iPhone 2.0: the hangover

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Versus all previous phones, my first generation iPhone was like a supermodel. Now, with the update to 2.0 version of iPhone software, which offers many, but not all, of the benefits of the 3G model, the downsides to dating a supermodel have taken center stage: the petulance, the tantrums, the inability to get ready on time (speaking metaphorically, of course, as my experience with supermodels has been limited).


No one should review a tech product without using it for some period of time, and having used my first generation iPhone with the 2.0 software for a few weeks now, I'm not so sure that the benefits have outweighed the setbacks, a tough thing for an early adopter to admit. I have a high tolerance for the frustration of life on the cutting edge, but in this case it feels like two steps forward, two steps back.


I've experienced many of the problems reported by other 1st-gen and 3G owners after having updated to the 2.0 software. Most noticeable and galling is interface lag. In a touchscreen device, this is deadly, because you tap again and again in frustration, thinking the device is frozen, and then you hit the home button, but when the device finally catches up it issues all your commands in sequence and bounces you out of the application you were in because you hit the home button.


Many more random crashes? Yep, those too.


Over at Signal vs. Noise, David lists a lot of the gremlins that are plaguing the 3G. I wonder if some if this isn't related to memory leak in some of the new applications. What's ironic is that when I jailbroke my iPhone previously and installed some unapproved apps the iPhone still seemed snappy and responsive. Not that I've installed "officially approved" applications built with the iPhone SDK, the phone seems sluggish and unstable.


Another things that bugs me: when any of the apps update, they get bumped to the last page of your home screen, rather than staying in the same place. Imagine if every time one of your Mac applications was updated, it shifted in your dock to the far right. I don't think I'm unique in relying heavily on spatial memory, so this is a bad thing.


Though I had fun installing and trying a ton of applications when the store first opened, none have altered my life. Some, like Facebook or Google, are ones that don't offer much more than what their mobile Safari interfaces do. Others are useful, like Pandora, or fun, like Enigmo, but they are vampires on battery life.


iLounge has a good, comprehensive review of the new iPhone 3G, and they give it a B. Their summary of its pros and cons:



Pros: A faster and more capable version of last year’s breakthrough mobile phone, preserving the world’s best cell phone operating system, a strong combination of voice and data communication features, and iPod-class audio, video, and photo functionality, while adding impressive third-party software expandability and features for business users. Offers enhanced compatibility with international telephone networks, including high-speed towers, as well as keyboard and language support for users in most of the world’s countries. Now includes GPS for limited purposes, and superior sound quality, particularly through its redesigned headphone port.


Cons: Overall cost of ownership is higher than prior model, despite regressing from last year’s stunning design, screen quality, and pack-ins. Battery life for key phone and data features is significantly worse than before, such that users will likely require inconvenient mid-day recharging. Service contracts require additional payment for 3G data services, despite inconsistent or unavailable regional coverage and performance; callers reported certain in-call sound inconsistencies. New model further decreases compatibility with past iPod accessories, including popular ones, while both camera and screen now have noticeable color tints. Defects and battery replacement will likely require Apple Store or other warranty attention during period of use; purchasing and activation can range from simple to confusing or nightmarish depending on your local service provider.



One benefit of the apps is that U.S. users can send free SMS Messages via the AIM app. It's a bit of a hassle, you have to text to a person's phone number, and years of carrying a cell phone means I don't recognize as many phone numbers as I once did, but paying $5 to send 200 text messages is one of those great telecom scams that so endear them to users.


The one positive to come out of this, if there is one, is that I'm glad I didn't wait out in line for a 3G. Supposedly the iPhone 2.1 software update is around the corner, and hopefully that solves some or many of these issues. If not, perhaps it's not the 3G but the real 3rd generation iPhone that I need to wait for.


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49

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Paul Westerberg has released a 49 minute, one-track album titled 49:00. The best thing is that the DRM-free MP3 is available at Amazon.com for the princely sum of $0.49. I was going to think of 49 reasons you should buy this, but you won't need them if, like me, you used to cruise around in your parents car in high school listening to Replacements albums on cassette tape and hoping you could date Winona Ryder.



