I’ve come to understand that the iPhone is something that I will never, ever own. Not by any fault of the device itself because I think it’s a beautiful and amazing bit of technology (plus I’m a diehard lifelong Apple fanboy to boot), but because of its ubiquity here in San Francisco and the methods by which people use it.

Occasionally I’ll hop onto the municipal bus, and it never fails… at least one passenger has one. How do I know? Because anyone who has an iPhone carries it IN their hand and fucks around with the screen incessantly. It doesn’t really matter how thin or lightweight it is for portability, because nobody carries it in their pocket; just the hand. I honestly believe people hold it and dick around just to show other people they have one, yet strangely they are oblivious to everyone and everything around them. That just makes them massive tools more than anything hip or enviable.

A couple years ago I remember reading an article exploring the negative impact iPods were having on society because they isolated and internalised the listening of music when it has always been a social activity. Another reason I plan to steer clear of the iPhone is that it very, very clearly escalates this strange, anti-social behaviour to an entirely new level.

Not only are the finger-flicking, touch screen zombies filling our public transit system, but also malls, restaurants, bars… even birthday parties. Yes, I have witnessed a birthday party devolve not into boys on one half of the room and girls the other, but the iPhone users secede into their own (literally) dark corner to iChat with other iPhonies; maybe each other for all I know. Or touring a chocolate factory, the iPhone users hung around at the back of the group with their faces and fingers planted strictly to their screens doing whatever was more interesting somewhere else.

I could list countless more examples… bottom line is that even for a techy geek like me, I know where to draw the line between life and not living it; that line seems to be the dotted signature portion of an AT&T contract. No thanks. I’ll go about impressing people the old fashioned way… with expensive clothing.

listening to:
A Dense Swarm of Ancient Stars
I Monster

As my luck would have it, ABC’s interstitial ads over the past two weeks during episodes of LOST have been about Honda’s new campaign for the Civic, called “Grooves” or “Musical Road”. It follows a team of creatives going about transforming a stretch of highway into something of an old time self-playing piano using the safety rumble strips in such a way that the spacing of grooves creates notes as drivers pass over.

A great idea to be sure, but it’s nothing new; not even close. The first I saw of the concept came a couple years ago via a car magazine or tv show, and featured some small countryside roads in Japan using the concept to draw tourists in for revenue. The first known use of such a musical road was in Denmark circa 1995, but used a slightly different approach and technology for the sound.

The thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the tone of the ad/video from Honda… it had some windbag (probably the Creative Director) explaining his genius concept to the rest of the team, as they all looked on in awe and disbelief of his sheer brilliance, and he basked in their glow the whole while, taking credit for an idea he clearly nicked elsewhere. Check it out:

Now that I’ve probably offended all of the potential creative offices/agencies I could work for out here in San Francisco, check out the “Melody Road” of Japan. Both the Honda and Melody Road of Japan concepts promote something commercial, but one seems like a fun idea to be proud of, the other is a disingenuous plot to try and be cool. First rule of being cool… don’t try to be.

listening to:
Silent Hill Zero Original Soundtrack CD (IMPORT)
Akira Yamaoka

thought of the day: my body is the most expensive vehicle i will ever ride in.

Above you’ll see a little CD album cover I put together this afternoon (click to enlarge). It’s for the band Baoquan, titled The Loss of Sleep. That’s all fine and dandy, except it’s not real; the band is fake, and the album is doubly non-existent. It’s just a fun little exercise paired with a sub-cultural internet meme. I thought it quite a larf until all the pieces came together in either the wildest of profound coincidences or the most meaningless nonsense I’ve posted since some of my high school poetry appeared on this very site.

As for real bands, many followers of popular music—or at least those who begrudgingly endure my interests as I foist them about—will know that U2’s new album, No Line on the Horizon, was released last week. Being my all-time favourite music-makers, it’s a momentous occasion for me; one that I embrace with nearly every waking thought in anticipation during the 2-3 months leading up to the street date.

