Ash to ash, dust to dust

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California fires seen from space

Boing Boing pointed me to this satellite picture of the smoke plumes from the California fires. Just incredible. There’s also a photoblog of pictures of the fires. Neat and scary stuff.

Forest fires are something that I don’t really have a whole lot of experience with. They’d hit Alaska from time to time, but rarely (if ever) came anywhere close enough to Anchorage to cause any major concern. Occasionally there’d be a decent conflagration out in the Mat-Su valley (about 45 minutes outside of Anchorage), but most of the time, it wasn’t a major issue in town.

Clouds from the 2001 Washington fires

Not long after I moved down here to Seattle, my friends took me out to see the Bare Naked Ladies at the Gorge near George, Washington. That summer there were forest fires raging over Washington, and we could smell the fire in the air as we were driving out. At one point during the drive, the sky was bisected — clear and blue on one side, and murky with smoke on the other, nearly enough to blot out the sun. This picture doesn’t really do it justice, but it was incredible to see.

Ash covers Anchorage

The stories posted of people coming out to find ash covering everything do sound very familiar, though — only for me, it was due to volcanoes. While I missed the Mt. Redoubt eruption in 1989/90 due to galavanting around Europe, in 1992 Mt. Spurr erupted not far outside of Anchorage, sending a cloud of ash all over the city. Unfortunately, I didn’t get quite as good a look at the effects as I could have.

I’d spent the day working at Fireweed Theaters, slinging popcorn at the snack bar. Got off my shift in the afternoon, probably around 5 or 6, and caught a ride home with a friend. As she was driving me home, we could see the sky darkening as the ash cloud moved in over the city. I had long hair at the time, and as we were heading across town, I wanted to let it down. I took the ponytail holder out of my hair, shook my head — and suddenly my glasses, which were a little old and not as tight as they should have been, went flying out the open window of the car and underneath the tires of the car behind us. Crap.

We pulled over and rescued what pieces we could, but the glasses were trashed. Given that I’m legally blind without my glasses, I spent the next day being driven around and getting new glasses, living my life in an out of focus, ash-grey world. I was a little bummed that I couldn’t see the ash clouds more clearly — it’s not exactly something that happens every day — but I did get to see some of the aftereffects as the cleanup got underway.

Just more of the oddball fun of life in Alaska, I suppose.

Bush's plans to expand the Patriot Act

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President Bush doesn’t think the current Patriot Act is good enough. In an attempt to “close loopholes” in the original legislation, he’s proposed three very frightning changes, examined here by Robyn Blummer of the St. Petersburg Times:

Bush wants three additional powers from Congress.

First, he wants to give the Justice Department the authority to confiscate records and compel testimony without review by a court or grand jury.

[…]

Second, Bush wants to chip away at the right to bail. …he wants passage of the “Pretrial Detention and Lifetime Supervision of Terrorists Act of 2003,” a bill that would keep people accused of a whole range of new crimes behind bars pending trial by making those crimes presumptively “no bond” offenses.

[…]

And third, Bush wants to expand the reach of the federal death penalty by making it applicable to “domestic terrorism.”

Under the Patriot Act, the crime of “domestic terrorism” couldn’t be more broadly written. Any criminal act intended to influence the government through “intimidation or coercion” involving “dangerous acts” qualifies. Aggressive protesters of all stripes from Greenpeace activists to abortion foes could easily fall within this definition, opening the door for politically motivated executions.

Bush also wants the death penalty for those convicted of providing “material support for terrorism,” a law that can be violated even when people think they are giving money to a charity and don’t know the group is a designated terrorist organization.

Put simply, Bush wants to finalize the process of turning America into a police state, where the slightest suspicion of dissent could land you in jail without bail, and possibly on death row.

