Tsaiberspace

I recently received an Amazon Kindle as a gift from thoughtful family members. The good stuff:

• The display is very nice to read in good light (better than paper, I think).
• The form factor is quite good. One-handed reading is a joy (and easier than with a thick paperback), and very doable in crowded environments (like public transit).
• Battery life is good (up to two weeks of commute-time WiFi-disabled use).
• The Kindle Leather Cover has a very nice feel to it that is superior to a plain paperback.
• Multi-book storage is great. I used to have the problem of finishing a book on my way in to work, leaving myself nothing to read on the way home. The Kindle makes that problem go away.

The bad stuff (and these are really mostly minor):

• The lack of obvious weatherproofing doesn’t leave me with a feeling of confidence. A paperback will easily handle a wait for the train in morning drizzly fog. I’m not so sure the Kindle is up to that task.
• In dim light, I think paper is easier to read (although things are already quite difficult to read at this point).
• Sprint and AT&T don’t really have anything to fear as far as data traffic is concerned. Book-purchase traffic is probably paid for by Amazon. Web browsing on the Kindle is just way too painful. The bandwidth itself is fine, but the display refresh rate is so slow as to be unusable. Kindles will not be replacing iPhones for portable web browsing any time soon. The only interesting terms-of-service-violating hack I can think of would be using the Kindle as some kind of tethering device.
• The slow display also makes page-flipping painful. Occasionally I will want to flip backwards to earlier pages to reread a paragraph or two. With a paperback, that is no problem. With the Kindle, flipping pages is almost painfully slow (1-2s per “page turn”). I really don’t see this as a viable textbook replacement.
• You lose some of the fun of a colorful book cover. It used to be interesting to see what other commuters were reading, but these days, as I see more people using Kindles and iPhones as reading devices, I think all reading commuters appear very homogeneous.
• At some point in time, my grubby hands will leave my white-plastic Kindle smeared with unattractive grubby little prints.

The economics of a Kindle purchase are quite compelling for avid readers of new books (Kindle e-books are typically priced at $9.99 or lower), but they are not as compelling for readers like me who buy used books or who frequent the public library.

The slow display is occasionally annoying in the rare page-flipping sessions, but otherwise, the form factor and multi-book storage easily overcome these minor shortcomings to make the Kindle a real winner.

I am a fan of the Logitech “marble” mice. The latest generation is the Trackman Marble Mouse (preceded by the “Optical Marble Mouse” and the “Marble Mouse”, all of which I’ve used and have loved).

The ergonomics are great:

• The trackball form factor means a fixed footprint. This is important for keyboard tray users, since “footprint space” is more limited.
• The “marble” design means manipulation with many fingers or the whole hand, and clicking with a more natural “grasping” motion with the biggest, strongest finger: the thumb. This is better than other so-called trackballs with smaller balls designed to be manipulated with just the thumb or one finger (and with buttons that require the traditional clicking motion).
• The symmetric design means rightie or lefty use. “Lefty” use is especially important for users of traditional keyboards with numeric keypads to the right.
• The smaller buttons are programmable. I program them as “PgUp” and “PgDn” keys, which provides equivalent functionality to, and faster use than, the small “scroll wheel” buttons found on many mice (which are also very ergonomically bad).

The only bad thing about these trackball mice is that they are bad for gaming (which I no longer do).

I had a problem with mine a few days ago (plugged into a MacBookPro) where the mouse cursor would just freeze at seemingly random times, with recovery requiring an unplug/replug of the mouse, or sometimes even a reboot of the whole computer.

With a coworker, we quickly narrowed the problem down to the mouse itself (we swapped mice and the problem moved with the mouse). Furthermore, the coworker discovered that recovery was much more conveniently achievable by simply popping out the “marble” and putting it back in.

This was almost acceptable, but I went ahead and called Logitech Phone Support to see about getting a replacement, just to see what would happen. The support representative told me he hadn’t heard of my problem before, but he gave me some “device reset” instructions:

1. Unplug the mouse from the computer.
2. Hold down both buttons for 90 seconds.
3. Release both buttons.
4. Plug the mouse back into the computer.

Voila! I haven’t had any more mysterious problem since! The tech support experience was great:

• After navigating a phone tree to enter my mouse model and operating system, I was speaking to a representative within 15 seconds.
• I did not get the standard script of rebooting the computer, unplugging/replugging the mouse, etc.

My only gripe is that the device-reset instructions should be available on the product support page; it would have saved all of us a phone call.

