io9.com’s Lauren Davis reports that there’s some hope for an Altered Carbon movie. The film would be directed by James McTeigue, who guided the V for Vendetta flick which I actually quite enjoyed even though I didn’t consider it a great movie. McTeigue also worked with the Wachowski brothers on The Matrix trilogy.

A screen version of Altered Carbon would provide an opportunity to do an update on the urban designs and themes of Blade Runner. Obviously it’s almost impossible to one up Ridley Scott’s classic, but I’d like to see someone try to advance that chic with modern CG techniques.

Come to think of it, while McTeigue may have potential, Ridley Scott is the ideal person to direct.

The New York Times had a piece on the MiFi, focused on Sprint’s rollout. The Times was mostly positive if a bit hyperoblic at points. In the comments, most of the people who had bought one seemed happy with the device.

I’m always amused by the no-data-limit extremists that appear on a MiFi comment thread. 5GB of data is a lot if you don’t treat it like it’s on a wired network. Read your e-mail (with limits on attachment download size), browse the web, stick to IM and you’ll be okay.

Once upon a time, some bloggers were a might interested in their rank for a Google Search of the key words from their blog title. Now, not so much.

But in that historical spirit, I will observe that this blog is currently #1 for a search on “Mass Programming Resistance”. How’d that happen!?

Ha, ha. Only serious.

So there’s a whole genre of speculative fiction known as Urban Fantasy, that takes the archetypes of traditional pre-urban fantasy and puts them in a modern urban setting. Read as werewolves, vampires, faeries and other magical folk co-existing with humans (to varying degrees of peacefulness) in Manhattan. In some sense, it’s hard to do the same thing with technology driven Science Fiction, since modern urbanity is such a product of technological advances. The mingling of the two is almost tautological.

But I wonder if there’s a class of science fiction that treats modern urban structures (read cities or metropolitan areas) as systems that can be hacked. There’s lots of SF that happens IN cities but is there much SF that happens TO cities? Even the good stuff that I’ve read with a heavy urban element, (Neuromancer, Altered Carbon, Brasyl, etc.) doesn’t quite get to where I’m reaching. The city, however well fleshed out, is always backdrop.

While I haven’t read it, China Mieville’s The City & The City would seem to be an exemplar, although it’s essentially a police procedural. Then again I should read it before holding it up as a prototype.

Now that I’m really ramped up on reading, I read texts a little closer. I’m noticing more nuances and fine details of language usage. Neat plot devices and particularly well turned dialog stand out more.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of these observations are lost. They simply don’t get recorded. I generally don’t like writing in books that I own. And a significant percentage of the books I read are borrowed from the library, so it would quite rude, to say the least, to write in them.

Maybe a small Moleskine combined with a “noteblog” would be the way to go. Given the tempting convenience of blogging with posterous this might be low friction enough to easily get rolling. I have accounts on GoodReads and Readernaut that could be used for this, but I’m less interested these days in funneling my content into other folks silos, social networking possibilities be damned.

There might be some other benefits. I’d also like to get a real sense of my daily page count. That would be fairly easy to capture. While I don’t always read them promptly, I do manage to scan (as in quickly look through) all of the New Yorker issues in my subscription. Capturing observations about the articles I do manage to read, a decent number, and the issue overall might be a worthy endeavor.

I managed 33 posts in the month of July. Posting occurred on 28 of 31 days. I missed three traveling for a wedding, but not too shabby. Who knows, I may eventually get back to the glory days of New Media Hack.

• Emissaries From the Dead, Adam-Troy Castro. Basically a mystery with a fairly complex character as the detective. Solid but not great. A few too many named characters eventually wasted for my taste. Plus there’s nary a sympathetic one in the bunch.

• Spin, Robert Charles Wilson. Essentially a finely crafted character and relationship study with some SF embedded as the driver. Very good. Surprisingly compelling at a human scale, given the interplanetary and interstellar events.

