HBO Online No Good

I was so excited when I saw the headline "HBO Putting Shows Online, at No Additional Charge." Then I read the article:

The free service will allow access to about 400 hours of movies and original programming each month. It will be made available only to people already subscribing to HBO, and it will be marketed and delivered through cable operators.

“There are a lot of people, particularly young people, who are watching TV through the PC. We wanted to create a product for them,” said Eric Kessler, a co-president of HBO.

Most major television networks already make much of their programming available free on the Internet. But as a channel with 29 million subscribers, HBO cannot afford to bypass its cable partners.

That really sucks. If HBO wants to reduce downloads of their shows through other channels, they need to address the needs of people who want to pay HBO for their shows but not buy digital cable and 500 other channels.

Quality of classical MP3s

There have been a bunch of recent articles and blog posts about the sound quality of MP3 files on iPods, some related to the opening of the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) Web Shop. It is disheartening how little evidence is presented regarding the claims of relative quality of MP3s versus CDs. Given how passionate some of the authors are about audiophile equipment and the like, they could have at least done some ABX testing to see how well they could distinguish between the formats. I'd especially like to see Fred Kaplan claim that lossless formats like FLAC only sound "very close to CD-quality" after such a test; give me a break. I'm also curious which of the authors could distinguish the 320kbps MP3s from the DG store from 192kpbs VBR MP3s properly encoded by LAME, the format long used by eMusic. On my decent equipment, I can't tell the difference between the 192kbps VBR MP3s and CDs, and that's good enough for me.

On the other hand, it seems that DG made a good choice with 320kpbs MP3s. The files easily work on all kinds of devices and players, and they seem to satisfy people who usually complain about MP3 sound quality (rationally or otherwise). Personally, until I can get lossless tracks for reasonable prices (around $10 an album), I'm sticking with CDs and eMusic.

Metropolitan Opera and Rhapsody

I just saw that the Metropolitan Opera has has just made available 100 past radio broadcasts on Rhapsody. I'm listening to a great 1958 Otello right now. With this, the theater broadcasts, and the satellite radio station, the Met is really doing amazing things these days.

using Gmail IMAP access for email backup

Gmail recently enabled free IMAP access, an extremely useful feature for many reasons. For me, perhaps the best feature of IMAP access is an easier and better method for backing up old email to a Gmail account. Now, email backup is a simple process:

1. Import the old email into Thunderbird. (Other clients may also work.)
2. Enable IMAP access to your Gmail account in Thunderbird.
3. Drag and drop the old email folders into your Gmail account.

That's it! Your folder names will show up as labels in the Gmail web interface. The copying process in Thunderbird takes some time, but you can safely let it run and go do something else.

Previously, one could backup email into Gmail using a program like GMail Loader. A key advantage of the IMAP technique is that the original email dates are preserved in the Gmail database. With GMail Loader, the date when a message was imported shows up during search (though the original email date remains in the headers). Use of the import date messes up both search and Gmail's threading features.

Generally, importing email into Thunderbird is a pretty easy process. I successfully imported and backed up some old Eudora email and mail in the MH format (by converting to mbox format with the packf command). The only downside of this whole process is the time one inevitably wastes reading ancient emails :).

"Long-Form" News Aggregators

I've had a lot of spare time recently, and one thing I've been doing even more than usual is reading in-depth newspaper and magazine articles. There are a bunch of good aggregators for these kinds of articles on the web, and I thought I'd point out my favorites:

• Arts and Letters Daily, the classic
• NewsDog (of course)
• The Informed Reader, which summarizes about three articles a day
• Other Magazines in Slate, updated once or twice a week
• Brijit, a new site that seems promising

If you needed help procrastinating, I hope this does the trick. Let me know if I'm missing out on some other similar aggregator.

Wire Season 5 teaser / Wire with a laugh track?

There's a promo up for Season 5 of The Wire: I can't wait. I also found this clip pretty funny, in a sort of disturbing way:

Vegetarian Frosted Mini-Wheats

We were recently told that 365 brand Bite-Size Frosted Shredded Wheat, the Whole Foods generic version of Frosted Mini-Wheats, is free of gelatin and hence vegetarian. We've been eating them like mad ever since. Apparently Organic Frosted Mini-Wheats are also vegetarian; sweet!

comparing renting and buying

David posted a nice analysis of whether to rent or buy a house, along with a handy spreadsheet to do your own calculation. Check it out.

Feed for Josh Marshall's posts on Talking Points Memo

Finally, full text feeds are available for Talking Points Memo. I've wanted a feed just for Josh Marshall's posts on the blog for a while. Now that these full feeds are available, creating such a feed was easily done using Yahoo! Pipes. The pipe for Josh Marshall's posts is here. Enjoy!

Toshiba Portege M200 and Dell 2407WFP

Warning: This post has specific technical tips that you probably won't find interesting unless you have hardware similar to that mentioned in the title.

I just got a new 24" monitor (the Dell 2407WFP-HC), and I had to set it up as an external display for my Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC. Unfortunately, the video drivers on my laptop didn't support the native 1920x1200 resolution of the monitor, even though the video card (an NVIDIA GeForce FX Go 5200) could do so. Furthermore, Toshiba is quite lax about updating the official video drivers for the laptop, and NVIDIA artificially cripples their official drivers so they don't work on older cards by default.

