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Ben is Vice President of Mobile Engineering at Walmart.com, where he works closely with his long-time friend Dion Almaer.

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I get a badge so I can enter a client’s secure facility. As an employee walks me over to test it, we notice the main door is propped open with a dead-bolt. He closes the dead-bolt and shuts the door so we can test my new badge. After the door successfully opens and we walk in, he opens the dead-bolt so the door stays partially open. “Better let whoever left it like that back in.”

I’ve just recently come back home after a month on the road. Consequently, I’m running behind on a few things, such as my email. Ah yes. My email. I hate email.

I find my emotional state is governed too often by my email. Or more specifically, the vertical scrollbar in the email application. What I long to see is:

A nice fat scrollbar

Sadly, what I see lately is:

My reality

Whenever I am that far behind, my general mood becomes quite anxious. My apologies to those who feel slighted or ignored. I have some good friends languishing somewhere in the scrollbar gutter. I’ll get to you, soon, I hope.

At some point in the email-whacking exercise, I always get distracted by how much every email application sucks. They all do. With Gmail, I get great searching in exchange for an awful user interface. With OS X Mail, I get a pretty interface with amazing UI latency and a search that seems to actually be more an exercise in generating some form of grinding noise from the hard drive than actually finding what I’m looking for on a timely basis. And the spam! Oh, that horrible spam.

There was a time in my life I thought I’d make time to write a really cool email client. But I never got the time. Can someone please get around to it?

In any event, if you’ve tried to reach me and haven’t heard back, shoot me another email. FIFO is out, the squeaky wheels are in. Sorry.

(Three tracks into the new Björk album and I’m very disappointed; hope it gets better.)

I recently watched the excellent “Judgment at Nuremberg” and so was interested to see that the lead translator during the trials in Nuremberg, Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, has written a book detailing his experiences and is giving a lecture in New Jersey next week. A summary of his experiences in a local newspaper reveals some fascinating insight into the war criminals of the era.

Said Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, in reply to an accusation that he’d killed 3.5 million people: “Oh, no, it was only 2.5 million.” Rudolf added that the rest died of “other causes.”

Hoess also said, in reply to being accused of taking gold teeth from his victims’ corpses: “What kind of man do you think I am?”

The degree to which the human mind is capable of warping to permit the worst of evil whilst still maintaining self-esteem is shocking.

Seen on a random night on a random street in mid-town: Two Bentleys, one of which was left parked over-night on the side of a busy street sandwiched between a Hyundai and a Honda.

In a parking garage on the same street on the same night: another Bentley and an Aston Martin DB9.

Mercedes Benz S-series sedans are to mid-town what Subaru Outback’s are to Boulder: a dime a dozen.

I’m a big fan of today’s travel-friendly world. I fly a bit more than I’d like, but I’m very happy that I can regularly leave my house an hour before a flight, drive 25 minutes to the airport, and walk onto the plane 25 minutes before takeoff (don’t try that in a big city). Normally, on the other end, I can get from my arrival gate to the inside of my rental car in anywhere from 10 minutes (e.g., EWR, JFK) to 20 minutes (e.g., SJC, OAK, ATL). For someone who has adjusted his life in many ways to avoid waiting in lines or otherwise wasting time, this is great stuff.

All of this, of course, is completely moot when traveling with the (four very young) kids. The biggest pain point is the rental car at the other end. So painful, in fact, that we usually drive to many of our vacation destinations rather than fly. But sometimes, we have to fly.

Avis generally is a no-hassle rental car experience (except for that time I left my driver’s license at the other airport). But when you need a car seat? Horrors. Four car seats? (Shudder.)

So for variety, this time I switched to Hertz. And man, was I ever punished for it. From the first moment when I walked up to the express lane line and was greeted with a lovely “Hey there’s only one line sir!” shout from behind the counter, I knew I was in for a treat.

As the line piled up behind me, the clock rounded 2 am, and the amount of time it took for two employees to service a customer continued its steady rise past 20 minutes, the tension in the air was palpable. A few Wall Street types finally broke down, shouting something about how important they were as they left the line to shout loudly into their PDA-phones in their vain attempts at other ways out of the Hertzatz quagmire.

My favorite part of the experience was how the agents sent the customers out to check and see if their car was in fact there, and both times it wasn’t.

I have no idea what happened to the rest of the poor saps in line, as I was #3, and though it took them a full 20 minutes to service me (including for some reason inexplicably blanking out all of my personal information character-by-character in their green-screen application and re-entering it all over again, character-by-character), I was so ecstatic to have actually gotten the car I reserved by the end of it all and miss the inevitable riot that was to ensue in the coming hours. I have not scoured local news but I would not be surprised to learn that the Hertz location at Newark International Airport was burned to the ground at some point that evening, with the two stock-brokers I sailed past on my way out charged with any associated crimes.

Driving around mid-town Manhattan at 3 am. Turn into parking garage with big “Open 24 Hours” sign. Closed. Back-up, avoiding a collision with one of the many pedestrians walking around on the surprisingly lively streets. Drive one block. Look before turning into second garage with big “Open 24 Hours” sign. Closed. Repeat with a third. Finally, find a forth that’s open.

