Author: corey

Rush photoshops Kerry Edwards left, adds “This says it All” title, original undoctored right. Why is it that he gets away with this stuff and if a liberal commentator tried the same move they’d be attacked mercilessly?

[via Headwaters Forum] 

My EPH brain cells are firing.

Joshua Allen of Better Living Through Software talks here about a phenomenon I’ve railed on in the past. The Scale Myth.

During the height of the dot-com bubble, you could sidetrack any business discussion by saying, “Yes, but, will it scale?“. The common perception was that Internet scale was at least two orders of magnitude larger than brick-and-mortar scale, and if a business launched without being able to sustain a bazillion transactions per second, they were soon out of business. People abandoned all reason when those words were uttered.

In fact, I think decision-makers have to be careful, because certain vendors can make a whole lot of cash by making you panic about scalability. RFID is unique enough, and it is big, so decision-makers could potentially be tricked into believing that the rules have completely changed. But before you go spend $10 million on hardware, run the models and figure it out for yourself. And remember, a terabyte of storage costs $1,000 dollars today, and we all learned some lessons about excess capacity during the Internet boom. Think.

I wonder how many internet startups would still be around if they had invested in making a better product rather than overly fancy servers (cough) with quadruple redundancy.

Good architects combined with good tools build solutions that can be cheaply scaled using commodity techniques in the vast, vast majority of cases.

The “certain vendors can make a whole lot of cash by making you panic about scalability” comment reminds me of a certain large vendor my company visited recently.  

We were talking about pinafores at breakfast (the outfit, not the dessert – how do you spell that one?) and the one that defines it for me is Vicki (Voice Input Child Identicant/V.I.C.I actually) from Small Wonder.

Fire up Google, and found this site: http://members.surfbest.net/[email protected]/index.html 

Now I know that it’s blogging easy pickin’s to go find some fan site for something relatively obscure, but trust me here.

This site really covers more than you can imagine possible about a tv show from the 80’s. I can understand a show that came on the air after the internet (web) was popular, people can collaboratively build a huge library of data, but going back to the 80’s for your material has got to be a challenge. 

Just a small sampling of the stuff available: Message boards and insider chat, episode guides, series & technical backgrounds, FAQ, theme song audio, lost spin-off, cast and character bios, Q&A with creator Howard Leeds, and Tiffany Brissette fan club page, the math and myth behind Vicki’s science and the social ramifications that a real-life V.I.C.I. might pose in families, religion, society and sex and of course fan fiction.

Why weren’t we constantly thinking “I would like to punch each and every person on this show in the face?” Were we all just a little bit more innocent back then – cause I’d really like to punch them all in the face.

 

My #1 top favorite item is the Small Wonder seriously section’s “Is it really a good idea to keep lovely and obedient Vicki in Jamie’s Bedroom?”

Perhaps the most downplayed but subtly volatile situation posed on Small Wonder was parking Vicki in her junior jock pubescent “brother” Jamie’s bedroom. Of all themes driving salacious “X-rated” Small Wonder fanfic on the web, this was it. Naturally, a sitcom geared for a younger audience was able to gloss over the ramifications by non-admission, but the real world isn’t that blind or innocent. …

The question foremost in storing Vicki in Jamie’s room is whether she poses too perfect a human replicate for a young pubescent boy with perking hormones to simply dismiss as an appliance or a toy. Like the perfect hypnotized subject, Vicki presents to any young boy the ultimate “play doctor” partner (primarily as a petting object since she’s only externally anatomically correct); totally docile, obedient, and obliging. She has no will, conscious, sense of morality, shame or modesty. She doesn’t blab and will permanently keep and encrypt or delete an experience if so ordered. The knowledge that Vicki’s non-biological and has no “mind” or true feelings to bruise or traumatize or have qualms about adds a notch of guiltlessness that’d encourage Jamie’s response to Vicki’s affect. Also, that she’s physically very comely can only exasperate Jamie’s pose of brotherly disinterest in her. So would he or does he? Jamie certainly has ample opportunity and privacy to carry out any wanton whimsy in his bedroom, so the question is, assuming he is like most boys his age, would he willfully and spitelessly move on his own “sister” or does he regard Vicki enough as one not to?

Had dinner with some HK peeps last night at what our host called “the most famous Chinese restaurant in the world.” (Don’t ask me) Their specialties are BBQ goose and a “Century Egg” which is a preserved duck egg appetizer. They use some secret Chinese preservation technique age it for a few months – it comes out gelatinous, oh and um black. They do include some excellent special ginger to put on top which makes it all ok somehow.

The goose was good although difficult to eat from a texture/presentation to our American point of view. These geese were special because they only this month rescinded the ban on imported foul due to the Asian bird flu. How’s that for a cultural differentiator – how long would an American wait before eating something coming off a government enforced import ban due to an exotic food-borne disease?  

Off to a western-friendly bar in western-friendly lan qwai fung for some live music. The band members were pointed out as being Pilipino (I had no idea that’s how you spell someone from the Philippines ((I also see you can do Filipino too)) by our Chinese hosts. We heard Sixpence None the Richer – Kiss Me, Lionel Richey – Easy like Sunday Morning and some other Matchbox 20 genre tunes done faithfully to the original. If I ever have a wedding in Hong Kong, I’ve got a band.

Here’s a shortened version of my recap of Cathay vs Northwest to Hong Kong that I posted on my internal company blog.

My latest trip I flew a newly retrofitted Northwest 747 from NYC to Tokyo and an older one from there to Hong Kong. I have flown twice previously on Cathay 747 through Vancouver.

