Seattle PI Getting Sued

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This isn’t much of a surprise:

An operator involved in a deadly Bellevue crane collapse has sued the Seattle P-I, saying the paper defamed him by printing details of his criminal history.

Warren Yeakey, the 36-year- old operator who was injured in the November 2006 collapse, filed the defamation suit in Pierce County Superior Court earlier this month. In court documents, Yeakey says the paper wrongly intimated that his arrests and convictions somehow contributed to the collapse.

“He felt like he was vilified falsely,” said Matt Renda, a Tacoma attorney representing Yeakey. The story, Renda added, “created an incorrect or false implication that operator error … was a contributing factor to the downing of the crane and the death of (Matthew) Ammond,” a Microsoft Corp. patent lawyer who was killed in the collapse.

I knew at the time of the collapse that the reporting of the accident was not the PI’s finest hour.

…when a crane collapsed in Bellevue last November, I was disgusted by the PI’s response: an immediate front-page article digging up and detailing five-year-old accounts of the past drug use of the poor guy operating the crane that day. As if this guy’s day wasn’t bad enough — he goes to work, climbs to the top of a tower crane, and then rides the thing down as it collapses into nearby apartment buildings — he then has to endure the ingominy and public humiliation of having his past transgressions dug up, splashed across the front page of the newspaper, and implicitly blamed as the cause of the accident. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had a drug conviction in five years, nor that his employer required drug tests that he had reliably passed, nor that there was no indication of drug use at the time of the accident. What mattered was that he was guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!

I wonder if the PI would be getting sued if they’d printed some form of apology or retraction at the time?

To Blu or Not To Blu?

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For Christmas this year, Prairie and I have decided to treat ourselves and upgrade our TV set from the one I bought when I moved to Seattle seven and a half years ago (!!!!!). It’s a nice enough TV (a Sony Wega 27-inch), but it’s huge, heavy, and while still in good shape, it’s old tech. The original plan was to wait until it died, but between Sony’s generally good longevity (my parents had a little Sony 13″ TV that went for almost thirty years) and my geeky techno-lust, Prairie surprised me by suggesting that we go ahead and upgrade to the new hotness.

So, the hunt is in progress. At this point, I’m pretty much decided on a 32″ Samsung, most likely either the LN32A550 or the LN32A650, depending on where prices land in the weeks between Black Friday and Christmas.

Of course, with the jump to an HDTV comes the jump to HD programming. Day-to-day entertainment will come courtesy of Comcast — we’re already getting our cable through them, so we’ll just upgrade that to the minimum possible digital/HD package. For movies, though, we’re doing a bit of back-and-forth (though, to be honest, Prairie’s on the “back” — that is, staying with what we have — while I’m on the “forth” side of the discussion).

My movie-loving, technology-geeking little heart tends to go all a-pitter-pat at upgrading to Blu-Ray. I jumped onto the DVD bandwagon as soon as it dropped into the realm of affordability, loved the jump in video and audio quality from my old VHS tapes, and have been looking forward to the next step forward.

Prairie, however, doesn’t really see what all the fuss is about, and her approach is one that I’m having an amusingly tough time arguing against: if we can see the show and enjoy the story, than what’s the big deal? She never saw a big difference between VHS and DVD, doesn’t really care about surround sound (a moot point at the moment, as living in an apartment building means that standard stereo at reasonable levels is far more realistic than full surround and gut-thumping subwoofers — something we really wish our neighbors would realize…), and just doesn’t see the point in adding another piece of electronics and another remote to the stack we have to keep track of already.

I’ve gotta admit, it’s hard to really say, “But…it’s better!” without realizing just how foolish that sounds.

Not that I don’t try. I’d have my geek card revoked if I didn’t at least try.

(And on a not-unrelated-at-all side note, I think it works wonderfully that our respective geek levels generally balance out into reasonable end results. I don’t know how couples made of dual übergeeks can manage!)

