- ESR on Canonical’s Unity interface. What He Said. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Interfaces, yeah. Here’s a thoughtful take on touchscreen interfaces that’s worth hearing. I have a (now ancient) iPod and consider the clickwheel brilliant. I didn’t know it was becoming extinct.
- Last night Eric Bowersox showed me how he took a stock Nook Color and rebooted it from a MicroSD card into stock Android Gingerbread packaged by Cyanogen. Eric downloaded the OS and installed it on a card himself (he’s a hardware guy par excellance), but you can actually buy a MicroSD card with alternate Android distros like Cynamogen preinstalled. Just pop the card into the corner pocket of your Nook Colo and reboot. These include N2A and RootMyNookColor. I’d sure like a Xoom 2, but when we’re going to see it in the US is unclear.
- If the upcoming dual-core Nook Tablet’s screen is big enough to render technical PDFs well, I’d be sorely tempted–especially if Cyanogen and the like will boot it into stock Android. (I would like an 8″ display, though.)
- Many have sent me the link to Things That Turbo Pascal 3.0 Is Smaller Than. It’s actually a lot simpler than that: Turbo Pascal 3.0 is smaller than just about any executable file that does anything useful on a modern OS. How small? Under 40K. K, not M. You know, that letter we almost never use anymore.
- Steve Ballmer evidently didn’t blow Microsoft’s chances to compete in the tablet marketplace all by himself. Oh, no. He Had Help.
- Here’s a list of failed DRM schemes. Every one of them helped turn paying users into pirates, and accomplished nothing useful beyond stroking content industry gigaegos. DRM stinks.
- To an extent, I agree with this article: Cheap wine is not necessarily better than more expensive wine. That said, the very cheapest wines are not as good as wines in the $6-$10 range. Gallo in particular has disappointed me.
- There are USB air fresheners. I’m not kidding. If DRM stinks, is this the answer?
- FUNEX? S,VFX. FUNEM? S,VFM. OK. LFMNX.
wine
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Printed book sales fall, and ebook sales rise by 115%. Something’s Going On Here.
- I bought an iPod Touch from Jim Strickland and am currently figgering it out. Although I was surprised that it won’t display .mov videos, this article makes much clear about Apple’s video formats.
- Michael Covington’s 2008 tutorial on reading email headers to spot phish and phakes is worth reading again.
- Richard McConachy sent me a link to The Great Wetherell Refractor, a hand-made 200mm F9 with some of the guldurndest metalwork in it.
- There was a horned gopher during the Pleistocene. Really. It is the only horned rodent known, and the smallest horned mammal.
- From Henry Law comes a reminder of an xkcd item from a while back. For heavenly performance, ground your receiver in a jar of holy water!
- And that led to this one, which (Ben Franklin groupie that I am) has always been one of my favorites.
- I haven’t had a monster zin in some time, but last night I opened the bottle of Klinker Brick 2007 Old Vine Zinfandel that’s been sitting on the rack for almost two years. About $18 if I recall. At 15.8% alcohol, it’s among the strongest reds you’re likely to find that aren’t port. Dry but not bitter, with strong spice and enough fruit to balance the buzz. I had about 100ml. Puh-lenty!
- A cool hack and great visual humor. I have a couple of these little KingMax USB sticks (courtesy Eric Bowersox) and although it would be a bad use of my time, I’m sorely tempted.
- Accidental visual feast: Search for “steampunk jewelry” on Google Images. My favorite would be this one, which I would title “Time Flies.”
- In addition to bathroom heaters like the one I bought the other day, the Fitzgerald Manufacturing Company was well-known for making vibrators, (PDF) albeit not the kind that generated plate voltage for car radios! (Could this have been the original killer app for mains electricity?) Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.
Odd Lots
- I’m still pretty sore from lingering shingles pain on my back, and a little grouchy in consequence, though I’m trying manfully not to show it. On the good news end, Carol is much better, and we both had cheese ravioli last night. I think it was the first meal worthy of the name that she’s had in almost two weeks.
- Anger really does make you lose: Sony has condemned “No Pressure” and completely disassociated itself from 10:10.
- From the Terms-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: milk float, a small delivery vehicle (often electric) used to deliver milk in urban England. Some photos here.
- And another from that department: steamdevil, a small vortex of condensed water vapor rising into cold air from a warm body of water like a lake or a river. This is the time of year you tend to see them, and Spaceweather posted a nice example from Wisconsin.
