Bookmark Round-up (weekly)

• It Might Get Loud

  Documentary on the electric guitar featuring Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White.

  tags: film, documentary, cinema, guitar, photography, photograph

• How to become a much better photographer

  Really cool article, in three parts, from the Buildings and Food blog.

  tags: photographer, leica, photography, article, blog

• The Linguists

  Homepage for the documentary “the Linguists,” a movie about two linguists quest to document as many of the planet’s dying languages as possible.

  tags: language, linguistics, resources, languages, research, article, cinema, movie, documentary

• apophenia: answers to questions from Twitter on teen practices

  Really fascinating article about teens and their Twitter practices.

  tags: teen, research, article, blog, apophenia, twitter

• Create Your Own Sun Jar: Lifehacker Edition

  Really cool, fun article from Lifehacker about making sun jars.

  tags: lifehacker, solar, jar, howto, research, article, blog

• Hamilton Watch

  Homepage of Hamilton Watches.

  tags: shopping

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmark Round-up (weekly)

• All Sorts – a linguistic experiment

  All Sorts is a weird thing. It collects people’s suggestions for collective nouns from Twitter and brings them all into one place. In other words, this is what the net is for.

  tags: funstuff, fun stuff, words, web2.0, language, linguistics, english

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Remember Me

A couple of years ago, a young man named Joe Murphy died from a rare and nasty form of cancer. I didn’t know Joe. Rather, I knew him only from the podcasts he co-hosted and I was a fan. During his illness and after his death, fans of his work made a wikipedia page for him. It was quickly nominated for deletion due to lack of appropriate citations for Joe’s noteworthy-ness. Fans rallied and added sources to the claims made in the article.

While researching this post, I did a quick check on Joe’s page and found that it had, in fact, been deleted:

“Article was nominated once for deletion in 2007 and kept with the assertion that material added during that AFD satisfied notability concerns, However, a review of that sourcing indicates that it does not. One is an obituary in his hometown paper, one is to an XM Radio page that no longer exists (Joe Murphy is not found in a search of the XM site), one confirms his nomination for a podcasting award (he did not win) and one is a band’s blog (not a reliable source). There do not appear to be independent reliable sources that are substantively about this person, rather there are many blogs and podcasts that offer tributes following his untimely passing. Wikipedia is not a memorial and the gentleman does not pass WP:N or WP:BIO. Otto4711 (talk) 13:37, 10 May 2009 (UTC)”

Clicking on the link “not a memorial” brings up the following:

“Memorials. Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others. Subjects of encyclopedia articles must satisfy Wikipedia’s notability requirements. Note that this policy does not apply outside of the main article space. Whilst using user space to create a memorial is generally not acceptable, limited exemption applies to the user space of established Wikipedians who have died. At a minimum it is expected that they were regular contributors, and that more than one tenured Wikipedian will have used the deceased user’s page (or an appropriate sub-page) to add comments in the event, and after verification of, their death.”

Ok. Fair enough. At the same time, it does seem like the barrier for entry for celebrity-hood is becoming transparently thin. The recent spate of celebrity deaths shows a distinct hierarchy of status, with Michael Jackson at the top and Billy Mays hitting close to the bottom, and yet there has been more than enough material written about both men to qualify for Wikipedia articles easily. The thing is, to take those two examples, Michael Jackson single handedly remade pop music and helped turn music videos into an art form. Billy Mays was a pitchman. He made commercials. (And please note that I am not disparaging Billy Mays at all, I’m merely using him as a recent example.) What Wikipedia’s “noteworthiness” really means is media appearances. Which seems terribly skewed away from people who are actually noteworthy towards people who are merely known to more people, publicly, than the rest of us.

Slate’s recent Culturefest (the Everybody’s Dead Edition, posted July 1, 2009) seems to be pondering related ideas. The three hosts spoke about the modern obituary and how the internet has changed the obituary pages. While they had a number of good points, throughout the whole episode, I found myself thinking about Joe Murphy and Wikipedia. I started to wonder why there was not a resource for the rest of us, why the “little people” should not be remembered as fondly, nor as publicly as celebrities, for whatever value of celebrity one happens to have.

A quick search revealed two sites: Wikiobits and Wikibios.

Wikiobits says of itself: “Wiki Obits has a one simple goal: We live to provide a one-stop site where you can find obituaries and biography information for every person on earth – dead or alive – famous or not, celebrity or not.” A great idea, but at the moment it is a piece of basic Wiki software with very little customization. There is very little to distinguish it as a service or directory. As a test, I ran a search on Michael Jackson and got a table full of biographical data much like I would expect from raw number search engines like Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared rather than an article collection like Wikipedia.

Wikibios, on the other hand states right on the front page: “Our belief is simple: you don’t have to be a famous celebrity to have a life worth documenting. That’s why we created WikiBios, a place where your friends become the storytellers of your life.” Which is an idea I can get behind. The problem is, is that for now at least, the majority of pages I came across (using the random bio button) seem to be yet to have been filled in by the person’s friends and families. It also illustrates another problem which is that wikis are, by definition, editable by the public at large and, here on the internet, the public is not always as kind and friendly as it might be.

So, while I applaud the efforts, it’s still not what I want. Aside from the issues of getting and maintaining an audience share not to mention the kind of brand recognition that would make these viable, long term solutions, I’m not sure if this is an area that is not better served by LiveJournal or FaceBook or Google Profile. it seems that those three brands have the audience and name recognition to be able to add obituaries / memorials as a valid part of their service; I know there are instances of both LJ and FB users being memorialized on their own pages after death, yet even those are not perfect – they don’t give friends and relatives and fans the chance to both eulogize and research the deaths of their friends in that if you were not connected to that person before their death, you may not be able to access their page on the social networks.

What I mean is, a few years ago, I lost another friend. He was someone I had known well in high school, but had not seen in several years. Then, at my sister’s wedding, we reconnected. A few months later, I read the obituary in our hometown newspaper and there were still so many questions I had that have never been answered. And I have no where to turn. Rob was not anywhere media-ized enough to show up on Wikipedia, nor was he, to my knowledge, on LJ or FB. So where do I go to write about and talk about my friend? Where do I go to read what others have written? If he did, in fact, have an LJ or FB, once he was gone there was no way for me to be added to his friends list so that I could see what others were saying and doing, in short, without a wikipedia page how will anyone know he existed?

Perhaps Google will step into the breach. Perhaps LJ or FB or WikiObits or WikiBios will do something that let’s us all eulogize and memorialize those who were like us and of us and who were never on t.v. long enough to get a Wikipedia page of our very own.

Now We’re Cooking

cook |koŏk|

verb

1 [ trans. ] prepare (food, a dish, or a meal) by combining and heating the ingredients in various ways.  • [ intrans. ] I told you I could cook | [as adj. ] ( cooked) a cooked breakfast.  • [ intrans. ] (of food) be heated so that the condition required for eating is reached .

2 something Joel is really, really bad at.

And yet I try. Last November, I bought a Brinkman’s 3-in-1 smoker, steamer, and bar-be-que. I have used it five times now, with various results. The first use was grilling a couple of steaks shortly after having bought (and cured) the grill. The second time was for the Christmas turkey. The third through fifth times were this past month, cooking for my family and a few friends.

The results were, as I said, varied. During my first attempts with the grill, I stuck to tried and true recipes I gleaned from the internet and followed religiously. The more recent attempts, however, were more experimental.

We had some friends come over and I attempted two (huge) steaks and a bit of grilled shark. I abstained from the internet and instead went for a bit of a steak sauce marinade and lots of lemon and orange juice squeezed over the meat while it was cooking. The steak was really good. The fish was ok, without being stellar.

But that’s not really important now. What’s important is why I have been trying to cook.

I’ve always been a big guy. In the last two years though my weight has gotten absolutely out of control. Cite the usual reasons – a desk job, a long commute, eating fast food in the car, not taking enough time to exercise, etc. etc. I decided that maybe if I learned to cook, I would begin eating better, possibly less, and that the activity would be good for me as well.

Prior to this my cooking experiences were less than promising. Starting with the Intro to Cooking class I took as an elective in Jr. High where I learned very little that I retained save for how much I enjoy Waldorf Salad and that my friend CJ was kind of an idiot. (It’s a whole other story.) My cooking ineptness culminated in an incident where in I almost burned down the house of the girl I was dating while trying to make her pancakes for breakfast. My cooking, in other words, all the way through high school, college, and after was pretty much limited to things that came out of cans or boxes and involved less than three steps.

In fact, according to my college roommate Chuck, anything that involved less than three steps was not technically cooking. It was merely food preparation. He had a point.

Now, for full disclosure, a good part of my wanting to learn to cook was fueled by my addiction to Top Chef. I’m incapable of watching something I think is cool and not wanting to try it. I watch Miami Ink and I want to get a tattoo. I watch Deadliest Catch and want to take a year off to go work in the Bering Sea. And when I watch Top Chef, I want to be able to cook.

