under different names. For some examples, check out these posts at BoingBoing, soulperblog, my heart's in accra, peterme, Silverspring Studio, Dandelion Salad, Creativity and Action, Discovering Your Inner Samurai, Backstage Unscripted, MWGblog, and The Mike Matas Blog (there are many many more).

One common thread is that the first comment—the one I deleted as spam (it starts "I've been recommending a book by Jill Bolte Taylor called 'My Stroke of Insight' to everyone I know.")—is often authored by "Ellen." Hmm. Are all the comments by "Ellen?" Was she just so moved by Ms. Taylor's book that she took it on herself to spread the word far and wide? Or is this some organized effort to push sales of the book? Or is it something else entirely? Some sort of vulnerability probe by a spambot? Who knows?

For now, I've closed the original post to further comments. You're welcome to comment on this post, Ellen...

When I bought my first dSLR a few years back, I chose to skip the undistinguished kit lens and opted for the 28-135mm IS zoom instead. It's a pretty good lens and served me well, but it's a little slow at the wide end (f/3.5) and quite slow at the telephoto end (f/5.6). Plus, my camera doesn't have a full-frame sensor, so at the wide end, I end up with a field of view equivalent to a 45mm lens—not exactly wide angle. I took a lot of great shots with that lens, but on our Canadian Rockies trip last year, I started to wish for something with a little more on the wide end (insert "wide end" joke here). Last summer, I did my research and ended up buying the Canon EFS 17-55mm f/2.8 zoom.

Now, I've been taking pictures for a long time, but I never expected I'd be the sort to rave about a lens, but wow. I love this lens! It's incredibly sharp, which is certainly nice, but what I really love is that extra speed. Combined with the image stabilization, I can take handheld existing-light shots that I would have thought impossible a few years ago. It doesn't hurt that I can crank my 20D up to 800 ISO with virtually no change in image quality.

The faster lens also gives me a brighter viewfinder and better focusing performance. Nice. Of course, in switching from the 28-135 to the 17-55, I gave up a whole lot of telephoto range. I figured I'd get a better telephoto zoom someday, but for the time being I could just switch back as needed. Well, last week "someday" arrived.

Canon has four (!) 70-200mm zoom lenses comprising each combination of f/2.8 or f/4, with or without image stabilization. They are all very highly regarded by people in the know. I settled on the f/4 IS version. It's smaller and lighter than the f/2.8 version, and a whole lot cheaper, too. Canon claims a remarkable 4-stops of image stabilization, which most reviews have said is accurate. The old rule of thumb is that you shouldn't try to shoot handheld at less than one over the focal length. So at 200mm, that would be 1/200 second. Four stops gets it down to 1/25, which is pretty darn slow. Of course, image stabilization doesn't help if it's the subject that's moving, but still. How does it work? Well...

This picture was taken from the very back of a rather dimly lit school auditorium. Handheld, no flash, 1/25 second. Amazing. So that's new Camera Toy #1.

With all this new gear, I finally realized that my old camera bag was more than a little inadequate. It's a small top-loader that really can't handle more than the camera and one extra lens. With the 70-200 on the camera, it had room for nothing else. So I did some more research and settled on the Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home:

It's got plenty of room for all my stuff, it's built like a tank, and best of all, it doesn't look like a camera bag. When Kathy first saw it, she said it looks like a diaper bag and that's fine with me. The less my significant investment in photo equipment looks like a significant investment in photo equipment the better. So that's new Camera Toy #2.

Despite being the smallest and cheapest of the three, Camera Toy #3 is by far the geekiest gadget of the three. It's a tiny GPS data logger. The AMOD AGL3080 is smaller than a cell phone and does just one thing: log GPS location and time data.

When you're ready to use the data, plug the device in via USB and it mounts like a thumb drive so you can copy the data to your computer. Assuming your camera's clock is set to the correct time, you can then use an application like GPS Photo Linker, myTracks, or my personal favorite HoudahGeo to match photos to GPS data and write the location information directly into the photo files. Flickr automatically recognizes this location data when you upload and can helpfully put your pictures on a map. I've been doing this by hand ever since flickr rolled out geotagging back in 2006, but having an automated process will make it much easier. Someday, I'm sure my camera-of-the-future will geotag my photos for me as they're taken (some cameras already do and more are on the way), but this gadget will tide me over until that day arrives.

I expect to see some revolutionary applications that take advantage of geocoded photos in the near future. Microsoft has a research project called Photosynth that is already pretty cool. And I'm embarrassed to say how much time I've wasted watching flickrvision.

I had no idea that the State of California had already done so much work on planning a high-speed rail network. The California High Speed Rail Authority website has routes, station plans, videos, economic analyses, and tons of other information about the planned network. San Francisco to LA in two and a half hours? For less than half the price of flying (and only slightly more than driving)? I'm in!

image courtesy NC3D

California seems to me like a great place to kick start high speed rail in the US (discounting the sort-of-high-speed Acela trains in the Northeast). LA to San Francisco is about 600 km, right in the sweet spot for high speed rail: long enough to be much faster than driving; short enough to be as fast—or faster—than flying. I've driven that route through the central valley many times. It's hot, crowded, smelly and sometimes very dangerous. I suspect a great many people would be very happy never to drive that route again.

The New York Times has an article today about a strange West African Fruit that alters taste sensation:

The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit.

Miraculin! Chew on a single berry and let the pulp coat your tongue and you're set for an hour or so. The result? "Limes were candied, vinegar resembled apple juice, goat cheese tasted like cheesecake on the tongue and goat cheese on the throat." I'm intrigued. It's available from Miracle Fruit Man.

