Fog Rolling In

At The Hair Salon

I got a haircut last Wednesday at a local salon in Berkeley on University Ave. I've gone there for two and a half years because they charge $12.00, which is between three and five dollars cheaper than the rest. While I still think $12.00 plus tip is outrageous for a fifteen minute haircut (without shampoo or shave), there aren't any better options. Even a barber near the campus wants $15.00 for a buzz cut, not to mention that barbers in the bay area won't give you a shave. I went to a barber on University last year and asked how much a shave was: "Buddy, you need to go to New York for that sort of thing!"

So, I go for a haircut on Wednesday and ask for a trim just to clean up my sideburns and even up my fade. The woman working on my hair spent a total of ten minutes on it, which is fine since it was only a quick trim. $14.00 bucks. I went home, took a shower and that was that.

The next morning after I took a shower, I noticed that she cut my hair unevenly in a number of places, either too close or left patches of my hair uncut. It was an all around bad job, so I went back the next day and asked her to fix it. She seemed absolutely amazed not only that I would accuse her of giving me a bad haircut, but that I would actually ask to have it fixed free of charge. I told her I'd been going there for almost three years, so she agreed.

When I sat down she told me to point out what was wrong. I pointed out that the fade, instead of being in a straight line, was completely uneven and missing in certain areas and that a few patches of hair were not cut at all while others were cut too close. She stared at my head for a minute or two shaking her head in disapproval as if she didn't see anything wrong at all.

Her response, and I kid you not: "I know I didn't cut your hair like that. You are probably losing your hair; don't worry this happens with a lot of men. This explains why it is uneven now."

Absolutely unbelievable (and absolutely indicative of the consumer's shithole that we affectionately call Berkeley, CA).

Japanese Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park

Norm Macdonald, My Favourite Comedian

YouTube originally pulled this video due to licensing restrictions but have since worked out a deal with Viacom to allow Comedy Central clips. Enjoy!

10 Ways to Spice Up Midterm Elections

1. More special effects in campaign ads.
2. Corporate sponsored election officers, from Hooters.
3. Oil, filter, lube while you wait (6-cylinders extra, plus recycling fee).
4. House music at the polling station.
5. No Republicans or Democrats.
6. Unlimited salad, soup, and breadsticks for just $5.99.
7. Polling stations inside of Fry's Electronics.
8. Automatic buy-in to the World Series of Poker Main Event.
9. Poll Tax.
10. Automatic renewal of your driver's license when you vote.

5 Resolutions for the Rainy Season

1. Avoid awkward eye contact with female classmates by replacing my umbrella's nylon sheath in private.
2. Remind Apple that offering a music player in "red" is not as seismic a shift in the portable audio player market as they think it is.
3. Finally finish the last three episodes of Kieslowski's "The Decalouge"
4. Renew my campaign against the term "pussy poppin" in any rap song.
5. Attempt to read more than 35% of the Economist in any given week.

MPRE -- Done. I think. I hope.

The Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE) is a part of the BAR exam for any state and was administered this morning. 60 multiple choice questions in 2 hours and 5 minutes, which is surprisingly reasonable. I finished in about an hour and a half, though I make no representations that finishing early has any relevance on my actual performance.

The test makes you leave feeling like you're stupid for not knowing which answer is ethical , and I think everyone leaves wondering if they failed. Surprisingly, there is very little information about there about the grading curve, raw scores, and passage rates. I assume that when we get our scores 5 weeks from now, that it will simply state Pass or Fail, and won't go into any detail about the breakdown of the grades.

While I think a breakdown of your rank and performance isn't necessary (because if you pass you pass), I do think it is necessary to give us some way of showing us what questions we got wrong so that we can learn what the right answer is. Frankly, if I'm never told what questions I got wrong, I'll probably assume--even when I start working--that what I originally thought was proper under the circumstances.

But I can't complain much. I think the test was at or near the level of difficulty seen on other practice exams. The Bar/Bri practice exams were a bit harder actually, not because of the material tested, but because of the confusingly written narratives.

