Welcome to the future, folks.

We just had a nice chat with a couple friends.

One of the friends is in London. The other is in Stafford, about 40 miles north of London. We, of course, are in Hawaii.

We all had live audio and video of each other, courtesy of iChat AV 3, the latest version of Apple's audio and video chat program (which also does AOL-compatible text chat perfectly well, of course), part of the new Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger." And we could have actually had a fourth party in on the chat, too.

Hosting a multi-way video chat like this requires a reasonably good broadband connection (DSL or cable modem), a fast Mac (at least an iMac G5, prices start around $1299 new), and a FireWire video camera like Apple's slick, tiny $150 iSight. But any computer Apple currently sells - even the $500 Mac Mini - is powerful enough to participate in a group video chat, with as little as an ISDN connection. And of course they can all do one-to-one video chats, one-to-one audio chats, and group audio chats with up to 10 participants.

This is one of those "the future has arrived" moments, really. I half expect to go outside tomorrow morning and discover that my Honda is now a flying car. If you've got a proprietary video conferencing system from Polycom or whoever, it just became a dinosaur - and there's an big nasty asteroid heading toward its planet. It can all be replaced by a thin, light iMac or laptop, a tiny camera and a piece of software.

Uncovered: The Terrorism-Chowder Connection

Ask yourself this question: "Are old men standing in knee-deep mud and digging for clams A) a possible terrorist threat, or B) a defense against terrorism?" I'm not sure which one is least plausible, but in the last four years, the Boston area has seen both. 

Some of the most productive clam-digging mudflats in the area lie on the sides of Logan International Airport bounded by Boston Harbor, providing a livelihood for dozens of people. After two flights out of Logan were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 (not, mind you, by clam-diggers), various measures were taken to improve security at the airport, including banning clam-diggers from the flats. Eventually, a 500-foot-wide perimeter was set up around the airport, then altered to contain a 250-foot "warning zone" and a 250-foot "arrest zone."

Meanwhile, the clam-diggers were out of work. They petitioned their legislators, and after 14 months of their livelihood being disrupted (much to the delight of their bivalve prey, who were presumably happy as clams about all this protection), a transportation bond bill passed containing a measure that granted them an exemption allowing them to enter the security zone, provided they were first fingerprinted and background-checked (at a cost to the clam-diggers of over $100 each), and given anti-terrorism training.

Now, the clam-diggers look for clams, but are also expected to report anything suspicious that might indicate terrorist activity. They wear special brightly colored vests and ID badges issued by the airport, are checked on regularly by airport security, and to make matters even more interesting, are being loaned GPS-equipped cell phones by the Transportation Security Administration to help them contact authorities in the event that any of the clams turn out to be terrorists.

So it's a happy ending for everyone, except the terrorists and their fearsome allies... the clams.

'Actually, I'm a pretty cheery reaper' - The Whole Death Thing

Part of it was probably triggered by a death in my extended family. But most of it was just thinking about life as usual.

The first thought I had, a couple weeks ago, was that I've had an interesting life. Not to say that it's not still interesting, but basically, if a telescope fell on me or something, people would think of my life as having been interesting. And I find my own life interesting, too. Sometimes in the "may you live in interesting times" ancient Chinese curse way, but always interesting in one way or another.

More recently, I realized that I don't have an "I must do this before I die!" list. Most of the general, mundane things I figured on doing in life, I've done. I've got a wife, a kid, a house, a car. I've had a career or two of sorts. And the particular way all those things have played out has tended to be decidedly non-mundane, in terms of things like who my wife and friends are, where the house is, what work I've gotten to do, and so on. That's really what's made my life interesting.

So as a doddering 33-year-old, I find myself at peace with the concept of death. This is not to say that I'm particularly looking forward to it or thinking suicidally; I think life is more fun, and if it persists, I'm sure additional interesting things will happen. But rationally, if the telescope does fall on me, aside from mild disappointment at having probably missed out on a few things, I'm not going to really have regrets. I'm okay with who and what I've been and done.

Interestingly, this is a good thing in my opinion, because "life vs. death" is now one less thing to have on my mind, and my mind would certainly benefit from having fewer things on it. More on that topic soon, I hope - telescopes permitting.

