All The President's Men

I'd been planning to read Woodward and Bernstein's All The President's Men for a long time but the recent talk about Mark Felt I finally bought the book. I was surprised how enthralling it was, I couldn't put the book down, I couldn't believe that this wasn't fiction, Nixon and his people were worse people than I had previously thought. That was shocking to me. I had grown up knowing that Nixon was a bad person but I think all of the talk right after his death might have seem like not that bad of a person afterall, he was a bad person, but not that bad. Nope, I was wrong. He was really bad.

Immediately after finishing the book I went to the bookstore to buy the sequel, The Final Days. While at the bookstore I saw Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command about Bush and I really really wanted to get it, but I couldn't. I have a problem reading about Bush and his people. I get really really pissed off and I grind my teeth and I usually can't even go to sleep afterwords. Even a 3 page Salon article will do this to me. So there's no way that I can read a whole book about Bush. I think it's just that I'm too involved with it. Watergate happened before I was born so maybe that makes it easier to deal with.

But I'm very interested in seeing what's written after Bush's presidency is up. I have a suspicion that he was worse than Nixon, possibly much worse. But I also think that these people have learned a lot from Watergate and it's gonna be hard to get information. I think maybe some of it will come out a decade after his last days as president but there will probably be stuff that doesn't come out for another 40 or 50 years.

PSP 2.0

A couple of days ago the v2.0 of the PSP firmware was finally released. I'd been waiting, in pure geek style, for quite a while. This was the version that was to include the web browser. Yes, I know I'm a geek. The installation was painless, I just went over to the PSP menu item to upgrading the firmware, pushed the equivilent of the enter button and it installed itself. A few minutes later I was surfing the web wirelessly through a WiFi WEP connection with my portable gaming console. Pretty frickin cool. I was surprised how well sites looked on the small screen. I quickly found the versions of website created specifically for portable devices' small screens. I found Google, Bloglines, Mapquest (where the hell is Google Maps?), flight info. I was very surprised that Gmail's AJAX interface worked perfectly with that small browser. I also found PdaMobileWeb to be a pretty good source for these type of sites.

Now, I usually get really excited about something like this and then never talk about it again. That's usually because what I thought would be so useful just isn't really needed. I thought having a laptop would be really cool, especially a unix laptop. "Wow, I have emacs and perl and everything else. If I'm stranded on the side of a road I could whip up a perl script." Yeah, I know that's a little absurd. I wonder if this is going to be one of those things. I'm usually bored out of my mind in airports. And I hate carrying around laptops because they along with all of their supporting crap weigh too much and take up too much space. But since I've had my PSP I've taken it on every trip and it's always been easy to access. I wonder if I'm going to start using it to read bloglines when I'm bored.

How much is enough

I was having lunch with Pat the other day and we were debating whether or not it was worth the effort to delete stuff and he brought of an excellent point about how much space do you need to record the audio that a person listens to for an entire lifetime. Hmmm... That sounds like it would be a lot of space. Well, my music collection is 14.8 days of music (according to iTunes) and it takes up 25.36 GB. That's 1.7 GB per day. The average lifespan of an American is 75 years, which is 27375 days, so it would take 46.5 TB to store an entire lifetime's worth of high quality audio. That may seem like a lot right now but that's 75 years worth of Moore's law. Let's say that you by only 18 months worth of storage at a time. Right now 18 months worth of audio (930 GB) will cost you about $400. The next 18 months will cost you $200, the 18 months after that will cost you $100. You'll probably not spend more than a thousand dollars to store your life's audio if you started right now.

Point and Shoot

I just read an interesting article about a photojournalist who uses a digital P&S instead of a fancy Digital SLR. That makes sense. The newer digital P&S's can sometimes be almost as good as Digital SLR's for most types of photography so there's no reason to speed $10,000 on a Canon 1D if a $500 P&S will do the job. Also, big professional cameras can sometimes get in the way. If people see a P&S you might just be a tourist, no big deal.