Jeremy, James and Richard go to the North Pole! I just watched this the other night (yes it was originally filmed almost 2 years ago) and it was the only show in recent memory that had me mesmerized. Besides being an amazing episode of Top Gear, it just reminded me of how poor the majority of content is on TV.
Even if you don't like cars, Top Gear goes beyond being a gear head show, to being one of the best programs on TV. The best part was the truck, a highly modified Toyota Hilux.
http://www.invinciblehilux.co.uk/
This one is for my brother Dan, who had one sitting in our deck for about a year. I believe he bought it for $1 and it ran once (after it was pushed/towed and jump started down a hill). Apparently they made the GT from 1965 - 1980 according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MG_MGB). I never liked the MGs (I do like Triumphs though), they were always low on power and seemed more fragile than sporty. I do understand their charm though, and I should thank the British for making this car as I drive the modern equivalent (miata).
Another reason why I don't like them is it takes a lot to restore them - http://whyisitnotworkingright.blogspot.com/So there is only so much time and so much effort I can put into blogging. And there are so many better blogs out there, I will no longer post my random musings or technology reviews. Instead I will go back to the root of this blog, junky quirky cars. I might expand that to just interesting cars, so many of which are lining the streets of LA. There isn't a day that goes by that I see one desired car from my youthful lists of wanted cars. I will try to photograph and document these Mashmandalis.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
What is a Mashmandali
Many of you might wonder what a Mashmandali is? Well first off I am probably misspelling the word. It is a Farsi word that describes a car that is falling a part and has lots of stuff hanging off it. A beater would be a close English translation.My dad use to use that word when we were young and my brothers and I always thought it sounded like a car manufacturer. The mashmandali 500RS. Sounds good. Probably because it ends in an "i" like Ferrari or Lamborghini.
I hope this page becomes a collection of random thoughts, ideas, blurbs, imagery or whatever comes to mind, much like a beater that has lots of mismatched parts, but you end up loving despite it's junkyness.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack) came up with a new start up, Square (http://squareup.com/). Basically it's a credit card swiper that works with your audio jack on your cellphone. The more you think about how useful that would be the more you think about the ability to bypass major institutions (and their fees). Maybe we could get rid of money altogether and create an online mega database of bartering exchanges. Another mobile money service is Obopay (https://www.obopay.com/), basically a paypal that works from mobile to mobile.
I know I just posted about streaming music services, and I just bought a squeezebox Boom (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001DJ64D4/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=3800222301&ref=pd_sl_53tzawaceq_e), which is really an amazing little box with good sound for such a small footprint. But that got me thinking, what happened to high quality audio? Have we sacrificed quality for portability? At first the advent of MP3s was a welcome solution to transporting music files from one local to another, but do we even care about audio quality anymore?
The average user probably rips music at 128k bitrate, or whatever the default setting is if they rip at all. Most radio streams are 128k or at most 192k, but in listening tests you need 256k bitrate to have no discernible differences between CD and MP3. What about another more universal measure of audio quality on equipment, Signal to Noise Ratio. Remember when every CD, receiver, and music listening device would be plastered with the SNR number? I don't think Apple even publishes the SNR for the ipod (5g), but CNET lists it as 83 (http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-11297_7-6510133-2.html). I think my old portable CD player was near 95 SNR. So if no one is listening to music anywhere near what is was originally created to sound like, are musicians less concerned about quality during production? Tools for the Audiophile Ripperhttp://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
http://www.accuraterip.com/Audiophile Resources
http://www.head-fi.org/
http://www.audioholics.com/
http://www.avsforum.com/
http://stereophile.com/
Are there a lot (too many?) music services available now? There are
so many flavors from subscription to download to stream to peer and
more. Here are some that I've tried and like.
http://listen.grooveshark.com/
Similar to Pandora, but you can directly search for album/artist/song
and build playlists. The great part is they have a huge database, but
there is some questions about their legal status Rdio
http://www.rdio.com/
Founders of Skype take on stream/subscription services like Pandora
and Spotify. Not available yet. Spotify
http://www.spotify.com/en/
Not in the US yet, but there is a lot of buzz around this service,
with premium and free versions The Hype Machine
http://hypem.com/
Just started using this today, but it basically pulls from blogs the
most talked about music and forms lists (or RSS feeds). Might be a
good way to get new sounds into the headphones.
