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.

Decorum, Outburst, Parry, Thrust, Riposte!

Today, in a fit of pique, I decided to parry with Salon.com and take a tilt a pop culture reporting. What an utter waste of time. To prove that it is thus, I "retweet" it here, to use the vernacular.

Decorum is dead! Long live the outburst! --at Salon.com

If this article had not been published, would it have made a noise? --my letter to the Editor
(anywhere else this would just be a feedback forum, but Salon pretends to be a print rag)

Why do I waste my time reading such dreck, and then compound it by writing to rail against it? And then pile insult on injury by reposting it here, spreading the virus without a sleeve to my sneeze? Because, dear reader, without it, the interwebs would implode from the vacuum.

Parade Laps at the Monterey Historic Races

Monterey Historics Porsche Club of America Parade Laps from Chris S Markham on Vimeo.

The Monterey Bay Region of the Porsche Club of America sponsored these two parade laps about the Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway during the mid-day break of the Rolex Monterey Historic Races, August 16, 2009. The video was taken from inside a 1959 Porsche 356 A Coupe. At the top of Turn 8, a Monterey County Sheriff deputy fell in behind me, with lights flashing. I really wish I had asked my Dad to turn the camera around--a once-in-a-lifetime shot being chased down The Corkscrew by a cop! There wasn't much high-speed as there were over 250 cars participating, but there was a lot of good cheer. But I couldn't help but think the motorcycle cops had it in for me....

The Maestro gets Domain Parked: One site, One story

HCP Research is Dead, Long Live HCP Research.com

I'm not a total wizard at reverse lookups and ICANN records, but it appears that the former home of Harry Pellow's HCP Research, once at http://hcpresearch.com/ has been re-registered and parked on or about 15 June of 2009, the very when the previous domain registration expired. Talk on the 356Talk web forum indicated that Harry's heir, Andrew, was alerted to the lapse too late. He found out on the 25th of June. I had raised the issue on 356Talk just two days prior. The site had been sniped by that time already, nothing to be done about it.

What this means for the availability of Harry's Books and Videos remains to be seen, but it likely doesn't bode well. They're listed on Amazon.com, but fulfillment has been spotty and the CD-ROM version...well, I don't get much feedback about it aside from the occasional reference to my Amazon review. But the website is definitely gone, and there's not much hope in reclaiming it for the 356 Faithful.

There are folk who fish for expiring domain registrations. They set up robots and get email notifications when domains expire. Then they re-register and set up some skeleton site that uses some of the terms that the site used to be known for (in search engines, exploting past glories). Sometimes the new owner is hoping to just get ad click throughs, other times to squat and hold the domain hostage until the previous owner realizes the mistake of their procrastination and has to buy it back from the new registrant at above market prices.

There's part of me that's loathe to point out that the website, though parked--and now having nothing to do with HCP Research--is alive. I don't want you to click through there, and I certainly don't want you to click on any links on the page. Because it puts money in the pocket of a cybersquatter and reveals nothing to you that you couldn't have found with a google of your own.

Who Owns HCP Research Now?
There are >6300 other domains registered to this particular server--and the company that owns it has 20,000 (yes, twenty thousand) domains more, indicating that it is indeed in a parking lot.

Below is the registrant info from a "whois" lookup & below that is a decoding for the curious.

• Registrant: privateregistrations.ws
  
• Private Registrations Aktien Gesellschaft
• CNR of Granby & Sharpe St.
• Suite K2134
• Kingstown kingstown, VC
• Domain Name: HCPRESEARCH.COM

"privateregistrations.ws" = What is ".ws", I hear you ask. Why, ".ws" stands for "Web Site", doesn't it? Suuuure.

You see, .ws is the Internet country code top-level domain for Samoa. It is administered by SamoaNIC, for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Samoa.

The .ws domain is an abbreviation for “Western Samoa”, the nation’s official name when two-letter country codes were standardized in the 1970s. ICANN restricts geographic use of ".org.ws", ".gov.ws", and ".edu.ws", but all other second-level .ws domains can be sold anywhere in the world. If it matters, this particular server is located in Portland, OR. But it doesn't. Matter. Because the web host has nothing to do with the domain registration. Except for an entry in some DNS servers translating the IP number of that humming server in Oregon to "hcpresearch.com" in your web browser.

