I got a new watch. Again. I bought my last watch in 2001. There was nothing wrong with it. However, Casio brought out a new version that drops the moon phase and tide graph, and instead has 5-band radio atomic clock synchronization. 
As you can see, it’s not a major departure, visually speaking. The function of the buttons is slightly rearranged, the actual time is larger and easier to read, the time zones don’t have editable names, and the alarm now has a snooze function. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same watch. Still titanium, solar powered, waterproof. But with the atomic clock synchronization, it’s one step closer to being the perfect watch–which, by my definition, is an indestructable watch that requires zero maintenance. I have a mild obsession with accurate timekeeping. The first watch I ever remember owning was the Timex I had as a child. It was a simple analog watch that required regular winding. Its clockwork mechanism was fairly awful as far as accuracy goes, and I had to adjust it each morning. Next, I got one of the first ever digital watches: a TI-500 from Texas Instruments. Mine was brown plastic with a brown leather strap. Since I was a kid at the time, it got scratched up pretty quickly. It also ate batteries. Still, I loved it; and I bet if I’d kept it, it would sell for a bundle on eBay. But technology was changing rapidly, and before long I had my first LCD watch, a Casio. Casio would soon take over the watch market, almost destroying the Swiss watch industry. My contribution to this process was one of these: 
That was the watch that never died. It lasted me through the 80s. I also had Casio calculators, but I’m happy to say I never had a calculator watch. I just wasn’t that geeky Since I love swimming and tend to be forgetful of whether I’m wearing a watch, I eventually upgraded to a waterproof Casio, again with a metal case and strap. I don’t remember too much about that one, except that once the battery needed replacing, it stopped being waterproof. Update: I’ve found out you can actually still buy the waterproof metal Casio I had. In addition, as the 90s arrived the backlash had happened, and digital watches were about as fashionable as flared trousers. So I looked for a watch that was waterproof but didn’t need batteries. For a while I wore a Swatch automatic. Aside from the lack of batteries needing replacement, I liked that it was totally unlike any other watch I had owned. Also, the back was transparent, so you could see the mechanism. It kept pretty good time, but still needed weekly adjustments. 
So, then came the Seiko Kinetic, which I wrote about before. Then, back to Casio. And now, atomic. I don’t know why atomic time synchronization is so seductive to me. It’s not like I need that level of accuracy in my timekeeping. Nevertheless, all the computers are synched via NTP, and we have a couple of radio synchronized clocks too. I think there’s just something fascinating about time, and about the idea of knowing it precisely. When Harper’s recently published an issue that had a whole feature about the debate over leap seconds, it was like they had published it just for me. Part of the fascination is that time is so mysterious. From the point of view of the laws of physics, you can treat it as another dimension; and physics itself doesn’t seem to care about which direction time flows. Yet our perception is that time is utterly unlike any other dimension, that it has a clear direction–and nobody can explain why that is the case. We simply don’t know what time is, even though we can measure it with very high precision. So now I know what time it is. For sure.
I gather that increasing numbers of people these days use their cell phone to tell the time, and don’t bother with a watch.
However, the watch is fighting back. Behold, the quad band GSM phone in a wristwatch, with Bluetooth (so you can pair it with a headset for phone use) and OLED display showing analog hands. Plus 1.3MP camera, kinetic battery recharge, and MP3 player.
At 13mm thick it’s still pretty bulky, but not much worse than my Casio G-Shock.
One of the defining features of mammals is the four chambered heart. A curiosity of biology is that all mammals have more or less the same lifespan, if you measure it in heartbeats: one billion beats, give or take a billion.
If you’re a large mammal, like an elephant, your heart beats slowly, and you live many years. If you’re a mouse, your tiny heart beats far faster, and you’re lucky to live more than a handful of years. If you’re a human, your heart usually beats around 70 times a minute. Mine is a little different. It likes to throw in an extra beat here and there.
À la carte TV myths
The controversy over à la carte cable and satellite programming keeps resurfacing. The basic problem is that cable prices keep rising, to the point where the basic level of digital cable is over $50 a month in many places. Prices have risen 40% in the last decade.
(As an aside, I’m amazed at the whiners in the UK who complain about paying £126.50 a year for a TV license that gets them the best premium programming from the US, as well as UK TV. I pay $588 a year to get a similar selection.)
Viewers find it galling to pay for a hundred channels when there are only a handful they watch on a regular basis. Hence there has been a campaign to get the FCC to rule that cable and satellite providers must offer the option of à la carte programming, where you can choose to subscribe to only the channels you actually want.
The cable and satellite companies don’t want to see that happen, as it would eat into their fat profits. Since the same companies own a lot of the mainstream media outlets, I’m constantly seeing astroturf coverage explaining why à la carte programming is impossible, would make your cable bills skyrocket, is tantamount to Communism, and so on.
This is my attempt to cut through a lot of the common bullshit spouted on the subject.
