Roman P. Stanley: Heroic Bureaucrat

That's how I described my creation for the class in Character Design and World Building being taught by Rocketo mastermind Frank Espinosa this semester (as seen in Entertainment Weekly's Must List 2006!). The assignment was to create a hero "for adults." I resisted the temptation to make some kind of Ralph Bakshi-esque "mature" cartoon. No, the spirit of the assignment was to create a hero adults could relate to. Others were charged with making heroes for children or teens. So here's what I came up with, a la Sculpey.



My thought was that the typical hero for kids and teens is a power fantasy, some indestructible or physically imposing figure in the superhero comics mold. So an adult hero would be a sharp contrast: someone more intellectually tenacious than physically strong. Someone who represents the classic adult tension between individual and social responsibilities. I thought of the most convincing heroic figures I've seen in media and life, and the heroic bureaucrat was born.

He's an amalgam of the title character from Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, button-down rule-stickler Edmund Exley in L.A. Confidential, and some good friends of mine who are tireless social workers. He's really not so much a bureaucrat as a civil servant who cares too much to let anything cross his desk without thoroughly resolving it, no matter how inconvenient the process or unpopular his actions may make him. And he's a punk rocker (but not a very good one). The taxing nature of his job combined with his after hours passion for music mean he's well on his way to a physical and emotional breakdown (hence the sunken eyes). But he's hanging in there for now.

I'll share more designs as the semester progresses.

HTPC Diary Part 4 - The Case... and Everything Else

With the TV season upon us, it seemed appropriate for me to finally wrap up my HTPC diary. So, without further ado...

The Case

The HTPC case can be more difficult to choose than one might think. That's because HTPC builders may impose more limitations on a system designed for the living room media rack than something to be shoved under their desk. Many want their case to mimic other components in their home theater cabinet, but PC cases are typically huge clunky towers rather than sleek, horizontal-lying enclosures.

Thankfully, case manufacturers are beginning to cater to the HTPC market. But one still has many considerations: form factor, noise, airflow, and, of course, budget. I decided early on to purchase a Micro-ATX motherboard for use in a Micro-ATX case. This form factor shaves a couple of inches off of the standard ATX measurements by limiting the number of expansion slots to 4. Some case makers attempt to further optimize for size by floating drive bays over the motherboard, or lowering the height of the case so that the system will only accept low-profile expansion cards. But the tighter you pack components into a case, the hotter it gets. The hotter it gets, the more cooling you need. More cooling means more or faster-running fans, which means noise.

After reading tons of reviews, the case in my price range that seemed to get the most unambiguous praise was Antec's NSK2400. It just fits into my media cabinet, its facade is silvery and elegant (doesn't match my black components, but it doesn't look out of place), and it provides ample internal space and noise-dampening features.



Other Stuff

Now I just had to consider components for which there is not much difference between brands. For the hard drive, I knew I could afford about 250GB, and chose the Samsung Spinpoint after reading that these drives are known for their quiet operation. For memory, I could afford 512MB DDR2 533, and Kingston seemed to be the only company offering compatible sticks in the 2x256MB configuration. Using paired memory instead of single sticks optimizes the performance of DDR2 memory. And because my motherboard features 4 memory slots, I can still upgrade without having to toss out what I bought this time.

Of course, my TV would act as my monitor. I already had an extra mouse and keyboard lying around. And I had an ATI Remote Wonder from my old video card that I wasn't using. For the CD/DVD drive, I plucked an old combo drive from my office PC.

Revisiting TV Tuners

When it came time for me to buy, ATI and their partners had still not released their Theater 650 Pro-based TV tuners. Just as my plans to use a Conroe compatible motherboard had been foiled by slow roll-out, so again I would have to make a compromise. I will eventually want to add a second TV tuner to my system, so I figured I'd just buy one of the more advanced cards later. Instead, I went with PowerColor's version of the Theater 550 Pro that runs on the PCI Express x1 bus. It was the least expensive card going at the moment, and I thought it unlikely I would ever need that funky slot for anything else.

