io9.com captured a recent press release naming Vincenzo Natali as the director of an upcoming production of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. I’m not one to say a book is unfilmable, but as a big fan of the seminal classic, good luck to Natali. He’s gonna need it. Sci-fi adaptations have a poor track record, c.f. Dune and Watchmen. Not to mention the results from adapting Gibson’s own Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel.

On the plus side, Natali seems to have a distinctive style and vision, having directed Cube and the recent Splice. Natali also did the story boards for Johnny Mnemonic, so presumably he’s familiar with Gibson’s work and well aware of what went wrong with that film.

Now that parts of the cyberpunk ethic have permeated popular culture, and we have other technology aesthetics emerging from the Web, gaming, and mobile telephony, the time might be ripe for a great Neuromancer film.

P. S. A better place to begin a a movie based on Gibson’s work might be the short story Burning Chrome. There’s enough story and style to form the core of a screenplay, but also a lot left unsaid and unexplored, leaving a director with plenty of room to work.

Stashing Rudix for future consideration:

Rudix is a package-based, user-friendly way to extend the Unix portion of Mac OS X with additional network utilities, computer languages, development libraries, text tools and everything else you missed from command line.

Plus Rudix is aimed to be Python friendly.

T. J. Luoma of The Unofficial Apple Weblog provides a little more depth on the utility of Rudix.

“I’m sure there a lot of Chicagoans expecting the big time collapse, but I’m not seeing it. The Blackhawks ain’t the Cubs.”

“Most people realize the Hawks are the better team, but Philly is showing a lot of grit. At the end of the day, their goaltending might finally bite them in the ass.”

Congratulations to the Chicago Blackhawks, the 2010 Stanley Cup Champions. This means in the past 25 years the city of Chicago has held the Lombardi Trophy (once), the Stanley Cup (once), the O’Brien Trophy (six times) and the Commissioner’s Trophy (once). Take that New York (Knicks waiting since ‘72) and LA (Los Angeles Kings working on their first cup), not to mention Philly (Eagles have yet to win a Super Bowl).

“If the Lakers can make a couple of adjustments to slow Allen down, without giving up a lot to Paul Pierce and/or Rando, they can get one or two in Boston.”

Still sticking with Lakers in 7.

In my quest to propagate Google Reader key bindings to all my feed readers, I discovered that you can rebind the keys for menu items in MacOS X. Caius Theory had the initial tip off when I was looking to get NetNewsWire to emulate Google Reader. Don’t quite know if NetNewsWire has the menu functions that can actually make this happen, but the capability is a neat little feature of MacOS.

Speaking of old House classics, digging around on the Amazon MP3 store, I was surprised to unearth Master C and J’s In The City. I thought I already had it in my digital library, maybe on some Trax Record compilation, but it was missing in action.

These guys were one, maybe two, hit wonders. We’ll give them credit for Liz Torres’ Can’t Get Enough as well, which is also available as an MP3. Both of these cuts wound up on a surprising number of compilations though.

The surprising thing about both In The City and Can’t Get Enough is how “murky” they were. Before the Acid outbreak, most House was fairly positive, well nigh spiritual. In the City has the standard House elements, especially the head cutting hi-hat, but the lyrics and mood are really dark. The song is reminiscent of a trip into the urban jungle gone wrong. Can’t Get Enough has a similar flavor, and is about a woman who tries to leave a man but come’s back to him, not quite crawling.

Definitely musts for the House aficionado.

When the Chicago Blackhawks jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the Stanley Cup Finals, I thought they were going to cruise to the championship. Got to give the Flyers credit for fighting back to tie the series. Most people realize the Hawks are the better team, but Philly is showing a lot of grit. At the end of the day, their goaltending might finally bite them in the ass.

Great moves by Joel Quenneville, breaking up the first line and sparking the O. I flipped away to watch some of the Lakers-Celtics, flipped back and the Hawks were up 3-0 in Game 5.

