© Menno E Aartsen 2009 and prior years. Scroll down for menu and more. Disclaimer and Fair Use statement at the bottom of this page.
For the past few years, I have bought probably 60 to 70% of my gadgets at the Amazon.com
I suppose Amazon has become to the online world what Wal-Mart is to the big box store - they stay on top, simply by combining tight pricing with a huge, available, product assortment. I say "simply", but in both cases this required a far sighted world view, and an uncompromising dedication. Wal-Marts stores in Beijing blew me away, their formula works, wherever they take it (except in Germany, and I understand why), and the fact that I got a German standard DVD of "Das Boot"
Since I review and discuss lots of the technology products I buy anyway, it is a small miracle I did not sign up for Amazon's Associates Program. I just never thought of it, especially since I don't like these programs, generally, as most are restrictive in where you can take them, and how you post their stuff.
But it seems that the Amazon program isn't too restrictive, they simply give you HTML to place, no complicated formatting like Google does. They do put sneaky "no show" links into their HTML, something I generally do not approve of, but I guess I will see how that works, what it nets me - this is about money, after all. One thing it will do is make me write more extensive reviews, there is little point in my posting links to products, and not tell you exactly why they're great.
Ethically, I won't review anything I haven't bought, and have not spent time familiarizing myself with. I've done product reviews in the past, when I worked as an editor in The Netherlands and the UK, but I find when I read others' reviews that they don't get to the essence of the products they review, since they don't use them on an everyday basis. So I will tell you about the Nikon D50
Something else I have never done, and won't start now, is write negative reviews. If I don't like a product, I won't write about it. I am not the Consumer Association, but I can tell you about what I buy, why I bought it, how I use it, how happy it makes me, and what you need to watch out for. Hopefully, this may help drive traffic to my site, and perhaps will net me a buck or two, when y'all rush to Amazon to buy the gear I recommend. There is plenty of it....
....more
No, I am not making fun of the locals, or of "southern speak". This is really how some of my blue collar neighbours speak English, and I love them for it. They are wonderful, supportive, helpful folk, especially once they figure out you don't look down on them, and after all the years I spent in and amongst what Virgin Airlines calls the "Upper Class" it is very refreshing to spend time amongst real people, who cope with their world in unique and very different ways. I love it here, even if they do all watch Fox.
It has been a bit of a messy week. A water pipe sprung a leak, somewhere in the wall upstairs, and I couldn't figure out where the leak was until neighbour D. came over and helped me rip some cabinets off the kitchen wall, and make a large hole in the ceiling, so we eventually figured out the defective water pipe was behind a vanity in the master bathroom. We ended up cutting the water pipe in the ceiling, I did not feel like ripping the vanity off just yet. The beams, soaked, are drying now, and then I have to figure out what to do for repairs in the kitchen.
Then I've been pressure washing the aluminium siding, or rather, one of the kids down the street is doing the work, and I supervise. But then yesterday, suddenly a fuse blew in the garage, and then I discovered one of my outside heat pumps is not getting power, even though it does not sit on the same circuit. I have enough A/C, the upstairs unit is fine, and I have some heat pumps on wheels, it is just annoying that everything seems to break, this month.
It isn't like I am not busy, I have finally decided to rework my Facebook page, as it looks like dozens of friends, former colleagues, some from way back, ex-girlfriends, and half my family are on Facebook. I absolutely refuse to maintain pages on half a dozen systems, that is ridiculous in terms of the amount of time it takes, between this website and Facebook it is a fair amount of work. Just setting permissions, so that Facebook doesn't use my information as though it were free, took hours, their system is so complicated.
And then friend D. is talking about possibly retiring, and we're talking about heading back to Asia. I was at the Oriental supermarket yesterday, and standing in an aisle, amid the Indonesian soups and Vietnamese herbs and woks and sauces, I almost shuddered with the strong desire to head back to Asia. It isn't that I am not happy where I am, I love this place, my woods, the turtles, the deer, and the sun and the heat, but I guess it is just a craving. And it is strong. I have promised D. I will talk, get on the horn, to colleges in Asia Pacific, so we could head out there and spend part of the year teaching, winters over there and summers over here...
Then I am putting together one of my laptops for him, I have too many, this one is barely a year old, and got replaced by one with an HDMI port, able to play Blu-ray to an HD TV set (using an external Buffalo Blu-ray Writer
So curious is as curious gets, and I decided to try to turn the newer laptop into a 64 bit machine, with an upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate
Not only that - you'd think you can buy a 64 bit upgrade, and take your PC from 32 bit Windows Vista Business to 64 bit Windows Vista Ultimate, right? Hah! Fuhgedaboudit! What you have to do is scrounge up an old copy of Windows XP, install that on the machine, and then you can run an "upgrade". And getting an old copy of XP installing on a new Lenovo is fraught with pitfalls - for one thing, it won't talk to SATA drives, I spent something like 4 hours experimenting with different drives, and different install packages, until I (first light shone through the trees already) had that brainwave, put the C: drive in IDE mode in the BIOS, and suddenly my old HP version of Windows XP Home rolled right onto the disk. Then I switched back to SATA mode, and 64 bit Win Ultimate installed like a dream. Then, it took another six hours to find and install all of the drivers for things like the graphics chipset, the modem, the flash memory slot, the HD audio (which Intel kindly locks in with the HD video chipset through HDMI) and then program the drive controllers back to performance mode, Ultimate reset every single interface in the laptop to "safe and slow" - something Windows installs have always done, making sure that you can't use your fancy new PC at its rated speed, because God forbid it overclocks the operating system...
But hey, it works - my $500 Lenovo 3000 N500 now runs at 64 bits, and has 8 GB of usable RAM, another 4 GB of Readyboost flash memory, and 14 GB of virtual memory. It freakin' flies, people! Now the waiting is for Windows 7, I've ordered three copies, so come October I can do this all over again...
The turtle, above? Living, as I do, more or less in the woods, there is plenty of wildlife that occupies the same acreage I do. What I have noticed (as you can see) is that the animals have gotten used to me, these past few years, and no longer exhibit the fear response you'd expect. That goes for the deer, the turtles, the squirrels, even the wasps, which nest all around the house, the most they ever do, when I am working outside, is fly up to me, check me out, and then go back to whatever it is wasps do. Quite interesting - unlike most of my neighbours, I don't have a dog, or dogs, and as a consequence I get plenty of deer grazing, and squirrels foraging, looking at me with that doleful "leave me alone" stare. By rights, the turtle should have withdrawn into its shell, I took these pictures at maybe two yards from it, but as you can see, it wasn't going to stop crossing the lawn for nothing....
The neat thing is, we don't have to do any more Crusades. They do them in-house now.
Usually, summer sets off irresistible urges to travel in me, but I have so much to do at home that I am, for now, quite content postponing my globetrotting for a while. "Foyle's War" is re-running on WETA, the sounds of British recreations of the WWII era are soothing, as I sit here waiting for the eggs to boil. I do realize, though, that that England no longer exists, as indeed does the one I went to live in, in 1979. The London Transport double decker bus up to Norwood Hill, and the Luncheon Vouchers that bought cucumber sandwiches, all quite novel to the newly minted Dutch emigrant I was. Ah, nostalgia.. the images of bus and the shops are burned into my mind, though, I suppose those were the days that the discovery of how different things were a mere hours' flight from home turned me into the globetrotter I became.
I am still in the throes of setting up my new file server - see below - after customizing the evaluation copy of Windows 7 I am using (fingers crossed that Microsoft will allow the final version to update this beta..), I have got the machine running like clockwork, although it took a bit of doing to get the AIS Backup software running on it. I eventually got it running smoothly in Windows 7's compatibility mode, for Windows XP Service Pack 2 in this case, it fails under all other modes I've tried. In order to ensure that it is fully reliable, I am running a full restore, followed by a full backup, this involving close to 1.2 terabytes of data, in 1.1 million (!) files. It looks like the entire process will take four days - necessary because I need to test not only the server's reliability, but that of the drives as well. While I had tested most of the drives I am using, the 2(!) terabyte Fantom G-force Raid Array
As the test file transfers involve using the drive on a USB port, which isn't terribly fast, the testing takes a long time. The primary network drives sit on a duplicated 3 GB/sec eSATA interface, which is plenty fast, while the "backup of the backup" doesn't really need to be fast, just reliable, and actually running on a slower bus will put less strain on the array, and on the server ports. Six of one...
Over the past week, I have almost exclusively worked on my systems and my network. As you may have read below, May 19, I bought a discounted Sony Vaio desktop, then blew that up, and so a repair person turned up to replace the motherboard (free of charge!). That makes me a Sony convert - more about that later.
Then I took the latest test version of Windows 7 Ultimate
Last but not least, I have taken a good look at how you can have your address book and calendar and portably, easily, exchange and update them between cellphone and PC. You see, all of these dandy iPhones are very nice, but taking their data, bringing that to a different phone, synchronizing it across multiple phones, and having your calendar and schedule on multiple PCs, isn't something you can do in what we call a "device independent" manner. Which I happen to think is much more important than moving your fingers across a touch screen in fashionable ways. For me, it needs to be cheap, easy, and I have to be able to give my kids or my girlfriend or whatever the same information I use - preferably without my password- and login file, or the email addresses of my sex friends. Right?
I can be brief about the Sony VAIO VGC-JS230J/S desktop
To my right, as I write this at my dining table, the Everex PC is restoring my main systems backup and file server, until now running on an old Dell PC. I built a 1.5 terabyte Seagate FreeAgent Pro
Long story short, the Cavalry is going into retirement, and is being replaced by a new terabyte Fantom G-force Raid Array
You gotta read this.
I don't know if you have noticed, but this eco-stuff is fast becoming a religion, where simple calculations and logical thinking no longer matter. I do not, per se, mind that people have different ideas about what's best for mankind and its future, but some of the thinking is simply crazy
One person I know reuses cola bottles - the big plastic two litre ones. She stores larg amounts of herbal tea in them, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that this leaches chemicals out of the plastic, over time, which she then ingests. This is very likely to impair her immune system.
Another acquaintance got behind the wheel of my SUV, and declared she hates SUVs. Not mine (of course) but the ones that soccer moms use. Apparently, she is concerned with the environment, and that relieves her of the responsibility of thinking.
This is beginning to be one of my major hobby horses - it is being hammered into us that we're going to reduce our carbon output by driving small and/or hybrid vehicles, and using CFL bulbs. This is, in fact, complete hogwash. The environment is not materially affected by soccer moms or gas guzzlers. What causes our carbon output is a combination of people commuting to work, and goods transportation by trucks. Hundreds of millions of people get into their cars, every day, and drive to their offices to sit behind a computer with a telephone at their elbow. This isn't something they need to go anywhere for - between teleconferencing, email, IM and camchatting, most office workers can do from home what they do in the office. And long distance goods transportation can be done by trains, with only localized delivery and distribution done by trucks.
