Better than “Information Superhighway”, I suppose
Spotted at the St. Petersburg airport. I’d like to say this ad is from 1999, when the term cyberspace at least had a degree of currency. Alas, no. It is new. Someone somewhere thought this was a good idea. Cyberspace. Sheesh! The term was awful even when it didn’t sound dated.
Sidenote: St. P’s airport is called Pulkovo II. Like a sequel. Revenge of the Airport.
How to know you’re in trouble for the web demo you’re about to give
Your co-presenter says the following things during set-up. Let’s call this person a she. Let’s call her Pauline. Let’s also call her my boss.
- In establishing a wireless network connection she said “Oh, we’re not connected.” The status said connected 100% and it clearly was. I looked at her funny. She said “See, the little lines aren’t making it all the way across.”
That’s eye-candy, Pauline. An animation. To make users feel warm inside. It means nothing. But that brick wall there, that really does exist. Best way to keep out viruses is to run your connection straight through solid brick. Kills ’em right off, I tell you.
- I ask her to find an empty spot on her desktop and drop a file there. She responds “There are no empty spaces.” Wha? Looking over I see she’s right. Not a single square of available space. I think everything she’s ever downloaded is crammed onto this single screen. Half of which are the executable installs for the very program icons that follow them. And, since Windows often uses the same icon for installs and for the program itself she reinstalls apps about as often as she means to run them.
- “Wow! How did you just switch programs that fast?” Um, I clicked on the other window. (No Alt-Tab sorcery here folks!) “I didn’t know you could do that,“ she says. ”If I need to go from one program to another I just close the window and open a new one.“ Hello, MS-DOS!
I’m doomed.
Midnight in St. Petersburg
Like a light-bathed chicken I have been laying eggs around the clock.
Not so good for the jetlag timeshift, but still wonderful.
This is what happens back at home when I travel
The inmates run the asylum (and my Last.fm account, apparently).
Enough already
I’m sure there are some readers sick of the baseball and genealogy posts. Suffice to say that my blissful month of no travel (OK, not much travel — I’m in NYC right now) is coming to an end. This means new posts on things like Russia when it don’t go dark, travels with Oprah Winfrey, certainly a trip or two to China, and a few other new destinations.
My loss, your gain.
Roof, raised
Continuing down the checklist of things I’d like to see/do at Wrigley Field (lounge in the outfield, check; witness drubbing of Sox in crosstown match, check), Tuesday night was my first game viewed from a building rooftop outside the park. Those of you who don’t follow baseball may not know that Wrigley, being a 93-year-old urban ballpark, is tightly surrounded by a residential neighborhood. Three-flats line left and right field and, except two that display advertising, each of these buildings have for years hosted private groups on their rooftops. It is a unique vantage, this outsiders’ view inside.
I remember watching a game with my grandfather in the late 70’s when Bill Buckner hit a home run out of the park and shattered a window in one of the buildings. I thought, wow, someone is going to come home from work and find a great surprise. Of course, these days very few come “home” to these buildings. The homes have been almost completely taken over by the “clubs” which perch atop them. Many are owned by local bars, nearly all are managed by the same company. (After a nasty battle involving the erection of screens to partially obscure the view from the roofs most of the clubs agreed to give the Cubs 17% of their revenue annually.) There’s one private club too. A few years ago my wife tried to get tickets for me up on a roof for my birthday. It was next to impossible because the roofs are really for groups, corporate outings, and the like. Sorta like a skybox, except across the street.
I was invited by a friend who was in with some Chicago society of CPAs. Yes, I was on a Wrigleyville rooftop with a bunch of accountants: good times! I tried to keep out of conversations — which was easy given the free beer and food and the fact that I was there to watch a baseball game. And that’s the thing about the rooftops. Many people hardly notice what’s going on in the ballpark. (It is, in that way, very much like a skybox.) Most are corporate types, many are not Cubs fans or even baseball fans. Of course, you get this in the park too, but on a rooftop quarters are tight — tighter than I imagined — and you’re kinda stuck with these folks.
The rooftops all have high-def TV’s sprinkled around, but the broadcast delay makes it almost useless for anything but replays. I was grabbing a beer in an area where I could not see the park and I heard a cheer go up. I looked up at the screen and the camera was on the pitcher, scratching himself. To make matters worse the audio is off and they are playing the radio coverage of the game, which has no delay.
The view is great though. Not that much worse than some of the cheap seats in the upper deck. The only thing you can’t see is activity on the track near the ivy. But you use the cheers or sighs from the bleacher bums to determine what happened there. And of course it is just fun conceptually: I’m watching a live baseball game and I’m not in the park.
In the end I suppose the idea is a bit better than the experience. Of course, I didn’t pay for the ticket (which was at least $90) — and perhaps it would have been more fun with a roof full of friends — so I can’t complain really. It just wasn’t the raucous time that the park delivers. I think I’d rather be inside.
The ultimate social network
It is said that researching family history is second only to scouring the web for porn in popularity. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I can see how it might be so. If ever there was a medium perfectly suited to establishing lineage and contact with unknown family it is the Internet.
I’ve always had a simmering interest in genealogy, but the sorry state of family tree applications never got me very excited. These were almost always legacy beasts that could import the archaic GEDCOM standard file format and do little more. Where these apps really failed was in areas of collaboration and visualization. What good is a family tree if you are the only person who can work on it? And, much thornier, how do you slice and dice such a fractal dataset so that it is actually useful?
