web: "where do they find the time?" exposed

This blogger gets the same response that I do when I tell people about Wikipedia editors, users supporting users, collaborative development, etc.:

Where do they [i.e. those losers] find the time?

First he figures out how much time we're talking about:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

Wow, that's a lot of time devoted by people whom the clueless majority accuse of needing to "get a life". But the key insight is that is dwarfed by TV viewing:

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus

How come TV watchers get a free pass? Then he goes on to talk about if only 1% of the time we waste on mass media (whose attitude is just "How much can you consume?") goes to participatory culture, the change will be dramatic. Do the math, it's 20 Wikipedia-sized projects, every year. So expect more great things!

videogames: prior to GTA IV

Here are the "explore world" games I've traveled through while waiting for Grand Theft Auto IV.

Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

The first backport from the PSP to the PS2. It has slightly better gameplay than its parent GTA III but is far from the gargantuan mind-bending achievement of GTA: San Andreas. It's one of the weaker story lines, and the music selection isn't very good. However, the DJ dialog and commercials are the best of all GTA games! Someone transcribed a bunch on wikiquote.org; Reni, the transsexual DJ on Flashback FM, is brilliant, his/her lines include:

"Music is life and we snort it until we O.D., again und again"
"At least in the 80s they could play their instruments and there were two ambiguously gay men beating a synthesizer who were up for a go"
"I'm having a flashback... from when I was a man! I still look good in a tie. Now it's ties and titties! These tunes are enough to make me fertile again! I can impregnate myself! That's a talent, no?"

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories

One of the best features of the GTA games is the weather and lighting that puts you in the environment, culminating in San Andreas where every region feels exactly right: foggy San Fierro, smoggy Los Santos, hot bright Las Venturas. But the 80s pastel colors in GTA:VCS are so over the top that it's phony. And the storyline with the loser army AWOL whining at his coked-out brother has little emotional punch. On the upside, the map shows you attempted jumps and rampages, and the business takeovers are an interesting gameplay develoment. Launching an Infernus off a ramp straight into a palm tree for a triple insane stunt bonus never gets old. And Reni Wassulmaier appears as a bisexual studio head!

Bully

An interesting variation, you're a 15 year old juvenile delinquent trying to patch things up at school by beating up all the cliques, recovering your health by kissing girls. It's a fantasy of school hijinks with a fine storyline and good characters, but it's let down by glitches: the load time every time you go in or out of a building is awful, and you can get stuck in places.

Scarface: The World is Yours

This isn't by Rockstar, it's from Radical Games who made the pleasant Simpsons Hit and Run. I've never seen the movie Scarface (I don't like violent movies, too realistic!) but the game is not bad. It has several improvements on GTA:

• You have some funny scripted encounters with pedestrians
• It's a challenge to intimidate people.
• The "balls" mode where you go into a blood-hazed frenzy is nice.
• The mechanism of loading up just a few weapons from the trunk of your car is much more realistic than GTA's "machete, revolver, shotgun, machine gun, and rocket launcher" all at once.
• Best of all, making a profitable drug run is appropriately complex and rewarding: meet a supplier, fly to the islands, intimidate for a good deal, pilot a boat back, then a wild balls-to-the-wall ride all over the islands trying to distribute it to your fronts as other gangs and the police get increasingly crazy.

But it's somehow a shallow world. Two examples: there's absolutely no fun in driving around to explore with the radio on; you have a huge mansion that you can equip with lots of no-class drug lord knickknacks, but there are no surprises or interesting interactivity in it, unlike the videogames in GTA:SA and Bully.

All these games I played through to 100%, completist that I am.

I dipped a toe in the waters of two other non-Rockstar games by renting them, but passed on both of them:

Destroy All Humans 2

Oh dear. It could be great, an alien flying around 60s San Francisco and London with crazy weapons, psychokinetic powers, and the ability to take over other bodies. But the dialog is deathly dull, and even more so than Scarface, the world feels like a cardboard set. Even though you have a flying saucer you can't jump into a single area where you don't belong. And watching the cut scenes with the laconic alien ... speaking ... his ... lines becomes painful only 4 hours into the game.

The Godfather

Another movie I've never seen (don't people know that violent movies rot your brain?!), another game studio (big bad Electronic Arts) attempting to make a GTA competitor. This has its moments. You feel you're on a movie set of New York and the voice acting is pretty good. I might yet buy it, my hesitation is reviews said that the missions become very repetitive.

Rockstar's San Andreas is a giant compared to any of these games. These recent Rockstar games are all obviously filler while they labored over GTA IV, yet even Rockstar's lesser efforts are enjoyable efforts. It's nice to see other game studios coming close. Meanwhile, I've only 10 days to buy a TV, a surround system, a PS3, and umpteen cables, to play GTA IV. It's already scoring perfect game ratings. Rockstar have made the Birth of a Nation of videogames with Grand Theft Auto:III, the Gone with the Wind of videogames with GTA:VC and the Citizen Kane of videogames with GTA:SA. I believe the hype!

computers: old storage media

Remember 3.5" floppies? Here are 90 of them, free for the taking.

