2 March

ST:TNG Treadmill Reviews #59 and #60: All Good Things…

No, I didn’t skip ahead to the series finale in season 7. But this will be my last entry in the ST:TNG Treadmill Reviews series, wherein I will cover the last two episodes I watched, but didn’t get around to reviewing earlier.

Why am I ending this? Three reasons:

  1. The weather is getting nicer and I’m prepared to run outside again. In fact, this afternoon I ran outside for the first time since Thanksgiving-ish.

  2. I had been losing steam on the treadmill. Even though I was still watching full episodes, I was finding it harder and harder to stay motivated to get past 3 or 4K — or sometimes 2K. On top of that, my timing was often bad, where as soon as I was done on the treadmill, it would be time for a shower and dinner, and not so much sitting around at my desk in sweat-soaked running shorts opining breathlessly on my blog.

  3. Our treadmill died yesterday.

The treadmill probably can be fixed, but with the other two factors having already piled up, that was definitely “strike three” for me to wrap up this blog series. Plus, 60 is a nice round number. The Babylonians thought so. As good a place as any to call it quits on a project I had concocted primarily to get myself through the winter without turning fully sedentary again, now that winter is (mostly) behind us.

Anyway… I’ve got two more episodes to review, so let’s get to it!

#59

In Theory
Season 4 Episode 25
Original airdate: June 1, 1991

Netflix Synopsis

When a female crewmember is infatuated with Data, he decides to give a romantic relationship a try.

My Brief Review, What Passes for a Memorable Moment, and the Whole Episode Is About a Crew Rando, So Let’s Get It All Over With Under One Heading

Ugh.

No, actually, it’s not that bad. But I do feel a bit sorry for Lt. Jenna D’Sora. That is, I would have felt sorry for her if the very idea of getting into a romantic relationship with an android weren’t so obviously stupid. One thing I’ve always wondered: what does it feel like to touch Data? How skin-like is his “skin”? And how hard is whatever is under it? What’s his body temperature? Etc. Not to mention what it would be like to kiss him. Which she does. Repeatedly.

There are some highlights. Data programmatically instigating a “lover’s quarrel” — yelling “You’re not my mother!” Data ludicrously turning on his “seductive” chip or whatever. But for the most part this relationship story is not compelling.

Meanwhile, something completely unrelated and, once again, far more interesting (to me) than the personal drama we spend most of the episode dwelling on, is unfolding. The Enterprise is attempting to maneuver through a dangerous nebula. A “dark matter” nebula. I love how TNG went all-in on incorporating up-to-date cosmology and theoretical physics into storylines, even if sometimes it didn’t make any sense. I’m not sure if such a thing as a “dark matter” nebula exists, but if it does, I’d be surprised if a human spacecraft could interact with it at all without being destroyed. (But I may be conflating dark matter with antimatter. Oh did I mention that they somehow have developed a means of containing antimatter, which is how they power the ship?)

Would musicians in the 24th century really be using paper sheet music? A lot of us don’t even do that anymore now!

I forgot to mention, the episode starts with a woodwind quintet (!) performing in Ten Forward, featuring Keiko on clarinet, Data on oboe, and Jenna on flute. Plus two super-randos on bassoon and horn. (The bassoonist is a non-humanoid alien who would appear to be more at home in Mos Eisley.)

Anyway… a surprisingly weak episode this close to the end of the season, but it did air in June. May sweeps were already over, so they had to stick in one more throwaway episode before the exciting season finale cliffhanger!

Distance Rating: 2K

IMDb score: 7.2/10

#60

Redemption
Season 4 Episode 26
Original airdate: June 15, 1991

Netflix Synopsis

Both Capt. Picard and Lt. Worf must decide where their priorities lie as the Klingon Empire descends into civil war.

My Brief Review

Gowron is in it. Enough said.

Memorable Moment

Worf gets his honor back, which involves holding a nasty looking Klingon dagger by the blade, slicing into his hand, while Gowron says the magic words that clear his family name.

Crew Rando

Not a member of the Enterprise crew, but who’s that Romulan lurking in the shadows, conspiring with Duras’s duplicitous sisters? Gasp! It’s Tasha Yar! But… but… how??!

ANOTHER CLIFFHANGER!!!

I remembered that it was her, and so I recognized her voice, and was not at all surprised when she appeared at the final moment of the episode. Eventually I will get around to watching season 5 so I can be reminded of what happens next!

Distance Rating: 4K

IMDb score: 8.5/10

Can a developer use an iPad as their only portable “computer”?

I am at a crossroads in my work situation. Since 2008 I have worked as a freelance web developer, which naturally meant using a laptop as my primary/only computer. I worked mostly from home, but I would frequently go to coffeehouses, and occasionally work on-site at client offices. A portable computer was a must.

The same week that Steve Jobs announced the 11-inch MacBook Air, I went out and purchased one. It was exactly what I wanted: a full-blown Mac, (almost) as small as an iPad (which of course I already owned as well, but mainly used for testing, occasional gaming, and watching all six seasons of Lost in the span of a month on Netflix, not for “real work”). I loved the MacBook Air. I said it was the best Mac I’d ever owned, though I admitted it was a tad underpowered. Enough so that when SLP needed a new computer 6 months later, I gave her my MacBook Air instead and bought myself a new, slightly more powerful version of the same.

That MacBook Air has been my only computer ever since. In fact, shortly after switching to it full-time, I wrote a glowing review of it right here. But last April I moved my business into a storefront studio space. I’m not going to coffeehouses anymore. Now, more often than not, clients come to me instead of the other way around. And all of this time I’ve been sitting at a desk, with that same 11-inch MacBook Air hooked up to an HP 23-inch LCD. (Yes, HP. I may be a self-proclaimed Apple fanboy, but even I can’t justify the expense of one of their Cinema Display monitors.)

It’s in this context that I’ve finally really become aware of the performance limitations of the 2010 MacBook Air. It’s unbearably slow with Adobe Creative Suite apps. It’s even unbearably slow running Panic’s Coda. And no computer today should choke up on what is essentially a glorified text editor. (That said… As much as I love Coda, it does seem bloated and slow almost everywhere I’ve used it. There’s no comparison to the blazing speed of BBEdit, which I also love, but Coda has some features I prefer, so it remains my main coding tool.)

Over the past few months, as my workload has increased and my patience has diminished, I can no longer pretend that the 2010 MacBook Air’s performance is adequate for my needs. I know the 2012 Airs are at least 3 times faster than the one I have, and I’m sure this year’s will be even faster, and maybe even have a Retina display, and therein lies the problem: I’ve been desperately wanting to upgrade my Mac, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy one of the current 11-inch Airs (the only portable I will consider) when they’re getting so close to a refresh.

At the same time, I have a major crunch at work over the next 3 months. I couldn’t afford to wait on my creaky old Air anymore. So last weekend I settled on a compromise, borne of the fact that I almost never touch my MacBook Air outside of the studio anymore. I got a Mac mini for the studio. I went with the more powerful quad-core i7 model, which is rated on Geekbench as at least 6 times faster than my old MacBook Air, and almost twice as fast as the current ones.

I’ve already noticed a huge difference. Adobe Creative Suite is way faster, almost to the point of no longer being infuriating. (But that’s another story.) Coda is still occasionally sluggish, but that may have more to do with the fact that I’m working with files on our local file server over a questionable WiFi connection. I should try putting the files directly on my hard drive to see if it makes a difference.

But now I am faced with a weird dilemma. This is the first desktop computer I’ve owned since the Dell I had back in 2001, and the first Mac desktop since even before that. (It was a Bondi blue G3 tower, if you were wondering.) The dilemma is this: in a world of iPads, where I am already pretty much never touching my MacBook Air outside of work, do I really need a portable Mac at all?

I still have the Air, of course, and have continued to lug it around next to my iPad in my Tom Bihn bag this week. But why? In the two meetings I had this week at client offices, I only used my iPad. Maybe the iPad is really all I need. Maybe?