• The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin. A great book. An elegant parable of man’s dreams and hubris. Le Guin also demonstrates an amazing facility with language.

• Blue Light, Walter Mosely. Freakishly distasteful transforming into goofy mysticism. Didn’t enjoy this one. Mosely is probably saying something interesting about race, but I never felt any of the characters as “black”, except maybe for Horace LaFontaine. Not to mention Blue Light is more fantastic horror then science fiction.

So that’s 18 done for the year, and I’m rolling into August with 3/4 of a book done. Gaining on that target goal of 35.

Complete book roster for the year, and some comments, after the break:

• War Surf, M. M. Buckner

• The Execution Channel, Ken MacLeod

• Disapora, Greg Egan

• Going Postal, Terry Pratchett

• The Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross

• The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

• The Black Swan, Nassim Nicohlas Taleb

• Daemon, Daniel Suarez

• The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner

• Brasyl, Ian MacDonald

• Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks

• The Cassini Division, Ken MacLeod

• Kop, Warren Hammond

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy

• Emissaries From the Dead, Adam-Troy Castro.

• Spin, Robert Charles Wilson.

• The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin

• Blue Light, Walter Mosely

While I liked most of what I read, the last five books have been somewhat downers. Unsympathetic characters, apocalyptic scenarios, and distasteful violence abounded.

I’m declaring August “Happy, Happy” reading month though. Lighter works with a more humorous or satirical touch will be targeted. I’m also going to throw in a couple of graphic novels.

I’m about two thirds to three quarters of the way through my re-read of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon. It’s better than I remembered. Hell, Altered Carbon is some really good stuff!! I just love it when Takeshi Kovacs channels Quellcrist Falconer, goes apeshit on the bio-clinic, and slags 17 folks to a Real Death.

The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-…
If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous.

I’d forgotten about the little political thread of the Quellist Revolution that ran throughout the book. It’s a relatively minor part of Altered Carbon that explodes in Woken Furies, the third Takeshi Kovacs novel. Still, this element makes the book that much richer.

Okay the sex is overwritten in a few spots, but the tech milieu and styling is on a par with Neuromancer and the hardboiled detective noir is to die for.

Speaking of Neuromancer, it’s next on the reading deck. The pairing with Altered Carbon will make for some nice comparison and contrast.

A rather in-depth and overall positive review of the MiFI by Jason Snell for Macworld.

The fine folks of the Google Reader team came up with a solution for my issue with “likes”. Now there’s an option to only see them from people you follow. Well, since I don’t follow anyone in Reader, this is effectively an off switch for me. Which is just fine and dandy.

In other feed reader news, NewsGator shutdown NewsGator Online it’s webbased feed aggregator. Not exactly earthshaking given their current market focus. However on a more interesting note, their desktop clients, including NetwNewsWire, now synch with Google Reader.

My phone and contract with AT&T are way old. So old, I don’t even have to think about whether I can get a really, cheap phone with a new plan. I was all jacked up to buy an iPhone 3GS in the next couple of months. What with AT&T, Apple, and AT&T + Apple, recently stumbling hard though, I’m losing my enthusiasm.

A combination of an iPod Touch and a Verizon MiFi might be the ticket. See I really care much more about wireless data than voice. The downers of my scheme? A comparable data plan is $40 more than your data increment for the iPhone. Plus the Touch winds up being more expensive since it’s not subsidized. Not to mention it’s not really a phone, so I still have to do something about that.

On the up side, “tethering” (USB or WiFi) for my laptop is included, something I can’t even buy from AT&T today and which they’re hinting at will cost extra if they get around to it. I also wouldn’t be on AT&T’s network. I don’t know if usage in DC compares to SF and NYC, but given that this is prime Verizon country, I’m guessing they have better performance.

I hadn’t realized that 1) the MiFi was so small, and that 2) you could just power it up and leave it in a pocket or backpack unattached to another device. Depending on local signal quality, this could be just as effective at data as the iPhone.

