Kind of a big deal

Yeah, yeah... you are by now tired of first sentences that go something like, "I know it's been a while since I've posted, but blah blah blah." So we'll just dive right in.

First of all, Kansas won the Big 12 again. This is cool not just because it's incredibly rare for one team to win a power conference 11 times in a row, but also because it sets the stage for a Spinal Tap reference:

Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Second of all, the conference was exceptionally tough this year; some number crunching indicates it was actually the toughest conference top to bottom. And that means the Big 12 tournament, which starts next week, will be unusually fun to watch. Just about every matchup either puts two ranked teams against each other or involves general bad blood.

I'm sure this, like all memories, has become a bit sepia-toned with age. But I remember getting into a game on an early day of the 1988 Big 8 tournament to watch Oklahoma (I remember because they had Skeeter Henry) play Colorado (I remember because they had, and still have, a buffalo mascot). My dad had gotten tickets. Kemper Arena smelled of sweat and popcorn. And cheering on two teams my 12-year-old self only vaguely cared about with my dad was... awesome.

Sadly, most of the games will be on at an hour that not even an unhappy Baby Blog would care to be awake at. I'll either be watching solo, or on time delay. Either way, I'm sure there will be a stream of text messages that will give me a pretty good idea of how things went. And then it's on to the NCAA tournament.

So here's to some great basketball. This has always been my favorite time of year for sports... even before Kansas' streak started.

What's inside the box, Pandora?

As you have probably seen splashed all over the internet, Microsoft announced its Xbox One today. Here's the video that went with it:

There is a good summary of all the features here. The stuff that stands out to me--at least in terms of trying to position a product to hit as much of the market as possible--is how gaming actually seems almost like a secondary function to all the multimedia stuff it's rigged for.

It doesn't just look a little bit like a Tivo box, it's meant to BE a Tivo box, more or less. Television, music, other streamed content, Web browsing and Skype are all part of the voice-controlled package. And, of course, you can play games, although there is a little controversy about how that will work and whether there will still be a market for used games.

I have an Xbox 360 (now eight years old, somehow), but I don't play a ton. To me, video games are entertainment in the same vein of television or movies... something to do in a spare moment but not something to do all day. Mrs. Blog, who doesn't enjoy many games you can't dance to, is much less of a fan.

But she is exactly who Microsoft is taking aim at. Not only is the box sleek and unobtrusive, it is arguably more of a multimedia reciever than a gaming console. And that's an easier purchase for a non-gamer to embrace. If you can make the case to someone that they need this because they can eliminate other devices and streamline content access, then you're in good shape to expand your consumer base. There is even talk of a subsidized system, where you pay a greatly reduced price for the gear, but pay a monthly fee for Live access (and presumably streamed content therein). That, too, feels at least psychologically like a cable bill and not a means of online gaming.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Microsoft, like Apple and Google, is trying to create a device ecosystem. Whether it works depends largely on how people like Mrs. Blog react. But it should be noted that the motion-sensing Kinect is geared toward dance games.

Be careful what you wish for

Just a quick post on what "news" seems to mean to many in the 21st Century.

In the wake of the Boston bombings, the story moved fast. So fast, in fact, that several outlets reported incorrect information. Today's latest screwup seems to be CNN reporting that someone had been arrested in connection with the bombing. That turned out not to be true. Ouch.

But what is driving all this incompetence?

It's not a lack of smarts or--I hope--a lack of training. It's the desire to be at the front of the pack in reporting a story in which every detail was being followed, posted, tweeted, retweeted and blogged. The adage is that as a journalist, your goal is to get the story first but your duty is to get it right. But the pressure to lead the digital herd has, apparently, flipped that on its head.

This is not an attack on digital journalism, by the way. The Internet is where the readers are, it's where most people consume their news, and it offers a remarkable spectrum of tools for presenting that news.

And speaking of tools, the wide and instant dissemination of information creates another opportunity... and problem. The opportunity is for crowdsourcing: investigators can easily reach millions of people instantly with information, and those people can instantly reach investigators. The odds that "someone saw something" are high; with the immediacy of the Internet, it is extremely likely that such information winds up in the hands of investigators.

The problem is that crowdsourcing an investigation can quickly and easily snowball into the digital version of vigilante justice. Sites like Reddit and 4Chan, which are essentially fast-moving message boards, have  spawned conversation threads in which users have sifted through the thousands of images from April 15 and "deduced" the identities of several "suspects." (I'm not going to link to the threads for obvious reasons.)

The guy in the green vest was seen near the site of the bombings. SUSPECT!

The quotes, if it's not clear, indicate skepticism. After this New Yorker piece about a guy of Arabic origin--wounded in the blast--who was tackled while running away, it's a little disheartening to see that no one seems to have learned a goddamn thing about jumping to conclusions.