I’m sure there a lot of Chicagoans expecting the big time collapse, but I’m not seeing it. The Blackhawks ain’t the Cubs. The Bulls got over the hump. The White Sox got over the hump. The Bears made it to the Super Bowl with a mediocre (at best) QB, almost managed to beat one of the greatest QB’s of our generation, and frankly were not the better team.

What’s better than playoff time in Chicago? Championship time in the summer baby!

P. S. Speaking of the Lakers, they’re in a bit of trouble, but keep in mind Ray Allen had to have a historic game to keep the Celtics in Game 2. Then the Lakers just fell apart for no apparent reason. If the Lakers can make a couple of adjustments to slow Allen down, without giving up a lot to Paul Pierce and/or Rando, they can get one or two in Boston. I’m sorry, KG can’t go for 40 any more and Perkins isn’t even looking for his shot. So I’d help off of the big guys and take my chances.

I can’t claim to have been there at the dawn of House music, being nowhere near Chicago or New York at the time. But four years of college in Boston, starting in 1985, gave me a front row seat for the genre’s breakout into the underground. The transmission vector was a cohort of New York students, a few of whom had pretentions to deejaying. They obviously brought a lot of fresh Hip-Hop back to campus, but they also mixed in this new higher tempo stuff from Chicago.

Thinking back to those days, and my own delusions of spinning records, I remembered a handful of tracks that were often played at campus events or late night on the college radio mix shows. I eventually got all of these records on vinyl, but by chance looked to see if there were MP3 versions for sale. I wasn’t holding out much hope, but was pleasantly surprised to find the following:

• Serious Intention, You Don’t Know, Easy Street Records 1984. A little slower than the typical House track, but the synth lines are to die for. The swirling breakdown is legendary.

• Cultural Vibe, Ma Foom Bey, Easy Street Records 1986. Similar to You Don’t Know, Ma Foom Bey has great synth lines. The chunky organ sound is the hallmark of this track. Also, probably one of the earliest tracks to incorporate African chanting.

• Nitro Deluxe, Let’s Get Brutal, Cutting Records 1986. If Phuture’s Acid Tracks is the first Acid House record, then 1986’s Let’s Get Brutal is definitely a precursor. The ultra-minimalist 14 minute version, The Brutal House, is sans Roland TB-303 tweakiness, but definitely comes from the same spare, trancy mentality.

• Strafe, Set It Off, Jus Born Records 1984. This is a little more up tempo and arguably more Electro than House. But I note it here for the emphasized head-cutting hi-hat. Hey, if Walter Gibbons mixed it and Larry Levan threw it down on the decks, that’s close enough for me.

I found the first three on the Amazon MP3 music store. Apparently, a lot of the Easy Street Records catalog recently came available. Set It Off I found on the iTunes Music Store.

Best of all, these four tracks date pretty well. I think House DJ of today worth their salt wouldn’t be embarrassed to throw any of these tracks into the mix right now. Might even be a badge of honor.

Okay, I have to admit that the Wi-Fi syncing in 1Password for the iPod touch is pretty sweet. It’s exactly what I was looking for when I bought the application.

Still haven’t had a chance to try out the password filling features on the iPod Touch though.

“Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

John Wooden’s career wound down a little ahead of when I got into following sports. But the echoes of The Wizard of Westwood’s achievements propagated well past the end of his tenure as UCLA basketball coach. If you tracked college basketball at all over the past 30 years you got at least one annual John Wooden appearance.

Not to mention the overly loquacious Bill Walton all over the place, who’d give you five run-on minutes on Coach Wooden whenever he got the chance.

There will be plenty of highly eloquent Wooden tributes. I won’t be able to make much of an addition. But for all the simple, folksy, life lessons he dispensed, I’m sure there was a ton of hard work behind the winning results. Don’t be deceived by the seemingly effortless achievements.

And “Be quick, but don’t hurry,” is a pretty damn good line.

Godspeed kind sir.

I’ve long known I share my birthday with John Wayne. Can’t say I’m particularly a fan of his movies or some of his politics. I don’t think I’ve watched a single Wayne film.

