District 9

As I get older and busier with work and life activities, and have less time to go see movies, I often leave theaters thinking “well that was a waste of time, I could’ve just watched that at home.”  We do make time to go to the theater once in a while, but only if there’s something that feels really one-of-a-kind.

Watching District 9 was the first time in a while that I was glad to have gone to the cinema, with a full opening-night crowd.   It was exhilarating, shocking, dramatic, emotional, and packed in some hectic, satisfying action during the climax.  The nature of the film’s marketing also meant that no one in the audience could’ve seen what was coming.

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Kind of Bloop

Andy Baio’s Kickstarter project Kind of Bloop has been completed, and the album is on sale now.

They raised over $8,500 to pay the artists and royalty fees to the label, releasing the tribute record on the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’ original.

I’ve listened to it a couple times now and it’s so well put together. I’m not a fan of chiptunes, typically, but somehow jazz music’s structure lends itself well to 8-bit chirpiness. Shnabubula’s rendition of All Blues is particularly incredible.

Lots of movies

Movies I watched last week:

• Spirited Away
• Rififi
• Touch of Evil
• Rear Window
• The Hurt Locker
• District 9
• The Machinist

Wow. I should be more productive, but unfortunately started watching Mad Men this week. So there go another 20ish hours.

Trash Track

A team of MIT scientists is embarking on a mission to track individual pieces of refuse through the American sanitation system. Cellular tracking devices are attached to specific items, like coffee cups:

A Starbucks cup's final journey.

The idea is that if folks saw the ridiculous paths their garbage took to get to its destination, maybe they’d think twice about what they were disposing of. Typically when your trash is picked up, its taken to a nearby processing facility (and sometimes not so nearby), strained of metal and other easily sorted recyclables, then compacted and buried in a landfill. Certainly sounds like a waste of energy.

If I could see actual GPS tracks of my “garbage footprints,” I’m sure that thought would pop in my head each time I opened the garbage bin in my kitchen.

Trash Blog

The current rotation

(An update on what I’ve been listening to recently, mostly for myself to look back on years later. Doesn’t look too embarrassing.)

Shad – The Old Prince

Shadrach Kabango is the new hotness in the hip-hop rotation. He’s a Canadian rapper with crazy amounts of technique and personality, and writes with meaning to his songs without coming off as preachy, but only a few of his tracks have heavy subject matter. A fun-loving spirit and energy permeate a lot of his less-serious tracks, a similar vibe that you’d get from things like old J5 or Del. It’s neat that he seems to be on the up-and-up lately in the American scene. Right now he and his crew are on the Warped Tour, so we plan on heading to the Vinoy here in St. Pete to check him out. They’re blogging the trip, too, with videos and random messin’ around. Favorites: I Don’t Like To, Out of Love Pt. 2, Old Prince Still Lives at Home. The Old Prince recently dropped in the States, so you should buy it.

The Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

I’ve been hearing of the Dirty Projectors for a number of years now, but never bothered to check them out. The band is the brainchild of singer/bandleader Dave Longstreth, and apparently is more or less fixed around a set group of 4 or 5 (?) people for this record. The way the vocals are layered together with the complex instrumentation really makes for some beautiful pieces of music. The sort of afro-pop quality to some of the tracks sounds unique for a band with so much orchestration. I’ve heard that Bitte Orca is more musical and rhythmic than their previous works, which are qualities I’m generally more drawn to, but I plan on checking out some more of their stuff considering the quality of this record. Favorites: No Intention, Useful Chamber, Remade Horizon. Highly recommended.

Discovery – LP

Discovery is a side project of Ra Ra Riot singer Wes Miles and Vampire Weekend keys player Rostam Batmanglij. Comparitively, the closest thing to their sound is the Postal Service, even though the sound only has a vague resemblance (2 guys from other groups, electronic, emo-ish). Personally, I like Discovery better. This record is wistful, emotional, and short, but it’s abbreviated length is a good thing. Too much of this chiptune-ish emo music can get grating after a while, but I really dig in in short listens. They get fall pretty deep into the current auto-tune craze with a number of the songs, for some reason, but it doesn’t bother me that much to listen to. Maybe because I think auto-tune fits better with electronic music than it does with club music and hip-hop, and also works better when the singer can actually sing, instead of using it to fix your bad vocals. Highlights: Orange Shirt, Can You Discover (Ra Ra Riot cover), I Want You Back (Jackson 5 cover).

Classics back in the mix:

Beach Boys – Pet Sounds

Picked this up during an Amazon deal recently. Such a classic. So many of today’s indie artists owe everything to the sound of this record, and it’s younger brother, Sgt. Peppers.

Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique

The 20th anniversary remastered version of the Beastie masterpiece was released back in January, with better audio, a commentary track, and also the final medley (The Bouillabaisse) has been tracked into its separate sections. With this record, the Dust Brothers defined how sampling should be done in hip-hop: keep them organized and stylistically similar, and dig the crates for obscurity. They dredged up and introduced me to some great forgotten sounds from the 70s that I’ve since become a fan of. This isn’t really “back in the mix” because it never really leaves the mix. It’s a staple on the iPod.

Some quick dopeness from Shad…

More of the current tunes are tracked on Last.fm also.

William and Sly

Derek Yu from TIGSource posted about a game recently called William and Sly by a developer named Lucas Paakh. I played through it on Sunday and really enjoyed how it was put together.

It’s a platformer in which you play a fox, romping through a magical forest to reignite a series of portals for your master. Along the way you must collect “fairyflies” to enable the portal stones, and there are underground beasts you must avoid, each looking to rob you of your magical tinkerbells.

It feels like a world out of a Miyazaki film, the mood of the forest feels sleepy and ethereal, even inside a Flash player. I loved the music and sound design. For a little while, I had the game paused and the thunder sounds in the game had us thinking that the picnic we were about to go on (in real life) would be a waste. It’s a short game, but worth playing to explore the environment and have fun with the platforming controls.

Zombie history

To anyone who has not heard of or read it, I highly recommend Max Brooks’ World War Z. It’s speculative fiction, with Brooks chronicling an imaginary Zombie Apocalypse, and how humanity would respond. Even if you aren’t a fan of “zombie fiction,” which is generally used to tell horror stories, this book is utterly fascinating. Calling WWZ a horror novel because there are zombies would be like calling The Dark Tower a horror series because it’s written by Stephen King. An interesting angle is taken to the writing: it’s an “oral history,” containing interviews with people who took part in this global catastrophe. Ten years after the end of the twenty-year battle with the plague, Brooks’ interviewer character sits down with the people that lived through it.

The Battle of Yonkers, our last stand in New York to restore American morale

The presentation of the narrative in WWZ is provocative because of how it withholds the details from the reader, allowing you to sort of see things in your own personal context. Shrouding the truth of the conflict in mystery gives it more weight, like the TV show Lost, which regardless of its problems is provocative and addictive. Brooks deftly handles the presentation to give you an oblique glance at the events, rather than the whole picture, so your mind fills in the gaps. It gives a greater sense of awe when hearing a third- or fourth-hand account of what happened. There are occasions in the book where an interviewee mentions a totally horrific event offhand, without detailed description, as it’s common knowledge to anyone surviving the zombie war. I love the realistic tones the characters use. In realily, if someone recalling events of the Second World War mentioned the horrors of their “boxcar ride to the camps of Poland,” anyone would pick up the reference to the Holocaust. In the alternate world of WWZ, this war was real and it was global. Everyone was part of it. The narrative style kept me engaged where a novelistic approach to storytelling would’ve been pretty generic. It’s a new take on an old genre.

A number of cliche zombie/disaster storytelling techniques are subverted in interesting ways. The plague originates in China, actually beneath the waters of the reservoir created by the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, and one of the primary vectors for its spread is the black market for human organs. The idea is that China, being a source of illicit human organ trafficking, discreetly spreads the hidden plague around the world, without realizing the consequences until it’s too late. I also really enjoyed the notion that zombies can survive infinitely underwater, making isolation on small islands kind of useless.

It seems, though, that one of Brooks’ primary goals in writing WWZ was to use a fake catastrophe to analyze how cultures and societies would react in today’s climate. The Americans, being complacent and distrustful of their government, are caught off guard and are completely ignorant of the “survivalist” tactics that become necessary. Another story tells of an American pharmaceutical company that uses news of the plague to market a fake “African Rabies” (the colloquial name for the plague, as it’s initially assumed to have come from South Africa) drug for profit. Russia becomes a theocracy, Cuba becomes the center of the economic world, and (my favorite) North Korea becomes devoid of human life, supposedly having evacuated the entire population underground.

The only gripe with the book is sort of systemic to its style. The narrative relies on accounts from so many diverse perspectives, we only ever get 10 or 12 pages with a person before jumping to a completely unrelated person on the other side of the world. Brooks does a decent job revealing an event, technique, or historic individual in one story only to flesh that subject out further with the subsequent interview, but overall the narrative being broken up into discrete, short parts makes it harder to read for long stretches.

If you’re an audiobook fan, the audio version of WWZ is a pretty amazing production. The interviews are voice-acted by a number of famous names, including Carl Reiner, Alan Alda, and John Turturro. The deal-breaker with the audio version, though, is that it’s abridged. I have no idea why this was done, other than budget, but each individual account is made richer by hearing the others, so I’d recommend the text version.

