Mark Cuban wants to put digital projectors in all his Landmark theatres. This would drastically improve the quality that we the audience see.

Best quote from the article

"People get frightened about all kinds of things in Hollywood," he says. "That's not my system. I don't have a business to protect. I have a business to build."

PS - I'm moving ... about 7 blocks.

Following on this thread. The problem has been that Microsoft has gone more and more verbose on names that should be short (like Windows Media Player, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005). Not only is it too long, it also stresses the Windows monopoly, which has bad connotations.

So here are some criteria for new names for the Media Center: 1. short, 2. descriptive, 3. memorable, 4. does not cause confusion, 5. can be used as a verb.

Well, there's the interactive Media Activity Center (iMAC).

But all jokes aside, here are some suggestions and rejections.

You could call it the Icon for interactive converter (because many people still call a channel switcher a converter). But it's not fully adequate, since Icon is already an overloaded term, and the i* moniker may cause confusion with apple products.

You could follow the xBox route and call it an mBox. But that doesn't fit well as a verb (imaging saying, "why don't you just mBox it", that just sounds dumb), and it's slightly misleading, since MS doesn't sell the box (unlike the xBox), only the software. Names like xTV and x(Anything) are no good because 'x' is so overused, and TV watching is only one feature of the software (would you also call it xStereo because it plays music).

I like Microsoft Metaphor, because it's vague, sounds sophisticated, and has absolutely no meaning. But it goes deeper and sees how entertainment is a metaphor for ... well, something.

There's also Microsoft Moment. Just imagine the tagline "live in the moment" (yes, it's cliched, but the public will eat it up). I can see the commercial now - "At Microsoft, we live in the moment, that's why we're never bound by the fixed scheduling of cable stations and the inconvenience of leaving the house to rent a movie. You want to watch your favourite show, but can't sit at home and wait because of your busy schedule? Let us record it for you. You have a couple of friends over, and want to watch a movie? Stream it from the internet..." So it satisfies most of the criteria, but what about usage as a verb? "Just moment it" doesn't quite fit. But you can use a short form, you can say to your friends, "just mint it", and that fits on many levels, either recording a show, or burning a DVD (like minting it from a press).

Whatever name's out there, MS needs to seriously rebrand its OS. Windows followed by 10 descriptors (like XP Pro N for Europe) just doesn't cut it anymore.

Update: so now that I think about it more, they should go back to the basics, and just drop the Windows and Edition, so it's simply Microsoft MC. It's simple, descriptive (Media Center), easy to pronounce (it rolls off the tongue quite well), can be easily used as a verb, and I like the tie-in to emcee, or Master of Ceremonies, whose job is to serve entertainment.

John and I looked at an apartment tonight. It's on the hill, not far from where I live now. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, 1075 square feet.

Pros:
- cheaper for me
- view of space needle and downtown
- balcony - BBQ allowed
- big kitchen
- paintable
- parking in building
- closer to Broadway
- wood fireplace
- free cable
- new building - good water pressure and electricals
- just renovated - all new lighting
- good placement/separation of bedrooms
- two bathrooms
- washer/dryer in apartment
- dishwasher
- quieter neighbourhood
- storage closet outside perfect for snowboard and hockey equipment

Cons:
- more expensive for John
- less privacy
- slightly less storage in apartment
- smaller bedrooms
- farther from coffee
- farther from chapel
- farther from downtown
- layout not as optimal for TV watching
- will need to move

Things to investigate: cellphone coverage.

I think we'll put in an application.

Yesterday, at the last minute, after receiving confirmation that there was indeed something to do there, we decided to drive up to Vancouver. In our usual unprepared fashion, we didn't leave until about 6 pm.

Half an hour out of Seattle, we hit traffic. There was an accident up ahead. While listening to the iPod shuffling our songs, we hear a warning bell going off. I notice that the Neon's temperature gauge is beyond the red. We pull over, pop the hood, and take a look. Diagnosis 1 was that the Neon was out of oil (which it was). So we wait 10 minutes for the engine to cool down, then gun across 4 lanes of traffic to the first exit. After another 5 minutes of confused driving in circles, we finally find a gas station and bought many quarts of 10W40.

