Now that comments are working, let me ask a question. Part of Irresponsible Holiday Spending Spree ’07 was the purchase, by Charles and myself, of an HDTV. It’s backordered from Fry’s at the moment, but I’m assured by many Amazon commenters that it’ll be great. When Sunday school classes ponder the question “Could God make a TV so big that He couldn’t watch it?”, this is the set they use to illustrate the point (Answer: “We can never know. But lo! Surely He would have delivered unto us these three HDMI inputs, for He is just and good.”).

So we’ve got a lot of new pixels, or will have them in short order. We don’t have enough signal to keep them occupied, though. So it’s time to say goodbye to our beloved DirecTivo. But should we consider DirecTV’s hi-def package, or go talk to Comcast? Is one hopelessly inferior to the other, or is it worth taking the time to shake each down with the trademark mixture of cajoling and threats (think “abusive husband from Law & Order”) that I use in all my interactions with customer service representatives? Help me internet, you’re my only hope.

Bah. Apparently I need to make my comment-script rotating script a little more robust — if it hangs halfway the whole system gets screwed up. Sorry about that, aspiring commenters. Things are fixed.

Julian’s just linked to a pretty good article about audio compression from Rolling Stone. I’d also recommend this IEEE Spectrum article on the subject. I suggest you choose according to who you consider more culpable: the geeks who engineer the offending waveform compressors, or the sold-out music journalists who help create a market for them.

But I wonder how much longer this will be a problem. The cost to keeping an alternate version of a digital file in inventory is just about zero. And consider that radio-ready crossover tracks are already commonly mixed into different forms for different broadcast outlets: adult contemporary stations get the acoustic guitar cranked up, and stations with “Z” in their names may be treated to an extra bass line (the better to make their listeners’ rusted-out hatchbacks buzz, rattle and hum).

I’ll admit I’m not an expert on the mixing and mastering process — Charles, maybe you can chime in? — but my impression is that compressing the hell out of a song requires considerably less work than mixing those alternate versions. So if you can get just a few hundred people to buy the crisp, uncompressed FLAC version of a song, I imagine that’d pay for its production costs. It’s actually the audiophiles who are holding this back: their disdain for portable players and digital files is preventing support for the lossless FLAC format from hitting the market (some players support it, of course, but not many).

Incidentally, this all ties pretty well into something I’ve been pondering lately. Since the demise of Oink I’ve found myself listening to a lot of 128kbps or lower MP3s — the Hype Machine transcodes everything to that bitrate, and WOXY’s 32kbps AACPlus stream, while somewhat of an apple to MP3′s orange, is certainly less than perfect sounding. And it’s true that I’ve been feeling a little less emotional impact from many of the songs. It sounds stupid, I know. This didn’t happen to me in the past.

But I think this is partly just the result of getting older, and it’s given me an important perspective on audiophile pretension. The market for high-end equipment is defined by the rich old guys who can afford to buy it — folks whose high-frequency-sensitive cochlear hair cells have given up the ghost in significant numbers. So one should expect that audiophile gear will be tuned to overcome these deficiencies. It’ll seem both extravagantly stupid and stupidly extravagant to the still-immortal young’uns, but decreasingly so as their own ears age — different age groups effectively have different equalizers built into their heads. It’s worth keeping in mind that a hunger for ludicrously expensive speakers may be as much a sign of a medical condition as it is a sign of having too much money. Happily, the cure for both afflictions is the same.

(None of the preceding should be taken to mean that anyone buying this is anything less than a complete moron.)

As part of the holiday season’s string of irresponsible purchases I picked up an Xbox 360. I haven’t been playing very much so far, and what I have been playing is pretty exclusively Halo 3. But it seems likely that Charles and I will acquire some other digital entertainments in the future, so if you’re on Xbox Live you should add us to your friends list regardless of how you feel about sort-of-lame first person shooters set in decidedly lame, transparently derivative sci-fi universes.

Sigh. I miss Quake 3.

At any rate, our gamertag is “Club Loser”, which is not at all coincidentally what we called Jeff’s videogame-filled basement during middle and high school. Come teach this n00b a lesson.

It’s now safe to say: I’m sick. This is no surprise, of course — it happens to me every winter, and with enough severity that I’m told I’m commonly described as “sickly”. But I had high hopes for this year! I’ve started taking vitamin D, The Supernutrient They Don’t Want You To Know About (except via features in Reader’s Digest). I’m adopting an optimistic interpretation of the vitamin’s powers and assuming that without it my body would presently be undergoing incineration at the hands of concerned NIH workers in contamination suits.

I take some comfort in knowing that this bug has also laid waste to everyone else I know. Considering that my immune system is capable of amplifying the pathogens contained in a kitten’s single adorable sneeze into a maelstrom of phlegm and whining worthy of an unusually tedious episode of House, this is an improvement. At least I know my body’s surrendering to a worthy microbe.

I may as well add my two cents, speaking as both an all-around nerd and someone who bought a gig of RAM this holiday season (it’s the gift that says “Baby, I consider reducing your disk swap space usage a subcomponent of ‘treating you right’”). RAM is indeed ridiculously cheap right now — there’ve been allegations of price-fixing in the memory industry, in fact, as the players try to grapple with the bottom falling out of their market. But a few things about buying memory for your Mac:

• Macbooks can only take up to two gigs. Current-generation MBPs can accept 4 gigs. Buying more than this is pointless. Unless you have a particularly memory-hungry application, 2GB is probably as much as you’ll notice having. UPDATE: Yglesias pointed out to me that I’m wrong — current-generation Macbooks can take 4 gigs, too. You should still probably only buy 2.
• Macs are notoriously finicky about memory. Buying a name brand is probably worth the slight price bump. Crucial is a well-regarded brand, if you’re looking for a suggestion.
• You only get two memory slots in MBs and MBPs, and one of them will already have a stick of RAM in it. Plan accordingly.
• You’re looking to buy DDR2 SODIMMs.
• Newegg is a good, reputable place to get dirt-cheap prices on memory.