In any case, I think part of the conversation is simply the fact that we don’t really know how much of a change we’re going to see when we upgrade. Sure, I’ve looked at all the numbers and can see the mathmatical difference between SD 640×480 and FullHD 1920×1080, I’ve done simple little experiments looking at resolution increases, and I’ve been working with digital photography long enough that I can get a feel for the difference betweeen a .3 megapixel image and a 2 megapixel image (the approximate difference between SD and FullHD). But running numbers and reading webpages is no substitute for actually seeing what happens when we plug it all together.

So I tried a little experiment today, and tossed out two questions on Twitter…

You who’ve moved from “old school” TV to a new HDTV (pref. w/some form of HD feed): is it really that big of a difference? Turned up to 11?

Same question, part 2: Along the same lines, how about the DVD to Blu-Ray transition? Again, is it that much visibly better?

…and got the following responses:

  • axsdeny: DVD to Blu-Ray: yes. If you have even a 720p TV you can tell the difference. It’s beautiful.
  • lyracole: i don’t notice the difference between my standard and hd, but sir does. also, fuck blu-ray.
  • stoppableforce: w/r/t the difference between SDTV and HDTV: YES. YES. DEAR GOD YES. The difference in clarity is A-FUCKIN’-MAZING.
  • stoppableforce: w/r/t the DVD-to-Blu-Ray thing: Not so much. We’ve got both, Blu-Ray looks slightly better, not enough to make me buy a PS3 yet.
  • mellzah: I hate to admit it, but blu-ray looks great. DVDs don’t look sharp on my TV– non-HD projection 50ish inch–but Blu-Ray movies do!
  • skyler: Huge difference. I attribute most of it to HDMI, actually. Clearer interference free signal. Xbox 360 + 1080p is great w/DVDs.
  • antifuse: short answer? Yes. Longer answer? Depends what you watch. Plain DVDs upscaled by Blu ray look fab, and many shows look great too.
  • wnalyd: Finally answering your HDTV question: Heck yeah there’s a difference bwtn HD + SD. Turned up to 17. Wouldn’t go back.

So the final consensus (admittedly, since I used Twitter, drawing from a very weighted sample of at least somewhat geeky-type people), while not clear-cut across the board, seems to be that yes, there is a difference, ranging from “better” to “A-FUCKIN’-MAZING”. We’ll just have to wait and see where we fall along that spectrum with the equipment we have (we’ll have the HDTV and HD cable from Comcast for the pretty pretty pixels, and a non-upconverting DVD/VHS combo deck for movies), and maybe see if I can find anyone with a Blu-Ray player for us to borrow for a night to help us decide if we want to add that piece, too (of course, if the Blu-Ray players don’t drop into affordability, that’ll make the whole point moot as well).

Did I miss anything?

Links for November 20th through November 21st

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Sometime between November 20th and November 21st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Pushing Daisies: ABC ”Cancels” Beloved Fantasy TV Show: As a result, ABC has opted not to order any additional episodes. The network has avoided saying that it’s actually cancelled the show. The series could possibly return at a later date but, considering Daisies’ ratings track record, that is highly unlikely. More likely, the network is trying to avoid backlash from devoted and disappointed fans. (Pity that there are enough "devoted and disappointed fans" that ABC may be trying to avoid backlash, but that's still not seen as enough reason to keep the show around. I'm going to miss this one.)
  • Row over altered US Army photo: The Pentagon has become embroiled in a row after the US Army released a photo of a general to the media which was found to have been digitally altered. Ann Dunwoody was shown in front of the US flag but it later emerged that this background had been added. The Associated Press (AP) news agency subsequently suspended the use of US Department of Defense photos.
  • MPR: Challenged ballots: You be the judge: Representatives from the campaigns of Sen. Norm Coleman and Al Franken have been challenging ballots across the state. It's your turn to play election judge. Tell us how you would rule in the case of these challenged ballots.
  • Free to Be… You and Me: the 35 Anniversary Edition: the book every kid needs: If you were to distill the messages that every kid needs to hear to grow up to be a confident, loving individual who does what's right even when society sneers, if you were to turn them into great songs, funny poems, without a hint of preachiness or condescension, it would be this book and CD. Every kid needs this book — and the organization that publishes it is every bit as great as the book itself.
  • Digital Youth Project: If you care about kids and want to understand how they use technology and why, this is a must-read: The Digital Youth Project, a MacArthur-funded three year, 22 case study, $3.3 million ethnographic study of what kids are doing online, has wound up and published its results. The project was undertaken by the eminent sociologist Mimi Ito and her talented colleagues (including the incomparable danah boyd) and is the largest and most comprehensive study of young peoples' internet use ever undertaken in the US.
    The conclusions are sane, compassionate, and compelling: in a nutshell, the "serious" stuff we all hope kids will do online (researching papers and so on) are only possible within a framework of "hanging out, messing around and geeking out." That is to say, all the "time-wasting" social stuff kids do online are key to their explorations and education online.

