Disorderly Content

Here are some words I never expected to say: Arianna Huffington, I love you! I love the way you point out that Bob Woodward is an empty suit in your article on AlterNet. I remember reading The Final Days, the Woodward & Bernstein book about the end of the Nixon administration, and how you made me almost sorry for Tricky Dick. But I also remember a couple of reviewers taking you to task for all the things you didn't say, about how Nixon's staff were saying one thing to each other (and to you), while they were saying something very different to the public. That charge didn't penetrate with me then, when I was young and naive and wanted to believe that the heroes of Watergate were beyond reproach. But now, reproach is all we have.

Woodward is an object lesson: Spend too much time with sleaze and it'll rub off. Assuming of course you were better than this, once upon a time. Now I'm not so sure.

Update 12/02: Apologies to any and all blondes, natural or otherwise, who are offended at being compared to Bob Woodward. The phrase was Ms. Huffington's. Me, I have nothing but respect for blondes. Especially my blogger friends Silvia and Elke. (You can stop pummeling me any time.)

I saw Pride & Prejudice on Thansgiving morning. And today I finally caught up with the latest Harry Potter film. The connection between the two is in the way they were both reviewed, by comparison to other adaptations of the same works. In the case of P&P the comparisons were to the A&E miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. The reviewers I read or heard seemed equally divided; half preferred the longer TV version, half the new film. (Nobody mentioned the Greer Garson/Laurence Olivier version, which isn't a surprise if you ever tried to watch it.) Me, I'm torn. I like the miniseries a lot; I've watched it on DVD at least a half dozen times. I like the pace, the way they have enough time to tell a romantic story in glances and smiles and the odd gulp. But the new movie has its charms too, even if it does feel kind of rushed. For one thing, it feels more alive, as if these are real people and not just literary creations spouting clever dialogue. And the surroundings are much grittier; there's a lot more dung in the movie, and a lot more clothing that looks like it would last, and rooms that look the way a room would look when it's been lived in for a few decades. I guess in the end I have to say I like them both, but wish each could have had the benefits of the other. And I should also mention how strange it felt to be one of a very few men in a theater filled with women. Dunno why Jane Austen doesn't appeal to more men. Or maybe they just aren't willing to go public on the subject.

Now for that connection I promised. Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire is the fourth film, with the third director. I'd heard both good and less good things about Mike Newell, the director on GoF. Some people thought he had less imagination than Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Prisoner of Azkaban. Others felt like GoF worked in a way the three previous films didn't. (Interestingly, nobody had much good to say about Chris Columbus, who directed the first two films. Workmanlike was about as kind as they were willing to get.) Me, I liked GoF, and in ways I hadn't expected. Unlike the earlier films, this one is exciting, layered and filled with moments of real danger. It's more than a roller coaster ride, where you know the hero will emerge at the other end but just don't know how. There's a real feeling of fright and peril and uncertainty that was missing earlier in the series. And (and here comes another connection) there's a feeling of realism and grit to the look of the film that's new as well. The Hogwarts of the earlier installments looked like a Disneyland creation; this one has a worn and functional feel of a real school, even if it has all kinds of magic about it. I can't wait for the next volume, which is something I wouldn't have said up to this point. Book five wasn't my favorite, but given the right director, the film version may just surprise me.

Need some holiday decorating ideas? Check out this guy's light display. Well worth the time, even if it is in Windows Media.

Okay, that's overstating it. A lot. But it feels like a big deal. Today one of the hit counters on my website went over half a million. Granted, it took just over ten years to get there, but there have been a whole lot of visitors to my travel pages since this site went live in August of 1995. Back then it was at reality.sgi.com, a server Silicon Graphics let us use for whatever we wanted, as long as it was noncommercial and didn't put the company in legal jeopardy. I got my own domain a little over two years later, having figured out that I wasn't going to be at SGI forever and that it could take a while for search engines to notice my new location. And of course I've added stuff to the site over the years, until it has become the lumbering behemoth you see today. Which gets a lot more visitors; at the current hit rate, I could hit a million visitors this time in 2008.