Normally I am too pure of heart to even attempt listening to music from my choice bands before the release dates because the quality of such contraband is often an insult to both the bands’ efforts and my delicate/pretentious audiophile sensibilities, and also because as an artist, I respect the moment of unveiling; people cannot see my work until I’m damn good and ready to show it, so I grant the same courtesy to the two or three musical acts my conscience cannot transgress. However this time around I had access to a pristine, high-quality edition, and just couldn’t resist.

Maybe I jinxed it.

It turns out the first listen was bittersweet. The first couple tracks got me really enthused, but then it seemed to trail off into a confusing array of verses, bridges, and refrains like a plate of really loud spaghetti noodles. By the time I reached the end, all I could do was shift my eyes back and forth suspiciously and wonder if in fact what I’d just heard was even a legitimate copy of the album. It was completely legit. Seems that this album is ground-breaking in a whole new way for me, as U2 records go, insomuch that this time around, it’s one of those unfortunate albums that need to be heard a few times for things to sink in, whereas all their previous work has found me awestruck the first time through; it’s just not as immediately listenable.

U2 is a band whose heart is really in performing live. The trouble is that 30 years of touring have taken their toll on Bono’s voice… it’s not quite as flexible or flamboyant; it’s raspier and has lost some of its definition. instead of a range of blacks, whites and range of greys, it’s just the extremes. Normally, these are valuable qualities earned only with age and experience, but for most of Horizon, it seems Bono is using his stage voice for the studio recording. The difference is that on stage, you need to sing at a higher, louder register to project to a large, screaming audience, versus the tranquil acoustics of a studio that can afford softer melodies and performances. So for the first couple listens, instead of the sensitive nuances he’s known for, it sounds more like eleven tracks of him either yelling or tone speaking than actually singing.

The good news is that after about 5 complete listens, you start to make some sense out of the madness, much like immersion in a foreign land… after a short time, your brain begins finding patterns in the seemingly random chaos of the local language and things get a little clearer. For me, the weakest track is actually their premier single, “Get on your Boots”. It’s a rhapsody of about 6 disparate songs and styles all quilted into a single 3.5 minute ditty, and has a vibe reminiscent of the breakout single from their last album, “Vertigo”, which likely explains its choice as the radio thumbnail for the rest of the album, even though it doesn’t represent the other tracks at all; it’s something of a toe jutting from a hand while the other fingers tolerate its curious presence. For me, the strongest song is the title track, planted firmly at the beginning. Speaking of which, it’s been about 25 years since they’ve titled an album to match a song it contains, with one exception; just an interesting observation.

A tough call; I DO like the new album, and I’m not really disappointed, but at the same time—as a geeked out lifelong fan—it pains me to find such obvious critiques. Regardless, I’ll keep listening and memorise each detail right up to the moment of attending a show on their next tour, at which point, I’ll be yelling singing it all right back at the band along with waves of other fans from the sweaty sea of general admission.

listening to:
No Line On The Horizon [Limited Edition]
U2

it seems microsoft is hell bent on running it’s long-popular, long-dominating web browser, internet explorer, right into the ditch of the information superhighway.

the past few years has seen its market share eroding rather quickly by faster, more secure, more intuitive modern applications like mozilla firefox and google chrome. on the mac side, they even discontinued the application in favour of apple’s own safari. these other browsers, aside from enhanced user and usability features of the browsers themselves, the rendering engines have been far superior to explorer for quite some time, and its conformance to both ratified and emerging web standards has fallen so short that it’s laughably ridiculous and as a designer/developer, ridiculously infuriating.

