It's Alive!!! Robot Chicken does Star Wars

My wife is routinely amused and disturbed by my sense of humor. Robot Chicken is a prime example of this. Rarely does an episode fail to make me bust a gut laughing.

Robot Chicken, for those of you not initiated, is usually a 15-minute long string of short videos shown on Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim". The videos are just stop-motion animation, usually of toys and action feature, and the sense of humor driving it is just warped beyond pale. That's saying something considering the fellow shows on Adult Swim!

It's not surprising, though - one of the main guys behind it is Seth Green, who is one sick (yet funny) little puppy. Added bonus, through his work on Family Guy, Green often manages to rope Seth MacFarlane into doing voices on Robot Chicken, and both of them are master voice artists.

Now Robot Chicken has released a special half-hour parody of all things Star Wars, with guest voices from George Lucas, Amhed Best (Jar Jar Binks), Mark Hamill, Conan O'Brien, Malcolm McDowell, Hulk Hogan (!!!) and James Van Der Beek.

I bow before their superior geekdom.

If you have even a passing rememberance and/or fondness for the Star Wars movies, I highly recommend checking out this special. It's a pricelessly brilliant skewing of the Star Wars pop culture. This clip, which opens the show, really sets the tone perfectly.

Trusting your employees?

I read this article about "mystery shoppers" in hospitals in the Boston Globe this week. Interesting concept, using "fake patients" to take notes on the sly about how well a hospital/medical waiting room is serving patients.

I don't disagree with this concept. The medical profession is, in many ways, a service profession. So applying the "mystery shopper" concept to "check up on the employees" isn't an inherently bad thing. And if done correctly, I would choose to believe that employees would welcome the feedback; it could lead to needed resources being allocated to a poor-scoring office. And sometimes we just don't realize that something we're doing is being taken in a bad way by others. I know I'm mighty far from perfect so I kinda welcome the occasional dope-slap like this.

But at the same time, it's hard to get away from the feeling that this is management showing a marked lack of trust in their employees' ability to do their jobs. And if management uses this as an excuse to scapegoat the front desk, it could really undermine those workers and make for a lousy work experience.

The article in question did touch on this issue:

Brigham and Women's Hospital, however, will not mystery shop its employees. "Is it a little devious, a little misleading to staff, and how would they react?" said Dr. Michael Gustafson, vice president for clinical excellence.

But for a two-page article that barely scratched the surface...I do wish a little more attention had been paid to it.

God I'm SUCH a Red Sox Fan

We've got a 9.5 game lead in the AL East.

Our interleague record is already 5 - 2 (last year was 16 - 2, IIRC)

And yet all I can think of is "We're only beating these NL teams by a run or two...we're gonna get clobbered in July!"

I swear, members of the Red Sox Nation are physically incapable of not worrying. We're ALWAYS convinced the Olde Towne Team is one step away from total implosion. What's WRONG with us?!?
:-)

UPDATE 6/15/07: Apparently, after last night's loss, I'm not the only one starting to worry. Although at least I'm cheered by this funny video of Roger Clemens in 2057. And hopeful that lying slimeball Barry Bonds will get beaned every time he's at bat this weekend in the Fenway.

Sportscasting and RBDS

Recently I had a chance to catch a Sox game on their Rhode Island outlet, 103.7 WEEI-FM. Interestingly, I thought the audio quality was "better" on their Boston AM outlets...680 WRKO-AM and 850 WEEI-AM...but the real nice thing is that WEEI-FM uses RDS to show what the score is and what inning it is.

I can't speak for other baseball teams, but the Sox announcers have a pathological aversion to announcing the score and the inning as part of their play-by-play commentary. Pretty much the only time you hear it is at the beginning and end of each inning...which could be a long time to listen depending on how good/bad the pitchers are that day. Drives me absolutely bonkers when I just want a quick update as to what the blankety-blank score is!

I've long suspected this is intentional...it's a clever way to get people listening to become invested in listening. They sit there, waiting for the score, long enough to interrupt whatever else they were doing...and that means they're more likely to listen during the commercial breaks.

Still drives me bonkers, though. And the RDS provides some nice relief from that.

But I wonder...in this age of multiple "data streams" hitting us media consumers all at once (just tune to any cable news TV channel and there's a talking head, a powerpoint slide, an animated graphic, and at least one news crawler at the bottom of the screen) I wonder if the style of game announcing will suddenly and radically change as the "old school" sportscasters retire and the newer breed fills their shoes. With a new mandate from corporate, no doubt.

I'd be curious to see if there's an actual strategy for a "new way" to announce sports games being formulated as we speak by program directors at sports stations.

I Respect an Honest Company

Okay, this is just random silliness, but here's a cameraphone image of a charter (presumably) bus I saw on Boylston Street this Saturday. The "destination" screen reads "I'M LOST / DON'T FOLLOW ME"

Ya know, I respect a company that's honest. And hell, the roads in Boston are pretty confusing...