"Private Registrations Aktien Gesellschaft" = This is like saying "Incorporated", in German. So this company does Private Registrations. It's the Swiss Bank Account of domain registrations. It has more than 26 thousand, and aside from some google hits on some of the registered porn sites (no big surprise), you're not going to find out a lot about this company.

"CNR of Granby & Sharpe St." = Corner of Granby & Sharpe streets. Yeah, that's supposed to be an address. Okay, so its a small town, and maybe Granby is a small street. Well, not really.
There are major banks on this street, as well as the Finance Ministry and the Telecom Ministry.
And in the same building, at Suite K059 (ground floor, no doubt) a very interesting little company, an Internet Service Provider and the islands' largest cell service provider, named Digicel SVG Limited. But that's just a co-incidence, because this drop-box registry parker doesn't need any kind of infrastructure in St. Vincents, just the right regulatory (i.e., non-taxed) infrastructure.

"Suite K2134" = Umm... That's a lot of numbers. Its a city, but not with 20-story skyscrapers. Okay, maybe a two-story. Which means its probably a mail drop and not an office. With forwarding...or not.

"Kingstown, Kingstown VC" = Kingstown is the largest town on St. Vincent, largest island in the Grenadine islands chain, part of the Carribean Islands being just west of Barbados and north of Grenada.

You know, it is fascinating that Google Maps has no street information for this thriving metropolis. I don't mean that it doesn't have Street View. I mean...no features. But check the satellite view, its a big city, with a doc for the expected cruise ships and everything.


View Larger Map

But you can't look up street addresses in Google Maps for this island. Hmmm.

So, as you would expect with anything Internet-shady, this is pretty well obfuscated, and unless I wanted to do a Neal Stephenson "Hacker Tourist" kind of thing, I don't think I'll ever find the bottom of this rabbit hole.

Gone, but is anything really gone on the internet?
That's not the end of this tale. privateregistrations.ws just has the "now" of HCP Research (and probably the future, too). But it doesn't have the past. That's available from The Internet Archive, which is just really a fantastic and under-rated resource. While google updates its cached web pages often, and now it reflects the "new look " of (nee) HCP Research, the Internet Archive has all the old pages that were developed and published by Harry Pellow.

To be very safe about it, I've snarfed off a copy of his Stories and Quizzes into PDF, which I can't publish here due to copyright, but they may be available in the future on the 356 Registsry website.

Here are the Internet Archive links to the Maestro's Stories from the old HCP Research Website. And the Maestro's Quizzes, too. All copyrighted by Harry Pellow, All Rights Reserved, Aktien Gesellschaft et al., not withstanding.

Long Live HCP Research, indeed.

Wireless A/V Audio is 7.1, uses new 5.1-5.8Ghz band

Reported on TWICE, an A/V marketing newsletter, manufacturer Focus Enhancements will debut a "Summit" multichannel wireless-audio technology for direct-to-customer release via distributor Aperion Audio in Q2 of '10.

The Summit line transmits uncompressed 48kHz/24-bit PCM over the air, using FEC, and uses the 5.1-5.8GHz U-NII band. The 23 channels in that band are non-overlapping and are an ITU standard for unlicensed use not interfering with the 802.11a/n wireless-network band.

Focus plans to upgrade the technology to deliver 96kbps PCM audio over the air in mid-2010.

Other features are spread-spectrum OFDM modulation, four-antenna tuning, dynamic frequency selection (automatic channel hopping), up to 10ms of interpolation to fill in dropped packets, and automatic speaker discovery and channel assignment for easy setup.

A

The King of Pop is dead, long live the King

10:38 AM mdk: Haven't been this sad since Britney shaved her hair.

10:38 AM csm: Because Cameron Diaz shaved hers in the tear-jerker "My Sister's Keeper" opening this weekend?

10:39 AM csm: Because Miley Cyrus said MJ was her inspiration?

10:39 AM csm: Because we'll never know where the other glove was now?

10:39 AM csm: Because Farah's posters will now be much more expensive?

10:40 AM csm: Because Farah and Ryan O'Neil never tied the knot before she died because she couldn't, as he requested of her, "Get out of that bed and get married"?

