One of the cool things at the auto show was a dynamometer demo sponsored by Lexus. They had a tuned IS330 on the dyno and were lettting people sit in as passengers while one of the techs did a dyno run. Pretty awesome, as I’ve never seen a dyno in person, and the Lexus sounded pretty nice, but you couldn’t see any of the dyno readings. It would have been a bit more engaging to see a huge display with torque and horsepower. My joke at the time was: “Talk about going nowhere…fast.” Har har har.

We rolled out our new HD video player at work. It’s beta, a bit buggy, but still pretty exciting. The newest version of flash allows for streaming of h.264 content inside of flash objects which means no more FLVs and crappy encoding. Here’s a demo with some BBC HD content. You might have to wait a sec to allow the video to buffer. Also, the newest version of Flash is required. If this seems like a viable way to host videos…Vimeo’s going out, Motionbox is in.

Here’s a blood orange I ate.

I was able to get ajaxy commenting working it its most primitive state. Still need to do some clean up of styles and fix navigation. 2:30am on a school night? Uh oh.

I’ve undertaken the task of overhauling the blog. You’ll notice a slightly different look, but with completely different guts. Tomorrow night’s task is ajaxy window blinds in-page commenting.

A little while back it was Chinese New Year(s?). Chinatown fills up to the brim with confetti. At first I thought there was a some sort of parade, but soon found out that the confetti was from these awesome party poppers, see below.

They ranged from $5 to $10, and were between 1 foot and 3 feet in length. Some had parachutes with good fortune messages where a toy soldier should be. I apparently twisted mine the wrong way and almost took my pink off with the explosive charge.

Panasonic had this huge plasma thing on display. They also had a 150 incher, but, for some reason, it wasn’t as impressive. Perhaps, after a certain point, the screen takes on a sort of ballpark or movie theater display aura, something that most people have seen many a time.

My mom got an iPhone and, despite the simplicity of activation and use, I had to do some remote tech support for her. But thank goodness for gotomypc (thanks Robert). Instead of the old days when I’d have to explain everything over the phone, now I just take over her computer and get down to business lickety split.

Below: At one point there were 4 of these things living under our roof. When a tech challenged person goes out and buys a tech-awesome product, you know that you probably should have bought more stock 6 months ago.

Adblock is the shit. It’s a Firefox add-on. It lets you block images, iframes or flash in web pages based on the source. I’d totally recommend running it. At first I didn’t get it (for 2 seconds), as I thought It’d automatically block ads. But then I found that you have to build your own database of ads.

So I took 5 minutes, went to my daily reads, right clicked on the ads and blocked them down to the root, i.e.,

This: http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/800/14845/1187986648/oasc04.247realmedia.com/RealMedia/ads/Creatives/BusWeek/AMD_63019_ros_300_geo/AMD_PeoplePower_300×250.swf?clickTAG=http://oascentral.businessweek.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/businessweek.com/home/143853630/Right2/BusWeek/AMD_63019_ros_300_geo/AMD_63019_ros_300×250_geo.html/34353536653630383436643036646630?http://breakfree.amd.com/people/?sa%20_campaign=media/breakfree/busweek/crmain

Becomes this:
http://a248.e.akamai.net/* (Edit: be careful about blocking Akamai content, they deliver good and bad. Probably more good than bad.)

I stamped out annoying flash ads (press ctrl-F, and then click on the beige overlay), silly google adsense text ads and even that Washlets ad (NSFW maybe, seeing butt doesn’t make me want to wash butt…oh btw, watch the video with the Asian woman: Washlet is “an opportunity to pamper yourself” [your butthole]).

You can also block non-advertising content, say for instance someone’s ugly profile pic on Facebook or all those annoying badges on TechCrunch. Whenever I come across a new ad, I love stamping it out. Yep. I’d definitely recommend it.

Below, from the NY Transit Museum. A detailed model of how a hydrogen fuel cell works. For homie Daivd who 1) shared a video with me and 2) works on hydrogen fuel cell buses.

I’ve been working on the design and coding of our of email newsletter at work. Curious? Basically pretend it’s 1999 and use only tables and inline styles for design. Then assume you have these test cases…Mac and PC versus Firefox, IE6, IE7 and Safari versus clients Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook 03, Outlook 07, Entourage. Multiply all by all = test cases. Emailing 45,000 people in one fell swoop–all in a day’s work.

Here’s a happy little site: tools.google.com/gapminder. It’s a google labs flash tool for visualizing the disparities in life expectancy and per captia income by country.

Below, a airplane narrowly escapes nebulous clouds of toxic gas as lightning bolts shoot across the sky, one narrowly missing the jetliner. All the while, a coarse hail falls–some hailstones as large as soccerballs. In the distance a fire rages–a fire so hot that the sky itself has become engulfed in flames!