This book fails to live up to the gun-porn action suggested by the two balaclava-clad machine-gun-toting troopers on the yellow-on-red book cover. As one might guess from the cover, a hostage is taken, and violence ensues. I won’t go into the “plot” because this book is over three years old (2006); “plot” summaries can be easily found elsewhere on the web.

The viewer of this cover might reasonably expect to read lots of text like, oh I don’t know,

The three 9mm rounds fired in rapid succession lifted his body upwards and backwards into the wall; he fell and settled, sitting, like a life-sized Kevlar-wearing rag doll.

(Yes, I wrote that myself, on the spot.)

The failed promise is that out of 750 pages, the reader (me, with the protagonist) encounters only three pages’ worth of shots fired in anger, none fired by the protagonist, and none fired at the protagonist.

My (other) gripes about this book:

• The Hostage, at 750 pages, is too inconveniently unwieldy to carry in my commuter bag for my ride to work.
• The garish primary yellow-on-red color scheme draws attention to me. But let’s just say that the ladies don’t walk up to me asking what I’m reading.

After finally completing this book, I did some research and found that Griffin’s style is to highlight the behind-the-scenes bureaucratic and logistical gymnastics that must precede the expected Kevlar-wearing-rag-doll-yielding operations. Instead of gun-porn, we get pages and pages of West Wing-style dialogue and bureaucratic shenanigans, which people apparently pay good money to read.

We are excited to announce the birth of Ethan! Follow him at his blog:
http://ethan.tsaiberspace.net/

Cholesterol free, and no low in saturated fat.

Ingredients:

• One ripe avocado (I prefer to err on the side of almost-ripe rather than over-ripe).
• Extra virgin olive oil.
• Fresh sea salt.
• Ground/powdered chili pepper.
• Other spices to taste (paprika, etc.).

Preparation:

• Cut avocado in half.
• Scoop out of rind, cut into thick slices (either latitudinally or longitudinally is fine), place on plate.
• Slightly separate the slices from each other. (The slices will inconveniently stick to each other; there is no need to go overboard with this, it is for the next step.)
• Drizzle olive oil over the avocado slices.
• Add salt, pepper, and spices to taste.

Eat with fork.

If the avocado turns out to be too ripe for fork slices, it can also be mashed like guacamole, spiced, and spread on toast.

One-liners like that draw me into a movie.

Unfortunately, neither the dialogue nor the Frank Miller styling could save this movie. The plot was simple yet somehow confusing. The action was ho-hum. And the styling managed to look like a Frank Miller copycat even though it was the real deal.

I’ve already paid the sunk cost of sitting through the previous two attempts to bring Frank Castle to the big screen. To recap:

• Dolph Lundgren, 1989. The lack of dialogue and acting can be forgiven (come on, this is Dolph, and this is The Punisher). The lack of the skull T-shirt can not.
• Thomas Jane, 2004. Too much dialogue and “acting”. The movie also pretty much just rips off the character name and does not follow much of the story, leaving this as a standard “man pursuing revenge” movie.

Ray Stevenson does a much better job with the character. The script is truer to the comics. The movie is distilled to an episode of the story of The Punisher; what little backstory references are made actually intrude on the movie rather than enhance it. This will alienate people unfamiliar with The Punisher, but helps those that already are.

My only complaint is that the movie’s violence is simply gratuitous, rather than serving as a vehicle for “action”.

The Cliff’s Notes: Moderate Boredom

Back in the day, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the video trailers for the namesake game Max Payne.

What made Max Payne stand out in a video-game market already extremely crowded with first-person shooters was a combination of John Woo-style cinematics combined with the concept of “Bullet Time“. I expected both the visuals and Bullet Time to be the true stars of the movie, but unfortunately these elements are not as integral to the movie as they are to the game.

After further research into the game, it appears that a plot was also not that integral to the game, and this unfortunately was faithfully carried over into the movie, making this yet another mediocre video-game-turned-movie.

Finally, another walking commute, about 10 minutes. The scenery isn’t as great as before, but the weather is nicer. Mostly it’s just views of the city:

One nice thing about the new digs is that the first and last photos above are views from our balcony at the beginning and end of the day. You can just make out AT&T Park just to the right of the Bay Bridge.

Jason Statham firmly cements himself into his standard role of guy-with-weird-accent-who-drives-cars:

Watching the movie was like watching a video game (Twisted Metal: Black, maybe), except that the acting was worse. In short, a great time to be had by all who watch this movie.