John Petrie’s LifeBlag

Ah, I love 4th of July weekend. Not necessarily because of anything intrinsic about it, but I loved this one and I loved the one two years ago, so it’s becoming a trend.

Today I got up early and ran in the Tortoise and Hare 5k in downtown Ann Arbor, hung out at home and finished editing a paper that I was unable to finish last night, and went out to lunch at ABC with Dave. Lame-ass Theresa and Rich didn’t join us, but that’s okay, they probably didn’t feel well or have time. Since I had no particular thing to do or place to be, and I didn’t want to go back home and sit in my hot, stuffy apartment for 6 hours, I decided to drive around to a couple stores and look for furniture or electronics that I could buy in the future (after I move next month or next summer). I headed for Art Van, the furniture store, to look at coffee tables, end tables, night stands, and couches. I saw lots of good ones, probably plenty of things Kathy and I would like, but it felt kind of pointless without her there (for her knowledge of home design and her opinion of every piece, as they will be joint decisions), but then I saw the TV store that existed in an annex in the back of the store: Paul’s TV. It is like the “home theater” section of Best Buy, just a medium-sized room in the back of the store, and it operates as an independent store. I’m sure they have plenty of TV/furniture deals in coordination with Art Van, but other than that, they’re separate.

I went back to Paul’s TV and sat down in an armchair to watch a plasma TV (Panasonic P50S2) and an LED-backlit Sharp (LC52LE700U) that were set up perpendicular to each other. I had a good angle to watch the Tigers game on both, though it was closer than I’d typically sit at home. The reason I sat down to watch those two, mainly the Sharp, is that the local appliance store ABC Warehouse had given me a guaranteed price of $1500 for the Sharp, to be delivered in August after I move, if I paid a down payment on it, but I saw that Paul’s TV had it for $1197. THAT…is insane. Paul’s TV never charges for shipping, whereas ABC Warehouse would have charged $50.

Naturally, my first thought was that this was too good to be true, but I double-checked the model number and size. I had been keeping track of many TV prices in a spreadsheet over the last year (yes, total loser-geek), so I had gotten good at memorizing model numbers and was already familiar with this one anyway. It was definitely the same TV, for $350 cheaper. Its MSRP is $2000. My second thought was also along the lines of, “This is too good to be true,” but referring to the picture quality—maybe this TV isn’t all that great, despite great reviews (at both Amazon and Newegg, which is a ringing endorsement, considering the tech-savvy videophiles who populate Newegg). It is that great. I thought that its colors might have been a little too bright or washed out compared to the plasma, but, first of all, that’s adjustable, and I don’t believe that the Sharp’s colors will be the slightest, remotest bit sub-optimal after I adjust them. One strong point of the Sharp LEDs according to reviewers is the color accuracy. The motion of the ball and players seemed nearly identical to the S2, with the edge probably going to the S2. I don’t know if that’s a by-product of the colors being turned up too bright, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The big advantage of the Sharp LED was, surprisingly, its black levels (and other dark levels). They were better than the plasma’s. Its blacks were blacker, and it was easier to distinguish a few details in dark places than on the plasma. This is despite the incessant claims by videophiles at CNet and everywhere else that plasmas’ black levels are so superior to LCDs’. Not these two. (Nor any plasmas in ABC Warehouse, which is the very thing that swayed Kathy and me towards the Sharp in the first place.) In and around the backdrop of Comerica Park, which is the dark, empty part behind center field that enables the hitter to see the pitched ball, more detail was distinguishable. It was July 4th, so the Tigers and Mariners were both wearing these special “patriotic” caps (here’s the Tigers one). Before the start of one inning, the camera zoomed in very close to a Tigers hat that was sitting in the dugout or in a shaded part of the stands or somewhere; I guess the Fox Sports crew had set it up there for the purpose of zooming in one inning. The LED-backlit TV was far, far more detailed and accurate in showing the lines of the Tigers’ English D and distinguishing the navy-blue textures of the middle and left side of that logo from one another. It was a mess of navy blue on the plasma, and a clear English D on the LED-backlit screen. Sold.