MiFi photo cribbed from the Gizmodo MiFi Review

Setting up a new posterous blog and adding a custom domain name, under my control, only took about 20 minutes. The majority of the time was spent trying to figure out if I could have a domain name that starts with digits. Turns out you can. Defining and assigning the custom domain was a piece of cake.

My 100 Hours Project site is now live. I’m going to use it as a linkblog and thoughtspace for my off hours hacking projects. Not to mention as a place to experiment with posterous.

Bonus, Not that I’m a big Facebook poster, but posterous seems to have fixed their Facebook autoposting. Now I can hit Facebook and Twitter with one swell foop.

You know you’re in a reading groove, when you finish a book you don’t like, but have the urge to start another one right away. And you have one you’ll like immediately handy.

You know you’re in a blogging groove, when daily posting is almost effortless. Sure they’re not all high content or essay long, but it’s the habit that counts.

Of course habits like these are fragile and need to be constantly nurtured.

An exploding picture tube on your ancient TV is quite handy. As well as the discipline not to instantaneously run out and buy some new flat panel.

I just upgraded my homely home Linux box running Ubuntu. Man have they smoothed this process out!! Went from Intrepid Ibex to Jaunty Jackalope in less than a half hour, no muss no fuss. Having FiOS to make the download of 200+ MB of packages a 5 minute task also helps.

Since I’m an infrequent Linux tinkerer, this isn’t a huge deal. There are a couple of major wins though. First, Python 2.6 is now part of the standard distribution. This makes the most rock solid, yet latest featured, version of my favorite programming language available. I’m also guessing that a lot of Python packages are updated as well, meaning quite a few less source builds and installs by hand.

Second, Erlang and RabbitMQ have updated or new Ubuntu packages. Experimenting with a production quality, open source, message queuing server is now a piece of cake. I sort of have a sense that with the commoditization trend of message queuing and the growth of real time notification on the Web, having working message queuing knowledge will be essential to successful programmers.

I can’t seem to find MP3 versions of the following tracks on the iTMS or Amazon MP3. Tis’ a shame.

• Dope on Plastic, Uptown

• Step Up Front, Positive K

• Potholes in My Lawn, De La Soul

• Plug Tunin’, De La Soul

• You’re Gonna Get Yours, Public Enemy

• B-side Wins Again, Public Enemy

• Smooth Operator, Big Daddy Kane

• A Roller Skating Jam Named “Saturdays”, De La Soul

• The Show/La Di Da Di (Slick Rick vocals intact on both tracks), Doug E. Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew

• Housing the Joint (The Magoomba Mix), Schoolly D

• Jail House Rap, Fat Boys

• The Mission, Special Ed

Of course I do have 12” versions of all of these in storage, hopefully not warping away to uselessness.

Is Strictly Business EPMD’s best track? I’m really starting to think so. The bass/piano combo on the fours hammers the underlying beat. Plus it’s one of their finest lyrical efforts.

Exhibit A

Try to answer to the master on the mc rap artists

No joke on the lyric -it’s hard to be modest

I knew i was the man with the master plan

To make you wiggle and jiggle like gelatin

Exhibit B

Total chaos — no mass confusion

Rhymes so hypnotizing known to cause an illusion

Like a magician who draws a rabbit out a hat son

I’m drawin’ more, like a 44-magnum

Exhibit C

You’re just a soldier … and I’m a green beret

I do not think twice about the mcs I slay

So if you want to battle, I highly recommend this:

Bring your dog, mom, and dad … because i’m strictly business

A pretty good case could be made.

I heartily endorse Agile Web Solution’s 1Password. Worth every penny. Macworld’s Dan Frakes documents the reasons why way better than I can.

This was mostly an excuse to do my first ever post with embedded video. Might have try out some more of this “social media” stuff.

Not to turn this outlet into a meta-blogging stream of self-encouraging aphorisms, but I was reading a back issue of The New Yorker and came across this quote from Louis Menand, writing about writer’s workshops:

I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.