10:40 AM csm: Because now Neverland will have to become a museum and the sleep-overs we dreamed of in our youth will never happen?

10:41 AM csm: Because now Elvis will get a chance to punch MJ in the face for marrying his daughter?

10:41 AM csm: Because you'll have to get a refund for your tickets to the British shows?

10:42 AM csm: Because now, when you show up to work in a black sequined hat, short socks and one glove people will cry instead of smile?

10:42 AM csm: Because all that money spent on moonwalking lessons is wasted? Wasted, dammit! Wasted!!

10:43 AM csm: Because now a Charlie's Angel's reunion is as distant as a Beatles reunion?

10:43 AM csm: Because now Tito will have to sing "I'll be There" and it, somehow, just won't be the same?

10:44 AM csm: Because celebrities die in 3s, and with Ed MacMahon, Farrah, and MJ...Pauly Shore lives another day?

10:45 AM csm: Because Liz Taylor has added another soul to her devil's keychain of the dead and undead?

10:45 AM csm: Because we'll never know who Billy Jean's lover really was? (It was Quincy, it was always Quincy.)

10:47 AM csm: Because we'll be forced to watch interminable "Remembering Michael" shows ranging from Ellen to Oprah to primetime and even into late night?

10:47 AM csm: Because you just know Saturday Night Live is going to "go there". And it will be too soon. Way, way, too soon.

10:48 AM csm: Because Will Smith will have to play the "old MJ" in the biopic and his son will have to play "young MJ", and Jada Pinkett-Smith will be Janet and that will all be so wrong?

10:49 AM mdk: Don't make fun of the King of Pop!

10:49 AM mdk: Not today!

10:49 AM csm: The King of Pop is dead, long live the New King of Pop: http://www.tmz.com/2009/05/11/eminem-the-new-king-of-pop/

We're Outnumbered, 2:1, not Counting the Microwave

There are no CRTs in our house any longer. A few months ago I took the last ones to the electronics recycling center. Couldn't give away a 17" CRT on craigslist nor freecycle.

Actually, that's not quite true. There is one old G3 iMac DV/SE that is unplugged and on the floor waiting for a data dump (next to a Kodak slide projector, waiting for same). Nonetheless, even discounting the comatose iMac, I count the blinkers and the breathers and "we" are outnumbered. Our home has a 2:1 computer/human ratio. That is, if you do count smart phones and do not count the Roomba robot (nor DVR, MP3 players, Amana, Kenmore, et al.). Include anything with a microchip in the census and, well, that war was lost a decade ago, I'm sure. Today that would include picture frames and light bulbs in addition to clock radios and automobiles.

Back to the things with keyboards/pads, and I note that in the Great Platform War we're divided on our systems 3/3 PC v. Mac. It tips 4/3 to the Mac if you count my iPhone as the Youngest One's Samsung smart phone is neither. Cheryl & I have our Macs from work, and we've a flat-panel iMac (largely unused) in the family room. The third Win platform (apart from the girls' laptops) is the Media PC hooked to the big screen for movies and gaming (aka The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player), which is now running Win7 RC.

The shift to LCDs over CRTs was over before everyone in the house went to the blissful portability of a laptop. We also have 3 additional desktop PCs and their LCD screens unplugged and unused. While the girls shifted over to their laptops fairly readily, I believe it was the gradual decay of the desktop PCs--driven perhaps by malware?--that caused, one day, the switch to be left off. That, and unless you're gaming, or doing video-editing, there really isn't anything a laptop can't do that a desktop can't. Maybe the Youngest One would launch Hulu onto her 19" LCD desktop screen--but that's really a question of usable distance v. using the laptop's 5" smaller screen.

Three standalone inkjet printers tethered to those desktops and a flatbed scanner were replaced by one multifunction network printer last Xmas. You know, as I ponder it, the desktop as a USB printer host may have been the true anchor for those machines. Up until the network printer came online we were almost a "one person, one printer" household. I'd leave one desktop in the family room on with a shared USB printer, but the girls each had their own. Multiple printers, unless they're specialized (e.g., for photo printing, large format, duplex, etc.) aren't really economical. Especially if the host PC has to be on for them to work. Wireless network printing is the only way to fly.

