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I was never a big fan of Christina Aguilera. Her music work was “ok”, but all that high pitch “ooaaaah, aaaaah, ooooooh, yeaaah yeaaaaah” shit in her older songs were pissing me off. This is one of the reasons why I don’t like R&B/soul music, it’s like the artists try to show off their vocal abilities rather than singing the damn lyrics. It turns me off immediately.

But her new song, “Keeps Gettin’ Better“, is actually, better. It has an electronic style music, but with a mix of alternative rock style singing melody, and a bit of Rihanna in it. I like it, a lot.

The problem is the “Heroes” creator, Tim Kring, himself.

The way I read the above, and the rest of the things he said in that interview, is like this: “I have no master plan. I just put together a convoluted, written-on-the-go story, and I crossed fingers that people will buy into it. You see, the Marvel movies were all over the Box Office, so I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could strap together some super hero stories to make a quick buck? So I did. I made a quick buck, and it was fun while it lasted”.

And then, he also says that serialization on modern TV is a bad idea. Maybe it is, but then again, where would serialization be possible then? The movies, where it’s impossible by definition? What he fails to understand is not that serialization is not wanted by viewers, but that viewership naturally decreases on series after 3 years, because older viewers get bored, and new viewers don’t understand the whole back-story to get hooked. Which is why having a clock, a master plan, a premeditated story that makes sense, and a series that doesn’t last more than 3-4 years, is important. But nooooo… Tim preferred the quick buck rather than creating an artistic masterpiece (like “Lost”), or enjoy the kind of money that does come with it in the longer run (e.g. “Firefly” made more money after its demise).

The trailer for the new Star Trek movie is out, and it’s looking good. The forums are full of comments and the old hard core trekies absolutely hate it, but then again, we are talking about old people who will die soon (hehe…), and so it is of the outmost importance for the future of the franchise, that Star Trek gets revitalized, modernized, and finds a newer audience.

Before I saw some pictures a few weeks ago, and the trailer today, I had a problem with the Spock portrayal. I just didn’t believe that there was any actor out there that could have Nimoy’s eerie look and mannerisms. And if the actor would have decided to go his way and redo Spock’s character from scratch, that would have been a huge disappointment for me — given that Spock was the first love of my life, at age 5, a character that has inspired me, and steered a lot of my personality’s evolution.

But Zachary Quinto just looks amazing as Spock. I dare to say that this is the only actor from the bunch that actually tried to recreate Spock’s character as closely as possible, while the rest all look like a bunch of new kids on the block. Interestingly, I never particularly liked Quinto’s character on “Heroes”, the villain Sylar, but there are a couple of scenes in the ST trailer that show what a great actor he is. I had trouble thinking that this was not Nimoy. He seems to have put a lot of effort in recreating Nimoy’s body movements when in action, which is what makes him believable.

So overall, I am excited about the new Star Trek movie, and my only real concern is about the new franchise to not lose the “soul” of Star Trek. And that soul is just that: social commentary. Hopefully, JJ Abrams — who I don’t particularly trust — won’t turn Star Trek into a shallow action packed flick as this would be a lose-lose situation eventually.

Even more interestingly, this movie will be the first space-based science fiction movie in theaters, in two years. The longest, I believe, we ever had to wait for a space movie in cinemas. Makes you wonder.

The second video from our weekend trip, a relaxing nature video. HD version, comments and download here.

We visited Santa Rosa and Bodega Bay this weekend, and so here’s one of the two videos I shot. HD version, comments and download here. The second video will come later today.

RED announced the specs for their 2009/2010 products: ranging from a fixed-lens 3k Scarlet at around $3000, to a 9k system that can shoot in stereoscopic 3D mode (two connected cameras at once, next to each other), to a crazy 28k (261 mega pixel) sensor ($55,000 just for the main unit). How big is a 28k image you ask? Here’s a comparison to a 1080p HD image. These are amazing specs of course, and the prices are extremely low for what these products will be able to do. There’s no question about that.

Here are my two problems though.

