In LA

I’d barely gotten used to the idea that there’s this fabricated new consumer holiday the day after Thanksgiving called ‘Black Friday’, when all of a sudden another holiday pops up a few days later, “Cyber Monday“.

I received a flurry of emails over the weekend advertising upcoming Cyber Monday deals, and I’d have thought the number of these emails would decrease over time, but today I received yet another mass email from yet another internet retailer announcing the extension of Cyber Monday. It’s now “Cyber Week”. I suppose we’re all supposed to spend spend spend in order to help the economy. If the economy continues its free-fall, we’ll soon be hearing of “Cyber Month”, and maybe 2009 will be dubbed “Cyber Year”. Hopefully we won’t have to suffer through a “Cyber Decade”. Buy buy buy!

If only there were a pre-established consumer holiday coming up in a few weeks, maybe the retailers wouldn’t have to try so hard to stoke a few sales…

I just received the famed “black olive” foam earbud sleeves that I’ll be using with the Shure earbuds I mentioned in a previous post. It would appear that the smallest box Best Buy uses to ship items is 8″x12″x9″. So I received a box full of cushiony air pockets, with the tiny earbud sleeve package pressed right up against the top of the box. What a waste. The earbuds likely could have survived the trip just in their original packaging, or wrapped in a single strip of bubble wrap.

I didn’t realize that these earbud sleeves do not fit the i2c’s without modification (their inner tube is too narrow), but they fit my Future Sonics Atrios perfectly. I tore out the tubes and stuck a couple of ‘em on the i2c’s, and the sound is much improved over the stock silicon sleeves. When I wear this pair out, I’ll try using a small needlenose pliers to enlarge the tubes in the next pair rather than performing that more-damaging tube-ectomy.

(This post was mostly written a week ago, but lay unfinished until now due to work and dead-car related business)

I’ve never before structured a long weekend around a long-distance run, but there’s a first time for everything.

On the evening of August 30 I drove down to Orange County to pick up my bib and chip for the race. During the journey, my car decided to throw a fit and blink its “check engine” light at me. This led me to ponder the fact that it’s now the 21st century and our vehicles, which are endowed with enough intelligence to actually know the nature of any problems they encounter, are still unable to communicate anything more to the driver than the non-specific illumination of a single LED or light bulb. Pathetic. It would probably add fifty cents to the cost of the car to put a little LCD screen that shows human-readable error messages in the space currently taken up by the check engine light. I suspect that in my case this screen would have read “cylinder 1 not firing”, as when I exited the freeway I noticed that the car shook a bit and the engine was running less smoothly than normal. Luckily I was already near my destination, and when I met up with Ken and Essie we all jumped into their less problematic vehicle.

Final registration for the half-marathon took place in the Disneyland Hotel convention center. I was given my bib (which I pinned to my singlet for the run) and championchip¹ (which I zip-tied to my shoe). There were a ton of companies with booths at the convention center, selling or promoting their wares. I saw a number of running shirts with amusing and/or stupid slogans written on them, such as the worrisome “toenails are for sissies“. I taste-tested a bunch of different Clif bars, tried a Mocha-flavored Clif Shot Gel (that gooey packet was the nastiest thing I’ve ever “drunk”) and a Clif Shot Blok (mmm, carnuba wax). I ended up with a nice collection of schwag, including energy bars, gels, and caffeine-laced energy jelly beans².

The race was set to start the next morning at 6:00 AM, so I set my iPod’s alarm for 4:30, and set the alarm to play a really obnoxious remix. Ken and I watched the Firefly miniseries/Pilot and then it was lights out.

I woke up instantly at 4:30 AM and shut off the alarm before it could finish playing one bar. My left eye seemed irritated and possibly infected, but I had not brought glasses along and was not going to run blind, so I inserted my contact lenses. We had breakfast and coffee, and then headed to Anaheim.

The nearest freeway exit to the race was closed, and so were many of the streets leading to the start line, so it took a while to get anywhere near the race. Ken and I ended up exiting the car about a mile-and-a-half from the start point and ran to the race. It’s too bad he hadn’t yet instructed his gps watch to start logging data, as it would be interesting to know how much further than 13.1 miles we both ran that day. We both entered our respective “corrals”. Since I’m an untested runner with no time on record, I started in the last wave of the last corral. This meant I queued up with thousands of other slow folk in a wide, block-long swath of thousands, and my race began about 20 minutes after the first corral had started running. I set my Nike+ iPod to have me run a half-marathon distance and queued up the run playlist I’d put together.

