Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Well, I thought I’d post something on this beautiful Sunday evening. Luckily I spent a few hours outside today already walking around the neighborhood, up to the zoo, and enjoying the sun that’s been so rare in the Washington DC Area for the past few months!

First of all, I’ve been adding a few links of interest on the right hand side of the page. I could post a bazillion more, I suppose, but I thought I’d build it up gradually and eventually start categorizing things a bit more. For now, since the list is small I thought I’d actually mention the stuff on it:

• Gizmodo - This is a great blog for anyone interested in gadgetry and consumer electronics. It has the latest news about anything related to this field. A lot of the stuff I post here I get from Gizmodo.
• Marie’s World Tour - this woman got to travel around the whole world without flying. Quite an adventure which in theory I’d love to do myself, but I think I would probably start going nuts after a couple of months - it took her I think about a year! I’ve only read some of her entries - there’s probably enough to fill a book!
• Off Wing Opinion - This is the blog of Eric Mcerlain, a friend of mine, who introduced me to blogging. His blog is primarily about sports and in particular hockey.
• Photographyblog - a blog all about photography
• The Black Monk - a link to the electronic text version of one of my favorite short stories. It was penned by the Russian master of short prose, Anton Chekhov, and is about a scholar who deprives himself of sleep to the point where he starts hallucinating. Quite entertaining.
• Email me - just a quick link to send me mail
• AIM: DVDmon - a link to send me an instant message through AOL Instant Messenger. I can sometimes also be contacted via MSN (leviwallach@hotmail.com), yahoo (lwallach), and ICQ (116719291).
• About - a little bio on myself.
• DC Metro Blog Map. This is another site that spurred me on a bit to start my own blog. I thought it was really cool the way they created a clickable DC Metro Map where clicking on different stops on the metro yielded lists of people close to those stops who have blogs. I’m on the Dupont Circle metro stop, which is the closest to my neighborhood of Adams Morgan.

I will be adding more as time goes on. Right now I am trying to figure out a way within Blog City (my weblog host) to create a separate stream of blog entries about what I’m reading or watching on DVD. Hopefully I will get that up shortly as well.

One more quick item. My brother in law sent me a link to this article in the New York Times about how this guy is able to give you enhanced cognitive abilities via electrodes. Quite amazing! Unfortunately the times archives their stuff after 7 or 10 days, after which you’ll have to pay for it. In case you read this after June 29, the article is called “Savant for a Day” and is dated June 22.

I thought this would be a compelling movie about civil rights of Aborigines in Australia, but it turned out to be this weird x-files type of mystery/fantasy. It was interesting on one level, but pretty silly on others. Me and those I watched it with couldn’t help going into MST3K mode after a while. The DVD has an amazing transfer from Criterion - so much so that at first I thought it was a modern movie that just had been set in the 70’s. It drags in parts too. I would probably give it a C+/B-/2-2.5 stars.

Personally I hadn’t heard much about this device until really recently. As many might know, Palm and Handspring just merged, but the device that Handspring has been developing for the last 12-15 months is still slated to go on sale by this fall in the $400-500 price range. It looks pretty slick! The only question I still have is whether or not the SD slot will be able to handle SDIO cards. As I noted in a previous entry, the first SDIO Wifi card was just announced. Here is the full story from Cnet along with a long video interview of one of the Treo 600 developers who is demoing the prototype for the camera! Thanks to Gizmodo for the reference!

It was way back in the Spring of 1992. I was working for CIEE (Counsel for International Educational Exchange) at the time, as the Program Assistant or East European and Russian Programs. CIEE was kind enough to send me to visit their programs in Budapest and Prague as I was going to visit my sister who was studying in Scotland at the time anyway. I took the train from Budapest to Prague and decided to buy some snack in case I got hungry during the trip. I didn’t know Hungarian and I guess I just picked something in a can that looked like it might be meat or fish. At some point I got really hungry and opened the can. I think it was fairly dark, but I just remember what I at was white-ish and tasted kind of like fishy pate. I had no clue what it was, but it tasted really good to me.

Since then I remembered this once in a great while and wondered what the hell I ate. I hoped it wasn’t something really horrible! I would always peruse the isles of international food stores or gourmet food stores looking for something canned and unrecognizable that I could try. This went on for over ten years.

Today, my search ended! I happened across this international food store/restaurant/bakery in Alexandria very close to where I work. I would never have known this place existed if not for the post office right next to it being the closest to my office. I went in and was overcome by the amazing selections of products. The store is simply called “Mediterranean Bakery” but they have a website that’s called EastWestMart.com. I have not really looked at this site, but they take online orders. The prices in the store, in any case, were very reasonable, especially for international stuff, which is often priced in the stratosphere!