1. I am what the author and video professional Stu “ProLost” Maschwitz refers to as a “DV Rebel” on his book of the same name. DV Rebels are basically amateur videography artists, that take cinematography more seriously than normal camcorder owners. DV Rebels try to make the best with what they’ve got even if they only use dirt cheap hardware. In essence, is a lot like how computer geeks like to play with Linux, tweak it like there’s no tomorrow, and enjoy the challenges. The 3k fixed-lens RED Scarlet, possibly the cheapest RED of the bunch, will still cost over $3000 after you add an LCD monitor to it, the special kind of CF cards it requires, battery etc. I am sure that quality will be good, but if Canon comes up with a next-generation 1080p “geek” AVCHD camera for under $2000, similar to what I describe here (e.g. all features the HV30 has, plus gain/AV/TV full manual control, true 24p, DigicDV-4 half-inch sensor, 43mm filter size, fast lens up to 8x or 10x zoom, full 1080p at 24mbps, proper focus ring), I would go for that instead of a Scarlet. Simply because, it would be enough for my needs, and a good bump over the HV20/30 legacy. The RED will definitely change professional cinema as we know it, but I don’t think it will grab all the lower-end artist attention. I have a feeling that wedding professionals won’t care much about it either. In other words, Canon will continue to exist and sell well, but it will feel the heat and hopefully will upgrade their specs for a new market class that it’s between consumer and prosumer. That’s what I am waiting this January from Canon.

2. RED is a hardware company. And as with all hardware companies, their software sucks. RED has been under heavy criticism about their buggy software, and how they sell hardware where the firmware is barely stable. The early bird users end up losing their feathers and becoming guinea pigs, while some basic functions for professionals are missing. Their computer tools are not great either, and only few editors support their files (meaning that you might need to additionally buy the $1000 Cineform Neo4k to get your footage on your editor). Adding to the injury, if you complain about these problems, you end up getting banned from their online forum.

The only way I am getting the cheap Scarlet is if the complete package (with LCD, battery, CF card) costs up to $3000, if it has the ability to shoot 1080p in non-windowed mode (I don’t care about its 3k resolution at this point as I don’t own a super-computer to process it), and if the PC tools (compared to their Mac tools) are sane enough to let me process the raw image and export in an AVI lossless codec via DirectShow (so I can edit in Vegas). There are a lot of “if”s there, so there’s a better chance that Canon will release a hybrid consumer/prosumer “geek” (”DV Rebel”) camera that does everything I need in a more convenient fashion than RED can.

Discussion here.

As sketched:

As colorized with GIMP:

As traced and colorized with Illustrator and Photoshop CS4:

I didn’t use any advanced tools to get this result with Illustrator/Photoshop, but compared to Inkscape/Gimp it was more intuitive. Photoshop’s truly magical magic wand worked better too. With Gimp I even had trouble setting a transparent background layer, I had to google it to find out where to get the option.

Update: The best I could do with Ginp/Inkscape using the exact same tools as in PS/Ai (not the same colors). I couldn’t get these apps to give me a solid, artistic bitmap tracing like Illustrator did (note: the “photocopy” plugin was ran before the tracing in both cases):

If you ever visit Seattle, make sure you visit the SciFi Museum and their airplane/space museum close to Boeing’s factory. So, here are a few interesting tidbits from our vacation in Seattle:

- A lot of people with iPhones in the Seattle airport. iPhone here, iPhone there. But wait! Here’s a person with just a RaZR. Oh, what is he doing? Ah, he’s taking his iPod out of his pocket!

- Virgin America, the airliner we flew with, runs a touchscreen, flash-based system in their per-set screens. It’s based on a Red Hat Linux 2004 release, it has 256 MB RAM, and it uses a flash-based filesystem. They also use Google Maps for their geo-tracking. Looked impressive and worked well. They even offered video podcasts of Diggnation for viewing. Only thing missing was internet access.

- While in the museum of music in Seattle, we used an interactive key-learning system that tried to teach you how to play a “hook”. I sucked at it, and started playing random keys, and voila! A blue screen of death! It apparently ran Windows.

The same museum ran an automated version of the open source audio editor Audacity too (in the same hall as the interactive demo one).

Geeks.com, known for their cheap digital cameras, sent us four gadgets for a review: the Kodak M883 8 megapixel digicam, a flash reader, a 16 GB SDHC card, and an iPhone case. It also happened that this weekend we spent it in the beautiful Seattle, visiting museums and friends. What a better way to test these items but by taking them with me to see how they perform and survive the trip!

* Kodak EasyShare M883 8MP 3x Optical/5x Digital Zoom HD Camera
The M883 is a low cost/range 8 MP digicam from Kodak, currently selling below $100. It has a flash, 3x optical zoom, digital image stabilization, video recording capability at VGA resolution and 30fps, a microphone, and a nice, spacious 3″ screen. The camera is physically pretty thin, and stylish.Exactly because the camera is a cheaper one, it has fewer buttons than the $200/$250 range Kodak digicams, but this actually works to its advantage. Switching between video, auto and scene mode is very organic, and the joystick carries through actions like “flash on/off”, focusing, and screen information. Through the main menu you can choose between focusing options, a choice of 4 white balance presets, SDHC formatting, image and video resolution. The main problems with the product is extreme purple fringing, a very mushy look at the upper right side of the image, and complete inability to do macro in any way that’s useful. Adding to that, it takes up to 4-5 seconds to save a JPEG image, which is a rather slow performance. Nevertheless, the “you get what you pay for” doctrine applies here, and the M883 is better than most cameras in that price class. But don’t expect miracles.

