Turntable & Fiddle

In the mail, I recieved I small package that contained a CD. When I opened it I was surprised to see the a EP from Battlestar America. I wrote about their album last year. For whatever reason, they sent me a free CD with six new songs on it.
Battlestar America is a mix of honky-tonk and rap, mixing turntables with fiddles. When you read about it, it sounds weird. When you hear it, it sounds great. They seem to be calling themselves B Star now. Their old site is still up at Battlestar America, so I’m a little confused as to what exactly is going on.
Give it a listen. I’d recommend Bootleg Dreams, Someone Like Me, and Yellowbelly. You can listen to the whole album on their site.
Trust me, once your hear a few songs, you’ll be hooked.

Glo Balls don’t glow!

I found myself in 7-Eleven waiting for Michele to finish making her coffee when I spied a package of Hostess Glo Balls. Around various holidays, the usual Sno Balls are replaced with seasonal versions. A while ago I got some Lucky Puffs and examined them.
I brought the Glo Balls home and began to investigate them.


The main thing I wanted to see was the Glo Balls actually glowing. The girls and I gathered the necessary test gear and headed into the Cruft Manor Auxilary Laboratory (the bathroom), pulled the shades and began. First we examined the packaging of the Glo Balls. They had that green luminescent look so we aimed the black light at the package.

No glow at all. We were quite disappointed. I removed the wrapper and looked to see if the Glo Balls themselves would glow.

Again, not a bit of glow at all. Our disappointment grew. Zoe accidentally touched the black light to the Glo Ball. We heard a sizzle and then a pop as the black light bulb blew up. Not a huge explosion, but enough to make everyone jump.

Here you can see the glass part of the filament sticking out the side. Who says science does not involve danger?

Of course, I had extra black light bulbs on hand, the testing continued. What? You don’t have spare black lights in the closet? In a final hope for glo-osity, we cut the Glo Balls open and looked to see if the cake or internal “s’cream” filling would glow. As you can see, Hostess let us down yet again.

We turned the lights on in the Laboratory. Here’s the insides of the Glo Balls.
I tried the Glo Balls next and was not suprised to find that they taste exactly like Sno Balls. There is no differentiating factor other than the color. This is upsetting to me, since variety is the spice of life.
I gave the Hostess hotline a call and asked a few questions. You can listen to the recording of my call about Glo Balls (1 MB mp3 file). I still don’t have phone recording down as a direct science, so I had to mess a bit with the volume levels of the call and use an equalizer to remove line noise. Enjoy.

Straight Flush


I drew a straight flush in last night’s game at Brad’s house in a game of Anaconda.
This is my second straight flush at Brad’s game. My first was fun and being there for Rich’s straight flush was good too. For those non-poker players, a striaght flush is an exceedingly hard hand to make and can only be beaten by a Royal Flush. It even beats Four of a Kind.
It was a lucky night for me and I ended up coming home with a little extra cash in my pocket.
Thanks to Mister P. for doing the driving so I could gape at the Burbank Hills fire and doze off on the ride home.

20 Years in 860 characters

In about a month is my 20th high school reunion. Narbonne High 1985, Go Gauchos!
Hard to wrap my head around that.
Part of the reunion is writing a short bio of what you have been doing since high school. You are only given 860 character for your bio.
Here’s what I wrote:

I studied Electrical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York for my Bachelor’s degree. After college I took a job with National TeleConsultants, designing TV facilities in 1989.
In May 1994, Michele Keller and I were married. After the wedding we moved to San Francisco. Fellow Narbonne Alumni Kirill Sheynkman was one of my groomsmen.
I joined Sony and built TV facilities for them overseas. In Singapore, I met some Disney people and ended up taking a job with them in 1995.
We moved back to LA and had our first daughter Zoe in January of ’96. Our second daughter, Mira, was born in July of ’98.
At work, I manage TV & IT technology for Disney Channels and other Disney TV networks globally.
Currently we live in South Pasadena where in my spare time I referee soccer games, play video games, and lose at poker.

It’s not easy to sum up 20 years in 147 words.

