The Brunch Table

VIA Rail, Canada’s national passenger railroad, is going to be providing wireless internet access to business class passengers on its Toronto-Montreal runs as a pilot project. If Amtrak did that on the eastern corridor, I’d actually have a reason to pay the business class premium on my frequent rail trips. Of course, given that Anu ended up in a business class car without electrical outlets on a recent trip, it might be a stretch for Amtrak.

It’s worth mentioning that Amtrak did have a promotion last year that offered bolted-down iPaqs that could surf the web over a CDPD connection. However, there’s a big difference between doing some random web surfing while you’re having a snack in the cafe car, and being able to do net-related work on your own laptop at your seat. (That link also has a nifty story about kindhearted Mac users bridging Ricochet to WiFi on commuter trains in California.)

I’ve stumbled across an impressive number of open wireless nodes along the tracks, though the train is generally traveling too fast for them to be useful. For now, I’m stuck with a bit of browsing on the HipTop here and there. I wonder if I could get a usable laptop connection with one of those new bluetooth phones at 115 miles per hour…

How come Objectivists make so much free software?

When I first heard the news of our latest victory, I was listening to the Chicago soundtrack:

He had strength and she had none. And yet we both reached for the gun Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes we both Oh yes we both…

It’s awful cynical of me, but it took maybe a minute or two for me to stop laughing.

I won’t believe they’re really dead till I see it on the Iraqometer.

While most of the accusations in the report are still under investigation, the report said a handful had been substantiated, including those against a federal prison doctor who was reprimanded after reportedly telling an inmate–

Hold on a sec. What’s so frightening about this next bit is, it sounds like the doctor just says this offhand. Like, he’s quietly scribbling some notes on his clipboard, and then he looks up:

–after reportedly telling an inmate during a physical examination that “if I was in charge, I would execute every one of you” because of “the crimes you all did.”

If you’ve ever been interested in the MAX visual programming environment (aka “another interesting strategy for teaching programming to artist types”)…well, I just found out that the original creator, Miller Puckette, has been encouraging the development of free MAX clones for some time now, under the name PD.

At this point, PD has even evolved free equivalents for MAX’s add-on packages, MSP (for audio) and Jitter (for video)…PD’s versions are called IEM and GEM, respectively. The only problem is, all the different bits of PD are split up and scattered across the web, and some of them you have to compile yourself…which kinda defeats the purpose of teaching programming to artist types, as we don’t tend to start out with compilers.

Long story short–finally, here’s a complete Windows distribution of PD 0.36. We have Hans-Cristophe Steiner to thank for it. To me, PD feels a bit clunkier than MAX, but I haven’t got a Macintosh, nor $450 to spare, so this’ll be great to start practicing with….

I have a fair amount of respect for Walter Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal’s personal technology reviewer. He tends to pay close attention to the basic sensibility and usability of a device, rather than being blinded by the bullet points. Yesterday’s review of the new Fossil Palm watch is a great example–he confirms that the PDA aspect of it is dorky and impractical, but is intrigued by its incidental ability to dynamically change the virtual “watch face”.

Swatch really pioneered the concept of the wristwatch as a downmarket fashion accessory that you could swap to fit your mood and outfit. (I’ve heard that in the interests of keeping their designs interesting and fashionable, they have a voracious appetite for fresh young designers, which they dismiss after bleeding them dry for 6 months or so.) As Mossberg points out, this is the true mass-market appeal of the high-res digital watch–in theory, you could choose from a near-infinite number of interesting face designs, and switch to a different one in a moment’s change of heart. Personally, I’d love to use it to simulate some older, baroque timekeeping designs, like Chinese water clocks, the lion fountain from the Alhambra, or some of the experimental 24-hour designs that people tried before they standardized on the modern 12-hour face.

I learned a new film term today. Spatial incoherence is what happens when editing “breaks,” and you lose track of where Sean Connery is relative to the man he’s shooting at.

I’ve been waiting for a compilation of Chris Cunningham‘s eye-popping videos for far too long, and it looks like it’s finally in the cards for this fall. Along with the Cunningham collection, Palm Pictures is also releasing discs for Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. I suspect I’ll be picking up all three.

Boing Boing often has interesting guestbar bloggers, but I’ve been particularly delighted by Marc Laidlaw’s recent tenure there. When he was first announced, I thought his name sounded familiar, and it was–he’s the writer for Half-Life, as well as the author of The Third Force, a novel which was much better than the game it was based on.

So far, he’s name-checked PaRappa, betrayed his obsession with Shoggoth and Daguerreotypes, and pointed me to a bunch of great sci-fi, like George Saunders.

I had actually read and enjoyed Jon before, but one of Marc’s entries pointed me to Sea Oak and My Flamboyant Grandson as well. Saunders’s dystopic hyper-suburban tales, delivered in a rambling, valley-girlish voice, are at the same time funny, horrifying, and touching.

A couple weeks ago, I saw Tommy Pallotta, the producer of Waking Life, give a talk on his new machinima projects. Along the way, he explained what Richard Linklater does to get the eerily natural-sounding stream-of-consciousness conversations in some of his films…when Linklater’s auditioning actors, he has them all give an interview on a subject related to their character–say, physics. Then, once he’s picked the actor he’ll use, he “retro-scripts” that conversation into the actual screenplay, which the actor then performs in the film.

I’m staying with my uncle for a few days…he lives in a suburb of Philly. I’ve been talking with him about problem of chains and their drain on local tax dollars…he says that big-box retailers often buy the land their stores sit on, and then lease it to the local franchisee. Then, if the municipality tries to regulate them to boost local businesses or get more tax out of them, the big-box corporation threatens to sue under something called “takings law“–an old English law principle that says property owners can do what they like on their own land.

He also says that, on paper, a chain looks like a better tax revenue source than a local business, because they appear to have computerized, standardized systems for reporting payroll, profit, and so on. Naiive local politicians sometimes think that means more trustworthiness than a local outfit that works with cash and paper books, and they don’t realize that a national or transnational can easily enron their taxable local profit away.

His own town, he says, has pretty much given up trying to tax chains; their books keep breaking even–convenient, since profit is taxable and the IRS automatically audits a business that loses money seven years in a row. So half of the town government’s budget comes from income tax, which hurts poor people most.