Two Minutes

Two minutes apart. April 22 of this year.

CoolIris - Very cool

Though there's a lot to like about Adobe's Photoshop.com, the king of the online slideshow has to be cooliris.

Here's my slideshow, drawn from my Facebook gallery. Simple, elegant. Speaks for itself.

Your Next Netflix Streamer: "Everyone Says I Love You"

This movie,. "Everyone Says I Love You" (1996) is another Woody Allen love poem to New York--and this time to Paris as well. Allen's films after his early comedies nearly all have some deep homage to some director. In this case, its Vincente Minelli or maybe Stanley Donnen. It is without a doubt an embrace of another American treasure, pianist, composer and arranger Dick Hyman, who worked with all the great bands of the 30s, 40s and fifties. Hyman is the driver for this romp. Indeed the main reason for watching is it is a singing/dancing musical with a delightful selection of 50s standards. Just one by Rogers and Hart, but they're all of that ilk. When characters just burst into song in a store or hospital and everyone around jumps into intricate choreography, what's not to like? There's no one in the film that actually sings well--by movie standards--but in my mind the songs are just all the more accessible.

The primary singers aren't great--just cute and fitting--but the Helen Miles Singers make up a teriffic background chorus. They and the estimable Dick Hyman's arrangements and incidental score lift every performance. Graciela Daniele is the choreographer and has fun with the numbers, even though some of the principals would be better to stand still and let the professionals dance around them. A young Ed Norton looks particularly clumsy but is still endearing.

I somehow only saw parts of it over the last dozen years and watched the whole thing last night with a smile on my face almost the whole time. Aside from Allen's usual driver-of-drama, "The heart wants what the heart wants," and his lamentable attitude that marriage is just a forever temporary convenience (he laughably says at one point, 'I'm not that guy'), the story looks at "love" from a lot of different angles--almost completely as an excuse to get to the next song.

The film features a huge name ensemble cast led by Alan Alda, Goldie Hawn and Woody Allen.
Ensemble parts by Natasha Lyonne, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Tim Roth, Ed Norton, Drew Barrymore. Billy Crudup, Itzhak & Navah Perlman, David Ogden Stiers and many others make cameos. A lot of fun, a lot of great tunes rolling around in your head afterwards.

1. Just You, Just Me - Helen Miles Singers, Ed Norton
2. My Baby Just Cares for Me - Natasha Lyonne, Helen Miles Singers, Ed Norton
3. Recurrence/I'm a Dreamer [Instrumental] - Olivia Hayman
4. Makin' Whoopee - Timothy Jerome, Helen Miles Singers
5. Venetian Scenes/I'm Thru With Love - Woody Allen
6. All My Life - Julia Roberts
7. Just You, Just Me [Salsa Version]
8. Cuddle up a Little Closer - Billy Crudup, Sanjeev Ramabhadran
9. Looking at You - Alan Alda
10. Recurrence/If I Had You [Instrumental] - Tim Roth
11. Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think) - Patrick Crenshaw, Helen Miles Singers
12. Chiquita Banana - Christy Carlson Romano
13. Hooray for Captain Spaulding/Vive le Capitaine Spaulding - Helen Miles Singers
14. I'm Thru With Love - Goldie Hawn
15. Everyone Says I Love You - Helen Miles Singers

Disc or stream? Stream or Disc?

To quote myself (Rick, this is for you): "We are on the cusp of a transition matrix." Meaning, the digital convergence of the Internet, the networked television and widely available and inexpensive streaming content is nearly rivaling what we can purchase and own on optical disc.

So are we still buying movies on disks? I'm tapering off. It seems like most every movie I have (over 400) on my shelf are available on Netflix--many streaming--and Hulu, etc. And I've this pile of disks that are in the "to watch" list, which doesn't seem to get any smaller. How many of these that I have already watched will I watch again (aside from a relatively small handful of true favorites)?

It seems that more and more often I catch myself or the family watching a movie on cable or the computer and say, "We have that on disk" and am met with a shrug (even to myself).

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You can't really dismiss the streaming stuff due to quality any more. Sure, you may still have to suffer the occasional buffer/stutter but that's going to be the first of all issues resolved by the providers and hardware and network (am I leaning away from "net neutrality" here? No, but that's a different topic altogether). Even YouTube is now touting 1080p resolutions and they're providing commerical streams as well as the Niagra of amateur offerings. And it's all legal, too. Movie content owners have seen what happened to the Music industry. They're not fighting it, they're going with the flow--or trying to own the flow. If piracy is in your bent then there's an even bigger hose to drink from.

