I’ve been a huge fan of Trent Reznor’s band Nine Inch Nails for as long as they’ve been around. First introduced to their music in high school, I’ve followed every album release right up to today. Nine Inch Nails has been known for producing one of the most visually spectacular concert tours each and every time they hit the road. Detroit was a regular tour stop for them on every tour and it pained me as each tour went by and another series of unfortunate circumstances prevented me from seeing them live in concert. In all, it’s been 10 years since I discovered the music of Nine Inch Nails and finally in December I made it to one of their concerts – and it was everything I hoped it to be!!
Ultimately, it turned out to be amazingly fortuitous timing as I caught one of the final American shows at the end of the tour. After the tour ended Reznor posted on his website that this tour’s shows were in fact “the last shows for the foreseeable future”. Wow, talk about great timing. As for the show itself, no description I put in writing can really capture the experience, but if you ever get the change to see video of one of Nine Inch Nails’ live shows check it out. YouTube has a decent collection of fan video from the latest couple tours. You’ll be wowed. For this most recent “Lights In The Sky” tour Reznor partnered with Canadian production house Moment Factory to create one of the most technologically advanced tours ever produced. Wired magazine even did a write up on the show’s production that you can read here.
Whether you’re a fan of their music or not you simply cannot deny that Trent Reznor knows how to give back to his fans. He has launch a whole host of community projects since leaving his previous record label and going independent. Most significant of these is the release of his latest album The Slip, in its entirety, completely for free online. Reznor took it even one step further at the conclusion of this latest tour by making available (for free) over 400GB (yes, GB!) of raw HD video footage of three US tour shows. And guess what, the show I attended in Portland – and was about fifth row back for the entire time – was one of the three cities filmed. Fucking awesome!! I feel lucky to have found an artist who is so connected back to his fans. Even if Nine Inch Nails never released another album (highly unlikely) I would feel at peace having now been to one of their epic live performances.
One of my first posts on this blog was about the revelation I had when talking with one of my friends who works at Microsoft. What he opened my eyes to was a brave new world of streaming media distribution that will become the wave of the future. I said back then that the first company to successfully develop a streaming media infrastructure where you actually retain ownership privileges for what you buy online, will be the leader in the new era of content distribution. I also said that there are only a handful of companies on the cusp of achieving this including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and others.
CES 2009 has come and gone and having looked at all the players and their announcements for 2009, I believe that a clear winner has emerged. Keep in mind that the key to winning the digital content distribution crown is that when you purchase an item, be it a song or a movie, that item goes into your own personal media library with that company. From there you can play the media as often as you like, at any time you like, and from anywhere you like. Just like when you own a piece of physical media such as a CD or DVD.
Internet integrated televisions were everywhere at CES this year. Everything from YouTube streaming, the Flickr browsing, to sports, weather, and news streams. But only one company presented integration into a key technology. Panasonic announced it’s streaming media technology for plasma screen TVs called VieraCast. And the content provider of choice was Amazon Video on Demand. What separates Amazon’s Video on Demand service from all other stream media providers is that they are the only one to add your video purchase to a personal online media library from which you can play the video in all the ways I described above. When you consider other streaming media services what you get is a nickel-and-dime structure where you essentially rent the media for some amount of time with inherant restrictions. Amazon stands alone in their approach and as the combination of being first to market with this approach as well as providing non-content-protected music downloads.
Amazon’s service is not perfect out of the gate though. Right now they are still working with manufacturers to develop devices with access to their web-service. Current partners include TiVo, Sony Internet Video Link, an Internet-connected Windows or Apple PCs connected to your TV, and new VieraCast Panasonic plasma TVs. The only drawback of the current implementation of the service is that it is standard definition content only. Eventually HD content will be available, but there is no firm date for this. The bottom line though, is that Amazon is the first content provider to give you a personal online media library for your online media purchases. Before you continue to throw money at physical media, consider how streaming media through Amazon Video on Demand might make movie-watching a little easier.
Once again life has gotten the better of my schedule and it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. Believe me when I say though that it’s not for a lack of things happening in my life. I’ve got a ton of commentaries lined up regarding the auto-bailout, the larger floundering economy, CES, and other things that have really captured my interest of late. But first, I want to get some movie reviews posted. Given how long it’s been since I’ve posted I’ve seen a few movies (still not as many as I would like) so in the interest of time I’m going to give some really quick reviews in one post. I know that a few of these movies have been nominated for awards. Honestly, I don’t really need an award of any kind to validate whether I like a movie or not so I won’t go into the debate of whether or not any part of these movies warrant award.
