April 2003 Archives

Pulled the trigger on a Canon Digital SLR this morning. I had the chance to play with my friend's D60 while in Vegas, and it convinced me I wanted to enter the world of interchangeable lenses and CMOS sensors. Not cheap by any means, but hopefully an investment in the future that I won't have to replace for a long time.

I honestly only really got into photography with my current digicam, the Canon Elph S100. It's a fantastic device, all the more amazing for its small size, and it's been taken to Sweden, Austria, England and number of other places by both myself and trustworthy friends to whom I've loaned it. However, there comes a time when you want more resolution, better optics, and a wide selection of lenses. The 10D fits the bill on all these counts, as well as does for for thousands less than what equivalent or lesser cameras sold for 6 months ago.

There's a pretty in-depth review of the camera here, as well as another one here. Now to try and decide on a lens... suggestions welcome.

Apple released iTunes 4 yesterday. A whole bunch of us upgraded immediately and spent some time fooling around with the new features.

I walked into my office this morning and was confronted by this. Auto-discovery of cow-orkers' music libraries, thanks to Rendezvous. Work days just got a lot more interesting, music-wise. Good thing we just upgraded to switched gigabit on our floor...

I'll be doing a much bigger update with pictures from my recent trip to Las Vegas soon, but I thought I should throw up a quick highlight. In the Valley of Fire state park, there's a pachyderm-esque rock formation which is photographed by nearly everyone who treks through. I'm no exception.

Actual line from an email received by my group today:

These cookies are still very insecure.

We kick off Las Vegas Restaurant Review Week on a real high note: the Nevada outpost of Michael Mina's fantastic San Francisco seafood eatery. Located within the fabled Bellagio -- a hotel I am still too cheap to stay in, but unable to resist for most of my meals -- the restaurant is right off the beautiful flower conservatory, in a space which I believe used to hold Steve Wynn's collection of Impressionist paintings. From a repository of cultural loot for Bugsy Siegel's spiritual heir to Baghdad-by-the-Bay fish shack -- if these walls could talk...

...they would undoubtably complain about the second-rate Rauschenberg, entitled Aquacade, which hangeth upon them like an albatross. Aside from that, the Left Coast roots of the restaurant are clear by the decor - this is an understated space, minimalism inflected by warm color tones -- and a menu only the ruling class can afford. Oh, and two tech guys trying to blow a month's worth of freelance income.

Since we're only in Vegas once a year, we decided to splurge on the $75 tasting menu. (We were also convinced that our prowess at nickel slots would soon recoup any temporary financial setback such an extravagant dinner inflicted upon our wallets. Cruel Fate would soon show us otherwise.) The evening began with a delicate amuse-bouche of vegetable soup, followed by Grilled Hamachi Carpaccio nestled under English Cucumber and Radish Salad, garnished with Tobiko Caviar. The salad was a crisp counterpoint to the soft raw fish hiding underneath, and the accompanying caviar garnish provided a perfectly-balanced dressing for both.

Next up was Dungeness Crab Cake with Tomato and Basil Confit & Aged Balsamic Vinegar. This is one of Aqua's signature dishes, and the tart, fresh confit upon which the crab cake rested was indeed perfectly complementary to the breaded crabmeat. For those of you interested in replicating this recipie at home, click here and scroll down.

The Miso-Glazed Chilean Sea Bass with Mushroom Consommé & Shrimp Ravioli, however, was perhaps the highlight of the meal -- if not the entire trip. Marinated in miso soy sauce for an entire day, the asian flavor permeated the soft fish and gave it a buttery-soft texture. Demonstrating even less of an adherence to customary dining decorum than usual, we were mopping up the miso sauce with bread by the end. I considered "mistakenly" shoving my plate off the table so that they might feel obligated to bring me a fresh serving, but considered the odds of this to be even lower than those in the Pai-Gow High Roller room.

Rounding out the tasting menu was Medallion of Rare Ahi Tuna with Seared Hudson Valley Foie Gras & Pinot Noir Sauce. Here was perhaps the only chink in the armor of the dishes presented that evening. The tuna, while expertly prepared, was at times in danger of being overwhelmed by the thick Pinot Noir flavor from the sauce. On the other hand, the foie gras was perfectly matched by the sauce -- what could have been overpowering flavors managed to mellow eachother and create a unique context for the nearly-raw fish.

Finally, the fabled desert sampler arrived. Normally desert in a seafood restaurant is an afterthought, or worse yet the victim of the kind of knee-jerk fusion which attempts to marry cod liver and powdered sugar -- with legally actionable results. Luckily, Aqua has risen above the chum and delivered a sampling plate worth the considerable risk in social ostracization and bouncer encounters that documentation with a flash-happy digital camera often entails.

The plate itself was filled with what looked like refugees from Dr. Seuss's wastebasket -- but in a good way. Finding a way to split each and every one of these beasties was task in and of itself... several solutions required the knowledge of non-Euclidean geometry.

Off to the side was a Liliputian root beer float, measuring no more than 5" tall and served with a straw made out of chocolate. It's a cliché about high-end restaurants that by cutting their portions by 1/3rd they convince you that the food tastes 3x as good, but there's something about a delicately-prepared miniature that's strangely compelling.

Gilding the lilly, a final set of small cookies and pasteries was delivered -- on what appeared to be a leftover prop from the 3-D Chess Set from Star Trek. It is with a deep sense of shame that I must admit we could not finish the last of these morsels. A last-minute plan -- hatched in the kind of desperation only Vegas can engender -- to ferry home the remaining confections in our pockets foundered upon the realization that the chocolate-based goodies would stand no more of a chance of survival than a ice-sculpture swan in the Valley of Fire.

Seeking a complete water-theme for the evening, we soon decamped for a showing of the Cirque du Soleil's O.

