The lawn bowling green just above Green Lake.

Yesterday at the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival I took in Arid Lands, a documentary of the early years of Hanford, and the people and geography of the Columbia Basin. Having grown up the area, I was particularly curious to see how this landscape of diversity, or even better irony, would be portrayed in a documentary.

A film by Grant Aaker and Josh Wallaert, Arid Lands is an excellent overview of the massive contradictions that confound the Columbia Basin. From war machine to environmentalism, irrigation and farming to rampant development. The Tri-Cities is a complacent community that’s as grateful for it’s nuclear history as it is wary of it…the entire area is inextricably tied to the wake of plutonium production, and now the biggest environmental cleanup in the history of the planet.

The film did well to not delve too deeply into issues that could easily sidetrack what was the star—the land. No mention was made of downwinders, while particular emphasis was placed on the changing landscape—quickly changing from an agrarian base to a service-based economy bolstered by tourism. While the wine industry flourishes, other agriculture is consumed by ever-expanding housing developments—quickly erected with little planning or thoughts of the native landscape.

It’s a well-rounded film with a great diversity of viewpoints, excellently shot and edited. If you’re at all interested in the history of Hanford and the Columbia Basin, this is highly recommended.

Zodiac is a recounting of the people and events surrounding a series of unsolved murders throughout the Bay area in the 1960s. It was based on the non-fiction works of Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle during the killings.

But let’s get one thing straight, San Francisco is nice and all, but as far as serial killers go nobody holds a candle to the Northwest.

They might not all make the silver screen, but the likes of Robert Pickton and Gary Ridgway are so much scarier than The Zodiac killer it boggles the mind. Yes, we’ve got crazies up here that Jake Gyllenhaal wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole.

Mark Ruffalo as lead detective Dave Toschi is outstanding, as is Robert Downey Jr. in the role of Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery. This movie is worth watching just for their performances, they even overshadow the complete lack of chemistry between Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his family, and the less than convincing “obsessive” that Graysmith devolves toward as he attempts to unravel the Zodiac crimes.

The movie is long, 2 hours and 40 minutes long, and its stodgy pacing forces you to ask why. Slashing 30 minutes off the picture would’ve gone a long way toward making it a more taut thriller, but it still has great performances and the kind of disturbing imagery that will make you think twice about walking around the streets of Seattle San Francisco tonight.

It might be that Mike Judge’s Idiocracy is more notable for what happened to the movie before it hit theaters than for what shows up on screen.

[Idiocracy was] expanded to only 125 theaters, not the usual wide release of 2500-3000 theaters. According to the Austin American-Statesman ^[5], 20th Century Fox, the film’s distributor, did nothing to promote the movie — while posters were released to theatres, no movie trailers, television ads, or press kits for media outlets were provided. The film was not screened for critics^[6]. Lack of concrete information from 20th Century Fox led to speculation that Fox may have actively tried to keep the film from being seen by a large audience… Wikipedia Entry

It’s not hard to imagine 20th Century Fox being less than thrilled with Judge’s look at 500 years into our future. At that time, intelligence has been completely bread out of the human population. Corporations have both hastened our fall and ensured the populations’ continued depravity. Starbucks sells handjobs, and Braundo, a sports drink manufacturer, has bought both the F.D.A. and F.C.C. in order to replace water as the preferred beverage nationwide.

The President of the United States is a porn-star and champion wrestler. The only thing that doesn’t change is FOX News.

Idiocracy is funny and entertaining, as most things from Mike Judge are, but the script is light – it gives the distinct feeling that more should be said – damn witty commentary but not every bit the biting social critique it could be.

Bond: “Martini.”

Bartender: “Shaken or stirred?”

Bond: “Does it look like I care?”

It was never more explicit – the old Bond is out, and the new Bond – Daniel Craig – gets bloody, nasty, and emotionally involved while in the service of Her Majesty.

There are a few problems with Casino – most notably the movie would be vastly improved by chopping off 30 minutes. A stunning chase scene at the beginning of the feature is too long, as are several poker scenes. (And yet the screenplay never takes the time to explain why the central villain bleeds from his eye.) Product placement is rampant.

By showing James in his formative years, Casino Royale is classic but surprisingly fresh – a good introduction to the new Bond.

Watch your back today.

It’s dumping snow right now in Seattle; this is the third major storm of the winter.

