I know, no updates in the past few days. And there will probably be none for a few more; I’m on the Farewell Tour. More (including moments on Swimming Pool and Capturing the Friedmans) when the dust settles.

Until then, have good times.

Coming soon: the film that brought “Ben & Jen” together. The early buzz: it sucks. Hard.

What a surprise.

Seems that Affleck doesn’t cut it as hitman, and Lopez isn’t convincing as — wait for it — a hardass lesbian mob enforcer. Yet the writers should also get their fair share of the blame, gossips say:

But the major complaint is the lack of onscreen chemistry between the two off-screen squeezes, part of which is being blamed on suck-o dialogue. In one laughably unsteamy scene, Lopez lies on a bed with her legs spread and announces “It’s turkey time!” “What?” asks Affleck. She replies with what one critic has called “possibly the worst line ever said in a movie”: “Come on, gobble, gobble.”

No wonder some wacky IMDb poster labeled it “EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Satan.”

Buy.com put the iTunes Music Service in its sights this week with the launch of BuyMusic.com. TV commercials for the new Windows-only service blatantly copy the iTunes ads, and BuyMusic.com uses a “music for the rest of us” slogan, flaunting its more popular platform (Windows), broader selection (advertising their ~300,000 songs as “The World’s Largest Download Music Store”), and lower price (79¢/track.)

Naturally, they leave out the attached strings: sure, some songs are 79¢ apiece, but not all. Similarly, the rights that you buy with a track vary depending on the respective record company’s whims. Oh, and did I say buy? Perish the thought, as Ars helpfully notes in a BuyMusic license excerpt:

All downloaded Content is sublicensed to End Users and not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms “sell,” “purchase,” “order,” or “buy” on the Site or this Agreement.

I guess SubLicenseMusic.com wasn’t catchy enough.

UPDATE: You can download the Audioslave album from BuyMusic for $12.49. You’re then allowed to burn it at most 5 times and/or transfer it to portable players at most 5 times. Why is this better than spending 99¢ more to get the actual CD from plain ol’ Buy.com? You got me.

This week Wired reports that tiny charter company Southeast Airlines plans to outfit its planes with digital video cameras to monitor passengers during flights. They also plan to archive the video for ten years.

There’s a valid debate here, but I’m going to side-step it and note only that I’ve said for years that live monitoring of the cockpit seems like an excellent idea. If a pilot isn’t keying his/her mic, authorities can go to the live feed. When accidents happen and the ‘black box‘ cannot be located, there’s always the data center. Recordings can be automatically erased for flights which land without incident.

But back to Southeast. The idea of monitoring passengers bothers me, sure, but even worse is the company they’ve tipped to do it: Sky Way Aircraft. The home page, with its faux seal and prominent “threat advisory,” leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

A moment’s read compounds the feeling. The technology overview begins by noting a Clearwater facility “will provide” services and “will utilize” a WorldCom network. Their 162-node wireless network is “under development” (does that mean construction or planning?) Then you hit this line: “The original cost for this network, that has been in operation for the past 10 years, is in excess of $1.5 billion dollars.” So does it exist or not? Who paid the $1.5 billion?

The second paragraph makes more promises about what the network will do and flaunts its “DOD-5” status. (What the hell that means, I don’t know.) I do know this: this company is selling vaporware, and not well. Hoover’s — even the business phone books — have no record of the organization, and the domain name is registered to Brent Kovar of “WoDark.” That is, unless you look up the skywaynet.us domain, which is owned by Brent Kovar of “Freedom Toyz.” Presumably, Brent is related to the “jkovar@skywaynet.us” you get when you click “Investor Relations.”

This from a company that promises to offer “facial recognition, manifest data, telemetry, health / welfare captures and other secure information.” So once again it comes back to the classic question:

Who’s watching the watchers?

I’ll be away until Monday, so I’ll have to wait until then to post on 28 Days Later and J.D. Powers.

Have a good weekend.

So I’m happily walking west along Lincoln Way, approaching Sheldon Ave., when the two small windows of the drive-thru at the nearby Taco Bell burst open. The employee leans out as far as he can, and shoves his middle finger upward with vigor, pumping his arm aggressively.

“You FUCKING ASSHOLE…” he begins.

I, of course, am quite taken aback. The few times I’ve been to Taco Bell, they’ve been exceedingly polite. Was this just a mask for their visceral hatred of me? And who the hell was this guy, come to that?

Then I realized he was actually yelling at the cackling occupants of a car that had just pulled in front of me. Apparently, the jokers had said something inappropriate into the speaker.

Ahh, Ames.

What does the ‘Q’ in Q-Tip stand for? Quality. But that wasn’t its original name. No, the makers (the Leo Gerstenzang Infant Novelty Company) dubbed their very first cotton swab something else.

What, you might ask?

Would you believe Baby Gays?

(Hat tip: Ask Yahoo!)

[B]ars and restaurants that measure no more than 3,750 square feet (not including the parking lot, as long as the parking lot is used exclusively for parking purposes) can contain no more than four TVs (of no more than 55 inches diagonally) for their patrons to watch, as long as there is only one TV per room. The radio can be played through no more than six loudspeakers, with a limit of four per room, unless the restaurant in question is run by “a governmental body or a nonprofit agricultural or horticultural organization, in the course of an annual agricultural or horticultural fair or exhibition conducted by such body or organization.” Then it’s OK to use more speakers.

It is…technically against the law for Girl Scouts to sing “This Land Is Your Land” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon” around a campfire without paying royalties. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers tried to collect such royalties. It backed off only after it faced public outrage–which was fanned by restaurateurs wanting to play the radio without having to pay fees. It now charges the Scouts $1 a year, foregoing real profits while making it clear that the girls sing only by ASCAP’s belatedly good graces.