I began where I always begin, the internet. YouTube in this case, looking for cooking videos that I could follow. One of the videos I came across was Gordon Ramsay bar-be-queing buffalo meat as hamburgers. The idea seeemed simple enough, and even if I couldn’t get hold of any buffalo meat, the other things Ramsay incorporated (dicing a red onion into his mince, topping the burger with buffalo mozzarella cheese) seemed like things I could do by myself.

So, while I mainlined the first two seasons of Gordon Ramsay’s The F Word, I began shopping for a grill. My wife and I had bought a house the previous August so it seemed only natural to wait until we had gotten everything unpacked before buying anything new. As anyone who has ever moved can tell you, unpacking can take years and I eventually got tired of waiting and bought a charcoal grill.

While this brought me great acclaim and several dozens of “man points” from my friends, the somewhat cumbersome and wasteful nature of charcoal grills made itself apparent and the grill sat unused for months at a time. In the meantime, several cookbooks appeared on my Amazon wishlist and remained unpurchased. Especially as my job changed suddenly and the copious free time I had had vanished in the night.

Still, learning to cook and cooking for myself, remains a goal. The cookbook I have been reading about and most want to try is The Ratio. The idea behind the book is that the professional kitchen cook or chef uses certain ratios in their cooking, even if they’re not aware that they’re doing so. Therefore, by teaching the novice cook to use these same ratios, anyone can learn to cook. Personally, this concept fits fully into my idea of geek – that anyone can learn to do anything given enough time and patience.

Two weeks ago, I managed to cook some really nice chicken on the grill for my family for dinner and did so without specific aid from the internet, merely with some tips I half remembered from watching various cooking shows. My wife was quite pleased, both that she didn’t have to cook and that the expensive grill was seeing more than one use per year. So I’m planning on trying again soon.

However, there are things I have learned about myself in the attempts so far:

1. The fun is in trying, most times I could care less about the final result. In fact, I’m usually planning the next assault while still enjoying the fruits of my labor.
2. It may take me six months or a year to get around to it, but I will get to it and try it eventually. Whether this is cooking or learning javascript, it will happen someday.
3. I have to do it myself. Give me all the advice you want, it won’t make sense until I have royally cocked it up all on my own. That’s when your advice will make sense, now that I know how not to do it.

Where I go from here, I’m not actually sure, but I’m looking forward to giving it a go.

Bookmark Round-up (weekly)

• 10 Even Better Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs

  More Easter Eggs from Wolfram Alpha and Mashable.

  tags: wolfram alpha, research, article, blog, technology

• Top 10 Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs

  Mashable rounds up some of the best Easter Eggs on Wolfram Alpha.

  tags: wolfram alpha, research, article, blog, technology

• Lifehacker – First Look at Wolfram Alpha’s Impressive (and Fun) Knowledge Computation – Wolfram Alpha

  Lifehacker’s first post on Wolfram Alpha.

  tags: wolfram alpha, research, article, blog, technology

• Buildings and Food: What’s the future of Wolfram Alpha?

  Interesting and thoughtful article posted shortly after the debut of Wolfram Alpha.

  tags: wolfram alpha, research, article, blog, technology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Essential iPhone Apps (‘Cause Everyone Else is Doing It)

It’s June. That means I’ve had my iPhone for about four months and it has already become extremely hard to live without. In fact, I have no intention of trying to live without it. Not only does it sit in my pocket for most of the day, it recharges right next to my bed every evening. In short, you can have my iPhone when you pry it out of my cold, internet deprived, hands.

On the other hand, one of the single best things about the iPhone is the Apple App Store. And what could be better than sharing out a list of my favorite apps?

So here’s my list of favorite apps, in no particular order. Rather, these are the ones that I use on a regular basis; these are the apps I go to as primary functions in my phone.

Bloom – Brian Eno’s ambient music maker is a fantastic bit of stress relief kit. The interface is simple, clean, and, if I may say so, pretty. When launched, the app gives the user a blank field of pastel color. Touching the screen will produce a chime or bell, whose pitch and tone vary with where on the screen the user has touched. Generally, the pitch is lower at the bottom of the screen and higher at the top, with tone density going from heavy to light when going from right to left on the screen. Once a sound is produced it repeats itself, along with any others produced in short loops creating ambient, atonal rhythms from the touches the user has made. And the loops can be quite beautiful, and totally relaxing in a very zen way. I find it works beautifully as stress relief during a hard day. If I can find just five minutes along to play with Bloom, things seem much more workable.

Tweetie – A very functional Twitter client, this is probably the one app I use more than any other. (Yes, I am a Twitter fiend.) What I like about this particular client as opposed to the dozens of others available is the interface. I found it very easy to become used to, almost to the point of preferring it to actually using my computer.

Google – How anyone can live without Google at this point is completely beyond me. In addition to gMail, I am a fervent devotee of both Google Reader and Google Docs and I can get all three of those services through the Google app.

Kanji – As anyone who has studied Japanese can tell you, Kanji are one of the hardest aspects of becoming proficient in the language. This app is quite simple, but brilliantly designed. The visual interface is based on Tuttle’s Kanji Cards, with each screen focusing on one kanji. Touching the screen brings up additional information, including the various readings and words that use that character. There is an option in the top right to mark wether or not the kanji has been memorized or not. (It is also uncheckable in case the user has forgotten a kanji or two.) The other great aspect of this app is the organization of the “cards” based on JLPT level or Japanese school grade level. This is just a must have app for anyone who’s studying the language.

Kotoba – Another app I use everyday for studying, Kotoba is, simply, a very good dictionary for Japanese to English and vice versa.

BBC NewsReader – The Beeb’s app is different from other news apps in that it keeps a running update of the stories already loaded into the phone. Everytime you start the app, it begins downloading both recent information and updates to previous downloads. This makes loading pictures and older stories much faster on slow networks. The app breaks the news into three broad categories – Magazine, UK, and Americas. Within that, the user can define what kind of news they’re most interested in. The one thing I’m not quite happy with, especially in comparison to the two other news apps on my list, is that tapping on a story takes you to a BBC page that has to be resized before it could be considered remotely readable. However, for quick access to news that has a perspective different from the U.S. one, this app is a must.

New York Times – The NY Times has received a lot of (deserved) praise for their iPhone app. It serves as a prime example of how newspapers can remake themselves for the web and, in this case, the mobile web. The home screen breaks the paper down into its familiar sections – World, U.S., Politics, etc. From there, users have the option to scroll through stories in a given section or to choose the Latest, Popular, or Saved stories. And it’s this last option that really sets the app apart. The ability to save stories for later reading (as well as being able to e-mai them) adds a necessary functionality that recognizes that being mobile does not mean always having all the time you’d like to read up on the news. Further, the stories are automatically formated for the iPhone screen so that resizing before reading is not necessary.

New York Times Crossword – This is easily the most expensive app on my list. At roughly 10 bucks you have to love crosswords to make this worth the money. What’s more, you have to love the NY Times Crossword as there are cheaper (lesser) apps available in the iTunes app store. However, on the plus side, this is the same puzzle that appears in the daily paper. Players can submit their answers to an online database and find out if they have gotten all the cells correct or not. The controls are intuitive and easy to use; the screen uses a keyboard to input characters, but allows finger gestures for resizing the puzzles and for moving around the puzzle area. The puzzles start at a relatively easy level on Monday and get progressively harder throughout the week. For myself, this is my favorite lunchtime application. I find that nothing wakes my brain up as taking thirty minutes to play through a puzzle before heading back into the classroom.

Doodle Jump – You know those games that take 10 seconds to learn but can eat up hours on end being played? Well, the iPhone has a lot of them and Doodle Jump is my favorite. The object is very simple. Maneuver your Doodle through a series of obstacles to see how high you can take him. The game functions by giving your character an automatic bounce off of platforms; the only control the player has is to move the Doodle from side to side by turning your wrist and taking advantage of the iPhone’s motion sensors. Great fun.

Brushes – This is the newest on my list of must have applications. I picked it up earlier this week after seeing the story where the cover of New Yorker magazine had been made with it. Not only was it a cool cover but the idea that this could be done on an iPhone was pretty spectacular.

CameraBag – While the iPhone camera is not the best cameraphone available, apps like CameraBag make it a lot of fun. I won’t say too much about it here as I have already written about it and posted photos I took using the app on this blog.

Text – I live in Japan. Japan is somewhat notorious for preferring phone based e-mail to text messaging. In fact, my last three phones did not have texting software on them at all. So having a phone that can finally text, combined with Softbank’s data plan which lets users text each other for free, is really, really, cool. Having texting available means I feel like I can finally keep up with services like Twitter and the now, sadly defunct, I Want Sandy, in the manner for which they were designed.

Stanza – People are still skeptical about the value of ebooks but this app should push at least a few people decidedly into the “for” column. Stanza works with several different online services to download books to the phone, where they can be read offline, one screen at a time. I’ve found that the small screen makes books feel longer than they are, but, on the other hand, that the rapid pace with which the screen changes makes them just fly by. In short, while this is not my favorite way to read, it is an acceptable and convenient way to read.