That was followed by this old chestnut from Justin Hall:

put time into whatever it is you like to do, and put that up on the web.

write about yourself, your hobbies, your passions, your politics, your community

whatever turns you on because if you can be excited about them offline, and somehow transmit that enthusiasm online, or that depth of emotion over the wires people will find it and stay for it and check back in on it, especially if they think it’s going to change

via Michael Sippey.

Folks who dismiss various forms of social media as trivial and narcissistic often forgot this aspect. These media provide venues for pent-up creative enthusiasm. Yeah a lot of the results will be poor or even hateful. The act of making makes it easier for many more to care about others. In the aggregate, that’s a great thing.

This is all in building up to my 100 hour project.

Recently MetaFilter turned 10 years old. I’m pretty much a MeFi lurker, surfing the frontpage feed for interesting nuggets. I don’t even have a MeFi account to participate in the discussion. But I was interested to read in Matt Haughey’s birthday ode that the site was circling the drain in 2003. Somehow it managed to recover and become a force on the web.

There are probably lessons to be learned from MetaFilter as an example of a community that could have petered out (self-immolated?) but somehow managed to leap the chasm into what looks like a sustainable equilibrium. Clearly strong gardening and moderation is a key factor. I think that the academic community has documented that prescription for online communities. Opening up Ask MetaFilter seems like a distinctive action from the maintainers and response from the community.

I wonder if anyone’s done a cross site analysis of some of the more prominent sustainable web discussion communities e.g. The Fray, Flickr, MeFi, Slashdot, etc. This would be especially interesting in comparison with the new breed of “karma and commentary” sites like Digg, Reddit, Stack Overflow and Hacker News, which seem to be explicitly designed to avoid some of the pitfalls of their predecessors.

Speaking of those headline driven karma sites, has anyone thought to force the writing of summaries before submitting an article? I find myself more often clicking on the discussion to get a sense of flamage or utility before clicking the headline. Said feature would enhance these sites immeasurably and provide more grist for voting.

Posterous is doing some serious rapid innovation, especially in their autoposting capability. Exploiting the syntactic capabilities of standard RFC 822 e-mail addresses they’re building up a fairly sophisticated, yet accessible, infrastructure to flow content into social media sites.

The only nit I have is the last line of their autopost FAQ:

We do not autopost private posts, or posts created on private sites.

As I wanted to experiment with autoposting I was trying to send test stuff to my Twitter account. Since I’m just doinking around with posterous, my site was private. So here I am wondering where the heck the first twitter updates I’d sent in over a year were. Silly me.

One side benefit of using e-mail as a posting front end is that in many e-mail systems you can easily capture all of your outbound messages. Instant blog post backups!! Mitigates some of the backup issues I mentioned earlier.

Now I’m leaning even more towards experimenting with posterous, especially as a progress/development blog on my eventual 100 hour project.

Or my 100 hour contribution.

In his talk “Scope”, which opened the reboot11 conference, Matt Webb discussed the notion of 100 million hours of human effort and resulting achievements possible, e.g. the Lunar Landing and Wikipedia. At the tail end of the slides, he issued a challenge to the participants to set aside 100 hours over a 12 week period and do something. Get out there and make some culture instead of just consuming it or complaining about it.

Now 100 hours isn’t 100 million hours. And there weren’t a million people at Reboot. Webb even argues that 100 hours isn’t enough time to come close to becoming an expert at something.

But 100 hours can be a pretty good start for many things. Who knows you might go on to put enough time to become an expert. Or find the thing to does capture your fancy. Or build a community that generates 100 million hours.

I’ve been meaning to start some kind of focused project as a release from the daily grind. Webb’s call to arms resonated. I won’t be able to do my 100 hours over the summer, but I’m game to kick something off in August or September. The current thought is circle back around to pygame and visualization. Reworking a number of, or even all the, examples from one of the processing books provides a nice ramp up, with some easily defined goals.