Final Specs and Price

Case: Antec Solution Series NSK2400 - $85
Motherboard: Asus M2NPV-VM - $84
CPU: AMD Sempron 64 300+ - $60
RAM: Kingston ValueRam 512MB (2x256MB)DDR2 533 - $51
HDD: Samsung SpinPoint P Series 250GB (OEM) - $70
TV Tuner: PowerColor T55E-P03 $74 - $10 rebate
CD/DVD: Repurposed MSI 52xCDRW,16xDVD Combo Drive - Free
Keyboard & Mouse: Repurposed Logitech Wireless Combo - Free
Remote: Repurposed ATI Remote Wonder - Free

I ordered everything from NewEgg.com. After tax, shipping, and one rebate the price came to about $450. A little more than I wanted to spend, but still within reason.

Here's how everything looked out of the box:



With a little wrangling, I managed to cram everything in:



Installed Windows and other vital drivers and software, the open-source media center MediaPortal, and shoved it in my cabinet:



Impressions

As to the look and feel, I'm fairly satisfied. The case certainly is quiet. Even with the hard drive running it's barely audible. I'll probably pull it out again and disconnect the hard drive monitor light. No need to have that little LED flashing at you in the living room. The CD/DVD drive, though, yuck. That's super-ugly. I'll need to replace it with a drive that matches the color of the case, or do a manual modification to cover it up.

The system does indeed run as fast as I need it to, which means not very fast for anything but serving the media and web browsing.

The quality of the TV image could use some work. The tuner in my TV set is noticeably better. Hopefully the next generation of TV tuner cards will alleviate the difference. And there's probably some tweaking of the output settings that I can do to improve it.

The MediaPortal software is great, but definitely a hobbyist's solution. Keep in mind it is still version 0.2. I've spent hours configuring it, searching the forums for advice, and configuring it again. But I've finally managed to get a stable system running that will turn on, record a show, and turn itself off. It retrieves program guide information from Zap2It.com for free. It also plays music from a shared folder on my office PC, which is my entire CD collection. It runs photo slide-shows from a shared image folder. I've integrated details of my DVD collection from DVD Profiler, so I can browse my DVD shelf on the TV. I can also check the weather and listen to broadcast or internet radio. And the open source community is constantly introducing new features. Pretty sweet.

Conclusions

I managed to build a multipurpose Media Center PC for only $150 more than the cheapest DVD Recorder+HDD. Of course, I reused some parts and got my OS for free. And this kind of configuration still has some significant barriers to wide adoption. But for those who enjoy tinkering with tech, have intermediate computer skills, and a good chunk of time on their hands, building your own convergence box is an ever more reasonable proposition.

HTPC Diary Part 3: Motherboard and CPU

I ordered and built my HTPC this week, so now have some practical knowledge to buttress the theoretical. I'm not going to reveal all of my selections just yet though. A lot of thought went into each component, and I want to share my considerations at each step of the way.

The choice of motherboard and CPU was probably the most belabored of all of my decisions. I spent a truly ridiculous amount of time weighing all of the options, creating and comparing different configurations in my Newegg.com wishlist. It didn't help that we're in a transitional moment for processors right now, so at stake in my decision was not only how much processing power I could get for my budget, but also whether the platform I built would be supported in the future, and what amount of upgrade potential I was willing to pay for up front.

A Tale of Three Platforms

It's all Intel's fault. They recently released their Core 2 Duo (Conroe) processor, which by all reports, blows all other desktop CPUs out of the water. While the geek inside me started salivating, I never planned to buy a high-end CPU for my system. My budget just wouldn't allow it. But building a system that supports the current microprocessing champ would guarantee a decent level of upgradability in the future. So the choice seemed simple at first: pair an Intel motherboard with an Intel budget CPU like the Celeron, or even a low-end Pentium 4.

As I did more research, however, I realized it would not be so easy. Even though the Core 2 Duo uses the same type of motherboard as their last generation of CPUs--that is, the same CPU socket (LGA 775 or "Socket T")--most of the existing motherboards do not really support the new chip. The sockets may be the same, but the Core 2 Duo requires new chipsets and configurations. Turns out, to get a Conroe-compatible motherboard would cost a pretty penny.

Another requirement I had for my motherboard was that it be in the Micro-ATX form factor. This would allow me to build a more space-efficient system. Also, M-ATX motherboards typically have built-in graphics engines. As I don't plan on using this rig for gaming, integrated graphics is fine, in fact preferred, as long as the mobo provides TV outputs. But with the pathetic trickle of Core 2 Duo motherboards to the market, my search for an affordable Conroe-compatible mobo for HTPC seemed doomed. In fact, by the time I made my order, the least expensive such M-ATX motherboard that I could actually find, the Intel BOXD946GZISSL, was $90. And with no TV-out I'd have to buy a separate graphics card, a minimum $30.