Tiger, my precious!

I knew I'd have to buy Tiger sooner or later. But I just wasn't sure how I wanted to buy it.

A single DVD can be used to install it on any number of Macs, so the possibility of forsaking ethics and just buying one license was always there. On the flip side, there's a 5-license "family pack" that would be nice and legit, and since we don't have 5 Macs (nor do we want to - maybe 3, maybe 4, but not 5!), there'd be room for expansion. And the family pack lists for $199, quite a bit less than even two individual $129 licenses.

But there's no academic pricing on the family pack in the US, while a single license can be had for $69, and since we're only actively using two Macs, $69 times two would be far less than $199. But what if we got more?

And then, of course, there was Amazon, which had mail-in rebates for $35 off a single retail box, or $50 off the family pack. And an offer for $30 off my first purchase made with an Amazon VISA card. With instant online approval.

So I wound up spending $169 ($199 minus $30) up front, and will get another $50 of that back, bringing my total cost for a family pack to $119, and my per-license cost to roughly $24. 5 licenses for $10 less than the list price of a single one is... acceptable.

Internal (EP)

"Quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger... IS WHAT I SHOULD BE!"

Thus begins Forthfading's impressive debut EP, Internal. Aptly named, it contains a half-dozen lucid, thematic songs dealing with the internal challenges we all face - hypocrisy, stress, lack of self control, lack of focus, fear of failure, and change.

Two vocalists (both can sing; at least one can also scream, growl and rap), two guitars, bass and drums. Hard. Loud. Musically tight. Sort of like an all-male Evanescence, but louder. Lyrically intelligent. No, I mean really intelligent. I could draw parallels to Carlos Castaneda, scripture, and other things... but I won't.

Track listing:

1. Treading Water & Tasting Victory (2:36)
2. Perfect Imperfection (2:34)
3. Know Where to Run (3:38)
4. Fear (3:21)
5. Push (3:39)
6. Sleeper (3:06)

Fear is a definite 5-star song for me; Treading Water & Tasting Victory, Know Where to Run, and Sleeper are 4-star; Perfect Imperfection and Push are 3-star (the noise is a little thicker than I prefer). Notice the lack of 2-star or 1-star songs? Yeah. No duds. Good songs that all work together.

They claim to be "new rock," but they're not as sophomoric as a lot of bands I think of as being in that category. New rock for smart-but-conflicted people, maybe?

Hmm, maybe that's why I like this so much...

Progress = Shinier Toys

Everyone's getting shinier toys, over time. Even the ophthalmologists, as I learned at this morning's eye exam.

Now, I'm not saying they've got toys of the same scale and quality as, say, astrophysicists. But something that can take pictures of the backs of my eyes... is pretty cool. (They look, incidentally, sort of like plasma spheres, but pinker.) Even if they wouldn't email the pictures to me. :(

Anyway, after testing all sorts of things with various machines (all of which, sadly, did not go "ping!") the doctor put a bunch of DelusionalDrops™ in my eyes, did some more tests, and pronounced me good to go, after which I went around town feeling very unfocused for a couple hours.

End results? Uncorrected, my right eye is around 20/25 and my left one is still almost 20/20. That's somewhere around 6/7 and 6/6 respectively, for you metric sorts. I can get glasses if I want them, but I don't have to at this point. Maybe if I get a job with vision coverage...

Egg-stremely worrisome news

I don't know if I like this particular news coincidence.

April 14: ABC News runs an interesting story about "Resurrection Ecology," in which eggs laid years or even decades ago by aquatic species were found by scientists in lake-bottom mud and actually hatched, allowing the scientists to do "then and now" comparisons between the species.

April 15: CNN runs a story about shelled eggs found in the fossil of a 10-to-13 foot tall carnivorous, bipedal oviraptorosaurian.

Now, from the CNN story, I can't tell whether the eggs are fossilized. I presume they are. I hope they are. But if they're not, I just want to issue a heartfelt plea to the scientists to not try to hatch them. I'm very allergic to 10-foot-tall carnivorous bipeds, you see. Make an omelet, scramble them, hard-boil them, make a really large amount of egg nog- I don't care. Just don't hatch 'em.