Weblog Archive - March-July 2000
2000/07/23 10:40	My First Sony. You think it looks huge here? You should have seen it with the battery pack... Sunday Morning "Newspaper In Bed" Technology Reaction Dept.: Most of the hardware in my home A/V setup is Sony-branded. Every CD player I've owned since the D-5 portable has been a Sony, and Amy's laptop is a Vaio. A book about Sony's industrial design labs is on my wish list at Amazon. Clearly I'm not a member of the ever-more-popular Sony-Bashing Sewing Circle. But still I have to wonder what the hell they're thinking when they try to cram ATRAC3 into everything they build. The Memory Stick Walkman and the Vaio Music Clip? Great concepts, great form factors, geek-chic tech to the nth degree...but you have to convert your MP3 library to ATRAC3 before you can dump it into either of the players. The MD Disc Camcorder? Dweebo heaven, 40x digital zoom, bits go straight from the CCD to MD, instant in-camera editing and near-infinite still storage capability...but you can't do anything useful with your video once it's in the camera, because it's encoded in the Sony-only "Video MD" format (MPEG2 video+ATRAC audio). Unrelated Technology Dept.: Behold the dawn of the Color Palm Vx, available only at Best Buy. See what happens when you teach the pasteup guys how to use PhotoShop? Earth to Sony: folks, it's okay (even cool) to come up with proprietary formats if they actually have a purpose. F'rinstance -- I'm down with the Memory Stick. Yes, it's Yet Another Digital Storage Medium, but the "cute" size gives it some unique advantages (though its incorporation in that $800 electric picture frame counts as points against). But ATRAC? It boys you nothing. Why are you trying to shove this stupid codec into every piece of audio hardware you make? I'd own all these toys by now if not for this inane obsession. The first time I played with the MD Camcorder, I swear I felt stirrings. But what good is a digital camcorder if you can't dump the video onto your computer and fiddle with it? What good is an "MP3 Player" that makes you recode all your MP3s before you can play them? (That one verges on bait-and-switch, like calling a VCR a "LaserDisc Player" because it can play tapes of your laserdiscs.) You'd think that by now, a quarter-century after the dawn of the VHS-vs.-Beta wars, Sony would have figured this out: license fees good, hardware sales better.
2000/07/22 21:55	Fanboy In Tha Hooouuuussse Dept.: I've been reading comic books since I was six, but I was never really a Marvel man. My parents' old house in Albuquerque had a big cardboard box of comics in the utility room, chock full of Archie and Richie Rich and Disney and DC stuff, but not a single Marvel. I distinctly remember stumbling across some copy of the The Mighty Thor at one point and deciding that it wasn't even a real comic book -- all that action exploding out of the cover and exclamation points everywhere. So it's with no little surprise that I admit that I think the X-Men movie is actually a lot of fun, in fact it's probably the best movie based on a comic book that I've ever seen. Not like that's saying too much, at least as far as Marvel movies are concerned anyway. Filmmakers have always tried to pare the Marvel stuff down to just origin tales and action, when the real appeal of the books was always cemented by angsty, soap-operaish lives of the characters. I don't know how they got Brian Singer to do the film (I still only know him by The Usual Suspects), but it was the right move. The whole thing is played without a trace of the self-referential irony that plagued, say, the Batman movies. The knowing winks in those flicks always yanked me back to the real world, where I couldn't help but realize that I was in a theatre watching something that, if I thought about it, was actually kinda stupid. None of that here, not a smirk or a hint of "ha ha, isn't this wacky...you know, this movie is based on a comic book after all, so we don't really want to take it seriously." Having everyone in the movie act like they buy all the absurd things taking place makes it a lot easier for you to buy them too, I guess. The movie looks great, the casting is solid (way to go on whoever handled Hugh Jackson's hair and all the stuff they smeared on Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), and the script captured a lot of the characterization that I liked about the book back when I was reading it. Nibble Say: Bring On The Inevitable X-Sequels! After this one, I'd sit through a Power Pack movie.
2000/07/05 22:50	This "Weblog" Looks More Like A Charade Every Day Dept.: Poked my head out to let y'all know that the Drive site has received some major upgrades, including a separate section on video releases as well as acres of new review links. I'd also like to share that I now own THREE distinct versions of BT's Movement In Still Life album, and I'm staring down #4 (the UK 2CD that came out this past Monday) as I type this. I love the guy like a brother and highly respect (his|Nettwerk's) decision to pad the long-delayed US disc with new tracks while issuing it as a mid-pricer, but damn buddy, the multiple release thing is sooooo ooooollllddd!! MP3 piracy looks better every day. C'mon Brian, don't drive me to the sidelines until Complete BT 1995-2025 comes out...