Photosynth from Microsoft. I can’t really even explain how cool it is. It’s essentially a 3d gallery/rendering tool for photos, but really so much more. The examples that they show (Piazza San Marco, Venice and Gyeongbokgung Palace in Korean) are rad. They use people’s flickr photos to create a composite 3d image of an environment based on data in the photos. It’s not just using the photos to skin the 3d environment, but it arranges them so that you can randomly and graphically access full resolution of each photo in a wonderfully magical way. It’s some amazing technology, something that I’d actually want and use in my photo collection.

Photosynth currently runs as a demo in Firefox or IE7, but by no means is this some lacking browser-based demo. It’s awesome. I think you need the newest versions of java virtual machine, and you need to install the amazingly lightweight Photosynth Add-on (in Firefox, 5.5mb) but trust me, it’s well worth it.

Here’s the product: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Here’s the YouTube vid…I thought it was just a fluff demo, like the Microsoft surface table computer demo vid…a product that we’ll probably never see, but what he does on stage in the demo is available in full format right now from Microsoft labs.

On another note, today was an amazingly beautiful day–similar to a beautiful day in SF–80 degrees, clear blue skies, hint of a breeze. I walked around Central Park for hours. Photo not from today.

Do you remember good old days when you could lay down those magic words and customer service would succumb to you? “LET ME SPEAK TO YOUR SUPERVISOR.” And you envision some peon of a customer service rep timidly stepping into his boss’s office saying, “Sorry to bother you Mr. Lumbergh, but I have a customer on the phone who wants his activation fee waived…” They knew you meant business, and you usually got what you wanted. Corporations have become keen to such tactics–gone are the days of asking for a supervisor, they’re happy to transfer your call to someone who has slightly better grammar, is a bit less apathetic and has the ability to credit up to $50 to a customer’s account.All is not lost, however. I’ve determined the new magic words, words that definitely worked for me:

“Before we start, I’m legally obligated to inform you that I am recording this conversation.”

Yes, the pause….the confusion. She (the supervisor) never expected it. Of course this comes with some legal caveats, which you should read up on before making any claims or actually recording a conversation. I didn’t actually record the conversation, but it definitely produced the desired effect. She knew I meant business. It’s like that one time when I forced our landlord to spend $40,000 remodeling and cleaning our apartment because of toxigenic mold. This new strategy was partially inspired by the “Cancel AOL” circus of a phone call.

And below, the bastard of a device, sadly married for 5 years to the wrong carrier.

After work on Friday, I met up with roomie Chris, as he works on top of (in the GM building) the flagship 5th ave Apple Store. I wanted to get my 3rd gen iPod fixed but apparently there was some hooplah about a “phone, widescreen video ipod, and internet communicator” combo device that was being released. I wasn’t sure what was going on but it was fun to watch the controlled madness–lots of media, lots of cheering Apple employees, a line wrapping around a whole city block.

I got there right after 6pm, the drop time, and consequently missed the initial burst of excitement. As I said, there was a line wrapping around the block, that was separated from normal traffic by police-type barricades. There were plenty of Apple employee handlers and security watching over and guiding the line to prevent any misfortunate cuttages.

Around 7pm, the line had slackened. Perhaps the line ushers weren’t doing a good job of moving the line foward. There were breaks in the line to allow for entrance into the center courtyard, and the ushers would have to shuffle people between such breaks. Perhaps it was in one of those shuffling periods, but with nobody in sight behind, that Chris and I made a dashing move to get in line. We effectively waited less than 10 minutes in line. It was our original intention to perhaps see a live specimen of the phone in its birth environment and maybe even touch it; however, the plan completely backfired when, while waiting in the relatively short line, either Chris or I decided it would be a good idea to just buy one.

Our eager, child-like banter shifted from “I wanna touch it” to “various was to get out of our current contracts and sell our current phones.” Well, we succumbed. My credit card company is happy. Apple is happy. The phone is so slick that it makes me happy.

30 minutes later, after soaking in the frenzy of the subterranean store, we emerged back to street level to the cheers of Apple employees, iPhones in hand…

I love criticizing and love making things work better. So I’m standing, baking in the subway, waiting so that I can go home and bake some more, and get a podcast idea. I was listening to the Business Week Tech podcast–it’s like tech for your mom, if you know what I mean (no offense mom). Usually my mind is working quite a bit faster than the speed of talk, and usually I can’t verbalize well because my mind is trying to spout out something that’s 17 words and 2 thoughts ahead. I sound like a bumbling fool. So I thought, why not speed up podcasts…especially slow ones. I don’t mean Alvin and the Chipmunks style, but I’m pretty sure I could handle 25% faster on most podcasts. Then I thought, wow, what if I could speed it 2x or 3x faster, and still understand? I think I just invented something…speed listening.