Slumdog Millionaire
Danny Boyle is one of my favorite directors and has been for a long time. The man is a master of the intangibles that separate the good movies from the great ones. Most people know his hit movies like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, but he keeps a pretty low profile and there are some real gems in his filmography that many people have never heard of. Millions and Sunshine are two fantastic movies that got almost no press. Both are highly recommended and especially Sunshine which ranks in the top 5 science fiction movies I’ve ever seen. In Slumdog Millionaire Boyle makes and incredibly bold move and creates a film based entirely in the dizzying world and culture of India. The basic premise of the story is about a young man from the slums of Mumbai who finds himself on (and about to win) the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. Sounds kind of lame right? The film was marketed domestically based on this premise, so it’s no surprise that it failed as a mainstream success. What the story really is, is an amazing tale of a boy’s survival in a chaotic world. You’ve likely never imaged what it would be like to grow up in the slums of a third-world environment, in Slumdog Millionaire you get to see one very moving version of it. It’s definitely one of the best of the year and yet another triumph of storytelling by Boyle. It’s not exactly the feel-good movie of the year but it’s still damn good. BTW, if you’re familiar with India’s Bollywood films stick around for the end credits for the cast’s fun Bollywood tribute.
4.5 out of 5
See it in the theaters
Buy it on DVD (if you’re a movie-lover)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
I absolutely love David Fincher’s movies. More than other people, I enjoy the artistic aspect of filmaking as much as the storytelling and special F/X. Fincher’s films aren’t always blockbusters but he knows how to create a tight film. Benjamin Button is an epic movie about a man who ages in reverse. If that makes your mind do a double-take, that’s a good thing because the movie is probably best enjoyed if you know nothing about the story. Some of my favorite movies are ones that cover a litanny of themes and not just the one that the plot is about. Pleasantville is a perfect example of this. Benjamin Button casts a fascinating light on our own aging process and mortality. You might be tempted to wow over Brad Pitt’s performance given his character’s journey, but trust me it’s Fincher’s filmaking process that makes this film what it is. I could go on forever about the intricacies of what makes this movie so great but there just isn’t time. All you need to know is this one actually gets my vote for “the” movie of the year and is a must-see.
5 out of 5
See it in theaters
Buy it on DVD
Yes Man
Generally speaking I’ve grown less found of Jim Carrey’s movies over the years. Ace Ventura came out when I was in middle school as was a perfect fit for my juvinile sense of humor at the time. Now that I’m a little older I just don’t find Carrey’s brand of humor that funny any more – and yes, it is still the same kind of humor no matter how it’s packaged. Yes Man is an ever-so-slightly more mature turn for Carrey where a lot of the comedy is in the world around him rather than his character himself. It’s still good wholesome fun and at least the premise doesn’t feel recylced like so many Hollywood comedies. If you like Jim Carrey comedies, this is a pitch right down the middle. Mainstream comedy for the mainsteam masses.
3 out of 5
Worth a rental
Not worth buying on DVD
Revolutionary Road
If you can’t tell, I’m a fan of certain directors. This is because there’s a huge difference in talent between film’s top directors and all the rest. Sam Mendes is a director with amazing vision. His movies (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead) are impeccably filmed but rarely aimed at mainstream audiences. His latest is based on the best-selling novel of the same name and once again allows Mendes to focus on the suburban American family experience. This time however, the story takes place in the mid-1950′s. My wife and I spent the first half of the movie nodding along to much of what the young couple is going through but in the second half things start to turn toward less relatable themes but the story remains absolutely gripping. DiCaprio and Winslet give unbelievable performances and while the story is good, it’s their portrayals of these two flawed people that makes this movie great. What this movie shows painfully clearly is that the “American Dream” is not always what it seems. I get the feeling that had I seen this film with my parents or grandparents it may have been very awkward. I’m sure that the premise of Revolutionary Road is more common than most adults of the past two generations would like to admit. It’s an amazingly powerful movie and one that I highly recommended seeing. That said it’s lacks the dark and overt humor of American Beauty and as such is not a movie you’re likely to watch repeatedly.
4.5 out of 5
See it in theaters
Good enough to purchase but I doubt you’ll want to
About six months ago (and long before the election outcome was certain) a friend of mine who is still in college was griping to me about a paper he had to write. The topic chosen by the professor was, “What does it mean to be an American?” I actually empathized with him because as soon as he told me the topic I laughed at the stupidity of the question. As I explained to him, it sounded as if the professor wanted to open a dialog about patriotism but just lacked the creativity to create a compelling question about it. I posed back to him, “I think a better question would have been, ‘Are you proud to be an American?’”