If any of you in the East Bay are considering taking the exam in March 2007, I would recommend the Alameda testing center, which is easy to get to and has ample parking. I've never seen a test administration run smoother.

This is in absolute contrast to taking the LSAT (the first time), where the person reading the instructions was reading at a third to fourth grade reading level and the time keeper insisted that the time kept running in between sections of the exam, such that we were getting about 25-27 actual minutes for a "35" minute section. What a debacle.

One down -- many to go.

Adbusters

I bought a subscription to Adbusters during the summer. It only comes once every other month, so I go through withdrawal for awhile before I can get my next fix of cutting edge cultural commentary. The magazine, based out of Vancouver, is made by The Media Foundation, which describes itself as the following: "We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century." I suppose that's what they call "puffing" in trademark law. Sure it's putting it a bit strongly, but the Media Foundation is right that Adbusters magazine is a cultural crossroads. It reminds me a lot of studying critical theory during my undergrad years.

What The Media Group says about the magazine is also informative: Adbusters has 120,000-circulation and it is "concerned about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces." The magazine definitely has an activist energy, offering "incisive philosophical articles as well as activist commentary from around the world addressing issues ranging from genetically modified foods to media concentration. In addition, our annual social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week have made us an important activist networking group. Ultimately, though, Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment."

Adbusters has wonderful cultural commentary on consumption. They create wonderful spoof advertisements, real anti-consumption advertisements, and insightful articles on topics you don't normally see. A few issues back they wrote an amazing article titled "How Nike Conquered Skateboard Culture," which discussed how the traditionally anti-brand skateboard crowd embraced the swoosh-company that represented the epitome of corporate branding.

Adbusters really fills my curiosity about how advertising and various systems of production generate true need and desire. Realizing that much of the desire is artificial--or at least sufficiently malleable--amazes me because sometimes I wonder how difficult it is to unlearn certain lessons about consumption.

One thing I really like about the magazine is that the magazines anti-consumption message is not absolute. The articles are written by people who function in a modern world economy, who own laptops and buy clothes. They're not Luddites; instead, they're just looking for moderation and accountability when these systems have harmful effects outweighing their contributions to society. While I don't really care about brands for clothes, wallets, and normal things, I undoubtedly suffer from "needing" the latest solutions for modern technological living. As if you didn't already know it, I'm a technophile.

Adbusters is a pretty pricey magazine, but they have a fantastic website where you can find most of the featured articles as well as a culture shop, where you can see some of their ad campaigns as well as see the postcards that I've linked to throughout this post.

U.S. Patent Application No. 2004 / 0161257

For more information see, PHOSITA's blog.

"Kallide"

Norm MacDonald, My Favourite Comedian

(re)Construction

Apparently the beta version of Blogger is causing errors and freezing up people's browsers. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the unplanned outages over the past few days by Blogger, but I'm taking this opportunity to update my template. Thus, the blog will be changing over the next few days. I guess that's what I get for going beta.

Here are some of the changes I've implemented:

1. Added a Downloads Section on the sidebar. Here you can download my movie list and a PDF copy of my honors thesis, generously hosted by my friend Adam.
2. Added a few pictures in the sidebar.
3. Removed the Flickr badge.
4. Removed the Pandora sidebar
5. Added a hierarchy/tree for my archives, which is much easier to use than the old school month by month links.
6. Added a Top Albums section in the sidebar linking you to an artist's website
7. Added a feedburner RSS icon
8. Added working Atom and RSS feeds for syndication
9. Added a Favicon
10. Updated the Links section
11. Updated some colors and changed the size of the fonts
12. Fixed my hit counter, which was misreporting my hits for quite some time
13. Removed the background image, mostly because I can't figure out how to get it back with this new template

Intellectual Property Auctions: Hendrix

There is apparently a push to create a market for intellectual property auctions, which I am not quite sure how to interpret. Apparently companies like Ocean Tomo have set up auctions where you can bid for the intellectual property embodying a particular object, not necessarily the objects themselves.

