The Richter Scale^®

The timing is interesting. A few weeks ago I got a notice from the U.S. Consulate on the neighboring island of Curaçao requesting that I register on a U.S. State Department web site:

If you are an American citizen living or traveling in Aruba or the Netherlands Antilles, the U.S. State Department and the Consulate General in Curaçao strongly encourage you to register your trip on the State Department’s travel registration website at https://travelregistration.state.gov/. 

Since then I have seen a number of blogs run by military strategists discuss the possible invasion of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao by Venezuelan dictator and madman President Hugo Chavez.

The various blogs are:

- Strategy Page - The Dutch Defend Their World Empire
- The Dignified Rant - Dutch Treat
- Strategy Page - Might Venezuela Looks for Justice
- Pito’s Blog - What Would Happen If Venezuela Invaded Curacao

In reviewing the above blogs, it appears the primary source for this topic of Venezuela invading the ABC islands stems from the Strategy Page web site. But I find this particular quote chilling:

But for the last two years, Venezuelan officials, including the country’s demagogic president, Hugo Chavez, have made numerous public statements about the “reunification” of the islands of the Dutch West Indies (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaτao) with Venezuela.

The reality is that Venezuela is only 50 miles from Bonaire, and they could invade and take over the island in mere hours. The other reality is that such hostilities would probably give the West a great excuse to remove Chavez from power. But Chavez, at least from where I sit, is a cowboy - a socialist cowboy with far too much oil money in his hands - and thus capable of most anything the rest of us would consider crazy.

Bonaire’s change of status from being part of the Netherlands Antilles to being a remote municipality of The Netherlands, scheduled for December 15, 2008, can’t come soon enough for my taste, assuming that at the very least it serves as a further deterrent to Chavez’s purported desire to reunify the islands with Venezuela. However, the blogs I list above stress Holland’s inability to respond militarily to any incursion, so as an American living abroad, I can only hope that my registering with the State Department as requested will make sure the U.S. military knows where to find me should Chavez decide he wants to claim the ABCs for his own.

Registering your trip allows Embassies and Consulates abroad to send you newsletters and time-sensitive travel warnings and public announcements specific to the areas in which you will be traveling or living.  The information you provide also makes it easier for them to contact you in case of emergency, or to contact your family or friends in the United States in the event of an emergency abroad.  Registration will also allow residents of Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles to receive notification when the vice consul will be on your island.

But still, the timing of the registration request is curious. Maybe the U.S. Consulate over in Curaçao knows something we don’t?

I attended an interesting conference a few weeks ago at which a number of people whom I respect shared their advice for presidential candidates in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The conference ended with a drop in visit by New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (himself a candidate for President, running on the Democratic ticket.

Other discussions at that conference included ones dealing with the impact of electronic communications on print media, and my aging brain slowly put together all sorts of disparate pieces. The result of my ruminations was a question: “Can the people of the U.S. elect a President with the same tools and principles used in the new Internet?” These tools include things like wikis, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, and more.

The more I have thought about this idea, the more I have come to the realization that just as there has been a shift from physical media to electronic media, there will ultimately be a similar shift in campaigning. And thus was born the concept that I call the Wiki Presidency.

I’ve started a new blog at http://wikipresidency.blogspot.com/ to discuss and explore the Wiki Presidency, and hope that you’ll join me there and become involved in getting campaign financing abuse and partisanship out of the presidential campaign process, while bringing the ideas and energy of real people into the process.

The Blu-ray Disc camp has been crowing in recent weeks about how it has already won the next generation movie disc format battle, touting the fact that in early January, there were twice as many Blu-ray movies sold as HD-DVD. The Blu-ray folks are right, based on numbers I’ve seen, that they are outselling HD-DVD movies, but the differences are slim, and the numbers are very low.

Sony, in particular, has been posturing about the “large” numbers of PS3 systems sold since that platform was released in mid-November 2006. Every PS3 system incorporates a Blu-ray player. By my estimates, according to data from Sony and NPD Group, as of the end of January, there were 1.25 million PS3 sold (one million through end of 2006 per Sony, 244,000 sold in January per NPD). Combine that with the standalone players sold, and you add maybe another few hundred thousand.

