Jimmy

I have a problem. It has to do with Microsoft’s ads for Bing, the rebranding/relaunch of Microsoft Live Search. This problem might just be bigger than my problem with the Laptop Hunter ads, which is saying quite a lot.

One of the Bing ads:

Here’s my issue: Bing is being billed as a “decision engine” and that it will reduce “search overload” (see video above), but I’m just not seeing it. I’ve done a few side-by-side searches on Bing and Google and I really see no difference between the results (doing a search for “huntington, in weather” turns up a weather forecast and current conditions from both search engines, but the current temperature is a degree higher from Bing, with Google’s closer to what my home weather station is reporting. (In Bing’s favor, it does return Huntington, Indiana as the first result, whereas Google returns Huntington Beach, California as the first result with my correct Indiana city as second)). I assume Bing is trying to cash in on the recent media about Wolfram|Alpha (the only “computational engine” currently in the Internet) with the “decision engine” definition, but in my opinion it just serves to confuse as the software doesn’t seem to “decide” any more than Google or Yahoo what the information that you’re looking for is, and to even imply that it’s relatively easy to build a “decision engine” (which I can only assume is a cross between a search engine like Google/Yahoo and a computational engine like Wolfram|Alpha) cheapens the concept and insults pretty much everyone in the field of Information Technology, whether they’re working on developing such technology or not.

And then there’s my even bigger beef: “search overload.” What the hell is that? The only way to get search overload is if you get the wrong information than what you were searching for, and no amount of software is going to change the fact that if you do a bad search, you don’t get the information you wanted and, I suppose, it could lead to information overload, but it’s really up to the end user to become a smart searcher and not try to rely on the computer to read their mind. Look, the user knows what the user is looking for, right? The computer is dumb. It’s dumber than dumb. It’s a freaking idiot. It does what it’s told. Google, Wolfram|Alpha, Yahoo and all the other engines on the web have a lot of programming going into them to try to return the results that are most likely to be what the user wants. But it’s still based on probability because the computer can’t read the users mind. It can’t. Maybe in the far future when we’re all dead computers will be able to read the user’s mind, but for now it’s not possible. So instead of trying to pretend the computer can do something it can’t (”decide”? A computer doesn’t decide, it does what it’s told. It gets a search query, it does what the search software tells it to do. There’s no room for deciding, because it’s a set software program. If search is “A” then do “B”. It’s all very logical and metal and binary. Deciding is an emotional process, obviously there’s logic involved as well, but it requires thought and prior knowledge and all the things that make human brains different from every other “brain” (animal or machine) on earth. Simply put, the search software can include a near infinite number of if statements and it will never really be “deciding” anything, it will simply be following the set software routine and it will return the same results to the user no matter if they wanted to know about the cloud type, the band, the movie or the tool when they typed in “anvil” and hit “Search”.

So instead of making “decision engines” we need to teach users better searching habits. I don’t care if the user wants to use Google, Bing, Yahoo, Woflram|Alpha or anything else. It’s nobodies business what engine the user uses, because if we all became a little less lazy and a little more savvy about how we search, the world would be a better place, because we could finally take these annoying “search overload” ads and shove them in a dark closet in Redmond.

And one last thing: Google doesn’t shove as much information at me as Bing does: Google has no annoying (albeit pretty) picture with hover boxes on the main search page and it pushes the “related searches” information to the bottom of the page, not right up top on the side. Little nitpicks, I know, but that extra clutter right at the beginning of my search experience just further justifies my “your ’search overload’ assertion thing is crap” argument.

Maybe if I tried Bing some more I’d like it. But I doubt it, as every time I see one of those ads I hate Bing I little bit more.

Cheers!

-j

You might’ve noticed that I haven’t posted in a while. The reasons are many, but there are two main ones:

1. I just haven’t had any stunning flashes of insight that I felt like blogging. There have been one or two, but those came at a time when I wasn’t able to blog and by the time I had time, the muse had passed.
2. Any small musings that in the past I might’ve flushed out into a blog post I’ve recently been squeezing into the 140-char limit of Twitter as I’ve found that to be easier and quicker.

I’m still planning on trying to work up some longer posts (hopefully things will slow down enough in my life for that to happen soon, but I’m not counting on it) but in the meantime I would love it if you’d click on over to my Twitter page and even “follow” me if you have a Twitter account.

Cheers!