YouTube video, watch in better quality here.

* All-in-One USB 2.0 Card Reader/Writer
This travel-size flash reader is an extremely useful tool, for the right price. It’s extremely small and it easily fit in my laptop bag, along its small USB cable. It not only supports all the major flash format card standards, but it is amazing that it can fit in there a Compact Flash reader and full SDHC support. In fact, finding specifically SDHC readers is still an exercise in patience, so this reader has it all: features, and small size.

* Transcend 16GB Class 6 SDHC Memory Card
With the above camera and reader I used a Class-6 16 GB SDHC card; it worked out of the box and without compatibility problems. When I used it with the above reader and the Acer Aspire One netbook that I also had with me, it flew. Reading/writing from and to it was really fast and without problems. A good card to trust for your AVCHD needs as well.

* Leather Case for iPhone
From the four review items in this blog post, this is the worst one. It doesn’t properly fit the iPhone. Sure, it looks good on paper, with a nice build quality, a magnetic lock, all the right cuts around the speaker, microphone, volume keys and camera, but when you actually use it with the iPhone, it proves that can’t be trusted. When opening the magnetic lock to access the phone, the iPhone doesn’t securely sit in the case, and I had two cases where the iPhone almost flew out of place to the floor. I had to use an additional silicone iPhone case to make sit properly in this case.

And the whining begins. Barack Obama chose Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff in the new administration. I read about him, and to me his life choices sound ultra-biased about Israel (who in his right mind volunteers to serve in the army of a country he never extensively lived in?) to be in the White House at a time where everyone is so fed up with the Israel-Palestinian problems and wants a solution that works well for everybody. I don’t know the man personally of course, so I might be wrong, but I usually can read into people’s faces, and this guy spells trouble to me. I don’t believe him to be a neutral force, and I expect him to lobby hard for Israel. That’s good for Israel actually, but the question really is: who will lobby for Palestine?

A year ago the Internets were littered by Ron Paul news stories, it was painful to read Digg with all the gaming his advocates were doing to get Paul’s word out to the population. But as I knew he wasn’t going to get the Republican chrism to run for President, I avoided reading more about him.

Since last night’s charge of the presidential election, I gave him a chance though. I never read the biographies of politicians, as I am not interested in their past, marriage, religion, or their lives in general. I am interested only in their political positions and the day forward. And so I sat down and read Ron Paul’s.

Reading about his foreign policy, it became very clear to me that the guy is a xenophobe. Sure, as a non-US citizen it’s nice to hear that he wanted to withdraw troops from around the world, bring them home and stop messing around with third world countries, but when reading that he also wanted to withdraw USA from the UN/NATO/etc, and instead secure the borders adamantly and create harsh laws for immigrants, it became very clear to me that the reason for his non-imperialistic position was not pacifism, but xenophobia. He seems to be the kind of guy who longs for the idealistic, growing America of the late ’40s, early ’50s. Problem is, this is 2008.

Some of his internal policies were ok (smaller government, no surveillance), some were very Republican-ish and unfair (e.g. gay, capital punishment, abortion issues). But it’s that xenophobia vibe I get that would make me to never have rooted for him. In fact, McCain and all his shortcomings, seems 10 times better to me that Ron Paul as a candidate.

Ultimately, apart from my favorite Mike Gravel (read the link for his liberal positions) who opted out early in the race, the best guy won, and that’s Obama.

I have a b43-based broadcom BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01) chipset for wifi on my 1.5 years old DELL laptop (almost the same model as the one DELL originally sold Ubuntu with), but the b43 module is very unstable: it drops the connection after a few minutes. So I have to use ndiswrapper. I installed the firmware just fine, and blacklisted ssb, and b43 in order to force ndiswrapper to load.

Unfortunately, even after having blacklisted ssb, it still loads and takes control of the wireless chipset and simply does not let ndiswrapper to do its thing. It loads the “b43-pic-bridge” driver instead of letting ndiswrapper to use its “wl” one.

