A Wii White Christmas

Thanks to Elia (13) we co-bought a Wii system months ago, when a shipment of them came into Best Buy. Having already a dreaded xbox and the annoying repetition of a gamecube, I was sold on the idea of a controller that responds to moving some part of the body other than your thumb to take action. Turns out it was a good sale.

We have spent many hours playing virtual tennis and bad golf, but the Wii has been a welcome addition to the house. Now though, it has attained stellar proportion.

Guitar Hero III came out, and after meeting a guy in a secret location with a wad of cash, we are blissing out to screaming guitar solos, that I only dreamed of being able to play (and of course, still can't) but can PRETEND to. The Santana and Who tracks are comforting to play, as is Foghat's Slow Ride which I recall being able to play even in high school. The new (to me) tracks from Weezer, Priestess, and Eric Johnson are amazingly fun to play.

And when I tired of trying to beat Tom Morello's doppelganger, I can try to make the Wii controller into a virtual whiteboard tracker...

Rogers finds clever customer-hostile technique

Rogers has reasonable coverage in the Vancouver area, but I get a dropped call 90% of the time on the same spot in Burnaby - the 29nd avenue dip between renfrew and slocan. I always called the 611 service to complain and always giev me the assurance that they would not charge me for the call. Got a lot of free calls that way.

Rogers new approach to getting people to stop calling to complain is amazingly brazen, and clever in a most diabolical way. They tell you they can't provide service for you if you are calling from YOUR CELL PHONE! No, even though they did it for 10 years, now they want you to pull over to the use the Telus pay phone, of which there are, let me see...carry the zero, Zero left. Oh, but I can always just wait to get to the office at which time, do I really want to queue up on the wait list while I should be working? - no.

You have to admit, it is an absolutely brilliant strategy if you want to stop customers trying to get assistance, which is of course the underlying desire of poorly-managed businesses who never learn that they could reduce service costs and increase customer loyalty by actually delivering good products at a reasonable price - something the cell phone carriers have never learned.

Good thing work pays for that account - I would have cancelled it there and then. But then I have to wait till I can get to a land line...

Don't Save the Planet!

I am getting very tired of the "save the planet" mantra people trot out when trying to convince other people to drive smaller cars than themselves.

Let me tell you - you don't need to save the planet. Earth is doing fine thank you very much.

It's people that are at risk.

Regardless of the sources, climate change will not cause the earth to explode, or wobble on its axis (any more than it does now), or burn up and become a cinder falling into the sun.

It's much more likely that an increase in CO2 will make it hard for many people to breathe, or that sea levels rise and wipe out the billions of people who live along seashore, or allow the next ice age which would clear out most of the countries in the northern hemispehere.

So let's cut the chatter about saving the planet. I saw a bumper sticker once: it said "Save the Humans"

Now that's what it's about.

iPod Touch/iPhone Remote

How to use ipod touch or iphone as a remote control, not quite air tunes but getting there

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I've Got the Touch...

My iPod Touch arrived just the other day (with that engraving, so no one can say it's not mine (and a hats-off to Peter Gabriel)). I don't really need another iPod, but I really want to use a couple things that I think will become widespread.

1. multitouch displays
2. hand-held browsers

Since we have pervasive 802.11 in the house I like being able to find a wikipedia entry at my fingertips. The pinch model for ui interaction is a bit awkward, but workable, and the gesture of "flick" as they call it, which I first saw on google earth is pretty sweet.

Two things missing: Bluetooth stereo headphones. Airtunes to beam to my music to my Airport-express-equipped speakers...

This Just In...

After googling "ipod touch airtunes" I came across this site for an app called "Signal". Signal runs on the your computer with iTunes (Mac or Win), uses the iTunes API, and shares a nicely-copied web browser interface that you can connect to from the iPod Touch/iPhone that makes it feel like your music is local.

While there are a couple user interface glitches, Matt Stevens was kind enough to reply to my feedback, and it looks like Signal should be on its way to being a killer app for iPod Touch, since many its users will have their master library on their mac anyway.

Canoeing on Bowron Lakes

Last week I took Elia (age 12) with me as we canoed the 60km of the Bowron Lakes in the Caribbo region of BC.

Eight days: no cell phone, no computer, just hours of paddling, setting up camp each night, and good sleeping, good water, and good exercise. Well, mosquitoes too..

For a high tech geek, this was an almost perfect holiday, to remind me of what it is to be in nature 24 hours a day, in natural beauty, and where awareness and muscle are mor important that cleverness.

