Amazon Kills Pocketpedia

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For a while now, I’ve been using Bookpedia to catalog Prairie’s and my book collections, and DVDPedia for our movie collection. One of the handiest things about the system was the ability to sync our libraries to my iPod through Pocketpedia and have them available at my fingertips whenever we were out and about. No more trying to remember whether or not we’d picked up a particular book from a particular author or series, just check the iPod. It was one of my most-used iPhone apps.

Unfortunately, that’s not an option anymore: Amazon recently changed their API Terms of Service, and included the following clause in section 4(e):

You will not, without our express prior written approval requested via this link , use any Product Advertising Content on or in connection with any site or application designed or intended for use with a mobile phone or other handheld device.

Since the update to the TOS, Amazon has been aggressively enforcing that clause. I saw the writing on the wall a couple weeks ago when Delicious had their iPhone app pulled, and now Pocketpedia has been killed as well.

This morning we received an email from Amazon requesting the immediate removal of Pocketpedia from the App Store since the program is in violation of their license agreement. (A clause we’re pretty sure didn’t exist when Pocketpedia launched with the App Store in June last year but TOSBack only tracks Kindle and MP3 music service terms of use.)

We’ve logged a request with Amazon that Pocketpedia be exempt from the mobile clause (this is stated as a possibility in the license agreement) but it seems others have tried this before and were shot down so we’re not holding our breath for a favourable response. Hopefully the future will bring a positive change in their policy and we can all go on competing in the App Store.

Pocketpedia Not Available

Unsurprisingly, I — and a number of other previously-happy customers — are none too thrilled with Amazon about this. I’m hoping that some workaround can be found, and that Pocketpedia can continue on (even if that means gutting it to remove all data ever retrieved from Amazon). All I can do now (aside from dropping Amazon a quick complaint e-mail, which I’ve already done) is wait and see what happens next.

Update: Hooray! As of today, Nov. 10th, 2009, Pocketpedia is back! You can download the new, Amazon-free version right here.

A Goodbye

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A few years ago, I posted one of my fondest memories from my days in the Alaska Children’s Choir. At the time of the performance mentioned there, the choir was under the direction of founder Renda Horn.

The founder and director for many of the years I was in the choir was Renda Horn, a wonderful, energetic woman with more life bottled up inside her than most other people I’ve ever known. She had a great love of both music and children, and was able to use these to corral a bunch of children into an internationally award winning children’s choir — and those of us in the choir were as fond of her as she was of us.

[…]

We sang a short selection of the pieces in our repertoire and, as had become standard, ended with “The Rhythm of Life”. We were all arranged on the steps in front of the altar, and as the song progressed, the clouds that had been obscuring the sky that morning parted, sending warm golden light through the windows of the church. The church building itself seemed to be acoustically perfect, taking our voices and wrapping them around us and the congregation and on up into the rafters and beyond. Renda’s smile grew wider as she watched “her kids” give the performance of a lifetime that day. Her eyes started to glisten, and soon started to overflow with tears of pure joy in the moment — and by the end of the song, most of the choir had joined her (and I’m not at all ashamed to admit that nearly twenty years later, I’m getting a bit misty eyed reliving the memory as I write this down).

We got a standing ovation that day — no small feat, given the stereotypical British reserve combined with our performing in the midst of a C of E service — and while the choir has received many standing ovations over the years, in my mind that has always been, and always will be, the standing ovation.

Some time after I posted that, Janet Stotts (who was co-director at the time, and later took over when Renda retired) saw the post and left some kind comments, and a little later, Renda did the same, which was a joy to see.

Just a few minutes ago, I received a note from Janet letting me know that Renda died on Monday in a small float plane crash in Canada. Her husband Steve, who was piloting the plane, survived.

Renda brought a lot of joy into this world, both through her many years of music and work with the choir and just by the simple virtue of being herself. My heartfelt condolences go out to her family, many friends, and the many, many kids and parents whose lives she touched. She’ll be missed.

Back To the ’80s!

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Chances are you’re either going to love me or hate me for posting this. Personally, I think this is great — my tolerance for cheezy pop is really high — but there will be no hard feelings if you blame me for wanting to brillo pad your brain clean after watching this. :)