Ignore the “2.0 MB” label, these actually store about 1.44 MB. So that stack represents all of 132 MB, or less than a fifth of a CD-ROM. I remember when these first came out for the Mac and cost $10 each.

Those floppies are junk, you can't even give them away. I consolidated the information from them to a few MB on a network drive. Many were backup and transit disks (so-called "sneakernet") with only slight differences between directories and files. I couldn't find a good tool to help me consolidate them. I wanted a split view explorer that would show floppy details (including bootable or not, DOS version, hidden files, etc.) in one pane and in the other pane intelligently search a hard drive for likely matching files and directories. Probably a DOS version of such a tool was on one of the floppies!

Several of them are installation disks for nifty integrated phone answering machine +FAX software like Ring Zero and QuickLink that came with modems. Back then the mental stumbling block was “Your computer can be your telephone,” just as now the stumbling block is “Your computer can be your TV.”

The disk in the IBM sleeve on the left is a 5.25" floppy from 1983 or so that stores 360KB. I have several dozen of those I still need to archive. I also have an 8" floppy with some documents I made on an IBM Displaywriter, plus a 3.5" magneto-optical disk, a Jaz disk, and a Sun 1/4-inch cartridge. Compared with the 80s and 90s, we are in a period of incredible media stability.

computers: relentless storage progress

Here's the picture from my old storage media post.

That speck on top is a 2GB microSD memory card for my phone.

It holds 1,360 of these floppies, or a stack 15 times taller (4.5 meters—14 feet tall!). Or 5,555 times more than the 5.25" “IBM” floppy in the picture.

When you just switch letter prefixes around you lose sight that 2 gigabytes is an insane number. It's roughly 2000× a megabyte, 2000000× a kilobyte. 2,000,000,000 characters! If you write pure ASCII text, you could never, ever fill it up. But of course the computer industry finds a way to inflate simple sequences of letters. The text of my post on old floppies was only 1,647 characters; Blogger turned into a 16,000 byte web page; it's 100,000 bytes including the two images; it would have been 4,200,000 bytes if I had used the original photos instead of resizing them for the Web. If I had made this a presentation in evil Microsoft PowerPoint it could easily be 1,000,000 bytes. If I had made a video zooming in from the pile of floppies to show just the memory card, it would have hit 100,000,000 bytes. But it wouldn't be 10,000 times more information.

audio: record scanning not a fantasy

It turns out my armchair fantasy of digitizing my records by visual scanning rather than dragging a stylus through the groove has been done by researchers, including project IRENE, the visualaudio project, and other attempts. Carl Haber at IRENE in a long interesting presentation (80MB! PDF) says

We study the use of new, optical measuring and image processing methods to create a digital representation of the complete record surface, on the computer, and then “play” it with a virtual needle.

He points out in another paper that a 10" side becomes a 300 MB processed image scanned in 2D (so an LP might be a few GB), and, just as I perceived, that “[the process] can archive images for future re-analysis with new algorithms.” Awesome, ship it!

Alas, the sound-to-noise ratio is poor. It's a vital technique for non-destructive archiving of sounds from rotting wax cylinders, cracked shellac transcriptions, and broken 78s, but doesn't come close to top-notch vinyl playback. The Swiss visualaudio researchers comment

Reaching the same quality as with a good 33rpm record played on a modern turntable probably is probably utopic.

Oh noooes, say it ain't so.

audio: thoughts on digitizing vinyl

I have quite a lot of vinyl records. I play them on a Rega Planar 3, a fairly high-end turntable.

I'm not dogmatic about analog vs. digital. My well-recorded CDs sound great, though the loudness war means many are tiring to listen to. And many of my vinyl records sound fantastic, though some are warped or have irritating pops.

The thing about vinyl playback is the headroom for improvement is vast. Decent CD players sound very similar, but a better turntable solves real engineering problems and sounds much better than lesser turntables.

A big motivation to get a better turntable is to make better digital copies of my albums and singles. The digital library I cart around on music phones and PCs currently only has songs from my CDs

On that subject, I was struck by this review of a super-exotic Rockport Sirius III turntable:

I made two demo CD-Rs of various tracks using the Rockport, to A/B with the LPs in real time. Of course, the "live" LPs creamed the CD-R, which sounded slightly brighter and edgier but less immediate. Nonetheless, the CD-Rs did capture the Rockport's essence.

When I A/B'd the CD-R with the "live" LPs on the Yorke [a merely good turntable], the CD-R topped the LPs in overall presentation, dynamics, and especially solidity.

In other words, a digital recording from a super-exotic turntable sounds better than vinyl playback from a merely good turntable.

