I’ve been in a bit of depressed state the past couple of days and, as is customary for me during times like these, I went and splurged on something really stupid and unnecessary this afternoon at the Apple Store.

I first read about Shure’s In-Ear phones in this IGN review several months ago, and although I was impressed as hell about the idea, I never actually expected that I’d be able to find a pair locally. For those who aren’t familiar with the in-ear concept, the e2C (along with the rest of its brothers) takes the notion of "high-fidelity music" to a whole other level by almost completely blocking out outside noise. How does it do this? Well, you can probably already guess that just from the name. Yes, it goes straight into your ear canal. The picture on the left shows what the e2C looks like straight out of the box.

In theory, the rubber white tips are burrowed ostrich-style in your ear canal, so that only the smallest top portion of the earphones protrude. This creates a "tight seal for sound isolation and a snug, secure fit."

In practice though, the e2C’s were a bit hard to use the first time around. I quickly discovered that Caucasian ear canals tend to be a lot larger than Asian ones, so before I could even turn on my iPod, I had to replace the rubber tips with a smaller pair (the box comes with 3 pairs of different sizes – I chose the smallest one). This proved to be a more comfortable fit, but it still wasn’t blocking out noise at the level I was expecting (I could still hear people talking around me, which was kind of the whole point why I bought these phones). After a few minutes of inserting and reinserting the rubber-tipped phones, I decided to try the included foam tips (also available in 3 sizes), which were softer and could theoretically fit the contour of your ears to produce a tighter seal. It turns out that this is exactly what I needed — the foam tips felt great and, more importantly, sounded great.

I think that thought deserves its own paragraph, so here it is again, for emphasis:

These phones sound great.

The closest analogy I can come up with is graduating to a Digital-SLR after years of taking photos with a consumer-grade digital camera. The difference is fairly friggin’ obvious.

I queued up my Radiohead collection on the drive home and I have to say, it was like I’d never actually heard these songs before. You could pick out every instrument, every jangle and every wail; I was hearing little details and nuances that I never knew were even there. "Idioteque"’s multi-layered soundscape was exposed in startling clarity, as was "Exit Music"’s elegantly subtle chords. (With these phones, silent portions of a song are really silent.)

Although I wholeheartedly recommend these phones to anyone who loves their music, the price (US$100) is pretty darn prohibitive. I guess the only consolation is that this is probably the last pair of phones you will ever need to buy, unless you decide to go professional, or require the additional features of the even more expensive e3C (US$180) or the top-of-the-line, fuck-the-almighty e5c (US$500).

BusinessWeek writes about the possibility of a video-enabled iPod:

"We have a saying around here: It’s the music, stupid," Jobs said in early 2004 when asked whether Apple’s plans for its white-hot music player extended beyond the audio realm. "We have to stay focused on the fact that people are buying these devices because they want to listen to music."

Yet something is in the works. Apple has been talking to record labels about licensing music videos so they can be sold for $2 or so on its iTunes Music Store, says one music industry executive. Media reports suggest Apple is also in talks with TV studios including Disney about getting the rights to other kinds of programming.

This is actually the sort of news that Filipinos don’t really give a crap about, because … well, at the risk of sounding like a bitter third-worlder, DRM is a white man’s technology. iTunes has sold half a billion songs, the counters continue to spin, and support for countries outside of the "chosen few" continues to lag fairly far behind what I like to refer to as "the majority of the Earth’s population".

One possibility is that Jobs could use this opportunity to introduce a subscription service, in which customers would pay a fixed monthly fee to watch as many videos as they want.

Bitter or no, it IS fairly interesting that DRM-protected video subscription may eventually make its way on to our portable devices. (I wasn’t expecting it until 2007 at least, because I figured they would try to solve the music subscription issues first. It looks like they might push forward regardless of how half-hearted the current subscription-based services currently are though.)

One of my favorite animated series is coming back this Wednesday, after over a year on hiatus. Carmen Electra is joining the cast as the new voice of sex-robot Six (who is, according to her bio, the most advanced sex-robot in existence: among her many features is the ability to fake 2000 orgasms in over 600 languages).

Thinking about Tripping the Rift reminded me how thankful I am for bittorrent and file-sharing in general. Shows like this would never make it to my little corner of the world otherwise. (Being able to pick and choose from practically any current TV series on the P2P is the main reason why I’ve survived for so long without turning on a television set).

There’s an interesting writeup over at ZDNet summarizing the anticipated featureset of the operating system formerly known as Longhorn, which has been widely discussed for about 3 years now and is expected to arrive in late 2006.

Among the features in the OS are security improvements, some snazzy new graphics, and a new means of searching and organizing information. Rather than having to remember the single folder where something is stored, users will be able to put documents in any number of virtual folders. They can also establish folders that will automatically update, such as "files edited in the last week" or "documents from Jane."

The virtual-folders part excites the heck out of me for some reason, probably because I think it’s a really media-centric kind of feature, and I appreciate how Windows is putting a whole lot of focus on how we organize the things we love. If you think about it, we already see this selfsame virtual-folder functionality in the current crop of media devices — we call them "playlists." (A single song can appear several times in any number of different playlists, each instance simply referencing the same file, and that, in a nutshell, is essentially what virtual-folders are all about.)