Via the Flickr blog, I learned that Dorothea Lange was also born on May 26th. Now there’s someone I’m happy to share birthdays with, especially since some of her best work is preserved at Cal Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. I did my graduate work at Cal, and while not a raving Old Blue, I’m quite proud of my alma mater.

And it turns out that a number of Lange’s photos are out of copyright, so some digital versions are freely available from Flickr, including the unretouched original “Migrant Mother” shot to your left.

SportsGrid looks like a conveniently timed sports feed replacement since I deadpooled DeadSpin.

Via Michael Sippey, who called SportsGrid: “ESPN meets The Awl.”

Our goal is a simple one: to cover the culture of sports and entertainment, as well as the media personalities who talk and write about it, in a fun, compelling and easy to consume way. Perhaps more importantly, we also aim to objectively rank the legions of participants of our favorite pastimes by tracking who is – at any given moment – receiving the most “buzz” from his or her actions on and off the field.

From what I’ve read so far, I like the coverage. The stories are actually intellignet reporting and opinion, without being more of the sports same old, same old. Or dry statistical overanalysis. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The “buzz” and ranking stuff is a gimmick. Seriously, who needs a hype index for NFL coaches? But it’s probably paying the bills.

I could care less about those steroids you took allegedly. I’m over 30, have been on the Internet before you even knew what an emoticon was, and will use one if I damn well please ;-)

Ha, ha. Only serious. Hugs if you flashed Vincent Vega

AT&T’s failure to provide tethering was my biggest hurdle to buying an iPhone. Today’s announcements by the company, revising its data plans and providing tethering, are now a big spanner in my smartphone works.

ArsTechnica has the best overview of the plans and the implications. If you believe AT&T, a lot of their smartphone customers who only use under 200 MB are gonna save money with a new $15 DataPlus package. Their “prosumer” DataPro version only provides 2GB of data but at $25 is a little cheaper than other providers 5GB plans. Tethering is an extra $20, only available if you get the DataPro plan, and doesn’t provide any extra bandwidth. Your laptop usage and smartphone usage have to fit within 2GB or you pay overages.

I’ve argued before that 5GB caps are pretty reasonable. 2GB seems a little snug, especially if you stream any audio or video. Plus it’s actually $5 more than what you’d pay monthly to be on Sprint’s 3G/4G network, with tethering. Then again, AT&T, unlike Sprint, seems to be trying to avoid unleashing those types of applications on its network. Also, the basic plan that Sprint forces you into, at $70 may wash that $5 difference out.

I do agree though, that AT&T has screwed Apple and iPad users.

The other complication is that there is mounting evidence that the HTC Evo may have serious battery life issues. 4G may be bleeding edge and all that, but there’s no point if you have to constantly be recharging the phone.

So for once I actually will be waiting with some anticipation to see what Steve Jobs announces in the near future. I’ll be a fanboy yet.

Washington Business Journal is reporting that Clearwire has unleashed WiMax coverage in the Washington DC area. That’s the service behind Sprint’s, and the HTC Evo’s, 4G capabilities. Makes that smartphone even more tempting.

The odd thing is that the coverage map doesn’t hit my home, but seems to cover a lot of other places around the metroplex where I spend a lot of time. Actually, it’s not odd considering how far west I live.

Via DCist

Of course it’s most appropriate that the first App Store app I buy for my new iPod Touch is Agile Web Solutions’ 1Password. This week Agile is running a promotion on Daring Fireball. Half price ($6.99) for the Pro version. I can live with that for a good password manager. We’ll see how well it works in practice.

Just went and pulled the trigger yesterday. On my Macbook, I flipped my default web browser to Google’s Chrome.

I had been using Apple’s Safari. The main reason that Safari won out over Firefox at the time was that Safari actually supports Apple scripting (of course). I don’t really take advantage of that any more though.

Even with Flash turned on, Chrome just feels faster and cleaner. Nothing real definitive or quantitative that I can point to though. Basically a pure gut feeling. Your Mileage May Vary.

As there’s wider penetration of the HTC Evo to reviewers, more reports of the smartphone are coming in.

+1. Ginny Mies has a fairly positive review of the phone over at Macworld.

-1. MG Siegler of TechCrunch, admittedly a fan of the iPhone, is down on the Evo. The big minus for him is the battery life, but also the difference in the UI fit and finish relative to the iPhone.

Nothing in his review really surprises me or is a showstopper. I aslo think you need more than a week or two to truly appreciate the qualities of any phone, but that goes for all the reviews I’ve seen so far.

The Evo is still my next phone frontrunner. However, I’ll be interested to see what comes out of Apple in June. And I’ll check out the Evo in the store just to get a good sense of its physical presence.

With the Stanley Cup Finals starting last night and the NBA Western Conference Finals closing, today is a sports slate pretty much devoid of meaning. Oh yeah, there’s the French Open in tennis (thanks for the tape delay NBC!). The Indianapolis 500 just wrapped up (Yawn!). After that it’s late-May baseball. Not exactly a whole lot at stake today. Heck, even the NCAA Men’s Lacrosse D1 Final isn’t until tomorrow.

The upcoming NBA Finals is intriguing though, with a Celtics-Laker rematch of the 2008 Finals. Despite having home-court advantage and Kobe Bryant, it’s unclear who is the favorite in this series. While seemingly challenged in the Western Conference, the Lakers haven’t gone more than 6 games this year. It also feels like they have a bit more talent than the Celtics. Meanwhile, the Celtics have been on a roll and their defense has rounded back into 2008 form.

I’ll take the Lakers winning it in a close game 7, although I’m a little nervous going against Tim Legler, who has the Celtics in 6. He’s been on target with his predictions much of the postseason.

And after my whining about the weakness of this year’s NBA playoffs, things got a little more exciting, but not much. The Suns provided 2.5 exciting games. The Magic saved face by avoiding the sweep and added one overtime victory, but got schooled in Game 6. Still an eminently forgettable post-season, unless we get 3 or 4 overtimes in the Finals.

I’m a hockey newbie, but even I know that the first game of the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals, between the Chicago Blackhawks and Philadelphia Flyers, was a brutal affair. Both starting goaltenders looked like sieves. Somehow the Hawks managed to wind up with one more goal, winning 6-5, and taking a 1-0 game lead.

I hadn’t been following the Hawks closely until the semis, but their 3rd and 4th lines are really good. Bolland is a beast. Meanwhile, I was impressed with the amount of good chances the Flyers were able to generate.

P.S. As much as I’m a Chicago fan, I think The Fratellis Chelsea Dagger is a pretty stupid goal/victory song. Frankly, all of Chicago’s team and theme songs have pretty much sucked. Go, Cubs, Go? Don’t Stop Believing? Bear Down, Chicago Bears? Yick!!

Super Bowl Shuffle excepted, but that’s 20+ years old.

Apocalypse Now is one of the five best films I’ve seen in my entire life. I’m saddened to hear that Dennis Hopper has passed on. He was one of the more memorable parts of Apocalypse Now despite a fairly small role. A couple of choice quotes from The Photojournalist.

“What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans? That he had wisdom? Bullshit man!”

You can’t travel in space, you can’t go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions. What are you going to land on - one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That’s dialectic physics.

Hopper had a pretty interesting and varied career in the cinema and on the television, appearing in Rebel Without a Cause along with writing and directing Easy Rider. Many folks in Hollywood would have been happy to call that a career. My only thought is that somehow Hopper and Quentin Tarantino should have worked on a project together. Yeah, Hopper had that really uncomfortable scene with Christopher Walken in True Romance, which was written by Tarantino, but it’s not quite the same. Hopper and Harvey Keitel working together and directed by Tarantino? Intense!!

Godspeed kind sir.

Photo courtesy of antje verena via a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Tabnapping. Yet another fun-filled, action packed browser exploit. As a tabaholic, I’m particularly vulnerable if this thing breaks out in a big way.

Tynt, or as John Gruber best puts it, “Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks.”. Of course in the process of praising Posterous I ran across their usage of this moronic facility. Operator error. I was faked out by Posterous’ use of click tracking on links. Tynt is still whack.