So, do I really want a $5,000 turntable? Not when there's someone with the same vinyl who plays it through a cartridge hand-made by the 90-year old sensei, mounted to a gazillion-dollar 1000 kg turntable hand-calibrated by its engineer, in an isolated underground vault, connected to the discontinued $25,000 Boulder phono preamp — I'll take his digital files instead of playing my own records!

The next issue is what kind of digital file to make. MP3 isn't enough, even FLAC lossless is only CD quality. I want future-proof. The consensus is zeroing in on DSD. The latest Absolute Sound has a review of the Korg DSD recorder capturing vinyl playback and makes the points of how close the DSD sounds to the original and how it's the best format for archival. Again, I want someone else's superb digitization of their vinyl. Her archival file will be better than mine.

(This still locks in the playback of the vinyl record on a particular turntable, cartridge, arm, and digitizer. What about future improvements to vinyl reproduction? So my most radical thought is to capture the record and read it in software. It should be possible to make a detailed scan of the record surface itself. Then software can reconstruct the audio waveform without the primitive mechanical operation of dragging a diamond along an undulating spiral valley. As long as the initial scan is high enough resolution, software can do a better job knowing what kind of cutting head made the vinyl, how vinyl deforms when stamped, where best to read the undulations in the walls. I have no idea if a 100 square inch microscopic 2½-D scan is remotely practical.)

Returning to reality, if the record companies were smart (OK, that's still unreality), then they would meet the demand for very high quality digital copies. From a rant

My concern is that we get every possible historical recording archived to DSD as soon as possible, AND that the artists (both performance and recording) can and should make DSD the authoring medium of choice, REGARDLESS of what happens to it subsequently.

Definitely! The DSD file becomes the fabled "master tape" that is the source for every released version of the music. But unlike a reel-to-reel tape, the music's owner can sell me the master DSD file, charging me more than a $0.99 MP3.

Here's Pete Townsend of the Who on DSD, from a great interview about recording music:

Genex DSD [was] what my Mastering Supervisor Jon Astley preferred. I preferred the sound of analog tape (1/2", Dolby SR at 15 ips) but they sounded so close it was almost impossible to tell the difference. ... It’s hard to tell whether going to tape would have produced better sound on CD. A CD is pretty difficult thing to get to sound “warm” (whatever that means, such a hard word to define in audio terms).

So the ultimate sound would be to play Pete Townsend's analog master tape. But even an analog fan like Pete Townsend says the original DSD file sounds fantastic, then gets mucked up when you turn it into a CD. So sell us that master file! 2L is one label offering this, as a test: a DXD file, as well as several lesser formats.

skiing: Advanced Ski Clinic

I took the Squaw Valley Ski School's recent three-day Advanced Ski Clinic, with Dan Ray, Tim Reeve (the two top instructors with whom we had private lessons last year), and Jim Moore. I kept a lid on the pernicious rumors that I'm a former ski instructor myself; skiing isn't a sport you master, it's a sport in which you progress, and like most skiers expert tuition accelerates my progress. My group of 3-5 skied with Dan Ray. Ahh I remember back when he was a kid hucking technical lines between ski lessons.

Here are the instructors scoping out a steep firm icy chute under Olympic Lady chair (off KT-22) for our video capture.

A big part of the clinic is daily video recording, with review at lunch and further review in the evening. At advanced levels this is incredibly useful, because all skiers need to be more forward yet most skiers think they are pretty forward, until they see incontrovertible video evidence of themselves in the back seat/on the toilet/riding the backs of their skis. At expert level video review is less useful because the focus is on moving your hips and upper body down the hill/into the new turn/across your skis; you don't need video to know you haven't got that subtle complex motion right and you would need an overhead tracking camera to best capture the movement. The video showed my hands rising way up away from the snow instead of a tight reach downhill, I had no idea I was doing this.

Here's Dan on Dead Tree, also off KT-22. Also pretty steep.

I would have liked to ski even harder terrain, such as the entrance to Dead Tree or hike somewhere, but that's a lot of pressure on the instructor—one participant falls and the day is over. Once we reached easier terrain Dan skied ridiculously fast. I could keep up with him for one flat-out run but then the little speedometer in my brain would flash red and I'd scrub off speed. Skiing fast recalibrates your skiing.

Three days with a great skier full of technical expertise who loves to ski, what's not to like?

Even though I didn't master the hip move downhill into the new turn, I improved. My goal was not to shred my skis and while working on other things that problem cleared up.

Squaw Valley: Northern Lights chili

There aren't many deals in Squaw Valley U.S.A., home of the $9 sandwich. But the $6 chili from Northern Lights in the Olympic House is one of them.

Proprietor Alan serving his delicious concoction.

superbad Tiuke Tuipulotu to the fro

When and if Seth, Evan, and Fogell grow up, this guy is the one they want to be.

He has to make it big at football so we get more photos.

I love Lyle Workman's soundtrack. Time for a 70s revival!