Eventually our corral was released, and we all jogged slowly, with hiccoughs, toward and through the starting line. I’d planned to take it easy and go slow the first few miles, but quickly found that I needed to put no effort toward that goal, as the crowd was so tightly packed I could barely run. According to my iPod, I started out running an 8 minute mile, but then dropped to about 11 minutes per mile for the next few as I weaved my way through the crowd. As Ken had forewarned, there were plenty of people walking or stopping to take photos within the first few hundred yards of the race. They all had as much a right to be there as I, but it would have improved the race experience for everyone if slower folk were encouraged to move to the right and faster to the left. It didn’t help that the route through Disneyland and California Adventure often went through fairly thin bottlenecks, at which points we all had to walk or even stop if the people ahead were taking photos.

By the fifth mile I’d found a little more space, and celebrated by accelerating. It was fun to realize that benefit of all that training. When mile 6 came around I felt great, and wasn’t remotely fatigued. It was fun running along with thousands of other people, and though I’m not the most competitive person in the world, it was fun and great motivation to continually pass people –hundreds of people. I suppose that’s a benefit of starting in the last corral: With the exception of the times I stopped to drink at refreshment stations, I don’t think I was ever passed. I guess everyone was taking it easy. I’d expected to run most of the half-marathon at a steady pace of about 8:30/mi, and eventually I settled on a speed a little faster than that according to my pedometer.

Along the route were often stationed local police, boy scouts, cheer squads, and marching bands. These people showed as much endurance as any runner, as they cheered and high-fived relentlessly from the sidelines for over 3 hours.

After the first few miles, there were drink stations each mile or two at which volunteers would hand out cups of water and powerade. I walked through every-other station to drink a half-glass of powerade. Somewhere towards the last few miles there was a station handing out Clif shots. I grabbed a mocha-flavored Clif shot, it was the tastiest thing I’d ever drunk.

I’ve been using my Nike+iPod pedometer to keep track of pace and distance during training, and its soothing female voice gave me periodic updates during the half-marathon as my preloaded playlist of mp3 files spooled out. I remember noticing as I passed the sign for mile 5 or 6 that my iPod had already told me I’d passed that distance. At one point, it told me I had 1 mile remaining, and it was a little dispiriting to pass the mile marker for mile 10 or 11 soon afterward and realize there were still more than 2 miles to go³ –and just then the last song in my playlist began to play. When constructing my playlist for the run, I’d placed Milli Vanilli’s “Blame it on the Rain” as the last song, after the 2-hour mark. I figured it would motivate me to finish the race before it played. Oops.

I sped up for the final mile just for fun, and crossed the finish line with a time of 2:09:08. Slower than my goal, but better than half the pace of the race’s winner (John Lucas finished in 1:08:05!). Since this was the first time in my life I’ve ever run over 11 miles, let alone 13.1, I was happy to finish. And since I finished without dying, I figure I should keep the momentum and have registered for the upcoming Long Beach half-marathon.

Medals waiting to be placed on the necks of the finishers. 13,000-some people ran in the race and 10,847 finished, that’s a lot of medals.

Special thanks to my brother-in-law Ken Fine (who bested my half-marathon time by over 20 minutes) for the photos.

Addendum: My 1997 Nissan Sentra, who served me well for the better part of 175,000 miles, did indeed die. It was a good car, and it came through for that one last trip to make my half-marathon experience possible. I’m sad to see it go. That said, I will not be unexcited about its replacement.

1. WTF is a championchip? Yet another benign use of RFID technology. [↩]
2. I’m not making these up, they’re Sport Beans EXTREME, made by Ronald Reagan’s favorite confectioner, Jelly Belly. [↩]
3. I think the iPod+Nike may have been fooled into inaccuracy by all the running in place that occurred in the early part of the race [↩]

I received my Panasonic DMC-LZ8, and shot a few test photos today. In summary, I’d give the camera an A- for optics, an A for features, a B for user-interface (I have to click how many times to manually set the ISO equivalent?), and a solid D for image processing.