Jimi Hendrix's entire music portfolio was up for auction and was purchased by a phone bidder for $15 million. Hendrix's music was--allegedly--the property of his manager, Michael Frank Jeffery, who died in the late 1970's. The beneficiaries of his estate are a number of charities in the U.K. Jeffery's estate put the songs up for sale to the highest bidder. But Hendrix's family--who believe that Jeffery never had rights to the music--is going fight: "Whoever bought this bought themselves the right to be a litigant."

The most common reaction I hear when I tell people about this story is how terrible it is that Hendrix's songs are being traded, and that the family deserves the money. Perhaps I've already been indoctrinated by the property rights-centric canon of IP law, but I think I've read enough cases to know that practically every party, often the author him or herself, is a rent-seeker.

In this case, it is difficult to identify the "good guy." Is the family trying to make some profit on the 600,000 records Hendrix still sells a year? Should the fact that the beneficiaries of the Jeffery estate include the Asthma Research Council, the British Heart Foundation and the Kings College Hospital sway my opinion? The answer, I'm not sure and, frankly, I don't much care.

Courts and law professors often make character judgments based on the parties (and I suppose that's what good lawyers have to do). At any given time, a movie studio can be an evil corporation or a business held hostage. An author can be a powerless cog in corporate machinery or an unoriginal pirate. An estate can be a greedy rent-seeker or a deserving widow. Knowing just how fickle and opaque these characterizations are most of the time, I'm willing to suspend judgment in this matter.

An interesting aside on IP auctions: at this auction, a number of trademarks were also up for sale. This seems a bit counter intuitive to me because I always assumed that the sale, transfer or assignment of a trademark included "the goodwill of the business connected with the use of and symbolized by the mark.” If so, I wonder how smart it is to open up the sale of a trademark to anyone willing to bid on it without asking whether the buyer has any interest in using the mark for similar goods or services.

15 Reasons the Last 6 Weeks Sucked

1. 11 missed Comcast appointments
2. Four parking tickets, including a two-fer, for a total of $142.00
3. The awfully predictable and undisciplined writing on "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"
4. Lack of internet
5. "Family Guy" withdrawal
6. Mets / A's World Series
7. Forgetting to purchase shoe insoles and, as a result, not quite gellin' like Magellan
8. CBS's "How I Met Your Mother"
9. Defective network enclosures
10. FOX's camera work during the World Series
11. William Newmark
12. Bob Ryan guest-hosting on PTI
13. Trader Joe's
14. Constantly forgetting to put new CDs in my car
15. Almost getting killed on the highway--twice

Netgear SC101 Storage Central Review

The third time's a charm . . . sort of.
I have recently taken an unplanned pilgrimage to the market for Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. These devices let you add more storage to your existing home network so that you can share music, movies, and other media with other computers or with devices that can stream content in your house. The key advantage to NAS devices are that they plug right into your router/switch, not an individual computer on the network.

I first purchased D-Link's DSM-G600 (reviewed here) and returned it because of a manufacturer's defect. I then purchased Linksys' NSLU2 (reviewed here) and was quite dissatisfied by Linksys' false advertising and the product's overwhelmingly poor performance, so I returned that as well.

I have purchased Netgear's SC101 Storage Central and, although it has some drawbacks, it is probably the best out of the three. Although with slight reluctance, I declare this NAS device a keeper.

I. Yet Another NAS Concept

Netgear has stayed out of the NAS market for a long time and the SC101 represents their first real attempt to capture any portion of the home consumer market. As noted in earlier posts, NAS devices come in many shapes and sizes and the SC101 is no exception.

As you can see above, the SC101 has 2 drive bays that can take 3.5" hard drives, which unlike the DSM-G600 that can only take 1 hard drive. Having 2 drive bays allows mirroring of your hard drives (RAID 1 configuration), but according to Tom's Hardware Guide, enabling this kind of setup slows down performance.