WordPress – Obviously, I’m a blogger. Not quite as heavy a blogger as I once was, but I do still enjoy keeping a blog up and running for those occasions when I want to say something that won’t fit into 140 characters. That’s where WordPress’ iPhone app comes in. It has a nice, clean design that makes it easy to log in and update any blogs you have hosted on WP. This is kind of a no brainer for anyone who has both an iPhone and a WP blog.

Wolfram Alpha – One of the best features of the iPhone / Safari combo, in my opinion, is the ability to put a bookmark on the home screen of the phone. What this means is that when I want to search for something on Wolfram Alpha, I do not need to open up Safari and scroll through my bookmarks. Rather I just touch one icon and there’s WA, ready for input. And while I’m not a heavy WA user (not yet anyway) I have been curious about the service and wanting to try it out. So, while the individual site may change, eventually, the capacity to keep it right on my homescreen won’t and that is something that I just love about the iPhone.

MLB.com’s At Bat – I’m not much of a sports fan. I enjoy watching the games but I don’t really keep up with the statistics or even the player rosters too much. But I love baseball. I love the romanticism and history associated with the game and I do try to keep up with at least the Padres every season. At Bat makes it much, much easier to do so. The app provides schedules, play by play, recaps, standings, stats, photos, live game coverage, and soon, live video streaming of games. The only downside is that those clever bastards at MLB.com have decided to charge by the season, rather than a one time fee. Still, as a way to follow baseball that doesn’t require you to be in front of your t.v. at a set time or wading through tons of newsfeeds, this is the app to get.

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha has been around for a few weeks now, having debuted to a squawking chorus of voices. The initial reports from Mashable and Lifehacker sounded intriguing and promising but the talk on podcasts like TWiT and the virtual water cooler that is Twitter was more confused than relevatory. The single most coherent and reasoned explanation of / musings on was on Buildings and Food (a great site anyway).

The first question most people had was, what is Wolfram Alpha? The answer is that it is a knowledge computation engine, whatever that means. From the website:

“Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.”

Wolfram Alpha was designed by mathematician Stephen Wolfram; the database/search functions are based on the programing language Mathematica which he also designed, way back when.

Taking the play-with-it-until-it-breaks approach exemplified by Gina Trappiani’s original Lifehacker post, here are the things I learned via WA.

I am 33 years, 10 months, and 8 days old today.

I live 5663 miles from my mother’s house, which itself, is 243.4 miles from where I went to university.

My name, Joel, has some interesting data attached to it: there are currently 222,373 people sharing my name. It was most popular as a birth name during 1979 / 1980.

By comparing my first and middle names, we learn that my middle name is much more popular as a given name than is my first name.

Arizona became a state 97 years ago. Its highest point is Humphrey’s Peak at 3850 meters, while its lowest is the Colorado River at just 21 meters.

The average lifespan of American men vs. Japanese women is 75.92 years to 85.59 years, meaning that my wife is going to outlive me by ten years. But we already knew that.

There are also a number of things I couldn’t find. For example….

A search for the average rate of oxygen consumption used by SCUBA Divers at one atmosphere resulted in this:

Searching for the average lifespan of labrador retrievers brought back no results at all, only a suggestion to search on the word “dogs.”

Searching for “ the average number of e-mail addresses of teenagers” likewise brought back no meaningful results.

And finally, there are the Easter Eggs (which I found via this post, and this follow-up post on Mashable):

In the meantime, WA has released it’s first update, which has a few changes to the system, namely updating the linguistic structures recognized so that more queries will be returned. (Again, Mashable has the full list.)

In the meantime, Google has its new Google Squared, and Microsoft has launched Bing, both of which aim to change and modify how we search the web.

Study

I’ve never been one for lyricless music.  The words to a song are more important to me than the actual music.  Often the first thing I connect with when looking for new music is a phrase or word that seems to say something I like.  And I realize I’m not unique in this respect, I just put it out there as background so I can talk about The Octopus Project.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge eMusic fan; the fifteenth of every month is just a great day because that’s when I get to dig through eMusic and see what new albums and bands I can find.  Several months ago, on a friends recommendation, I downloaded The Octopus Project’s “One Ten Hundred Thousand Million” and it kinda sat in the background of my iPod for a few months.  In the meantime, my main job got downsized out from under me, I scrambled and ended up with a new job that gave me some free time and actively encouraged me to study.

What I find is that when I’m studying, I can’t have lyrics.  They just distract me.  And, no offense to any fans out there, but classical and most jazz puts me to sleep.  So I went back to dance music.  I dug up some old Groove Armada and club mixes I had laying around and they worked for a while.  But I wanted something new, something I hadn’t already heard a thousand times.  Which brings us back to TOP and their music.  I started somewhat slowly, adding the track “The Adjuster” to my study mix and letting it soak into my brain stem and it just hasn’t left yet.

Last month, when my eMusic account was refreshed, I picked up “Hello, Avalanche.”  If possible, I like it more than I do the previous album.  The track “Truck” especially is just infectious in its joyousness and I have been known to loop it so that it plays several times in a row.  I’ve set 2006’s “The House of Apples and Eyeballs” for this month’s downloads.  But that’s next month.

In the meantime, here’s the video for “Truck.”  Enjoy.

Mario and His Stars

I am the proud creator / owner of a Super Mario Galaxy save-file in which the full complement of 241 stars have been collected. And when I say proud, I mean bring it up in conversations at cocktail parties and show strangers my photos of it because I’m so proud.

Now, as to why I am so proud, that’s a little trickier. I mean, sure, you could say it’s the innovative design of the game or the revolutionary way the Wii controller lets the player interact with an incredible physics engine. Or you could say that it’s the artwork, which retains the charm and lovableness that has been inherent in the Mario games from the start. Or maybe it’s just the cute story.

Whatever. The real reason is, one, I’m a completist, and two, it was an achievable goal.

Starting with the latter, I started playing the game during a short period where I felt like nothing else was getting done in my life. All projects were at standstills, my job was becoming routine, and there was no vacation on the horizon. Enter SMG. From the get-go, figuring out the puzzles and learning how to get the stars was a lot of fun. I won’t deny that. But it was also something I could do. Something I could achieve, no matter how small and pointless an accomplishment it was. So I did it.

And once I did it, I really, really wanted to play some more. Rather, I really wanted to recapture that same feeling. Not so much of beating the game, as was the goal when my friends and I went to arcades, way back when. But more of completing something. Of finishing completely and being able to check something off the list.

So, a friend loaned me his copy of Super Mario Sunshine, the predecessor game that had been made for the Nintendo GameCube (and one I continue to hope will be revamped for the Wii). I started it and quickly got close to the maximum number of “Shines” but, over a year later, I have been unable to finish. And it’s driving me nuts.

Not in the same way that Mario Kart Wii is, because at least in that one I can show continual and steady progress. (I’m down to just a half dozen unlockables and most of those have to do with the ghost races and getting star level ranks on some courses.)

Because I really want to finish the game. I want to be able to add that save-file to my SD card, right next to Mario Galaxy and Pikmin and Lego Star Wars and the other (few, very few) games I’ve been able to play to completion. Because I’m a completist. I have to finish. Leaving a game unfinished feels like having an itch you just can’t quite reach. Something nagging at the back of my mind, something I should be doing, something I should be achieving.

My wife is the same way with jigsaw puzzles. She doesn’t start them because she will not stop unless she finishes. Or passes out.

But anyway. Last night I restarted Super Mario Sunshine from the very beginning. There are some glitches or something and where there should be purple coins to get, there is nothing. So I’m starting over and I’m looking forward to completing this game. Right after I finish all the other projects on my plate.

Docile Whale

Here’s one of those little things that amuses me far more than it should: my wife gave me this notebook to use at work. She said, “It’s friendly. The children will like it.” And it is and they do.

But I like it because of its friendly and charming little poem. Across the top it says: “I’m feeling much better. I live as I please. I like the natural flow of time. How are you?”

Well, I’m just great, thanks for asking! You docile whale you.

Resting Places

Trying another post from the iPhone, this time with photos.

Yesterday, my wife and I went to put flowers on her dad’s grave. He’s interred at a beautiful temple / cemetary near our house. We took a quiet walk around the grounds and I took a few photos, keeping others privacy foremost in mind and being respectful.

Anyway, here’s a photo of one of the small Buddah statues that surround the grounds and some of the flowering trees that are omnipresent.

I took the photo with my iPhone, using CameraBag and the Helga filter.

Bookmark Round-up (weekly)

• http://www.thomasfuchs.com/site/digital/Digitalpage001.html

  Awesome redesigns of the Republican and Democrat logos.

  tags: design, art, artist, politics, coolstuff

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Songbird

While it isn’t quite ready for prime time, Songbird is an excellent music player with the potential to be a one stop music application.

The biggest thing that differentiates Songbird from other library managers like iTunes is the built in browser. Based on the Mozilla engine, the browser works just like any other, only that when you surf to a music site, Songbird automatically searches the site for .mp3 files that can be downloaded and arranges them in a window at the bottom of the screen. This makes reading music blogs a whole lot cooler as you can immediately download the file you are reading about (if it has been posted to the site). Legal issues aside, it is a great way to find new music.

