mike.carlucci

Once you’re lucky, twice you’re good.

stattleship:

Felipe Paulino and the Royals split a four game series with the Yankees earlier this month. In a bit of an odd twist of fate, both teams are currently in fourth place in their respective divisions. Each had hoped for better even at this point in the season.

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Book Look: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

After I read Carry On Mr. Bowditch in third grade I became fascinated by books. For years I was rarely seen without a book in my hand. I was reading enough as a kid that I ran out of children’s books pretty fast and read the adult version of Jurassic Park after the movie came out. One book I never read though was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the first in a series of Oz novels. This is a bit surprising when you know that my favorite movie, after The Empire Strikes Back, is Return to Oz. This 1980’s Disney “sequel” took a completely different look into the Oz universe, focusing more on the world described in the books than the Technicolor sing-along we all know and love. But I finally crossed my goal of reading the first Oz book off my list in a way I never imagined: on my iPhone. With the Classics app, I read an entire book electronically.

My overall impression: genius. L. Frank Baum is a witty, clever writer and the Oz universe is filled with strange, quirky characters that would feel at home in a Joss Whedon TV show. The characters are more varied than in the musical and the world is filled with much more magic and depth. Nevertheless the movie is actually a pretty faithful adaptation once you look past the singing. Like Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Lord of the Rings, many backgrounds and details are faithfully recreated, from Oz as a giant head (though in the book this is only one of his many forms) to our hero’s initial battle with the flying monkeys in the forest.

On the small iPhone screen, the book translated into about 500 pages of material. Classics uses the same kind of page turning system Apple just implemented in iBooks buy where a swipe or tap of your finger will advance the page, but after the first few times the effect becomes very natural – not a distraction like I would have thought. I have not used a Kindle , Nook or other e-reader so I can’t compare the feel of e-ink books to the iPhone, but I never had a problem with eye fatigue despite reading the entire book in a couple large chunks of time.

While the movie version of Oz features a more Harry Potter style of magic (no real need for resources to cast spells) the magic in the Oz book is more tangible. The Wicked Witch of the West has limited resources and in a number of attacks she exhausts her magical creatures before calling upon the flying monkeys, who are quite tragic creatures bound into services by the wearer of a golden cap endowing magic powers.

The behavior of Oz himself is different as well, more con man than wizard or ruler. Oz requires everyone in the Emerald City to wear green goggles at all times to perpetrate the illusion that everything there is green – from cloth to people. Even his words of encouragement and congratulations to our heroes are more jaded and sharply worded than the movie, but are in fact, real advice. As Oz says, he isn’t a bad man, just a bad wizard.

·      To Scarecrow: “You are learning something every day. A baby has brains, but it doesn’t know much. Experience is the only thing that brings you knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.” [I like not capitalizing earth here, literally referring to the Scarecrow being lowered from his pole to the ground]

·      “You have plenty of courage, I am sure,” answered Oz. “All you need is confidence in yourself. There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger. The True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid, and that kind of courage you have in plenty.”

·      “I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If only you knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.”

ThinkGeek Cease & Desist: The Other White Meat

Does your business fear competition from imaginary goods and services? It does? Well, you might have found a friend in the National Pork Board. Either the legal team was bored or someone is looking pretty foolish right now (pointy haired boss perhaps?) but the Pork Bored went ahead and C&D’s ThinkGeek over their Canned Unicorn Meat. We all know their trademark “The other white meat” referring to pork as an alternative to chicken during those beef-fearing days of the last decade or so and apparently the Pork Board was concerned that this newfangled unicorn competitor might start eating away at their branding. Of course, there’s also parody to consider. But they didn’t.

ThinkGeek has had some great April Fool’s over the years and Canned Unicorn Meat is right up there with the best. In 2009, the site offered up a Taunton sleeping bag. You know, the ice planet steed Han Solo cuts open that smells bad “on the outside.” Well, toady they are for sale. 

Maybe the Pork Board feared the success of on April Fool’s product would lead to Canned Unicorn Meat “the new white meat” finding its way to consumers tables?

