Today I received the Amazon Kindle 2 in the mail. I bought it refurbished, for just $110 (US Edition, there’s also a Global Edition). The Kindle is along the iPad among the best book reading devices. Truth is, I don’t read much, since I can’t focus (apparently a problem that has become worse in the last few years).

So for me, the Kindle has another major feature that it’s indispensable — if you’re willing to put up with some of its shortcomings. That feature is FREE, unlimited 3G Internet access, FOR LIFE.

Unless Amazon removes the feature somehow, the Kindle 2 comes with a web browser (under the “experimental” menu). Kindle’s Netfront web browser is definitely not as good as the likes of Webkit on the various modern smartphones, but it’s still good enough, and fully operational, for basic web browsing and emailing.

Personally, when I’m using my phones via WiFi, I only browse to very few web sites, the ones that form the skeleton of my internet experience. They’re mostly general news, tech news, and emailing web sites. So by using their mobile pages, I was able to get the same experience on the Kindle as I’d get from my smartphones. I don’t feel I’m missing out here, because even when using my smartphones via WiFi, I still prefer mobile pages, for browsing speed, and lesser bandwidth consumption.

So these are the sites I generally use when on the go, and apparently they work great on the Kindle:
- Mobile.osnews.com
- i.engadget.com
- m.gizmodo.com
- m.digg.com
- m.cnn.com
- m.io9.com
- slashdot.org/palm
- m.facebook.com
- mobile.twitter.com
- https://mail.google.com/mail/x/ (mobile version)
- https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ (lite desktop version)
- This blog

My 1-year pay-as-you-go phone service with my cellular provider is about to expire soon, so I was pondering if I should get an iPhone, or a Samsung Galaxy S, along a 2 year contract with “unlimited” data. However, that would cost me thousands of dollars, when I can just go for another $100 pay-as-you-go service for 1 more year (I don’t call a lot via my cell — I still have $50 left after a whole year), and then use the Kindle as my “data” device. For the rest of my sporadic calls, I use either Google Voice when at home, or my landline directly, or Skype when calling my mom.

Would it be a better experience if I had a smartphone and/or an iPad instead? The answer is yes. However, since my online needs are not major and I don’t do a lot of calls, it makes no sense to pay for things that I don’t really need just because “they look better on a colorful screen”.

The user experience I get from the Kindle reminds me of my old monochrome Palm PDA. I was using the offline browser Avantgo with it, or my infrared-based modem (the PDA would create a dial-in networking connection via infrared — these were the days). However, the Kindle is still better: the browser is better than what we had back then, it has a bigger screen, a hardware keyboard, and a real 3G connection. And if I had bought the Global Edition of the Kindle, I’d have Internet almost everywhere in Europe too, for free.

So overall, it kicks ass. Internet on the go, free of charge. Sure I have to put up with a gray screen, but it works.

The fact that “water” is the next “oil” is not well understood by most people. They don’t realize that in the next 40-50 years water will be so expensive, that many will perish for not having access to it — just like they do today in Africa.

In fact, many people think that Africa doesn’t have clean water because “there’s no water there, it doesn’t rain often”. This is a huge mistake. The reason why Africans don’t have potable water is because all their clean water is sold to corporations by their governments (in order to pay national debt). The water is pumped out and sold back to Africans for a stupendously high price. Africans are poor (for similar corporation-theft reasons), and so they simply can’t afford to buy clean water. So they have to just use whatever dirty water they can find near their villages.

This is what is going to happen to Greece in the next 30 years too. I remember when I was a kid that the river Acherontas was full of water, even in Summer. These days, it only has a few streaks of water in it, and very few eels/fish survive. When my mom was a kid she remembers even more water in that river!

Greece has already water shortages during summer, but things are going to get worse. The government has put on sale its water stakes in order to pay for debt (exactly what happened to African countries).

Water shortages happen because of dams which disrupt the flow and flora, over-consumption, bottling & exportation, de-forestation, and because of city asphalt, which drives water to the sea instead of its natural cycle of soil/clouds/soil. This makes the planet a DESERT. In a few years Greece will officially be a desert. But it doesn’t stop there. Because there is no water anymore under the soil, the Earth’s crust cracks. And when that happens, big earthquakes happen. And big sinkholes too, out of nowhere.

