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CES 2012

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Amex CES #ces12For those of you that don’t know, I work in the trade show industry.  I’m the Director of IT for a premier exhibit marketer.  We do everything related to exhibit marketing.  Design, Build, Warehouse, Ship, Install, Tear Down etc.

Since I’m on the back-end IT side of things, I normally don’t go to the show floor to see how things happen leading up to an event.  This year I decided to change that, and go see what takes place before an event.  I figured I might as well go big and hit the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.

In a word, overwhelming.

This show is absolutely huge.  On the CES website they state that there are 35 American football fields worth of exhibit floor.  I walked all of that.  Every day.  For three days straight.

I walked it on Monday, before the show was open to the public.  I had my exhibitor badge and got to wander and check everything out.  This was about 20 hours before the show went live, and it’s amazing how much work still has to be done in that last period of time.  I honestly was floored by how much teams for every exhibit do in that last day.  They had been setting up for a week already, and still had tons of fit and finish work to do.

One Tuesday I got there about an hour before the doors open, and I was able to once again walk around before the floodgates opened.  There was still polishing and vacuuming and tons of other things going on everywhere.  Teams really do make the most of their time.  🙂

I spent the day walking the floor again, taking pictures, and checking out various products.  I just wanted to take in the enormity of things, so I spent most of my time walking and checking out differing booth designs and how different categories of products related to each other.  It tends to become sensory overload really quickly.  There must have been 40 premium headphones vendors and just as many iPhone case manufacturers.  Those were just two of the many categories of products.  But even though we in the tech industry enjoy CES, this is really a show focused on the average consumer.  People buying TV’s, cell phones, tablets, stereo equipment, accessories, car stereos etc.  Sure, many manufactures showed off ultra-book designs to compete with the likes of Apple’s MacBook Air, but that wasn’t the big focus.

So I enjoyed it, but since it was my first time, I ran around and looked at everything fairly superficially.  I think in future years I would probably plan out what I wanted to look at first and map out where I wanted to go.  It would make for a less harried experience. That said, I really have a new admiration for the people that put these events and booths together.  The work put in is simply mind-boggling.

In all, CES is an awesome behemoth of a show and worth a trip to other gadget addicts out there such as myself.  It’s absolutely overwhelming in every sense of the word, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing 🙂

If you want to check out my photos of some of the various booth designs.  You can find them here.

R.I.P. Napster

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Today the Napster service was absorbed by Rhapsody in the United States.  I’ve been a long time user of Napster, and am really sad to see it go.

For those of you unaware, the original Napster program was basically a way to get free music.  You would connect to others and share MP3’s.  The MP3 format basically made it easy for anyone to rip a CD and make it available to the world.  So you could try any music you liked, but it also lead to rampant piracy.

Now instead of trying to embrace and extend the MP3 concept, record companies sued Napster into oblivion. It took a long time for music companies to come around.  And a lot of it had to do with Steve Jobs and Apple requesting that copy protection be removed from songs.  Once that happened, many services started to emerge.

Napster itself rose from the dead as a pay service for music subscriptions.  It had a better library than others as well as higher quality music files.  It also had the ability to download tracks for offline listening.  So I jumped back in, and got a subscription and have been a happy customer ever since.

But, alas, Napster sold its US assets to Rhapsody, so now as of today, I’m a Rhapsody customer whether I like it or not.  I’ll give it a fair shake as it’s been a couple years, but Napster has historically been a much better service.  We’ll see if Rhapsody has finally caught up.

If not, many other services have emerged.  Spotify, MOG, Rdio, Slacker and others are just waiting to fill my ear hole with tunes.  We’ll see which way I go.

Why I cancelled SiriusXM

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Yesterday I finally cancelled SiriusXM.  For those unfamiliar, SiriusXM is a satellite radio service.  It has tons of really good commercial free music, talk radio, and sports.  The NFL, MLB and Howard Stern all call it home.  I love the content, but I’ve grown increasingly annoyed with the service.

You see, Sirius and XM used to be competitors.  I was an XM subscriber from the beginning, and the switched to Sirius when they got the NFL and Howard Stern.  So I’ve been subscribed to one or the other pretty much from their inception.