That compares with just a few hundred thousand HD-DVD players in the same time frame - about 262,000 in 2006 (170,000 standalone units per the HD-DVD group, and 92,000 HD-DVD add-on Xbox 360 drives), and some relatively equally smaller number in January 2007. For argument’s sake, let’s say that by the end of January 2007, there were 1.5 million Blu-ray capable players vs. 300,000 HD-DVD capable players in consumer’s hands. The actual exact numbers don’t really matter, but what is striking is that this means there are roughly five (that’ 5!) times as many Blu-ray players out there as HD-DVD players.

But most of those Blu-ray players are PS3 game consoles. Sony’s posturing about Blu-ray player sales in the form of PS3 game consoles is just that - posturing. That’s because only a fraction of the PS3 users out there are buying Blu-ray movies. Look at these numbers from an article in Next Generation less than a month ago, where Sony Computer Entertainment America is quoted as quoting NPD Group as saying that cumulative Blu-ray movie sales at the time stood at 439,000 units vs. a cumulative 438,000 HD-DVD movies. In my book, that’s a dead even race. But more importantly, it shows clearly that people are not buying Sony PS3s to watch Blu-ray movies. If they were, the Blu-ray movie numbers would be three times what NPD Group says (according to Sony).

Those numbers imply a tie ratio - the ratio at which movies are tied to players - as approximately 0.33 for Blu-ray players, and about 1.4 for HD-DVD players. However, in the short run (i.e., the present), all these numbers don’t really matter because they are still pretty small in the grand scheme of things - high-definition movie playback is for all practical purposes still a niche market, and anyone claiming to be king of that market is making a mountain out of a mole hill. It’s not until the installed base of players numbers in the several tens of millions that this market will be a real mass-market.

So what’s Sony to do get people to start using their PS3s to watch movies instead of just playing games on them? I have a short list of suggestions:

1) Include a real DVD remote with each PS3. You can now buy a $25 Sony-branded Bluetooth Blu-ray DVD remote control for the PS3, but it really should be included free with every PS3 if Sony is serious about the PS3 being a real Blu-ray player.

2) Add an infrared (IR) port to the PS3 so that folks can use their universal home theater remote controls to control DVD and Blu-ray DVD playback on a PS3. For older units this can be a USB add-on, and for newer units it should be built it. Blu-ray is supposedly a home theater delight, so why shouldn’t consumers be able to use their home theater remotes to control it? Bluetooth is “cool”, but IR is the standard for remotes.

3) Provide decent DVD upscaling so that older DVDs still look decent when played back on the PS3 on that nice new HD-TV. This would provide people with greater purchase justification for the PS3, as they could then sell their old upscaling DVD player on eBay (not that it would bring in much money, but it’s still a great rationalization point).

4) Offer a breadth of family-friendly games so that moms and non-game playing spouses would feel better about having it in the family (or communal) living room. Nintendo has done this so very right with the Wii, but meanwhile among the sparse assortment of PS3 games, you pretty much have only Mature and Teen ESRB rated titles.

5) Include a way to write to PS2 game cartridges as well as the current optional dongle to read them, so that the living room PS2 can truly be replaced by a PS3, as opposed to only kind of, somewhat, almost replacing the PS2 (and that’s in the U.S. - European PS3 will have far greater PS2 compatibility issues when they ship).

6) Rebrand the PS3 as a Blu-ray disc player which also plays games, instead of a game console which also plays Blu-ray discs.

Without better addressing PS3 owner apathy in using the PS3 for playing Blu-ray movies, the tie ratio for Blu-ray titles to Blu-ray players will continue to embarrass the Blu-ray camp as it becomes more and more obvious that the majority of PS3 owners aren’t watching movies. 

One of the news services I get daily clips from about various intellectual property issues in this electronics age is Doug Isenberg’s Gigalaw. This morning one of the headlines caught my attention: Fair Use Bill would ‘Legalize Hacking.’ RIAA Says. Boo hoo for the RIAA.

