Betsy Newmark writes that flexibility and Obama are mutually exclusive terms — he definitely stays on target no matter what the damage his plans may cause; arguably because collateral damage to the economy is a feature, not a bug in his mind (reference his bankrupting the coal industry rhetoric):
Nina Eason makes the point that Obama was masterful during the campaign to stay on message. He didn’t change that message no matter what.
Barack Obama promised universal health care and a mass conversion to green energy when he launched his presidential campaign. On that frigid February day in 2007, the economy was growing at a 2.8% clip. Obama stuck to the same promises a year later when he won Iowa, as the housing market was slumping into recession. And energy and health care were the twin pillars of his acceptance speech in Denver, 18 days before Lehman Brothers collapsed.
But now the question is whether his audacious plans, which might have been less questionable when the economy was doing well, would actually sink any hope of recovery. And the answer seems clear that piling up massive future debts as well as putting new burdens on business are lousy moves to make during a deep economic decline.
As one of the most disciplined, on-message politicians of our time, President Obama hasn’t wavered from his audacious plans to remake entire business sectors. But when wavering is what the U.S. economy seems to do best these days, the President confronts a new question: Does his own agenda threaten to choke off the economic recovery that he also promises — and that will define much of his legacy? Both of his legislative campaigns for the fall, health-care reform and the cap-and-trade plan to curb carbon emissions, could put new burdens on a weak economy.
Well, duh! But what’s a bit of common sense about how to avoid hurting the economy when the President has to stay on message and rack up big legislative scalps to hang on his belt?
“They are the villains in this,” Pelosi said of private insurers. “They have been part of the problem in a major way. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening. And the public has to know that. They can disguise their arguments any way they want, but the fact is that they don’t want the competition.”…
“It’s almost immoral what they are doing,” added Pelosi, who stood outside her office long after her press conference ended to continue speaking to reporters, even as aides tried in vain to usher her inside. “Of course they’ve been immoral all along in how they have treated the people that they insure with pre-existing conditions, you know, the litany of it all.”
Emphasis above via Allahpundit, who adds:
Take one of the most unpopular politicians in America, have her go off half-cocked in a crude attempt to satisfy Democratic demands for a villain to demagogue in selling ObamaCare, then wait for the backlash. Bonus points for using the same Orwellian rhetorical device Paul Ryan called Katrina Vanden Heuvel on last night, namely, exploiting the language of competition to push one of the most anti-competitive domestic measures in American history.
Not to mention the notion that this is coming from someone who no doubt sees the idea of “villains” and “morals” as dated rhetoric in the postmodern world, where one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and the like.
Update: Michelle Malkin adds, “opposition to Hope and Change™ is starting to take its toll. Nancy Pelosi is starting to act like somebody spiked her Botox with traces of arsenic, and the descent into paranoid madness is somewhat reminiscent of Captain Queeg on the witness stand in The Caine Mutiny.”
The weekend prior to my recent trip to Alaska, I had planned to purchase a Flip Mino HD or Creative Lab Vado HD after reading the review of the two tiny video cameras by Skye at her Midnight Blue Weblog. However, since Best Buy was out of both cameras, but had a Sony MHS-PM1 “Webbie” in stock, I figured what the heck.
About the size of a pack of cigarettes (to borrow a common measuring term now apparently verboten) for the most part, the Webbie is certainly intuitive enough; rotating its tiny lens up from its protective cover turns the camera on, and the buttons below the monitor screen marked PHOTO AND MOVIE are certainly intuitive enough.
But there are several aspects of the camera that are less than intuitive. Clicking the movie button once lights up a small recreation of a typical video camera’s tally light, to let you know the camera’s recording. But then clicking it again generates a note that says “RECORDING”. It’s the camera’s way of letting you know it’s recording the just captured to the unit’s Memory Stick card, but it takes a couple of tries to figure out just when the unit is actually, you know, recording. (Also, you’ll need to purchase the Memory Stick card separately, which bumps the total price of the unit up slightly, as the Webbie’s onboard 12MB is pretty useless except for recording a handful of still shots.)