Of course I also have this fantasy of one day picking up photography, in a semi-serious amateur way, but you can’t do everything at once in life.

Twitter’s Alex Payne has a thoughtful piece about where feed reading is today, and where aggregators could be going tomorrow. Along the way he reviews Fever, a new self-hosted, Web based aggregator.

As a person who’s been heavily invested in syndication and aggregation since the heyday of Usenet, I was hoping web based aggregators would take off. Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. Or at least in the current form of things like Google Reader, Bloglines, and NewsGator Online.

But aggregation is surreptitiously sneaking into everyday usage. Think about what typical Facebook users wind up with. An aggregated collection of lifestreams from their “friends.” Given that now locales, brands, and news sources can be friended on Facebook, these relatively unsophisticated users are engaging in feed reading. It just doesn’t look like the typical geek perception of feed reading, e.g. e-mail or Usenet style user interfaces. This trend is spreading. In a parallel development, FriendFeed allows you to aggregate your disconnected streams from across the Web.

But Payne is also pushing on the idea that whatever an aggregator looks like in the future, more smarts inside are needed to deal with information overload. I agree with him that this is greenfields territory, and eventually a highly successful business will be built in the space. An interesting approach might be to actually try and build a Facebook application specifically targeting newsish aggregation. Whatever the result, my guess is that will look radically different from the aggregators we have today.

So I’m still flirting with Safari. Like Robert Palmer, I find some shin bumping occurring during the transition. I’m still liking the scriptability and the overall speed.

Firefox’s AwesomBar is mildly missed. Didn’t think it would make that much of a difference, but it’s noticeable.

I’m much more irritated by the fact that Safari doesn’t support multiple rows of tabs, and collapses the rightmost ones into a menu. This leads to some disconcerting behavior for those of us who like to open and keep open a lot of tabs. Even though Safari is opening new links from apps in another tab, it looks like the rightmost one is being replaced. One is also never quite sure if there’s already a tab open for that link you’re considering looking at.

Not bailing on Safari yet, but I need to find a workaround or new workflow to deal with this limitation.

Just parking to the backup brain, but here’s the majority of the current reading plan for the rest of the year:

• Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive: William Gibson

• American Flagg!: Howard Chaykin

• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One: Frank Miller

• Song of Time: Ian R. MacLeod

• Black Man, Altered Carbon: Richard K. Morgan

• The Stone Canal: Ken MacLeod

• Making Money: Terry Pratchett

• The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula K. LeGuin

• Hominids, Wake: Robert J. Sawyer

• Blue Light: Walter Mosely

• Elric of Melnibone: Michael Moorcock

No particular order. All titles subject to change. There’s also some open slots if I’m to hit my goal of 35.

Via MetaFilter I was pointed to this entertaining rant by Adam Roberts on the “poor taste” of the fandom that voted for 2009’s Hugo Award nominees. Although I’ve read a lot of SF in the last year and a half, I don’t really feel I’m in a position to agree or disagree. Oddly enough, I’ve read books from all of the nominated authors, many quite recently, yet none of this year’s books.

But the quality and delivery of the vitriol was quite good ;-) One thing that a lot of folks will miss though is that Roberts is tweaking the fandom because he thinks they can rise to the challenge. He believes that people of above average intelligence and curiosity are drawn to the genre. Their best books of the year shortlist should rise above mediocre.

Robert’s post is universally good for pointing to and justifying some more challenging works. Checking out the past winners lists for the Nebula award and similarly for the Clarke, I see a lot of author names new to me.

Immediately added to the reading list, Ian R. MacLeod’s Song of Time, and Richard K. Morgan’s 13, nee Black Man.

On the other hand, Google Reader just added a couple of new social features. They’re generally unobtrusive, except for a little “N people liked this” badge right at the top of many items.