Why that low grade? Because after the camera has responded to the user’s commands, the lens has focused and zoomed, the image has been focused on the sensor, and the sensor has captured an image, Panasonic’s Venus Engine IV software goes to work. It takes the raw image off the sensor, processes it, and writes a file to the memory card. The problem is in the processing — digital images contain some amount of noise, and this noise can be reduced by applying noise reduction algorithms. But there is a downside to noise reduction, as these algorithms reduce the level of detail in the image. Every manufacturer approaches this tradeoff in their own way, but Panasonic’s decision is very unfortunate.

The Panasonic DMC-LZ8 (and apparently most other Panasonic digital cameras) suffers from an overly aggressive style of noise reduction. The user can set the noise reduction to be reduced in one of the camera’s menus, but it can’t be reduced nearly enough, and can’t be disabled. It doesn’t appear to be possible to shoot a photo that is not visibly mangled by Panasonic’s digital noise reduction.

Panasonic’s noise reduction may be useful for photos shot in low-light conditions, as such photos can have enough noise to warrant some smearing of detail in order to make the noise less distracting. Photos shot in bright sunlight should have very little noise and thus require little to no noise reduction, yet the DMC-LZ8 attacks such images with its noise reduction algorithms and leaves them noiseless but also a bit impressionistic, as if they’d been painted with a tiny brush. Definition and fine details are lost in the process. I dialed the digital noise reduction down to its lowest setting and shot a few more sample photos, but the noise reduction was still very apparent.

The problem is not limited to the Panasonic DMC-LZ8, as is attested by this internet petition which asks Panasonic to release a firmware update for several other Panasonic cameras to allow users to choose to disable noise reduction. I would also prefer to disable the camera’s noise reduction feature, because it is easy to apply noise reduction in computer to shots that really need it, and 9 times out of 10 I prefer the organic look of the noise itself to the painterly look of noise reduction.

Gripes aside, the camera seems nice in all other aspects, and for $111 I’m happy with it. It’s small, fast, cheap, and the images are reasonably good (they’d be great if not for the problem noted above). If I’d paid the suggested retail price of $179 I’d probably already be in the process of returning the camera and replacing it with the Canon SD870IS, but at $111 I’m content. I don’t intend to use this as my primary camera. Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

The US Census bureau¹ has come out with a report which states that ethnic and racial minorities will outnumber the majority by the year 2042². I don’t know if the Census bureau uses the word “whites” because I can’t find their report online, but the Associated Press promptly wrote a headline declaring,”White Americans no longer a majority by 2042“, and the Detroit Free Press declared,”Whites will be US minority group by 2042, Census predicts“.

But “White” and “minority” are surprisingly mutable social constructs in the USA. History tells me that in the U.S., whoever is considered to be on top of the socioeconomic ladder at a given period of time automatically becomes part of the “White” blob. At one point, all those Italian immigrants to the US were not considered to be White, and the Whiteness of Irish and European Jewish immigrants was also in doubt.

I bet there were similar if more clearly alarmist headlines back in the early 1900s, shouting to anyone who would listen that in a few decades Whites would be outnumbered by these non-Anglo immigrant masses. In 2042, when the ethnic and racial groups included under the White banner include Latinos, Hispanics, and East Asians³ , I fully expect to see identical headlines to those of today about how “Whites will lose their majority status by 2076″.

America has always bubbled with immigration, cultural exchange and conflict, opportunity and oppression, and demographic shifts. My rational mind suspects there’s little new about this latest batch of news, though I am planning to hurry up and learn some Español, Italian, and Yiddish just in case.

Technorati Tags: race, whitey

1. Motto: “Page Last Modified: May 20, 2004″ [↩]
2. Perhaps not coincidentally, 2042 is also the year in which a computer-generated Charles Grodin will replace Chris Tucker as Jackie Chan’s co-star in the ever-popular Rush Hour franchise. [↩]
3. If that assumption sounds improbable to your 2008 racial spidey-sense, please reevaluate my argument in 2038. [↩]

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

Somehow that statement¹ just looks wrong in iChat next to my smiling avatar.

