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December 28, 2005
First Channukah!
As you can see above, Sam thoroughly enjoyed his first Channukah. He was very excited about the paper, and even more so by the cute Gund doggie inside who his promptly began to spontaneously hug. More pics of the Sagan and Handelman's from Sarasota here.
technorati tags: sam, channukah
Posted by jetrotz at 01:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 22, 2005
Nothing big, just cute pics of Sam
Just felt the need to post some photos of our cute little guy. He's having a ball with the push-cart thingy our friend Jan gave him.
technorati tags: sam, baby, walking
Posted by jetrotz at 07:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 21, 2005
The Horror
In a stunning blow to Red Sox Nation, the evil empire scooped up Johnny D. last night. 
Say it ain't so, somebody? The Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy sums it up this way:
So now your Boston Red Sox have no center fielder, no shortstop, and no first baseman to go along with no Theo Epstein and no clue. It's fair to say this is becoming a winter of discontent in Red Sox Nation.
Ah, there is trouble in Beantown, and no savoir in sight. How could the front office have let Johnny Damon go? I can only hope the Braves pickup of BoSox refugee Edgar Renteria gives my other fave team some help in 2006 with Furcal heading to the Dodgers.
technorati tags: red sox, yankees, baseball, boston, braves, furcal, damon
Posted by jetrotz at 03:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 20, 2005
360 Time
To complement our spiffy new HDTV, I managed to find an Xbox360 on eBay for not-too-high a premium. The Fedex guy came a day earlier than the tracking said it would (who knew that was even possible), and I was like a kid on the first night of Hannukkah as the delivery dude came up the front steps. In a word, the image this thing produces on the SXRD is stunning. I had picked up Project Gotham Racing, Madden 2006 and Kameo - and every one of them is just mind bogglingly beautiful. PGR is especially slick - driving the streets of NYC and seeing the skyline come hurtling toward you, driving past the casinos of Las Vegas by your headlights - all the while seeing true-to-life reflections and dirt on your windscreen. I've also partially hooked this up to our Dell PC running Media Center Edition 2005. I did have to update it to this year's patch, but once I did, the two machines saw each other easily. Now I can get photos, video and music from my desktop on the Sony in the living room. Spiffy! Embedded here in this post is my XboxLive 'GamerCard' that shows my current reputation, score and 'zone', whatever that is. It will also show any games I've gone online with.
technorati tags: xbox360, hdtv, mce, gaming
Posted by jetrotz at 02:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Digital Edge Awards
The Newspaper Association of America's New Media Federation (one of the top two online
journalism ogranizations focused on the newspaper business) has announced their 2006 awards nominees - and two of my old companies - The Savannah Morning News and The Augusta Chronicle received the ol' hat tip in the Best Overall News Site (50k-99k circulation).
Also receiving kudos for innovative storytelling in the 50k-100k category is a multimedia project photographed by Josh Meltzer for the Roanoke News, where Josh and my good friend Natalee Waters are photojournalists. Augusta also gets a nomination for their 'Spotted' site - a slick take on user-generated photo-blogging their parent company, Morris Communications, has syndicated to several of their newspapers.
Also nominated is the Chronicle's Masters web site. I launched this back in 1996 in a joint effort with Sports Illustrated magazine. In 1997, we took the "Digital Edge Award", recognizing the most innovative web site in the newspaper industry, besting papers of all sizes including the New York Times which took the number two spot that year. Morris has a great history of breaking new boundaries in the online news business, and it looks like this continues today. Great to see my old cohorts keeping up the good work!
technorati tags: savannah, augusta, newspaper, morris communication, naa, digital edge awards
Posted by jetrotz at 01:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 17, 2005
Happy Happy Joy Joy
I'm happy to announce that the Trotz household has finally entered the HDTV-age. Since I've been working for a broadcast company heavily involved in HD technologies for the last several years, I've been eager to experience this at home. After much research, agonizing, and negotiations with my lovely wife, we purchased a Sony KDS-R50XBR1 Grand Wega SXRD rear projection television last weekend. We talked about buying the 60" version - Best Buy was selling both the 50 and 60 for the same price - but Amy knew that the 60" would be waaaay to big for our living room.
