Scott Adams nails it as usual:

It’s expensive to travel anywhere, but on the other hand, the new season of 24 is almost here.  I don’t need to go to faraway places and meet people when I can sit on my couch and watch Jack Bauer shoot those people.

So apparently I’m in the minority with my opinion of the new Microsoft ad campaign.  I think the first and second ads, with Seinfeld, are great, and the third one is totally lame.  Everyone else seems to think the opposite.

The Seinfeld ads were ads about nothing, which was of course the whole point of Seinfeld’s TV show.  The ads weren’t trying to sell Windows or PCs.  They were just Gates and Seinfeld hanging out, trying to be normal guys.  The ads were pointless, but they were funny and interesting.  And they sure as heck got people talking about Microsoft.

The new "I’m a PC, and I’ve been made into a stereotype" ad is whiny and pathetic.  It’s basically saying "please don’t listen to what Apple says about me!"  The ad shows lots of politically-correct multicultural images of people around the world saying "I’m a PC", which when you think about it, just means that the PC is pedestrian, in contrast to the Mac, which is special.

The new ad also fails because, technically, every Mac is also a PC.  And furthermore, Microsoft doesn’t even sell PCs, they sell Windows, which isn’t mentioned at all in the ad.  So what’s the point again?

The Seinfeld ads were bold, new, interesting, and subtle; and they made Bill Gates a little more accessible to us, even if only for pretend.  The third ad is utterly unoriginal and boring.

24 fans, if you haven’t watched the movie Flatliners since before you started watching 24, you should watch it again.  Not only because of one particularly hilarious and well-delivered line, but also to see where Jack Bauer got his toughness.

There’s an interesting episode of Mega Disasters called "Oil Apocalypse" that runs on the Discovery channel.  Here are some details and quotes that I transcribed from it:

In the US, nearly 100% of cars, farm equipment, trains, and planes run on oil.

Oil provides nearly 50% of all our energy needs.

Petrochemicals are the base of many of our day to day products including plastics, asphalt, tires, polyester, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals.

The US produced 10 million barrels per day in the 1950s, but only consumed 7 million, so we exported the surplus.  World consumption was 20 million barrels per day.

Today the US produces 8.3 million barrels per day, but consumes more than 20 million, so we import about two-thirds of the oil we use.  World consumption is now 84 million barrels per day.

Saudi Arabia produces and exports 10 million barrels per day, and has reserves of between 160-260 billion barrels.

The world has consumed 1 trillion barrels since 1859; there are an estimated 1-3 trillion barrels left, but it’s harder to extract than the first 1 trillion, and it’s being consumed much faster now.

Ethanol has for years comprised about 10% of most US gasoline, to reduce engine knock.

Most US ethanol comes from corn, which means that its use as a fuel is hard on our food supply.  Ethanol is expensive to produce, takes lots of energy to produce, and still produces pollution.

Hydrogen fuel cells are expensive, and they aren’t technically an energy source since the hydrogen in them takes energy to produce.

Most of our electricity is currently provided by coal.  Nuclear power provides 20% of US electricity; solar and wind provide less than 1%.  The US is "the Saudi Arabia of coal."

Canada is the US’s primary supplier of foreign oil (surpassing even Saudi Arabia) partly due to the oil sands in Alberta.

Venezuela exports 2.2 million barrels per day, but it is mostly heavy oil considered inferior to middle eastern light crude oil; it needs more refining to be usable.  But the reserves could be hundreds of billions of barrels.

Colorado’s oil shale has more oil than all of Saudi Arabia’s reserves, but it’s probably not feasible to extract/convert it.

These Slowsky commercials are the best.

When Kim bought me a TiVo a few months ago, it didn’t immediately occur to me that it was a great way to build a video archive.  But a month or two later when I discovered that you can point a web browser at the TiVo and download videos from it to your computer, it started to click.

I also started to realize that there’s actually a ton of good stuff on TV, far more than I have time to watch in fact: stuff like How It’s Made, Survivorman, Planet Earth, Most Shocking, Shockwave, etc, not to mention things we’d already been into like 24, Prison Break, The Office, and Heroes.