The initial download comes with a few bookmarks preloaded; there are a ton of music sites and blogs that are greatly enhanced by viewing them through Songbird. Some of my favorites are Muxtape, eMusic, and Gumdrop.

Songbird also recently added their own version of Coverflow, letting users scroll through their library by album cover, much like in iTunes. While this is very cool, there are still some issues – like getting all the album art – that need to be worked out.

Hopefully, too, future versions will add video support and better integration with the major music shopping sites as well as podcast management. For now though, Songbird is a decent player and library manager but it is not quite a replacement for iTunes. Yet.

*I’ve written about Songbird before, here.

Testin Y’all Testin

Nevermind this post. Seriously. This is just a quick test of the WordPress application for the iPhone. We’ll have to see what this looks like and take it from there.

A Little Bit More

Here’s another couple of shots done with Camera Bag:

This is the cinema filter:

​

This is the Holga filter:

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I’m really digging the Holga filter.

Toy Camera Phenom

A couple of weeks ago I went down to the park for the annual Hanami festivities. This year, for the first time in a long, long time, I didn’t take a camera with me. Instead I decided to put my iPhone’s camera through the paces. More specifically, I wanted to see what the applications CameraBag and ToyCamera would do with Hanami shots. Here are two results:

This first pic. was altered with ToyCamera’s XXXX filter. I really like the effect this app applies to images; it gives things a nice retro feel as well as warming up the colors.

The second pic. was altered with CameraBay’s 1974 filter which has an even better “back in the day” feel to it.

Generally speaking, I like CB just a bit better than TC. CB’s filters are based around older camera styles, while TC is based more around classic film stocks. On the other hand, TC has better menus and community features. They’re really both worth having for photogeeks and for iPhone users who want something a little different for their photos.

Nirvana featuring…

Shortly after Freddie Mercury died musicians from all over the rock ‘n’ roll world gathered in the U.K. for a tribute concert. It was shown on t.v. around the world and the CD sales numbered in the millions. It was an awesome, awesome show.

Slash, Elton John, George Michael and the surviving members of Queen. They all performed Queen’s songs, Freddie’s songs, and showed what a genius Freddie was.

But my question is, where is the Nirvana tribute?

Ok, I know there have been a couple, but I want the really big, televised, spectacular, grandiose, laden with rock stars covering Nirvana songs, badass tribute.

But I don’t think we’re ever going to get it.

And it’s not just that Dave and Krist don’t get along with Courtney. I think it has a lot more to do with how Freddie died versus how Kurt died. Freddie died of AIDS at a time when people were just beginning to accept the idea of homosexuality as a mainstream culture. Freddie died a tragic, but heroic, death. He maintained a brave front, continuing to work and to spend time with family and friends, right up until the day he died.

Kurt, on the other hand, shot himself.

There is still such a phobia and lack of understanding about suicide that I feel like there would be protests should there ever be a massive tribute to Kurt Cobain. People have already claimed that his suicide encouraged kids to follow suite, and that his is an image that parents do not want their children to idolize.

Still, Nirvana is / was, arguably, the most influential band of the nineties. They broke a new style of music into the mainstream. They were the icons for the grunge lifestyle and their music is not only still being played, it is being covered by new bands all the time.

I would love to see a Nirvana reunion, the larger lineup, featuring Pat Smear, and a guest roster of lead vocalists, similar to the Queen tribute to Freddie Mercury. Get Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell and Thom Yorke to take the vocals and do the best live versions of Nirvana’s music since 1994.

This year was the 15th anniversary of Cobain’s death and I, for one, still miss him and his music.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

Crayon Physics Deluxe is an innovative and charming game that uses the iPhone’s touch screen to demonstrate a new way to game.

The premise is simple: On each screen there is a ball and a few simple elements, like a box or a ledge drawn. The user must draw new elements and move the ball from the starting point until it can cross the star, completing the level. The graphics are deceptively simple, creating the look of simple crayon drawings on newsprint, like a child might create, but the physics engine that moves the ball around is fully developed and simultaneously beautiful and frustrating.

One of the most exciting and challenging aspects of this game is using your finger to draw new elements onto the screen. Exciting because it is novel and intuitive and fun, challenging because the iPhone’s screen just isn’t that big, and when you have big, sausage sized fingers like mine, achieving the necessarily delicate touch is sometimes difficult.

The iPhone version of the game has 50 levels to play, as well as a sandbox where users can create and save custom levels.

One of the few drawbacks to the game is the lack of save features. For example, if you stop playing on level 25, the next time you turn on the game, you’ll have to skip all the way to level 25 to resume where you left off. Other than that, the game is simple, beautiful, and a great way to spend a few dollars and a lot of time.

Pocket Cocktails

Back in university, my roommates and I had a poster on the wall that gave the recipes for a few dozen different shooters. 44 Shooters or something like that. Dan’s favorite was one called Nutty Irishman. Anyway, in college, we made most of these things, as well as a lot of conventional cocktails and a few that we made up ourselves.

(The snowball: Five parts milk, four parts vanilla ice cream, three parts vodka, two parts Kahlua, one part flavoring agent of choice [Frangelica and Bailey’s Irish Cream were popular] and ice. Blend everything except the flavoring agent, pour into frosted glasses, top with the flavoring agent. Serves five.)

These days I tend to stick to beer; maybe I’ll have the occasional scotch for a nightcap.

And then, sometimes, I just really want a cocktail. Enter Robert Maran and Deidra Jones’ Pocket Cocktails for the iPhone. The app is a little pricey at $5, but I got it for a sale price of $.99 and for that, it is beautiful.

Immediately after loading, the user is presented with an attractive, retro styled menu pages featuring options for Martinis, Classics, Summer (which I presume will change as the seasons progress, but maybe not), Wine and Beer, Creamy, Shooters, Warmers, and Mocktails, along with a row of buttons along the bottom for a random cocktail and the (surprisingly useful, but basic) sommelier.

Once inside, the options are presented in an easy list that makes good use of the iPhone’s touchscreen by letting users scroll through alphabetically. Tap on a cocktail and a picture of the cocktail comes up with options for just the picture, the recipe, or the ingredients necessary. Each cocktail also has the option to save it to a favorites menu.

One of my favorite features is the random button, which brings up a friendly red screen and the instructions “shake for a cocktail.” Which it does if you do.

But the real test of the application was getting it out into the store. I got vodka, checked the app, and bought the other necessary ingredients for a Bloody Mary. As I said before, I don’t know if I would have paid $5 for the app. In fact, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have. But for a dollar, or even two, this is a fun app to have in your pocket.

The New York Times Crossword for iPhone / iPod Touch

There is something compelling, even obsessive about a good crossword puzzle. And the New York Times is one of the best crosswords around. So finding out that they had put together an app for the iPhone was fantastic news. However, the price tag, a hefty $10, left a me little cautious. After all, once bitten, twice shy and while the NY Times had yet to bite, plenty of other applications had.

A quick glance through the online reviews assuaged some of my fears and I purchased the app.

It has been worth every penny so far.

The first, and most important note is that this is the NY Times Crossword, just as it appears in the newspaper, delivered straight to your phone every day. The puzzles are generally easier at the beginning of the week and the weekend puzzles are slightly larger. The puzzles are difficult but doable, the clues are clever, and the app is easy to use.

Although it does take a second to load, once it’s up, users are given options to Play, Connect, Rankings, Extras, and Help.

The Play option, naturally enough, takes users right into the main area of the application. From there, players can continue they puzzle they had been working on, choose the newest (daily) puzzle, or browse through the archives. Once inside a puzzle, the options are useful and clearly defined without an distractions or unnecessary information cluttering up the onscreen real estate.

Players can check letters, words, or complete puzzles, with the option to fully unlock each puzzle 24 hours after it has been released. Some of the more useful features include using the iPhone’s multi-touch option to resize the screen, making it easier to highlight the correct space, and being able to circle letters for easy reference. Other, lesser features, include being able to “write” with a pen or pencil, although both allow the player to change their answers, and reading a list of clues.

The Connect feature adds a bit of sociabilty to the application by letting users compare themselves to other users via a “Legends” page as well as maintaining a profile. The profile area lets users track their daily stats and provide a bit of information about themselves. Related to the Connect menu is the Rankings menu, allowing users to view online scores and to (again) check their daily stats.

Under the Extras menu, users can view the front page of the New York Times and check the Magmic Social Network, etc.

The one negative is that at $9.99, the application is quite pricey. Especially when there are $.99 crossword puzzle applications available in the iTunes store. However, when you consider that a subscription to the print edition of the New York Times can run $50 a year, and even the online edition is $30, $10 for the crossword and the free NY Times news app seems like a bargain.

All told, the New York Times Crossword is a fantastic application for crossword lovers.