I finally cancelled my DirecTV service last week - the constant outages and costs to upgrade to support HD (a new dish for $300, a new HD-DVR for $500-1000, new boxes for my other two rooms ($250+)). So we've been enjoying free over-the-air HD. It's kinda sick that there is such a beautiful TV signal just floating in the air for anyone to pickup. I'm looking forward to today's visit from the Comcast guy however - they should be bringing Motorola's latest and greatest - the 6412 dual-tuner DVR. That baby has all sorts of features I'm eager to check out, including the ability to output recorded HD content over it's Firewire ports to a Mac.I can finally get back to seeing how our own networks look, especially the Law and Order HD channel. Oops, I mean TNT!
technorati tags: sxrd, lcos, sony, hdtv
Some useful links about the new setup:
- Sound & Vision Magazine's review that convinced me this was probably the set to buy
- Product page on Sonystyle.com
- Samsung's 50" 1080p, the HL-R5078W
Anyway, for those among you interested in the sordid geeky details of why I choose this one - it uses 'SXRD' (Silicon X-tal Reflective Display - a new display technology developed by Sony as a variant of the better-known LCOS or Liquid Crystal on Silicon. This spiffy set uses three separate panels (one each for red, blue and green) and projects these onto the screen for a 1920x1080p HDTV image. I considered the 1080p series from both Samsung and HP, but several reviews sold me on the Sony based on the better controls and details offered by their SXRD format. There's also the missing 'color wheel' used in traditional DLP - there, instead of having three panels there's a single one with an RGB color wheel spinning in front. I've heard various reports of costly repairs to replace those. And while I never saw them in the store, some users do report a 'rainbow' effect on some high-key source material (think white-on-white scenes with pans and zooms).
This set is the 3rd generation of Sony SXRD technology, and the first in the price range of mere mortals (compared to the Qualia 70" at over $10k or their first version at $27k a few years back).
The .61" panel in this set is the worlds smallest, and combined with some signal processing produces a contrast ratio of 10,000:1, and a response time of less than 5ms - good enough for the highest action video sources. At this size, and via what Sony claims is an exclusive manufacturing process (until they license it I guess), the narrow spacing they provide between pixels in the panels elminates the well-known DLP 'screen-door' effect.
Posted by jetrotz at 08:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sammy Update
The little guy just continues to amaze. As of last week, we've officially entered the world of Cheerios and other solid foods, and boy is he enjoying them! It's been great to watch as he can amuse himself for 30 minutes at a time eating them one-by-one, and he's also been getting into bits of chicken, bannana - whatever we put in front of him, really. Sam and I are spending lots of time bonding this month since Amy is playing umpteen Nutcrackers at the Fox Theater, so this has been great fun. New pictures coming soon.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 06, 2005
Don't 'diss a blogger
Thomas Hawk documents his experience with a Brooklyn discount photo store (PriceRitePhoto.com) as he tried to purchase a new Canon EOS 5D. Like all the lore suggests, the price was just too good to be true, and the retailer threatened Mr. Hawk after learning that he was going to blog his experience after the seller refused to fulfill the deal unless he purchased all sorts of high-markup accessories. Long story short - Yahoo! Shopping delisted the company, Digg.com users nearly took the company's server down, and they ended up being pulled from most of the major comparison shopping sites following the brouhaha. I've experienced this on occasion before myself, though not quite to this degree. Seller beware!
technorati tags: eos d5, canon, priceritephoto, thomas hawk, photography
Posted by jetrotz at 02:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sweeet
PC Magazine has just published a review of CNN Pipeline - the closing sentence has a really nice ring to it:
CNN Pipeline isn't perfect, but it's certainly the most impressive video offering the Web has ever seen.
technorati tags: cnn, pipeline, broadband, paidcontent, pcmagazine
Posted by jetrotz at 02:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Pipeline Comments and Content
Two quick links for the morning re: the CNN Pipeline launch on Monday.
