Magic95vert Blog

This is an open letter to Mike Arrington.

Mike, I don’t know you and I have not followed your career. That having been said, I want you to know this is not meant to bash on you for what happened on the Gilmor Gang.

I do know Leo. I have come to know him for many years from the Screensavers right up till TWIT. The one thing that should never come in to question when dealing with Leo is his integrity. I realize that you are a busy man and cannot watch TWIT 24/7 but, just before he started The Tech Guy (his radio show), Leo had already been pointing out some things that he did not like about the Pre after using it for 24 hours. This was on TWIT before The Gilmor Gang started recording. Secondly, while this whole back and forth was going on, Leo said he was going to buy one. That alone should have been enough for anyone to know that Leo was not biased towards a positive Pre because it was a “free” unit that Palm sent him.

Finally, if your intention was to call out Palm for not sending Techcrunch a review unit and sending them only to Palm positive reviewers, then you should have called them out and not used Leo as a pawn in your game to out Palm. I realize that what has been said, and done cannot be undone, but perhaps you will think about this incident going forward and hopefully you learn from it.

I wish you no ill will and you are entitled to your opinions. Leo may have overreacted but without his integrity he is nothing.

Sincerely,

Richard Ventura

If anyone wants to be able to listen to LiveATC.net on their iPhone, it’s really easy to do.

First download fstream (iTunes Store Link).

Then, from a computer, go to liveatc.net and search for the airport that you want (e.g. KFRG, Republic Airport Farmingdale, NY), liveatc.net does not allow direct linking.

Find the link on the page that says Listen (launches in your MP3 player)

Right click on LISTEN and save to the desktop. This is a .m3u file that will open iTunes or Winamp or Media Player, etc. on a computer. Open this file with a text editor and note the URL (this URL changes probably for load balancing but whatever you enter into fstream should keep working).

From the iPhone, open Fstream and tap favorites. Then tap edit, then tap ‘Add new webradio’ at the bottom.

Then enter the required info. Only the URL and the Name are required. Tap Save, then tap Play. Your new LiveATC Radio will show up on the fstream home page.

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Subject: Red Bull Air Race

Recently I, and some really great friends, went to the Red Bull Air Race in San Diego. We all had such a great time. I took A LOT of pictures. Not just of the planes, but of the friends that I went with and other things as well. I wanted to do something special for this occasion since it was such a great experience.

Creating the iPhoto Book:

I have been wanting to have an iPhoto photo book printed for a really long time, but I was never really happy with the ones that I had laid out prior to this one. So I spent several weeks going through nearly 1200 photos. That may seem like a daunting task, but it is really not. Since I was shooting fast moving planes I needed to take several photos of each, panning along with the planes as they flew by. Naturally this resulted in some photos that were obvious “throw aways”. So the first pass was to get rid of those, followed by subsequent passes to pare the 1200 raw images down to about 200. Once that was done, all that was required was a quick cleanup in iPhoto to crop, adjust levels and fix exposure. The sky was overcast and really gray for the first day and most of the second, iPhoto was able to fix some of this.

Now that I had my 200 “best” shots, I started to layout the book. I enjoyed this a lot. Those who know me, and those reading this blog post, know that I love to write. The templates that iPhoto ‘09 provides are really great. They allow for a ton of creative expression. The travel template really encourages ‘Storytelling Through Photos’ but also lets it’s creator tell the story their way. The default template has some ‘About me’ and ‘About this Book’ sections and it also has a page dedicated to telling backstory. This is a great way to get your audience involved. Starting out with a little background lets your audience know what they are going to be looking at and why they should care. Since I love to write, this was one of my favorite parts of putting this book together. In addition to this section, the default templates have “scrapbook like” elements (torn pieces of paper, postcards, old style border print photos) that allow you to add more notes about the photos. The templates are much more customizable than iPhoto ‘08, but I would still like more freedom. Even with this shortcoming, they are still very rewarding

The Finished Product:

The book itself is very professional looking. I opted for the hardcover version, which includes a dust jacket and room for the ‘About this Book’ text and a small photo (more on this later).

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Since this is at its heart an Apple product, packaging is about what you would expect. As you can see in the photos, the book ships in a box suitable for wrapping if this was a gift. As with all things Apple, it is very clean and simple.

Upon opening the box, you get your book wrapped in plastic to prevent any damage to the dust jacket. My first impression of the book was it small. I went with the 8 ½ x 11 page size. I don’t mean that the book was small in that respect, I just was expecting a 44 page book to be thicker.

