yjblog

Picture from Christine’s wedding, courtesy of TG. Where the hell was Murph? And Erin?

Good to see (most of) the old drawgroup again.

In a nutshell: wow.

In a slightly larger nutshell: Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show (which I’m a big fan of etc.), appeared on CNN’s Crosstalk, and proceeded to slam the hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala (who are Kerry campaign advisers, I believe) on live television for, in his words, having a show “so bad it’s hurting America,” “partisan hackery,” and being hacks.

Some exchanges:

STEWART: You know, the interesting thing… is, you have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.
CARLSON: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think.
STEWART: You need to go to one.

and

STEWART: It’s not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery….
CARLSON: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you’re accusing us of partisan hackery?
[...]
STEWART: You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?

Full transcript here [CNN.com], or watch for yourself with this torrent [bitflood.org].

I haven’t actually been exposed to all these vapid political debate shows (if they could be called such), but major credit to Stewart for standing firm on what he believes to be a real problem, and not being afraid to call out the perpetrators on national television.

Maybe one day a concerned citizen could, in Singapore and on national television, honestly criticise what’s wrong with — ah, let’s not go that far. Watch the video and be glad someone somewhere is getting something right.

Hmm:

Creative Declares War on Apple [straitstimes.com.sg]
Edit: ST articles expire in a couple of days, so here’s a link to something more permanent, hopefully (and with more articles from Today and Business Times): Creative unveils iPod killer [macuser.org.sg]

The article spotlights Creative’s latest product, the Creative Zen Micro, targetted at the iPod Mini large-flash-drive portable music player market. It describes how our country’s Only Entrepreneur Ever (or so it seems) Mr Sim Wong Hoo plans to blitz the media in promoting his latest “iPod Mini Killer.”

Before I begin ranting, qualifier: I’ve actually owned, and quite liked, four Creative MP3 players before switching to the iPod (and before that, switching to the Mac), namely an early-generation really-cool-at-the-time Nomad Jukebox (6GB?), a Nomad II MG (64MB?), a Nomad Jukebox 3 (12GB? — I really can’t remember any of these numbers; furthermore, I bought and returned this twice because I magically managed to fry each in a few days) and finally the first Nomad Jukebox Zen (20GB). I desperately clung on to the last one after I bought the Powerbook, but no, there were no freaking drivers, so out of necessity (and, umm, inexplicable geek lust for the newly-announced third-generation iPods) I bought a 30GB iPod and sold all my Creative players (even though the Nomad II MG was compatible with iTunes — I just didn’t need it any more when the iPod was only marginally larger in size the Nomad).

So, objectively (i.e. not in full Apple-maniac-fan mode), competition in any field is great. However, I find that Creative’s advertising has been rather cringe-worthy in its catch-up efforts with Apple. I refer to the “Beat This!” print ad with the MuVo2 that poorly ripped off Apple’s iPod print ads, as well as its latest TV spot where it shows the “charging” icon on the iPod screen and then touts the Zen’s (I’m not sure which one) 24-hour battery life. In the article, Sim also states “We have learnt a lot of painful lessons in the MP3 market after being overtaken by Apple,” and that “the Zen Micro was developed by engineers and designers whose mission brief was to ‘beat Apple on all fronts.’”

I’m disappointed that this supposedly successful Singaporean technology firm can’t seem to define itself by any better methods than gasping comparisons to the top dog. For example: their most recent digital music player launches were: the Zen Touch, an attempted ripoff of the iPod (Sim admitted as such); the MuVo2, their first answer to the iPod Mini, even coming in the same pastel colours; and finally this Zen Micro, another answer to the iPod Mini. And they call themselves Creative?!

What happened to the company that made Sound Blaster Live Pro 128 Extreme Seamonkey? Please, take that marketing money and make something nearly as ridiculously cool as the Nomad Jukebox was when it first came out, please, please.

Heard this over the TRS (walkie-talkie set):

Division Orderly Sergeant: “DOS to guardroom, what is your sentry doing?”
Guardroom: “Standing.”