Things I am tired of hearing about

Dear Internet,
Please give the following topics a break for a while. I am sick of them.
1) IPods – No more articles about hacking them, listening to them, new models, or sales figures.
2) WiMAX – No more WiMAX testing stories, WiMAX product launches, WiBRO linkage, or business models based on WiMAX.
3) Conspiracy theories – They are good for fictional novels, but in real life no one is smart enough to pull them off.
4) Lastly, please make Ed Adkins and Tom Green kiss and make up. I’ll buy the beers. I’ll even buy pitchers at Hooters to get them to stop.

In the fast lane

Since August when the Hybrids in the Carpool Lane rules went into effect, People have been asking if I gotten my stickers yet.
Well, I slapped them on the Prius last Friday and blissfully cruised in the Carpool Lane all the way home down the 134. It was a great feeling to bypass all that traffic and get home 15 minutes sooner. Driving in the fast lane makes all the difference on my Burbank <-> South Pasadena commute.
I had read that people had complained about the size and shape of the stickers, so I was anxious to see what the big deal was when I got my stickers.


I have to agree, it’s not the prettiest sticker, but it’s not so bad.
As for the overall size, the people complaining are full of crap. Take a look.

If you have trouble seeing the sticker (’cause it’s so small), it’s behind the rear tire.
People will whine about just about anything these days.

MPEG-2

I recently read an article about MPEG-2 in the New York TImes (should not need registration). I sent the author, David Pogue, a note trying to help explain things. He seemd to appreciate it, so I thought I would share it with you all.

Mr. Pogue,
I read your article on MPEG-2 and can empathize with your travails. I
am a professional television engineer and have been dealing with video
format issues for quite a while.
MPEG-2 is not a format that will be gaining in the marketplace, it is on
the decline. MPEG-2 is one of the older video formats in use today. It
was developed in the mid-1990s as a revolutionary new way to digitize
video. The idea was that you could roughly predict the next frame of
video in a sequence. If you could get the sender and the receiver to
predict the same next frame, you have the sender send to the receiver
only the ACTUAL CHANGE from the prediction. This would save a lot of
bandwidth. There had been a older version called MPEG 1, but it didn’t
work so well at the high bitrates that broadcasters use.
The concept worked, the broadcasters said hooray, and began implementing
MPEG 2 systems in professional broadcast, transmission systems like
DirecTV, and DVDs. There were limitations to the format, but since it
was only intended for well-financed professionals to use, no one worried.
The main drawback was all this prediction stuff. It’s fine for playing
back video at normal speed, but it gets quite mind-bending to think
about playing it in reverse or editing it. Trust me in saying it is a
Hard Thing To Do.
To solve this editing problem, an alternate method (sometimes called
DCT) for encoding was used. The method used did not use prediction,
thereby solving some of the problems. It did create new ones though.
To get the same image quality you needed a higher bandwidth. It’s all
about the tradeoffs.
To compare, a DVD uses MPEG-2 at 4-6 Mb/s and a MiniDV player uses a
form of DCT at 25 Mb/s.
(By the way, DCT stands for Discrete Cosine Transform with means little
to anyone without an engineering or math degree. It’s pretty much like
a JPEG image with the lower the resolution, the blockier the picture.)
Then the dot-boom happened with the desire for video over the internet
started driving money into the problem. Lots of money. This money
poured into next-generation forms of encoding and you get the family of
Windows Media, MPEG-4, H.264, etc. All more advanced video encoding
methods that work well as long as you have plenty of processing power to
do the math. Microsoft and Apple are pushing these technologies because
they have the computing power to utilize them and get the benefits of
low bandwidth and high picture quality.
Fast forward to today and you see manufacturers trying get into the home
video market as inexpensively as possible. The MPEG 2 chips are old
(therefore inexpensive) and they utilize less bandwidth than the
comparable DCT type encoding and they don’t require computing power
since the encoding/decoding is done on a chip, not in CPU. Put this
together and you have and inexpensive video camera that make
hard-to-edit video.
The trouble with converting MPEG-2 to another format lies in the fact
that MPEG-2 requires a license to legally use the codec. Imagine that
you are a software maker and you want to be able to convert MPEG-2 to
another format as a feature. To do this, you need to pay the MPEG LA
for a license to do this. Usually it’s a per copy license and believe
me, that adds up. The license cost is the reason you see MPEG-2 as an
additional costs and often why you need special, separate software to
play DVDs on a computer if the MPEG-2 codec is not included with the
native media player software.
There you go, a long unsolicited reply to your article. I hope it
shines a bit of light on the topic.
-Michael