Feeling burned by waiting for the next-gen platform, I thought, "to hell with upgrading, I'll just buy the cheapest motherboard and CPU that fits my needs." This sent me looking at the AMD Socket 939 platform. Even though Intel's new processor schooled AMD's high-end offerings, AMD's budget processor, the Sempron, is still a better value than Intel's Celeron, and more energy-efficient to boot. And with AMD moving on to a new platform, the Socket AM2, for their next-gen chips, the market is saturated with Socket 939 motherboards and processors. There's a lot of variety in this mature product line, with good values to be found from vendors. In fact, for about the same price as the Intel motherboard and graphics card, I could afford a tricked-out 939 AMD motherboard and a CPU from the mid-range Athlon 64 line of processors. I went to bed one night sure that I had resolved the issue.

When I woke up the next morning, I had nagging doubts. The 939 platform is so cheap because everyone knows AMD isn't going to support it in the near future. What if I get an HDTV and need a more powerful system to handle the HD signal, but find I can't upgrade? And the next-gen platforms of both Intel and AMD use 240-pin DDR2 memory while 939 motherboards use 184-pin DDR RAM. So, if I did upgrade my motherboard in the future, I wouldn't be able to use the memory I buy today. I became convinced I needed to invest in one of the next-gen platforms, even if it came at a premium.

Intel's platform is still too rare and expensive. But AMD's new platform, based on the Socket AM2, has been on the market for a few more months, and it shows in the variety of motherboards available. And sure, Intel is the new speed leader, but AMD will counter soon enough. And even if they never beat the benchmarks of the Core 2 Duo on the AM2 platform, as long as they're competitive, I'll be happy.

The IGP Wars

Realizing that Integrated Graphics, the kind included on lowly business PCs everywhere, outsell high-end video cards on volume alone, computer graphics hardware manufacturers Nvidia and ATI have each moved into that space recently, and not a moment too soon. With more people making HTPCs, and the stiff requirements of Windows Vista, better performing Integrated Graphics Processors (IGPs) are going to be ever more important. And Intel has not been particularly receptive to the needs of HTPC hobbyists with their IGP solutions.

So I resolved early on to go with a motherboard containing either ATI's Radeon XPress 200 or Nvidia's GeForce 6150 GPUs. Both chipsets provide hardware MPEG decoding (to compliment your TV tuner's MPEG encoding), some level of HD acceleration, DirectX 9 support, and the option of TV-output (though not all motherboards exploit this). In the end, the choice was more-or-less made for me. After narrowing down the options to AMD Socket AM2, Micro-ATX, and TV-Out, I had exactly two choices (at least from my preferred vendor):

MSI K9NGM2-FID
ASUS M2NPV-VM

Seems a lot of people are coming to the same conclusion, as various system builder forums are host to comparisons between these two motherboards. I spent a few extra bucks for the Asus, for the simple fact that MSI requires you to buy their TV-Out header separately, so it's a wash on cost and a plus to Asus for convenience.



Crawling Back to Sempron

With the extra cost of the AM2 motherboard, and the premium AMD charges for the CPUs that fit it, my dreams of affording an Athlon 64 CPU were dashed. I opted for the not-quite-bottom-of-the-barrel AMD Sempron 64 3000+, which at least has twice the L2 cache of the 2800+.



So, my choices represent a compromise between current performance, cost, and upgradability. The results aren't perfect, but they'll do. Wait a few more months and I could probably have found a reasonably-priced Core 2 Duo-compatible motherboard, perhaps even with ATI's next-generation IGP, the Radeon Xpress 1250, with full HD support. But that chip is already a few months overdue, and my shows are starting soon!

Next time: The Case

HTPC Diary Part 2: Tunerama

What Makes an HTPC an HTPC?

Before I go into the results of my research into TV tuners, it might be helpful to break down exactly those qualities that differentiate an HTPC from any regular old PC. Of course, both share many features, such as hard drives, a motherboard, an operating system, etc. But there are a few things an HTPC must have above these:

TV Tuner - Until the media companies start beaming digital, pre-compressed feeds of television programs straight through the Internet, an HTPC needs something that will grab a TV signal off the air or cable box and convert it to a workable format. Some media companies are doing this already through iTunes or, in the case of some ABC shows, on their own website. But iTunes downloads aren't free, ABC's streaming feeds can't be archived, and these only represent a tiny fraction of all the shows available.