Directed Electronics drives into the car HD Radio market

The "broadcaster's buy" from iBiquity in early 2007 included a new offering to the HD Radio tuner market: the Directed Electronics DMHD-1000 "car connect" radio. It's an "add on" tuner designed to work with your existing car radio. Overall I'd say it's a mixed bag: it has some good things, and it has some not-so-good things.

First a little description of the radio: the actual tuner/converter box is about the size of a small paperback book, meant to be hidden behind the dash or under a seat. A small, wired, display/control unit is barely bigger than the (mostly redundant) remote control that also comes with the unit.

Rounding out the package are a wiring harness for power (with nice, long wires), some extra fuses, the equipment manual and two RF jumper cables with Motorola plugs so you can install the tuner in-line with your existing antenna. The latter is especially nice as it avoids the growing problem of Part 15 transmitters (for iPods and whatnot) causing interference to licensed stations.

The user interface (UI) is pretty good. There's not much "hidden" in the menus; most every function has a button you can find by touch. The radio has five preset buttons but uses a "bank" button to cycle through four rounds of presets, for twenty total. The display is a black LCD characters with an amber backlight. The dimmer & contrast settings are good – you can run the dimmer from very bright (suitable for daylight) to very dim (or even off). Contrast is flexible enough to handle most any viewing angle.

Like any good engineer, I like to see how intuitive the design is by working without reading the manual. I found I didn't need to check it for anything; the installation was pretty intuitive, save for one big exception I'll come back to. After my tests, I browsed through the manual (PDF) and found it to be reasonably well-written. The last page had a ton of interesting (albeit, somewhat cryptic) specifications, such as “1st adjacent rejection” (SNR=60dB at D/U = -25dB) and “post-detection bandwidth” for DBB (Adjustable from 8kHz down to 3.5kHz). See my blog for the full list of specs. Finally, there’s no visual indication of it, but the DMHD does seem to decode C-QUAM AM Stereo based on my listening tests.

Good morning Mr. Phelps
My greatest challenge (if I chose to accept it) with this review is that I live in the city, so I don't own a car. I had to borrow a friend's car, install the DMHD, drive around listening for the day, and uninstall it…leaving no trace. Ten years ago, the wiring on many car radios would've made this impossible…but today it was no sweat.

The test vehicle was a 2006 Ford Escape SUV that, by chance, also had a similar-styled XM satellite radio tuner. A little struggling with a DIN tool popped out the factory radio, the in-line RF modulator installed in less than a minute, and I jury-rigged the three power wires to a cigarette lighter adapter. In less than 30 minutes I was on the road.

Downtown Boston is notorious for multipath, intermediate-frequency and blanketing interference. As expected, the HD Radio signal really shined here; as soon as HD blended in, all the pops, hiss and clicks just disappeared. The XM satradio's RF modulator also co-existed nicely with the DMHD.

I did notice that for HD listening, the radio isn't quite as sensitive as I'd prefer, but it’s not bad. Large FM stations were no trouble, but smaller Class A FM stations have inherently low HD wattages, and they seem more susceptible to being "lost in the noise floor" on this radio. Analog reception was acceptable; there weren't any places where the Escape's OEM radio was getting noticeably better FM reception than the DMHD. AM listening is tougher since we only have three stations transmitting HD in Boston, but the DMHD didn’t seem to have any particular trouble acquiring a digital signal from any of them.

All-in-all, I wouldn't consider it "dynamite" radio for reception…but it's far from "deaf". Your average listener shouldn’t notice a significant difference in reception between the DMHD and most OEM car radios, nor with your average HD Radio car tuner.

Keep your eyes on the road!
DMHD handles HD Radio PSD (Program Service Data) quite well; the display is not large, but the design & layout of the text makes the most of it. The “status bar” along the bottom edge will always contain critical info like call letters and preset bank.

The rest of the display can be cycled through several modes by the DISP button, and exactly what gets shown depends heavily on what the station is transmitting…in either HD or RBDS. It can be call letters, frequency, a slogan, artist/title, etc. If no HD PSD, or more generic PAD (Program Associated Data), is available the radio defaults to some combination of call letters and/or the frequency. Overall, I found most every mode was useful. A nice touch is the HD "program guide" mode which shows the current artist/title for all the multicast channels at the same time.

However, with RBDS I have one big criticism of PAD on this radio. If there is dynamic PS (Program Service name), as many stations have…each time the PS refreshes it resets the RT (Radio Text) field’s scrolling to the beginning. This means much of the RT field may never get displayed.

Wait, isn’t this supposed to sound better?
Another big gripe immediately appeared when I tried to use the RCA line-level outputs: serious distortion! It sounded badly over-driven, although it got somewhat better as the tuning unit got warmer. A second and third DMHD proved to have the same problem. A call to Directed's tech support said I just return it for an exchange, but a colleague at iBiquity told me the solution he stumbled across: you have to ground the tuning unit's chassis (or in some cases, try grounding one of the RCA's shields). This is in addition to the ground wire on the power connector. I suspect many people will never even notice since they'll bolt the tuning unit to something metal behind the dash. But there's no specific mention of this in the manual, and if you don't ground it – the sound is inexplicably awful on the RCA outputs.


