The Ottermanempire.com

This is to the tech crowd, the geeks e.g the people that should know better.

Nearly
everything I’m seeing from the Pax08 concert has such poor sound /
video that it’s a complete waste of time and energy yet this crap is
getting 4 and 5 stars. Here’s where it bugs me. The crappy sound
and video in a sane world would be “mediated” by the crowd and given
an appropriate rating but it seems that it’s totally broken in the
cases of geek centric clips. Self recognition doesn’t = ****/*****
stars dumb ******/*******

You are today’s equivalent of the
idiots in sports stadiums with their GN14 flashes trying to reach out
all the way to center field. Either drop the money on a reasonable
recorder or just leave it in your pocket.

Nice scenery , customer service taught by Klingons. The drinks where really nicely thought out, kicked like an arcturian megadonkey and were,surprisingly, priced ,fairly. Shame the bar has to go as it was one of the better “imagineering” that’s functional E.g it looks more real than many things in Vegas that try to emulate the real world.

quarks vegas,
originally uploaded by haltse.

Oh damn it sucks that this place is closing . They mix some strong ass drinks..

Nice decor.

I’m going to start posting items from my work blog onto this one since I get more exposure here.

A couple of items appeared on my  reader in close proximity that  suggested that iPhone isn’t just a neat phone but it’s also the future of handheld gaming and the death of terrestrial radio.

It’s also the death of common sense least for  the current incarnation of the iPhone. Which network is going to have the ability to support that many real times streams?  If you don’t have immediacy it’s not radio.  Sure you can  DL the playlist  1st over night then just add in the  hosts  locally  may work, but  why bother  what are we trying to achieve here?   Replication of radio? Why if it’s so bad, would we want to?

Apples  target… 10 million  phones.

Yep that kills radio’s    more than 1 unit per person.   > 300 million.
that kills  Nintendo’s ( just one  companies) 20 million  DS base.

It doesn’t even kill XM/ Sirius  merge  with  17.3 million paying users.  It’s a bit late to walk by the  bleeding corpse of radio  and get your friend to take a picture of you standing with your foot on its chest.  That’s the perception of radio anyway.   Sadly it doesn’t jibe with these results.

Radio reaches more than 235 million listeners over the course of the week according to the RADAR 97 June 2008 Radio Listening Estimates. (link)

20 times more people than  Apple expect to sell phones to. Radio  Two controls,  no computer needed to keep it in sync  and oh battery life can be in weeks/ month range.

As to handheld gaming?  Would you  pay  $70 a month for your kid to play games on it?  Beggars belief really that it’s being seriously considered as a question. 

Can we start using the iPhone to do excellent iPhone  related things rather than trying to recreate the old world?

One of the original cast  for Now never funny, er Never not funny ( buy  season 1 disk it’s really good  )started a podcast sixteen episodes back.   I forgot to mention it to people.    If you don’t like casual vulgarity , talk of violence towards those that deserve it .

If things like

“I’d stick my dick in a fence just to get it away from Lucy “ 

re Lucille Ball   in  a made  up piece re “the joker”" Cesare Romero  trying to hit on Desi.  His mind doesn’t just wander, it books cruises and  circumnavigates the Earth. 

The show iss deeper than this of course but  I’m  trying to make the point that  if you believe that truth can only  be found in civil company with no naughty words then  please avoid this and go back to your Marmaduke comic collection

Mike Schmidt Comedy - Podcast

We’ve talked about it,  threatened it  and I’ve been living with the peer embarrassment of assisting many people get their podcasts up and running  yet not having a regular outlet of my own.

The good news is Creddy is now interested in following through with a  2-3 times a week < 20  min show  “Reivers of reality”  which is not a misspelling and a deliberately  arcane choice.   Reivers are  from the area of the Scottish borders from which I originate and are raiders, pirates, rustlers and a few other   less savory behaviors which I assure you we don’t partake in.    Why now?     Basically there’s not enough exposure for our world view. Even in  groups that are meant to  have a reality  based outlook the ability to  go of gods in the  form of the State and the man upstairs seems to be sorely lacking.     Oh and we need friends too as well as stocking up on the enemies list. 

So expect a few shaky weeks until we get used to this …

Here is an interesting problem with podcasting, and many other forms of social media.  One might almost call it a beggar’s banquet when you consider that we’re a very large party with millions of people who’ve all chipped in their contributions yet somehow the waiters are not getting a tip.Even worse than that the bill is short.

Bandwidth is “expensive” roughly $90 a terabyte give or take a few bucks depending on how large a user of it that you are .There aren’t many services that for a nominal fee will allow you to consume “infinite” resources hedged against the vast majority off their users using a minimal amount but that’s where the net has ended up ( at least the marketing of it has done so)

Ergo it should be obvious that the vast majority are subsidizing the top of the pyramid yet by an “amazing”  coincidence those are the ones  agitating for such noble and egalitarian causes such as net neutrality you know that’s were the evil corporations limit access based on the idea that if they do not recuperate the cost of providing the service then that service and indeed the company will no longer exist.

Which is a victory for whom exactly?