1. by the way, I’m not remotely violent, and am not about to punch anything. i was just venting some frustration in a chat with a friend [↩]

Because I was switching between Windows and OS X, and was trying to make the text on a web page look nice, I was a little riled up when I wrote my last post about Microsoft Windows XP’s technique of rendering fonts. Now that my mental dust has settled, I still think Windows goes about font rendering in an ass-backwards way, but I can better articulate why that is, and how I think they got there.

I think the Windows font rendering method is designed specifically to make each character as clear and sharp as possible. I think the engineers who designed Windows XP’s typography engine did a great job accomplishing this task. The trouble with engineering is that it’s possible to come up with a great answer to the wrong problem. In my opinion, that is what happened here. The real problem with text on a computer is not clarity or sharpness, but readability.

The challenge of rendering fonts well on low-resolution screens is that fonts are full of curves and thin lines that just don’t line up exactly with the screen’s coarse grid of individual pixels. OS X and Windows both use sub-pixel rendering, so portions of characters that don’t land exactly on a screen pixel are rendered in shades of gray to represent how much of that pixel is covered by the font¹. In order to make each character look as clear and sharp as possible, Windows alters the shape of characters to optimize the amount of each character that lands exactly on screen pixels and minimize the number of pixels that will be rendered as anything but black.

This definitely gives many characters a sharper look in Windows. Many instances of this can be noted in the images from my previous post, one obvious example is that Windows has taken the curved-top, bottom, left, and right edges of all lowercase ‘a’s and has straightened them so that they render as single and sharp lines of pixels at right-angles to one another. In comparison, the OS X rendering of the lowercase ‘a’s looks blurry and curvy.

But the trouble is, characters do not stand alone. Typographers for hundreds of years² have taken great pains to design fonts so that the shape of characters, placed next to one another, produces well shaped words and sentences optimized for ease of reading. A well-designed font leads the eye through words, and the shape of the characters and the spacing between letters is crucial. The Windows font rendering engine changes fonts so thoroughly in order to maximize contrast that it warps them into shapes that barely resemble the original font (again, see those lowercase ‘a’s as a good example of this), and it also shifts portions of the fonts left and right such that the width of characters and the space between characters varies inconsistently, not just within within a line of text but even within individual words (note that in the Windows rendering of the word ‘event’ in the example image, there is a lot of space between the characters ‘e’ ‘v’ ‘e’, but ‘e’ ‘n’ ‘t’ are closer to each other).

The Microsoft engineers I know are very smart people, and I know Microsoft does a ton of usability studies, so how could they get this one so wrong? I suspect the wrong questions were asked. Perhaps test subjects were asked to look at blocks of text and rate their clarity and sharpness, or were asked to look at blocks of text rendered using different methods and were asked to judge the appearance of the text. Although I think the OS X method of font rendering is superior for the criteria that matter, I do think that when placed side by side with a block of text rendered by Windows and asked which block has the greatest clarity, many people would say the text in Windows looks clearer. And of course it does, there’s less gray, and those subjects might also be used to the look of non-antialiased fonts or bitmap fonts (especially at the time Windows XP was in development).

But the more important question to ask would be, “Which font rendering method produces more readable blocks of text”. And the way to test the question would be to take two groups of people with good reading skills who do not frequently read text on a computer, have each group read a 20-page story rendered on each computing platform, and time them. I contend that the OS X group, regardless whether they rated the text as clear or unclear, would finish reading first³. The reason being that OS X renders the fonts much more accurately, and since body fonts are carefully designed to be readable when typeset as words in paragraphs, the Windows tendency to mangle each character out of shape and out of harmony with its surrounding characters in order to maximize the clarity of individual characters turns out to be counterproductive. And butt-ugly IMO.

Ask the wrong questions, and you often wind up with answers like “42″ and font rendering engines like the one built into Windows XP.