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Doveman covers Footloose

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Doveman covers the Footloose album for his friend Gabriel as a memorial to Gabriel's half-sister Jenny who died as a teenager in the 1980's.



When I was very young, my half-sister Jenny died tragically. She was a teenager, and it was the 80's. She left behind a wardrobe of brightly colored clothes, rainbow stickers, life-size paintings, doodles on lined paper, and hundreds of tapes. These constitute most of my memories of her. It's sad for me to look at these things, and usually I don't. But a couple of summers ago I found a tape of hers with a startling cover photograph - this was Footloose. I couldn't stop listening: it was a portrait of 80's love, desire, pain, freedom, and frenzy; of being a teenager in a time of change. By listening, I could step into Jenny's shoes, see things from her vantage point. I could be emancipated by rock and roll and walkmen, just as she had been. We could listen together.


I asked my friend Thomas to cover the album, which, sheltered as he is, he had never heard before. I was clear that I wanted to him to cover the whole album - the point wasn't to rework any one song, but to re-imagine the picture they made together. With a new Footloose we could reply to the past, tell our own story about being young. This is what he made.


-- Gabriel Greenberg



A cease-and-desist letter from a music label means you can just stream the album from that link above or from imeem, but there's a rar of mp3s at this link.


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That intersection

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No spoilers. In The Dark Knight, there's one scene in which some vehicles go from traveling above ground in Chicago to a down ramp that takes them to the underground street levels in the loop. If you've seen the movie you'll probably know which scene.


I stood out there a few years ago and took a long exposure picture of that ramp down to lower Wacker Street. I recognized it in the movie because of the Lyric Opera sign.


Entrance to lower Wacker St. in Chicago


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Fullscreen

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DVDs that fill a 4x3 tv are called fullscreen. But since more and more homes have 16x9, that title doesn't make sense anymore. Fullscreen DVDs don't "fill" the screen of your fancy plasma tv. Yet DVDs still come out now dubbed fullscreen.


A better title would be 4x3, with a little boxy graphic to illustrate the aspect ratio, though the video snob in me is tempted to dub them "not widescreen" or "visually truncated."



The Dark Knight

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Really, really good, which is a relief, because I haven't seen a summer blockbuster that I've enjoyed in a long, long time. It has an operatic grandeur, aided again by the Wagnerian themes of the score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. Much better than Batman Begins, which I wasn't as crazy about in execution as everyone else was (though the concept of a darker, more realistic telling of the story was great).


See it in IMAX. Seeing it at a regular theater you will get a pan-and-scan version of about 30 minutes of the movie. It won't be bad, but if every there was a movie you had to see in its native format, on the bigger-than-big screen, this is it. You won't be able to replicate this in any home theater. The cuts between the 35mm shots and the 70mm IMAX shots are near seamless, and you barely notice them (they're easier to spot when going from IMAX to 35mm than vice versa.


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Largo

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Los Angeles gets its fair share of crap, and I'm as guilty as anyone. Elsewhere, people complain about the weather. Here, people complain about the traffic, the strip malls, and, well, the traffic.


But today I want to focus on one of LA's treasures. Betina asked me in the afternoon if I wanted to go with her and Justing to Largo, a movie-theater-converted-to-music-hall in Hollywood, to hear Fiona Apple. I haven't heard her sing live since a concert at the Paramount back in Seattle many years ago, but I've always enjoyed her voice, that deep and smoky megaphone.


Largo is a cozy little theater tucked on the not-so-cozy mega street of La Cienega, a long stone's throw from the Beverly Center shopping mall. Such are the geographical realities of LA.


It turns out the headliner this night was the Watkins family, consisting of sister-brother duo Sara and Sean Watkins, of Nickel Creek fame (Nickel Creek's self-titled Alison-Krauss-produced debut album is a great place to start if you want to grok them; of the 267 customer reviews on Amazon it has 213 5-star ratings).