Right out of the box, the Webbie’s default mode is 720P, which is perfect for uploading videos to YouTube’s recently adopted widescreen format. The above video, documenting my train ride from Anchorage (where my plane got in) to Seward (where we picked up our cruise ship) was shot in the Webbie’s 720P format; mainly because I wasn’t sure how to switch the Webbie into 1080p without first flipping through the Webbie’s instruction manual. The button on the right hand side of the camera marked MENU brings up some commands, but the button to its right, which also doubles as the button to delete unwanted shots is what changes video modes. (VGA is also available as an option, for those who prefer standard def.)
As you can see by the above video, the picture quality is pretty darn good for such a tiny camera. But perhaps the most frustrating feature on the Webbie is the lack of a smooth zoom control. Obviously, because of its tiny lens, the unit uses electronics to generate its zoomed images, rather than adjusting the actual lens itself, a money and space-saving feature common on lots of low-end consumer camcorders.
But most camcorders have a fluid zoom effect. In contrast, the Webbie ratchets between positions in its zoom; you’ll want to compose your shots first, then hit record, or be prepared to discard the material shot while the camera zooms, and fluidly focusing on an object then zooming back (see Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon for this technique repeatedly used as a leitmotif) is impossible.
While the unit does have a tripod mount, it lacks a seperate microphone input, so you’ll be relying on the Webbie’s built-in mic, which may be fine for some occassions, and very frustrating for others.
But then, that’s the Webbie in a nutshell, isn’t it? Filling the gap between a cellphone camera and a decent consumer camcorder, the Webbie is great for quick and dirty video blogging, as a handy second camera for shooting B-roll footage, and certainly for home movies. But with a few additions and modifications, it could have been a much more useful little tool.
And fromVideomaker magazine in late 2007, here’s my look at some of the other video hosts out there, complete with quotes from my interview with Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.tv.
(For some uber-wonky video talk, my latest Videomaker article compares and contrasts CMOS and CCD sensors in video cameras, with a cameo appearance by Hahn Choi, one of the many hard working behind the scene people at PJTV.)
Sensing the future is just around the corner, the New York Times experiments dilligently with a smaller, more portable, pocket-sized edition of its newspaper. But I’m not sure if they have the technology quite worked out just yet….
(And yes, it’s still April 1st on the West Coast for another 20 minutes as I write this.)
(That last item found here, naturally enough. Though some in the comments are declaring it an early April’s Fools prank. If so, sorry for the unintended mellow enharshening.)
Hey, it’s survived me being on there, so I’m guessing it’s somewhat bulletproof. But still, Nova Spivack has some interesting questions about Twitter’s future. In my “All You Need Is Tweet” video, I compared Twitter to a combination police scanner and Internet chatroom; Spivack has an equally viable analogy:
Twitter reminds me of CB radio — and that is a double-edged blessing. In Twitter the “radio frequencies” are people and hashtags. If you post to your Twitter account, or do an @reply to someone else, you are broadcasting to all the followers of that account. Similarly, if you tweet something and add hashtags to it, you are broadcasting that to everyone who follows those hashtags.
This reminds me of something I found out about in New York City a few years back. If you have ever been in a taxi in NYC you may have noticed that your driver was chatting on the radio with other drivers — not the taxi dispatch radio, but a second radio that many of them have in their cabs. It turns out the taxi drivers were tuned into a short range radio frequency for chatting with each other — essentially a pirate CB radio channel.
This channel was full of taxi driver banter in various languages and seemed to be quite active. But there was a problem. Every five minutes or so, the normal taxi chatter would be punctuated by someone shouting insults at all the taxi drivers.