When the merger was proposed, there were a lot of people opposed to it.  I wasn’t, I thought it was a great idea.  It was supposed to keep both carriers in business, while lowering costs for consumers and providing a la carte content.  It was also supposed to combine the two so no matter if you bought a car with XM or Sirius, you could be assured that you would get the same service.

It was an uphill battle to get approval, but it went through.  I actually wrote my congressman in support of it, that’s how much I believed that the benefits would be a big deal.

Well, it’s been four years, and while they’ve JUST combined the Sirius and XM websites into one, the services are still separate with some separate content.  We have Sirius in our mini-van and XM in our Prius.  I still have to have separate logins to each.  One website, one billing address, two separate logins. This means that I don’t get the multi-radio discount either.

In addition, prices have not gone down, but rather have gone up.  I used to have access to more stations for the price, and in May they changed plans so I lost some stations that I had been listening to.  A la carte has NEVER materialized and quite frankly choices are now limited.  I also noticed that the streaming internet radio of SiriusXM is raising it’s price on Jan. 1st as well.

So now, in a time where I’m trying to save money by cutting out unnecessary expenses, I just don’t see this as a good deal.  To really get the plan I want, I now have to increase my spend.  It’s still a separate account because the vehicles I happened to buy didn’t have the same service.  I’ll miss the Jason Ellis show, and Faction, Octane, and the Morning Mashup. I’ve missed Howard Stern and the NFL for awhile now.

The tweet that you see above is from the Customer Support team from SiriusXM.  I know that they truly want to help, but I think the problems are too deep and ingrained now for them to make much of a dent.  And I think this doesn’t bode well for the company as a whole.  If I’m leaving, I’m positive others are as well.

Why I support #suckforluck

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I’ve been a hard core Miami Dolphin fan all of my life.  Much of my youth was spent watching a consistently good Phins team make the playoffs year after year.  My man cave is adorned in aqua and orange, I have tons of signed Dolphin memorabilia, I listen to (or watch) every game every weekend.  If the Dolphins lost on Sunday it used to ruin the start of my week.

Not any longer.

You see, since the retirement of Dan Marino (where the organization basically forced him out) this team has been nothing but a middle of the road team year after year.  In fact, look at these links:

Miami Dolphin QB’s Since Dan Marino
Coaches Since Don Shula

So yes, SEVENTEEN QB’s and SIX coaches in 12 seasons.  How pathetic is that? Yeah, that’s a rhetorical question.

This organization has now pretty much sucked for a long long time.  And as of today, the team is now 0-7. We suck, plain and simple, and despite that, I still watch or listen to every game.  It just doesn’t bother me when we lose any more.

Part of it simply because I realized that I should “let go” of the fanaticism that comes with being a football fan.  The other is the prospect of landing Andrew Luck as our QB of the future in the upcoming draft.

Andrew Luck is regarded as the best QB to come out of college since Peyton Manning.  He’s the type of player you can build a team around.  It’s become increasingly clear that to win in this league, you need an elite QB.  Someone who can lead your team to victory.  Luck is that type of QB.

So now, there are many Dolphin fans that are all on board the Suck for Luck train.  They want us to suck so bad that we get the first pick in the draft and we can draft Andrew.  It goes against everything a fan should want, but at 0-7 I’m firmly ensconced on that train.

I don’t want another semi-shitty middle-of-the-road season that allows us to draft some kid with a “good motor,” I want a leader.  A killer of a QB. I want Andrew Luck.

Wouldn’t it be a fitting if we could draft Luck in the 13th draft after we forced out Dan Marino?  I think so.  Let the misery end, let us rebuild.  All hail #suck4luck.


Kickstart My Heart

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Recently, I’ve supported a couple of projects on Kickstarter.com and I realized that it’s possible that many of you don’t even know what Kickstarter is.

Kickstarter is what is called “crowd-funding.”  Simply put, inventors or artists or anyone with a dream can try to raise money for their dream via Kickstarter.com.  They place the project online, and let people know how much money they are trying to raise.  People can then donate to the project and help to make the project a reality. If enough money isn’t raised, then you aren’t charged a dime and project doesn’t get made.