All things are well, and we continue our journey after getting some gas station hot dogs (never again). No problems until the border, where we hit the red again. This is getting peculiar. We cross over to Canada (where we no longer have AAA protection) without even getting our passports checked, and pop the hood again. Diagnosis 2 - the fan isn't working. We think that the mechanic, after replacing Matt's starter, forgot to connect the electrics for the fan, so we're fine when driving on the highway, but when idling at a standstill, the radiator is getting no cool air love.

We had to pull over one more time inside Vancouver because of the inner city stop and go traffic. But we think we've nailed down the problem. After a late night out and a 3 hour ride back, I am tired and ready for a nap.

In all my years as a student, I've still not mastered the spaghetti.

I never know how much to put in, and it always ends being too much or too little. I also can't handle the ratio between spaghetti sauce and spaghetti. Sometimes my spaghetti is drenched in sweet sweet spaghetti sauce, and sometimes it's as dry as a mormon's liquor cabinet during prohibition.

Last night, I cooked enough for at least 3 servings (and they're my servings, not regular people servings), and only ate 1. Some might say that this is good, since I will have left overs for lunch and dinner. But it really isn't.

Number 1, I don't bring lunches to work. The profile of a plastic container doesn't fit well inside my bag (I hate putting plastic containers in a bag sideways, I have a mortal fear that it will inevitably open and spill its contents all over my multitude of electronic gadgets). Number 2, I don't like leftovers, especially spaghetti, since the noodles dry up in the fridge, and the sauce becomes brittle and tastless. Number 3, whenever I have leftovers, I feel like I'm being inflexible. I have to go home and finish my leftovers lest they go bad, instead of going out on a whim.

So how do I cook spaghetti? Do I need to go out and buy one of those spaghetti measurers with the round holes? What's the optimal amount of sauce (keeping in mind that I also like meatballs, and will cook them with the sauce)? It's times like these when I think it's easier to just eat out everyday.

I finally decided to get off my lazy butt and wake up early this morning so I could get some errands done. I drove to the customs office in the shipping district so I can get some paperwork done on importing my car.

The process was pretty boring. What interested me was that the customs officer was wearing a gun, at a desk job. Their office is located in a business complex of four or five three storied buildings. I'm not quite sure what possible use they could have for a gun at the office, but there it was.

On a side note, I've been in the US off and on for a while now, and I've always been intrigued by what they call American cheese. When you go to a Subway here, they have an off-white, slightly yellow cheese called American. It kind of looks like cheddar cheese (from the Canadian Subways), but when I ask for cheddar, they always go for the orange cheddar, which I don't like on my sandwich. So I ask for the other one, and they say, "oh, American cheese".

So I did a little a9.com'ing (ha, okay fine, it was google) the other day, and apparently, American cheese is just young cheddar cheese (or processed cheese, if you look here). They just needed to call it some patriotic name like American.

Go figure.

Everyone knows that if you buy from amazon.com, they'll also give you recommendations on other products based on what you've bought. This is a really powerful feature, since rarely can a brick and mortar store give you recommendations based on past purchases and other customers' buying patterns.

But are you tired of your last Happy Naked Girls purchase, or your little indiscretions drawing in embarassing recommendations when you visit amazon.com? Well, just follow these simple steps to improve your recommendations.

Step 1 - go to amazon.com

Here's the link.

Step 2 - get an account, buy something, or add something to your wishlist

If you're already a customer, you'll need to sign in to get recommendations.

To start a new account, click on the 'Start Here' link as shown below.



Then surf around, and add something to your wishlist, or buy something.

Step 3 - go to the recommendations page

Click on the 'recommendations' link from the amazon.com gateway, as shown below.



Or you can try the link here.

Step 4 - find the Improve Your Recommendations box

Scroll down, it's on the left, and looks like this



Step 5 - repeat for each link in the box

Click on the link, after you sign in (I know, it's a pain, but it ensures security), you can rate each of your purchases (or wish list items, or rated items, etc), and also check/uncheck the box below the ratings to specify whether you want that item to be used when amazon.com calculates your recommendations. So goodbye to embarassing pictures showing up on your amazon.com gateway, hello to more useful stuff you can buy.