Fortunately, there's a web site dedicated to solving these problems: Laptop Video 2 Go. The site provides various versions of NVIDIA drivers along with modified INF files to enable those drivers to work on older hardware. I got things working with driver version 97.44 and this INF file, following these installation instructions. My INF file differed from that provided by the site in two ways:

1. I added the appropriate resolutions for the 24" monitor and for my laptop screen (1400x1050), as in this post.
2. I added support for Tablet PC features like rotating the laptop screen, as in this post.

After updating the driver, I also disabled the NVIDIA Driver Helper Service, as suggested here. The service was causing constant 20% CPU utilization (mostly in the RPC service under svchost.exe), and it doesn't seem to do anything critical.

Anyway, things seem to be working nicely now. Hopefully this post will help others in a similar situation.

Insane Tetris Video

I'm not sure if this is real, but in any case, it's pretty awesome:

Mad Men

We started watching Mad Men a few weeks ago, and now we are addicted. Matthew Weiner, who wrote for The Sopranos, is the executive producer, and as one would expect the writing on Mad Men is amazing. The show is also richly detailed in terms of props, costumes, etc., and the acting is fantastic. There was a nice interview with Weiner on NPR this past weekend about the show. Anyway, it's definitely worth a look, and if you do start watching, be sure to stick with it until Episode 4, which in my opinion was the first great episode (Episode 7 from last week was the second).

Playing With Prediction Markets

David writes about our weekend toying with prediction markets like Intrade. Apart from the clearly false assertion that I'm smarter than him, it's a good read.

Two Quick Recommendations

1. I've listened to Björk's new album Volta a few times now, and it's fantastic. It's easily her best album since Homogenic.

2. I just watched the first episode of 30 Rock online, and it had me laughing out loud in places. I'll post again if the show holds up.

The Wire on Wikipedia

Today's featured article on Wikipedia is the entry on The Wire. I watch for changes on the entry (correcting sabotage, inaccuracies, etc.), and it's gratifying to see that people think it's an especially good article. Check it out if you haven't already.

Remnick on "The Sopranos"

I enjoyed reading this David Remnick article from 2001 on "The Sopranos." I especially enjoyed the end (the piece ran during the third season):

And, as Chase told me, there’s probably only one more season left in him before “The Sopranos” gets stale. He wants out. His next planned project is a feature, backed by HBO and distributed by Warner Brothers. And it is not about the Mafia. It’s about the Christian-rock scene.

Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?

Heh. With the show really ending soon, I guess we have a Christian-rock movie to look forward to.

Multi-Column Article View Greasemonkey Script

I'm finally ready to reveal to the world my procrastination tool of the past few weeks, a Greasemonkey script that creates a multi-column, multi-page view of long articles. A screenshot will probably do much more than that description:

The view is obviously inspired by the New York Times Reader (which I've previously written about). Usage should be fairly straightforward. For most sites, using the script simply requires navigating to the printer-friendly version of an article (the original article is modified for sites like nybooks.com that don't provide printer-friendly pages). The pages can be navigated with the left and right arrow keys or with the buttons.

Some aspects of the script are not entirely debugged. In particular, sometimes the text alignment on a page is slightly off. I've found that slightly resizing the window often fixes this problem. If there are any Javascript experts out there, I'd welcome a patch to make the script more robust. Also note that I've primarily used the script along with Adblock, and it's possible that if ads are present the viewer will misbehave.

The viewer works on the printer-friendly version of an article, or the main article if no printer-friendly view exists. The following sites are currently supported:

• New York Times
• New York Review of Books
• Washington Post
• Los Angeles Times
• Boston Globe
• The New Yorker
• Boston Review
• The Atlantic
• New York Magazine
• San Jose Mercury News

I also welcome patches to support more sites; hopefully it shouldn't be too difficult. You can get the script from this page on userscripts.org. Let me know if you like it or if you have problems / suggestions.

Update (5/22): I updated the screen shot to show the aesthetic changes in version 0.1.3 contributed by Dave.

Update (6/27): Instead of updating things in two places, I'm only going to keep the userscripts.org page up-to-date with a complete list of supported sites and a change log from now on. So go there to see the latest news.

Moyers on the Media and Iraq

I wanted to recommend Buying the War, a documentary by Bill Moyers that aired last night on PBS (you can watch it online). It's really amazing to re-watch some of the media coverage preceding the Iraq war and to see how unbelievably wrong it was. Glenn Greenwald has a nice post on the topic.

The Waiting Game

There haven't been many posts for a while, due to a good deal of traveling for job interviews. Now that I'm done with the traveling, all I can do is wait until the decisions come in. The waiting is fairly miserable; I've managed to be somewhat productive research-wise, but I can't help but glance at my email and phone a bit too frequently to make sure I don't miss any news. Even though the waiting is hard, I'm also slightly dreading the end of waiting, since at that point if I have multiple offers I'll have to make a decision. I know that all my options will probably be good, but I'm sure I'll agonize to no end over minutiae in trying to make the best possible choice anyway.

Well, that's about all I have to say for now. I just finished reading Bleak House after several fits and starts, and I hope to write a bit about it soon.

Suppressing a line number with the listings LaTeX package

Don't bother reading this post unless you are using the LaTeX listings package, have a code listing with line numbers, and want to suppress a line number in the listing.