But during their long show, they were accompanied by one guest musician after another. Dan Wilson, former leader of Semisonic and recent Grammy nominee, came out for a few tunes. Then Fiona Apple strolled out, with that introverted, nervous body language, until she opens her mouth and that powerhouse of a voice takes over the room. She is our nation's little waif, our little Edith Piaf.


Then Fiona left and Glen Phillips of Toad the Wet Sprocket fan took his place. I haven't seen Phillips since a concert at Stanford back when I was an undergrad. I'm glad he still looks reasonably young, or I would have felt even older than normal.


And then Dan Wilson came back, and who did he bring on stage for a duet than John C. Reilly, of, well, Talladega Nights fame. Reilly, besides being one of the few people I know who carries his middle initial almost like an honorific, can actually hit his notes.


Great music all night long in the larger but still intimate of two performance spaces at the Largo, and yet there were empty seats in what was an arthouse movie theater sized hall, with tickets only costing $25 each. How that place does not sell out every night is a great mystery to me.


Just the previous night, I was out with some coworkers, and we were comparing LA to Seattle and NYC, and we discussed how one problem with LA seemed to be the lack of a public place you felt you could call your own. Largo feels like such a spot, and I could see myself becoming a regular.


In contrast, I went with some coworkers to The Forum in Inglewood on Monday night to see Coldplay, and that venue is one of the fugliest buildings I've been in. It's like an oversized high school gym, and picturing the Lakers playing there after seeing them at Staples Center is difficult to fathom. Since Coldplay's debut, I've liked each successive album less, and their last album had me swearing them off, but their newest album caught my ear's interest again.


The show was good, but not great. They did not bring a full musical outfit, so on string sections of songs like "Viva La Vida" they just piped in the missing backing instruments which is always disappointing. I also didn't love all the arrangements. But Chris Martin seems like one of the nicer guys in rock, and they have a long list of big anthems to call upon.


The handicapped parking at the Forum filled up, so I had to walk what felt like two miles from the stadium back to the car in the parking lot. I felt like Jude Law in Cold Mountain. When I got home and took off my walking boot, I found a big bloody spot on the back of my sock, recalling Curt Schilling's famous bloody sock. I'm going to frame it as a memento of my heroic effort on that night.



Watchmen, the trailer, and The Dark Knight, part IMAX

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Premiering with The Dark Knight tomorrow is the Watchmen teaser trailer. You can see it in all the usual Quicktime resolutions at Apple, or you can look at this teeny embed version:








Instead of "visionary director" it should read "visual director".


I'm seeing The Dark Knight at an IMAX theater tomorrow morning, bright and early. In the past, seeing feature films at an IMAX theater has been more of a novelty as those movies were shot on 35mm and transferred to a 70mm IMAX negative. But parts of The Dark Knight were actually shot natively on IMAX this time, a first for a Hollywood feature.



The filmmakers received permission to shoot a number of action sequences in Imax; these would include the opening sequence, which depicts a huge bank heist, and the climactic closing scenes. By the time production started, four major action sequences were planned for Imax, but “Chris and I knew that if we had the money and the cameras, and if it made sense, we would add other scenes,

Alternative WKW cuts

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Wong Kar-Wai has revisited Ashes of Time and produced Ashes of Time Redux. Sony Picture Classics is releasing it in September. It's the only WKW movie I haven't seen yet, and I'm excited to see a version, either version, on a big screen.


On a related note, David Bordwell compares the current cut of Days of Being Wild with an obscure, alternate cut he was lucky enough to screen. There are some spoilers for those who haven't seen the alternate cut, but since it doesn't sound like there are any plans to release this as a redux version, maybe they don't qualify as spoilers. I would give a whole lot to get my hands on this mythical alternate cut as Days of Being Wild is one of my favorite WKW movies. Bordwell tries to decode that last scene from the original cut, the famous appearance of Tony Leung in that one long handheld shot, but doesn't come to any definitive conclusions, even with the new sequencing in the alternate cut..


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Purchased song sync via the iPhone

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I saw this screen pop up for the first time when I plugged my iPhone into my laptop:






iTunes



At first, I thought this was a good thing. I'd never been offered this option before, and of course I'd like to sync them to my library. It feels like using my iPhone for backup.