These two simple measures would take a large percentage of cars and trucks off the road, which means much less fuel is burned, and our road building and maintenance budgets can be significantly scaled back. It seems so simple it is stupid, but think about it - and steer clear of the effects it would have on the oil industry and car and truck manufacturers. All I am saying is that unless we take an analytic look at the problem, and come up with organized and enforced solutions, we're going to have more of the same. At the present time most vehicle manufacturers are putting hybrid vehicles on the market, leading to more cars being produced and sold - but the underlying issue, those cars getting on the road and being driven in our congested commutes, isn't being addressed. That is where the majority of pollution takes place, and the majority of our wasting fuel.
Soccer moms and one way bottles aren't the problem. Standards of hygiene have risen, in the Western world, because we have all manner of disposable articles, from sanitary napkins to the plastic bottles that water comes in, in Third World countries. We cannot simply roll these things back, because we would negatively affect hygienic standards and living expectations. Airplane travel, specifically for tourists, is an issue we could have another look at - if you can fly to Egypt to visit the pyramids, there is no reason why you can't take a cruise ship to Egypt, instead. I have spent many years doing my work from remote locations, all over the world, with a laptop and a cellphone. There is no reason why a manager can't work while on that cruise ship traveling to their vacation destination, just to think out loud. Lots of inventive solutions are in existence, today, as fully mature technologies, things we can start using tomorrow - think of it, the space shuttle crew can work from orbit, or from the ISS, and so can we.
On a different note, I've owned a small refractor telescope, the Meade ETX-80, for a while now, not so much because I want to gaze at the stars, but because Meade sells an SLR adapter for it, and I was curious how well this would work, with a digital camera. Nikon has software that will let you access the sensor element directly from a PC, so from an experimentation perspective the ETX-80 with one of my Nikon D bodies is a very nice combination to have.
As an interlude, the reason for me to have SLR cameras is that I spent part of my career as a professional photographer, both in the studio and as a photojournalist, and from the day I started, back in the 1970s, I have always worked with Nikon SLR cameras (beginning with the F2) and lenses. To the right is a shot taken in my yard using the Nikon D90, with the Meade telescope and a 2x converter in between the camera and the telescope. Not at all bad, considering the price.
One of the big advantages of using a notebook or laptop computer is that you can set it up so it will "power down gracefully" - shutting down all applications, closing files, and shutting down the operating system, all by itself - when the battery runs low, for instance when you have a power failure, or have simply gotten distracted and left the machine on. Many consumers suffer damaged files and even damaged hard disks when their power fails - but what isn't so well known, they can do the same thing with their desktop computer you can with a laptop. The purpose here is not that you can finish your work, but that you can send your machine into hybernation without losing or damaging any data.
All you need to do is get what is known as an "Uninterruptible Power Supply", or UPS, which is generally available beginning at around $40. If you buy one that is fully compatible with Microsoft Windows - all those made by APC are, and I have recently discovered newer Belkin UPS devices are, too - you don't need to install any software, plug it in, connect the USB driver connector to your PC, and Windows will install a "Human Interface Device" driver that works directly with your power settings (if they're not on your task bar, find them in the Control Panel).
Your PC will, once all this is running, behave (set up properly) just like a laptop would - when the power fails, it will close files and programs, and shut down. If you are at your keyboard, you can finish what you were doing, and either shut down manually, or let the automation take care of it.
These devices aren't much more expensive than the surge suppressors many consumers think they should use (mostly unnecessary today), and they contain not only the UPS, but have built-in surge suppression as well, in many cases for the power, phone lines, and for cable or satellite TV and internet connections. The batteries will last something like four to five years, and in most cases you can replace the battery (which is generally of the lead-acid variety) yourself, from a third party supplier. At my house, all electronics run on UPS's during a power failure, which, when I am in, bridges the gap between the power fail event, and the time I have my emergency generator running and connected.
I am going to have to wait telling you more about the Vaio desktop I bought (see my May 19 rant), as I blew it up. I connected my airplane power supply to it, to see if that delivers enough power to run this thing, this is a power supply that runs off the 24 VDC an airplane seat connector delivers, as well as off a 12 VDC car jack, and even though I connected it following instructions it delivered -20 VDC, rather than + 20VDC. So it is waiting for the repair guy. What I did discover, though, is that Sony provides in-home warranty service. I guess that is why the Vaios are generally more expensive than other brands, which you have to take or send in to get fixed. I got an immediate callback from their service provider, after I opened the trouble ticket with Sony, and an hour later the local technician called to tell me when he expected to receive the new motherboard, and he'd call me to set up an appointment the second he had it. This is the level of service IBM delivered, when they still had a PC division, and I am pleasantly surprised to see Sony does this too. If you cannot have a system go down on you for any length of time, it seems Sony is a good choice. I'd say that especially with kids in college, they cannot by and large study and work without their laptop, this makes Sony an excellent choice.
I am procrastinating bigtime. I keep on buying stuff I really do not need, keep promising myself that I will put on Ebay what it replaces (anybody for a Nikon D50 in pristine state? A Lenovo 3000?), and then don't get around to doing it. This despite my having a long established Ebay account, all I need to do is take some pictures and start the auction.
This is one of those strange periods - for months, not a sniff on any of the internet dating sites I have a stake out on, and then - bingo! - four on the same day. Maybe I should try polygamy. Mind you, in the Commonwealth of Virginia even cohabitation is officially against the law, so my guess is that living with more than one woman would be even more of a problem. I don't know that this law is actually ever used any more, but it is the reason that my medical plan, for instance, can't accept domestic partners, only spouses. I imagine the legislature does not want to get into changing the law, because that would open the door to same sex partners, and this is one of the most conservative states in the nation.
I shall not let it bother me. Other than that, I have mostly been busy with technology - I really ought to make an effort to find myself a teaching position somewhere - my vast storehouse of expertise and knowledge is going to waste, right now I am doing a few research projects whose results really aren't going to go anywhere, other than here in this blog.
If you are tempted to take a look at Windows 7, which is now in a kinda final pre-release state, I suggest you do. The last beta version, a few months ago, wasn't recognized as "windows" by many applications and drivers, but with this latest version that does not seem to be a problem. Prerequisite is that you are prepared to buy an official upgrade, when that becomes available, or that you have an unused PC or laptop sitting around you can experiment with. I do.
I have installed Windows 7 on an auld HP Compaq NX9008 Notebook PC, a somewhat oversized laptop with a 2.6 GHZ Celeron - quite a fast processor, but it generates so much heat the fans (3!) whine continuously, and you could use the thing for a hairdryer, if you wanted to. I bought this in early 2005, expanded it to 1 GB of memory and a 100 GB hard disk, and stopped using it altogether a couple of years ago, after it had sat in my garage for a while, managing my main UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply).
I tend to like testing operating systems on older computers, and on computers that don't have the latest greatest whatever. Of course a new operating system will run on a PC with the latest greatest whatever, but the thing is, that does not prove anything. You will recall the issues with peripheral drivers for Windows Vista - I don't understand why people are still bitching about Vista, I have it running on every PC I have, save for one I use as a file server, and it really runs well and is vastly superior over Windows XP Pro. Sure, you have to tweak it - turn off Defender, Aero, User Account Control, Index/Search, and a bunch of other crap the Microsoft wizards think will benefit the consumer - they have absolutely no clue how the average person uses their computer. None - I swear, I can prove it, too. I am the guy who gets to fix the PCs at the neighbour's, mostly elderly folk who just want to mail with the kids and look stuff up, now and then.
If you don't like the tweaking, you will like Windows 7 even less than Vista - the Microsoft nerds have actually managed to put even more crap into "7" that is even harder to defeat. Much of this stuff takes lots of memory and CPU cycles, and as 32 bit Windows, which is what most folks use, can only address a maximum of 4 gigabytes of memory, and many computers reserve some or a good chunk of that for graphics use. The net result is that if you leave everything the way Microsoft wants you to run most of your memory will be used by your operating system, instead of your software. This is asinine, because once your PC runs out of memory it starts "swapping" (putting bits of temporarily used code on the hard disk, fetching them again as needed), and whatever you were doing slows down to a crawl. Because the ordinary user does not know a thing about memory management, they will declare they have a virus (they don't know a name for anything else that can go wrong with a computer) and all hell breaks loose. Not that there can't be a virus..
My over the road neighbours were having problems with their PC, so I had them bring it over and looked at it - it didn't have one, two, or even three viruses on it - it had seventeen!! See, the only thing we need from Microsoft is built in virus protection, and that is the one thing Microsoft does not provide. How stupid is that? The Sony Vaio desktop PC I found discounted at my local BJ's, the other day, was even worse - it came with a "free" trial package of Microsoft Live OneCare, a security and maintenance package for Windows completely tied into all the other stuff Microsoft attempts to force you to install, like Live Mail, Live Chat, and new browsers that link all that together. These packages are hacker's paradise, as they are all tied in with each other and your internet, IP address, email address, and everything else, and once the hackers discover a flaw all of your personal information is open to them.
So I don't use any of it - I don't even use the standard chat engines, Yahoo, MSN, and AIM, as they all tie in with your browser, and pass on your email address and your IP address. I use Skype, which is better, and doesn't do any of that crap. Add the AVG Free virus package, and you're home dry.
Back to the latest Windows 7 beta, though, and my NX9008 notebook computer - it installed flawlessly, recognized every single device in the system, including the USB dongle plugged into a USB port, and came right up. It could not find drivers for two devices, the built-in modem and the built-in Ethernet port, but as I don't need either I did not worry about those. I know I have in the past managed to get the XP drivers for these devices working with Windows Vista, so I guess I could probably tweak "7" as well, but as I said, I don't need them. More importantly, it did recognize the older WiFi dongle, and once I had told the operating system which router to use, it recognized every single system, server and device on my network. Not only that, Windows 7, on that Celeron based system, runs at least as fast as Windows XP ever did, and that is impressive, considering Vista on that notebook was slow as molasses, although it did run. Windows 7 bases its loadable drivers not on the devices it sees, but on the chipset and/or processor inside the devices - it got the Zonet WiFi dongle going because it was able to "see" and recognize the processor inside the dongle.
More about all this magic in my next posting, folks, I promise, and I'll bend your ear about the Sony Vaio VGC-JS110J, a stunning looking PC with all of its innards built into the high resolution 20 inch screen (the link points to its replacement, the VGC-JS230J/S, which has a faster processor and a larger hard disk, not that mine is stingy). I would have never bought this ca. $1000 computer if there had not been a showroom model sitting at BJ's on Route 3, I noticed it marked down to $800 - 4 MB of RAM, 64 bit Windows Vista, 802.11n networking, a 320 MB 7200 RPM hard disk - and told myself I did not need it, and tore myself away, only to find it marked down again, to 629 baksheesh, the next day. I did the same thing I do when a gorgeous blonde makes eye contact with me from up close - I went weak at the knees, stuttered a bit, and pulled out my Platinum Visa. More about this later, when I receive the 8 MB of RAM the 64 bit OS will handle - hehe.