- I’ve always suspected that grains aren’t good for me, but here’s some analysis as to why. Your Body May Vary, but a lot of this sure sounds familiar. Note well the caution on soybeans, which give both Carol and me a lot of trouble.
- Napa’s cool summer has winemakers biting their nails: They may lose much (and perhaps all) of their harvest if a freeze comes before the grapes mature, but if they can walk the tightrope to harvest without falling, this year’s late-harvest wines (my favorite kind) could be spectacular. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- The Colorado Springs marijuana industry has made the New York Times , and has injected new life into local newspapers. I like The Independent, our quirky little free paper (its offices are in an old church with interesting architecture) and every issue I flip through down at the Black Bear Coffeehouse has another page of MMD ads. The latest issue had a 48-page pull-out supplement, devoted entirely to You Know What. The world is clearly crazier than we can imagine.
- Mars may have had not only oceans, but (c’mon, this is obvious!) also icebergs. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Australia is about to get its first native-born Roman Catholic saint: Sister Mary Helen MacKillop, who in 1870 got a child-abuser priest removed from his position. In retaliation, friends of the priest orchestrated her excommunication, but she was exonerated in 1872. She will be canonized later this month, and I’d say she now stands fair to become the patron saint of whistleblowers.
Thanksgiving Break
I’m by no means finished with my current thread on how necessary Windows is, but the Thanksgiving holiday weekend intervened, and Carol and I flew to Chicago earlier this week to spend time with family. I hadn’t seen our nieces Katie Beth and Julie since the beginning of August, and kids change quickly at this point in their lives. Julie is now making short but full sentences (at 18 months) and Katie, now 3, is chattering away as she discusses some pretty interesting issues. For example, last night at Gretchen’s house, Katie looked at me and asked her mother, “What is Uncle Jeff?” (A few of my early girlfriends probably wondered the same thing.) Gretchen tried to explain that Uncle Jeff is her brother, but Katie does not have a brother and may not quite grasp the concept yet.
No sweat on that one; she’ll get there. Carol and I visited with her mom on Wednesday, did some shopping, and helped her sister Kathy prepare the Thanksgiving feast. It was drippy from the moment we got off the plane on Tuesday, and the drips continued through the day Thursday, when the family finally gathered at three. The feast included all the traditional fare: Turkey, ham, stuffing, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, rolls, both ceasar and Hawaiian salad, three kinds of home-made pies (with ice cream, as an option) and probably a few things that I missed, most likely green vegetables. As has become the tradition, I acted as sommelier, and brought both dry and sweet wines for the table. The dry red was Cosentino Winery’s Cigarzin 2004, a superb, fruit-forward Zinfandel without much oak but with explosive fruit flavors. Not subtle–but then, neither am I. On the sweet side I chose Bartenura’s Malvasia, an unusual sweet blush with just a little fizz. We also had a German Riesling Auslese from St. Christopher, with a bottle of White Heron in the fridge in case we needed it. As feasts go it was outstanding; much credit going to Kathy, her husband Bob, and Bob’s mother Betty for somehow making all the food appear at an appropriate time at the appropriate temperature.
I stayed out of the stores yesterday for obvious reasons, even though I’m shopping for a new subnotebook or (gasp) netbook. Instead I spent time at Gretchen’s making an old family recipe handed down from our Irish grandmother Sade. It’s called gumgash, which is essentially hamburger mixed with chopped onions, mushrooms, diced tomatoes, and shell macaroni. I dumped a little Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel 2006 into the mix, which isn’t historical but adds significant flavor if you can let the whole thing simmer for 20 minutes. After we all feasted on gumgash, the girls demanded to hear their Phineas and Ferb music CD. This is a spinoff from a cartoon show on the Disney channel, about two 10-year-old nerds who invent things and drive their 15-year-old sister to distraction. The show is the girls’ current favorite (having recently upended the Madagascar Penguins; could there be stirrings of Linux culture here?) and I danced with both of them to a few of the brief but well-written cuts (some of which were hilarious) on the album. There aren’t many effective ways to dance with an 18-month-old, so I sat taylor-style on the kitchen floor and held Julie’s hands while we both swayed back and forth to the pounding rhythms of “I’m Lindana and I Wanna Have Fun!” which, while only 51 seconds long, is insanely catching, and echoed endlessly around in the back of my skull until I finally dozed off at 11 last night.