International superstar David Beckham is coming to the U.S. to play for the L.A. Galaxy. A move for Beckham shouldn’t be a giant shock as his tenure at Real Madrid was winding down, and his days of international competition with England appear to be over.

Beckham will become the biggest star to play soccer in the United States since Pele and Franz Beckenbauer played in the now-defunct North American Soccer League in the 1970s.

But will anyone care? Salary caps were lifted for the MLS to pull in these kinds of blockbuster names but the league is still far from mainstream. The deal is reportedly worth $250 million, which goes a long way toward explaining why Beckham would come stateside (that and still be in a major media market, L.A.), but what’s the larger story?

‘I don’t think it’s just about glitz,’ U.S. Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati said. ‘He wants to play on a winning team and be part of a winning organization and help build the game in the United States.’

Admirable, but getting the U.S. to care about soccer might be too big of a task for even the world’s most recognizable player. If the MLS truly wants to become a world-renowned sporting institution, they should start by naming their sport correctly.

Call it Football

It’s “football,” not “soccer.” Soccer is just unfortunate slang that will forever relegate the game to 2nd tier status in the United States. For the beautiful game to ever stand as an equal to the major sports of the U.S., it has to be football to which we also have American Football.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs and Apple, Inc. unveiled the iPhone. It’s the most important mobile technology release in years, and I believe it will have an impact on the portable computing landscape for more than a decade to come.

What’s in an iPhone?

From a hardware perspective, the iPhone isn’t absolutely breakthrough in any one single way. It’s a GSM mobile phone, a music and video playback device and a portable computing platform. All of these are technologies taken apart are established if not mature, in the form of smart phones, iPods and laptops. But of course no one has ever come even close to combining all of them into one device, let alone demonstrating the requisite engineering, design, and user interface innovations necessary to make it an intuitive and effective experience.

At the end of this piece in TIME magazine, Apple’s Jonathan Ive said,

I think there’s almost a belligerence—people are frustrated with their manufactured environment…we tend to assume the problem is with us, and not with the products we’re trying to use.

Far too many device manufacturers have been taking people’s frustrations for granted. I’ve only tolerated mobile phones in my life, I’ve never genuinely enjoyed a single one. The iPhone may just be the device I’ve been dreaming of for 4 years: WiFi, bluetooth, high-speed mobile connectivity, a full OS, slick media playback capabilities and all in a sexy package. Perhaps I can finally put my broken-record complaints to rest, and a few lucky people with iPhones can stop blaming themselves for not “getting” poorly implemented technology.

Why the iPhone Really is Revolutionary

Every mobile phone in existence today has a marginal interface at best, marginal controls, and a feature set that’s crippled. Even Windows Mobile I find frustratingly constrictive in use on modern devices like Qs and Treos.

A Re-thought Interface
Apple has broken down the walls of conventional mobile phone building by starting with an interface not built on buttons—nearly every bit of it is touch based. They call it Multi-touch. Multi-touch is unproven in the hands of the consumer, but it demonstrates the lack of real innovation in the mobile device market in the past three years. Handsets are progressively slimming and increasing in power, but the most popular mobile in the country, the RAZR, is novel only for a appealing form-factor.

The interface concepts demonstrated by the iPhone will haunt the thoughts of mobile device manufacturers for years.

A Full OS
Apple has promised a full OSX implementation. This doesn’t mean an identical interface of course, but the OSX kernel will be running on the iPhone. Conventional thinking was that this couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be done with a small computing device, considering limits in processing power and battery life. A complete operating system opens up the functionality in robust applications, not just miniaturized utilities that have become the norm on many handsets.

A Full Browser
The biggest benefactor of a full OSX kernel on an iPhone is undoubtedly Safari, Apple’s web browser. Safari on an iPhone allows full page web browsing. If it truly allows easy scaling and the device can process complex web applications smoothly, in one swoop Apple may have called into question the entirety of WAP, the protocol that allows internet access in many conventional mobile phones.

Again, this one new device calls into question the way web content has been delivered to millions of phones every day for years. How’s that for revolutionary?

Will the iPhone be a Walled Garden?

Before I’m accused of chugging the Cupertino Kool-Aid, I do have to bring up what I believe is the single biggest question left outstanding on the iPhone: Will it be open?

Many mobile experiences today are defined by content provided by specific vendors through fixed channels. No choice, no flexibility. Verizon’s Vcast comes to mind, like AOL all over again. We already know the iPhone will be an iPod, and even though an iPod is still the exclusive player for iTunes Music Store protected AAC files, it will still play standard MP3s and properly encoded un-DRM’ed video (H.264).