Don't you just love Youtube? The only reason why I rarely posted videos, in the past, is that I had to convert them to a reasonably common format, then put them on one of my webservers, then write the code to push them, and Youtube has solved all that. While my sister couldn't run the HD version of my little Nikon test video, below, as she is in Europe and doesn't have quite the bandwidth, she was able to run the "regular" version. That's not a compliment to Youtube, but to the folks at Google. They have standardized the interface, something they are masters in doing, and they have such a humongous server park that nobody ever runs out of space - those HD .AVI files are huge, in the case of the Nikon output, some 3 megabytes per second, due to the high resolution of the 10.9 megapixel image sensor, which wasn't designed to do video.
I just hope that Google and Amazon, if the internet providers make good on their threat to surcharge large volume consumers, will sue to get a portion of that surcharge - after all, if Google and Amazon weren't doing HD, there wouldn't be any reason for those surcharges. It is, paradoxically, not the consumer that uses the bandwidth, it is the provider of the programming, who determines what type of compression is used in the provisioning of their video products.
On the pageant front, I hope Donald Trump will tell Carrie Prejean "You're Fired!" tonight. I am not clear how a plastic Barbie on heels wiggling her ass across a stage with boobs paid for by the pageant is anyone's dream woman, or even an interesting human being. I completely don't understand how anybody even finds these women attractive, seriously.
My vote for Grrl of the Year goes to Welsh firefighter Rebecca Jewell, on the right, who does stuff the way G*d built her, and a fine job She did too. Excuse me for saying so in a family forum, but WOOF! And she has a real job to go back to. Maybe we can introduce "misslaunching" as a sport, and then Rebecca can introduce this to the general public by manually launching Prejean. She might struggle a bit, but I don't think in the capable hands of Ms. Jewell that will matter much. You all can vote on the cliff, and she can wear water wings - oh wait, she's already got inflatables.
The story of George Zinkhan, who shot his wife and two other people, then committed suicide, keeps me wondering why it is so hard for some people to control their rage. At least, I cannot think of another reason why he did what he did - and then, in a final gesture, partly buried himself while taking his life. How does a university professor with a good life, a social life, and all the mod cons, fly off the rails like this? And all the others like him? (Unrelated, by the way, to the right a test video I shot with the Nikon D90 D-SLR, described on May 6, below - if you play it do not forget to click the "HD" button underneath the picture)
I was thinking about this as I met with a friend recently, who has the same problem - she is forever in a rage, ready to explode at the slightest provocation, and, what really puzzles me, doesn't think there is anything wrong with this. Wrong, as in "get therapy, girl" wrong. I've seen her in a fit of rage over not being able to find a restaurant, to the point that she was no longer able to speak intellegibly, while standing right in front of the restaurant she couldn't find, I have seen her cross a street right in front of a government limousine doing 50 kph in the metropolis she lives in, for the sole reason that she wanted to make the point that driver behaviour in her Asian country is atrocious, I could go on. I stare at this in amazement - why would someone be dysfunctional in this way and not know it? I am no angel, to be sure, but I taught myself to contain my anger, walk away from confrontation, although I occasionally use it, fully controlled, to make a point (with extra hot sauce), but I have learned that uncontrolled emotion is fine during sex, anywhere else it is incredibly destructive. And that is what professor Zinkhan proved once more - nobody wins...
In an interview with the Times of London Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah remarks that "57 nations of the United Nations do not recognise Israel, a third of the world". Indeed, Sir, that is true. But I believe that if you are now working to establish a peace process that is supported by the Arab League, you should take steps to ensure that Arab and Middle Eastern countries that not now recognize Israel take steps to change that. It can't be a reward at the back end, Israel is a de facto country, a trading nation, and I don't think you can get the Israelis to behave themselves, and get serious about their place in the world, if you do not recognize that Israel exists, and has a right to exist. Not doing so will only maintain the status quo, and make your words more toothless rhetoric. If you know it all so well, and since you're the potentate of Saudi Arabia, you can show the rest of the world how it's done.
With the recession slowly receding, I wonder what our next "hot product" is going to be. There really is little new technology on the horizon that can have a major economic impact. Wireless digital connectivity is reasonably mature now - 3G has finally made it into the United States, airliners are getting WiFi, kind of the "last frontier", and handheld devices (like the iPhone) are now sophisticated and powerful enough that, with 3G service, they can function as a pocket computer.
The reason I am not listing any of the "green" initiatives here is that they don't embody new technologies, consumers aren't interested in them unless they are subsidized, and many are pie-in-the-sky. If you think we're going to make a dent in global warming by driving hybrid cars, or replacing light bulbs with other light bulbs, you are thinking simplistically, and have fallen prey to the "Al Gore" smokescreen, a set of measures and incentives that solve no problems at all.
We are not concentrating very well on the technologies that we need to future proof our society. Roof shingles you can buy from Home Depot that can generate electricity, without needing the installation of complicated wiring schemes, would be a good example of a useful technology, but they'd have to be paired up with a power company "black box" that could process the output of such shingles, run it back into the power station, deliver power to the home as usual, and deduct the power delivered to the grid from the home's energy bill. IOW, develop an integration that would seamlessly slot into the existing infrastructure. I am completely comfortable with telling you that any technologies that require design or construction changes to the way we build and live aren't going to make it - if it needs tax incentives, it is the wrong thing to sell.
Having untold numbers of car companies developing electric-only vehicles for consumer use is another one of those futile exercises. Nobody except for a couple of Hollywood types is going to buy an electric vehicle if it doesn't match the performance of a gasoline driven car, and if it can't be charged everywhere. So all car manufacturers should work together to build one type of battery pack, which will then be cheap, and make it chargeable from a standardized outlet. Nobody is going to buy a Toyota if the Toyota's charge point in their garage cannot be used to charge the wife's Honda, and the charge point in their office parking will only fuel Ford electric vehicles. It is ridiculous. You can fill the tank of a car with a gasoline engine, bought anywhere in the world, at any gas station, anywhere in the world. That "came about", but now we have to "make it happen".
So while there are plenty of opportunities to invent products that will "take over the world", there is not much being done that I can see will lead to any breakthroughs. Manufacturers are creating products that will be part-subsidized by governments - take hybrid vehicles and their tax rebates as an example. That's a singularly bad idea, as the taxpayer money spent on these incentives can be used far more effectively on other environmental initiatives. Think about it for a moment: we fund people buying certain cars, thereby creating a situation where folks that could pool or work from home don't do that, but continue to commute, since it continues to be affordable.
How does that protect the environment, and combat global warming? Not, right? How come nobody sees this?
It seems like an improbable mountain to conquer, turning the current, dead-end, initiatives into the change we really need. Forgetting about the fuel efficient vehicles, and the high tech lightbulbs, the solar panels and the windmills, understand they all come from Don Quichote, that we need to pull an engineer in, give him or her the task to reduce energy consumption, on all fronts, and make those changes at the bottom of the pyramid, with the people that live and work.
We need some rules, basic rules. We can't tell people on welfare they have to buy fancy expensive light bulbs, because "it saves them money". We can't put a commuter into a hybrid vehicle "because it is good for the environment". We can't have expensive "energy star" equipment - everything must be energy star. We have to understand that the energy consumption of a refrigerator isn't the amount of electricity it uses, but the number of times its door is opened, on an average day. We must start measuring these realities, instead of fancy lab research that has no bearing on the real world.
For those of you thinking I am blogging from a hospital room after getting my spine fixed, that didn't happen. I had a problem with one of my feet, that made me limp, and I did not want to convalesce after spinal surgery while not being able to walk normally. Now (I've seen the doctor to get the foot back to normal) I have to figure out whether to do reschedule this in the next 30 days, which is how long the insurance approval runs, or have it done later in the year.
I recently replaced one of my Nikon D50 digital SLR cameras with the D90 model, which is a couple of steps up, in terms of capabilities and resolution, with double the megapixels at 12.9, a larger sensor, and more programmability (which I really wasn't all that interested in - the D90 comes with various recognition modes, including face recognition, and has a database of possible scenes it might encounter). What really picqued my interest was the D90's capability to shoot video - HD video, at 720p, nothing to sneeze at. Having to constantly change cameras while you are shooting pictures is a pain, and you run the risk to lose just the one shot you should have gotten as a still, or the one clip you should have gotten as video, while you're putting one camera away, and grabbing the other.
With the Nikon D90, that's no longer an issue, you never have to move the camera from in front of your face (for video, you need to look at the display screen at the back of the camera body, while stills can be shot using either the screen or the "regular" viewfinder). You will probably think I have gone anal, and that's not a bad description of the way I work, but I am a former professional photographer, and I simply like to continue working as a Pro - and for that, ultimate control is what gets you your shots. There is nothing as frustrating as standing there, and just missing that winning picture.
The flipside is that the camera, which had so many features it could do with a training course to begin with, is now complicated beyond belief. I have a hard time believing that anybody, except for the most committed photgraphy nerds, and control freaks, will go through even half the capabilities the latest digital SLRs have. I see perfectly ordinary people having a hard time using standard Windows computers, even Mac aficionados have little control over everything the Macbook Pro has to offer, and I myself use maybe 10% of the functions.
To explain that a little - I am perfectly capable of learning all of the intricate menus, settings and sensors the Nikon D system has. The problem is, everything else electronical in my life is just as complicated as my Nikon cameras are, and I actually consider it a complete waste of time to learn everything every piece of equipment has to offer. I'll grab a manual (most of which are available online, and which I store on my main laptop) and check whatever it is I need to do that I don't know the command for.
The capabilities of an average piece of equipment are today complex to the point that even the manufacturer does not include all of the possible combinations and scenarios in the manual - in many cases, there aren't any combinations and use scenarios. My new Haier washing machine only has the primary controls explained; the Jazz digital camera has no manual at all, and only a rudimentary one on the CD that comes with it. The Nikon D90, on the contrary, comes with an extensive 278 page book, and you can download that book from their website, as well, but no matter how much work they did on it, it still doesn't cover all bases. Trying to connect an older Nikon flash unit, an SB-20, to the D90, I needed to go to four different places in the manual to get all of the instructions about what I can and cannot do with this particular model Speedlight - yes, it is all in there, but I just don't see someone do this for equipment they don't even own.
You may think I am being critical, but that isn't my aim. I just am beginning to wonder who all of these new features in our digital products are aimed at? I will wager that the vast majority of Nikon D90 buyers don't use most features, and then you need to realize that this isn't even a professional camera, although I have a hard time thinking of things that this camera doesn't have, and I would need, as a pro. Barring sports photography, I can't think of any type of professional photography that this camera would not be suited for.
Increasingly, then, you will need to read a professional review before selecting a camera type and model. And once you make the selection, your first decision needs to be about the capabilities you will want to use. But that, of course, would mean you know all about what you can do with the camera - and even though you can read the manual before you buy, I doubt you'll develop a full understanding until you get hands-on.