1. both OS’s also leverage the fact that LCD displays are high-resolution arrays of red, green, and blue pixels, and render not just levels of gray but colored pixels in order to use this additional resolution –Microsoft calls this technology cleartype and OS X doesn’t give it a name [↩]
2. thousands actually, we still use fonts such as “Trajan”, based on Roman typography [↩]
3. and would probably suffer from less eyestrain, but that wouldn’t be as easy a thing to test objectively [↩]

I’m building a web page right now, and am testing it on a number of web browsers on a few different computing platforms. After staring at type on computer screens for a while, I have reached the conclusion that font rendering on over 90% of computers out there is incredibly bad. Here’s an example:

Which do you prefer? Be honest now. OK, so maybe it’s not fair to compare the rendering of a font on a computer screen with a scan of actual printed type. And maybe it’s wrong to pick on Windows without offering up an example of how text is rendered in Mac OS X or Linux. Surely all computers have huge limitations when rendering the printed word. But actually I’m being more unfair than that. Please take another look at those examples, compare them, then click here to reveal the real captions for the above images to find out where they actually originated. (If you prefer the deceptive captions, you can reload ‘em).

To my eyes, OS X’s type rendering looks much like a scan of a newspaper or book. The weighting of characters is nice and even, and the text is pleasing to the eye and easy to read. Even if you didn’t buy the pretense of the original caption, it’s at least slightly possible to pass the OS X rendering off as something that was actually typeset and printed at high resolution.

Windows XP’s font rendering is an indefensible monstrosity.² It pains me to think that over 90% of the personal computers in the world, in the year 2008, display text in this manner³. The characters in the Windows sample have very uneven weighting, with all corners and pointy details stabbing my eye with a couple pixels of absolute blackness while curves are rendered an anemic gray and straight lines are often reduced down to a single pixel in width (This problem jumps out at me in almost every letter, but can be seen more clearly in the sharp “J” next to the soft “o” in Jonathan, in the oddly sharp lower left corner of the lower-case “a”, and in the weird unevenness of the italics and the numerals). The best that can be said for the kerning is that it is bizarre; Letters are either smashed too close together or separated by chasms, within a single word. Italics are so awful in so many ways that I’m thinking of redesigning my pages to avoid using them altogether –Windows users have to suffer enough with regular text. Some characters look strangely condensed.

A few details to note: compare Windows’s rendering of the word “sweeping” to its rendering of the word “events” (why so much space between the instances of “e” and “v”?), then compare Windows’s renderings of the word “events”, “Rhys”, “1930’s”, “Children” to the OS X versions. And why are the OS X and Windows renderings of these lines so different in their relative lengths?

I’m sure there are compelling-sounding engineering reasons behind Microsoft’s assault on typography-loving eyes everywhere, but the proof is in the pudding. Both of these samples are of the same font, Georgia (designed specifically for Microsoft), and it is either Alanis-ironic or just plain sad that OS X kicks Windows’s ass so soundly at rendering Microsoft’s own. Another few hours of flipping between platforms and I’ll be compelled to file a shareholder resolution to push Microsoft to fix their font render engine, undergo a few sessions of maoist self-criticism, and make a public apology.

Windows, heal thyself, particularly thy crap-ass rendering of typography

1. If only there were a recognized acronym for “rolling on the floor hemorrhaging out my eyeballs” [↩]
2. And I’m being charitable. If you are even entertaining for a moment the idea of defending the crappy font engine built into Windows XP, please first revisit the sample images above and start building up your reserves of purest denial. [↩]
3. actually, it’s worse than that, since most Windows users don’t know to enable cleartype [↩]

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “the most powerful investigative panel in Congress” according to the Gray Lady¹ is spending time investigating whether baseball pitching great Roger Clemens used steroids back in 1998.

If my understanding is correct, this means that my taxes are funding an investigation into whether a ball player took pills and injections with the goal of making him throw a round white object a little faster. While I will grant that one of our government’s core functions is to make sure that the scourge known as the designated hitter rule doesn’t spread beyond the American league…

–but seriously, what an incredible waste of time, resources, and priorities. Let Major League Baseball and the World Anti-Doping Agency deal with the case. If the league, a private enterprise, wants to ban the use of such substances, let them spend their own money policing it themselves. It’s bad enough that public money goes to fund sports stadiums for the use of private businesses.

At this rate, the government will soon be holding congressional hearings into whether the gladiators on American Gladiators are juiced, whether Tyra Banks’ breasts are real, or whether members of the Grateful Dead (or their fans) used a lot of LSD.

Should I care more about this? Am I just becoming a cranky old man?

1. the most powerful newspaper in the land, after USA Today and The Onion [↩]