The Answer is Probably “Yes”

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I’m trying to decide if I’m a hypocrite for being unsure about how I feel about Kid Rock’s new single “All Summer Long” — which, though catchy, is little more than new lyrics on top of the riff from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” — when I’m sitting on a 10.79 GB collection of 1,462 mashups.

(Update: Y’know, after watching the video, even if I am on the hypocritical side of things, I’m feeling less guilty about it, based solely on the fact that Kid Rock is incredibly skeezy. Ick. I feel dirtier just having watched that.)

(Second update: The worst part is, the song is damn catchy, though that says far less about Kid Rock than it does for Warren Zevon and Lynyrd Skynyrd, whose “Sweet Home Alabama” is also sampled.)

Links for November 17th through November 20th

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Sometime between November 17th and November 20th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Race in D&D: I do not want to spend too much time beating a dead war-horse, but your average D&D game consists of a group of white players acting out how their white characters encounter and destroy orcs and goblins, who are, as a race evil, uncivilized, and dark-skinned. To quote Steve Sumner’s essay again, “Unless played very carefully, Dungeons & Dragons could easily become a proxy race war….” I would argue with/ Sumner’s use of the phrase “could become,” and say that unless played very carefully, D&D usually becomes a proxy race war. Any adventurer knows that if you see an orc, you kill it. You don’t talk to it, you don’t ask what it’s doing there – you kill it, since it’s life is worth less than the treasure it carries and the experience points you’ll get from the kill. If filmed, your average D&D campaign would look something like Birth of a Nation set in Greyhawk.
  • Stevens loses Alaska Senate race: Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in Senate history, narrowly lost his re-election bid Tuesday, marking the downfall of a Washington political power and Alaska icon who couldn't survive a conviction on federal corruption charges. (Hooray! My old home state isn't completely wackadoodle after all! Mostly, sure…but not completely!)
  • Thieves Target Pay Parking Stations And Rip Off Thousands From City: "The City believes the criminals used something to cut the units from the bolts cemented in the ground, and then used a truck with a wench to hoist them out." Emphasis mine — apparently, the lead suspect in this crime is the Society for Creative Anachronism….
  • Fireweed 7 slashes price of movie tickets to $3: Wow. This is the theater I worked in, slinging popcorn, for about a year and a half when I was 18/19 years old. The Fireweed has quite a history of Anchorage movie-going, from being a drive-in (many years ago) to having one of the largest single auditoriums around. Dolby Digital was installed when I was working there, and at the time, Theater #1 was the largest DD and THX certified screen on the West Coast. I got to sit in on the demo reel that was screened for the press just after the installation which had short clips from a few movies, including the first Tim Burton Batman. The scene shown was whe the bats fly out of the cave and past the camera, and at the time, the difference in audio clarity between standard (optically read) Dolby Surround and the new, all-digital, multichannel Dolby Digital was mindblowing. In a way, it's sad to see such a storied theater turn into a second-run cheap-seat house…but at the same time, what a great second-run theater!
  • How to process photos really, really quickly: I take a lot of photos — I'm on pace to have taken more than 150,000 photos in 2008. Not bad, since I'm not a sports-shooter and very rarely mash down the shutter button for continuous shooting. The good news of the digital era is that I didn't have to spring for more than 4,000 rolls of film. The bad news is that I have to process each of these photos myself. As you might imagine, I've streamlined the process a bit.

