Recent TV Pilots

It’s no secret that I love good TV. Unfortunately, that’s rarely found on the big networks these days. San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate TV critic Tim Goodman is one critic whose taste seems to match well with mine, and he had several picks these past couple of weeks. Here are my thoughts on the shows I’ve seen.

Modern Family

This is a pretty standard network sitcom: a look into the frequently funny lives of a few families, each with its own “modern” take on the definition of family. I found it to be funny in spots, but not compelling enough to make a season pass.

Cougar Town

Its overt sexuality, especially in the context of women “preying” on younger men, is certainly brash for network TV, and I thought it worked. Courteney Cox still has great comedic timing in my opinion, but she shouldn’t have had whatever surgery she had that stretched her mouth and eyes like that; she was an amazing looking woman that didn’t need it. I’ll get the next episode or two before deciding whether or not to keep it, but it looks positive so far.

Glee

Fox’s new show, which some have been billing as a musical even though it’s not what I’d traditionally consider one, has been really surprising. I figured it was a hyped-up made-for-TV High School Musical clone, and was ready to write it off, even though Goodman thought it was great. I shouldn’t have doubted him. While I thought the second episode was a seriously weak follow-up to a superb pilot, the third episode brought the quality back up. I’ve got a season pass to this one, and would recommend it strongly. Make sure to get the HD version and crank up the volume on the sound system for the musical numbers— with its top-notch production quality, Glee is a lot of fun.

FlashForward

It’s getting compared to Lost for good reason: it starts with a catastrophe that leaves more than a few questions about what the hell happened. The pilot has a lot to set up, and still hits the ground running at a furious and entertaining pace. This one’s a keeper.

RubyMine 2.0 Beta

I’m a long-time IntelliJ IDEA user, and sorely miss it when using other languages and environments that don’t have such a nice, sophisticated tool. When programming in Ruby, I tend to use TextMate (with the Ruby bundle) and the command line. They work fine, of course, but I always miss IDEA.

JetBrains have been working on a Ruby IDE called RubyMine, but the 1.0 version didn’t seem too solid when I tried it out. They just announced the 2.0 beta version, and I’ve played with it a few minutes and immediately bought it (at a 20% discount during the beta period, BTW). It’s so nice to have a solid set of tools for Ruby, and all the keystrokes and shortcuts that I’m used to from programming Java.

Like I said, a few minutes was enough to pry the money from my pocket, but it’ll take a few hours to see if it lands a permanent place on my dock.

Notes on Tools for Blogging

Since kicking off this blog reboot, I’ve been looking for ways to streamline the act of writing for the it. To that end, I’ve tried a few different tools and techniques, and not quite landed on anything I love. If anyone who reads this has some suggestions, I’d love to hear about them.

The Effect of Technology on Writing

I read two interesting articles today on the effect technology is having on writing skills, and I thought I’d pass them along.

Whither Handwriting?

First, schools are apparently teaching cursive handwriting later than they used to, and placing less emphasis on it than they did when I was a kid.

I would be OK with dropping penmanship as a required school-taught skill, insofar as that means writing in cursive. I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I moved to high school and my teachers stopped requiring it. I write in all capital letters, and have done so for such a long time that I’m super slow when writing in cursive. I fall into the pattern that the article seems to describe: short of note-taking, all of my writing is done via an electronic input method such as keyboard or touch screen.

Note that I’m not advocating not teaching kids how to write. The ability to write longhand is critical, but I don’t see that writing in cursive really is. I would be OK with dropping cursive writing altogether, other than perhaps as an artistic endeavor, perhaps replacing it with shorthand. I’ve always thought it would be neat to have learned to write in shorthand for note-taking, but never gone so far as to learn how.

Digital Writing Renaissance

The other article dealt with the skill of writing, suggesting that the current generation use writing as a form of communication far more frequently than past generations have. I write fairly frequently and find that my behavior has mapped to what the author suggests: I typically write to a known audience of more than one person (and in the blogging case, a unknown number of unknown readers). I do use social networking sites, and also write small updates there on a daily basis. I can see how these activities might be looked down upon by some people as degenerate forms of writing, but I would disagree that this is the case.

While many people are pretty careless writers where spelling and grammar are concerned, let’s face the fact that many people who aren’t great writers probably wouldn’t write as often as they do without these low-ceremony outlets. And there’s nothing stopping people who would like to write more correctly in those environments from doing so. As far as I can tell, that’s a win-win situation, and I hope it continues.

Thoughts on GF1 Shipping and GPS

People state-side are starting to take delivery of their GF1s if they ordered them from Panasonic’s online store, which I find pretty amazing, really. Other than Apple, I can’t think of too many electronics companies who actually ship orders to customers directly faster than Amazon can—certainly no camera company I’ve ever dealt with has. This has the effect of Amazon customers chomping at the bit to get their cameras. My pre-order hasn’t even been updated with a shipping date, which doesn’t fill me with confidence that I’ll get mine soon, although I can always hope. In fact, Amazon has a shipping date of tomorrow for the GF1 kit with the zoom lens and no date for the 20mm f/1.7 I ordered, whereas the people who ordered the 20mm are the ones getting theirs now and the zoom lens customers there haven’t heard anything. Weird.