End communication!

I whined about not fulfilling my technical aspirations over the holiday, but the truth is that I did get a few things done — just not the ones I had intended. I wasted a solid couple of days trying to get Boot Camp installed, for one thing (it turns out not to be so easy when you have a heavily fragmented disk and aren’t willing to reformat it). And I constructed this monstrosity:

We’d hung up lights for a little holiday shindig, you see. But this year we were forced into the bigger-bulbed option, as Target’s clearance Christmas light section was picked over a bit faster than I had planned. I think it ended up looking a little bit nicer, but the default level of illumination afforded was a little higher than we wanted for a proper party.

So: to Logan hardware! It’s actually pretty simple to make a dimmer box suitable for incandescent bulbs. Grab an extension cord, a dimmer switch, a few spare wire nuts, a junction box and a switch faceplate — I’d suggest plastic for the last two items since a) it’s cheaper and b) it’s less likely to result in your electrocution if you screw something up. All told your purchase should come to under $10.

Snip the extension cord in two, thread it into the junction box and wire it up to the dimmer as the included instructions dictate. The wire connected to the smaller prong on the extension cord’s plug is the hot lead — that’s the one that gets routed through the dimmer. The other is neutral; reconnect it to itself. If the extension cord has three prongs, the bottom one is ground; it should be reconnected to itself and to the dimmer’s ground wire. If there isn’t a ground wire, just wrap the dimmer’s ground lead up in tape so it can’t accidentally come in contact with anything energized.

Screw everything together and voila: you’re done. Keep a fire extinguisher handy, never leave this unattended, never connect it to anything other than a reasonably short string of incandescent lights, and resign yourself to my complete disavowal of any responsibility for the results of using this horribly unsafe gadget. It works great for me, though!

From Megan, this is a pretty good line:

I abhor fake meat. If you really want anonymous grade-z vegetable matter pulverized into tiny pieces, assaulted with various chemicals, and then processed into something that at leas superficially resembles a chicken muscle, I suggest you have the processing done by a chicken.

I forgot to do the morning roundup last night, so I had to wake up early this morning to do it. First: it was surprisingly easy! I guess having two weeks’ worth of sleep saved up makes it possible to get up before 9:30. Second: morning news is even worse than I had imagined.

A moment ago CNN’s American Morning is engaging in some legal analysis of the recent noise over whether ripping your own CDs to mp3 is illegal. It’s true that this is a bit confusing. For instance, although I respect Mike Masnick’s analysis of the issue, I disagree with his assertion that the RIAA only objects to users ripping CDs to shared folders. It’s always seemed to me that they tolerate such activity, but consider themselves to be doing so thanks to their basically generous nature (and not, of course, out of fear of a crushing backlash from consumers and the courts). One commenter points out that Sony lawyers have referred to ripping CDs as “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy.’”

But I do agree with Mike that the media’s treatment of these issues has been abysmal. And even granting that the legalities can be murky, CNN’s treatment of the story was stunningly bad, revealing that their legal correspondent is not only completely unacquainted with the relevant issues, but couldn’t even be bothered to spend a few minutes on Google reading up on them prior to going on the air.

But I have never heard it happen that you buy something legally and then you put it on your own computer to make it more portable, I think so many people do this, and now you’ve broken the law to the tune of thousands and thousands of dollars.


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I don’t see it as really being legally any different from using your DVR and downloading some shows, some Oprah shows as I do, and putting them on your computer so that I can watch them and make them more portable.


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You know it’s my job to keep up on the legality of things, and I thought it was legal as well.
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For the viewers out there the takeaway needs to be you have to be very careful. Let’s wait until we find out the ruling on this case before you continue downloading these CDs.

No! The takeaway is that we should grab torches and pitchforks and march down to the courthouse. Or write our congressmen, anyway.

I suppose it’s nice that big media outlets are paying attention to these issues. Still, this is pretty piss-poor. The scope of fair use in the digital age may not be as immediate a concern as health care or stagnant wages, but it affects nearly every consumer in the country. People are randomly getting caught in an industry’s death throes, and suffering serious financial losses as a result — none of which benefits anyone except the attorneys involved. It’s a real problem and we should all be thinking in a deliberate way about how we want to solve it.

Well, it’s been a pretty restful holiday break, but tomorrow it all ends. This past week or so of vacation has been disappointingly unproductive — I barely got to the gym at all, I didn’t really write anything, and I only made minor progress on the two technical projects I had in mind. In fact, I spent an amazingly small amount of time online. If you’re one of the people to whom I should’ve been writing emails, I apologize.

But I did manage to get to a hell of a lot of parties, see a number of old friends (albeit not as many as I would’ve liked) and wake up on New Year’s Day feeling like I was probably not going to die after all (better yet, I didn’t even want to!). Pretty good, all in all.

Anyway, all I really mean to say here is that I’m looking forward to returning to routine. I’m hoping that 2008 is bloggier, healthier and even more fun than 2007 was.