As always, Wikipedia has more.

The Seattle Times profiled our neighborhood the other day. Curiously, the photographs accompanying the story were taken by Courtney Blethen. The Blethen Family founded the Seattle Times and now owns 50.5% of the paper. (via The Wedgwood Blog.)

Beijing's new airport—now the biggest in the world—is open for business. (via Gizmodo.)

I've been thinking about getting some sort of drive dock so I can read bare hard drives. I have an old WiebeTech DriveDock, but it only does ATA and all my newer drives are SATA. Looks like this one might be a winner. (via engadget.)

Google is now hosting a bunch of popular AJAX Libraries. Cool (for geeks like me that care about such things).

NY Times: Placebo pills for kids.

NY Times: Breaching a dam, slowly.

Following on the HOPE and PROGRESS posters by Shepard Fairey, there's a new Obama print from Scott Hansen of ISO50.

Up in BC, there now up to four severed human feet that have washed ashore in the last 10 months. Is David Lynch filming up there? (via Seattlest.)

Awesome stacking bento box by Plastica. Mmmm.... Melamine. (via Babygadget.)

Wow. This is an incredible video of El Caminito del Rey, a narrow walkway through a gorge in Spain. Built a little over a hundred years ago, the walkway hasn't been maintained in many years, leaving gaping holes in the concrete and making the whole thing very scary. It looks like something out of Indiana Jones (or maybe Myst). I'm not the least bit afraid of heights (much to Kathy's occasional chagrin), but I'll pass on this one. (via digg.)

I had my first Nanaimo bar this past Friday. Oh sure, I'd seen them around here and there since moving to Seattle but had never tried one. For those non-Canadian and non-PNW readers, Nanaimo bars are rectangles of chocolatey custardy goodness. Alas for some of you, they have nuts, so if those are poison for you, you can skip the rest of this paragraph. I was curious about them, having never seen them back east in the "M" states (Maine, Massachusetts, and Maryland), so I googled them. That's what you do when you're curious these days. I found this post over at the wonderful Cakespy, and a bunch of other links that were good but that I don't have to include here because all that info is in today's timely Cakespy entry. Cakespy, you rock.

Moving on to kung fu. (I said "Random" up there in the title, did I not?) Brad and I watched The 36th Chamber of Shaolin last night. Fun movie. I am ignorant in the ways of kung fu films, but enjoyed this one, especially the early scenes in the monastery when the novice fails, fails, fails, then masters the various skills in each of the chambers. I'm a sucker for that Karate Kid stuff.

I'm also a sucker for Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. Brad and I each took our Henry to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this weekend, me on Saturday and Brad on Sunday. So, Henry has seen it twice! He loved it (of course) and has been talking about it, acting it out, and lego-ing it ever since. I liked the movie too, in spite of its many flaws, maybe because of some of those flaws. It was implausible, sometimes even cheesy, with plot contrivances galore and ridiculous action. But, it was so fun. It was like going on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. You know it's fake, a little corny, you swear you are not going to get sucked in... And then your kid has a chance to "drive" the jeep that goes out of control on the ride and he's so excited it's contagious and you let your guard down a little bit and realize you are having fun pretending that you're trying to outrun a giant boulder and when it's all over and he says "Let's go on it again!" you reply "Heck, yeah!"

Don't forget: the Phoenix Mars Lander is about to land (or attempt to land). Watch on NASA TV.

Update: Phoenix Has Landed! Go NASA!

If you've been paying attention to the interweb's strange fads over the last few years, this weezer video will be immensely entertaining to you. If not, it's likely to seem almost completely incomprehensible (not that that's any different than most music videos, of course). If ever there was a music video that belongs on YouTube, this is it. (via MeFi.)

Update: Valleywag links to a bunch of the original viral videos.

This seems like something from The Onion, but then truth is stranger than fiction (that movie was great, by the way). Apparently a group of Joss Whedon fans have started a "Save Dollhouse" campaign in support of his new show before the show has even aired. This despite the fact that Fox greenlit the show before the pilot was even shot and even upped their initial order from seven to 13 espisodes. Strange. Now, as a Firefly fan, I'm the first to admit that that show never got a fair chance, but c'mon.

Of course, I do need to give The Onion the credit it deserves. They have managed to correctly predict the future more than once.

The World's Longest Pier: 6.5 km long! There's a joke here somewhere, but I can't seem to find it.

Those nifty carbon nanotubes that are supposed to revolutionize next-to-everything? Turns out they may act just like asbestos in the lungs. Nifty, indeed. (via Engadget.)

A professional photographer was in the midst of photographing a wedding in Sichuan, China when the earthquake hit. What does a photographer do in an earthquake? Keep shooting a series of incredible and disturbing pictures. If you can read Chinese, you can get the full story here. (via Kottke.)

Continuing on the photography topic, we have this series of Polaroids: one a day from 1979 to 1997. They are presented without comment, but you can read the full story over at metal_floss.

Buy an iPhone, get a plastic bag... delivered... in its own box... via DHL 2nd day.

Pretty and imminently impractical wall outlets by Bocci. More here. (via BoingBoing Gadgets.)

I've been pretty thrilled by the low-light performance of my cheap little 50mm f/1.8 lens. Stanley Kubrik wanted to film the candle-lit scenes in Barry Lyndon using only candle light, so he use a specially adapted 50mm f/0.7 lens. Wow! The full story was told in this article from American Cinematographer. (via Coudal via Daring Fireball.)