To make the end of this story rather shorter, I took this price to ABC Warehouse to challenge them to beat it, but I had no documentation, so all they could beat was the website’s price of $1497 (the $1197 was a special 4th of July sale). I went back to Paul’s TV, paid a 10% down payment on my credit card, got the receipt, brought it to the ABC Warehouse manager, who eventually told me he would not only match it but beat it by $100. I don’t know if he mistyped, misspoke, or miscalculated, but he actually gave it to me for over $160 less than Paul’s TV: $1102 after tax and shipping, compared to $1268 in total from Paul’s TV. That is INSANE, people.

When Kathy and I had first picked out the Sharp LED-backlit TV in June, I walked out of there telling her it wasn’t quite a steal, but it was a very good or great deal on a great, long-lasting, highly reviewed TV that we both witnessed outperforming every TV in the store with a remotely similar price. But $1100, THAT is a steal. It’s unbelievable. I am ecstatic. This has made my month.

My brother told me about the web page Symphony of Science, where its proprietor, John Boswell, mixes the voices of famous scientists (e.g., Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, Richard Feynman) with an autotuner and puts them over R & B–style music. You should check it out.

I have seasons 1–5 of South Park on DVD, and I don’t ever plan on buying any more because every episode is available for free 24/7 at its official website, southparkstudios.com. I know there is abundant evidence that giving something away for free actually increases its sales, but I at least understand the basis of where the RIAA is coming from. I won’t pay a penny for South Park as long as it is available on demand for free.

One of the worst things Amazon.com has ever done is lump the reviews and ratings of the DVD version and the Blu-ray version of every single movie together, so that you can’t tell whether someone’s review and star-rating refers to the DVD version or the Blu-ray version, unless they state they’re reviewing the Blu-ray version specifically. What idiot thought of that? I can’t imagine the level of stupidity required to approve of that idea at multiple levels of management in the Amazon company hierarchy. It is inconvenient, counterintuitive, and simply inaccurate because the two different products are, um, different products!

So, it turns out my TV is a hell of a lot sweeter than I had ever thought. It is a Samsung SlimFit high-definition television. It is capable of displaying 720p and 1080i video. It’s only 30 inches diagonally, and it’s a cathode ray tube TV, so it isn’t as awesome as the larger TV I’m going to buy next summer, but, hey, that means it has a higher pixel density. I found this out because Kathy got me a Blu-ray player for Christmas, and I hooked it up to an HDMI port in the back of my TV (hmm, that should have made it obvious to me that it was an HDTV, but it never occurred to me), and it plays Blu-ray movies in very nice quality. I tried out my new Blu-rays of Star Trek: First Contact and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and I’m pretty sure they looked as awesome as they could on a 30″ TV. Maybe a new LCD (or plasma, if they existed at 30 inches) would show an improvement over my 3-year-old TV, but the Wikipedia articles on plasma displays and LCD screens indicate that, other things being equal, CRT produces the best picture in terms of color accuracy, sharpness, and blur. (The problem is, other things aren’t ever equal, not anymore.) However, CRT picture quality fades a lot sooner than the flat-panel displays, so I’m sure mine doesn’t look as good as it used to in high-definition. Those two movies looked really awesome, though; you could tell the source and the display were both high-definition.

I began to suspect that my TV was capable of playing video at some level of high definition (either 720 or 1080 vertical resolution) the night before I discovered it for sure, as I was reading my TV’s manual for probably the second time. I don’t remember reading a lot of it when I got it in August 2006. I think I was reading it to determine if it might be possible for me to use my TV’s remote control for both the TV and the Blu-ray player (both Samsung). I know it’s possible to use the Blu-ray player’s remote to control the TV, but I don’t think it’s possible to change the picture’s aspect ratio/zoom with the Blu-ray remote, and I’ll need this for watching regular TV content that is widescreen because I don’t have high-definition cable, so most things are 4:3, so I have to zoom in on a widescreen program to avoid having black bars on the sides and top and bottom. It might be possible, but first I’ll need to figure out how to navigate my TV’s menus with the Blu-ray controller; all it can do so far is power-off, power-on, and change the volume, channel, and input source.