Nearly every business has already built in the costs associated with the percentage of bad customers, internal theft and things that just go wrong but somehow that’s meant to fall to the whims of people that are basically saying give me a free  pass or we won’t give you business ( I’d agree to that)   sadly they are saying give us a free pass or we’ll force you to do so… lovely.

I have never been a fan of the term net neutrality and feel that it’s all too often used to obfuscate the issues that occur at carrier or network level where the network owners prevent rival services from even connecting or being allowed to exist against the terms and conditions that they wish to sell their access on

Been a long run.  My favorite  entertainment podcast  “Never not funny” has  had a change in lineup which  has  , and I know it’s  unfair maybe to judge the first show after the affair as being representative of where it’s going , eviscerated the joy the show held for me.  Oddly enough the dynamic I enjoyed the most  that from the dearly departed Mike Schmidt  and Jimmy Pardo  whose ironic  bumper sticker now seems sadly prescient. I needed the real world  “crunchiness”  of Mike  juxtaposed against the   Hollywood “phony”   with a straight man  thrown in to really  show how good those two were.. Sigh…   

I think a lesson  from Episode 59 should be   in the immortal ( not yet anyway) words of Stephen Lynch “I’d never say cunt to an audience”

Still I recommend  you buy the CD compiled from the first 20 shows /it rocks.

Ok  let me first dispense with the maladies.  After a shot at the Dr’s and a  pill ( singulair) and a nose spray  to free up my nose I woke up SORE the day after to which I attributed to Erin Sadly that wasn’t the case and over the next few days  nearly every muscle when  resistance is applied to it hurts.  Couldn’t open dishwasher,  get in a couple  of doors in the house  lift  coffee pot without both hands etc.. Less than happy.. Thankfully I am getting my grip back. 

Losing my grip.  Nearly did that last night.   I was helping out a friend that has a book coming out   record a podcast / vidcast. So I thought . The c0-author brought along a camera person that has no camera, no back up and  eschewed my  rather much better 3ccdDV  to shoot on D8, I shit you  not. ( i’ve nothing against d8 other than I don’t have a fucking deck to import it with)   Using onboard sound. That was enough fun  but NO   he had a vision!   Handheld camera for the hour, compressors HATE hand held , did I mention my cam as OIS?, and then ran out of the only tape.  

Sometimes you know the most interesting thing is the subject matter and not those creating it :)    For my part I mic’ed up the two people with lavalier mics and  used the Zoom h4 to record and what a nice job it did too. The Zoom is a pain in the ass in the field , I had everything set up , then boom battery warning came on,  replaced those but all the settings had defaulted.Anyway a separate article on that follows. Hands are once again tired.

 Ok so it may be a departure to comment on this from work ( Yes I actually crossposted this for a change) but when it directly wanders into the area I have a great deal of interesting in  Vlogging and Social media  the asinine statements by the talking heads ( they may ask  themselves  how did we get here? )  to camera commenting on the generation and presentation of  media  was some of the most unintentionally hilarious TV I have seen in a long time.   Questions like,  who worked the camera   were asked even though   it’s obvious that  a shelf, a tripod and  wait a minute the clue that he leans to the camera to stop recording MAY just indicate what’s going on.  Don’t even get me started on what they are getting wrong re firearms and the surrounding laws. 

Ok leaving MSM and wandering back to the MSB ( main stream blogosphere) I’ve seen a few entries, best summed up by this one, that  such a link is even considered between a technology and this event seems to be clutching at straws or

I said we hadn’t foreseen this use of the technology because, as utopians, we tend to look for the good stuff. I liked to think I had a balanced view, and could see where bloggers weren’t doing good, but I hadn’t seriously considered our tools used to further such a bad cause. 

What’s next? Isn’t it obvious — the latest and greatest stuff, Ustream, Twitter and mass murder. When you see a suicide bomber with a camera strapped to his or her head, you’ll know that the bad has caught up with the good.  

Source: Cho-TV, day 2 (Scripting News)

I can’t think that this would ever be a reasonable way to think and live your life trying to work out .  What cause is being advanced here that   couldn’t be leveled at the station  covering Oswald’s murder by Jack Ruby?  Maybe Zapruder was a nascent vlogger ?   Could  bic  and moleskine  wouldn’t be complicit in had  he been more into  good penmanship?  Were the murderers of Daniel Pearl vlogging?   Hopefully my argument ad absurdum is bugging you as much as it did for me to type it.

 I don’t buy this red herring  which is  reflected in my title   which ,I hope ,shows that   way too many groups are taking the foreground events and contextualizing , ne compositing it,  to fit  their own interests, agendas or regular subject matter. ( like I’m doing )  

To date  it doesn’t appear that  the murderer posted it to the myriad of  video sites,  blogs, a personal webpage of did anything other than use OLD methods  ( relatively in the case of Quicktime)   to MAIL  material.  Gee   let’s go after Franklin now for touting the post office not knowing the evil it could be used for….   His methods were akin to a PR agency which  may tell Bill Hicks fans more than they need to know

Ze Frank and THE Frank  totally priceless.  GALACTICAST presents The Ducky Horror Picture Show

Just one of the many well executed parodies from the duo that comprise Galacticast.     This is yet another way not paying for cable has led to some fun new material which unfettered by  focus group, fcc, and budget( you sometimes get way more creative  without an fx budget )  is consistently funny  to the point that SNL  and Mad TV  should teleport themselves into the nearest star out of embarrassment. 
 