"Arabic running guy" was tackled because he looked suspicious. Suspicious, in this case, basically meant "brown." So maybe we should be a little cautious about posting pictures of people online and linking them to a fatal bombing because they were, for instance, carrying backpacks at the Boston Marathon.

It's easy for anyone these days to post about hearing "chatter" (usually code for "I read it on Twitter") or identify a "suspect" based on nothing more than what the person was wearing or carrying.

Yeah, so many scare quotes. Sorry. But these days, it's scary to see what rushing into a story can do.

Read my lips! Or don't

As a guy whose hearing, shall we put it generously, "kind of sucks," I find myself reading people's lips without even realizing I'm doing it. In noisy bars, this can come in handy. While watching sporting events, it can be amusing: no, that coach wasn't loudly telling the referee to have a great day.

And during times like these (and by that I mean near the end of a long U.S. presidential election campaign), it can be hysterical. Because even though I KNOW Jim Lehrer isn't saying "and then when he died, they had him stuffed. Like that water buffalo--stuffed." his lips sure are moving in a way that closely matches those words. It also helps that I am a sucker for absurd humor.




To put it another way, this made the presidential debate not just watchable and entertaining, but possibly even more informative than the real thing... even without sound.

A 10.0 from the Russian judge

Watching U.S. TV overseas is more complicated than you might expect. All of the major networks have IP blocks that prevent you from accessing whatever they put online if you're outside the country, and thus outside the scope of U.S. copyright laws. Many times, you can get around this by either [REDACTED] or simply [REDACTED], both of which are illegal in the U.S., but hey, you do what you have to if you want to stay current with Breaking Bad.

The sole 100 percent legal way of watching TV abroad that I'm aware of is buying episodes on iTunes if you're in a country in which iTunes sells things. (This only recently became the case in Hong Kong, for instance)

Sporting events by definition require a live feed, which can often be found on [REDACTED], [REDACTED] or [REDACTED]. For the NCAA Tournament, I used a [REDACTED], which is legal unless you're using it to pretend you're in the U.S., and therefore are allowed to view all the CBS live feeds of the games.

Of course, right now the biggest sporting event in the world is going on in London. Allegedly, there is an over-the-air channel in Hong Kong that carries coverage of the Olympics, but neither Mrs. Blog nor I have owned rabbit ears in the last decade. Our free cable service doesn't carry it. It streams free, and live, in China, but they have put an IP block on anyone outside the mainland... apparently being "part" of China doesn't apply to the People's sports programming. Thanks, guys.

NBC and the BBC have geographical limits on where you can access their online Olympic feeds.

That's where the Russians came in. After scouring the Internet last night for a working feed, I finally came across [REDACTED], Russian site that carried multiple feeds of all the events. So I got to see this...

 Durant doing what Durant does.

... in somewhat pixelated form, presented on our television via my laptop. The U.S. didn't look great in terms of picture quality OR basketball. But in the end, I guess we both won, even if only one of us played strictly by the rules.

The optician of the future

We have been watching a lot of TV these days. Some of it is entertainment--thanks to the miracle of torrenting (and the disaster that is satellite TV in the Middle East, unless you're a Marine) we have watched several complete seasons of some great shows that we missed simply by living here.

A large part of it is also, of course, news. You might have heard of a minor event called the Egyptian Revolution. Well, it most definitely was televised and streamed online... Mrs Blog and I found ourselves glued to the TV or my laptop screen more than once, watching protests convulse Cairo.

It is riveting in two dimensions. But how much would it hurt our eyes in three?

Squint hard and you can see Princess Leia.

Yeah, I get a headache just thinking about that. Not to mention the annoyance of audience members literally seeing the show from different points of view. Villains couldn't lurk in the shadows (because you could see the action from over their shoulder) and a "surprise" bunch of roses held behind the protagonist's back would be visible for the world to see.

So holography is cool and all, but maybe it's better left for things like delivering secret messages and detailing space station plans. In the meantime, we'll rely on the Internet for both news and Glee.

As I sit here watching "30 Rock"

I am once again confronted with some truly bizarre promos. When I first moved here, I noticed that "Air Force One" was being advertised as being part of "Romance Sundays." Keep in mind this is a movie about Harrison Ford cracking hijacker skulls. But it does have a scene at the end where he hugs his wife and daughter. So, awwwww, love. It's grand.

Just now I saw a medley of scenes from "Scrubs," "Ugly Betty," "Lost," "Desperate Housewives," "30 Rock" and, I think, "Die Hard" set to, naturally, "I Want It All," by Queen. It makes perfect sense.

YouTube is failing me here on that particular ad, but I did find one for Action Saturdays, or something.

You don't really get a sense of anything except that if you tune in on Saturdays, people will be blowing stuff up, shooting things and running across parked bicycles. All set to random music.