The Half Baked Lunatic

I’ve never tried pot. It’s not that I have any moral objections to Marijuana , and I really don’t care whether it’s legal or illegal – it’s not a big issue to me.  The reason I have never smoked Marijuana is the same reason why I don’t smoke cigarettes: I just can’t understand why anyone would willingly inhale the soot and tar and ash of burning carcinogens into their lungs.  Blech.  You might as well suck on the exhaust pipe of your local city bus for all the good it’s going to do for you! Back around 1985 or so, I was staying at a friends house for a few days and he asked if I wanted to smoke a joint with him.  I politely declined, but he was persistent.  After he finished the first joint by himself, he rolled me a fresh one and offered it again.  When I convinced him I really didn’t want it, he put it in a plastic baggie and told me to bring it home and keep it – just in case I was ever in the mood to give it a go. I put it in my suitcase without really thinking much about it, and when I was packing up to go home I threw it into my toiletry kit alongside my razor, toothbrush, deodorant, and travel size bottle of shampoo. The joint ended up staying in my toiletry bag for the next ten years. During those years I was a global exhibits manager (travelling to over 20 trade shows a year, half of them international), a product manager (visiting customers and training our sales team worldwide), and an Asia regional manager (primarily supporting our sales offices in Tokyo and Hong Kong, but still attending trade shows and attending marketing meetings at our corporate headquarters in the UK). My joint was with me on many trips to South America, Europe, and Asia; we became very well acquainted. According to my United Airlines statements, I accrued over 700,000 actual flight miles during those years. It was during one of my many trips to Singapore that I realized that I had been smuggling pot into some very strict countries.  S... [More]

I’m writing this blog posting whilst sitting in my stateroom aboard Cunard’s flagship ocean liner, the Queen Mary 2 – enroute from Southampton England to New York City (coincidentally, it’s the exact same route that the Titanic was taking ... hmmm.) We are moving from Switzerland back to the US.  This is our third year in a row (and fifth time in six years) that we are moving to a different country. And yet again, we will have to live out of suitcases for a month or so while we wait for the container with all our household belongings to arrive at our new home. Exactly a year ago, we moved from Washington DC to Switzerland. It was supposed to be an easy trip – a quick flight from DC to Newark, then a direct flight from Newark to Zurich, and finally an hour train ride to Basel (where we’ve lived for the past year).  However, the flight from DC was delayed by over 8 hours and we didn’t arrive in Newark till almost 1am, missing our 8pm flight to Zurich by a long shot.  The four of us, plus our dog, had to make our way to a hotel in Newark in the middle of the night – and then up early for a flight on a different airline the next morning.  Of course, none of our luggage made the transfer – so we had to spend our first three days (including my son’s birthday) in Switzerland without any fresh clothes to wear.  Oh yeah, it was a holiday as well.  August 1 is not only my son’s birthday, it’s “Swiss National Day” – equivalent to the Fourth of July – so no stores were open anywhere for us to buy some new clothes. Not even grocery stores were open. But this year, we’ve somehow managed to have an even MORE stressful start to our relocation home, and I have quite the story to tell ... When we purchased the tickets on the cruise over a month and a half ago, we booked for two adults, two children, and a dog (Cunard just happens to be the only cruise line with kennels on board, and they made it very easy to bring our dog Sally along with us). We g... [More]

I just recently found out that almost all of Penn & Teller’s “audience participation” card tricks involve the three of clubs. It’s some kind of an inside joke that's been going on for years. It's funny, because I remember that specific card. They had a show in Seattle - on December 18, 2002 - which was SUPPOSED to involve the three of clubs. Unfortunately, the trick was foiled by a certain Half Baked Lunatic dressed in a tuxedo :-) It was our anniversary, and my wife surprised me with a night out on the town. We started with a nice dinner, accompanied by an expensive bottle of wine. After dinner, she directed me to the parking lot in the back of The Moore Theater where we had previously seen a few shows, such as “Stomp” and “The Flying Karamazov Brothers.” I couldn’t see the marquee in front, so I didn’t know what kind of a treat we were in for; but before we went inside she produced a brown paper bag, seemingly out of thin air, which contained a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin, some good tonic water, and a lime. Woohoo! So after a couple of good stiff drinks, she spilled the beans – third row center seats for Penn & Teller was our entertainment for the evening. We made our way into the theater and found our seats just as the lights were going down. I wasn’t really wearing a full tuxedo, I had a nice dinner jacket that was half way between a suit and a tux – and I was wearing a bright fire-engine red vest with a bow tie.  Looked pretty sharp, if I do say so myself. The show started with a hilarious warm-up monolog by Penn which got the audience laughing and put us in a good mood.  For the first “audience participation” magic trick of the night, they selected an elegantly dressed woman out of the audience, and she was perfect for the part.  Too perfect, I thought, and I mentioned to my wife that she must have been a plant. There’s no way they’d rely on the unpredictability of total strangers for a live show like this. So a while later, wh... [More]

