the mofo with the info.

A question of etiquette

2011-02-16T18:36:00.000-05:00

There is no appropriate convention to yell something at someone holding an elevator door to tell them to not hold the elevator (Sorry, for my British readers, I mean to not halt the lift). There are plenty of conventions for the opposite. If I'm running late and I see someone I know get into an elevator right as the doors are closing I might yell "hold the elevator", and they will grudgingly stick out a hand or at least feign some sort of gesture towards the <> buttons, or maybe they'll at least politely pretend not to hear you.

Dicks.

However, I have the opposite problem, in which I find people on my floor are irritatingly and unnecessarily polite. On our floor, the men's room is right next to the elevator (Sorry, for my British readers, I mean the Gents' loo is spot ajax the lift (Sorry, for my LA readers, I mean the elevator is Beverly-Hills-Adjacent)). Frequently, someone will get into the elevator and see me entering the shared hallway, and they will politely hold a hand out to keep the door open, only to have me walk right past them and quite literally piss all over their kind gesture. Unlike yelling "Hold the elevator!", I don't feel comfortable yelling "Nope, dropping a deuce!" in a work environment.

This is what it's like inside my head. Now you know why I don't blog more.

Not Useful

2009-11-02T11:53:00.000-05:00

I'm still trying to use Google Voice as my main voicemail handler, and I actually love it- even compared to the iPhone's visual voicemail. Among other things, the ability to just tap read phone numbers and dial them is an amazing feature that just makes my life easier.

That being said, the voice recognition sucks. Every time a friend says "um", or "uh", or swears, it tries to recognize it as a word, and it creates some pretty bizarre sentences.

Not on the Internet

2009-10-14T11:00:00.004-04:00

I have a song stuck in my head from a commercial I saw as a child. It was for some kind of promotion for the Muppet movies maybe being released on VHS. I only remember the very end of the commercial.

(To the tune of "The Muppet Show Theme")
All:
We've got "The Muppet Movie"
"The Great Muppet Caper", too.
And you can get a free watch

Statler & Waldorf:
Did you say get a free watch?

All:
Yes, you can get a free watch
when you see the sign "It's Muppet Time"
especially for you!

Try as I might, I can't seem to find the full lyrics online. So I'm putting it there.

Ready to give up on Google Voice...

2009-09-28T10:47:00.004-04:00

I have been trying to move people over to my google voice number for a few months now, but after all that effort, I might be ready to throw in the towel, or at least put my migration efforts on hold for a while.

Pros
I like that if I'm at work and I want to text someone, I can type them a text in the Google voice web interface rather than type it on the iPhone keyboard.

I like that I can set up schedules to have my phone ring my work phone during office hours and my cell phone at all times.

I like the concept of the google voicemail transcription, although my experience with it has been limited, as sometimes my AT&T voicemail will pick up first, and the few times I have seen it, the transcription was not available.

Cons
I really hate their mobile web interface. I know the iPhone app got rejected, but still... Google is a web company right? Why can't they have a decent mobile web site for Google voice?

I am in a flux state where people know both of my numbers and just will randomly pick one or the other. I would have everyone move over to the Google number, EXCEPT:

Dealbreakers
The Cons section is only the minor inconveniences. The real dealbreakers are the complete functionality gaps, which don't even tell you that they're failing. Namely:

International SMS is a complete crapshoot. Some countries you can SMS, some you can't. However, if you try to SMS someone in another country that is not supported, you don't get any kind of feedback at all.

MMS just doesn't work. You don't get a message that it failed. The person doesn't get a notice that they were supposed to receive a video or picture. Nothing. I don't even use MMS myself, but I'm not comfortable with the fact that someone might send me one with the assumption that I'll see it or even know about it, and I'll know nothing about it.

Anyway, Google Voice is a great idea, but the telco system is just a complex mess that is not currently navigable with this solution at this time. Maybe next year.

Unfollow Thursday: What the fuck happened to TechCrunch?

2009-09-03T15:29:00.005-04:00

What the fuck has happened to Tech Crunch?? Tech Crunch used to be one of the most prolific and gamechanging blogs in the tech scene. Their reviews of new sites used to make or break startups.

Recently though, I just see a ton of crap in my RSS feed reader from them. Either crazy unbalanced op-ed pieces on technology, or ENTIRELY non-technical blog posts. Look, I pick my blogs to cater to a topic. The same way I'm not expecting the gizmodo guys to review the latest Dan Brown novel, I really don't give a crap what the weirdos at Tech Crunch think about the Brazilian government's tourism industry.

So this post today just completely broke the camel's back. Not only is the subject matter entirely non-technical, but it's just whiny and fucking annoying. Yeah fine, you had a bad day and everyone has travel problems, but you know what? I really don't want to hear it. If you want to whine about your personal problems and whatever that's fine, but start your own personal blog to do this- don't dump this crap on the loyal followers of techcrunch.

Even the founder, Michael Arrington has been digressing into multi-post rants about how shaking hands will spread plague and what not. As amusing as it is to visualize him as a modern Howard Hughes, I still fail to see how this comes up in the context of a technological review site.

I can get my tech news elsewhere, without all the psycho drama, thanks.

Google Reading too much into this

2009-09-02T11:15:00.004-04:00

Schadenfreude on Google Reader
Originally uploaded by InfoMofo

"3 people were interested in this" was too hard? What's with this internet obsession with reducing our emotions to "like" and "star"? Why do facebook and google reader only allow you to pick emotions with necessarily positive connotations?

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis on Linguistic Relativity claims that the amount of diversity of concepts in a language actual shapes the way that speakers of that language think. For example, Eskimos don't just have a billion words for snow, they are actually able to perceive snow differences in ways that someone who did not grow up with those linguistic terms would never be able to distinguish.

I understand why facebook does it actually. Most things on facebook tends to be positive. Being allowed to dislike "Michael got married to Rachel" or "John is in a Relationship" would set a dangerous tone for the overly social community and discourage the oversharing that makes the network what it is today. However, if the internet is being forced to communicate in terms of "like", "follow", "star" and not given any options to express dislike with things, then our discourse is going to be stilted, and our cognitive processes that stem from our internet-based relationships will be incomplete.

TL;DR version: DO NOT LIKE.

and what's so hard about just reducing all reactions to cool and schmool. it's worked for me for years.

My Googleganger: the future modal tense of a singlish verb

2009-07-14T14:57:00.002-04:00

Buzzfeed has a post about "googlegangers", or people with the same name as you that prevent your name from coming to the surface in a google search.

Searching for "William Chiong" is fairly expected- there are two professional William Chiongs, a dentist and a musician that come up before me, and then you start seeing my name in the context of a publication I was on in college for the graphics lab, and some limericks andy left in comments on an old blog post of mine.

But my more commonly used nickname provides a bit of a problem. In "Singlish", english words such as the modal verb "will" are commonly paired with hokkien and slang words such as "chiong" (to be gung ho). So, when you search for "will chiong" you get some of my stuff, peppered with crazy Singaporean blog posts ranging from topics like the stock market to Counter-Strike. I actually don't really understand the meaning of "chiong" but I have tried to piece it together from the context. Here are some of the stranger headlines (links removed because it would run counter to my goal of being googlable):

"Don't feel bad. Market will chiong up tomorrow. Remember, buy on dips!"
"CopperTone will chiong weeks worth of homework now."
"When I let go my accelerator and cross the 2nd last arrow and the light is still green, I will chiong."
"If they turtle, I will chiong. If they mash SRK, I will bait. If they play normal, I will play cautious."
"Too bad my laptop broke down or I will chiong this game lol."
"You never know how the market will chiong in short - mid term due to volatility."

ARGH people actually talk like this. If they ever offer a way to kill a phrase Will Chiong will chiong for that opportunity.

Close your eyes. Clear your heart. Cut the cord.

2009-05-20T17:40:00.004-04:00

So it's been 3 month since I unceremoniously dropped my grey cable box off at the Time Warner office, and it's been pretty great. Basically I looked at my pretty sweet Boxee set up on my mac mini and I decided I wanted to try and see if I could replace my expensive cable subscription with free offerings from the internet made available through Boxee. I already don't watch that many shows, so it really wasn't much to cover.

Official Sources
Hulu
SNL clips
30 Rock

CBS.com
How I Met Your Mother

Comedy Central
South Park

Joost
Adult Swim
United States of Tara

Netflix
(this basically takes the place of flipping through channels bored).
L&O reruns
Weeds back season

The rest of the shows are filled in via bittorrent, namely TVRSS which is sex on toast.

Unofficial Sources
Bittorrent
Gossip Girl
Big Love
Entourage

[UPDATE: I decided to take some pretty screenshots]

Once you find the feed you like, put it into your boxee profile (I have separate search feeds for each tv show I like. The metadata such as the image url is automatically added by boxee.

Select the episode you want to download. This list updates as the search feed adds info.

You can monitor all your downloads in a separate screen. This can happen in the background while you are watching other shows.

Once the show is downloaded, provided the episode is named in a conventional manner that boxee can recommend, it can automatically add metadata such as an episode title, number, description, and screengrab.

