E.J. Junior Senior Junior High

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

NPR has a weekly game show called “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” which they describe as “The Oddly Informative News Quiz” (and I’d say that’s a fairly apt description). There’re various panelists — P.J. O’Rourke, Paula Poundstone, Mo Rocca, and others — and either the host asks the panelists questions or listeners call in and the panelists ask listeners questions. It’s actually a lot of fun & mdash; a lot lighter than the usual NPR fare — and I’ve recently taken to ripping the episodes to mp3 to timeshift them.

One of their favorite games is “Bluff the Listener” where a listener calls in and hears a weird news story from three panelists. The catch is that two of the stories are fake and only one of them is real — and the user has to guess which. On last weekend’s show, they were playing a “best of” set of clips from years past. And, one clip in particular featured Roy Blount Jr and his telling of a news article about basketball player E.J. Junior (yes, his last name his “Junior”).

Spoilers below — including whether Blount’s story was the fake or real story that week.

Blount concocted a fabulous tale about how E.J. Junior had been named as father-of-the-year and a middle school was being named in his honor. Naturally, Junior’s son was also named “E.J.” and so the father was known as “E.J. Junior, Senior”. And, the middle school in question was a Junior High. I’m afraid that words alone can’t really do justice to Blount’s diction; however, as I already had the episode as a stand-alone mp3, I edited it down to just Blount’s pontification and uploaded this clip on the dedication of E.J. Junior Senior Junior High (1 min, 24 sec mp3).

Man, I must have listened to that clip a dozen times, but I laugh every time :). It’s too bad, though, the listener calls Blount “Ray” at the end (rather than “Roy”). D’oh!

PS Mad propz to Audacity, an open source sound editor (which is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux). I made use of it to trim the original 60:00 mp3 (the entire show) down to the (01:24) clip of Blount’s bit.

I’ve Got Your Eminent Domain Right Here

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

Eminent domain is the “power of the state to appropriate private property for its own use without the owner’s consent.”. It’s traditionally used when a public project needs to make use of private land, such as building a highway. I suppose that giving up one's house for the sake of a highway isn’t pleasant for the people that own the land, but perhaps it’s necessary. All the same, eminent domain has drawn the line at taking private property for private use… until now.

In a recently decided Supreme Court case, the City of New London, Connecticut wanted to take away some Fort Trumbull residents’ houses and give that land to Pfizer so that it could build a plant there. The city cited “eminent domain” as their justification but the residents balked at that idea and sued. The case went from the New London Superior Court to the Connecticut Supreme Court and from there to U. S. Supreme Court. And on June 23rd, the Supreme Court ruled against the homeowners.

With that out of the way, a private developer wants to make the most of this newfound power and build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road in Weare, New Hampshire. Naturally, there’s already a house there, though in this case the house is owned by Justice David H. Souter, one of the Supreme Court justices that supported the recent ruling:

On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter’s home.

Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.

The proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel” will feature the “Just Desserts Café” and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon’s Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans. […]

Though Clements insists that this is “not a prank”, I doubt his request will go any further than the nearest circular file. All the same, I wish Clements the best of luck — even if his request is denied (or ignored), perhaps this will bring some public attention to this atrocious Supreme Court decision.

(Via: Boing Boing)

Treo 650 On Its Way

Ashley Bischoff10 Comments
PalmOne Treo 650

I’ve been looking for a new cell phone for some time now. I currently have a Nokia 3650 which looks pretty good on paper — color screen, Bluetooth and polyphonic ringtones — but it sucks a bit in real life. You see, the clowns who designed this thing thought it'd be Super Cute(tm) to put the keypad in a circle. That’s right — the numbers run counter-clockwise in a circle on the face of the phone. And, it's hard enough to dial on the thing (my fingers have twenty+ years of muscle memory with grid-layout phones), but trying to enter SMSes is even worse. Trying to make use of T9 text messaging with the keys in a circle is like someone secretly replacing your keyboard at work with one of those Dvorak jobbies.

I bought the 3650 about two years ago, IIRC in summer of 2003. And, really, it's worked out fine for the most part. It places calls; it receives calls. What’s not to like? ;) And, the Bluetooth has been handy for transferring contact-information with my friends and shuffling my contacts to my PowerBook when I had to replace the handset (broken phone’s contacts -> PowerBook -> new phone). Still, even though it was a Symbian phone and I could theoretically run apps on it, the screen was too small to much useful. (Not that this last aspect was the phone’s fault — most phone’s screens are too small for web browsing, e-mail, and the like.)