In a similar complaint, but much longer standing, SnapShots hijacking of link hovering really irks me. At least you can turn this off, but if you use multiple browsers on multiple platforms, it gets to be a pain.

And I’m still chapped about iTunes title scrolling on the iPad Touch.

Just in time for my birthday, Posterous added a couple of nice new features. First off, you can style posts with Markdown. This is convenient for me, since I use Markdown in MarsEdit to author my posts for MPR. One post format across multiple tools is handy.

Posterous also added code syntax highlighting. Basically you can markup sections of a post that have code from a wide variety of programming languages. Then the code text will be rendered in a much friendlier fashion for presenting and copy/pasting program snippets. I’ve thought of posting code here on occasion, but didn’t want to hassle with getting it formatted correctly. This Posterous feature gives me a place to park those posts.

We’ll ignore the fact that I haven’t really been posting to my Posterous blog much lately. Maybe these new features will help get me going again.

The new iPod Touch is pretty nice, but why does Apple hate people who love playlists in iTunes? I have about 200+ playlists. Apparently there’s no way to traverse them, other than thumb swiping through. Not fun.

But the capper is that the Touch doesn’t scroll long playlist titles. Christ, my iPod Nano does that and scrolls long song titles to boot. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to see a playlist title in full. I think this fundamentally stems from not being able to select an individual playlist.

WTF Apple? Makes the Touch somewhat sucky as an MP3 player. It’s even worse when I know you have a working solution on a “lesser” model. Apparently a few other folks also think this issue should be addressed.

My better half got me an iPod Touch for my birthday. Just fired it up, tweaked a few of the settings, and managed to send a couple of e-mails. Don’t have a ton to report, although getting used to the keyboard will take some doing. I’m currently befuddled by cursor navigation in text fields. Update: Looks like text navigation is covered in an iPhone How-To.

At 64 gigabytes of storage the Touch can hold all of my music library with plenty of room to spare. I’ll still carry my trusty iPod Nano, but now I have to figure out what to put on it. I think I’ll make it a repository for smart and shuffled playlists.

As a middle-aged computer scientist, it’s amazing that we’ve gone from about zero to ten times the original Xerox PARCTAB in under 20 years. We overestimate technological change in the short term, and underestimate the impact in the long term.

It’s sort of hard to call an Academy Award Best Picture winner a guilty pleasure, but I seem to remember a bit of a kerfluffle given the competition that year: The Pianist, The Hours, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and Gangs of New York. You could make an argument that Chicago is the lightweight of the bunch. But this one is a must stop when I come across it on cable.

Things I really like about the movie:

• Chicago, while being a musical also imparts a sense of being at the theater.

• Love the music, especially And All That Jazz, Nowadays, We Both Reached for the Gun, and Razzle Dazzle.

• A fun cast, including Richard Gere, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger, Queen Latifah, and John C. Reilly.

• The Cell Block Tango is probably the best dance number, a great song, and the ladies are easy on the eyes.

• Love the rousing closing sequence of Nowadays, All That Jazz, the audience cheering and then into the credits.

• It’s Chicago!

See, my guilty pleasures aren’t all about cars and/or Jason Statham.

So I’m not huge on announcing changes to my media intake, but this is such an irksome occasion I feel justified. Once upon a time Deadspin was a cheeky little sports related site in the vein of “sports and stuff sports fans talk about, including other sports fans.” The above screen capture of Deadspin headlines exemplifies its current state. Lots of sports types doing dumb things, tasteless sexual innuendo, and rumors of the day. A sports version of TMZ.com, sans shaky, paparazzi-style videos, might be an apt analogy.

This may be selective memory, but two to three years ago, Deadspin seemed an order of magnitude more intelligent. I know it’s hard to compete against the flood of legitimate, sober, sports reporting and opinion on the Web (yes, I’m serious about that), but I honestly feel stupider just reading Deadspin’s headlines.

I’m sure they won’t miss me, but I’m hitting unsubscribe right after I finish this post.