We are killing our planet and ourselves. If this continues, one of the first “developed” countries that will die in the upcoming “World Water Wars”, is Greece.

A few months ago there was an uproar in Greece about the prospects of selling Greek islands in order to pay for debt. I can tell you right here that selling a few small Greek islands is MUCH MORE APPROPRIATE than selling even more water to the big water corporations (the biggest ones are Vivendi, Nestle (Κορπή), RWE, Suez, Thames Water, Coca Cola (Άυρα), and Pepsi). In fact, most of the existing water contracts should be canceled, or re-written.

Greeks, visit your local government representatives. Ask them to not sell the Greek water. Do they want to privatize other parts of the system, e.g. Olympic Airways? Part of the health care system? That’s cool, I’m all for capitalism. But don’t do that with the water too. The water should be a human right and a common good. Water bottling companies can continue to exist as long as they play with specific rules and they DO NOT suck dry rivers and lakes. There have to be limits in their commerce.

Everyone must watch the following documentary (in 9 parts). Don’t you dare not watch it.

Wired posted the other day an interview with label exec Tom Silverman, titled “What’s Wrong With Music Biz, per Ultimate Insider”. In this blog post I will try to show why the guy is wrong. And too late.

Tom basically advocates that the solution to the music industry’s decline is this: setup new LLC companies for each artist, and share everything 50-50 with the artist from the profits. The difference with the old model is that the artist now will be supposedly receiving more money, and because everyone in that company will work together, and towards a single goal, the career can be crafted more carefully.

On the surface, it seems that Tom wants to help the artists and the labels by creating a situation that’s more fair. And that’s a step in the right direction. However, what Tom fails to realize is that the world is changing towards not needing labels at all anymore. He’s trying to save his business, in a world where his whole profession is going to go extinct.

When Tom was asked about why Sweden was the ONLY country in the world with sustained physical sales, he said: “If it were the music, you’d know that there were three groups that were all the equivalent of Abba that came out last year, but there were not. [...] Where are the Swedish numbers coming from?”

And that’s Tom’s big problem to gasp the truth: he thinks in terms of super-stars. He believes that if there are no super-stars, there are no sales. If Tom knew anything about music today he’d know that the most innovative country in terms of music today, apart from the USA, is Sweden. Here’s a country of just 9 million people which has had over 30 major acts in the indie scene last year. Acts that made the jump to this side of the pond too. They might not be in the Billboard top-5 like ABBA got in the ’70s, but they are many, and they are leaving a mark. A mark that actually influences a lot of US musicians. As I wrote on Twitter a few months back: the Swedes are coming. Be aware of the Swedes. They know how to write NEW, good, music. And they’re having Pitchfork’s blessing too. All this innovation makes the Swedish people go out and buy music. Because the bulk of their music is good.

Tom said: “Back in the early ’80s, when the cellphone was first invented, there were more artists breaking on their own, with no technology, than they are now, with technology.”

This is not true. Back then you were either with a label, or you didn’t exist. You’d be lucky if you could work on weddings or in cruise ships.

Tom said: “80 percent of all records released are just noise — hobbyists”.

So we rather limit art creation and personal expression just so Tom can have a yaught and no competition?

“Who uses Photobucket and Flickr? Not professional photographers — those are hobbyists”.

FlickR has some amazing pictures in it, some of them better than pro photographers. The part that Tom fails to understand is that technology has made musicianship a COMMODITY. Just like what digital cameras did to the photographic art (both my brothers in law did not use pro photographers for their wedding for example).

“79,000 releases that sold under 100 copies. Under 100 copies is not a real release — it’s noise, an aberration.”

So you’re saying that these ~5 million copies should not be counted in the overall sales numbers of the music industry? Because these guys are not part of your industry?

“I guess you could put toxic gases in it and maybe that would change the environment. I guess what they do in China is they find a way to filter it, to prevent certain kinds of sounds from going through. That’s a way that they could change it. Deep packet inspection could possibly change the fluidity or the transmission properties of the medium.’