The reason for ssb loading EVEN if it’s blacklisted, it’s because of the b44 ethernet driver which is loaded automatically, that also needs ssb. You see, this DELL laptop has both a b43 and a b44 chipset in there, and so even if I have b43 and ssb blacklisted, b44 keeps loading ssb back before ndiswrapper is. And so ssb takes control of the wifi chipset (with the b43 driver blacklisted, so it doesn’t load any driver, it just keeps the control tight), and poor ndiswrapper fails.

This is a chicken and the egg problem btw, but I didn’t have these problems with the older Ubuntu, because it didn’t use the b44/b43/ssb modules back then for these chipsets. Now that it does, this needs to be fixed somehow. Either they need to fix the b43 module to be rock solid so I don’t need to use ndiswrapper, or fix the ssb problem to allow ndiswrapper take control over the wifi chipset.

I filed a bug report. The way to go around it is to also blacklist b44, and then manually load it on startup after the ndiswrapper line on the /etc/modules file (so it loads ssb after ndiswrapper has already taken control of the chipset). But obviously this needs fixing.

I am not an American citizen, so I couldn’t vote yesterday. But I am very happy that Obama won the presidency, as I believe that this president is destined to change America, and the world. This was the first time in my life that I cried for a political reason. Obama’s speech was inspirational, as it wasn’t a triumphed speech, but a “this is when the work starts” one. He even mentioned “the world” in several occasions in his speech, while McCain only mentioned “America”. Obama even mentioned how the world would be in 100 years from now, which is a big thing for an American president to say, given that in the past most wouldn’t mention things passed 4 or 5 years. That’s the big difference between the two candidates, and why Obama is important.

However, I can’t say that when I look at the election’s results from a 10,000 ft view I am happy with them. When taking the popular vote into account, there was only 5% of overall difference between the two candidates (5.7 million votes of difference out of 130 million votes). To my liberal mind, Obama just made sense and McCain didn’t. So having only 52% of the US agreeing with common sense, is still troublesome to me.

The only major city-counties that came close to my ideal election result (ideal as in, how it makes sense to my mind) are the cities I always loved: San Francisco and Boston. Both cities, voted ~80% for Obama each! These are progressive cities, liberal, and full of techies. My own kind of people. I feel blessed to be living in the Silicon Valley, near SF.

Washington DC also voted for Obama: an astonishing 93%. While there is a big african american population living there, it also has some of the youngest population, and people who work in the White House and see how things are running there on a daily basis. The fact that DC voted so highly for “change” it just shows how much change is needed! It’s a testament that something was wrong in the White House in the first place!

The rest of the US (with the exception of Hawaii, and the younger voters) was less impressive. Evidence to this are all the gay-related propositions (I think there were 5 throughout the US). All 5 results were against the gay rights. Even in California, which is considered progressive, the rural Christian fundamentalists voted for Prop8 (at least at 62% of the precincts as I write this, “yes on prop8″ is ahead by 4.5%). Most of the Silicon Valley residents voted against, but they were not enough. Heck, even most of LA voted for Prop8, LA for Christ’s sake.

So there’s more time that America needs to be as progressive and modern as SF and Boston are today. At least 20-25 years. The next generation that is.

Thanks to Billy for the funny video link!

Another DVXUser competition, Twilightfest, opened its doors for viewing and voting (free registration required). Because Comcast now has bandwidth consumption restrictions I will not be able to watch all films, so I limited my viewing to films shot with the HV20 (4), RED (3), AVCHD HF100 (1), and HPX-170 (1) cameras.

From these four HV20 films I watched, the “Calls From The Führerbunker” was probably the best. It had good direction and cinematography, beating out the rest of the HV20 films that actually used 35mm adapters. The also HV20-based “Mr. I” film was not too bad either, but it was strangely under exposed (it felt underexposed rather than “dark”, which I am sure it was the intention of the cinematographer). I was indifferent about the third HV20 film, dubbed “The Box“, while the fourth one, “Pain Container“, I didn’t like.

The HF100 film “Benjamin Merrymeadows and the Curse of the Four-Holed Button” was amateurish and silly, while “Broadcast“, shot with a RED One camera, was the best of the three RED-based films in the competition. Finally, I watched the “Cold Calls by John Whalen” (shot with the HPX-170) because it had so many comments in the forum. And indeed, it was amazingly good. This film was the only one that I wanted to have more of, and wasn’t feeling ready in clicking “fast forward” on the media player. That was amazingly well done and clever. Most of the films in the competition used the Panasonic DVX and HVX cameras, as usual, but as I said, I didn’t watch any of these, so some gems might be among them.