For me, the added video recording capability was what clinched the deal - but please note I own a number of camcorders, disk based as well as memory card based, I do not think the D90 is suitable as your only video camera. It isn't that that can't be done, but if you buy this not-cheap camera and then find out you still need a "proper" camcorder for what you want to do, you'll not be happy. I've not looked at the video output on an HD screen yet, but on my laptop it looks pretty spiffy, partly because of the large CMOS sensor - why only mono audio, though? It probably does not much matter for the maximum five minute clips you can shoot in HD mode, and I must say I've never heard much difference when checking the Digital Dolby out of my Samsung camcorder.
Getting an HD camcorder with picture taking capabilities is really not much of a problem, these days - I just bought one for my dentist, after we talked about the little Jazz I have on my belt 24/7. Rather than tell her what to get, I made the trip to Walmart (actually bought it from their website) and sent her the one that best fit her needs - currently, there is a high end Aiptek recorder for just over $100 (Aiptek has been around - I bought one of their earlier digital cameras at Singapore Changi Airport some ten years ago). It does everything you could want, takes decent pictures, too, and the video is excellent - here is an example I shot during the Obama inauguration (click on the HD button underneath the picture to see high resolution). If you're in for a new camera, get this first, get used to it, then figure out what else you need.
Only last week the nighttime temperature dropped to close to freezing, and I had the heating on - today the temperature in the shade came up to 95.7° Fahrenheit, a shade over 35° centigrade. After four hours of working in the yard, in the sun, I had no choice but to go inside, and cool off in the airconditioning, I was overheating seriously. But I love it once it gets hot, and buying this house in Virginia was one of the better things to do - no trips to the sun for me, I have it all right here. This area being "Virginia horse country" helps - beyond where I am it is Virginia vacation country, the rolling hills and abundant greenery that made the English think of home, when they colonized this part of the Eastern seaboard. The county I live in, Spotsylvania, is named after Alexander Spotswood, a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, who became Lieutentant Governor of the new British colony of Virginia in 1710.
Ever since I moved away from city life in the United States I find a country and people rich in traditions and history. Back in Westchester County, New York, there is a clear line all the way back to colonial times - at the Old Dutch church near Tarrytown I encountered worshipers that might be distant relatives, even if they had phonetically changed their surname from Aartsen to Orser, because of the British witch hunt for Dutch descendants, after the Dutch republic traded New Amsterdam for Surinam, a piece of northern South America. And the mid-state area of Virginia I now live in has roots going back to British colonial times, and to the American Civil War, which ended up being lost to the Confederacy after their armies tried and failed to stop the Union armies from moving south. In the immediate vicinity, including the very land I own, some 30,000 soldiers lost their lives, out of a total of more than 600,000 who perished in the American Civil War.
Steeped in history, then, and drenched in blood. How important it is to America and Americans I witness every time I drive past through the Chancellorsville battlefield, where I turn onto State Route 3 to go to Northern Virginia, to D.C., or to the local shops. It is rare that there aren't tourists doing the battlefield tour, "my" particular battlefield is even expanding, as the United States Parks Department is acquiring more land from retiring farmers, locally, and letting that return to its natural state. It amazed me that the remnants of the defensive earthworks laid down during the battles are still so prominent, after 146 years - they must have been enormous when they were first constructed. It is at Ely's Ford, not a mile from my house, that the Union armies crossed the Rapidan River, to engage the Confederates at Chancellorsville, a village long gone, only the foundations of the Inn that served the Confederates as a headquarters remain, right by where the Ely's Ford Road changes to the Old Plank Road, preserved Civil War guns still guarding the killing fields, to my right as I wait for the lights on Route 3 to change. The Ely family, once farming all of this land, still live around the corner from me, with a small family cemetery next to their home, right by the Spotswood Furnace Road.
Spotswood Furnace Road ran past the Spotswood Furnace, an iron smelter that was owned by the same Alexander Spotswood, who returned to England after he was replaced as Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, but then returned to America as a private citizen, wealthy landowner, exporter of pig iron to Britain, and eventually Deputy Postmaster General. Not until 1783 did the British cede Virginia to the newly minted United States of America,
I've been so busy I really haven't had the time to update this blog - partly procrastination, I intend to return it to Wordpress, which my new ISP offers, but that is a bit of a learning curve. Network Solutions offers a version of Wordpress which is much newer than the one I used in Freeservers - not only that, I need to figure out how to move the backup I have from Freeservers into the Network Solutions setup, which uses a different backup technology.
As if that weren't enough, I now have decided to have my spine fixed - one of the lower vertebrae is out of alignment, that caused pressure on a nerve bundle, that caused an inflammation, etc. My orthopaedic surgeon really only gave me one option, so for safety's sake I went and got a second opinion, but the second surgeon, a Chef de Clinique at Georgetown University Hospital, mostly confirmed what the first had said. He did mention that the condition is unlikely to get worse, so if "you can deal with the pain" there was no need to have the surgery, he said, but upon reflection the discomfort is such that having it go away, even if that means fusing two vertebrae, is preferable. So I am doing all the stuff you do when you have major surgery - updating the will, pre-op medical tests, flying in friend A. all the way from Beijing so I have moral support, and a chauffeured drive home afterwards (70 miles), and of course having a guest means cleaning the house from top to bottom... etc. I found myself unexpectedly anxious at the prospect of long lasting deep anaesthesia, I have only had small in-and-out surgical procedures, the past few decades, but more than one sleepless night it hasn't given me, I am quite used to doctors and hospitals.
I am a bit of a procrastinator - I've got a million jobs on hand, but I tend to add work before I finish the older jobs. Yesterday, with a neighbour's help, I brought my old washing machine and dryer to the recycling facility Spotsylvania County operates, and then installed a second new washer/dryer, which is basically a spare, but I still needed to make sure it works OK. As if the old ones weren't heavy enough, the new machines weigh 185 lbs apiece - I don't even know how I got the original one installed, I did that all by myself.
At any rate, I got all that done (not the Wordpress stuff yet) - at which point, playing around with operating systems, I inadvertently discovered that solid state disk drive emulators - hard disks made not of rotating magnetic platters, but memory chips - have become both affordable and big-gish. I found a Crucial 64 gigabyte solid state drive at Newegg.com for a paltry $189. Installing it in the Everex SA2053T subnotebook I had been using to travel with took only a few minutes, and installing the Everex version of Windows Vista Home Premium didn't pose a lot of problems, and, much to my surprise, took 17GB of space, leaving me plenty of storage space for a travel machine.
What I am hoping to achieve is that the Everex laptop will consume less power, and generate less heat, in the process helping the batteries last longer. A side effect of using solid state memory is that, in the absence of electro-mechanics, I don't need to worry about "bumps and bruises" any more. When you let a laptop go to hibernation, prior to traveling, it can take two or three minutes to store its memory image on disk, and power down. One of the worst things to do is to pick up the still running laptop while it is powering down - that is when your hard disk is at risk. Now, with the solid state disk, I can just shut the lid and immediately put the laptop in my backpack, and leave, without running the risk of a disk head crash.
The heat thing is interesting. It is little understood that the primary limitation of the processing power of any laptop isn't its processor speed, or installed memory, it is simply the maximum amount of heat that the laptop can dissipate. When I opened the Everex up to swap the disk unit, I found to my amazement that the small heat sink that formed part of the 2GB memory module I had upgraded when I bought the notebook had come apart, basically "steamed" off the SODIMM it was part of. Everex doesn't recommend upgrading the memory, the SA2053T comes with 1GB of RAM, and it was clear why when it turned out the 2GB package that fits the motherboard came with a heat sink, which barely fits in the casing. They don't put heat sinks on memory modules for nothing...
So far, I can't say the solid state disk makes the battery last longer - I've got just under 3 hours, but then the laptop came with two batteries. The processor is a first generation Intel Core duo, which isn't exactly frugal with power, but I do notice there is less heat coming from the cooling fan.
Let's see, what else is there. Ah! Sure, Mr. Cheney, your interrogation techniques may well have resulted in the acquisition of relevant information for the War on Terror. Kneecapping might have worked as well. You're not getting it, are you?
And then the hypocrisy. New York model Julissa Brisman was allegedly murdered at a Boston hotel by Boston student Philip Markoff, with whom she met up after she had advertised massage services on Craigslist. Except, from the placement of her ad, and the pictures that have now surfaced, professional model Julissa Brisman made a living from prostitution and erotic modeling. That is a risky business to be in as a woman alone - especially if you don't use a driver/minder, as many escort girls do. It just bothers me that the mainstream press maintains this "model" fiction - it looks like she made money with her looks and body, any way she could. That's a) illegal b) it has a name, and c) she probably did not pay income tax on those earnings. None of the above is a reason for her to die, but let's please not paint this girl as the latest angel to have an unfortunate "accident" at the hands of a callous criminal. I really think we should report honestly, and this ain't it, kids.
Shows you how you really never can judge a book by its cover - click on the pic for the vid. The appropriate subtitle, I suppose, is "The mouse that roared". And I don't think this Susan is looking for a job any more...
Commentator Fareed Zakaria is probably a good example of how President Obama has his critics on the wrong foot. I recall an article only a few weeks ago, when Zakaria tried to prove that Obama had it wrong - now, suddenly, Zakaria feels that Obama is heading in the right direction.
Part of the problem is that Zakaria has a book out, in which he tries to outline the tenets of the "post-American world". Writing that before President Obama's policies are really hashed out an visible is a risk - and it is clear from what is reported out of the G20 summit that the United States still somehow has that leading role. As Obama is reaching the end of his trip, there is significant cheer in Europe - the leading German weekly Stern says that "Obama has returned the United States to its leading role" and ends its review of Obama's blitz by stating "The United States under Barack Obama are a Superpower, that listens, plays ball and wants to set the example. This is what Winners look like". This at a time when British Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling has to admit that his Treasury "got it wrong" when trying to predict the length and intensity of this recession. Tea leaves...
Zakaria, much like most of the other journalists that have been trying to predict where Barack Obama might be headed, has not understood who the man Obama is: he is a nerd, a detail oriented manager with an impossible grasp of the issues. Obama is driven, and he published his manifesto way before he was elected.
A video clip I saw yesterday spoke for itself: Mrs. Obama commented to an audience at one of her school visits that "on our first date, he took me to a community meeting. How romantic is that?". I was completely blown away by his acceptance speech - he was ready, had his talk completely memorized, and didn't crack a single joke, you know, the stupid jokes that politicians that won usually unleash on their followers. Everything he does is more of the same, he doesn't lose focus for even a second, and he comes at you directly. If you watched the televised press conference he gave last week, maybe you noticed it - he didn't communicate with the press, he didn't try to answer questions without giving away too much information, he addressed and treated the entire White House Press corps as if they were his staff, and he was their boss. No interruptions, he called people by name, he continually scanned the audience, and he answered every question in detail, even if he had to pause to think. That often gets referred to as inexperience in public speaking, supposedly it shows one is not prepared to speak on a certain subject, but I've always found that short pause the hallmark of somebody who has the information, but needs a moment to find it - pretty much like accessing information online to a computer server.