• [stuff about the seats]
  
• [stuff about the movie selection]
  
• Cathay has great noise cancelling style headphones, Northwest has crappy throw-away ones. Luckily I had my new Bose noise-cancelling headphones with me. You really appreciate quality headphones on a 20 hour flight.
  
• I’m pretty sure the flight attendant on Northwest was on crystal meth and she was the only one tending to the whole upstairs cabin. (~22 people) 
  
• Cathay’s cockpit has a little security curtain and you almost never see the pilots come or go. On Northwest the pilots were constantly opening the door and you could see right out the front windshield. Security no-no.
  
• This may have been an isolated case, but on Northwest the plane landed at a “bus gate” in Tokyo. I had to get out of the airplane, get rained on, get on a crowded bus, drive around the tarmac for a while, then go back through security(!), find the next gate, and no first/business class lounge. [Cathay is better]
  
• [comparing scheduled departure and arrival times]

And what exactly is Northwest Airlines thinking referring to themselves as NWA. There is only one true NWA and they are from Compton.

 

Global-travel-packing is mentally exhausting. I ask myself “What will I want to have with me, read, listen to, wear, etc for the next two weeks?” A tremendous amount of predictive thought exercise ensues which is taxing on the brain “What if.. what if.. what if”

How will I know what I am going to want to listen to next week? These digital music days mean I’ve grown accustomed to having huge libraries of music available to me at all times. My ultra-portable laptop (Dell C400) just doesn’t have the HD storage to lug it all with me. I have to preemptively DJ my trip which I don’t like at all. Now listening (Roots, The Tipping Point)

The good news on the computing side is that I’ve gotten very good at synchronizing my data on my primary devices (work PC, home PC, Laptop, Smartphone). And what I don’t synchronize I have ready access to via VPN + remote desktop.

I have a variety of posts in my blogjet queue to go, but I’ve landed in Hong Kong, which is starting to feel not-so-foreign anymore which means I spend entirely too much time here.

I’ve been using Audioscrobbler for a while now to suit my OCD music telemetry needs. It works as a plugin to whatever media player you use, Winamp 5 for me, and uploads every song you listen to for analysis at their site. They offer a host of features like creating a network of like users for you to browse and hopefully pick up new artists and such.

You can browse my history here – and always on the left nav link under Music + (what I’m listening to right now).

Now of course with the massive amount of data available they put together a top 100 list – but see the difference here is this is the top 100 songs people actually listened to. Not what they bought or what they called into Carson Daly to request. Granted, these are internet savvy people listening on their computer who are willing to let the world know how much they love Abba so they don’t represent the total population but still very valuable data.

Check out this week’s top 15 artists: 1. Radiohead 2. Metallica 3. Nirvana 4. The Beatles 5. Modest Mouse 6. Red Hot Chili Peppers 7. Linkin Park 8. Beastie Boys 9. Muse 10. Coldplay 11. Pink Floyd 12. The Cure  13. Weezer 14. Incubus 15. Franz Ferdinand

The top two tracks: 1. Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out 2. Modest Mouse – Float On

Note Modest Mouse’s success here. I’m a big fan of theirs but how many people have even heard of them, let alone would guess they would be the #5 played artist.

More charts are available here: Rising and falling tracks, artists + Top 100 Tracks + Top 100 Artists

Great writeup from Lev @ Gizmodo on a new robotic device available on the market.

I’m all for the future. I mean, look at where you’re at, who you’re talking to. I like the future so much that I even like the past’s futures, futures that were planted with love but never quite formed into a fully blossoming flying cars or whatever. But in the future, as I’m lounging around with my dome open, instructing technicians to lift my brain onto a substrate of pure electrical joy, I will never, ever, ever let a robot cut my dick. I might have sex with a robot, that’s fine; looking forward to it, actually. But at no point will I be placing my penis into a tube filled with knives. […]

I’m a penis slicer luddite, I know, but no, for real, no. So why do the people that make SmartKlamp think that — when I wouldn’t let a robot, which can maneuver with mathematical precision, touch me — I would use a Bris-O-Matic on my or my progeny’s spurters? Is there a market need here? Are scapel-wielding doctors and rabbis not fast enough to get the job done? Is there a worldwide circumcision shortage?

Fine, I’m overreacting, but look at the pictures on the SmartKlamp page (warning, bloody boy genitals ahoy!) and think about the possibility of malfunction. (Thanks, Steven, for the ‘tip.’)
Read – Fiddish [Forward]
Read – Product Page [SmartKlamp]

Note: Gizmodo and Engadget diverged not long ago and the resulting editorial competition has been great for readers. Except for the fact that I can’t stand the idea of missing something so I read both and end up reading about the same gadgets twice 85% of the time.

BBC’s The Office is a great show, but it can be tough to follow some of the dialog as an American. The BBC has a bunch of videos up of Ricky Gervais explaining a bunch of English lingo for us.

 Bender  Blue Peter  Buckaroo  Bunse  Cheeky  C.V.  Divv Kid  Dixon of Dock Green  Doodling  Formula One  Duncan Goodhew  Howard Jones  Hob-Nob  Knackered  Mac  Minge  Mother’s Meeting  Orienteering and T.A.s  Peter Purves  Red Nose Day  Scotch Egg  Slapper  Yates [all in Real format]

 

I was an Edwards man before the primary so I’m very pleased with today’s announcement.

William Saletan in Slate makes the point here that Kerry, who has the credentials for the job, isn’t so great about selling himself and that Edwards is a great pick to sell Kerry.

It all seems more real now for some reason. Go team!