man with the Midas touch

Last nights 4 x 100 meter freestyle relay will go down in Olympic history alongside the famous "Do you believe in miracles?" hockey game of 1980. The race was on close to midnight, Eastern time. My wife had gone to bed only a few minutes earlier. I called out to her and convinced her to get up and come watch the TV in my office.

This morning she urged our son to go online and find some video highlights. First he tried to watch it on an older laptop, choosing the option to watch without downloading Microsoft Silverlight. That didn't work. He then found that it wouldn't work without updating the version of Firefox on that machine either. I sent him upstairs to get my laptop. We downloaded the application and finally watched the race. It was well worth it. In fact it was even better the third time around. If you haven't already seen it, click here to watch the race. And then watch it again a couple of times so that we'll be caught up.

To win more gold medals than Mark Spitz, Michael Phelps needed to be on a winning relay team. Obviously he could not do that on his own, especially against the heavily-favored, smack-talking French team. Phelps swam an American record time in the first leg and still got beaten by the Australian competitor. His teammates took the lead, lost the lead and then came from behind to win the race. Jason Lezak's anchor leg was amazing. Equally outstanding is the jubilation of the American team as they celebrate their victory.



All the teams were so good that even the fifth place finisher came in ahead of the old world record time of 3:12:23. Imagine explaining that one to the grandchildren. "Oh yeah, we broke the old world record. Yet somehow we came in fifth!"

listen freely

Maybe one of these days I'll get an iPod. I've gotten by with the mp3 player on my cell phone and by listening to an occasional podcast on my TiVo or my laptop. Over the weekend I went along on one of my wife's many shopping trips during the sales tax holiday. While our son picked out a silicon cover for his iPod, I looked at the other accessories and got to thinking about how convenient it would be to use a little FM transmitter to listen to podcasts in the car or on my clock radio. I'm not really interested in using the earbuds.

Today I started downloading a free audiobook from Project Gutenberg. Last month I had the idea to listen to something by Mark Twain during our upcoming road trip to Arkansas. At the suggestion of blog reader Clay, I limited my search to only human-read books rather than those done with a computer generated voice. Although the selection wasn't as good as I had hoped, I thought "Chapters from My Autobiography" might teach me about my distant relation. I downloaded most of its 25 chapters today. Tomorrow I'll get the rest and start burning them to a stack of CDs. I hope the disc player in my wife's car works better than the one in mine. Months ago I burned a CD of a podcast by a GMU economics professor. The disc is still in my car's player, unwilling to play. I think it's too long for the machine to read.

Reader John suggested I pry open my wallet and buy some of Chris Addison's CDs. Perhaps next year. For this trip I'm sticking with the free downloads. John's idea did remind me to look for some NPR podcasts for the show "Radiolab" that I discovered in June. There's still time for you to nominate a free download for my travel playlist.

connectivity

An article about the Smithsonian caught my attention a couple of weeks ago when the new exhibits "The Truth About Crystal Skulls" and "Jim Henson's Fantastic World" opened to the public. The writer wonders how the pop-culture inspired displays are in keeping with the museum's mission for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge."

The crystal skull is at the National Museum of Natural History, which may explain the problem the writer has with it. Usually all the pop culture stuff goes in the National Museum of American History, which is closed for renovations until November 21. That's where my daughter saw Jerry Seinfeld's puffy shirt almost three years ago.

The Smithsonian has some radio artifacts including a microphone used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Jimmy Kimmel recently emailed me a link to the site for a new radio that could end up in a museum someday. It's easy to use like a table radio but has the brains of a computer that can play both terrestrial and Internet stations. The two places I listen to radio most (on my own time) are in bed and in the car. It would be great to wake up to some of my favorite stations from around the country but it's not worth spending $650 for the convenience.

Most of the time I have the TV on while I'm reading and writing on the Internet. I do it in an effort to keep up with the accumulated shows on my TiVo and my HD-DVR. I would like to make time to listen to a few radio podcasts and maybe I can now that I know how to increase the playback speed on Windows Media Player.

mired wagazine

It stung a little bit to see radio on Wired Magazine's new list of "Things That Suck." Obviously, I still enjoy radio and have hope for its future. However the Wired article does raise valid points. Radio does remain viable as a way for new songs to get mainstream exposure but it is unique content that will guarantee the medium's survival. With the technology available to us today, the main reasons for listening to long sets of music on the radio are convenience and price. We give up song selection and sit through a few songs we don't like because it's cheap and easy to listen to music on the radio. Ultimately we may get bored with the music on the air and switch to a CD or MP3. It's the talk and information that makes a radio station worth our time. It's hearing opinions with which we agree and disagree that will engage our minds. It's a community for us to call in and express our thoughts about a celebrity or a local news story. That's what makes radio great.

HD radio is supposed to rescue the industry from iPods and the Internet. It may very well do so but not for the reasons being pushed on us. The braintrust behind HD is mainly promoting the audio fidelity angle. The AM band does stand to benefit from a static free broadcast more than FM. I've read Mark Ramsey's 2005 essay about HD that points out consumers are choosing lower audio quality and greater selection. You've done this yourself if you've ever taken some CDs and compressed them into MP3 files to fit more songs onto a portable device. Therefore it may not be the better sound of HD radio that listeners want, it might be the additional channels of programming that it could offer. So far most stations that run a secondary channel of programming are filling it with music that true fans would already have on their iPods. It's time to open up the airwaves to stuff that can't be found elsewhere and that stuff is personality radio.

dinner dance

The first annual All Saints parish Christmas party was held tonight in the gym at Knoxville Catholic High School. The place was packed. My wife heard that nearly 900 people had RSVP-ed. Over 700 of them showed up. The parish provided the meat, the beer and the wine (and the soft drinks). The parishioners brought salads, side dishes and desserts. After the party, the excess was taken to Samaritan Place. I had my first ever taste of Strawberry Pretzel Salad and really loved it. There weren't any leftovers of that. Before dinner, Fr. Michael Woods grabbed the microphone to make an announcement and to say grace. As he tried to get everyone to be quiet, he quipped that this was why they didn't serve wine at the beginning of Mass.