  I met with James Cameron a few times when I worked in the Windows Media Division at Microsoft.  Mr. Cameron had just finished the 3D IMAX documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss” and was looking at different technologies to use in an upcoming “big budget 3D production”. This was back in 2003 or so. In the first meeting, we just provided a broad overview of the technologies that Microsoft was working on, and had a general discussion on what he was looking for.  I must say, I was exceedingly impressed with Jim’s technical knowledge. Most “Writer/Director” types I’ve interacted with are great on the creative side but fairly light on the technical side. I pointed out that the digital camera that they used for the “Ghosts of the Abyss” had a subsampled horizontal resolution, and he jumped right in and told me how they solved that problem ... by tapping into the actual image sensor itself, bypassing the rest of the storage capabilities of the camera, they were able to capture the higher resolution image which the sensor was capable of, and store it directly to hard drives. I knew about this solution, but he had all the exact specs right off the top of his head and was able to describe, in perfect detail, how it worked. I scored some points with him as well, and he was in complete agreement with my opinion that full chroma resolution, known in the industry as 4:4:4, is absolutely critical for matting, chroma keying, and compositing special effects during production. But no one will ever see a difference between 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 (where the chroma information is subsampled by half) in a final distribution copy – even if it’s projected on a big screen in a movie theater. At the time, we (Microsoft) had just finished developing the Windows Media 9 Series Professional Video Codec (known as WMV9, which was later standardized as SMPTE specification VC-1). I was demonstrating the differences betwee... [More]

I’m tired of dinner at home, so I think we’ll go out to Little Seizures tonight. My kids always have a Petite Mal Seizure. It’s a really good deal and it comes with a small shake. You get a large shake with the Gran Mal Seizure, but sometimes it’s just too much for me – and one time I ended up biting my tongue. It was closed the last time we went, and the kids had a fit. We really love that place – there’s just no stopping us when we’re having our Little Seizures!

I bought my wife the new Kindle, from Amazon, for her birthday last week.  I really love the whole idea of eBooks – the Kindle is quite portable (about the size of a regular book) with a gorgeous high resolution surface that is really easy to read. Plus, you can do cool things like set multiple bookmarks, change font size, store hundreds of books at one time, and download new books wirelessly from almost anywhere in the world. It even has “text to speech” built in so it can read to you! Wow. It really is very, very, very cool technology. But there’s one thing that still bugs me ... we read a lot, my wife and I both go through a few books a month. So it’s quite likely we could spend a few hundred dollars (or more) on a library of Kindle books over the next couple of years. But what guarantee do we have that we will still be able to read them in ten years?  What happens if our Kindle device breaks, and there is no replacement?  Or what if the best device on the market in ten years happens to be a product from another company, which isn’t compatible with our library of Kindle eBooks? This isn’t just an issue with the Amazon Kindle, it’s an endemic problem with electronic distribution of all published material, whether it’s music, videos, books, what have you.  No one has really figured out how to properly handle copy protection and copyright management yet. Let’s back up for a little bit.  For the last 500 years or so, ever since Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press, you could buy a book and keep that book pretty much forever – if you took good care of it. If you want to re-read a book in 50 years, you are free to do so – even if the publisher of the book has gone out of business. You can also loan your book to a friend, or sell it “used” (although publishers, rightfully so, have always hated these practices). But even then, only one person at a time could read the book. Even if a book is re-sold multiple times as used, most l... [More]

We finally moved in to our house two weeks ago (after living in a temporary apartment for the past three months) and we’re busy exploring our new neighborhood. We live up on a hill, just southeast of downtown Basel, in a nice and quiet residential neighborhood. At the bottom of the hill, just three tram stops away (or about a ten minute walk) there’s an eclectic commercial district with stores, restaurants, and a huge outdoor ice skating rink that we just discovered last weekend. I was down the hill the other day and had passed by a Thai restaurant that looked pretty good, so last night I suggested to the family that we give it a try. We haven’t eaten out since we moved, and I’ve been wanting to try out some of the local joints. On the way to the restaurant, we went down a block we hadn’t been down before, and discovered a large group of industrial buildings with a bunch of establishments – an incredible arena with eight huge rock climbing walls, a local theater (live stage), a dinner show, a circus school (not kidding), and a few bars – all mixed in with some light industrial and manufacturing businesses. On our way out on the other end of the complex, right across the street from the Thai restaurant we were planning to go to, we saw an intriguing looking place called “Blindekuh”. Now, my German isn’t very good, but the logo was an outline of a cow wearing dark glasses and I came to the conclusion that Blindekuh was “Blind Cow”. The kids said Blindekuh is what they call a game of “Hide and Seek”. Curiosity got the best of us, so we decided to check it out. It’s a restaurant where you eat in a darkened room, and you’re served by blind waiters and waitresses. Now, when I mean a “darkened room” I don’t mean that it’s just dim in there ... it is completely, absolutely, and utterly pitch black. Before we went in, we were asked to remove anything that might emit even the slightest bit of light – we had to leave our watches, cell phones, everything, in a locker (plu... [More]