Well, fuck you, you fucking Redditors! I submitted this article from the Daily Mash (Britain’s Onion), about how Santa hates ginger kids, to Reddit, thinking at least a few of them would get a kick out of it, especially since it is reminiscent of a glorious South Park episode. But, no, I went to check on it a day or two later and saw that it had a score of 0, meaning one more person down-voted it than up-voted it (it starts with a score of 1 upvote—yours—so its vote-score at a given time is the number of other upvotes minus the number of downvotes, plus 1). Probably one loser down-voted it and no one else liked it enough to vote. That person was probably a red-headed abomination himself, goddamned ginger motherfucker, I’d like to bash his face in…

You know what’s stupid? That old saying (I guess it qualifies as an “old saying” now) that if a million monkeys banged away at a million typewriters, they would eventually reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare. Obviously you could fill in any other writing(s) and it would remain equally true, i.e., not at all. It would literally never happen because the universe would end before it happened. Oh, it isn’t a metaphysical impossibility, but it is a physical one.

Let me give you some background. I recall reading this article from the BBC News about the futility of the WEP wireless encryption protocol and the superiority of WPA. One of the network security experts they interviewed said something that blew my mind. Do you know how long it would take the best computer-hacking (password-guessing) programs to guess a 20-character password by brute force? (On average.) What would you guess? I assume it could only contain letters and numerals. So that’s 36 possible characters, times 20 places, and computers can try an awful lot of them per second. Would it take weeks? Years? Decades?

This guy said that on average, it would take longer than the entire history of the universe to guess a 20-character password by brute force. Fourteen billion years! Wow! This is verified by the all-knowing God Himself.

A computer that could perform a billion billion computations per second would require 10¹³ years to guess a 128-character phrase, which is 1,000 times longer than the age of the universe. A 256-character password would require 3×10⁵¹ years.

No one has any way of even guessing how long the universe will last. It could be 3×10⁵¹⁵¹ years. If it lasts that long, it probably will have died in ice many eons before, killed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It doesn’t matter. That old saying about monkeys on typewriters has no relevance to the actual universe. Not just monkeys, humans, the Earth, and the solar system, but the entire universe itself could not last long enough for it to happen. You could make it a trillion trillion monkeys, who can type as fast as Lieutenant Commander Data can read, and they would never come even remotely close to producing a single page of any Shakespeare play.

These are some of my favorite examples of technological impairment from the Parents Just Don’t Understand articles at CollegeHumor.com. The best ones are the ones you could never, ever make up.

My mom asked to see my pictures on Facebook. I thought about all the drinking pictures that are on it and then I thought about my mom’s computer skills. So I said, if you can find them by yourself, sure. I came back 5 minutes later and she had an empty Microsoft word document up. I think I’m safe.

Instead of using the kitchen timer option on the microwave to time whatever she’s baking, my Mom turns on the microwave and lets it run for the hour or so she’s baking something.

My girlfriend’s dad typed a huge letter out on the computer. After he was done, he printed it and decided the font was too small, so he erased the whole thing, changed the font size, and retyped it.

My mother claimed she could not read my latest email because her printer was broken.

My dad uses the word “video” every time he searches for something on Youtube.

My dad works from home, and often needs to receive updated blueprints. His office has now given him 2 different computers which I set up, and he refuses to turn on. Instead of including him on emails, they have to print their emails and fax them to him. In an odd twist the younger interns in the office had to spend 8 hours on a training day to learn to use a fax machine.

I sent my father a long Google link to a photo, and he proceeded to print out the actual web address. He thought the printer would “decode the link” and turn it into a photo.

I work in a small computer shop in my town. One day a woman walks in, and tells me she has a problem with her computer, that it has broken. I then ask her the problem and she shows it to me and describes her situation. She told me that she had been online, ordering something off the net, when she had put her card in and it hadn’t done anything, just got stuck. Naturally assuming it was something to do with the machine i start booting it up and examine things, this is when she asks me “can you get the card out first please,” curious i asked what she meant. It had turned out that with her limited computer knowledge that she had managed to go online, start ordering items, get to the checkout and wanting to pay with a credit card, she had push her card into the floppy drive. She never came back to the store, but did have to order a new floppy drive.