As long as I'm describing the compute devices that don't have keyboards, I suppose I must include the Linksys/Cicsco NAS, with 2TB store--seemed like a good idea at the time, but has turned out to be a struggle. It doesn't appear that you can yet go DIY on a cheap NAS unless you hack the onboard linux kernel. Seems you only get a decent OS out of the box when you spend >$1k. The management UI is okay, but it just doesn't appear on the network from most devices. Interestingly, Win7 Media Player sees the media server library just fine, but Win 7 Media Center does not. Yep. Same machine, same network, same vendor. Different apps behaving differently.
From other Win systems or the Macs, only the FTP is available. The SMB/Wins hosts don't respond.

The sturdy WRT54G Wireless router has been serving yeoman duty, but is getting a bit long in the tooth. With Hulu in wide use in the house, and Netflix on Demand, the laptops and Media PC really need wireless-N. But what's surprising to me is that we have to have 10 ports open (and no, haters, the default "admin" is not the logon :^P ). The aforementioned laptops + Media PC + iMac, two smart phones w/wifi, our wireless "barn cam", and the printer. We had the barn cam port-forwarded to a DDNS server while the baby lambs were in the barn, but its been silent for a while. I'll have to set it up as a weathercam or something until it is next pressed into nursery duty.

I Hadn't done that kind of inventory in a while; I never would have guessed at that topology even five years ago. While we don't have exotic tech like a head-end 19" rack for our NAS, the need is also obviated by a reliance on wireless. There's a total of maybe 6' of Cat-5 in the whole house. I keep a spare line hanging off the router encase I need to reconfig, and the NAS is on a hardline as well.

Amazingly, the tech support load is low. Everyone is largely self-sufficient (the wireless/LAN printer driver addition to all computers was the most recent Big Change). That may be because I'm less available (or interested) in jumping into the fray when a small issue arises. And 7+ years with WinXP and OS/X breeds familiarity to the quirks and reset paths. The NAS is more a long-term project at this point as I return to poke at it when I think of it. I sometimes unplug it just because the fan is loud. Router or cable bridge reboots are rare.

Indeed, the only time all that tech causes me concern is when I get up at night for a glass of water and see all the LEDs blinking at me from various shelves and tables. The slow throb of an Apple notebook heartbeat light while it is asleep is kinda creepy. I've always said that as long as they have plugs, we'll still be in-control. Recharge over a wireless network? Not in my house. And if I ever hear the Roomba start up in the middle of the night on its own... Hmm. Maybe I'll put the wireless web cam to watching the Roomba in its dock. Just in case.

Don't Count Cadillac Out Yet

A friend tipped me to a pretty negative blog post about the Cadillac CTS Wagon, due to go on sale as a '10 model at the end of summer. It has been on sale in Europe, and Cadillac was going to bring it to the USA.

What started off in an email thread among friends really became a referendum on Cadillac and its role in the "GM Reinvention" world.

My friend wrote in the email thread, "I really, really wish GM would take Cadillac more in the direction of the Audis, Mercs, and BMWs of the world, but I think they are too afraid. And that's a shame, but I won't give up on them."

I submit that is Cadillac's answer to that wish:

Grudge Match: Cadillac CTS-V vs BMW M5 vs Mercedes Benz C63 | Sports | SPIKE.com

Some see Cadillac's current position in the world market against the European luxo-sports lines half-empty, I see half-full. I think they are exactly aiming Caddy at the luxo-euros. This wagon is another example. Their halo car, the XLR, isn't a luxo-sedan, it is a two-seater, CLK and XJR in its sights (w/o BMWs Z8, you might ask them where they are, and wither Audi?).




And they competed at LeMans for a few years in LMP1 (though perhaps w/o enough guts to continue to lose to Audi--as everyone else did). And on of the most notable concept cars in recent years, the Cien, was a supercar beast. Perhaps the only exception in the Caddy line is the DTS. But you just don't walk away from all the fleet-luxo and old-school US money market. You'd be just as crazy to tell Benz to stop making limos. OTOH, perhaps they should make those into Buicks and break clean with some of the old brand identity. I'll take your point about oldsters in the Caddy ranks and I'll posit that the problem isn't in GM marketing per se, but in the old dealer network for Caddy. They're doing the frontline marketing and it may be that's where the polyester-and-gold walks in the door. And salesmen tuned to that audience may not know how to pitch a bimmer-class car.