”Fair Use” is a long standing doctrine under U.S. copyright law, which permits limited use of copyrighted material without permission from copyright holders for scholarly efforts and review. The fair use doctrine has also been applied to the right of consumers to make backups of software they have purchased. Under the fair use doctrine, we can backup our CDs to our hard disks to preserve our purchase and data. However, fair use does not permit one to wantonly make copies of things and distribute them to others.

But that distinction does not matter to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), an organization which helped bully the Digital Millennium Copyright Act through Congress in 1998. The DMCA made it illegal to reverse engineer and disable most any effort used to protect digital content. The DMCA effectively slammed the door on fair use as provided for in copyright law.

Now, U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, and John Doolittle, a California Republican, according to an article in InfoWorld, have introduced a bill called The Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship (FAIR USE) Act in order to restore fair use rights to consumers.

This new bill upsets the RIAA greatly, considering that they have worked hard to trample upon the rights of consumers with the DMCA, and then have embarked upon a “reeducation” campaign about file sharing, where the educational part involves suing everyone they think has been illegally sharing music files. Very consumer friendly organization, the RIAA - not!

Under the DMCA, without fair use provisions, we consumers are beholden to the whims and mercies of distributors of electronic media content under the guise (or curse) of something called Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM is a bane to one’s being able to freely use purchased media for one’s own use. For example, if you buy a movie from Xbox Live Marketplace to view on your Xbox 360, you have a limited number of views and days in which to do the viewing, and then poof, the content is no longer accessible. With Apple iTunes music and video, you can only view the content on a limited number of “authorized” PCs or Apple iPod players. Should Apple decide to stop supporting iTunes platform at some point in the future, you would no longer have access to that content. And the future is even scarier as some companies have suggested that we should pay for every use of content - imaging being charged money for listening to the same song over and over, or having to pay something every time your kid wants to see Shrek on your TV, even if it’s the 17th viewing of the same movie.

On the flip side, if you take care of your CDs and DVDs, you can have them last decades (in theory), and you can also backup the CDs into whatever the most current safe storage form is (and DVDs too, but then arguably you’re breaking the laws created by the DMCA). And you don’t have to pay for repeated use.

Our use of content as consumers and purchasers should not be dictated solely by draconian organizations like the RIAA, nor by corporations looking to squeeze us for more money at every turn.

Boucher and Doolittle are doing a great thing by introducing this bill. One can only hope that their efforts to protect consumers will win against the big dollar lobbying by the music and movie industries. Boucher is no stranger to the fight for Fair Use, incidentally - in 2001, he gave a speech about this very topic.

There’s no question that copyright law needs to be respected. Artists and creators of works - whether they be musicians, writers, actors, software developers, artists, or any one of a near limitless number of professional content creators - need the respect (and revenue) their works generate. Making copies of content and given them to one’s friends is wrong (we call that stealing), and selling illegal copies for a profit is even worse (we call that piracy). But on the other end of the spectrum is the fair use doctrine, and the necessary right of people to protect the investment they have made in their purchases. That right needs to be returned to the people, and protected.

As I have oft documented in these pages, I am (trying to be) on a life long low-carbohydrate, high protein diet. I started the diet almost exactly two years ago, when I weighed in at nearly 250 pounds, and had regular colds and illnesses, suffered regularly from fatigue and other maladies. Never mind being embarrassed about my large belly, my increasing large jowls, and yes, even man-breasts.

Since being on the diet, I’ve dropped a lot of weight (was down around 205 pounds, but am now holding steady around 210), losing the jowls, man breasts, and enough around my midsection to drop from a 38-40 waist to a 32-34 waist (and a whole new wardrode). And my health has improved remarkably too. I’ve not had a serious sick day in almost two years, my energy levels are good, and based on a very thorough physical back in November at Duke University’s Executive Health Center, my blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol are also in great shape. That’s all mostly due to diet - I am definitely a low-carb believer.

The area I found to be below par during my physical was exercise. I really don’t like exercising. I find it mundane, boring, and rather pointless. I’m a type-A person, and I feel like I need to be accomplishing something most of the time, and while I cognitively understand the long term benefits of exercise, the short term achiever in me finds “better” things to do. I get my best ordinary exercise when traveling and staying in cities, because I try to walk most everywhere. Duke gave me a pedometer, and I find that most days in a city on business or vacation, I average 8,000 to 15,000 steps (anything over 10,000 is considered reasonable exercise, and 3,000 or less is being a couch potato).