- Digg.com coverage of Pipeline's launch. The comments are a great read.
- A liveblogging of Pipeline's first day of programming.
Most of the discussion is dismissive of this as a pay product. Others try to balance the trolling with reasonable questions about the acceptance of users if the conent was interspersed with ads. A good discussion overall. I especially like the comments from Digg users pointing out that there is really no other source for day-in, day-out live streamed news on the web other than Pipeline. A few requests for BBC Pipeline, Digg.com Pipeline, and ESPN Pipeline. One user predicts CNNSi Pipeline for $5/month by the end of next year. Nice idea, but they'd have to resurrect my old network to do that ;-). Here's a great comment from blueice03:
I beta-tested this and I was overwhelmingly impressed. Why? Because few other outlets, sites, news organizations or what have you, have done what CNN is attempting to do with this. All these comments about how absurd it is to pay for a service like this are, not to be a troll, the types of comments I'd expect from the slashdot crowd. I guess I don't get it. Why is there this expectation that services offered over the internet should be cheap or free? If you want a premium service then you should expect to have to pay for that premium service and this, my friends, is a premium service. Hell, it is even cheap. It is just a little over $2 a month. And whoever complained earlier about having to download CNN's own special player, you don't have to. They do have a web version that is download free. It is a great looking service and the kind of offering I have always expected news outlets to have but don't.technorati tags: pipeline, cnn, broadband, digg
Posted by jetrotz at 12:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 05, 2005
Aperture Anxiety
In an exhaustive review on ars.technica, serious concerns are raised about the RAW import/translation capabilities of the new monster app from Apple. While they rave about the UI and organization tools in Aperture, they point out that the output from the program includes far more noise than any professional would tolerate in the images. Basically, the program is getting hammered in reviews. Studio2f.com points to one commenter on Slashdot who said it like this: 'Photoshop is the darkroom. Aperture is the light table. If you don't understand this, you're not in the target market.' While that sounds dead-on right, I'd have to say that crappy RAW handling is something that any pro-level workflow tool simply cannot have.
From the red channel framegrabs in the Ars review, I suspect that Aperture is using a JPEG as a transitional format for display purposes despite the fact that the source is a RAW file. iPhoto has always done this - claimed 'RAW' support but actually converted all the files to JPEG. Ars sums up the problem thusly:
The problems continue for basic features like Unsharp Mask combining with this type of post-import noise to produce lots more artifacts for basic editing tasks. Also missing are a true 'curves' tool - only a 4-step levels tool exists. And a pixel sampler is also absent, something most pros want to see in their basic workflow. To me, this app would need to provide the basic tools I need to import, ouptut galleries, prints, etc plus organize, do basic color and exposure correction, plus minimal unsharp mask tools. If, however, the RAW issue is pervasive and real, Apple may have jumped the gun on releasing this latest application. To sum it up, Ars closes as follows:
Ouch! Even with all these problems, if Aperture helps deal more fluidly with the 22k+ images in my iPhoto library, it will be a godsend.
technorati tags: apple, mac, photography, RAW, aperture
Posted by jetrotz at 07:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Pipeline has Opened
After several rounds of beta testing and a few leaks in the wild, CNN's new Pipeline product has officially launched. Traditional media have covered this a bit (see this AJC.com story, free registration required), and the blogs have had a lot to say - almost all of it quite positive.
- MediaBistro covers the softlaunch on Sunday
- HDBeat gets all excited about the HD back-end to the new app
- Paidcontent.org mistakenly thinks the main feed is going out in HD, but has good commentary overall
- What's Happening at CNN also chimes in on the Sunday launch
- Tadspot.com talks about Web 2.0 features he'd like to see in the product
technorati tags: cnn, pipeline, broadband, paidcontent, hd
Posted by jetrotz at 04:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Lava Lamp
One of our favorite adventures on our honeymoon to Hawaii was our stay in Volcano Villiage at the Bamboo Lodge and the nightime hike out to the Kilauea lava flow. Last week, some 40+ acres of land fell away into the sea, exposing a rare sight - a lava waterfall. 