But what about applications on the iPhone? Will users be able to install non-authorized widgets, or create their own without delivering them to an iPhone with Apple’s blessing? Will 3rd party games and applications make their way into the Apple ecosystem? I believe the iPhone can still be an effective device even if the OS is constrained, but that it would be a much more compelling tool as an open system.

My hope is that Apple will offer a route for user-created widgets (as they do now for OSX), and create an application delivery mechanism for 3rd party programs. Any game or productivity app could be verified/registered through Apple, and Apple could take a cut of any proceeds. It may lessen the burden of support that would undoubtedly increase on an “opened” OS, but still have the power of user-created projects and 3rd party development—all while creating an additional revenue stream. It seems a decent compromise.

Make a great device, open up the platform, and watch the world of mobile technology scurry to keep pace. June has never seemed so far away.

Here it is, the eve of Macworld 2007; tomorrow is the biggest day of the year for Apple fans and the most highly anticipated Expo in years.

Like most lists of Macworld predictions, mine will no doubt prove at least 50% dead wrong in little more than 12 hours from now, but that’s all part of the fun.

Here’s my list, in order of likelihood, from sure thing all the way down to wishful thinking:

1. iLife & iWork Suite Updates
   This is hardly even a prediction; both suites have seen regular updates demonstrated at Macworlds of the past. The spreadsheet question may be answered, for those mac users that love Excel, I know there has to be at least two or three of them in the world, just dying for *shudders* spreadsheets.

2. Leopard Ship Date, Fancy New Features
   On the latest MacBreak Weekly, Leo Laporte postulated that Leopard would be ready to ship at the Expo, so Apple could beat Vista’s January 30th launch date. I think that makes a lot of sense, but other than bragging rights I’m not sure if the rush to ship 10.5 would bring Apple a considerable amount of extra sales. I’ve always thought Macs sell OSX, not OSX the seller of Macs. Since I don’t see a ton of significant Mac hardware upgrades at this Expo, why rush to ship Leopard without a spiffy new piece of aluminum around it?

3. “iTV” Media Extender Introduced
   I have to admit whether or not the “iTV” has a hard drive, whether or not it allows 3rd party DVR integration, I’ll buy one of these instantaneously. I’ve been waiting years for a great media extender for my TV that doesn’t require a huge box in my living room.

4. New Cinema Displays. + Really Big Ones.
   Cinema displays and iSights have been disappearing from retail stores, so at least we’ll see new displays with built-in iSight cameras, just like iMacs and MacBooks already sport. Further, I think Apple will rebrand even larger LCDs, perhaps up to 50 inches and larger equipped with HDMI and more versatile I/O than their current displays.

5. 6G, Full Screen iPod
   Long overdue. Give me a 16×9 touchscreen or give me tears.

6. Refreshed Airport Express
   A draft-N unit, for streaming video. When this is released firmware upgrades will be passed out to Mac owners with newer units to bump up their Airport cards to draft-N as well.

7. MobileMe / iChat Mobile
   Ah yes! The notorious “iPhone.” I highly doubt Apple will go the path of MVNO as many people have claimed, but instead selling GSM or CDMA phones directly to the customers on behalf specific carriers. (Locked units.) Apple’s hardware, Apple’s lightweight OS, Apple’s walled-garden & features—the device will be more iPod than Treo, 4 and 8 Gigabytes of storage and priced in the neighborhood of $299 / $399. I was formerly quite convinced we’d be able to purchase these immediately, now I’m a bit more reserved.

8. Pro App Updates: Logic, Final Cut, Aperture
   All these are begging for an upgrade—true Aperture just hit 1.5 just a few months ago, but development seems to be progressing very rapidly, and it’s not an impossible dream for v.2 in the near future.

9. Mac Pro Goes 8 Core
   Back in September AnandTech confirmed that two quad-core chips work just fine in a Mac Pro. I wouldn’t be shocked to see this new configuration available.

10. MacBook Pro Updates
    Admittedly, this is just a selfish desire. I’d love to see spec. bumps and a 12 or 13 inch MBP, but I think it’s unlikely.

11. GPS and Proximity Importance
    One last bit of complete conjecture. Apple will announce at least one device with integrated GPS capability. This could be a phone, iPod, or other portable, but the potential for creative and functional uses for geo-specific data creation and aggregation are far too huge to be passed up. Look at geo-tagged photos and location-specific blogs. Location-based searches are exploding, and news will soon be able to be filtered by proximity. We need more devices that are smart enough to gather, and create, the data layer that’s beginning to cover the globe. Google’s going to be putting these services on handsets, so Apple had better team up with them or build their own.

The dubious benefits of enduring a nasty case of food poisoning hours before entertaining 50 guests at your house for a New Year’s Eve party

1. You gain a new and unabashed appreciation for washed vegetables from clean restaurants, and towel racks that break away from the walls of your bathroom as you tumble toward the toilet.
2. You learn that watching an uncut TV airing of The Exorcist is not a good way to stem an unrelenting tide of nausea.
3. You are luckily able to find great friends that help you recover and ready your house for the party, despite your various ineptitudes.
4. You find more great friends at your party whose honesty forces them to admit that, “you look a little rough tonight.”
5. After 36 hours of ingesting only Gatorade and soda water, cocktails are resoundingly successful intoxicants.

Definition

Noun. A portmanteau of tryptophan and fanboy.
Alternative spellings: tryptophanboi, tryptofanboy, tryptofanboi

One who is obsessed with tryptophan, especially when consumed via turkey dinner on Thanksgiving. Despite use of the pseudo-suffix “-boy” a tryptophanboy can be male or female. (See also tryptophangirl.) A tryptophanboy is particularly fond of turkey’s alleged sleep-inducing effects, and is commonly quite geeky.

Conventional Usage

“Baste me with gravy because I’m a tryptophanboy.”

l33t Usage

“OMG pwned. LOL ur asleep after 3 h3lpings. tryptophanboy.”

November is crock-pot season.

Whilst the clouds roll in and the leaves and rain begins to fall in earnest, some flee to distant lands whose latitudes graciously bequeath them mild and sun-filled winter days. I do not flee however, I remain. In these short and cold days I remain, white and pasty, and here I start slow cookin.

Today marks my inaugural venture into homemade chili. Last night I had decided chili would be a good way to warm the house and the stomach, and make for some nice comfortable football-watching faire. Time to dust off that rockin’ crocker.

I don’t usually follow recipes, which at times proves to be a tragic methodology, but more often teaches me more about cooking than a cookbook ever could. I certainly don’t bind myself to rigid recipes when crockin’, such would be blasphemy. Can you imagine confining the contents of your crock to nothing but someone else’s sterile list? Worse yet, can you imagine BUYING things for your crock-pot, instead of using it as handy receptacle for ancient booty, plundered via a bold leftovers-raid of the refrigerator?

Neither can I. The crock-pot—it’s your kitchen’s Mr. Fusion. Recipe’s are as confining as roads. (”Roads? When you’re making chili you don’t need roads.”)

Turkey chili is what I decided to make, with the goal of getting robust flavor without the heaviness that frequently comes with beef-based chili. I have to say that my first effort came out quite well, so feel free to duplicate (or likely improve upon) my efforts detailed herein.

Ingredients

• 6 cups soaked and rinsed beans (2 cups each of black, red, and pinto)
  3/4 lb. ground turkey
  1.5 c chicken stock
  1 can full kernel corn
  1 can chopped tomatoes
  1 large yellow onion
  1 celery stalk
  1 carrot
  3 cloves garlic
  cumin, chili powder, paprika, s & p

• 4 dried New Mexico red chiles
  2 dried pablano chiles
  1/2 c chopped tomatoes
  1/4 c brown sugar
  2 Tbls honey
  1 Tbls red wine vinegar

Prep

To begin your grand, savory, slow-cooked experiment, add the chicken stock and minced garlic to the crock-pot, and set it on it’s most crock-tastic (hottest) setting. Dump the beans in the crock as well.

Throw your turkey into a saute pan. Don’t worry too much if you sear the heck out of it- that’ll create good de-glazing fodder later. When the turkey is cooked, dump it in the crock.

Dice the onion and mince the celery and carrot. De-glaze the turkey pan with stock from the crock-pot. (Or wine, etc.) Saute the aromatics and add seasoning and spices to taste. (Cumin, chili powder, paprika, s & p.) Again, dump it all in the crock.

Dump the whole can of corn and the whole can of tomatoes into the crock, liquid and all.