I came across this container among the scores of different ones they had there labeled simply Roland Smoked Cod Liver. This looked very promising! I mean, there was no picture, but this sounded like it was the closest to whatever I thought I had eaten back then. When I got home, I popped it open. It was indeed kind of white-ish non-descript blobs of stuff. Well, of liver, I guess! I crossed my fingers, got ready to spit it out if it was too vile, and took a piece. Yes! I had found it!

For those who haven’t tried this and aren’t squeamish about trying new things, or have a dislike for fish or things with unusual textures, I do highly recommend you give this stuff a shot. It kind of has the smokey taste of a sardine, but it is actually less “fishy” then that. It is more mild somehow. The consistency is very smooth, kind of like pate, but even more so. Like it is almost in a state between solid and liquid.

There’s been a lot of new attention put on cod liver oil in the last 5-10 years due to it’s Omega-3 content and the health benefits linked to that. So I am assuming a similar benefit from eating the liver itself! Unfortunately the can doesn’t have any nutritional information, only ingredients (cold liver, salt). I am assuming it is mostly fat (lots of Omega-3), some carbs since it’s an organ “meat” and some protein. But I have no clue how much of each. All I know is that it was a great treat that took me back down memory lane in a direction I thought I might never have found again!

Sorry, looks like I spoke to soon - at least concerning the Tmobile 2002 Pocket PC Phone edition (HTC). It has an SD slot, but not SDIO. This means it can use the SD memory, but not the expansion cards such as the Wifi card mentioned in the last post.

Neither does AT&T’s (the other GSM carrier here in the US) Siemens SX56 have an SDIO slot, only SD. They do offer the Palm Tungsten W, which is a GSM Phone with PalmOS (albeit not the latest PalmOS 5), that does have an SDIO slot. Unfortunately the SDIO Wifi card offered by Socket Communications only works in Pocket PC’s! Argh! You can’t win, I tell you!

Well, it looks like I have finally found the answer to my ongoing struggle to find a convergence device that includes a phone (preferably GSM) with cellular data capabilities, a PDA that has good syncing ability with Outlook, and Wifi. It seems like it should be a no-brainer for a company to develop such a device. Especially T-mobile, who has the Starbucks/Borders hotspot network, you would think, would want to capitalize on this and offer something that would let you do high-speed data when at Starbucks and lower-speed when on the train.

As I mentioned yesterday, I have yet to find such a device, but now, thanks to Gizmodo, we learn that Socket Communications will be coming out with a Wifi SDIO card! So what, you ask? Well, there are a bunch of PocketPC and PalmOS PDA-phones out there, but as I’ve mentioned, none do Wifi. But most if not all of the Pocket PC Phones as well as the Palm Tungsten C and T (although the C already has built-in Wifi) have an SDIO slot for expansion modules or memory. As far as I know, up until now, there’s been no wifi SD cards, this is the first. Of course, another format of card called Compact Flash, which is also used for memory, is large enough that there are numerous wifi options built using this format. Many PocketPC devices come with a Compact Flash slot, but no PocketPC Phones come with such a slot, only SD, at least currently.

What this means is that finally, we will have now a large choice of PocketPC Phone devices that will allow us to do wifi as well! Of course, we will have to wait about 6 weeks for it to come out, and the cost of the card and the PocketPC Phone together might top $700 in some cases depending on which carrier you are currently with and which one you will be switching to (or staying with as the case may be). But I have seen the Tmobile 2002 PocketPC Phone Edition for as low as $200 on eBay and if this card is discounted at all, you might be able to pick up a brand new solution for around $300, which is the same price as the Color Sidekick. Not a bad deal, I think!

Reading the boards over at hiptop.com, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Color Sidekick may not be worth the upgrade, unless of course you have lots of disposable income!

I’ve had my monochrome Sidekick for about 7 months now, and although it is really nice to be able to email/web-browse/instant message people from almost anywhere, there are some serious problems with the device which have become more and more annoying over time. The two biggest for me are reception and the PIM apps (address book, to-do list, calendar, notepad, etc.). With regards to reception, I am constantly dropping calls. Even in my apartment where normally the reception is very good, I’ll be sitting on the couch talking to a friend and all of a sudden, blam! No signal! It can get infuriating especially if it happens more than once within a few minutes, which has happened countless times! So as a phone, this device is not reliable. But even with the data connection, I’ve had similar problems. Data connectivity will drop, and with both data and voice, you have the problem of having to reboot the device sometimes when being out of reception range for too long. For example, I’ll go into a building or into the metro where signal drops to nothing, and when I come back out again, chances are I will have to turn the unit on and off in order for it to “figure out” that it needs to start looking for a signal again. Of course this takes 2-3 minutes to complete! It just goes into a permanent sleep if it can’t get a signal for more than 20 minutes or something like that.