So we dropped HBO (well True Blood won't be back till next year) and I
started focusing on my netflix queue. I didn't pay much attention to
the movies since with HBO on demand I always had like 10+ movies I
could watch. Well the two movies that were sitting on the coffee
table for a while were Dead Man and Donnie Darko (directors cut). Not
sure why I was reluctant to watch them, because both were way better
than I imagined.
Depp, but it really was an intriguing movie. It was shot very
artistically in black and white, but as with most good movies it was
the story and characters that pull you in. Highly recommend it, even
if it's not a typical western it has the elements that the best
westerns have. The soundtrack was also great, added to the mood of
the film. Donnie Darko - I'm sure by now everyone has seen DD, but it has been a
while, and I figured the directors cut would be worth watching it
again. Maybe it was the late 80s soundtrack or my mood, but damn did
I enjoy this version. So much that I started wondering what
difference the dir cut has (I've read it has 20 more minutes that
round out the whole film). Whatever it was, I highly recommend it. Crank 2 - My GF loves Jason Statham and Crank 1 was a highly
entertaining if slightly cheesy movie. I had no expectations for this
one, and as a result it pleasantly delivered. The same video gammy
feel taken to a higher level, made this a funny and entertaining movie
to watch. In a lot of ways the low fi special effects worked well,
maybe I'm done with high blown digital perfection, movies are about
entertainment (mostly) and this one does.
Damn is Grooveshark good or what! I have been wasting my time with Pandora (sorry, but you just don't stack up) and other online radios for years. If you don't already know Grooveshark takes the good parts of Pandora and adds the ability to directly search for a song/album/artist. It's like having 7 million songs in your library. woot!
http://listen.grooveshark.com/
After living with the phone for a month, I can say that overall I like it. I have not done any scientific analysis of the iphone 3Gs versus the Pre, but the obvious comparison is the amount of apps. The Pre has been out for almost 2 months and there are about 30 apps. The variety and amount of apps in iTunes is just sick. Also the 3Gs is faster, by a lot, maybe 50% or more in comparable actions like camera, google maps, messaging, browsing, yelping.
Pre Pros
- small form is easy in the hand or pocket
- keyboard and overall UI allow for one handed operation
- card interface is intuitive and quick if you have all the apps you need open
- gestures become automatic to the point where i kept wanting to slide to go back on the iPhone
- synergy makes setup via google mail/calendar and exchange a breeze
- battery life blows, 1 day at most and if you leave it for 2 days without using it (over a weekend for example) it dies
- no applications
- slow for opening apps
- either the internal antenna sucks or this firmware isn't properly using it*
- synergy has no fine tuning so you can get duplicates and triplicates and quadicates of your contacts
For $99 (well in tax-loving Santa Monica $118) per month for all you can eat, I am happy with the features and service. If the apps don't improve or multiply in the near future I would get the iPhone for the next round although I still hate iTunes.
I got the Palm Pre on Sunday, and I was hesitating about getting it, but I'm glad I did. Julia should get the iPhone 3G in a few weeks so we'll have to see how the two compare. I like it better than the Mogul, but much of that phones issues were the win mo more than the phone. I'll post a decent review once I've had some time with the Pre.
I'm so tired of getting crap results from Google. Don't get me wrong, there was a period where Google search was just fantastic, but then keywords and paid ads started becoming more important than good results. That in combination with everyone scrambling to googelize their content creates pages and pages of results with regurgitated, dumbed down content. I do think that Google coming out and sorting the Internet in the early 2000s was a great step forward, but it does bother me that their overall indexing really boils down to popular = good.
With a smaller, less mailable Internet, maybe popular sites should be displayed higher on results, but now that everyone can self promote and blog and twitter themselves to higher rankings don't we need a new way to determine results? If the tool used for search is no longer a neutral observer, but more of an influence on the results (content) then don't we need a new tool?
I'm excited about a few new search tools coming out, and I hope that Google doesn't just use it's massive power to crush any new voices in search.
