Plaidophile

For a long time I've been aware that I have trouble recognizing faces that I'm not familiar with. Usually I'm at least okay at faking it (like, if I don't recognize someone right away I pretend to know them until their identity comes to me), but today after lunch, a person who I met in Japan a year ago and had lunch with just once came to me and asked if I remembered who he was — and got a bit offended that I didn't immediately recognize him until he prompted me a bit (and after that he seemed to think that because I didn't recognize his face I wouldn't remember the lunch, which I did quite well).

Anyway, this led me to find an online test (made by actual real prosopagnosia researchers so it's not like a Myspace WHAT COLOR IS YOUR INNER FURRY thing or whatever), which I scored 67% on (65% is their threshold for "you are almost certainly faceblind"), and there's probably enough of a margin of error that I am comfortable saying that this shows I'm probably faceblind. Hooray.

So I just got this email from Netflix:

You are receiving this email because you added unlimited Blu-ray access to your account for $1 a month. The number of Blu-ray titles has increased significantly and will continue to do so. As we buy more, you are able to choose from a rapidly expanding selection of Blu-ray titles. And as you've probably heard, Blu-ray discs are substantially more expensive than standard definition DVDs.

As a result, the monthly charge for Blu-ray access is increasing for most plans and will now vary by plan. The charge for monthly Blu-ray access on your 1 DVD at-a-time (Unlimited) plan will increase from $1 a month to $2 a month. The price of your 1 DVD at-a-time (Unlimited) plan is not changing and remains at $8.99 a month.

The new charge for Blu-ray access will be automatically added to your next billing statement on or after April 27, 2009 and will be referenced in your Membership Terms and Details.

If you wish to continue unlimited Blu-ray access for $2 a month, you don't need to do anything. If not, you can remove Blu-ray access anytime by visiting Your Account.

If you have questions about this change or need any assistance, please call us anytime at 1-888-923-0898.

-The Netflix Team

Considering that I haven't even gotten any Blu-Ray disks since the first price increase (and in fact I've only gotten like two DVDs, what with me mostly watching movies via streaming) I guess it's time to remove Blu-Ray access. Hopefully enough people will do this that they lower the price again.

I like having the option for Blu-Ray but I really don't see how me having that option is costing them even the slightest bit more.

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Aspect	Bicycle	BART
Distance under own volition	3 miles	1.5 miles
Average total time taken	30 minutes	30 minutes
Total active activity	30 minutes	15 minutes
Active-time side activities	Dodging cars and other bicycles	Listen to music, take interesting pictures
Passive-time side activities	N/A	Read, people-watch, post to twitter, check email
Cost per day	Seemingly unbounded	A bit under $3

I'll keep my bike around but I think I'll stick to a BART commute for the foreseeable future.

So, since I take BART home every day now, I end up walking past quite a few Mexican grocers, who all have a bunch of fine, low-cost produce bins on the sidewalk. I never really paid them any mind because the Mexican grocer across the street from me (Azteca produce) is generally pretty crap, but lately I've been looking at them rather a lot and noticing how good most of their produce looks, and of course the prices are pretty phenomenal.

For the past few days I've just been picking up a few items at different ones on the way home, and it's actually really good stuff, and incredibly cheap compared to what I'm used to. Today I got a whole bunch of onions and jalapeños and dried black beans for $2.50, and yesterday at a different stand I got some very nice tomatoes and tomatillos and corn and a big bag of garlic bulbs and a jar of capers and a few other things for about $6. And it's good quality stuff!

From a spam email (all the spam parts removed). All below the cut.

Yet another hand-wavey "cloud" video game console, like the Phantom except this one doesn't even have any game processing in the console itself — supposedly it'll somehow have all the games playing on a remote server farm and have the video streamed in realtime to the console. Call me skeptical.

Also, money quote, from "Sid:"

Can you imagine living in a futuristic society where men don't need PS3s and Xboxes to play insanely gorgeous games? Someone pinch me, I feel like I'm living in a George Orwell book.

I don't think Sid has actually read any George Orwell.

I dreamed that for some reason I bought an apartment in an old Victorian building with a cake shop. The cake shop owner would constantly take liberties with my personal space and stuff, such as coming into my apartment and disconnecting my laptop so she could hook hers up to my monitor. She thought this was okay because she was working on an elaborate tangerine cake for me.

The previous owners had decided to partially renovate the bathrooms, and put up ugly paper-backed photo-laminate paneling, which had to go. Dr. Beverly Crusher beamed down from the Enterprise to help me assess the situation.

Also I think the cake shop owner turned out to be Dr. Crusher's mom or something.

Woo!

So, of course people are a bit atwitter with the news of the new iPod Shuffle. Personally I'm surprised it took them this long to add VoiceOver to the Shuffle. The actual device's form factor is too small; I have a hard enough time keeping track of my many 4GB USB thumb drives which are much larger than it. And it doesn't seem like it was actually necessary for them to remove the controls from the device itself, considering how small the buttons are on the inline headphone controller thing. I expect to see third-party "sleeves" for it soon which bulk up the device and add playback controls back to the device itself (via the headphone jack).

Meanwhile, the main odd thing about VoiceOver appears to have all the text pre-rendered by the sync PC; on the overview video, they mention that the voice is different for Macs and PCs. Considering the old 68K Macs had a speech synthesizer in a tiny amount of space and CPU, it's a bit surprising that they'd add time to the sync process instead of just putting the speech synthesizer on the player itself (not to mention all the storage space that likely wastes). Very odd.

The less-odd but still pretty odd thing is that they're making a big deal about how it's "the first mp3 player that talks to you" even though the current iPod Nano and Classic already did that.

Woo! Now I just have to ship 5 off to CDBaby and then they can finally be available for sale!

If anyone who knows me in person wants to buy one right away, I guess $10 is a good amount. (On CDBaby they'll be like $12 or something but then they take a $4 cut.) Let me know in advance if we're going to be in the same spot and you want a copy.

So, the three remaining pre-Seattle fillings (one from grad school and two old silver ones from when I was a kid) needed to be replaced. Today I went in to get the first two (on the right side of my mouth) done. My dentist has everything in his office set up to try to prevent at least a veneer of relaxation, and one of those things is a continuous slideshow of vacation photos on a swing-arm-mounted monitor.

So, of course, while I was waiting for the numbing agent to kick in, I had "Be A Dentist" from Little Shop of Horrors stuck in my head. And then a little bit later, a photo came up of some weird plant which looked rather a lot like Audrey II.

So, a week ago my bike got a flat in the front. I couldn't find anything embedded in the tire, so I decided to replace the tube. Performance was out of Schraeder-valve tubes in my bike's size so I went ahead and replaced the rear one too so I'd have both Presta (which I like better than Schraeder anyway). And then the front went flat again with the same slow leak.

So yesterday I took it to Performance, and the tech found the shard of glass in the tire that was causing the flat, and he removed it, replaced the tube, and charged $15. And then I got the same goddamn flat.

Whoa, Amazon just released a Kindle app for iPhone. Amazingly enough you can read Topaz books on it. And they look just fine. I don't see why the hell everyone on the Internet feels compelled to say they look like crap. Screw you, Internet.

The UI on the app is a bit weird though. And there's no way to rotate the screen or zoom in on images. I know Topaz supports image zooming!

So, the world of independent music distribution has gotten pretty interesting. Right now the key players seem to be CDBaby (fulfillment and digital distribution), TuneCore (digital distribution and manufacturing), and Disc Makers (manufacturing and digital distribution). They each have their strengths and weaknesses in each arena.