-jbh

It’s 2am and sleep is not really in sight. Well, sort of, but iTunes e-mailed me and told me that my pre-order of Green Day’s new album 21st Century Breakdown was available for download and I just started listening to it and damn it’s good and who stops listening to such a good album in the middle? You’ve got to hear it through all at once to fully take it in, and so I’m left with needing to find something to do for the next 1.2 hours. (OK, since doing the math tells me that that takes me ’til 3:30am maybe I will have to cut it short mid-album. But we’ll decide that later.)

Anyway. Final exams are over and I’m pretty sure I failed at least two of them, and quite possibly both the classes that said finals were in. But I don’t really care. I got a much better grade than I was expecting in another class, so that’s awesome.

So I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my summer. Because sleeping 12 hours well into the afternoon is awesome for only one or two days. So that was today, and now it’s time to move on to bigger and better things (hopefully things that don’t entail sleeping quite so much of the day away). I’ve been feeling for a while that I’d like to focus more on teaching myself more about filmmaking, from actual camera-work and stuff to editing (I loooove editing, but I don’t feel like I know Premiere Pro nearly as well as I could) and post-production stuff (After Effects, anyone?), so that’s something to do with the summer, but then the question becomes what kind of structure to put it in? E.g. what kind of raw video footage do I use for my editing adventures? old family vacation footage, or shoot new footage? If so, what?

Those are the questions.

Enter the awesome web video series that I found yesterday called The Guild created by the awesome Felicia Day (Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, anyone? She was in that). While watching all 24 6-8 minutes episodes of this little web video that won three awards at the Streamy Awards, I got to thinking: what about spending the summer creating little web video episodes? Obviously this brings up as many (or more) question than it answers, but at least we’re going in the direction of making progress on the question of what the shrack to do this summer. And to help answer some of those questions, we find that not only does Felicia have a blog, she’s currently posting on how to do a web series and make it work. One begins to wonder if this is some sort of sign.

(Click “read more” to read more of my middle-of-the-night rambles.)
Read the rest of this entry »

I posted a still image of my almost finished 3D puppet a few weeks ago, but here now is a short animation of the final puppet.

I’ll admit that I can’t take credit for modeling the fire; one of my classmates did that for me.

3D puppet from Jimmy Bouma-Holtrop on Vimeo.

This was my second and final project of this semester in 3D Character Design class. I’ve had a blast in this course this semester, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the few posts I’ve made on it. I’m continuing my 3D modeling/animation coursework in the fall, so look for more posts starting in September.

Meanwhile, as this semester is just about over (last week of classes just ended, now it’s just 4 days of finals next week) I hope to be able to devote a little more time to blogging again and hopefully post more often than once every 1 or 2 weeks. I’m not 100% sure I’ll have more blogging time, but I’m gonna try.

Cheers.

-j

I posted a still image of the model way back in February, but here finally is the actual animation. For some reason the sound didn’t convert, but if you just imagine the sound of a wind-up toy while you’re watching it’ll all be good.

3D Wind-Up Toy Animation from Jimmy Bouma-Holtrop on Vimeo.

Cheers.

-j

Here’s a picture of an early/not quite finished version of my current project in 3D Animation: a self-portrait Muppet-style circus performer puppet.

Let nobody say that my professor is not creative in his assignments.

I should probably go back to my Visual Basic homework now.

Cheers.

-j

I was really excited to see the CNN headline “Obama unveils high-speed rail plan” this evening. Anybody who knows me or has read this blog can probably attest to my great interest in this topic, so I was very pleased to see that Obama would be coming through on his campaign promise to bring HSR to America.

Except that’s not at all what he’s suggesting. It is High Speed Rail in name only, and from what I can tell most of what he’s proposing would be slower than the “High Speed” Acela service that Amtrak currently runs between Washington D.C. and Boston.

Now I understand that definitions of what constitutes “high speed” rail differ from person to person and I know that my definition is up there, but CNN informs us that Obama “cited the success of high-speed rail in European countries such as France and Spain” while at the same time presenting a plan that would have “some trains traveling at top speeds of over 150 mph.”

Let me enlighten you, Mr. President: the trains you speak of in France and Spain cruise at speeds up to 186mph or even 199mph. And I believe even faster trains are in the works (can’t find the link right now, but I think France is planning a 220mph train to be launched sometime in the next few years).

And so, having gotten fairly familiar with the trains in Europe (the 186mph Eurostar is an amazing, fun and smooth ride from London to Paris) and the struggles to bring that type of train technology to American shores and seeing what went wrong I have this to say about your HSR plan, Mr. President: scrape it until you can go all out. The last thing we need is a “sort of” version HSR that nobody rides because it’s just not quite fast enough, but that cost enough to get every single taxpayer in America mad at the government, you AND (worst of all from my viewpoint) the idea of HSR. If we don’t do this correctly right out the gate, America might not give us another chance. Americans are going to be tough to sell on HSR already: we’re wary of it because it’s European, we’re wary of it because it’s really, really expensive.

