Archive for July, 2007
Winnie Cooper Sets ‘Em Straight
Monday, July 30th, 2007Danica McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, has had enough:
When girls see the antics of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, they think that being fun and glamorous also means being dumb and irresponsible. But I want to show them that being smart is cool. Being good at math is cool. And not only that, it can help them get what they want out of life. I want to tell girls that cute and dumb isn’t as good as cute and smart.
Ms. McKellar has written a book entitled, “Math Doesn’t Suck,” in which she offers “tips to avoid mistakes on homework, ways to overcome test-day anxiety and profiles of three beautiful mathematicians.”
What a fantastic message at a time where the opposite message is so, so prevalent.
Go, Winnie, Go!
Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | Comments Off on Winnie Cooper Sets ‘Em Straight
The Search for The Perfect Sponsor Has Ended…
Monday, July 30th, 2007pop adj; 1. of or pertaining to popular songs: pop music; pop singers.
tart (n.2); from earlier use as a term of endearment to a girl or woman (1864), sometimes said to be a shortening of “sweetheart.”
So who’s sponsoring the 2007 American Idol tour? That’s right:
Categories: Primetime TV | Comments Off on The Search for The Perfect Sponsor Has Ended…
How Walkable are you?
Friday, July 27th, 2007Check out Walkscore.com. You put in a street address and zipcode, and it tells you how “walkable” the address is, based on its proximity to grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, movie theaters, schools, parks, libraries, bookstores, fitness centers, drug stores, hardware stores and clothing/music stores.
Even more interestingly, it shows you a Google Map with the eight closest establishments in each category marked, and a clickable list that will find each for you on the map & tell you its walking distance. Who knew, for instance, that there were four Dunkin’ Donuts and two Starbucks within 3 miles of my home, and also something called the “Illusions Go-Go Lounge” just 1.89 miles away?
My suburban, New Jersey home scored just a 6 out of 100 (“Driving Only”), whereas my Rockefeller Center office location scored a 98 (“Walker’s Paradise”). What do you have to do to get a 100 on this thing?
Anyway, I know that at least one of my loyal readers will instantly consider this his favorite site on the web, so I thought I’d post it for his benefit, at least.
So, how about it? What’s your walkscore? Leave a comment & let me know…
Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 3 Comments »
PC Market Share – Q207
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007IDC just released league tables detailing the market share of the top 5 PC makers in the United States and globally. Here’s the US chart:
|
Rank |
Vendor |
2Q07 |
Market |
2Q06 |
Market |
2Q07/2Q06 |
|
1 |
Dell |
4,854 |
28.4% |
5,437 |
34.1% |
-10.7% |
|
2 |
HP |
4,023 |
23.6% |
3,193 |
20.0% |
26.0% |
|
3 |
Gateway |
965 |
5.6% |
1,039 |
6.5% |
-7.1% |
|
4 |
Apple |
960 |
5.6% |
761 |
4.8% |
26.2% |
|
5 |
Toshiba |
901 |
5.3% |
600 |
3.8% |
50.0% |
|
6 |
Acer |
888 |
5.2% |
337 |
2.1% |
163.8% |
|
Others |
4,492 |
26.3% |
4,569 |
28.7% |
-1.7% |
|
|
All Vendors |
17,083 |
100.0% |
15,936 |
100.0% |
7.2% |
And here’s the worldwide chart:
|
Rank |
Vendor |
2Q07 |
Market |
2Q06 |
Market |
2Q07/2Q06 |
|
1 |
HP |
11,335 |
19.3% |
8,303 |
15.9% |
36.5% |
|
2 |
Dell |
9,491 |
16.1% |
9,978 |
19.1% |
-4.9% |
|
3 |
Lenovo |
4,879 |
8.3% |
3,989 |
7.6% |
22.3% |
|
4 |
Acer |
4,261 |
7.2% |
2,742 |
5.2% |
55.4% |
|
5 |
Toshiba |
2,407 |
4.1% |
1,981 |
3.8% |
21.5% |
|
Others |
26,452 |
45.0% |
25,303 |
48.4% |
4.5% |
|
|
All Vendors |
58,824 |
100.0% |
52,297 |
100.0% |
12.5% |
Information Week headlines their article with “Apple Ties For Third In U.S. PC Market,” which is technically true, although the leader sold more than five times as many PC’s. It also points to Apple’s impressive 26.2% growth, calling it a “halo effect” from the iPhone and the iPod before it and mentioning those adorable “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads, but fails to mention Toshiba’s 50% growth and Acer’s 163.8% growth (both companies are within 75,000 units of Apple). Those two companies also cracked the Top 5 globally.
The bottom line here is that it’s still a two-vendor race between Dell and HP, both in the U.S. and Worldwide. Apple’s had a great year, but if they want to make a true dent in the PC market, they need to move out of the educational and Starbucks markets, and get into the big time.