Pictures here.

Bar Mitzvah Flashback

As I approach my 49th birthday, I gave a little thought sketch at Or Shalom this morning.

I imagined that I was once again 13 years old and looking out at the congregation at my Bar Mitzvah, seeing my parents and friends in the pews, and an older gentleman who looked strangely familiar, but a little weird. After the service, this guy approached my younger self and introduced himself to me as myself, myself at 49. The older me seemed pressed for time, but felt the need to explain all the amazing, sad, wondrous, and important events to come in this pudgy teenager's life, and watched for the reaction. After a few moments thought, the youngster replied, "Cool," and excused himself to go see his friends. "Just before you go, some advice," I told myself in the little cone of silence that seemed to be keeping us separate from the bustling friends and family. "In the 80's, when interest rates are like, 25%, it would be a better idea to save than to borrow."

The weekly portion (parasha) for my Bar Mitzvah "Behar" - on the mountain, starts talking about a period of 7 years, and 7 times 7 years. According to the Torah, farmers are supposed to let their fields lie fallow every 7 years, like a Sabbath for the land. After 7 cycles of these 7 years, the year after is called "Yuval" or in English "Jubilee". I remember thinking at the time that it was pretty smart to build sustainability into God-given rules so that people follow wise rules even when they are inconvenient.

I've always liked the number 7, and it has great significance in Judaism. Now that I am 7 times 7 years old, I'm looking forward to a great year. Forty-nine, is called a "perfect square" because it is formed by multiplying a number by itself. There are lots of significant perfect squares for me this year. Six times six is 36, which is the number of years between being 13 and turning 49. Five times five is 25, which is what interest rates were when I should have saved more. Four times four is 16, which is the age of our oldest son, Sol. Three times three is nine, which doubled is 18, known as "Chai" or "Life" by the sum of its letters, and is the number of years Tilly & I have been married. Two times two is four, which is the number of people in our immediate nuclear family, and One times One is One, which is what I always seem to be making out of two things, and what I think the world is about.

iPod Infinity

(inspired by The Book of Sand by one of my favorite authors Jorges Luis Borges).

Since its introduction in 2000, subsequent versions of Apple's iPod have been getting physically smaller, while their capacity has steadily increased. Following these trends, it is just a matter of time before Apple introduces - iPod Infinity.

Not only does iPod Infinity have infinite storage space, but iPod Infinity comes pre-loaded with an infinite amount of stored songs, (saved in uncompressed aiff format since you have no limit on storage space). Just think what that means, iPod Infinity ships with every song ever recorded, and all the ones that never were! Hear the original performance of Bach's Brandenberg Concerto, performed with original instruments at a time that no recording equipment existed! Hear the basement tapes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and all the songs they never had a chance to compose. Listen to Janis Joplin singing live with Bono, and hear Jim Croce's cover version of Metallica's "Seek and Destroy."

Imagine it. With iPod Infinity, you never have to run out of storage space to put your movies, videos, and music. iPod Inifinity always has room for more. Ipod's new double-up feature moves all the tracks from track 1 to 2, from track 2 to track 4, track 3 to track 6, etc. and this creates room on all the odd-numbered tracks on the infinite disk, allowing for an infinite number of new downloads. Sorry, gift cards in the amount of infinite dollars are not available at this time.

Plus. if you buy now, you will receive every song that has not been written yet. You'll be able to hear Avril Lavigne crooning jazz standards from recordings she wll make in 30 years, and the next 100 years of Billboard hits.

One warning; because of the infinite capacity of the iPod Infinity, it is unlikely you will ever find the same song twice, creating the most awesome shuffle ever. Sadly, some users have reported frustration at hearing several versions of a song, varying by only one note. The most serious drawback has been that the song titles for all material consists of a random string of characters, so that Bruckner's 9th Symphony perfomed in Munich in 1932 has the unfortunate name of $F63896A6383745E5638683462A3. Hopefully 3rd parties will upload meaningful song labels as they are discovered.

Enjoy your iPod Infinity!

Traditionally...

I'm amazed at how often I see the word "Traditionally..." used to describe a way things used to be done. It's not inappropriate, it's just that it USED to mean, like 50 or 100 years ago, but now the time-scope for using the the term seems to be about 3 years, and shrinking...

You are coming to a sad realization, Cancel or Allow?