Despite the general putridness of the NBA playoffs, it was good to see the Phoenix Suns show some heart. They won game 3 at home against the Lakers and look like they have at least a few wrinkles to stay with the current champions. They did this despite shooting crap on three pointers (siddown Channing Frye, hello Robin Lopez). If the Suns win game 4, you’re looking at at least another week of Western Conference finals.

Meanwhile, with the Orlando Magic playing like dogs, the Celtics may finish the sweep on Monday night. That means they’d be quite healthy, rested and prepared for the Western Conference champions.

I’d actually be sort of stoked to see the Lakers versus the Celtics, the last two NBA champions. The emergence of Rajon Rondo makes a big difference in the 2007-08 champion Celtics. Since being beaten in The Finals that year, the Lakers have better integrated Pau Gasol, won the 2009-10 championship, and signed Ron Artest. This would be a good rematch. And no guarantee that Kobe would come out on top.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t congratulate the Chicago Blackhawks on making it to the Stanley Cup finals. Championship time in Chicago is just a boatload of fun.

So far Gruml has been interesting as a desktop app, since it has a neat little menubar item, and a nice frontend to all the Google Reader content in one of my accounts. But using Gruml reminded me of the key navigation feature of Google Reader, especially since the feature is missing from both Gruml and NetNewsWire.

n/p in Google Reader moves forward/backward through headlines without opening items. This means I can devote a fair amount of real estate on feed item headlines and easily visually scan through the items. Then I can n/p my way to items of interests, pop them open, then pop them shut. For me, this works really well in processing large numbers of new items.

This headline navigation feature is what I’m really searching for to reach feed reading nirvana on the desktop.

Macworld has an in-depth review of Sierra Wireless’s Overdrive mobile 4G hotspot. It’s the Mi-Fi for 4G. Apparently, it’s not a performance win for devices such as the iPhone or iPad that have their own 3G radio built-in. Seems to work great though for laptops. The review is actually a pretty good match for my use-case.

But if a smartphone can serve the same purpose, with the same performance, that’s one less device to carry. The only upside is that the mobile hotspot might have better battery life.

As an ardent feed reader fan, I’m always on the lookout for new reading software. Via LifeHacker I heard about Gruml, a new reader that is specifically aimed to be a desktop adjunct to Google Reader. Since I love Google Reader this looks very interesting.

Now of course on the Mac it’s going to be difficult to pry NetNewsWire out of my hands, but there is one potential chink. I really love Google Reader’s keyboard navigation, j/k/n/p for navigating items and their shift equivalents for traversing feeds/groups, is brilliant. If there’s one thing that truly bugs me about NetNewsWire is that once you’re in an item, I haven’t found a keyboard gesture to get back to item/feed navigation. Also, in NetNewsWire while the arrow keys are equivalent to j/k/n/p on my MacBook they take my fingers away from the home row. Just a touch of friction that slows me down.

So I’ll give Gruml a try on a tertiary Google Reader account, and see how it goes.

A couple of reviews are out on the leader for my next phone. Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal likes the Evo, can’t get the top advertised bandwidth even in Baltimore where it’s been out for a while, and he’s really down on the battery life when using 4G. However, and this is a big however for me, he lets on that Sprint really is working to get 4G rolled out in the DC area. The 4G performance is also much better than 3G typically. More evidence in the Evo’s favor.

The Engadget review swoons over the tech specs and adores the phone in general. They drill in to the tech details a little more than Mossberg. In combination, you get a pretty good idea of how the phone can do for power user and for average users.

Still not digging the monthly fee, but coming to grips with the fact of $110 being the going rate for the bag of features I want. With any luck, there’ll be an iPhone announcement in June for comparison.

I’m starting to think Dieselboy’s The Human Resource is better end-to-end than Dieselboy’s The Dungeonmaster’s Guide. Heresy!