It’s sort of unfortunate to think that a lot of potential readers will be turned off by the title of this book. The draw of this book is everything but the zombies.

Workflown’t

Next week I get to attempt to create this workflow I drew up for our hiring process in Sharepoint:

Holy. God.

I’m so excited!

Reading 2.0

I’ve now gone into the digital reading realm full steam by downloading some books on my iPhone. Not just browsing electronic reference material and manuals, but actually reading actual books.

My experience with Dashiell Hammett was a good one, as I read his influential detective novel Red Harvest in the fantastic Stanza app on my iPhone. Stanza lets you download, for free, a whole boatload of out-of-copyright works through sources like Project Gutenberg, among several others. They’ve also got a handy desktop app you can install and use to transmit new books to your phone over wi-fi. The iPhone app is incredibly flexible and allows you to modify most settings, like typeface and font size, colors, spacing, and allows for full control of sleep mode and the dynamic page rotation behavior. For a free app, it’s pretty amazing*.

I’ve been dabbling in Amazon’s offering with their Kindle iPhone app, too. I bought Nixonland a few weeks ago through the Kindle store, and The Man in the High Castle even more recently. The Kindle app shares a lot in common with Stanza, but the most noticeable difference is the lack of customization options. What it lacks there, though, it makes up for with it’s Whispersync utility that keeps your reading progress in sync across your Kindle devices. Useful if you have a full Kindle and the iPhone version. Your devices are bound to your Amazon account, so purchases are delivered immediately over-the-air. Slick and functional.

Electronic delivery and reading on a small device do have their advantages, along with some quirks you might expect. I’ve had a good experience so far, but I have a few comments on what Amazon could do to vastly improve the general “Kindle experience,” with the format and the hardware.

First of all, reading on the small iPhone screen doesn’t bother me near as much as I had expected. I’ve even used it a fair amount for my pre-bedtime reading. Portable, on-the-go reading is what it’s best at, but even at home I find myself using it. The tactile response of flicking back and forth between pages definitely feels preferable to the button press page turning of the full Kindle device or the Sony Reader. Of course I’d prefer to read a paperback, but the paperback is not in my pocket everywhere I go, so the portability is obviously also a plus. And with a light tap in the upper right corner, pages are bookmarked.

Regardless of the obvious negative differences of electronic text from hard copy, ultimately you are getting the same content for less money with the digital format. Kindle books seem to average around $10-$12. That’s just something you have to balance with your desire to read paper instead of glowing glass. I don’t mind saving a few bucks and reading it electronically, though with older works, you’re better off looking in bookstores for used copies you can nab for one or two dollars. Unless of course you want the portability. Another benefit to electronic text format for me is that they don’t consume space on my shelves. Having your book collection exist in the aether is something that’s questionable for some folks, understandably. And even though I’ve got a fairly epic assemblage of books, new and old, I’m even coming around to the idea of my library being in the cloud. No more shelf space required! Colette would definitely prefer it that way.

Some genres of books are extremely difficult to digitize, though. Atlases, reference books, some science works; basically anything with a heavy use of graphics and visuals is best suited to larger page sizes and physical page flipping. I know when I was reading Lord of the Rings, I referenced the maps of Middle-Earth and the glossaries constantly, something that would have dulled my experience had I been forced to do so on a tiny iPhone screen. Physics, mathematics, and geography books are full of diagrams and figures that would be diluted or non-existent on a tiny device.

There are a couple of features that could elevate the Kindle book reading experience above traditional formats, the first being it’s primary advantage: it’s a connected, electronic device. When reading on my Kindle app, I want to be able to highlight a word and use it as a search term in a dictionary or Wikipedia or Google Maps, embedded right in the app. Though this would distract from the experience of reading and interpreting the contents in your own brain, the ability to click Isaac Newton’s name and find his Wikipedia entry could add valuable context. Mapping a location on-demand is another thing I’d enjoy, as a spatial-minded geography person. While reading about the Brooklyn Bridge and it’s surroundings, I could add depth by pulling up satellite imagery of the area to build a map of Lower Manhattan in my head. “Book rentals” are another thing Amazon could implement by taking advantage if Kindle’s electronic nature. It would be neat to pay $1 and get the first 50-100 pages of a book, then be able to pay the difference for the remainder once I’ve decided it’s worth my money. Sort of an analog to what you can do down at Barnes & Noble. I can sit there and read half a novel, then decide I’m not digging it, shelve it and leave. That can’t be done with e-books, and I see no real reason why not. A dollar to “test drive” a book is no big deal, I’d do it all the time.

The elephant-in-the-Kindle-Store, as it were, is something that’s device agnostic, and it has to do with DRM — sort of. When I buy a book on the Kindle Store, I have to register my device to my Amazon account in order for “Whispernet” to sync the file to my device, a wonderful feature if you have multiple Kindle devices for your content. But this means that my content is always bound to my hardware. I have no way of “lending” a file to a friend to read, as I would a paperback. What I want to see Amazon do is turn the Kindle Store into a “social reading” environment. I could buy a book and “lend” it to my brother, at which point it would become available to him, and unavailable to me. When he’s finished, he could “return” the file to me, transferring permissions along with it. I could even reserve the ability to “revoke” his permission to read it, just like walking into his house and taking back my copy. I’ve sometimes wished for such a simple procedure when a friend keeps forgetting to return a DVD or CD of mine. E-books could also allow me to add comments and remarks inline with the content to share with my friends. I could press a “view friends’ comments” button to have my Kindle display footnotes linking to my friends’ thoughts on particular parts on-the-fly. Such a feature would make it more enjoyable to read the same things friends are reading, fostering more discussion electronically and in person.

Of course I’m no stranger to “Shit’s Easy Syndrome,” and I know that developing this sort of interaction in a copyright-based medium like books would be crazily complicated. Additions involving money and security are always touchy, and it may not be something they’re eager to undertake. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be worth the effort. In fact, the geniuses at Amazon probably have these features brewing in their Subversion repositories as we speak, waiting to be tested.

I see so much potential for e-books, so many ways we could augment the experience of reading a book. I hope Amazon takes advantage of their new platform. If anyone can do it, they can.

* As it turns out, Amazon has bought Lexcycle (the developer of Stanza) already. I can’t wait until they integrate it’s superior features into Kindle.

Ending with a bang

So the Keys trip is over, and we’re back. The last couple of days held some interesting activities.

Tuesday we took a trip down to Key West. I’ve been there a number of times, but it doesn’t have the appeal to me that the rest of the Keys do. The attractions tend toward more seedy recreations (drinking, strip clubs, the “Overdressed Male Nudist” in a thong, among others). They’ve got a couple of nice restaurants and shops, but they don’t keep my attention for long. I go to the Keys for the fishing, diving, and boating, not the t-shirt shops.

Returning from Key West in the late afternoon, the weather took a turn for the worse. Inches of rain poured down all night and into most of the following morning. Thunderstorms and boats don’t mix, so we were confined^[1] to the house until early afternoon when we ventured out into the still-overcast outdoors. Our options were to attempt a Looe Key snorkeling trip, or ride up the Keys to Worldwide Sportsman and Robbie’s. We opted for the former, since it was our last chance to do any real boating before leaving Thursday.

We headed out beneath overcast skies, and the chop seemed only moderate considering the storm that had just passed. As we left the channel and reached the last marker, we took a heading of 180°, due south, where Looe Key was situated about 5 miles out. We set a course and motored out… And motored… And continued motoring for about 10 or 12 miles (estimated) without seeing a single semblance of any marked reef. After switching to our reserve tanks, we decided to scrap the idea and head back in before we burned too much fuel, now that we were out of sight of the shore. We reversed our heading and started in.

As we approached the shore, we passed what I eventually determined was a marker for a fishing spot about 3 miles due east of the Looe Key mark. We were completely baffled as to what we’d done, and ended up back at our spot from Monday to do some more snorkeling to salvage something out of the trip. Like the previous time, we saw little new, only a small moray eel and some good sized angel fish.

We headed back to the house to try to diagnose what had gone wrong, as we had no way of knowing without more information. I had joked that Admiral Nelson had more technology at his disposal than we did out there, while Nat remarked that our situation was like an episode of Seconds from Disaster. We tied up at the dock, and my dad immediately discovered that the compass upon which our whole fate had rested was about about 30° in error, tricking us into heading east of any target. Over distance that error was amplified by several miles, resulting in being completely out of sight of the marker. The whole ordeal, while sort of upsetting, ends up as a lesson in checking your equipment before your trip. It also makes for a better story than our hazy day, cold water dive at Looe would have been.

That was the end of our trip. We left Thursday morning early so we could be back in St. Pete by late afternoon. Colette had a bachelorette party to go to. We did stop at Robbie’s to feed the tarpon on the return trip, a Keys tradition. The only other notable happening on the drive back was the detour over the Card Sound bridge north of Key Largo. They’re doing some kind of construction on the stretch of US-1 between Florida City and Key Largo, so everyone got detoured up to Card Sound. Nothing fantastic, but I’d never driven up there before.

[1] I use the word loosely. I’d rather be “confined” in the Lower Keys than “free” at the office.

Some photos & videos, courtesy of Colette:

The Key West version of Man's Best Friend.

Dahli, my neice, drinking from dad's straw.