In LA

From saveourtacotrucks.org:

Led by District 1 County Supervisor Gloria Molina, the L.A. Board of Supervisors has passed new restrictions that will effectively eliminate taco trucks from our streets. Under Supervisor Molina’s new rules, taco trucks will have to change location every hour, or face a misdemeanor charge carrying a $1000 fine and/or jail. Yes, jail.

Taco Trucks are a special facet of Los Angeles, and something we don’t want to lose. Though this ordinance currently affects just unincorporated parts of L.A., that’s 65% of the County. And of course it opens up the doors for legislation closer to home too.

I happen to think taco trucks are cuter than the average brick and mortar restaurant, and always like seeing them parked around the city, serving their wares. If you also think taco trucks are charming or useful, and don’t want to see them disappear from Los Angeles, you could do worse than spend a few minutes visiting the saveourtacotrucks.org website. There you can download printable posters, sign petitions, that sort of thing. If you’re wondering what a taco truck is, there are plenty of photos of taco trucks on flickr for you to peruse.

Technorati Tags: food, hollywood, los angeles, mexican food, politics, taco, taco truck

If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user who would like to be able to input Chinese characters using handwriting recognition, today is your lucky day:

A screenshot of me using the HWPen input method to write one of the more important Chinese phrases in my iPod Touch’s “Notes” application.

It would appear that someone has ported the excellent HanWang Chinese handwriting recognition engine to the iPhone. This software can also do English handwriting recognition, but that doesn’t work nearly as well as the Chinese recognition. Details on how to install and use the software can be found on Gizmodo.

I have this installed and living just fine side-by-side with a Chinese pinyin input method, and it’s very easy to switch between pinyin, handwriting recognition, and the standard English keyboard.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Chinese, Chinese IME, Chinese Language, IME, iPhone, iPod, OS X, software

There’s a custom Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealership (run by a man whose last name coincidentally, is Harley) in Britain that not only sells “custom wide tire kits” and other Harley-related items, but in the “Custom Accessory for Harley” section of their site sells some nice looking stainless steel kits and supplies for making your own tofu, as well as tofu recipes¹.

If I was a little less sleep deprived, I’d probably find that this post practically writes its own punchlines, but I’m drawing blanks. This is probably for the best –given how popular Harleys seem to be among people from all walks of life, any joke based on preconceived notions of who would be found riding such a bike are bound to be at best severely outdated. And who wants to tell an outdated joke? Take my wife, please!²

1. And no, I have no idea how I came across this page [↩]
2. Has Henny Youngman’s repertoire become public domain yet? [↩]

Some of my friends and relatives don’t yet know that I’ve moved back to the U.S. A quick update on my life is in order:

1. I moved to Beijing, China in March of 2007
2. While in China I did a number of things:
   1. Studied Mandarin Chinese
   2. Met a lot of very cool Chinese people (我很想你们, 我有机会的时候我应该要去中国访问你们).
   3. Worked on the first NBA produced Chinese television show (”NBA制造”, a sly title meaning “made in NBA”). Edited the initial promotional materials for the show and about half of the pilot episode.
   4. Worked on the film The Children of Huang Shi (黄石的孩子) in an IT role likely unique to productions in China, facilitating the lines of communication and data between the director and producers in China and the editors in Australia –not an easy task given China’s internet censorship and general network instability. While working on that film in a little town named Hengdian, I met a director, producer, and postproduction supervisor who were doing preproduction work on “The Forbidden Kingdom”. This led directly to my subsequent job.
   5. Worked on the film The Forbidden Kingdom (功夫之王) as second assistant editor. We built our editing suites into a room in the not-too-luxurious Yingdu Hotel in Hengdian (横店).
   6. After four months of work in Hengdian, shooting of The Forbidden Kingdom ended. Last September I and the other members of the editorial department were sent to Los Angeles to continue editing the film.
3. Editorial began working on the director’s cut of the film over in Studio City. Initially I was to be sent back to Beijing (to continue working on the film there) after one month, but one month in LA became two, then four, and then they ended up keeping me in LA for the duration. Somewhere in the middle of those 6 months of work in LA, I decided I might as well consider the U.S.A. my home base again.
4. I’m now finished with The Forbidden Kingdom and have gone on to a new job in the editorial department of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I’m living in Studio City, not far from Universal Studios.

A busy intersection in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. 5/2006

Yesterday I walked to lunch along a busy street in Hollywood, having a very difficult time hearing my friend on my cell phone as busses and trucks rattled past. I marveled at the amazing amount of noise I encounter on a daily basis, and thought of how peaceful the aural landscape of the future city will be if one day all internal combustion engines are replaced by electric equivalents.

There are a ton of Toyota Prios¹ zooming around the streets of LA fairly quietly using their electric motors, the first wave of the new sound of transportation. Sounds like progress to me.

So I’m hoping that a new piece of legislation introduced in the US House of Representatives, the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2008, doesn’t result in a mandatory minimum noise level for all vehicles. Here are the details on the Act, courtesy of its supporters at the National Federation of the Blind (NFB):

The bill requires the Secretary of Transportation, within ninety days of its enactment, to commence a two-year study to determine the best means to provide the blind and other pedestrians with information about the location, motion, speed, and direction of vehicles. Upon completion of the study, the Secretary will report the findings of the study to Congress and, within ninety days, establish a minimum vehicle safety standard for all new vehicles sold in the United States. Automobile manufacturers will have two years to comply with the vehicle safety standard.