He paces, as well. I can see how he suffers from not having a flip chart next to the lectern, where he could draw diagrams and write talking points - you can see it during his town hall gatherings, when he uses the entire podium - I notice because I do the same thing, when speaking publicly, I speak from talking points, rather than a fully prepared text. You can't really do that on camera. But he lectures, he is there for a purpose, and don't you forget it.
If you are among the folks concerned that Obama "is squandering our money", you've got it wrong. The funds that are being pumped into the economy will, to a large extent, flow back to the government in the form of taxes. The rest will make its way back into the economy again, in terms of wages, spending money, and ultimately, expansion. This is not rocket science - when you give somebody money, they will for the most part spend it, and that is exactly what's missing, at the moment, there is no spending. The consumer doesn't spend, the industry doesn't spend, if you know that the pollution in Beijing, and other Chinese large cities, has significantly reduced, you know nobody is spending. And what we will spend, on the back of the bailout, isn't money for luxuries, this, for now, is just money we need to live, eat, survive.
I am delighted that President Obama isn't pumping more money into the auto industry - any enterprise that needs propping up, right now, needs to come out the other end making a profit, and Detroit has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt it can't do that. Hurriedly slinging hybrid cars onto the market is just show - the people that invented the gas/electric hybrid, Toyota and Honda, are doing well out of it, followed somewhere in the distance by Ford, which followed in their footsteps in a more timely fashion. But most importantly, we've still not learned our lesson, in the United States: hybrids are just cars. And we're buying hybrids for many reasons, in the United States, but not solely because of their fuel consumption. The Europeans and the Asians figured this out a long time ago - they produce small cars that use less fuel than hybrids do. Cars that do fine in commutes, because there is normally only a single person in a commuting vehicle, and they build small diesel engines, which pack plenty of torque and are miserly with fuel.
Just look, above, at the little Opel vehicle I rented during my last visit to The Netherlands - Opel is German General Motors, and Opel has a bunch of excellent cars that could have been introduced here aeons ago. Check out what they make at their German website. And note that the grapevine has it that GM wants to sell Opel - umm, run that by me again? A company run by German engineers, which make the types of cars that we import wholesale from other German companies, like BMW, Mercedes, Audi, and Porsche? Well integrated into the GM framework - and you're going to sell that?
Lastly, I wanted to show you one of the floral tributes to British TV queen Jade Goody, who was interred today, after losing her battle with cancer. She famously once didn't quite know what to make of the name "East Anglia", the Easternmost region of England, and she wondered, on camera, whether "East Angular" was abroad. Eventually, her blue collar gaffes came to endear her to the British public, as this floral tribute from her funeral cortège proves.
"The United States Government is behind nearly everybody, except in certain discrete areas, in terms of technology," Secretary Clinton told State Department employees at a town hall meeting in February. "We are, in my view, wasting time, wasting money, wasting opportunities, because we are not prepared to communicate effectively with what is out there in the business world and the private world."
In fact, it goes beyond that, way beyond. Think back to the Clinton administration, to the dotcom boom that occurred between 1996 and 2000, when computer and telecommunications technologies fueled significant money market growth, due to the expectations created by the super-imposition of the world wide web on the internet. This evolved out of Arpanet, getting its major boost from a bill introduced by Senator Albert Gore in 1991, followed by the 1993 release of the world's first generally available browser, Mosaic. Not surprisingly, in terms of timing, 1991 also saw the introduction of GSM, the digital cellular portable telephony system that would, in three short years, take over mobile telephony in much of the world outside of the United States, and eventually replace wireline telephony in the developing world. Beginning in 1995, it began making inroads into the United States as well, provided by Sprint in their Washington - Baltimore cellular network - eventually, AT&T Wireless converted its network to GSM, while German carrier T-Mobile bought the GSM networks in the United States AT&T did not already own.
It was during the Clinton administration, not least because of the active involvement of (by then) Vice President Gore, that development of applications and interfaces for the internet began taking shape. Both telecommunications providers and computer manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon, assisted by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which, amongst others, allowed traditional phone companies with their deep pockets to create advanced technology subsidiaries to exploit the potential of the new carriage medium, followed by permission for the cable TV companies to offer telephony services.
The dotcom boom came to a close in 2001, when manufacturers and providers finally realized that the general public was not prepared to pay for some 80% of the services and products they had developed. Soon, cellular telephony followed suit, realizing profits in the advanced core markets for services that could be provided using advanced cellular PDA devices, but requiring vast investments in third world markets, where the general population can only afford very minimal services and equipment.
Mrs. Clinton's argument is best illustrated by the limited use she and President Obama can make of their Blackberrys. Every CEO in the entire world, and most heads of state in the Western world, use PDAs or intelligent handsets, but the American security services have limited the use of these devices within the U.S. administration. Contrary to belief, this isn't because the devices cannot be made secure - secure PDA communications are used the world over - but because the U.S. government technology divisions do not have a good handle on the technology. Any senior technologist in the industry, yours truly included, can put together a team of engineers, developers and manufacturers tomorrow, capable of making wireless communications within the Administration fully secure, but this would mean that quite a few of the security divisions within the Federal government would have to be dismantled, and their staff retrained, and there is a civil service layer that actively prevents this.
Why is this important? It is simple: a government unit that would produce secure wireless communications could give rise to an industry, there is after all great demand for equipment and services that cannot be hacked, or used by the criminals that populate the internet today. To create that security, however, there would have to be cooperation among manufacturers, and between at least the governments in the Western hemisphere, and that cooperation can't happen today. The people and institutions involved simply are not eligible for the advanced security clearances they would need to have, clearances that at this point in time prevent the U.S. government from using the most advanced technologies available. Especially since 9/11, it is almost impossible to get the higest level of clearance unless you are American born, have been a member of the Armed Forces or one of the security services - basically, if you're not a white fourth generation American male from Wisconsin, who joined the U.S. Air Force out of college, then retired to McDonnell Douglas, you're going to have a hard time getting clearance to work on the stuff America needs. Similarly, if your company is headquartered in Paris, your technology isn't going to be adopted by the United States, as there is significant xenophobia in the industry here - again, if your company is American owned and headquarted in South Dakota, you have a good chance of getting mediocre technology into the Fed. If it isn't, it does not matter how advanced your technology is.
It is exactly what happened during the dotcom boom, new applications for the internet technology, itself not hugely novel, but a buildout of facilities that had existed in laboratories since the mid-1960s, were created and rolled out by the dozen. And even though the boom went bust when consumers were unwilling to pay for the new inventions, many of those were eventually introduced later "via the back door", when funds for development were found in economies of scale, automation, and the transfer of data entry from enterprises to the consumer. To some extent, today's recession is caused by inadequate adjustment of our economies to the new technologies - manufacturing of consumer products moving to the Far East, without our actively supporting this development, in-house information processing moving to the internet, without dismantling the relevant departments, and retraining their staff. Keeping a factory going, in the face of its Chinese competition demolishing its sales, could have been made unnecessary by selling that factory to the Chinese, in time, and taking the proceeds to create new employment for its workers, in a field where we have little competition.
At the end, she had wanted her sons to visit her one last time, on Mother's Day. She did not quite make it there.
RIP Jade Goody - June 5, 1981 - March 21, 2009.
It is perhaps part of the natural progression of things that TV has gone to a technological stage where High Definition imagery now forms the core of the experience. For some time now, "regular" television viewing has been migrating to the internet, and in some places even to wireless telephony. By "regular" I mean the kind of TV that provides information, news flashes, perhaps some popular shows like daytime soaps, cooking shows, and the like. This is rapidly becoming untethered television, in much the same way as telephony has become untethered, if you consider that even I have relinquished my landline in favour of a semi-portable wireless technology called UMA, which lets me use my cellular line at home as a landline, and on the road as a hybrid cellphone/wi-fi phone.
At home, then, television truly becomes the home theatre, where you can now watch shows, games, movies, informative programming in cinematic quality with cinematic surround sound. All other "family room" functions we associate with the home have been personalized, to the point where we all have our own wireless number, and IP address, which together allow us to access entertainment and information streams meant for us specifically. Society, facilitated by technology, is undergoing massive change - food technology has made it possible for the individual to get food at competitive prices without having to resort to the home kitchen.
Food technology in itself is interesting, in its development - fast food need not be unhealthy, but the big chains have built the "addiction factor" into the food more or less from day one. I find myself popping into MacDonalds occasionally, even though I am a good cook, with a fully equipped kitchen, who likes to cook. Even so, I eat frozen food on a regular basis - the quality of the frozen prepared "bulk" dinners you can get at outlets like Costco, Sam's Club and BJ's is excellent, and I can't cook for less that what it costs, it is significantly cheaper than the frozen dinners you get at the supermarket.
Communications technology lets us be in touch with others from our "nest" whenever we choose, and more importantly, wherever we choose. Skype, for instance, works seamlessly with my T-Mobile cellular service to connect me with family and friends across the world, at a flat rate I pay once a year. My laptop connects, again using the T-Mobile network, seamlessly with the internet, wherever I am in the world. An additional feature now found in many cellular phones, GPS, can localize my position in the world, and provide me with information about where I am - you can do the same thing with your laptop by buying a GPS antenna, which I think now costs around $50, and a mapping application. I actually drove around Germany with that, using my 11 inch Everex laptop, before I picked up the Nokia Navigator 6110 in the Philippines.
Gotta get on with my taxes, they're the reason I haven't been updating as often as I'd like. Back with you in a little while...
OK, I give up, I'm over. If you like watching television - series, or the odd movie - you've gotta get HD. I am just watching "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" - not fare I would normally spend a couple of hours on, unless it can't be helped, like in flight - and I have to tell you this is more home theatre than anything I had before. What I had before was pretty good, but getting every series, every movie, in movie quality video with Dolby 5.1 sound is totally something else. What I had before, DVD quality video, with Dolby when available, was beauteous, but getting Law & Order and Star Trek TNG in HD/Dolby (did you know they shot Star Trek TNG in Dolby 5.1?), not to mention Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek Enterprise, it blows me away. Woof.
I ended up getting more HDMI cables, of course, as each of my HD units has to have a direct connection to the display - I note that newer displays have multiple connectors - and an Atlona HDMI switcher solved that problem, dandy, because it comes with a remote. This switch (the Atlona AT-HD41D) solved one problem for me - my display has DVI, not HDMI, and that means I have to get the Dolby audio to my decoder/amplifier using optical or coax (SPDIF), and this particular Atlona box switches SPDIF and optical along with the HDMI.
I have to tell you that I still don't understand how somebody without an advanced degree is supposed to make all this stuff work, since there is no standardization of any kind among components of different manufacturers. And remember that if you start watching movies on Blu-Ray you may end up with a DTS 7+1 (eight audio channels, as opposed to the six Dolby 5.1 has) sound track - to be honest, I've set up my decoder for 5.1, and have foregone the additional three audio channels, even though I have the speakers for them, and my Kenwood 1200 (!!) watt decoder amplifier will handle 7+1.
