And Still I Persist

Sorry blogging has been a bit light here. Besides writing a very long expert report during the past month, I’ve also driven (with Sandra) a few thousand miles over the past several days, with over a thousand more to go. Last week, we made a quick trip to Utah to see some close friends from DC before they head down to Peru for a few years (he’s now with the State Department). We got back from Utah on Saturday, then left this past Tuesday to drive down to San Diego to see our son Jon graduate from MCRD.

Here’s Jon this morning, still a recruit, during the Motivation Run just a few hours before the Emblem Ceremony:

That’s Jon in the middle, just to the left of the DI’s head. I honestly didn’t recognize him until his sister pointed him out.

And here he is this afternoon, having received his Eagle, Globe & Anchor emblem and now one of the 611 newest US Marines walking on this planet:

To his left is Greg Barsic, our son-in-law and another Marine (currently serving in the US Coast Guard but looking at getting back into the Corps).

The final Graduation Ceremony is tomorrow morning. Jon wants to hit the beach this weekend, and then he’s coming back to Colorado with us until he has to report to Camp Pendleton in 10 days or so. He’s still waiting to see what his next training will be.

He’s hoping for Infantry and an overseas posting.

I could not be more proud. ..bruce..

OK, this is the best hack I’ve seen in years:

And he’s my favorite quote from Ron Patrick’s website:

You have to give the California Department of Motor Vehicles (the DMV) credit for creativity on this one.  A DMV insider has disclosed to me that the DMV has made a formal request to a federal agency to rule if my Beetle constitutes a threat to national security based on what could happen if it got into the wrong hands.  This raises three questions in my mind: #1 Does this mean I’m the right hands?  #2 If someone with the name “b_laden13″ is the highest eBay bidder for my Beetle can I refuse his offer even if he has the prestigious eBay Red Shooting Star feedback rating (the highest)?  #3 Would this affect my eBay rating?

Be sure to read the whole article (with lots of pictures).  ..bruce..

But I’m sure my dad would have liked some of this gear back in WWII or even during Vietnam. It’s my son’s military, now. This article by Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica shows just what R&R techno-gear our military folks over in Iraq and Afghanistan can get hold of:

One of Mikhail Woltering’s strangest experiences in Iraq came when he helped a US unit fix a problem with their satellite TV hookup. One of the soldiers in the unit had hauled an amazing array of electronic gear into the desert with him: expensive computer, turntables, speakers. He had converted one corner of his 10-man tent into a complete DJ studio and worked late into the night, remixing samples and patching together his own beats. And then, one night, he made a mistake—he accidentally unplugged his headphones.

The homemade beats blasted out of his speakers instead. Woltering remembers that the noise “woke everyone up in the tent. They all hit the deck, donning their body armor, thinking they were under attack. That guy got a talking to about that particular incident.”

I’m heartened by this, also:

Personal video cameras and digicams have allowed the world to see both music videos and prisoner abuse. That might lead outside observers to suspect that the military would like nothing better than to limit the use of these sorts of devices. DiePilot notes that in his experience, however, that simply isn’t true.

“Most commanders tend to take the attitude that they’d like their soldiers to refrain from doing things which they would be afraid or ashamed to have filmed in the first place. Said one colonel at a preconvoy brief, ‘Do nothing that you would be ashamed to have your mother learn up.’ That’s a little simplistic, I suppose, but it’s also not a bad metric.”

In fact, the military has proved generally open to cameras so long as they don’t violate requirements regarding operational security. They even allowed three soldiers to shoot the footage that became the feature-length documentary The War Tapes, a new film that chronicles life in the military through the eyes of the soldiers on the ground.

So, I wonder if this means that Jon’s going to be hitting me up for stuff when he graduates from MCRD bootcamp next week.
Read the whole thing. Hat tip to Slashdot.

And while you’re at it, head over to Pat Dollard’s web site to make a contribution to help get “Young Americans” through production and into release. (Yep, I’ve donated — twice, as a matter of fact.) And don’t forget to watch the clips (warning: audio track NSFW). ..bruce..

I’m flying out of town on business and won’t be back until Saturday. I may have some time to do blogging over the next few days, but I wouldn’t count on it.  ..bruce..

I’ve searched YouTube. I’ve watched YouTube. YouTube is my favorite “TV channel”. Believe me, Current TV is no YouTube. Let me explain.

Tom Bevan, over at the excellent Real Clear Politics, points to a San Francisco Chronicle article by Joe Garofoli that compares and constrast’s Al Gore’s CurrentTV channel with the YouTube website. Garofoli starts with:

Television insiders and pundits mocked Al Gore and Joel Hyatt a year ago when the pair introduced Current TV, their San Francisco-based cable and satellite channel. Even after critics saw that the ex-vice president and Democratic Party fundraiser weren’t crafting a left-wing network, few in the change-averse world of television could understand why anyone would tune into Current’s programming motif: three- to seven-minute videos created by emerging filmmakers, citizen journalists and the most rank of amateurs — the viewers themselves.

Soon after Current’s premiere, the Wall Street Journal described it this way: “Newsless, often clueless and usually dull, the new channel is a limp noodle.” Plus, Current was carried in only 17 million households, making it the equivalent of a one-stoplight town in the television universe. Big advertisers don’t start calling until a network can be seen in 40 million households.

