Monthly Archives: January 2005

White Noise

I haven’t done a movie review in quite some time, but I did manage to get out with my better half to see White Noise, starring actors Michael Keaton, Chandra West, Debra Unger and Ian McNiece.

The film begins with the tragic death of author Anna Rivers under mysterious circumstances. Her husband, Jonathan Rivers, is distraught, but begins to receive strange phone calls from his dead wife’s cell phone. He then meets Raymond Price, a self-made psychic investigator who uses EVP, or electronic voice phenomena, to contact the dead. Rivers becomes obsessed with trying to contact Anna and to resolve the situation surrounding her death.

The problem is that it isn’t always safe to talk to the dead.

To give much more of the plot would probably give away too much, but I’ll just say this: while the performances were credible, I really didn’t find the movie that scary, nor did I find the use of EVP to be in anyway critical or central to the story. It could have just been a conventional ghost story, and it would have been just as effective. I give the movie about a C+: no nightmares or glancing over my shoulder as I exit into the dark parking lot.

By the way, EVP is something that some people take very seriously, including concerns about its safety, although they note:

We believe that working with EVP and ITC is fundamentally safe. It is difficult to find a single example in which an individual has been harmed because of their communication across the veil. Yes, people have occasionally been “bothered.” It is known that the time we spend carefully listening too hard to hear EVP examples seems to enhance our clairvoyant and clairaudient senses. To many people, this is exciting and something they want. To others, it can be disturbing. This enhanced sensing has been reported to fade if one takes a break from EVP or other development work.

Indeed.

Personal Achievement

I ran a mile today. A real mile, at a real run. I probably last did that at age 25. It probably doesn’t mean much to anyone but me, but I think I should view it as quite an achievement.

One of my New Years’s goals is to actually run a 10K race in 2005. When I was in graduate school I could do one in just under 50 minutes. If I can get to the point where I can hold a 12 minute mile pace in 2005, I’ll consider it miraculous, but very cool.

The Hipster PDA

I’m 40 years old now, and I’ve realized two things:

  1. I’m much wiser than I was when I was 25, or even 35.
  2. My raw talent, ambition and enthusiasm only carries me so far.

Toward that end I’ve made some changes in the last couple of years. I’m exercising, I’m trying to keep more regular sleep hours, and I’m trying to become more organized. When the Palm Pilot first came out a few years ago, I bought one, and tried to use it. After a month or two it sat unused on my shelf. It was just too much of a hassle to keep it up to date.

My friend Tom keeps a “poor man’s PDA”: a small notepad and a pencil. He’s constantly jotting down little notes to himself which get acted upon in seemingly random order. Not a bad idea.

Over at 43 Folders a similar idea, The Hipster PDA was presented, with some additional hints. I’ve used stacks of 3×5 cards during long weeks of debugging to keep track of individual action items, discarding them as they are processed. I’ll probably try this when I’m back to work (on Monday, sigh, vacation almost over).

TiVo announces new developer tools | PVRblog

The gents at PVRblog are reporting that Tivo is beginning a new developer program. I’ll have to keep an eye on this, as it appears they may support the ability of amateurs to create content on the Internet which can be delivered directly to Tivo players. A quote:

TiVo announces new developer tools | PVRblog

TiVo Video Publisher will allow video creators to provide downloadable content for TiVo. They talk about how content providers will be able to package and protect their video, but I hope that the amateurs won’t be left out of the party. It would be great to be able to pull up my mom’s vacation video as easily as a movie from the big studios. If they play their cards right they could make a killing off of long tail videos.

Exciting stuff! Can you imagine having podcast feeds which are delivered directly to your Tivo player? It sounds like it may be within the reach of the APIs specified.

I’ll read up some more and get back later with information in my next podcast.

Don’t get IP law advice from a security guard…

Those clever people at BoingBoing give a link to a story about a little girl who was asked to stop sketching famous paintings hanging in an art museum because the paintings were copyrighted. Sigh.

