wurdsome

"That water reclamation stuff..."

The Sierra Club was kind enough to call us just as we were trying to find info on these candidates, so here's the Illinois Chapter of the Sierra Club's "Clean Water ticket".

Dean Maragos
Matthew Podgorski
Mariyana Spyropoulos

http://illinois.sierraclub.org/vote/index2.html

My first world problems don't seem so bad now that Apple is giving rebates to all the people who bitched and moaned about the iPhone price dropping after they bought theirs. I thought it was universally understood that "early adopter" was synonymous with "i paid $200 more than I should have". Did anyone at all think they were getting a bargain when they stood in line to buy a $600 phone?

I don't blame people for buying iPhones. They're cool. I want one, and I've been trying to calculate how long I have to hang on to my relatively new phone before i can justify upgrading again. But it's hard not to blame these people for taking their buyer's remorse out on Apple. If you don't balk at a $600 price tag on a phone, that kinda implies that you're ok with spending a couple hundred dollars more than you should.

Anyway, boo fucking hoo people.

this seems to warrant discussion, and probably a book-buying fund.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/welcome&dcmp=ILC-DND062006FP

we skipped william gibson and watched nascar. i'm not sure how that happened.

cancel netflix before it destroys us all.

I don't have any insightful commentary for this. I did think it was sort of interesting that I've always been partial to Soda, and there's an epicenter of Soda radiating out from St Louis into a predominantly Pop region. Then again, we've all had this conversation too many times, so just enjoy the neato map and marvel at what could have been done with the energy used to create it.

link

This one almost had me until they said they were going to champion Ogg Vorbis as a file format. (It would be an unfortunate but fascinating train wreck if Apple and EMI fooled us good and in turn made one of the worst PR moves in history).

I'll also (partially) take back my rant about AAC. Ok, so it's an open standard. It's still underutilized and far from universal and will continue to be a pain in the ass until...ok, why generalize...Microsoft, do you seriously thing wma still has a chance? You might was well let people play their music on your devices. And no, I don't anticipate ever buying a Xune. If you let me stream aac on my 360 I'll have one less reason to dislike you. That's something, right?

Here's a list of aac advantages from wikipedia since I besmirched its good name...

Improvements include:

* More sample frequencies (from 8 kHz to 96 kHz) than MP3 (16 kHz to 48 kHz)
* Up to 48 channels (MP3 supports up to two channels in MPEG-1 mode and up to 5.1 channels in MPEG-2 mode)
* Arbitrary bitrates and variable frame length. Standardized constant bit rate with bit reservoir.
* Higher efficiency and simpler filterbank (hybrid → pure MDCT)
* Higher coding efficiency for stationary signals (blocksize: 576 → 1024 samples)
* Higher coding efficiency for transient signals (blocksize: 192 → 128 samples)
* Can use Kaiser-Bessel derived window function to eliminate spectral leakage at the expense of widening the main lobe
* Much better handling of frequencies above 16 kHz
* More flexible joint stereo (separate for every scale band)
* Adds additional modules (tools) to increase compression efficiency: TNS, Backwards Prediction, PNS etc... These modules can be combined to constitute different encoding profiles.

Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store

Granted, letting consumers choose between crippleware and DRM-free music is a step in the right direction. Hmm, I wonder what they'll pick? (And please, make the right choice here people. It's 30 friggin cents.)

There are a couple of problems with this...

One, it's a little insulting to have to pay to "upgrade" music I already paid for and should be able to do whatever the hell I want with in my own home. But, screw it. If it really takes proof that consumers don't want DRM and that it provides them absolutely no value, fine. I'll play your little game. Hopefully some of the smaller labels that don't suck will be all over this and open up their catalogs as well.

Two, it's still AAC. Unless companies either open up their proprietary standards or additionally give consumers a choice between proprietary files or plain ol mp3s, they'll be doing as much harm as the record companies (or at least more than EMI in the short term). If my music files are DRM-free but still won't play on half the devices in my home, Apple and Microsoft will become the digital music bad guys. Apple doesn't need a proprietary format after building an mp3 player that overwhelmingly kicks the crap out of everything else out there.