I'm thankful for a hobby that's kept me entertained for a decade. How about you?

Back in my college days, we'd regularly make the four hour run to Toronto to visit the Ontario Science Centre, the first hands on museum I'd ever seen. One of the exhibits I remember was a demonstration of speech synthesis. In those pre-PC days (the computer kind; I'm pretty sure political correctness had already arrived), it was all done with dedicated hardware. And the exhibit was a one trick pony, saying the word coffee every time you pressed a button. What was cool was that you could adjust the pitch and the intonation, making coffee either a statement or a question at the turn of a dial.

Thankfully, we've moved on in that area of technology. But what reminded me of those long ago days was a posting on Boing Boing about a Swedish site that will sing whatever message you type. The cool part is that it doesn't use synthesizers. No, it's better; it grabs clips of songs with the individual words and strings them together. Go on and try it; it sounds much better than it... sounds.

I'm sure you've all missed me terribly and were wondering why I seemed to have dropped off the face of the blogoplanet. Yes, it's true; I was actually out of network access for the past four and a half days. In Burbank of all places, at my annual Farscape pilgrimage. I'll have a writeup of the festivities up in a few days; you can read about previous years' cons in the meantime. But let's just say that there was a lot of fun, a lot of laughter, perhaps a little too much drinking and carousing and not nearly enough sleep. Scapers are about the best people to be around, both the fans of the show and the cast. And interestingly, although the line between the two hasn't blurred, it's certainly beginning to run a bit around the edges. The con's organizers finally understand they don't have to protect the cast from us. Heck, on occasion we're the ones who need protecting!

From The iPod Observer comes news of a story at the Wall Street Journal, that bastion of all that is right and true, or at least it's true if you're on the right, that Apple is expected to abandon it's $.99 per track pricing model for the iTunes Music Store within a year. Call my cynical, but I have to question the source of this non-story. It's EMI, one of the record labels that's been putting pressure on Apple to charge more for hit songs than for the rest of its catalogue. Could it be that EMI has an ulterior motive in spreading news of a policy change at Apple? Like that once everybody believes it's gonna happen anyway, it'll be that much easier to strongarm Apple into going along? Naw, that can't be it. A record label wouldn't be that devious. Or that transparent for that matter.

(Filed under Music, although Scams is probably just as appropriate. And I'd have provided a link to the WSJ story, except they still think they can charge for their collective wisdom.)

I've always gone with the classic definition of chutzpah: the guy who kills both his parents and then asks the court to show him mercy because he's an orphan. But I may just have to reconsider. Because this one fits as well if not better. It's an email message I just received. Judge for yourself if the word fits:

Subject: Dear Hank,


I use a good spam filter, and you probably do the same.
I have whitelisted you and that means that I will receive all the emails you send to me.
I would appreciate it if you would whitelist my email address:
* * address deleted * * in your spam filter.

If you don't have a spam filter, I can recommend * * product name deleted * *. It is a highly effective free spam filter for Outlook and Outlook Express.

You can get the free * * product name deleted - again * * here:
* * URL deleted * *

I hope that you will whitelist me, so we can continue to communicate safely via email in the future.

Best regards

* * name deleted * *

Needless to say, I've never heard of the author of this oh so helpful missive. But I want to thank him, her or it for caring so much about the safety of my electronic communication. Unless... do you suppose this was just a ruse to get me to download some piece of software? But... wouldn't that make this... spam?

I decided to take off this afternoon and catch a movie. Hadn't seen Wallace & Gromit yet, so I checked on times and headed off to my local multiplex. Got my ticket and headed over to theater #12, which is where things got a little bit strange. The overhead sign listed Get Rich or Die Tryin'. But I figured, hey, maybe they hadn't switched it yet. So I settled in with my iPod and waited for the movie to start.

Which didn't happen according to schedule. When the scheduled start came and went, I went into the hall and noticed that the sign now agreed with my ticket: this was the theater for Wallace & Gromit. So I went back in to the empty theater. And eventually saw a handful of other people come in just as the trailers started. But I was more convinced something was wrong. First, they didn't look the type for the subtle charms of stop motion animation. And second, the trailers seemed way too dark for the movie I was expecting to see. A few seconds after the credits rolled, I had it confirmed that I was in the wrong place.

So out I went to find someone in charge. Yes, they'd decided to switch theaters, I'm guessing because they didn't want to waste a digital projection system on one patron. SIC claimed they went in to tell the audience about the change. I suggested without using these words that they had done no such thing. And I was led to to the new theater, to join the presentation already in progress. Fortunately, all I missed were the trailers and a cartoon based, I believe, on characters from Madagascar. The CGI cartoon, not the island.

So all's well that ends well. I enjoyed seeing W&G on a big (or at least big-ish) screen, although it was weird being alone in the theater. And I think the people in charge of the theater are incompetent boobs, but that's hardly a revelation either. So what shall I see next? Keira Knightly doing Jane Austen? Zathura looks like mindless fun. Or should I wait 'til Walk The Line and Harry Potter hit theaters?

I have a weakness for nerd humor, especially when it's tied to popular entertainment. (I was gonna say it's like Mad Magazine for grownups, but Mad Magazine is Mad Magazine for grownups.) But the best thing about Kill Bill's Browser, an effort to wean the masses off the disaster that is Internet Explorer onto something less, well, disaster-prone, is the list of 13 reasons to switch. My favorite is number 8; what's yours?

Oh, and if you click on the button below, Google says they'll give me a dollar. I'm guessing they can afford it.

Yeah, like that's news. But this is special. Not in the Princess Leia bikini for your dog sense, but still special. Just in time for Christmas, Boing Boing delivers word of a seasonal Darth Vader, decked out in shiny red and accompanied by an equally shiny green wreath. Gee, remember when Darth Vader was a symbol of bad, rather than of bad acting? Okay, he was always a symbol of bad acting. But you know what I mean.

I was listening to the latest edition of Cinecast, Sam and Adam's weekly movie review podcast. And was surprised and pleased when they read my email about their review of Capote. You can hear it for yourself if you're so inclined; it comes about 21:44 into episode #52. Or you can grab my two minutes of the show, cut from the cast with an app called MP3 Trimmer.

I'm sure you're as excited as I am about my moment of semi-demi-hemi-fame. What can I say? I'm easily impressed. As I hope, dear reader, are you.

Happy post-election day! Aside from the good news here in California about all of the Governator/Gropenfuhrer's ballot propositions going down to defeat, I am cheered by news from Dover, Pennsylvania. According to the New York Times, every one of the Dover school board members who ran for reelection was defeated. Why is that such a big deal? This was the school board that is being sued for introducing intelligent design into biology classes as an alternative to evolution. Guess the voters didn't think that was such a hot idea after all. Heck, when even the Vatican thinks evolution is good science, you have to recognize that something interesting is going on. Like sanity, at least in small portions.

Spent a few minutes at the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara this morning. (A job fair, if you must know.) And as I was walking by the reception desk I noticed something new. Like a lot of moderately upscale hotels, the Westin has a concierge desk to help guests with travel, dining and other arrangements. But something was different; there was no one behind the desk. In fact, I realized the space behind the desk would have been a tight squeeze if anyone had been there. There was a guest in front of the desk, talking to someone. And as I came around I saw the big flat screen monitor on the wall and realized that the concierge had been outsourced. There was a video camera on the desk, and the concierge, dressed in standard hotel garb and with the hotel display behind her, was helping the guest. But as to what country she was speaking from, I couldn't say. It struck me as strangely impersonal and personal at the same time. But having dealt with outsourced support at places like Earthlink, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that even upscale places are looking to cut corners.

An interesting aspect of selling stock photographic images is the legality of taking pictures of someone else's property and then selling them. You get lots and lots of opinions, with complications when a building's owner trademarks their buildings (like the Transamerica Building in San Francisco or the Opera House in Sydney). But even these aren't clearcut, as the Court of Appeals found in a case involving a photographer who sold posters of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The district court gave the museum an injunction against the photographer; the appeals court vacated the order. You can read the decision yourself, which explains that using a structure as a trademark is a complicated business that doesn't necessarily keep others from benefiting from your property. Then again, this was a preliminary injunction and the vacating of same; we don't know how the courts would have ruled in a full trial.

Yeah, I'm getting a headache even as I type...

Has the web gotten boring for you too? Remember the days when every trip to the browser offered at least the possibility of something wonderful, or at least wonderfully weird? You do? Me too! Gosh, what are the odds of that?

Okay, that was a pointless digression. Let's get to the meat of this post, which started with an entry on a stock photography forum. In the Off-Topic Discussion area, in case you were worried I was about to start singing the praises of my photo hobby yet again. Anyway, the entry mentioned a very funny piece about domain name choices gone wrong. Like The Experts Exchange, whose domain suggests they're experts, but in a rather specialized domain. (According to Snopes, they've since added a hyphen to their official domain.) Or an Italian battery maker called Powergen Italia that either didn't notice the pun in their domain name and didn't have an English speaker around to point it out.

That was fun. But it also led me to an article on company and domain naming that's a pretty thorough debunking of another article on the subject. That article (the debunking, not the original) was both educational and a lot more entertaining than finding puns in domain names. And to think that I wasn't looking for any of this when I started pulling at this thread.

Read about it for yourself. Then pester your doctor. And I'd say that even if I wasn't getting a big kickback from the manufacturer.

...or at least a nice picture of it. As I've mentioned a few times before, I've gotten caught up in taking pictures and attempting to sell them on several microstock photography websites. The idea is that designers of websites, brochures, magazine ads and the like can search websites for appropriate graphics to include in their work. They pay a few dollars for each image, which the stock photo site shares with the photographer.

Anyway, a while back there was a lot of sturm und drang on one of the stock sites about somebody who was selling prints on eBay. The problem is that the prints were of pictures that were purchased from that site, a site which is pretty explicit about what are appropriate and inappropriate uses of purchased photos. And the license terms do not allow for printing and selling copies of photos. As I'm sure the eBay seller knew all too well. I mean, you read those click-through licenses carefully, don't you?

That seller was dealt with. And then it happened again, only with a twist. This time when the seller was told to stop selling what doesn't belong to him, he explained that he'd bought a sort of business kit on eBay. Somebody was selling a printer, a library of images, and the idea that you'd make a business out of selling photos on eBay. Of course, the buyer of the kit had no idea the seller didn't have the rights to what he was selling.

Which reminds me of all those ads for work at home businesses, the kind that involve stuffing envelopes. Which always seem to turn out to be businesses selling those same work at home businesses to even more gullible people, who'll have to find new gullible people to sell to. As with everything else that promises an easy way to make money, Caveat Emptor: Let the buyer beware.

A week ago Forbes Magazine wrote a polemic about the evil that is the blogosphere and what companies whose God-given right to spread the word about the wonderfulness of their products should do to undermine the menace that is the blogger. (If you missed it, you can read a precis at Google Blogoscoped or pretty much anywhere else in that selfsame evil blogosphere.) Anyway, now Michael Malone, who once hosted a news show for our local no-budget public broadcasting station before moving on to bigger and possibly better things at ABC News, weighs in on why nobody should take Forbes remotely seriously when the subject is technology. Or the technology business for that matter. As Malone points out, Forbes ignored the dotcom bubble as it grew, only getting on board right before it blew up in everybody's faces. They're just as wrong about bloggers, whether over the business potential that might be there or the rights of the people (said with Forbes' trademark derision) to question their betters online.

I've often wondered how a word like elitist got so completely divorced from the idea of being elite. Isn't there an implication of a meritocracy in declaring someone elite? I ask because the more we hear from the elite, the less elite they seem.