And now, this is the (optional) spicy road. I was afraid that all the above ingredients wouldn’t give me enough flavor, so I wanted a little more depth and punch. Enter dried chilies. Throw your dried chilies into a saucepan with water, cover, and cook until soft. Remove the chilies from the hot water and remove the stems and excess seeds. Mince the chillies. (Or, if you have an immersion blender, a rough chop is fine.) Dump them back in the sauce pan an add in your red wine vinegar, brown sugar, honey, and a few more tomatoes. Reduce, then blend up the mixture. Add this sauce to the chili to taste- I needed only about half a cup of the chili-sauce to spice up the pot!

This spicy divergence sounds a bit odd, but worked nicely to thicken the chili and give it much needed color and heat.

There you go, the chili is done when the beans are soft, which could be anywhere between 3 and 6 hours, depending on the crockability of your crocker. Yes, the diligent crock will do the rest of the work for you, so spend the interim watching football or making cornbread, preferably both.

Crock n’ Roll Will Never Die

The end result was very tasty—definitely a satisfactory version 1, and just enough to do the wonder that is the crock-pot some justice. In the future I’d like to try and incorporate some other flavor (and mood) modifiers like beer, whisky and coffee. We’ll see where that takes us.

The Northwest has been pummeled by rain in November. Seattle proper has received nearly 10 inches in the past week and a half, while Mount Rainier was recently drenched with 18 inches in 36 hours.

All that new rain on Rainier has to go somewhere, and one of those swollen routes to the sea is the Cowlitz River. The Wish clan has a place in Packwood, which is right on the Cowlitz, so when we heard the river had changed course and swallowed several houses we were alarmed to say the least. Most of the roads into Packwood were knocked out, as was electricity—all of our neighbors were evacuated.

Concrete details started to stream in (pun sort-of intended) when I began to follow the story unfurling on the web. I saw one of our neighbor’s houses on MSNBC:

Photo via MSNBC: Shelley Matchett / Lewis County Sheriff’s Office

And then another terribly unfortunate neighbor:

Photo via MSNBC: Nick George / The Chronicle

• View the entire slideshow

From what we’ve heard from FEMA, the Sheriff’s office, and scattered reports from locals we were lucky, and our place is virtually unscathed. We’ll find out for sure soon enough. Just hundreds of feet away whole houses were lost. My heart goes out to them.

Ironically, trees that had grown up on the river bank near our cabin that I had planned on removing last summer may have been what kept the earth together enough to stem the tide.

Akamai and JupiterResearch Identify ‘4 Seconds’ as the New Threshold of Acceptability for Retail Web Page Response Times.

My own benchmark for page load times has always been “the three count.” It’s a simple rule I’ve constructed based on a bit of usability testing, feedback from friends, family, and of course my own lack of patience when sitting at a computer…waiting…for things to happen.

Say (out loud if you like for dramatic effect),

“ONE…TWWOOOOO…THREEEEE…”

…and if your page hasn’t loaded yet, you haven’t instigated some sort user interaction, or you haven’t clearly communicated your intentions, you’re going to have problems with your page.

Dear Steve,

Today I read your Q & A with Newsweek posted on MSNBC. Though it was brief, I very much enjoyed it.

When you were asked about Microsoft’s Zune however, your response didn’t quite sit right with me, even as an avid OSX and iPod fan.

Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?

In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

I agree that the first generation versions of the Zune aren’t a threat to the iPod. The iPod and the iTunes Store are great experiences—they are market leaders for a reason—top to bottom sensational lifestyle media products. However, when (note I do not use the word “if”) wireless purchasing is enabled on the Zune, and there are a decent amount of them floating around (C. 2008), the 3×3 try n’ buy scheme will be an appealing feature. (Despite being nastily DRM-laden, which as you know is currently the sad reality we all live in.)

I appreciate that adding wireless purchasing capabilities to the iPod could negatively impact the UI experience. Save the heavy lifting for iTunes, don’t rob Peter to pay Paul, Peter Paul & Mary are still .99c per track on the iTunes Store. Gotcha.

But iPods need WiFi too. You might as well come out and say:

We can’t currently make a larger iPod screen and offer seamless wireless features without disastrously compromising battery life in our current form factor.

Now I know you’d never say that, and I know that battery life and technology is really what’s holding you back, but as an iPod/OSX user I hate to hear you say that headphones are the only good way to connect people around music.

And perhaps being a billionaire allows one a slightly more flexible window of what is deemed socially acceptable today, but I’m pretty sure if I walked up to a strange woman in a coffee shop and asked her, “hey, can I put this in your ear?”

That the answer would be NO.