Why settle for a table lamp on a timer? If you really want to convince Mr. Burglar you're home, you need a FakeTV, a little LED light panel that flickers like a real TV. (via BB Gadgets.)

A beautiful gallery of vintage classical album covers.

Today's xkcd isn't so much a comic as it is an algorithm. An algorithm for something called "geohashing" (a pun on geocaching). It took me a couple minutes to figure it out, but once I did, I saw its geeky pointless brilliance. Basically, for any given day between 26 May 1896 and today, the algorithm will give you a unique nearby location (where nearby means within one degree of latitude and longitude). Okay fine. What's cool is the how and why.

The algorithm starts with three pieces of information, a location (expressed in latitude and longitude), the date, and the most recent Dow Jones Industrial Average opening. The inclusion of the DJIA makes it impossible to pre-calculate future geohashes, except over weekends and holidays when the market is closed. The date and DJIA are concatenated and an md5 hash is generated from the resulting string. This is cool. Hash functions occur frequently in computer science. They're a way to convert some arbitrary hunk of data into a single (potentially large) number. The simplest sort of hash is a checksum. Run a credit card number through the Luhn algorithm and if the resulting number ends in zero, it's a valid credit card number. MD5 is what's called a cryptographic hash function, which means a couple things. First, it must be difficult to find two messages that map to the same hash or to find a message that matches a given hash. And second, the resulting hash must not reveal anything about the original message. From the outside, the process must appear to generate arbitrary random numbers. Anyway, MD5 takes a message of any length and converts it to a 128-bit number. (As an aside, I should mention that although it is still widely used, a number of vulnerabilities in MD5 have been found).

The Geohashing algorithm (not to be confused with this) uses the first 64 bits of the hash as the decimal degrees of latitude and the second 64 as the decimal degrees of longitude. Combine these with the whole degrees of latitude and longitude of the original location and you get a new set of decimal coordinates. If this seems overly complicated, you can just use this tool to find the location for any day.

So what's the use of this thing? Well, on its face, it's all about the geeky pointlessness, but I could imagine some real uses, too. I wouldn't be surprised to find groups of people planning meet-ups at geohashed location (followed by an overwrought exposé on Dateline when someone gets lost in the wilderness trying to make it to a meet-up). This could be a handy way to secretly pass things from person to person. Imagine replacing the DJIA with some other publicly-accessible bit of information and you could generate a new secret drop point everyday without having to communicate anything more than the date. Cool.

Oh, in case you were wondering, 26 May 1896 was the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average was first published.

As of today, the tallest structure ever built on earth is the Burj Dubai. At 650 meters, the building is now taller than the ill-fated Warsaw Radio Mast. When completed, it will be a good 300 meters taller than the current tallest building, Taipei 101. Incredible. It's surprisingly attractive, too. The building was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the designers of many a snooze-inducing skyscraper. Maybe SOM just needed a bigger canvas to really show off their stuff.

I'm surprised there hasn't been an Extreme Engineering or Build it Bigger about Burj Dubai. There has been a show on Ski Dubai and the Burj Al Arab hotel, but I can't recall seeing anything about Burj Dubai. Honestly, there's enough cool engineering and construction going on in Dubai to fill a whole TV series of its own. Henry would love it.

Of course, we've got our own record-setting building here in Western Washington. Boeing's Everett factory, where they manufacture their wide-body jets, is the biggest building in the world by volume. Henry and I toured the factory a few months back and it's thoroughly impressive. The scale of the place is hard to fathom. If you ever find yourself in Western Washington, I highly recommend the tour. If Boeing ever manages to get the kinks out of the 787 manufacturing process, I expect to see a Build It Bigger about that, too.

(via digg.)

Ancestry.com has signed an agreement with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to extend and accelerate their digitization efforts. Ancestry already has a huge treasure trove of NARA records online, including census, immigration, and military records. I'm looking forward to seeing what's yet to come.

To celebrate the agreement, Ancestry.com is making their entire Military Records Collection available for free from May 20 through May 31. This collection includes the Marine Corps Muster Rolls I used for my investigation into my grandfather's military service.

(via 24/7 Family History Circle.)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and mentioned that version 2 is now in beta. What I didn't mention is that anyone can download and try the Lightroom 2 beta for free for 30 days. What's more, Lightroom 1 users (like me) can invite their friends to use Lightroom 2 for the duration of the beta period, thus extending the 30 day window. So if you're thinking about trying Lightroom, let me know and I'll get you an invite. (via John Nack on Adobe.)

"Have you ever stopped to wonder why certain baked goods are popular in your area?"

So begins this superb post over at Cakespy about the mystical and magical Mazurka. It's exactly the sort of thing that makes me love the Internet. Part investigative reporting, part culinary history, and part local history, it could be about offal and I'd still love it. That it's about tasty local baked goods just makes it all the better. Thanks Cakespy!

The Space Needle gets cleaned for the first time since 1962. Thanks Karcher GmbH & Co.

Just what the world needs: The Fizz. I love the au courant Depeche Mode music in the demo video. Now, what we really need is a way to apply milk to crunchy cereal just as you lift the spoon to your mouth. (via BoingBoing.)

Mmmm... caffeinated chips. Still waiting on baconated grapefruit. (via Gizmodo.)

The Phoenix Mars Lander is scheduled to land on May 25.

Google Street View, now with horse-recognition technology.

Review of the Canon EF 70-200 2.8 IS telephoto zoom lens. I've been looking at Canon's 70-200 lineup trying to decide whether to pony up for the speed, the image stabilization, or both. I'm thinking the f2.8 non-IS might be right for me.