Links for July 14th through July 15th

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Sometime between July 14th and July 15th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Why America Is Flunking Science: "The experience of CERN is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today. It is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent — an uneasiness that comes across repeatedly in Hollywood depictions. As science-fiction film director James Cameron has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists 'as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains.' That's not only unfair to scientists: It's unhealthy for the place of science in our culture…. To begin to counter this problem, though, we need to wake up to a new recognition: Fixing the problem of science education in our schools, although very important, is not the sole solution. We also have to do something about the cultural standing of science — heavily influenced by politics and mass media — and that's a very different matter."
  • Psychotic Letters From Men: Customer Disservice: "Every woman who's ever held any type of service or sales job knows about one of the major inherent hazards associated with their chosen profession. Namely, the unavoidable encounters with creepy fucking dudes." Oh, my lord. As if the posted stories aren't bad enough, there's all the stories in the comments. So, so, so many disturbing guys out there.
  • How to Scan a Cat and Other Subjects: "MetaFilter became that rarest of online creatures: a booming online community that's mostly intelligent, mostly civil, and mostly functional. It's not just a good read, and it's not just popular and lively, but it actually makes one feel slightly better about being human. It might be the best site on the Internet. The trick is trying to explain why it happened." Happy 10 year anniversary, MetaFilter!
  • Pinboard – Antisocial Bookmarking: Interesting looking Delicious competitor just getting started.
  • Spectacular Dream Yachts to Set Sail: "So often we're teased with amazing renderings of things that could be but never will because they lack a bridge between blue sky and real world. The latest virtual tease, a pair of futuristic yachts rapidly rising in virtual visibility, breaks that convention. Designer Kevin Schöpfer plans to set sail in three years." If I were a mad James Bond villian, I would totally have the Infinitas as my base of operations. That's a gorgeous yacht.

Links for July 10th through July 14th

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Sometime between July 10th and July 14th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads of All Time: "What do murder, pedophilia, suicide and a baby tiger have in common? They have all been used to sell stuff in these amazingly disturbing vintage ads! These are real, untouched advertisements from the good old days. It doesn't matter if it's lovely ladies or adorable clowns, somehow these old-time ad wizards found ways to traumatize us while pedaling everyday products."
  • Top 10 Myths about Mythbusters:: "There's a rumor going around that Jamie is a human being. This is plain wrong. The show admits this one itself. Several episodes refer to the fact that Jamie is a robot — I mean, how else can he keep his shirts so well-cleaned and his moustache so well-trimmed? But believe it or not, there are people out there who are convinced that Jamie is in fact a human — Homo sapiens, just like you and me. This one is surely busted."
  • Watchdog Group: Dozens of Active-Duty Troops Found on Neo-Nazi Site: "It is Facebook for the fascist set, and the typical online profiles of its members reveal expected tastes. Favorite book: 'Mein Kampf.' Favorite movie: the Nazi propaganda film 'Triumph of the Will.' Interests: 'white women.' Dislikes: 'anyone who opposes the master race.' But there's one other thing that dozens of members of newsaxon.org, a white supremacist social networking website, have in common: They proudly identify themselves as active-duty members of the U.S. armed forces."
  • The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin: A Round-Up: "After you have read these, ask yourself: what wouldn't Sarah Palin lie about if she felt she had to?"
  • DateLine: "DateLine is a small, simple app which displays a linear calendar on your desktop in a transparent window. It provides easy access to iCal by double clicking on a day. The background and text colors are customizable with support for transparency."

MiniBreak: Corvallis

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Two weekends ago, Prairie and I headed down to Corvallis to visit my brother and his family. Emily, my sister-in-law, is just finishing her doctorate in oceanography, and has accepted a position doing post-doc work at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, associated with MIT. Great news, of course, but it does mean that they’re all moving across the country to Falmouth, MA. Since that’s going to be a lot harder to visit than Corvallis, OR, we wanted to make sure to get a visit with them in before they left.

The full set of photos is on Flickr, here’s a small sampling…

Noah can Ride! 1
Noah, on day two without training wheels on his bike!

Swimming 7
Me, Noah, Kevin, and Paul swimming at the campsite Prairie and I stayed at.

Coloring Time 4
Noah, Prairie, and Paul coloring.

Story Time 4
Me reading Noah a couple chapters of some of his current bedtime story (The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe).

We’ll miss being close enough to take a weekend to drive down and visit, but it’s a great opportunity for them and for Emily, and we wish them the best.

Official Norwescon Photographer

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As most who pay much attention to my ramblings know, I’ve spent three out of the past four years wandering around Norwescon taking pictures (29, 30, and 32). A couple of weeks ago I got an invitation from the Norwescon 33 publications director asking if I might be interested in the con photographer position. I, of course, said that I was very interested, and we agreed to meet at today’s Volunteer Appreciation Picnic.

So, today I showed up at the picnic, chatted with Adrienne for a bit, and signed on as photographer for Norwescon 33! This will be pretty low-key for most of the year, getting shots of various meetings and Norwescon promotional events as they happen, and then be pretty intensive (but fun!) during the con itself, adding getting official shots of key events (the opening ceremonies, panels with the guests of honor, the Masquerade, the Fetish Fashion Show, etc.) as well as the usual candids and hall costumes that I’ve been doing on my own. I’m really looking forward to this, it’s a great way to combine interests and have a lot of fun doing it!

So that’s my little happydance for the day. Woohoo!