The story had a happier ending though:

Actually, the museum guard was mistaken. There was no copyright issue, and the museum apologizes and is telling artists to sketch away as long as they do not interrupt the flow of traffic in the always crowded gallery.

Nice that it was resolved. It was a pity that an eleven year old was kept from sketching in her notebook because of the incorrect actions of a security guard. These impromptu attempts at law enforcement (or percieved law enforcement) seem to be increasing to irritating levels.

Software makers lobby for copyright changes – Jan 7, 2005

CNN is reporting that BSA is lobbying for copyright changes. They wish to require that ISPs be required to reveal the identities of individuals who may be distributing copyrighted software on the net using P2P technologies.

The courts have so far resisted this interpretation of existing laws, instead requiring that lawsuits need to be filed separately to obtain those records from ISPs.

Here’s your thought of the day: why should law require an industry to be deputized into a law enforcement capacity and to reveal the private information regarding someone’s use of the internet before there is any evidence whatsoever that a crime has even been committed?

What is your alternative?

Over at evilgeniuschronicles, Dave Slusher has dug out yet another Internet pundit who proclaims that the idea of allowing every individual to have their own radio show is somehow a bad thing. I promised that I wouldn’t rant, and it may seem like I’m piling on, but here’s my take.

  1. If you don’t want to listen, don’t. Podcasting isn’t like billboard advertising, or even television or radio. You have to specifically request any content you are interested in. Any perceived problem with listening is solved quite simply: don’t bother listening.
  2. Is this argument really saying that some people should not be allowed to express their opinions merely because someone finds them banal? Is the argument really that the world is a better place when there is less communication, rather than more?
  3. Podcasting allows audio publishing at very low cost. There are lots of reasons that someone might wish to do that, and many of them are great for society, not to mention the individuals who participate. If you are a musician, or in theater, or a performer, podcasting gives you the same ability to reach individuals with your talent that writers and programmers have had. That’s awesome. Revolutionary even.

I don’t care all that much about the business opportunities that podcasting represents. I’m more interested in the real opportunities that podcasting has to create a whole new class of human interaction. That’s good. That is very good.

pypod

My ipod is on the fritz, so this isn’t immediately useful to me, but check out pypod: a Python library and script for manipulating the song database on your ipod. Neat. When mine comes back from the shop, I’ll have to try it out.

Brainwagon Radio: Miscellaneous Rambling

Where your host blinks the sleep from his eyes, relates his experience with swapping operating systems on his laptop, and tells the story of how he came to work at Pixar and what he did on the Incredibles.

Expanding on my operating system debacle:

  • I never got Fedora Core 3 to have acceptable record quality. I also experienced a number of Firefox crashes which I hadn’t seen before. Not sure what was going on, but I decided to get back on more familiar ground and install FreeBSD 5.3 on it. (I’ve used FreeBSD a lot more than Linux.)
  • FreeBSD 5.3 installed easily, but when I tried to do a kernel recompile, I would get random segmentation faults from gcc. Usually such faults indicate bad hardware, and while I hadn’t noticed any problems like this before, I didn’t immediately discount the notion that the laptop could become less reliable when it overheated.
  • On the other hand, I thought it might be a problem with gcc 3.4 or something else having to do with 5.3. So I reinstalled 4.10-RELEASE on the laptop. After a problem with incorrect probing of the network device (it autodetected into hw-loopback mode) and noticing a problem with the sound driver (begins lound, but tails off after 15 seconds on the initial use, seems fine afterwards) I did a kernel/world recompile. The laptop shut itself off during the compile. Very strange, and could indicate an overheating condition.
  • Now, I’ve come full circle. Back to WinXP SP2, because I suspect I’m going to have to call HP to get this resolved (not under warranty anymore unfortunately). Surprisingly though, the laptop seems to be running cooler now, with less use of the fan than it has previously, even when I began with WinXP.

Additionally, here are the items that I got from Powell’s Books when I was in Portland: