Disorderly Content

Too good to pass up: a remix of the president's speeches that has him doing a Shatner on Imagine and Take a Walk on The Wild Side. Where in the world does Boing Boing find stuff like this?

I've just come from the first showing of The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy at my local theater. No spoilers follow; I'll just say that the film is both funny and sweet, human in a way that of all the Hitchhiker incarnations, only So Long And Thanks For All The Fish comes close to matching. The movie couldn't be what the radio series is. For one thing, there isn't the time. And for another, radio calls on the imagination in a way that a visual medium like film can't.

(I think the BBC series is weak precisely because it's just the radio series with pictures. And those pictures show things we're already being told about. They add nothing to the proceedings.)

But this isn't about the movie. I just wanted to call your attention to a lovely article at IGN's FilmForce site that collects reminiscences about Douglas Adams from people who knew and worked with him. Because the only downer moment of this gloriously funny and likeable film is the knowledge that Douglas wasn't here to enjoy it.

I'm a huge fan of the television show Farscape, which is hardly a surprise to anyone who's spent any time around here. I'm also a devoted fan of Television Without Pity, a website that does for teevee what a dog does to a bone. So when TWoP announced a charity auction for a recap of a favorite show not already covered, Scapers were there. And now, so is the recap. The episode is Crackers Don't Matter. Good choice, although I suspect non-fans (aka the uninitiated) will think it's not just Moya's crew whose sanity is in question. Trust me, it gets better. And weirder. And better.

I was wandering around Cost Plus today, looking for bits and pieces for a little creative project I'm working on. And among the candy stuff I spotted this foil envelope of something called Muscat Gummy, which are candies made from muscat grapes. When I hear "muscat" I always think of muscatel, favorite of television winos and Kermit & Piggy in The Muppet Movie. But what grabbed my attention was the description on the package:

"Its translucent color so alluring and taste and
aroma so gentle and mellow offer admiring
feelings of a graceful lady. Enjoy soft and
juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy."

D'you think that made more sense in Japanese?

Major thanks to Elkit, our local Reine du Meetups, for telling me about Starship Dimensions, a website with gorgeous drawn-to-scale images of spacecraft from life and fiction. It's another example of people with talent and way too much time on their hands. Reminds me of why I love the web!

(I bet you're surprised I didn't use some of the ships from Farscape to illustrate this item. Yeah, me too.)

Oh, joy! It only took me a week and a half, but I finally finished documenting my trip to Australia. With pictures, lots of pictures. So go ahead and browse. There's Tasmania (but no devils). And Adelaide and the Barossa Valley wineries. Kangaroo Island, with lots of wildlife sightings. Coober Pedy, the opal capital of the world. And my day in the outback with the Australian mails. Good stuff! Well, the trip was; you'll have to make your own mind up about the web pages.

Is it September yet?

I guess I'm a fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I used to have the series on record. And on CD, until I lent it to a coworker who never returned it. I saw it onstage. I played the Infocom game. I have all five books. And the BBC television series on DVD. And yet another copy on CD, complete with a CD of Douglas Adams interviews. So yeah, I guess I'm a fan.

If you're a fan too, you must know that the long delayed movie version of HHGTG opens this Friday. What you may not know is that Slashdot has a set of snappy answers from Robbie Stamp, the movie's executive producer, to questions posed by Slashdotters. Suddenly I'm feeling pretty excited about the movie.

Repeat after me: They didn't screw it up... They didn't screw it up...

Engadget has a piece about T-Mobile's new street-level coverage maps, something they and I wish every wireless provider offered. That's the good news. The bad, at least for me, is that it provides graphic evidence that their service is just as awful where I live as the former PacBell Wireless, Sprint, AT&T Wireless and Cingular. According to their own map, I'm in the grey zone, just on the cusp of the slightly yellowish grey band. They call that fair. I'd call it being kind.

So they'd suck. But at least they're honest about sucking.

I've been playing with the capabilities of my Motorola V551 mobile phone since returning from my Oz trip. And appreciating for the nth time the essential nature of both the web and Google for getting anything done. In this particular case, I wanted to know how to get pictures and ringtones on and off the camera, preferably without having to pay Cingular to do it.

The phone supports Bluetooth. Which would be nice if my PowerBook did. I could solve that easily enough by buying an adapter, and I probably will. But Googling told me that I'd have a "half a loaf" solution. (At last he gets to the point.) Here's what I learned:

• Mac OS X supports the V551 with iSync, but not with Bluetooth. You need a physical connection for that: a USB cable. I found one on eBay, bought it and did indeed discover how to sync phone book and calendar between my Mac and phone. Took forever the first time. But it was easy, aside from a panic when a call came in while I was syncing. And I'd left the cable tied up, so I had to abort the process to get the phone to my ear. My fault, not Apple's or Motorola's.
• You might think making a USB connection would mount the phone as a disk on the Mac's desktop, like a flash drive or a camera or iPod. I certainly hoped it would. No such luck, alas. But from others' reports, you can use Bluetooth to copy files back and forth. I guess I have to get that Bluetooth adapter after all.

So I can sync and back up my phone, but only with a cable. And I can copy pictures and ringtones, but only with Bluetooth. Talk about your consistent interface!

To be fair, there's are indications that Apple will make things better when Tiger, the new Mac OS X release, comes out next week. A new Bluetooth implementation is supposed to solve the iSync problem with Moto phones. We'll see if it does.

Update 04/23: It's a few hours later. I've been playing with Bluetooth with mixed results. The good news is that it works: I can get my Mac to talk to the phone, to browse folders and to send files over. The not so good news is that I've had limited success doing what I want to do. For one thing, I can't see all the files on the phone. For example, I can see pictures I took with the phone's camera. And I can see pictures I've sent via Bluetooth. But I can't get to pictures I received via the network. I assume that's a security thing to keep me from getting at pictures I paid for, although that's not what I'm trying to do. The same with audio files; I can't retrieve ringtones. And, although I can send audio files to the phone, I haven't been able to make any that the phone'll play. So until I can figure this out, I'll have to rely on smashTheTONES to create my ringtones.

Damn, I was so close...

Update 05/11: In case you were wondering, installing Tiger on my Macs did make syncing a lot better. Now I can use Bluetooth for both syncing and uploading to my phone. Better late than never, although now I have a USB cable I don't need. Well, actually I have about a dozen USB cables I don't need. But this one is special.

In celebration of Passover, we have... oh, I hate to ruin the surprise. Just click here and play the Flash animation. It's all good.

I've never coveted a kitchen appliance before, but I think that just changed. Their description is classic Engrish, but who couldn't love a high speed sushi maker with a touch panel and adjustable wasabi.

3000 pieces an hour? Makes me hungry just to think about it!

(Thanks as always to Boing Boing for the pointer.)

For anybody who's been waiting breathlessly, my advice is to breathe!. But seriously, folks; I've finally finished my con report from OzScape, Australia's first Farscape convention. Took nearly a month, mainly because I was too busy enjoying Australia to write about it. Or, if you want to be more charitable to your humble narrator, it took less than a week from my return to the Land Up Over.

Next I start on the Tasmania and South Australia pages. Trust me, it'll be worth it. But don't hold your breath. Seriously, dude; breathe.

In search of a business model, Meetup has made the fateful decision to start charging groups for the right to use their service. Which is fair and reasonable, I suppose. Although the charges themselves are not: $19 a month. The one Meetup group I attend runs six to eight people at a meeting. And much as I like them, I'm not sure I like them $3 worth. Besides, that's either a cappucino or a piece of lemon cheesecake. A guy has to have priorities, right?

Not that I'm planning on not attending. No, what I suspect will happen is that the meetups (or should that be meetsup?) will continue. They just won't be Meetup meetups. It'll be a little less convenient, and a little harder for newbies to discover them. But they'll go on in spite of Meetup's attempt to capitalize on their user base.

I notice that LinkedIn is now running ads on their site. Hope it works for them; it's a whole lot less obtrusive than a fee structure like Meetup's. And a lot less likely to wipe out the population they need to matter.

One of my Scaper buds just pointed me at this amazing site. smashTheTONES will generate ringtones for your cellphone from an MP3 or MIDI file you provide. And it'll generate wallpaper from your image files. It even lets you edit, selecting the starting point and length of the music, as well as the position and scale of the graphic. And it does it all for free! I just tried it with my Motorola phone; the results are as good as the phone can provide. And the price is hard to beat: just the cost to download the file.

The new pope notwithstanding, I'm almost ready to believe in miracles.

Thanks to Dan Gillmor for linking to an interview at the San Francisco Chronicle with Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, who's rather more outspoken than is good for him or his company. Seidenberg opines that community-supported WiFi "could be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard" and that we shouldn't expect cell phone service to work where we need it:

"Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house?" he said. "The customer has come to expect so much. They want it to work in the elevator; they want it to work in the basement."

And why, I ask, would we accept anything else? Does he really think giving out multiple phone numbers and letting the caller find one that works is an acceptable solution? Having used Pacific Bell Wireless (now owned by Verizon), Sprint, AT&T Wireless and now Cingular and not having good service at home from any of them, I'm particularly amused to discover that it's not their service that sucks; it's just my expectations that are unreasonable.

And who set those expectations? Oh yeah; cell phone guys like Seidenberg.

You may have noticed a huge gap between my last blog entry and this one. For the first time since I got hooked on this blogging thing, I went on an actual vacation. To Australia of all places, about which I will have much to say and lots of pictures to help you ignore all the words I use to say it.

Anyway, despite the presence of Internet cafes all over Oz, or at least the cities and towns worthy of the term (and a few that barely qualify as hamlets), I managed to avoid connecting to the net for almost my entire trip. Which means, of course, that my RSS newsreader wasn't getting any exercise. And boy, did it make me pay!

Facing more than 600 unread entries in the blogs I read regularly is more than I can bear. (I'm down to 162 unread as I type this.) And that means pruning the list. Time to get this obsession under control! Besides, the more time I spend reading, the less time I have for writing. And that's a bad thing. (The imbalance, not the writing.)