I’ve helped two projects recently.  One is for my favorite lounge music cover artist, Richard Cheese and Lounge Against The Machine.  Richard covers contemporary songs in a lounge style, and he’s quite funny as well.  I’ve purchased all of his albums and even seen him in concert.

Well it takes money to make an album, and they weren’t sure they were going to be able to continue making music.  So they decided to try to raise money on Kickstarter to pay for the recording of the new album.  If you donated a small amount of cash to the cause, you would get the album, a little more and you would have it autographed all the way up to paying to get your name said in a track on the album.  So you weren’t just donating, you were getting something back too.  Needless to say, they raised enough money to make the album and I now have an autographed copy featuring awesome new lounge covers like Tik Tok, Like A G6, Boom Boom Pow and even Rebecca Black’s Friday.  🙂

The other project I donated to will probably get it’s own blog post because it’s a pretty cool new piece of tech, so I’ll hold off until then.  That said, I wanted to clue everyone in on how cool Kickstarter is.  Go check out the site, and you may be able to help some really cool ideas come to fruition.

Recommending: Tyrone Wells

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Tyrone Wells
Metal & Wood by Tyrone Wells

I haven’t recommended music here on the blog in a long time, but recently I started

listening to a singer-songwriter by the name of Tyrone Wells.

I heard him on a Pandora mix based on Jason Mraz a couple months ago, and thought I needed to look him up.  Well I checked him out on Napster and became an instant fan.  His most recent album, Metal & Wood, has been in constant rotation on the Sonos and in car for months.

Admittedly I’ve been on an adult-alternative singer-songwriter kick lately, so he just fell into that perfectly.  That said, he’s able to encapsulate emotions in his songs so well, and many of his lyrics tend to fit my hippie sensibilities quite well.  For example:

Take all the Metal and Wood
Used in the waging of war
And teach the men that make those weapons
To build shelter for the poor
 
Take all the money we spend
On the way that we appear
Find the ones that die of hunger
And help them see another year
 

He also has songs of happiness and hope, like is expressed on And The Birds Sing:

Poor man and a millionaire
Both under the oak tree’s shade
Not stressing over money made
 
Preacher and the Atheist
Both jumping in the ocean waves
Today they both feel saved

If you see some of his earlier work, you can tell he’s a religious guy, but I like the fact that he’s not judgemental and actually includes an Atheist in his song.  🙂

Lastly, he can really touch a nerve on love lost too.  Songs like Let Go and Give Me One Reason are so packed with emotion that you can sometimes find yourself tearing up when he sings them.

Today, so many artists lack that emotion when they sing, but Tyrone Wells really draws you in, and that rare quality is to be rewarded.  Pick this album up, you won’t be disappointed!

LOST is like a lap dance

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For the last six years, I’ve watched the show LOST on ABC. It was always one of my favorite shows, mainly because it was so out there content-wise, and partially because the actors in the roles were really top notch. It entertained me, which is what TV shows are supposed to do. So I’m thankful for that, but for me, the ending didn’t do enough, and the season as a whole seemed really rushed to me.

I liken it to getting a lap dance from a stripper. It’s entertaining while it lasts, but ultimately it’s unfullfilling. I’ll explain why I didn’t like the ending in a bit, and it contains spoilers, so if you don’t want to know yet, then stop reading now.

Okay, so here’s the deal. From what I understand the gist of the finale is this. The losties sideways universe was a holding place for them to reside until they all were dead. A limbo for them to live in until they all died and were able to move on together. They collectively created this place by finding each other to be the most important things in each others lives, so thus, they wanted an afterlife where they could be together. There was no time in this sideways universe, they all resided there until they were awakened to the fact that they were living in a limbo world. Some people died before Jack, and some many years later, but they all had to be dead to collectively move on like they wanted to.

So they make it seem like the island was real, and they really lived and died on the island, and many of them got off the island while others did not. But now, here they are, they all finally ‘let go’ and realized that they were in the sideways universe and it was time to move on.

