Monthly Archives: July 2009

On TiVos, Kindles, and Old Shoes

Posted on July 30, 2009 | 4 Comments

Allow me to set the stage for this post with a metaphor: I have a closet that is teeming with old shoes. Around 25 pairs, which is quite a lot, especially for a guy. I don’t buy a lot of shoes, I just have a lot of shoes, some of which are as old as nine years (my basketball Nikes) or even a decade (my Gore-Tex hiking boots, which saved my live during those Finnish winters on the Arctic Circle).

Every year or so I tell myself I’m going to consolidate my shoe collection: I’ll buy two good pairs to replace 10 old pairs. I buy the two new pairs of shoes, but then I start to think about all the specific usage scenarios I have for those old pairs. In the end, new and old shoes are forced to fitfully coexist in my small closet.

For instance, two years ago I was all set to throw away my favorite pair of shoes ever, a pair of brown Onitsuka Tigers. I bought some replacements, and wore my Tigers on a rafting trip as a final hurrah before I chucked them. But after an afternoon in the river, the shoes looked good again, and I decided it was important to have a pair of “kick-around” shoes. I’ve continued wearing them regularly for the two years since, and now they finally have a hole in the fabric. I’ll probably still keep them around for mud football or some such occasion.

Now, on to the point of this post. Technology is very much like my shoes, and it’s driving me crazy. Case in point: My DVD player. It’s a nice DVD player, but I almost never use it. I subscribe to NetFlix and have a TiVo, so I very much prefer to stream movies on my TiVo using NetFlix Watch Now. It’s free, it’s immediate, and there are no red envelopes to return; no waiting for new discs to arrive.

But only maybe 10 or 15 percent of Netflix’s catalog is available for streaming–the vast majority require getting a physical disc in the mail from NetFlix. Some of those I can download to my TiVo through Amazon’s Unbox on-demand service, others I can buy through iTunes. All of them are available through BitTorrent, but I usually feel guilty doing that and it’s a bit of a hassle.

There are plenty of NetFlix/Amazon/iTunes movies to keep me occupied for the rest of my life, if I didn’t ever care about watching specific films. But I do. So the DVD player stays.

There’s also a VCR hiding in a dark corner of some closet, but we won’t even mention that, except to say that I never need it, until I do.

Just like with the shoes, I’m surrounded by AV clutter, but I don’t want to get rid of it because I really do use it all. Physical and digital media don’t coexist nicely together, and yet they have to because of the stupid digital holdouts that are only available in physical form. If EVERY movie were available through NetFlix Watch Now, I’d be a happy man, and I would pay extra to be able to throw out my DVD player and still have access to a complete movie catalog. Do you hear me, movie studios? I will pay extra.

My wife and I recently got hooked on a TV series that had the first two seasons available on TiVo Watch Now. We devoured those, and were hungry for more, but guess what? The more recent seasons weren’t available for streaming. So I got them off BitTorrent, loaded them on to my iPhone, and hooked my iPhone up to my TV. And I didn’t even feel guilty about it!

The Kindle is the same way. We’re literally drowning in books in my apartment–I’m trying to cough a paperback out of my lungs as I type this. We could box most of them up and donate them to a library, if the Kindle could replace them. But it can’t, because the catalog of available books is incomplete. Not only that, but the catalogs are disparate across various e-reader services. So I’ve got my favorite e-reader on my iPhone, Eucalyptus, but there aren’t anywhere near enough books available for it, so I also have Kindle on my iPhone. And the catalog for that is woefully incomplete as well.

I know we’re experiencing the natural pangs of new industries being born, and I’m sure in five years these issues will mostly be resolved. But I’m impatient. I want to be able to stream every movie, download every book, and have two pairs of shoes that fit every occasion. Surely that’s not too much to ask?

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Posted in Tech Stuff

A Neighborhood Tour

Posted on July 22, 2009 | 2 Comments

It’s amazing the stuff you can see within a ten-minute walk of your apartment here in Manhattan. In the Financial District we had the Stock Exchange, the courthouse where Washington was sworn in as president, the burial place of Alexander Hamilton, the Fulton Fish Market, and the cool buildings on old Stone Street, to name just a few. It was one of the most historic neighborhoods in the country, and I really loved it there, despite the hordes of tourists.

Corinne and I moved to the Upper West Side a few months ago, and at first I figured there wouldn’t be much to see, since it’s mostly a residential neighborhood. But there’s tons of cool stuff up here.

The alignment of a beautiful Sunday afternoon and the recent purchase of our first D-SLR resulted in a perfect afternoon of walking around the neighborhood shooting the sights. I’m still learning how to use the camera (a Canon XSi), so I didn’t get every shot the way I wanted it. Overall though, this camera takes darn good pics…its only limitation is due to the guy holding it.