What that means for our loved Optical Discs is that when it comes to the commitment of purchase, I'm just down to the Really Big movies. Kaboom movies where you want the uncompressed sound and really optimum viewing experience (i.e., without the aforementioned apologies of buffer/stutter/compression), or in cool packaging--like the Star Trek Target disk where the disks are stored in the Saucer Section of the Enterprise!--or rare small ones that won't be available on-demand for a while (i.e., "The Wages of Fear", or early seasons of "Fringe"). A very few disc releases have good extra content disks which may or may not be available from Netflix (usually no).

And. of course, there's always the need to complete a series started long ago, before we got to this "cusp" between "own" and "use". Which brings me to the point of this ramble.

Harry Potter &THBP: buy? Netflix first and then decide? I've got the others in a mish-mash of DVD, HD-DVD (yeah, I'm that guy) and Blu-Ray. So there's the "complete the 'collection'" argument. And potentially it could be like Star Wars, where once a decade you want to pull out all the disks and re-watch them all in order. Or do I wait until juuust before The Deathly Hallows comes out in theaters for a reprise before waiting in line opening night?

As a complete aside, yes, I would like to rip all these 400 movies to my network store, but even letting them run overnight that's a year or more of very organized effort. The Ektachrome slide trays I have stacked in the family room attest to my will on such endeavors. To say nothing of the Terabytes of disk that would in fact pay for years of Netflix subscription. Ah, the trevails of the 21st century.

How cheap can a Win7 laptop be? Try $250! Schwing!

I'm now using a new and rediculously cheap Acer notebook. It is an Extensa 5230-2177. I got it for $250 at BestBuy. Specs are pretty sweet, especially if you consider that this is netbook pricing for a full-service laptop:

15" screen /2.2G Celeron 900 /x64 chip and OS /2G DDR2 RAM/148G 4600 RPM HD /
3-USB ports on two hubs /a PCMCIA-II slot / 802.11n-draft 2.4G wireless /and a screen-bezel webcam.


This ain't no stripper. The "Windows Experience Score", a new metric introduced by Windows 7, is just 3.3 (on a 1-7.9 scale), but that's determined by the lowest subsystem score, not an average. The low-end is the graphics subsystem, Intel "Mobile 4" on-chip (GM45 probably, but I haven't dug in to find out for sure--Intel's chipset identification utility refuses to run in Windows 7, though they claim support). The rest of the system is snappier, 5.5 score on the CPU, 5.4 on the RAM, both respectable.

As for how this snuck out of BestBuy for $250 when lesser computers (i.e., every one of their 10" screen Netbooks by any vendor) all went for $100 more, I'm guessing this was a "pre-black-Friday" loss-leader. I found it on the BestBuy website quite by accident and they didn't have it on display when I went to the store an hour later (no online orders). I had to ask the clerk for it, and he hadn't heard of it. I told him the website said they had it in stock and he went looking. The next cheapest laptop was also an Acer, for $329--and it didn't have the specs of this one! When the clerk brought out the factory-sealed box, it was as-advertised. I suppose I was supremely lucky as today I look through all the stores in my area (6 within 50 miles) and only Marina (Salinas) is listed as having any. Perhaps they only had the one yesterday and I got it? Google it and you find folk selling it from $300 (SEA) to $400(ORL).

I can imagine it would be down into OLPC price range if you could get it w/o Win7 (Home Premium version!). It has a decidedly "Target" button feel over the MacBookPro's "Nordstrom" ergo that I've become accustomed to, but it is very serviceable. My biggest complaint is that the trackpad buttons to "mouseclick" are extremely loud. There's a big spring under them, quite obviously, and it sounds like a castanete. It's not thin, but that's only noticable if you have a crowded backpack.

iPhone development will have to move to our iMac, but I probably wasn't going to get into that anytime real soon. There are presently other fish to fry.

Some interesting notes are that the Acer came pre-installed with Adobe AIR and Acrobat.com AIR app, as well as Acrobat Reader, but it inexplicably did not have Flash pre-installed. Had to run the downloader/updater on just the second website I went to (after Google).

I should also point out that on our 2.4Ghz Athlon Phenom quad-core HTPC (see previous posts) Windows 7 is pretty snappy, but on this single-core 2.2G Celeron (512Mb L1 cache) it has some significant pauses--especially before throwing up an Aero dialog box. Its using main memory (800MB of the 2G avail) for the video, so the DMA controller has to do a lot when windows are swapping around. This machine isn't for gaming at all, though it does support DirectX 10. The expectations of the graphics system isn't high. It plays HD full-screen from Vimeo and Hulu w/o stuttering and will probably handle that even better when I replace the router with an "N-spec"
[Update 11/16: did get the "N" router as the venerable Linksys WRT54G started flaking out. More on that later, but the laptop loves it for streaming video!].