For the most part, I’m really okay with this aspect. Now as an atheist, I don’t believe in the afterlife, but for the show I think it makes sense and wraps some things up nicely. Still, I think the wound in Jack’s side was a little too Jesus-esque, but whatever, I get it. If they want to wrap up a happy-go-lucky ending for such a good cast, that’s okay by me. That’s only one part however, the island and all of it’s mysteries were never really explained at all, or in-depth enough to satisfy me.

I’m not saying that every polar bear has to be accounted for and each oddity needs to be wrapped up in a little bow, but I’m thoroughly convinced that the writers had no fucking clue how they wanted to do things, and then when they HAD to wrap up, they did so too quickly and concentrated solely on the characters to deflect the obvious continuity flaws in the island. So in no particular order, here are some issues I have with the show, if you have answers, I’d like to see them.

  • How is it that Jacob could get on and off the island at will, but the man in black couldn’t?
  • How is it that Ben could get on and off the island and had money stashed everywhere, but people like Whidmore couldn’t find the island
  • How is it that Dharma found the island and could get back and forth with no issues, yet when Whidmore was banished, he couldn’t find his way back?
  • When the six found their way back with Ben and Locke’s corpse, they went through Eloise Hawking, who had a device to locate the island. How come Whidmore, with all of his resources, couldn’t find that?
  • Walt was so important as being “special” in season one, yet nothing ever came of him.
  • The island had the cork that kept the bad stuff out. So I guess that cork was like a stopper preventing Hell from invading the world. When the cork was removed, why didn’t worse things happen?
  • In sideways world, the island was underwater, so the cork was gone. Wouldn’t sideways world have gone to hell?
  • If the electromagnetism was so bad that only Desmond could survive it, How did Jack survive it? You could say that once the cork was removed, the electromagnetism went away, but then he put the cork back. At that point wouldn’t it have killed him? Or at least made him a smoke monster like it did the man in black? Instead he was just back in the river later?
  • Why would Sayid choose Shannon, a girl he knew briefly, over Nadia, the love of his life?
  • Faraday helped Desmond discover the sideways world and the awakening, so why didn’t he end up with the group at the end?
  • Why was Sayid allowed to die and then come back in the pool, and how were he and Claire considered “infected?”
  • If they were both infected, how did they overcome such a thing? Why weren’t more people infected by Locke?
  • With Sayid being a ruthless killer, torturer and everything, how did he find redemption? Was it simply taking the bomb on the sub that took care of it all? Does that really erase all the evil crap he had done?
  • Why was Aaron still a baby before moving on from sideways land? If he had lived, and died and was wanting to move on, wouldn’t he have been in a more adult form? In fact, he wouldn’t remember most of them FROM the island, so why would he choose to move on WITH them? What about Sun and Jin’s kid?
  • The original others were destroyed by the Mom of Jacob and the MIB’s, so where did the new others come from?
  • Where in the hell did Mom even come from? And why if you were the protector of the universe and good and light, would you be such a merciless killer? Killing the real birth mother, destroying the original others, trying to kill MIB.
  • If Richard was on the island for hundreds of years, what was waiting for him once he got off the island on the plane? He was no longer immortal supposedly, so he would just be thrust into modern life and then NOT move on with everyone in the sideways world?
  • The time travel. Why did some travel and some not? Even when returning to the island?
  • Why didn’t the nuclear bomb kill them all? Were they immortal as candidates? Certain folks were not candidates that still were on the island, they would have at least had radiation poisoning.
  • Why did they time jump to present time after the nuclear bomb blast?
  • What was with the ashes and towers set up to protect from Smokey? Why did that work?
  • In that same vein, when Ben went with Locke to talk to Jacob at the cabin in the woods, the cabin was surrounded by ashes, but they briefly showed Christian IN the cabin. Well the MIB was masquerading as Christian at some point, so was the guy in the cabin really MIB and not Jacob? And wouldn’t he be trapped by the ashes?
  • Why couldn’t women have babies on the island? And why was there the Egyptian statue of the goddess of fertility and Motherhood?
  • What WAS the tie in to Egypt mythology? Hieroglyphics were everywhere, and there were temples, the statue, etc. No real relevance?
  • Flashing back a bit (so to speak,) if you had the technology to prevent a massive amount of energy from being released, and you built a hatch to take care of that, wouldn’t you come up with a better mechanism than simply typing in numbers every 108 minutes? I’m SURE they could automate that somehow. Declan could whip up some LotusScript in 5 minutes.
  • What was with the numerology? We know the numbers were of the candidates, so WHY then were they integrated so much in Dharma?

