May The 4th Be With You

Landmark

 

Anyone hungry?

Snuggle Truck

Apple rejected the iPhone game Smuggle Truck, wherein the objective is to drive illegal immigrants into the US by dodging all kinds of obstacles at the border. It was not in very good taste and could be seen as somewhat racist I suppose.

 

So rather than scrap the whole idea, the developer just swapped Mexicans for stuffed animals and renamed the game Snuggle Truck. Now that's making lemonade from lemons!

 

 

Going Twice

One of the most famous cars of all time is going on sale at auction this week. Of course you remember the Gen 11 of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang fame. While there were several doubles and replicas made both for filming in 1967 and after the movie, this one is the original. The one true Gen 11. And while it can't really fly or sail, it's still one cool automobile. It was sold immediately after filming of the movie to stunt driver Pierre Picton and has been in his possession ever since, so basically that's "original owner".

 

"Designed by Ford’s racing team to resemble a prewar vehicle, Chitty was no mock-up. Though she stayed on land throughout filming, she moved under her own power whenever possible and has been driven regularly ever since. The vehicle was built on a ladder frame with a boat deck crafted out of red and white cedar, a polished aluminum hood, a dashboard from a British World War I fighter plane and actual exterior pieces from 1930s vehicles."

 

Hurry up and get your financing in order, Gen 11 is expected to sell for millions.

SETI

This is the Allen Telescope Array, named after the deep pocketed donor who paid for it - Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It has been used for the last 4 years as part of Project SETI to scan millions of frequencies for signs of a broadcast originating from intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy.

 

SETI was always an interesting long-shot, space is so huge and the odds of finding something is tiny. Tiny, but not zero. But alas, SETI has been defunded by the government (presumably to buy one more case of guns or something - it wasn't a big budget item). So the Allen Array will "hang up" very soon.

 

The excellent Carl Sagan book (and subsequent movie) Contact was a fictionalized account of the interception and decoding of a signal from space. Carl was a great proponent of the search for extra terrestrial life. Note that this search has nothing at all to do with UFOs or Area 51. The odds of a SETI discovery are small, but at least it's real science.

 

Was. Was real science.

Allergens

From Heather

 

"After eating strawberries, Mads said her throat felt funny. And her stomach too! I told her she might be allergic to strawberries, especially since I am. Mads asked what else she's allergic to & I said we don't know until she eats something & has that funny feeling. Then she said, 'Mom, I think I'm allergic to broccoli!'".

25 Years Ago Today

"Twenty-five years ago today, the sky fell on a corner of Ukraine. The Chernobyl nuclear plant, a symbol of man's triumph over the atom and the pride of a nation, experienced a system failure so complete, so devastating, that it left an irreparable wasteland in its wake. Explosions rang out. Radioactive smoke stained the early morning sky. And 350,000 people lost their homes forever."

"On the Friday evening of April 25, 1986, the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4 prepared to run a test the next day to see how long the turbines would keep spinning and producing power if the electrical power supply went off line. This was a dangerous test, but it had been done before. As a part of the preparation, they disabled some critical control systems - including the automatic shutdown safety mechanisms.

Shortly after 1:00 AM on April 26, the flow of coolant water dropped and the power began to increase.

At 1:23 AM, the operator moved to shut down the reactor in its low power mode and a domino effect of previous errors caused an sharp power surge, triggering a tremendous steam explosion which blew the 1000 ton cap on the nuclear containment vessel to smithereens.

Some of the 211 control rods melted and then a second explosion, whose cause is still the subject of disagreement among experts, threw out fragments of the burning radioactive fuel core and allowed air to rush in - igniting several tons of graphite insulating blocks.

Once graphite starts to burn, its almost impossible to extinguish. It took 9 days and 5000 tons of sand, boron, dolomite, clay and lead dropped from helicopters to put it out. The radiation was so intense that many of those brave pilots died.

It was this graphite fire that released most of the radiation into the atmosphere and troubling spikes in atmospheric radiation were measured as far away as Sweden - thousands of miles away.

The causes of the accident are described as a fateful combination of human error and imperfect technology.

In keeping with a long tradition of Soviet justice, they imprisoned all the people who worked on that shift - regardless of their guilt. The man who tried to stop the chain reaction in a last desperate attempt to avoid the meltdown was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He died 3 weeks later.

Radiation will stay in the Chernobyl area for the next 48,000 years, but humans may begin repopulating the area in about 600 years - give or take three centuries."