The full collection of photos is on my Flickr page, but here are a few of the highlights (all of them unedited):

This church is just a block away from our apartment, and still rings the bells on Sundays. Behind it, of course, is a shiny glass temple of gentrification.

This is the statuary outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 10 blocks north of our place.

Another one of St. John’s. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more amazing building…every inch of the outside and inside is incredibly ornate.

And man, those Catholic architects know how to make a guy feel small.

This is one of my favorite spots in the city: A tree-lined walking lane in Riverside Park along the Hudson River that stretches as far as the eye can see.

I love this shot of a dad and his kid looking at each other across the fountain of the Fireman’s Memorial on 100th St.

The Columbia campus is seriously amazing. Here’s a shot of the quad. Well, half the quad, and the other half is nearly as impressive.

That’s it for here. Wanna see more? Go to Flickr or come visit!

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Posted in New York Stuff

Baby Playtime Redux

Posted on July 22, 2009 | Leave a comment

So apparently instead of collecting all those baby songs into a GrooveShark playlist to embed on my blog, I could have just embedded the iTunes playlist in the form of an iMix. GrooveShark’s module looks a lot better and is customizable, but it took a while to build those lists. Anyway, here’s our Baby Playtime mix again, which you can now buy on iTunes.

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Posted in Family Stuff, Music Stuff, Web Stuff

Straight Outta Context

Posted on July 15, 2009 | 4 Comments

The part of parenthood that I’m most excited about—besides, you know, the perpetuation of the human race—is enjoying music with the kid(s). It’s like getting a blank Etch A Sketch to play with, a musical tabula rasa. I’ll be able to listen to my favorite tunes with someone whose mind is unencumbered by all the cultural baggage we attach to bands, songs, and genres. There is no “cool,” there is only “fun” and “not fun.”

I think we assign way too much social context to our music; we judge musicians by the fit of their jeans, the fit of their fans’ jeans, the amount of radio play they get, etc. None of that stuff has much to do with the actual music—the collection of notes, chords, and words that make up a song. I can’t wait to see what kind of meanings and memories our child attaches to songs when she doesn’t have access to the cultural context.

As an example, my dad is a big Motown fan, and has been since he was a kid. My head is full of nice memories that I’ve attached to those old Jackson 5 and Supremes and Temptations and Four Tops songs. I’ll always remember driving through the Sierra Nevada mountains on a family road trip when I was 10 or 11 listening to The J5′s “The Love You Save” over and over.

My dad’s dad, not surprisingly, referred to that kind of music with a racial epithet that I won’t repeat, but I’m extremely grateful to my dad for: 1) listening to it anyway; 2) Passing the appreciation of that music on to me, stripped of its social context that my grandpa and my dad assigned it.

Those Motown tunes represented something to my grandpa—perhaps other-ness, perhaps the uneasy race relations of his generation, I’m not sure. And maybe he meant his epithet as a joke. To my dad, the music may have represented rebellion to a certain extent, or who knows what else. But I was able to enjoy those songs on their own.

Of course, you’d be right to say that we lose something valuable when we strip Motown music of its historical context. But I’ve had plenty of time to fill in the music’s missing meta-data since I was 11, and my daughter will too. Context-free living is not permanent—hopefully she’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

Pulling from the playlist I just posted, my kid will be able to listen to Mates of State, Mere, The Meters, Mika, The Monkees, and Neutral Milk Hotel back to back without realizing that it’d be an uneasy blend of like five radio formats. Hipster music, indie bands, emo, post-punk, nu-grass, oldies, gay disco…it’s all just songs when you don’t know any better!

To get all tangential for a moment, Corinne and I watched a great documentary tonight called “My Kid Could Paint That,” the true story of a four-year-old who becomes an art celebrity when her modern art canvases start selling for $15K, $20K, $25K. Her paintings are considered brilliant, until a 60 Minutes report comes out that claims that she’s not producing the works on her own (her dad was accused of helping her).

Of course, in the art world, this is the most scandalous thing that could happen. “The four-year-old whose painting I just bought for $20K was getting help from her father??”

And why is it so scandalous? Because those art buyers were paying for context, not paint and canvas and skill, nor even beauty. The paintings they bought are still the paintings hanging on their walls. The beauty of the paint on the canvas doesn’t change a bit when they find out the artist’s a fraud—it looks the exact same. But the context is now different. Any themes they saw in those paintings—innocence, youth, precociousness—are still there, or else the buyers were deluding themselves into recognizing those themes in the first place. (I’d say that’s the Grand Dilemma of modern art.)

“Boy With A Pipe” is worth an immense fortune because it was painted by Picasso; were it done by another painter, even if every brushstroke and hue were the exact same, it would be worth a fraction of that. 99% of the value of that painting is in the context.

Anyway, I’m excited to have a little person around who can enjoy a fun song as a fun song, a good book as a good book, and a pretty picture as a pretty picture.

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Posted in Family Stuff

Baby’s Playtime Playlist

Posted on July 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

This playlist is a happy jam. Going over our iTunes catalog the other day, much of it seems targeted at the under-5 ankle-biting set, so this list wasn’t tough to assemble.

I love every song here, but the hidden gems are Blur’s “When the Cows Come Home,” Flogging Molly’s “The Wanderlust,” Frightened Rabbit’s “Old Old Fashioned,” everything by I’m From Barcelona and Mates of State, The Shins’ “Australia,” “M79″ by Vampire Weekend, and “My Sweet One” by Phish. Awesome tunes; I hope the kid loves them as much as I do. And I hope she can dance!

If you’ve got kids, feel free to do some focus group testing, or recommend kid jams of your own.

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Posted in Family Stuff, Music Stuff

How to Make Your Own Ice Cream Cake, Ben and Jerry’s Style

Posted on July 13, 2009 | 4 Comments


Remember that job you had in college, the one that was WAY beneath your abilities, but you were sick of/from selling your plasma so you took it? Mine was working as a scooper at Ben & Jerry’s.

The fabulous upside of the job—besides the free half-teaspoon of ice cream you could eat every workday—was working the day shift. No one goes to an ice cream shop before 1 or 2 in the afternoon, so if you worked the day shift, you could put on whatever music you wanted and spend your shift concocting new and exciting ice cream cakes for the store to sell. I made all kinds of cakes, my favorite being a tie-died Cherry Garcia cake to celebrate Jerry’s 60th birthday or something.

Anyway, the cakes are delicious, and we were able to charge an arm and a leg for them, but they’re really not that hard to make. We had all these fancy cake decorating tools and turntables and stuff, and an unlimited supply of ice cream to work with, but you don’t need all that stuff. What follows is my home-brewed method for building the perfect triple-layer brownie-and-ice-cream cake. It takes a couple hours, but it’s not hard or particularly expensive.


Here’s what you’ll need: Brownie mix + ingredients, two pints of ice cream (I used Häagen-Dazs mint and B&J’s Mint Chocolate Cookie), heavy whipping cream, chocolate syrup, and a bar of dark chocolate (though you really just need a piece).


Start baking the brownies in a round cake pan or pie tin. I do this by baking three thin layers of brownie separately…it takes longer, but it looks better. Alternatively, you could just make a full brownie batch and either cut it in half lengthwise for a double-layer cake (works ok, but it’s hard) or crumble the brownies for the crust. But that’s just lazy. To get the perfect brownie crust, pour a third of the batter into a pie tin at a time, and bake at 350 for 16 or 17 mins (until it’s not mushy at all). Use a soft spatula to get it out intact, or throw the whole pie tin in the freezer for a few minutes so you can get it out easier. If the brownie comes apart a bit, don’t worry about it…it’s going to be covered in ice cream/frosting anyway!

While the baking is happening, make your whip cream. Just dump a small carton of heavy whipping cream into a bowl and mix the heck out of it. Wire whisk attachment works best, but I lost mine, which isn’t easy to do in a 10-square-foot kitchen. The whipping should only take a couple minutes, and while you’re mixing, squeeze in enough chocolate syrup to make the frosting light brown. Don’t make it too dark, because we’ll be adding swirls to it later. Once the whip cream is a semi-solid consistency, throw it in the fridge for later.

Once the last batch of brownie batch is done, pop it out of the pie tin or round cake pan and let it cool a bit, then put it back in and start layering the ice cream on top. The order is crust, ice cream, crust, ice cream, crust, (or, slackers can just do two crusts with two pints of ice cream in between). Glop it on there and smooth it out with your spatula. If you’re using the mint cookie ice cream like I was, make sure you dig out all the huge chunks of cookie and eat them yourself. The photo above is of one of the crumbled brownie crusts—still worked great.


Side note: Häagen-Dazs Five white mint ice cream is awesome, and it’s made from only five ingredients: Milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and mint. (I’m not getting paid for this post or anything, just wanted to point out a good new ice cream flavor.)

Ok, as soon as you’re done smoothing out the ice cream and layering the brownies, pop the pie tin back in the freezer for an hour or so. Once it’s good and frozen, it’s time to frost it. This will require some creativity on your part, assuming you don’t have a turntable that you can use (Mindy, use Jeff’s Techniques! They’ll be perfect! Two cakes at once!) I popped the cake out of the pie tin, turned the tin upside down, and put it on top of a metal bowl that spins pretty well on the counter. Then I put the cake on top of the upside down pie tin. Worked and spun pretty well. I also don’t have the official frosting spatula thingy, so I use the back of a straight bread knife. You basically just need something straight and flat—use a ruler if you want!


