Funny

You know what’s funny?
Getting new business cards a month ago, handing them out to many people, and being told today that the email address is wrong.
And not just wrong as in typo/misspelling, wrong in as another person’s address all together.
Poor Mr. P has been getting my emails and having no idea why.

Change comes

Today is a big day in the Pusateri household. Michele and I have discussed this quite a bit and come to the decision for me to leave the world of television and move into working full time on my real passion, Datafloss.


You gotta do what you love, and I love this new opportunity.
Some may say I’m crazy to give up the executive pay, first class travel, and a corner office, but they simple don’t know the world-changing and paradigm-shifting power of Datafloss.
Life will be different for the family as we enter ‘start-up mode’ and I finish up the first round of financing that’s been going on in the background for a couple months now.
Cruftbox will remain as my private voice on the net, but look for my new professional voice at Datafloss!

PixToPix

Most mobile phone carriers offer camera phones as one of the new features to induce people to upgrade and commit to even longer contracts. Obviously camera phones have great appeal to many people for a variety of uses. From a mobile phone, one can send these images off to email addresses and other mobile phones via the MMS feature. MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service, which is a fancy way of saying a way to send images, sounds, and text.
While some phones can now handle true email, almost every cameraphone has MMS capability built-in. On paper this sounds great, using MMS to send photos from your phone to the phones of your friends and family. Unfortunately this is not the case.
MMS works well within a carrier, so I can send MMS messages with photos to other T-Mobile users (like my wife 🙂 ), hell we can even record audio clips into the phone and send them along with the photo for a fully multimedia message. It’s funny and useful. More than once I’ve shopping and sent a picture to my wife for the go ahead on a purchase. We envision our daughters doing the same thing in the future as they get older.
Imagine this conversation:
Me: Hey Zoe, what’s up?
Zoe: I’m just hanging with Emily.
Me: Oh really, where at?
Zoe: Um, err, at the library, yeah, we’re at the library.
Me: Really, sure you’re not at the mall drooling over boys?
Zoe: Dad!
Me: Well if you are at the library send me a picture of some books.
Zoe: Dad!?1!! You don’t trust me?
Me: Humor your dear old father…
Zoe: [a photo of Zoe giving the finger arrives]
In another spectacular failure of American telecom policy, almost no major wireless carrier allows MMS traffic from outside their network. The glaring example of the ‘marketplace deciding’ technology issues make the American mobile phone scene dead last in the industrial world.
Here’s how US MMS policies don’t work. My phone is on T-Mobile. I want to send a camphone picture to my brother who has a Verizon phone. If I send him an MMS message of a photo, Verizon intentionally strips the photo from the message before relaying it to him. I have the same problem sending MMS messages to every other wireless carrier.
The carriers will tell you send the MMS messages to an email address that is invariably something like [yourphonenumer]@[yourwirelesscarrier].com. I have tested this extensively and it does not work from phone to phone. The carriers think that if they erect these information blockades, they will force you to get your friends and family to switch to the same carrier. Just like their position on number portability, they are wrong. If they opened MMS capability, it would be an advantage to use them instead of other carriers that block the MMS messages.
Have no fear; help has arrived in the form of PixToPix.com. The kind people at PixToPix.com offer a free service to serve as a middleman for cameraphone pictures. If you sign up with PixToPix and give then the vital info about your phone, you get a [yourusername]@pixtopix.com email address. When you give that email address to your friends and family, they can send MMS messages from their phones to that address and PixToPix will convert and relay them to your phone. The service even works with emailing images from a computer directly without using a phone.
I’ve tested it and it works well. If you send a MMS picture to cruftbox@pixtopix.com, it will pop up on my mobile phone. Now my brother and I can exchange photos even though T-Mobile and Verizon don’t want us to. 🙂
The system even addresses privacy issues. If somehow people start sending photos I don’t like, I can drop my current Pixtopix address and get another. Much better than having to change your phone number.
Looking toward the future, imagine an interface with Flickr or Textamerica where you could subscribe to pool image feeds and have them sent to your phone. Or parsing the Yahoo News Top Photos RSS feed and getting a daily dump of interesting photos. Or getting a regular photo sent to you from a nannycam. The possibilities go on and on.
Give it a try, I would bet that a high percentage of loyal Cruft readers have camera phones.
The service works for most major US and Canadian wireless carriers, but if you have one of the remaining small local ones, you may be out of luck.

Three more books

Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman
Ever since I read American Gods, I’ve been a fan of Neil Gaiman. Michele bought and read this book before I did and said it was great. She liked it so much that she tracked down the DVDs of the BBC production of the book and watched that as well.
Needless to say, it moved to the top of my reading stack.
The story takes place in a Gaimanesque world where the world is oblivious to the magic world that surrounds and permeates it. After living a normal life, our protagonist, Richard Mayhew finds himself slid out of his reality and into the Underground.
His adventures take place in the world that exists in the under London. Below is a fantastic place of history, magic, and the supernatural where the base currency is one of ‘favors’. Each chapter gives glimpses of the world and then pushes you forward leaving you craving more about what is hinted at. Enjoyably, each new chapter brings more interesting things to ponder.
Like American Gods, the only problem with the book is that it ends. As you finish the book, you want more, much more about the world that Gaiman describes. The story touches on other places and people that you want to know more about.
Supposedly the upcoming book, Anansi Boys, is similar in delving into Gaiman’s vision of the supernatural. I look forward to it with baited breath.
The Merchants of Souls – John Barnes
This is that latest book in the Thousand Cultures/Giraut series that Barnes has created. In this series, humanity is mending itself back together after splitting to hundreds of planets with thousands of cultures. The idea being that planets were colonized based on specific cultures to allow harmony as they developed. Imagine cultures devoted to such varied ideals as Tamil Poetry, Occitan Chivalry, Calvinism, a pure military society, and even a pure hedonistic society. The invention of the ‘springer’ and instantaneous transportation device that can span the light years arrives to weave the culture back together in some fashion. Chaos ensues.
This book takes place mainly on Earth and involves the challenge of the OSP (the good guys) to face down the billions of Earth people living in virtual reality their whole lives. The bad guys want to use stored copies of people’s consciousness as virtual playthings fort their virtual lives. The OSP must stop this.
Barnes touches on several interesting ideas in a future world when machines do the work and all that is left for people to do is think and create. He touched on these ideas in the other novels, but examines then a little more deeply in this book.
Still, it’s science fiction and the story involves murder and misdirection in a hard sci-fi world. Barnes is good in this aspect, with consistency and refusing to solve the issues with miraculous invention in the nick of time. His inventions and culture are fully realized and you can understand the motivations of those involved event though it takes place in the imaginary future.
I enjoyed the book, but it’s for people that have read the first two books, A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass. I’m sure you can find the first book for sale used for only a few dollars.
Idlewild – Nick Sagan
Last week when I was heading out to Utah, I asked Michele for a book to read and she handed me Idlewild. She said was good but not great. After finishing it I have to agree.
The story is a mashup of the Matrix, Stephen King’s The Stand, and a whodunit. Our protagonist wakes up with amnesia and we learn along with him about his world. A good literary technique, but the author won’t get away with using it again.
Central to the book is the concept of IVR, a form of Matrix-like virtual reality where much of the story takes place. Perhaps the Matrix has ruined the concept of virtual reality for sci-fi writers in the near term, since a lot of the ideas felt lifted, but probably weren’t.
I enjoyed the book and Sagan puts in enough red herrings and false leads that I was unable to deduce what was really going on until I read it. Most things follow but in the last couple chapters, things seem rushed with travel over distance happening way too fast and the death of a character happening in an almost unexplained way. I’d bet there are a couple more chapters that the author cut that would have made the story a little smoother at the end.
The book is good enough that I am looking forward to the follow-up, Edenborn.

Cabling

I don’t often talk about my work here on Cruft. While I find professional television and computer technology a fascinating career, many are more interested in my adventures in my kitchen instead.
Here’s a little tidbit to show you how my somewhat irreverant style surfaces in my professional life.
One of the trade magazines I read is TV Technology, a fairly good source for news and opinions. My favorite column is by The Masked Engineer, a TV engineer that hides behind a psuedonym while he/she writes about the FCC, industry players, and other TV trends in a humorous way.
In a column last year, The Masked Engineer wrote about cabling in facility. His/her viewpoint was so far out of whack with reality that I was forced to reply. I sent in my rebuttal soon after and was suprised to find it in the current issue.
(Loyal Cruft readers might recognize the use of photos and humor to make my points)


Of course, the Masked Engineer and Belden are full of crap in their idea that reasonable tie-wraps can hurt the signal quality. Belden is the same company that once advocated running SDI video over Cat 5 cable. If anything would be bad for signal quality it woud be running CCIR 601 over unshielded cable designed for ethernet.
We’ve had a fully SDI plant for ten years now, with tie wraps, and without any troubles with cabling. By far our biggest signal troubles are with RS-232/422 cabling long lengths and patchbay jack failure, neither of which have anything to do with tie wraps.
Perhaps we’ll have an Indiana Jones style showdown at NAB…

More change to LA radio

This may be old news, but it looks like Arrow 93.1 ‘The Best Classic Rock’ is now gone, replaced with 93.1 Jack FM ‘Playing What We Want’.
More change to the LA radio scene is probably a good thing, but alas it is not a Top 40 station like Kiss-FM going away.
I’m listening now to it and it sounds like a mild rock station with 70s & 80s stuff.
There a few googleable articles on the Jack FM format here and here that shine some light on what to expect.
Taking a look at Yes.net will give up the details.
This morning, they’ve played:
SUPERTRAMP – Goodbye Stranger
MARCY PLAYGROUND – Sex And Candy
THE STEVE MILLER BAND – Abracadabra
WAR – Why Can’t We Be Friends?
BON JOVI – You Give Love A Bad Name
LONDONBEAT – I’ve Been Thinking About You
STYX – Too Much Time On My Hands
BONNIE TYLER – It’s A Heartache
DEF LEPPARD – Animal
THE BEATLES – Get Back
THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS – Heartbreak Beat
JOURNEY – Any Way You Want It
SHAWN MULLINS – Lullaby
TALKING HEADS – Once In A Lifetime
CARL DOUGLAS – Kung Fu Fighting
ZZ TOP – Legs
Well, that is some playlist. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether it is good or bad.

What to do at a party in Austin

The traditional end to SxSW Interactive was a party at Bruce Sterling’s house on Tuesday night. With Bruce living in Pasadena for a year, this presented a problem in 2005. Thanks to the marvels of corporate sponsorship, the party was still held at the American Legion Hall.
One of the sponsors was Wired magazine. On every table were tons of little postcards about their Nextfest conference. Martin made a video about what I did with the cards.
Check out Martin’s post and watch the House of Cards.