But that doesn’t help me at home. Enter Nintendo. Yes, Nintendo.

Thanks to the game Age of Empires (a turn-based strategy war game) on my DS Lite, I can do about 10 miles on my recumbent exercise bicycle in half an hour, never realizing how hard a cardio workout I’m getting (but I am getting my pulse into the target range Duke set for me), because the game has me so distracted. My cycling activity is natural, autonomous, and repetitive - perfect for doing while mentally focused elsewhere. However, I have found that I’m not getting any upper body work-out doing this bicycle thing, and this week, upon returned from a trip to Santa Fe (see below) along with a few extra pounds of carb weight, I decided to do something about it. I call it my Wii Workout.

Three times a week (that’s the plan - I’ve only done it twice so far, but the week’s not over), I play Wii Sports on the Nintendo Wii in my living room, playing a combination of both Wii Tennis and Wii Boxing (Golf, Bowling, and Baseball don’t appear to give enough of a workout). I’ve used Wii Sports in the training mode, in the workout mode (too short for my needs), and ordinary game play against “computer” players. The latter seems to be the most intensive.

My very sore and aching muscles yesterday and today after my first Wii Workout on Monday (two days ago) bear witness to the fact that playing tennis and boxing on the Wii have already put various upper body muscles to use which have not seen a workout in months, if not years. A couple of ibuprofen or acetaminophen pills and I’m feeling better.

This morning’s Wii Workout stretched those muscles again (they aren’t as tender now, but let’s see how I feel tomorrow), and I also tried playing tennis left handed (I’m a righty) to balance out the workout on both sides of my torso.

An auxiliary benefit to the Wii Workout is that I might finally get good enough to beat my kids at Wii Tennis and other Wii games.

My actual goal, though, is to be really buff in a few month’s time, thanks mainly to video gaming, combined with my on-going diet of course. Think it’ll work?

Everyone in our family of four has their own Nintendo DS Lite. My wife has a pink one, my son and I have black (Onyx) DS Lites, and my daughter has my wife’s white DS Lite hand-me-down.

My wife generally uses hers for playing Sudoku and Brain Age, the kids play Nintendogs, Pokemon, and a bevy of other games, and I use mine mostly for Age of Empires while exercising on our recumbent stationary bicycle.

However, last week while on a partial vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico (where we had three wonderful dinners with with old friend Ed Bott (a CNET blogger and author of one of Amazon.com’s top selling computer books, Windows Vista Inside Out) and his wife Judy), we discovered a new DS title (new for us) from Destination Software - Uno / Skipbo / Uno Freefall. Uno and Skipbo are family favorites in traditional card games when we travel, and the idea that we could do away with the cards themselves, and play together electronically was just too tough to resist.

We had to buy four copies of the game at $19.99 a pop, but boy what fun it was. First, it prevented my son from trying to cheat (which he sometimes tries when things aren’t going his way), and second, it let us play while non-adjacent (or at least not near a flat surface). See photo above of Linda and the kids in a 3-player Uno game at the Albuquerque airport last Friday.

The coolest thing, though, was when we were playing during a ground delay on the plane. My daughter and I had been upgraded to first class and were in row 3, while Linda and our son were back in row 9 in coach, and we were all playing together. The only downer was when they told us to turn off all electronic devices in preparation for take-off. You can’t play with networked DSes (or PSPs) in flight, sadly.

There are a bunch of variations of Uno and Skipbo in the cartridges, and the person who is hosting the game gets to choose which variations to apply. I tend to be a traditionalist and select all the defaults, whereas my son turns on all the different wild cards (many of which we have no idea what they do, and have to learn by observing their effects when they are played).

I also picked up an extra copy of Mario Kart DS so I could race wirelessly against my kids (you can play with multiple people if there’s only a single cartridge via a game download function, but you have to wait a while for the download, and then only have a couple of tracks to choose from). We played at Macy’s in San Juan waiting for the girls to shop. That was a fun way to while away the time too.