By suppressing a line number, I mean something like the following:

Line 16 is split across two lines in the figure, but it's really one code statement, and I didn't want to have to refer to the statement using multiple line numbers in the text. Here is the LaTeX source for the key line:

String firstName = /*@\\@*/      /*@\underline{fullName.substring(0,spaceInd-1)};@*/

Note that since this snippet is used within the listings environment, the whitespace and the lack of a newline are significant. I used \lstset{escapeinside={/*@}{@*/}} before this listing to declare the escape sequence for adding other formatting. The {\*@\\@*/} inserts a linebreak, and then the spaces before the next characters appear as indentation in the figure.

Anyway, I googled around and couldn't find this trick, so hopefully this writeup will be useful to someone.

UPDATE (10/27/2008): In response to a request in a comment below, here is a minimal-ish full example that uses the technique. I've confirmed that this example works with the MacTex 2008 distribution (pdfTeXk, Version 3.1415926-1.40.9 and version 1.4 of the listings package).

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{listings}

\lstset{escapeinside={/*@}{@*/}}

\begin{document}

\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{lstlisting}[numbers=left]
String firstName = /*@\\@*/      /*@\underline{fullName.substring(0,spaceInd-1)};@*/
\end{lstlisting}
\caption{Example illustrating suppression of line numbers.}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

Snitches in Baltimore

I read this article on witnesses being harassed and murdered in The Atlantic yesterday, and was absolutely infuriated. Everyone knows The Wire is a realistic show, but for some reason it was only after reading this article that it hit home for me how horrible that is. Is there any vaguely practical path to a sane drug policy in this country? Please let me know if one exists, as I'm eager to support it. Also, email me if you're not an Atlantic subscriber, and I'll email you access to the article.

Rice and Keats

Just wanted to plug Rice and Keats, a blog well worth visiting; and I'm only a little biased :)

The Wee-Bey Theory

Brilliant. I can't believe I didn't think of this. Via the unofficial Wire home page.

Times Reader again

I just wanted to recommend the New York Times reader again. They just updated it so that you can read any issue of the Times from the past week, a really useful feature. I've used the reader extensively on flights by syncing the articles before I leave, and it's been great.

Update (3/16): It looks like the Times reader will soon not be free, and for me, it's definitely not worth the price they are asking. On the other hand, Times Select is now free for students and faculty.

News War

I wanted to recommend News War, a great Frontline documentary on the evolving role of the media that has been airing recently. You can watch it online, and the extended interviews are also really interesting.

Pipe for all my posts

Just for kicks, I made a pipe (as discussed previously) for all my posts here, on NewsDog, and on del.icio.us, and added a link to the feed.

Great David Milch video

I highly recommend this video of an interview / Q&A with David Milch (hosted by David Thorburn, who taught a lit. class that I took my freshman year). Milch talks about Deadwood, NYPD Blue, his own life, and the writing process. Perhaps the most interesting factoid: the role of Al Swearengen was originally written for Ed O'Neill (the father in Married with Children), but HBO wouldn't cast him; crazy.

Yahoo! Pipes

I messed around a bit with Yahoo! Pipes a few days ago, and it seems like a very cool tool (if a bit hard to use). I made a pipe for my brother's columns in the Stanford Daily, and it works nicely. I also recommend this Freakonomics pipe that only includes Levitt's posts from the blog. There are pipes that do all kinds of crazy mashups, but even the basic filtering functionality is quite useful.

Hacking a felony?

I just saw this article in The Tech about three students being charged with a felony for getting caught in the middle of a hack. It seems a bit overboard to me; you would think that the MIT Police would be able to figure out that no harm was intended in a case like this one. Hopefully the charges will be dropped.

NPR Music Articles

I was listening to the NPR Most-Emailed Stories podcast on my flight yesterday, and heard a bunch of good music-related articles:

• Band Tries to Make It Big Without Going Broke
• 'Violin Dreams': Chasing Bach's Elusive Chaconne
• Tackling Mahler's Fifth Symphony

Check them out.

A visit to Philadelphia

I wanted to write briefly about what we did and ate during our recent visit to Philadelphia, which was a lot of fun. We took some recommendations from this Times article. In no real order:

• Kingdom of Vegetarians: We ate here on our first night. Good food, but very large quantities; one appetizer and a main dish is probably enough for two. I was impressed with the number of vegetarian places in center city Philly; we had lunch at a vegetarian falafel place once, and there were plenty of other options.
• La Colombe Torrefaction: Recommended in the Times article, this place does in fact have amazing coffee.
• The Rosenbach Museum: A small, cozy museum showcasing the rare books collection of Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach and some antiques. Lots of neat stuff here, and you can see everything in under 2 hours.
• Porcini Restaurant: A friend took us to this friendly Italian restaurant, where the owner typically mingles with the diners. It was a bit cramped, but the food was quite tasty.
• Pietro's Pizza: The coal oven pizza was good, but stay away from the salad.
• Naked Chocolate Cafe: Go here for some intense hot chocolate, very dense and served like an espresso shot; wow.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun we had during the trip; Philly is a place worth visiting.

The re-up

I just saw this headline on ESPN.com: Staying Put: Bonds to re-up with Giants for $16 million. I had never heard the term "re-up" before watching The Wire, but according to The American Heritage Dictionary, it can in fact mean "to sign a renewed contract for employment or service." It's still kind of funny to refer to Bonds as doing a re-up.