So here I am, taking a breather on Saturday afternoon before getting busy again. We’ll be home in a couple of days, when I’ll continue the current series, and then segue into some observations about writing fiction. I like lumps in my Thanksgiving mashed potatoes, and I like lumps in my exposition. The important part is what the lumps are made of. If they’re tasty enough, nobody will care…but I’ll get back to that.
Odd Lots
- There appears to be a new online scam that is a first cousin of scareware: Driver updaters. Drivers ride with hardware, and install with hardware, so unless your hardware changes or you do a major OS upgrade, drivers do not need to be updated. Every such updater I’ve researched appears at best to be adware and often much worse. Get your drivers from the hardware manufacturer (or built into the OS) and nowhere else.
- While trying to determine if Chicago had ever had a radio station WYNR (it did, briefly, from 1962-1965) I ran across this exhaustive list of all broadcast radio stations that have ever operated in Chicago (both AM and FM) with brief discussions of their history.
- There’s a downside to modern optical drives that spin discs at 50X Not all discs can take it–and when they go, they turn into daggers. I know it took the Mythbusters guys awhile to detonate a CD by spinning it on a Dremel tool, but one wonders if a disc accumulates stress fractures over time and one day just…lets go. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Among other things that Carol and I have been using since we were married in 1976 are a Realistic STA-64 30W tuner/amp, a Rival crockpot, and a Sunbeam 16-speed blender. Admittedly, we don’t use them as often as we use our flatware, but we use them regularly, and they all work basically as well as when they came out of the box, way back when I still had all my hair.
- While not as old as our Rival Crockpot, I still have and use my TI-30 SLR scientific calculator, which I bought in 1983. Won’t do hex, but it’s handled every other piece of math I’ve ever thrown at it.
- A nameless source in the filesharing community tells me that MP3s of every pop song that has ever charted on Billboard will fit on a single $50 500 GB hard drive. I have no way to verify this, but if true, it’s a good demonstration of what the music industry is facing, and perhaps why they’re as nuts as they’ve gotten in recent years. (I already have an external 320GB USB hard drive that slides into my shirt pocket–and disappears. For $125, I could have one containing 500GB. All of pop music hiding in one shirt pocket. Egad.)
- From the Wines-To-Avoid-At-All-Costs Department: Pepperwood Grove Pinot Noir 2006. A whiff of galvanized iron is not a plus. (Dumped it.)
Odd Lots
- Here is the entire sky projected on a plane, and zoomable. (LINK REMOVED–SEE COMMENTS.) That doesn’t do it anything like justice. Cruise the image a little and gasp. (Give the site time to refresh; it’s newly slashdotted.) Read the rest of the page too–it’s fascinating, and full of great photos. Chile looks a great deal like Mars in some places.
- There is apparently a correlation between sleep loss and amyloid tangles in the brain, which are a key element in Alzheimer’s Disease. Causation is still a little unclear, but I find it significant that in our era of Anything But Sleep, the incidence of various dementias is exploding. Be in bed by 10:00PM and keep your brain. Now there’s a deal I can live with.
- Wired has an interesting retrospective on tablet computing, which I found worthwhile mostly for the mention of a steampunk-era electromechanical handwriting encode-and-transfer device, which ferdam sounds like what Sherlock Holmes would use to IM Watson.
- Here’s another worthwhile perspective on the Google Books Settlement.
- A chap who calls himself the Jolly Pirate wrote to tell me that the Pirate Party is alive and well in the US (I was under the impression that it was a European thing) and some interesting links may be found on its site, many of which have nothing to do with piracy. Now, would an American instance of the Pirate Party lean left or right? (Or would it be port and starboard?) I’ll be damned if I can decide…
- It’s been a bad season for big-time wine critics, who can’t seem to find a business model and keep getting busted in conflict-of-interest scandals. The Internet allows the crowdsourcing of critique of all sorts of things–why should wine be any different?
- Pertinent to the above: What we need is the wine implementation of the “People who liked this also liked…” mechanism I see (and use) in the book world. I very much like Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel, though the 2007 vintage now in stores is a pale shadow of 2005. What would be a wine similar to that? (If you know of such a system for wine, please share.)
- There are candy Legos.
- The charger for my Kodak pocket camera is a thin little slab with two 110V power plug pins that swivel out to plug into the wall, and then swivel back into hiding when they’re not needed. Why can’t they build that mechanism right into the back of an ebook reader? (I was without my Sony Reader for a couple of months after I lost the charger.)