(Account of the disaster from "Elena", who has seen the mess in person)

Harleys and Hellboy

I really like Sons of Anarchy. It's a show about a motorcycle gang in California. I know it's in its 3rd season, but I just found it recently and it's really good (and more than a little gory). Seasons 1 and 2 are on Netflix and I had seen a few from season 3 but yesterday Heather and I watched the pilot. Dramatic, for sure. And that Ron Pearlman, that is one badass-looking dude. No wonder they chose him to play Hellboy. When he looks at a guy with those beady eyes, staring out from under that Neanderthal orbital ridge, it makes my blood run cold. And he's got the voice to back it up. They cast that whole show well. There are some really creepy and half-crazy looking dudes in that gang. Oh, and Peg Bundy too.

More photos from the spring flower shoot

 

Now THAT'S a photo shoot!

 

Steve in Carbonite

Coolest iPhone case ever.

Roll 'em!

Now that the theater is in place I can stop thinking about scan rates and 24p and HDMI and just enjoy movies! Not that I don't love the technical side of it all too, but the bottom line is it's the movies I love.

A Breezy Spring Day

Some shots from a customer shoot during the weekend.

Follow-up

Ugh. As bad as that idiot Terry Jones is, I really don't think Dearborn should have attempted to get him to leave. Everyone, even idiots, deserve freedom of speech. Yes, there was danger of a major disturbance of the peace, in fact, that's what Terry is trying to accomplish, get someone to kick him and then he's a martyr which is all he really wants in life. And yes, he was going to protest from the grounds of the Islamic temple, which is trespassing and that's not allowed. But I think that judge in Dearborn, who took Terry into custody and told him not to return to Dearborn for three years was wrong. Much better to let the guy have his say and prove his idiocy (which is his 1st amendment right) than to make it appear that you are trying to keep him quiet...that's exactly what he wants. Now he can claim he was right all along.

 

It wasn't an easy position to put that judge in, not at all, And that was by design. If he'd let the protests go on, Terry would have incited someone to do something to him and then he's a martyr. Block him, and he can claim he was right in the first place.  No-win situation, see? And that's the way he designed it.

 

Man I hate bigots.

Easter Dave!

 

Progress!

From Gizmodo:

 

"Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death has been simultaneously worrying and pissing people off since Windows 1.0. No doubt trying to add a bit of sexy glamour to an otherwise frustrating experience, Microsoft's next OS looks to include a black screen."

 

You can't make this stuff up.

2D

So concerned are people about carbs these days (thanks, Atkins) that Einstein Bros has turned the once-noble bagel into a 5-millimeter-thick cream-cheese transport disc.

 

I like my bagels three-dimensional thankyouverymuch.

New Applications for Common Household Items

Hip and knee surgery replacements are now being performed with the aid of the iPod Touch!

Humor with Humility

"Everyone wants to be Cary Grant—even I want to be Cary Grant" - Cary Grant

Tinted

This big scary machine looks like an old IBM tape drive, but it's not. It's called a Spirit DataCine. It is a modern version of what is called a Telecine device. This is properly pronounced "tella sin-ee". A Telecine is a machine that transfers film to video (hence the name Tele - Cine). These machines have been used for years to allow movies to be seen on television. The frame rate of movies is 24 fps, while TV ranges from 25 to 30 depending on what country you are in. This difference is bridged by the Telecine which literally photographs or scans the film and transfers the individual frames into video fields for transfer to various video formats. Telecine machines typically work in real-time, so they transfer very quickly.


In the old days, the Telecine would "film" the film and write it immediately to video tape. With the Spirit DataCine though, the data can be saved to external hard disc drives for intermediate editing, and then re-transferred onto film or video. The implications of this are huge for movies, when this technology was introduced in 1996 it became evident that a new type of film editing was possible, and the "digital intermediate" was born.


The first film to use a digital intermediate created by a DataCine was Pleasantville in 1998. The colorization effect that movie uses would have been very difficult to do without using a digital intermediate.


The second movie to use this technology was O' Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) where the Coen brothers used it to adjust the color timing of the whole movie to give it the fade-to-color dusty look they wanted. The flood gates have been open ever since, as film after film has come along to take advantage of the possibilities of recoloring and intermediate editing.


Criterion has one of these $1.5 million beasts, and they use it to perform digital restorations on film that would have been much harder to do working on the actual negatives.


So if you've ever wondered why movies "all of a sudden" started using all kinds of various color tints and color fade effects (for example, each story line of the excellent movie Traffic is tinted a different color), you can blame the DataCine.

Caught Up

We don't get to watch many TV shows, but Modern Family is our favorite. I think we're actually "caught up" on this one with no new episodes waiting up on Hulu's servers. This show consistently makes us both laugh out loud, something I haven't encountered from a TV show in a long time.

Do Unto Others

Warning: here's my Easter sermon, a bit early...

 

Some bat-shit crazy freak is getting a rally together in Dearborn this weekend. Apparently he's a fundamentalist Christian pastor (yeah the same one from Florida who tried to organize a Koran-burning day on 9/11 last year) who thinks that Dearborn is shackled under the iron grip of Shari'a law and wants to...well, nobody is sure what he wants to do except get international attention for himself. Apparently he'd be ok with hanging the Ten Commandments in all our public buildings but would have an issue with any other religion imposing a similar breach of church-state separation. It's all relative I guess.

 

And he's not the only freak that thinks this. Both Newt Gingrich (remember that pompous asshole? Yeah, he's still alive) and Mike Huckabee (another bigot intolerant to any beliefs but his own - where do they find these dinosaurs?) think the same thing...that the Muslim religion will supplant Christianity in the US and start making us all pray five times a day and avoid eating swine. This is one of the big reasons I am averse to organized religion on general principle...it does nothing but promote division in society. I can't think of a single good thing it does for humanity in any case.

 

First off, if you know anything about Dearborn (and since I have spent at least 8 hours there every weekday for the last 18 years, and even have a Dearborn library card I think I qualify) you would know this dope's premise is laughable. If Dearborn (which has an Irish-American mayor by the way - O'Reilly, who replaced the previous Italian-American mayor Guido in 2006) was under Shari'a law, there would be no establishments selling alcohol. There would be no topless bars. And believe me, Dearborn has many, many of both of those (or so I've heard ;) Also, one of Dearborn's most famous and successful businesses is the Dearborn Ham and Sausage Company, which is not, if you'll pardon the mixed-religion joke, very "Kosher" when it comes to Shari'a law.

 

So what evidence do these bigots put forth to prove their conjectures? Um...well... U of M Dearborn has installed footbaths to aid their many Muslim students in their prayer rituals. The fact that U of M Ann Arbor has had a chapel for their Christian students since 1841 doesn't seem to factor into this for Terry Jones and his ilk.

 

And then there was the incident last year when some extremist Christian agitators were arrested trying to provoke a riot while "defending the gospel of Jesus" in the middle of an Arab-American festival. Hmm...doesn't really sound like Shari'a law to me. Sounds more like a bunch of jackasses trying their hardest to get beat up while crashing a party and eventually being saved by the police. How exactly does one go about "defending the gospel of Jesus" in the middle of an Arab-American festival anyhow? That festival by the way, is awesome, I've been to it several times.

 

I know, this guy Terry Jones is a crazy freak. Yes. We should just ignore him. But it's not that he's an idiot that bothers me. It's that his whole ideology is built on the premise that people who are not of his religion are somehow not as good as him. That really drives me nuts. It's the classic case - people who have views different from his are not to be tolerated...exactly what he's accusing Dearborn of doing. Yes, very true, most Christians are not that radical or bigoted, but the fact is "normal" Christians are not coming out in droves to denounce this guy and that means that they are all enablers. They provide cover for these radicals via implicit agreement. The same thing happens in Islam and every other religion of course. If anyone from the outside tries to stomp this guy down they become the intolerant ones. These crazies can only be restrained from inside their faith and that's not happening.

 

Dearborn is classier than he is though. There is a counter-protest planned. It's perfect too, done as a joke so as not to give him any validation, they're holding a rally to impose "Shawarma Law" on Dearborn and it's residents, forcing everyone in Dearborn to eat at least one Shawarma sandwich every day.

 

Fight bigotry with humor. I like it. And it's tasty too!

 

Oh, Happy Easter, peeps.

 

Peace out.

N by NW

Ever since we got our big new television it's been occupied playing Pixar movies. Cool enough, but it was so relaxing and exciting Sunday when I got to (not without major interruptions mind you, but still) watch North by Northwest! A real, bona-fide grown-ups movie!

 

And it was fantastic. I love Hitch, he made about the best suspense movies anyone ever has.

The Last Phase

The last step in building our home theater is tying it all together with a universal remote. Why in 35 years the various electronics conglomerates of the world couldn't get together and figure out a universal system is beyond me, and inexcusable. I know, they just didn't want to.

 

We're looking for something that can be run from any of our iDevices from anywhere in the house, something that is expandable to multiple rooms of control, and something that has all codes in the cloud and constantly updated for easy setup and obsolescence avoidance.

 

This one looks promising: The Dijit / Griffon co-venture called Beacon. It's not out until May but I downloaded the app and tried out the setup and it looks awesome. We'll see...