I’m also a bit of a connectivity nut. I’ve often thought that it could be rather convenient to be able to update my Netflix queue from my phone after having watched a preview or get directions for a spur-of-the-moment dinner at a restaurant. Or if I forget to print out my Fangando-like movie ticket confirmation number but only realize it after driving to the theater, I could check my e-mail and retrieve it from there (a “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” goes out to someone in particular on that last one).

So, if I’m looking for an Internet-capable phone, I only have a handful of options (literally, I could count them on one hand). There’s the Sidekick II which looks pretty snazzy — my brother has one — but it’s missing Bluetooth and the Sidekick II is, erm, getting a bit long in the tooth as well; I could just see the Sidekick III coming out as soon as I were to buy one ;). There’re also several Pocket PC-based phones, making use of Microsoft’s miniature Windows version. However, considering the distaste that I have for the full-sized version of Windows, the last thing I want is a scrunched version of the Windows UI in my pocket.

Handspring, one of the Palm OS licensees, has come out with a few Palm-based phones over the years. But, I’ve just largely ignored those as they've consistently fallen behind the curve. Not that I blame them — I can understand that it can take many months to receive an OS from Palm and then build a phone around it (or into it, as the case may be). When the latest Palm PDAs had color screens, the Treo was still black-and-white; when the latest Palm PDAs had high-resolution (320 x 320) screens, the Treos remained at low resolutions (160 x 160). Until now.

By some freak of nature, Treo has caught up to Palm. And, in fact, “Treo” is now a Palm brand after Palm reacquired Handspring. Ok, back to the freak-of-nature thing for a moment. Is it that Treo found its second wind, or is Palm's PDA division slacking? Well, I’ll say this much: PalmSource (the spin-off OS division from Palm) shipped their next-generation OS (v6) to licensees over a year and half ago (January 2004). No OS 6 devices yet. They’ve even shipped an interim version (6.1) in September. Still no OS 6 devices. Either OS 6 isn’t quite ready for production or the licensees (including Palm Inc proper) are just sitting on their hands.

Anyway, back to the Treo. Up until recently, the Treo 600 was their latest model, complete with 160 x 160 screen. Granted that resolution is certainly usable — I made of that on both my Palm Pro and Palm Vx. However, I’ve had a Palm Tungsten C (with a 320 x 320 screen and WiFi) for a couple years now and a resolution downgrade wasn’t really what I had in mind. On top of that, the Treo 600 didn’t have Bluetooth either. However, late last year, Palm released the Treo 650 which fixed much of the Treo 600’s shortcomings. (Well, “released” may be a bit of strong word ;). It was mostly a paper launch and then only to Sprint customers. The full scale launch was a few months later.)

The Treo 650 has a 320 x 320 screen and Bluetooth. I gotta hand it to Palm on this one — it’s as if the muckety-mucks at Palm read the Treo 600 reviews, noticed how journalists were pointing out its low resolution and missing Bluetooth, and directed their electrical engineers to concentrate on implementing those. (Were the Treo made my Microsoft, I could just see their developers being directed to add talking paper clips and new wallpaper tiles rather than toiling away with Bluetooth.) The Treo 650 also has a 312 MHz processor compared with the 144 MHz chip in the Treo 600. The 32 MB RAM isn't too bad either (by PDA standards), though that much was unchanged from the Treo 600.

The one thing that was holding me back for a little while was the upgrade-doh!-upgrade scenario — you know, you upgrade, the next model comes out a month later (d’oh!), and you either have to upgrade or look stupid while all your friends buy the latest model and you're stuck with the old one. I mean, I remember reading the news at the time when PalmSource released OS 6 to its licensees back in January ’04. At the time, I thought that licensees might have some applicable hardware out in 8-12 months (which was just conjecture on my part, but it seemed like a reasonable guess). So, even when I learned about the Treo 650 (which runs Palm OS 5.4), I thought for sure that a PDA/phone with Palm OS 6 would be coming out “any day now”

I later researched the goings-on about OS 6 and, of course, learned that an interim update (6.1) was even released back in September but new OS 6-based PDAs were still nowhere in sight. I then read a rumor on Engadget that the next Treo might only come out in Q1 2006. And, knowing Palm, even if their internal goal really was Q1 2006, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to me if it ended coming out a quarter or two after that. The upshot of all this? The current Treo is capable — high resolution screen & Bluetooth — and there probably won’t be a new one coming out for at least the next six months.