Those last few shows need to be watched in order, and usually on or near their original airing date, but the rest can be archived and watched any old time.  So for the past month or two I’ve been archiving shows; I’m up to about 250 episodes, taking up 150 gigs of space.

Back when I first got my TiVo, right away I thought about how it’d be great to be able to somehow watch its content on my iPhone.  The iPhone isn’t a home theater, just like it isn’t a full PC, but the thing is that it’s always with me, so having my favorite TV shows on it would be pretty sweet.  Still, it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I started to really think about this, and I discovered that it’s possible and not even that hard.  So I’ve written up a little guide on putting TiVo shows onto your iPod or iPhone, posted on my tech blog.

A 1-hour episode ends up using about a fifth of a gig on the iPhone.  Since my 8 gig iPhone is already full, I’ve had to cut back the amount of music that’s on it a little bit to accommodate a few TV shows, and that new 16 GB iPhone is looking better and better. 

I’m just continually amazed by this device; now in addition to being my phone, calendar, email & web device, music player, and podcast player, it also has my TV shows on it -- all automatically kept up to date by iTunes with minimal fuss required.

Well the game ended up being really exciting, though you wouldn’t have known it from the first 3 quarters.  But this year’s superbowl ads were mostly terrible.  Here are the ones that I liked:

Audi Godfather ad:

Tide To Go interview ad: funny only because the stain sounds like Steve Carell in that hilarious news scene in Bruce Almighty:

Doritos mouse ad: funny, but apparently it’s actually from last year:

Etrade baby ads: these are both hilarious.  The "you don’t know how old I am" line kills me:

Coke politics ad: James Carville & Bill Frist become friends.  I’m embarrassed to admit that this ad is genuinely heartwarming:

Bud Light Semi-Pro Will Farrell Jackie Moon ad.  "and the loins" says it all:

The anti-drug drug dealer ad:

Most Ridiculous

Most ridiculous: the idea that people get excited over Dell hardware:

Most Annoying

Both of these are too annoying to display inline; I can only bear to link to them.  Note also how both commercials defecate on top of classic songs:

AMP Energy Jumpstart TV commercial from The Big Game

This is getting out of hand.  Gruber links to Kottke who has live-blogged a Mythbusters episode about the plane on a conveyor belt riddle.  (Mythbusters must be running out of myths to bust.)  There are nearly 300 raging comments on Kottke’s original post alone, with other forums similarly ablaze.

The thing is, this is SO easy once you recognize that it’s just a trick question; the whole point of this riddle is that it’s a trick question.  The riddle says that there’s a plane on a giant conveyor belt runway, and the conveyor belt has a control system which keeps the belt moving backwards at the same speed that the plane itself is moving forward.  The question is: will the plane take off?

The Simple 4-Sentence Solution:

The bit about the belt moving backwards at the same speed is supposed to make you think that the plane isn’t moving relative to the real ground and the earth.  If that were the case, then of course the plane would not take off.  However, the force generated by the belt does not translate to backwards force on the plane, because a plane’s wheels are free-spinning: as the belt moves, the plane’s wheels spin, rather than remaining stationary so the plane itself can move backwards.

There would be some small amount of backwards force on the plane itself due to friction on the axles of the wheels, but that has virtually no effect on the plane’s forward motion because it’s such a tiny force relative to the forward-thrust of the plane’s engines.

The comments on these other sites are full of debates about airfoils and Bernoulli’s Principle and what really makes a plane fly; all of those people have missed the trick in this riddle (the free-spinning wheels) and so are over-complicating the problem.

I just got a hit from a visitor who found my site by searching for:

does Jack Bauer get overtime

I think it’s a safe bet.

For Apple fans, Christmas comes in January, at the Macworld Conference.  Yesterday Steve Jobs took the stage at this annual event to give his keynote on the state of Apple and the new products and services that the company is releasing.  Apple nerd that I am, I maintained radio silence from the time the keynote started (noon eastern) for 3 agonizing hours until the video was posted online, to avoid hearing or reading any of the news before I could watch it firsthand.  (You can watch the video here, here, or here.)