There are no real dead spots in The Human Resource and there are plenty of high points. Parallel Universe gets the mix jumpin’. Subculture breaks up the instrumental flow with some solid rhymes. I always like a dose of vocals in my mixes. Coming out of the downbeat Barrier Break, Reality Check is explosive. The triple play of The Rapture, Grunge 3 and The Divide is just sickness kicking off the last quarter of the mix. It’s rare when a mix’s final five tracks are all over the top high energy, peak cuts.

Yup. I’m revising my original thoughts on The Human Resource and moving it to the front of the Dieselboy oeuvre. Or at least the part I own.

It doesn’t make up for the Capitals getting bounced in the first round, but the Washington Wizards just won the NBA draft lottery. That means they have the first pick in a decently deep pool of talent. Speculation is that Kentucky’s John Wall be the #1 pick. From what I’ve seen that wouldn’t be a bad choice.

What with Ted Leonsis becoming the majority owner, and now the first pick, things may actually be looking up for the Wizards. What next? Gilbert Arenas playing more than 40 good games in a season?

Addendum: The Wizard’s have had pretty crappy point guards for a while now so John Wall makes a lot of sense. Earl Boykins is a nice guy and has more bball talent in a fingernail than I’ve ever had in my entire life, but if he’s playing significant minutes your team has serious matchup issues. And no Gilbert Arenas is not a point guard.

So in my reading of of The Four Horseman of the ScifiBlogalypse, I’d put John Scalzi at the top of the list for entertainment value, and then a big dropoff to Charles Stross, Neil Gaiman, and Cory Doctorow. The latter two I pretty much don’t even bother with any more, despite their continuing presence in the feedreader. Gaiman is too precious for my taste and Doctorow is thin on anything outside of digital rights/free software. Stross’ problem is that he doesn’t post with the same frequency as Scalzi.

But Charlie’s been closing fast.

His series on Common Misconceptions About Publishing is a great inside look at the writing and publishing industry. Especially from the perspective of an author that knows a bit about technology. If I take one thing away from this series it’s that, “a manuscript is not a book.”

Now he gives the inside scoop on two books he highly recommends. Deep State by Walter Jon Williams is a sequel to This is Not a Game, which I highly enjoyed. I’m all in for this one. Meanwhile, I’m actually a bit scared by Stross’ description of Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief. Greg Egan already made my head explode once, and Stross is slotting Rajaniemi in that same “hard sf” bin as Egan. Not to mention that Stross thinks Rajaniemi may be a better writer than…Stross. Yikes!!

I’ll also take this opportunity to pump up This is Not a Game and Stross’ own Halting State. For whatever reason, a number of people I know and/or respect didn’t cotton to Stross. Worse, a couple of them are touting Daniel Suarez’s Daemon as some great work. Sorry folks, Daemon was dreck. Beautiful black female math genius working for the NSA gets blinded and falls in love with the heroic white identity free hacker. Does not compute. This is Not a Game and Halting State just did the near future combination of ARG, VR, and RL way better than Daemon. With actual developed characters to boot!

Just had to get that off my chest!

In a former life, I made a prediction about Amazon putting together computation, messaging and storage in a utility pricing framework. This was before Amazon EC2, and Amazon Web Services more generally, came into being. My prediction, if not dead on, was pretty accurate.

At that time, it was a little unclear what the impact of Amazon’s offerings would be. A little less than four years later and now the White House is deploying systems to EC2. And it’s not just some piddly site, but Recovery.gov. Not to mention there’s now a whole “cloud computing” industry in which EC2 is the standard bearer.

To this day, I still think EC2 is one of the coolest things to happen in computing in a long time. We overestimate the impact of change in the short run, and underestimate the impact in the long run.

I find myself using LaunchBar much more for search queries and opening URLs. And when I do I often TAB select my way into using Chrome. Might be time to switch my default browser. And who needs Choosy?

Macworld’s review of LaunchBar 5.0.2 gets to the heart of my favorite launcher. Mind the user reviews as well. I’m also using LaunchBar’s clipboard history features more and more.

Thunderbird 3.1 Beta seems to be working out well so far. Dock icon madness may have been solved.