(via TalkLeft, via Atrios)

Panther goodies

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Lots of interesting tips and tricks for Panther are showing up on the web now that it’s been out a few days. Some of the niftier ones I’ve run across so far:

  • The Exposé blob (an on-screen trigger for the Exposé effect).
  • SIPS (Scriptable Image Processing System — Panther-specific command line image processing similar to ImageMagick or NetPBM).
  • System-wide inline text autocompletion.
  • When you hit command-tab to bring up the application list, you can choose which application to switch to with the mouse as well as with the keyboard.
  • Exposè is usable during a drag (start to drag a file from a visible window, invoke Exposè to find the target window, then drop the file into the target window).
  • Easily find special characters (accents, math functions, currency symbols, etc.) by choosing Edit > Special Characters… in any application.
  • Choosing your desktop picture now ties directly into your iPhoto library.
  • Lots of high-powered upgrades to the text services engine, giving us professional level typography options by default.

Bush in Oz

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Kookaburra has an interesting wrap-up of President Bush’s visit to Australia posted on his site. While it’s certainly no surprise, apparently Bush’s visit was heavily stage managed to make sure he got the most possible accolades, and the fewest possible questions…

Every aspect of the visit was stage managed to ensure that John Howard controlled it for maximum political gain. Simon Crean managed a single 20 minute audience with George Bush, despite more Australian’s voting for his party than John Howard’s in the last election. (Howard is in government as the leader of a coalition between his Liberal Party and the National Party).

Alan Ramsay (of SMH) in commenting on the exclusion of Crean, “…the Opposition Leader was left out in mugsville. He was not included in the welcome at Canberra airport, in the farewell, in the ceremony at the War Memorial, or in the barbecue at the Lodge, the only social occasion Bush would agree to. Even the press gallery was represented at the lunch by its president, Malcolm Farr of The Daily Telegraph. But not the Leader of the Australian Opposition. If nothing else, you’d have thought protocol if not manners might have extended an invitation to Crean.”

Lord knows we can’t have our President actually have to face questions about what he’s doing to the world — he might slip up and accidentally tell the truth.

Kill Bill, Vol. 1

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I’m going to keep my comments here fairly brief, as this is only the first part of a two-part story. So, briefly, first impressions of the first half of Kill Bill:

  • Much butt-kicking fun.

  • There is far less dialogue than you might expect from a Tarrantino film, but in this case, I can’t see it any other way.

  • There’s also a very bitter, sorrowful tone to the film that is easy to overlook during the fights and general carnage, but is very present, and very important to the tone.

  • Yes, it’s violent. Very violent. But two points on that:

    1. It’s Quentin Tarrantino. Did you really expect anything else?
    2. How can you take it seriously when every severed limb or head (and there are many) is apparently attached to a high-pressure firehose?
  • Best line (delivered by The Bride while spanking the last living henchman — a sixteen (?) year old boy — with the flat of her katana): “This is what you get for fucking with Yakuza! Now go home to your mommy!”

  • I hope that Vol. 2 gives us more of The Bride’s background. But if it doesn’t, that might not matter — in an almost zen-like way, she simply is. More background might actually detract from this.

  • Using anime for O-Ren Ishii’s background: very nice touch.

  • The fight scenes were deliciously over the top. Unrealistic, but enjoyably so.

  • One shot in the mass battle royale towards the end — a grainy, black and white travelling shot of a spinning hatchet — was almost a mirror of a shot in the diner scene of Natural Born Killers.

  • Favorite sequence (at least right now, immediately after my first viewing): the blue background silhouetted section of the battle in the restaurant.

  • I know I’m not catching the majority of the references Tarrantino is making throughout the film. That’s okay, though. I’m guessing there’s enough to fill an entire book — which will probably be at your friendly neighborhood bookseller not long after Vol. 2 is released.

  • This review (which I found thanks to Kalyx) may sum it up the best:

    Gratuitous in the most passionate, brutal and aesthetically exacting way, this first half of Quentin Tarantino’s blood-drenched mash note to the eclectic, disreputable genres he grooved on as a kid is a remarkably pure orchestration of imagery and attitude. The content of those magnificently moving pictures is whatever the opposite of pure might be: an endless orgy of degradation, dismemberment, cruelty and bile. The \”Pulp Fiction’ auteur has ratcheted it all up into a fantasy realm, and he has a point when he claims that anybody who thinks this disturbing stuff is happening to anything like a real person is crazy — or, at least, crazier than he is.