Conclusions
It’s hard to get around the problems with the RCA outputs…and the lack of documentation, or viable tech support about it, is disappointing. This is something I can see the average user immediately demanding a refund for their “broken” radio. The strange behavior of PAD from RBDS was also minor, but annoying and highly visible. And the tuning unit gets quite warm, although at least the documentation warns about this.

In addition, with an MSRP of $200 the DMHD1000 unfortunately has come out right at the same time Walmart announced that they’re selling the JVC KD-HDW10 car radio for $190. Of course, the JVC is a replacement radio; if you want to keep your existing car radio, the DMHD might be a good pick.


THUMBS UP:* Small and well-designed control unit
* Decent signal sensitivity
* In-line RF modulator (instead of free-radiating)
* Easy installation

THUMBS DOWN:
* RCA outputs sound terrible unless grounded & manual doesn't mention it
* RBDS doesn't display properly
* Tuning unit gets quite hot

MSRP: $200
Website: http://www.directed.com/Products/MobileAudio/HDRadio.aspx
Manual: http://www.radiolink.org/blog/dmhd1000manual.pdf
Specifications (from the manual): http://www.radiolink.org/blog/dmhd1000specs.txt
Thanks to David Maxson & Lew Collins of Isotrope, LLC for their assistance!

Mall of America

I was in Minneapolis this weekend, and my hotel was almost across the street from the Mall of America.

Words fail me.

Actually, after visiting it, I was somewhat impressed. Yes, it's disgustingly huge...four tall floors of consumerism about a mile from the airport. But if you're going to have that, at least do it right...and I'd say the MOA is "done right".


It's basically every "mall store" you can imagine all packed into one giant building. Granted, most of these mall stores are the usual "overpriced crap you don't really need" kind of store, but at least it's got ALL of them under one roof.


Even better, the whole thing wraps around a sizable amusement park...complete with two roller coasters, two water flume rides, trampolines, and a variety of other carnival-esque rides. Plus the Lego store (and several "play stations" for kids to make Lego creations). Everything you need to keep the kids occupied while you get your shopping done.

Also smart, the area where the MOA is located isn't very residential at all...there's little out there besides the airport, the airport hotels, some office parks, some industrial plants, a giant IKEA store, and the intersection of two major roadways...I-494 and MN Rt. 77.



I didn't buy anything but some funnel cake while I was in there. But at least I can say I was at the Mall of America. :-) That's me with the amusement park area in the background. Pepsi is apparently a major sponsor.

---

While I'm on the subject, I'd like to give a tip of the hat to the Twin Cities for being confident enough in their drivers and their overall roadway infrastructure that they can just shut down the main north-south highway between Minneapolis and the southern suburbs (and the airport) for the weekend. It was a mild pain in my butt, but overall having I-35W closed from 10pm Friday thru Sunday (to tear down an overpass to widen it) was not a big deal. The news covered it, there were ample detour signs...the traffic was a little worse than usual, but nothing hideous.

I remember when the DNC came to Boston in 2004, and they shut down I-93 through the city. What a giant mess that was. Actually it wasn't a mess, but only because they scared the crap of everyone for five months beforehand, and half the city went on vacation far, far away. The fact that Minneapolis pulled this off is a testament to the logical layout of their city, and the overall intelligence of the transportation planners.

The Skyways throughout the city are pretty damn cool, too. Why can't Boston have them?

Brand Management

A nifty blog called "Websnark" had a great discussion of "brand management" recently. Just yesterday I had cause to reflect on this. I was visiting Minneapolis and my rental car happened to have Sirius satellite radio. I was getting my weekly WWDTM fix and during the "commercial" break Sirius ran a promo for the Sirius "Patriot" Channel, which is their conservative talk channel. And this was your typical "We're here to stop liberals from destroying America" promo. Literally, I think the promo guy actually said that once.

Now I'm not going to lie here...my politics skew pretty liberal/progressive. So yeah, I don't like conservative talk - it's typically ultra-right wing. It gets my blood pressure rising quite a bit, but what really got my goat in this case was that I was hearing on the NPR Now channel on Sirius!! This is, by any definition, a massive failure of brand management!

While I, and many others, think the "ultra left wing" label that NPR often gets slapped with is, to put it mildly, rather undeserved. It's far more centrist these days, with perhaps some liberal/leftist leanings. So most of its listeners are probably not going to be conservative talk radio fans, so why the heck was Sirius running "Patriot" promos on the NPR channel?

It's certainly not going to "broaden their listening horizons"...at best it's going to make them wonder what the heck is going on. At worst they'll shut their radios off. While that might not matter too much to Sirius since subscribers pay whether the radio's on or off...it should matter to NPR. Contract or no contract, it looks bad for NPR to have this exact-opposite programming popping up in the middle of their flagship entertainment program.

To paraphrase Websnark: bad promo manager! No donut!