First of all, this little bit of info needs to be out of the item content. Put it in the little bar that starts or ends an item where you have other GReader UI stuff. Second, there needs to be an option to turn this off completely.

Lifehacker has a couple of ways to eliminate the like misfeature with some client side, browser hacks.

Google Reader has been one of my most useful information trapping tools for a long time. The combination of starring items and search is really handy.

I didn’t realize how long I’d been in the starring game until I downloaded all of my starred items. The earliest item captured was published on Dec 5, 2006. That’s just about 2.5 years ago! I also have a grand total of 1713 starred items.

My goal is to get all of these old items into an IMAP folder. Then I’m going to setup an automated script to monitor for new starred items and push them into my GMail account. This should provide me with the ability to search and access these nuggets outside of GReader. I also might be able to do some information retrieval and data mining experiments on these items.

A while back, I used to dabble in music visualization. The kind of stuff you see in the iTunes or Winamp visualizers. At the time, I was working on Windows and really interested in writing the graphics code in Python. I actually got pretty far in putting Python inside a Winamp plug-in and using OpenGL for the graphics. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really fast enough, and I had to drop the experiment as life intruded.

Since then I’ve been thinking about what the right combination of Python modules would be good for this sort of hacking. The key is to have good image processing facilities, fast bit blitting, and decent vector graphics support. A lot of interesting music vizzes that I’ve seen in the commercial music players rely on rapidly mogrifying bit images. Occasionally you want to draw some vector figures to initialize the mutating bit images. And of course it has to get to the frame buffer reasonably quickly to keep up a decent framerate.

Thinking about coming back to this arena, I wasn’t aware that there were any good prepackaged solutions. Then I decided to take a look at pygame. Lo and behold pretty much everything I was looking for, including the ability to use Numpy to manipulate images as bitmap arrays and then easily blit the array to the screen.

Now that I think about it, starting with pygame you might be able to build up a more dynamically realtime NodeBox that could be competitive with processing. Sure you couldn’t plop your sketches into an applet, but you’d be able to write them with Python.

I had a family wedding to attend near Columbus, OH this weekend. Me and the missus decided to make this a road trip and see how our little guy would do on a long ride. I rented an intermediate-SUV from Avis to haul all our stuff, and as is par for modern rentals, XM Radio was installed.

The drive was about 6.5 hours road time (7.5 wall time, with stops) each way. Noodling around I landed on XM’s Backspin channel which is wall to wall classic hip-hop. Since it was satellite, I could just park it for the entirety of the trip, commercial free.

A lot of cuts in my recently built iTunes hip-hop playlist made appearances, but there were a number of tracks I was reminded of. Gotta see if I can’t purchase MP3s for:

• De La Soul, Potholes in My Lawn

• Fat Boys, Jailouse Rap

• Rock Master Scott and The Dynamic Three, Request Line

• Positive K, I Got A Man

• Positive K, Step Up Front

• Kid and Play, Last Night

• Joeski Love, Pee Wee’s Dance

• MC Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock, It Takes Two

• Funk Doobiest, The Funkiest

There’s plenty of other pre-1988 stuff that I’d like to be reconnected with. It’s almost enough to make me seriously consider buying an XM/Sirius subscription.

Jeez Louise. Things are moving fast on the Solid State Drive front:

Crucial said Friday that it will be debuting a new 2.5” 256GB Solid State Drive on July 20th. Solid State Drives are swiftly becoming all the rage for those looking for more performance and better reliability for their internal storage needs. The 2.5” form factor makes the drive small enough for use in laptops.

That’s a quarter of a terabyte of highly reliable storage in a small, power efficient form factor. It’s not cheap now, but a year from now it will be. Or we might even have a 1 Tb SSD (sick!!) within a power user’s price range.

While datacenters, laptops, and netbooks are the obvious targets, there might be some unintended consequences for mobile media capture and playback devices.

Hat tip to The Mac Observer

The following are not particularly earth-shaking insights.