Refinements

The last time I went book shopping I didn’t actually buy anything. Instead I took pictures of the things I wanted then went back home and got online: Wikipedia to Amazon to iTunes and back around comparison shopping and information gathering until I found the best deal and best format for the book I wanted (David Sedaris’ “When You Are Engulfed in Flames.”)

While bouncing between these sites I came across a few refinements that I (as a loyal customer) want to see.

And the first thing is this – why doesn’t Amazon have a library function built into it?

Amazon should be able to let users make easily accessible library files that are searchable by Amazon’s robots to let readers know which books they’re missing or when new books come out. In other words, I don’t want to wade through the stacks and piles of books to see if I still have a copy of another Sedaris book while I’m online. I want to know, right then, if I have a copy or if I should take advantage of Amazon’s “buy together” deals. Amazon bought Shelfari a while ago, so I’m hoping that maybe they’ll add some more social functionality to their sites sometime soon.

Addtionally, Amazon should be able to host bookclubs and discussion groups fairly easily, shouldn’t they? Somewhere where users / readers can get together to discuss the books they’ve bought in something a little more organized that the current reviews system?

I’m also hoping they make something like the iTunes Genius sidebar, but for Amazon for better recommendations of new books.

Then again, speaking of iTunes, why is there no wishlist? One of the best parts of the Amazon shopping experience is being able to bookmark books one is interested in into either a shopping list or a wishlist. I’m getting frustrated by going into the iTunes store, finding something that I want to buy in the future and having to save the name in a file completely separate from my iTunes account. And how about gifts? It would be very nice to have the gift lists that Amazon has.

Basically, I want Amazon’s shopping functionality in iTunes and iTunes library management in Amazon and better social integreation
and user interaction in both.

And then there’s Wikipedia. I’m a bit of a completist, a bit of a collector. It’s pretty common for me to surf to Wikipedia to get a full bibliography on whichever author I’m interested in at the moment. But because of Wikipedia’s lack of built in bookmarking, I find that I end up searching for the same information over and over, or cluttering up my browswer bookmarks with Wikipedia links.

I want a tag cloud so I can bookmark my favorite articles and references within Wikipedia. I want to be able to build my own wiki of most referenced articles, and I want a way to pull that information into shopping sites / applications.

All of this may seem a little demanding, and it is. After all, I’m just a customer, with no knowledge of how difficult it would be to implement any of these ideas in any of these places. At the same time, I’m a customer, and a good one. I spend a fair portion of my disposable income in both Amazon and iTunes and Wikipedia is my go to source for information.

Which is to say that I am not entitled to these changes, but that it is in the best interest of all three services to continue to explore ways to make the experience better for the end user and this is just my two cents on how to please this particular shopper.

Bookmark Round-up (weekly)

• Plinky

  Plinky provides inspiration in the form of questions or prompts for users to then write or blog about.

  tags: writing, microblogging, blog, inspiration, prompts, plinky, blogging

• 25 Vintage Food Prep Tips

  Tips from back in the day about how to prep food. This list pertains mainly to fruits and veggies.

  tags: tip, hack, advice, recommendation, resource, reference, food, cooking, preparation, recipe

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmark Round-up (weekly)

• Miniature Trading

  Fantastic resource for collectible miniatures trading.

  tags: minature, trade, trading, resource

• elements

  Part Tumblr, part Stumble Upon, Elements lets users post and comment on or add to “elements” found on the web.

  tags: blog, tumblr, twitter, stumble upon, community, curious, web2.0, to try

• Squarespace

  Website and blog building software and host provider. Recommended by TWiT.

  tags: blogging, blog, webdesign, tools, web, hosting, web2.0, website, TWiT, leo leport

• Weebly

  A free, onling blogging service.

  tags: web2.0, website, tools, design, blog

• Sawlogs

  Sawlogs aims to do for dream journaling what Blogger did for diaries – make them public, searchable, and easy to write. Has some of the best elements of blog and micro-blog software while adding analysis tools specifically for dreams.

  tags: blog, websites, share, community, web2.0, to try, funstuff, coolstuff, curious

• Tabbloid

  Tabbloid is an interesting new take on the RSS reader. Tabbloid takes user set RSS feeds and compiles them into a newspaper like format in a pdf file that is then e-mailed to the user. Curious.

  tags: RSS, PDF, web2.0, tabbloid, magazine, tools, feed, convert, coolstuff

• Gocomics.com: Comics, editorial cartoons, email comics, comic strips

  Comics, editorial cartoons, email comics, comic strips all available in a searchable database.

  tags: comics, humor, toread

• Heinlein Society

  Part fan club, part non-profit, the Heinlein Society works to promote the ideals imparted in Heinlein’s novels as well as knowledge of the man himself.

  tags: heinlein, sf, charity, non-profit, fanclub, science-fiction

• RiffTrax

  Rifftrax is another site dedicated to humorous commentaries on popular movies. Funny stuff.

  tags: humor, mst3k, audio, rifftrax, entertainment

• Cinematic Titanic

  From the creator and original cast of MST3K, Cinematic Titanic is the crew of the Satelite of Love back and riffing on movies once again.

  tags: riff, movies, mst3k, cinematic titanic, humor, voiceover, film

• Too Much Coffee Man

  First a comic, then a magazine, now a website, Shannon Wheeler’s Too Much Coffee Man is always a good read.

  tags: Too Much Coffee Man, TMCM, Shannon Wheeler, comic, comics, comicstrip, humor, toread, to read

• Livemocha

  Livemocha is another social language learning website. The key feature here, however, is the ease with which students can contact one another for help or just to practice new languages.

  tags: language, learning, education, languages, web2.0, training

• Mango Languages – Annotated

  Mango is a language learning service that lets members interact and practice the new language they have learned.

  tags: language, education, learning, languages, tutorial, web2.0, english, training

• Brain Games & Brain Training – Lumosity

  Lumosity provides games and training exercises for your brain. For a monthly fee, users can log in, play the games, and have their progress recorded and made available in a variety of formats. Excellent, if a little overpriced.

  tags: brain, health, psychology, learning, mind, fun, memory, education, training

• Suvudu

  Del Rey’s free eBook Library.

  tags: del rey, book, books, ebook, ebooks, library, content, want, wishlist, toread, shopping

• Whatnot Workshop

  FAO Schwarz has built a site where customers can create their very own whatnots. Whatnots are the nameless background characters found on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. $99 and a limited selection of colors and accessories but oh so cool.

  tags: coolstuff, funstuff, want, wishlist, FAO Schwarz, muppets, kermit, hensen

• The Best Job In The World

  Tourism Queensland built a website asking people to apply for “the Best Job in the World” – maintaining and performing research tasks on an island in the Great Barrier Reef park. Applicants needed to send in a video. Really cool.

  tags: funstuff, coolstuff, australia, job, reef, island, article

• Hunter S. Thompson Motivational Posters

  Some clever genius out there made a bunch of motivational posters featuring pictures of the Doctor (Hunter S. Thompson) and quotes from the man himself. Genius.

  tags: slashpost, hunter s thompson, the doctor, motivation, quote, art, pictures, pop art, funstuff, coolstuff, weirdstuff

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmark Round-up (weekly)

• The Godfather Wars

  Really good article in Vanity Fair about the making of The Godfather.

  tags: vanityfair.com, the Godfather, making of, movies, film, cinema, history, article, reference

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmark Round-up (weekly)

• Transistor Rodeo

  Podcast Novel by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff. Not yet completed.

  tags: podcast, archive, novel, transistor rodeo, to listen to, to read

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmark Round-up (weekly)

• List of computer-animated films

  Wikipedia article

  tags: list, wikipedia, animated, film, movie, animation, movies, 2d, 3d

• Flashlight Worthy

  FW makes lists of books, primarily books by a single author, but also lists of “best of” or thematically as well. Good resource for making sure you’re current on a given series.

  tags: books, recommended, handpicked, flashlight, book, reading, toread, to be read, list, resource

• http://www.fring.we.bs

  DIY hack for making a continuous lens mounted ring flash on the cheap.

  tags: DIY, hack, photography, photo, camera, flash, ring, fiberoptic

• ACME Studios, Inc.

