Lamerica
Netflix finally got Lamerica, a film I’d been hunting for a while. This is a wonderful movie about two Italian carpetbaggers who come to Albania shortly after the fall of Communism and attempt to set up a fraudulent business. Well, that’s the plot anyway. What it is about is the way Italy has become a symbol of hope for the destitute Albanians, their own “America” across the western sea. It is an allegory of Italian fantasies about coming to the USA so many generations before. And it is a beautiful one at that.
OneVoice gets a lot louder
Daniel at OneVoice is in overdrive. With the attention of the world cast toward the upcoming Palestinian elections there’s a great chance that moderation can snatch the spotlight from extremism. OneVoice is doing all they can to help in the snatching. Good news from the OV blog today.
The first-ever Get-Out-The-Vote Campaign in the Palestinian Authority, conducted by OneVoice-Palestine, is about to release a Public Service Announcement that will turn heads: it juxtaposes Sheikh Taysir al Tamimi, the Chief Palestinian Islamic Justice, and Father Attallah Hanna, the Patriarchite of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, with Richard Gere, the film star and humanitarian. They all encourage the Palestinian people to go out and vote. Sheikh Tamimi calls it a “religious and a national commandment” to participate in the elections.
The main site — very soon to receive a facelift, by the way — can tell you a heck of a lot more.
2004 ended with tragedy. Let’s start 2005 on the other end of the spectrum of human emotion.
No-go on TiVoToGo
Today TiVo announced the availability of TiVoToGo, a feature they first mentioned almost a year ago. TiVoToGo is supposed to allow you to copy recordings from your Tivo(s) to your local network for archiving and playback on your computer. Now, aside from the fact that MythTV and ReplayTV have been able to do this for some time, and ignoring the current unavailability of this feature for Mac, and setting aside the nasty DRM they’ve included, and temporarily accepting that the software that allows DVD’s to be created is neither part of the service fee nor even available yet, and trying not to focus on the annoying ability for a show to be desigated un-copyable by its owner, the fact is that TiVo isn’t ready for this rollout.
Sure, you can install the new desktop software, upgrade your MPEG2 codecs, get everything ready on your home network — but it still won’t work because TiVo has not rolled out the box-side software uprgade that enables the service! You can get on a “priority list” for the upgrade, but they are saying that could take weeks. There’s no surer way to piss off your best customers than to make available a product that doesn’t work yet. Why even release it? Why not roll out the set-top software upgrade first? I mean, why empower a user to download and configure their own system only to have to wait for more software that is out of the control of the user and, by the way, gives no easy notice that it has even been updated?
I’m annoyed.
Resolved
OK, I’ve given these a lot of thought. Here are the tasks I resolve to accomplish in 2005.
- Learn how to conjugate Italian verbs in a tense other than the present. This will help me formulate the sentence “Would you be interested in being my wife in an alternate reality?” when I finally meet Sylvia Poggioli, which, I suppose, is another resolution for this year.
- Get a goddamn backhand. I’m done performing acrobatics to be able to hit every ball as a forehand. Left-side muscles atrophying, I’m starting to look lopsided.
- Fall in love with NASA again. C’mon, people, seduce me. I’m easy.
- Be nice to political bloggers. That is, I resolve not be so condescending to the legions of “Olde Media Killers” whose contributions to the global dialogue mostly include copying scads of text from other sites and appending small comments like “Awesome” or “Devastating” or “Go read this”. Hint: you don’t need a site for this. It is a called an RSS Reader. (Crap, guess I need to resolve harder.)
- Learn to match beats when remixing. Currently my efforts sound like a session of “Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore” gone tragically askew.
- When home, watch only high-definition television programming. This might be difficult since I rarely watch live television (‘cept when the Cubs play) and my TiVo don’t do high-def. I must be strong-willed for this one.
- Convert all old mix tapes to MP3. Not a technical problem but a problem of data scarcity. Much of this music is obscure, unlabelled, and basically un-Googleable. Damnit, tune-recognizing search tool — where are you?
- Become able to change my son’s diaper with one hand. Not sure what I will do with the other hand, but this will surely be impressive to onlookers.
- Avoid LAX like the Black Death.
- Avoid the Black Death.
- Get to know my nephews better. It is one thing to be fatherly, quite another to actively participate in avuncular kookiness and crazy relative hijinks. I am looking forward to this one.