My employer defaults to issuing new employees laptop computers. It’s actually hard to get a desktop out of IT.

I went to a meeting with bunch of researchers and grad students. Everyone brought their laptops. There was a brief moment where we considered moving to a desktop for a demo, since the machine had a larger screen. The notion was quickly squashed.

At home, I have an old Mac G4 which I haven’t turned on in months. There’s also a Linux box, which I only ssh into. I never sit at its console. I have a personal MacBook which I take everywhere. Even to work where company policy actually prohibits me from using it. (I commute with a long bus ride.)

iPhones, Palm Pres, Blackberrys and their ilk are essentially consumer PARCTABs liberated from the office. And with an order of magnitude more processing power and bandwidth. (That’s a gut guess, don’t hold me to it.)

For many people, the concept of a computer as something you “go to” to get anything done is non-sensical. Computing always goes with you.

Making a push to read more books, means of course acquiring more books. I’ve been using the library but that primarily means hardbacks, which are too bulky for my taste.

So I’ve been looking into buying used paperbacks, which are significantly cheaper then new editions. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good fix on a used book store, with a good SF section, here in Northern Virginia.

Enter Amazon Marketplace or Half.com. There are these books with insanely low prices like a $1 or $0.75 or 1 cent. But that’s with a $3.99 shipping fee tacked on. What gives?

Turns out that there’s enough of a kickback to the seller on the “shipping” fee that they can make a little money. Especially if they do a decent volume and can get good postal shipping rates. This is for the Amazon Marketplace. I’m sure something similar works on Half.com, but I’m not seeing 1 cent books there. Not that I’ve looked all that hard.

Learn something new every day.

Don’t get me wrong. The price point for the Verizon Triple Play was sweet relative to Verizon + DirectTV. But there are a few glitches:

• Leasing the set top boxes for $7 (standard) and $15 (DVR) a month

• The semi-occasional box reboot with the blinkenlights going “FPGA”

• The online listings which are too frequently flat wrong

• The minimal amount of space devoted to metadata for program entries in the online guide

• Lag in bringing up a new channel

I’d been a DirectTV customer for over 6 years, so there’s no surprise in a bit of culture shock. Fiber to the curb Internet is still kickass after three though.

Yipee!! Over at io9, Graeme McMillan reports that an American Flagg! collection is back in print in the US.

American Flagg! was the under-appreciated older sibling of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns in the mature theme family of 1980’s comics. Flagg! probably drew less subsequent attention because it didn’t have superheroes as its foundation. Howard Chaykin, the author and early illustrator, forged an astounding mix of cultural satire, political sendup, and science fiction. Not to mention some of the most distinctive art of the times.

Apparently Paul Verhoven (what’s he up to these days?) was going to make a feature film based upon American Flagg!, but it never got done. Given the current times, and available computer generated image capabilities, this would seem like a great project for The Wachowski Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, or Robert Rodriguez.

Anyway, it’s just good to have old Rueben back on the shelves. Amazon is making available two trade paperbacks, which seem to overlap on issues. But Dynamite Entertainment has a nice looking hardcover collection of American Flagg!, which I think is what McMillan was referring to.

One other thing that could help smooth my information trapping is to leverage starring in Google Reader more, instead of e-mail. While e-mail is pretty cheap, starring is a one key gesture. Since I’ve already figured out how to post e-mail to a folder, and written a cron script to continuously download my starred items, it’s a short step to combining the two for automated item capture.

I’m old enough that I was in high school when Whodini was emerging. The cover for The Haunted House Of Rock stuck in my head because of the distinctive art and that it was one of the first Hip-Hop twelve inches I ever bought. Whodini helped prop up Hip-Hop in the eventual backlash after the genre’s initial burst into popular consciousness. They really only had three good albums, but their tracks still get played and have influence to this day. I’ve put together a Hip-Hop playlist for my iPod Nano, and a surprising number of Whodini tracks wound up on it, including:

• The Haunted House of Rock

• Five Minutes of Funk

• Freaks Come Out at Night

• Funky Beat

• Friends

And that doesn’t even account for Magic’s Wand, Big Mouth, Escape (I Need a Break), I’m a Ho, and One Love, which has a really nice beat, but which I think is a little sappy.