I’ve been spending some time reading the boards about peoples’ impressions with the camera, and they’ve all been really good so far. The low-light capabilities seem good up to 800 and the 1600 results haven’t been half-bad either. The 20mm lens really looks to be stellar for a kit lens, which is refreshing; it’s half the reason I’m attracted to this camera.

Speaking of what attracts me to the GF1, the main draw was its size. That’s still the main “feature” of the camera (in fact, it’s really a little bigger than I’d prefer, but I realize that it’s the best physical size-to-sensor size ratio I’m likely to get in a package that handles well (the Sigma cameras have been dinged in reviews for being fairly slow to work with). I realize that means that other features have to be cut out. But there’s one feature I really wish the GF1 had: GPS.

As I mentioned earlier, my primary interest in this camera is as a take-everywhere camera. And by “everywhere”, I’m including mountain bike riding. That’s why size and handling are important—I need it to not weigh me down and I need to be able to draw it and have it ready to shoot quickly. But since it’ll be used all over the place, and bike rides can cover quite some distance, it would be wonderful to have the camera recording GPS locations for the shots.

That said, I already carry a GPS on my bike and the GF1 doesn’t include GPS, so I’ll probably look into syncing up their clocks and using software to add location info to the EXIF data to the pictures.

The Best Camera…TM?

If you read photography sites, you couldn’t miss Chase Jarvis’ announcment of his The Best Camera trifecta of iPhone app, book and community site. The long and the short of it is that Jarvis has been shooting pics with his iPhone for several months, taking some great shots along the way, making the point that if the iPhone’s camera is the one you’ve got, there’s no excuse to miss a shot. He’s now got his own iPhone app for taking photos and the community site to back the app up. His upcoming book is filled with his own iPhone shots.

Personally, I think all that is great, and Chase’s blog is certainly great reading and plenty inspiring. What I did find kind of offensive is that he’s apparently trademarked (or perhaps just applied for a trademark for) the line “the best camera is the one that’s with you.”

This line has certainly seen a resurgence of use lately (hell, I used it a few posts back), and while that resurgence might be due in part to Chase Jarvis, the line itself has been around awhile—certainly before I’d ever heard of him, anyway. And even if it was something he coined, it just feels wrong when you see it spelled out with the TM right after it. Hopefully the community slaps his hand a bit, he backs off and enjoys the otherwise positive buzz that the apps and his book seem to be otherwise receiving.

Interbike Pics

Charles from Passion Trail Bikes is at Interbike (a bike industry trade show) in Vegas right now, and is riding a ton of new bikes and taking pictures along the way. If that kind of thing interests you (and it makes me sad if it doesn’t), you should follow his Flickr Photostream this week. (The bike in the pic is the new Turner DHR with the DW-Link rear suspension. Sweet.)

Pacifica Ride

Pacifica is a beautiful place on the California coast just south of San Francisco. It has a reputation in the Bay Area as always being foggy, but that’s really not the case, at least not all of it. It certainly wasn’t this past Sunday, when most of the Bay Area was pretty hot and a group of us decided to get an early-for-us start on a ride there.

Some of the mountain biking Pacifica is best known for is a steep rocky area with several trails on it: Boy Scout, Mile and Crack. We planned on hitting some of the steep descents, so most of us broke out the heavy gear such as full-face helmets and armor, normally not used by us in the Bay Area.

Getting to the top requires some fairly serious hike-a-bike. One used to have to climb all the way up along the same route that one descends, which I’m sure you can imagine isn’t optimal, with other bikers flying down at near terminal velocity in sections. The locals have built a new set of switchbacks parallel to the descending line which, while it doesn’t keep you completely off the descent, is far better than it used to be. The new trail is really soft and narrow, with lots of freshly cut poison oak encroaching on it, so I’m hoping it gets some use to bed it in and push the vegetation back a bit.

It got pretty hot by the time we reached the top, and I wasn’t feeling too well. “Crack”, the fall line trail that we descended first, is a steep, rocky and sometimes loose affair. One of its challenges is that there’s no warm-up to get accustomed to that type of riding—it just starts at 100% and keeps on going. Those things combined to keep me pretty conservative the first half of the way, which isn’t how this kind of ride should go. I think the next time I go, I’ll plan to stop and session some of the features on Crack and get some extra practice in on this terrain.

Below Crack is Boy Scout, which has a lot of built-up jumps. I don’t really jump much, and although some of our crew have been practicing, a lot of the stuff on Boy Scout is still beyond their skill set. We did play around on the jumps for quite some time, and some local kids were there showing us fogeys how to do it.

The bottom of Boy Scout is a lot of fun. There are some steep drops, railing berms and some g-outs and jumps that are within our skills, and just a ripping good time. Unfortunately, the altitude gained at the start passes by all too quickly on the way down, and I think a lot of the group felt like it wasn’t a lot of return for the effort put it, especially on such a hot day. It was still fun, and I really think sessioning it would be fun.

Here is a link to the pictures, and here is a link to the GPS details.