enter internet explorer 8 beta. one would think considering all of its internal struggles and external pressures from competition that it would at least aim for parity on the basics of web standards and technology. yet it touts as a main feature being fully compliant with css 2.1. css version 2 has been around for over 10 years, and its revision, v2.1, has been waffling back and forth between draft and release candidate for about 5. because it’s still not finalised, firefox, safari, chrome, opera have all moved on to supporting the next full version of css, with varying levels of compatibility. internet explorer adds some basic, minimal support for version 3, but nothing even remotely close to its competitors.

one of the biggest challenges for web designers today is (on top of side-stepping ie6 and ie7 quirks) realising rounded-corners. css3 supports the concept, with its border-radius selector, and many of the other popular modern browsers support it in some fashion (although mysteriously, opera once did but removed the functionality in the most recent releases). given the opportunity with a new version, one would expect microsoft would do its very best to make great strides to catch up to these competing browsers, if not surpass them in some ways by being somewhat forward looking with it’s underhood tech. alas, the border-radius selector of css3 is not supported whatsoever, as are a lot of other now common css3 features. just one more nail in the coffin as far as i’m concerned.

reference their ie8 css chart

perhaps it’s laziness or pride, but all the hubris and self-indulgence has kept internet explorer from innovating, evolving, or it seems even adapting. the latest beta builds seem to break more things than fix them, which is and will be a major problem for both users and developers for at least a year into 8’s life. designers and developers may continue to provide basic support for legacy ie or even the newest iteration, but i have a feeling this browser won’t ever see a mainstream (read: popular) version 10.

listening to:
No Line On The Horizon (pre release)
U2

A couple recent gaming articles I’ve written:

Prince of Persia: The Fallen King (DS) review
MadWorld hands-on impressions!

listening to:
The Sun And The Moon Complete [2 CD]
The Bravery

i think my recent trip to japan spoilt me in many ways. or maybe it opened my eyes to some things here in america we all take for granted that are just messed up. like the concept of gratuity for every mother-loving service under the sun. you bagged my groceries while i was preoccupied with purchasing them. plus 15 percent. you opened a door allowing my arms to fall into atrophy. plus 10 percent. unless your job doesn’t already pay you a wage, how about doing your fucking job and not carrying some chip of entitlement on your shoulder that people owe you something extra when you’re just scraping by doing the bare minimum? and if your job doesn’t pay you a wage, you are a fucking idiot; wages are why you get a job in the first place.

today i travelled from san francisco to minneapolis, taking two shared van services to get both to one airport and home from the other. it’s like a miniature city bus, with slightly more convienience that you pay a significant premium to use, versus municipal transportation. having no luggage other than my laptop backpack, i neither asked nor received any assistance from the van driver aside from his apt handling of the rotation of the steering wheel, and the depressing of floor pedals in the proper sequence.

now i’m not sure about anyone else, but i and nobody i’ve ever seen has ever tipped a bus driver. yet when this guy chased me down inside the airport after leaving the van and pestered me to give him a tip–he actually made me sign a receipt to verify he was getting zero for a tip; it’s hard to tell who was more insulted. him for not getting a tip and having not done anything to earn one, or me who is assaulted by a greedy slob who had no qualms about cursing at me in his native slavic tongue.

what ever happened to people having pride in a job well done? or even just doing your job satisfactorily if for nothing else than to avoid consequence? america’s service industries are infected with too many people who expect me to pay extra for them to just do their damn job. “gratuity” is to be paid for exceptional service… for a favour, or for going above and beyond to please me as a customer. if your idea of A+ service includes sharing aloud fictional adult scenarios involving my mother and livestock in a ukranian dialect, my idea of gratuity is not exhausting my egg mcmuffin’s calories in physical appreciation… to your face.

japan is one country that does it right. people very happy to do their jobs and do them so well you couldn’t complain if you tried. and their only expectation? that you are satisfied. in fact, trying to offer a tip there can result in two outcomes: a) they are insulted by your condescending charity, or b) assume you overpaid and graciously correct your oversight as a hapless customer by handing the extra back.

i guess my point is that the guilt–and the guilt trips–surrounding the american system of gratuities needs to stop, and i am fully preparing myself to take a stand by “being an asshole” and not just tipping because i’m supposed to for some mysterious dogmatic reason. and if you’re a service provider who supplements an hourly wage with tips, that’s fine, but unless you’re willing to go beyond “meets expectations” when we meet, you should expect nothing extra from me either.

listening to:
Brian Vander Ark
Brian Vander Ark

So last week marked the beginning and end of the E3 2008 expo in Los Angeles, California. Traditionally, each of the main gaming platforms holds a pre-show spectacle to kick things off, and this story’s title suggests the chronology of how the three shuffled out this time around. But how did things go down? Nearly like a page from Goldilocks and the Three Bears: one was too hot, one was too cold, and one was just right. Here’s part two of three…

Nintendo

I’ve kept it no secret among friends and other gaming journalists that my opinion of this year’s conference comes somewhere between a papercut and genital mutilation on my scale of things I’d rather not endure; it was bloody painful — not just to watch, but also to listen.

From mommy dearest’s fake, over-enthusiastic stage presence to the contrived duel of the executive fates, to Ravi yes-my-last-name-is-”Drums” awesomest gig ever warming up for the Shiggy All-Star Band and their audio-in-audio (picture-in-picture) deaf-mute sound of Wii Music… I couldn’t tell if (EVP of Sales and Marketing) Ms. Dunaway was trying to teach me my ABC’s, or if my vast collection of Koji Kondo, Yasunori Mitsuda and Motoi Sakuraba had spoiled my taste in good game music.

Sadly, while the overall content of their show didn’t turn me off completely, it was the presentation that was just a little too Humpty Dumpty having a great fall for my preference. It was a sloppy, disorganised mess with very little structure…the little info they DID have was scattered and discombobulated. Compared to the slick shows put on by the other two giants, Nintendo’s was left looking like the slacker in class who turns in their homework as a pile of crumpled papers.

I can’t say I was surprised by any of the announcements… or lack thereof as it was. While E3 may tend to be the show–at least traditionally–for the real gamers out there, Nintendo’s conference was clearly a photo op of sorts… a flim-flammery of soundbites intended for The Today Show, Ellen, Oprah, and other similar demographic shows. Perhaps they’d have done well to focus more on real announcements and information, instead of spending nearly 2/3 of the show spouting the same tired braggadocio anyone who’s seen the empty store shelves could already tell you.

A few of the puzzling details:

• a 2-minute video for the major Animal Crossing title on Wii, and then it’s all but ignored?
• an awkward 5 minute tease of Wii Sports 2? And what exactly about this title requires development until 2009?? It appears that between the original title, Wii Play, and Wii Fit, all the assets exist.
• 5-10 minutes talking about a Guitar Hero DS sequel when the original is barely two weeks old?
• hearsay about experimental DS technologies in airports and kitchens, but zero proof of any of these wonders?
• not even a mention of the new kick-ass Wario platformer coming to Wii soon?
• the ungodly mess that is Wii Music–or as i have dubbed it, Wii Cacophony? I had to put that rubbish on mute and look away. I love Shiggy to death, but that “game” is missing something…a whole lot of something that curiously should have been added after over TWO YEARS of development. Rhythm is a vital component of music, and to ignore that in lieu of freeform pretending is clearly not good. I may as well turn on MTV, iTunes, and my clock radio to all different channels. Same difference.

They showed software for everyone, but didn’t show stuff for everyone, if that makes sense. Nintendo has built itself up as a company of innovation and leadership in the industry, and that’s just not what anyone saw this year—casual, hardcore, or otherwise.

If Nintendo is a TV channel, it seems they’ve been airing reruns from the Home Shopping Network lately. Infomercials are fine to fill out the schedule, but we need regular programming too. Which leads me to wonder… if it’s Nintendo’s aim is to bring everyone into the “gamers” fold, what are they going to do with them once they’re there?

They might just wind up with a growing base of “core” gamers as people expand their tastes beyond the Game & Watch or Tetris varieties, and then have an army of unsatisfied customers on their hands.

One thing they need to understand is that as people are diverse, there’s no one thing that can appeal to everyone, and as a business, diversity is always key. If GM were to have turned 100% of their focus to SUVs a few years back because everyone can fit inside one and they sold like hotcakes, GM probably wouldn’t exist in today’s market at all. If Nintendo wants to include everyone as a customer, they can’t be excluding anyone.

Sure, they’ve had a good track record so far by releasing their flagship franchises in champion time, but unless the Wii has been officially declared dead, they still have work to do, and games to release. There’s plenty of time to improve what they did show or to announce new surprises to catch us off guard. And if Nintendo fans like me are good at anything, it’s holding out hope.

“How do you figure, mr. jezter?”, I hear it, I really do. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak. Just the other day, Satoru Iwata marginalised Nintendo’s core audience and the core gamers as a “small number” of their customers. Not fans, supporters, pillars, or even informed enthusiasts. We’re customers; and a statistical rounding-error to boot. While image, reputation, and customer service are important to any company’s business, the core gamer is already a tiny piece of the pie compared to their current and potential demographic (of everyone); and Nintendo has bigger fish to fry than appease us, the vocal minority. They could likely cut out all of us and still be ahead of the game, no pun intended. So we can whine all we want, it’s just becoming less and less relevant to their strategy of assimilating the entire world’s population into gaming.

Plus, it’s no secret that the company’s marketing of its software is and has always been rather poor, if nearly non-existent. For the sake of this discussion, their “biggest ever marketing push” surrounding Wii Fit is excluded, because it’s primarily a hardware offering, and also being targeted at everyone, of which core gamers are again a small subset.

Now I consume a lot of media–a LOT–and can honestly say that except for a Mario Kart Wii spot last week, the last TV commercials I saw for any Big-N game was one of two, both about the same time frame last fall: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and Brain Age 2 DS (with the Crimson/Onyx DS). Either Nintendo isn’t marketing its software in venues the core gamer resides, or they’re not doing it at all; another unfortunate sign of our clan being marginalised. The Wii system hardware really needs no advertising…the thing sells itself. But with so many non-core gamers buying the system and no real marketing to support its games, how on earth does a company expect to rake in the recurring revenue? Enter the Nintendo Channel.

What better way to create a marketing campaign for a very captive audience–just the Wii owners–for free, or at least very cheaply? Give the people who might only be playing Wii Sports a chance to see what other games are out there. Of course, only show them the commercials and other marketing assets, because seeing is believing. Wait…I specifically remember seeing and hearing first-hand both Reggie and Iwata two years ago this week at E3 2006 and their pre-show bonanza touting “Playing is Believing”.

Obviously I think the biggest missed opportunity with the Nintendo Channel is the lack of Wii demos. Granted, that would put additional focus on the whole storage dilemma, but wouldn’t that really only affect us small percentage of avid gamers? We ought to be used to struggling with our makeshift solutions by now to make do. Perhaps the storage issues really aren’t issues at all. The DS doesn’t have a hard drive, but it has downloadable demos. How is it that the superior specs of the Wii make it less capable of doing exactly the same thing? If kid brother can do it, big brother can too. Or perhaps offering demos will only expand the storage needs and concerns out into the mainstream, and create the need for an internal system of rating, testing and approving the additional content; both solutions they want to postpone? That’s a lot of rhetoric…best pull myself back to reality.

For me as the quintessential Ninty fan and avid gamer, a channel on the Wii to view game footage is going to be precisely 44 steps behind my web browser in both timeliness and amount of content available. I guess there’s always the DS demos…but if I didn’t already own one, it’s nothing more than a lure for me to buy one. Since the DS and Wii have virtually no other connectivity between one another, the demos almost seem off-topic. But as a core gamer, I do have a DS and will gladly accept the bones thrown my way.

