LEGO® Construction Video

During my assembly of LEGO® model #10030, the Ultimate Collector's Edition Imperial Star Destroyer, I took photos after each major sub-assembly was completed. These photos have formed the basis for this Shockwave movie, which condenses several days worth of assembly tasks into less than a minute. (I originally thought about taking a bunch more pictures and doing the full-blown time-lapse treatment, but didn't have either the requisite discipline or the requisite level of OCD to follow through with that plan.)

After joining the "elite ranks" of crazy folks who have not only acquired, but also assembled a kit containing 3,104 LEGO® brand interlocking plastic bricks, plates, and various other pieces into this giant (37-inch long!) model, I can honestly say that I don't think the upcoming Ultimate Collector's Millennium Falcon model -- which features more than 5,000 pieces -- is in my future...

P.S. - That really long description and the link that it points to begets its own form of hilarity. I suggest that you follow that link and read the legal text regarding "How LEGO^® Enthusiasts May Refer to LEGO Products on the Internet" and related subjects. In fact you should print that page, xerox the printout about 10 times, fold a couple of the xeroxes into a coaster for your coke, and use others as kleenex.

P.P.S. - If you represent the Coca-Cola, Xerox, or Kimberly-Clark corporations, the above P.S. is intended as a parodic commentary on the state of trademarks and IP law in the age of the blogosphere. Such parodic commentary has generally been upheld as a form of fair use, although some may argue that its intrinsic satirical nature undermines my claim. (Reference (PDF): "The Satire/Parody Distinction in Copyright and Trademark Law— Can Satire Ever Be a Fair Use?")

Potential Mac Screen Properties Life-Saver

I managed to freak out the display settings for my screen that was set as the primary display (TV via the S-Video out adapter, because I was using Front Row, and didn't want to use mirror mode) on my notebook this morning by magically switching it to PAL and hitting OK while moving the notebook. [This particular maneuver requires a unique mix of uncanny bad luck coupled with a distinct lack of caffeination, and is neither likely to occur nor recommended.] Well, being an resident of the USA, said TV's S-Video input needed an NTSC signal, and so things were not exactly happy. Because of the way OS X puts the properties page for a given screen on that screen (which is normally nice) and because it also lacks a hot-key for moving a window, I was fairly hosed for a while.

Plugging back in my DVI monitor didn't help (separate settings were maintained on a per-device basis), and I simply couldn't find the darn settings anywhere in the Library or elsewhere... I got lucky, though, that monitor happened to have an S-Video input, and managed to sync with the 50Hz signal. That change in luck allowed me to reset the mode in which the TV adapter was running successfully. But, what would I do if I ever hosed something in an manner that was not so easily recoverable?

Enter cscreen, the hard-to-find (because the author abandoned it and his site) utility that allows modification of OS X display settings from the command line. I finally found it on the ScriptBuilders site, and am pleased to report that it works as designed -- allowing screen properties to be properly transmogrified from the command line. This even works from an SSH session, so now no amount of sleep and caffeine deprivation mixed with poor thumb placement can ever cause near-tragic screen gobbledy-gookage ever again...

Oh, yeah, this also makes it easy to switch which screen is the primary, and to rig up some scripts to switch among settings that I may want to use from time to time. Now, I still kinda want to find where these settings actually live, but that's a project for another time.

New Silly Illustration

Ridin' with Lance (PDF format -- because I want to make a T-shirt)

Hair-brained mumbo-jumbo numero uno

Some corporate linguists like to go with the four E words and the three R words when discussing employer-employee relations. Being a sophisticate, I prefer the verb forms of these words to the contrived noun forms. (Of course, the verb forms imply that action may be required, and management theories are supposed to shy away from that...):

• E words
  
• Empower
• Enable
• Engage
• Encourage
• R words
  
• Respect
• Recognize
• Reward

Interestingly, the first two "E words" represent things that individuals in an organization generally get for themselves, because they simply couldn't do their jobs otherwise. Therefore, they only require management intervention in the form of removing external roadblocks. Our theory should incorporate enough management awareness to perceive these roadblocks and act without being prompted / begged to do so.

The other five things can probably be combined into a cohesive formula for employee motivation, if we can figure out how to map them on a chart and subsequently devise a self-test that deterministically and artificially lets people sort themselves accordingly. Of course, before doing that, we'll have to enroll in a post-graduate Psych program.

CEO-speak, merger edition

Bust out your buzzword bingo cards folks. It's merger season, and the CEOs are spouting this season's freshest corp-jive. Two fantastic case studies in highly-evolved, value-added diction that is both empowered by, and leveraging of, the unique corporate lexicon are presented below to enhance your short-term amusement value.