The extra bonus of all this wireless Nintendo DS Lite gaming, besides being able to play video games as a family, is getting my wife, who is typically video game averse, into the action.

I highly recommend the Nintendo DS Lite be provided to all family members, not just the young ones you want to distract during a nice meal out (which we do as well).

And then take a look at Destination Software’s Uno-related titles, as well as the various multi-player Mario games, such Mario Kart DS, for some more fun.

As some of you know, my wife Linda suffers from Rheumatoid Arthritis in her right knee. During her recent semi-annual visit back to New Hampshire to see her Rheumatologist, it was decided that it was time for her to get her knee completely replaced. That much needed surgery has now been scheduled for April 5th - just about 5 weeks from now, back in New Hampshire.

The net result is that Linda will be off-island for about 2 months for pre-surgery, surgery, recovery, and physical therapy.

And during that time, I will be both mom and dad to the kids, providing the chauffeur services that Linda normally provides (to/from school and activities).

During the week that Linda was gone in January, I learned quickly that I could manage about 3-4 hours of working time during the average day, and the rest of it was shot. And working late at night is not an option because I need to be up at 6:30am to get the kids ready and off to school.

So, in anticipation of not being able to get a lot of work done when Linda leaves towards the end of March, I had to cancel my planned press trips to attend the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in San Francisco and the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show in Las Vegas, both starting next week. As such, I will necessarily be reporting from afar. And I still have a huge backlog of blog items and other projects to work on too, so maybe it’s good that I’m not going.

I am not sure how soon I will be able to travel after Linda (our very own Bionic Woman after surgery) returns to Bonaire in late May - a lot depends on how mobile she is, and whether she can drive, but I suspect I will be staying with the kids (and home with Linda) through the end of June, which is when school ends here on Bonaire. That’s a good thing though, as I am already starting to spend part of my afternoons getting our daughter ready for home schooling (she starts 7th grade as a home schooler in August), and doing projects with our son as well. This will also be the longest contiguous stretch I have spent with the kids since 2001 or so. That part’s a bit sad in retrospect - the last few years have been a whirlwind of travel, with me typically being away more often than not, although last year we did manage to spend almost three months traveling with the kids.

Before I launch into my latest Tech Annoyance, let me say some of this is probably my own fault for not researching as thoroughly as I should have had I been more cognizant of the potential pitfalls. The annoyance is two-fold, stemming from a combination of Dell’s design-your-own system options, and a lack of easily locatable documentation.

Part one of this is that I ordered a Dell system with 4GB of RAM, but because the system also has the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad-SLI hardware (which requires 2GB of memory mapped address space) I only get to use 2GB of RAM, and have the other 2GB just sitting there collecting dust. Dell’s on-line system creation system should have warned me of this, as should have the sales person I spoke with. Interestingly, the order system did warn me that I had no more PCIe slots left when I wanted to add the AGEIA physics accelerator to the system, so it works properly for some combinations of things.

A Dell technical support representative indicated that as my Dell XPS 710’s quad core Intel CPU also had 64-bit support, should I get a 64-bit version of, say, Vista, then I would have full access to all 4GB of RAM I purchased. Nice to know that, but not very helpful as 64-bit OSes were not offered by Dell during the system configuration on-line. I am using Windows XP Media Center Edition at present.

The other technology annoyance was that this great QuadSLI NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 dual-board set will not allow for dual display monitors when the SLI-acceleration is enabled. So I have to choose between running really fast graphics for games on one screen, and my more regular day-to-day work on two screens as I am used to. If I could dynamically switch between the two modes, it might not be so bad, but going from non-SLI to SLI mode requires a reboot of the system, and that is truly annoying.

So in the meantime, my second 24” Dell LCD panel is being used as the display for my office Xbox 360. Not ideal, but at least I don’t feel like I have completely wasted my money on the second display. Now I only need time to actually play games on the Dell XPS 710 and the Xbox 360.