Removal of the dust jacket reveals a glossy cover, bound book comparable to any that you would find a bookstore (if anyone remembers what one of those are). The first page and the liner that covers the inside covers (I used to know what this is called, if you know please comment), is a textured linen type paper. Adds a touch of class. The paper itself is very heavy, probably 100lb and semi glossy. Again, it is much as you would find in a bookstore book. The book is printed using a four color, offset process – the same as a magazine. I looked at the pictures through a jewelers loop and then compared it to a LIFE Magazine book I had laying around the printing looked very similar.

Critique:

While I am overall very happy with this book, there are some things that I need to say.

Technical:

The dust jacket and a couple of the pages have some printing artifacts on them. Nothing major, but unacceptable at these prices.

One page has the offset misaligned, noticeably. As a result the images look off.

The text on a couple of the annotation sections is misaligned – offset error I would imagine.

Artistic:

This being my first book I made some poor artistic choices. The small images can be REALLY small. Make sure that any image in a small frame fills it completely.

Exposure is critical. Under exposed images lose a lot of detail

PROOF YOUR WORK, OFTEN. WHEN YOU THINK IT’S RIGHT, PROOF IT AGAIN. Yes that is the voice of experience. If you see the mistakes in the book, please don’t point them out.

Choose your photos carefully. If a photo does not contribute to the story, lose it, I don’t care how ‘cool’ it is.

Conclusion and observations:

Have fun with a project like this. As I was putting it together, I constantly checked the Red Bull Air Race site to get information about the planes and pilots. This gives your audience something to hold onto and it draws them in. Without it, it is just another ‘bunch of pictures that somebody took’. I guess you could call it “Scrapbooking 2.0”

I am very happy with the final book and I will do another one, probably for the Hoover Dam. Although expensive, about $70.00 with tax and shipping, it is a very professional looking product and a nice change from a traditional photo album. You can save money by going with the softcover style book, but I think the hard cover is well worth the extra cost.

I am going to contact Apple regarding the printing errors and see if they will ship out another book. I will update this post when I get an answer.

I welcome constructive critiscism, so please feel free to comment.

Fate is a funny thing. While sitting at the bar yesterday we were speaking to some people who told us that Brighton was the shiznit on Saturday.

We checked the weather throughout the evening and into the night on Saturday and the weather report looked promising. We knew all the skiiers would want to go to Alta again, so we were trying to recruit at least one other person so that we could take a car to go to Brighton. That didn’t happen because 7 of the 17 of us went to Deer Valley, another anti Snowboarder mountain, so that meant 10 of us had to cram into the remaining two cars. That also meant that we were all going to Alta and the outcast boarders were going to Snowbird, again.

Snowbird got dumped on overnight, but only not as much as Brighton. Also while on the road to Alta the weather was looking about the same as yesterday. We were going to ride anyway, but we would not have been happy about it.

I started this post with a comment about fate. The skiiers we are with are such ski snobs that Alta us the only place they like to ski in Utah. Well as it turned out, less than a mule past the turnoff for Brighton we hit a traffic jam that would make New York proud. We sat in it fir about 10 minutes then gave up and turned around and made our way to Brighton.

So, day one ended with beer and wings at The Porcupine. It’s a local restaurant that served 3.2% beer and you don’t need to be a “member”.

After returning to the condo, everyone just chilled. Some of the guys went to dinner at the “unnamed” bar. The rest of us got pizza at the condo and had a rousing discussion in politics.

Day 2 started out better than day 1, but as we get closer to the mountain, the weather is looking really nasty. I called this post “Day 1 redux” because we are returning to Alta/Snowbird in hopes of actually getting to ride today. The snow reports all say the mountains got dumped on last night, but as it stands now, I am not holding my breath.

I will post again later, hopefully with better news.

Rain continues to fall on Snowbird.

We have written off this first day and are now heading to the ski shop and The Porcupine to drown our misery.

Hopefully this trend does not continue throughout the rest if this week.

So we are at Snowbird today. Seems like a nice mountain, tons of terrain, but it us still raining and the top of the mountain is in complete white out conditions.

Getting our boards tuned now hoping to salvage a half day out ofo today.

Keep it tuned right here for more updates.

An honest review, from a Whigs/Singers junkie Perspective by Richard Ventura

If the the Twilight Singers are heroine, and The Afghan Whigs are really, really good heroine, then the Gutter Twins are Methadone. It’s not as good as the real thing, but it’ll do until the real thing comes along.

Greg Dulli has a style that is unmistakable, and some may say it is an acquired taste (I would be one of those people), but once you get a taste for it you need more.

Since the Afghan Whigs have disbanded for good following their recent retrospective Unbreakable, featuring the first AW single in ten years, and the last Twilight Singers album Powder Burns, I found myself wanting for more. This want led me to realize that Greg Dulli’s own Amber Headlights is an amazing album that closes the gap between  the Whigs and the Singers. It wasn’t enough tho. I really wanted, no needed, more. So I turned to the Gutter Twins.