Better Slate RSS feeds

Finally, Slate has upgraded their RSS feeds so that there are separate feeds for each department. I've wanted for a long time to have a feed for the Today's Papers feature, so this is great.

Thompson and Bordwell Blog

I just found the blog of Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell (via GreenCine Daily), authors of Film Art: An Introduction. I picked up the book since it was the text for a film class I started to take; I couldn't handle the weekly 3-hour film screenings in the middle of the day and dropped it. But, I still read most of the book and learned a ton from it. The blog is beautifully written, the kind of stuff that makes me want to drop everything and watch movies all day. These two entries on Soderbergh's latest film are a good sample of Bordwell's style. Check it out.

Again on The Wire

Slate has a great lengthy interview with David Simon. We were re-watching some of the first season last week, and it's just stunning how many connections there are with small moments in the fourth season. I think this post is right that The Wire is best when watched in chunks, as it will essentially be "a 66-hour movie" (as Simon puts it) when it is finished.

UPDATE (12/05): Here's another interesting Q&A.

David Milch's New Show

Here's an article on David Milch's new show, John From Cincinnati. It sounds promising: with Deadwood basically over, and The Wire and The Sopranos close to being done, I need a new show to become obsessed with.

How Much Coffee to Drink

Just wanted to point out this NPR story from a while back on recommended amounts of caffeine consumption. I've switched from drip coffee to single americanos, which both taste better and have a predictable amount of caffeine. I haven't gotten jittery since, and I've been sleeping really well too. It might not work for Cog, but it works for me.

Yessssss

Thank goodness. It's the best money I've ever spent.

End of Tower Classical

I had heard about Tower Records going bankrupt a while back, but it took this article to make me realize that this means the end of the classical section in the store at Lincoln Center. I remember many a leisurely afternoon spent browsing there and listening to recordings through their very nice headphones. And, I got a bunch of my favorite CDs there, including the Böhm Tristan and the Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Bach cantatas recording. Anyway, I guess I should enjoy Amoeba while I can.

New York Times Reader

I've been using the Times Reader application on and off for a couple weeks now, and overall it's very nice, though there are some annoyances. I first read about the reader in an article on Slate, which raved about the readability of articles inside the reader. I agree that the text rendering and automatic columns in the reader make a huge difference, especially for long articles. Also, being able to read offline is really nice. On a recent flight, I was able to read most of the Sunday Times without having to flip pages on a crowded plane.

There are some problems, however. Although the Slate article claims that a week of the paper is stored, I've found that articles are deleted within a day, which is actually really annoying. Also, I've found that certain articles just never appear in the reader; I assume this bug is fixable. For some reason, the reader consumes an obscene amount of memory, often more than 100MB. This isn't a deal breaker, but if reading 5 papers through similar readers requires 500MB of memory, then that will be a big problem. Finally, it's annoying to be separated from the web while reading the articles; I don't see the most-emailed articles list, and it's harder to quickly search for something on Google or Wikipedia.

Anyway, if you have Windows, the reader is definitely worth a look.

You Know

It's yet another web site on The Wire that sucked up an hour of my time. The Q&A sessions with David Simon are especially worth reading.

Clothes on The Wire

A behind-the-scenes feature was just posted on clothes in The Wire. It's cool how much thought goes into these things.

GOP Contract Tanking

The Tradesports contract on whether the GOP will keep the House has gone way down in the last few days, as you can see above. Let's hope this holds up.

The State on iTunes Store

MTV has just released Season 1 of The State on iTunes, and supposedly if it sells well, it will eventually be released on DVD. The members of The State even did a new skit to promote it. I bought an episode to give it a try, and overall I'm not impressed with the experience. First, playing the video back on Windows maxes out the CPU on my laptop, and it's not a slow machine; apparently this is a problem with Quicktime for Windows. So, I can't even watch the thing in full-screen mode. Second, they took out the copyrighted music from some of the skits. In the "Pants" skit, it's a little strange to not hear "Cannonball" during the pants shopping scene, but it's not a big deal. However, "$240 Worth of Pudding" is now missing "Sexual Healing," and they did a terrible job of sticking in another song. The skit was originally done in front of a live studio audience, with Showalter and Lennon responding to the crowd. Now, they dubbed in a fake laugh track over the new song, and it's just not nearly as funny. Anyway, I might still buy the DVDs, but for me the episodes on iTunes aren't worth it.

Props to Sudoku Slam

Sudoku Slam, the best Sudoku site on the web (and free!), is ready to go. It's also getting lots of attention, both on digg and del.icio.us. Congrats to splag and Bill for a job very well done.

More on The Wire

There is way too much to read about The Wire these days:

• Heaven and Here is a blog dedicated entirely to the show. Watch out for spoilers: they sometimes comment on episodes before they've aired (they are available early on HBO On Demand).
• Tim Goodman has been doing episode breakdowns on his blog.
• Slate has a TV Club feature breaking down the episodes.

I found a couple of these links via Matthew Yglesias, a fellow addict.

The Wire will be completed

I just saw that The Wire has been renewed for a final 5^th season. Hooray! Now I just hope they actually make those two two-hour Deadwood movies to give some closure; the end of Season 3 was satisfying, but definitely not as an end to the show.

David Remnick profile

It's here (via Emdashes), for all you fans of The New Yorker.

calendar for Cal home football games

I made up a calendar on 30 Boxes with all the Cal home football games, so I know when to not move my car :). It's here (ICal file) if you'd like to use it; I successfully used that link to import into Google Calendar. Let me know if it doesn't work.

Gillian Welch on Pandora

I've been using Pandora a bunch lately, and I'm starting to really like it as a radio alternative. I made this Gillian Welch station with just a few of her songs, and it seems to generate a really nice mix. The only downside is (as usual) you can waste a lot of time, tinkering with stations and reading about bands.

Only a couple days left...

Tim Goodman seems to like the fourth season of The Wire, which was provided to critics in its entirety; it almost makes me want to change careers.

investing tidbits

I've been reading a lot about investing lately, as I need to make some financial decisions in the near future. I started with The Intelligent Investor, which was very interesting. I then sought out a discussion of index vs. actively-managed mutual funds on the web, and at first couldn't find much useful, impartial information. Then, I hit upon a great resource: Google Scholar. I found a bunch of interesting papers, both on actively-managed funds and on market anomalies, i.e., phenomena that, at least on the surface, seem to contradict the efficient market hypothesis. Here are some of the more interesting things I came across (you may need various subscriptions to actually read the papers):

• Another Puzzle: The Growth in Actively Managed Mutual Funds shows that many investors consistently choose mutual funds that beat the market, later termed the "smart money" effect.
• Profitability of Momentum Strategies: An Evaluation of Alternative Explanations is a recent paper on an anomaly termed "stock return momentum": briefly, a portfolio that buys recently-rising stocks while shorting recently-falling ones is consistently profitable (ignoring transaction costs, I think).
• Does Stock Return Momentum Explain the "Smart Money" Effect? answers the question posed in its title in the affirmative.

I also found this page, which documents various stock market anomalies.

So, what did I conclude? I'm now fairly convinced that a smart person that devotes a lot of time to research can beat the market, in the long term. I'm also pretty convinced that I don't want to spend that kind of time on investing, and even if I did, I may be too risk-averse to be successful. So, for the most part, I'm sticking to index funds.

Vaguely related: this Business Week article on adjustable-rate mortgages is worth a read. Looks like a lot of people made bad decisions with these things.

hedging the election

TradeSports is a cool site with futures markets for all sorts of events. I've been following the markets for the GOP keeping control of the House and Senate in this year's elections for a while. Just recently, I decided to buy some contracts in the House market, meaning I would make money if the Republicans keep control of the House. I figure that if they lose, I'll be happy enough to not care about the lost money, and if they win, the money I gain will be some small consolation. It's a fun experiment. Right now, the market is predicting only a 46% probability of the Republicans winning, so things are looking good (except for my small investment)...

San Francisco Symphony Mahler recordings on eMusic

I was browsing eMusic the other day, as suggested over at The Abstract Factory, and discovered that all of the recent Mahler recordings of the San Francisco Symphony are available. Talk about a sweet way to use your 25 track free trial! Anyway, I grabbed Symphonies No. 1, 2, 4, and 9 (I already owned tbe 6 recording). All are really good, but I highly recommend Symphony No. 2, if only for the absolutely stunning singing of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. The recording of course can't reproduce the live experience (one of the best concerts I've ever attended), but it's still very nice. I'm pretty seriously considering staying on as an eMusic member; with the entire Naxos catalog, they have quite a broad classical selection, and the price is right.

couple classical music things

First, Joshua Kosman, the classical music critic for the SF Chronicle, is also now blogging (via Alex Ross). Second, the BBC Proms is now happening, and you can listen to a bunch of recent concerts for free. Finally, Bayreuth is also going on. Anthony Tommasini is keeping a journal of his experiences, and Operacast has a schedule of online broadcasts.

Behind the Scenes for The Wire Season 4

So...it's been a while. Those who know me know I've been busy. Anyway, here's something that whet my appetite for the upcoming season of The Wire: they've started a behind-the-scenes feature on the web site, with lots of interesting information. I can't wait until the season starts. In other HBO-related news, The first 4 episodes of Season 3 of Deadwood have been great. I also went back and watched some episodes from Season 1 a while back, and found them even better than when I watched the first time. I definitely plan to re-watch the whole series when I have time.

Incidentally, Tim Goodman, the television critic for the SF Chronicle, has a nice blog on television. He has lots of interesting tidbits on HBO shows in this post, and posts on the The Sopranos here.

Re-reading books

I just finished The Metaphysical Club, a very interesting book that I recommend. Apart from its main tale of the evolution of pragmatism, it has many fun side stories, including the beginnings of some universities (Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago) and some background on academic freedom. Anyway, good stuff.

After finishing, I was thinking about what to read next, and decided on Portnoy's Complaint, which a friend bought for me a while back. It's a new read for me, and for a while I've been wondering what the proper ratio should be between reading new books and re-reading old ones. For many good books, I imagine I would get much more from a second read than from the first; this certainly holds for film. On the other hand, I always feel that there are tons of good books that I haven't read yet, and I should be working on those. I guess the same dilemma holds for movies, but since I can watch a movie much faster than I can read a book, I haven't given it as much thought.

Anyway, any thoughts on a good ratio? Or is going with your gut the best thing to do?

FreeNX rules

I just got FreeNX installed for remote access to my school Linux computer from my home Windows machine, and it is amazing. I used these excellent instructions for Fedora, which worked almost perfectly. The only kink was that my existing installation of Cygwin interfered with the Windows NX client; Cygwin does not enjoy having two versions of its DLLs loaded simultaneously. To fix the problems, I renamed the DLLs in the NX client bin directory, so that the DLLs from my standard Cygwin install were used. Everything works great now, and the system is far more responsive than just using a local X server.

"Swine of the Times" in Harper's

I wanted to recommend the May issue of Harper's, which includes a great article "Swine of the Times" on the pork industry. All I can say is, these ain't no charmin' motherf***in' pigs (through no fault of their own, of course). The author is Nathanael Johnson, a friend and a very good writer. So, grab the magazine off the newstands and check it out.

Personality Feedback

Check out http://realpersonality.com, a web site AJ wrote to allow anonymous feedback on your personality traits. Cog has some interesting thoughts on the site. And, of course, if you'd like, rate me.

Complete New Yorker Blog

For those of you that own The Complete New Yorker, Between the Squibs is a new blog that tries to dig through the mountain of articles and find some of the great ones. They just accepted a submission from me, and I'm looking forward to having time to read the other posted articles. Oh, and if you don't have the collection, think seriously about getting it or asking for it as a gift. The software sucks, but the content is amazing.

Thelma Schoonmaker

I heard this interview with Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's editor, a while back. It had many interesting anecdotes, and it sparked my interest in Michael Powell, to whom she was married. I just saw The Red Shoes last night, and it's a wonderful film.

Various logs

Inspired by Abstract Factory, my filmlog, musiclog, and booklog, all with RSS feeds. I'll do my best to keep them up to date. I might cheat and write about old stuff once in a while too.

A Thought for Graduate School Admissions

I was discussing the admissions process for the EECS department with a friend at lunch today, and a question popped into my head. Why is there nothing similar to "early decision" for applying to grad school? Actual early decision probably would not work, as we have no admissions office reading applications, so the extra work of going through applications early would be too much. My idea is instead to have a checkbox on the regular application, saying something to the effect of, "If admitted, will accept offer." This should probably actually say something like you won't accept an offer from another school, whatever the early decision form says for undergrad admissions.

According to my friend, this information would be useful during the admissions process. There are lots of qualified students that get rejected for essentially arbitrary reasons, and with this information, it might be slightly less arbitrary, as certain students could be accepted to guarantee a certain yield. The very top students would be admitted regardless of whether they had committed or not, but for others, checking the box may provide their application with a little boost. Of course, applicants who don't check the box may be at a disadvantage compared to those who do. But, some applicants who would definitely come to Berkeley may be at a disadvantage now, since they can't communicate this information to the admissions committee.

Anyway, I'm curious as to what others think about this proposal.

Wikipedia shock

I had a bit of the "Wachet Auf" Bach cantata stuck in my head earlier today, so I went to seek it out on Rhapsody, but couldn't find it. Then, as I often do with random things in my head, I looked up its Wikipedia article. Lo and behold, the article links to a recording of a full performance of the piece...done by the MIT Chamber Chorus, when I was singing. Yikes! I realized that if they had our Wachet Auf recording, they may also have the Schubert Mass performance from the same concert, where I sang in the trio in the Benedictus, having never taken a voice lesson in my life...yup, it's there. Well, we gave it our best; enjoy, worldwide Internet listeners.

The Met. Opera and Levine

Here's a nice article on James Levine, showing him geeking out about some Mozart. Incidentally, I've been making fairly decent quality recordings of the Met. Opera broadcasts this season; check out this site for the schedule, and Operacast for where you can listen online. Wozzeck was really good, and An American Tragedy grew on me after a couple of listens. Let me know if you want the recordings.

Music Rights for TV DVDs

I just read this article on securing music rights for DVD releases of TV shows. The difficulties particularly annoy me since I imagine they are holding up the DVD release of The State and make releasing the Beavis and Butt-Head music videos almost impossible. There has to be a better way.

Greasemonkey script for Rhapsody

I wrote a Greasemonkey script for Rhapsody that shows full album names in the album lists. The truncated album names were really getting on my nerves. Hooray for Greasemonkey!

Anti-aliased Emacs on Fedora Core 4 (and 5)

I managed to build Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on my FC4 machine. I mostly followed these instructions (ignoring the Debian-specific stuff), with the following extra steps:

• I had to install the libpng-devel RPM (I used yum). The lack of this library was not detected by the emacs configure script.
• I had to install setarch to use during the build process. The exec-shield functionality and randomization of virtual address spaces in Fedora Core 4 messes up the emacs bootstrapping process. I ran ./configure ; setarch i386 -R make bootstrap to build emacs.

The build seems to run fine, and the anti-aliased fonts make a big difference.

UPDATE (10/27/06): I just did a re-build on Fedora Core 5 using these instructions, and everything went fine. Now, when compiling, you need to run ./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft; setarch i386 -R make bootstrap to make things work. Hopefully soon this code will be stable enough that someone releases an RPM.

Wall Street Journal through ProQuest

I found a fairly decent way to read the Wall Street Journal (which charges for online access) through ProQuest, which I can access through the UC Berkeley library proxy. Go to this page to see issues by date. Then, after choosing an issue, sort the articles by page number rather than alphabetically. Finally, skip all the articles listed as being on "p. 1", as they are just short blurbs; the long articles start on "p. A.1".

Vlissides

I just read on Lambda the Ultimate that John Vlissides, co-author of the well-known Design Patterns book, just passed away. I talked to John a few times when I was at IBM, and ended up co-authoring a paper with him. I remember him giving me good advice on grad. school the first time I met him; he told me how he worked insanely hard (16 hours days) as a grad. student, and how (not unsurprisingly) it turned out to be a bad idea. He also gave me a free copy of Design Patterns, which I thought was really nice of him. Anyway, he was a really good writer and a very nice guy, and I was sad to see the news of his passing.

"I'm da boss"

I just finished watching Raging Bull for the first time in a while; what an incredibly powerful film. The very last moments, where La Motta repeatedly mutters "I'm da boss" while shadowboxing, reminded me in some remote way of the ending of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Both endings take a small piece of thematic material, emblematic of the work as a whole, and fade away while repeating it more times than one would expect. When the work finally does end, the audience is left with a sublime echo that resonates more deeply as one reflects on the work as a whole. Anyway, just a random connection that popped into my head.

"I Come From Lake Titicaca, Nicaragua"

Slate has a nice review of the new Beavis and Butt-Head DVD release. It's too bad they couldn't get all the music videos, though, as they often had the most brilliant observations.

Microloans

I just saw this site Kiva, which looks really cool. It allows you to loan money to small businesses in the developing world, and get paid back if/when the business succeeds. It looks like all their businesses are funded now, but I put myself on the mailing list for when they find more.

TV on DVD

This sounds familiar. And yet again, one must ask: why no mention of The Wire, which is at least as marathon-inducing as any of these shows?

Rosen on Recording

Here's an interesting book review by Charles Rosen of Performing Music in the Age of Recording. It made me feel bad that I don't perform music nearly as much as I used to; I really need to get a piano.

Catching Up

It looks like Alex Ross is catching up on episodes of The Wire, and he comes to the same conclusion I did a few months back. Yet another confirmation of his good taste :)

Doctor Atomic reviews

I thought I'd collect links to reviews of Doctor Atomic as I find them. I'll try to update this list as I see more reviews. Maybe I'll add my own after I see it :). Alex Ross has some cool stuff up on the opera too.

• Los Angeles Times
• Bay Buzz
• SF Chronicle
• New York Times

Best-Of Compilations

When I used to watch a lot of television, I can remember seeing certain commercials for "best-of" compilations (like Ultimate '70s or Piano by Candlelight Platinum) so many times that the little song excerpts would merge in my head into a new song. Even now, I can still remember chunks of songs from some '50s love songs compilation commercial I saw in elementary school, and I cringe when I think about it. I always found it jarring when I'd here the full version of some song that I only knew through an excerpt from one of these commercials. It was almost always disappointing; my brain was so used to the commercial that the real song seemed worse than a chunk of it in the context of the commercial. Or perhaps the song had been built up too much by being associated solely with a "best-of" collection. Anyway, not sure if others have experienced this; just a random thought.

A Little School Pride

It looks like MIT came out first in the new Washington Monthly college rankings, which emphasize both academics and service to the community (also covered in The Tech). The statistics used to compute these rankings are not ideal, as acknowledged in the article, but it still seems like a good idea to me. Hopefully they'll be able to find better ways to measure service in the future and MIT will stay close to the top.

I've been meaning to write a couple of other posts; I'll hopefully get to them soon.

Saul Bass Titles

You can view stills from a bunch of titles done by Saul Bass here. I posted on Saul Bass before (but the link in that post is broken). Cool stuff.

More on Diet Coke

Here is a page that breaks down the various diet versions of Coke, vaguely related to a post of mine from a while back.

Poor Guy

Check out the White House press briefing [RealPlayer link] where Scott McClellan tries to dodge questions about Karl Rove. He's not very good at it, and it's just kind of sad to watch.

On del.icio.us

After hearing about del.icio.us for a while, I decided to get an account, and it's pretty cool. Now I can easily access links to my online bills / accounts and technical papers that I check from time to time. I've also been trying to bookmark things I think are worth reading; it's for cases where I don't feel like writing a blog post about an article or posting it on NewsDog, but I still think others may want to take a look. There are RSS feeds on all the pages, although the only one I imagine anyone else would want to track is the last one. Anyway, good stuff.

ForecastFox and Berkeley library proxy

Here's something that about 0 of you care about. I use the ForecastFox extension in Firefox to show the upcoming weather, and I also use the UC Berkeley library proxy to access certain web sites from outside school. Unfortunately, the proxy configuration script lists AccuWeather, the site ForecastFox uses, as one that needs to go through the proxy, thereby necessitating a login to the proxy server every time I want the weather forecast to show up. To fix this, I changed the script to not access AccuWeather through the proxy server; here is the altered script. Just use that link as your proxy configuration URL instead of the standard one, and you should be set.

Obligatory Stella Review

I just watched the first episode of the new Stella show on Comedy Central, and given that my blog is called Raking Leaves (Quicktime link), I figured I should comment. To put it briefly, it's funny, and still weird in that Stella way, but it just didn't have the impact that I was hoping for. Stella's lunacy just doesn't work as well over 22 minutes as it does in 2 minute sketches. And, I agree with this Dana Stevens review that this stuff might be too weird to get big ratings. But, don't get me wrong; the episode had really funny moments, and I'm definitely going to watch whenever I can. And, I know from experience that Stella gets funnier after a few viewings, so maybe I'll take another look at the first episode sometime soon.

The Wire Season 3

I just finished watching it, in spite of my current massive workload. I'd say that in the end, it didn't quite match Season 2, mostly because it was a bit too sprawling. To really appreciate Season 3, you need to remember Season 1 and some of Season 2 in a fair amount of detail. The amount of mental effort required to try to track all the plot connections detracts from the impact of the episodes. I imagine that upon a second viewing of all three seasons things would connect in a deeper way, but that's 37 hours of television, which is beyond even an addict like myself. Also, I didn't find the running theme of politics in the third season to be quite as compelling as the inside look at union workers from the second season. Nevertheless, Season 3 is definitely worth watching if you've seen and liked the first two.

Cable Choice

I heard this interview with Tim Winter, director of the Parents Television Council, yesterday on the radio. From the things I had previously heard and read about the PTC, I assumed this guy would be some sort of nut, but he was actually fairly well-spoken and reasonable. I was pleased to hear that his group wants to deal with objectionable content on cable by allowing consumers to only pay for the channels they want. This solution would also solve my problem of wanting HBO, but not wanting to pay $50 for the other 200 channels on digital cable that I'll never watch. Anyway, even though some of what he said was BS, he seemed thoughtful, which was a pleasant surprise.

New Tristan

This is funny. It's related to this earlier post.

PDF e-books

You can get free e-books in PDF format here. Normally these things are a pain to read on a computer screen, but the typesetting in the PDF helps a bit. And, on my Tablet PC it's actually pretty comfortable to read longer documents, so this site should come in handy.

Lens Flares

Here's a nice, insightful essay on Punch-Drunk Love that talks about the lens flares that appear throughout the film. These flares always caught my eye, and the essay does a nice job of linking them in to the film's overall use of color.

Busy

I'm getting hammered by the end-of-semester workload, as usual. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll be pretty busy through the end of July...so posting may be sparse. Couple of random things. I saw Romeo and Juliet at San Francisco Ballet last week. Being somewhat unappreciative of dance, I went primarily to hear all of Prokofiev's wonderful score. The orchestral playing was good, but not great, and as a friend pointed out to me, I was probably one of the few audience members that really cared. You never see music critics reviewing how an orchestra plays for a ballet, and the dance critics don't seem to write much about it either. I guess you can't have everything, but it would be nice if the standards were higher, since some of these ballet scores are rarely if ever played in full by a top orchestra like the SF Symphony.

Second, Backpack is a pretty cool service that I started using. I always thought that done right, this type of web-based organizer / scratchpad would be really useful. That's all for now.

Sandow on Indie Rock

Another nice post by Greg Sandow, this one on indie rock. It's great to see a another "serious" classical music person understanding this stuff (like Alex Ross). Hopefully people like Sandow and Ross can help classical music find ways to be more relevant and accessible.

Running Numbers

I've often wondered what it means to "run numbers," something that Harvey Keitel's character does in Mean Streets; this article answered the question.

The Sleeper Curve

I just finished reading this article on a topic near and dear to my heart, television. I instinctively recoil at the hand-waving arguments made in the piece, but I do agree with its overall gist that television drama has become more complex. Couple things, though: Johnson doesn't mention film at all, and I can't imagine that trends in television are unrelated to what's going on in movies. I know that David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, aspired to bring the complexities of film to a television series, and that his vision for the show was deeply influenced by the intertwining of domestic and mob life in Goodfellas. Given the similarity of the media, it just seems like an obvious point to address. Also, as a nitpick, Johnson left out discussion of two great shows that would fit nicely into his arguments. The first is The X-Files, which used all kinds of obscure terminology and was really fun to watch until it jumped the shark. The second is The Wire, which I blogged about recently. In terms of plot complexity, it's probably harder to follow than any of the shows mentioned in the article.

How To Do a Film Festival

So I was looking at the schedule for the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival, and I was completely overwhelmed. Tons of films, lots of which could be good, and few of which I'll actually have time to attend. Does anyone have a strategy for picking out films to see in a situation like this? If so, I'd love to hear about it. For now, I used this GreenCine Daily post as a sort of filter. Perhaps the interface on the film festival web site is not ideal; I remember the web site for the Seattle International Film Festival being better last year.

Sandow

Greg Sandow writes a great blog on the state of classical music. Reading this entry made me wish I had been in Pittsburgh at the time. There's lots of other good stuff there; check it out.

The Wire Rules

I just finished the second season of The Wire today; wow. It was even better than the brilliant first season. The show doesn't have the same hype as The Sopranos, and it's not as good, but it's the closest I've seen another HBO show get. So, when you have some time, get the DVDs; you won't regret it. But, seriously, wait until you have some time. I have the 3rd season too, but I need to wait a couple of weeks to start watching it to avoid the distraction. Anyway, it's past my bedtime.

GreaseMonkey

GreaseMonkey is perhaps the coolest Firefox extension I've found yet. You can do all kinds of cool web page modifications with it, as listed here. Right now, I have all links to New York Times articles going to the single-page format, and a script that fixes some of the crappiness in allmusic. Once you've installed the extension, to install the linked scripts just right-click and select "Install User Script...".

WHRB

Just wanted to give a quick plug to the online stream of WHRB, which is the best classical music station I've found online since Andante Radio, which is no longer free. I just heard a fantastic performance of Das Lied von der Erde on there the other day, and you'll rarely find a station that plays pieces like that in their entirety anymore.