Categories: Money Talk, Tech Talk | Comments Off on PC Market Share – Q207
Painting with Sound…
Saturday, July 21st, 2007This guy is really cool. Watch the video all the way to the end…
Here’s more, and more still. For the complete collection, go to paintjam.com.
Categories: The World Wide Weird | Comments Off on Painting with Sound…
The Ghosts of 9/11 Return to NYC
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
Some thoughts on today’s steam pipe explosion in New York City:
– It’s going to be an entire generation, maybe two, before people see an image like this and don’t think of 9/11. Especially in New York City. We can talk all we want, but in this regard, the terrorists won.
– People’s reactions are the same, even once they know it wasn’t an attack. People ran down long fights of stairs in office buildings. My mother called the house to make sure I was OK. I irrationally scanned through the pictures on the web, looking for people I might know.
– New York City firemen, some of whom responded to the 9/11 attacks, and most of whom know someone who died responding to them, still ran into the fray to secure the situation and help the citizens of New York. The bravery these men & women exhibit is beyond my comprehension.
– Finally, no matter what happens, someone will always stop to take a picture of it.
Categories: New York, New York | 1 Comment »
Checking More than Just the Keywords…
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007Hat tip to Scalzi for the link to these unfortunately placed advertisements. He likes this one:
Here’s my favorite (took me a few times to see it properly – hint: the jokes on the wall, not behind it):
Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 1 Comment »
ISBS Review: The Apple iPhone
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007So one of my colleagues at work went out and bought an iPhone, allowing me to spend a solid block of time with it in fully functional mode (as opposed to a store demo, which limits what you can try). For those who are interested, here are some of my thoughts:
First, this is a rock-solid device. Many of the “chic” cell phones out there look cool, but feel really flimsy, like if you pressed on them really hard, they’d bend or break. The iPhone feels solid in your hands. It feels like it’s made of metal, not plastic. And while I didn’t try to scratch the surface of my colleagues device, all of the reviews I’ve read put that down as super-durable as well, and I saw nothing to contradict that claim.
On to the functionality. First, I have to say that every new computer I’ve ever bought has filled me with a level of excitement, and that excitement tends to wane quickly as I start to use it. It may be shiny and new, but in the end, it’s just a computer and it does basically what your old computer did, just faster and cooler. The iPhone was the same way. I was very excited to pick it up and play with it, but within fifteen minutes, I realized that it’s still a cellphone. It does what most cellphones do, just faster and cooler.
The “pinch/spread” functionality for pictures and webpages lived up to its expectations. I suspect that as two-touch displays become commonplace, these movements will become a second nature as pointing and clicking. My only complaint was that the graphics grew/shrunk a little too quickly for my taste, making it difficult to achieve the size you want without making a few correcting movements. I’m guessing this is adjustable (much as a mouse’s sensitivity is adjustable), but I didn’t go looking for how to do it.
The asynchronous voicemail is another landmark change that will shortly become the de facto standard. My only comment on this is that as voicemail becomes more like e-mail, the habits around maintaining it will change as well. For instance, my colleague had 15-20 voicemails sitting in her voicemail box. With a typical phone, people tend to empty their voicemail box, or at least pare it down to the messages they need to keep. If they didn’t, they’d have to punch in “next, next, next, next” to get through all the garbage before getting to the one they wanted. Now, with random access, there’s little to no harm in leaving voicemails hanging around (just like e-mail).
In other news, the web browser was also very impressive. By far the best web browser I’ve ever seen on a handheld device. At just about any size, the text on the pages was readable, and the images were clear. When you resize a webpage, it employs the old “fuzzy and then gradually clear” technique that used to be the mainstay of web graphics in the dial-up days. Again, just one complaint: the preferred view for reading a webpage is “zoomed out,” but the preferred view for interacting with it (e.g., clicking on buttons or links) is “zoomed in.” So, in navigating to a few pages, I found myself zooming in to click on something, then zooming back out to view/read the page. After a while, even the super-cool “pinch/spread” thing started to wear thin. I’m not sure how I’d have solved this, but there it is…
The iPod functionality is basically the same. The only new thing is the “flippable album cover” view that appears when you turn the device sideways while in iPod mode. This view, to be honest, was disappointing. It looks very cool, but the album covers flow too freely from left to right, making landing on the album you want very difficult. Both of us tried to pick a specific album cover, and while we eventually got it, we both had to try more than once to get there. If I owned one of these devices, I think I’d always use it in good, old-fashioned portrait mode.
Oh, and speaking about the gyroscope functionality, here are some interesting points. First, it only works in a couple of instances (web browsing, iPod mode, and maybe e-mail – I didn’t get a chance to try). Other places where you’d expect it, such as your picture library or some of your on screen widgets (e.g., YouTube), it is absent. Not a major complaint, but I throw it out there for your consumption.