TV and Audio Out - The HTPC must also have the hardware allowing it to convert the digital signal back into analog for display on a conventional TV set. That is, unless one has an HDTV with DVI inputs, or plans to use a monitor instead of a TV. I'm still kickin' it low-tech with my 27 inch cathode ray. So I'll need something with S-Video or Component outputs (I may not have the fanciest TV, but even I would never use composite video). And even the lowliest of motherboards now has, at the very least, stereo audio output.

Media Center Software - To schedule recordings, play back video and sound, and do a host of other media central things. Lots of options here, which I'll get into later.

Remote Control - Unless you want to whip out the keyboard every time you need to change the channel.

Smaller case and quieter components - Actually optional, but do you really want a noisy monstrosity ruining the mise-en-scene of your harmonious living room?

That's about it. Of course, to get everything to work together reliably and optimally, one has to put a lot of consideration into the selection of all components. But these are the minimums.

One more consideration. Let's say you have a fairly modern PC in another room already. Do you have to build a whole new machine? You could just add a TV tuner and media center software and then buy a media bridge, such as the Sage TV Media Extender to stream content to your TV wirelessly. For this you would also need a cable hook-up in the same room as your PC, which is one reason why I won't be going this route.

Tuner Salad

Microsoft jumped into the HTPC fray in late 2004 with their Media Center Edition operating system, a version of Windows XP with integrated Tivo-like functionality. I probably won't be using this OS for my box, for reasons to be explained later, but the software has, and will continue to have, a strong impact on TV tuner manufacturers and HTPC builders. Microsoft has, in a sense, set a de-facto hardware standard for media PCs, one that should not be ignored lightly. Expect better third-party application compatibility for Windows MCE-supported hardware as the operating system gains widespread use, and as Microsoft incorporates many of its features into Windows Vista.

And not just because Microsoft is the 500-lb gorilla will I be following their hardware requirements. Many of them, including their specifications for TV tuners, just make sense. Under Windows MCE, a TV tuner must have hardware MPEG 2 encoding. Some tuners, like the ATI All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro that powers my current PC, merely have a TV receiver and offload the processor-intensive task of encoding that video to the CPU. By selecting a TV tuner with hardware encoding, you reduce the load on the rest of the system, which means you can use more modest (read less expensive) parts.

Three Typical Selections

On nearly every hardware news or HTPC building resource I visited, three options seemed to dominate discussions of TV tuners: the Hauppauge Win-TV PVR line (150, 250, and 500), the Nvidia DualTV MCE, and cards based on the ATI Theater 550 Pro chipset (such as ATI's own TV Wonder Elite).

The Nvidia DualTV is a well-reviewed two-tuner card, which means it can record two shows at once. This is a great feature. However, this card is also priced about twice as high as other single-tuner cards ($170 at the Nvidia store, the only place I can find it). To keep the price of my system low, I'm going for the single. I can always add more tuners later, as most DVR software supports the use of multiple tuners.

The Hauppauge 150 seems a popular choice among HTPC builders, but reviews warn its picture quality is not up to snuff in comparison with the ATI and Nvidia cards, which are ITF certified and have all sorts of digital comb filters and the like, none of which is particularly meaningful to me, but they do seem to result in better video according to side-by-side comparisons.

So that leaves the Hauppauge 250 and the ATI Theater 550 Pro. In reviews, the two cards are said to perform comparably, with the ATI chipset narrowly edging out the other on video quality. But the ATI tuner can be found in cards costing almost half as much as the Hauppauge, perhaps because ATI licenses its technology to multiple card manufacturers. Packages vary widely, with some brands providing a remote control and more premium bundled software.

If I were to buy a TV tuner card today, therefore, it would be one based on the ATI chipset. Specifically, the VisionTek VTK-THXP550P comes bundled with Snapstream's BeyondTV software for just $60 after rebate, or about $110 with an included MCE remote.

To ATI or Not To ATI

One trend among system builders I noticed just did not make any sense to me at first. Why are the Hauppauge cards so popular if their products are so inferior? It took me a while to figure it out: Linux compatibility. Apparently, ATI is not so proactive in their Linux support, and have yet to release a driver for the 550 chipset. Choosing ATI, then, means choosing not to install Linux as your operating system, and that means the high cost of purchasing a copy of Windows. This would break my budget. I don't have an extra $100 to spend on an OS.