In recent years Ancestry.com has stepped in and taken care of much of the problem. Ancestry is run by the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) as a commercial offshoot of their ginormous genealogical holdings. The site is strictly secular though and offers an amazing array of backend research services that turns one’s offline family tree into a portal to dozens of historical record repositories. Just upload (or enter) what you know and the site begins searching census records, immigration manifests, military archives — and the best of all, other people’s trees that link up with yours back in the mists of time. Depending on where you’re from you can flesh out your family rather easily. Just a few nights ago I actually got bored after taking my mom’s mom’s line back so far through the UK that my line proceeded through a reverse Norman invasion back to France in the 11th century. Goodness knows how far back the recorded lineage goes.
Perhaps the most entertaining feature of Ancestry.com is the “Find Famous Relatives” function, six-degrees of separation on steroids. Basically if you have a pretty fleshed-out tree (and especially if any branches of it stretch back through the UK), Ancestry returns a bewildering collection of well-known relatives. For instance, I am the seventh cousin twice removed from William Faulker. This means ol’ Will and I share the same great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent, though this person is two generations off from me. (Twice removed is what you are to the first cousins of your grandparents.) Not exactly thrilling. Ah, but there is thrill. I am the twelfth direct cousin of Werner Von Braun. This means we share the same great-grandmother12. Let’s set aside that Herr Von Braun developed the V2 rocket for the Nazis and instead focus on his role as the father of the American space program, OK?
Even before I found Ancestry.com the web has been an inadvertent boon to family-finding. All you really have to do is get your name indexed by Google and it is off to the races. In the last six years I’ve been contacted by dozens of people with similar surnames or lineages who think they might be family. There’s Roberto di Tolve, a citizen and resident of Holland who was born in Barile, Italy and who is now a close family friend. Roberto travelled to Barile with my family and I in 2003. He’ll be back with us this July. There’s Stephanie Saville of the Paternoster line who traces her line to the famous winemakers of Barile. Most recently there’s Mike Botte who lives in NY and who grew up in Barile. (My great-grandmother is a Botte.) This may be the closest to true relation that’s been established simply from an e-mail. Mike’s cousin is the current mayor of Barile, who I will meet in July; so we’ll know soon. Much more on Mike and his extraordinary brother John in a future post.
So, ok, you get it. Online genealogy can be fun. But I am already seeing the underside of it. For one, it really does make you think hard about what family is. Genealogy is really about bloodlines, not family in the broader sense which includes step-relatives, foster parents, and illegitimacy. It charts gene propagation not family structure. In this way it is conceptually similar to The Genographic Project.
Also, you do come across people who treat genealogy with the same trainspotting zeal as online discographers. For example, finding a limited pressing of a Rolling Stones LP with a typo in the liner notes makes it more valuable; finding a misspelling on an emigration document might be a useful clue — but it might also be (and usually is) merely a massive pain in the ass. There’s a kind of genealogy buff I’ve come across that doesn’t really get this distinction.
Why go tapeless?
No moving parts.
Imagine what the tape looked like when I finally got it out.
Update: You know this whole thing reminds me of the hell of getting my data out of Outlook a few years ago. People care about the data, not the app. Same goes for hardware. I didn’t think twice in destroying a videocam in my pursuit of a stuck videotape with Christmas 2006 on it.
See also: Canon Fodder.
Canon fodder
Convergence is not a flavor of tech hype I’m particularly susceptible to. Best device for the task, and all that. But both my trusty mini-DV cam and still camera went south at about the same time and so I naturally wondered if I could get away with a single camera. About a year before I was able to play around with a friend’s remarkable straight-to-memory videocam (which because of its small size enabled things like this). It was far too expensive to justify, however.
Enter the the Canon TX-1, by most accounts the first reasonably-priced ($500) high-definition tapeless camcorder that takes equally good stills. I’ve had it for a little over a week now and I’m totally impressed. There’s a comprehensive review over at DCRP, but here are a few quick thoughts.
Video image quality is stunning. It captures at 720p in 16:9. The downside is filesize, since the format is not MPEG but rather MJPEG (wrapped in an AVI container). MJPEG is literally a stream of single JPEG-compressed images. 15 minutes of video captured this way is a whopping 4GB. Even with the new 8GB SDHC cards on the market the TX-1 will stop recording at 4GB. (You can start a new clip immediately though.) The upside of MJPEG is that, since there is no inter-frame compression, you can actually pluck a still from the middle of the video and get a 7.1 megapixel shot. In fact you can take a still photo while shooting video. Nice touch — except that the camera records a frozen shot and shutter noise into the video itself. What’s up with that? Of course, you don’t have to capture in high-def. Video shot at VGA resolution looks quite good. You can capture a few hours at this rate, depending on tweaking.
The form factor is vertical, which takes some getting used to. Like you’re shooting a gun. People have complained about being unable to shoot with one hand. It can be done, it just takes time to learn. The really hard part is not the form but the size. The thing is just tiny, hardly bigger than a pack of cards. I constantly feel like I am going to drop the thing.
iPhoto works fine in snagging photos and videos from the camera … to a point. Any video larger than about 3/4 GB chokes. You must use the included Canon ImageBrowser software to remove files this size and larger, which is a bummer because the software itself is crappy. Hopefully iLife ’07 will address this issue.
So to recap. $500, tapeless, high-def video, 7.1 megapixel stills, tiny, great 10x optical zoom. Highly recommended.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
