The New Olympus E-P1 "Digital Pen" Micro Four Thirds Camera

This may be the one I’ve been waiting for, the answer to my DSLR blues. So small, so powerful, so stylish. And so available by my upcoming birthday.

Official Olympus E-P1 page
DPReview in depth preview + samples
Engadget gallery w/ plenty of lust-inducing pics

Digitally manipulated photo showing what light-rail trains might look like crossing I-90.

A couple of things struck me about the above photo, found in today’s Seattle Times, as I peered closely at its details. First, those electrical power poles are really ugly. It had never occurred to me before that power poles with cable strung between them would be necessary to get light rail trains across Lake Washington, and now that I see the reality of the situation, I don’t like it. The low profile of the floating bridge is one of its best features; it distracts from the otherwise magnificent view only slightly. Adding power poles and cabling across the lake will add an unsightly grid to the horizon, no doubt spoiling the view from, say, Stan Sayres Park looking north, as well as the view south looking at beautiful Mount Rainier from Madrona. Perhaps someone with design sense will find a way to camoflague or otherwise beautify these structures.

Second, the digital artist has squeezed four lanes of westbound traffic into a space that currently only has room for three, not by magically adding concrete where there is none, but by eliminating entirely the right shoulder. Isn’t that convenient? However, there is a problem with this clever solution: cars break down on the bridge. In fact, cars break down on the bridge and pull into the right shoulder every week of the year. I’ve seen it. I’ve been driving this route for almost 18 years. If you take that shoulder away, you might as well kiss goodbye any hope of a trouble-free car commute. And from the looks of things there isn’t a full left shoulder, which means there really isn’t room to have four full lanes and a shoulder on the existing bridge.

So take this picture with a huge grain of salt.

And one more thing: I met I guy at a party recently who happened to be an engineer working on the structural retrofit of the bridge for the light rail expansion and it occurred to me to ask him, “Where else in the world are they running light rail over a floating bridge.” And he just grinned and answered, “Nowhere. No one’s done it. It hasn’t been done before.” Because, you see, there’s the problem of the expansion joints that connect the floating part to the not-floating part, and trains have real problems running over dips and such since that could throw them off their tracks. So the joints need to be redesigned. This engineer seemed pretty confident that it could be done and his firm has the designs to do it, he said. They were testing those designs already. The testing will take approximately three years.

And so it goes.

This guy is me.

But times have changed. So, I was thinking one day not too long ago, “Let’s buy a new TV for the 2008 Summer Olympics! Let’s get a big, but not too big, high-definition set! Happy family memories will be forged by this high-definition Olympic bonding experience!” And so I did my research. It was not easy or enjoyable and in the end I picked a set that looked better than the others next to it at a local Best Buy.

Now I must say that the picture quality of my new LG HDTV is spectacular. I’m using my almost-new bunny ears to receive the local high-definition broadcasts and the signal is strong. The experience would be absolutely stunning were it were not for one niggling problem: the sound is out of sync with the picture. At first I thought I was crazy. “How could the sound not be in sync? Didn’t they solve that problem back in, say, 1930? Hasn’t TV always had synchronized sound? Here, let me twiddle this thing. I’m sure I can get it back in sync if I just click a few buttons a few hundred times. There must be a setting somewhere…” No amount of twiddling could get the local broadcast stations to present their programming with perfectly synchronized sound. But wait, there’s more! The sound synchronization fluctuates!  That’s right, it goes from just a little out-of-sync to way-out-sync all by itself. And some stations are more out-of-sync than others. It’s truly amazing.

So I wrote to our local affiliates.  Here’s what one local broadcast engineer, who was kind enough to reply, had to say about the situation:

Digital audio-video synchronization has proven to be an industry-wide problem. We have been successful in syncing our house video and audio, but are still having problems with the ABC network, where some programs have lip sync issues and some don’t. Occasionally we receive from the agencies commercials that have lip sync issues. These outside sources of the problem our not under our control, except to advise them of the issue.

One aspect of this problem of which many folks are not aware is that lip sync problems can be caused by the digital decoder/receiver and its associated video display audio amplifier. Plasma screens and LCD displays have a built-in latency between audio and video because it takes more computer processing power to process the video than the audio; and it appears different with different brands of TVs and converter boxes.

We can control the amount of video-audio delay and have set audio to be within two frames of video (this is 21 msec of delay), and is good for the majority of our programming.