My cousin, who is my age, recently found a bunch of pictures of us when we were really little and she told my mom. My mom then called me and said “Leanne found some pictures of you two from a long time ago and is going to tag you on facebook, whatever that means. I guess you’re it.”

I bought my mom a new laptop for her birthday. As I’m showing it to her I explained that she needed a power outlet converter because the cord has the ground plug while none of her outlets have the ground inlet. At this point she stops and looks really confused. When I asked what was wrong she said, “Why do I have to plug it in. I thought it was wireless.” I explained that the wireless part is for the internet, but she needs to plug it in for power and to charge her battery. Her response: “So, what’s the difference between the internet and power?”

While my grandpa went online to manage his bank account, there was a box that read “sign here.” He either scrolled down the screen a few times or there was more than one box…his name and initials were written about three different times on the monitor. In ink.

My mom thought that an iPod worked like a cassette player. When I heard her complain that she had to listen to songs she really didn’t like on her playlist to get to the ones she wanted to hear, I suggested she just take those songs off her playlist. She replied with, “Well then I’ll just have to listen to 3 minutes of silence until the next song comes on.”

You know the little image with the wavy letters that sites use to make sure you’re not a robot? It can also be used to make sure you’re not my mom. I have to fill them out for her.

My dad doesn’t know how to send me e-mails. Instead, he just uses the customization feature on stuff like e-cards. I recently got an e-card of a cute kitten with the message “I transferred $100 into your account”.

Our printer ran out of ink, so my Mom bought a new printer.

My grandma kept complaining about how she couldn’t get her new alarm clock to stop displaying 12:00. I went up to her room and took the sticker off of the display screen.

My high school Spanish teacher, on multiple occasions, has been known to photocopy blank pieces of paper in order to get more blank pieces of paper. She’s completely oblivious to the fact that you can open the copier to take out the paper.

My mom thinks Google’s “Suggestions” are the only options available. If she’s trying to find something and it doesn’t come up in the suggestions, she’ll say, “Sorry, it’s not on the internet.”

My dad called me to ask about removing a virus from his computer. Somewhere in the middle of the instructions, he interrupted me to ask, “Are computer viruses man-made, or are they like real viruses?”

My mom was once using my desktop to check her email while I was away at school. I got a frantic phone call that afternoon because the mouse was at the edge of the mousepad but the “thingy” wasn’t at the edge of the screen.

I had fairly bad eyesight for most of my life, so I ended up getting Lasik eye surgery as soon as I was old enough and had enough money. My mom apparently never heard of this procedure, so she was amazed when I told her about it, and is now always asking me how many fingers she is holding up while she is right in front of me, and if I can see the license plate of cars that are up to a mile away. She also tells all of her friends about my amazing “super laser vision”.

I was watching “Jurassic Park” with my grandmother a few months ago. During one particularly scary moment she leans over to me and, with a very worried tone in her voice, asks, “The Dinosaurs…they’re only for the movie, right, they didn’t breed any extras?”

I was in a very dimly lit restaurant with my parents and I asked my mom what time it was. She took out her brand new iPhone (which has the time displayed in huge digits on the screen) and used it like a flashlight to read the time on her watch.

When my parents got the internet, I spent hours explaining how to type in a web address, but my dad still doesn’t understand that it has to be a real website to work. When I look at the previous addresses they read, “www.golfcoursesnearmyrtlebeach.com” or “www.insurancepoliciesforseniors.com”.

My dad got a cell phone a few months ago, but he never turns it on. He thinks that you get charged for every minute the phone is on.

I told my parents I wanted the new MacBook for school. Two weeks later I received “Macs for Dummies” in the mail.

My parents don’t have a debit card. Anytime they need cash, they make out a check to cash and go into the bank.

My mother has never sent, nor attempted to send me a text message ever before. Earlier today, I inexplicably found this waiting for me on my phone: “We r on ca nif eigh six mail gmom”. Anyone want to take a crack at what she meant to say?