Links for November 14th through November 17th

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Sometime between November 14th and November 17th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Best Seat in the House | Election Night: The Seattle Times photography blog's experiences on Election Night 2008.
  • Timeline twins, music and movies: When I was a kid, "oldies" music and movies seemed ancient. Even though I'm now in my 30s, the entertainment that I watched and listened to in my youth still feels pretty recent to me. Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn't all that long ago, right? But comparing my distorted recall of childhood favorites to the oldies of the time jogs my memory in unpleasant ways. For example: Listening to Michael Jackson's Thriller today is equivalent to listening to Elvis Presley's first album (1956) at the time of Thriller's release in 1982. Elvis singles in 1956 included Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, and Love Me Tender.
  • Obama’s Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani: The most detailed and fascinating explication of Barack Obama's faith came in a 2004 interview he gave Chicago Sun Times columnist Cathleen Falsani when he was running for U.S. Senate in Illinois. The column she wrote about the interview has been quoted and misquoted many times over, but she'd never before published the full transcript in a major publication. Because of how controversial that interview became, Falsani has graciously allowed us to print the full conversation here.
  • Tube-side chat? Obama takes radio address online: President-elect Barack Obama is taping Saturday's weekly Democratic address not just for listeners, but for YouTube viewers, his office said Friday. And he plans to keep videotaping the radio addresses after taking the oath of office on Jan. 20. Before then, the videos will be posted on Obama's transition Web site.
  • unlibrarian: Journey: The secret behind the Obama logo…

Are We On? Tim Conway and Ernie Anderson

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A couple weeks ago, author, actor, and humorist John Hodgman was the guest on NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” As I listened to John and host Peter Sagal, John’s simple, polite, and deadpan delivery of often ludicrous responses to Peter’s questions reminded me very strongly of an old comedy album of my dad’s that I listened to time and time again growing up, where ABC television announcer Ernie Anderson plays straight man to comedian Tim Conway in a series of interviews.

Tim Conway and Ernie Anderson: Are We On?Here, then, is that album, recorded to .mp3 from the very album that I grew up listening to. You can listen to or download the tracks individually or grab the full album as a 47Mb .zip file. Enjoy! The whole album is quite funny and worth downloading, but if you want to sample, my particular favorites are “Do You Fly Much?”, “Boy”, and “The Baseball Coordinator”.

  1. Do You Fly Much? (3.8Mb .mp3)
  2. Boy (5.1Mb .mp3)
  3. Dr. Herford (6.3Mb .mp3)
  4. Matchmaker (5.8Mb .mp3)
  5. Race Car Driver (6.8Mb .mp3)
  6. King Anderson of Parma (4.7Mb .mp3)
  7. The Warden (5.1Mb .mp3)
  8. The Baseball Coordinator (4.7Mb .mp3)
  9. The Swiss Astronaut (4.8Mb .mp3)

As a bonus: this is one of the funniest Tim Conway bits I’ve ever seen. An outtake from the Carol Burnett Show, Tim won’t let the sketch go on until he’s done telling his elephant stories…

Liner notes for the ‘Are We On?’ album after the jump:

Read more

Links for November 12th through November 13th

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Sometime between November 12th and November 13th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • High quality YouTube video hack: By default all videos on YouTube and embedded on other sites load at normal quality, but there's a way to set your default viewing quality to high, link to high quality video, embed HQ video, and even save HQ videos for later viewing.
  • James Bond: 5 Things I Learned About Women From The James Bond Books: Did you know that James Bond has the power to turn lesbians straight? And that lesbians were only gay in the first place because they have the right to vote? We always knew the Bond movies were trashy exploitation fests, but it turns out they're Gloria Steinem sit-ins compared to Ian Fleming's original books. The books are a treasure trove of wisdom about female sexuality, explaining why women should only sleep around at the office, and why "No" means "Take me now." What important lessons did those politically correct movies leave out? Here's our list.
  • More evidence that Pushing Daisies is dying: Sad, but certainly no surprise. Prairie and I have said since it first debuted that there was no way PD would be around long-term — it was just too good, and quirky enough that most people "just wouldn't get it." We've been resigned to seeing it disappear for some time now, and are just enjoying what we get before they officially pull the plug. (Of course, if, by some miracle, it does get to continue, we'd be thrilled!)
  • Australian mistakenly surfs over big whale: "At first I thought it was the shadow from my kite. But I quickly realized it was a whale," said Sheridan, a 42-year-old high school teacher. "The whale kept coming up. … I did not know what to expect and I went over its back just past its fin," he said. "Next thing I felt was its tail come up and hit me on the back of the head."
  • D700 Field Report from Web 2.0 Summit: So how did it go? I won’t make you wait until the end of the post for the verdict. In a word, it rocked.
  • Disney on iTunes: There's a lot of classic, vintage Disney hidden in iTunes, and this page has a great roundup of what you can find.

Links for November 11th through November 12th

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Sometime between November 11th and November 12th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Roadside Attraction: The Alternate History Theme Park Where Dinosaurs Fought in the Civil War: Most speculative fiction surrounding the American Civil War imagines how the world would be different had the Confederacy won its independence. But roadside attraction creator Mark Cline has imagined an entirely different kind of Civil War science fiction. His fiberglass creations tell the tale of a group of Union soldiers who discover a lost valley of dinosaurs in Virginia and plot to use them as weapons against the South. (This is AWESOME and I'm so going if I'm ever in the area!)
  • Election windfall: Word spread quickly last week through Sto-Rox High School when students learned that the administrative offices were filled with Barack Obama paraphernalia. Students snapped up posters and stickers for their lockers, backpacks and bedroom walls, eager to commemorate the victory of the first African American to ascend to the nation's highest office. The enthusiasm excited administrators, but it's not what brought tears to the eyes of Jean Schmalzreid, the district's director of federal programs and special projects. That happened when she saw school facilities workers bring in dolly after dolly piled high with thousands of dollars worth of supplies donated from Obama campaign offices in Pittsburgh.
  • 10 Reasons for Zenfolio Account: One possible spot for trying to sell some of my photography.
  • Lonesome penguin cheered up by his new friend… a stuffed toy: The penguin – called Pingu – began to lose weight and appeared weak after its bigger relative regularly helped himself to all the fish on offer. Concerned keepers were forced to remove Pingu from the enclosure, but at just three-weeks-old the penguin was in desperate need of company. Staff bought a £3.99 toy penguin from the zoo shop which acts as a surrogate sibling to the chuffed chick – who cuddles up to its new friend all day.
  • First Full Image Of New Star Trek USS Enterprise: The moment everyone has been waiting for is here. In anticipation of the upcoming Star Trek trailer premiering this weekend, Paramount has released the first full image of the new USS Enterprise (NCC-1701, no bloody A, B, C or D). EW’s Popwatch blog got the exclusive first look at this beauty…

Links for November 9th through November 11th

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Sometime between November 9th and November 11th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Interview @MarsPhoenix: For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars. Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official mouthpiece of NASA's Phoenix mission and has catalyzed an entirely new kind of public involvement in science.
  • Urban Dictionary: palin: 1. An applicant lacking even basic job skills 2. Someone supremely un-self-aware or lacking any relative sense of what he/she does or doesn't know.
  • Barack Obama: The 50 facts you might not know: He applied to appear in a black pin-up calendar while at Harvard but was rejected by the all-female committee.
  • First-family-to-be given code names: The Secret Service traditionally has given pithy, private names to those whose lives they protect. The monikers are a throwback to a time when electronic communications were not encrypted, and they no longer serve a security function. Still, they give an occasional peek at the players' personalities, in addition to serving as great trivia questions. (Renegade, Renaissance, Radiance and Rosebud)
  • Childhood Fears: Incredibly creepy horror photography (NSFW) by Joshua Hoffine. Also worth checking out his behind the scenes weblog which details how he sets up his shots. Cool!