The reason why we only see this on media players and photo organizers right now is simple: although this scheme is incredibly handy for your average user, it’s a real bitch to implement when you’ve got hundreds of gigabytes of data to index and reference. Of course, by the time Windows Vista arrives, we’ll be well in to the dual-core revolution, with little else to challenge our twin processors other than the occasional simultaneous Halo 2/Photoshop sessions.

So yeah, I’m pretty excited about Windows Vista. I haven’t given up hope on the idea of having a stable, crash-free Windows experience, and I think they’ve been steadily improving with each new release (although Window Millenium was a troubling step backwards, imho). Who knows, maybe its 6th revision will be the one that will finally let that dream come true.

Saw this rather startling proposition while visiting one of our local news sites today. I wonder if it was part of their marketing strategy to prominently mention the single most-hated word on the internet in big bold letters. Kinda like a pharmaceutical company trumpeting "Viruses ‘r’ us! Click here!" or something equally ambiguous.

There is something deeply, deeply retarded about Michael Bay’s The Island, and like anything that’s retarded, it’s phenomenally fun to watch.

This is a sci-fi film set firmly in the ADD-stricken MTV territory of the year 2015: not five minutes go by without having a sharply-lit, low-angle, slow-motion shot of someone walking through smoke with the sun flaring behind them (preferably with helicopter blades spinning in the background). And in an effort, I suppose, to avoid confusing his audience, Bay’s movie is peppered with references to their favorite things, e.g., Puma shoes, XBoxes, Nokia cell phones, Aquafina Sparkling Water, Calvin Klein, Budweiser, Apple, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and MSN (which, btw, still can’t search for shit 10 years into the future).

Apart from its penchant for Microsoft branding, The Island is a glossy paradise full of plotholes and unnatural dialogue. Consider how every one of the hapless residents at the facility are tracked and watched, and yet, when Ewan McGregor’s Lincoln character decides to start exploring in the middle of the night, he makes it all the way into a whole other part of the facility without setting off any alarms. (You’d think that this high-tech center would at least have alarms on their door-locks after lights-out.)

And what exactly is the point of forcing the residents to "watch their proximity", when each one of them has had their sexuality suppressed at the genetic level? (My theory is that they just added that part in to incite the anger of your average hormonal teenager. "No sex?!?" they’ll exclaim. "Those heartless bastards!!!")

I suppose what depresses me the most is how annoyingly inept everyone in this movie has to be, in order for our two naive escapee clones to survive. The mercenaries hired to track them down (who use HP Tablet PCs!), led by a confused-looking Djimon Hounsou, are the worst of the bunch. Not only do they shoot and kill the wrong Lincoln (apparently the arsenal that they travel around with doesn’t include any tranq darts), but they don’t even think to frisk Scarlett Johansson for weapons when they finally capture her. (Again, there are no walk-through metal detectors at the facility, so anyone can just come in with a concealed gun and shoot everyone dead.)

I must admit that I had a lot of fun watching this nutty movie, although I doubt that uproarious laughter was the reaction Michael Bay was really shooting for.

Hot Hot Heat’s Elevator is an interesting followup to 2002’s Make Up the Breakdown. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is just how pop it all sounds. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing of course, just that it’s … well, not exactly what I was expecting.

Consider how the first Breakdown single was the controversial "Bandages," an off-beat swath of howling craziness, and compare that with the instantly catchy, ready-for-the-mainstream Elevator single "Goodnight Goodnight."

This is a nice album to listen to, definitely, but it remains to be seen just how far into the mainstream Steve Bays and company are willing to dip.

Saw this lovely vehicle (and its generically happy model couple) on WorldChanging today. Named "Twike" (as in "twin bike"), this transport-for-two is the latest in the hybrid-electric line of automotive innovation, and is already available in Europe and the US.

It’s an interesting idea, but one that will (I think) not see a lot of use in the third-world (and by "third-world" I of course mean the Philippines, which is the only part of the "third-world" which I can speak knowledgeably about.) It might get a bit of attention if they took the roof off completely, slapped handle bars and steps on the sides and added a second engine for all the overloading (see below) it’ll have to endure during its duty cycles.

Pictures like the one on the left are interesting because it makes the casual observer think that it’s depicting a weird, out-of-the-ordinary scene (because it wouldn’t warrant a photo otherwise). The truth of the matter is, you see things like this every day here. All you have to do is drive a few kilometers out toward the outskirts of town.

So until someone can come up with a hybrid-electric vehicle that can withstand something like 10 grown men hanging off of every available hand- and foot-hold, the third-world will be sticking firmly with its gas-guzzling stalwarts. 

Not a review, because obviously the movie hasn’t come out yet, but I just wanted to post this nice-looking poster I pulled off of an RSS feed today.

2003’s Underworld had a great looking poster too; one critic actually went so far as to imply that the poster was better than the actual movie.

Anyway:

I actually wanted to have this entry say something like "Are they making a sequel just so they can put out another kick-ass poster?" but that’s not really true. Neither is it a very informed statement to make, because there are currently 51 million reasons for producing a sequel to Underworld (and that’s not even counting DVD sales). Unfortunately not one of them have anything to do with it actually being a worthwhile movie to see.

More Underworld: Evolution images here.

I don’t really care enough about this book to spring over a thousand PhP for it, although I did spend quite a bit of time scouring the P2P for bootlegs of it yesterday. I think it was more of the excitement of finding something digitized just hours after it had been released in traditional dead-tree form, more than my need to save money. Regardless, the book is available at highfiber.org for anybody interested (registration required).