- Figure out how to make my own oak switches for the Russian Baths. Come on, it isn’t that bad. (Hmm, this’ll pair nicely with #11.)
That’ll do for now. Twelve resolutions, twelve months. Wish me luck.
“Is it over?”
Today we put in Mary Poppins for the first time for our three-year-old son. He immediately asked if it was over. You see, Mary Poppins, like most movies of its period, opens with screen after screen of detailed credits. Today’s movies having barely any at all my son naturally figured the movie had ended. I mean, come on, that much text belongs at the end, right?
Two degrees of separation
Each year I give away a CD’s worth of music to my friends at the end of the year. Not so much a compilation of the year’s best, it is merely a collection of the music I enjoyed this year regardless of when it was released. Since I give it away at a party the tracks are largely uptempo. This year I tried my hand at mixing the whole shebang into one continuous track using Traktor, a simple program of shocking complexity. I wasn’t completely successful, but the experience did add one more bullet item to my growing list of resolutions for 2005: learn to match beats so as not to create music that sounds like an EKG pinging cardiac arrhythmia. (Full list of resolutions coming soon.)
My pal Len Perez also released a mix for his friends this year — four CD’s to my one — so I thought it interesting to note the overlaps. Granted our tastes are similar, but this very small scale collaborative filtering is still notable given that we receive our musical inputs from different sources.
So, the overlap: Orbital, Sasha, Mr. Projectile. Orbital released their last album this year; Sasha his first (studio album, that is). Mr. Projectile is the one to watch — perhaps the most promising artist of his genre this year.
Wine and fine fabrics
Gutenberg, the story goes, was inspired to build his printing press from the mechanics of a wine press. Who knows if that’s true or not, but I’ve always loved the idea that the most important invention in the history of the world sprang from a way of making alcohol. No less interesting a story — though certainly better documented — is the degree to which the automated weaving loom created by Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1802 inspired punch-card controlled computing and, arguably, the entire notion of separating data from the control program in an automated system.
I’ve got some history of fascination with the loom as a metaphor for computing and so I was naturally drawn to James Essinger’s new book on Jacquard and his loom. The book is about 100 pages too long and too strident in its claims about the importance of the loom to the history of computing overall, but it is not a bad book at all: controlling weaving patterns with punch-cards did in fact inspire Charles Babbage and Herman Hollerith to do the same with their computing and tabulating engines. What’s most interesting to me is the historical prevalance of the computing-as-weaving or computing-begat-from-weaving motif. Though Ada Lovelace was probably the most articulate in portraying the linkage, the idea has never been so much a part of the popular imagination as it is today in the World Wide Web. Arachne’d be proud.
Carbone Dolce
Here’s an easy way to remind the kids that they’ve been bad this year without scarring them for life. There’s a super-simple, traditional Italian dessert called Carbone Dolce, literally “sweet coal”, presumably a confectionary joke, but possibly pre-dating the whole stockings for bad kids thing. In any event, it could not be easier. You melt 400 grams of chocolate then mix in about half that in crushed Rice Crispies, form into coal-like clumps, and let cool. Voila! All the recipes I’ve come across are in Italian and I know they call for white chocolate, but I cannot figure out how or why you’d make something look like coal with white chocolate. Any ideas? Anyway, add a few pretzel sticks to the mix and you’ve got yer sticks and coal for the holidays. Better than pre-packaged, I’ll say.
Merry Christmas, dear readers!
Here’s the crew of Apollo 8 sending a Christmas Eve wish (Quicktime) to Earth as they orbited the moon, the first humans to do so, 36 years ago.
Going, going, gone
The blogosphere likes to talk about toppling old media. Today, I saw it topple for real, with nary a blogger in sight. Beats my normal daydream-fodder cubicle vista.
I should have one hell of a view carved out for me when I return to work after the holidays. A temporary thanks to The Donald.
(Photo gallery here.)
Mommy, is that a type of swimsuit?
No doubt conservatives hear the gallop of the Four Horsemen in this story, but I find this totally hilarious. Someone at the YMCA near me needs a better Dayplanner. Citing “a very regrettable scheduling error,” the Y overlapped an all-night transgender fashion show with a 7am kids swim meet.
Tired omnisexuals. Protective yuppie parents without their lattes. Bewildered children. Hilarity ensues.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, 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.