Links for July 8th through July 9th

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Sometime between July 8th and July 9th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Mythbusters to Test Star Trek’s Gorn Cannon: "Finally someone is going to put the Star Trek cannon to the test (that is 'cannon' with two n's). Mythbusters, the Discover Channel show that puts urban legends (and TV & movie magic) to the test, is finally going to take on Star Trek. Specifically they are going to test the feasibility of the cannon that Captain James T. Kirk built to defeat the Gorn in the original series Star Trek episode 'Arena'"
  • "Harry Potter" Stars Felt Pressure to "Ace" Kiss: Dan Radcliffe's reaction to seeing his kiss with Bonnie Wright (as Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley, respectively) in HPatHBP is great: "'I saw the film again a couple of nights ago at the premiere and … my God, my lips are like the lips of a horse, kind of distending independently away from my face and trying to encompass the lower half of hers,' Radcliffe, 19, said. 'So I apologize for that.'"
  • Ritz Camera, Parent of Wolf and Waxman, Plans to Sell Remaining Stores: "Ritz Camera Centers Inc., which has been struggling to reorganize and save roughly 400 of its more than 800 stores, says it no longer has enough money to purchase fall inventory and continue operations. Beltsville, Md.-based Ritz Camera, which is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, says the lack of funds now forces it to auction off its remaining locations by the end of July." Wow, not good. Good luck to everyone I know at Ritz/Kits!
  • Paste Without Formatting by Default: "Here's something I know affects plenty of users out there. Have you ever pasted text in a document or email message, only to have it formatted differently than all the text around it? Irritating, right? There's an answer, thanks to the Keyboard & Mouse pane in System Preferences." Thank you! Mac OS X's default 'paste with the source style' has been driving me up the wall for ages — I honestly can't think of a single time recently when I've wanted to work the way the system does by default. One of the weirdest, most brain-dead UI decisions in the Mac OS.
  • Marvel Wants to Help You Look Stylish!: The latest in costume fashion from Marvel: Boys! Be The Hulk! Or Captain America! Or Iron Man! Or Ghost Rider! Girls…um…girls? Oh, girls. Here, have some lip gloss.

12:34:56 7/8/9

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Just a fun little numerical oddity: at the time of this posting (more or less, as WordPress doesn’t let me schedule a post time down to the second), the combined date and time (if you drop the leading zero from the two-digit abbreviation for the year) becomes 123456789.

Or, if you prefer not to worry about those silly leading zeros, wait until five minutes and six seconds after four o’clock, at which time it will be 04:05:06 07/08/09.

That’s all, nothing to see here, move along, go about your business….

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

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Yesterday, nearly two years to the day after going to see Michael Bay’s first “Transformers” film, Rick and I once again channelled our inner 12-year olds, did our best to turn off our brains, and headed off to see “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”.

My original summary of the first “Transformers” was:

Mini-review number one: It was glorious, incredible, over-the-top, in-your-face, enjoyably bad.

Mini-review number two: Moments of “holy shit, that was cool,” buried in a whole mess of, “what the fuck?”

I can quite easily update that for this sequel, with just a couple brief changes:

Mini-review number one: It was incredibly over-the-top, in-your-face, bad.

Mini-review number two: Moments of mild amusement buried in a whole mess of WTF.

Admittedly, after seeing the first and reading some of the reviews of this one, I wasn’t laboring under any illusions of what I was walking in to. Mainly, Rick and I wanted to go because we’d gone together to the first one, we new it would be bad…and we knew we’d have a lot of fun suffering through it. Mock me if you wish, but I doubt we’re the only two people out there who’ve done such a thing!

Actual reviews of the movie have been handled far more ably than I’m likely to do. Here’s a few choice quotes from three of my favorites. First, from Roger Ebert‘s official review:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

Second, and again from Roger Ebert, his blog entry The Fall of the Revengers:

The day will come when “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms.

[…]

The term Assault on the Senses has become a cliché. It would be more accurate to describe the film simply as “painful.” The volume is cranked way up, probably on studio instructions, and the sound track consists largely of steel crashing discordantly against steel. Occasionally a Bot voice will roar thunderingly out of the left-side speakers, (1) reminding us of Surround Sound, or (2) reminding the theater to have the guy take another look at those right-side speakers. Beneath that is boilerplate hard-pounding action music, alternating with deep bass voices intoning what sounds like Gregorian chant without the Latin, or maybe even without the words: Just apprehensive sounds, translating as Oh, no! No! These Decepticons® are going to steal the energy of the sun and destroy the Earth!

Lastly, from io9’s brilliant review by Charlie Jane Anders:

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer’s biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari’s cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I’m still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that’s because people don’t understand that this isn’t a movie, in the conventional sense. It’s an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

If I haven’t bored you enough already, what follows are a few things that stuck out to me during and after the film. Mostly bad, of course, but there were one or two things that I actually liked….

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