Thought I'd mention my friend has put up a review of Lukas Moodysson's new film Lilja 4-Ever. You can also read Anthony Lane's glowing piece in The New Yorker this week.

I missed the premiere in Stockholm this summer by a week, but was lucky enough to catch a press screening in November (thanks Claes!). Not an easy film to watch by any stretch of the imagination, but probably Moodysson's masterwork. You can watch the trailer here. [3MB AVI, digitized from Swedish TV. Mac users will need to download the Windows Media Player for either OS X or OS 9.]

We do a fair bit of live webcasting in my office, usually with Real's suite of audio and video codecs and streaming server. We've had a standalone PC hooked up to our video mixer to encode the analog video into Real format, usually at a few different bandwidth rates for modem as well as broadband users. The resulting video stream is sent to the RTSS server which then bounces the stream out to anyone who requests it. This PC has to be configured with a minimal set of software, must be up-to-date and virus-free, and is susceptible to all the normal maladies a desktop PC usually is - software hiccups, hardware glitches, and driver conflicts.

There is another approach: a special box, with an embedded OS and firmware settings, which is dedicated to video compression. vBrick Systems manufactures such hardware. Roughly the size of a flattened shoebox, they are plain black boxes with no VGA, keyboard or mouse ports, just Video-In and Ethernet.

Several vendors, from Real to Sun, were showcasing video on cell phones this year at NAB. There are a number of components which have to come together at both hardware, software, and data transmission levels, for this idea to become a reality, and they probably aren't all there yet. Still, this year was the first that vendors were showing actual working models, so who knows what will happen in the next twelve months.

No major hardware introductions at Apple's NAB booth this year, but I was glad to see a large number of Xserves and related hardware. Apple's now claiming the thoroughput of their Xraid disk array is sufficient for HDTV's 1080i standard, which happens to dovetail nicely with their efforts to shape FinalCut Pro 4 as an editor capable of handling resolutions from web to high-def. 1080i is about 125MBps, which is pretty heavy-duty. The Xraids have an independant IDE controller for each SCAII removable chassis, which actually makes sense - the chips must be really cheap nowadays, and even though their bandwidth individually may be less than SCSI, if you dedicate one controller per drive you have more than enough.

Luck and a good macro lens led me to this fellow crawling across a rock in the Valley of Fire. This Nevada State Park is only an hour northeast of Las Vegas, and has some amazing natural rock formations as well as Anasazi carvings - highly recommended.

Incremental upgrades to existing products, coupled with a major transition to a new touch-sensitivity technology, were the hallmark of SmartTECH's 2003 NAB booth.

Rear-projection SmartBoards are now being shipped with new system for sensing the presence of markers, erasers and human hands. Four motion-sensing cameras, installed in the corners of the screen, record the positions of objects touching the screen in two dimensions and relay the information back to the computer via a serial cable. The previous approach used a membrane to create an electrical connection along a transparent grid when a user pressed a point on the screen.

I know my friends who are Star Wars fans will appreciate this picture of an AT-TE model used during the filming of Episode 2. It was on display at NAB in a booth devoted to bluesceen products.

Here's an album of pictures taken while flying at 30,000 ft. above Utah.

As a test of the Canon Elph S400's movie mode, we took this movie of the dancing fountains in the Bellagio Conservatory's dancing fountains.

[AVI Motion JPEG, 320×240, 2Mb]

Kids playing baseball in Morningside Park, 2:30 last Sunday. The trees are just beginning to come into bloom - yesterday's snowstorm would put an end to that. The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine towers above.

Been trying to track down some info on any new construction underway in Vegas, in preparation for my trip this week. Was able to find this map showing the rough location of "Le Reve," Steve Wynn's new $1.6 Billion casino due to open in 2005.

I'd just like to say that the weather in Las Vegas will be a good 35 degrees warmer than New York City next week. Spring! Spring at last! Dry heat, too - like a blowtorch.

Packing my silly vendor t-shirts now. Hope to acquire many more when I'm there.

Been listening to Radiohead's Hail to the Thief for the last week or so - really fantastic work, even in its current, unfinished form. I'm finding more favorite tracks on it than Kid A or Amnesiac... have 2+2=5, Sit Down Stand Up, Where I End and You Begin, There There, and A Punch Up at a Wedding on heavy rotation.

Many loyal readers express continued and vehement interest in the personalities, dreams, ambitions and stories of the technical professionals with whom I work on a daily basis. It seems an aura of mystery, awe — and no small degree of intimidation — surrounds the project managers, programmers and artists who daily contribute to my office's productive output. It's not surprising, really — the character and essence of one's fellow workers reveals much about the mores and values of the individual him- or herself: thus are the denizens of neighboring cubicles as light through a prism, each polychromatic ray a small component of the original bright beam. Little wonder we seek to see ouselves in their visages.

Wonder no more.

When it rains, it pours: a friend across campus sent me this nauseating collection of recipies from 1974. These certainly give Lileks a run for his money...

The occasional political disagreement aside, lileks.com rocks my world. He's just put up a sequel to the popular Gallery of Regrettable Food feature - and this one is even more ghastly.

Today's Random Mural Art comes from a painting on the side of a cafe/comedy club on 108th and Broadway. This is actually a recent creation - there used to be a previous mural which was painted over when the venue changed from full-service restaurant to the current incarnation.

Anders brought his latest discovery into the office today: a new variant of the Japanese cookie Pocky. We had enjoyed Men's Pocky last week, but today we were treated to Pocky G. Perhaps an attempt to reach out to the hip-hop generation? This new flavor promises an experience both "Hard & Rich," and I can attest that it fails on neither account. It's innovative brand extensions such as this which keep Pocky "loved throughout the world for many years," according to the packaging.

That's just as well, given the stiff competition.