Bevan (rightly) cites this paragraph as the nut of the article:

Current “caught the (viewer-created content) trend early, but it is kind of surfing by them,” said John Higgins, business editor at Broadcasting & Cable magazine, a trade publication for the television industry. “These guys (at Current) had all the right ideas and all the same machinery in place that YouTube did, but they didn’t quite do it. Lighting struck 10 feet to the left of them.

The problem is, Higgens’ statement is wrong in all the most important respects, as are the hopeful comments of others quoted in Garofilo’s article — which is why Current will never have the cache and popularity of YouTube. Here are at least three of the fundamental differences.

Narrowcast v. Widecast

I have Current TV because my TV signal provider (DirecTV) decided, for whatever reason, to carry it. Our lineup of DirecTV channels shifts slightly on a regular basis, and at some point in the last year, Current TV showed up. When I stumbled across it (and “stumbled” is a key word), I had no clue this was Al Gore’s famous venture into broadcasting. I watched it for a few minutes, trying to figure out the “theme” of the channel. No luck, other than it seemed to be lame and a bit desperate-to-be-hip-and-edgy. I pulled up the on-screen program guide, which simply said “Current” 24 hours a day. I tuned into it a few more times, remained equally unimpressed, and then went on-line to find out what this channel was — which is when I discovered it was GoreTV.

I have Current TV (for now, at least) because of some financial and/or editorial decision made at DirecTV HQ. I don’t have it in any of my hotel rooms, nor have I found it at the houses of friends/relatives where I’ve visited in the past several months. This is what I mean by “narrowcast”.

By contrast, I have YouTube pretty much anywhere I can get a ‘net connection. No net provider has to “decide” to carry YouTube (at least not yet; re the debate over “net neutrality“); if I’ve got net access, I’ve got YouTube. And I can watch YouTube on a number of devices, ranging from cell phones to large-screen TVs. This is what I mean by “widecast”.

Sequential vs. Random Access

I’m an old enough geek to have worked directly with various sequential-access data media (paper tape, reel-to-reel mag tapes, cassette tape, and so on). Sequential access means that you start at the, well, start of the media and read through until you (a) find what you were looking for or (b) hit the end of the media. Needless to say, it’s slow and inefficient compared to random access data media, such as floppy disks, hard disks, CD-ROMs, RAM, ROM, and so on, where you can go directly to a given location or address in the media and read what you want. Think VHS tape (sequential) vs. DVD (random), and you get the idea.

Current TV is sequential access, and the worst kind of sequential access: time-bound. To get to a particular video, I have to “sit through” (figuratively) everything up to that point. For example, with a VHS tape, I can at least fast forward until I find what I want. With Current TV, I can do so such thing; it plays out only in real time. The best I can do is to go to the Current TV web site, see if there’s anything I want, and then make plans to either watch it or record it at that precise moment in time.

YouTube, by contrast, is random access and time-free. All content is available directly and simultaneously. I do not have to wade (or wait) through content that does not interest me. And should I (in my search) bring up something that I thought I wanted to watch but that doesn’t interest me, I can halt it immediately. Furthermore, YouTube is time-free in that it can broadcast (serve up) thousands of hours of video every hour, limited mainly by the number of servers it has on line.

Editorial Selection vs. Post At Will (Mostly)

The editorial staff at Current TV has to decide what to broadcast and go through a rather complex series of production steps to convert user-created video to a TV signal in my living room. And since they can only fit 24 hours of broadcasting in a 24-hour period, they have to make constant decisions as to what to show. In so doing, they have to worry about regulartory issues, legal issues, political issues, and so on. They have various guidelines and constraints on what you should do in order to produce and submit vidoe. They may use viewer input to decide what video to air, but they ultimately control the signal.

The YouTube model, by contrast, is largely hands-off. They have a simple set of rules for what you can upload and ask you to assert lack of copyright violation. They have limited on length of video, largely because they found most video above a certain length was, indeed, copyrighted material. And they delete copyrighted or other illegal matter on request and notification. That’s about it. Users can vote on how they like video, but that’s after the fact; it doesn’t affect whether your video can be seen.

In Sum

YouTube’s biggest weakness is not the quality of the content — Sturgeon’s Revelation applies just as much to traditional TV as it does to YouTube videos — but the quality of the video itself. Both sound and image are tolerable at best and often are just plain wretched. On the other hand, pre-cable TV was like that for decades; the big advance in my childhood home was when my father installed a remote antenna turning system, so that he would no longer have to climb up on the roof to manually adjust the antenna for a given channel (”How does it look now?”). But I’ll still usually take content over presentation. (On the other hand, I’ll watch just about anything in High Definition.)

On our DirecTV satellite system, we have hundreds of channels, though fewer than we used to; we dropped all the movie channels when we discovered that we only watched one or two movies a month on them. Yet, outside of the local morning news/weather and occasional news channel updates, I seldom watch more than half a dozen shows and/or movies on TV each week. By contrast, I suspect there are few days that go by in which I don’t watch one or more YouTube videos, embedded in a blog or linked to in an e-mail I receive. In terms of total hours, I still watch more TV; in terms of discrete video productions, I watch more YouTube.

I don’t watch Current TV at all. ..bruce..