My friend just got a text message from her mom that said: “What day do you come home question mark”

A friend of mine found a cell phone. She called the owner of the phone’s parents to see if they could get the phone back to their daughter. Five minutes after she got off the phone, a text message came through from the girls dad saying “Lizzy, some girl found your phone…call her at ***-***-**** to get your phone back”

I’ve worked at an internet company for about a year. One day, a lady called and told me her computer wouldn’t turn on no matter what she did. I said “Ok, can you look at the back of the computer and make sure the power cable is plugged in.” She responded, “Just give me a second, I have to find a flashlight because the power is out here at my house.”

My 75-year-old grandfather just bought a laptop so he could learn to use the Internet. I got an empty email from him yesterday, and the subject heading was, “Andrew what does it mean when it asks ‘are you sure you want to send an empty message’ when i click on the send button??? —-love grandad”

Every time my dad wants to check his email, he goes to Google, types in www.hotmail.com, hits search, and clicks on Hotmail. He recently told me he discovered a shortcut—he can just hit “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

My grandma always reminds me to turn my GPS off a few blocks before I get home “so that the man giving me directions doesn’t know where I live.”

Whenever my mom doesn’t feel like answering the phone and lets the machine get it, she makes everyone be really really quiet because she thinks that the person calling can hear us while they’re leaving a message.

My boss thinks that Google is slang for find. Just this week, I’ve heard him tell our interns to google old documents in our file cabinets, google meeting minutes saved on our server, and google some sugar packets for the coffee bar.

Mom’s Text Message: “Can u go 2 niketown to buy a Pacquia shirt 4 dad size lrg? B careful swine flu.”

My mother got my father a GPS for Christmas. He told me the reason why it wasn’t working in the house was because it couldn’t see the stars.

My dad thinks that he can only check an e-mail account on the computer he made it on. Therefore, he checks his work e-mail in his office and his personal e-mail on our house computer. It wouldn’t be that bad, but he works at home and those two computers are about 20 feet apart….

My mom has a contact in her cellphone named “?.akj.e0″

I showed my dad the BustedTee with Mao Tse Tung on it that reads, “LMAO” and he didn’t get it because he doesn’t know what LMAO means. I showed it to my mom, and she didn’t get it because she doesn’t know who Mao Tse Tung is. Which is worse?

My mom just got a Facebook account a few weeks ago and on Valentine’s Day she posted on my wall:”I HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR VD!!!”

My grandma cannot grasp the functional purpose of a thermostat. She cranks it up when its cold, then proceeds to regulate the heat by opening and closing the windows.

I made the mistake of trying to explain Wikipedia to my grandmother. She’s now convinced that anybody can modify any website at will, and she won’t use Weather.com anymore because she’s worried that vandals will change the temperature on her.

I caught my father on google the other day typing in “show me snow machines”. I later found out that he starts any and all searches with the words “show me”, or “I want to see”.

My mom needed to transfer pictures from her digital camera onto her computer. After a few minutes, she was hopeless and asked me for help. I took out the memory card and put it in the computer. Nothing was on it. I hooked up the camera to the computer, but still, there were no pictures. Finally, I had to ask my mom what she had tried before she asked me for help. She put the camera’s batteries in the mouse.

My professor has tried to show different DVD’s in class for the past 4 weeks. She couldn’t get any of them to work so tonight she decided she was just going to show a VHS tape because “it’s simple and I know how to work it.” It took her 20 minutes to get it to show on the projector. Now she’s trying to turn the volume on. Class ends in 10 minutes.

While my mother was looking over my shoulder at an AIM conversation:
Mom: “What does LMAO mean?”
Me: “It’s an abbreviation”
Mom: “Let’s Make An Omelette”?

A few years ago my mom tried to call my brother and reached his voice mail. She left a 2-minute message calling out for him to pick up the phone, as if it was being played through his speaker phone.

The other day I was at work and an older lady came in and wanted to buy Firefox. I explained to her that Firefox was a free download. I then told her to find it by going to Google and searching for it. She told me, “I don’t have Google; I only have Yahoo.”