But I’ve noticed something: America is not totally averse to the idea. California just passed the proposal to build a $40 billion+ 220mph High Speed Rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and with gas prices creeping ever higher and Al Gore still on his global warming campaign Americans are seeming to slowly change our minds about HSR.

On the third hand I think that just means we have ONE chance now. Before we had no chance and quite a few HSR proposals have been killed in the past in various states and regions (Florida, Texas, etc.).

Mr. President, don’t be an idiot and dishonest. You promised us High Speed Rail last year, but your proposal of sub-150mph trains on outdated routes for $13 billion over 5 years is a joke and should be treated as such. Do you think we’re that stupid and gullible? If you and the Vice President are really so concerned about HSR for America you need to remember just two things:
1. lots and lots and lots of money. California is building a system that is currently budgeting in at $40-50 billion for 700 or so miles. That means that for national HSR we’re looking at an amount of money that can be measured in meaningful fractions of a trillion dollars. Sounds bad, but you’re giving Wall Street that much money unsupervised, can’t our nations failing transit infrastructure have some, too? (I mean, more than the laughable-in-comparison $13 billion you’ve proposed for HSR thus far?)
2. 200+ mph. Don’t try to pass off Acela-type trains on the whole country and call it HSR. It will fail. If done right, super-HSR (what France and Japan have crisscrossing their countries) won’t fail, but your brand of HSR-lite will fail. And it will bring billions of our dollars down with it. Don’t patronize us by pretending it will work.

Now I should really be working on my research paper, which is interestingly enough on this exact same topic.

Cheers.

-j

This is beautiful:

A few months ago NASA held a contest to name the new wing of the International Space Station. They allowed anybody to submit whatever name they wanted, but said that they wouldn’t absolutely commit to naming it the winning name if they didn’t like it. So, Stephen Colbert, in typical fashion, called on all his fans to vote for his name in the contest. And he won. (Let nobody say that Stephen doesn’t have a load of very loyal fans!) This, as is well imaginably, created a little bit of a problem for NASA: the name won and it would be…unpopular for them to just ignore that fact, but always talking about “the Stephen Colbert” wing of the ISS does present some odd issues (is NASA endorsing a sudo-politic figure? Etc. Etc.).

So what did NASA end up doing? Well, they didn’t name the new ISS wing after him…but they did name a treadmill after him. Win! Literally. Everybody wins. Stephen and all his fans who voted for him get something on the ISS named after him, but NASA gets to call the new ISS node “Tranquility,” which is more in line with the names they give other space-faring vehicles, anyway. (Although I’m sure every Firefly fan out there is very disappointed that the #2 winning name, Serenity, didn’t get chosen by NASA either.)

And that, folks, is the story of how Colbert (and the Colbert Nation) pwned NASA, and how NASA pwned him (and them) right back.

I hope this made your day a little bit better like it did mine.

Cheers.

-j

I’ll admit that I find the new “I’m a PC” ads from Microsoft annoying and all that, but what I find most annoying is the reactions that they’ve been inciting from people. Everyone from the people declaring that little “Kylie” was gonna make PC sales skyrocket (OK, don’t flame me: I know he didn’t actually say that in his post, but it felt like the subtext) (because everyone likes the idea of a 4-year-old being able to use a computer so well. [/sarcastic] I don’t know about anybody else, but I kinda find the prospect of a 4-year-old being that good with a digital camera and laptop to be quite scary) to the people who got so bent of of shape about the newest ad in the series featuring “Lauren” who says she’s “just not cool enough to be a Mac person” (reaction in my living room when that ad first came on: “huh?” from every direction) all the way to the people yelling about the people doing the yelling. (Isn’t the blogosphere grand?)

I should say that I am a Mac user (in case that wasn’t clear already). Having used Windows at home for nearly 12 years I finally went Mac last fall when it was time to upgrade my laptop (I’d been using Macs at school for digital media work for 2 years) and since then I’ve brought three more MacBooks into my house, as well as Time Capsule and several iPod Touches. I am very happy with my 13.3-inch MacBook and wouldn’t give it up for a PC if you paid me (OK, if you paid me a LOT of money I probably would, but I digress). My point is: I know computers, I’ve used and enjoyed Windows computers (although I will never remember fondly the 4.5 years I used Windows ME) and I’ve used and enjoyed Mac computers. I obviously prefer Mac as my primary computing environment right now, but I still use Windows XP on a daily basis at school and on my old laptop at home. I’ve only had the BSOD twice on my little Dell Inspiron 6000 and I’ve never had a major failure in the 3.5 years I’ve owned the machine. I’ve abused it so much I’m very surprised it is still running, so I don’t actually have a lot of bad to say about XP. I think it’s a wonderful (if not a little dated) OS.