The I'm-a-Mac-I'm-a-PC commercials were getting a bit tired for me, and was thinking it was time for Apple to just move on, until I saw this week's new ad about Vista ( see the one marked Security). For the first time in a while I had to laugh out loud. The writing is bitingly poingnant, and the performance by the square-jawed security dude is perfect, right down to the ear-tube and the constant horizon-scanning behind dark glasses.

On our metabadge project, we ran into this kind of crazy windows pseudo-security. Microsoft seems to confuse inconvenience with security (or maybe that's true for the U.S. in general when in comes to homeland security), by making users answer questions they are not qualified to answer, and the very software that should help them make the decision, withholds the very essence of what they need to know. In our case, the metabadge control software queries exchange for your appointments so it can turn them into speech and download them onto your wireless metabadge. When this happens, in spite of you installing the application yourself, and in spite of it following the micorosoft api, and in spite of it authorized under your username and password, Windows puts up a dialog, saying that "an application" is attempting to access outlook, Cancel or Allow? The dialog does not even name the application that is trying to make that access, even though clearly the application you just installed is probably allowed while "crazyviralspamgenerator" might not be on your list. Even if you say "Allow" , it gives you a time limit of NO MORE THAN 10 minutes so you can delightedly make that decision every 10 minutes of your work day.

This pseudo-security is so annoying and so widespread that some person we don't even know created an application that does nothing more than wait for that dialog to appear, then presses the "OK" button for you.

Have you come to the same realization? Allow.

Rediscovering Stephenson

One of the things I love about winter break is being able to catch up on my reading. I breezed through my new copy of iWoz with a bit more insite to the Wozster than I had before. FInding a place for it on my bokshelf reminded me to dust off my copy of Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle. The fact that I love Stephenson's books should be no surprise to those that know me. They are rich in nerdy detail, convoluted in plot and double-clickable in character; that is the characters have enough depth to be interesting and sometimes unpredictable.

I often pick up Cryptonomicon and reread favorite passages: Randy's encounter with the Dentist, and his breakthrough moment in the jail visiting room with Amy. Avi's confrontation with Goto Dengo as to the source of WWII gold in the Japanese-built crypt in the Phillipines; Lawrence's spontaneous performance of Bach on a questionably-tempered pipe organ.

Picking up Quicksilver finds me in a very foreign literary land. Not having a degree in English, names like Pynchon mean little to me, so trying to plough through this type of literature dulls the blade of my skimming reader pretty quickly. Like my universtiry textbooks, there are pages that I finish reading and then stop, realizing I have no clue as to what they said. Then I have to trudge back to the place I took my first mis-step, align both visual and mental acuity, and attack the text with persistent vision leading to - usually - comprehension.

I look forward to finding the story of wootz, the makings of hardened steel. Stephenson makes this sound like a discovery that changed the face of battle in the entire world. Maybe he's right.

Wii Consider the Implications...

I've never been a fan of console games, in spite of the kids having bought an xbox and borrowed a friend's gamecube. But this Wii thing looks interesting, since it actually requires you to move something more than your digits.

One thing that always kept my interest in arcade games was the quality of input devices. Driving games like OutRunner that slam you to the side when you turn hard, and a game I spent (too) many quarters on Hard Drivin', the first one with a decent physics engine and a steering wheel with force feedback. More recently, I like to play Police 911, with the excellent interface that detects your body position and uses that to control the point of view of the camera. (Konami has brought out a PlayStation 2 version of it, I haven't played it).

The Wii looks attractive to me both as a player and as a parent. The idea that a kid has to get out of his chair and move around to use the Wii's wireless motion-detector controls has got to be a step in the right direction, both in terms of game play, but more in the realm of actually developing some physical skill and expending some calories. If that looks promising, it might be the first video game console we have in the house that the parents are actually happy to buy...

In the Beginning...

Our younger son Elia is starting to study for his Bar Mitzvah, and today's group class was about how regular people can read and interpret the Torah without having to be scholars. The first five lines of the Torah cover the few (microseconds? millenia?) of the creation of the universe. As we discussed whether this refers to creation of earth or the entire universe, and what the authors might mean when the story says light was created the first day, but the sun was not created until the fourth, another thought occurred to me.

The story of Genesis (B'reysheet in Hebrew) can be thought of fundamentally by the numbers, zero, one and two.

What was before the universe? Some would say - nothing, or zero. Hard for most of us finite beings to think if nothing existing, and perhaps rather than nothing, there was only one thing - what the Kabbalh calls "Ein Sof" - without end. Rather than zero - nothing - the Ein Sof is one. United in its one-ness.