I was showing my mom how to get pictures from her camera to her computer. I told her to click on the desktop icon which she clicked once. I told her you have to double-click and she said, “Is that where you click something twice?”

My dad makes the subject for all of his emails “Hi, It’s Mitch.”

My mom sent me an email with the subject as my cell phone number. The email said “Is this a text?”

My mom deleted friends off Facebook in an attempt to free up her hard drive space.

I just saw an old guy working out with a discman inside a fanny pack.

My mom just got a new cell phone. She was setting up her voicemail on it and wanted to see if she did it correctly so she asked me to call her. I called her phone and she picked up so I told her to just let it go to voicemail. She said OK. I called back and she picked up again. This happened two more times until I took the phone away from her.

One time I opened a Firefox window, minimized it to look at something else, and then brought it back up again. My mom freaked out and yelled, “You just wasted twenty dollars!” “Huh?” I eloquently replied. “It costs twenty dollars every time you open up The Internet,” she continued. “Our plan costs twenty dollars.” I assured her that this was a monthly charge, but she remained unconvinced. She demanded that I repay her $20 for “wasting The Internet,” and then reminded me to “turn it off as soon as you’re done with it, we don’t want to use more than we absolutely need.”

I tried to teach my grandmother basic computer skills, but I wasn’t able to get anywhere with her because she kept rotating the mouse on the mouse-pad. She thought you had to steer it like a car when you wanted the pointer to go someplace.

My grandfather literally used the screen as a mousepad because he thought the cursor was controlled by the mouse being on the screen.

My dad has a Zune.

Some people, including myself, kind of make fun of me for buying so many DVDs without ever having seen them. I heard they were good, I think I would like them, they were on sale in a weekly ad, and I don’t feel a particular need for high-definition copies of them, so I buy them. But did you ever think about this—how many books have you read before you buy those? The upper threshold of price I’m willing to pay for most movies on standard DVD ($5 or $8) is less than or equal to the price of most paperback books, so really there’s a higher chance of waste in paying $8 or more for a book when you don’t know that you’ll like it. It takes a lot longer to finish and occupies more space on your shelf.

Oh, and lest you think I’m a DVD-buying maniac like Mike, I have about 120-130 movies on DVD plus a couple dozen seasons of various shows on DVD, but my Amazon wish list contains more movies than I already own. The vast majority of them are Blu-rays. I am waiting extremely, excrutiatingly patiently for Blu-ray movies to break the $10 threshold and for good, reliable Blu-ray players to break the $100 threshold. (If I get a good job and a cheap-ish apartment somewhere, I’ll settle for $150. Then again, I’ll probably make my first Blu-ray player a PlayStation 3, so that negates the price considerations.)

I have read a lot about high-definition technology online, mainly Blu-ray movies, Blu-ray players, and TV’s. Most people who pay attention to these things know that downloading movies to a hard drive and streaming movies on-demand is the way of the future. On-demand streaming from Netflix, Amazon, and other companies is already available via your ethernet-connected television, Blu-ray player, or X-Box. Considering how often we experience buffering delays with simple embedded flash videos on the internet, especially with a wireless ethernet connection, I am surprised the streaming services are so reliably smooth and fast with those huge video files.

But I suffer from a bit of Picard’s Syndrome even with movies, so that I want physical copies of movies on my shelf. I like owning them and seeing them all on my shelf, just like all my books. I don’t think I would be satisfied with an on-demand streaming service because I wouldn’t actually own my own copy of the movie or TV show, and what if you don’t have an ethernet connection or that video becomes unavailable for some reason?

Link of the day: The Parents Just Don’t Understand series from CollegeHumor.com. Some of the items therein are truly hilarious.

John Scalzi is pretty much awesome as a blagger; I am now tempted to further investigate his merits as a novelist. He blags at the Sci-Fi Scanner, which is, oddly enough, part of AMC television’s website. His last two posts were devoted to exposing and criticizing design flaws in the futuristic technology of Star Wars and Star Trek, respectively. Some samples from his Star Wars post:

R2-D2
Sure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion—and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness.”
[...]
Death Star
An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can’t get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.
[...]
Midi-Chlorians
Oh, man, don’t get me started. Except to say this: If in fact a high concentration of midi-chlorians is the difference between being a common schmoe and being a dude who can Force Choke his enemies, the black market in midi-chlorian injections must be amazing.

