Gessel On…

My favorite rental cars so far.

It’s a pretty nice rental car. Pure white seems to be a bird poop magnet, but the car is fast, comfortable, and quiet.

it ranks as one of the better rentals so far; below Volvo, Audi, and (of course) the Mercedes, but still quite nice.

Hertz gave me a lovely Mercedes E350 as a free upgrade in LA this trip: definitely the best upgrade so far.

It is quite a nice car, with plenty of trunk space, and extremely quiet interior, a powerful engine, and excellent handling. The interior is clean and well designed with a nice dash that’s easy to read. In fact the entire system was fairly intuitive. I had my phone paired with the in-car audio system, the voice recognition system figured out, the nav system programmed, climate set, and my favorite Sirius classical station on the radio in the 20 minute drive from LAX to Santa Monica. It was probably the first time I’ve made that trip and arrived a little disappointed it was so brief.

Most of the interaction with the Car’s computer is through voice prompts and the system is very effective: it never made a mistake in my use. One can also navigate the cars computer options with a fairly nice click wheel, which is reminiscent of the BMW system, but without the force feedback (alas).

The Nav system in the car is excellent. It works far better than the Hertz NeverLost system (which was, inexplicably, also installed). The Mercedes version is a lot easier to read and understand and is integrated with the audio system in the car (though the announcements were painfully loud and the one thing I didn’t figure out was how to turn them down).

The computer’s visual interface also serves as the backup camera. It seems a bit superfluous on a normal sized car, but it has a good down-view, so one can see if one is about to backup over a child’s favorite toy or limb, which I suppose has merit for people who haven’t realized that most children are the free byproduct of an otherwise pleasurable activity.

I was very impressed with the iPod integration. The in-glove-box cabling includes an analog headset port (female, for reasons I do not comprehend – it should be male) and an iPod connector.

The on-screen interface is a nice integration with basic iPod functionality and the click wheel emulates the iPod’s navigation mode in a very intuitive way, unlike the Audi interface.

Mercedes even manages to push their own logo to the iPod, which is pretty impressive.

All in all, an excellent rental I’d be glad to get again.

My standing with Hz LA must be improving…

Jennifer's Body Various

We saw Jennifer’s Body at TIFF09.  It is a fun fright fest, I mean how can you go wrong with a super hot high school girl turned human-flesh eating demon who seduces boys and then rips them to shreds.  Plus, as a bonus, there is the hottest lesbian kiss in mainstream media between Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried.

Alas, while Jennifer’s body (the physical corpus) is very much worth of the general public’s lust, there’s no gratuitous nudity, not even a single breast, despite many opportunities.  There’s a single distant shot of Fox swimming naked across a lake, but otherwise more about the blood than the boobies.

In the end, the omission of fleeting nudity is forgivable as the two stars more than make up for it with a light-hearted and funny screen presence and some very sexy moments.  It was an entirely enjoyable experience.  And it was nice to see Ash.

I saw Red Riding at the Telluride Film Festival. It is a three part story of a corrupt police force in Yorkshire over three different eras, each marked by murders. As the series goes on, the weight of the unsolved crimes accumulates until it reaches a breaking point in the third, 1983.

Each movie was done by a different director, and the first, 1974, was the best.  It had the strongest story line and the best acting.  Andrew Garfield as a reporter was particularly good.  1980, about the yorkshire ripper, seemed to stand somewhat apart from the trilogy, though it did advance certain aspects of the story of police corruption.  The last, 1983, brought the trilogy to a satisfying conclusion and was certainly a powerful bit of storytelling, but I found it somewhat burdened by flashback references to the earlier movies that proved a little confusing given the complex story line.

The series was well received at Telluride and many people thought it was one of the best in the festival.  I enjoyed it very much, though I was glad I watched the whole series through in one sitting.

Quite lovely, excellent view and an exceptionally helpful staff.

This is an important question: where did Worldbeat go? Worldbeat is the essential reference for news about both Penii and angry robots. Without my weekly does of worldbeat, the world seems colder, as if the sun is hidden behind a permanent haze that just won’t clear.

Even if you don’t know Chris Watson’s worldbeat, you want it back because until you get the chance to experience Worldbeat you will never know how bright the sun shines on absurdity. Where else will you learn:

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE

In March, a 13-year-old girl sent a letter to her mother. There were, however, some problems this letter. First of all, she didn’t put a stamp on it. Secondly, her mother is dead. And third, the letter was addressed to “Paradise Street, Heaven.” Two days after she mailed the letter, it was returned to her. It came marked “unknown at this address” and with a 1.35 euro fine for the missing stamp. Everyone got all pissy at the French post office, for what was seen as its callous treatment of the girl. Nobody got all pissy at a world that tricks kids into thinking there’s a magical fantasyland where their dead parents are waiting to get mail. Nobody except Worldbeat. Because that’s what we do here.

Michael Cahill of Cambridge Beat wants to know where Chris has gone too. Where is our worldbeat? I stopped by the offices of the Echo Weekly personally and asked, but nobody there knew.

It is time to demand answers! Write the Echo and demand Worldbeat!

If you have a wordpress blog and the thought of bidirectional integration with twitter is interesting, twittertools is pretty cool.  For a long time, used KBB RSS widgets to display the RSS feed of my facebook status on my personal, unedited, why would anyone else possibly care web site (aka “blog”) and never really noticed how slow it was to retrieve the RSS feed (and maybe the facebook fave icon) but it seriously hung the page load times.   Plus FaceBook is so last month.  I mean seriously, who uses it any more?

Twitter is only so last week and while it may already be uncool, the cool phase is so short that even with rapid software development tools it is hard to build an ecosystem around the hot new technology in the two weeks between when it has enough traction to be “hot” and when it is so mainstream as to be “burned out.”

Sometime in that brief arc, twitter tools appeared and it does a couple of simple things really well:

• You can display a selectable number of your most recent tweets in your sidebar,
• You can make tweets into blog posts (why? 140 characters is a short post!),
• You can “digest” a day’s worth or a week’s worth of tweets into a post,
• You can tweet your blog entries (like this) in some format we are about to discover,
• It prefixes your tweeted blog entries with a fixed text to prevent a masturbatory circle tweet.

I messed around with twitterfeed, and that too seems cool, doing a similar thing, but it requires a third party site and I generally prefer to have my code local.