Fortunately for me, due to my student status, I happen to have a license for Windows XP Pro sitting around (don't be too jealous, this minor perk comes after paying $30 grand in tuition). So I will indeed be using an ATI card. I'll be missing out on the most popular open-source media center application, MythTV, but should still have plenty of options (more on that later).

But if you don't have a free Windows license and still want to build the cheapest possible HTPC, the Hauppauge Win-TV PVR 250 seems the most economical choice. Or even consider the Nvidia--though an expensive card, the money you save by using Linux will offset the extra cost.

But Wait!

All of that being said, I probably won't purchase any of these cards. ATI is coming out with an update to their 550 Pro chipset: the 650 Pro. Though they haven't released the hardware to the public yet, many reviewers have received test copies. The result? The new chipset provides even better image quality. What's more, the tuner can receive regular analog plus ATSC broadcasts. ATSC is the over-the-air HDTV standard. With an antenna, and depending on proximity to the broadcast tower, one may be able to pull down free HDTV from the major networks. I know, I don't have a digital TV. But it's still cool. And, even downmixed to standard resolution, HDTV broadcasts should still be clearer than Boston Comcast's dodgy analog cable.

Tuner cards based on the 650 Pro should start coming out this month. Remember, I said my goal was to get this thing built by the end of summer. Stay tuned to see if a new card makes it into my machine.

HTPC Diary Part 1: Introduction and Justification

I've been spending inordinate amounts of time over the last several weeks researching components to build my own home theater PC (or HTPC, or Media Center PC, etc), so I thought I'd serialize my thoughts, processes, difficulties, and conclusions for anyone who might be interested, or who might be able to give me advice along the way. This will be the first in a series of posts as I select components to buy, put them together, and test the machine. Today I will address the most obvious question about this task: why?

DIY HTPC: Not Just a Really Expensive Tivo

My VCR had been on the fritz for several months before my wife and I moved from Oakland to Boston to attend grad school. It played tapes reliably, but recording was a crap shoot. About half the time it would shut itself off after recording was engaged. So when hard decisions had to be made about which items would earn valuable space in our packing crate, it didn't make the cut. And I couldn't bring myself to buy a new one for our new home. Buy a VCR? Why not churn our own butter? Hello, digital technology.

But some deep-seeded geekiness (or genetic cheapness) also prevented me from buying a Tivo. It's just a function-crippled Linux box with a TV tuner, I could make one of those! More pointedly, my student budget would not bear the monthly service charge.

Subsequently, during a busy year of graduate study, we missed all of our shows. I resolved to find a solution by the end of the summer. As God as my witness, I will never miss The O.C. again!

Tivos are now essentially free. Buy one at retail and you'll get a rebate covering most of the cost under the condition that you'll subscribe to the monthly Tivo service for one year. Depending on how you look at it, they're either subsidizing the cost of the hardware or the first year of the service. They've also introduced two- tuner decks which can record two shows at once, and are experimenting with direct delivery of content to Tivo boxes over the Internet. Still, I refuse to buy a Tivo.

Here's why. Unlike when VCRs first came out and the hardware manufacturers fought the media industry tooth and nail in the courts to protect the consumer's right to record and archive broadcast TV, Tivo has cozied up to the TV industry, presumably to avoid such costly litigation. Instead of fighting, they've simply sold their customers out. First, they buried the 30 second skip function to make it more difficult to zap commercials. More recently, they've allowed the networks to flag shows for restricted access. Some shows will self-destruct if you don't watch them soon enough, others can't be recorded at all. This is unconscionable.

Frankly, I also refuse to pay for the Tivo service on principle. What is it that they're charging you for? Let's look at the elements that go into it. First, there's the program guide, the list of shows and showtimes and other metadata. This information is important, sure. But another way to look at it: these are advertisements. TV networks aren't carefully guarding the secret of when their shows are airing. They want you to know! Second, there's the data about your viewing habits that Tivo uses to make recommendations for other shows. The key word in that last sentence: YOUR. This is data you provide, and valuable demographic data at that. Tivo should be paying you to access it.

Those are the only truly dynamic aspects of the service. Tivo synthesizes these streams together with some statistical intelligence and a graphical front-end to provide their characteristic new media experience. What's a better term for this "service"? Software. But software you pay $13 a month for.