I had high hopes that the new Color Sidekick would have much improved reception, but early reports from folks on hiptop.com seems to indicate that the reception is about the same as the old monochrome Sidekick, or the Nokia 3390, which has similar reception issues. My complaint with the PIM apps are theoretically remediable by Danger putting out a new version of software or operating system for the device, something they could do “over the air” without users having to do anything. The hardware reception issues, I’m afraid, are not going to be fixable in such an easy manner.

If you’re going to use one of these just for emailing, web-browsing and IM’ing, you might not be that bad off. It has a nice design and apparently the color screen is very nice. Unfortunately for those of us who have it just as much for its phone as it’s data and need something with good PIM apps and ones the sync well with the desktop, $300 seems like a lot to pay for something with so many limitations. I have been looking at other potential phones for a while and really like the various incarnations of Pocket PC Phones and PalmOS phones, but the one key feature for me in addition to the PDA and the phone itself is internet connectivity. How the Sidekick actually connects to the internet is really nice, but only when it works! If one of these PDA phones could replicate that via a GSM/GPRS connection, that would be great. But what I am really holding out for is one that in addition to this, also allows one to connect via a much faster wifi connection. So far such a phone isn’t being sold. Hopefully we will see one later this year, but till then I’ll still be searching for that perfect all-in-one device!

Maybe Apple could come out with a combo Palm-iPod-Sidekick-GSM-Phone which also has satellite capability and GPS built in? Ok, maybe next year!

Well, I thought this article might be a good enough way for me to introduce my nutrition/dietary leanings. I’m a big advocate of low-carb. I was a big low-fat advocate for much of the 90’s until I saw the light almost three years ago and started following a plan called Protein Power, which is similar to Atkins but different in a lot of ways too - it emphasizes health improvements over weight-loss, does not require one to be in ketosis (but also says there’s nothing wrong with it if you are), and generally explains a great deal of the science behind the plan, backing it up with lots of studies and great logical arguments. I’ve even written a document called Protein Power in a Nutshell, which I freely distribute to those who are interested. The article caught me as funny because I have asked many times for a substitute for the potato, rice, etc., but I normally ask them to just add extra veggies and I don’t think I’ve ever been turned down!

DPReview is reporting on a new line of digital cameras under the “Qualia” brand. These are super small, with tons of accessories and even lcd’s (no small feat for tiny cameras). Of course the coolness factor comes with a price - around $3,200! With the rate that these things devalue, they will probably be a few hundred dollars in a couple of years. Or maybe not, maybe it will just stay a product for the rich - they don’t even need to be geeks anymore since it seems everyone has a digital camera these days!

Well, just finished my latest book from the audio-book service Audible.com (if you end up signing up with them, I’d appreciate a referral - my user-name is “leviwallach”). For those of you unfamiliar with this service, it has various subscription options which bring the average price of an audio-book down to $10 a pop. This is for any title, including completely unabridged tomes that would require 30+ CD’s or tapes! The catch is that it’s all on your computer, or you can download it to certain MP3 devices. If you don’t have one of the devices they support, one of their subscription options comes with a free player, called the Audible Otis, which also plays MP3 and WMA files. This is the device I have, although I am lusting after an iPod since the Otis only comes with 64MB of RAM. I’ve been trying to get it to work with external SD Memory, but it looks like it will only take MMC.

Anyway, the book I just finished was Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. I got it primarily because it was one of the books recommended by Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, and it does, indeed, remind me a bit of that book! It’s about Orwell’s days as as struggling young writer and how he worked as a dishwasher in France, and basically became a tramp on returning to London.

Of course, this takes place in the 1930’s, so one wonders really how similar things are now, but it is still a fascinating look back at poverty some 70 years ago in Europe, and probably there’s still a good bit of this that is still relevant, if not in Europe as much, than assuredly in many other places.

The first part looks at the restaurant and hotel industries from an inside (rather disturbing) view, and conveys the utterly exhausting 17-hour days put in by the workers (which could easily be done away with) for wages just enough to stay at the most modest of lodgings and eat and drink enough to keep working at the exhausting pace.

Orwell, then takes you on his journey back to London where he ends up becoming a tramp for some time. This world is even more fascinating because it is even further from what most people have experienced. Even the homeless of today’s America have some things much better than an English tramp of the 30’s, where by law one could not stay at a given shelter more than one night, forcing one to walk miles and miles to get to a new one each day, and subsisting on only tea and bread with margarine.

Orwell offers lots of interesting social commentary about the futility of such existence, and even makes suggestions for solutions. Most people know Orwell from his penning of 1984, so it was a bit surprising to come across an autobiographic piece that looks so critically on part of capitalism. Communism does come into play here, but only very peripherally as an ideal that some poor attach themselves to, or conn artists pretend to belong to in order to swindle people’s money. Communism nor socialism, even in parts, are never suggested as a solution to these problems. One wonders how Orwell would comment on the much more developed social welfare systems in Europe of today.