Some six feet in diameter and plumeting 45 feet to the ocean below, the waterfall appeared after the shelf collapsed over the course of 4.5 hours last week. On our visit in September 2003, there were a handful of active vents, enought to see the lava glowing as the sun set, and to realize how thick the stuff actually can be - much more like oozing rock-like mollases than streaming water like I had always perceived it from photos and video. Anyway, it's quite a sight to see - I highly recommend a visit to Kiluaea if you ever are on the Big Island.
Photos from USGS.gov web site.
Technorati Tags: volcano, lava, kilauea, big island, honeymoon
Posted by jetrotz at 03:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 01, 2005
Sam revisits NYC
After Thanksgiving, I had work meetings Monday through Wednesday
in New York, so Amy and Sam joined me in the city. Here's a gallery of pics from that visit. Early plans to avoid Logan Airport on the Sunday after the holiday led us to book on the Amtrak Acela until a last-minute check on Saturday night revealed that the train provided no baggage check and limits riders to two bags per person. Not so helpful when traveling with baby Sammy. Booking the Delta Shuttle was quick, painless and no more expensive, and the afternoon at the airports was amazingly easy. The NY visit featured a walk through Times Square and past the Saks Fifth Avenue holiday windows, a date night for Amy and I at Carnegie Hall and Greek restaurant Molyvos, and a family dinner with the Golus/Trotz/Celedonia clans. The concert was wonderful - featuring the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by James Levine (who I spotted on our Delta Shuttle flight btw) playing one of Amy's faves, Mahler's 4th. The concert also featured Peter Lieberson's 'Neruda Songs,' a haunting set of movements set to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's love sonnets. And the vocalist was Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the composer's wife, 'natch. The New York Tims reviewed the concert's premiere the previous week in Boston. We sat with Amy's teacher Julie Landsman, principal horn of the Metropolitan Opera (also conducted by Levine). She's a peach of a person, and it was great to finally meet her.
technorati tags: sam, baby, new york city, carnegie hall, travel, symphony, music
Posted by jetrotz at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sam Update
I'm late in posting several important Sam updates. First of all, he had his second haircut the week before Thanksgiving. This time, we went much shorter, and boy does he look cute. His hair had been growing like wildfire, so we figured we'd avoid monthly haircuts by being a bit more aggressive this time around. In other news, we have TEETH! We suspect that this has been the cause of Sam's recent nighttime fussiness, but he seems to be on the rebound. He now has two of his lower front teeth poking out, and continues to love to chew on anything he can get his mouth on. ON a related note, Julie convinced us to let him try a Cheerio while we were in Boston for Thanksgiving, which he sort of choked down. We tried the following day again, this time with the little cereal bits softened with a bit of formula. That went much better for Sam and his parents. And in a final bit of news, Sam actually slept through the night on 11/29 while we were in NYC. We'd had a very long day with him the night before (dinner with the Golus/Celadonia clan at Serafina) and put him down around 10pm. When we woke up in the morning we realized he'd slept all night Hoorah!
technorati tags: sam, baby, baby, teething, cheerio
Posted by jetrotz at 04:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Thanksgiving in Boston
'Twas a lovely six days spent in Swampscott, Littleton and Boston with the my brother, Amy's sister, and the extended Trotz-Handelman-Sagan clans. Sam had a heck of a great time with all his cousins and was even happier than usual. This gallery includes photos of Mason's Thanksgiving pageant, turkey preparations and carving, an NHL game at the 'new' Boston Garden, Faneuil Hall, and lots of family photos (starring Sammy, of course!). Enjoy.
technorati tags: thanksgiving, sam, baby, boston
Posted by jetrotz at 04:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack