I’m sure Goodman’s right, but after HBO let several of their great series die without replacing them, I was one of those who left. It especially burned that they let Deadwood die without a satisfying end. It was super disappointing, and a black eye for a channel known for such great shows. I liked a lot of HBO’s shows back then, and Deadwood was the last one I’d have let die at the time, were I in their shoes.

Now I check out the shows via Netflix when they hit DVD. Maybe someday they’ll get my trust back and I’ll re-subscribe. I promise I’ll do it if they wrap up Deadwood!

Holy cow!

Everyone “knows” that texting while driving is dangerous, but here’s proof. It’s clearly more dangerous than simply talking on the phone.

Of the 2,501 drivers surveyed this spring, 95 percent said that texting was unacceptable behavior. Yet 21 percent of drivers said they had recently texted or e-mailed while driving.

Wow.

(via Daring Fireball)

In what now seems like a former life, I worked for a small television production company on a children’s show called Adventures with Kanga Roddy. OK, it was really about 11 years ago, but the show hasn’t been on the air in years.

This past Saturday, Erik (who also worked on that show, oddly enough) and I were riding at the Soquel Demonstration Forest (aka Demo) and saw the strangest thing: a VHS video tape of the show, wedged in a tree trunk.

So. Freaking. Bizarre.

I’ve been hoping that SSD prices would drop and capacities would rise to a point where I could justify getting one. But a 1 TB drive in my MacBook Pro sure sounds great.

Update: Turns out that TUAW reports that it’s too high for a MBP at 12.5mm. Darn.

I was recently listening to episode 1025 of Buzz Out Loud, in which they were discussing AT&T’s recent revelation that their current customer churn rate is the lowest in that carrier’s history despite recent loud complaints about the low quality of their service. That discussion pointed out that such disparity between the public conversation about AT&T’s lack of quality (dropped calls, slow network performance, no coverage in areas in major cities, missing key features due to the network) and the metrics that company inevitably uses to decide what its priorities are can only lead them to believe that their current course is a good one.

Personally, I’ve been relatively happy with AT&T. At least I’ve been as happy as one gets with a cell phone carrier, which I’ve determined is like being happy with a parasitic organism in your body: if you have to have one, you want the least malignant one you can get. Their customer service has been fine when I needed to use it and the service generally works when I need it to.

However, 3 G service is worse than non-existent in my home. How can it be worse? Well, there’s enough that I get the smallest possible amount of 3 G signal in parts of the house, so it causes the phone to toggle from the 3 G network to the older one constantly. It’s been this way for over a year. The net effect is that I frequently miss calls if my phone is in 3 G mode, and the battery runs down very quickly. Consequently, I leave my shiny new iPhone 3 GS with its 3 G capabilities turned off unless I’m out-and-about and using the network capabilities a lot.

I should point out that I don’t live in the boonies, either. I’m in San Jose, a respectable technology center, and only a 5-minute drive from an Apple Store or downtown San Jose. Heck, I can easily walk to either. And it’s not isolated to just my place. There are many, many spots where this happens. Nor is it my phone: I’ve had 2 iPhone 3Gs and 1 iPhone 3 GS, and it’s the same on all of them. I can also confirm reports that there are places in downtown San Francisco that simply have no reception at all. Completely unacceptable.

Let’s make no mistake: the thing that ensures I stay with AT&T is the iPhone.

My point? If the conclusion AT&T arrives at when studying its great customer retention numbers is that its current level of service is acceptable to its users, it would do well to recognize that there are those of us who love our iPhones, and AT&T is just the baggage that we have to put up with to have one. (Yes, there are ways to get the iPhone on other networks, such as T-Mobile locally, but that’s even worse than AT&T, in my experience.) If we get the chance to move to Verizon, whose network coverage is much, much better than AT&T’s, I think AT&T will be shocked the next time it reviews those same customer retention metrics.