    Still, there’s nothing wrong with avoiding \”Kill Bill’ if you’re easily offended by violence to women, violence by women, violence observed by traumatized children or lots — LOTS — of violently detached body parts scattered all around the screen.

    But if you’re not like that: Man, is this movie cool.

Bubba Ho-Tep

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On a whim for something silly and fun, Prairie and I went out and saw Bubba Ho-Tep today. It was exactly what we were in the mood for.

Bruce Campbell as Elvis

Bruce Campbell plays an elderly Elvis, spending the last of his days in a retirement home under the name of Sebastian Half, an Elvis impersonator who he switched places with when he got tired of constantly being in the limelight. Along with his friend John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis) — also in the retirement home, and now a black man (“They dyed me this color!”) — he has to battle a resurrected Egyptian mummy who is using the retirement home as his personal feeding grounds, sucking the souls out of people so close to death that no-one blinks an eye when they pass on.

BHT was done surprisingly well. While definitely an action/comedy, it did a remarkable job of not taking the camp too far, and instead, taking the time to create real characters that the audience could believe in and empathize with. It may be the best actual acting I’ve seen Campbell do, too. He’s a lot of fun as Ash in the Evil Dead series, but those are so over-the-top that they don’t really feature Campbell the actor, merely Campbell the comedian (not that that’s a bad thing at all, mind you).

Here we have an Elvis facing mortality — questioning leaving show business, losing contact with his wife and daughter, and watching his aging body fall apart. The battle with the mummy is the first thing in years to give him something to live for, and Campbell does a wonderful job of creating the character.

The setting for the movie is brilliant, too. One of the oddities of mummy movies is always that the mummy, as a desiccated corpse, really isn’t the most threatening of monsters, shuffling along after its prey, who never seem to be able to outrun it. By setting the movie in a retirement home, filled with potential victims in wheelchairs and using walkers, suddenly the threat becomes a lot more real.

All in all, well worth the time and money to see, and definitely recommended.

Metadata is a good thing

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Phil and I got into a conversation this morning (which he’s already mentioned) about the iTunes Music Store and the metadata (ID3 tags such as Artist, Year, Track #, Composer, etc. that are included with each song in iTunes) that they provide.

While I’ve played with it a bit, I don’t see myself becoming a big user of the iTunes Music Store for one very simple reason — their metadata doesn’t meet my standards. Specifically, the “Year” field is often wrong (for instance, Meat Loaf‘s ‘Bat Out of Hell’ is tagged as 2003, when it was re-released, rather than 1977, when it was originally released), and for the majority of the tracks on the store, the “Composer” field is empty — the Classical genre is the only time the Composer field seems to be used consistently.

Now, I fully recognize that for 95% (at least) of the population, this isn’t going to be a major thing at all. As long as the Artist, Album, and Track Name are there and correct, we should be happy, right? Well, sure, for most people. I’m just in that 5% who are picky (ahem…anal) about this (and it’s certainly not limited to my music, as I tend to be quite meticulous about keeping my books and movies alphabetized, and sometimes broken down by genre).

Part of why I like having all that information available is just the amount of different searches that can be done when it’s all in and entered correctly — and when you’re dealing with a music library that is upwards of 80Gb, emcompassing over 10,000 different tracks from around 1,200 CDs, that can be important!

To use one of the examples I gave Phil, Al Jourgensen has been active in a ton of different industrial groups over the years, including Ministry, the Revolting Cocks, Lard, and many, many others. As long as I have the Composer field entered correctly, then I can do a quick search through my library for “Jourgensen” and instantly I’ve got a list of every track in my collection that he’s worked on.

Another example: Bob Dylan has written an incredible amount of music, much of which has been covered by many different artists over the years. Suppose I felt like listening to all the covers of Bob Dylan tracks I had in my collection. Without good metadata, it’s not happening — but with the metadata, I can set up a smart playlist using the terms “Arist does not include Dylan, Composer includes Dylan”, and I’ve got a list of Dylan songs performed by anyone but the man himself.

As far as the Year field goes, I like to keep smart playlists for each decade — I touched on this briefly earlier this month — or just be able to sort a listing of songs chronologically. Having the correct year in the metadata is necessary for this, and years that are off can be pretty jarring (for instance, listening to a modern music playlist and suddenly having 25-year old rock could be a little odd).