2000/06/10 17:45	Sweet Holy Mother Of Christ Dept.: What does it take to get me to update this page again? It takes Big Mouth Billy Bass, that's what. Before today, I never laid eyes on the thing. But in the space of six hours I've seen them at Fry's, in three different stores at the mall, and in a commercial for some Chiropractic joint on the Soulbeat station here in Oakland. Bobby McFerrin -- from Spontaneous Inventions to a singing fish. Lordy, lordy, lordy, but his momma must be proud. Also: the bowels of the CA DMV finally spat out a plate for the Civic. Dig the wiggy, discordian sentiment. (Should have been JAMS 23T but traded the T for the background image.)
2000/04/30 21:10	Spring Break Arrives: Well, documentation of the trip that Amy and I took to New Mexico and Nevada over Spring Break, anyway. Since we went to Area 51 instead of to Busch Gardens, I hope that you'll find it more interesting than you find your brother-in-law's vacation slides. In other news, father and TiVo are doing wonderfully, thank you. Aside from a brief fall off the wagon during last Wednesday's South Park, I haven't watched live TV since I installed the thing. All those little interludes (lunch, vacuuming) that used to prominently feature the TV blaring nothing in particular now feature the TV blaring things I actually wanted to see. (Okay, I deleted Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo before actually watching it, but the basic theory is sound.) Strangely, I can't seem to find any of the channels listed at TV Go Home. Guess I'm popping for that satellite dish next. Finally, if you have ever held any delusions that the British have ever contributed anything meaningful to world cusine, please allow expatshopping.com to clear your confused little mind. 1500 items in stock and not a single one I would put in my mouth at any price. Funny, I loved Lilt Soda when I was there with my friend Anne in the summer of '83; since then things have all gone horribly wrong! I blame the death of Diana Spencer.
2000/04/24 19:50	Nibble Did A Bad Bad Thing: Heaven, I'm in Heaven, yes, my TiVo has arrived! Bwa ha ha haaaa!! I knew I shouldn't have set my alarm clock to the Howard Stern show; he's been pumping hype about this wonder box deep into my brain when I'm at my most groggy and vulnerable. At the moment the thing's setting itself up and I'm making my list of shows that I never get to see, shows I never remember to watch, and shows I'm getting sick and tried of planning my time around. Let's see: to start it'll probably be Space Ghost: Coast To Coast, South Park, The Howard Stern Radio Show, and the Fox Sunday Night Futurama-to-Simpsons powerblock. And now I can get my Adam Carrolla fix seven days a week, with The Man Show and the MTV version of LoveLine supplanting the Sunday-to-Thursday LoveLine radio show. Oh, life is so sweet. And you, you lucky bastards, you get to hear me go on about it for a couple of weeks until I get sick of the thing and move on to some other new toy. Good thing I didn't feel like updating this page a couple of weeks ago when I bought my new Palm IIIc, huh?
2000/03/22 22:10	Is There Anybody Out There: Been a while since the last update, thanks in large part to a nice week-long vacation to New Mexico with a stopoff in Vegas on the way home. (Lost $100 at the hotel, won back $50 from two different slot machines at McCarran.) Damn, it's nice to be offline for a week. This trip will spawn a more detailed entry later, once I've had a change to scan in a few more photos, but for some reason I felt the urge to start with this teaser. My dad is UPS'ing my old Apple //e.
2000/03/06 21:00	Stimme der Energie: Apparently someone poked Kraftwerk with a big enough stick to coax them off their teutonic heinies; they've released a new single ("Expo 2000") and hired out a massive revamp of their web site that features some virtuoso Shockwave Flash interpretations of their music. (Excellent timing, as a copy of Autobahn arrived from CDNow today.)
2000/03/01 22:40	Long-Distance Static: I absolutely cannot explain why I love these things...maybe it's those late nights I had as a kid, surfing the AM band on my Mom's Grundig portable...but ReelRadio has more old Top 40 radio airchecks than you could listen to in a month. Can't get RealPlayer 7 to play any of the RA3.0 stuff, though.
Previously: Jan-Feb 2000