  ACME designs unique writing tools and accessories for the geek-savvy consumer.

  tags: shopping, writing, tools, shop, art, design, gift, store

• Printing Museum, Tokyo

  Fascinating museum that looks at the history of printing in Japan and the world.

  tags: tokyo, todo, museum, goto, see, visit

• OpenPandora.org

  Pandora is an OMAP3 Powered Handheld Linux Console being developed as an open source community project.

  tags: linux, handheld, project, community, hack, hacker, people, technology, want, wishlist

• Kate Micucci

  Kate Micucci is an artist, actor, and ukelele player in L.A.

  tags: art, artist, actress, actor, l.a., people, creative, ukelele, music, funny, comedy

• The Oblique Strategies Web Site

  The Oblique Strategies are a series of prompts designed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to help get the user un-stuck by giving a problem or solution or puzzle to think about.

  tags: creativity, productivity, tools, obliquestrategies

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmark Round-up (weekly)

• Pure Mac: Software for Macintosh

  Good list / index of software for the mac.

  tags: mac, software, apple, osx, tools, freeware, resources, downloads

• The Frugal Magic of the “Five Ingredient Crock Pot Meal”

  Good post from “the simple dollar” detailing five easy recipes that can be made in a crock pot cheaply.

  tags: simple dollar, crockpot, cooking, recipe, howto

• Beauty Dish for SB-800

  Really good how to on making a beauty dish for portrait photography.

  tags: photography, diy, lighting, fstops, howto

• Amazon.com: Free – Songs: MP3 Downloads

  All Amazon.com free Mp3s available for download.

  tags: amazon.com, songs, free, mp3

• South Park Episode Player

  All South Park episodes, online, for free.

  tags: tv, humor, streaming, southpark, episode, fun, online video, video, to watch

• The Guild

  Online series about a group of socially awkward gamers. Stars Felicia Day.

  tags: guild, humor, gaming, video, to watch, online series, felicia day

• The Millions: Millions Meta-Data 2008

  Fun round-up from The Millions on their best and most popular posts from 2008.

  tags: the millions, reading, toread, toberead, fiction, best of, 2008

• The Millions: A Year in Reading: New Yorker Fiction 2008

  Really cool round-up from The Millions reading blog with links to all the fiction published by The New Yorker in 2008.

  tags: new yorker, toread, toberead, best of, 2008, fiction

• The Flip – Products – Meet the Family

  Homepage for the Flip video camera.

  tags: flip, camera, video, wishlist, shopping, electronics, gadgets

• SUCK UK – Sun Jar

  Cool little solar powered lamp. Available in a warm yellow or a cool blue.

  tags: jar, suck uk, shopping, wishlist, light, lamp, solar

• SUCK UK – My Life Story

  Beautiful looking diary intended to cover your life from birth to death; if I ever have kids, I’ll buy one of these for sure.

  tags: suck uk, shopping, wishlist, diary, kids

• Think Progress » Obama’s First 100 Hours: A Clean Break From Bush

  Round-up of the official legislative work President Obama did in his first 100 hours in office.

  tags: obama, best of, think progress, politics, action, moveon

• Playing The Beatles Backwards

  Cool article from Jams Bio magazine by JBev, where he counts down every recorded Beatles song, with commentary.

  tags: jamsbio, Beatles, music, countdown, best of, list, commentary

• Flickr: Fluid Icons

  Flickr user pool of icons created for Fluid for OSX.

  tags: flickr, fluid, icon, icons, OSX, mac, software, group, pool

• When Nixon Met Elvis

  Cool online art exhibition about the historic meeting between Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon.

  tags: elvis, nixon, art, exhibit, exhibition

• The White Balance Lens Cap at The Photojojo Store

  Really cool little gadget to help keep your digital SLR white balanced.

  tags: photography, camera, white balance, SLR, digital, photos

• Gel Videos

  Ideas and inspiration from the Gel conference; similar to the TED talks.

  tags: Gel, TED, video, ideas, collection, presentation

• The Best Links 2008

  Kottke’s list of his best links from across his sites during 2008. Interesting list and worth perusing.

  tags: 2008, list, reference, resource, best of

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” doesn’t get nearly the recognition it should. That is all.

really loving “World of Goo.”

Raiding the Vaults: .45s – Mix Tape 21

Since it’s the holiday season and I’ve had time off, I’ve been going through a few boxes that have been unopened for the past several moves and finding out what’s inside. In today’s box, I found a pile of mixtapes I made by copying my aunt’s 45 RPM record collection with my first stereo system, back when I was in fifth or sixth grade. Here’s the playlist:

Billy Joel – Laura
Billy Joel – Pressure
Genesis – That’s All
Genesis – Don’t Lose My Number
Def Leppard – Photograph
Def Leppard – Rock of Ages
Twisted Sister – We’re Not Gonna Take It
Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams…
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – You Got Lucky
Soft Cell – Tainted Love
UB40 – Red Red Wine
Moving Pictures – What About Me
Moving Pictures – Joni and The Romeo
The Honeydrippers – Sea of Love
Madness – Our House
Adam Ant – Crackpot History
Adam Ant – Goody Two Shoes
Fire Inc. – Nowhere Fast
Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem – Can You Picture That
Blondie – Heart of Glass
Prince – When Doves Cry
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts – Crimson & Clover
Prince – Purple Rain

A few thoughts: I thought I was really clever for calling the mixtape “point 45″ like a gun, even though the 45 in question (RPMs) was a whole number.

This is my aunt’s collection. Bear that in mind if you go looking for the dates of these songs. Then again, I was 10 in 1985 so maybe it’s not so disparate as all that.

I miss vinyl.

I miss making mixtapes. Playlists on my iPod just don’t have quite the same feeling.

Tomorrow, another box, possibly more tapes.

Switches

I have to get used to having a video camera. Having a camera, and taking pictures is second nature. After all, I’ve been doing that since high school. Having a video camera, however, well, I’m still learning when it’s going to be better to have video than stills.

And essentially, it seems to be, video is best for events, photos are best for locations, although that can still be completely true even when reversed. But that’s what I’m working to remember right now. I have a video camera, I just have to use it.

A Blessing, Some BBQ, Cricket

For a bank holiday, today ended up being a long day if a fun one. We started this morning by having the Shinto priest come around and bless the building site, us, the chief construction worker, and our joint effort. He had my wife and myself hold a wooden pick and smack it into the ground three times, and then the carpenter dude did the same. Then we (wife, mom-in-law, me, carpenter dude, salesman dude, boss dude, priest dude) each had to lay a green leafy thing on the alter and that was that.

So that was good.

Then, after, we made it back home to rest up a bit, then Mayumi and I went out to a BBQ with a lot of friends in a park near one of the guy’s house. Two hour drive due to holiday traffic, but more food and beer than could be believed once there and we ate and drank way too much.

So that was good.

Then, when the sun was looking like it was thinking about setting soon, two of the guys endeavored to teach me how to play cricket and after swinging the bat a few times and bowling a few times, I can see where it might be a good game. Even if, like baseball, playing is much more fun that watching.

So that was good.

And now I’m going to bed. Which is good.

D&D Geek

Quick post: My friends and I have recently been playing D&D. All of us played back in the day, and were quite surprised to learn we were all D&D geeks. Well, life being what it is, getting everyone together for extended campaigns is hard to swing.

To try to make things a bit easier, I just picked up a copy of the official Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures 2 person starter set. The minis game seems to be much more focused on combat, rather than a campaign, which should lend itself to shorter sessions.

Anyway, we’ll see. But I am looking forward to trying it.

Return of the Kitsch

Sometime recently, when I had my head turned, Kitsch came back in a big way. Something about the goofy, weird, vaguely obscene, plasticky junk that was turned out by the truckload in the beginnings of the modern era just appeals to…well, people today.

The reason I say people is there seems to be no easily defined line separating who likes kitsch from those who don’t. After all, it’s popular with thirty-something hipsters, aging baby-boomers, falsely nostalgic teenagers, pop culture junkies, graffiti writers and modern artists, etc. etc.

And the point? There is none.

Just that last January I got a dashboard Hula girl from Archee McPhee’s for my dad, for his birthday, as a gag gift. He loves it. Stuck it right in his truck. Then, last month, when visiting friends, they gave me a cojoined pair of wrestling Sumo guys* to go on my dashboard. And then, another friend sent me a dashboard Buddy Christ from Kevin Smith’s Dogma. Which is actually on my desk, but still.

I would write that the current kitsch fetish was confined to dashboard iconography, fuzzy dice, and other car decorations, except that I’m starting to see a lot more garden gnomes and pink flamingos than I used to.

In fact, I think that’s what I’ll try for Dad’s next birthday. A pink flamingo. Just because.

* Not my flickr photo, unfortunately, but a good one!

LOLing

During episode 105 of Californication, the protagonist, Hank Moody as played by David Duchovny, sets off on a beautiful diatribe about the decline of the English language through blogspeak while appearing on the Henry Rollins show.

It’s a great speech in a great episode of a great show. So, great, right?

The trouble is, it’s based on a false premise: Hank’s rant is based on the idea that there is a correct way of speaking English and that blogspeak is nowhere near it. In fact, English is a beautiful, complicated language that succeeds because of the ease with which it can be altered, manipulated, re-purposed, and re-worked.

So, first things first. Moody (or, more realistically, the show writer) gets wound up by his girlfriend using LOL in actual conversation. He cites this as an example of the decline of the English language through the use of blogging and other technologies. He goes on to state that we are all only psuedo-communicating because of this; we are not really communicating using the full glory of the English language.

And, again, I call bullshit.

English was spread around the world through a complicated web of colonialism, commercialism, capitalism, religious and democratic evangelism, and simple pragmatism. But then, so was Spanish. And French.