- After an unexplained absence of several weeks, Fort Carson’s cannon is back. (See my entry for September 15, 2009.) Maybe the cannon was broke and they had to send it back to the factory for repairs…
Odd Lots
- One of the most remarkable photos of a volcanic eruption ever taken apparently happened by sheer chance, when the ISS passed over the Kuril Islands just as the Sarychev Peak volcano let loose. The rising plume literally punched a near-circular hole in the cloud cover.
- Just in case you happen to see a nuclear weapon go off, having one of these in your pocket would be handy to quantify things. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
- From Bruce Baker comes a pointer to a NYT article about the perils of being an outsourcee for an unscrupulous publisher. And so much for our textbooks being created by experts with advanced degrees.
- John Cleese’s lighthearted but still informative documentary “Wine for the Confused” can now be seen on Hulu, at the cost of a few Toyota commercials. I’m good with that–and in complete agreement with Cleese that knowing good wine from great wine is not automatic, and in fact knowing good wine from bad takes more effort than most would think. Don’t miss it. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for letting me know it was there; I saw it on TV a couple of years ago and much enjoyed it.)
- We may gasp at 64 GB thumb drives now, but storage technologies coming to market in the next few years will make 1 TB thumb drives not only possible but commonplace. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- The annual amateur radio Field Day event happens this weekend, from 1800 zulu on Saturday to 2100 on Sunday. I’ve got the radios boxed up, and will be experimenting with a interesting rotatable dipole made from a pair of AN-45G collapsible military whip antennas, on top of a pipe mast made of four 5′ sections of 3/8″ pipe mounted on my ancient telescope pipe base. The rotator is my right hand, turning a greased 2″ pipe joint on its own threads. I’ll describe the dipole with photos if it works; if it doesn’t work I’ll admit failure and quietly forget about it. But if you’ll be on the air, I’ll be working solo from a nearby campground as K7JPD. Listen for me.
- From the Too Weird To Be True but True Anyway File: The woman who may well become our first Hispanic supreme court justice stated quite flatly in her Princeton University senior thesis that “…in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition.” I’m a Polish-German-Irish-French ubermongrel who last took Spanish in 1973, and even I know better than that. So…can I be on the Supreme Court instead?
Odd Lots
- Pete Albrecht alerted me to Collecta, an interesting twist on a general Web search engine, in that it gathers news being posted Right Now, and displays it item by item on the screen in realtime While You Wait. Alas, most of what it seems to index are tweets, which may just barely count as information, for small values of “information.”
- And yet another stab at the same concept.
- Kingston has just announced a 128GB flash drive. Figuring an average MP3 is 5 MB in size, that’s 25,600 MP3s. And if the average MP3 runs 4 minutes, that’s 71 days of music running 24/7 with no repeats.
- Rich Rostrom sent me a link to a (pretty dense) medical research paper suggesting another possible benefit of low-carb diets: ameliorating schizophrenia. A 70-year-old schizophrenic woman went on a low-carb diet and after eight days ceased experiencing hallucinations. Not any reasonable cause-effect here in this one case, but boy, this suggests a promising avenue of research. (Steak, cheese, and fish are way cheaper than designer drugs.)
- It’s gotten cold enough in Brazil this year to allow Brazilian vineyards to make the first-ever Brazilian ice wine. (Babelfish translation of the original Portuguese.) Ice wine is a dessert wine delicacy made from grapes that are allowed to remain on the vine long enough to freeze in the first cold nights of autumn. Trouble is, there are almost never enough freezing nights in autumn in Brazil to make ice wine. (Most ice wine comes from places like Austria.) Ice wine is great stuff: I’ll continue to worry about global cooling but damn, I’ll buy a bottle!
- Ten years or so ago at Coriolis, we had an underwear policy. We did not, however, have an open wounds policy. HR gets more complex all the time…
The Secret to Making Good Wine
Basically, charge more for it. That's all it takes, and I roared when I read the account on the Boston Globe site. Take that, ye wannabe wine snobs! In summary, when people have not learned the subtleties of wine flavors, they fall back on the assumption that good wine is more expensive than so-so wine, so when told how much a bottle of wine costs without being told what it is, they overwhelmingly declare that the more expensive wine is the better wine—even when all the wines in the tasting are exactly the same wine.
Heh.