Ugh.

appletv.png

There are dozens of great reviews of the Apple TV out there. I echo Walt Mossberg’s review: just worked, streams like a dream from any computer in the house, and finally offers my wife a way to use our digital content without me around to help. I have some additional observations:

  • The kids love the photo slideshow feature. So cool to setup a slideshow without hooking up a computer or firing up iPhoto, etc.
  • I can’t believe that iTunes offers no easy way to move items from one machine to another. Now that our media collection is nearing vast sizes, I’m amazed I can’t sync iPhoto across two machines (while picking up photos synced to one but not the other, etc.), decide to move a TV series from the home server to the laptop (without jumping down to Explorer / Finder), and so forth.
  • I’m really disappointed they released the Apple TV half-finished. You can see what the top items at the Apple Store are, but you can’t buy them. Nice.
  • Way too klunky to share media from multiple machines with the Apple TV. I can only move items to the Apple TV from one computer, which stinks, and you have to explicitly chose which computer to stream media from — there’s no consolidated view of all media in the house.
  • The Apple TV doesn’t support at least some of my Audible files. I haven’t looked into whether these are Audible’s non-MP3 wrapper types (Types 1-3 if I recall…)
  • The UI seems… weird. Front Row seems more refined in some aspects. For example, the Movie Trailer UI in Front Row shows you rows and rows of movie posters for all the trailers. In Apple TV, you get a list that you have to scroll down, and only see one movie poster at a time. I think the new Windows Media Center UI trumps Apple TV pretty handily.
  • A shame that in the quest for simplicity, the Apple remote doesn’t do much useful. I have to have at least two remotes to use the thing as the Apple remote doesn’t control audio. This is an area where Apple made the wrong trade-off.

All-in-all, I’m happy with the Apple TV, despite the trade-offs, and look forward to further software updates.

I’ve decided to rename my blog from “Married… with Children” to the boring-yet-more-informative “Ben Galbraith’s Blog”. But don’t worry, I’m still happily married with a whole pile of kids to show for it.

UPDATE: iMovie ’08 now supports AVCHD.

Just in time for the holidays, our old JVC miniDV camcorder broke. We used it just a handful of times in the years since we purchased it, but we’re convinced that now we’re finally ready to start recording all those home movies that friends and relatives love to watch.

As we pondered a replacement, I noticed that Amazon is selling Sony’s new HDR-UX1 HD camcorder for an amazing 44% off: $850, a steep discount off the $1,500 retail price.

Sony's HDR-UX1 Camcorder

Wow. I did some research and found that this camera uses the brand-new AVCHD file format, currently unsupported by nearly every application on every platform. Only a couple of Windows programs — Sony’s viewer and PowerDVD 7 — can even play it back. However, the camera doubles as an SD camcorder — but recording in an MPEG2 format that’s also not compatible with iMovie. And, iMovie and other Mac programs can’t use the camcorder for video input like they can with miniDV. Hmm…

We took the leap and bought it. The quality of the HD video recorded by this device is astounding. I’m not a videophile, but it seems to rival equipment in the $3,000 range. However, using the HD video footage on the Mac is painful. You currently have to down-size it to SD sizes through a multi-step process (down-convert to MPEG2 on the PC using Sony’s tools, convert to DV format using the free MPEG Streamclip on the Mac, import into iMovie manually), but we’ve found that the quality of the final product in iMovie is just as good as any other DV / SD device (some find Sony’s downsizing algorithm too crude for their tastes). Of course, you can skip HD entirely and just record in SD with the device, but you still have to convert the output files using MPEG Streamclip for iMovie to use them (and Final Cut, too).

Since AVCHD is just H.264 in a different format than Quicktime’s H.264 movies, and given its use by both Sony and Panasonic, I’m hoping support for AVCHD by Apple is just around the corner. Regardless, I’m sure as AVCHD devices gain more traction in the marketplace, an easy workflow that converts this stuff to HDV footage for use with iMovie (as opposed to down-converting it to SD res) is around the corner. In fact, some folks report already doing it by a combination of custom C code and command-line video file format converters.

So the pain of the current editing process notwithstanding, we’re very happy with the HDR-UX1 and have given it quite a workout over the holiday season. It’s twin, the SD1, has a built-in hard-drive, but it goes for something like $1,400 on Amazon.

It’s election time. I’m increasingly frustrated by the often binary decision facing American voters: Republican or Democrat. The policy-making decisions of the world’s largest economy and largest democracy are complex, multi-dimensional, and of course, very controversial. Yet, I just get to choose “blue” or “red”.

The notion of choosing proxies to represent voters was necessary for all of the Republics of the past, but with the advent of modern technology, perhaps in my lifetime we’ll see a system that empowers the people to participate more deeply in the political process. Put the issues to the people and let us decide. Money can corrupt the individual representatives; who’s going to buy the majority of an entire country? (Of course, there are efforts to tie money to voting in recent states, but that’s another very scary story).

It’s a long shot, but maybe someday we can all participate more fully in the policy-making process.

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