The main impression I got from this particular keynote is that Apple right now is a company firing on all cylinders.  There was no single earth-shaking announcement like the iPhone from last year; instead there were four slightly smaller and relatively disparate announcements that show Apple is quite busy in several different areas.

Macbook Air

The big new product is the Macbook Air: a laptop so impossibly thin -- sixteen-hundreths of an inch at its thinnest -- that it fits in an envelope.  It’s got a full-sized (and LED-backlit) screen and a full-sized (also LED-backlit) keyboard, but no CD/DVD drive and almost no ports.  Probably most impressive is that the Macbook Air has 5 hours of battery life, compared to 2 hours or less for many other tiny notebooks.

Time Capsule

The second new product is the Time Capsule: a wireless router with a built-in 500 GB or 1 TB hard drive, primarily meant to provide simple automated backups of all the Macs in your house via Leopard’s Time Machine backup feature.

Incidentally, the heart of the Time Machine backup system is its dated backups, which allow you to "go back in time" through all your data and access/recover files from one day ago, two days ago, a week ago, a month ago, etc.  This is based on and made possible by the fact that on Unix filesystems, a single file can be accessed through multiple different filenames known as hard links.  So you effectively have a full data backup from each previous day, week, month, etc, but the amount of space used is only that required by one full backup plus the incremental changes between the backup dates.  That’s the magic of hard links: a single file on disk can appear to exist multiple times, once in each backup folder.  All of that to say this: when I was working as a system administrator and programmer in a bio lab at Penn State in 2004, I created a backup system based on exactly this same concept (which neither I nor Apple invented) using just BASH, cp, and rsync.  It was used to back up not only OS X, Windows, and Linux systems but also even Mac OS9 systems.  This was 3 years before Apple introduced the same technology in Mac OS X Leopard.  So, I win.

Apple TV + iTunes

The third keynote item was the rebirth of Apple TV.  Originally released about a year ago and since described by Steve Jobs as just a hobby for Apple, the Apple TV hasn’t been a smash hit: they haven’t released any sales figures for it, and yesterday Jobs admitted that -- along with Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and others -- Apple had missed the mark in getting internet-based content into the living room.  But Apple TV "Take Two" fixes most of the shortcomings of the original: it doesn’t need a computer, it has a much-improved interface, it supports HD content, you can buy iTunes content on it directly, and you can now rent movies on it.  To top it all off, these new features are all available as a free software update to existing Apple TV owners, and the price of the Apple TV has been cut from $299 to $229.

The fact that iTunes now offers movie rentals is at least as big a deal as the Apple TV update.  Apple is currently receiving a small beating from the record labels, all of which are now offering their music as DRM-free MP3 files through Amazon’s music store, but withholding the DRM-free versions from Apple for their iTunes store.  And while Apple has been offering movies for sale through iTunes for a while now, the selection is slim because Apple has only secured deals with a few movie studios.  But with the new rental feature, Apple has signed up every major movie studio -- no small feat.  Apple is far and away the leader in digital distribution of music and movies, even with the aforementioned handicaps, so having every studio on board with rentals would seem to cement Apple’s position.

As an Apple fan and general geek, I’m fascinated by all of these things.  But most likely I won’t actually buy any of them.  I don’t really have a need for a super-thin notebook because I don’t travel much, and when I do, I’d rather have a more full-featured notebook than one that’s exceptionally thin.  Time Capsule is cool, but I run Linux on most of my systems, and I’m a data freak so I already keep multiple backups of all my files.  The new Apple TV and iTunes stuff is awesome, but I’ve recently discovered TiVo and don’t know how I ever lived without it for TV shows, and I’m extremely happy with Netflix for movies.