Glop a pile of whipped cream on top of the cake, and, holding your straight knife or spatula still and slightly diagonal, start turning the pie pan. The straight edge should start smoothing the frosting in the middle and work its way to the edges.


Want spiral swirls? There are a couple ways to do it, but the easiest is to put a few blobs of chocolate sauce on the edge of your straight edge, and then do the spinning-rotating thing again. Just don’t overspin or you’ll mix the extra sauce into the frosting. One spin, or two at most. Which is just as well, because your ice cream’s probably starting to melt at this point.


If your ice cream is melting, throw the cake back in the freezer to solidify before frosting the sides. Otherwise, just glop some frosting on the sides and hold the straight edge vertical while you spin the pie tin to smooth it all out. I like it kinda messy on the sides, but you can make it all smooth and nice if that’s what you’re into.

Last step: put the cake back in the freezer for a few minutes, and shave a piece of dark chocolate into a bowl using a fine cheese grater. Sprinkle the shavings over the top of the cake, throw the whole thing back in the freezer, and you’re DONE.


Give the frosting an hour or so to freeze before eating it, or else you’ll have a mess on your hands. Enjoy!

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Posted in Uncategorizable

Baby’s Bedtime Playlist

Posted on July 8, 2009 | 6 Comments

Our Fourth of July was great this year. We went downtown to Battery Park with some friends for a free Jenny Lewis/Connor Oberst concert (Corinne and I are Jenny Lewis fans).

It was as good an afternoon as one could hope for—hanging out on a blanket in the park with the tall Wall St. buildings on one side and the Hudson River and Statue of Liberty on the other. And there’s no better way to nap in the park than to doze off to Connor Oberst’s singing. I’m not a huge fan of his, but if I were hiring someone to sing my wife and I to sleep every night, he’d be on the shortlist of candidates.

Anyway, that reminded me to make a sleep-time playlist for the baby before she gets here in the next few weeks. Like every music-loving parent, Corinne and I can’t wait to have someone new in the house to enjoy music with.

So here’s the first of many baby-centric playlists: The Bedtime Mix.

The Sleeptime All-Stars in my book are Hem and Norah Jones—any tune off of “Rabbit Songs” or “Feels Like Home” is going to be a good one, and Norah’s side project, The Little Willies, have some good ones too. Corinne will probably add some Innocence Mission, Kings of Convenience, Sun Kill Moon, and more Iron and Wine, but I don’t really know those bands that well.

Anyway, enough talk. Have a listen, and let me know if you have any suggestions of your own!

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Posted in Family Stuff, Music Stuff, New York Stuff

Reworked

Posted on July 7, 2009 | 1 Comment

Quickie post before bed:

Watched Mad Max tonight–very disappointed, even though I know it was made on a shoestring budget. The dialogue, the music, the pacing, the camera work; it was all just wrong and disjointed. Like those movies from the thirties and forties, when directors were still kind of figuring out how to adapt stage pacing and dialogue to the big screen. It just felt off. Corinne didn’t even bother finishing it.

Anyway, the plot of the movie is familiar: Upright, respectable man loses loved ones to thugs, gets a steely glint in his eye, and goes on a rampage.

It’s a common plot arc for action movies, to be sure, but the funny thing about it w/r/t Mad Max is that it’s the same plot as all of Mel Gibson’s other blockbuster action films. Let’s face it, Braveheart and The Patriot were the same movie, and both of them follow the exact formula of Gibson’s first big hit.

Wonder how many millions he’s made off of making the same movie thrice…

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Posted in Uncategorizable

A Star-Studded Tech Podcast

Posted on July 3, 2009 | Leave a comment


Those of you who don’t follow my Twitter feed—and you absolutely SHOULD, because every tweet reads like it was spun from pure gold—probably don’t know about the little podcast that I co-host for PCMag.com called PCMag After Hours. My co-host Brian Heater and I chat about technology with tech-industry luminaries and PCMag’s own experts.

Basically, every week Brian and I sit in my office and make a list of people we really want to talk to; we’ve had guests ranging from an editor of The Onion to Trent Reznor to a tech-industry venture capitalist.

This week, everyone on our list inexplicably agreed to participate in the show! Our friend Natali Del Conte from CNET is our in-studio guest, talking about her new video project for CBS, and we also talk to Gary Vaynerchuck (of Wine Library TV), Xeni Jardin (of BoingBoing), and comedian Marc Maron (of Air America).

Listen/watch here, or you can subscribe to the PCMag podcast feed on iTunes.

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

LEGO My Bible!

Posted on July 2, 2009 | 1 Comment


This is amazing: The Brick Testament is the entire Bible acted out in LEGO scenes. Beautiful, inspiring, and hilarious (much like the Bible itself). The image above is of David taking out Goliath’s sword to decapitate him with it.

[Via a comment on By Common Consent]

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Posted in Random Links