blake johnson

Phyllis and I biked around the Healdsburg area, tasting a bunch of wine. Here’s what I think of what we tried.

Ridge - Good wines but many of them were not particularly distinct. Their Zins were on the subtler side, but my tongue could not detect much complexity… maybe a better palate could. They did have one Zin which was a bit spicier and fruitier, the 2006 Lytton Springs Zinfandel. We ended up buying a couple bottles of this. The Syrah was a typical California fruit-forward Syrah, which is to say it was quite good, but their petite Syrah had more complexity (along with more tanin), so I actual preferred this to the regular Syrah.

Peterson - A small winery which produces only about 5,000 cases per year. The wine was very accessible (and affordable!). Great for drinking with pizza and burgers. A lot of spice and pepper. Each wine had a very distinct personality.

Toad Hollow - Once owned by Robin Williams’ brother, Todd, this winery seems to have slipped a bit from its glory days. The wines were cheap and tasted like it. Everything was kind of “eh”. They did have an interesting blended wine (supposedly) composed of 18 different varietals. Unlike the other wines being poured, this one had enough going on that I bought a bottle to ponder its many different flavors while we eat smores by the fire pit at the Farmhouse Inn.

Thumbprint - This winery has decor which is a bit too cool for school, but the wine is fantastic. Our tasting started out with a voignier, which is quite possibly the best white wine I’ve ever had. It was rich, almost like honey (but not too sweet, either), and not oakey at all. We also tasted a fantastic cab and a blended wine going by the cutesy name of “threesome”. This wine is not cheap, but Phyllis and I were sufficiently excited about it to sign up for the wine club.

I got a response to the letter I wrote the Birmingham science musuem. This is what Jeff Smith, director of IMAX theater operations has to say:

Lamar has just passed your message along about the stats presented in the IMAX Theater Pre-Show. I have to agree with your comments, but have never changed the show since this is the way it was originally produced, but having talked with the creator of the show over the years, I have learned his methodology for the 24,000 CD-ROMs of information statistic.

According to him, if you take the average 74-minute CD-ROM at 650MB of data, and multiply it out, that would result in nearly 15TB of data for the image portion of a film.

Going backwards, assuming a 45 minute film, that would be ~241MB per frame (at 24fps.)

There is actually an active argument in the IMAX industry over the past few years concerning what type of resolution you need to achieve the quality of an IMAX 15/70 film presentation. An IMAX VP has said that it is the equivalent of a 105 megapixel image. While I think this might be a bit overkill, I’ve seen 8k images output, and that is far too low compared to the image quality of the film.

Hopefully this helps explain our usage of units a little.

In other words, it would take 24,000 CD-ROMS to store a 90 minute IMAX film as a sequence of uncompressed, 105 MB images.

Over the weekend, the Habari community released version 0.5. Among other things, this version features a redesigned administrative interface. Something that I am particularly excited about (and, correspondingly, something which I put a lot of work into) is the time line:

The time line gives a visual representation of dates of your posts; the size of each month corresponds to the number of posts in that month. You can then filter posts by date by simply dragging the loupe over the relevant section of time. A similar interface widget appears in flickr’s organizr tool, but this is the first time I have seen it in a blogging platform.

Habari is now stable enough to be used on any personal blog. So, I encourage you to try it out. We’re not quite ready for corporate multi-author blogs because we have not finished adding access control lists (to define roles such as administrators vs editors, for example). This is the primary goal for Habari 0.6.

I have seen several movies in the last couple weeks: Wall-E, Wanted, and Batman: the Dark Knight. Two of these were spectacular. Another was spectacularly terrible. I have already encouraged you all to see Wall-E, so let me say a few things about the other two.

Wanted

This movie is a perfect example of a movie made for Mystery Science Theater 3000. The main character is so utterly unlikeable as to make the audience completely apathetic to his fate. The story is ridiculous, and I am not talking about the usual level of comic book ridiculousness either. When you (spoiler warning) find out that the assassins are getting their targets from a loom, and that the other characters find this completely normal, you know something has gone wrong with your screenplay. The movie could get away with this if it were about explaining the origin story of the hero; however, the plot and morality of the actions of the main characters depend crucially on this plot device.

The upshot of this, though, is that it makes the movie mostly laughable. I was left thinking, “what?!” so many times that I was laughing. So, in the end I was entertained by the impressive special effects and the (unintentional) hilarity of the story. I left the theater in a good mood.

The Dark Knight

Wow. I mean, wow. Spooky, creapy, dark… but with enough sunshine seeping through the cracks as to not become so depressing that it loses its audience. Summed up well by the movie itself, sometimes “the night is darkest before the dawn”. A probable posthumous Oscar is in the works for Heath Ledger.