Examples (courtesy of NPR): Here’s normal. Here’s fast ( 1.6x faster). Not too bad right? Here’s super fast
(2.083x). Yeah, not very relaxing but you get your shit done quick. I bet with a little practice, and a cleaner compression algorithm, I could get used to 3x.

Photo below: We need to have another damn dinner party. It’s been too long. People, come here, I’ll cook!

Went to a robot demo at the Japan Society. I was expecting something along the lines of robocup, but the demos were on a much smaller scale. The Toyota i-unit was an interesting conceptual prototype transportation unit, but was reaching for some sort of utopian promiseland that won’t exist in the near future. There were robotic seals–if you slapped them, they reacted to such abusive treatment. If you slapped their heads or pulled their whiskers, they shrieked, closed their eyes and put their heads down. I have a cute pic with one.

I finally got a joost.com beta invite. It’s the hot thing now (aside from getting a Tesla). It’s iptv/tv on demand/youtube on steroids without retards. After playing with everything in their beta and watching a couple episodes of Man Bites Dog, I’ve concluded that it’s 4/5 good. Not enough content yet, not enough bandwidth for acceptable compression levels, but they’ve definitely got something. Plus, I was able to get in on the beta, so I’ve gotta say thank you by promoting a little.

I’m sitting here trying to fend off my unemployed insomnia with some web browsing. It’s 4:23 am and when I close my eyes, ideas just start ramming my brain, some good and productive, some just pure nonsense. I think of firefox extensions that would would get daily use, yet I can’t create them as I’m not a programmer. I think of photo shoot ideas, or photo project ideas, yet I haven’t shot anything serious in months. I think of startup ideas for web 2.0 companies, but without any practical programming knowledge how am I supposed to get that Y Combinator grant? I think of changes that I should make to my resume. I think of responses to a dreaded interview question such as, “what is one of your weaknesses?” “Bullets” I say. Just kidding. I want to say something like, “my lack of a flux capacitor” but that probably won’t go over well. I read a chapter from the Warren Buffet book. I think, tomorrow is swiss chard night, cook the swiss chard. I think, “what am I not that I could be?”

Justin.tv. An insomniac’s dream. Well, that, and myspace. Another Bay Area start up. Justin is streaming his life live through a hat cam and other video cameras as an experiement in vlogging and live streaming media via EVDO and flash. Instead of the cliche computer webcam or bedroom cam, he takes it everywhere he goes. The content is actually pretty boring, but it’s an interesting exploration into uses of the technology. Maybe someday, we’ll be able to stream live video content to a flickr-like site with live feeds, tagging, archiving and all of the usual goodness. Well, that’s what I’d use it for, not sure about the rest of the world.

View of my world. (fuji sensia 400)

I don’t click online ads. I’m probably the person that web advertisers (like google) hate because they don’t make any money from my non-clickage. But the other day, out of sheer boredom/excitement, there was an ad for liquid chocolate on torrentz. Well hey now, I do love the hershey highway, let me click on this.

“The Lava Bar™ is the world’s first LIQUID CHOCOLATE candy bar” (!) It’s a chocolate bar that comes in a GU/Clifshots form factor pouch, but without the intent of health or energy, just the intent of chocolate. Well that’s great, I mean I always hate it when I can’t get my Hershey’s Special Dark single serving Halloween candy to explode when I on it like a ketchup packet from Mcdonalds. But the real fun is in the simulated “Hot Karl” action: “a perforation at the top of the pouch enables chocolate lovers to easily tear open the Lava Bar and squeeze the liquid Lava Chocolate into their mouths (an added fun factor).”

I don’t think the world needs this. Reasons: 1) do it the old fashioned way–get a chocolate bar and put it in your pocket, wait until you forget about it, remember it, then eat. 2) At 80 cents per ounce, it’s still more expensive than Ghiradelli, Sharffen Berger or Lindt. 3) The name only reminds me of the pumice impregnated bar soap that was once the cure-all to dirty hands. 4) I think I just nodded off, that was a waste of a blog entry, what’s with all the product placement.

Unrelated. If you spent weeks at home recovering from foot surgery, you might be taking pictures of your bathroom also. (Sensia 400)

I saw this on engadget. When I saw it, I thought that’s a mess waiting to happen…..barf sprinkler. I reminds me of spit spin out at Magic Mountain. Nobody likes that ride. It makes you feel like death by vomitage.

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