Top Chef Indeed

I've hooked myself on Top Chef on Bravo, and while I normally don't care for reality shows, I consider this more of a poorly-edited cooking show, so I'm consistent.

It is entertaining to watch the drama, but I do wish the editing wasn't so outrageously skewed to foreshadow outcomes. Between the in-show edits and the teaser trailers for the next week's episode, it's almost impossible to be surprised. At one point one of the contestants (nay, characters) is speaking and there is a late-night-comedy-style tone change as the apparently strung together the words they wanted to have him say. The one who is going to be getting the ax is invariably commenting early in the show about whatever it is that will be their eventual undoing.

Perhaps the taste is more complex than the presentation.

For what it's worth, I liked Mikey and I think Elia is a reasonable character if not a little annoying some times when she laments. Sam is probably going to be the winner... the final four probably are the better chefs when all is said and done.

I predicted the hair scenario, though I thought they would actually have chopped it off. Reminded me of a college prank-- though a legal prank should be easily reversible, this one would not have been. Buzz cut was my second choice, though... my first was some sort of Sharpie madness not unlike that experienced by Zach Braff in Garden State.

Oh well, it's entertaining, and very little bad singing.

Comediculous

This weekend I managed to catch some of Louis Black doing his most recent HBO special (Red, White, and Screwed I think it was), then I saw Louis C.K. doing his raunchy stand-up on HBO (Louis C.K.:Shameless), and then I just caught Demetri Martin. Person. on Comedy Central.

I love watching stand-up comedians. I think most of the people I've seen are pretty funny, and I think all of them possess a certain bravery that we all wish we had. It's one thing to get up and read a script in front of people, or point at your PowerPoint slides, or read off a cue card. Try getting up in front of a random bunch of people and trying to make them laugh at what you think.

I've seen Howie Mandel, Louis Black, David Cross, Laura Kightlinger, Alonzo Bodden, and Dwayne Perkins live. Seeing stand-up life makes a difference, though in some of those cases when you see the comedian on a talk show or a Comedy Central or HBO special, you end up seeing the same act that they were working on when you saw them live. That's sort of funny when you see what they've changed (if you have the mental bandwidth to store that away), but I almost always find myself saying "oh, this is the routine we already saw." That's not a good attitude, but honesty is not always a bowl of cherries.

When I was at Thuc's bachelor party in Vegas I had brunch with Dwayne Perkins, who is a good friend of Thuc's. He's a really interesting guy. I found out the evening before that "You look hilarious" is not a humorous comment to pay to a professional comedian when he's getting ready to go clubbing in Vegas. Well, it may have been humorous to some, but it was not well-taken by said professional.

I should go see a show.

Co-co-co-cold

It is cold in Sunnyvale.

The cold snap gripping the western part of the nation can be felt through many layers of clothing and at all hours, with a sharp chill in the air even with the evening sun still shining. "Sunny" indeed.

I don't turn the heat on at my place. Why? I'm an idiot. In addition to that, though, I don't like heating the whole place when I spend most of my time at the ol' computer anyway, so I dress warm and drink some hot beverages and all is well. But my my my is it cold.

I have an Oregon Scientific device with a remote sensor placed just outside, so the two are about 10 feet apart separated by the outer wall. As I type this it's 45F and 56F. I'll let you decide which is which.

Good times.

iPhony II

From an iPhone Article at Engadget:

The iPhone's shortcomings:

• No 3G. We know you know, but still, it hurts man.
• No over the air iTunes Store downloads or WiFi syncing to your host machine.
• No expandable memory.
• No removable battery.
• No Exchange or Office support.

The lack of WiFi sync seems like a huge downer... in other words, no sitting at Starbucks downloading last night's Battlestar Galactica episode, and no adding of extra hackery, etc.

iPhone v1.0 is, based on these missing features is overpriced and overhyped. DOA? That's where I'm betting my $1.

I'm still looking at the N80 or the coming N95 (hopefully a model with US-compatible 3G+ support) for my honest-to-goodness smartphone needs, and I am very very pleased with my Creative Zen Vision:M for media goodness on the go. Nokia phones run python...

iPhony

I had the Engadget web page open and reloaded it a few times once Jobs mentioned the 3 devices, as the inevitable unfolded. Very interesting.

Here's my take:

On the one hand, Apple has done quite well with iPod, and in fact they have changed everything in terms of personal media (from the device to interaction to distribution to personal media publishing ala podcasts, etc etc etc) and they've made it compatible with "my mom" so that it's accessible. Doing the same with personal video will probably be just as interesting.

On the other hand, I think Apple is the Centaur in the x86 race. That is, they're coming in with some different ideas and different ways of doing things, but they're goal is a 1% market share in 2008 with a single product at a high price point (though I would hope they'll roll out variations on a theme, who really knows?). Not that Apple will be bought up, but Apple has rocked the boat a little bit and they've used their amazing brand to amplify that rocking. Much like the non-Intel x86 companies made things better for those using the x86 (everyone from developers to integrators to re-sellers to end users), I think Apple will force the tide to rise, as will all boats.

I for one have enjoyed using my Nokia N70 "smart phone" on a daily basis. It's great, despite an annoying reset bug where it soft-reboots itself sometimes. The camera is great, the features are just fine, it can play video and audio, has an FM tuner, etc. However, I also have a palm pilot and an mp3 player. Why?

Because a device that can do everything doesn't always satisfy everything. I'll take my current phone and a really good media player (one of the Creative Zen products, something from Archos, etc) any day, and I'll be able to take a call while a video is playing!

Look for the standard "version 1 syndrome" to strike the iPhone out of the gate, and then watch for angst about scratched and fingerprinty touch screens, battery life, etc. I'll take an unlocked Nokia phone any day of the week...

Some day...

Long time no nothin'...

I'm trying out the new Blogger.com features. Well, some. I'm not going to switch to the wysiwyg layout tool, since I prefer manual html editing for the moment.

I've been in a little mental sinkhole lately regarding the re-deployment of my real personal blog-- which will be located in the same place at DanHugo.com when it does rise from its ashes. Over the summer I designed a flexible hierarchical database schema with flexible node types so that everything in what would be the CMS database is a general "node item," and every such node item can be treated in some ways like any other-- for example, anything can have a comment node attached to it.

As some may know, I prefer python to, say, php, so I've been playing with cherrypy and psycopg2 as I develop a little custom framework-like thingie to deal with this db backend. As always, I've included some supporting stored procedures written in pl/pgsql so the commitment to a python platform is not too rigid.

So one of these days I'm going to port my old vanity site content over to this new scheme and re-deploy the new world. Before and until then, I'm working on some "real" stuff of my own (which I may mention here soon) which may or may not be able to leverage this "universal schema" idea. I'm still not completely sure how practical it is, so the personal blog seems like a reasonable testbed.

First Post

I'm trying out this silliness, mostly because if Google/Blogger want to give up the free bandwidth and storage, why not?

I'm sitting at Intel at the moment, where I'm contracting unhappily for the bread. More on that later.