Having heard a couple of singles through Pandora, I realized that I had not given them a fair go the first time I had listened to the album. You see, I figured since Dulli was involved with it that I would automatically like it. That was unfair, because this I not solely a Dulli project. The band name, The Gutter Twins, is really a misnomer, because Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan are as much twins as “Mini Me” (Vern Troyer) and Wesley Snipes. Those of you looking for this album to be second coming of the Whigs or even the Singers, will be disappointed…although not at first.

The Stations and God’s Children  clearly have the Greg Dulli touch, but aside from the next to last song on the album, Each to Each, a Greg Dulli signature pice, and the last song Front Street, the rest of the album is clearly Mark Lanegan’s baby. That is not to say that it is bad, just not Greg Dulli. Having many other projects on his plate, Dulli seemed happy to sit back and let Mark drive for this one.

Where this album differs from a typical Dulli project is without a doubt in the style and feeling. The writing styles of the two artists are as different as Jazz and Blues. In fact, that is probably the most glaring shortcoming of the album. Both the Whigs’ and the Singers’ styles really defy being pigeonholed, having elements of many different styles, the Gutter Twins’ album seems to be more rooted in blues and classic rock styles. The feeling of the album is not the same, lacking that minor tendency of the previous Dulli works. Even on the Dulli penned and sung songs, it is there, just not turned up to Eleven.

All in all, I would say that it is a good album that has good music on it, as long as it is taken in its own right. Expecting this album to be a Whigs/Singers/Dulli album is a lot like expecting to see a copy of the Mona Lisa to be as good as the real thing.

Here is a copy of the Mini Cooper S service bulletin regarding the exhaust tips.

So as a designer you look at a thing and say “Ok, what is the purpose of the thing being built?” As an engineer you say “Can it be built?” As a laborer you say ” How should it be built?”

So you take those three criteria and the designer comes up with a vision.

The Vision

Then the engineer draws up the plans.

The Plan (part of it).

Then finally the laborer has to actually build the thing.

The fruits of the Laborer.

So, here’s the thing about that. At no point in the planning phases does anyone chime in and say “Should it be built?”  Now this paradigm applies to all manner of construction, be it a skyscraper, an interstate highway or a “Boot Box” for a R56 Mini Cooper or Cooper S or JCW for that matter.

The original plan was grandiose. Four separate compartments, four doors over them , a notched base plate to keep it from moving about in transit and the oh so clever “Butler Tray” handles. Yeah about all that, uh let’s keep in mind here that we are building this for a MINI!!!! THEY’RE FREAKIN’ SMALL!!! So if we follow that logic, then whatever we build to put in the back of them is going to be, say it with me, FREAKIN’ SMALL!!!! Now I don’t mind the 40 bucks I spent on parts. I don’t mind the time spent designing it, ’cause that was fun. I also don’t mind the time spent building it, ’cause I don’t do a lot of woodworking and it is always nice to do a project like this. Yeah I cut some corners and yeah it is not perfect, but that is not what is bothering me about this whole endeavor. After I put my compressor, California Duster, first aid kit and jumper cables in it realized one thing…IT’S FREAKIN’ SMALL!!!

So as I sit here typing this, I think “Are you pondering what I’m pondering?” “I think so, Brain, but if they called them Sad Meals, no one would buy them.”<cough><cough> sorry wrong train of thought. I am sitting here pondering the usefulness of this project and trying to decide if it is worth seeing through to its proposed conclusion. That being said let’s do some lists:

Pros:
Secure enclosed area for aforementioned items
Relatively low cost of entry (after fabric and remaining hardware about half of the store bought version.
Pride of saying “I built that”
Creative outlet.
Lightweight (under 3 lb.)
Easily removable.

Cons:
Storage compartment is not very large.
ROI may not be worth cost of entry.
Shame of saying “I built that” (I said yesterday, I am a crappy woodworker)
Takes up valuable space that is normally occupied by luggage on road trips.
Yes it is easily removable, but the way it stands now, it takes the “tool kit”
cover panel with it, thus exposing the tool kit. This means that this also has to come out during the autocross.
Actually finishing the project, and having it be worth the effort. While it will be fun to finish it, as I have more grandiose ideas, should I?

Let me address, in no particular order, the above lists. Sure it would be cool to have a custom built boot box, but do I really need it and if it doesn’t come out acceptable, at the very least, is it worth having. I really do need a place to keep everything that is in it (except maybe for the duster) and right now, that place is non existent. The car is small and not having that extra space for luggage can become an issue. That about covers it. Right now, my biggest hurdle to moving forward is that no matter how hard I try, It will never meet my expectations. I guess I’ll sleep on it, and revisit it later. Enjoy the pics. Oh and yes, I added some stuff for autocrossing and the duster had be relocated. <sigh>