A Whole Lotta Nothing

In the past couple months

In the past couple months I've had to grab some hotel rooms while traveling, and often wished that there was a service I could call to find out which hotel in the area had the best internet access before settling on one.

This past weekend, I had the luxury of a borrowed dial-up connection before selecting a place and knew there must be a hotel listing somewhere of all the chains that featured ethernet or wireless access. Geek Hotels is just such a list, though it doesn't offer searches from a location, it does have fairly complete listings for each city. Being near Anaheim, we ended up staying at the Sheraton, since it offered wireless connectivity.

Of course, as this technology is still young and unreliable, there were problems. The hotel desk wasn't even aware it offered such service, so they couldn't help when I noticed that even though I had a full signal, Mobilestar's access point wasn't redirecting me to their sign-up page or letting me log onto their network. I spent the weekend connection-free, though it would have been nice if it worked once for a quick five minute email check.

So close, yet so far.

Once apple's new upgrade, Jaguar,

Once apple's new upgrade, Jaguar, comes out, I'd love to get a bluetooth-enabled cellphone and finally have a way to backup and maintain my contacts without having to use a tiny keypad for data entry. Looking for phones that might work with it, however, I see "available everywhere but the US" on most models (like these).

Apple wouldn't enable a new feature that couldn't be used on day one, there must be some bluetooth phones currently available that I can't find (I've googled, searched the cingular and sprintPCS phone pages to no avail). If anyone knows of currently available (in the US) bluetooth phones, mind dropping me a line? Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. It appears that there are only a handful of choices, a couple ericsson models, a motorola, and an upcoming nokia. Coverage looks to be a problem for the AT&T/ericsson combo as they don't cover all markets (not mine at least). Looks like another cool bit of technology that's not quite ready for prime time.

Bruce Perens is planning

Bruce Perens is planning on violating the DMCA tomorrow in a speech at the O'Reilly Open Source convention, by describing in detail how to thwart useless region encoding in DVD hardware.

I can't wait to see what happens, it's win-win either way. If he gets arrested by g-men, he'll have a great case against a pointless law that protects pointless technology. If he doesn't get stopped, information on how to thwart pointless technology will get out into the public realm.

UPDATE: hp pressured Perens into scrapping the demo, for their fear of lawsuit. Looks like it was lose-lose, afterall.

Over at Blogroots, we got

Over at Blogroots, we got the green light to start putting chapters online for our upcoming weblog book. The first chapter to go up is actually a later chapter, about using weblogs in a business setting. It's one of my favorite chapters in the entire book. It covers a facet of blogging usually left behind, and explores how weblog software specially adapted to business settings could function. If you're in the weblog tool building business, this should read like a how-to for how you'd go about creating a new product.

In regards to this latest

In regards to this latest assault on P2P networks, this quote is apt:

"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statue or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

-Robert Heinlein, Life Line, 1939 [via MeFi]

CARP is quickly killing

CARP is quickly killing online radio, but there is an upside.

You are free to play any non-RIAA artists on an internet radio station without having to pay any royalties (provided you have some sort of agreement with them, that the music artists are ok with it). I had toyed with the idea of creating an online clearinghouse for unsigned bands that want the promotion of online airplay on niche streams. People running net radio streams could go there and pick out artists and music for their shows, and artists could add themselves to the database with additional info on where you could see them play or how you could buy their own CDs. Think of it as a sort of mp3.com for the people, by the people.

If successful, it could help speed the death of the RIAA. If enough people could stream non-RIAA music, and enough listeners could buy self-published music, there wouldn't be a need for the RIAA control freaks to touch music. We could route around the damage they cause fairly easily and promote a new way of conducting online music business on our collective terms instead of theirs.

I even found a good, available domain for it: fuckyouhilaryrosen.com

In the past week, I've

In the past week, I've seen at least a dozen Apple Switch parody ads with varying amounts of quality, but you have to hand it to Ben, he took it at least a couple steps further than anyone else that came before him.

As much as I know

As much as I know this video is a cheap nostalgic ploy to rope in any gen-X-er, I can't help but feel good whenever I see Kermit in a Weezer shirt.

Or Rivers smiling, for that matter.