I like problem solving. I like looking at each unretrieved show as a project that can be quickly remediated. So here are the remaining issues I'm still working on:

Unresolved issues
Live events such as the Oscars or sports
Small market unsyndicated content

So the biggest gap for me personally has been small market shows that don't have enough traction to get torrented and seeded, and are not on distributed channels. This basically includes The Soup and The Millionaire Matchmaker. Try as I might, I can't find any channels to get my Patti fix. And that's a DEALBREAKER, ladies.

How to Conjugate Final Fantasy Spells

2009-05-04T15:38:00.014-04:00

an excerpt from my unpublished book: 101 Final Fantasy Spells.

Final Fantasy spells are a synthetic language with a moderate-to-high degree of inflection which shows up mostly in the spell conjugation.

The Final Fantasy spell system is separated into 3 distinct inflections indicating the degree of the spell. Final Fantasy spells represent a pro-drop language, as the object of the spell is generally limited by the intention.

A large number of spells are irregular. The rest fall into one of three regular conjugations, which have -rx endings (where x represents any vowel or affricative consonant sound.

The basic -rx ending typically indicates a single target, while the advanced ending -ra typically indicates a more powerful single target (formal). The multiple target ending is -raga, and the most powerful (although uncommonly used) suffix is -raja. If a spell name is longer than 8 characters then the -raga and -raja endings are frequently shortened to -ga and -ja.

yó/tú	usted	nosotros/vosotros	ustedes	notes
BasicSpells
Fire	Fira	Firaga	Firaja (uncommonly used)
Cure	Cura	Curaga	Curaja
Blizzard	Blizzara	Blizzaga	Blizzaja
Irregular Spells
Thunder	Thundara	Thundaga	Thundaja
Esuna	N/A	Esunaga	N/A	As Esuna has no qualitative measure,only the single target and multiple target versions have any distinct inflection.
Break	N/A	Breakga	N/A	As Break has only a binary reaction, there are no qualitative modifiers for it. It should also be noted that "Breakga" is a stupid name.
Quake	N/A	Quakega	N/A	The augmented power inflections for quake were never established, probably to avoid offending quakers. It should also be noted that "Quakega" is a stupid name.

If I ever create a pop song that will have a corresponding dance craze, it will be called "Do the meteo now".

Rumor Control: Hipster Grifter and Swine Flu

2009-04-29T13:28:00.000-04:00

My friend's cousin told me the hipster grifter started the swine flu in order to be able to pass freely around brooklyn in a mask.

Pass it on.

My Weekend in Flickr

2009-04-27T10:36:00.003-04:00

There were a billion people in Central Park this weekend, each with less clothes than the last.

Then I got to relive the college experience I never had when my friend (who is like 33 or something) bought a beer pong table for his patio...

This is unrelated but the highest number of views for any image in my flickr photostream is for this photo at 31,532. The next highest is like 4,000. I think I should find a way to partner with xkcd or something...:

Musicology: Single Ladies

2009-04-24T09:52:00.006-04:00

p = you liked it.
q = you should have put a ring on it.

p	q	p -> q
T	T	T	You liked it and you put a ring on it.
T	F	F	You liked it and you did not put a ring on it.
F	T	T	You did not like it and you put a ring on it.
F	F	T	You did not like it and you did not put a ring on it.

∴ If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it. Q.E.D., bitches.

They call me Stay-cey.

2009-04-20T12:43:00.002-04:00

I need to have IM buddies that I'm allowed to, in the middle of the day, just start typing out the lyrics to The Ting Tings - "That's Not My Name".

I guess I could always just become wil wheeaton and twitter them, but that seems indulgent...

Hackintosh!

2009-03-23T21:20:00.003-04:00

As promised, here's my kinda dell mini 9 hackintosh howto and my experiences with it.

Howto
Pretty simply, I followed the instructions here:
MyDellMini - How-To: Install Mac OS X - DellEFI Method

It is a LOT easier if you have the retail disc for 10.5.6. Apparently if you have anything prior to that you have to do a lot of patching. You need 2 flash drives, one for the disk image, and one to boot off of. The disk image usb drive needs to be large (I used 8GB) and the boot one needs to be 1GB I think.

In addition to the guide there, there is a really active forum there, and I think the community is one of the biggest assets of the dell mini 9 hackintosh setup.

Other than some oddness right after I did the initial install (where I basically had to reboot one more time than the guide said), the whole thing took about 4 hours, which isn't so bad for a format and fresh OS install.

Review

So if I didn't say it before, the hardware is awesome. It's just this tiny light machine that I feel like I can take anywhere pretty comfortably. I really can't envision a trip where I can't find a way to squeeze this into my bag or backpack.

Once I had macosx on there, the machine ran great. The write speed of the SSD drive is a little slow sometimes, and a lot of the forum denizens recommend upgrading it, but I'm actually fine with it as is.

I was surprised that the webcam worked pretty much right after the install. Same with the sound, wi-fi, and bluetooth. The main developer occasionally posts patches on the site which improve battery life or something else, but for the most part, I just leave it as is.

I was surprised that core OS functions like the software update work seamlessly.

The two big downsides of the device of course stem from the very small form factor.

The first is the low resolution. The screen only does 1280x600, and as apple doesn't officially support any display under 800 px, there are some prefpanes and screens that just can't fit on the screen. Similarly, some web sites just look wrong at the resolution given, namely, embedded video in a google reader frame will often not fit.

The keyboard is the second big downside, and that's just cause they had to remove so much to fit it in. First of all the keys are very small, so like any notebook, it's just not as comfortable as typing on a real keyboard, and I make a lot of mistakes when I try to type fast. Second, they have gone crazy optimizing and removing keys, to a ridiculous extent. The quote button is next to the spacebar, making it unusable. There is no backtick key or tilde key, but rather a Fn-combo for those characters. Same thing for the square and squigly brackets. I would hate to attempt to write code on this. But of course that's not what it's for. For e-mail, browsing the web, and IM, it's pretty great. Except that quote thing. I really don't know what they were thinking there.

Anyway, for a cheap hobby hackintosh, you can't beat the value, form factor, hardware compatibility, and ease of a Dell Mini 9. I highly recommend it.

Desktop Linux

2009-03-20T11:31:00.003-04:00

So i finally got my Dell Mini 9, and hackintoshed it the first night I got it pretty much. I'm gonna write up a post on that later, because there were some really helpful resources I found for it and I might as well write it all down in case I ever need to do it again. However, I thought I'd rant about the state of desktop linux for a sec first.

So I bought the Ubuntu Dell Mini 9 because it's cheaper than the windows one, and I was going to flash the hard drive for Mac OSX anyway. I did get to play around with the Ubuntu build for a while, and here were my impressions.

I used to run desktop linux about 5 years ago, before I decided to just put my life in the hands of the Apple Store. I liked the flexibility of the operating system and the power to customize it, but eventually the hardware incompatibility and my burning desire to have an iPod finally made me give up.

1) First of all, the interface is much nicer than it used to be. I'm not up on the latest linux things, but from what I could tell this desktop was basically a streamlined GNOME ui, with basic tasks grouped into different activity windows, and a windows style taskbar on the top to manage multiple windows.

2) Even though the UI was better, it still looks like crap compared to mac or windows. I can't even describe it, but the actual window bezels themselves bother me.

3) The hardware compatibility is still an issue. This is of course not really a linux flaw, but it does limit its usefulness.

4) Dell makes potemkin software for this build too apparently. I tried their knockoff version of photo-booth, which is called "F-Spot" or something horrible, and it was really choppy. I thought it might be the hardware, but now that I'm running OSX, iChat's video chat and photo booth apps run fine with no noticeable choppiness.

5) The core linux software that linux people are used to now is just not user friendly.

Basically, I was thinking if my sister or someone not very computer saavy would be able to use the Ubuntu build, and it pretty much fails for the hardware compatibility and basic software offerings. My sister would not be able to sync her iPod, manage a music collection, or video chat with her friends.

Right now I think the linux desktop is just not there yet, but it has made progress. At this time though, I feel like Dell is shipping this Ubuntu book as an open invitation to hackintosh it.

Why is it so hard to find out which fucking flights have wifi?

2009-03-20T11:30:00.000-04:00

Virgin America, you're cool and tell me what flights have Wi-Fi, but unfortunately none of your NYC->SFO flights have it.

Delta, American - your website doesn't even say which planes have it. I actually called up Delta Customer Service, asked a CS rep there if my flight would have wi-fi, she said "hm, that's a good question", escalated me to a super, who then told me "maybe check seatguru.com?" Wow.

Stress Purchase: Dell Mini 9

2009-02-27T13:52:00.004-05:00

For some reason, the fact that they reduced the price on the dell mini 9 by 50 bucks prompted me to buy one. I'm gonna hackintosh it.

It will be sweet. This will make the 4th mac machine in my house. I'd like to pretend they will still have defined roles in the technology hierarchy of my tiny studio apartment, but that remains to be seen. If anything, this can be my cheap travel laptop that I won't miss when it gets jacked from my hotel room in Brazil.

some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain that is pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain.