In , there’s hope for humanity for recognising a good thing dept,   Goodnight Burbank   the  ruthless self promoters that gave me so many postcards at the podcast expo that I wallpapered the spare room with them  have “graduated” to  an HBO pilot.  While I’m still awaiting them to  “Drop the Dead Donkey”  a  reference to a    obscure UK tv show ( for Americans anyway)  I can’t find a clip on You Tube, the   “breaking news”  being the broken news staff has so far made it to a must watch part of my cable tv replacement …Oh crap Hbo’s on cable isn’t it.. 

Just go check them out.

NewTeeVee » G’night Burbank Scores HBO Online Pilot

Or as they have named it SModcast.  Smith/Mosier 

It’s over here, it’s free, and doesn’t have dumb British people asking him questions…

Finally, at long last, after a difficult and complicated pregnancy  Quick Recorder was brought into the world and is a pretty way of creating the basic building block of podcast.  More on the work blog but for now I have some housekeeping.
Dobhie the cute.  New video  is up at Podcast.john-paxton.com and has him wandering around a park on a happier day. Today is not happy he’s got a double ear infection, more time of work for  Erin :(  I just couldn’t leave today which is  horrible feeling:(    

Maybe I’m just looking for it but representations of torture seem to be increasing within the entertainment sphere as a  handy little plot device, not happy about it.

Today’s meal at Earl’s wasn’t exactly torture but  on three occasions now I have had a dish in transition. Their curry has gone from vindaloo to , are you sure this isn’t just isn’t a sauce from the store?  Today’s attempt was on par with Pataks sauces, I like those but maybe  restaurants should aim a little higher.  I really used to like this place but  it’s sad to see a slide so completely into the mediocre.  Previously the people I’ve been with have on the whole experienced one  meal failure per  4-6 people.  Scottsdale triangle. …

A rant is coming soon.  Seemingly Janet  the governer is into speed cameras for reasons that ring hollow on anything other than revenue  generation. In short  whenever somone refers to law enforcer  rather than peace officer I thin you really get which side of the state their bread’s buttered on. 

My Me 2.0 post

No rush  the I phone is coming out in the summer which is a cruel and heartless trick to play on the Q using public. Apple , though I have not seen anything other than the site (I’ll watch the keynote at home later in QT)  but the thought that’s made “no thought just do it”  an apparent reality is gratifying. I’ve not been having that great a day with technology  as it is.  

So the rumored Apple phone and Widescreen iPod just happen to be in the same body, add in a fully featured browser a top OSX and what we have here is technolust writ large. ( so much so I am not even going to indulge in carrier bashing)

K this phone has a glass cockpit , it’s just touchy touchy  and if Smith had dialed for help , say from a scriptwriter, in I Robot this iPhone would not have looked out of place.   They’ve taken one of the oldest actions  flipping through a rolodex or your record collection and brought it into gestures that  look natural.    The phone’s  “aware” of it’s orientation and function and changes the display accordingly, disables features you shouldn’t hit when on a call, moves to landscape mode at the same time you tilt it 

Whoopee a camera.. I’m a real downer on these since the kind of results you can get out of the space a lens has to go in  invariably sucks. I have a really neat Sony with Zeiss optics that you can see chromatic aberration on and it’s a GOOD dedicated camera of it’s kind costing more than the iPhone so  please just stop with the cameras  it’s the  “new digital clock on a smaller item” that seemed to sum up Japanese innovation in the 70’s

Connections?  Frankly I don’t care about the phone section at all. While the  iPhone uses quad-band GSM and  Cingular’s EDGE network, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0  leave enough options to make this useful around the home  as a player, vid and organizer if someone can hack skype into it I am so there.

Storage, OMG  a mobile device that doesn’t come hobbled  with 64mb or 128mb  but a reasonable 4 or 8gb. Given Apple’s penchant for doubling the size of these in the first few iterations I’m not too concerned.

As for iTV  I need a raise, I need some kind of plan where pre tax  Apple purchases can be taken of my salary.. like a 401k  but maybe a 1024Mb?

What’s even cooler is Erin   was suitably geeked and cooing in all the right places : I had no sleep,   blocked head, unblocked bottom and  I need some sanity nap

The kid is happier today but sadly I was in too late to really benefit since he was heading to beddy weds as I was heading for food. He came back from daycare with one more bruise than he left with and no explanation.

If you wear a cross does that mean you wish to crucify people?

must do

wearing a gun shirt means you wish to shoot people.

I’ve started , ha testing, still the pissed otter cast it’s mainly an excercise in getting used to talking to myself but there’s some funny parts in it ( I’m biased ok)

Uncle Al’s thought for the day, hey it’s now a book this I may have to order The Slaves Shall Serve: Meditations on Liberty..

Night all.