I think Jaguar had a similar problem; they're only just coming out from under that "old wool and lace" market (for their sedans).

Here's a like anecdote: when we bought our Jimmy Suburban from Moore Buick/GM in Los Gatos, the guy who served us was a Buick salesman. He talked to us more about the interior and ammenities than the seating and pulling capacity, though those criteria were the first things out of our mouth. Unlike when we went to the Santa Cruz Dodge dealer, where the trucks were across the street from the Nissans and VWs and Dodge cars. That guy could talk locking hubs all afternoon.

A Caddy dealer experience that is more like BMW may be what's needed. Because they do have the cars:



And let's not forget a young man named "Andy Pilgrim" and what he did for Cadillac for a couple years in the Speed GT Challenge. Beat the sox off my favorite driver, Randy Pobst who pedaled an RS6 around the same circuits.

As far as the suspension settings/choices, that may be the Old Dealer effect I mentioned above. You can't blame Caddy for the option boxes their customers check, or for building what people are buying. But back to the specifics of that blog. What Banovsky wrote is that Caddy is suffering from having customers that it doesn't want, so it shouldn't make cars for them. Instead, it should make cars for a different market and try to woo them. And this market shouldn't be performance luxury sedans but hybrids and diesels and brand-badged Volts. Oh, wait, they're doing all those.



Well, maybe. Turns out in this climate that all the cards haven't hit the table. GM may quit on the diesel for Cadillac in europe (a huuuge mistake, IMHO):

You can chip at Caddy; there's certainly a lot of grist for the mill. I just object to poor automotive journalism because it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to actually make some good points (as you can see here :^> ). Instead, Banovsky is just setting up straw men to knock them down, and wrap it in a snarky New Englander finger-and-tongue wag.

Just read his summary: "The CTS Wagon....has been borne from misguided market research."

Wrong. They're competing successfully with this car in Europe, it is made in the USA, we export it, and it is a platform that could be a Voltwagen or use the Chevy/Escalade hybrid electro-trans. What's not to like about that? If they only sell 30k in the USA this year (and Banovsky never sees one in a parking lot while he's antiquing) then remember this: Porsche sells fewer Cayennes than that in the USA and those sales are what kept Porsche in the black.

Further, if that market can be drummed up then we're poised to go, rather than saying, "Gee, when all those folk stopped buying LX500s and M-class Mercs, why didn't we have something in the wagon segment they're all flocking to now?" That's how you lead. You get your troops in the right spot prior to the assault. I don't think it is wrong at all. I think its pretty smart. And actually, Banovsky makes a pretty good case for it in his own writing, if you can just stick to the facts and pitch the "Yankee common sense".

Casablanca in Blu

In one of my recent trips along the HD Movie aisle at Fry's Electronics store I noticed a Blu-Ray edition of Casablanca. It was tagged the "Ultimate Collector's Edition" and was full of frivolity, including a "passport holder", "luggage tag" (really...) and photo books, cards, etc. And more etc. Okay. However, the reason d'etre for this collection was the Blu-Ray transfer of the movie itself. So checkbox #1: you've got to have the movie. And why not? Casablanca is one of my favorite movies--and for whom is it not? It is Number 11 on IMDB's Top 250, and near the AFI's Top 100 list. Interestingly, Casablanca is the most represented film in the AFI's ballot for "Top 100 Best Movie Quotes". It is mentioned seven times! Here's one, a classic, #2 on the list. Okay, I don't have to sell you on the movie. Checkbox #2 is, however, "Do you have it already?" Well, yes, of course I do. I have two. One on VHS. And another on DVD. So now its time to pony up for the Blu-Ray, right?

But all those "Ultimate" goodies commanded a premium price. I don't really need or particularly want all that hoo-ha. What I was pondering as I held the box in the stores was this: would the Blu-Ray bring out that much more out of a 57-year-old print?

Amazon thinks so, they have a sales pitch video for it. Seven hours of extras, yeah, yeah. But the 2" web preview doesn't really let me know if it is really going to look and sound that much better. Don't get me wrong. If I didn't already have the DVD, I'd be on it like Captain Renault on Ugarte. But I do already have the DVD, and I also have a very good Toshiba A30 HD-DVD player with an excellent 1080p up-converter. Of course it would be good, but the question for me was, "would it be that much better?"

I'm at the point where I'm going to buy almost all new movies in Blu-Ray, I'll get closeouts I don't already have in HD-DVD because they're cheap, and I'll still shop the closeout bins for DVDs for relatively recent movies--because the transfers upconvert very well. For special movies, some "kaboom" flix or a special effects blockbuster or anything Pixar, I'll probably duplicate a DVD I already have in Blu-Ray. I mean (and I think I've asked this before), can you really have too many copies of 2001: A Space Oddesey? The answer is no.

But for movies I already have, on DVD, the bar is a bit higher. That's my point. I love Casablanca and it will probably be a go-to movie on many rainy nights in the future. But isn't the DVD pretty good? I've always thought it was.

The experience which lures me to wanting more was one of a few years ago (December 19, 2004 to be exact) when the City of San Jose reopened the California Theater, on South First Street. I'll save all the info I have on the California, nee, Fox movie house, for another post. On that one particular night my mom, my sister and I went to see Casablanca there. Courtesy of the David Packard Foundation. There was a newsreel (FDR, Churchill and Stalin in Casablanca!), a Bugs Bunny cartoon which featured "As Time Goes By" and some live organ music. All that culminating in a wonderful print delivered on a brand-new screen with state of the art projection and sound. It was sublime.

Could I get closer to that at home? I'm just talking degrees here, of course I don't have the kind of home theater setup that would rival the California. Or even the local cineplex shoebox. So discretion prevailed that day at Fry's and I put the box (and all of its "etc"s) back on the shelf. To be quite Candid about it, if it were just the disk, and the asking was $25 rather than $70, I probably wouldn't have thought twice. But I've got to be somewhat discreet with my video upgrade expenditures. There may be 50 candidate films in my collection I could replace in DVD with Blu-Ray. That's well more than a thousand dollar outlay for something I already posses.

But then the fates came to me. A co-worker had the Casablanca Blu-Ray and loaned it to me. Heaven! Better than that, because as the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player and the HD-DVD upscaler are on separate HDMI inputs, I would be able to do a true back-back compare of the two disks.

And here, dear reader are my results. I don't have the time nor chops to present this comparison in a format akin to Tom's Hardware or other sites which do this for a living. I can also say that if you want someone else's textual analysis of the new release, there are plenty of reviews on the web. What you're going to get here is my amateur visual comparisons. Because that's what its all about, baby. Which one is better when you slot the disk and turn down the lights. No exotic measurements or tuning to the "nth" degree of output. This is a seat-of-the-couch evaluation. What's the best picture for your buck.

You can skip the next couple of paragraphs if you like; it is all about the technical bits.

The TV is a Samsung 46" LCD with 1080p, flourescent backlight and 15k:1 contrast ratio. A couple years old, but still very nice. Its got the shiny, not matte screen, great for films. The settings are out of the box, "Standard" (not "Movie") and with contrast and brightness settings in the middle. Color settings don't matter a whole lot here, but there was no color casting to the B&W print that I could see in either the DVD nor BLU-Ray. Feeding the DVD-side is the aforementioned Toshiba A30. In the Blu-Ray's corner is the SSBRP, which is an LG player driving an NVIDIA PureVideo^® HD engine off an Asus M3N-HT Deluxe/HDMI Hybrid SLI motherboard. The player software is CyberLink's Power DVD 7. I took screen shots by hand with my Canon S5-IS at the widest zoom, fixed 1/60sec exposure with ambinent room (i.e., LCD backlight) lighting.

Sound output from the Toshiba is HDMI to the TV set, wheras on the Blu-Ray the sound is optical S/PDIF out to the Sony home theater reciever and its theater-in-the-box speakers. I should say right now that the audio was very obviously better, but the differences between the outputs make the comparisons difficult. From other reviews I understand that the sound hasn't been remastered, and that it was still in Mono, but it was clear and bright on both the DVD and the Blu-Ray. Not enough difference there for an upgrade repurchase.

So what were the visuals like? From the opening credits, the improvement in the transfer was apparent.

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The text on the background map was much more legible and the drop shadow behind the title was clear and made the text pop with depth as was certainly originally intended.

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After the narrative introduction with the model globe showing the route to Casablanca--there is this establishing shot of where our story takes place. Although it is actually a matte painting with an composite of the sky, the minaret, and a little figure walking the parapet. The figure is actually quite blurry and the Blu-Ray magnifies this, but this is decades before ILM mattes. I didn't give the minaret much space on the Blu-Ray side in the above mash-up, but you can click through on the links below and see the obvious differences.

Note especially the dynamic range in the sky as well as crispness in the minaret roof shadows. Truth be told, I didn't know the cityscape was a matte painting until I saw the Blu-Ray for the first time and could pause the picture. You can't do that at the movie theater! I should have known though as all the airport scenes (except the arrival of Major Strasser) are all mattes and models.

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As nearly the entire movie takes place inside Rick's Cafe American, we skip ahead to the first musical number, where Sam leads the bar in a rousing rendition of "Knock On Wood". Here, in the busy background, you can see the depth of the lighting, the slight push to the contrast, but most of all the crispness of line and brightness. The DVD looks positively muddy by comparison. This wasn't just the camera or the brightness of the TV (though the latter could be adjusted to achieve some better parity, I suppose). The Blu-Ray just pops. This indeed does remind me of my night with Casablanca on the big screen at the California Theater.

With a crisper print details abound. I thought it was just wonderful that the extra at Sam's right arm was playing in the scene. You could see her facial expression as Sam runs his hand through his hair. Never saw that before!

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For this shot of Rick, where he denies the Deutsche Bank representative access to the gaming tables, I didn't get the Canon in exactly the same spot between switching inputs. So the images are slightly different sizes. Rather than introduce artifacts by scaling in Photoshop, I decided to put them side-by-side here. Which is a better presentation of all the differences anyway. Look at the tile on the wall, and the pattern from the lightshade and shadows (the film is full of such rich lighting details). Notice the individual chess pieces and the shadows on their left sides in the Blu-Ray.

And most of all, notice Bogie's wonderful mug. The scar on his lip was clearly visible as were the pupils of his eyes. You might give the nod to the DVD's dynamic range when it comes to Bogie's forehead, however. Those famous brow wrinkles are just a little deeper, his face just a little wearier. I should mention that these are not frame-by-frame time-code matches in these pictures, so Bogie's brow might actually be a bit more relaxed. I just used the pause buttons and my eye to freeze the pictures, flipping back and forth on the HDMI inputs until I got a reasonable match.

If there is anything that the DVD's flatter contrast provides, it is that there might be a hint of a white-on-white stripe in Rick's dinner jacket (a Gasbarri of Rome, made for the movie for Bogie). But then again, that might be a moiré pattern introduced by the DVD transfer, the upscaling to 1080p for the DVD to the TV set or from the CMOS chip in the Canon camera I used for the caputre. I didn't notice it anywhere else.

Even if that is the case, everything else in the scene--the sets, the decor, the costumes and most of all the facial expressions, all pop with new clarity.

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At Ilsa's introduction, where she asks Captain Renault about Sam at the piano, there is this exquisite close-up of Ingrid Bergman. Even with the soft-focus and halo lighting treatment by Arthur Edeson's crew, the Blu-Ray punches out detail. Though the contrast line just at her neck & hairline is lost, that might in fact demonstrate this transfer was taken right up to the edge of what is possible for the contrast ratio of video--or at least of my LCD screen. Who knows, the contrast gradient might be better on an LED-lit or Plasma screen? The grain introduced by the earlier transfer, subsequent scalings and computer intervention by the Toshiba is reduced in the Blu-Ray The lighting is made more uniform, and the removal of the sepia-like cast means the Blu-Ray image is very near like a publicity still.

I should mention that the reddish "bursts" on the upper and right edges aren't in the print, that's my halogen spot room lighting reflecting off the TV screen. In the larger files you can see curtain reflections as well. Mea culpa. This is my first time shooting off the TV screen.

Though I watched a little bit more of the movie (I had to stay in for that quote, "You played it for her, Sam you can play it for me!") I was ready to shut it down after the first half hour, return my borrowed copy and get one of my own, leather passport case and all. Truly and absolutely worth it.

I'm convinced: a great transfer makes a great movie....wonderful.