Saturday we went biking at St. Edwards park out by Kirkland. It's a really close drive, only about 30 minutes from downtown Seattle, bordering on the north end of Lake Washington. We had a little trouble finding the trails at first, always running into trail blocks stating that the trail is for hiking only. But once we did hit the trail, it was pretty decent. It reminds me of the hydrocuts in Waterloo, not a lot of climbing, single track, somewhat technical, and very close to the city.

Sunday we went to look at boats. Conclusion: boats are expensive. Ski boat + docking + insurance + gas = $700 a month.

After a nice 25 for $25 dinner at Brasa with the kids, I headed over to the Croc to see Tegan and Sara. I really liked their bantering at their last show with Melissa Ferrick.

Who knew that they'd be sold out? This was an unforeseen turn of events. After standing outside for 45 minutes, seeing many people (including a couple of the bartenders at Chapel) pass by, trying to convince their tour manager to no avail, and talking to a crazy scalper who wanted $30 which I wasn't ready to pay, I was ready to give up and go home. Just then, some random guy came out and said that he had 3 extra spots. I jumped at the opportunity and went inside.

The best part? He didn't even want any money.

Last night on Fox news, they had a compelling feature about the lack of security at airports because the rent-a-cops hired aren't trained to recognize fake IDs at a glance.

Apparently, someone in Q13's news department read Sunday's New York Times magazine, where Richard A. Clarke (the last counterterrorism czar) wrote a piece called Real ID's, Real Dangers.

In these days when the first lesson in any university level class is the wrongs of plagiarism, where is the journalistic integrity?

The lack of dissent is sometimes boring. Living in Seattle, we're hard pressed to find republicans. Even when I see "Bush '04" bumper stickers, I have to think twice whether they're for real, or if it's some ironic form of sarcasm.

Yesterday there was a march through Capitol Hill (Seattle's "alternative living" neighbourhood) for gay marriage, but it seemed almost lifeless since there was no anti-protesters opposing the protesters. I want to see a good protester/anti-protester shouting match with the riot squad in the middle.

Sometimes I wonder what it's like to live in places like Washington DC, where people from different parts of the political spectrum really clash (or is that too much of a fantasy, and everyone in DC is a centrist?).

There's now two competing models of (for profit) online music distribution, one is the more traditional buy your music for 99 cents (ala iTunes), where you buy DRM'd (i.e. copy protected) music that you can play on up to 3 computers, your iPod, can burn to a CD ... and so on. Then there's Napster's subscription service, where for around $15 a month, you get all the music you can consume. The catch is, once you stop your subscription, all your music goes away.

I can actually see the subscription service catching on, especially for the pop music genre. To explain this, we really need to take a look at video rentals. People think it's cheaper to rent a video for $5 instead of buying it for $25 because they'll most likely only watch it once, and they've decided that it's more cost effective (especially if you're a big consumer of videos) to rent because for the same amount of money, you get to see more movies. This is kind of like the pop music scene. The average top-20 song has a shelf life of maybe half a year before people start saying "that's so last year". And once people start on new music, they don't really need to go back and listen to the old songs (especially since pop music is so homogeneous these days) -- when was the last time you hear a Backstreet Boys song on the radio? With a subscription service, they can "rent" the most popular songs of the moment, and quickly move on without having to shell out more capital to sample new songs. And it's worth it if more than 15 new songs come out each month.

I think it can really work if they play their cards right.

In the cemetery.

I'm drab, crabby and friendless. I fill my days fighting a constant battle to keep my dignity. Loneliness is my curse -- our species' curse -- it's the gun that shoots the bullets that makes us dance on a saloon floor and humiliate ourselves in front of strangers... Maybe you're ashamed to be reading about loneliness -- maybe someone will catch you and then they'll know your secret stain. And then maybe you're not even very sure what loneliness is -- that's common. We cripple our children for life by not telling them what loneliness is, all of its shades and tones and implications. When it clubs us on the head, usually just after we leave home, we're blindsided. We have no idea what hit us. We think we're diseased, schizoid, bipolar, monstrous and lacking in dietary chromium. It takes us until thirty to figure out what it was that sucked the joy from our youth, that made our brains shriek and burn on the inside, even while our exteriors made us seem as confident and bronzed as Qantas pilots. Loneliness.

-- a new novel by Douglas Coupland.