The Professor of Magic is the preeminent technological luminary of the new millenium. As an astute observer of the human condition, connoisseur of fine wine and spirits, raconteur, and master of the mythical yellow ball, his knowledge of the universe is beyond all comprehension. After an hour in the gym today, the endorphin rush inspired him to bestow the following wisdom unto me.

I decided to rescue a bunch of old data off my old Garmin Forerunner 201 tonight. The only problem is that this is now impossible. Even though 1.5 years worth of GPS data is on the watch, it’s quite inaccessible now. Google Earth can only read the last 11 routes from the watch. I tried deleting those routes from the 201 and then syncing the watch with Google Earth on my Macbook Pro via a USB to DB9 converter. Unfortunately, on both operating systems the software errors out with “Loaded %1 Waypoints”.

Next, I gave the newest Garmin Training Center a try. Garmin’s software managed to load all the data off the watch using a serial connection on my Windows XP desktop (the 201 doesn’t work with the Mac OS X-version of Training Center) Unfortunately, the map overlays didn’t load for the 201 routes like they do with the Garmin Forerunner 305 ones. Now, all of my historic Forerunner 201 data is half-usable and silo’d up in the training center software with no hope of exporting it out.

Adding insult to injury, Garmin has deprecated the “Export to XML” feature that existed in their old Training Center software. This effectively locks-out third-party developers because the export data is now only available in proprietary TCX format. It’s unbelievable that Garmin wouldn’t continue to support XML or, at the very least, Google Earth’s KML format. This is even more troubling because Garmin used to enable hackers to do cool stuff with their hardware. By allowing access to the unencrypted GPS data, Garmin enabled quite a bit of tinkering. Programs like USAPhotomaps and several community GPS running sites sprouted up as a result. Back in 2005, I even wrote my own GPS overlay program to map data onto a USGS orthoimage of Austin using the exported XML data from the 201.

Strangely enough, I met three of the developers from Garmin’s Motion Based community web site at SFBeta last week. We talked for a while, and I went all GPS-nerd on them. So, the next day, I tried out Motion Based and uploaded the data off my Forerunner 305. The result is that I was completely nonplussed with their site. The only thing extraordinary about the site is how extraordinary it is. What’s particularly troubling is that since you can only access the GPS route data from Garmin’s watches using proprietary software, this is the only community web site that is gong to work with their devices.

Some feverish miscreant has managed to upload all six episodes of Adam Curtis’ Pandora’s Box documentary to the youtube. It has a similar theme to his later Century of the Self, but it’s still worth watching.

Episode 1 - The Engineer’s Plot
Episode 2 - To The Brink of Eternity
Episode 3 - The League of Gentlemen
Episode 4 - Goodbye Mrs Ant
Episode 5 - Black Power
Episode 6 - A Is For Atom

Adam Curtis’ interpretation of current events viewed through a historical and political lens is a tour de force in explaining the absurdity and cognitive dissonance of our current reality. I recommend watching all of them, twice. Curtis is picking up where the greats like Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski have left off. He is their worthy successor.

The Trap

Google Video: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3a, Part 3b, Part 3c

The Trap consists of three, one-hour programs which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.”

(via wikipedia)

The Mayfair Set

Google Video: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

The Mayfair Set looked at how buccaneer capitalists of hot money were allowed to shape the climate of the Thatcher years, focusing on the rise of Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith, and Tiny Rowland, all members of The Clermont club in the 1960s. It received the BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series or Strand in 2000.

(via wikipedia)

The Power of Nightmares

Google Video: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. The series consists of three one-hour films, consisting mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis’s narration, which were first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and have been subsequently aired in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival

(via wikipedia)

Century of the Self

Google Video: Part 1, Part 2,Part 3, Part 4

This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.

(Adam Curtis via wikipedia)

Okaysamurai, Foobarfighter, and I had a big jam session at 199 Fremont Street tonight. Here’s the obligatory Youtube embed.

This young upstart programmer named Bob Remeika decided to schedule a pizza lunch at 12:00 PM on Thursday. Wouldn’t you know, he didn’t actually order the pizza until 11:45. All of a sudden at 12:19, I get an email saying “UPDATE: The pizza is coming a little later than expected so we’ll wait until it gets here to get started.” You can guess what happens. The pizza guy doesn’t turn up until 12:39, and by this time my tummy was so grumbly that it actually started to digest itself. These new Web 2.0 frigtards don’t know the first thing about pizza ordering. They should just leave it to the 1.0 old-timers.

Documentaries attempting to excite the proletariat annoy me. Does some bloke playing a cello really illustrate string theory? PBS and BBC seem to think so. I have to believe that if James Burke were in charge, this kind of nonsense wouldn’t keep happening. It’s difficult to understand what Ed Witten has to say, but I want to believe that I don’t need the cartoon version in order to grasp it.

Yesterday, I was walking down Valencia and I saw a dog holding another dog’s leash in its mouth. This made me wonder if the lead dog was a seeing-eye dog for the dog holding its leash. This is something that you don’t think about: Seeing-eye dogs for dogs.

The Professor of Magic and I headed on down to Bimbo’s 365 to catch The Puppini Sisters last night. The show was a fantastic mix of covers from Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” to The Bangle’s “Walk Like an Egyptian” all performed in Andrew Sisters-style close harmony. A flash mob of 1940’s gangsters, old-timey cars, WWII soldiers and Lindy hoppers erupted on the scene to shoot the curl and drink the Jittersauce. Who knew that the kids are still cutting the rug down at the old Barrelhouses in this day and age.

Happy Apple is the best band in the entire universe regardless of what this one has to say about it. I’ve tried and tried to get Jon Gifford to like them, but his preconceived ideas about what music should be was irrevocably discombobulated during a rugby match in ‘86. So, in conclusion, if you know any live people that haven’t been turned into robots by the corporatocracy yet, you should have them attend the big Happy Apple show with you in San Francisco on November 7th. They will totally blow your mind.