Wo-wo-wo… If I’m reading this correctly, Tom says that free or indie music should be filtered out from the consumer. And bringing China into the discussion, it kind of makes me think that he would love to make it illegal for people to give away their music, or even release it! And of course I’m saying this with the context of the recent ASCAP bullshit happenings, where they want to kill Creative Commons!

And this is a major point. First, the labels went against the consumers. When this failed, now they go against the real competition, the indie artists. They figure, if they can stop music from ever being free or easy to make, or easy to market, people will have to buy again from a limited selection of artists.

Nice try.

“The songs on Susan Boyle’s record are forgettable, and her performance is just okay. There are a million singers who can sing that well at least. It’s just the story that sold it.”

Here we go again with the star system. Tom seems “jealous” of the Boyle phenomenon. Boyle is just that, a phenomenon. Boyle is not an artist. She is just someone with a nice voice, and that’s it. Indeed, what sold her records was the story behind it. However, we should not forget that the human race gets smarter with every passing day. People I socialize with, usually software engineers, don’t listen to Boyle. Not only they don’t listen to her, but they don’t bother with her. They don’t watch her on Youtube, and they definitely don’t buy her record.

Maybe today a good story still sells. But for how long this will last? Young people are getting over the star-system. They’re getting over the drama sold by Hollywood. They don’t care if Lohan will go to jail, and they don’t buy her music either. Instead, they buy music from some obscure Brooklyn band, with no “story”.

Sure, sometimes I do read Perez Hilton myself, but only to laugh at these idiotic actors and singers who have everything one would ever wish and they still manage to screw up their lives. Rest assured I don’t buy their movies or their music. I read Perez’s site the same way I read the LOLcats site.

So again, hunting “the next Boyle” will only get you so far. Maybe it will give you another 10, or 50 years of business. But it’s not a sustainable strategy for the long run either. Simply because you can’t base your success on selling the personal stories of people, and the ignorance of the consumers. At some point, consumers will get smarter, and will simply demand better music rather than a good story.

This is why all the American Idol artists have failed and have lost their contracts. Because none of them was a real artist. They were singers, who were given pre-cooked songs to sing, and all they were selling was image. Well, this doesn’t work in the new world order anymore. Not among my kind of people anyway. And we’re getting more and more everyday.

Silverman’s proposal is too little too late. The idea of setting up an LLC for each act is not a bad one, but getting 50% off of it for setting it up is. Sure, venture capitalists have similar percentages when they invest to start-ups, but there’s usually some serious, expensive technology involved in that case. In the case of music, everything is relatively cheap. A new artist doesn’t need more than $250k to break it if he’s good (this includes staff, van, instruments, album mastering, booking, distribution, PR/marketing). And if an artist can work his way around on a few things, the only thing he might need is PR (e.g. Blitzen Trapper in 2007). Nothing else. Music videos you say? I shot at least three good music videos for $0, so I know what can be done with limited resources.

It’s interesting that Silverman is proposing this idea now that CD sales are down. You see, today, the only way for an artist to make money is to tour. So Silverman is now trying to get some of this touring money too, before it’s too late too. I’m pretty sure the artist will still be screwed at the end, especially if he’s not very successful.

So what’s the solution?

As I explained in the past, there is no solution. The music industry will die. But music won’t die. Hobbyists will carry the trends alive. But there won’t be “stars” anymore. Most of these artists will give away their music for free, and the best ones will also tour, and make a modest living out of it. The rest, will just record on their leisure, from their bedroom or their mother’s basement, release these works for free, and they will make sure they won’t stay up too late, because there would be lots of work at the office tomorrow.

No, this new world order won’t make music quality worse. Many popular acts today started off by recording, mixing and mastering their shit on their bedroom (again, Blitzen Trapper comes to mind, Wavves, Wild Nothing, Memory Tapes, Deerhunter etc). Also, technology will evolve to find easily the type of music we want to hear: just like FlickR makes it easier to find specific pictures. But the labels, and paying for most music, are concepts that will disappear. It’s rather simple, really.