I guess that whole issue would come down to price: we currently pay ~$90/mo for cable+TiVo+Netflix, so would we be able to get the same content for the same price or less with Apple TV and iTunes?  We mainly watch 4 shows: 24, Prison Break, The Office, and Heroes.  Each episode is $1.99 on iTunes, so 16 shows per month would be $32 per month.  Then throw in say 6 movies per month -- with Netflix, it’s unlimited, and our usage varies pretty wildly -- which at $4 each comes to $24.  So the total with Apple TV + iTunes would be $56: a fair amount cheaper than our current bill.  However, with the TiVo, I’ve now discovered a few more shows that I would really hate to give up: How It’s Made, Most Shocking, Shockwave, Mega Disasters, and World’s Most Amazing Videos.  Adding all of those in would certainly push us past what we’re currently paying.  And I just checked the iTunes store for The O’Reilly Factor and it doesn’t appear to be available there; that’s certainly a deal-breaker.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I’m excited about all the new stuff Apple is doing, but at the end of the day, none of the aforementioned stuff affects me.  The fourth thing Jobs presented, though, certainly does: iPhone updates.

iPhone

Apple released iPhone firmware v1.1.3, which contains a few new features.  The most exciting thing to me is the update to the Google Maps application.  This includes a new "Locate Me" feature that uses cell tower triangulation/multilateration to determine your current location and show it on the map; not bad for a phone that lacks GPS.  The Maps update also includes a new "drop pin" feature, which lets you stick a pin anywhere on the map (and drag it around) and then make it a bookmark, get directions to/from it, etc.  Both of these new features make it far easier to map routes, since you don’t have to type anything in for one or both of the route’s endpoints.  The Maps app also now includes the hybrid view, showing satellite imagery with roads and locations overlaid on it.  Frustratingly and ridiculously, though, it STILL lacks a freakin’ scale bar!  I can’t believe there’s actually some meathead at Google or Apple who thinks the scale bar should be left out, and that this glaring omission somehow gets past all the other engineers and execs.

The iPhone update also includes the ability to rearrange the icons on the home screen, and to add bookmarks to the home screen from the browser.  These bookmarks also remember the zoom and pan state of the browser, which is really useful; for example, I visit weather.com for the detailed weather forecast since the iPhone’s built-in Yahoo weather sucks, but since weather.com has about 9 miles of ads and other crap at the top of the page, having the iPhone automatically pan to the forecast within the page is really helpful.

Another small item in the update allows the iPhone to send SMS messages to multiple recipients simultaneously; Jobs made no mention of the much- seldom-requested iPhone MMS support.

And of course, the iPhone can now play video content rented through iTunes.

All of these new features were delivered for free to existing iPhone owners like myself, which may be the best part.  I’m just so happy that this device I purchased is continually getting more useful, as opposed to getting more and more obsolete with each passing day.

Finally, Jobs touted the iPhone’s impressive sales figures: 4 million sold in its first 200 days on the market, or about 20,000 per day.  In its first 90 days the iPhone captured 20% of the entire smartphone market, making it #2, behind only RIM BlackBerry.  The fact that the iPhone surpassed all Windows Mobile smartphones in just 90 days on the market is particularly funny in light of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s comment -- after the iPhone was announced but before it was launched -- that the iPhone would get "no significant market share."

So there I am, watching an episode of How It’s Made, which incidentally may be my favorite show ever, and as it ends I catch a moment of the next show, which is apparently Unraveling the Mystery of Alien Abduction.  And right off the bat they start talking about sleep paralysis!

But I only catch a few seconds of this show, because the episode of How It’s Made is from a few days ago and I’m watching it on my TiVo, which incidentally is one of the greatest inventions of all time, and as a result the next show naturally hadn’t been recorded because it wasn’t one that I had told the TiVo to always record.

The problem now is that I can hardly find any mention of this show online, other than the fact that it’s a Discovery Channel show, and the TiVo doesn’t show it running again anytime in the next couple of weeks.  I really want to see this show, because I’ve never heard any mention of sleep paralysis in the media before (nor from any other kind of official source for that matter).

Could it be that my (undiagnosed) sleep paralysis is really just a matter of alien abduction??

NB: I don’t actually have any interest, much less belief, in the concept of alien abduction, except when portrayed by Mulder and Scully.