It's only when creation starts that the one-ness of the Universe gets split into two. And forever more, this universe wrestles with duality - light & dark, good & evil, heaven & earth, body & mind. B'reysheet introduces the beauty and tragedy of the world - it is created by splitting the one into two. As someone who seems to have spent a lot of my adult life trying to bring diverging things together that I think belong that way, whether they are human struggles, product messaging, or user interfaces and underlying computer systems, the struggle to return to the One seems to pervade many aspects of my life.

Google Shortcuts

I saw a great sign of simplicity in the last few months with the Vancouver CJA campaign "Live Generously." Rather than put a complete url on a billboard that people race by every morining on the way to work, they did something simple and remarkable. They bought the ad words "Live Generously" from Google AdWords, and then put the phrase, "for more information, google "Live Generously"



Now that "googling" has entered the list of verbs in common use, this is very effective technique to quickly and easily map a catchy phrase into a complicated url.

Neon's Gone Generic

I see them everywhere now. Stop reading this or you'll see them too.

No, not Starbucks, although those things are multiplying like rabbits. I'm talking about the inescapable trend of neon (and now faux neon) open signs that hang in many store windows. They follow the same prescription: red neon for open (actually all neon signs are red, the other colors use other gases, Argon for blue, Krypton for white, Xenon for purple)



Now don't get me wrong, I love neon signs. I have a similar affinity and nostalgia for them as I do for coffee but maybe there is a link between neon open signs and Starbucks after all.

Ya, that's it - it's another niche thing that has gone mainstream. While many more people now can drink espresso, and can see a neon sign in their neighborhood, part of the cachet, the magic of it is lost. Neon signs have had a Vancouver history, whimsy, and a night-time celebration during our long, dark winters.

Sadly though, the blue-red open signs that dot the street fronts now are so commoditized and generic that they actually might create a negative wave, an anti-nostalgia for this once briliant commercial art form.

Apple's iPhone - Can't be Soon Enough

The growing momentum about the not-so-secret iPhone adds serious cred to the idea of Apple introducing its own phone.

This is great news for the ease of use of cell phones, and a death-knell for the Blackberry users who think obscure knowledge of how to turn off their ringer is somehow a badge of honor.

Dave Pogue's most recent public rage against the cellphone user interface is one signpost along the path, and even mac-agnostic Joel Spolsky delivers a bitingly critical review of a free Samsung phone he was sent. But of the Apple iPhone, you can count on a few things for certain.

1. The iPhone will sport an iPod like user interface, and be like an iPod that you can make phone calls with. It will be a humble phone.
2. The integration with iTunes will be superb, scrolling through the store and listening to previews like the web experience.
3. The iPhone will sync contacts with Address Book (and Outlook on Windows?), and hopefull iSync will finally be useful.
4. It will have Bluetooth and the awesome feature, of having the id of the caller appear on your computer without having to unleash your phone, will become ubiquitous and indispensable.
5. You'll be able to access your phone book and reach anyone on it will take less than 5 seconds, 2 scrolls, and 1 button press.
6. The iPhone will support both the bluetooth wireless headset and stereo specs. so your experience of listening to tunes and switching to take an incoming call will be apple-smooth, getting to choose whether the music pauses while you take a call, dims to background level behind the conversation, or mixes in with the call so your caller can hear what you're listening to.

Several other vendors have apparently created small network brands, buying a share of bandwidth from the larger cellular coverage networks, but this might be Apple's Achilles Heel in the venture, for as good as the user experience will be with the iPhone, if the carrier reception is poor or easily overloaded, listening to the cool tunes will be cold comfort.

Coke Blek

My love affair with coffee didn't actually start when my folks allowed me my first cup at 16. Think of it as an engine on idle, awaiting the lead foot to stomp down on the accelerator. The seeds of my coffee-love were planted many years before, on entering the now-lost Java Shoppe in downtown Edmonton in the 1960's. The exotic aroma of newly roasted beans, cinammon, and espresso settled into a deep place in my hind-brain, and got all connected-up with a nurtured indelible memory of a sunny Saturday morning adventure of a 9 year-old with my Mom & Dad. In those days, espresso was a rare indulgence, and the machine to squeeze out those precious drops of super-concentrated coffee essence were the size of a 50-gallon drum, usually encased in copper and brass, with a perched eagle on top in full wing flight. I had no desire to drink the stuff, just the smell, the dark interior shot with beams of sunlight, and the alternating wafts of coffee and cigarette smoke made the whole experience surreal and memory-misted.