So that’s why I have some of the habits I do (well, ignoring the deep-seated childhood psychological trauma), and why I’m not likely to use the iTMS for much more than occasionally grabbing a track to replace a scratched section of one of my CDs. I may use it for expanding my classical collection — I just bought a great collection of Bach‘s Brandenburg Concertos last week — but that’s probably going to be the extent of it for now.

What to do to fix that (and send more of my money Apple’s way)? Well, Phil and I batted this one about for a couple minutes. I’ve looked into this a bit in the past, and it seems that Apple doesn’t really have a lot of control over what metadata is and isn’t present for the songs in their store. If I’m remembering correctly, all encoding and tagging is done by the studios themselves, then provided to Apple for inclusion in the iTMS. So sniping at Apple isn’t likely to do much good, and it would likely be a bit beyond my ken to start harassing each of the various studios to pay attention to these little details (especially when, as I stated before, most people couldn’t give a flying fig about things like this).

The best case scenario, I think, is one that Phil mentioned: if Apple treated the iTMS library’s metadata in a similar fashion to the Gracenote CDDB (this is the service that iTunes connects to in order to automatically discover album information when you put a CD into your computer). With the CDDB, all information in the database can be updated by the users — if you put a CD into your computer and notice that some of the information is incorrect, you can make the edits and then re-submit the updated information back to the CDDB, essentially creating a self-updating and self-correcting public service.

If Apple could implement something like this for the iTMS, I’d be thrilled. Logistically, it’s a bit of a quandry, though, as it would likely need to include some sort of moderation to prevent someone submitting information for an album with every track titled “tHIz ALBum SuXX0Rzz!!!!!” or something equally intelligent. That extra added overhead creates more work for Apple, and as the iTMS is currently running in the red, Apple probably isn’t going to be anxiously looking for ways to put more money in for a feature that only 5% or less of its users are going to care about.

My suggestion, then, would be to create something akin to an “iTMS Pro” service. For, oh, \$5 a month (billed directly to the credit card already registered with the iTMS), an “iTMS Pro” subscriber could edit and submit information on tracks in the iTMS library, correcting information that might have been entered badly the first time (I’ve already noticed the occasional dropped space or inconsistent naming conventions), or adding information that wasn’t included, such as the Composer field. The information would still probably need to go through some sort of moderation process at Apple, but limiting the editing ability to people who were willing to pay the slight extra bit of money would weed out casual pranksters, and provide a few extra dollars to Apple to pay for that moderation process.

Is this going to happen? Oh, I seriously doubt it. But if it did, I’d be sure to sign up.

I like my metadata.

New toy: iSight

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iSight screencapture

So I went and got myself a new toy today — Apple’s iSight webcam. I haven’t done a ton of playing with it so far, but from what I have done, it’s quite the nifty little addition to my arsenal of toys.

The packaging is up to Apple’s usual standards of excellence. The box unfolds in half to reveal all the pieces: the iSight itself, a plastic carrying case, and three types of stands (one for sticking to the top of a CRT, one for sticking to the back of an LCD screen, and one for clipping to the top of a PowerBook). A FireWire cable is included, packaged underneath the camera.

Setting it up is incredibly simple — plug it in. Instantly, iChat recognizes it, and you’re ready to go!

I didn’t have anyone online who I could test a two-way video chat with, but I was able to test a one-way video chat (me broadcasting, them receiving) with audio going both directions, and it worked fine. The iSight has a microphone built in, so no extra cables or pieces are required to get the audio portion of the chat working.

After playing with iChat for a bit, I bounced into Yahoo! Messenger for a few moments. While Y!M doesn’t have anywhere near the speed or quality that iChat does, and doesn’t support voice chat on the Mac, it was able to recognize the iSight and allow for video/text chatting with other Y!M users without a hitch.

All in all, I’m quite impressed. It may not be the most practical toy that I could have picked up — especially with so few other iChat/iSight users in my sphere of influence at the moment — but it’ll be quite handy to have around at those times when I can take advantage of it.