I suggest to Tom to get out of this industry as there’s still time. Sell the company, move to a nice home in the suburbia, live the rest of your life happy with your family, get a hobby, and invest again only if you have to.

…so far, in my opinion:

ALBUMS:

1. Broken Bells – Broken Bells
2. Wild Nothing – Gemini
3. Phantogram – Eyelid Movies
4. The Morning Benders – Big Echo
5. Beach House – Teen Dream
6. Surfer Blood – Astro Coast
7. 22-20s – Shake / Shiver / Moan
8. Neon Trees – Habits
9. Yeasayer – Odd Blood
10. Local Natives – Gorilla Manor

Most over-hyped:
1. Vampire Weekend – Contra
2. The Black Keys – Brothers
3. MGMT – Congratulations

Biggest disappointment:
1. Blitzen Trapper – Destroyer of the Void

Fun fact: Broken Bells’ and Wild Nothing’s albums are the only albums where ALL the tracks have 5 stars ratings from me. There’s not a single weak track in these two albums.

TRACKS:

1. Beach House – Norway
2. Broken Bells – The High Road
3. Wild Nothing – Confirmation
4. Surfer Blood – Harmonix
5. 22-20s – Latest Heartbreak
6. Phantogram – When I’m Small
7. Scanners – Salvation
8. Tame Impala – Solitude Is Bliss
9. Laura Veirs – Wide-Eyed, Legless
10. Neon Trees – In the Next Room

Runner up:
Ke$ha – Take it Off [I'm serious, it's a great dance track]

Fun fact: When I first heard Beach House’s “Norway”, I hated it. In fact, I tweeted about how much fucked up it was (I made a joke about their “broken keyboards”). Now, every time I hear it, it wakes up my romantic side and almost makes me cry.

The brand new Sony PS3 firmware that was released tonight comes with a built-in video editor. It is able to edit in real time HDV, AVCHD, and [almost] dSLR h.264 footage.

First, you have to copy your video files in the internal hard drive. If you already have video files there, you will have to re-copy them, because the files must be copied with firmware 3.40 or newer (this firmware copies more needed attributes).

HDV and AVCHD files will work out of the box. If your footage is dSLR/digicam MOV h.264 files, then you must pass them via a re-wrapping utility, to make them MP4. Take note, this is NOT a re-encoding. Re-wrapping simply changes the container from MOV to MP4, without re-encoding. It’s done in mere seconds, and it has zero loss in quality. I usually do mine with Quicktime Pro, or MPEG Streamclip, or a DOS script utilizing ffmpeg, or mp4box and mencoder.

The easiest way is with MPEG Streamclip, but it doesn’t save the audio along. Google it, download it, install it, load it. Then click “List” from its menu, “Batch list”, “Add Files…”. Using your mouse or the SHIFT key in your keyboard, select all the files you want re-wrapped from MOV to MP4. Select “Open”. In the next dialog that pops up, select “Save As” from the drop-down menu, then the “Ok” button. Then select a folder to save the new MP4 files, and click “Ok” again. From the new dialog that pops up, select “MP4″ from the drop-down menu, and then “Ok”. Then, select “Go” from the main dialog, to begin the re-wrapping process.

If you do want to keep the video’s audio, use Quicktime Pro (exporting the files one by one: use the MPEG-4 exporting option, and use “passthrough” for the video, and AAC 192 kbps for audio), or write a batch script that uses FFmpeg (e.g. ffmpeg -i input.mov -vcodec copy -acodec libfaac -ac 2 -ar 44100 -ab 192k output.mp4).

Then, copy the created .MP4 files on your PS3. I do it via the TwonkyMedia UPnP server, but you can use an SD/CF card too, or a burned DVD disc (with your files in it, not DVD video), or another DLNA/UPnP server.

Then from the “Video” XMB PS3 menu go up, and find the Video Editor option. Create a new project and “Add” your video files in it. Then follow the on-screen instructions to edit the videos. Usability is not stellar, but it works, and it’s super-fast. There are about 15 pre-installed music tracks to select from for your video, and there’s a text, and speed-up/slow-motion ability too.

At the end, you’re given the option to create a new MP4 file, or to upload to Youtube/Facebook. Unfortunately, we’re not given the opportunity to export to HD. All uploads are in 640×480 resolution, at 29.97 fps. For widescreen videos, the 1.333 aspect ratio is attached to the VGA resolution. The PS3 and the VLC players support that aspect ratio flag, and your widescreen-edited video will playback in widescreen, but Quicktime won’t recognize the flags and it will display your video squashed. I haven’t tried Youtube/Facebook about if they recognize the widescreen flag properly. Leave a comment if you tried it.

Quality of the saved video is very good: 2 mbps h.264 MP4, and 128 kbps AAC. It’s at least DVD quality. And exporting is very fast: 40 seconds of my edited video, took only about 30 seconds to encode!

Anyways, if Sony gives us the ability to export at different resolutions, frame rates, bitrates, and possibly add the [dreaded] support for the MOV container and the Canon audio dSLR/digicam format, they’ll have a winner. But even as it is now, it can really be of much help to people who have a camera and a PS3 but no video editor on their PC, or their video editor is too slow for their camera’s format. The PS3’s CELL CPUs really fly in video editing.

Since my husband lost so much weight recently by following a loose version of the South Beach diet, a lot changed: we planted a garden, trying to grow our own vegetables, and I started following a similar food regime as well: a lower carb diet, with more vegetables in it. Doing so even helped my health issue somewhat: instead of getting sick every second or third day, it was reduced to once a week. Obviously an improvement.

JBQ and I have been joking that the traditionally accepted food pyramid is one of the reasons that America is obese. Also, I was reading lately that the Mediterranean diet is one of the healthiest in the world. Cretans are among the peoples with the best health in the world, apparently.

In fact, prior to 1985 (the ’80s was the decade that Greece became “modern”), I don’t remember anyone in my vicinity to die of cancer. And yet, as time goes by, I hear of cancer for people I know in Greece more and more. In the olden days, that was something very rare. I personally attribute a good chunk of the blame to the food changes. Back in the day I remember myself eating wild or other vegetables, and beans, 6 days out of the 7. We usually had meat every Sunday. Then, the ’80s came, a lot of the EU “free money” was spent (in good and bad ways), and everyone started eating more meat, and more junk products.

Now, don’t get me wrong. We probably had a protein deficiency back then (although some of the vegetables we ate, like wild amaranth, were rich in protein too). But the point remains, I feel that our diet back then was better than what it is now. Less crap in the shelves (hell, there were no shelves).

So in the last few days I tried to create another food pyramid, one that I personally believe is more proper for hommo sapiens (no, I’m not a dietitian or a doctor btw — just a good observer). A pyramid that takes into account the ancient people, and the way they evolved, the new theories about bad carbs (that now are getting proven, I was reading recently), the studies about how good olive oil is, and how I felt way back then, and now. Basically, this food chart is a mix of personal experience & knowledge — which could be way off, but so far, it works for me: I’ve lost weight, and I feel healthier.

Much healthier than my very-low-calorie diet (if you remember that one, which I blogged about it too). At the end of my VLCD I lost half of my hair. And I was always hungry throughout the 3 months I managed to live at 900 calories a day. With this new diet (which is not an actual weight loss diet, but a lifestyle change), I eat like a cow — and I lose weight.

Some clarifications:

- The basic principle is: don’t overdose on anything. Even when we have to eat vegetables every day, have a selection of veggies, not a full plate of the same vegetable. Our progenitors didn’t have a giant broccoli for lunch. They most probably had a bit of this, and a bit of that, whatever they could find. Therefore, we evolved in a way where overdosing EVEN for “good” foods is probably bad for us.

- You noticed that I don’t value wheat/corn products a lot. That’s for two reasons: First, flour products are not exactly natural. You can’t find flour in the wild, you will have to make it, after heavily processing it (and processed food is not very natural). Also, we can get their minerals and vitamins from other sources too. Plus, there’s a high-fiber bran cereal in my chart, which can offer all the vitamins and gluten one needs. I started eating this cereal. It’s very good, except the added aspartame. Alternatively, go for added-fiber wholewheat bread. But avoid pasta — wholewheat of not. Pasta is even more processed, and it’s impossible to eat in small quantities (spaghetti bolognese would look silly without enough pasta in it).