You have no idea what 1200 watts of multi-channel surround sounds like, or should I say "feels like", it thunders, the 2 woofers and 1 subwoofer (with its own 350 watt amplifier) actually vibrate the floor - I actually had to replace all of my speakers after I upgraded my original JVC 5.1 decoder/amplifier to this Kenwood, the speakers I had just couldn't handle the sound pressure - when I cranked up the amplifier its protective circuitry would kick in at around 85%. Installing main front speakers with one woofer, one tweeter and five midrange speakers each solved the problem. I vaguely recall a 150 watt amplifier was huuuge, when I was in my teens, but 1200... I don't know that I could crank this baby up the way I do if I were still living in suburbia. I do know that if I put the speakers out on the deck you'd be able to hear the audio over a mile away.
I'll give you the lineup of equipment I use to get my HD from source to screen and speakers, but bear in mind that I went way past first base. I output HD from cable, HD (Blu-Ray) from disk, and output from a DVR you don't have, the Philips DVDR 9000H. This box has a tuner that can only be used in Europe, parts of Asia and parts of Africa, but it will accept S-Video quality input from other components, as well as (and this is special) Dolby 5.1 audio. It is the only consumer DVR that I know of that has a digital sound (SPDIF) input. I had to cart it back here from Singapore, but it was worth it, as once it has a program on its hard disk it can copy that to the built in DVD writer, which will handle DL DVD's, double layer, double length. Now while that is major cool, you don't need that component.
Another something I am doing is downloading or copying video clips, and stitching them together onto DVD. I do this not only with other people's clips I want to retain, but my own bits of video, as well. DVD is a nice archival medium, and makes it easy to watch things in one stream. The Corel Videostudio software I bought (I had an OEM version, so only needed a $50 upgrade) does a good job of seamlessly joining clips in the right order, none of the other software I have would recognize all of the file formats, recognize Blu-Ray disks (I am not yet using those, but will, in the near future, so it has to work), either software I received (Cyberlink, which came with the BD drive) or software I bought (Roxio Media Creator). Even when you go to the various websites the information about what a certain package cannot do isn't there. That is a pain.
In short, my favourite bits of HD equipment are the Tivo HD (and remember I tried both the DirecTV and the Dishnet offerings, earlier) and the Lenovo 3000 laptop. The Lenovo particularly pleases me. The time is long over that you were best off buying a powerful PC, and then try to do everything with it - especially if you were getting into the problem of having multiple family members use it. If you can buy a laptop for somewhere between $400 and $600 ($399, but add extra memory, an interface card, and a Dolby encoder) that handles the particular function of playing Blu-Ray disks, playing and writing movie DVDs and audio CDs, and writing and reading data disks in all those formats, you're much better off, and it doesn't have to have Microsoft Office or anything else that you don't need for that function. I have dedicated laptops for all sorts of purposes now - the aforementioned Lenovo for multimedia, another Lenovo for everyday stuff, webpage authoring, email, dating sites etc, and a small (11.5" screen) Everex laptop for travel. Like this, nothing breaks, if the Everex goes south while I am traveling I can jump straight on my home Lenovo (I actually blew up the Everex' forerunner, an Averatec, in London), and generally, if you know how to do such things you can configure Windows appropriately for the tasks the machine runs. And it is not actually that expensive, because I've been buying laptops cheaply, from $699 three years ago, to $399 now, you do not need the expensive units, two cheapies is better!
More later in the week, folks, gotta do laundry now...
Oh good, the Dow is up. At some point it has to reverse course - for a moment, I thought the election and installation of President Obama was turning the tide, but then I guess the investor realized that just him getting to where he wanted to go wasn't an immediate solution. That, combined with the negative noises Republicans are making - this won't work, that won't work.. Guys, your free market economy became a freefall economy, so please take a hike with the advice already. Partisan you may be, but anybody who does not understand that any political movement that thinks Rush Limbaugh is a poster boy for anything other than excess has a screw loose. He is feeding on you, not the other way around.
I am certainly no longer the bleedin' liberal that moved from Europe to America - you can't own guns and gas guzzling sportscars, take the rivers of money the American economy has to offer, live in the South, and say you're a socialist. Right? And we were all in this together, we went out on our fancy boards, and rode the waves until we smacked into the beach - hard. Those of us that made it in, that is, and didn't become a snack for a shark along the way.
Nice metaphor, that, if I say so myself.
I don't even want to think what the lives of folks who lost their jobs are like, right now. Most will have their savings linked to the stock market, so those are evaporating just as their income is, and living cheaply in this country is an anomaly. The heavy emphasis on home ownership has made most of us dependent on real estate for part of our savings, and the value of that has dwindled aling with everything else.
Perhaps more telling than anything else are the car dealerships, right now. In the past week I needed to have a State inspection done on my Camaro, and then my Durango sprung an emissions warning light on me, so I took that in. Both the Chevy and Dodge repair departments were empty - when is the last time you brought in your car at 11am, and had it seen to straight away? Or have an emissions inspection done, have that taken care of straight away, have the service manager escort you to your car afterwards - that's usually "she's parked out front, Sir" - and get a friendly smiley sendoff? These people have just about nothing to do, I've never seen them this empty on a weekday.
Something similar happened the other day at my dentist's, a dental office in downtown Washington, where I asked the assistant how they were doing, businesswise. She answered, much to my surprise: "You patients rock!", which took me aback a bit, but apparently even in D.C. the civil servants are cutting back, though I am not aware of any layoffs in the Federal Government. I would have thought that most of their patients have dental insurance, like I do, but I guess folks are being cautious even with the copays, and perhaps not having those expensive restoration jobs done. I am having several crowns replaced, but I am assuming my dentist was right, in that some are really old, I had one come off not too long ago, and another that needed a root canal. Owell. For as long as I have it, they're welcome to it. Wal-Mart still reports an increase in sales, I'll bet they never thought a recession would be good for them..
I had not paid too much attention at the various HD implementations, as I don't watch enough programming available in HD to make it worth my while. That's what I thought, anyway.
The DirecTV DVR whose service I retired, recently, has an HDMI jack - the DVR is HD capable, but I did not subscribe to that service (DirecTV attempted several times to charge me for HD service "because you have an HD DVR"), the projector I use to do most of my TV viewing isn't HD capable. By the way, please note that if your equipment does not have HDMI connections, you won't be able to watch HD in its high resolution, and you may not be able to hear audio on broadcasts and disks at all! Then when I switched to cable and bought a TiVo, I got the basic HD model, as that has all sorts of bells and whistles the base model does not, and is still reasonably priced - besides, the lowest tier service Comcast offers includes HD channels.
One thing I do like is that the HD broadcast and cable standards include Dolby 5.1, multichannel surround sound. What I did find problematical is that you have to jump through hoops to connect a computer in the lineup of HD equipment, a device you need if you want to write HD disks in the Blu-Ray standard, as well as play them. If you read the specs, you would need to custom build such a machine. Needed, I should say, because that picture changed in the past few months.
Where a few weeks ago the cheapest laptop featuring an HDMI port showed up at around $650 (a Hewlett Packard I saw at the BJ's membership store chain), last week I discovered a Lenovo 3000 laptop at Tiger Direct, featuring the same at $399. Now I hardly need a new computer - I already have two more than I really need, plus the IBM Thinkpad laptop that will work fine once I replace the fan - but when looking at the specs for this unit I thought I could make this work with HD and Blu-Ray. If you are thinking about going full HD, or even if you will likely switch from DVD to Blu-Ray sometime in the future, read on. The solution I created will give you HD, Blu-Ray as well as a full implementation of the Microsoft Media Server software. You will be able to put together cable/satellite with Blu-Ray/DVD/CD and central online media (video, photography and audio) distribution to your own entertainment center, and you will be able to do so at a reasonable price.
To begin with, there is the Lenovo 3000 N500. As I found out, there are actually multiple models of this laptop, with different processors, different graphics chipsets, etc. The one you want is the 4233-52U - it comes with (to mention the important parts) an advanced Intel graphics chipset, the 45M(obile) Express, and an external HDMI port integrated with both graphics and audio chipsets. The one thing it does not have is an external eSATA disk port - the eSATA drive connection standard has superseded the IDE standard, and has a maxumum throughput of 3 gigabits/second (you should pay attention here - whenever throughput speeds are indicated, those are in kilobits, megabits, and gigabits. They're often quoted as BYTES - they're not, it takes 8 bits to make up one byte). If you are thinking of using a USB port to connect a Blu-Ray burner or drive, don't - it is not fast enough - you really need the minimum 1.5 gigabits/second only eSATA can give you. Even if you could get a USB port to run at that speed, USB ports share one bandwidth - the more devices you have hooked up to USB, the slower they all get.
What I discovered is that the 4233-52U has an expanded graphics capability - if you install 4 gigabytes of RAM (two modules) in the machine, you'll end up with about 3 megabytes of usable memory, and 1.3 megabytes of video ram. Here again, if you're thinking you're going to display Blu-ray movies with a standard graphics chipset, say with 256 megabytes of graphics memory, it won't run - the combination of Blu-ray's high resolution and the fact that it displays a moving picture, i.e., rewrites the screen 50 or 60 times a second, technically able to smoothly display 30 different high resolution frames per second, means that you have to have a fast graphics processor with a good amount of memory dedicated to it - that is a heck of a lot of data you are pumping out of the graphics port. HDMI (and its forerunner, DV, which does not transport audio) have the ability to use HDCP, a form of digital copy protection that ensures the video/audio output only go where they are supposed to, and can only be used if there is a DVI or HDMI connection between player and screen - neither a Blu-ray disk nor a Tivo DVR will output high definition video and Dolby or DTS audio if HDCP is not active in the link. The current Intel architecture, under Microsoft Windows, cannot support more than 3.2 megabytes of memory, but as it turns out this chipset can allocate the remainder to graphics use. For graphical applications, and HD video is one, that actually makes this machine fly - all of the graphical processing is "offloaded", done by the graphics processor, leaving your main CPU (a 2 megaherz Celeron) to do other stuff. My only gripe is that this 3000 has a large (160 GB) but slowish hard drive - 5400 rpm, rather than 7200. It is understandable, considering they made this thing cheap. Little is understood that Windows runs significantly faster when it has a large harddrive, and faster still when that drive is fast, as well. This has something to do with the way Windows handles memory - it uses a swapfile on the disk to offload bits of code it temporarily doesn't need, and there is a memory cache as well. These facilities are maintained whether they are in use or not, and so size and speed of the disk have more effect on machine speed than memory and processor.