Anyway, it's a hobble in the right direction. Don't fuck this up, Steve, and don't stop here.

Several computers have come and gone over the last few years (ok, not as many of them have gone as Kaz would like). All of them have been enjoyable in their way, but none was an upgrade from the Dell desktop I bought about four years ago (five? who knows). From the $50 desktop I got from Kaz's company to the two Dell laptop hand-me-downs (thanks Kaz and skc), it didn't take long before this mound of hardware was chugging through simple tasks and repeatedly letting me know it was very tired.

So finally, after patiently waiting for a moment of financial stability, I went to the shiny Apple store and bought a shiny MacBook Pro. Damn, it's sweet. This is the first new Mac that I've owned, and it'll take some adjusting. Like everyone else, I kept trying to click by tapping the touch pad rather than the button. I'm still not sure why the home and end keys (extra bluetooth keyboard, also sweet) don't seem to do anything. But the good is far outweighing the bad (or just slightly less good) at this point. Some other bonuses:

- at long last, a huge performance upgrade
- an actual bash shell, not a barely functional putty client for windows
- expose is fun
- the apple remote is cool
- it handles a monitor a whole lot better than any windows laptop I've used
- and finally, it runs World of Warcraft like nobody's business

I'm sure there's plenty more good to come. I think I'm mostly glad that I've finally reached a point in my life where I can make a large purchase and leave myself significantly more than two dollars in the bank.

i'm pretty sure misskaz and i sat next to the guys from 37 signals at dinner last night, including david heinemeier hansson, creator of ruby on rails.

dinner was pretty freakin awesome, but that's another post.

I'll do you one better liquidbrain6502, I'm going to complain about our HD-DVR. We had used Tivo for a couple of years and loved it. Then we got a new TV and decided to go with HD. The HD Tivo boxes are absurdly expensive, so we went with the cheap and hopefully acceptable Comcast alternative, which is their Motorola DVR. What a piece of crap. I can't think of any other way to explain its issues--it's just a piece of crap. The fast forward and rewind are so unresponsive that they're virtually useless, the software is terrible from the interface to the features, and apparently if you use more than 80% of the storage it just sort of gives up and takes a nap. It's like having a half-assed coworker who does his work acceptably most of the time and then ends up screwing you by skipping out early on a day that you need him (maybe this is just karma).

So it sucks, and I feel like a bit of an asshole for complaining about something like this. There are far worse things to be than a mostly satisfied consumer of electronics and premium media services.

Since I'm sort of a late starter with sci-fi/fantasy books, I've started making my way through the lists of Hugo and Nebula award winning novels. These lists have some obvious classics, and a lot of not-so-obvious authors who may or may not still be in print.

Having finally read Dune for the first time, I've moved on to Camouflage by Joe Haldeman. I'm sure this has been done to death, but it leaves me wondering about the criteria for judging sci fi and fantasy and whether (or how much) the majority of the genres has lowered the bar rather than the classics raising it. I can't pass judgment on Mr. Haldeman just yet, but I'm at least comfortable saying this ain't Dune. I am at least making an effort not to judge any of them by the silliness of their covers.

Both lists include some clearly talented writers, but are they a minority, and have they lent credibility to an otherwise mediocre list? How about the lists themselves? Am I missing out on too many authors who are more deserving than the winners?

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect all of these books to hold their own against Moby Dick. I'll still read them and will most likely still enjoy them. The whole point of this exercise is to find more of what I like and don't like, so hopefully the majority of it will be positive.

i was having a hard time getting too excited about election results, though i was cautiously optimistic. then i saw this.

thanks rummy, i feel better now.

...sitting on my desk. in a box. taunting me. hopefully the sun will hold out so i can take some pictures at lunch, and i'll try to post some stuff tonight. in the meantime i'm trying to be productive and not open it. yet.

thanks yahoo. thahoo. my fantasy football team is fixed, i have all my old mail, and all is water under the bridge. i promise i'll cease my bitching and moaning now.

this is lame, lame, lame. it sounds like it wasn't a huge surprise to the employees who got laid off, but that doesn't excuse management from being human and actually speaking to the people they're laying off.

radio shack e-fires 400 workers[slashdot].