Other Options

Given my stand against Tivo, I did consider some other options.

Comcast offers cable subscribers the ability to lease a DVR for about the same amount as the Tivo service charge. But since Tivos now subsidize the cost of hardware, why lease when you can buy? Also, you have to have digital cable to lease the box, and I don't.

You can find DVD Recorders/Hard Drive hybrids which allow broadcast recording without paying a service fee, many of which also pull schedule information off the air for very limited Tivo-like functionality. These seem a good step forward, but they are also quite pricey, starting at $300. I feel confident that, for about a hundred bucks more, I can build something far more versatile.

The Dream Machine

My goal is to create a low profile, lowish noise PC that can sit with my other home theater equipment but do a whole lot more: the fabled convergence box. It should be able to do all the stuff Tivo does (program guide, "season pass" recording, pause live TV, etc), in addition to these things:

play all of my digital media
network with my desktop PC to share files
browse the web
run bittorrents when necessary
serve as an emergency backup word processor when my wife and I both have papers due

and maybe even:
run limited games (ideally arcade and early console emulators)
pull down over-air HDTV signals

That's the project. I've seen a lot of HTPC tutorials, but most are pitched at a much higher budget than mine; people building high-end vanity equipment or otherwise high-powered PCs with DVR functionality. My aim is to get a minimal configuration working for around $400, but which will support plenty of future upgrades.

The components are interdependent, but I have to start somewhere, so next I'll be looking at the heart of any HTPC: the TV tuner card.

HUZZAH! Kicking and F-ing Screaming Criterion DVD!

About time! A full-on special edition of one of my favorite movies ever, never before released on DVD and seemingly eclipsed by a wacky Will Ferrell movie of the same name that came out last year. Seems the critical mass over The Squid and the Whale and The Life Aquatic (which Noah Baumbach co-wrote with Wes Anderson) has finally had the effect I had hoped. This marks the official retirement of my VHS collection.

Amazon shows a release date of August 22.

Frightening Post-Apocalyptic Movie from Pixar

There's this new movie out from Pixar in which all the humans are gone, but their cars remain, and they talk. What happened to the people? Did the radiation kill them? Global warming seems a likely candidate with all the cars around. Or, having become intelligent, was there a Matrix-like war between humans and machines in which the cars, like those in an early Peter Weir film, ate the people. "Soylent gasoline is people! It's people!"

Am I the only one completely underwhelmed by the concept of Cars? I usually love Pixar movies, especially the last one, The Incredibles, but have no plans to see this new one. I'm going to reveal my PC liberalism here, but does America really need a movie to teach kids how to further fetishize the automobile? I know they're only playing to their base. Kids have a natural fascination for cars and already play with Hot Wheels and RC kits. So, in a way, it's just a natural extension of Toy Story, which taught kids that they should really care about the feelings of inanimate objects. But at least toys don't cause global f-ing warming!

How about a movie about talking subway trains or public buses? Or, better yet, bikes and skateboards. Enough with the cars.

Or am I over-reacting?

Spooky 3D Photos

Becky and I visited Lexington and Concord yesterday, and I used the occasion to experiment with some stereo photography. Here are some photos of "Authors Ridge" in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord (not to be confused with the more famous Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York, where Washington Irving is buried). The cemetery houses the family plots of Alcott, Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne, and the graves of the famous American authors from those families.

These are cross-eye stereo 3D images. I created them simply by taking one picture, moving the camera slightly to the right, taking another, and then combining them in Photoshop. To get the effect, cross your eyes until the two images "overlap" and resolve. If you like this kind of stuff, check out the Stereophotography group on Flickr.

Freedom Ain't Free

Looks like Becky is going to make any description of our recent Massachusetts explorama redundant with her epic post on the subject, but I did want to add some quick reflections on historical tourism in our nation's crucible.

Living in Oakland, just a bridge crossing away from San Francisco, whenever we'd host first time Bay Area visitors we knew we'd be subjected to the baseline area tourism experience for at least one day. As any resident could tell you, this includes such attractions as Chinatown, maybe a Cable Car ride, Fisherman's Wharf, and the almost universally loathed Pier 39. I'm sure many residents resist the tourism loop completely, but we feared dissuading visitors from the experience would just be selfish of us. As lame and misrepresentative of the area as some of those tourist-trap sites could be, how could we send our visitors back home without that common frame of reference, some content for conversation with any past or future Bay Area tourist or resident?