I have a few months to find out. I won’t consider buying another MacBook Air until the new models are out, so in the meantime I will experiment. I will try only using the iPad for any and all computing tasks outside of the studio. I’ve begun that today, by typing this blog post on it as I sit at the kitchen counter with my Saturday morning coffee. It’s been a bit of a challenge. I gave up on using the WordPress web interface and switched to the (marginally better) dedicated iPad app. And I’ve made lots of typos… some that iOS auto-corrected, some it didn’t, and some false positives it shouldn’t have. (C’mon, iPad… use some context, would ya? Why would anyone ever write “you we’re”?)

The biggest challenge will be if I have to write some actual code. But it’s a far different world for that than it was even a year ago. I have a handful of coding apps on my iPad, though nothing I have could be more valuable than another pair of apps from Panic: Diet Coda (great name, BTW) and Prompt, a terminal app. I haven’t had much call to use either of them… yet. But I’ve been comforted knowing they’re there.

At the end of this month we’re planning a family vacation to Utah. That may prove to be the ultimate test. Do I dare leave for a week with only my iPad? Honestly, I’m not sure I can. It will depend on the state of my various work projects at that time. But I’d like to be able to give it a try.

I’ll post follow-ups here as the experiment continues.

Rolling Stone album reviewers are idiots

Rolling StoneYeah, I know. Big news. But I was just reminded of it again.

I was listening to one of my favorite new albums, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future by The Bird and the Bee. In particular, I was listening to the song “Witch,” a song that is extremely evocative of the music of classic James Bond movies (and not just because I’ve been watching Moonraker on my iPhone over the past couple of nights). So I decided to google “The Bird and the Bee” Witch “James Bond” to see if anyone had discussed this correlation.

The first result back was the Rolling Stone review of the album, which I was disappointed to see had only received a 2-star rating. The review is scornfully dismissive of the blatant influence of Burt Bacharach, bossa nova and the Bee Gees. So imagine my surprise when I read Rolling Stone’s 3-and-a-half-star review of their first album, which mentioned, in a far more appreciative tone, the blatant influence of Burt Bacharach, bossa nova and the Beach Boys.

Granted, the Beach Boys are probably a more enduringly worthy influence than the Bee Gees. But I happen to really like “How Deep Is Your Love” (which The Bird and the Bee covered on an EP a couple years ago and which, I have read, but I hasten to note I would not know from personal experience, was also included in the Sex and the City movie soundtrack), and I doubt that the influence of the Beach Boys vs. the influence of the Bee Gees would, on its own, make a star-and-a-half difference in the quality of the two albums.

I have not actually heard The Bird and the Bee’s first album (yet), but if their second is only a 2-star effort, then the first must be a 3-and-a-half-star masterpiece beyond anything in the known world of music.

The real problem here is that musical tastes are highly subjective, even among music reviewers who work for the same publication. But although the reviewers in Rolling Stone get a byline, RS still presents a monolithic face as the voice of popular music criticism, and as such it would be nice if they could maintain a little continuity in their treatment of individual artists from one album to the next, at least to the extent that the star ratings should not be applied as subjectively as the commentary within the reviews themselves… or, the star ratings should never be presented out of context without noting the name of the reviewer who assigned an album its rating.

For example:
Rolling Stone reviews, accordingly amended

If it’s good enough for Radiohead, it’s good enough for me

Name Your Own PriceIn the wake of the RPM Challenge, I’ve stepped up the presence of my solo music online, most notably making all of my recent music available as a paid download on INDISTR.

Initially I had assigned prices to the albums, but INDISTR has recently added a new feature, “Name Your Own Price.” Well, that works for me. Even if you only pay $1 (the minimum) for my albums, I still make about as much off the sale as most signed musicians make when you buy their CDs for $19.99 at Sam Goody.

So, in short, Sam Goody can suck it. But that’s not really the point. The point is that I want you to download my music! You can listen to it for free here, and then head on over to INDISTR to download it for whatever price you feel is fair. If you want. Or you can suck it too.

Just kidding. Buy my music!