So why has English become the default international language? Why is English the second language favored by almost every country of the globe? The answer lies in English’s inherent adaptability. New words can be created by advertising agencies (Xerox, Kodak) or borrowed from other languages (plaza, garage), or stolen outright to be re-purposed for something new (robot, soda). Additionally, Greek and Latin roots make for dozens of synonyms and antonyms thereby almost guaranteeing that there is at least one word people feel comfortable using.

Further, the grammar of English is robust enough that there are several alternative ways of expressing the same or similar thoughts, allowing speakers of other languages the luxury of finding the way that best works with their thinking patterns. (This is why language teachers can identify students native languages from the mistakes made in English.)

Couple this with the fact that English has no academy while France and Spain do; English has no established authority to tell us what the correct form of expression is. So, while Americans may say, “I don’t have any cash on me.” the English can say “I haven’t got any cash on me.” and both expressions are correct. This extends to vocabulary as well, as I pointed out above.

Last, think about slang and natural expression. None of us, and I do mean none, speak slang or expression free. We all use idioms and metaphorical language on a daily basis to help express ideas or communicate thoughts from one person to another. And vocabulary developed on the internet, used with appropriate grammar is no different from using an established idiom from the 17th century.

All of this taken together gives us, as I said, a robust, changeable language that is not constricted by the need to prove what is correct or what is right. As long as listeners can understand clearly what is being meant by the speaker, it is correct and proper English, no matter where it comes from.

I’m done ranting now. Thanks for reading.

Muxtape

This morning, while browsing Twitter, I noticed that both Warren Ellis and Casey McKinnon posted links to Muxtape, which I had never heard of.

Being the social media junkie that I am, I immediately dropped everything and rushed over to make a new account. Muxtape is…well, it’s got potential. A lot of potential. But it is also very much a work in progress.

Essentially, each user is asked to make a mixtape by uploading up to 12 Mp3s. That playlist is then posted under a unique URL which can be favorited by other users and which will play the songs listed when clicked. That part is unequivocably awesome.

The downside is that, other than stumbling upon random mix tapes, or being pointed directly to one, there is no real way to find any given user’s mix. There is no search and no tagging (at least, not yet) so it really is luck of the draw as to whether or not you will like the mix you choose to play. Further, the website notes that by uploading a song the user is agreeing that they have the requisite permissions to upload the song in question. And while this protects the site, it does little for the users confidence that the site is legal, especially in this litigious age.

Having said all that, the site is fun. It manages to put a little of the spark back into discovering new music. As friends create their own accounts and send out links, it re-caputres a little of that feeling we all had when a friend would hand us a new mixtape, scratchy sound, hand-written label and all. And that is always a good thing.

Smiley.muxtape.com

Sculpey

Several weeks (months?) ago I picked up a brick of Sculpey at the art supply store. I had no real ideas for using it in mind, it just seemed like something fun to play with. (Yeah, I know, I can justify expensive polymer clay, but not Legos. It just…well, it makes sense to me.) Since then, I have played with it a lot, but, with the exception of making a base to support an old pocket watch, thereby turning it into a miniature clock, I have not made anything worth keeping. Or blogging about.

So I’m trawling the internet for ideas. First and foremost in the search is Flickr’s Sculpey tag. The only problem here is that 90% of the photos seem to be of jewelry people have made from various Sculpey products. And while I have nothing against these sorts of projects, they’re not really what I’m looking for.

I know I would like to do some sort of sculpture.

In fact I have a fantasy (not like that pervert) of being able to sculpt a designer toy. I’m a huge fan of all the art toys that have come out in the past few years, things like those designed by Touma and Tokidoki. One of my longstanding favorite series is the Vimobots by Mimoco.

Even a lot of the independent artists and illustrators I like are getting into the act.

And that’s what I would like to do. Really. No joke. I just think that is a really cool form of art that has come into its own in the past couple of years and something I would like to try. But I like inspiration and technique. The latter I can learn, the former though…well, that’s where trawling the internet comes in. So I guess, for now, it’s back to fishing and hoping that inspiration will rise up from the murky depths of the web.

Legos

Last weekend, my friend’s little boy came around for an afternoon while my friend played rugby. The boy and I played Nintendo for a while (Super Mario Galaxy, MarioKart 64, and Pokemon Snap for those who care) and then we started in on the Legos.

We were soon joined by my friend and the three of us sat and played with the Legos for an hour or so, making spaceships and then blowing up each others ships. The child won, of course, but it’s amazing how much my friend and I enjoy playing Legos with him.

Ok, I’ll say it: I love Legos. I always have and can guess that I always will. They were my favorite toy as a child and, as I related above, I still enjoy tinkering with them.

But I don’t have any. I don’t have kids and my niece and nephew live too far away for me to justify buying tons to keep in my house. More than that, I can never make myself buy any for me. There are just too many other things vying for my paycheck that are (marginally) more important. Like healthcare. And rent.

Enter my find of the week – Lego Digital Designer. The Designer is a piece of software designed by Lego that lets you build, virtually, in the computer, anything you could build in the real world using Lego blocks. Admittedly, the program can not provide the same visceral, tactile thrill of putting things together with your hands, but it’s a good substitute for when there are no blocks available.

So, if you’re like me, a childless thirty-something with no nieces or nephews in close enough proximity to spoil and you have a jones for the toys of your childhood, check out the builder. It’s not the real thing, but it’s close.

CandyBlogging: M&M’s Razzberry Chocolate

My wife sighed in exasperation. “How much are you going to buy?” She looked pointedly at the large, plastic bag in my hand, already filled near to bursting.

“Just a little more. They have all these new flavors!” I got a second bag and started to fill it. My wife sighed again and pointed at one of the bulk containers lining the wall of the M&M store. “Well, at least get some of those. For me.”

Some of those turned out to be M&M’s Razzberry Chocolate. We had stopped inside the M&Ms World, Las Vegas, mainly to see what all the fuss was about and maybe to pick up a souvenir or three. And the store did not disappoint in that regard. There were t-shirts and pens, keychains and snowglobes. But the highlight, for both of us, was the row of bulk candy dispensers on the second floor. Each color got its own container, ranged from light to dark and back to light for the peanut M&M’s on the far right. In between the milk chocolate and peanut candies were several containers with the newer flavors – dark chocolate, almond, crunchy, and the like.

Including the raspberry candies. We filled up a quarter bag with raspberry, then added a few colors of dark chocolate for variety before tying off the sack and getting out of the store with our wallets still (mostly) intact.

Back at our hotel (the Paris Las Vegas, which was fantastic, and an excellent place to stay) we opened one back and stuck the other in a suitcase to bring back to Japan. We just happened to open the one with the raspberry ones in it.

Like all M&M’s, the raspberry ones melt in your mouth (go on, say it: not in your hand!) releasing the chocolate after the candy shell is gone. The raspberry ones are a little tart and not quite as sweet as the plain M&M’s, making them a welcome relief after scarfing a handful of green ones. The chocolate is the same commercial grade Mars Inc. has been using for decades and they have the same old candy coating, but the addition of the artificial fruit flavor is quite nice. They are, all in all, a welcome addition to the line and a nice treat. Here’s hoping Mars adds a dark chocolate orange to the line sometime soon.

As a side note: At one of the staff member’s recommendation, I also grabbed a bag of the new mint crispy chocolate M&M’s, which were unavailable in bulk. The staff guy said they tasted just like Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies, and he was right.

It’s Not the House, but the Furnishings

As my friend said, “it’s not that big a house.” And it’s not. Graceland, as a home, does not seem that big – it’s not a castle, it’s not a mansion, it’s not really even a manor.

But it never had to be. Because the man who owned it, who made the name of the house part of the American lexicon made it huge. The tour director tells you that Elvis had things added, changed, re-built, torn down, and resurrected, and always, always, in ther service of his family and friends rather than himself.

Which is not to say that the King did not indulge himself, he did. The areas for keeping peacocks and other animals, as well as using an old storage room as a shooting range, these tell of a man well used to getting his way and to doing anything he wanted. But the greater fact is that he build rooms for his parents, his cousins, his daughter, his friends.

He provided areas for offices and bedrooms and play space. There was music everywhere, along with the semi-famous t.v.s and odd shag carpeting.

And it seems obvious, after wandering through the grounds, that there was never any need for anything bigger, for anything grander because nothing, nothing at all, would have been able to contain the King any better because it was not the physical limitations of the farm that kept him in, rather it was the bounds of family and friendship that constrained him to Memphis and thus to Graceland.

See more progress on: Graceland

Danny Boy

My phone rang. I jumped up to answer, more excited than I should have been, probably, but I had just moved to Seattle and getting phone calls was still a rare thing.

Especially on a Friday evening.

“What are you doing?” The voice on the other end belonged to my best friend and one of only two people I knew in town.

“Watching t.v.”

“Get dressed. We’re going to the pub?”

“Where?” I asked but he had already hung up.

Half an hour later we were met at the door by a young woman with a pleasant Irish lilt to her voice, and whether it was fake or genuine I could not say.

She led us through a dark corridor and seated us at a small table near a stage. Menus came and were ordered from; beers with exotic names came and were drunk. We were joined by others, men and women my friend knew from work, and our table turned into a party rather quickly.