When I asked my driver about this he said, “Yes, that is very annoying. Some guy has a high powered radio somewhere in Manhattan and he sits there all day on this channel and just shouts insults at us.” This is the problem that Twitter may soon face. Open channels are great because they are open. They also can become aweful, because they are open.
Which also dovetails nicely with Compuserve’s groundbreaking CB chat application, which, in the early 1980s, along with regional BBSs, was one of my very first online experiences. (Yes, I had to walk a mile home from school barefoot in the snow to get to my computer, and we needed tin cans, strings and stone knives and bearskins–or at least TRS-80’s–to connect. In those primitive days, 1,000,000 years B.C. (Before Cable-modem), life online was a constant struggle to survive–and pay the connection fees.
I don’t think Twitter is as susceptible as Compuserve’s CB was to a high signal to noise ratio, simply because it’s possible to filter much of the spam and noise out of a conversation. But Spivack has some additional suggestions that might help to ameliorate the impact of a sudden rush of new tweeters.
After all of the recent political and media bias Silicon Graffiti videos, I wanted to do something in a lighter vein, so here’s (hopefully) a fun overview of Twitter. No doubt, hard care power Tweeters (yes, it’s supposed to sound silly) will chide me for leaving out whatever this week’s killer app of the century is, but I’ve tried to make something enjoyable for both newcomers and veteran users of Twitter.
From a Twittering Barack Obama to Hugh Hewitt and all points in between, we go deep inside your computer and try to make sense of Twitter.
And while I often have sushi while sitting in front of my PC’s twin LCD monitors, apparently the in-thing amongst the really hip members of the digerati is preparing the sushi right on them. That sounds good to me, but aren’t they worried that the wasabi will melt the plastic?
Allahpundit explores the boffo box office–which a different kind of PC industry, politically correct Hollywood, would kill for–of Microsoft’s Halo 3, which ties in with an apt comment Glenn Reynolds made a while back:
It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly — movies, music, newspapers, TV women’s shows — seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren’t. I’d be interested to see more analysis on that subject.
Meanwhile, James Lileks has online video of the haves and have-nots of the videogame world as Halo 3’s launch approached.
Ahh, but what sort of space would be worthy to qualify as the perfect rec room in which to play such an awesomely awesome game? There can be only choice:
ABC reports, “The Future of the Workplace: No Office, Headquarters in Cyberspace–Some Companies Don’t Care Where Workers Are as Long as They Get the Job Done”.
Geez, Toffler wrote about telecommuting in The Third Wave in 1980. Numerous businesses (not the least of which is Pajamas) rely heavily on it. Wall Street firms used telecommuting to stay afloat immediately after 9/11. Why such a breathless headline from ABC?
SciFi.com gives us a sneak preview of what the laptop of the future will look like. As to what it will have inside, see my recent CE Pro article on 64-bit computing.
Of course, this is all contingent on the UN’s forecast of the world coming to an end in 2015 not coming true, but somehow, I think we’ll muddle through…
From what I’ve heard, once you go dual, you never go back. I’ll let you know–I’m experimenting with dual 19-inch LCD monitors. Surprisingly, it was a PITA to install, because apparently my PC’s ATI videocard, which is designed to simultaneously pump out both VGA and DVI video–and hence allowing two monitors–apparently had a defective DVI output. But now that I’ve replaced the card, and have both monitors working, it seems like it should improve workflow with recording programs such as Cakewalk Sonar, and video programs like Adobe Premiere Pro. Not to mention experimenting with rotating the monitor 90 degrees for Word documents.
Besides, it looks bitchin’ cool to boot. Maybe I’ll add a third!
During the late-1990s, as the new millennium was approaching and pre-Blogosphere, I was largely toiling away for various home automation magazines (something I still do quite often, actually), where I wrote my share of “Welcome To The Home Of The Future!” articles. Here’s one that featured quotes from my interview of Star Trek veteran David Gerrold, and is a representative (though heavily edited, as I recall) sample of the genre.
