Pecha Kucha is coming to Phoenix!  What's Pecha Kucha, you ask? 

Pecha Kucha Night (pronounced pee-chack-shaw is Japanese for the sound of conversation or chatter) [was] devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham... in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.

 

But as we all know, give a mike to a designer (especially an architect) and you’ll be trapped for hours. The key to Pecha Kucha Night is its patented system for avoiding this fate. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds... giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

 

(From Pecha-Kucha.org)

The basic idea is that it is a night of presentations by local artists of all flavors.  Think musicians, sculptors, architects, knitters, poets, etc., who are given exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds to talk about their passion.  It's a great way for artists to meet artists and to be introduced to local philanthropists and art lovers alike.

 

As of this writing, 119 cities across the world are running Pecha Kucha events, and Phoenix, AZ is finally getting it's own chapter.  If all goes well, the first event should be within the first half of the year.  Stay tuned.

More reading:

• Pecha Kucha in Wired magazine (and example 20x20 format)
• http://www.pecha-kucha.org
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_Kucha
• http://www.pecha-kucha.org/cities/phoenix

I had a love/hate relationship with physics.  In college, my classes were too big (for me) but the theories were so intriguing that the classes kept me coming back for more.  Of particular interest were my Statics (not to be confused with Statistics) and Dynamics classes.

If I had these games tools available to me when I was in school, some of the subject matter may have been slightly easier to grasp.

Phun

Crayon Physics

Yesterday, Gizmodo found pictures from the dbstalk forum of an on-the-horizon product from DirecTV called the HDPC-20.  Non geeks will look at this and say, "meh."  I look at it and say, "WOOOOWWWWIEE!"

The scans (front, back) from the brochure offer the following points of interest:

• "Use your computer as a DVR"
• "Enhanced user experience from PC power and Internet connection"
• Can stream all your media to multiple devices in the house (via Windows Media Center Extenders) such as other TVs and your Xbox 360

I've been warning (threatening?) my wife that I'm looking to geek up our TV watching experience by adding a PC and/or Mac to our mix.  The biggest reason for not jumping in with both feet is that I want the experience to be seamless.  I don't want my wife, or the babysitter to have to remember to change the tuner to "Video 2", then change the TV to the PC input - which isn't called PC, but rather "DVI 2" then... well, you get my point.  I want to say, "to watch TV, go to the easy-to-navigate menu and hit 'Live TV' and to see the last 5 episodes of Good Eats, go to 'Saved TV.'"

Even with the best of setups, current technology demands that you own a TiVo, a PC, and a DVD (read HD-DVD or Blu-Ray).  This setup fails at the Wife Acceptance Factor.

The HDPC-20 however, opens the door to a combined product which potentially replaces at least 3 products with one box playing Windows Media Center (yes, everyone on a Mac who wants to run OSX/Leopard just rolled their eyes; sorry, but it sucks to only have 8% of the market share sometimes) and getting all of the benefits of having an integrated experience, but not only integrated with TV and movies, but with music, pictures and the internet.  Check.  Mate.

The only downer is that the scans don't call out this product for being HD.  That likely means that it's not... which is significant.  (Another tell is that this product does not have a third coax for off-the-air HD broadcasting, which both DirecTV HD receivers have.)  Obviously, their R&D department is out of sync with their marketing department.  There is no way this product is taking off without HD, because 100% of the early adopters of this product are turbo geeks who have a big plasma or LCD in their house which is currently running HD.

[Programming note: I'm going to try to keep my music posts to Monday mornings.  That is all.]

For months, there's been a low buzz in the internet about when The Beatles and Radiohead are going to break down and sign a deal with Apple to provide their music on iTunes.  Radiohead last night told Apple (and the rest of the industry that treats musicians as slaves) where they can stick their 1s and 0s.

Last night, Radiohead announced they will not only be selling their next album, In Rainbows, on their own site, but they'll allow the purchaser to name the price, from $0.00 to $1,000,000 (or whatever your credit card max is).  From their site,

Radiohead have made a record.  So far, it is only available from this website.

The release will come in two flavors: digital download, and in a "diskbox" which will contain

the new album, In Rainbows, on CD and on 2 x 12 inch heavyweight vinyl records.  A second, enhanced CD contains more new songs, along with digital photographs and artwork.

The latter diskbox will cost 40EUR, or roughly $57USD.

You can get more information about the purchase by wandering through Radiohead's website, or by going directly to the order page for In Rainbows. 

I think there are a couple of very interesting things to note here.  The first is that witness to a significant paradigm shift in the world of music distribution.  This isn't the first band to distribute directly, nor will they be the last.  But they are arguably the biggest band to do it.  Beck has been toying with direct-to-consumer material for over a year, and Barenaked Ladies released Barenaked Ladies Are Me tracks before their album was complete.  With BNL, Avril Lavigne, Dido, Jars of Clay, and Sarah McLachlan have moved their management to the non-traditional Nettwerk Music Group, who is foregoing the traditional methods of band conscription by (among other things) offering alternative methods of distribution.

The second, more geeky, and real deal maker/breaker, is whether Radiohead's site will be able to manage the traffic gracefully.  Their site is very cool, but at the sake of being lightweight.  The main store page for example is nothing but imagery which makes the page about 100x bigger than it would otherwise be if it were the textual analog.  The rub is this: if they can't manage the traffic that will be hitting them on 10/10/2007, the band's goodwill might be shot.  What's the over/under on Radiohead.com and the download site denying connections by the time NYC wakes up?

CH Products has strangely been the lone producer of a yoke system, the most familiar interface to flight simulators for real pilots.  I've never been a fan of the cheap feel that their plastic products give off, and the layout of some of their sliders and switches have been less than convenient or realistic.

One of the oddest parts of the CH yoke is where their throttle/control stack is; right over the yoke itself.  So, say you've got your realism set fairly high, you're fighting a crosswind during a landing and you decide to go around.  You would have to reach over your yoke and shove that little tiny switch forward.  That's just not comfortable, and at best, it's just strange.

I just read that Saitek has added their own yoke to the market, and it seems to be a superior product than CH's.  Although CH does offer a separate throttle/control stack similar to Saitek's, it costs more.  So out of the box, it appears Saitek is offering more value for the sheer volume of products.

Although the casing is still molded plastic, the control shaft is metal (presumably aluminum) so if you're more into fighter games, you won't twist or snap the shaft off.  Saitek also has a USB hub in the yoke, so there's not a tangle of chords you have to plug/unplug to your main box (especially if you also use their rudder system, which also consumes a USB port).

I'm disappointed that they haven't released this product with a good force feedback, as that feedback is a much more realistic way to diagnose a stall or feel winds aloft.  Given that they've decided to add a timer to the center of the yoke, it appears Saitek wanted to add some realism to the product, but apparently not too much.  Certainly, if they offered feedback, they wouldn't be able to offer it at such a reasonable price, but a guy can dream, can't he?

GameAlmighty.com has some great close-up photos of the product in their review.

What's been in development longer than the iPhone, and will outsell said Jesus phone in a week?

SPORE, an upcoming game from EA and famed game designer Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims), that's what. The game was finally let out of it's cage at the Leipzig Gaming Conference, and was just reviewed by 1UP.

It sounds just as fantastic now as it did when I first heard about it.  Maybe I should buy a gaming rig...

Hello everyone, my name is Matt, and I'm a Flight Sim junkie.

<crowd> Hello, Matt </crowd>

Back in 1982, the first PC-based game I played was subLOGIC's Flight Simulator.

I played it on my oldest brother's ultra-compact, ultra-lightweight Compaq Portable IBM-PC clone.  It only weighed 34 pounds and had two -- COUNT THEM -- 2 floppy drives and looked just like this:
Anyway, Flight Simulator has always had a nice warm place in my heart, regardless how piss-poor as it was in 1983.  Consequently, I've been very excited to get my laptop setup and settled for Microsoft's latest refresh of the venerable series, FSX.

I checked out all of the specifications to see if my 2 year old Dell will hold together for it:

• XP/Vista?  Check!
• Processor > 1.0GHz?  Check!
• RAM > 512MB?  Check!
• HDD > 14GB...  uuuuhhh

Ummm... that can't possibly mean what I think it does.  They just want me to have a big HDD.  Right?

Nope. One-four gigabytes avialable on the hard drive.

In the back of my head, Dr. Emmet Brown is yelling "ONE POINT TWENTY ONE JIGAWATS!!?!?"

Holy moly.  I've read some amazing reviews of this piece of software, but I cannot dedicate 90% of my available HDD space to one game.  Visual Studio 2005 Pro, the product I use to actually make a living, doesn't take up more than 2GB of space.

Back on the shelf you go, FSX, I hope to build a special machine just for you.  One that looks like a Delorean.  And has a Flux Capacitor.

*SNIFF*