Kevin Yee has an extensive review of the new Toy Story Midway Mania ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios. The ride will also be opening at Disney's California Adventure this summer.

A few weeks ago, a construction crew started building a little utility shed just down the hill from our street. The zoning sign said something about equipment for a communications utility, so I figured it was related to the array of cell antennas on top of the commercial buildings down there. As it turns out, it was antenna-related, but the antenna was yet to come.

Last week, they put up a 59.5 foot pole at the edge of the sidewalk on 35th. Why 59.5 instead of 60? At 60 feet, it would have triggered a more extensive review process. This is the new view from our upstairs window:

According to a post over at Smarter Neighbors, T-Mobile supposedly notified all property owners within 500 feet of the pole prior to a neighborhood meeting back in December 2006, but I'm quite certain we were never notified. Thanks T-Mobile. I guess Wedgwood needed a new Festivus pole.

January 22, 1939. Assistant Professor Henry "Indiana" Jones Jr. denied tenure:

Criticisms of Dr. Jones ranged from "possessing a perceptible methodological deficiency" to "practicing archaeology with a complete lack of, disregard for, and colossal ignorance of current methodology, theory, and ethics" to "unabashed grave-robbing." Given such appraisals, perhaps it isn't surprising to learn that several Central and South American countries recently assembled to enact legislation aimed at permanently prohibiting his entry.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that Ancestry.com had added a new database of military records: "U.S. Marine Corps Muster Rolls, 1798-1940." I knew my grandpa DeVries had served in the Marines sometime after WWI, but before he got married in 1926, so I typed in his name and clicked the search button. Up popped a whole bunch of records, all with the same name and same enlistment date, 24 Feb 1922. I didn't know much about his service except that he had been stationed in China for some part of his enlistment. I clicked on the first record and there he was, John H. De Vries, serving in the 39th Company, Marine Detachment, American Legation, Peking China:

Cool. Looking at some of the remarks, I guess I was glad his remarks column was blank. But what about all those other records I'd turned up? As it turns out, I was able to reconstruct his entire path through the Marines through these Muster Rolls.

John H. DeVries enlisted on 24 February 1922 at the Denver Recruiting Station, 1705 Lawrence Street. The same day, he left Denver for Mare Island Navy Yard in Vallejo, California. He arrived there three days later and entered Company A. At the time, the Mare Island Marine Barracks was the boot camp for all recruits west of the Mississippi.

On 24 April 1922, John finished basic training and was assigned to Guard Company #1 at Mare Island. Less than a month later, he left Mare Island for The Philippines aboard USAT Thomas. He arrived at Cavite Naval Station on 9 June. On 3 July, he left Cavite for Peking (Beijing) aboard the USAT Merritt. The ship arrived at Tangku (now Tanggu) and he travelled by rail to the American Legation in Peking on 14 July.

John served in China for a little less than two years. During his time there, he qualified first as a marksman, then as a sharpshooter. In the summer of 1923, he briefly moved to Camp Schurman in Peitaiho (Beidaihe). It's hard to tell what this "temporary detached duty" was about. Jacob Gould Schurman was the U.S. Ambassador to China at the time and Peitaiho is a beach resort town not far from Peking (for years it was Communist China's "Camp David"). I suspect Schurman was summering at Peitaiho and a detachment of Marines accompanied him there, but this is purely conjecture on my part.

China was in a tumultuous state during John's service there. Following the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, China entered the "warlord era," a time of weak central government and warring factions that didn't really end until the factions unified to fight the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War. It was not unusual for U.S. newspapers to carry stories of foreigners kidnapped or killed in China during this time.

On 13 June 1924, John DeVries left Peking by train and boarded USAT Thomas at Chinwangtao (Qinhuangdao) to sail back to the U.S. He arrived in San Francisco on 5 July and re-entered Guard Company #1 at Mare Island the same day. Five days later, was assigned to the Naval Prison at Mare Island. Finally, in September of 1924, he was transferred to the Destroyer Base in San Diego, where he worked as a prison chaser until the expiration of his enlistment in February 1925 (he may have been a prison chaser at Mare Island, as well). A prison chaser typically oversees prisoners on work detail, though the job does occasionally involve chasing down escaped prisoners, too.

It was interesting to watch this story gradually unfold as I found more and more muster rolls with John's name on them. Fortunately, Ancestry's index was good enough to give me a few key records right off the bat. I was then able to go back and browse through additional muster rolls where I expected to find him (and often did). The very last roll I found was from December 1924 and it was the only one that had anything negative to say. It seems that my grandfather didn't quite make it back from his weekend leave. On Monday the 8th, he was Absent Over Leave (AOL) from 8 AM to 4 PM. On the 9th, he was given a warning by his CO and returned to full duty status.

I have some pictures John DeVries took while in China. I hope to get a few of them scanned and posted sometime soon.

Update: I've scanned most of the pictures and posted them on flickr.

New video of a real-life Wall-E. Unlike the toy I linked to a few days back, this one is not for sale. It's scheduled to appear in theme parks and make visits to schools and children's hospitals. Too cute.

Wow. For the first time ever, Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference has sold out. I guess I registered just in time. Every WWDC for the last few years has been "the biggest ever," so I suppose it was only a matter of time until they sold out.

I heard today that the U.S. Supreme Court has chosen not to hear the case of St. John's Church vs. City of Chicago. Why do I care? Well, The suit is all about tiny St. Johannes Cemetery on the grounds of O'Hare Airport.

When St. Johannes United Church of Christ was founded in 1849, there was no O'Hare, nor was the area part of Chicago (it was in Bensenville, DuPage County). One hundred years later, the City of Chicago bought and annexed Orchard Field. The city renamed it O'Hare Field and proceeded to buy up the property around the field so that they could expand the airport. St. Johannes was in the way and after considerable wrangling, the church building was moved. Cemeteries aren't quite so easy to move, though, so the church cemetery stayed put. The church continued to maintain the cemetery and all was well until the turn of the 21st century, when the city decided it was time to expand O'Hare. St. Johannes Cemetery lies directly in the path of the new runway, so the battle was on anew.

The St. Johannes Cemetery Alliance (SJCA) has been fighting the City of Chicago by every means available to stop the expansion and protect the cemetery. A few avenues remain, but taking this case to the Supreme Court was in many ways the last best hope to protect the cemetery. As much as I hate to say it, I saw this coming. The SJCA used a first amendment argument; that is, they argued that the City of Chicago was infringing the church's religious freedom. This argument always rang false to me. The City just wants the land, no matter who is the owner. The appeals court found —and in its decision not to hear the case, the Supreme Court affirmed—exactly that: that the City's motivations are strictly secular. The remaining case involves the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which in my non-lawyerly opinion is a slightly better case. We'll see, but I have a feeling that what Mayor Daley wants, Mayor Daley is going to get.

So, again, why is it that I am interested in this case. It turns out some of my ancestors are buried in St. Johannes. Well, not exactly my ancestors, but my relations, anyway. The Frantzen/Franzen line of my family settled in Bensenville when they arrived from Germany in the first half of the 19th century. There are quite a few Frantzens in St. Johannes.

More information on the history of St. Johannes here. The Chicago Tribune has the latest on the case.

Someone at Apple has a sense of humor. From the support document titled Do not remove or modify SyncServices folder (emphasis mine):

As if it were a swarm of bees, you should stay away from the SyncServices folder in Mac OS X. Removing or modifying anything in it—or in subfolders within it—may cause unexpected issues.

Bees! I wonder what sort of sweet sweet honey will I find in the SyncServices folder?

The New York Times reports that Oxford University Press has no plans to publish a future print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. (via Slog.)

This music video is getting a lot of attention for its use of the Mac OS X desktop as its stage. It's pretty much the same technique used on Scientific American's The Monitor video podcast. Personally, I think it works better on The Monitor than the music video.

The Brass Brain, an analog computer from 1928, was used by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey to predict tides. More pictures at NOAA. I wonder where it is now; it would fit right in at the Computer History Museum. (via BoingBoing.)

mental_floss has a list of the 10 Most Common Place Names in the U.S. An excellent reminder for genealogists and researchers everywhere. I'd have thought Auburn would be on the list, too. (via 24/7 Family History Circle.)

Footnoted.org, a weblog devoted to finding interesting stuff in the fine print of financial reports. (via 2020 Hindsight.)

A lightbulb in Livermore, California's Fire Station No. 6 has been burning continuously for 107 years.

PicLens, a cool new way to view pictures online. Works with IE, Firefox, and Safari (though sadly not Safari 3.1). (via GeekBrief.tv.)

The first time I saw pictures of the sleek futuristic robot Eve from Pixar's upcoming movie Wall-E, I thought she looked like something designed by Apple. Well, Fortune reports that's exactly the look they were going for:

"I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous," Andrew Stanton, Wall-E's director, told Fortune. "The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design."

Pixar even consulted with Jonathan Ive, Apple's VP of Industrial Design.
(via MacNN.)

KEXP's song of the day today is More Bad Times from The Presidents of the United States of America's new album These Are The Good Times People. Excellent. I didn't even know they had a new album out, so I downloaded it and gave it a listen. It's classic POTUSA: poppy and infectious and fun. And awfully familiar:

You twisted your ankle,
I carried you.
You got a divorce,
So I married you.
You fell off a cliff,
So I buried you.
I wish there were more bad times
To see you through.

Hey! I know that melancholy sense of humor... It's Ed's Redeeming Qualities! Back when we lived in Maine, ERQ was one of our favorites. I don't think they ever got much attention nationwide, but they were pretty popular in the Boston alternative scene for a while. Like The Presidents of the United States of America, ERQ's music is sometimes silly and always disturbingly catchy. A couple carefully-chosen lyrics will have me singing an ERQ song to myself all day.

A couple months ago, I heard Ok Go's cover of The Pixies' Gigantic and decided to buy the tribute album it came from on iTunes. Kathy and I were immensely disappointed. There were a couple other good tracks, but most of the time, we just wanted to switch to the real Pixies songs. This led to a long discussion of what constitutes a good cover (we were driving to San Francisco, so we had the time). In the end, we didn't come up with much, though we did agree that when a cover is too similar to the original it just serves to remind you how much better the original is. Anyway, I asked Kathy what Seattle band she thought could successfully cover an Ed's Redeeming Qualities song and the first name she came up with was The Presidents of the United States of America. She's right.

I mentioned when I wrote about our San Francisco trip that I didn't expect to go to Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) this year. When I checked a couple months ago, I couldn't find a hotel room close to Moscone Center for anything resembling a reasonable price. Hotel rooms in San Francisco are never reasonably priced, but this was ridiculous. Even the closet-sized rooms at The Mosser were getting pricy (before they sold out). So I decided to sit this one out. No big deal.

But I did keep checking every now and then to see if I could find anything non-exorbinant within as easy walk of Moscone Center. Friday, I came across a hotel I'd never heard of: a brand new InterContinental literally next door to Moscone West. Better still, they're offering huge discounts when you book through their website (I suspect because they're new). I'm saving $250 a night on my room, which makes it less than I paid at the Marriott last year. Cool.

So I am going to WWDC again this year. Great news! Happy me. iPhone development, here I come! Then I read this about an outbreak of norovirus at Moscone Center during JavaOne. The name norovirus sounds mysterious and deadly, but in the UK they use the more colorful name WVD: Winter Vomiting Disease. Fun. I think I'll be eating lunch elsewhere this year. And washing my hands fastidiously whenever I get the chance.

A couple weeks ago, Henry and I were in the toy section of Target. He was looking at Lego and I was checking out the newly-arrived Speed Racer toys. I loved Speed Racer as a kid. If you asked me what TV shows I watched when I was Henry's age, I would immediately name Speed Racer, then have to think a while before I could name anything else. I'd hoped to find a nice Mach 5 to add to Henry and Charlie's hot wheels collection.

Despite the impressive selection, though, I was thoroughly disappointed by the dreck they had available. Unlike the nice die cast Cars cars I keep tripping over all over our house, the Speed Racer cars were mostly very cheap looking plastic. I've seen better toys in a Happy Meal. Much better.

As I was about to leave, a guy about my age walked by, saying "you want it to be like the show we watched, but you know it won't be." Of course, he was right. Speed Racer was too charming and too Japanese to make it to the silver screen unscathed. So I'm not the least bit surprised that the reviews are in and the new Speed Racer movie is just as bad as the toys. It's currently got a 35 on metacritic, right down there with College Road Trip and What Happens In Vegas. Hey, at least it's beating The Hottie and the Nottie.

Reading A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times this morning, it's obvious he could have commiserated with the two of us in Target:

Many of us who grew up watching television in the 1960s and ’70s have fond if vague memories of “Speed Racer.” Those big-eyed characters (Trixie! Speed! Racer X!), their mouths never quite moving in sync with the dialogue; those bright colors and semiabstract backgrounds; those endless, episodic story lines. Whether we knew it or not, the series was a primer in the aesthetics of Japanese animation, the love of which we could later pass along to our children.

But, you just know the movie won't be the same...

Like so many other expensive, technologically elaborate big-screen adaptations of venerable pop-culture staples, this movie sets out to honor and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering the fun in self-conscious grandiosity. The childhood experience the Wachowskis evoke is not the easy delight of lolling in the den watching one cartoon after another, but rather the squirming tedium of sitting in the back seat on an endless family car trip, your cheek taking on the texture of the vinyl seat as some grown-up lectures you on the beauty of the passing scenery.

Sigh. Where's Racer X when you need him?

I spent a couple hours at the dentist yesterday (new crown, two fillings: lucky me). They have a little flat-panel TV you can watch while they grind and fill. Before they asked what I wanted to watch, I got to watch about 20 minutes of Scooby Doo. The hygienist wondered whether most kids would even know who Scooby Doo is, which led the dentist to point out that Scooby is popular again. The one I'd been watching was actually new.

You'd think I'd know this, given that we have two kids in the prime Scooby demographic. But no. It's not that our kids don't watch TV, they do (though not as much as I watched as a kid). It's just that their tastes are a little different. Sure, they watch some shows aimed at them: The Mr. Men Show and Word Girl are recent favorites. But most of the time, they prefer to watch shows like Build It Bigger, Extreme Engineering, and How It's Made. Recent out-of-the-blue questions from Charlie have included "what is a wiring harness?" and "what is a metal template?" (The title of this post shows his actual sentence construction.) Our boys are clearly destined to be poets or artists, I'm sure.

What got me thinking about this is that Henry stayed home sick today. He slept most of the morning and is now watching a little TV. He's watching a National Geographic show called "Impossible Bridges: China," which is right up his alley. The first bridge on the show is the Lupu Bridge in Shanghai, which is currently the longest arch bridge in the world. When Henry heard this, he very excitedly called out to me in his sick croaky voice, "Dad, this bridge is in the same place as the Shanghai World Financial Center." See, his hero Danny Forster did a Build It Bigger about the SWFC. Want to know how tunnel boring machines work? How roller coasters are built? How they built the world's largest cruise ship? Ask Henry.

This morning, I heard a story on NPR about IBM's new "bluefire" supercomputer that's just been delivered to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). It sounds like a pretty cool computer, but the reporter spent half the story going on about its "unique water-cooling." Where'd he get that idea? IBM's press release says this:

Bluefire relies on a unique, water-based cooling system that is 33 percent more energy efficient than traditional air-cooled systems. Heat is removed from the electronics by water-chilled copper plates mounted in direct contact with each POWER6 microprocessor chip.

Hmm. Where have I heard of something like that before? Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the Cray-1's cooling system (circa 1976):

... [E]ach circuit board was paired with a second, placed back to back with a sheet of copper between them. The copper sheet conducted heat to the edges of the cage, where liquid freon running in pipes drew it away to the cooling unit below the machine.

Now, there may well be things about bluefire's particular liquid-cooling system that are unique and original, but there's absolutely nothing new about the idea of liquid-cooling a computer. I'd go so far as to say that in the history of supercomputers, air cooling is the aberration. Even before the Cray-1, the CDC 6600 was Freon cooled, too. Heck, my old Power Mac G5 was liquid cooled. You can even buy liquid-cooling kits for the Xbox 360 and PS3.

By the time he'd finished what I would term a sermon, I wanted to sign up for whatever he was selling at a price no lower than my heart and soul.

I'll agree that Newsom is an excellent and persuasive speaker and that he has some great ideas. On the other hand, every time I've seen him talk, I can't get over his uncanny resemblance to Will Arnett, best known as Gob Bluth from Arrested Development. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just a physical resemblance, but his voice and mannerisms are similar, too (Apparently, I'm not the only one to have noticed this). It's really disturbing. I half expect him to come cruising up on a Segway and do a cheesy magic trick. Why looky here...

Pixar's Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation (via Daring Fireball.)

The WALL-E robot toy I linked to the other day is out in the wild and Gizmodo has the video (and pictures) to prove it.

A hard drive recovered from the debris of the Space Shuttle Columbia has yielded valuable data from the Critial Viscosity of Xenon experiment that was aboard that flight. (via Engadget.)

Making and Maintaining a Master Information Document (via Lifehacker.)

A nice companion to my "Happy Birthday BASIC" post: Everything I Needed to Know About Programming I Learned from BASIC (Coding Horror).

Worlds Tallest Lego Tower Reaches 100-Foot Mark (Gizmodo).

Max Silvestri of "Gabe and Max's How to Get The Dreamlife of Your Dreams Using The Internet" parodies the video of Nicholas White stuck in an elevator. (via BoingBoing.)

I think it's about time to post an update to this post from 2005 about our accumulation of digital photographs. I suppose I should probably do these sorts of posts in January, but so be it.

I can't say I have any deep analysis about this, but it's interesting to me, anyway. I suspect that rather than seeing a continuing increase in photos taken per year as I suggested in the previous post, things will settle down to between 4000 and 6000 pictures most years. What were we up to in 2005? Is that big bump up just baby pictures of Charlie?

Over the last few months, I've read several articles about this amazing pork from a place out in Spokane. Wooly Pigs has imported a herd of Austrian Mangalitsa pigs. These very fat, very hairy pigs are worlds away from modern "improved" breeds. This isn't the lean, dry, flavorless "other white meat." Quite the contrary, the meat is dark, rich, and marbled with fat. But even the fat is special. Mangalitsa fat is more unsaturated than typical pig fat, which makes it healthier as well as giving it a softer, smoother texture. Or so they say. Now that the weather has improved enough to start grilling and smoking again in earnest, I had to try some Mangalitsa.

Fortunately, Wooly Pigs sells at the Saturday U-District Farmers Market, so when Kathy was heading out the door to stock up on veggies last week, I asked her to buy some pork, too. And did she ever! She came home with a huge hunk of Berkshire pork for pulled pork as well as a very attractive Mangalitsa loin roast. The Berkshire went in the freezer for another day, but I couldn't wait to try the Mangalitsa. So, this afternoon, I loaded up the grill with some Wicked Good Charcoal and fired it up.

I wasn't really sure how to prep the loin roast, so I decided to go simple: I scored through the fat to allow the smoke to penetrate a bit and rubbed the roast with a little salt and black pepper. I threw a couple blocks of alder wood on the coals and put the roast on over indirect heat. I wanted to keep the temperature down at about 300°F, but the fire got away from me a bit and the first few minutes were closer to 400°F. I got the temperature back down in about 15 minutes. And then I waited. Almost two hours later...

Wow. Beautiful. It was the most amazing and unique pork I've ever tasted. Rich and flavorful in an almost beefy sort of way. Even the juiciest, best-prepared roast pork often has a very firm cardboardy texture. This had none of that. And that fat! I should mention that I've never been one to blindly chow down on fat; I'll trim away even a thin band of fat from my meat before it goes in my mouth. But this stuff was completely different. It was light and almost airy; soft enough to spread (say, in place of butter on a nice hunk of crusty bread). And the outermost layer was salty and crispy and smokey. Yum. I know some people rave about lard in baked goods, but until I experienced this fat, it never completely made sense. This is the kind of pig that makes great lard and I can imagine any number of ways to use this fat that I'd never consider with regular pork fat.

Of course, this wonderful magical meat comes at a price. Literally. This stuff isn't cheap. I wouldn't be surprised if the price goes up further as more people experience its wonder. Time will tell.

There's likely to be a little chaos around these parts for the next couple days as I tweak the site's appearance a bit. There are a few things I've been dissatisfied with since the redesign last fall and I finally have the gumption to take them on. Feel free to point out any problems you come across by leaving a comment on this post. .

Excellent. A "picture" I submitted is featured today on The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. They've got a Cinco de Mayo theme going today...

Some time in 1984, my musical taste underwent a dramatic shift (or, I suppose, an expansion). Before that summer, my favorite bands were Duran Duran and Men at Work and I remember being thrilled to find a copy of the new Jellybean Benitez remix of Billy Joel's "Tell Her About It" at the local record store. I read Rolling Stone, bought lots of music (on vinyl, of course), and listened to Top-40 radio. My taste definitely tended toward the New Wave, but most of the bands I listened to were well known. That spring, my favorite record store had a strange poster on the front door for what seemed like months. It was some sort of weird snake thing, with the letters R.E.M. in the corner. Whatever it was, the album was coming in April.

When this mysterious new album—Reckoning—was released, I heard one of the employees talking about it excitedly to another customer: "their best stuff yet... a masterpiece." I had absolutely no idea what I was getting, but I bought it on the spot. Until I got home, I didn't even know whether R.E.M. was the name of the band or the album. It turned out to be a revelation to my 17-year-old ears. The strange, sometimes indecipherable lyrics, the jangly guitars... this was something different. Looking back now, I can point to many obvious influences (Velvet Underground, Big Star, The Byrds), but for me, it was totally new (I'd somehow missed the fact that Rolling Stone had named their previous album record of the year in 1983).

