David Gessel
AT&T guy visits our house to check our T1
AT&T hates poor neighborhoods. They come up with some wacky excuses not to go if they can. We were waiting for a few months on the install of a T1 line and while the Covad guys were totally cool, the AT&T guys did everything they could not to service the deal.
Running out of excuses for missing calls, they decided to claim there was “toxic waste at the site.” We ended up in a big pissing match between Covad and AT&T with Covad finally offering to chaperon the AT&T guys through the process. They couldn’t really refuse that, so they came in their toxic waste suits. We missed them the first time through, but we had some line errors and they had to come back. Having foolishly called it toxic waste, they had to come in the suit. I wish we had a picture of the Covad guy and maybe Isabella with the AT&T guy all bundled up, but no such luck.
This is basically the technology world’s version of “redlining” where certain neighborhoods are denied access to technology. Pretty funny though, in this case the excuses, once made, ended up being a nice extra measure of discomfort.
Finding fun TLDs
URL shortening services have discovered international TLDs because they aren’t as jammed as .com where every combination of 5 or fewer characters and every word in the English language is registered at a parking site. Some new ones (t.co) have found pretty good short domains.
I found that RWGUSA.net (was) a great resource for registering domains around the globe – not only do they let you register all the easy ones in the table below, but they also have a way to register more complicated ones that require in-country support (for a fee).
Then all you need is a wildcard dictionary search and some patience to find a cute short domain. Check out the list below:
Films at TFF 37
I saw the following films at the Telluride Film Festival. I’ll try to get around to adding a few notes on each:
- Chico and Rita
- Oka! Amerikee
- The Illusionist
- Moana: A Story of the South Seas
- The First Movie
- Precious Life
- Incendies
- Inside Job
- Tabloid
- Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
- The Way Back
- Le Quattro Volte
- Tamara Drewe
- Never Let me Go
- Biutiful
- Of Gods and Men
- Black Swan
The film festival was excellent, as always. The films selected are rarely anything less than excellent, so reviews tend to range from good to superlative. It is probably the best film festival to attend for people who really love films. While the environment is low-key and friendly, the festival is attended by luminaries of the film industry and most films are introduced by the directors. Technically the festival is flawless and some of the venues are fitted with top of the line projection and sound equipment.
March 1997?
What happened in March of 1997?
- March 4 – U.S. President Bill Clinton bars federal funding for any research on human cloning.
- March 6 – President of Guyana Cheddi Jagan dies in office.
- March 6 – Pablo Picasso‘s Tête de Femme is stolen from a London gallery (recovered a week later).
- March 6 – In Sri Lanka, Tamil Tigers overrun a military base and kill more than 200.
- March 11 – An explosion at the Tokaimura nuclear waste reprocessing plant in Japan exposes 35 workers to low-level radioactive contamination, in the worst nuclear accident in Japan’s history.
- March 13 – India‘s Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader.
- March 13 – The National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China creates a new Chongqing Municipality, out of part of Sichuan.
- March 13 – The Phoenix Lights are seen over Phoenix, AZ.
- March 16 – Sandline affair: On Bougainville Island, soldiers of commander Jerry Singirok arrest Tim Spicer and his mercenaries of the Sandline International.
- March 18 – The tail of a Russian An-24 charter plane breaks off while en-route to Turkey, causing the plane to crash, killing all 50 on board, and resulting in the grounding of all An-24s.
- March 21 – In Zaire, Etienne Tshiksekedi is appointed prime minister; he ejects supporters of Mobutu Sese Seko from his cabinet.
- March 21 – Mercenaries of Sandline International withdraw from Papua New Guinea.
- March 22 – Tara Lipinski, 14, becomes the youngest women’s world figure skating champion.
- March 22 – The Comet Hale-Bopp makes its closest approach to Earth.
- March 24 – The 69th Academy Awards, hosted by Billy Crystal, are held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, with The English Patient winning Best Picture.
- March 26 – In San Diego, California, 39 Heaven’s Gate cultists commit mass suicide at their compound.
- March 26 – Julius Chan resigns as prime minister of Papua New Guinea, ending the Sandline affair.
Nom Nom Leg
I came home to find that Tortuga, one of the stray cats that’s adopted us, had developed a nice open wound on her forelimb. When I left two weeks ago it was a bit swollen, presumably abscessed, and then drained. I’m sure it was really gross. Anyway, the cat just couldn’t get enough licking that yummy puss and had turned the wound into a nice open sore.
The vet gave me some antibiotics and antiseptic cleaning solution and this lovely and stylish Elizabethan collar that Tortuga clearly just loves to wear. Her thought bubble probably reads something like “once this collar comes off and I can get my teeth around your neck, you better sleep lightly.”
OMG kitten Mittons are real!
Not just an Always Sunny in Philadelphia joke anymore!
HDR video with SLRs
HDR is kind of cool – a nice way to get past the limitations of solid-state image sensors and recover some of the latitude of film, even improving on it.
The problem is that solid state image sensors tend to have very linear responses to light – an underexposed image vanishes into the noise floor of the sensor while an overexposed image clips off to pure white. Film exposure response is commonly called an “s-curve” and basically means there’s some data in the random conversion of a light sensitive molecule here or there even in the most underexposed image, and a few that resist converting under the harshest blast of light such that there is perceivable data in both.
This film is a pretty impressive example of HDR video. But there’s something a bit odd about such a technical achievement in cinematography mixing up “underexposed” and “overexposed.” The funny thing is, they’re using the terms as in making a print (e.g. printing on photo paper) or an x-ray where more light darkens the print: the paper starts out white and turns black with more light vs. a film or digital exposure where the media yields a black result that increases in representational lightness with with increasing light exposure.
Chico and Rita
TFF 37 Mini Review: Chico and Rita, Spain-Cuba, 2010, 96m
Chico and Rita is an animated story of a talented Cuban jazz pianist named Chico and the love of his life, the talented singer Rita. They chase each other across the Americas and across the decades, overcoming personal and political barriers to their marital bliss. The director went to significant effort to stylistically match the period in geography, dress, and music. The movie’s soundtrack is filled out by performers such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
Practical Santa Monica Car
Seems to be a real mil unit or model thereof, up-armored looking windows but the unarmored coily cable to the turret looks dubious. I bet people reflexively yield.
A week of tweets: 2010-09-05
- Oddly, LAX seems to limit cab arrival frequency to about 0.005 Hz #