Energizer acquires Playtex. Guess that means we'll soon be seeing the world's first battery-powered ______. Oh, it turns out that Playtex makes other products, Energizer already owns Schick, and this is mostly a bid to compete with P&G (who happens to own Duracell). But, that would sound bad, so here's the official corporate-speak version from Ward M. Klein, Chief Executive Officer of Energizer: "We are very excited about bringing the world-class businesses and people of Playtex into the Energizer family... We see Playtex as an exceptionally great fit with Energizer, with similar customers and distribution channels in the U.S. and Canada, and the opportunity for geographic expansion in many other areas of the world where we currently do business. We also believe there are significant integration and cost reduction opportunities for the combined businesses. Energizer will emerge with a more diversified portfolio of products, and greater scale in the personal care category, which will now be more evenly balanced with our household goods business. It will also provide a platform for possible additional value-adding acquisition
Meanwhile, IHOP will eat Applebee's and turn almost all of their corporate stores into franchises. The quotable clap-trap press release was absolutely full of the word "re-energize;" it includes the following yawn-tastic quote by IHOP Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Julia Stewart, who will lead the management team of the combined Company: “Over the past year and a half, we have been evaluating alternatives that would allow us to leverage IHOP’s proven competencies in order to create additional long-term value for shareholders, including a potential acquisition. Applebee’s meets all of our acquisition criteria and we expect the combination to generate significant additional value for our shareholders.”

Prescription for innovative management theories

1. Find a PhD student in psychology.
2. Assign a thesis wherein said student is expected to spew forth a new and innovative management theory.
3. Faculty review: Ignore the fact that the great majority of these theories work by way of generalization and over-simplification, and therefore ring just as true as the predictions of your average Ren-Fest midway fortune teller.
4. Partnering and Profit: Many of these amazing systems go on to become books and even seminars, it's absolutely staggering. Now, to make this work you need a nifty chart and a self-test that allows folks to assign themselves to one of your neatly-defined and mostly useless categories.

In the real world, these generalized categories (e.g. types of motivation, types of interpersonal interaction, etc.) are actually variable and highly situational. But, you can't sell a book that says that...

Happy Birthday "Star Wars"

Tomorrow, May 25th, officially marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Star Wars. Not surprisingly, this film, along with its sequels and prequels, has served as a cultural anchor for an entire generation. The BBC has joined the festivities by posting the following 30 trivia items.

No ManU on TV for me

Looks I'm going to have to follow along online for the duration. Thank goodness for http://www.premierleague.com/ and its real-time ticker...

FSC isn't running the Manchester Derby this Saturday, and the critical ManU / Chelsea match on Wednesday, May 9th has two problems that I won't be able to work around in real-time:

• It's only on PPV, and even then only at selected pubs, so a 1pm match is virutally unwatchable
• I'll be in Washington State, and at a conference, so playing hooky is also 100% off the table
  

Mountain Bike Rides

Here are a couple of maps generated from traces collected by my bicycle GPS device:

• Wolf Mountain Loop at Pedernales Falls State Park
• Last Sunday's Austin Ridge Riders "Beginner's Ride" at Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park

It's still fun to play with the toy. These simple trace logs don't include the HRM, speed, or cadence data that make it even more fun...

Dang! No DeepFish for me!

So, yesterday Microsoft Live Labs released DeepFish -- an enhanced browser for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices. But, by the time I got around to trying to download it today, they had filled all of their "slots" for the "technology preview."

Guess it's a good thing I still have Opera! Being forced to use Pocket IE is not a valid option...

New Hosting Provider

Update: Migration went pretty well, photo map updated with new links.

I am in the process of migrating my site to a new hosting provider. Red Check used to serve me pretty well, but lately they've been pretty close to horrendous in terms of service level. So, I picked up a GoDaddy plan for about 55% of the cost, that offers 10 times as much storage and transfers and lets me configure a greater number of databases, too.

Because I'm not a huge MySQL/PHP expert, I decided to re-create my Coppermine gallery from scratch. Luckily, the batch upload is working on the new site (it always bugged me that it didn't work on the old provider). That means I can also migrate my legacy hand-coded galleries into the database more easily... So, I won't have to maintain two separate gallery pages with perpetually outdated links. I will, however, have to fix the links on my map -- most of them will be broken as a result of the gallery rebuild.

Dan Brown's Doormat?

The graphic on this doormat forms a nice symbiotogram, but is conceptually similar to the ambigrams from Angels and Demons...

Wonder if they'll have a US distributor... I can always claim I just cleaned it and didn't realize that it was "backwards"...

GPS + HRM for the Bikes

I burned my REI Dividend and 20% member coupon on a Garmin Edge 305, which is basically the be-all/end-all of bicycle computers. I got the fully loaded version with the Heart-Rate Monitor (HRM) and the cadence sensor, then went on Amazon and ordered a 2nd cadence unit for the other bike...

