Archive for March, 2009

Photo: C. A. Bridges

I was at a Jon Bon Jovi concert in New Jersey with my wife a month ago and he was talking about the next Bon Jovi album. The last one, "Lost Highway," had a decided country tinge to it, but the new one was going to be back to basics.

"I'm tellin ya, you gotta trust me on this one," he said. "You wanted a riff rock record,
you got a riff rock record.  They wouldn't let me back into Nashville so I had
to turn up the loud electric guitars on this one." And the crowd of devoted fans went nuts.

One slight problem, of course, was that we didn't know what "riff rock" meant. But we cheered along with the rest and planned to go home and look it up later. I could take a guess. I know what a riff is, and I assume a "riff rock" song would be one with a lot of riffs shoved in it. But the way he said it made it sound like it had an identity. Was it a specific genre, a school, a trend, a group name, a musical theory, what?

No problem! Interweb to the rescue! There were probably hundreds of sites devoted to answering this very question. The Internet knows everything!

Except, apparently, for this. Wikipedia has no "riff rock" entry, not at all. There's a "riff rock" tag at Last.fm, but no explanation. Riffrock.com seems to think I should know already or I wouldn't be there. Google listed plenty of pages and Amazon had several reviews where "riff rock" was being used descriptively, but none of them included a single definition. Ask.com said it didn't know, dot com.

This staggered me. It has been years, literally years, since I casually reached out for information on the Web and came up dry. Had I walked outside, dropped a can, and watched it fall upward, I could not have been more surprised.

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The Prop Store of London is still digging out Serenity props for you. This one's a Reaver mask, and it's ready for your really creepy display.

This contorted face belongs to one of the cannibalistic humans who have been driven mad with the vastness of space seen pillaging planets and other spaceships, torturing and killing anyone who stands in their way, until they are faced with River (Summer Glau)…The rubber mask had foam latex detailing of the mutilated face, with the skin self peeled and pinned. There is a small light underneath the face that gives the frame an eerie glow, operated via a simple slide switch. The mask comes custom framed with a laser cut mount board featuring the film’s title and two movie stills. The display measures 37cm x 67cm (14.5” x 26.25”) .

In the battle of the fandoms, Stephen Colbert wields a mighty force. Even in space.

Fans of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" have marched forward on his behalf many times before. All he has to do is casually mention how nice it would be to have something — or, more accurately, everything — named after him to get hundreds of thousands of his eager followers swinging into vote-box-stuffing action. Colbert has already had his name slapped on a minor league hockey team mascot (Steagle Colbeagle, for the Saginaw Spirit), a trapdoor spider (Aptostichus stephencolberti), a Ben & Jerry's flavor ("Americone Dream"), any number of animals in zoos and scientific studies, and even a Virgin America jet ("Air Colbert").

His latest conquest? Node 3 on the International Space Station, thanks to the naming contest for it that NASA just held which included a write-in option, something they now may be regretting. The first two nodes are named "Unity" and "Harmony" and until very recently it was assumed that the third would become "Serenity." Not only does it fit the theme, but "Serenity" is the name of a spaceship in Joss Whedon's beloved-but-canceled TV show Firefly and the subsequent movie Serenity. And the early voting numbers confirmed overwhelmingly that no one is better at organizing online campaigns than Joss Whedon fans.

Except for the Colbert Nation.

"Colbert" won with over 230,000, beating "Serenity" by over 40,000 votes. Another write-in suggestion took third ("Myyearbook," with 147,637) and "Gaia" came in fourth with 114,427. But NASA may not be a democracy. NASA's human space flight chief, Bill Gerstenmaier, appeared evasive about Colbert's ascendency on Colbert's show on March 10. "Well, we're going to have to go think about that," he said.

"That's NASA's problem," Colbert said to him. "You guys think too much."

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Missed this when it came out, but some time back the folks at the SAMBA blog decided to see how tough it was to come up with new ideas for products or businesses, and offered them free to anyone who wants them. It's worth skimming through just for the laughs or the "huh, why hasn't somebody…" realizations. Some of the suggestions already exist in one form or another (which could be why one suggestion is for a service to tell you if your idea has been done; I smell some desperation there) but some are just inspired.

A church-issued credit card that automatically deducts your tithe? Movie theaters that display televised sports events on a 70-foot screen? A cellphone with a USB memory stick built in? In-grocery-store food prep that would chop your veggies while you shop? The notion of creating a portable drive-in theater with two semis (one to be the screen, the other to be ticket sales and concession) to go around showing independent movies appeals to me. And I would go for this one: "Rent a llama or goat to eat your front yard."