Came across this article:

Netscape Communications offers new network navigator free on the Internet [cnet.com]

… and was somewhat confused by what a “network navigator” was and how they referred to Netscape as a “six-month-old company founded by Jim Clark,” until I noticed the date. Classic stuff: Navigator “is optimized to run smoothly over 14.4 kilobit/second modems as well as higher bandwidth lines, delivering performance at least ten times that of other network browsers.”

Wow, ten years since Netscape Navigator? I very vaguely remember using NCSA Mosaic (for me, most things nowadays have been relegated to the “vaguely remember” corner — I think I’ve saturated my brain with useless but amusing quotes), and then fervently tracking the frequent updates between Netscape and the upstart Microsoft IE until the former imploded and the latter became evil(ler).

I’d heard Jim Clark (founder of Netscape) speak once at the SGI 20th anniversary while I was interning there. I don’t recall much of what he said, except:

Question: “You’ve founded many companies in the last 20 years (SGI, Netscape, WebMD etc.). What is it that drives you to constantly create and explore new technology?”

Answer: “The money.” (end of response)

Ah, honesty.

I found out about allconsuming.net through some RSS aggregating software, and they have this particularly cool service where you can use their feeds to list books you’re reading (with thumbnails from Amazon.com too). You can also keep track of books you’ve finished, those you’ve purchased but haven’t read and those you’ve given up on (at present, mine are The Art of doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming and Moo by Jane Smiley).

After some struggling with (and subsequently, giving up on — note semi-recurrent theme) making my own SOAP and Perl/PHP and RSS-parsing (their RSS feed of current reads doesn’t give the author nor the picture! boo, suck, etc.) scripts, I used the provided javascript, and just messed about with the CSS. Rather satisfied with the result — it doesn’t render properly in IE for Mac, but who cares.

Anyway now I have my own auto-updatable book list (see right). Yay. Highly recommended.

Must… stop… tweaking… blog.

After an afternoon of fiddling with MySQL export functions and a mess of CSS, I’ve finally managed to upgrade this site to use WordPress. It’s quite the improvement over b2, which should be no surprise since it’s a follow-up version of the program.

Pretty smooth transition thanks to this site’s instructions. Though one of the lines — DROP TABLE wp_settings — wasn’t applicable to my install (WP1.2). Took it out and everything else worked perfectly in the import. (Edit: To the author at wild-mind.net: Much appreciated for the help, and also in pointing out a textarea problem which went unnoticed on my Firefox browser)

Except there was still the resultant mess of incompatible CSS which took me a couple of hours to sort out into the site’s present incarnation. There are even three flavours of syndication available for the site now — RSS, RSS 2.0 and ATOM. My geekmind boggles.

Uh, in case none of that made sense, comments are back up so you can complain about it.

The monthly playlist thing gets boring, doesn’t it? Here are some albums I’ve been listening to:

Screenshot from Clutter, a very cool program for OS X that lets you place album artwork on your desktop that links straight to iTunes. Highly recommended, but you’re stuck using Windows aren’t you? Nyaa nyaah. Left column: - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Flaming Lips - Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie - Final Straw, Snow Patrol - Hopes and Fears, Keane - Give Up, The Postal Service - Good News for People Who Love Bad News, Modest Mouse Right Column: - Happenstance, Rachael Yamagata - Franz Ferdinand - American Idiot, Green Day - Garden State soundtrack - Oh Inverted World, The Shins - Around the Sun, R.E.M. Some comments: I think I’ve ranted enough about how much I enjoy Give Up, though it’s awfully hard to find in Singapore ($35 at Tower Records, ack). The new Green Day album, American Idiot is quite decent too, though it can’t match Nimrod for excellence (I’m not sure any punk rock can anymore, as I get older and crankier). Snow Patrol’s Final Straw: very melodic, but nothing exceptional other than “Run” (best song of the summer, IMO). As for the rest… they’re there to be clicked on, at least, which is more than I can say for the other 100-odd albums in my iTunes library. The new R.E.M. album I’ve yet to listen to, but how wrong can you go? Admittedly, Up was kinda crap but it did give us “Walk unafraid” and “At my most beautiful.” There, I’ve exhausted everything I can say about what I’ve been listening to. This is what happens when you’re on off and everyone else is at work.

Email me recommendations, maybe. That’s my spam-collecting address though.