Considered soft relative to the militant, Afrocentric, and gangsta strains that started to crest in 1988, I always enjoyed their music. Well produced, never vulgar, and lyrically solid, Whodini earned a well-deserved place in the annals of rap.

Noting a couple of small, user experience details that make my iPod Nano much more useable than my old Mini.

Shuffle Switching. I’m a playlist guy, and most of my playlists aren’t useful shuffled, as they’re for dj mixed CDs. However, I have one playlist that’s a bunch of singles, specifically designed for shuffling. Unlike iTunes playlists, apparently iPod playlists can’t be marked individually for shuffling.

However, selecting a track and then hitting the Nano center button a few times allows you to quickly switch the Nano’s current shuffle state. So the procedure is pick a track in a playlist, start it playing, then set the shuffle state with a couple of clicks. No muss, no fuss.

Scrolling Long Titles. The Mini would horizontally scroll long track titles, but not long album names, artist names, or playlist names. Irritating.

The Nano corrects this deficiency.

That is all.

Tumblelogging might be breaking out as a richer complement or alternative to twitter. I always dug the approach of media type specific posting elements and interfaces, but never got a chance to really practice the form.

While Tumblr has been around for a while, new kid on the block Posterous seems be getting attention from the ditherati. I’m enjoying Steve Rubel’s transition to posterous as his primary “lifestreaming” tool and the subsequent explorations. Jennifer Van Grove also compares and contrasts tumblr and posterous.

Two things strike me as interesting about posterous. On the inbound side, hijacking e-mail clients as a posting front end is an old concept, but posterous seems to be taking a fresh approach. Outbound, the routing to multiple popular social media systems feels like a winner. Supporting custom domains is a big step, but I didn’t see any real data export capabilities. They’re rapidly iterating though, so that might show up soon.

I grabbed a posterous account, but I’m not sure what to do with it yet. Thinking it might be a good way to do link blogging.

One of my all time favorite books, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, turns 25 today. Thanks to PC/Mac/Whatever-world for reminding me.

Thinking about what the The Road and Neuromancer have in common, brilliant dialog is central to their power. Gibson developed a whole new language of technology based cultural cool. His dialog imbued seriously nerdy elements with a hipster chic. McCarthy pared down conversations between a father and son, discarding even the quotation marks, to match the bleakness and despair of their situation. The duds I’ve read recently all had weak, tepid dialog.

Maybe I’ve become a dialog connoisseur, which might explain the obsession with Tarantino films.

I’m putting the complete Sprawl trilogy on this year’s to read list.

• Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks. Disappointing. So little shrift is paid to the Culture that I never really got a firm grip on what the Culture was all about. I never bought into the conflict. Banks needlessly sold out the Yalson character right before the climax, which really pissed me off. And it’s got one long, drawn out, and insanely unpleasant passage.

• The Cassini Division, Ken MacLeod. Great read despite tangling quantum computing, questions of “artificial” sentience, genocide, and socialism. Once again, I enjoyed MacLeod’s differing perspective on political systems.

• Kop, Warren Hammond. Essentially a straight-ahead noir dirty cop story with a light dusting of science fiction. Not particularly brilliantly executed but a nice wrinkle in the portrayal of poverty despite advanced technology.

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Worthy of all the accolades. Hope, despair, perseverance and love, brutally and searingly etched into the reader’s imagination. A surprisingly quick and “easy” read for all of its brilliance. Amazing how a great author can make one word (Okay) so powerful.

That makes 14 for the year. This was an especially productive month. Not quite on pace for 35, but closing the gap. Just have to avoid dud 500 pagers like Consider Phlebas.