A few display the thinker's personal pet peeves, such as "A self cleaning microphone that never smells like breath or beer." At least one contributor seems fascinated by the concept of having your stuff — cell phones, TVs, computers — smashed and returned to you as art, although I can't tell if it's from a love of art or hatred of electronics. Many of them are just suggestions for services that the suggester wants, like public nap stations and professional obituary writing and people to deliver the single 3/8" nut you need for your repair job to your house. And some are just silly, such as "A place where you can go and pop bubble wrap. Possibly a bar of some sort."

Of course, now that I said that someone will open a chain of "Popper's" restaurants and make a fortune.

Some suggestions are illustrative of how the social interactions of the Web have changed how we think of things, such as the one that suggest a Web site that, for every product you buy, ships a mystery product to a friend for the cost of shipping and handling. Improve the economy and bewilder your friends! Win!

And some are just wrong, such as Nicocream, the nicotine ice cream. "Comfort food that helps you quit smoking (or addicts you to ice cream)."

But this one? "An application that you have your friends fill out that will compare against your answers and give you a compatibility score. In addition, tips about their personality." Totally exists. It's called "Facebook."

Next time you get a free hour or five, check out "Hamster Burial Kits & 998 Other Business Ideas" from SAMBA. If ideas are a dime a dozen, here's $8.35 worth to get you started.

One Tuesday afternoon my left leg was severed. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. Well, it was. It was agonizing.

And so begins a free(ish) book by a reasonably best-selling author. Max Barry's new novel, "Machine Man," will produce a page a day you can read in your browser or have sent to your  e-mail, RSS feed reader, PDA or smartphone. The first page was posted today, but you can still get in on it at any time.

Barry is the author of "Jennifer Government" (an excellent and funny novel about how branding and consumerism will take over our future) and "Company" (an excellent and funny novel about the insular, insane atmosphere inside a corporate headquarters). What's "Machine Man" about? Who knows? Even Barry doesn't, quite, yet. But he's excited about the idea, despite a bit of underlying terror.

"It won't be a polished work. It will be raw and chaotic, and at some point I will probably need to back-pedal furiously to extract myself from a literary dead end. It's slightly frightening, the idea of being unable to go back and change anything. Usually I rewrite books until they beg me to stop."

"Machine Man" is hardly the first serialized book attempted on the Web, or even the thousandth, but Barry has a clear writing voice and a knack for engaging readers. And he's created Internet successes before; his online game "Jennifer Government: NationStates," created to help promote the novel, became its own entity with millions of governments created by users.

"Machine Man" may not be free forever; Barry indicated that if it becomes successful and threatens to turn into an actual novel that makes sense, he may charge for the rest of it. But right now it's a one-day-at-a-time experiment for him and for us. And why not?

It's got a killer beginning.

Spaceships by any other name… According to TV Week, the Sci Fi Channel soon will be announcing a name change and rebranding themselves as (wait for it) "Syfy."

"The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular," said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network.

Mr. Brooks said that when people who say they don't like science fiction enjoy a film like "Star Wars," they don't think it's science fiction; they think it's a good movie.

"We spent a lot of time in the '90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it's called Sci Fi," Mr. Brooks said. "It's somewhat cooler and better than the name 'Science Fiction.' But even the name Sci Fi is limiting."

But wait, sci-fi… um, syfy fan! Before you arrange your face into its habitual scowl of personal disapproval, just look at all the good reasons for this completely unnecessary change:

1. "Sci Fi" means "geeky losers." Always has, always will. But this new brand can be made to present the image that the network wants out there, which apparently (now that Battlestar Galactica is ending) means bad made-for-TV movies and in-your-face wrestling.

2. The new slogan, "Imagine Greater," has the added advantage of being both ill-defined and grammatically questionable, two things that science fiction fans simply adore.

3. Syfy is way easier to twitter.

4. Insulting your core audience is a proven method of increasing market share, as evidenced by the incredible success of Animal Planet's new Let's Euthanize Fido! and the Lifetime Network's surprise hit show, Stop Crying and Suck It Up, Geez.

5. Manipulating your mind into thinking something is new when it really isn't… hey, if that isn't science fiction I don't know what is.

6. Brand changing provides stimulation to the economy in the form of new advertising, all new logos and shirts and hats and stationery and executive name plates, marketers who desperately needed something to do, new interns to handle the piles of new "WTF?" hate mail, and eventually new executives to replace the ones who thought of this.