You may already see where this is going. I’ve ordered an unlocked Treo 650 from Newegg and it should be here shortly :). For what it’s worth, I went with an unlocked phone since my carrier, T-Mobile, doesn’t offer a carrier-branded version of the phone (which might present a cost savings if that were an option). That aside, though, an unlocked phone also has the additional benefit that I can pop in a foreign SIM card if I visit overseas and choose to rent a prepaid SIM from a local telco (rather than suffering through $1+/minute roaming charges if I were to make foreign calls with my native T-Mobile service).

Update — June 3rd: FedEx was scheduled to deliver the phone on Friday. Their tracking system asserts that the phone was “delivered”, but there was no package waiting for me when I got home from work. While I have a waiver release on file with FedEx indicating that they can leave packages without my signature, my release specifies that FedEx may leave packages at my back door — a fenced-in patio area (with a minimal chance for theft).

In this case, the driver acknowledged that he left the package at the front door. It looks like a claim will have to be filed with FedEx either way, but it appears FedEx is taking responsibility for this since the driver disregarded the release waver. All the same, I’ve ordered another Treo to replace the one that went missing and I’m sans Treo in the meantime. Argh.

Update — June 7th: The new phone is here and it works great! Whee! Now I just need to install all the handy apps that were mentioned in the comments :).

Ditto — Clipboard Manager with Type Ahead Find

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

The OS clipboard is pretty handy — except that it can only hold one item at a time. For a few years, I’ve been using a clipboard manager which fixed that and kept track of multiple clipboard items as I added them. (Essentially, it keeps an internal list of items which have been in the clipboard, updating the list each time something is copied to the clipboard.)

However, since upgrading to Windows 2000 (yeah, I’ve been using it that long), this utility acquired some consistency problems — sometimes it’d just stop working. I’m not mentioning the app’s name here since I’m not even sure if it’s the component at fault.

Anyhow, I recently sought a replacement clipboard manager. And, my first stop was at SourceForge since there’s a wealth of good open source goodies there. I found a couple good utilities there and finally settled on Ditto. It’s free, natch, and it works great.

If you’re new to the idea, here’s how a clipboard manager works in general:

  • Say you have a text document with the three biographies, one for “Alice”, one for “Bob” and one for “Carol”.

  • Then, suppose you were to copy Alice’s biography to the clipboard (to paste into a side document). So far, the built-in OS clipboard can handle this much…

  • After that, you copy Bob’s biography to the clipboard and paste that elsewhere…

  • So, Bob’s bio is now in your clipboard… But, what if you need quick access to Alice’s bio again? If you were using the regular clipboard, you'd be stuck.

  • However, with a clipboard manger, you can hit its hotkey and get a list of your past clipboard entries, choose the one you want, and that item is ready for pasting again.

All this may sound a bit esoteric if we’re just talking about biographies, but imagine this scenario with snippets of code or segments of a proposal which you’re editing. It can be a real time saver.

And the best part about Ditto — its killer feature which set it apart from similar apps — is that it supports type-ahead find. Also called “find as you type”, this feature was first seen in editors such as Emacs and became more widely known when it was built into Firefox. What this means is that finding stuff kicks in automatically. There’s no Ctrl-F or Edit -> Find; rather, you just start typing stuff and the program starts narrowing down the list as you’re typing.

For example, suppose that you had these entries in your clipboard:

  • Mozilla — An open source Web browser and toolkit from the Mozilla Foundation
  • Monkey — Any of various long-tailed, medium-sized members of the order Primates
  • Modern — Of or relating to recent times or the present

If you wanted to recall the entry on Mozilla, you’d invoke Ditto with its hotkey (configurable by you) and then type M… O… Z… and, at this point, Ditto would have automatically highlighted the entry on Mozilla since none of the other entries would have matched that third letter (the “Z”).

Another cool feature in Ditto is that you can, either manually or automatically, share clipboard items with another computer that’s is running Ditto. One use would be that you could have a unified clipboard among two computers that you used. Or, and this idea is more intriguing to me, you could sparingly use it to place stuff in a coworkers clipboard. Of course, the recipient would have to be expecting it at the time (otherwise he/she might be confused to find that entry in his/her clipboard).