Here are some items from his Star Trek list:

The Alien Probe of Star Trek IV
The programming of this probe is even more simple than that of V’Ger, and could be written in four lines in the BASIC programming language:

10. GOTO Earth
20. INPUT “I can has humpback whalez?” A$
30. IF A$=”no” THEN GOTO 40
40. DESTROY EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING

I’m pretty sure this is not optimal design.
[...]
Uniforms
You have your choice: Velouresque pajamas and miniskirts (resurrected for the 2009 reboot), burgundy jackets with puffy blouses (Treks II – VI), or progressively unflattering jumpsuits (Treks VII – X). Do Starfleet personnel ever stop what they’re doing, look at each other, and ask, “Who dresses us?” They should.

On the whole, the design flaws in Star Wars struck me as much more grievous than the ones in Star Trek.

I loved today’s xkcd comic. It’s funny ’cause it’s true. When my friends ask me to fix something on their computer (probably most often my roommate with her internet connection), I don’t really know what to do ahead of time. I don’t have any specific plan of action, I don’t know all the possible problems that could exist, and I don’t have a list of solutions to try in order of their likelihood of solving the problem. I just go to the control panel or Google and click around.

Hmm, that could be the title of a long and fascinating post. Instead, I’ll give you some links that are pretty interesting.

Have you heard of the ancient Chinese strategy board game, Go? It might remind of you of chess or checkers at first, as it takes place on a board with a grid, but it is thousands of times more complex. How complex is it, John? It’s so complex that the number of possible unique games of Go exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.

I was reminded of Go from this article about games that computers have already perfected or will become unbeatable at in the foreseeable future.

Also, see this fascinating article on quantum computing and online poker. I am not the least bit interested in poker of any kind—watching, playing, or reading about it—but this article is really interesting because it’s about some of the wonders and curiosities of quantum computing, which is sure to revolutionize our world if not permit computers to become self-aware and attack humans with endless movie sequels.

A link on MSN.com today read, “‘Star Trek’ tech isn’t light years away.” It goes to this slideshow of technological gadgets that might not be as futuristic and fantastical as we think when we see them in TV shows and movies. The introduction to the slideshow says the “gadgetry of Star Trek should appear light years ahead of today’s technology.”

When did people get so dumb? Hey, scientifically illiterate science writers and MSN homepage authors: How do you know Star Trek technology isn’t “light years away”? Maybe that technology does exist in some alien society in a far-away solar system. Are you sure that the technology doesn’t exist at some location that far away? How do you know this? If not, why do you insist that it isn’t light years away?

Idiots.

This Ars Technica article says a Chinese Blu-ray player manufacturer is pushing to sell a Blu-ray player for $99 soon, which to me implies this Christmas season.

I have said that I’ll buy a good Blu-ray player as soon as it’s under $100 before taxes, and good is the key word in the sentence. I don’t know exactly how I’ll determine if the player passes muster, but most likely I’ll have to read several reviews of the model, and it’ll have to be from a reliable brand. So “as soon as it’s under $100″ is dependent on my determination that it’s “good” to begin with…

Anyway, Ars Technica is skeptical that this cheapness will bring a Blu-ray player to every living room the way the $100 price tag brought DVD players to every living room:

The bigger question is whether hitting a $99 price tag will do for Blu-ray what it did for DVD. Our Magic 8-Ball says “outlook not so good,” and here’s why. First and foremost, we’re in a recession. While we may begin to pull out of it later this year, consumers are loath to spend money on luxury items, which leads us to the second reason. Even though Blu-ray’s picture quality is stunning (watch Wall•E on a large 1080p HDTV and you’ll agree), upscaled DVDs also look good on HDTVs—good enough for a lot of people, anyway. Lastly, Blu-ray is being challenged by HD downloads—if you want HD goodness, you’ve got plenty of alternatives to buying a Blu-ray player: your Xbox 360, Amazon, Apple TV, and cable/satellite TV provider, to name a few.