So it’s this background that I’m coming from in saying: chill out, everyone. Seriously. Arguing about Mac vs. PC pricing might be fun (I’ve had the debate many a time) but it’s just stupid. When deciding between Mac and PC price is a consideration, yes, it may even be the primary consideration for most computer buyers (especially during a recession) but comparing Mac vs. PC on a price level or a spec-for-spec level or any kind of level is futile. It’s like comparing apples and oranges (hey! An unintended pun! Yay!): they’re both fruits (computers) and have a lot of the same properties (hardware components), but they taste different, act different, cost different, have different amounts of varieties and have different fan clubs. So Lauren has a very specific set of goals she wants in a computer. She doesn’t seem to care what OS she uses and she couldn’t find a 17-inch computer under $1000 from Apple. She found one at Best Buy with Windows on it so she bought it. So what? There’s no way to argue it around that she could have or should have gotten a Mac. She didn’t seem to need or want one. People who want a really powerful 17-inch laptop with screaming graphics and all the bells and whistles might very well end up with a MacBook or MacBook Pro but that doesn’t mean that just because Lauren wanted a 17-inch computer that she needed to buy a MacBook. She didn’t. People are yelling about how amazing the ad was because it showed somebody who “should” be a Mac Person buying a PC. Well, color me surprised that someone doesn’t fit into a random stereotype. News flash folks: PCs are still used by 88% of computer users, so I’ll bet you can find a LOT of people in that 88% of the population who “should” be using a Mac based on some arbitrary definition of “Mac users”. Do I think that some of those people might end up using Macs in the future as Mac OS gains market share? You bet! But that decision will be theirs personally based on price, hardware specs, the “coolness factor” and a host of other things. That doesn’t mean computer and OS makers shouldn’t advertise their stuff using whatever tactics they think necessary. It doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t continue to debate what computer they like and why, but I do think that people should cool it with the holier-than-thou “ye gads they used the PRICE argument” outrage. Face it folks: Windows computers, on average, are cheaper than Mac computers, and Microsoft is going to milk that for all its worth. Calm down Mac Loyalists: our OS is still gaining market share, despite the recession and the “I’m a PC” ads.

OK, climbing down from my high horse on top of my soap box now.

Cheers.

-j

Howard Tayler, as you might know, is the creator, author and artist of the truly awesome space opera webcomic Schlock Mercenary (can you tell I love this comic?). Well, yesterday he posted a news post that one of his recent story arcs (The Body Politic) was nominated for a Hugo Award (awesome, huh?) he mentioned in the post that although there are only five other nominees he doesn’t think he is going to win. Specifically he says:

I’m the only solo-act (writing and illustration all coming out of the same person.) This probably explains why everything else on the list is better illustrated and/or written than my own work. It also makes me extra super-happy to have made the ballot at all. I suppose this is what it would be like if I were going to swim in a race against Michael Phelps. No way can I beat him, but at least I made it to the pool, right?

And I want to say in response: don’t underestimate yourself, Howard. It’s been a while since I read The Body Politic (a few months, if I recall correctly) but I did a quick Google search to find out who else is nominated for this here award (you have to scroll about half-way down the page to find the Graphic Stories category) and I was intrigued to see that although I don’t think of myself as being a big graphic novel geek I had in fact read one of the other works nominated: Serenity: Better Days by Joss Whedon, Brett Matthews and Will Conrad. Now, not having read the other four works up for the award I can’t come to a hugely informed conclusion, but if the other works are near the same quality as Schlock Mercenary and Serenity I think that The Body Politic has a good chance of winning. I think that Better Days is a nice graphic story and all that, but I don’t think it’s all that much better than The Body Politic and I think the storytelling in Schlock is better (sorry, Joss).

So think positive, Howard, and don’t give up hope. You got nominated and that’s awesome, but don’t think it ends there, because if it were up to me, it wouldn’t.

Of course, it’s not up to me, so who knows what’ll happen.

Anyway.

Cheers!

-j

P.S. (2am Saturday) it would probably be best if I spelled Howard’s name correctly. I’m always thinking it’s Taylor when it’s really Tayler. Eeek. Bad me.