AT&T, this good deal you have with Apple over the iPhone has given you a huge boost in this market. Ignore these metrics that might tell you that you’re doing the right thing in letting network capacity lag the competition. Instead, invest all you can in making your network better than the competition and when your exclusivity over the iPhone ends, we might just stay with you. But continue to allow your network quality to lag behind what the subscribers want and deny them access to the features they should have (MMS, tethering) and I bet you’ll witness an exodus of customers the moment a better alternative presents itself.

The AP is apparently looking to become as popular as other industry consortiums like the RIAA and MPAA. I guess they’re hoping that by wrapping their stories in DRM that they’ll be able to leverage the DMCA against anyone who uses the content of their members in court.

I think they’ll find the written word is much harder to protect than a digital song or movie. And while the DMCA might prove a valuable weapon, the laws regarding the use of written words are more defined than their newer kin. I think that all they’re doing is proving that groups such as these are anachronisms, waiting for their inevitable deaths at the hands of a public tired of being nickel-and-dimed.

I know Waterdog in Belmont pretty well. I’ve ridden there for years, at times as often as four times a week, before work. I was surprised when I joined Passion Trail Bikes’ Wednesday Wride last night and we rode a trail completely new to me.

To be fair, it wasn’t in Waterdog proper, but on the other side of Hastings Drive, on the way to the jump area farther down the hill. But this trail, called “Jack Daniels” by the folks on the ride, was good stuff. It’s steep and loose and has lots of tight turns with berms. It’s pretty soft, probably due to summer conditions and obvious wear—it clearly wasn’t built as a sustainable trail. But it sure was fun, and I’m looking forward to hitting it again the next time I’m at Waterdog.

The Online Photographer has a review of the new Olympus E-P1 Pen online today. I love the concept, but think that the lack of a real viewfinder is a real bummer. I love the 17mm pancake lens, and perhaps the reported chromatic aberration at wide apertures is something that can be corrected in Lightroom fairly simply.

Still, it’s wonderful to see a camera like this getting made and the bottom line is that I’m not really in the market to replace my Canon G9 yet. I think I’m going to continue sitting this generation of small(ish) cameras out. I am definitely looking forward to the E-P2 though. On top of the excellent start with the E-P1, I’m hoping to see a real viewfinder and simple refinements to the rest of what looks to be an excellent camera. Improved autofocus would be nice too, but I’d be willing to manually focus to get an otherwise superb camera.

Dave, one of a group of friends riding up in British Columbia, is posting pics and accounts on his blog of this year's version of the BC trip. I'm jealous that they're up there and I'm not, but what's up with that pic of Brian on those steep features? Check out that pic of his fork. His zip-ties are only 3/4 up the stanchions! I thought this was BC riding!

According to Fortune, the built-in video functionality of the iPhone won’t kill the Flip. While they’re certainly right in the short run, I don’t think it’ll take all that long for the Flip and its ilk to die.

I have the Flip HD and have now had the iPhone 3 GS for a couple of days, and the main saving grace the Flip has is that it shoots in HD and the iPhone doesn’t (yet). But the old adage that “the best camera is the one you have with you” applies here. Now that the iPhone can shoot video, I’m less likely to take the Flip with me anywhere. Yes, I still keep it in the living room to shoot a video of the baby when she does something cute, but when we leave the house, I’d rather not have to remember something else.

As the article points out, the iPhone already surpasses the Flip in functionality, other than the aforementioned HD quality. Users might like that simplicity (although I’d argue that the additional functionality is out-of-the-way in the iPhone’s interface), but I think that the “camcorder industry analysts” who believe that simplicity is what Flip users really like are underestimating the power of one less thing to carry.

I have a heck of a time maintaining a blog. I blame it on the fact that my friends and I have participated in a walled garden of my own creation for many years, and when I think to post something, I think of them as my audience, and I post it there. I’d like to have a more public way to do that, and that’s what I intend this to be.

That said, I’ve started a blog before, and I’m not sure what I can do short of pure willpower to keep it current. Anyway, I’m going to try again.

I’ve set this up with the latest Movable Type and some plugins, and I’m certainly not done. It has a mostly default style, with my “action streams” (read: my updates from other sites) thrown in the sidebar. I’ll work on making this look better, but I didn’t want to wait for that to start posting here.