2009-02-24T13:07:00.004-05:00

So I got bored and exhausted all my Google reader stories and main page stories, so I got to think about what I do to find the breaking news. There are a lot of sites that let you see the unfiltered upcoming stories, and in some cases vote on them. Obviously there's digg, but digg is awful so I can't stand that. I guess the ones I like so far are:

So far I'm a little disappointed. Reddit links are kind of scary and look potentially NSFW. Buzzfeed Raw is largely spam. Metafilter is kind of like slashdot circa 1999, and Neatorama's upcoming queue is generally very, very boring.

[UPDATE: Uh oh. Buzzfeed Raw just got very NSFW. Back to work with me.]

Posting for Posts sake

2009-02-20T12:13:00.002-05:00

Well I never post on this blog, but with Esther and Alex pimping their link farms like crazy, I figure I might as well bump them.

Maybe I'll follow their lead and start microposting. We'll see.

Fuck Horse Drawn Carriages

2009-02-02T12:22:00.019-05:00

Photo via Advocacy for Animals.

So I guess the big news in NYC is that people are trying to ban Horse Drawn Carriages in NYC for humane reasons. It sounds pretty terrible, the horses are not provided with adequate housing and live in horrible conditions until they are worked to death for the entertainment of tourists.

I oppose horse drawn carriages for a completely different reason. About 6 years ago in midtown manhattan, I was hit-and-ran by a horse drawn carriage driver.

So at the time I was living at 53rd and 8th and had a very short commute, a walk to 50th and 7th. I was standing at the northwest corner of 52nd and 8th, facing east, waiting for a light when this crazy fast carriage going east on 52nd street decided to turn sharply onto 8th avenue at a break-neck speed. While the horse itself didn't hit me, the carriage swung wide and then slammed into my back, knocking me to the ground. I was completely caught off guard, but some passersby were nice and helped me to my feet and kind of told me what happened. The horse carriage had stopped about half a block down the street. One of the people that helped me up suggested that I should get his insurance info just in case. It was probably just the adrenaline, but I got up and felt generally ok, so I went up to him and asked for his insurance as a precaution and he just took off! At that point, we noticed that his license plate area was intentionally obscured with some masking tape.

I went back on my way to work, kind of stunned, but feeling ok; a co-worker asked if I was ok, and I asked why, and he pointed out that the back of my shirt was actually ripped, and my shoulder was starting to visibly swell. It was at this point that I found that I was having difficulty raising my arm above my head, so I decided to just head to the nearby ER.

They did some basic mobility tests and checked out the area and determined that I hadn't broken anything or suffered any serious problems, they just suggested Ice packs and painkillers.

So in the end, it wasn't really that bad other than the emergency room fee, and I was pretty lucky, all things considered. Still, those things are a fucking menace and I'll be happy to see them banned.

Final Cylon

2009-01-23T15:22:00.004-05:00

So I'm a week late, but I just watched the first ep of the new BSG season and:

VERY LATE SPOILER AFTER JUMP

Ellen Tigh is the final Cylon.

Ron Moore says he's been planning this for a while, and I believe him. For example, remember that episode in season 2 where Ellen was trying to get a gmail account and had trouble solving the CAPTCHA? It all makes sense now.

Returning

2009-01-21T09:22:00.004-05:00

I'm almost thirty. I've lived in New York for ten years. Sarcasm is my first reaction and response. I'm far too jaded to be heading down on a bus to DC on a whim to see the new president sworn into office. I'm far too cynical to stand in below freezing weather, braving unfarhomable crowds of people just to be part of the crowd listening to a speech that, in all honesty, will sound better on CNN.com. But that's where I found myself this past weekend.

Standing in the national mall near the World War II museum, we were far away from the Capitol; we watched the ceremony via a jumbotron. However, I felt connected by the continuity of an endless crowd, proudly wearing overpriced bedazzled Obama hoodies and waving cheap polyester flags, despite the brutal cold. Barack Obama gave a speech about personal responsibility and the values he sees in our country, and I felt embarassed that I was moved by a political speech; my first reaction is to scoff when confronted with idealism. It was so foreign to hear an honest evaluation of our country that as in line with my own values. I had never felt a political speech resonate with my own beliefs like that in my lifetime. I had forgotten what it felt like to be ambitious, idealistic, and proud of my country. And so it is now that despite my age and experience and deep-rooted cynicism, on this bus back to New York after a long, cold, crowded weekend, I find myself hopeful again.

Geolocate this post.

Posted with LifeCast

Meatspace Shopping and Web 2.0

2008-05-28T17:53:00.001-04:00

My Moleskine Notebook is one of my few Savage Indulgences*. Despite the fact that I have readily available at my desk my iPhone, my BlackBerry, notepad.exe, evernote.com, PowerPoint, and countless other technologically advanced offerings that could easily supplant my Moleskine, I still like to have this clunky oilskin notebook with my horribly unintelligible scrawl to refer to in meetings and to keep track of my progress on various ongoing projects. However, due to a poorly thought out partitioning scheme several months ago, my current Moleskine is going EOL, and I have to replace it. Naturally, savagery begets savagery, so I am being forced to leave the air conditioned confines of my office and I must venture into meatspace to do some shopping. However, that doesn't mean I have to be completely unarmed for such a task...

Planning
I'm combinng my moleskine shopping with some other tasks. I need to buy some new pens and highlighters as well, and some sticky tabs for the moleskine. I'm also continuing my search for the Holy Grail of wallets (id window, space for bills, slim); a friend tipped me off to the Bosca Small ID Wallet which looks like it might be The One, and I notice that Saks Fifth carries Bosca. I'm planning to do this all in a half hour lunch break from work, so I'm also going to pick up lunch from one of my favorite food carts, Kwik Meal.

I start out with a tool that Esther just noted on Google Reader earlier today: Text 2 Mind Map. Basically I put my shopping list in a simple text format like this:

Shopping List
 Kinokuniya
  Highlighters
  Fine-tipped pens
 Office Depot
  4x6 Scotch Pads
  Sticky Labels
 Barnes and Noble
  Moleskine Reporter Notebook
 Saks Fifth Avenue
  Bosca Slim ID Wallet
 Kwik Meal
  Lamb and Chicken Rice

and I end up with this:

It's pretty but it's not quite what I'm looking for. I wonder if there were any google mashups that would do something like this, and lo-and-behold, it turns out this functionality is already built into google maps, in a fashion.

Some quick searches and tags later and I end up with this:

View Larger Map

OK, ready to roll.

Implementation
So it's a beautiful day out in Manhattan, so it's starting to look like this whole meatspace shopping might not be so bad after all BUT on my very first stop, I find that the Google Maps search for the Kinokuniya is outdated, and the space is now some kind of horrible tourist trap related to Rockefeller Plaza. While I could blame this on google not updating soon enough, I'm going to be fickle and use this as an example why meatspace shopping is vastly inferior to online shopping.
Internet 1, Meatspace 0.

My second stop (using the Dijkstra's algorithm shortist path!) is Saks Fifth Avenue. I wait forever for the elevator to go to the 6th Floor, and I look at their selection of Bosca Wallets and I'm horribly disappointed to find that they don't carry the one I'm looking for. The only id window wallet they have is a bulky brown monster, and isn't what I'm looking for at all.
Internet 2, Meatspace 0.

I'm on my way to my third stop, Barnes and Noble when I run into a pleasant surprise. While I had been planning to buy my sticky labels at the Office Depot on 43rd Street, I ran into a Staples 2 blocks farther north, which cuts my trip down a little bit. This is an unintended benefit of meatspace, so I am grudgingly giving them a point (However, they almost lost the point for playing a horrible muzak cover of Heart's Alone). I buy my sticky labels and some Pentel Flair Pens (not the cool japanese pens I was hoping to buy at Kinokuniya, but oh well).
Internet 2, Meatspace 1.

Barnes and Noble is next. While they sell Moleskines at MSRP which is such a ripoff, I still just buy it. Pretty quick.
Internet 2, Meatspace 2.

Any good venture into Meatspace should end with actual meat, and today is no exception. I stop at the aforementioned Kwik Meal, and the line is surprisingly short. It's lamb and chicken marinated with papaya, coriander, and whatever unearthly spicy goodness that makes this the best cart in midtown during the day.
Internet 2, Meatspace 3.

All in all, it looks like Meatspace is about to win, when suddenly I round the corner on 5th avenue and am treated to Hello Kitty in a coconut bra:

AAAAUGH, MY EYES! It's a children's cartoon character dressed up as Maui Hooker! WHY? Meatspace forfeits all points and does not pass go!
Internet 2, Meatspace negative a billion.

My collection of Savage Indulgences includes but is not limited to: comic books, the non-digital SLR that I never use, the fact that I sometimes order from restaurants that aren't on SeamlessWeb, my love of index cards.

On Tokyo

2006-05-06T13:47:00.003-04:00

After four days in Tokyo, on my last night here, it is difficult for me to summarize my opinions of Tokyo into one blog post. Tokyo is so many things at once, but I'll try to break my reactions up, in the order that I experienced them.

Tokyo is terrifying
Landing in Narita Airport, I was exhausted after a 10 hour trip from Sydney (with a transfer in Hong Kong). A co-worker had already advised me which line to take (the Narita Express) which went directly to Ikebukuro, and I knew that my hotel was only one block away from the train station, so I thought I was pretty good. First of all, I didn't realize how expensive the train in would be. Given that the New York Airport Shuttle runs 7 dollars, I was pretty shocked when I had to fork over 3300 yen for the ticket (about 30 USD). I also had not realized how long the train ride would be (about an hour and a half), and I realized during the long ride between the Tokyo and Ikebukuro terminals, that Tokyo is a much larger city than I had anticipated. Area-wise, it is so much larger than Manhattan, yet 5 or 6 of the major train stations are as packed (or more packed) than Times Square station.

Tokyo is not English-friendly
I quickly found that 50% of the written Japanese that I had been practicing in the workbook in the plane was pretty much useless to me... Most static signs use Kanji of course, rather than the hiragana phoenetic alphabet. Katakana was probably the most useful to know, and of the two kana-alphabets, the one I was the least familiar with after my 1 semester of Introductory Japanese in college. Though the train and subway stations are very good about having English signs, certain things like the fare-calculation maps above the subway ticket machines are in Kanji-only, so unless I had a secondary map with roomanji or hiragana on it, I would basically just take a stab in the dark. Even more difficult than the train stations were restaurants. When by myself, I found myself completely daunted at several places, where they didn't have an English menu, a menu with pictures, or a single waiter that spoke any English, so I would basically scan the menu desperately for katakana phrases (like setto, keeki) or the very few kanji that i recognize from Chinese menus or my long-dusty mandarin classes; I basically tried to not order anything poisonous or sound like an idiot, and I probably ended up doing both. At one onigiri stand, when I realized that the "setto" that I had ordered required a choice of two different types of onigiri, I pointed at one of the onigiri in the case tentatively, and the girl looked at me, a little nervously, and in broken English said "uh... is... dangerous?". I have no idea what she was talking about, but just in case I changed my order to the salmon (because I saw the girl rolling a salmon onigiri right at that moment), and an ume (because it was the only thing written in hiragana on the wall... and I hate ume). However, the food was all fantastic, and I was able to get more adventurous with food when I was with my friends who live here (I ate cow heart, raw cow's liver, assorted beef cuts that my friends didn't know the English word for, assorted raw fish that my friends didn't know the English word for,

Tokyo is confusing
Even after 4 days, having mastered the JR lines, the privately-run Toyoko line, and the much-feared chikatetsu, I still don't understand basic street addresses here. At several times I asked my friends what the names of certain streets were, and they told me that the streets didn't have names. In fact, all of the maps I see of Tokyo never have street names on them, and the addresses given are some weird combination of numbers and district names. I'll have to figure this out on another trip, but I'm still totally baffled by the addressing system here. It's even worse than Florence (which has separate blue and red numbering counters for addresses (which increment independently of each other)).

Tokyo is hectic

Several different areas I went to (Akihabara, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harajuku) had denser foot traffic than Times Square, and not the leisurely, ambling, photography happy tourists you see there, but rather crowds of business men, stylish women, funky-dressed girls, punky-dressed boys, all focused and walking with a purpose to some destination (well OK, in harajuku they just stand around, but that's it's own thing).

Tokyo is the fucking bomb

The people in Tokyo are just the coolest population you could imagine for a city of its size. Despite the aforementioned bedlam and Babel, the city is incredibly clean and the people are unerringly polite. At one juncture I was completely lost, and I asked a woman sitting down on a street bench how to get to Ebisu station. Though she spoke no English, she said something which I can only assume meant she was going in that direction, led me through a maze of streets, and then pointed me in a direction and said "go straight" in the best English she could muster. The food, though it may take some embarassing re-orders to get right, is just unbelievably good. The people here embrace technological innovation; you can see people of all ages using the public transportation, using the integrated features of their mobile phones, and the mass adoption of such technologies clearly spurs companies to innovate further.

There are so many small everyday things that strike you as incredibly efficient, and I don't know if it's just my tourist goggles, but I can't help how notice how certain operations in Tokyo are streamlined through the use of technology, standardization, and just common sense, to really improve on small annoyances. The first thing I noticed is that on a reserved train, the conductor does not come by and punch every ticket. He has a computer that tells him which seats are bought, and then he only asks for tickets of people sitting in seats marked as unoccupied on his display. Though it's not a technological thing, it also strikes me after being in both Australia and Tokyo, is that tipping is just an incredibly stupid custom. OK, I'm rambling now, but there is a lot to like about how things are done in Tokyo; there are so many things they do right here, that really make you think hard about some of the unnecessary bureaucracy we put up with every day.

All in all, I was completely blown away by Tokyo, and I will be coming back the first chance I get.

Three Versions of Tourism in Western Australia

2006-04-28T07:25:00.001-04:00

1. Meditations on Babel

Look at units of measurement. I’m pretty sure that every kid in the civilized world, when they first learn of the differing units of weight, measurements of length, and degree scales for temperature, thinks to themselves at some point… what the fuck? Every seven year old that struggles remembering how many inches equal how many centimeters (and that it’s actually centimeters, you damn Yank), must think to themselves, what purpose do these competing systems offer?

Look at driving. Someone, somewhere, at some time invented automobiles and motorcycles, and through word-of-mouth, demonstration, and those nifty Mitsubishi ads with über-cool music, convinced the civilized world that they were a pretty neat thing to have. Now… how, in the spreading of this idea from person-to-person, did some people decide that it was a good idea to drive on the left side rather than the right or vice versa? If it wasn’t for my local friends and relatives, I would have been turned into roadkill 10 times over now, with my 26 years of experience looking left before crossing a street.

Look at spelling. This topic is too exhausting to cover right now, but the American version of spelling “check” just makes more sense. Right now, Australians spell the bill at a restaurant “cheque”, and then the v-shaped mark that you put in a box “check”. However, when signaling for the “cheque”, they make a “check” in the air towards their waters. Unless this is some sort of hilarious visual pun, then their system is just inconsistent, and silly.

And you don't even want to know how many power adapters I'm lugging around in my suitcase.

Maybe it’s because I just read Snow Crash or because I’m doing my “Australasian tour” at the same time as everyone else I know, but I can’t help but notice that most of the differences dividing Americans and our pseudo-English speaking brethren here are basically standards issues. So many of these ideas are tied into our concepts of nationalism, and serve as a large part of our cultural pride; I know that a lot of the American spelling differences were a conscious effort on the part of American revolutionaries to rebel from their tea-sipping bastard parents. Is there any hope for a unified system of standards, such that a global coalition could eventually be formed, which will eventually join the United Federation of Planets in the distant future? For the sake of the possibility of First Contact and the Prime Directive, I beg that all people of the world unite behind a common standard! Naturally, we should just use the American systems, as they're pretty much a global standard, right? While were at it... It's pronounced "soccer".

2. The Prophet of Coolness

The great thing about being an American tourist, is that you can be the most out-of-touch loser in the United States, and still be more ahead of cultural trends than every single person you meet. Though not one of these Wallaby-eating Aussies (dat's pronounced "ozzies") has heard of “Death Cab for Cutie”, I can tell them with total certainty that they will be huge here in about two months, and they nod eagerly, as if I have shared with them some secret gem of cultural importance; they look around nervously, as I have surely violated the space-time continuum by delivering this gooey nugget, stolen from their future airwaves. Despite never having watched a single episode of last season’s American Idol, I know who won; this information is apparently toxic to the local television viewers here, who constantly beg and barter with me not to reveal this classified information (Note to self: make a t-shirt). In an age of the blogs, Wikipedia, and BitTorrent (for the non-savages out there), it seems that the people here live in constant fear of having their cultural future revealed to them, and only remain ignorant through extreme diligence. At the same time though, they sit enrapt as I regale them with tales of the modern United States, and, by inference, their own dark and unavoidable path. I guess it’s no difference from Californians waiting 3 hours to find out who their Next Top Model or American Idol, or Survivor, or Apprentice is… but I guess I’ve never understood them either.

On a separate note, I also have haunted-looking girls ask me pleadingly to explain what a "Hollaback girl" is. Unable to abate their confusion, I look away, as if I have not heard their question...

3. Touristy Crap

ZOMG! Kangaroos!!one!

Is the Legister Lacist?

2006-04-04T19:31:00.000-04:00

Here's a funny thing I just noticed. One of the Register articles today was posted with the enticing headline "Anonymizer looks for chinks in the Great Firewall of China". Funny right? Even funnier is if you follow the link through, you will see that the Register has prudently changed the name from "chinks" to "gaps". Who knows how long the google search page will be live, but I've screenshotted it for truth:

Get it? Chinks? China? That British wit gets me every time.

Mac Mini and Front Row Reviewed

2006-03-08T15:26:00.002-05:00

I sometimes grief Apple for what I perceive as marketing ploys or overpriced crap and the fact that it sometimes seems to be helmed by an irrational hegemon who dresses like a flood victim, but I dollaz speak louder than blogposts, and I recently purchased the Intel Duo Core Mac Mini. As I've used the little device for about a week now, I figured it was time for the inevitable review (and plus, I've been pretty light on the blog content this week, so what the hell).