R.E.M. would be the gateway drug that led me to tons of other music. Reckoning was produced by Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, so I started listening to their music. Don was married to Marti Jones, so she got added to the mix. The first time I saw R.E.M. in concert (The R.E.M. Timeline says it was 10 October 1984), they barely filled a quarter of GWU's Smith Center, but the few of us there were in for quite a show. Opening for R.E.M. was another band I'd never heard of: The dB's. The dB's would become one of my favorite bands of the 80s.

And at last, I've gotten to what I really wanted to write about. You see, someone over at MetaFilter posted a link to an article by Will Rigby, formerly of the dB's (and Amy Rigby's ex). Before there was a dB's, Will went on a pilgrimage of sorts with Mitch Easter and fellow dB Peter Holsapple. They drove from North Carolina to Memphis to find the "Big Star essence:"

It seems quaint now to have gone 600 miles in search of the secret of a band that had barely existed, got almost no radio play, and had no impact on the marketplace. We didn't want to go to Graceland, or Al Green's church, or the Stax studio; we did try to re-create the photo on the back of Radio City, at its original location, TGI Friday's (I don't know whether that photo still exists, and of course it didn't come out as anything more than a dumb snapshot). There was no essence to be found.

Ah, Big Star. Thanks to The Placemats Replacements, I'd heard of Alex Chilton and even owned some of his solo music. But I didn't actually hear Big Star until the early 90s, by which time they'd been gone for a good 20 years. Still, their music fit right in with all this vaguely power-pop indie stuff I'd been listening to since the 80s. It seemed remarkably contemporary to me (and still does); the production sounded 70s, but the music itself fit right in in the 80s and 90s. You just can't say that about Duran Duran or Culture Club.

Reading that Will Rigby article reminded me of a great period of musical discovery for me and made me feel a little wistful. It's not that I don't discover new music anymore—quite the opposite; it's just that today's discoveries aren't such seismic shifts. I listen to a much wider variety of music than I did when I was 17, so it takes a lot more to surprise me. But just as important is the fact that discovering new music is so easy now. From peer-to-peer networks, to last.fm, to iTunes, it's all there, ready to be heard. Big Star? Click. The dB's? Click. Let's Active? Click.

Wow. Proving that Microsoft can do something totally new and unexpected, they've dropped their bid to buy Yahoo. I'm honestly amazed. I'm also glad I don't own any Yahoo stock at the moment.

xkcd: "Stove Ownership"

Incidentally, if you're wondering whether this xkcd thing is a webcomic for you, read this one. If you think it's hilarious, xkcd is for you. If you have no idea what it means, look elsewhere for your funny.

When I wrote about our San Francisco trip, I mentioned that we just missed seeing the Babbage Difference Engine at the Computer History Museum. Well, the full exhibit is now open and I'm even more disappointed we missed it. The museum has a very nice section on their site devoted to the Difference Engine, including a description of how it works and a video of the beautiful beast in operation.

Wired also has an exclusive video of the machine in operation.

Forty four years ago today, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz fired up the very first Basic computer program at Dartmouth:

The college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe started running a Basic compiler at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964. The new language was simple enough to use, and powerful enough to make it desirable. (via Wired.)

Like many people my age, I got started programming in Basic. At first, I loved it. It was so simple to learn, yet expressive and powerful enough to do some amazing stuff. Of course, I didn't really have any point of comparison. Then my high school math/computer teacher got approval to offer an "advanced" programming class to the few of us already proficient in Basic. The class ended up being an applied algorithms course—pretty advanced for high school, at least at the time—and the language of choice was Pascal. Learning to use UCSD Pascal on an Apple IIe was quite a hurdle, especially while simultaneously trying to learn the intricacies of sorting algorithms. But my eyes were opened to what a computer language could be. To my 17-year-old brain, switching from Basic to Pascal was like switching from a Ford Pinto to a Koenigsegg CCR. My love affair with Basic was over.

When I got to college, I discovered that, yes, there are languages even worse than Basic. All of my college programming was done in FORTRAN. To continue my analogy, FORTRAN felt like a rusty old Model T that had spent the last 40 years in a muddy ditch. I got to be quite proficient in FORTRAN, but never much liked it. In the midst of this FORTRAN wilderness, I had a chance to do some more Basic programming and I enjoyed in immensely. The summer after freshman year, I worked at Georgetown University Medical Center. The department I worked for had an old Wang VS minicomputer they'd been using for word processing for years. At the time, Wang didn't provide a way to move documents off their system, but the department was switching to IBM PCs with Wordstar (or was it WordPerfect?) and wanted access to all their old documents. I reverse-engineered the file formats on both the VS and PC sides (though I think there might have been some documentation for one or the other), then wrote a program in Basic to do the translation. After working in FORTRAN my freshman year, I was actually pretty happy to be working in Basic again. Pascal was still my love, but Basic would do.

The funny thing is, I haven't programmed a single line of Pascal since high school. But Basic? Oh, yes, there was much more Basic. In my first job out of college, I did quite a lot of programming in Microsoft QuickBASIC, a little in FORTH (strange, beautiful FORTH), and a tiny bit in C. When I learned Macintosh programming, I figured it was time to learn a "modern" language, so I jumped in with both feet and learned C. Since then, I've worked in C++, HyperTalk, SuperTalk, Java, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, and my current love Objective-C.

Like they say, though, you never forget your first love. Happy Birthday, Basic.