Now all of the above were things that I contemplated off the top of my head without working up a sweat. I’m sure I could come up with more. In addition Television Without Pity had these burning questions. Can any of them be answered?

I guess that’s my major problem here. None of that stuff was ever resolved, so it seems like the writers just threw whatever crap they felt like into the series whenever they felt like it. I enjoyed the series thinking that somehow, some of this stuff would tie together in the end, but it didn’t. There was no resolution on many of the things that made LOST so talked about.

Now it just seems that the writers threw down whatever they thought of after hits from the bong, without ever really contemplating how any of it could ever be explained. It annoys me and disappoints me a little. I think the ending had potential to be so much more, and by leaving SO many questions, it just diluted it and made a majority of it seem completely pointless.

So I enjoyed the lap dance, but I’m still looking for the happy ending that’s never going to come.

Repeat after me: DRM is bad for the customer

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DRM, or digital rights management is the fancy term that movie and record companies use to mean copy protection. Basically they use some sort of technical lock-in technique so you can only play your media on a particular device, or it prevents you from making back up copies.

I don’t know about you, but for music, I want to play it a lot of places. iPhones and iPods, Sonos, streaming to Xbox or PS3, on my Mac, on Windows, etc. etc. My solution? Anything I buy is in MP3 format from Amazon or ripped to MP3 from a music CD. That way, I can play it everywhere.

Now when it comes to movies and DVD’s, I’ve never been a really big ‘ripper.’ I am an audiophile when it comes to movies. I want my 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound for my movie. Ripping a movie and streaming it across the network usually loses the surround sound and reduces it to stereo. That really limits my enjoyment. Add to that the fact that ripping a movie is questionably legal.

Nowadays, both of my daughters have iPod touches. As such, when we go on long trips, they can bring a movie or two along with them. The movie company’s compromise has been what is called ‘digital copy.’ So you can buy a Blu-Ray or DVD with a Digital Copy included. The DVD/Blu-Ray set with digital copy generally costs more, but you get a portable version of the movie that you can take with you. Every movie I’ve gotten with a digital copy up to this point works as follows:

  • You get an extra disc
  • You pop that disc in your Mac or Windows machine
  • iTunes pops up
  • You have to enter a DRM code that came with the movie
  • The movie downloads off the disc and into iTunes

So first of all, you have this movie that can only be played in the iTunes ecosystem. iPods, iPhones, iPads and AppleTV. It’s annoying, but that’s largely what we have in our house, so for the girls to take their movies with them, it’s a compromise.

Well yesterday we bought the movie ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.’ It was really funny movie and it comes highly recommended. BUT. It was a DVD/Blu-Ray/Digital Copy combo. We paid extra for the digital copy. Well yesterday I realize that the digital copy is only for Playstation 3 and the Playstation Portable. The big text on the front simply said Digital Copy, so I assumed it was the same digital copy as I always could get (a la iTunes.) Looking at the back of the box, I later found the tiny print saying it was for the PS3 and PSP, but the giant bold lettering on the front didn’t tell me that.

So needless to say, I paid extra for a digital copy that I’ll never use. I’m savvy to this stuff, and I still bought the wrong thing. How many other people is this happening to? It’s not good for the consumer in any case. If they are going to include a digital copy, it should be something open standards that can be played pretty much anywhere.

Yesterday, the movie companies turned me into a ‘ripper’ of movies. I’ll have no qualms ripping my own copy for portable enjoyment from now on. I’m not going to pirate anything, I’m simply never paying EXTRA to get LESS. I’ll take the DVD and make my own copy, and watch it anywhere.

Somewhere Volker nods approvingly

Quote of the Day

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Okay, I didn’t find this, it was brought to my attention by Chez over at Deus Ex Malcontent but it is a brilliant quote nonetheless by film critic Roger Ebert.

“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

An amazing quote, from an amazing man. Check out his story on Esquire online.

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