I have the unit configured to display seven data points simultaneously: Ride time (stop watch), Current cadence, current speed, ride distance, current time-of-day, current heart rate, and estimated calories burned.

With the GPS and this unit's barometric altimeter that increases the accuracy of elevation data, I can do crazy correlations like notice that as I climbed that easy hill, my speed stayed within a 2mph window, but my heart rate went up 15%. Basically, I'm my own science project now. This week's task: use published mechanisms to establish a good baseline for what my actual max heart rate is. I can download all of the data to my computer and do fun things like analyze my performance over time and even plot course maps using Google maps or Google Earth...

New Template

While my old template was nice and simple, it was also not very stylish. I'm working on customizing this one a bit. All of the font sizes, etc. are different than the old one, so I'm working out the details...

Jobs on Music: Pandering or Profound

I can't tell if Steve Jobs' latest rant against the music industry is simply pandering to the masses while whining about the European regulators, or if the "DRM will likely never work" sentiment is sincere. My first two thoughts are:

• Convenient excuse provided for not inviting others to the table: If it's broken, then we can't fix what we don't own...
  
• Instead of whining/blogging, go do some market research or broker a limited-scope deal. Maybe even run a trial and charge a premium for unlocked content (e.g. $0.99, or $1.49 for DRM-free)...

Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has graduated from beta, and has sucked a $200 pre-order out of my bank account. I've been using the beta for over a year on both Windows and, more recently, the Mac. I'm sure Aperture is nice, too; but the tools and features of Lightroom met my needs and the bounce across platforms didn't require re-learning. I use it as an image library and a RAW processing engine.

Now, I just have to wait for Photoshop CS3 to come out, and I'll be in image-manipulation Nirvana....

Before the Music Dies

Update: Got it, watched it, dug it. Erykah Badu still has freaky hair, and her interviews were fun. A bunch of clips and some promo stuff is on the DivX Stage 6 site -- Check it out...

Gonna have to go buy this soon... The Before the Music Dies documentary is now on DVD, so maybe more of us can all learn to enjoy the music while leaving the music business behind...

What would it take for me to buy an iPhone?

I may be the last standing survivor of the "old school," wherein my phone is mostly a phone, my iPod is a non-video-playing Nano, and my PDA is primarily a portable GPS and game machine that fills in as VGA-resolution video player and photo browser on the many excursions where I choose to leave my laptop at home. (Note that none of the three non-converged small devices listed above contain a camera; I use a real one, thank you very much.)

The mere fact that I have these three gadgets and gizmos makes me sound like an ideal candidate for a Blackberry, a Blackjack, a Treo, or a newly-announced iPhone (or some other converged device); but that makes the errant assumption that I don't pick-and-choose which device(s) will be carried for a given situation. Since my primary personal and work computers are both laptops, I don't actually use the PDA for so-called traditional PDA-type activities, such as maintaining my contacts and calendars, trying in vain to take notes at meetings, etc... Similarly, the "organizer" features and the stamp-sized photo-browsing ability of the iPod Nano are lost on me -- they don't get used, ever; the same is true of the truly bad games that came on the Nano, each of which have been played exactly once. I do occasionally check my Gmail account from my phone, but it's mostly to justify the fact that I'm paying a few quid every month for a minimal data plan. I access the Gmail app an average of 2-3 times per week. Did I mention that I don't have any games on the phone, or that I use the phone's network connection for non-Gmail things like news or weather less than once a month? It's slow, and the interface sucks.

So, with all that out there to set the context, here are a few key missing features that iPhone 2.0 will need to have in order for me to consider forking over the obscene chunk of change that 1.0 will be listed at, not to mention the --ahem-- massively-lube-requiring fees that Cingular requests for their unlimited data plan. The following incomplete wish list is displayed in no particular order:

• > An actual, legitimate, "3G" (or beyond) data network connection, and the ability to "share" this connection via tether or Bluetooth. EDGE is slow and sucky for anything but the most casual use. If you want me to believe I can surf real websites with a real browser, give me a real connection. Granted, the iPhone 1.0 may well offer the ability to use it as a "modem," but it wasn't part of the announcement. This is a requirement for the version I buy. If I'm forking over service-provider fees for an unlimited data plan, I want to be able to use said plan with my laptop.
  
• > Direct downloads from the iTunes Media Store. If I'm traveling sans-laptop and want a movie I can watch on the plane ride home, or other content I wish to enjoy while on the go. I should be able to take advantage of the fast data network connection (or an available WiFi hotspot) and download content straight to the iPhone while I'm doing the early check-in for my return flight. I would, of course, expect to be able to "reverse-sync" said movie/content to my iTunes library on the computer at home. With the iPhone 1.0, you need a computer to be the middleman, and this sucks rocks.
  