Best commercial I’ve seen in a long time.  Probably the best political ad ever, and certainly Huckabee has the best sense of humor of any of the candidates that I’ve seen so far.

"There’s no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard, only another fist."  That’s gold.

The CourtTV channel has this show called Most Shocking and it’s one of the best shows on TV.  It’s all actual footage from security cameras, police cruiser cameras, and citizen-recorded videos, and it shows all kinds of (often stupid) crimes being committed, and (usually) the police taking down the criminals.

I’ve never really watched the show Cops, but I guess Most Shocking is similar, except I think that Cops is at least sort of scripted (don’t they have a camera/cameraman intentionally going into various situations with police, as opposed to showing footage of interesting stuff captured by cameras that run 24/7?).  And from the previews for Cops it always looks really slow and boring, whereas Most Shocking is non-stop action, with stuff like shootouts, crashes, hostages, etc.

It’s on Wednesdays at 8 PM, though I usually watch the encore which is at midnight.  It’s also apparently on Fridays at midnight sometimes too.

I sometimes catch bits of other shows on CourtTV, and some of the shows about prison are really interesting.  One thing that I don’t understand about prisons is why they’re designed the way they are, with the convicts able to congregate freely at certain times, such as while eating and while out in the prison yard.  Prisoners are able to pass around drugs and weapons, and they sometimes attack the guards and even cause riots.  They can beat up, molest, and even kill other prisoners.

So why should prisoners ever be allowed to congregate?  Why don’t we keep them in their individual cells at all times?  It would be far simpler and safer not only for the guards, but for the prisoners as well.

Kim and I have been downloading the TV show "Heroes" in iTunes and watching it on our TV.  This is on my Mac Mini system, using Apple’s DVI to video adapter to display the video on the TV, which works quite nicely.

But today, right in the middle of watching one of the episodes in full-screen, iTunes decided to pop-up a dialog box saying "Thanks for using iTunes.  Would you like to back up your collection?"

Frankly, if I wanted this kind of brain-dead and annoying behavior while watching a video, I’d use Windows or Linux to watch it, where the overall experience is nowhere near as seamless and polished. I expect that kind of thing on those operating systems; I expect more from Mac OS X.

On every operating system, there should be a flag that any application can set, which would tell the operating system "I’m in full-screen do-not-disturb mode", the effect of which would be to prevent anything from popping up in front of the application.  I’m surprised that OS X does not have such a mechanism, especially in the tightly-integrated environment of iTunes/QuickTime, where all the running code should know that there’s a video playing.

The traditional solution to "mains buzz" or "mains hum" is to make sure that all of the components in your audio/video setup are plugged into the same outlet, thus ensuring that all grounds are at the same electrical potential.  As long as there’s no potential difference between grounds, then by definition there’s no voltage, so via Ohm’s Law there can be no current flow, and thus no unwanted hum caused by the current flow.

I just finally got around to setting up my receiver here, and got some pretty nasty hum right away, which I figured was due to the computers being plugged into different outlets than the TV and receiver.  So I ran an extension cord from the computers’ power outlet over to the TV/receiver, but it made no difference.

After a little bit of searching I found out that the coaxial cable line can cause a ground loop with the other components in the system, because it’s actually only grounded at the cable company (!) and not at your house.  Sure enough, unplugging the coax resulted in beautiful silence through the stereo speakers.

To fix the problem, you need to break the ground loop, which can be done with an old 75-ohm to 300-ohm matching transformer (Radio Shack Cat. No. 15-1140).  Of course, you need a 75-ohm signal for any modern TV equipment, so the solution is to buy 2 of these transformers and hook them together: the second one reverses the transformation done by the first, so the output signal is (theoretically) the same as the input signal, except that the ground loop is broken.

Radio Shack’s Cat. No. 15-1253 is pretty much the same thing except in the opposite gender, so I bought one of each to make it simple to hook the two transformers together.  But note that item 15-1253 does not break continuity between the input and output grounds (outer shield), so using two of those won’t break the ground loop; you need at least one 15-1140.