There are just those things you have to see when you travel somewhere for the first time, even if they are utterly corporate. To avoid them would require an almost comical act of repression. Ghiradelli Square? La la la la la, I can't hear you! Luckily, the standard crappy Boston tourism experience is a lot more interesting than the Bay Area's, in my opinion, because Boston's is built around US history rather than pretty scenery and shopping. In fact, it's downright moving at parts.

At the center of the experience is the Freedom Trail, a walking route starting from Boston Common which hits dozens of sites somehow relevant to the colonial experience and the American Revolution. Other popular Massachusetts attractions we hit last week were Salem and Plimoth Plantation. These sites may be more historically meaningful, but, as I found out, they are no less commercial than those SF hot spots. Now, I'm not naive. I know that wherever there are a mass of people there will be entrepreneurs hoping to take advantage of them. I suppose I just wasn't prepared for the high cost of even entering certain national landmarks. Aside from a few public areas like the Common, various burial grounds, and any landmark now inhabited by a shopping mall (like Fanieul Hall), walking the Freedom Trail is potentially rather costly.

Official Freedom Tour guided walk: $12
Paul Revere House: $3
Old State House: $5
Old South Meeting House: $5
Old North Church ("one if by land, two if by sea"): donations encouraged, and you can't go up to the steeple.
Historic Cambridge self-guided walking tour map: $2.50
Trinity Church: $5 self-guided tour
Salem Witch Museum (in no way official): $6
Plimoth Plantation and Mayflower II (both private "recreations"): $24

They haven't figured out a way to charge for the Holocaust Memorial. Yet.

I don't know, I understand the cost involved with maintaining all of these attractions, and that some of them are privately owned. The Old North Church is still a working church, so why sacrifice the living history for the mythology? But there's something pretty irksome about touring American heritage sites and being confronted by admissions fees at every turn in addition to the tacky souvenir shops. Don't Americans deserve some competent and, most importantly, free propaganda about the founding of our nation? Isn't it our birthright to visit gratis a convincing recreation, complete with LARPers, of the Puritan plantation where we launched one of our most impressive East Coast land-grabs?

Seriously, though, why doesn't the Federal Government feel it important enough to subsidize visits to the landmarks where our democracy was forged? Or is it completely fitting that our most primary landmarks reflect the characteristically American tension between democratic and capitalistic values?

Semester Post-Mortem, Wherefore Academic Excellence?

My resolution to blog weekly, as you may have noticed, was fiendishly foiled by events beyond my control, and a steady accumulation of work over the last weeks of the semester further eroded my resolve. That first shameful week I had been apprised of a Macarthur Foundation call for abstracts in a subject very close to my field of study. Although I only had a few days of notice before the due date, the potential $10,000 honorarium was motivation enough for me to spend my entire Friday in a windowless computer lab writing the outline for an ambitious but probably over-vague chapter about digital media. What became of my efforts I do not know. They promised to get back to all applicants by mid-May, but I have yet to hear anything. I'm not terribly optimistic.

After that it was one paper and presentation after another. It all turned out OK, really. Once you accept the fact that you're going to spend nearly every waking hour working on stuff, it becomes bearable in the short term. I've also wisened to my own limitations--I have about 3 hours during the day when I can do really good work, with diminishing returns after that, and I need plenty of sleep. So I don't feel guilty going to bed early, or winding down with an episode or two of The O.C. after my productive hours. It's all for the best. Just have to make sure I give myself plenty of lead time for any assignment, and I don't take on too much.

But I am far from representative of most MIT students. Some MIT folks seem to have reached their level of academic excellence due, in part, to chronic insomnia. They are able to use those sleepless hours to get stuff done. Others are almost completely socially non-functional, and not in a hip geek-chic kind of way. That's a pretty high price to pay for an advanced degree. But once you get this far out on the academic bell curve, the qualities that make a good student are necessarily abnormal. Is there a big difference between extreme academic excellence and mental pathology?

Of course, in my case, I got here out of sheer luck, which trumps all other virtues.

What do you think? Does "genius" exist, or is that an entirely bogus concept? Have incidental or even detrimental personal qualities helped you get ahead?

Guitar Hero: Two Tasty Kinds of Flow

I resolved to blog once a week, posting every Friday, but yesterday happened to be a marathon session of thesis presentations by the second year CMS students, followed by a party at department co-chair William Urrichio's house. And, writing up my blog this morning, it turned out to be more relevant to my studies, so I posted to the (yes, still under construction)CMS Journal blog. Hey, I'm trying!