Another interesting fact about the gyroscope: my natural position when holding the device is to hold it on about a forty-five degree angle to my body. If you do this and then rotate it into landscape mode, the image does not adjust. You need to stand it up closer to vertical (relevant to the ground), rotate it, and then tilt it back again to read. I’m sure I’d get used to its sensitivities in a day or so, but I did notice it the first time around.
Finally, the only thing I truly disliked about the iPhone: the on-screen keyboard. I’ve read reviews that say it’s not so bad, but I have to strongly disagree. Typing on it, I missed roughly one of every two characters I tried to type. My (female) colleague, instinctively types with her fingernail, so she doesn’t miss keys. At one point, she actually took the headphones out of the jack and typed with the headphone connector so she could move along more quickly. Again, maybe practice makes perfect, but I think they can definitely do better on this point.
So there are my thoughts. My cell phone is provided to me through my work and integrated with my work e-mail, so I’m limited to one of two RIM Blackberry devices. Unless I wanted a separate, personal cell phone, that puts me out of the market for an iPhone (that, plus the $1,200 it would cost in the first year). That said, I think the device will do well. Maybe not as well as everyone expects, but well enough that version 2.0, with several of the enhancements described above, will be an even bigger seller than this one.
Me thinks Apple is in the cell phone market to stay…
Categories: ISBS Reviews, Tech Talk | 2 Comments »
ISBS Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007When Christopher Columbus directed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, he said this:
[Screenwriter] Steve Kloves, David Heyman … and myself are really [such] truly obsessive fans about the book that we wanted to protect it for the fans. We wanted all the people who love the books to feel like they were experiencing [the book] … as much as you can give [that to] them in a film. Obviously … I would have preferred to do all seven hours, but I know that that’s [not possible].
My, how far we’ve come.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is an excellent movie. It is fast-paced, action-packed, and holds your attention from the very first frame until the end (which occurs more than two hours later). The acting is by far the best of the series and the special effects are fantastic. All of that said, though, the film’s defining characteristic is going to be the extent to which it defies everybody’s expectations. To wit:
Despite it’s PG-13 rating, a lot of people will expect this to be a kid’s movie. It is most definitely not. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was PG-13 also, but this movie is vastly different. The fighting scenes are truly violent now (although with one exception, there is still no visible bloodshed). And the scenes were the characters get angry are often downright vicious. The interactions among Harry, Ron and Hermione, especially in the beginning of the film, were truly uncomfortable to watch. This stands as a compliment to the rapidly developing acting chops of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, but the fact remains that kids seeing the film expect these three to be best friends, and the film takes them through a range of emotions that includes true frustration and sometimes even hatred. Having read the book twice now, I did not come away from it with this feeling at all. In the book, arguments between friends come off much more like bickering. This is much more serious.
And speaking of the book, those who have read it are in for several surprises regarding the plot. Unlike Columbus’ obsessive need to be true to the text, this film strays quite far from what J.K. Rowling wrote. I’d go as far as to call it the first Harry Potter movie that’s based on the book, rather than being a film adaptation of the book.
(NOTE: I will now attempt to give examples without providing spoilers.
You have been warned).
All of the major plot points in the movie occurred in the book as well (i.e., it starts and ends the same way). However, many major subplots in the book are either missing from the film entirely or have been significantly rewritten. There is, for example, no Quidditch in the film at all. The Department of Mysteries has only one door, so all of the action that took place in the book behind the other doors is simply missing from the film. The High Inquisitor’s classroom inspections are done as a montage, and contain zero dialog between her and the teachers. The Divination teacher goes through her trials and travails as she did in the book, but a second Divination teacher does not appear or even get mentioned. None of the hospital scenes are included, so the rather major plot point about Neville Longbottom’s parents needs to be significantly rewritten in order to explain Neville’s actions later in the story.
The Order of the Phoenix itself, in fact, is merely mentioned and then wholly ignored throughout the film. There are no meetings at headquarters, no house cleaning, and no scenes with Kreacher the house elf (he makes a couple of cameos, but is completely unrelated to the plot, despite the rather major role he plays in the book).
All of this made it feel to me like the film makers were rushing through the plot in order to fit it all into two hours and eighteen minutes. I, for one, would have gladly sat through another forty-five minutes in order to get more of the exposition and dialogue that J.K. Rowling wrote for her wonderful array of characters.
And I guess that’s the bottom line: this is a long film, but I walked away wanting more. The source material for these stories is so rich and so strong, that one cannot help but be entertained by it.
I’m told David Yates will direct the next film as well, and I’m very much looking forward to it. The sixth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood
Prince, strikes a better balance between dark times and teenage fun and frivolity. This will give Yates a wider range of emotions to play with, and will likely result in a film that is even more entertaining than this one.
Categories: ISBS Reviews, Movie Talk | 3 Comments »
Out of Touch…
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007I just put my $6 in an envelope to send it to Este Pizza and realized that, with all the e-mail and online banking, I haven’t mailed anything in a very, very long time. How long? I had to go here and find out how much postage to put on the envelope.
Sigh…
Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 1 Comment »