But this 3000 is plenty fast - and what I discovered after fiddling endlessly with the Cyberlink PowerDVD playback software (when you run it for the first time, it will want to update itself online - don't do that, when I ran the update it stopped working altogether, wouldn't even start, and as it comes it works just fine!) that comes with the Buffalo drive, is that the combination of the Lenovo 3000 N500 4233-52U with the Buffalo BR-816SU2 Blu-Ray burner, connected using eSATA via an eSATA II Expresscard Raid made by SIIG. One reason to buy this particular Lenovo laptop is that it has a PC Express bus, the successor to the "PCMCIA slot" - it is faster and has more bandwidth, but more importantly, there are very few eSATA cards for the older bus, and those that do exist are slow. The SIIG card has a nominal throughput of 1.5 gigabits per second, which is actually more than the Lenovo's bus can handle. You don't need a RAID eSATA interface card, but I use it as a backup for the RAID card in my server - if that dies, I can still access the data on the disks.
Before I forget, the Lenovo comes with Windows Vista Home Basic - the most heavily crippled version of them all. In order to have Windows Media Center and full networking capabilities, you will need to get an upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate.
Long story short, the assembly as I outlined it here will play Blu-Ray disks at full resolution (1080p) with full digital (5.1) Dolby, at full speed, without hiccups. I should add that the the Dolby audio needs its own output processor - I have used the (obsolete, but I had it sitting around) 24 bit Creative Labs Soundblaster USB, which works well and outputs Dolby 5.1 up to 96 kHz digital audio via SPDIF to a Dolby decoder. Oops - it is still being sold, shows up in Amazon.com. That this cheap laptop has such powerful features is a boon if you're wanting to put an affordable media center together, to work with your cable or satellite receiver and your HD television.
I am saying affordable, because once you're done, you've spent a fair packet of money, what with HDMI and eSATA cables costing $30 or $40 a pop, and the Buffalo drive going for over $300. Whether you really need a burner I'll leave to you to decide, just be aware that a single writable Blu-Ray disk (BD) holds 25 gigabytes (there are 50 gigabyte versions as well), and will set you back $18. Having said that, a standalone Blu-Ray player costs the same kind of money, and won't write anything - the Buffalo drive is very fast writing CDs and DVDs, especially using the eSATA interface (a DVD in my setup writes out at 22 megabytes/second, or 45 seconds for a gigabyte - that is quick).
It is quite possibly a function of the recession that there are such tremendous deals around - if you think you may have a need for some of this cheap gear, and you can afford it, I would suggest you stock up. A couple of years from now the technology will not have changed tremendously, processor speeds for laptops are restricted by cooling capabilities, and I am not seeing other restrictions, such as memory constraints, or even Microsoft Windows, change a whole lot. Windows 7, which is now in beta, I have running on three machines - it is nice, sophisticated, but not hugely changed - for the new Lenovo I had to reinstall Vista, you can't back Windows 7 out, and some software does not recognize "7" as a form of Windows - don't install it on a production machine!.
In my next installment I'll bore you a little about the software you need, and some other issues you need to consider if you want to make good use of your new toys.
I apologize for not posting updates, recently, I have finally taken the plunge and moved my website to a Network Solutions server. Last year, Freeservers, the hoster I used, "broke" my blog by initializing the SQL database - something that in a normal commercial business would be a firing offense. Worse, despite promises, they did not retrieve a backup of the server on which it ran.
Recently, I had an opportunity to look at the hosting offered by Network Solutions, and its implementation of Wordpress, the popular blog engine, and I was pleasantly surprised - a professional and trasnparent user interface, backup and maintenance capabilities that do not involve esoteric UNIX commands (I am really rusty) and arcane PERL and SQL stuff, but an easy to use programming environment. It isn't that I don't remember how to do programming, I feel that if you offer an environment to the user, it needs to be reasonably easy to use - learning curve is fine, having to get my PERL manuals out is - well, out.
I was particularly pleased to find that Network Solutions' support staff is US-based, and knowledgeable. I don't like saying what I am going to say, but the support people Freeservers uses, in India, speak good English, but have no basic training in American IT jargon, and they are not enabled to make changes - all they can do is email the programming staff in California. I see more and more companies come back from using Indian and Filipino call centres - yes, the staff speaks English, but the cultural understanding is missing to the point that this support is unworkable. I recall having to change a hotel booking in India, and getting a Filipino Expedia support person on the line, who then had to call Mumbai in India to effect the change. The call took half an hour, and was mostly comprised of misunderstandings between the three brands of English we all spoke.
Anyway, although you will at this point not notice a change, I have moved my files and pages over to a Network Solutions server. Network Solutions is one of the very early organizers of what you know today as the internet - I have, in the various positions I have held with Verizon and its predecessor companies Bell Atlantic and NYNEX, worked with these folks in the establishment of some of our nationwide networks and server parks. Moving to Network Solutions, for me, is then kind of a homecoming, and I have to say that what they offer today is professional, and at a competitive price, and has all the tools you might want included, from search engine submission to advanced HTML editors.
I will soon move my blog to the nice Wordpress implementation Network Solution offers - they especially have done a good job in implementing some of the administrative controls, and have excellent network and server security. Hopefully I'll have finished customizing the Wordpress format the way I'd like to run it, and will then return to my regular updates. Patience, please, and I thank you for your understanding.
As I sit here I am watching the coverage of the Turkish Airlines crash in Amsterdam, where a Boeing 737-800 apparently stalled just short of the runway it was trying to land on, possibly through loss of thrust. A senior investigator at the scene mentioned that there is virtually no crash track, that the aircraft cleared trees close to where it crashed, and that it looked like the aircraft "fell out of the sky like a brick" from minimal height. From what I hear on Dutch public television, the pilots managed to put the airliner down with substantial damage, but no fire, and minimal loss of life. Nine deceased, and that includes both pilots. They may well have sacrificed themselves to save their passengers - crashing in fallow agricultural land, with most of its fuel used up, they managed to avoid fire, this could have been a lot worse. What can I say.
The top picture is HD, the bottom one regular (analog) cable SD. Ignore the moiré, that is a photographic artifact. If you have satellite service, your regular image quality is digital, and a bit better than cable SD.
I don't know if you've ever had an email from your DVR, but I just got one. When you program your Tivo to record a program, via the Tivo website, it sends you a message to your email address when it has scheduled recording of your program. That is cute.
What else - ah, yes: you can download the Sports Illustrated swimsuit video for free. This isn't something that would get me to buy something, but I understand a lot of men like that sort of stuff. Me, I have spent so many years in fashion and theatre photography, the theatre and film production, that if I wanted a swimsuit issue I'd find a couple nice girls, fly them to a beach somewhere hot, and shoot it myself.
Of course, cute is not what this contraption is all about, and there is a lot to like about the Tivo HD. There is HD - this is not something I was really dying to get, because to have HD truly stand out, you need one of those very large panel displays that can handle 1080p, and that I have (barely) managed to stay away from. I do have a 32" LED panel HD display, and the HD picture looks absolutely stunning on that, although you only really see the gory detail if you sit a foot or so from the screen. I do most of my viewing using a TV projector, and that has a native resolution of 800x600, which is DVD resolution, and throws a good 60" (152 cm) image at 10 feet (this is over the 16:9 diagonal, which is how HD is broadcast, natively). It handles up to 1280x800, and looks pretty good for as long as you don't watch it from really close up. An HD capable projector, with a native 720p capability, today, will set you back some $835 (you can get a refurbished model from about $600). A projector that has 1080p native - start thinking at $3K.
I don't know what the take rate of DVRs is, but I think it is safe to assume they're pretty close to getting ubiquitous. And what Tivo set out to do, build the settop box that would be compatible with all or most services, has not happened - although they now supply their DVR concept to DirecTV and several cable companies, for inclusion into their own settop boxes, and the advent of the cablecard allows wide use of the Tivo, though the satellite services don't (and probably can't) use it, as there are no analog channels on satellite systems. There is a drawback in the cablecard Tivo vs. the cable company DVRs, in that the cablecard handles only one way traffic, so you cannot use video on demand services. Having said that, I am not seeing the difference - you pay the cable company for a VOD movie, or Amazon - Amazon says it has new movie releases online for download the same day the DVD is released, so that may well be a moot point. Come to think of it, having the Netflix and Amazon online libraries, combined with the cable TV lineup, could be a very powerful argument to take cable with Tivo service, as opposed to satellite - Dishnet and DirecTV don't come close to this powerful package. And it may well be that Tivo has finally reached the right price point - their basic HD box now costs between $250 and $300, they have a lifetime service deal that costs $399 (if you subscribe on a monthly basis you're out $12.95), and (in my case) basic HD service from Comcast, with unscrambled analog, local channels and the cablecard included, costs $54.20 per month. If you look at the total of the services you get for that, and a one time outlay of around $698, the list is quite impressive - although much of the interactive and external stuff will only work if you have the Tivo connected up to a reasonably fast Internet connection.
Then, I always like to have a spare so I don't lose service if my primary piece of gear conks out - shit does happen. That can be done cheaply - Surplus Computers (there are others, get details from the user base at the Tivo-run Tivo community forum system) has refurbished "Series 1" DVRs, the first type ever sold, and I got a Philips HDR (no HD, despite its model name) with 120 hours of S(tandard) D(efinition) storage capacity for $67.93, including shipping. In general, if you want to keep it cheap and cheerful, that is probably not a bad choice, and you can still order Tivo service for it, if you want (as I write this, I notice all of the Philips refurbished Tivo boxes have been taken off the website. Well, at least mine is on the way).
Apart from SD and HD cable TV, you get access to the Netflix online movie library, the Amazon.com online movie library, and the substantial lineup of free Internet radio available from Live365.com. There is other stuff as well, but these are the main providers. Last but not least, the Tivo lets you convert and copy movies and other media to a PC or laptop, and to a portable device, such as an iPod.
Unlike any other service I have used, the Tivo effectively is an entertainment center, but one that only gets to its full potential if you complete it with some more "stuff": an external hard disk for the Tivo (I just bought one for $120), and in order to fully appreciate the programming you really need a large HD flat panel TV (by "large" I suggest you look at 47 inches and up, and one that handles 1080i natively), as well as a Dolby capable sound system, the type that is sold as "home theatre". You can go cheap, and pick one up at Wal-Mart or BestBuy, or online, for $300, or you can go the distance, and put your own high end Dolby 7.1 system together. That (and this is the problem) requires a fair amount of knowledge, you need to learn how to program the amplifier, which requires all manner of adjustments for each channel, and each speaker. Then, of course, you end up with audio that is totally devastating - one thing that is not understood that you need to make sure you can play DVDs, but music CDs as well, over the system. I read somewhere that the Tivo is great, amongst others, because you can listen to Internet radio on your TV with it, that was written by a reviewer who wasn't getting it.
But: it took me two months to get it right, aiming for perfection I replaced three of the seven loudspeakers as I was setting the system up, and I think I had no change from $10,000. No kidding, you read it right, 10 big ones. And you are spoiled for life, because you will never watch a movie in the cinema, or on a television set, again. On a Dolby system, with Prologic enabled, your CDs will sound awesome too, even music you really don't like becomes palatable, there is absolutely no comparison with stereo, due to the clever audio processing most surround sound systems can do.