But then I read the fine print, and that confused me. If I buy a song on one of my Macs, plug my iPhone in and move that song onto my iPhone, then I go and plug my iPhone into another one of my Macs, and that song is not there, why should that song be zapped from my iPhone if I don't transfer it down to my computer? Does this mean I have to have all my purchased songs on all of my Macs in order for that song to stay on my iPhone if I plug it into each of them at different times?






Maybe I'm interpreting this wrong, but if so, it's because the message is confusing. One of the things i dislike about the iPhone sync process is that the music management piece of it if you have multiple Macs that you plug the iPhone into is not as simple and straightforward as it should be.

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Brand Tags

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I've meant for some time to link to Brand Tags, a site which asks users to help attach tag clouds to brand names. Users are served a series of brands and asked to enter the first word that comes to mind. The site then collects all the data and displays the results as a tag cloud. You could waste a good hour or two on the site seeing what people think of certain brands (and I have).


It's striking how similarly many people think of some brands, and even more striking to see how the advertising can affect some brands. When served Skyy Vodka, the first word that came to mind was "blue" as I could picture their ads in my head, with large bodies of water, the tall, blue glass bottle. I clicked through to see what other people had tagged the brand, and the largest tag above the fold was indeed "blue".


How successful are some branding campaigns? BMW has managed to attach "ultimate driving machine" to its brand. But the NBA, which has switched from "It's fantastic" to "where __ happens", hasn't really ingrained either in users' minds. The top tag for the NBA seems to be "Michael Jordan" which something about the league's struggles to establish its own identity since his Airness retired.


Here are some other brands and popular tags for them:


American Apparel: hipster, porn, cool, sex, nothing, boring, cheap, clothes


Amazon: awesome, books, buy, cheap, convenient, easy, everything, fast, great, shopping, useful, smile


New Yorker: cartoons, elite, elitist, intellectual, intelligent, magazine, old, pretentious, snob, snooty, sophisticated, stuffy


Microsoft: apple, awesome, bad, big, brother, bill, boring, buggy, computers, crap, crash, evil, empire, gates, huge, lame, monopoly, office, old, pc, shit, software, sucks, windows


Apple: amazing, apple, computers, arrogant, awesome, beautiful, best, bite, clean, computer, cool, creative, cult, design, elegant, elitist, expensive, gay, good, hip, innovation, ipod, love, overpriced, pretentious, simple, sleek, steve jobs, style, trendy, white


Segway: cool, dorky, dumb, expensive, fast, fun, gay, lame, lazy, nerd, scooter, silly, stupid, useless


Techcrunch: ?, arrington, blog, boring, cereal, computer, geek, huh?, nerd, news, no idea, nothing, tech, technology, no idea, what?, who?


Target: affordable, arrow, awesome, better than walmart, bullseye, clean, clothes, cool, design, dog, everything, fun, hip, shopping, store, value


Wal Mart: american, asda, bad, big, cheap, china, crap, everything, evil, exploitation, huge, low prices, redneck, shit, shop, shopping, store, supermarket, white trash


The site also stages brand battles, pitting brands against each other. Here's the leaderboard. Pixar, Adidas, Ferrari, Google, and M&Ms are the top 5. I was glad to see Maxtor at 651, near the bottom. I've had two of their hard drives fail on me in my G5 desktop, and I'll never touch another one of their drives again.


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Tiny Tim

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Tom Verducci with a great article on the mechanics of San Francisco Giant starter Tim Lincecum. He is fun to watch pitch. The article is painful to read for a Cubs fan, however, as it includes many cautionary tales that feature the North siders as the punchline.


For example, it includes the first dissenting opinion I've read about Mark Prior's mechanics.