While my 12" Powerbook is only about a year and a half old, my headless linux server was pushing 6 years (which is like a hundred in computer years), and after my last move, I think I jostled it to the point that I couldn't rely on it for basic operations like serving web pages, acting as an ftp server, etcetera. I'd been planning to replace it since November or so, but I put on the brakes expecting Jobs to announce an update to the line shortly. When he announced the new Mac Minis, I was pretty happy with the announced specs, save for the crappy graphics card; and as I was primarily planning to use this for non-graphics intensive operations, I went ahead and ordered the diminutive box within the first hour of its announcement. It arrived much faster than I expected; not only did it ship the same day that I ordered it, but it was delivered in 2 days despite the fact that I selected 5 day shipping. I've heard that this is a common experience among people who order in-stock products the same day they are announced.

First off, I found the Rosetta performance to be acceptable. Even before I installed the 1GB of RAM I ordered separately, I found the performance of most apps to be responsive if run by themselves. Non-Universal binary applications like Photoshop were not noticeably slow, and were certainly usable even with the translation hit.

Though I didn't think much of it from Steve's original announcement, I really took to Front Row. The interface is very clean, and just animated enough to let you know that it is being responsive. Before I installed the extra RAM, though, the performance was abhorrent, so you definitely need at least 1 GB of RAM to be using this without a noticeable lag. Once I had the extra RAM it ran great, and it was a ton of fun to browse through my music, photos, and video files in this way. I'm definitely going to be using this as my fullscreen music player of choice, and I plan on using it to view downloaded tv shows, and the like.

My main criticisms of the system as a whole are:

iTunes must be used to organize movie files in Front Row, and there is no clean way of labeling movie files as "tv shows" or "music videos"

Movie files must be playable in Quicktime, which leaves out a lot of the good bittorrentable files that require obscure codecs.

Front Row's interface is just similar enough to the iPod to really irritate a heavy user of both. Aside from the wheel differences, the fact that you can't rate songs while listening to the songs in FrontRow is really annoying.

All in all though, the Mac Mini has restored my faith in Steve Jobs' ability to pour our Kool-Aid. Drink up, Mac whores!

UPDATE: I've uploaded the pictures of the RAM install job to Flickr. It gets pretty gory...

Don't Mess with Tetris

2006-03-06T16:18:00.000-05:00

I hate the internet right now¹. I mean, the 'net is theoretically supposed to encourage creativity, but at the moment, I find it positively stifling². I'm talking about a brilliant idea, completely original and endogenous to myself. On the subway to work, I saw one of those "Don't Mess with Texas" t-shirts, and as I've been seeing a lot of gamer tees around lately, I thought it would be pretty funny to make a "Don't Mess with Tetris" shirt. Funny, right? It's so... awesome. You're so novel!³ As I got to work, I decided to make sure someone hadn't already thought of this, and sure enough sure enough, there it is laughing at me. Some young entrepreneur has created stenciled screenprinted shirts with the witty phrase, and sells them out of her dorm room for $15. There you go. To my credit, the phrase only gets 43 hits on google, but it still is a blow to the ego to find that even my original ideas are unoriginal.

It got me thinking, in the early 90s, you could have stupid, derivative ideas and not even know it. You could be blissfully ignorant with your stupid puns on pop-culture references, and until 'Weird' Al came released the same pun in a song, you could believe that you were the first and only person to have that idea⁴[1] The 'i' in "internet" is not capitalized in this sentence, even though the Chicago Manual of Style recommends capitalization. This blatant disregard for an informal standard with motley participation represents the author's general contempt for the whole concept of a global network of smaller computer networks that transmit information via standard protocols, as well as the related services such as e-mail, online chat, and especially the interconnected web pages known colloquially as "the web".
[2] The use of the idiosyncratic apostrophe before the abbreviated word is used to convey a sardonic sense of familiarity which combined with the author's aforementioned hatred of said technology is meant to reinforce a present sense of disregard and derision. It is also a reference to an early internet abbreviation convention that has fallen out of use after being overused by mainstream news sources and becoming cliched; it is used here to belittle the technology once more, much like the term "interweb" being reappropriated by hackers to mock computer novices. In escalating the degree of obscurity, it may be setting the tone for a highly irreverent blog post, indeed.
[3] The hyperlinked lyrics, presumably to suggest that the reader "sound out" the phrase with the same stresses and pronunciation used in the song, is probably the weakest association in the article. It requires the reader to 1) be familiar with a fairly obscure alternative song and 2) click on the link and read through the entire song lyric to make the association. Furthermore, usability studies show that most web users are extremely cautious about context-free links, a user would have read the phrase before clicking or even mousing-over the lyrics.
[4] This whole footnote thing is particularly unoriginal. Footnotes or endnotes with tangential rants that sometimes even eclipse the original material in style, intent, and effectiveness have been used by several major literary works, most notably in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, as the book had over 400 individual endnotes, some of which went on for pages themselves, and had salient plot information. The book received general acclaim from the literary community, but the practice itself fell out of favor almost instantly after the widespread fame achieved by the book. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman predates Infinite Jest, and uses a similar device, though not nearly to the same extent.

Playground Battles, Playground Wars

2006-03-03T18:10:00.001-05:00

The minds at Penny-Arcade have a new comic dealing with their newfound feelings at having switched to the flamboyant Apple lifestyle. While they joke about the dangerous path they have set down, I saw the announcement that the two authors of the comic were switching to Macs from PCs to be groundbreaking, and a signal of a big victory for Apple in general.

Here's some background. Penny-Arcade is the most widely read webcomic around, and they primarily deal with the topic of video games. They have a rabidly fanatical fanbase, and are treated by video game manufacturers as journalists; they have access to sneak previews of new games and consoles, they have been commissioned to make supplementary material for big video games such as Rainbow 6 and World of Warcraft. In addition to this, they have traditionally had a strict anti-Mac attitude; a character in their strip Charles, is typically ridiculed for his love of the Mac platform in general. This has made sense, as they are gamers, and there are... exactly one game (s) available for the Mac that are worth a crap. So I was pretty surprised when they announced over a month ago that they were both looking into buying Apple machines, spurred by the switch to the Intel processors. Though as a Mac fanatic, I am pretty happy about this, it had me a little confused. The switch to the Intel platform has very little impact on the immediate availability of games for the Mac. In fact, due to Rosetta issues, there are reports that some games that worked on old Macs will not work or will run slower on the faster powered Intel Macs.

So... These people were unconvinced by Apple's switch to BSD, they were unconvinced by Ellen Feiss, and they were unconvinced by Tiger. Why switch now, when nothing has changed from their perspective? How could two users so defiantly anti-switch be swayed by a change of architecture, and the announcement of minor improvements to the basic hardware that they offered before? I have a theory, natch.

Eater is not being sincere, per se.

2006-03-01T12:19:00.000-05:00

I give Eater a lot of slack, because they're part of the Gawker network which makes a living saying ridiculous things, and because they're mostly spot-on. However, their recent re-review of Per Se had me scratching my head. Did we eat at the same restaurant? I'm not going to go into their claims of "memorability" or "quality", because those are subjective things. Personally, I've been their twice and found the food to be phenomenal, and I certainly won't forget either of my dining experiences there any time soon. However, when reading that this man's colleague, a 90 pound size-zero was still hungry after eating there... I was flabergastified and confustibobulated. It is with a heavy heart that I call shenanigans; and disingenuous shenanigans, the worst kind. Unless that restaurant has changed completely in the past 8 months, there is no way that anyone leaves that place hungry.

My first meal there was a seven course meal, with several courses not even counting toward the total, such as extraneous bread and dessert courses at the end (I believe there were three dessert courses actually, but I may have lost count). This meal took about four hours to complete, and we had so much food that we had to take our last two dessert courses home in boxes, along with a free complement of cookies, chocolates, and Thomas Keller's signature Macaroons. My second time there, Keller was actually in the restaurant at the time, and our waiter gave us the option of having the "Extended Menu", which all parties involved that night now refer to colloquially as "The Meal of Death". This is because there was so much food on the table, in our stomachs, and probably scattered on the floor by our chairs that we actually wanted to die. The waiters seemed to take a cruel delight in serving us our gastronomic demise; toward the end we were no longer eating out of hunger or even enticement, but rather that we were too embarassed to consider sending an unbelievable foie gras terrine or a lobster tail over orzo back to the kitchen unfinished. Toward the end of the night we wondered if Keller himself was preparing us, in a Twilight-Zonesque twist, for our own slaughter, after which he could feed our own fat livers to the next customer; I expected him to come out of the kitchen and force food down our beaks with exquisitely crafted, pearl-handled chopsticks.

I cannot conceive of any person, be they female, 90 pound, hypoglycemic, tape-worm infested, or of any other constitution, that could leave that place hungry. Unless of course, they were picky and didn't eat the food in front of them... in which case I contend that the moniker of "Eater" is extremely disingenuous, no?

One More Thing: iPod Hi-Fi's hidden features

2006-02-28T19:20:00.001-05:00

I don't know why most of the Apple event recappers left off the most important part of Stevie-J's keynote, so i've transcribed it here.

10:49 Oh, one more thing... [The crowd goes wild]
[Steve pulls off back panel of iPod Hi-fi to reveal a fat wad of cash.]
10:51 Every $350 iPod Hi-Fi comes with $200 cash in the back of it! That's why the damn thing costs so much! It will also be available in a $450 version that comes with $300 dollars.
[Much applause from apple shareholders. Exeunt omnes]

Much better.

Thomas Pink... Panther... Get it?

2006-02-28T13:26:00.001-05:00

Thomas Pink was clearly a classy brand up until about six months ago, so what the hell are they doing? First I hear about this stupid iPod nano tie, which everyone is quick to point out will be unavoidably uncomfortable, and well, retarded. Fine, plenty of high-fashion brands have tried to profit off of the iPod or PSP brands with overpriced unusable accessories. However, right after that I backed out to their main US page and am greeted by... The Pink Panther?

OK, ok, back up there fella. About three years ago, Thomas Pink was the pinnacle of metro fashion; a businessman's way of declaring individuality from behind a boring double-breasted suit. Even pre-Queer-Eye, this posh british import convinced us that you can wear pink and purple stripes while still grooving on the vertical smile. New York magazine still refers to the store as "a wardrobe mainstay for cosmopolitan businessmen." Any New Yorker who visited a Pink store during their seasonal sale days would be confronted with a veritable shopping bloodbath, with grown men tearing through stacks of clothing like twenty-something girls at a Louis Vuitton sample sale.

Maybe they've just spread too fast. While it used to be a arduous task to find the oddly located Pink stores, they now have locations in prime spots, such as the Time Warner Center (which, let's face it, kills everything it touches). In either case, why would they tie their upscale menswear brand to a mediocre kids movie remake? OK, I get it... you both have the word "Pink" in your title. But are they really trying to spread the message "when you think of our brand, think of cheap foreign accent and fart jokes"?

Is this the new Dell Dimension B210???

2006-02-27T16:41:00.001-05:00

We have zero idea what this thing is, if it's real, or if it's some kind of factory leak, but this does look a bit promising as the new Dell Dimension B210 that fans have been speculating about for a while now (and yeah, we're assuming that's a USB slot at the bottom there). Dell Inc.'s marketing department has yet to confirm or deny the veracity of these leaked pictures, but they certainly look like they are in keeping with the existing Dimension aesthetic that fans have come to recognize. A VERY GOOD SOURCE suggests that these exciting new boxes will ship with 256 MB of DDR SDRAM, a CD/DVD combo drive and a whopping 80 GB Hard Drive!

More details are expected at Dell's widely expected press event this Thursday, and we will be sure to post more news as it comes to us!

Google Page Creator and spam.

2006-02-23T14:54:00.000-05:00

Google launched its page creator today... the fact that your third-level-domain is forced to be the same as your gmail account means that the whole "use my name as my e-mail address" gmail thing is probably going to go out the window now. At the very least, I'm going to start registering as many gmail addresses as I can to soak up some free web hosting space, and to give me more options with the naming.

My major concern is this: The fact that your third-level domain has to be the same as your gmail address could have some unfortunate consequences. By finding an active googlepage, they automatically find an active gmail account. Theoretically, I can envision spammers harvesting active e-mail addresses in this manner; once these pages are indexed, a simple google search for "site:googlepages.com" will return thousands of active gmail addresses. I'm surprised that they didn't let people choose their own prefix, as they did with blogger accounts; when I had an active fastmail.fm account, they recommended that you host your public files using an alias, and specifically warn you that the hosting of files under your active mail account could potentially lead to address harvesting. Until Google reveals that it has some ingenious way to stop his kind of address harvesting, I would recommend that anyone that wants to play around with this new service create a "shield" gmail account that they don't plan on using.

I have some other minor irritations, such as the inability to use custom CSS skins and the fine control of the actual HTML of the page. I can't figure out any way to edit the HEAD information of the page, which severely limits my ability to customize the styles or behaviors of the page. I still have yet to explore this fully. However, it's just like me to inspect this gift horse's teeth. It's free web storage at this point, right? For all the times I've tried to transfer semi-large files to another person and had to deal with awkward AIM firewall issues, I think this will definitely come in handy in some fashion or another. I do hope they fix the naming thing.

UPDATE: Well... rather than fix the third-level domain issue noted previously, Google has apparently shut down the creation of new accounts. This actually circumvents the possibility of creating a "shield" account to test this service with a fack gmail address. I would recommend that users be very cautious using this new site without seriously considering the risks of exposing your e-mail address publicly to the spammer-bot community. What's funny is a google for site:googlepages.com is actually returning no hits at this point, but a Yahoo search for the same term returns about 109 active pages. Is it possible that Google is aware of the spam risks to their googlepages users and was hoping to prevent this malicious usage by preventing the pages from being indexed for the time being?

The Set of Unrelated Homonymic Songs that Rock

2006-02-15T13:48:00.002-05:00

Ö = { all song titles x : | R(x | > 1 }

Where the function R is a function enumerating all songs with that title that totally rock, but are completely unrelated to one another.

Thus,

Ö = {
"Forever Young",
"Changes",
"One",
"Photograph",
"Push It"
}

NOTE: "It's My Life" was a close contender... but the Bon Jovi song really only has cheese factor.

An Infomofo Christmas: Rudolph, Reindeer, and Religion

2005-12-24T09:15:00.000-05:00

The perennial Christmas classic "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is a powerful commentary on the effect of external authority on the social customs of a small population. Though most versions have a lot of unnecessary material at the introduction (particularly the overdrawn Harry Connick Jr. version), the message of the song can be found in the last three stanzas:

All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names
They would never let poor rudolph join in any reindeer games.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say:
"Rudolph with your nose so bright, won't you guide my sleigh tonight?

Then all the reindeer loved him, and they shouted out with glee
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, you'll go down in history.

Though wrapped in jingly bells and drenched in eggnog, this story is actually a grim condemnation of "reindeer games", or what Nietzsche would refer to as a "slave morality". Though the reindeer initially shun the mutated Rudolph in order to preserve their social order, a single nod of approval from Santa, their employer and presumably their owner, we are supposed to believe that these formerly vicious cliques suddenly not only accepted the former outcast, but "loved" him. The reindeer are not only content to drag that fat red bastard around like their Sysiphusian weight, they also allow him to dictate their social mores and, one can assume, their sexual selection. Like the horses who affectionately nuzzle the same riders who dig into their underbellies with spurs and whip them with crops, the reindeers have created a morality completely flexible and dependent on the approval of a force outside of their own society. Rudolph is no better than his fellow slaves to external influence; he is unable to defend himself or assert his sexual and social fitness upon his population without the help of an outside influence; even Santa is not swayed by any outstanding personality traits or qualities that might recommend Rudolph as a good reindeer other than the simple mutation that caused his nose to glow.

If the reader then extrapolates beyond the limited lyrics of the childrens' song, it will quickly become apparent that this kind of behavior describes a mechanism in which the traits exhibited in a limited population can be dramatically changed in response to a non-environmental vector. "Santa" so subtlely influences the impressionable reindeer that Rudolph will necessarily be the prime stud in the next reindeer mating season, and in two or three generations, the mutated red-nose phenotype will be widespread in the limited gene pool. While Santa will no doubt tire of this night-light trick, it will have unforeseen repurcussions on the reindeer population when the clumsy beasts are now easier targets for predators such as polar bears and raptors. As the population of reindeer dwindles in the coming decades, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer will certainly "go down in history" along with the rest of his soon-to-be-extinct race, murdered by their own folly. In this manner Santa poses the problematic role of the malicious or indifferent intelligent designer, who has shaped the formation of a certain culture not to be better adapted for survival, but for his own arbitrary whims.

Can video games be appreciated as art?

2005-12-02T15:24:00.000-05:00

In a recent review of Doom, film critic Roger Ebert dismissed the entire platform of video gaming in the context of art. When questioned about it in his answer column, he responded:

I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense.

Now, the arrogant tone of this blurb has drawn ire from the blogosphere round. I really don't care about Ebert's opinion on video games; for that matter, I wouldn't ask Roger Ebert to review literature, opera, or rock and roll either. He's a reviewer of a niche artform, and an extremely mainstream one at that. Ebert can only appreciate art forms that lay themselves out before him, and not ones that allow a user to interact and test the scenery. There are games like "Metal Gear Solid: 2" that present a storyline that draws the user in and challenges the viewers' expectations in ways that M. Night Shamalan could only dream of. Games like "Silent Hill" will thrill users more than any horror movie, as the user is forced to assume the role of the main character, down to feeling her heartbeat in the controller vibration. In its relatively short lifetime, the video game industry has already crafted works that are unarguably artistic in nature, and have the capacity to surpass movies or books as captivating storytelling tools.

However, I ultimately have to agree with Ebert at some level. Although he fails to mention it, there is a serious difference between video games and more persistent artworks like literature, music and even movies. Video games are linked to video game systems, which compete with each other for market share and are obsoleted and replaced every five years or so. While certain titles have been "ported" to many platforms, most video games can only be enjoyed by maybe half of the video gaming at any given time, and will not have replay value five years down the line. While my Dad and I can sit down and enjoy a Clint Eastwood movie, it is unlikely that I will be able to recommend "Chrono Trigger" to my own children. I'm not saying that the ephemeral nature of video games invalidates it at an artform, but i do think that there is a fundamental technological problem that needs to be solved in order for video games to be respectable as a persistent work of art that can stand the test of time.

The (re)birth of Schmool

2005-11-30T18:00:00.001-05:00

After a little confusion, I thought i'd give Alex an fm to r, so here it is. For those of you who were unaware, everything(including each post on this blog) is either cool or schmool. The old examples have gotten a little stale in the past three and a half years, so just to give you an update:

Sony PSP	Nintendo DS
Google	Yahoo!
Cylon Number Six	Egg and Muffin Toaster
Optic Nerve	Kenkanryu
E-vite	The Pony Express
P. Diddy	Donkey Konga
L. Ron Hubbard	Frank Chu
T-Mobile Sidekick	Hulger P*Phone
Blog	Soapbox

In other schmool news, the concept of Dark Chocolate being both cool and schmool has been retconned.

Ugly Asian Rivalry or Ugly Asian Media?

2005-11-22T17:59:00.001-05:00

An article in yesterday's New York Times has been circling inboxes lately, especially if you are an Asian American of the Angry variety. It covers the trend in a few new Manga titles in which certain authors are beginning to brazenly deride the cultures and principles of nearby Asian nations (most notably China and South Korea), promoting a xenophobic and supernationalistic mentality. Though I thought it was definitely interesting and possibly something to consider, I did a little investigating and it seems that NY Times' statements about the reactions from the Japanese media were at the very least misinformed, and at the worst alarmingly biased.

Norimitsu Onishi states that the Manga comics in question "have drawn little criticism from the mainstream media", citing a quote from a book review in the Sankei Shimbun that praises the work for its balanced view. I found this to be extremely misleading, as further research revealed that many mainstream Japanese papers did criticize the book, and specifically boycotted ads for "Kenkanryu", the Manga in question. For example, though they did not deign to review the controversial book, Mainichi Shimbun did cover the resulting controversy in Japan, and identified the work as "strongly anti-Korean", noting that the work was turned down by several Japanese publishers for having unverifiable information before it was picked up by Shinyusha. Though Onishi identifies the Sankei as "conservative", the full context is not given; Sankei Shimbun is known as broadly pro-Western and anti-Chinese. The portrayal of the Japanese media as being accepting of this book is akin to painting all American media organizations as staunchly anti-rap music based solely on The O'Reilly Factor. As a media organization with a reputation of its own to uphold, I would expect that the New York Times put more effort into providing context, especially with regard to sources that will be unfamiliar to an American audience. As it reads now, this article does little more than to paint the entire country of Japan as a nation of racists and irresponsibly incite more uninformed, ignorant animosity between different groups.

As an American of Chinese descent, I'll be the first to say that many aspects of this story are worth being worried about. Movements such as the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform are eerily similar to
Holocaust refusals seen in the U.S. If the popular sales of this book
actually do reflect a growing xenophobia rather than a casual interest in a controversial title, this definitely would be something worth getting riled up over. Unfortunately, this information cannot be gleaned from the New York Times' article, which is set on sensationalizing a foreign country's editorial process rather than providing reasonable, reliable facts on the actual subject.

We wuz robbed

2005-11-11T15:43:00.001-05:00

The first annual Vendy Awards were held last night. While I appreciate the awarding community's attempt to honor the street vendors that sustain me so well, I was a little shocked that they overlooked the best street vendor ever. Kwik Meal is so awesome I have trouble forming sentences about it in my mind without drooling all over my keyboard. I have a lot of friends who evangelize for the Halal Cart man (I even know someone who dressed up as him for halloween), but I gotta tell you all, Kwik Meal is where it's at.

Read white and blue

2005-11-10T17:24:00.000-05:00

Whilst IMing a friend, I discovered a huge flaw with the English written language. Wanting to comment on a recent blog post of his, i told him, "I read your blog." I realized that there were two different meanings for that sentence, usually clearly disambiguated in speech, but in the casual medium of typed communication, the pronunciation was lost, along with any useful meaning. The above statement can mean one of two things, based upon the two tenses of the word "read" which share the same spelling:

The past preterite tense: "I read (rěd) your blog" - I happened across your recent post, and am now commenting on it.

The simple or repeated present tense: "I read (rēd) your blog" - I watch your blogspot, constantly hitting refresh, straining for some glimmer of information on your opinions, ideas and possibly what you had for lunch. Also, send me a lock of your hair.

The past tense of the verb "to read" is spelled the same as the present tense conjugation "read". As demonstrated in my simple example above, this is a huge problem that affects IMmers around the world. Er, that speak English. What we need is swift, decisive action to end confusion of this matter once and for all. Luckily, decisive action is what I do best.

To eliminate this ghoti-esque confusion, we should simply change the conjugations of the verb "to read" to match the conjugations of the verb "to lead". Hereforth I shall now conjugate the past tense of the verb as "red". There is little chance of a conflict with the color "red" as one is a noun and one is a verb. Other than the slight problem of verbing, the plan is pretty much foolproof.

From tomorrow on out, if you see me online, tell me "I red your blog". If you tell me "I read your blog", I'll have a restraining order on you so fast it will make your hed spin. For those of you keeping score at home, this means, of course, that Red is the new Schmool.

Who Googles the Googlers?

2005-11-09T20:17:00.000-05:00

here.

security pros

robots.txt discussion continued

Is AdBlock Immoral?

2005-11-09T19:59:00.000-05:00

I'm switching browsers, from Camino to Safari, which basically completes my transformation into a total Apple Whore. The only thing keeping me from switching earlier was the lack of an adblocker, and a friend recently clued me into PithHelmet, an adblocker for Safari that uses the same rules as the original firefox AdBlock plug-in. However, when explaining this change of heart to The Pos, he pointed out that ad revenue is important to the functioning of a small business; by blocking ads I was cutting off funding to sites that I frequented the most.

Pos has a sympathy for the small businesses that I do not share; his tenure at The Spec has left him uselessly biased in this case. However, I find that his and other people's arguments against the individual use of AdBlock falls into these categories:

AdBlocking devalues the model of web advertising; if the practice becomes mainstream and the ad market dries up, companies will turn to more intrusive forms of revenue generation, such as paid registration.

AdBlock prevents the content provider from receiving click-through or pay-per-view revenue.

The first point is one that has plagued the TiVo thirty-second skip from the very beginning.

I'm Ron. Ron Weeaasley.

2005-10-31T14:42:00.000-05:00

I was the esteemed Ronald Weasley for Halloween this year.

My friends all thought that was a bit drastic that I went ahead and made the carpet match the drapes, but I got the last laugh after all.

Metaphysics, Philosophy, and Green-Skinned Space Babes

2005-10-24T14:59:00.001-04:00

A well-read friend of mine sent me a disturbing e-mail the other day. After another friend recommended Ender's Game to her, she discounted the book after reading the amazon review:

I just started to read the Amazon synopsis of Ender's Game and had to stop reading after this sentence: Aliens have attacked Earth twice and almost destroyed the human species.

I don't think I can comment on this.

I consider this friend to be one of the most reliable litmus tests in terms of book recommendations; to see her reject a book out of hand (cart?) because of the mention of "Aliens" showed a closed mindedness that was disappointing, but not at all unusual, given the broad perception of the sci-fi genre as a whole. Between Star Trek Conventions and Hollywood remakes of Philip K. Dick novels, science fiction books and movies are generally seen as a niche, cult-appeal, sensationalist works meant mostly for the off-hours Dungeons & Dragons crowd looking for a break from the orc-hunting.

The Fifty Dollar Price Point

2005-10-13T00:51:00.000-04:00

Apple shares fell 10.5 % yesterday in after-hours trading, and it fell another $2.34 today.

too much credit for masterminding the ROKR as an intentional flop on the scale of New Slurm.

Mac Mini Grab Bag

Not selling enough 2GB Nanos

One More Thing...

2005-10-12T20:03:00.000-04:00

Refresh... Eat... Refresh... Eat...

The saddest thing is that I'm not only watching the apple announcements like a total psycho, I'm also streaming the important stuff to my friend Lin's phone, who is waiting for a plane right now and doesn't have internet access. Sometimes connectivity is a bad thing.

Google and the iGhetto

2005-10-08T03:17:00.001-04:00

I read up on Google's latest mind-boggling project, Google Secure Access, a free, secure wireless initiative, and prepared to get geekily excited about it until I found the increasingly common "(Windows XP and Windows 2000 only)" disclaimer. I thought back to the recent offerings from everyone's favorite Mountainview mothership, and couldn’t help but think, “Why does Google hate me?” As a home Linux and Mac OS X user, I have gotten by pretty well lately, playing some cutting-edge games (ok, game), finding most new hardware to be OSX/Linux compatible, and using the commodity standard Microsoft Office platform; things were looking pretty good for a lowly Linux/BSD/OSX user such as myself. The systems were finally making inroads to the non-tech crowds, too: my technophobic brother was asking me serious questions about the Mac mini, and I hear you can get a free Linux box with the purchase of a qualifying rifle at Wal-Mart[1]. Just as it looked as if the Redmond beast might have to deal with some serious competition, opposition came from the unlikeliest of places: the company that Microsoft identifies as its biggest threat.

Though the first line on Google's company overview page smugly declares that the company’s mission is to make information "universally accessible and useful", a glance at Google Labs is enough to turn a *nix user green with compatibility envy. Google Desktop, Google Deskbar, Google Web Accelerator, Google Video Viewer, Google Talk, and now Google Secure Access are six projects recently released into beta or production through their lab, and all are currently only compatible with Windows systems. Though Google Talk uses open standards for the bland text chatting protocol, the real meat of the service is its VoIP client, which currently only lets you talk to other boring Windows users. Even Gmail, the nothing-short-of-revolutionary webmail client, went into public beta without Safari compatibility (though they are now Safari compatible, advanced features such as Rich Text formatting still only work in IE and firefox).

Trebek is out there

2005-10-07T18:28:00.001-04:00

I've been sick the last couple days, which means I've had little else to do but watch Netflix DVDs. I just watched most of X-Files Season 4, and the screenshot on the right here is from "Jose Chung's From Outer Space". Re-watching that episode now, almost a decade after I first saw that, I can safely and without any hesitation say that it's the coolest episode of any tv show ever. It has pretty much everything you might want in an episode, including Rashômon style unreliable poly-narration, big-headed gray aliens, government men in black, and a cameo by the venerable Alex Trebek (pictured in the aforementioned screenshot).

On an unrelated note, I like Nyquil a lot. I mean, really a lot. If I still used "hella" as an adverb, it would be used here to describe my feelings for Nyquil.

The Obligatory Friendster PSA

2005-10-05T06:22:00.001-04:00

The Pos told me that posting a friendster screenshot on flickr is very post-modern. I told him that he's adopted.

If you've been living under a rock like my friend E-*, then you don't know about the "Viewed My Profile" feature on Friendster, also known as the most unwanted feature in the world. This is demonstrably true as the first thing that anyone will you do when you tell them about the most unwanted feature in the world, the first thing they ask you is how to turn it off. Go to "My Settings", and set "View Profiles Anonymously" to "Yes"

You're pretty lame if you haven't heard about this yet, because even Business Week has picked up on it. I mean, I know that Friendster isn't cool anymore, but do they have to rub our faces in it?

Infomofo's Authoritative Guide to Manhattan: La Cupcake Disputà

2005-09-30T20:30:00.001-04:00

La Cupcake Disputà

Cupcakes have become an integral part of Manhattan cuisine, growing quickly from "Sex and the City" fad pastry to a staple for a growing number of bakeries, following the success arcs of other such specific dishes as Lobster Rolls and the ubiquitous Corn. New York Metro has a great story on the original Magnolia bakery and the resulting schism between founders Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey , although their version is a little secular for my tastes.

Any real New Yorker knows the true story of La Cupcake Disputà, as immortalized by Raphael Santi in his famous Stanza Della Segnatura frescoes now displayed in the Vatican, and as documented by Milton in his "Aesthetics on Frosting". Torey, of course, was a strict believer of cupcake-transubstantiation, and that the eucharistic cake and frosting actually became infused with the Real Presence of Jesus' body and blood at the point of sale; Appel believed that Christ's body and blood do not come down to inhabit the elements, but that "the Spirit truly unites things separated in space". The resulting fraction led to the great Cupcake Reformation, by which Appel spun off the Buttercup bakery in midtown and the rest, as they say, is history.

Shining

2005-09-29T23:55:00.001-04:00

My friend Rob is an internet meme... and not one of the dirty ones!

He made a trailer for a contest, in which he had to re-cut a movie into a misleading trailer. The result is just awesome (mirrored here if the ps260 server gets hosed again). After he had submitted the original entry to the contest (which he won), he sent this link out to a few friends. We all thought it was pretty funny and forwarded it on, and now, maybe a month later, he's all over the place. Check out links 2-10 on the first page of hits on Google Blogsearch.

As an executive producer for Rob's student movie (this means that I had to go to the vending machines to buy diet sodas for our actors), I can't help but feel proud.

UPDATE: It's gotten crazy. Last night, The New York Fracking Times ran an article on Rob. We had to go over to his office to help him deal with the vapors. I'd make sure you watch the actual video before reading the nytimes article, because they kind of ruin the whole joke. And no, it's not my blog they're talking about, they're talking about Dustin's Xanga. I only posted it after it went hollywood.

North Carolina

2005-09-26T22:59:00.000-04:00

The last few posts have been light on graphics, so I thought I'd post this creation of mine made with Comic Life.

Infomofo is moving.

2005-09-25T18:15:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a fun month, but I have to say sayonara to this blog and hola to my new blog, a WordPress blog hosted at infomofo.blogsome.com. In parting, I'd like to say that my experience with blogger was pleasant, and of course was aided by the fact that Blogspot is something of a commodity standard now. As all my friends were on blogspot accounts, it made it easy to cross-post, etc. However, I decided to switch based on:

Lack of tagging - This was huge. I tried some third-party solutions like technorati and delicious, but it was too much work. WordPress supports this out of the box.

Lack of freedom - WordPress blogs on blogsome are pretty much fully customizable, and the forced content is much less noticeable than the blogger bar. (In fact, if you have adblock, you won't even see the google pageads).

That being said, I'll miss a few features from blogger- Blogger is much more user-friendly when it comes to changing themes (I'm still having some CSS issues, as you'll notice), and is a little more intuitive in its interface. Blogsome's admin interface is also a little slow sometimes. Well, I'll see you on the flipside.

Midnight thoroughew

2005-09-20T01:20:00.000-04:00

[name redacted as it was fucking up my name searches on google]
Stayed up all night long
Leaving Him
In Logical Whim

or

[name redacted as it was fucking up my name searches on google]
Smoked a bong
Saying, today still
"I Own Magic Hill"

Tags: insomnia, poetry, thoroughew, weed

Finally forced to turn on the stupid word validation feature on comments. The inane linkspam was getting to me.

Pret a Voler:The Social Cost of Lunch

2005-09-09T12:26:00.000-04:00

I must apologize, gentile reader, for the grainy nature of the photo. I will replace it at my earliest leisure, but the matter at hand was far too urgent to wait for a decent camera. I discovered today a social issue that is more disturbing than you can imagine.

Whilst purchasing a lunch, I noted the inscription on my sandwich box, and the salad box of my friend. The box brazenly declares "What we don't sell we give away to charity." I was immediately made to pause by the sheer weight of the action suggested to me. Now, I've been guilty of my share of a turned-cheek to the indigent in the past; many a time have I played the pauper to a beggar, when in fact I had an abundance of coin in my pocket. However, to purchase this sandwich, and essentially remove it from the hands of the needy was a monstrous act that I was not sure that even I could undertake. Was I ready for my role as the reverse Robin Hood of Manhattan?

I have often felt "liberal guilt" for the fact that I could freely spend almost $7 on a simple lunch, when that money could easily go to charity or the needy in Somalia; I brushed away the thought, thinking "I'm just one man. What can I do?" However, faced with the prospect of not only not donating my flush monies, but compounding that injury by stealing away one of their delicious, organic, hippie sandwiches, I was conflicted. Sure, the leafy greens and farm-raised chicken breasts looked appetizing, but I'm ashamed to say that the first thought through my head was "Will I have to deduct this against the charitable givings on my taxes? Does this count against the $15 I gave to the Red Cross, essentially making my donation balance zero for the year?"

In the end, cruel hunger overtook me, and I took the abominable food item to the counter, feeling for the world like a modern Ugolino. How the cashier must have glared at me as he dutifully made change! I know not, as I was unable to meet his steely gaze; I pocketed the crumpled bills and rusted coins. Blood Money, they jangled hatefully. As I had imagined earlier, the sandwich was sinfully delicious. However, with each bite, I only tasted the salty tears of the starving man on the corner.

It's too late for me; my sandwich has long since been digested by my gluttony. I can only aspire to be as Marley, and rattle my chains at you from the beyond. Be not tempted, lunchers of Manhattan, by the siren's call of organic Cobb Salad and cleverly machinated sandwiches on rye. Eat at KFC.

Tags: charity, economics, guilt, logic, lunch, manhattan

Bizarro Pissarro

2005-09-08T20:26:00.000-04:00

If you haven't seen The Cezanne and Pissarro exhibit at MoMA yet, you should definitely check it out. It's the coolest thing I've seen there since my friend Erik almost spilled a drink on a Monet at the opening last year.

It's a thorough comparison of the work contributed by the two artists while they were living in close proximity and painting prolifically, their styles influencing each other and mixing in unpredictable ways. It was also where I discovered that I missed my calling as a curator. Had I my druthers, the exhibit would have been called "Cezanne: The Bizarro Pissarro". My friend Jen thought the exhibit should be more focused on their close relationship, and suggested "Cezanne and Pissarro: BFF".

Tags: art, comic_books, MoMA, museum