At last month’s CES show, I had an opportunity to obtain samples of two products to help us mere mortals keep our notebook computer, smart phone, and PDA displays clean and crisp, without all those finger print smudges. Those products were Bart 1 Products’ “Peel & Clean” and Monster Cable’s Travel-Size ScreenClean.

The products serve a similar function in keep LCD screens clean, but Peel & Clean provides an additional function, namely cleaning the keyboard of the respective device. Peel & Clean works via a foam pad with adhesive on both sides. You peel a non-stick liner off one side, apply it to the keyboard of the notebook computer, peel the liner off the other side, and then close the notebook. And while not in the written instructions, Bart 1’s owner, Paulette Bartone (hence the name of the company), showed me that you could turn your notebook upside down, tap on the bottom to loosen any food, dirt, crumbs, hair, etc. that was in the keyboard so that it too would get stuck to the adhesive and be removed. The adhesive coating is supposed to remove all debris from the keys of the keyboard and the display. Once you open up the notebook, you remove it, and if your adhesive pad is not too dirty, you can reapply the liners and use it again at a later date (or on another notebook).

I followed the instructions, and while it removed all the dirt I could see, the results were not nearly as spectular as during the demo at CES (which featured a really grubby keyboard). But then again, I tend not to eat above my notebook keyboard. It should be noted that at least in the cases I have observed, the predominant cause of messy notebook screens is when human body oils left by fingers on the keyboard are transferred to the display when the lid is closed. The idea behind Peel & Clean is to reduce or even remove those oil/dirt deposits, but they go a step further and also provide this great “non-adhesive daily liner”, which provides both cushioning of the display, and a barrier separating the keyboard and display when the screen is down. For me, that’s probably the best feature of the Peel & Clean product.

Also provided is a “Smudgy” cloth intended to allow you to clean and buff your LCD display, but I found in my case it actually smeared the smudges on my screen more than it cleaned them.

Enter Monster’s ScreenClean product. It includes a LCD/display safe spray (doesn’t contain any alcohol either) which stays where you spray it, and you then use the included non-abrasive MicroFiber cloth to clean the display onto which one previously sprayed the ScreenClean fluid. And I must say it works great - better than any other screen cleaner I have ever tried on my LCD. No streaking, no staining, very fast to use and clean with. And it is also available in a big size for use on large screen TVs.

I liked the idea behind the Peel & Clean product, but perhaps because I am reasonably fastidious, my notebook doesn’t seem to get dirty enough to benefit from the cleaning power of the adhesive sheets. But the protective liner alone is probably worth the price of the product. As such I give Bart 1’s Peel & Clean a 6.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale. Peel & Clean for Laptops is $15.99 and for PDAs and smart phones it’s $8.99, ordered directly from Bart 1 Products.

Monster Cable has a reputation for solid, but expensive products, but Monster ScreenClean in the travel size is $17.33 from Amazon.com, and even less from a few other outline outlets I looked at. That’s the cheapest Monster product I am aware of. However that may be, it does an excellent job on my number one notebook dirt problem, which is a dirty screen (and my Sony VAIOs use highly reflective XBrite displays, so fingerprints can be very noticeable). I give Monster Cable’s Travel Size ScreenClean a very rare 10.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale. What pushed it to the top is that the Travel Size is 1.52 fl. oz., and non-flammable and can therefore even be taken in one’s airplane carry-on (even as part of the TSA’s 3-1-1 requirements for liquids), so you really can travel with it.

I have just posted a handful of my articles and commentaries from Jon Peddie’s TechWatch, an industry newsletter I write for regularly over on my Richter Scale Articles site.

Those articles/commentaries are as follows:

From the December 11, 2006 issue of TechWatch:

- What Was Significant in 2006
- Forecasts for 2007

From the January 8, 2007 issue of TechWatch:
- Bill Gates’ Digital Lifestyle Vision - Putting the Pieces Together
- LG’s New BH100 Super Multi Blue Player for HD-DVD and Blu-ray
- One size fits all, says Warner Bros. - New THD disc is both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc
- To HD, Or Not To HD, That Is The Question

Hope you enjoy them even if they are a little dated (I only repost articles after the issue the articles are in has been superceded by a newer issue).