In a word, avoid. Unfortunately it’s a competently executed movie, at least as far as acting and cinematography—so sadly, I must break with etiquette and provide a synopsis. It’s the only way to explain how truly bad the movie is.
I notice that 1GB of CompactFlash has dropped to under $100. It’s only a matter of time before it makes sense to replace DV camcorders with flash memory units. With MPEG-4 compression, a unit like the Fisher Sanyo FVD-C1 can record about an hour of NTSC quality video in a GB. (In fact, there are already some pro camcorders which use RAID arrays of CompactFlash, believe it or not.)
Sure, DV is cheap, but DV also sucks a lot. I won’t repeat the familiar reasons why tape needs to die; I’ll just add that MiniDV tapes are small and so there’s a tiny helical scan head whizzing around at very high speed inside the camcorder, which means you get a lot of audio noise unless you use an external mic.
What I don’t understand is why more companies haven’t done the obvious, and stuck the Hitachi mini hard drive from an iPod into an MPEG-4 camcorder. I realize MPEG-4 has compression artifacts, but I’d be willing to live with that. Shoot a few hours of video, plug the unit into your computer, pull the video across Firewire or USB 2.0 HiSpeed. A 10GB drive would probably do the trick for most people, and would keep the cost down. I shoot video with about a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of raw to edited footage, but I know that’s utterly unlike many–so put some basic “chop clip here, delete this clip” editing on the device itself, give it an analog scroll wheel for sliding through each clip.
OK, Samsung had the ITCAM-7, which they tellingly called a “gadget” rather than a camcorder. Unfortunately, they only stuck a 1.5GB hard drive in the thing, and it didn’t sell too well. C’mon, guys, it’s 2004, chuck a few more GB in the thing and try again.
From Remix:
Sitting next to his beloved Mac G3 iBook in the cool confines of his Manhattan apartment, Fischerspooner programmer, tuxedo aficionado and one-time classical violinist Warren Fischer has a theory about why electro has staged such a surprising comeback with an audience once enamored of hot house and techno turbulence. “There is a new element of DIY in the electronic-music world,” he explains. “The development of software synths made it easy to reproduce the sounds of expensive equipment. [Propellerhead] ReBirth physically models Roland 303s, 808s and 909s, making these sounds accessible to anyone, so anybody can make a pop song. You don’t have to be Steely Dan to make a decent-sounding record anymore. There is an impulse now to make music that sounds a little raw, and electro happens to have that element. Punk rock developed in a similar way. It is the right time and place for electro.”
[…]
Fischer composes and records the instrumental sounds almost entirely on his laptop iBook, taking the tracks into the studio when he’s ready to record vocals and work on the mix. “I am really into stereo,” says Fischer. “Every element but the bass drum is stereo. I don’t like mono. I like to fill up the stereo picture. In the studio, I work with our good friend Nicholas Farren. We put a knuckle into the specifics of the mix and the signal processing, most of which is done with [Emagic] Logic software, although we use a lot of outboard gear for vocal processing. There may be a little bit of analog creeping in there, but I don’t think it makes a substantial impact on the character of the sound. It retains a digital quality.”
Unlike most electro musicians, Fischer prefers the hard digital edge of his software synths to the warmth of classic analog machines such as Moogs and ARPs. “I like the coldness of digital sounds,” he says. “It has a painful edge that makes electro a little brutal. Analog makes things warmer, but digital makes things more realistic. People love the way analog distorts things, but I like how flat digital sounds. I use analog sounds only occasionally. On Emerge, I sent a couple of bass parts out through a simple EQ filter sweep and an analog amp just to see what the warmth would do. But that is the only time I did something like that.”
Fischer started composing music on the computer in the mid-’90s. “The first song I ever did with samples was with a program called [BIAS] Deck,” recalls Fischer. “It was such a pain; I made the loops manually. Then my nephew gave me ReBirth, and I eventually graduated to [Steinberg] Cubase and software synths, but the computer kept crashing. Now I use [Propellerhead] Reason, but I’ve got my eye on Logic. I use all Mac gear; I have a 600MHz G3 iBook. I use only software synths—no analog anything. The silences are absolute zero. I love how vacuum-sealed the sounds are. When you listen on headphones, it is weird. You are not used to silences being so dead. I also like how flexible working on a computer is. You can recall all your patches and automate your setting manipulations. With analog gear, you are always setting a knob, and it never sounds the same.”
At the weekend I bought a CD: “Blank Tapes” by Reynols. As the title suggests, it’s entirely made from recordings of blank analog audio tapes, dating from 1978 to 1999. The source sound has been processed in various analog and digital ways; because of course, an analog tape is never really silent on playback, even if it’s blank.
The result is an ambient soundscape of hissing, screeching, muffled rhythmic throbbing, ocean-like washes, and occasional bursts of distant echoing thunder. It’s hard to put into words, obviously.
If I have to explain what’s cool about this CD, it probably isn’t for you.
For information: Reynols are an Argentinian group, and the CD is released by a German label called Trente Oiseaux—which, of course, is French. Just so that’s clear.