Microsoft Will Kinect You to Tony Stark

7 AM. The alarm on my phone is playing Eve 6’s Open Road Song. I get out of bed and walk across the room to turn it off. According to the alarm app, I woke up right at the lightest part of sleep this morning. It has a 30-minute window to monitor my movements and wake me up no later than 67:15. It’s usually right on target. The lights have been slowly approaching full brightness over the same time period.

I head into the living room where Kinect recognizes me, turns on the TV and loads my twitter stream, Facebook, and morning blogs. By making Obi-Wan Kenobi’s “move along” gesture with my hand I can slide each app across the screen. Another Apple rumor has broken on Engadget during the night and I tell Kinect to read the post to me while I make breakfast.

While this future isn’t here yet, the possibility of this kind of setup is almost here with Microsoft’s Kinect. Facial recognition on a living room device could go a long way towards creating the sort of “digital home” science fiction has been dreaming up for decades.

In the Iron Man movies, Tony Stark is aided by JARVIS, an artificial intelligence system that can do everything from math calculations to voice recognition to making delicious chlorophyll shakes. Kinect is not artificial intelligence but it doesn’t need to be to serve up webpages, twitter, and Facebook in addition to music and movies. Because Kinect can tell individual humans apart, the AI can be faked through a few simple settings if voice and face recognition are advanced enough. 

Home Sweet Starbucks = Free WiFi

As a well-conceived change, Starbucks will make WiFi freely available at its stores in the U.S. beginning July 1, 2010. This is a good move, even as someone who doesn’t usually spend too long leeching of the free Internet while I drink some coffee or tea. The biggest headache when using WiFi at a hotspot is the login process. Passwords, clickthroughs, etc. make it such a hassle to get connected that once you do you’ve probably finished your drink and are ready to leave anyway. 

Starbucks isn’t about to be outdone though. Coming in the fall they are partnering with Yahoo! to provide free access to newspapers online, some free songs from iTunes and more! 

Starbucks has taken a lot of hits over the years from Dunkin Donuts to McDonald’s about “snobby coffee” and being “pretentious.” Heck, I own a t-shirt that mocks the Starbucks logo with the words FiveBucks Coffee. Adding truly free WiFi is easier for the stores to manage, easier for the customers to use and helps to make Starbucks the friendly, neighborhood handout. Even if you are just running through to pick up a drink this new WiFi access will let you hop on, look up what you need and walk out in record time. A lot of places could learn from this policy.

Twitter Announces Very Large Values of 140

The old joke goes that 2+2=5 for very large values of 2. This week, when Twitter announced their t.co link shorterner they also announced a move to allow “very large values” of 140.

In addition to weeding out malware in links shared on Twitter (which I have to admit leads to some scary places…will they also censor links to bittorrent or The Pirate Bay someday?)  t.co will give bit.ly, is.gd and the other link shorteners a run for their money by providing something those other services don’t: clarity.

What Twitter aims to do is shorten a link shared on twitter to something similar to what we are accustomed to seeing from bit.ly. In their example they shorten a full link to Amazon, in this case http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 to http://t.co/DRo0trj - pretty similar to a bit.ly creation. The magic comes in the translation back into the Twitter stream where the shortened link is view as, per their example, amazon.com/Delivering-. Now anyone seeing this link in their Twitter stream would know that it’s a link to Amazon, a trustworthy site and not a phishing scheme.

Unless another top level domain opens up that is only one letter long Twitter should have the edge among link shortening services with a 3 character domain for t.co. Translating the link into something understandable by a human is a good move as well. Unless I see a shortened link from someone I really trust I look for the long version first before I click the link. A little piece of mind would be nice.

Describing the link as originating, like in the example, from Amazon also frees up room for the sender to add their own message. No need to say “check out this book from Amazon” when you can say “Best business read in a while” with Amazon mentioned directly in the link.

Just for fun, I checked out bit.ly/amazon. Thankfully it goes directly to Amazon, but there was a risk I could end up in the land of popups.