At the other end of the building, the drama students were putting on a play in the Megan Birkel Performing Arts Center. As we left the party, we saw a car in the high school parking lot with something written on the windows. My wife pointed out that teenagers are really getting carried away with their text messaging nowadays.

Grendel's mom has got it goin' on

The family that lived next door to my boyhood home in Crestwood had a cat named Beowulf. That ancient memory came to light when my son said he wanted to see the new movie "Beowulf" to get some extra credit for his English class.

The film is available in regular or 3D. Even though it cost extra, we opted for the 3D version. The 3D technology comes from a company called RealD. Entertainment Weekly said that the glasses they give you are more like the sunglasses Tom Cruise wore in "Risky Business" than the old school paper framed red and blue glasses. I thought they were a little less Tom Cruise and a little more Drew Carey.

The last two previews before the feature were also in 3D. One was for "Coraline." The other was for a remake of "Journey to the Center of the Earth." Once you commit to a 3D screening, you have to keep the glasses on. Without them, the picture is blurry.

The characters are created with motion capture computer animation. The technology has improved a lot since it was used in "The Polar Express." The faces move realistically but, as my wife pointed out, the eyes still seem lifeless. I thought the movie got better as it went along, mostly because I didn't care for the way they designed Grendel. His speech, provided by Crispin Glover, was hard to decipher. The movie builds up to a spectacular fight scene between Beowulf and a dragon.

If the movie had come out a few weeks earlier, Jimmy Kimmel could have dressed his father in chain mail and included him in this year's "Half and Half Halloween Pageant." Mr. Kimmel would be perfect as Beowulf Blitzer.

a little mad sometimes

This is going to sound like the setup for a meme, even though it's not. What was the first DVD you ever bought? Go ahead and post your answer in the comments. About nine years ago I chose one of the all-time classics, "Psycho," as my first disc. At the time I didn't have a DVD player but I had just gotten a DVD-ROM drive for our family computer. I loved the idea that technology had progressed to the point where I could keep a permanent copy of one of my favorite movies. It wasn't on a tape that could get erased or on film that could decay. This was a digital video disc with Hitchcock's masterpiece converted to bits and bytes, preserved forever in plastic.

Last week Perry Simon posted a link to an interesting blog about the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs. The author points out that consumers have resisted replacing their DVD collections and are mainly buying only new releases in the new formats. Like most people I am in no rush to buy a machine in either format. I already made that mistake years ago when I bought a Betamax VCR.

Cut to the present day. My son has to do a presentation on movie villains for his speech class. The other students in his group are covering Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter. My son is reporting on Norman Bates. I told him a few things that I remembered about "Psycho" from the Intro to Film class I took when I was his age. My high school teacher, Mr. Naversen, took us through the famous shower scene frame by frame, being careful not to melt the film on the projector bulb.

We got my copy of the "Psycho" Collector's Edition DVD from its cool, dry place and placed it into the fancy Onkyo DVD changer that we got last year. The machine couldn't read the disc! Then we tried it in the Sony DVP-NS50P in our family room. Still nothing. As a last resort, we put the disc into a couple of laptop computers to no avail. What on earth could have happened to this nine-year-old disc that made it unreadable in all my machines? I tried cleaning it with a soft cloth but that didn't make any difference. Has the technology changed? Is my "Psycho" obsolete? Why won't it work and what can I do about it?

infinibyte

The 512 megabyte miniSD card from my cell phone served as a conversation starter for my son and me the other day. I think our family's first computer had 512 kilobytes of RAM. As I held up the 512MB card, I told my son to picture 1000 desktop computers in our house, together totaling the same amount of RAM as I held on my fingertip. We were looking online at the price of a microSD card to go in the next generation of phone that I will get as part of the "new every two" upgrade. The micro chips look to be about half the size but with 8 times the capacity of the mini chip I got two years ago.

During his college career, my son will probably get to use computers with terabytes of memory. Naturally, he wanted to know what was bigger than a terabyte. We looked it up and found a list all the way from bit up to the most amusing of the names, brontobyte (unofficial).

1 Bit = Binary Digit
8 Bits = 1 Byte
1000 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
1000 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
1000 Zettabyte = 1 Yottabyte
1000 Yottabyte = 1 Brontobyte

Two days later I was skimming through the Knoxville Blog Network and saw something about bits and bytes that I might have overlooked if my son and I hadn't just been talking about it on Monday. An entry from Think Time had a link to a fascinating post by James S. Huggins that gives you an idea of how much memory it takes to hold various types of information.

early frog gets the mate

The frogs in my backyard have decided that Spring is here to stay. My son and I listened to the mating calls of all the various species on the official Frogs and Toads of Tennessee website. We think we have Mountain Chorus Frogs in our yard. Their genus is Pseudacris, which sounds like a "faux version" of rapper Ludacris. Each year the frogs lay their eggs in the rainwater that accumulates on our pool cover. Unfortunately all that water will be gone before their little tadpoles grow up. Last year we were able to scoop out some of the tadpoles and move them into a bucket before the pool cover was removed. Two survived into froghood. Maybe this year we can do better.

In an effort to share the sounds of the amorous frogs with you, I recorded a 15 second video on my cell phone. The phone saved the video in the 3GPP2 file format, which my computer didn't recognize. Before giving up on the idea, I checked the phone's owner manual and saw that I should try downloading the newest version of QuickTime. Presto! We have frog sounds.