Anyhow, if you want to try Ditto, there’re two bits to download. First there’s the main installer for Ditto and then there's a DAO installer (I can’t say that I’m completely sure about what DAO does but its acronym stands for “Data Access Object” and I would conjecture that it’s some type of database toolkit). They can be installed in either order, for what it’s worth.

Ditto’s hotkey is configurable (Options -> Keyboard Shortcuts) and I’ve set mine to Ctrl-Alt-Y (which was the hotkey for the old clipboard manager that my fingers were already used to typing). And, as for other configuration options, I’d also recommend poking around in the Options -> Supported Types area which, as I understand it, defines what types of clipboard data Ditto keeps track of (text, images, and so on). There, I’ve added “CF_BITMAP” to the list (using the “Add” button there and selecting) which should enable Ditto to keep track of images in the clipboard as well.

PS I’m open to suggestions if anyone can recommend a clipboard manager for OS X (which runs on my other box). Unfortunately, a climate of shareware licensing engulfs that platform and I'm not holding my breath on finding a free equivalent for that OS.

Update 2005-06-18: Apparently, Quicksilver (for OSX) can be used for clipboard management. I may have to give that a try.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith Might Not Be Horrble

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

I have an aversion to PG-13 rated action movies. Invariably, I get the sense that the director is holding back — there’s absent or rare blood on the screen, violence which moves off screen as it becomes more intense and a general lack of suspense. For example, X-Men was fine — I didn't mind seeing it once — but I would have preferred not to have spent $8 to see it in a theater. And don’t even get me started on how awesome Anakin’s lava scene in Episode III could have been with an R rating.

For many years, there was only one PG-13 action film which I thought of as worthy of repeat viewings, Goldeneye (aka Bond 17) which also happens to be my favorite Bond movie (yeah, yeah, pipe down you Connery nuts in the back — his films were good too, but they just seem a bit anachronistic to me these days). As it turns out, I joined Netflix earlier this year and I’ve recently added two other films to that list — Hellboy and one other film which I’ll get to in a moment. (Then again, is Hellboy perhaps more of a sci-fi movie or even a comic book movie than an action flick?)

The film Mr. and Mrs. Smith opened this weekend and I’ve been largely doing my best to ignore it. At first, its mere PG-13-ness put me off; soon after, the hype surrounding supposed Pitt/Jolie affair made me even less interested in the flick. However, I looked it up on IMDB and learned that Doug Liman directed it — the same guy that directed The Bourne Identity.

You may have already seen where this is going, but The Bourne Identity is the remaining item on my list of PG-13 movies that I would consider seeing multiple times. I rented it through Netflix and watched it a few weeks ago. It’s almost two hours long but I didn’t find myself checking my watch at any point during the movie. The acting was good and the action was fairly lively within the confines of its rating.

Getting back to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I realized that I couldn’t completely discount the Liman effect. Granted, not every director makes great movies every single time, but even if Mr. and Mrs. Smith was half as good as The Bourne Identity, it’d still be a fun time. I then checked Metacritic to see how critics scored it. (Metacritic, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a movie review site that publishes a “Metascore” based on an aggregate sampling of many critics’ reviews.)

I’ll concede that Mr. and Mrs. Smith didn’t actually do very well at Metacritic, at least not in the conventional sense; it got 55/100. However, among the critics that I’ve found to be reliable — and which have tastes in movies similar to mine — they mostly liked it:

  • The Onion (A.V. Club) / Scott Tobias — “Rarely does a word like “deft” come to mind when viewing any film released between May and August, but Liman and company make it all look easy.”

  • Film Threat / Clint Morris — “Thankfully, Liman’s film is not the equivalent of a piece of stale cheesecake — all look, no taste — because the script’s as tight as a scout-tied noose.”

  • Salon.com / Stephanie Zacharek — “Some people will see “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” as cynical, but I think its heart is deeply romantic, admittedly in an anvil-on-the-head kind of way.”

I’m not saying that I’m ready to sing the praises of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But, it’s probably better than I initially thought it was — maybe even venturing into “good” territory. If nothing else, I’ll toss it into my Netflix queue if I don’t end up seeing it in theaters.