Some folk over at treehugger.com wonder if such concern is overkill, asking How Many Blind People Have Been Hit By A Prius? One answer can be found in an LA times article on the bill, “While the organization is not aware of people being struck by cars they couldn’t hear, NFB President Marc Maurer has said he fears it’s only a matter of time.”

I’d like to think that the desire for a quiet environment and the desire for blind people to be able to freely and safely navigate the streets don’t have to be at odds. Hopefully if the bill passes, the required study will show that tire and electric engine noise alone will suffice to warn pedestrians (especially given that as more and more hybrids take to the streets the total level of road noise will go down, so that the sound of approaching electric vehicles will be less masked by the din). Or maybe someone can develop a wristwatch for the vision-impaired which would use sonar or transponders built into every car to notify them of approaching traffic?

I’d prefer any solution to one that results in a future of roads filled with chirping, whistling, or beeping cars.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, ambient sound, Legislature, safety, sound pollution

1. the plural of Prius if treated as a 2nd declension Latin noun [↩]

What is it that they do at the pharmacy between the time they accept a prescription and the time they dispense the medication? Tonight I went to a CVS pharmacy, gave the pharmacist at the “drop-off” desk a prescription, and even spotted the medication on the shelf for him. He grabbed it, poked at a computer, and told me to come back in 20 minutes.

So I wandered the store for a while, then returned. There were 3 pharmacists working behind the counter and about two other customers waiting for their meds. I waited and waited, and finally it was my turn. The pharmacist asked for my info and went looking for the bag containing my medication on the rack. He looked for a while.

I mentioned to him that I’d just submitted my prescription 35 minutes previously, and then he saw the bag containing my medicine over by the drop-off counter, charged me for it, told me to use the eye drops twice a day and to not fill a squirt gun with ‘em and go shooting neighborhood dogs in the eyes. I agreed follow the instructions and left with my package, finally.

I’m curious why the pharmacist at the drop-off counter, who had my prescription and meds and had entered the data into the system , couldn’t have just sold me the meds right then and sent me on my way. What exactly happens in those magic “20″ minutes that elapse between the time a prescription is accepted and the time it’s actually given to the customer? Is there a federally mandated cooling-off period to make sure the customer really wants the meds and isn’t going to regret the purchase?

Technorati Tags: medication, pharmacy

In this example, column G is determining a timecode value, 10:45:46:2 based on the frame number in B, 0929906. That timecode value should end in :02, and will once I figure a good way to add leading zeros in an Excel formula.

The other day I was presented with an Excel spreadsheet listing a bunch of clips by frame number, and I needed to find the scene and shot numbers for each clip from an EDL¹ which listed the clips by timecode.

Rather than spend a lot of time with a timecode calculator converting each frame number to 24fps non-drop SMPTE timecode, I came up with a formula that would automatically generate and display the timecode for a given frame number. I didn’t spend the time to figure out how to coerce excel into adding leading zeros where necessary, so it doesn’t always generate timecodes that are formatted properly, but it was good enough for my purposes. I’m posting the formula here in case any other filmmakers find it useful, and if you happen to know how to modify this formula so that it does add leading zeros, please consider posting your code as a comment here. We’re all in this together. On that note, on to the formula.

For a given frame number in column 2, row B, the following formula will convert that frame number to timecode (24p, ND):

CONCATENATE( ROUNDDOWN(B2/86400,0),":", ROUNDDOWN(MOD(B2,86400)/1440,0), ":", ROUNDDOWN(MOD(MOD(B2,86400),1440)/24,0), ":", MOD(MOD(B2,1440),24))

–Update: A tip from Ken Case led to the solution. The finished formula, which produces properly formatted smpte 24p non-drop timecodes, is the following:

CONCATENATE( TEXT(ROUNDDOWN(B2/86400,0),"00"),":", TEXT(ROUNDDOWN(MOD(B2,86400)/1440,0),"00"), ":", TEXT(ROUNDDOWN(MOD(MOD(B2,86400),1440)/24,0),"00"), ":", TEXT(MOD(MOD(B2,1440),24),"00"))

1. acronym for Edit Decision List [↩]

Aesthetically, this clone of an Apple iPod Touch, advertised on Facebook’s China network, looks like the closest match yet, though its dimensions are not listed so it’d be tough to say for sure.

Other notable iPod Touch clones are the Optimus Touch, the Tsinghua Tongfang PMC-V560 (apparently only costs $52), the Portronics/Onda VX858, and the Meizu M7.

Of course, these are all just lookalikes, I’d expect they lack the features that make the iPod Touch so appealing –great multitouch interface, high resolution, robust Unix OS, great email application, great web browser, etc. But it’s amusing to me to watch the number of Chinese iPod Touch clones increase.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, OS X

At the extremes, those who think online filesharing helps artists¹ may see this story as logical and evidence for their beliefs, and those who assume illegal downloads of movies and music always hurts content creators may see this as a joke (funny or not), but I think it’s pretty cool that a little independent film has generated a lot of positive buzz through word-of-mouth reviews from people who illegally downloaded the film –and the producer of The Man From Earth has officially thanked these movie “pirates”. To wit:

“Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download. Most of the feedback from everyone who has downloaded “The Man From Earth” has been overwhelmingly positive. People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the net!”

All’s well that ends well.

Technorati Tags: film

1. I know I’ve discovered more artists and purchased more music due to the existence of p2p technologies, from napster to gnutella. [↩]