I ordered a copy of

I ordered a copy of the Get Your War On book, did you? All profits go to a mine detection team in Northern Afganistan (more info about the project).

You've got to hand it to David Rees, he's taken goofy but funny potty-mouth comics and turned them into a way to save lives. Rock on, Mr. Rees.

File under whoa. I was

File under whoa.

I was just visiting my friend Joe's blog, see he's on the radio, and clicked on the stream. The stream comes up:

"...and she had cancer, then eventually died. A few communities showed an outpouring of support, but eventually questions were asked. At one point this huge community called MetaFilter began tracking details down..."

Turn on the radio, hear "MetaFilter." Freaky.

My server kung fu is

My server kung fu is no good.

I just got back from

I just got back from a visit to a barber, one of the honest-to-goodness kinds that I haven't to in years. One of those places with a barber pole out front, guy named Mort waiting to get a cut after me, pictures of Joe Dimaggio and famous boxing champs on the wall, and the most frequent topic of conversation was gambling in Vegas.

After buzzing around my head once with some clippers the barber made a bold announcement.

"I bet you've been married for two years."

"Two years this fall, yeah" I said. "How'd you know?"

"I only counted one gray hair."

muse.net is in beta

muse.net is in beta and looking like a pretty cool way to pool your collection of music into a digital library you can access anywhere. It's about convenience, not piracy by specifically not allowing sharing or downloading, just personal playback. I've got a desktop with most of my music, and a laptop with a smaller hard drive and only a subset of my collection currently. This looks like a good way to share a single collection between both, even though the machines are physically miles apart.

I added my muse collection under my currently listening header below.

[UPDATE: After coming home from the office, I picked up my powerbook and logged into my collection. iTunes popped up and began streaming mp3s right off my office desktop. Truly amazing.]

It's funny how the "monkey

It's funny how the "monkey see, monkey do" phenomena happens online. One guy sends his resume out to tens of thousands of people (I got one from the guy), and even though he gets taken over the coals for it, someone, somewhere sees it and thinks "oh, we can do that now?" A month following Shifman's spam, I received an unsolicited resume from someone asking me to hire them, directed at my address associated with my domains. It seems like it is still happening.

In the last year, there were a few cases of politicians using spam as their marketing tool for their campaigns. It's no surprise really, last November on election day I got no less than three phone calls with not just people urging me to vote their way, but recorded pitches from the mayor, senators, and representatives. I was getting phone-spammed by robots.

My sincere hope is that other budding politicians don't see this guy and think "great, now it's ok to do that too."

I don't care what party politicians taking part in this belong to, if they can't respect the privacy of every citizen's inbox, they're not getting my vote.

U.S. Congressman Rick Boucher, moving

U.S. Congressman Rick Boucher, moving to strengthen "fair use" provisions under federal copyright law, said he is introducing a bill that would essentially restrict the record industry from selling copy-protected CDs.

While conceding later that copy-protected CDs aren't against existing law, he said their introduction wouldn't even impact the music piracy the music industry is trying to stop. Instead, the move will "anger millions of their best-customers who have become accustomed of making copies [of CDs] for their own use," which is allowed under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.

The provisions in the bill, which are expected to be up for debate by September at the latest, include the following:

- Change the "Ephemeral" Recording Exemption of copyright law
- Expand existing selection for sampling of songs, much the way offline music stores allow people to listen to tracks before buying
- Allow back up copies of music on a hard drive, much the way software copies are backed up in case a computer hard-drive has to be rebuilt
- Address older "mechanical" rights of copyright law by creating "safe harbor" provisions
- Require "non-discrimination" in the licensing of music inventories by major labels in the music industry
- Require an examination of programming restrictions
- Require direct payment to artists: Current law says royalty payments are to be shared among the recording companies and performing artists

Finally, a congressman who gets it.

My guess is that this has exactly one snowball's chance in hell of getting past the recording industry lobby unscathed, but still, it's nice to see something that's a step in the right direction.

Crap. My favorite living bass

Crap. My favorite living bass player (Charles Mingus would be my all-time fav) is no longer living. I think I've mentioned it before, but if you love great music, do yourself a favor and get out and see some live jazz by the living legends. A good lot of them are in their 70s and aren't long for this world.