Happy Easter/Passover, and a Minor Respite

Thanks to the absurd New England-only holiday, "Patriot's Day", and one of MIT's random but always welcome mid-term holidays, known affectionately by students as "suicide prevention days," I have Monday and Tuesday off and am feeling not-totally-overwhelmed this weekend. Thankfully so, it's been a busy couple of weeks.

The highlights of the past month or so have included a trip to NYC with Becky to mark our fist wedding anniversary, a class visit from
Sherry Turkle, my participation in an ongoing group narrative project with Geoffrey Long and Peter Rauch, my near-completion of videos and materials concerning Cory Doctorow for the New Media Literacies Exemplar Library, my semi-competent redesign of this very website, and some amazing news from one of my closest friends (keeping cagey about it just in case).

Not so fun moments included a beautiful spring break week spent almost entirely inside working on projects, the maddeningly protracted development of the architecture for the still barely functional CMS Journal, Becky's recent stomach flu, and the dawning realization that my thesis proposal is due in mere weeks.

This weekend I'm finally going to hit the Star Wars exhibit at the Museum of Science with Kristina, not only to enjoy but also to observe folks for our ethnography assignment. Local grade-school students have the week off, so we should see a lot of children exploring the exhibit, most likely dragged there, bewildered and complaining, by their nostalgic Gen-X parents. But, you never know. Will duly report on our observations next week.

New Look - Still Lame!

I'm getting my web-design act together, starting fresh with a stripped-down HTML page and basic CSS. Look for iterative changes to make this all look a lot better soon. Sorry.

Next from the Makers of Grand Theft Auto: Pong!

If it were April I'd consider this news a bit of tomfoolery, but it seems to be legit: Rockstar San Diego announced that its first next-generation title for the XBox 360 will be...Table Tennis? "Our goal was to create a game that is perfectly addictive in its focused simplicity," explains Rockstar founder Sam Houser. "It is a distillation of game design philosophy, focusing on removing the traditional areas of compromise inherent in managing size and scope and concentrating the hardware's entire power on one activity, with the aim of doing that better than it's ever been done before." Compare this to the company's Grand Theft Auto titles, which are a kind of meta-game, a game that contains all other games, almost infinite in scope but relatively shallow in depth. I sense the company is working towards a grand plan. Non-GTA Rockstart games, like Midnight Club and State of Emergency tend to have that "this is actually practice for something we're going to put in GTA" feel. Have their attempts at refining game engines led them to revisit the very genesis of action gaming, the old paddle-n-ball?

If they could capture the speed and immediacy of real table tennis, it would be quite interesting. That said, can anyone see this working with a regular Xbox joystick? Read the press release.

New Personal Focus + Hibernation Weekend

Hello. Not that anyone reads this page, but I've decided to change its focus to more personal-type news. My theoretical ramblings will be limited to other venues. Notes and reflections in preparation for my thesis can be found at my blog Confidence, Cohen. Media literacy related posts will go up at Project NML, as soon as I have some to post. And all other nuggets of brilliance about media will be exposed on the CMS Journal website, which should be up and running by the end of the semester.

The big news this semester is that I've joined the aforementioned New Media Literacies project. I'm really excited about it, and not just because I've won funding (well, some funding). In short, the purpose of the project is to develop curricula to give kids practical and theoretical tools for navigating a media rich world. Right now I'm editing an interview with sci-fi author/blogger/copyright activist Cory Doctorow that will go into our "Exemplar Library," an archive of many such interviews with media producers. It's so fun, I don't want to work on any of my other homework!

I realized this morning that the editing project, combined with the cold, the long weekend, and the fact that Becky is out of town, have pushed me into hibernation mode. Video editing is a real time-suck, when I get in the zone I hardly realize when 8 hours have passed. With Becky gone, it makes no sense to eat out or prepare complicated meals, so I've been subsisting on soup and left-overs. And, if I'm not going out, why shave or change out of my pajamas? So, what's the result: low activity (just shuffling around the apartment), low calorie consumption (can't be bothered to cook), low levels of natural light, high physical comfort. So now all I want to do is sleep. Got 9 hours last night but still feel groggy. This would be great if I had nothing to do this winter but survive. Not gonna be so good when I have to go to school on Wednesday.