Steve Jobs was interviewed last night at "D", the All Things Digital conference.  Best line:

Quoting RSJ:

We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people that say that iTunes is their favorite app on Windows.  It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in Hell.

Since I run Linux I don’t have much use for Mac OS X nor Windows.  But I used to be a Windows user, and unfortunately I still need to keep it around because of friggin’ IE, and I can say that it’s certainly the closest OS to Hell that I’ve used.  I also need to keep a Mac OS X system around because of friggin’ Safari, and we’ve now watched quite a few episodes of The Office on it, and it really is quite a joy to use.  iTunes really is pretty sweet, it’s awesome to be able to download a whole 350 MB TV show in 8 minutes, and the interface for the video player is totally lickable.

Update: check out the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interview.  I’m only halfway through it so far and it’s been really interesting.  (Note: the video embedded in that page is just the prologue; scroll down for links to the rest of the presentation [i.e. the actual interview].)

Google has this message at the bottom of their front page:

Watch your favorite Super Bowl ad on YouTube.

Not having watched the game yesterday, I was thinking how I would have liked to have seen the commercials.  Looks like Google is betting a few people feel the same way.  At the moment it looks like ads from yesterday haven’t been posted yet (though there are lots of older ads) but no doubt they will be soon.

Apple has 3 new Get a Mac ads and they’re even better than the last ones.  My favorite lines are from "Out of the Box":

PC: What’s your big plan?

Mac: I might make a home movie, or maybe create a website, try out my built-in camera; I can do it all right out of the box.  So what about you?

PC: First I gotta download those new drivers, then I gotta erase the trial software that came on my hard drive...

Mac: Sweet.

...

Mac: Let me know when you’re ready to go.

PC: Actually, the rest of me is in some other boxes, so... I’ll meet up with you later.

These played fine under Firefox/Linux, but skipped horribly for me on Firefox/Windows.  In case you have that problem too (or if you just hate inline videos like I do) here are direct links to the ads:

Work vs. Home

Apple introduced some new TV commercials on Monday and I think they’re pretty funny.  You can watch them on the Apple website.

It’s kind of annoying how they present it as "The Mac vs. The PC" when it’s really about Mac vs. Windows.  I run a PC, yet none of the PC-based problems mentioned in the ads affect me at all, because my PC runs Linux, not Windows.

But other than that, the ads are good -- they’re funny and they’re pretty much completely accurate.

Over time we’ve seen Jack plug any and all manner of media into his cell phone -- memory cards, 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppies, clay tablets... why can’t he plug the darn recording into there and just transmit it back to CTU already??!?

Is is just me or does Jack look like a turtle? I mean, if the camera shows just his face, his serious face, he kinda looks like a mud-slider( my teacher has one, and they look alike).

This week’s episode of 24 was fantastic.  OK, so every episode is fantastic, but after weeks and weeks of good guys dying left and right, it’s nice to have a week where the good guys in their various subplots all not only live, but win.

Did you notice how when Wayne snuck up on Aaron he had an M16 or some such beast, but then after the commercial break Aaron had the M16 and Wayne just had a pistol?  I’d love to know what it was that Aaron said to Wayne in order to get the big gun.  Aaron is a man of so few words, and he’s so tough, I’m sure whatever it was, it would have been hilarious to witness.

And this has got to be one of the greatest Jack Bauer lines of all time:

Quoting Jack Bauer:

He’s using you.  He wanted you to get inside my head, and it worked.  And now I’m... upset.  You have three seconds to tell me where the target is or I will kill you.

Not to bump your exciting business news from top billing but it’s all your fault for getting me hooked.  And jumping in at day 5 is confusing.  Especially when we’re watching earlier days being rerun on the A&E channel the hour before tonights premier started and I have no idea which day it is or what time it started.  Yikes!  But it is a great show; however, I feel my heart racing various times throughout the shows and I’m hoping my age can handle it :)  Just kidding.

Kim and I watched the movie Hostage yesterday (Bruce Willis, 2005).  I really liked it, and I think that any other fan of 24 would like it too.  I’ll post a comment with more specifics; don’t read the comments on this post if you don’t want to see spoilers!