Soon, the house band took the stage, performing a set list of standard Irish songs. We sang along with Danny Boy and Whisky in the Jar and anything else we knew. We made friends. Phone numbers were exchanged.

And then, suddenly, I was living in Seattle with a crew of friends, a hangout, and a phone that never stopped ringing.

See more progress on: The Owl N Thistle Irish Pub

Did it! Kinda.

The results came in yesterday and, congratulations me, I passed the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, level 3.

What’s bothering me is that I just barely passed. 65% cumulative when I had been hoping and expecting to get closer to 75% or 80%. Essentially, after a full year of studying and working at the language, my test scores were up by 6%.

I don’t know quite how to feel about this other than to say that studying on my own just isn’t working. So now I’m thinking about hiring a Japanese teacher and getting deep into the books again, but I am frustrated.

Still, we soldier on, right?

See more progress on: learn to speak Japanese better

A review of Burano: Burano, in the Summer

We arrived on a hot, sweaty, summer day in August. We had taken the water bus from Venice, crowded and suffocating inside, breezy and close on the decks, and were ready for something to eat and something to drink from the second we disembarked.

The colors of the island grew out of the green water in a rush, rising between the swells and bounces of the bus. The string of brightly painted buildings wrapped itself around the islands in an intricate pattern of canals and bridges, mirroring, in a way, the lace the island is famous for.

Legend has it that the colors helped fishermen to see their houses from the decks of their boats, giving them a sense of comfort and security as they went about their tasks. Walking amidst the houses and shops, this one green, this one pink, that one pale blue, a visitor can imagine the tranquility available in such a place. The island is quiet and relaxed and completely over-run by tourism.

All the shops sell lace, most of which is no longer made on the island, and far too much of which is designed as souveniers rather than material for pillows or trim or curtains. And far too many of the shops contain no public restrooms, nor decently priced, decently edible food.

However, the atmosphere, the photogenic nature of the island more than makes up for these deficiencies; the park that fronts the landing docks makes a pleasant place to relax and to take an afternoon out from a busy tour schedule or rush to sightsee.

(As a side note, one of the more interesting sights is the nearly flat island across the canal from Burano proper, on which stands the ruins of an old church, the spire of which can be seen from the bus stop.)

We arrived, we walked around, shutters clicking and euros jingling in pockets. We ate and laughed and bought postcards to be sent to friends across the globe. We wondered and read in our tourbooks, we wandered and guessed at meanings. We relaxed and wished we could stay.

See more progress on: Burano

Switched

During the past month I have successfully refurbished an older (2003) eMachines box. I removed Windows and installed “Gusty” Ubuntu Linux and assorted software to re-make the machine into a Linux powered media pc.

I am using Miro for television and video podcasts, Audacity for audio recording, Skype for phone calls, and Ubuntu’s native software for CD and Mp3 playback.

This is an easy, fun, project, and I have been enjoying the results so much that my next computer, someday, will be a linux box from the ground up (as in, I’ll build it myself). For anyone who is as sick and tired of Windows as I was, I highly recommend switching to Linux.

See more progress on: Switch to linux

Why I want to go to Graceland

“I’m going to Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee. I’m going to Graceland.” – Paul Simon, ‘Graceland’

My uncle is, unquestionably, one of the world’s biggest Elvis fans. He has all the albums (on CD of course), the DVDs of Elvis’ movies, action figures. He even has a velvet Elvis hanging on his wall.

My uncle is also Down Syndrome.

As a child, I just accepted that he was different and moved on, the way kids do. As an adult, I find myself increasingly interested in what makes my uncle tic. What makes him so completely fascinated by Elvis (and comic books, but this is about Graceland)?

Another Aunt and Uncle, ones much closer, both geographically and emotionally, took my uncle to see Graceland a few years ago. When I met up with my uncle afterward and asked him about it, he did not say much beyond “It was good. It was fun.” But my Aunt and Uncle told me that he was beyond ecstatic. He was energetic and talkative and showed a curiosity far beyond his usual remove.

And that makes me want to go. I’m not sure what I’m really looking for: an insight into my uncle? A bond with him? Or just to satisfy my own curiosity. The fact remains, I want to see Graceland.

See more progress on: Graceland

Switch

Next month, I may be inheriting an older Windows machine and I think I would like to set it up as a Linux media center.

I have been considering the various flavors of Linux and have yet to make a decision, but I have decided to go with a media-rich system. The only trouble is, I have very little experience playing with OSes. I have built websites and worked with a number of different kinds of programs, but this will be my first attempt at going into the guts of an OS to make it do exactly what I want.

I’m a bit nervous, but I’m also looking forward to it. Wish me luck.

See more progress on: Switch to linux

Life in the Big Wide World

A friend recently asked how living in Japan was going.  I answered that it was good and I gave him the same answer I give everyone.  I said that life was good.  Mayumi and I are doing well; we’re planning a vacation soon and house hunting on the weekends.  I’m pondering career options.  We’re semi-seriously talking about buying a dog.  The usual.

And I realized that none of that had anything to do with living in Japan.  It was all just…living.

None of the issues I’m dealing with at the moment are exclusive to this country.  There is an argument to be made, I suppose, that house hunting in Seattle or Berlin must be different from house hunting here, but I’m not buying it.  Those differences must be superficial at best because the desire to have a safe and secure haven, to have a home is a universal constant, isn’t it?  As are the desires for a family, for a job one enjoys, possibly even for children, or at least a dog to obey one’s every command.

What is shocking, to me, is that I don’t know when that changed.  When this life I have ceased to be an adventure, living in a foreign land, pretending it was any more or less bizarre than anywhere else I’ve been and became a more grown-up adventure, navigating the future with others welfare entwined with my own.  With responsibilities beyond paying my tab at the bar and ideas beyond plotting the next boys night out.

And yes, I know it has been happening gradually, for the last five years, if not longer.  And yes, I know I have noticed it and forgotten and noticed and commented on this a few times over those five if not longer years.  But I have never had it encapsulated in such a way before.

I no longer live in Japan.  I just live my life.  In Japan.

And I’m ok with that.

Tags: leftfrom seattle, real life as opposed to my imagined life, grown-up thoughts, lessons from the master

Searching for Reasons

Several people seem to have followed the move to Tumblr as a single place in which to read all my collected postings and doings around the internet.  However, there have been some complaints as to the dual nature of the posts:  the actual posts and essays vs. the one line tweets and links.  So, I have split them up.

For the time being and until it changes again, posts, essays, articles, and anything else longer than one or two sentences will be cross-posted to smiley.tumblr.com.

All one line bookmarks, song recommendations, tweets, jaikus, and whatever else, will be cross-posted to smiley.jaiku.com.

In the meantime, I have received more than a few queries as to why this blog has yet to be updated with a meaningful post and whatever happened to that whole 25 – 30 thing anyway?

And the answer is, well, two things:  one, I had originally intended to write the stories as close to the truth as possible, only changing names and distinguishing features, and two, I got sidetracked.

The first part is the more easily explainable, if not the easier to understand.  Basically, it became too painful in some cases and too embarrassing in others to write the stories I wanted to write.  There are too many people who would know exactly who and when I was writing about, even with disguises and name changes, and that could be unfortunate for a lot of people, myself included.  In addition, some events I had thought I was well past turned out to be very painful, still, in the act of writing them down.  I found that I had, and have, no desire to post what I have written (which is a fair bit, actually).

I’m not sure what I will do with it all yet, whether it gets re-written into semi-autobiographical fiction, or if I just figure to hell with it all and post it as is.

In the meantime, there is good old excuse number two.  I got sidetracked.  While all this non-blogging was happening, I started working on a novel, longhand, in a notebook.  It is slow going, but going very well.  I think I might actually have some idea of where it is headed…but it has surprised me once or twice already.  Once the longhand draft is finished, I’ll do a proper first draft on the computer and then we’ll see where we’re at.

(I’m using a trick called zero-drafting.  The longhand version is sloppy, uses telling instead of showing, and is all in first person.  The point is to get dialogue and basic plot points down, rather than working on details or nuances.)

So, yeah, that’s that.  Thanks for being patient and don’t worry, there will be stories on this site again, eventually.

Keep Up

Just a quick note:  I have a new site up at smiley.tumblr.com.  This new site is a Tumble Log, which means, basically, that almost everything I do on the web, whether it is photos, an essay, random links, whatever, is sent to and re-posted on my tumble log.

The site is hosted by Tumblr.com; from the front page:  “Tumblelogs are like blogs with less fuss.”

The RSS feed for the tumble log is here:  link.

Apologies

Well, after having managed to post almost daily for 2006, I think I’m at a record low for the number of posts on this blog so far this year.

The only thing I can offer by way of explanation is that I have been doing a lot of writing, just not on this project.  I have been writing and submitting like a madman, although there is very little progress to report as of yet.

I hope to get back on track writing some essays (including the Twenty-five to Thirty stories) soon.  In the meantime, just, uh be patient please.