So it’s an “industry-wide problem” that, according to my non-exhaustive research (i.e. Googling), has existed for five years or more. And on February 19, 2009, this “industry-wide problem,” should it not be solved, will be plaguing every dinosaur TV viewer who, quite foolishly, assumed digital TV would come with synchronized sound, just like the old talkies Grandfather watched for a nickel on Saturdays during the Depression.

It’s a “get what you pay for” society and TV is no different.  Want synchronized sound with your high-definition programming?  I know a guy named Comcast who’s willing to help.

Epilogue

My primary motivation for getting an HDTV was, as I mentioned, for watching the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, which are being broadcast in high-definition by the local NBC affiliate. Luckily, the sound sync issues are not such a big deal when watching sports. HD and a big TV really do make for an Olympian viewing experience.

However, what is up with NBC’s prime time Olympic coverage? What I mean is, the schedule stinks.  I work 9 to 5, have a family, and can only watch a couple hours of commercial TV before going bonkers, so that means I’m good in front of the TV from about 8:30 to 10:30 PM.  And what has NBC been showing in that time slot all week? Beach volleyball. Oh, there’s been a smattering of gymnastics and a heat or two of swimming, all over faster than the commercial breaks, but the majority of the programming has been beach volleyball.  And is there anything more lame and less Olympian than beach volleyball?  Are we supposed to believe that beach volleyball is on par with the 400M butterfly or the decathlon? It’s ridiculous. The men’s beach volleyball competition is especially bad. These guys barely move. Most of them look like they’ll be pounding a few cold frosty ones as soon as the match is over. There just isn’t much skill or athleticism on display.

I feel sorry for all the other atheletes who are unrepresented by NBC’s prime time coverage. NBC, give us more of what’s going on in soccer, fencing, track and field, and all the other sports we may not know about instead of this horrible beach volleyball dreck.

Lee and Sachi do it again. Their specialty is taking an overly-complex subject and distilling it into it’s most salient and tangible parts. Excellent stuff.

A small particle attached to the earth during an earthquake will be moved back and forth rather irregularly. This movement can be described by its changing position as a function of time, or by its changing velocity as a function of time, or by its changing acceleration as a function of time.

Since any one of these descriptions can be obtained from any other, we may choose whichever is most convenient. Acceleration is chosen, because the building codes prescribe how much horizontal force building should be able to withstand during an earthquake. This force is related to the ground acceleration. The peak acceleration is the maximum acceleration experienced by the particle during the course of the earthquake motion. –USGS

The strongest earthquake I experienced was the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, which measured 6.8 on the moment magnitude scale and a peak ground acceleration on Beacon Hill in Seattle of 13.5 % g. By comparison, the 1994 Northridge earthquake measured a peak ground accelleration of >109 % g, the strongest measured of any urban quake in the U.S.

The moon rises over the new National Theater in Beijing Wednesday July 16, 2008. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

The Big Picture is one of my favorite new websites. Every few days developer and curator Alan Taylor publishes his latest photography finds from the news wires.  And like the title suggests, the pictures are big, bigger than you see on most sites.  I especially liked a recent collection of photos taken around Beijing as that city prepares for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

You really owe it to yourself to start using OpenDNS for three reasons: it’s free, it’ll speed up your web surfing (a little), and it will help protect you against phishing attempts, drive-by downloads, and other evil things created by the evildoers of the Internet.

The last reason is the most important, especialy now. In case you hadn’t read the news, the domain name system (DNS), which is basically the address book of the Internet, is fatally flawed. And this week an exploit was released to take advantage of this flaw. The flaw allows evildoers to “poison” a DNS server’s data with phony addresses, which allows them to “hijack” domains to make you think you’re browsing the site you see in your address bar when really your browsing the evildoer’s site. Imagine this happening to your bank’s website and you start to see the problem. Usernames, passwords, anything you enter and submit into web forms all go to the evildoer. Game over.

There are patches for the DNS flaw, but many Internet Service Providers, even the big ones like ATT, haven’t fully deployed the patches yet. OpenDNS is fully patched. So if you switch to OpenDNS now, you’ll be protected right away.

Try out OpenDNS for a week or two and see if you like it.  I bet you will.  (And, no, I’m not being paid by OpenDNS to write this. I just think it’s a great service.)