• > An open API, an extensible OS, and a supported development environment for 3rd-party applications. If you want to replace my PDA, your platform had better allow me to acquire and load 3rd-party applications.
  
• -> You can't think of everything that I will want to do with my iPhone, and will never be able to provide for all of my desires. My name isn't Steve Jobs, which means I didn't have the luxury of asking you to build-in every little thing that I may want in my device. I want to use the device how I want to use it, and I may not even know how I want to use it until after I've mucked around with it for a bit.
  
• -> The first app that I want, assuming that OpenSSH isn't an included feature of OS X Embedded, is an ssh client with tunneling support. Since there isn't any Blackberry Enterprise Server pushing encrypted content to it, I want the ability to secure my own communications. Safari-lite had better support proxies, too... Otherwise, I'm gonna need Opera (the actual purveyors of the first "true mobile browsing experience" for all the Windows Mobile devices out there) or another 3rd-party browser.
• -> A close second on my wish list would be a compelling moving-map GPS navigation offering. I don't need a built-in GPS receiver, Bluetooth is just fine. However, the Google Maps applet isn't good enough for me -- it's fine for static situations, POIs, and general overviews; but (unless I'm missing something), it doesn't provide the standard you-are-here triangle, auto-scrolling map display, and voice prompts that a GPS navigation app includes.
  
• -> I would also like to be able to see how a diverse and talented "community" can make clever use of the multi-touch interface. I'd be willing to bet that freeware, shareware, and open-source game offerings, for example, would trump the dross that the iTMS offers for the video iPod.
• -> If this functionality isn't present, then I will not consider the device, even if the price drops to $100. My current phone supports the mobile JRE thing, but otherwise it's effectively a closed platform. Closed platforms suck the nasty scum-ridden rocks from the bottom of the bog.
  
• > More native memory, support for standard flash memory cards, and the ability to access media on those cards. I've got 8GB on my Nano -- and it has a low-dpi, low-res screen and doesn't play video. I shoot still photographs onto a 4GB CF card. If I'm supposed to put my life in my pocket, then I need more flexibility than the built-in 8GB can offer (I'd settle for 16 GB, but for $600 would prefer to see 32 GB; remember you're telling me I can carry my life in my pocket -- I watch and produce high-quality video, and shoot 8MP RAW images with my DSLR -- big files add up fast...).
  
• -> I carry a fleet of SD cards with my PDA -- one for games, one for short-term media, one for my GPS application and its map data, etc. If I want to take content that I have created (or format-shifted per rapidly-diminishing fair-use standards) and enjoy it on my PDA, I can just dump it to a card and play it -- no sync operation is needed, so it works from other people's systems, too.
  
• -> The idea of having to round-trip content through iTunes (on a computer) just to be able to access it on my so-called converged device sits wrong with me... I understand the need to have a system in place for purchased (and therefore rights-restricted) content, but I reserve the right to vote with my wallet and tend to avoid this type of content. Having to use the same mechanism to access user-generated and/or legally-obtained non-protected content is a bunch of hooey! For example, my PDA has a CF slot, which I can use to review the JPG versions of the photos that I capture alongside the RAWs... I take the card out of the camera, stick it in the PDA, and -- viola -- it just works (with either the native app or a 3rd-party app that I purchased because it was a better fit for my needs). With no support for removable media, the iPhone 1.0 would (once again) force me to use a full-fledged computer as a middle-man. Again, the middle-man requirement sucks rocks, and is a complete deal-breaker for me.
  
• -> (For the record, I feel the same way about ActiveSync, I generally prefer to get my WM5 apps as cab files, and load them directly on the device. The same is true for Word docs, Excel sheets, PDFs, MP3s, etc. that I view on the PDA; I'd rather dump it to a card than deal with the way some damn sync app thinks that I want to use my device. If I want it local, I'll copy it local... Don't tell me how to use my device, just let me use it however I see fit! Bleagh!)
  

Finally got around to...

I finally went out and grabbed the OS X Wacom tablet driver. Even tried messing around with Ink, but so far it is doing worse than WM5's handwriting recognition on my PDA. Therefore, it is probably destined to be a novelty. However, when Photoshop CS3 comes out later this year, I will be glad to have the absolute-positioning capabilities of the pen back -- it makes it so very much easier to work with masks and to add subtle effects..

Photo Gallery and Map Updated

Now that my photo gallery from Costa Rica has been posted, I have also updated my photo map to have a link to this gallery. The place marker is based off of a GPS read that I pulled from the top of Poás Volcano, near the main crater.