Vastly Important Notes

I cancelled my Kindle order, twice.

Hemingway's six words? Mine are nonfiction.

PIVMAN (was almost) Legend

About a year ago my previous company, CoreStreet, was approached by the makers of "I Am Legend". They wanted a PIVMAN handheld to potentially use as a prop in the movie. We lent them the equipment, but never heard whether or not PIVMAN actually made it in to the shoot and survived the editing process.

I went to see the movie on opening night with a few west-coast CoreStreet expatriates and the goal of cheering wildly for our favorite inanimate prop. (I was going to make a Will Smith joke here, but it wouldn't make sense as he's quite convincingly emotive.) Unfortunately, PIVMAN was replaced by some kind of large, hand-held computer that pretended to be a virus-detecting eyeball scanner.

It's a good thing PIVMAN was cut, since the plot called for the replacement scanner to fail in a particularly embarrassing way while sorting out zombies from humans and I'm not sure I would have wanted to be associated with that sort of thing.

For those of you now hankering for some PIVMAN action, the original comic book (for which I get co-author credits, w00t!) is still a good read as far as corporate marketing brochures go. Maybe the next issue will have zombies.

Unboxing the new iMac

Make it, so?

Geech continues to speak truth to power with this trenchant denunciation of Make magazine.  I agree, Make jumped the shark, whittled with found dental tools out of homemade soap, about six months ago.  And by "shark" I mean "bong".

I propose we start a magazine called Break, dedicated to running well produced photo essays of Make stuff being systematically reverted to their constituent elements.

A Plan for Rescuing Star Wars

I always knew that George Lucas harbors a burning hatred for all things that once made Star Wars great.  It's still common for arguments to break out at the office over whether Episode 1 or Episode 2 was the most egregious offender ("Remember JarJar!", "Remember Baby Fett!"), but all true geeks agree that watching the latest trilogy was like having garbage dumped onto your most cherished childhood memories.  Now there's proof that this was literally the intended effect.  Witness this officially licensed R2-D2 trash can on sale from ThinkGeek:

So it was really no great loss when Lucas announced that, although there were always supposed to be nine movies in the series, the anticipated final trilogy was never going to be made.  Better to have Star Wars be 3/6 good than 6/9 crap.  Ok, maybe it was only ever 2.5/6 good as there are some doubts about Jedi.  Still, what if the final trilogy could be made well?  What if it could be so good as to redeem the whole series??  Here's my plan:

1. Give Peter Jackson a billion dollars and send him New Zealand for three years to shoot the new trilogy all at once, ala Lord of the Rings.

2. Do NOT, for the love of god, let George Lucas know that this is going on.

3. Only after the new trilogy is completely finished, approach Lucas and see if you can negotiate the Stars Wars license.  If he says "yes", you've just saved Star Wars!  If he says "no", just re-render the CG with different looking alien models and you've got the world's best sci-fi movie trilogy anyway.

I think this could work, but George must never, ever, know.

Hmm, actually that trash can is kindda neat.  Awww, man, they're sold out.

The Pros and Cons of Biometrics

I wrote this simple article for a new publication - the ASSA ABLOY Future Lab - about biometrics.  If you want to read it for some reason, please do so.

You keep using that word...

I've received much good feedback on my last post about the pudding-headed report criticising the new DHS smartcard program.  Many people are justifyiably mystified by the report's references to Bluetooth.  The strange thing isn't that the new smartcard doesn't use Bluetooth, but that smart cards and Bluetooth have absolutely nothing to do with each other.  It's like asking, "Doesn't the new Honda Accord suffer from all the well documented problems of Esperanto?"  The short answer is "no", the real answer is, "what the hell are you talking about?"

The problem, of course, is buzzword creep.  With all the industry terminology floating around these days, it's hard for people to remember whether combining two particular concepts produces an argument that's coherent (like biometrics and privacy) or less so (like pancakes and the doctrine of original intent).  That modesty does not typically hinder such people from writing technology assesments or legal opinions is beyond the scope of this blog post. 

Bluetooth, a fine technology with many years of buzzwordiness behind it, is particularly suseptible to such content-free punditry.  In service to all the technology companies who make perfectly good products that have nothing to do with Bluetooth, but feel market pressure to be 100% buzzword compliant, I offer the following decal:

You wouldn't put it on a cell phone (whether it had Bluetooth or not), but you could stick it onto a toaster, tax software, or a government smart card.  I'd start sticking it on our software boxes, but I bet our attorneys wouldn't be too happy.

Stay out of my conference rooms

I remember long-ago debates with my friends about whether or not it was appropriate for children to play with toy guns.  Those were simpler times.  Now parents get to decide whether it's appropriate for children to play with toy automated fixed perimeter defense rapid fire cannons. 

Either way, I have just located the next office gadget.  After all, we did name our conference rooms after historically significant fortifications.   

Field test report to follow.

No dripping!

There are machines outside of hotels and office buildings in Japan into which you stick your wet umbrella and get it instantly wrapped in plastic.  This prevents wet floors and makes it look like everyone just bought a new umbrella. 

I'm reporting this fact to my loyal readers on a broadband wireless connection, while traveling at 270 kilometers per hour on the bullet train to Kyoto.

In my mind, this raises three fundamental questions about my own home country:

1. Why don't we have magic umbrella-wrapping machines? 

2. Why don't we have broadband wireless connections that work at 270 kilometers per hour?

3. Why don't we have trains that work at 270 kilometers per hour?

Write your congressman.  It's time for some pork barrel spending.

Mmmm pork barrel.

Back in Japan

I’m back in Japan this week.

The good news about Tokyo cab rides: there’s flawless, high-speed wireless Internet access even at 60 mph.

The bad news: You don’t get to go 60 mph very often and every trip takes an hour.

Net net: Lots of time for blogging.