Kylog

What a wonderful book! Here are some tidbits:

We keep our insignificant blemishes so that we can blame them for our larger defects. (20)

Re his lack of musicality and the piano:

I can play … I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths …. Then of course, a piano needs no real-time tuning. I strike middle C and I know that middle C will come out. Were I to try and learn a stringed or brass instrument that needed me to make the note as I played, then I hate to think what might be the result. (78)

Summarizing his childhood pains:

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me. (79)

Music matters to me desperately, I’ve made that clear, and I could cover pages and pages with my thoughts about Wagner and Mozart and Schubert and Strauss and all the rest of it, but in this book my passion for music and my inability to express it in musical terms stand really as symbols for the sense of separateness and apartness I have always felt. In fact they stand too as a symbol of love and my inability to express love as it should be expressed.

I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language — not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.

You see, when it comes down to it, I sometimes believe that words are all I have. I am not actually sure that I am capable of thought, let alone feeling, except through language. (84-85) [and goes on to quote from Wilde’s The Critic as Artist]

But in a culture like ours, language is exclusive, not inclusive. Those on easy terms with words are distrusted. I was always encouraged to believe that cleverness and elegance with words obscured and twisted decent truth…. To the healthy English mind .. there is something intellectually spivvy, something flash, something Jewy about verbal facility. (90)

Definitions of camp (136); great stuff

Queers are not the only unhealthy people to contaminate English society of course.  There are Jews too. (137)

I have mentioned before the use of the word clever and with what particularity it is applied to men like Jonathan Miller and Freddie Raphael [no idea who those two guys are].  Jews, like homosexuals, are not quite healthy.  They are part of that parade of pale, clever men who, at the turn of the century, confused with the healthy world with all that talk of relativism and doubt and those weird ideas about determinant history and the devided self.  … They’ll read anything into the most innocent of pastimes, these Jews and these pansies.  Reading things into things, if that isn’t the favorite hobby of the intellectual I don’t know what is.  (139-140)

Long passage on  EM Forster’s Notes on the English Character from Abinger Harvest, some excellent stuff. (144)

(192) pleonasm, sesquipedalian, tautologous, etc — funny stuff

It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary. (212) [followed some wonderful lists of things to apologize for and not]

A couple things I usually forget:

• Add “ClientAliveInterval 30″ to /etc/ssh/sshd_config for the server to initiate keep alives every 30 seconds, defeating firewalls that want to drop idle connections.
• My umask is 002, and ssh checks that permissions on authorized_keys is 644, so be sure to chmod this sucker after creation.

Some odd design decisions for python re scope. I gotta think more about this, but I’m groggy.

• the placement of a “global” in a scope doesn’t matter, but does warrant a warning if there’s an access or assignment prior to the “global”
• in the absence of a “global” an assignment always creates a variable with local scope
• global or not, access seeks from local scope outward

Very unsorted impressions:

DivX seems to be trying to build an entire ecosystem around their codec. This seems like a fruitless enterprise in the day of HD-DVD and BluRay but they are touting compatible players, portable and otherwise, an array of content (including HD disks on DVD?), and more. They weren’t getting a lot of traffic, at least not Monday at 10am. Not really sure what the business model is at this point.

Eton (owns Grundig) had a big, stylish booth, especially considering their products are decidely unsexy hand-crank radios for emergency use.

A number of companies are pitching audio distributed through the home via 802.11: Sonos, Logitech (via a purchase of Slim Devices), Philips.

• The Sonos solution is expensive, their remote looks sexy with an lcd panel and iPod-like scroll wheel. Since their on the floor database had a whopping 11 artists, it was kind of hard to tell how usable it would be.
• Logitech is more affordable, the remote has no LCD so you need to stare at the box’s display while you pick the music. It uses cell phone style T9 input to pick artists, pretty usable. The entry price is $300-ish, there’s a higher end box, and some cool looking remotes, but I didn’t figure out how they all plug in together.
• Philips looked nice but the details escape me now; I think it’s spendy

Pioneer: Elite plasmas look sweet. Showing off their BluRay player.

Sharp Aquos has excellent LCD TVs.

LG too: TruMotion, TruColor. LCDs are being emphasized.

I noticed the news that Toshiba made a last minute decision not to show their SED technology TVs.  Apparently they’re in some patent infringement struggle with Canon (their partner) and a third party.  SED may wither on the vine.
Talked to a guy from Qualcomm about MediaFlo. Initially being marketed through Verizon, branded as VCast. Transmits on UHF55; he said they had transmitters everywhere, although I thought they only had them in some markets; may be a timing thing. (Vcast coverage map here.) They had content deals with CBS, Viacom (Comedy Central and MTV, Fox, NBC, more. Doing pretty well there, ESPN is a big omission (”we’re in talks”). h264 codec. We talked about hitting the sweet spots in terms of price, content available, screen size, etc.

Moxi from Digeo is a DVR they’re trying to market to cable cos right now. May be selling direct to consumers at some point; he said to look for an announcement, oh wait. Linux based, he said they have an SDK but not clear if that will be targetted at end-users; also a nice UI, step up from MythTV. Has two boxes one central, and a thin client to receive media streams elsewhere in the house. So DVR plus media network in one. Looks sweet. Curious to see price, and rollout timetable etc.

Ubicod won a show prize, one of few that seems deserved, for their integrated pvr and home networking solution. Here’s gizmodo’s take, but unfortunately the company’s sites (try ubicod and/or gabia) are pretty weak and they appear to have no channels outside of www.auction.co.kr. Ahem. Best of luck to them; looks promising so far.

Stopped by the HP booth; they were introducing the G4050 a flatbed 4800×9600dpi scanner with slide/negative trays, $199. Seems like a good deal; reviews were pretty good, the downside is that it’s slow, but hey 2 bills.

Webcams are plentiful.

Michael Dell’s keynote:

• extremely low on content, even for a keynote, lots of cute graphics
• he knows they’ve sucked on support so:
• hired thousands of North American support people
• improved online chat support
• cut 1-800 #s by 83% (ouch, how many are left?)
• generally left the impression that they’re feeling the cost of their sins
• in a stunning lack of vision, Michael Dell professed that the PC will be the center of the consumer electronics world; wow MD, thanks. What a tool.
• he challenges telcos to provide more broadband in the US
• he showed a slide of a PC/monitor/printer at a desk; I assumed this was the before of a before-and-after. Nope, that’s the vision. Ahem.
• 85% of Dell business is govt/corp. Thus the lack of consumer vision.
• They’re psyched on a new 27″ monitor with increased color gamut. (On the floor Monday am, they had it hooked up to a crappy low-res video card, so it looked awful. Oops.)

Samsung was showing a lot of innovation in TVs. They’re covering LCD, Plasma, and DLP, but seem to be most pushing LCD:

• two technologies for improving motion perf: 120Hz with frame interpolation, and with LED backlights, BLU, not sure what it stands for but adjust led illumination dynamically to adjust for motion
• showing high contrast LCD, which had excellent blacks
• half their models will be 1080P by end of 2007

Sharp/Aquos, also showing 120Mhz for motion comp. Interesting: Sharp, Samsung, and many others feed their displays with Component cables not HDMI. Maybe this is because component distribution is much easier (and they like to distribute the same picture to a lot of monitors)? Anyway, they’re happy to show off quality via component, fwiw.

Sharp was also showing an IP/TV solution. I am baffled that CNet in their frantic foolishness gave this a best of show. Au contraire, when I was approached by some moderately technical Korean guy, I said I thought it was a bust, since its mpeg only, can’t handle streaming video off the internet, etc. You can’t even play a youTube video on the thing. What you can do is shrink your 16:9 image to the left half of the screen (thus getting huge letter box bars and about a quarter of the pixels working for ya) and then putting a browser on the right half of the screen. I guess you connect a keyboard to drive it. Ugh. This is not integration folks. The guy was very receptive though, and emphasized that they’re learning. Inputs to this box are ethernet and HDMI.

Sharp had a 108″ LCD but they were showing video without motion so I assume the motion sucks. It is big tho.

Sharp also had a cool LCD for use in cars with 3 distinct viewing angles giving 3 distinct pix. Cool!

Hitachi is really pushing plasma. “Unleash the power of plasma.” I think plasma is going to lose out to LCD. A wise man once said “never fight ethernet” and he was right. I think LCD may be the same way: not an intrinsically superior technology, but has traction and gets the volume and support technologies to make it fly.

Hitachi also had the 1st 1TB hard drive (7200 RPM, 14ms read seek time); interesting to see how this ramps down. They also had the 1st 4x BluRay reader. Hitachi is a pure technology company methinks. Good engineering.

Boy the Canon booth was slow.

DLP seems like the best picture technology; really mind blowing images, but physical depth is an issue. I think it will die or become a niche for home theater geeks unless they knock the depth issue. Someone is marketing “Slim DLP” which sort of begs the question.

3 AMD690 vendors, FoxConn, Elite, GigabitTech. Can’t find URLs for the mobos.

Ultralink HDMI repeater.

musicgiants.com had a band gigging. They sell high bitrate music, apparently from a small stable of artists(?). Anyway their site had many dead links and only support IE, so ttfn.

CBS keynote from Leslie Moonves (moon-vase), emphasized community and emphasized media companies need to lead the pack not be reactive, e.g. his guests:

• he pitched MediaFlo partnership
• no such thing as new media, old media, just media
• CSI creator came out pitching community in the form of responding to viewer preferences re character fates; this is just easier marketing to me not really community; this was the worst example of community, prolly b/c tv is not about community (except maybe the water cooler)
• CSTV, Brian Bedol, pitches an interactive video chat about basketball (Duke-UConn, whoohoo!)
• paltalk.com a chat site based around morning radio djs
• ourchart.com a web2.0-ish thing based around the L-word show, they had the creator and Jennifer Beals on stage
• the YouTube founder Chad Hurley gave a super wooden speech, poor guy, but I guess CBS puts a lot up on YT??
• Second Life; I’ll certainly buy that this is community
• SlingBox was pitching clip and sling, pretty impressive that CBS is cool with this, not clear what all the restrictions are