As I watched the results of Tuesday’s election roll in I thought back to that question and realized that I couldn’t remember a single time in the entire eight year tenure of George W. Bush (whom I never voted for) that I felt truly proud to be an American. It really struck me how sad it was that despite having all the advantages of being born and raised in this country, and all of the benefits I enjoy as a citizen, that I still was unable to feel proud of my country.
In the wake of Barack Obama’s resounding presidential victory, and for the very first time, I woke up this morning feeling truly proud to be an American. I finally feel as if the general populace has woken up from its ideological stupor and has suddenly seen the greater picture. We have elected an intelligent, educated, well-spoken, determined, and rational person to lead our country (Bush possesses none of those qualities). I remain hopeful that his ideas for the future will translate into a new era of prosperity in this country and that people will finally see that there is nothing wrong with having a president who is smarter than you are.
I’m not expecting President Obama to deliver miracles, but at least now I can actually hold my head high to the world.
Far and away the best photo gallery of the Obama election: HERE
I consider myself pretty tech savvy – I probably would have my job if I wasn’t. So when I noticed my computer exhibiting strange video behavior a few months I was sure I could figure it out pretty quickly. But then days of troubleshooting became weeks of annoyance and weeks became months of frustration.
One day I picked up a new mainstream video card for my home desktop. It was a single-slot middle-class Nvidia card that did require a 6-pin power connection but was by no means a power hog. Almost immediately after installing the card I began to notice single-pixel video artifacts popping all over the screen. Then the artifacts turned into complete picture outages on the monitor. The screen would just go black, flash a few times and then come back with the artifacts.
I tried everything to isolate the cause. I went through driver revisions. I replaced the card. I swapped between single and dual-link DVI cables. I thought perhaps the motherboard was overheating from the added wattage and put extra fans in to increase cooling airflow. I cleaned the components of any dust. I swapped the jack that the video card used on the modular power supply. At 600 watts, I was sure that my power supply was capable of supporting the middle-class video card and my small form factor system.
For a while I just learned to accept the flaw and conceded that I would need to replace the motherboard. My budget G965 motherboard used an extremely cheap 3-phase power system and electrolytic capacitors. For the record, I will never again buy a mother board with less than 5-phase power and all solid capacitors, but in this case even these cheap components were not the cause of the video problems.
Today at work I was cranking away on my dev box and it suddenly occurred to me the most likely candidate that I had not even considered yet. The power strip I had all my home computer equipment plugged into was an ancient strip that I had had since college. I started think that maybe my five-year-old, $15 powers strip was the real component incapable of dealing with the added wattage of the video card. So I picked up a new APC power strip on the way home from work, swapped everything to the new strip and just like that – my system ran flawlessly. No artifacts and no video outages. In fact, the video quality is amazing compared to what it was on the old power strip. The colors are deeper, the contrast sharper, and the brightness increased. All because of a defective power strip.
So this brings me to a point I want to make about power conditioning. As an avid home-theater buff I’ve seen all sorts of power-conditioning products peddled for high-end electronics use. Products from Monster, Panamax, and APC are advertised everywhere from A/V forums to big box retailers like Best Buy and Fry’s. Up until now I’ve thought them to be the single biggest rip-off in the realm of consumer electronics. I won’t back off calling Monster the biggest rip-off brand in consumer electronics, but I will say that I stand corrected on the question of whether or not clean power makes a difference in audio and video quality. I’m not saying that everyone needs to have $200 power strips and stand alone home-theater power conditioning units. I’m just saying to spend the extra $20 on a higher quality power strip and rest-assured that you are seeing and hearing everything you are supposed to be.
Leah and I headed down to the Qwest Event Center for this year’s Ski Fever convention today in search of our first snowboard gear. Every year the Ski Fever show comes through both Portland and Seattle but we missed it last year. Plus, last season we only managed to get out to Snoqualmie a couple times so we just rented gear from REI each time. The gear was alright, but it was..well..rental gear. We both had a blast learning to snowboard though so this year we resolved to actually buy our own gear for a little better experience.
I really wasn’t sure what kind of deals we might be able to find at Ski Fever, especially considering thatthere are some pretty good deals available online. I tried asking around to a lot of friends and fellow ski/snoboarders but strangely no one I asked had ever been to the show before. So we just threw caution to the wind and went for it.
The show was actually pretty fun, but at the same time a little overwhelming. Almost every ski and snowboard shop in the area was there with their gear which included new, last season’s, demo, used, and everything in between. In addition there were booths for most every major resort in the northwest and British Columbia. Deals were definitely there, but you had to really work to find them. We spent almost six hours at the show finding our gear. Ultimately we both picked up complete board, boots, and binding sets and spent far less than we would have at any store or online. We got brand new gear and in some cases were even able to haggle the price down a little.