In the end, the Nintendo Channel fits nicely with my weather and photo channels as novelties to show my non-gaming friends, propagating the expanded audience philosophy. It’s like one of those infomercials you hate clogging up the airwaves, but you just can’t resist tuning in. Maybe some megaton announcements in the coming months will prove me completely wrong; I sincerely hope that’s the case. Or maybe once Nintendo has converted all of humanity into core gamers, they’ll have no choice but to listen to us. But in the meantime, I can’t help but feel like the cuckold whose wife is sleeping with everyone in town, yet I put up with it because dammit, I still love her anyway.

thought of the day: one holiday we need is “calendar day”; a day you can mark on your calendar with utter redundancy and superfluity.

ok strangely enough, i had been working on a little opinion diatribe about how the world seems to be on a hedonistic binge of gorging itself with stupid people, and that has in turn distorted the modern higher education system into a dysfunctional, ineffective, if not completely obsolete relic which has creeped into our economy and perverted what used to be a capable and robust professional workforce. the college degree is now nearly a parody of itself, becoming the thing it was originally created to do: certify that you in fact have intelligence and skills worthy of positive contribution to society.

as it turns out, someone already went to the trouble of writing such a piece, mostly. it focuses more on the problems of the higher education system and how the “pursuit of a college degree” part of the contemporary american dream is becoming increasing futile, and less on stupid people and their effects on the economy, and without my cute attempts at humour that writing about idiots ought to invoke.

america’s most overrated product: the bachelor’s degree

listening to:
One X
Three Days Grace

good thing i don’t operate my mac from inside a kinkos, or i’d be sodding penniless. having to pay by the hour to use the computer after apple’s recent update of quicktime to version 7.4 is about the scariest thing i can conceive short of being suffocated under the arse of someone who’s typically asked to purchase two seats for their flight to the nude beaches of southern france.

as if i’m ever suffering from some wealth of free time, apple made sure i twittered away that bank this past weekend as my computer slowed to approximately the same pace as any movie starring both matthew mcconaughey and kate hudson; something likely showing near the precise centre of any given black hole. not entirely sure why my normally pacified mac was grinding away like a spoon in the garbage disposal, some troubleshooting revealed that the new quicktime update was in fact either a) so ‘quick’ that ‘time’ bent backward on itself and thus perceivably inert or b) an utter failure.

i don’t claim to understand the technical gibberish embedded deep within the program files, but it is sufficient to say that i understand when itunes balks at my unreasonable request that it play a tune…or anything for that matter, and instead opts to dazzle me with the hypnotic beach ball of death; perhaps its brains now powered by 7.4 only understand commands in said gibberish? it turns out the issue lies with a newly introduced ‘feature’ within the update to embolden DRM in support of the new movie rentals via itunes but also ironically gums up playback of most any other video you may have on your machine–legitimate or slightly less so–including video podcasts, which poor itunes was left befuddled trying to decipher. chalk up one more in the WIN column for DRM. now i can’t even watch that ten year old mpeg of the dancing baby cleverly synced to the tribal grunting of ‘hooked on a feeling’ that i had archived for just such a rainy day. youtube, i love you.

after hours of poring through mostly useless google searches and battling the black magic of os x’s unix underpinnings within the terminal, i decided to embark on the dangerous journey of reverting an installed system component to a version that allowed me to cuddle with itunes and the dancing baby in multimedia bliss. many thanks to pacifist for helping me dismantle the beast that is quicktime 7.4 to burn its unholy remains in my nifty metal trash can, and use its empty cave to reinstall my old friend, quicktime 7.3.1.

all said and done without all the minced words: avoid the quicktime 7.4 update as if it means to infect your human body with some terminal germ, as it’ll definitely happen to your poor mac, and squelch the voice of itunes.

listening to:
Blood Stained Love Story
seether