Getting the price of Blu-ray players down to $99—even if they’re not Blu-ray 2.0 compliant—will definitely give sales a boost. But it’s not going to set sales on fire as it did for DVD players back in the day.

In late March, I bought a Sansa Clip mp3 player, at long last. It’s made by Sandisk. It is pretty sweet. I like it a lot. It was $60 at Best Buy (and other, online stores) for the 4 GB version, which was only $10 more than the 2 GB version, so obviously I sprung for the higher one. I used the $50 gift card my aunt gave me for my birthday, and I bought an armband designed specifically for the Sansa Clip, for $20, along with it.

It’s called a Clip because it is designed to be their “exercising” mp3 player, with a clip on the back to fit into various armbands that are out there. (And, as I found out accidentally in a fit of panic, the clip is removable and re-insertable!) It also has flash memory (obviously) so it doesn’t skip when you’re running, and it’s really small. I think it’s comparable to an iPod Nano.

I bought an mp3 player other than an iPod for a few reasons. First and foremost, with the last firmware update, it can play Ogg vorbis and FLAC files, which I have quite a few of and which all music players should support. Ogg is a free and open-source alternative to the mp3 audio compression codec, and FLAC (free lossless audio codec) is basically the free and open-source alternative to .wav files. FLAC files are awesome because you can compress them a lot or a little—though never as much as .ogg or .mp3 files—and the sound is still identical to the original, uncompressed file from the CD. Compression level does not affect the sound at all. The only reason you would ever compress a FLAC file to anything other than its smallest size is because greater compression takes longer, so if you have hundreds of files and little time to convert them, you might choose the quicker compression. Hardly ever an issue for anyone.

Also, entirely besides the convenience of the Sansa Clip’s ability to play the FLAC files that I have on my computer, I wanted to reward the company that goes to extra lengths to support FOSS software. Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft apparently see no need to do that, and in fact they might think it to their benefit to promote the use of DRM-protected software*. I have no interest in giving my money to a company that can’t be bothered to provide support for two common FOSS file types, especially companies with as much money and resources as those three. (*Apple’s new non-DRM-protected mp3 files are a good start, but supporting more file types is better than fewer.)

The only other brand of mp3 players I read about that plays Ogg and FLAC files is Cowon, but they didn’t have any good, cheap options that I could find.

The second major reason I bought the Sansa Clip was that it isn’t an iPod. Everyone and their pet gecko has an iPod. I wanted something different. As long as it wasn’t clearly a worse product. And, based on the reviews of the Sansa Clip, my experience with it the last three weeks, and the aforementioned FOSS file support, it is as good as I had hoped. I am completely satisfied with it. I can only think of one flaw, which is in their list of bugs to fix: podcasts can’t be added to the “Go List” (the impromptu playlist that you can create on the spot). That hasn’t been a problem so far because on the occasions when I want to listen to several podcasts consecutively, they are usually all from the same program or symposium, so they are already grouped in their own folder by the Sansa Clip, so I just start at the first one and they play in order.

Yes, my desire to have something that few people have is essentially the same as the desire of emo teenagers to lash out at “society” and be non-conformist. So what, it resulted in me getting a great mp3 player for cheap, so apparently it’s a good strategy.

The third major reason, which ties in with my anti-iPod sentiment and is equally important, was the iPod’s requirement to use iTunes. I don’t use iTunes on my MacBook, I don’t have much music on my MacBook, and I certainly neither have nor want iTunes on my Ubuntu desktop computer (there is no iTunes for Linux, thankfully). iTunes is a terrible music program. It’s inconvenient, bulky, counterintuitive. I hate iTunes with a burning, searing, crippling passion. My loathing for iTunes is unmatched by that of Ahab for the white whale. It is 99% of the reason I don’t put much music onto my MacBook or listen to music on it very often.

The last reason I chose the Sansa Clip was its price. $60 for this mp3 player, even if it only last for a couple years, is a fantastic deal. So far I’m certainly getting my money’s worth.