I am forever being accused of being the gadget man, and I tend to protest I really only buy the technologies that I actually need. So I never switched to Tivo, which most of my technology peers seem to own and rave about, although I had (actually, still have) what was probably the first DVR, a JVC digital tape recorder sold by Dish Network, able to tape up to six hours of programming on a single digital tape (D-VHS, althoug S-VHS worked fine, too), programmable from DishNet's onscreen TV guide.
For the past few years, I've had DVRs, first a DishNet PVR, then, when I switched to DirecTV, which my employer Verizon has a marketing deal with, DirecTV's own HD DVR, a serviceable piece of equipment, with a massive hard disk. Most importantly, being the bleedin' liberal that I am, I bought all three of these recorders, I don't permit providers to have their equipment in my home. Recently, I wanted to switch to cable (DirecTV messed me up bigtime) - not that much of a stretch, I have Comcast Internet service anyway, so I looked at their equipment offerings - and discovered that Comcast lease their DVRs, pretty much like everybody else does, and I did not want lease equipment. I think DishNet no longer sells any equipment, while DirecTV does have a couple of DVRs you can get through retailers, like BestBuy. Shopping around, however, I realized that there is a Tivo DVR compatible with a number of cable service providers, including Comcast, using something called a "cablecard" - a decoder / security device you insert in a slot in the Tivo. Same as the DirecTV HR20 I was using, the Tivo HD has an ATSC tuner built in as well, so it can receive and record off-air digital television.
So far so good, the Tivo is a little more expensive, and that is before you subscribe to the Tivo service, which you have to buy or the box doesn't work. It provides full TV scheduling, cable as well as off-air, which I understand from reviews is superior to other DVRs - I can't confirm that, because Larry the Cableguy doesn't get here until Monday. Pleasantly, and novel to me, Comcast quotes a price that includes everything - local channels (which the law allows them to charge $5 for) - and the cablecard. Like on the DirecTV DVR, you can access the Tivo TV schedules on the Internet, and, provided your DVR is connected to the Internet, will let you set programs to record right from their website - in Tivo's case, you go to the Tivo website, register your Tivo, and you can then send program recording commands to your box right from the TV schedule, which "knows" what is available from your cable company in your area. DirecTV has been offering this too, that I know of.
But that is where the comparison stops. The Tivo can do way more than any other DVR can. I had read about what they are working on, but only now that I am sitting here playing with it does it really hit me - it is here, and it works. I am so used to seeing features announced that, when you buy the equipment, are available "real soon now" or "any day now", but in the case of the Tivo HD, it looks like they are all there. The only thing I was unable to do is use the eSATA port to connect an external hard disk. From reading the extensive Tivo support forum, there are a few drives that will work on this port out of the box, but my Seagate did not, and would require removing the built in hard drive, connecting that and the external drive up to a PC, simultaneously, and running a Tivo utility on them. Surprising, because when I connected the Seagate, and ran disk tests, it came up with the device installed (/dev/whatever, the box uses Linux for its operating system), which means it had mounted it, and would even run tests on it, but would not recognize it as available space. So, I ended up going to Newegg and ordering the Western Digital "My DVR EXpander" 500GB external eSATA drive, which is certified for use with the Tivo. Expensive it is not, so we'll see how that works.
Anyway, back to the features. First of all, you can download a free Windows application that will let you store Tivo recordings on a PC - very dandy, if you have a massive 1.5 terabyte eSATA RAID server setup, like I do. The application, Tivo Desktop, has another capability: it lets you view and play media from your PC via your Tivo, like pictures, MP3 audio, and, if you shell out $25 for the "Plus" version of the software, all manner of video files. Much to my surprise Nikon's NEF format, a raw format used in Nikon's range of single lens reflex camera's, is supported. The main drawback of the Tivo HD, as opposed to its more expensive sister, the HD XL, is that it has limited hard disk space, and will only store 20 hours of HD programming. What I am hoping is that the Tivo Desktop will let me move programming off the box onto my storage server, if that is the case the 20 hour limitation is not that much of an issue. What I have discovered with my DirecTV DVR, which had 80 hours of storage space, is that you fill this space up quickly, and once your 80 hours is full you have to do a lot of sorting out to see what you will want to keep, and what can go. My storage server, in that respect, has more or less endless space - should the 1.5 terabytes fill up too far, I can simply add the two Seagate spares I have, for another 1.5 terabytes, the RAID software I use can actually span all four, and turn them into one volume (drive letter). If you want to know what equipment I used to put the server together, apart from an old Compaq Deskpro with Windows XP Pro, some of my product reviews at Amazon.com discuss this. Optical media turn out to be unreliable for long term storage, and data on a server can be moved to basically any other server in the future, on the web or at home.
But we're not done yet. I still occasionally buy DVDs, mostly programs that are rarely broadcast, or hard to get - the German version of Das Boot, for instance, or English comedy series that aren't sold here, but that I can pick up in Singapore or Hong Kong (I have multistandard DVR/DVD equipment, so I can handle all DVD regions) cheap. Arcane foreign stuff I often order from Amazon UK or Amazon Germany (totally cool, your American Amazon account will work with the overseas Amazon sites, as well, and DVDs mailed from England or Germany get to you within days). You've probably heard of DVD-via-mail renter Netflix, you maybe know they have a settop box too, now, that will download movies via the Internet, and I read somewhere that Amazon was working on something similar.
Well, long story short, there are thousands of movies and TV programs already available on Amazon.com that you can buy and have downloaded to your Tivo, I am thoroughly impressed. You go into your Amazon account, or your Tivo account, from either link the two accounts up, and then all you need to do is go into the Amazon movies section, select the program or movie you want to watch, pay for it (which is a one-click thing in Amazon - oops, actually, just selecting it rents or buys it, good thing it was a 99 cent episode), and a while later (I don't know yet how much later, but it is pretty quick if you have a "fast pipe") you can watch whatever you just bought. I noticed that some test things I downloaded began streaming to the Tivo within minutes. Amazon.com calls the service "video on demand", but that it is not. VOD generally is taken to be video you can begin watching immediately after you order it, and Amazon, who by the way sell online storage space, so have massive storage available for these products, does not push the videos out fast enough for you to be able to watch them as they come in. I don't find that a huge disadvantage - you can order a movie and go cook dinner, I'll test this for you over the next few days. The Tivo with the Tivo Desktop software is able to convert recorded programs to portable devices too, but as I am perfectly happy using a laptop, I have never felt tempted to watch a movie on the plane on my iPod - apart from which, I don't own an iPod. Granted, I have the capability to record stored movies during playback to a Philips DVR I picked up in Singapore. This records from S-Video ports as well as optical Dolby audio ports, and can then burn DVDs, so I can carry the movies or programs without "portable device".
I will let you know in a few days what the whole experience is like, how well it works, what the quality is like, but I am mightily impressed - and this is not in beta, it is a ready and working application. You can sit in your office, think you might want to watch a few episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" tonight, go online, order, and when you get home they are ready for you to watch.
Is this cool or what? And if you don't feel like shelling out $1.99 for an episode, or $6 for a movie, you can watch your own videos (and everybody else's), on Youtube, for free, on your big screen at home, 1080p. I mean, talk about a new toy.... woof!
Back in the Netherlands, right wing Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders will be banned from entering the UK, because, as the Home Office puts it, his "presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society" - read the full text here.
Now I am not an ardent fan of Mr. Wilders, who is an outspoken opponent of Islam, to the point that he produced a film about radical Islam - I haven't actually seen the thing, but it is called "Fitna" and I am sure available on Youtube. It did not go down well in many Islamic countries. But at least one member of the British House of Lords (!), Lord Malcolm Pearson, saw fit to invite Mr. Wilders to show the film in Britain - where and who to I do not know.
I knew Britain as a country that valued the rights of the individual, and exercised free speech. But I guess that's all on its way out, now - the decision has been taken to make all Britons and residents of the UK carry a national ID, once anathema in Europe, because the Personalausweis was the tool the Nazis used in WWII to round up the Jews and the gypsies and the homosexuals and people with their hair parted on the left. And Wilders wasn't exactly invited by a group of football drooligans from Sheffield. Perhaps the British government has gotten a bit paranoid after the repeated bomb attacks by homegrown radical Islamists. I could understand that. I could understand that somebody from the Home Office might want to have a chat with Mr. Wilders, ask him to tone it down a bit, don't make waves, perhaps prescreen the movie.
But then I looked at the letter, and realized that it is actually rude. You see, it is common courtesy, especially between member countries of the European Union, to address each other's legislators properly. Mr. Wilders is, after all, an elected member of parliament, he represents a whole bunch of EU citizens. The Home Office, however, did not even find it necessary to address Mr. Wilders by his proper title - Geert Wilders, MP. The Home Office does have a little internal website that spells out those rules. One would assume the Secretary's secretary knows that. And sure, you may not like what somebody has to say, but if he is an elected motormouth from the country next door, should you not at least pretend to go through the motions? He does not like Islam - well, I have news for you, a lot of Britons don't, either. All I am saying is that I am surprised. That's not the Britain I used to live in. And with national IDs, enough CCTV cameras so you need curtains in your bathroom, even if it is on the tenth floor, and now barring people because of their expressed democratic views, I think the British need to slowly take a long hard look at the direction their government is taking them in.
Wilders may be an ass, but he says what he thinks publicly, and has made the effort to work on his society by becoming a legislator. Misguided he may be, a loose cannon he is not. And he is not preaching in a little mosque hidden somewhere on a fourth floor in an industrial estate, in a language nobody can understand. I really wonder what prompted the Home Secretary to be rude to a fellow European politician.. in Britain, these things do not happen accidentally. Part 2 of Fitna is here
Back in Amsterdam, my dear dear dear friend Gary Christmas has passed away (the announcement is in Dutch, sorry), at 78.
The flamboyant, vivacious, openly gay and inseparable "Christmas Twins", native American Indians, singers, dancers and actors, they were for many years shakin' booty at the core of the Amsterdam gay community. I will never forget that day when we were gathered for my sister's wedding, next door to the Twins' boutique, Backstage, and Gary and Gregory (Greg passed away 12 years ago) came up to give my sister her wedding dress, which Gary had crochet'd for her. Then, he turned around, and yelled right in front of our very conservative parents: "I'll be back in a minute, I have to go wash my pussy". We were mortified, but I don't think they got it, probably thought he was going to shampoo the cat.
Amsterdam won't be the same without you, Gary, and I am so sorry I heard this too late for me to be at your funeral, but there will be more people there than you knew you knew - and you knew a lot of people. I've sent my sister, a heart of flowers, and a pluche animal, to the crematorium, Gary, since you were an animal - that is why you lived in Amsterdam, where you could be you, that is why we loved you. I am glad you did not suffer, toots, but I am still sitting here bawling my eyes out. I always stop by the shop when I am in Amsterdam, so now I feel really bad I didn't in December.
The Youtube clip is in English, it is a slice of Amsterdam that I had to leave behind, when I came to America. The second half of the documentary is here.
Previous blog entries, back to August 2008, are here.
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