I really like Robert Hodgins’ Hello, Cinder introduction to programming with Cinder. Makes particle systems in C++ seem damn easy.

So the details of my potential next phone are out. Hardware cost is pretty reasonable for a front line smartphone: $199. I was hoping for a little better plan pricing though. Forced into a $70 “premium” smartphone plan. Then a mandatory $10 for 4G that I can’t even get? Thank god my mother in law lives in Chicago, so I might at least get an occasional taste. Sprint better roll out that 4G in DC quick. Add $30 for Mi-Fi capability and I’m looking at $110 a month.

Hmmmmm. Some serious financial analysis will be the order of the day.

But apparently the HTC Evo 4G handles video like a champ.

This may arguably be one of the worst National Basketball Association postseasons in recent memory. To wit:

• Earlier in the season, I thought the Denver Nuggets might be the only team that could take out the Lakers. Then they lost George Karl. Then they went out to the Jazz in 6 uninspired, undisciplined games.

• Oklahoma City, the most exciting young team in the league, failed to force a game seven against the champion Lakers.

• The Dallas Mavericks at least looked like a contender. With Caron Butler and Brendan Haywood they seemed a little tougher. They reverted to their typical soft form and went down in 6 to the ancient Spurs.

• There was only one game 7 in the first round. A scintillating matchup of Atlanta vs Milwaukee. In that series, Atlanta managed to get blown out on the road multiple times and lose game 5 at home.

• The conference semi-finals featured 3 sweeps. The team of the league MVP, and the best regular season record, was ousted in 6 games including an inexplicable home blowout in a “must win” game 5. The Cavaliers basically gave up with a minute to go and down less than 10 in game 6. Now all we’re left with is a frenzy of LeBron free agency speculation.

• There have been 4 sweeps total and two 5 game series. Half of the 12 series this year have been complete mismatches.

• I may be wrong about this, but there have been no overtime games so far. If there have been, they weren’t all that memorable.

To top it all off the favorites in the conference finals, Los Angeles and Orlando, are prohibitive. The Lakers have way too much size for the Suns. Boston might give Orlando a challenge, but the Magic are hot and have beaten the Celtics three out of four times this year. If form holds, we get a rematch of last years finals, with essentially the same rosters. Okay Vince Carter, Jameer Nelson, and Ron Artest might stir things up a little, but I wouldn’t predict a different outcome.

Yawn!! Jeez, the Bulls vs Celtics series last year had more excitement than this year’s playoff games combined. My only real rooting interest now is to see Steve Nash in the finals.

The NBA, where disappointment happens.

I’ve told you I like Mark Farina and of my Dieselboy fixation. Recently I’ve started putting an additional DJ in my steady iPod Nano rotation. Another Chicago House music icon, DJ Heather.

It started with Fabric 21, and it’s great sequence of Puffin Stuff, Feel Alright, and Acid Jack. I wore that CD out when I first got it, and it’s still a go to mix when I’m looking for a guaranteed foot tapper.

Picked up Dancefloor Principles which isn’t quite as good, but still definitely listenable. Por Que Amor is the highlight, while Mile High Club into Wrong is bumpin’.

Heather’s disc for House of OM, the other belonging to Colette, might be just as good as Fabric 21. I love Tracy Cooper’s Uptown. The Dopeheadz Now I Got makes a strong contribution as well.

And lastly, the DJ Heather mix on OM Summer Sessions 2 doesn’t have any spectacular moments, but I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit lately. I especially like the tail end of the mix including the sequence of Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Zoooom, Free Your Mind, and Don’t Clap Your Hands.

I would link to her web site, but it’s a heinous Flash only destination. You’ll have to settle for @djheather.

Memo to self, purchase the Tangerine and DJ International Allstars mixes.

I know about and use virtualenv for Python quite frequently. I’ve had an off and on relationship with pip, allegedly “… a replacement for the (outmoded) easy_install command.” My main issue has been key packages that don’t install over the network, requiring a fallback to easy_install. Adam Charnock has a couple of pip tips that might improve our arrangement. Also includes a link to a handy guide on pip and packaging.