Survival of the Typist

When the Macintosh first came out in 1984, it  "...came with the Macintosh Intro, a disk that held a little tutorial explaining how to use various parts of the Mac. Among the topics covered was what a mouse is and how to use it (and even that you can lift it off the table and put it down in another spot to have more space to move in a particular direction).

According to various reports, when someone suggested to include a touch-typing tutorial in this intro as well, since many people did not know how to use a keyboard, Steve Jobs simply said not to bother as those people would die out eventually."

"Foreign" Films

From The Criterion Collection, bastion of great films:

 

"In this photograph of the Brattle Theatre circa 1953, you can see a sign that says "Opening Soon! Foreign Films." The brilliant idea behind the sign belonged to Harvard classmates Cy Harvey and Bryant Haliday, without whom the Brattle Theatre would probably not be showing the eclectic array of films it does to this day; there would be no Janus Films, which Harvey and Haliday founded together in 1956; and there would be no Criterion Collection as we know it. Cy Harvey, the last surviving of the two Janus founders, passed away last week at the age of eighty-five. He was stylish, kind, courageous, and retained a deep love of cinema long after he left Janus Films in the mid 1960s. He will be deeply missed, and we thought we would share this image as a testament to his youthful vision, one that still sustains us all today."

 

Fact is, many of the greatest films in history were not made in America. It's a shame more people in the U.S. don't get to see them. Thanks to Cy and Bryant for making it possible for us to see the timeless films of these and other great directors:

 

Japan: Kurosawa, Ozu, Ichikawa, Kobayashi

Italy: Fellini, Rosi, Olmi, Antonioni, Cavani

Germany: Fassbinder, Lang, Wenders

Austria: Spielmann

France: Goddard, Malle, Varda, Truffaut, Cocteau, Renoir, Clouzot, Melville, Bresson

UK: Hitchcock, Pressburger, Powell, Lean, Olivier, Gilliam, Reed, Merchant

Australia: Weir, Roeg

Canada: Cronenberg

Czech Republic: Forman, Menzel

Denmark: von Trier, Christensen

India: Nair, Ivory, Ray

Iran: Kiarostami

Mexico: del Toro, Buñuel

Norway: Skjoldbjærg

Poland: Polanski

Soviet Union: Tarkovsky, Eisenstein

Spain: Bardem

Sweden: Bergman

 

And here's the cool thing. If you have a Hulu Plus subscription, you can see them all, anytime you like!

The New Snake Oil

I'm sure all you electronically savvy peeps know never to buy cables at the retail stores right? I mean, even Radio Shack? Never, ever, ever.

 

Yeah, here's the thing. In the digital age, you do not need to buy expensive cables. HDMI for instance - if it passes your signals, it works. If not, say there is a break in one of the leads, then it doesn't. That's it. There is no in between. Gold connectors, extra shielding, even the new "high speed" HDMI cables, none of that stuff means anything. It's all crap.

 

You can buy the cheapest cable you can find and it will work just as good, even on 3D sources.

 

You can pay $130 for an HDMI cable at Best Buy. Seriously. That's why there was a Monster Park in San Francisco for a few years. When a company makes so much money on their cables that they can afford that kind of advertising, run, don't walk, away. Look at the above graphic of the various Monster "Speed Ratings". All bullshit.

 

You know how much an HDMI cable that performs exactly as well as that $130 Monster Cable costs on www.monoproce.com?

 

$2.77

 

That's $127.23 difference! And I mean it when I say the monoprice cable works exactly as well: it's all bits, a cable either works 100% or it doesn't work at all in the land of digital.

 

I just took a trip to my local Micro Center store to try to pick up a few cables I didn't want to wait for, knowing I'd have to pay more, but the cheapest ones I found were still an order of magnitude more money than the ones I went home and ordered online.

Right Here, Right Now

"The best camera is the one you have with you" - Chase Jarvis

 

As a sort of real-life proof of that concept, note that the iPhone 4 is about to overtake the Nikon D90 as the most popular camera used on Flickr.

We got a few deck dinners in before winter came back...

 

Melissa, dipping...everyone else, watching

Loving up Mavis

Ice Cream With B :)

The magic of iPad

Planting herbs!

Fearless

Beautiful

Scooter

Nan comes bearing wine!

This one introduced the US to Pinot Grigio and they still make the best. Thanks Nan!

Battleship

Believe it or not, this huge thing taking up half my office is our new HDTV!

Kisses!

Was

Zach was hanging out with his friend today, and he looked at me and said "his motto is 'Life Was Good'".

It Was Bolt!

It was Bolt! Our first family movie on the new TV. It was also amazing!