The drawback of this setup is that the SC101 has no USB ports available, which means you cannot add additional hard drives to your network later on.

The SC101, D-Link's DSM-G600, and Linksys' NSLU2 represent a spectrum of NAS concepts. The SC101 offers no expandability, but doesn't require to you buy individual enclosures for your hard drives. The drawback here is that you cannot add drives later on. Compare this with the NSLU2, which represents the other extreme. The NSLU2 is minimal and simply allows you to plug in whatever external devices you like. Occupying a middle ground is the DSM-G600, which basically gives you an internal enclosure and USB ports. The DSM-G600 is the best option theoretically, though the fact that the product line is defective means that it isn't a viable option.

II. Installation and Setup

I had two spare 200GB drives laying around (one from Seagate and another from Maxtor). Opening up the machine was very easy. On the front panel is a spring loaded lock that you can twist open with a quarter. The face of the SC101 pops up easily and reveals two drive bays. You don't need any screws; just slide in the drives and connect the IDE cable and the power connector. It's a snug fit, but the face of the SC101 does not seem to be set tight enough, which does make some noise from vibrations.

You turn on the machine and plug it into your network, then you have to run the setup CD. One possibly major drawback for some users might be that the SC101 only works on PCs running XP or Win2k. Although I use XP Professional, I can really see how this might be a point of contention for a lot of other users who use a mix of machines.

The other drawback is that you must add the drive manually to each and every computer on your network by running the install CD. This might make the SC101 a poor option for a small business that has several computers.

III. File Systems Revisited

I won't go into the same tirade I went into last time on how NAS devices require you to format your hard drives to a particular format, rendering whatever media you already have useless. The SC101 is no exception. Nowhere on the box does it suggest that it will reformat your drives or that it uses a peculiar proprietary IP-protocol. It turns out you do have to format your hard drives, information virtually hidden on the Quick Install pamphlet that comes with the CD.

The SC101 employs "Z-SAN" technology by Zetera. This format is proprietary, and Windows mounts the hard drives as "SFSZ" disks, which I have never seen before and have very little information about. I have also noticed that after updating to the latest firmware, the SC101 drives are now displayed as "DATAPLOW_ZFS" file systems. The SC101 lets you create one large virtual drive or multiple drives of different sizes, all independent of the number and size of the physical hard drives you are using.

At this point, I have conceeded that there are no good NAS options that have true NTFS compatability and I am willing to trade off this significant drawback in exchange for ease of use and strong performance, of which the SC101 has both. I figure I already have at least two spare hard drives that are wiped clean, so I'll just format them and move on from there.

IV. Using the SC101

During installation, the SC101 installs a SCSI driver on your system for these hard drives. When you leave your home network, the drives disappear from your "My Computer" listing. But the moment you log into your home network, the drives appear.

Windows XP creates an annoyance here because of its "Autoplay" feature. When the computer recognizes a drive, a status bar pops up scanning the hard drive and then a window pops up how you'd like to view the new media. This major pain has been mentioned on a number of forums and I am glad to say that Netgear's most recent software/firmware update resolves this issue.

I will mention that Netgear's process for updating your software and firmware is counterintuitive because you have to download and install the updates on each and every computer. And after an update, one of the drives won't show up or attach properly for a few hours. Buggy firmware as usual.

Once installed, browsing and streaming your files is a breeze, however. I can upload to the drives at about 5,000 KB/sec, which is more than I was expecting. There are no significant lags unlike the DSM-G600 and the NSLU2. Nor are transfers are interrupted when I or someone else on the network access the drive. I can also access both drives at the same time too. I have not had any problems streaming movies, music, or working on documents directly from the network drive.

V. Conclusions

I am still a bit skeptical about NAS technology, but the SC101 makes me feel a bit more secure about the data I am putting on these drives. I think this product deserves a 6 out of 10.