I like a lot of these ideas. Especially the one about knowing when there’s an HD/SD version of the same show and following my preferences to record the right one.

Just wanted to drop a quick note saying that we’re home. We decided that it was time to come back to real life and look for jobs, and got back on Friday evening, just over 1 month after leaving.

We had a great time, and I obviously stopped writing up the trip here, and perhaps I’ll try and post more later. There are pics on Flickr for those who are interested.

Stats for the trip: 5900 miles on the dot and according to the truck’s trip computer, we averaged 10.2 MPG for the whole trip. We managed to hit all the Swine Flu hotspots, but seem to have dodged the flu itself. (I did feel a bit flu-ey one day, but was feeling better pretty quickly, so it must not have been the bad stuff.)

I managed to re-injure my old knee injury by twisting on it wrong and dislocating it. I set it on the spot, took Advil and iced it and it’s getting better much faster than when I did it many moons ago in karate. Must be getting old…. ;)

I’m behind on writing the trip up, but I’m caught up on uploading pics. They’re gathered in a collection on Flickr, which I keep adding to.

(Pics of this leg.)

After the touristy walk in Tombstone, we headed for Carlsbad Caverns in southeastern New Mexico. That’s a drive of over 450 miles and we were starting in the afternoon, so we set a goal to stop for the night in Las Cruces, NM and complete the rest the following day. We made it to Las Cruces no problem and “camped” in the local Wal-Mart parking lot. For those not into RVing, there are 2 places that are easy to stop for a quick pit-stop when you’re not in a place to actually see it, but are just driving through: a rest stop and Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart are very friendly to RVs, and allow RVs to stop overnight in their parking lots, and many even have their security patrol the area where RVers stop (usually in a far corner of the parking lot). It’s considered bad form to stay more than a night or to fully deploy your gear, but it really makes for a safe, handy place to stay when you just need to get some sleep before moving on. I’m sure Wal-Mart makes a decent amount on people who stop and go in to get a few things while they’re there. We usually buy something when we stop there—it’s the only time I really shop there. Anyway, this stop was uneventful, and we moved on in the morning.

Getting to Carlsbad routes through Texas if you look at the map, and we got a quick look at El Paso as we passed through. It’s clearly a city of religious, mostly Christian, people. I don’t know if they were gearing up for Easter or what, but there were lots of anti-abortion billboards and “praise Jesus” sorts of signs. Anyway, we weren’t planning on stopping in El Paso, and so continued on to Carlsbad Caverns.

Once in the vicinity of the Caverns, we stayed at Brantley Lake State Park, which was a nice, cheap state campground built on a reservoir. Many RVers (including a couple of other Airstreamers) were there, several with boats. It was a nice place to stay, and we enjoyed a nice night—grilled dinner, eating beer and watching the end of Arrested Development (great show that we just caught up with on DVD).

Carlsbad Caverns is a national park that is mostly underground. We did the “Big Room” tour, and when they say big, they mean it. It’s 75-stories underground, but is 25-stories high at its peak. Walking around the outside perimeter is a 1.3ish-mile walk. It was challenging to take pictures—I hadn’t brought my tripod because we were pressed for time and I knew I wouldn’t have time for setups. On-camera flash pics don’t look good because of the harsh shadows and the way the vast rooms swallow up light in wide shots. So I went available-light, and there wasn’t much. The NPS has lit the caverns interestingly, but it’s still hard to capture. I spent a lot of my time at ISO 6400 and 12500, as those were really the only options for an decent pictures at all.

Anyway, the caverns are a constant 56 degrees, year-round. It’s a little humid, but it felt kind of good when combined with the longish walk. I’d be interested in going back and doing it again and taking more of the walks. One of the things the Caverns are famous for is the nightly rush of bats flying out of one of the cavern mouths, heading out to eat insects. There are apparently over 300,000 of them that fly out all at once. Unfortunately for us the bats are still hibernating so it doesn’t start until later in the year, perhaps next month.

Next, on to Texas.