7. The Sci Fi channel has just had the best year since it began, ranking 13th in total viewers among ad-supported cable networks in 2008. Clearly, the old name and format just weren't working. (See "Coke, New")

8. Now all the old Sci Fi-branded stuff will become collectible.

9. 73% of the coveted 18-35 market responded favorably to a brand name vaguely suggestive of a venereal disease.

10. Now, finally, Sci Fi executives will get to date cheerleaders.

See? Perfectly sensible. But this was not just a marketing-driven decision to shed a public perception that, by all rights, should be targeted and advertised at. No, in true science fiction style there's a deeper, more nefarious plan in place: by announcing this seemingly needless change, Syfy will rally those science fiction fans who love nothing better than to band together in loud opposition to something stupid (i.e. all of them), who will then have to watch Syfy in order to snarkily condemn it properly.

It's genius.

In the beginning, there was Peanut Press. One of the oldest e-book publishers and sellers (and by oldest, I mean almost 10 years old, ancient by e-publishing clocks), they built up a good rep, got bought by Palm to become Palm Reader and then eReader, and then finally getting bought by Fictionwise (which just got bought by Barnes and Noble!). eReader has been around forever, is what I'm saying, and they've built up a solid and dependable program that works on possibly more hardware than any other. eReader is available for Palm, Pocket PCs, Symbian phones, your Windows, Mac or OQO desktop, the iPhone and iPod Touch (shown), and as of this week, the Blackberry, all for free.

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Before the Kindle app came along, Stanza was the big dog in iPhone e-book reading. And with good reason.

It's free. It does what it does with minimum fuss, with easy-to-understand menus and directions. Once you use it once you've pretty well got it figured out. And getting books from the Web, from a variety of places, is quick and easy. And it's free.

Pros:

The convenience. Download Stanza from the iTunes store and most of your e-book reading is now covered. Stanza can read DRM-free Amazon Kindle files, Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT,  PalmDoc, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, HTML, and PDF, as well as eReader files in both secure and unsecure formats.  Tap the screen to turn a page and you're off and reading.
The experience. Once you're actually in the book, it's pretty much the same as every other e-book reader. The font is crisp, the page-turning animation can be changed to a sliding effect or turned off completely, it saves your place and lets you add bookmarks, and you can search for words.
The customization. Don't like something about Stanza, you can probably change it. You can change text size through the settings or on the fly with the iPhone's pinch and unpinch gesture. You can change the background color, line spacing, margin widths, alignment, you can even change the cover of the book you're reading if you prefer a different one.
The content. Stanza allows you to connect easily to several major e-books sites such as Fictionwise.com, ereader.com, Manybooks.net, and more. Best might be Project Gutenberg, which has thousands of public domain books ready for you to nab for free, and Stanza handles searching and downloading from Project Gutenberg with ease.

The cons:

Not a lot, really. Stanza is a well-designed program.

I do have a few gripes, though. Stanza breaks books into chapters (presumably for faster loading) but that means you can't easily jump around or search inside the entire book, and the scroll bar isn't always very responsive even within the chapter. Getting your personal content into Stanza on your iPhone is a pain, but that's the case with every iPhone e-reader app (Stanza offers a free desktop app that works as a server for you to download from, or you can upload your content to a personal space at Fictionwise.com). And I prefer swiping to tapping for my page-turning, not an option here.

But other than that, I like Stanza. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, so will you.

Photo by Richard Masoner

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If you've read my column/blog/mental dumping ground/whateverthis is, you know of my love for e-books. I read a lot, averaging a book every other day — I've slowed down a bit — and have been known to get actively shaky when I finish a book and don't have another at hand, ready to go. So the concept of being able to carry a few hundred with me wherever I go was irresistable.

Since then the convenience and savings in both money and shelf space has converted me to the point where I prefer to buy e-book versions wherever possible, saving the print version for gifts, special editions, or books that won't translate well to a small screen (say, pop-up books; pop-up technology is woefully behind the times).

For many people, reading on a small screen simply doesn't compare to a printed book, and that's fine. And enjoying e-books doesn't mean you have to abandon the printed word forever. But if you like the idea of being able to knock off a chapter or two in line at Publix or on the bus, I highly recommend them, and now's a good time to give it a try.

March 8-14 is "Read an E-Book Week." Check out the list of sponsors, most of which are offering free e-books for download for a variety of e-book readers.

And to help you make sense of this, starting tomorrow I'll post reviews of popular e-book sites as well as the various e-book reader applications that are available. Get reading!

It doesn't get much better than free.