The 160G disk has only 148G formatted. But at least Acer doesn't squirrel away 10% of your HD for a system restore volume as other vendors do. I believe that a 500G upgrade will be pretty easy. However, following Markham's Computer Axoim #2: "Never buy disk storage until you need it because it will always be cheaper in the future", I'll wait until I'm down to low double-digits in free GBs before I make that purchase.

Other nits on the Acer are when you switch from battery to plug-in, it gives an Awful alert, probably not-unlike other versions of Windows have done when you're below the sleep threshold and the system is about to die on battery. My daughter's old ThinkPad did that just the other day. It sounds like an 80s Casio keyboard version of a french police siren. This is probably controlled by a setting, but I did jump when I plugged the laptop back-in after running on the battery all morning.

The battery experiment went from a first-charge (overnight, sleeping computer) indicating 100% in the tray to running on the battery with screen all the way bright, wireless activity, a 2.5" 7200rpm Hitachi USB2 disk, and a thumb drive all active. I got the 5% notice at almost exactly 2.5h after unplugging and waking-up the computer. After 10 minutes of being on the wire, the meter shows 17%, a good charge rate a 6-cell LiOn. I stopped watching after that. I'll look at it again after I've exercised the battery a little and am not using the external HD to load up the internal disk.

So color me happy. Double bonus of retail therapy win and new computer. I'll report more as it burns in. But even if it lasts just a year (the screen hinges look particularly lightweight and vulnerable)the amortization is still less than a computer that would last 3 years and cost $750, as was the case for the last laptop I bought, a Compaq.

Now what to do about Kasia (inheritor of the long-demised aforementioned Compaq), because she is once again the only one in the family laptopless. There is this Toshiba Satellite L455-S597 at Best Buy.... Ah, the problems of 21st century middle-class America.

Toshiba's new TV has a 218GFlop PS3 processor inside

Full disclosure, in conjunction with new FTC regulations regarding blogging about products. Toshiba, its affiliates and subsidiaries in no way influenced this posting with an offer to give me a

CELL REGZA 55X1

LCD television set in exchange for my views on this most awesome and excellent innovation to home theater viewing. Of course, if they were to give me one, post facto, I wouldn't have to report it nor would I be required to revise this review--either up, nor down. I think you know what I'm saying, Toshiba.



But onto the facts:

First, there is a seriously awesome CPU in this TV set.

It is the Cell Processor, a new version of the one co-developed with Sony and IBM and which currently powers the PS3 for Sony and IBM's server line. Here (in Japanese) are all the details about it.

It has 218GFlops...in a TV!! Wow. Why all that power? So that it can use the 3TB (!!) of DVR storage in its external dongle to present up to 40 split-screens showing scene selections to jump right into a recording. Or up to eight simultaneous projections of video. Wow! It's like that screen in Back to the Future 2 where Marty's kid comes in and asks the TV for "Channel 34, 126, 22, 44, the music channel and the news". Oh, and one or more of those channels could be YouTube, in HD using an Opera browser co-developed with Toshiba.

I'm telling you, man, this TV just Rocks! Available in December in Japan, and not soon enough in the USA. You have got to get yourself one of these.


Okay, I'm waiting, Toshiba.

What I learned at the DMV

Not me, I can't take credit for this lovely list.
A friend of mine, who is a bit of a curmudgeon but who has a keen eye for the absurd, sent this to me.

I had to go to the DMV to renew my license this year and did you know?

1) You are required to stop at a red light!

2) At 8 sided red signs that read STOP, you are required to stop.

3) You are not allowed to drive down a sidewalk.

4) Right of way rules means that the car on the right has the right-of-way even if they are turning left.

5) If slowing or stopping your car will prevent an accident, it is saver to use the brakes than honk the horn.

6) When merging onto the freeway the freeway traffic has the right of way.

7) The flashing lights on the back of a vehicle indicate a plan to turn in the direction of the flashing light. Emergency signals do not mean that you can choose at the last second.

8) If you are blind you are not allowed to drive faster than the speed limit.

9) Parking at colored curbs is not racist.

10) Do not open the driver’s side door unless it is safe to do so.

11) Don’t make gestures to other drivers.

12) If you drive faster than other traffic you will have to keep passing other cars.

13) You must use your headlights if it is dark out.

14) If you are stopped by a police officer hang up your cell phone and turn off the radio.

15) You can not be a designated driver unless there are at least 2 people in the car.

I hope that this information helps you in your day to day driving. My trip to the DMV went really well. I spent 3 hours and managed to get my picture taken for a new license. I did find a California Driver Handbook written in English of all things and read it several times as I was waiting. The people at the DMV were personable and apparently received a 15% raise this year. Most of the people at the DMV were wearing SEIU polo shirts. Some may have had an ACORN for distinguished service on their lapel. I didn’t actually see this.