Mark Prior is a classic example of a high-performing pitcher who was permitted to break down because of poor mechanics. Ironically, Prior was often hailed for his "flawless" mechanics when the Cubs drafted the righthander out of USC with the No. 2 pick in 2001, though that assessment seems to have been influenced by scouts' preference for his 6' 5", 225-pound body type. Studied closely, his mechanics included two severe red flags: 1) Prior lifted his throwing elbow higher than his shoulder before reaching the loaded position, increasing the stress on his elbow and shoulder; and 2) unlike Lincecum's dynamic late torso rotation, Prior rotated his hips and torso before getting to the loaded position. With the letters of Prior's jersey already facing the target, his arm could not simply "go along for the ride" -- the ride was over, so his arm had to generate all of its own power.


Prior went 41-23 over his first four seasons in the big leagues. During that time, in 2003, when Prior was on his way to a career-high 18 wins, [former Mets pitching coach Rick] Peterson gave a presentation to the Oakland scouting department about "certain red flags in a delivery that we can't do much about" as the A's prepared for the draft. The idea was to avoid sinking large signing bonuses into players with a high potential to break down. (Late picks, because of their lower cost, don't carry the same concern.)


One of Oakland's scouts, responding to Peterson's red-flag warnings, said, "Hey, that's what Prior does. Are you saying that we shouldn't draft a player like that?"


Replied Peterson, "No, not exactly. He's one of the best pitchers in the league right now, but what I am saying is, If he doesn't have maximum [shoulder] rotation, it will lead to injury. It's like slamming the brakes over and over. The brake pads are going to wear out until it's metal on metal."


Prior has suffered a series of shoulder injuries that have limited him to one win and nine starts in the three seasons since. Still only 27, he is out for the season -- again -- after surgery to repair a tear in his right shoulder. "Prior is almost all upper body," Chris Lincecum says. "You could cut his legs off and he would throw just as hard. I don't like to put my finger on players, but I've been doing this a long time. I've said, 'He's going to blow his elbow out' or 'His back will go out.' Sure enough, it happens, including Dice-K [Daisuke Matsuzaka], Jake Peavy, Prior. . . . I have a hard time enjoying the game. I'm sitting there criticizing the pitcher. It hurts to watch pitchers. Seventy percent of the pros have poor mechanics."



As the owner of a Mark Prior Cubs jersey, I'm still wistful for what could have been. It scares me to think that the Oakland A's were willing to trade Rich Harden to the Cubs given how much they rely on Rick Peterson's counsel. Is Harden simply the second coming of Prior, immensely talented, doomed to physical breakdown?


Prior isn't the only example of a Cubs high draft pick whose body broke down.



Bobby Brownlie was supposed to be Tim Lincecum. A 6-foot righthander from Rutgers who hit 97 mph on the gun, Brownlie was regarded as one of the top pitchers in the 2002 draft. Peterson was working as the A's pitching coach at the time. Just before the draft, Oakland G.M. Billy Beane gave Peterson videotapes of some 20 pitchers the A's were considering as draft picks and told him to break down each pitcher not by stuff and performance but by the biomechanics of their deliveries.


The previous winter Peterson had met Brownlie at a banquet and told him, "Hey, I hear you're great. Congratulations, I hear you're going to be a [first round] pick." But when he watched Brownlie on the tape Beane had given him, Peterson says, "I'm literally sick to my stomach. I'm going, 'This is so sad.' "


A few days later, when Beane asked Peterson what he thought of Brownlie, the pitching coach replied, "He has certain characteristics in his delivery that will lead to shoulder problems."


The Cubs took Brownlie with the 21st pick -- bypassing future big leaguers Matt Cain, Joe Blanton, Jon Lester and Jonathon Broxton -- and lavished him with a $2.5 million signing bonus. Within three years Brownlie could not throw any harder than the mid-80s, and minor league hitters were crushing his pitches. Chicago released him in March 2007. Brownlie spent much of last year playing independent league baseball and is now pitching for the Washington Nationals' Double A Harrisburg affiliate. In May '07 Brownlie told SNY.tv, "The major question about me is why my velocity has dipped in the past couple of years. . . . There's really no answer to it; we don't know what's going on."



The last poke in the eye to Cubs fans: Lincecum was drafted by the Cubs in the 48th round after his last season of high school baseball, when he was named Washington's 2003 Gatorade High School Player of the Year. He turned them down.


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