I got to enjoy Ray Brown's work live on several occasions, but the bay area doesn't have the level of regular, high-quality jazz that the Los Angeles area commands.

I saw Men In Black

I saw Men In Black II over the 4th of July weekend and was quite a bit disappointed in how much energy, effort, and money went in to something so completely devoid of a story.

Walking away from the theater, I realized what I had just seen: A spinoff show. You know those lackluster shows that follow some previously interesting, but somewhat minor character in new situations and new locales? They're rarely half as good as whatever spawned them, and usually for obvious reasons.

MIB 2 was held up by a few characters that had brief amusing parts in the first film. That talking pug that got a shaking in the first film? He's funny for about 30 seconds in both films but shows up as Jay's partner for a number of unfunny sequences. The pawn shop alien who gets his head blown off? He gets a much bigger scene this time around. I barely remembered the worm guys from the first film, but they're given full supporting roles in this one.

I bet it goes like this: take a quirky film that grossed way more than you thought, and take the cash cow to sequel with as little creative work as possible. Instead of a script, start by turning every funny 30 second cameo by an interesting character in the first film into five minutes with the stars. Sprinkle in pre-paid product endorsements and placements liberally, then tack on love story to fill out the remaining minutes.

Overall it was way too much computer generated sets and action with very little plot and character development. It's hard to care about anyone in the film and the whole thing seems like Wild Wild West: plenty of nice looking CG work sans a story to hold any of it up.

Mark Pilgrim's 30 days to

Mark Pilgrim's 30 days to a more accessible weblog is such a wealth of fantastic information that I would be completely surprised if he hasn't already been contacted by a publisher to make a book about the subject (generalized to websites, instead of just weblogs). Perhaps he'll offer a downloadable pdf version of the whole series for a small paypal fee. I'd buy a copy if one were offered that way. The series reads like a to-do list of what I should implement on this site, as well as MetaFilter.

It's great to read the

It's great to read the range of critical feedback about Minority Report (Jason's plot holes, Michael's bad marketing, peter's empty plot, and jane's hilarious open letter to the bad technology planners). I tend to agree with just about everything I've seen there, even though I thought it was a pretty good movie. I wondered what brought about the criticism; what would compel people to take a movie apart bit by bit? Then I remembered the reviews I heard before I saw the film. Roger Ebert is someone I respect and he was giving it some of the highest praise I've heard about a film all year. It seems like the collective webloggers, if you can lump them together like that, are basically calling bullshit on the film's high overall rating among critics. The movie was heralded as something akin to Bladerunner or 2001 when it's maybe a Gattaca at best. It's a pretty good film but nothing stellar, and it has plenty of holes in the story that keep it from being much better.

I wonder if the high praise the film garnered was simply due to the lackluster movie year so far, especially this summer's onslaught of tired, hyped films.

Dear every web designer on

Dear every web designer on earth,

Read this and start following it on your sites.

thanks,
Matt

P.S. I tried to explain why new windows are bad in the comments from this post.

I spent today setting up

I spent today setting up a home theater, not because I had my heart set on owning one, but because I finally got to the point where I had too many things to connect to the TV. I went with this RCA package due to its power, price, and ample number of inputs on the back (most low priced "home theater" systems have a minimal number of inputs, this one has a couple dozen on the back).

Even though it was an integrated package, getting my tivo/satellite, vcr, and dvd player talking to the receiver was a bit of a pain, and doesn't operate as smoothly or as easily as I envisioned. Two things were pretty lackluster about it; the remote is supposed to be able to control up to five devices, but the manual only lists codes for tv, vcr, and cable boxes (not a single dvd player is listed). The second thing is that all devices have to use the same input types if you want to be able to switch between sources. In order to watch a tape on the vcr, I'd have to get rid of the s-video inputs and go with lower quality rca cables throughout. So for now I've got to contend with multiple remotes and I have to unplug the s-video to the tv whenever I want to use the vcr (which isn't very often, thankfully).

While poking around for setup tips, I found Donald Norman's screed on the ails of home theater design and I can say now, after having gone through an installation, everything he said is exactly right. Industry folks should print it out and post it above their desks, as there's no way the average consumer will take the time to learn the pointless jargon and work around the limitations of various standards.