Italy took me to another coffee level in 1977, when I backpacked through Europe on my pre-university Eurail-Hostel sojourn. We took the night-train from Roma to Firenze, arriving at 6am Sunday morning. Stumbling off the train after the conductor gave us a 2-minute warrning to get up, dressed and packed, we stood on the platform looking up at the morning sky, and watched the stream of people heading for the cafe. There, the animated waitress was slinging the "cappuccio" and a bar full of bleary-eyed travellers were being transformed from zombiehood to several rungs up the evolutionary ladder. Two spoons full of sugar, and that small cup solidifed a feeling of well-being (and settled an uneasy stomach) that monks have to spend years in meditation to achieve.

Of course, twenty years later, Starbucks has commoditized and packaged that experience, but it still retains much of its original allure. But whether or not you think Starbucks is over-roasted crap or a good cuppa, we can certainly find lots of REAL BAD COFFEE. Real Bad Coffee (RBC) can most likely be found in the following places:
1. school cafeterias
2. coin-operated offee machines
3. offices that pride themselves at providing their employeess with "free coffee"
Real Bad Coffee has some basic characteristics. It comes from robusta beans; high caffeine; high acid acrid chunks of brown stuff. It has been dripped from tap water through water reservoirs and taps that haven't been cleaned since they were installed. The check-out people wouldn't drink it even if it's free.

Coca-cola, on the other hand, is also part of my growing up experience, and while it doesn't carry the semi-spiritual patina that coffee does for me, it is up there in list. Coke would like-to-buy-the-world-a-Coke, and the Real Thing, and all that, and who cares what the taste-test says, I ain't drinking Pepsi (ha, Brand Autopsy tells me I'm already doin' that, if Frappucino is bottled by Pepsi!). Coke is the pickup, and man, nothing cuts the grease of food-fair chinese combos than a can of Coke.

So when I heard about Coke Blak, I dreamed about what it might be like. My two favorite black liquids - together. I imaged a bottle of frappucino, with a coke twist. I imagined classic coke, with a shot of sweetened espresso dripped into it.

So, after cruising ebay for a while looking for the early versions, Sol brought a bottle he picked at 7-11. After leaving it for a night in the fridge to settle, I popped it open today. It is so bad, I can't hardly even write about it. Imagine Diet Coke, then you took the worst cafeteria coffee you could find, boiled it down, and poured it in the bottle. Unintegrated, vile, caustic. Unbelievable.

Well, they totally missed MY demographic. Perhaps someone will like it...

Peace It Together - The Movie(s)

Creative Peace Network Society is proud to present…
Peace it Together 2006!
Reel Perspectives by Palestinian, Israeli and Canadian Youth

Please join us at the world premier screening of seven short films about the Middle East through the lenses of 30 young people.

The films will be the result of a two-week program called Peace it Together. In partnership with the UBC School of Music's Young Artist Experience, chamber musicians will add some beautiful interludes

When: Sunday evening, August 20, at 7:00 PM
Where: Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, 2750 Granville Street
Tickets: $15.00 (general admission) at the door
www.ticketmaster.ca 604 280 4444
Arts Club Theatre box office 604 687 1644

For more information, contact info@creativepeacenetwork.ca
See our website http://www.creativepeacenetwork.ca

Day 1 - Mohammed arrives

Our Palestinian guest Mohammed Shaqura arrived yesterday and after adjusting to his jet lag, seems to be getting a bit more at home in our house. They flew by way of Jordan, Amsterdam, then Vancouver so it's not hard to see why fatigue was the dominant feeling as they arrived. So far, we're concentrating on communicating, and connecting on our most common themes - tech, coffee, music, and movies. Starting with the basics - shower and sleep, and moving on to rechargeable batteries and ac adaptors. It was great to see him "perc-up" after this morning's double-latte and I got to listen to some contemporary Lebanese music. Sol & I watched the DVD "Promises" late last night and about halfway through it, Mohammed woke up (about midnite our time) and came downstairs so we watched the end of it together.

The Canadian, the Israeli and the Palestinian

Sounds like the beginning of a joke, but in our case it's true. We'll be housing two teenagers, one from Jerusalem and the other from Bethlehem in the Palestinian territories, as part of the creative peace network. This was all set up months before the rockets starting landing in Israel, and the invasion of Lebanon, so what looked at the outset as chance to open an initial dialog has taken on a whole new level.

Still, it's all going ahead and we'll head out to the airport this week to pick up Mohammed and Nadav, and see where that all goes.