Perceiving the subtleties of wine is like playing the piano, or most any other musical instrument: It takes years of practice, and (though we may mightily deny it) many or even most people have no talent for the skill and cannot learn it. Add that to the fact that human taste perception varies wildly from individual to individual and cannot be quantified, and, well, it cooks down to this: Buy what you can afford and learn to like it, as the odds are that you cannot tell the difference between good and ordinary wine anyway. From the article:
After the researchers finished their brain imaging, they asked the subjects to taste the five different wines again, only this time the scientists didn't provide any price information. Although the subjects had just listed the $90 wine as the most pleasant, they now completely reversed their preferences. When the tasting was truly blind, when the subjects were no longer biased by their expectations, the cheapest wine got the highest ratings. It wasn't fancy, but it tasted the best.
The larger issue, that expectations color what we consider “objective” perception, is worth close study, as it applies to a lot more than just wine. People say that house brands are inferior to name brand only when they're told which is which. Our sense of taste is not as good as we think, nor are our skills of perception. I don't buy brand name Rice Chex anymore, nor real Diet Mountain Dew. (And we buy Joe's Os when we're somewhere that they're sold; they beat Cheerios all hollow.) I save money, and I'm just as happy as I was going with name brands. Objective quality is perceptible (and thus definable) for some things, less so for other things, and not at all for a great many (perhaps most) things. Being able to tell which is which is an important skill. Don't assume that you know more than you do, nor that you can discern more than you can.
A recent phone conversation with Michael Abrash triggered some insights in this area. More on it when I find the time. And thanks to several people who sent me the Boston Globe link; I believe Rich Rostrom was the first.
Open That Bottle Night
Last night was Open That Bottle Night, the annual event that Wall Street Journal wine columnists John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter created almost by accident a few years ago. The idea is for people who have been saving a bottle of wine with emotional or historical connections to their lives to stop hoarding it, just open it, and enjoy it. It was a golden opportunity for us to pull out the dusty bottle of the Schlossadler Gau-Odernheimer Petersberg Dornfelder Rotwein 1994 that we had originally intended to open on our 25th wedding anniversary in 2001. The bottle has a peculiarly effective sort of self-preservation instinct: We forgot and left it behind in Phoenix when we drove to Chicago to celebrate our 25th in 2001. (9-11 was only a week before we left, and other things than wine were on our minds.) We then figured we'd open it on the 35th anniversary of our meeting one another in July 2004, but again we were in Chicago. The following year we figured we'd open it on July 31, for the 36th anniversary of our meeting, but were famously foiled by my flop into a patch of poison ivy. We then figured we'd open it for our 30th wedding anniversary in 2006, but by that time the bottle had gotten so far back in our memories that we clean fergot.
That bottle was a survivor, heh.
So a couple of weeks ago, while reading John and Dorothy's column in the WSJ, Carol looked up from the paper and said, “We have to open That Bottle on February 23.” This time for sure, Rocky!
And so we did. David and Terry Beers were here for dinner, and we cobbled together a Polish feast, with some kielbasa, honey millet bread, and cheese pirogi. Although I was concerned that the wine might not have survived (like all dornfelders it's fairly light, with only 9.5% alcohol) 14 years isn't all that long a time, and just as several people reassured us, the wine was unbowed.
What I did find remarkable was how indistinctly I recalled it. (We had bought half a case in October 1996, for our 20th, and I would think it would have remained clearer in my mind.) Dornfelders are almost invariably off-dry to semi-sweet, and this one is about as sweet as any dornfelder I've ever had. I remember it being a little drier, perhaps because I've had numerous drier dornfelders since then. The fruit was explosive, with some of the most intense black-currant flavor I ever recall in a wine of any stripe. It went well with the kielbasa, and the four of us had a wonderful evening talking about life, relationships, dogs, writing, ebooks, and ultra-mobile PCs. (It's that kind of crowd.) I don't recommend dornfelders to everyone—sweet reds bother a lot of people—but this one was a keeper, and if you have an open mind, sniff around the odd corners of your larger wine shops and try one.
Alas, we have no bottles of anything even remotely that old, and certainly nothing with that memorable a run of brushes with consumption. So next February we may just go eenie-meenie-mynie-moe and pull something from the rack. The wine is the thing, sure, but more than that, it's about friendship and having history together. This July, Carol and I will have known one another for 39 years, and we're pondering a whomper party somewhere in summer 2009. I guess it's time to shop for That Special Bottle so we'll have something to pass around in celebration of friendship, ours and that of all the many people we value in this beautiful and extravagant world.