Not out yet, but here is a quote from Physorg.com
A new search engine described as an "electronic brain" could make searching the Internet more intelligent. Called Wolfram Alpha, the search engine computes its own answers rather than looking them up in a large database, as Google and many other search engines currently do. With its computational abilities, Wolfram Alpha could lead to new types of questions, answers and computations that today's search engines can't handle
Been around for a while and it's getting better. I didn't like it at first, but I do like their privacy policy.
"when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies"
Interesting concept, it's a search engine but focused on learning and writing with a deeper focus on History, Literature, Poetry and so on.
Searches the web in "realtime". It give s you a glimpse of trends in social. I think there are a few of these, but I like the simple layout.
Went shopping with Julia for lunch at Fred Segal, which has super cool clothing all at a low low starting price of $250 bucks. I think that I would fit in better if I had some big sunglasses. Rollover image for the LAified Dave.
Reading my friend Lance's blog [http://seelance.blogspot.com/] I saw his post about his attempts at some faked tilt-shift miniature photographs. I thought I'd try my own with one of my recent Chicago photos. I think his are better, so take at what he's done and there are many tutorials on the web.
Tutorial
http://www.tiltshiftphotography.net/photoshop-tutorial.php
Flickr Group
http://www.flickr.com/groups/tilt-shift-fakes/
Heard Sex is on Fire on the radio and had no idea who it was by. Truth be told, I have heard of the Kings of Leon, but never really listened to any of their songs specifically. The single, and the interesting article in RS discussing the brother's Pentecostal upbringing and some of their adventures piqued my curiosity. I've been listening to Only by the Night for a few days and it's good. Solid old school rock with a hint of southern rock, sort of reminds me of Pearl Jam at some moments, or maybe mid-career U2, Bruce Springsteen maybe? They have a simple, natural, rich tone that is welcomed amongst all the Auto-Tune drenched music that is the norm nowadays.
I like Closer, Crawl, Sex on Fire, Be Somebody, Cold Desert
Listen to Samples
http://www.amazon.com/Only-By-The-Night/dp/B001FXCE46/ref=dm_cd_album_lnk?ie=UTF8&qid=1241397210&sr=8-1
Yikes this was a disappointment. Maybe my expectations were too high, but Rotten Tomatoes confirms my opinion (Wolverine - 38%). Hugh Jackman did an amicable job of providing entertainment, but the story was uninspiring. I was hoping for more of a Batman Begins type of dark story about a personal search type of plot, and Wolverine did dance around that storyline in the begining. I did get to see it the day before it was out at a cast and crew screening on the Fox lot thanks to Lance. And the effects that Lance and his company were responsible for were very crisp and beleavalbe, which is more than I can say for all the visual effects in the movie. Oh well...I will hope for better results from Star Trek next week.
I saw a 4 door hatch sedan looking thing the other week off of Lincoln in Venice. Three of the same vehicle turned into a car wash, I had Julia snap a few picks as we drove by. I only realized later that this is the yet to be release Porsche Panamera.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_Panamera
I was going to take a architectural river boat tour on Saturday, but due to the rain it was canceled. I'm going to try to go today, but it's still raining so the chances are low that it will happen. The strange part of walking around The Loop, Michigan Avenue and River North was the radical temperature changes. On Friday, when I went to the Hancock tower it was around 80 during the day and 70 at night. A very Virginia feeling day due to the high humidity, but still very pleasant. Saturday was suppose to be similar to Friday for temperature, but when I started walking at Navy Pier where the river tour was to take place it was freezing and drizzling (felt like 45), much to the dismay of the numerous tourists wearing tshirts and shorts. But walking towards the city, away from Lake Michigan the temps felt like they were increasing 10 degrees every block.
I wandered around and tried to make it to the Museum of Contemporary Arts, which closes at 5pm, but due to the off and on downpours I spent too much time ducking out in the ledges of buildings and too little time progressing towards the museum, so I arrived at 5:05pm. Maybe today I'll have better luck!
Wow what a view from the Top of the Hancock Observatory. I highly recommend going if you're in Chicago. I wonder if the view is as amazing during the day.
View from iCrossing office in Chicago.
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