But my sci-fi forecasting had nothing on the Minneapolis Strib’s apocalyptic vision of the future domus. Roger L. Simon writes that many of us are having the same reaction from Al Gore’s low budgetPowerPoint presentationagitpropumentary Academy Award-winnning blockbuster film:
After viewing the movie I was less troubled with the global warming issue and more troubled by Gore’s narcissism – not exactly the result intended. In fact, the reverse. And evidently, from the poll results, I am not alone.
Remember this 1993 AT&T commercial narrated by Tom Selleck? Pretty amusing to watch it again today and realize that all of the gee-whiz technology in the ad is either here now already, or particularly in the case of the clunky looking PDA/tablet computer with an AM-style telescoping antenna sending (oooooh) faxes from the beach in the last shot, already obsolete:
(Not sure which, if any, of these technologies were actually brought to us exclusively by AT&T itself, but still, it was a stylish look at the minor wonders of the near future.)
I am so not excited about Windows Vista! … And I was excited about Windows XP, because I thought its sturdier code would stop it from crashing. I was wrong, at least for the early version of XP that I bought. Now I can’t see a thing Vista’s going to do for me that seems worth braving the inevitable Microsoft early teething problems. [It says you can "spend more time surfing the web"!--ed No I can't.] … P.S.: Needless to say, if everyone has this attitude Vista (and the need to buy new computers powerful enough to run Vista, etc.) won’t provide much of a boost to the economy.
I do think 64-bit computing (on Windows or otherwise) has some real possibilities, but it may be a while before it filters down deep into the Army of Davids/serious consumer level.
Television long ago replaced the fireplace as the central gathering place in the American home, which adds to the layers of McLuhanesque irony hidden in the annual Yule Log video. Fortunately, the spotlight shines even brighter on the world’s most famous log this year, as The New York Daily News reports:
Generations have sat raptly in front of the television on Christmas Day, mesmerized by a holiday classic: “The Yule Log.”
Now, for the first time in the storied log’s 40-year history, secrets of the burning timber will be revealed.
WPIX/Ch. 11 presents “The WPIX Yule Log: A Log’s Life,” Dec. 23 at 7 p.m.
Hopefully they’ll put it up on YouTube in time for Christmas. In the meantime, the above clip should help get you in the mood, though you’ll have to keep hitting play after its short run, rather than waiting for it to automatically loop.
I have a few articles online and on dead tree this month that you may enjoy.
Regarding the latter, I have a piece in the Robb Report’s Home Entertainment magazine on IPTV, a technology being leveraged by phone companies to become players in the arena previously reserved for cable and satellite providers. Initially, it’s being sold as a cheaper alternative to digital cable and satellite. But the format’s long-range potential could lead to dramatic shifts in how we watch TV. For one, expect to start seeing downloadable YouTube-style TV, err, on your TV. As well as much more narrowcasting video, and… well, read the article for more.
For DIY recording enthusiasts, in the October issue of England’s Computer Music magazine, I have an article on step sequencers, arpeggiators, and other electronic instruments that allow you to play one note and get ten. Or 100. Note that in the US, this issue probably streets next month. At least the Borders’ chain seems to have a 30 day delay between the issues’ cover dates and when they appear in stores.
At the moment, to the best of my knowledge, both of those are strictly “dead tree”, but we’ll let you know if that changes. As for online material, speaking of DIY music, my podcast interview with The Man From Izotope on audio mastering is also online at Blogcritics. Along with a piece that could be titled, “An Orchestra Of Davids“. It’s a review of an impressive self-published book on programming orchestral arrangements from MIDI synthesizers.
Sad to say, no Vanessa Williams sightings in any of these pieces, though.
Betsy Newmark writes that flexibility and Obama are mutually exclusive terms — he definitely stays on target no matter what the damage his plans may cause; arguably because collateral damage to the economy is a feature, not a bug in his mind (reference his bankrupting the coal industry rhetoric):