The show included some other stuff like skier/snowboarder celebrity appearances (oh whom I had absolutely no idea who they were) and some events like rail-riding and acrobatics. It added a little to the atmosphere but they weren’t really that great. Almost every booth had some sort of raffle going on and of all the ones we entered I actually did win one of the drawings..a free t-shirt from a resort (yeah). The bottom line is that the show is really meant for the gear and that’s what it does best. Here’s the gear that Leah and I picked up.
My setup:
Ride Decade board
Burton Mission bindings
Burton boots
Leah’s setup:
GNU B-Nice board
Burton Citizen bindings
DC boots
In a previous post, I talked about a meeting I had with a group of Intel sales reps back at the end of June. I’ve gotten a lot of hits on it and I thought I’d post a follow-up. When we met, Intel was in full hype mode about their upcoming solid state drives and promised that they were about to change the market. Fast forward three and a half months and there have been some new developments. While I’m usually a very modest individual, I want to point out that I was right on a few points. Now don’t get me wrong here. I’m not posting out of hubris. I wanted to follow up on this because I think it’s an indicator of greater market conditions. What’s changed is that Intel has lifted the NDA on their first solid state drive.
But I want to work my way back to that. To follow up on my mention of Seagate; at the time (pre stock market crash) Seagate Technology was (and still is) the market leader in magnetic hard drives and I mentioned that its share price looked like a great deal considering the doubt many people had about the realistic timelines surrounding solid state drive technology. Well, then the bottom fell out of the market and everything went to shit. With the economy in its current state it’s hard to see any company actually growing profits and their share prices reflect that. But are Seagate and other hard drive manufacturers facing obsolescence? Not at all. In fact, it’s leadership has just come out with revised roadmaps for 2009 restating that not only will they themselves be releasing their first solid state drives (solely focused on the enterprise market mind you) next year, but that they will continue to lead the expansion of magnetic storage technology in the form of 2TB+ hard drives. Furthermore, they have reiterated that they will be slowly releasing solid state drives into retail as appropriate in light of the fact that they are simply not cost-competitive in the marketplace. By the way, they are speaking directly to Intel with that statement. Not the other SSD manufacturers.
The next thing that happened occurred just yesterday. Apple announced its latest notebook refresh in the way of its new MacBook Pro and MacBook models. And what was the big hardware improvement for these models? Apple completely dropped Intel’s G45 integrated graphics in favor of Nvidia’s latest discrete mobile graphics. Ouch. So basically Apple confirmed to everyone what most already knew, that Intel’s latest graphics chip was not the next big thing in integrated graphics, but rather a barely adequate stop-gap that only served to allow Apple to release its previous generation of notebooks with the stellar Intel mobile CPUs it really wanted.
So we find ourselves back at the point I made almost four months ago. Intel makes simply the best processors on the planet. But they’ve strayed into unfamiliar waters of technology that some of its competitors are far more established in. Consider the following: Intel announced that it would be releasing two models of solid state drives. One mainstream drive based on MLC NAND flash and another enterprise-focused model based on SLC memory. However, only the mainstream MLC drive has actually been tested by independent reviewers, it’s still not available in retail channels, and it’s priced at $600 for a 64GB drive. To put that in perspective, it would be easy to configure a complete Dell laptop with an 80GB hard drive included for just $700. Hmm, $600 on an otherwise inexpensive component that’s not even available yet or $700 on a complete system now?
So did Intel at least get the performance of their drives in line with the hype? Actually, yes. Their mainstream MLC-based drive simply outperforms every other solid state drive currently on the market at any capacity level. Of course Intel knows this and has also priced their drives higher than every other solid state drive currently on the market. Compared to the magnetic hard drives that it is supposedly going to make obsolete, performance is very good but in many applications it’s on par with today’s fastest consumer hard drives and there have been observed performance problems with random write operations. Not exactly the stats you expect to see in a product that proclaims to be the end of magnetic storage technology.
Furthermore, you didn’t see RAID results included in the reviews. Why does that matter? Because many business systems rely on RAID to provide protection from data corruption and drive failure. The price of these drives is already a sticking point. If the RAID performance is no better than current technology at a fraction of the capacity, you can expect business customers to look the other way.
The bottom line, Intel needs to pull back on the hype and modestly release their solid state drives. Solid state drives will have their day. The performance speaks for itself, but whatever level of success they achieve in the market will show you exactly where the technology is positioned and how it will fare against a very scalable magnetic storage technology.
As a footnote: remember the example we all hear about how computers that used to be the size of an entire room are now the size of our iPhones? We are fast-approaching the day when technologists will say, “Enterprise SANs that used to fill half of our data center, now resides in just 4Us of rack space.” Magnetic storage technology will be how we get there.