Remember when I used to bitch about copyright law every other day? This is why. (Quotes from the Jonathan Zittrain’s excellent article, The Copyright Cage.)

It is a measure of my intense geekiness that I can get excited by a product such as Cisco’s new phone. But excited I am: here is a handset that operates through wireless Ethernet (so-called “Wi-Fi”) and allows users to have a phone extension that “follows” them wherever they take it, provided a wireless connection to the company network is available. The next version, Cisco says, will have a VPN client built in, so employees can take the handset anywhere (London, anyone?) and make and receive calls over the public Internet just as if they were in the office.

Of course, the product (similar versions of which are also available from vendors such as Avaya) is not without its shortcomings. Chief among these: poor battery life, the short range of Wi-Fi hotspots, and the inability to “roam.” These are serious obstacles, but to those who claim the cell phone will conquer all, I offer three numbers: 54. 0. 30.

That’s 54Mbps, the current top speed for the recently ratified 802.11g standard. While this is a theoretical maximum, no cellular network — including the vaunted 3rd Generation (3G) — gets anywhere near this speed.

That’s 0, as in 0¢ per minute. When call traffic is carried over the Internet, per-minute metering (almost always) goes away. It’s such a trivial amount of data that it’s not worth tracking. You might pay a fee for access to the hotspot (perhaps, heaven forfend, the cost of a Big Mac) but from there it’s potentially free calling worldwide and high-speed Web browsing, concurrently. Surfed the Web on your cell phone lately? How about while you were chatting?

And of course, 30% of long distance traffic is already packetized, hopping from switched phone company circuits right into the IP rodeo.

Add it all up, and I think my cell phone will be relegated to conversations on the move, provided the quality is there. My more relaxed (or data-intensive) exchanges will likely be made at rest, in a setting where I can speak — and surf — all I want.

I saw this a few days ago, but just couldn’t bring myself to admit it. (And yes, I saw the first one in the theater as well.)

I read somewhere that the big bank this Diesel-less sequel scored proves that it’s the cars which are the real stars of the show. Even with that in mind ahead of time, I’m at a loss to explain why. These are basically Mitsubishis, kids, but made even uglier with the application of loud, garish colors and decals.

The whole after-market industry is very foreign to me, and not just because so much of it is so ugly. I guess it’s because I’m biased towards the manufacturers. I want to believe that the full-time vehicle designers and engineers knew what they were doing, and if they didn’t think a huge-ass spoiler was necessary, then it probably isn’t.

But then somebody mentions the Aztek, and I think maybe these people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing after all.

Another Fast Company article, and this one makes me laugh.

It’s a study about luck, and here’s how they did the experiment:

How did you uncover that in your lab?
We did an experiment. We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That’s it. Luck wasn’t on their minds, just some silly task. They’d go through, and after about three pages, there’d be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert — I mean, we’re talking big — that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU’VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, “There are 43 photos. That’s what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?” We’d say, “Yeah, carry on.” They’d flip some more and say, “Do I get my 150 pounds?” Most of the unlucky people didn’t notice.

There’s also techniques for becoming lucky, which I presume include “read everything when you’re picked for a study.” I don’t know — I didn’t read them.

Which I guess means I won’t become this guy.

A Fast Company article on GPS tells the story of how that technology is permeating every part of the modern business world. Two items, however, give me pause.

Privacy. The author convinces a GPS vendor to let his guard down and discuss more advanced applications of the technology. The exec “starts talking about insurance companies selling you auto insurance based on how you actually use your car, say, a month at a time. They review the GPS information on where you’ve driven, how far, to what areas of town, and how fast (speeding, eh?) and bill you for the risks that you’re taking. Progressive Insurance has in fact done a trial using just such a system in Texas.” I stand with the author when he adds “Holy mackerel. The insurance company will have records of everywhere I drive and how fast I drive there.” Then imagine what would happen when people sued for this information, or cops requested it…

Efficiency. Services such as expediter Con-Way NOW use GPS to rush shipments for clients. One client is Ford: “Ford books an average of 1,000 such shipments of auto parts each month.” Do you think that perhaps if you need 12,000 rush shipments per year you might just have systemic problems that should be addressed? Yeah, I think so.

I was visiting my sister in her hotel room last night and picked up a copy of TV Guide. In it I learned that Mr. Jerry Seinfeld & Co. are finally coming to DVD, with Jerry supervising the addition of extras such as outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage. This must mean they’ve finally wrung out enough cash from syndication deals that have it on four times daily or more in some markets.

If you’re like me, you’ll find this news bittersweet. Seinfeld was a hell of a show, and most of the re-runs are still eminently watchable. But what we really need is some new material.

Side note: I wanted to mentioned this immediately when I got back last night, but my Internet was down. As it was when I awakened this morning. And after lunch. When I finally got ahold of my providers (they hung up the first time), they made noise about a “virus,” which is computerspeak for, “We fucked up but don’t know how to fix it yet.” (Not to be confused with “That’s technically impossible,” which as Dilbert tells us, often means “I don’t feel like doing that right now.”)

On the drive down, I was listening to mindless radio and this Train song “Calling All Angels” came on. Here’s a section of the lyrics. See if you can spot the line that confuses me:

When children have to play inside so they don’t disappear
While private eyes solve marriage lies cause we don’t talk for years
And football teams are kissing queens and losing sight of having dreams
In a world where all we want is only what we want until it’s ours

I know the best bet is just not to listen to this stuff, and that’s usually what I do. But… huh?

Oh god help us. I’d heard about it, but I didn’t think it got off the ground.