- Regarding animal meat, the best would be eating it only once a week. But I think my JBQ likes his steaks, so it’d be difficult to not cook it more for him. Fish 2-3 times a week is a must though, I’d say.

- Regarding sugary products, e.g. desserts, it’s best to make them yourselves, to ensure that you’re using the best ingredients. Use agave nectar instead of actual sugar, but still, not very often. There’s no better dessert than a fruit salad (add a bit of natural orange juice), or a smoothie (blend frozen fruits, with a little bit of natural orange juice — again, no sugar is required). All the sugar one needs can be found in fruits. So there’s no reason for a lot of added sugar, or its substitutes.

- Raw root vegetables are OK, e.g. carrots. Cooked root vegetables are ok too, but not too often, and not at high doses. E.g. a small potato is ok, but giant jacket potatoes twice+ a week are not. I admit, this is mostly a keep-the-weight-off tactic more than a healthy one though. Root vegetables are not “bad”.

- Dark chocolate is fine (75% of cocoa or above).

A new direction

My new favorite thing is gardening. Which I possibly enjoy more than video.

I grew up literally next to a large vegetable & flower garden, but I didn’t try it for myself until 2 months ago. You’d think that coming from a place where everyone has their own vegetable garden I’d be well-trained for it, but truth is, I didn’t like the idea much until recently (mostly after my husband started following healthier diet last March). The feeling of seeing something growing day by day is beautiful: the plants almost feel like children.

The idea

I started with a pot of parsley, but I now I have also planted tomatoes, zucchinis, mix of salads, radishes, basil, oregano, spearmint, and bell peppers. I’m also expecting in the mail some celery seeds (not the Utah variety found in the US, but one that grows and looks like parsley, same as the one I grew up with), and runner beans (“μπαρμπούνια για φασολάκια). I’m also planning on growing thyme, marjoram, sage, garlic chives, and possibly mache & a small rosemary bush (that my JBQ seems to be fond of). These plants really don’t need much work: possibly about 5 minutes a day, to water them. And since our apartment doesn’t have much sun, 5 minutes every 2-3 days feels more accurate.

I have a rule of thumb. Basically, I’m growing everything that I always need a little bit of, but I can only buy in big quantities here in California, costing me a lot of money, and ending up with half the product in the garbage. Fresh herbs well-fit in that category. I usually need a tiny bit of basil or salad for a dish, but I have to buy big quantities, since these are usually sold in bunches, and then we end up throwing away half of it, since it would usually go bad within a few days in the fridge. Bell peppers also fit in this category, since they cost about $1 each, here in the Bay Area. Eggplants don’t fit in this category, since they take their sweet time to grow, and they can be bought individually at super markets anyways, at reasonable prices. So my goal is to eliminate costs, by growing by myself small portions of what I need.

Another aspect is that some of the plants I want to grow can not be found easily in the US. For example mache, green amaranth, Amsterdam celery, fresh “flat” runner green beans, are all super-rare (or too expensive).

The “fresh” and “organic” aspect in all this is secondary for me, since our local market actually has pretty fresh vegetables. Freshness and ripeness is more important for bigger plants, like tomatoes, I guess.

I have already harvested salads, basil, parsley and spearmint for my daily cooking, but I’m expecting that my radishes will be ready too in 15 days or so. I’m mostly excited about the zucchinis, although so far only 1 seems healthy, the rest 2 seem problematic, and the 4th one didn’t sprout out at all. When (and if) the zucchinis grow up, we will probably have a difficult time walking around our patio, as they spread a lot (and this year we also bought an outdoors table & chairs, limiting our patio space even more).

Vleeta, aka Green Amaranth

The last two big pots I want to plant this year is that of green amaranth (viridis variety, aka “βλήτα”/vleeta). This is one of the most underrated plants ever. They can only be found in some Chinese super-markets in the US & Canada, but only in their red, non-wild, variety (I grew up with the green variety). The Green Amaranth is basically wild weed. It grows up in Greece where you don’t want it to grow, often pissing off my mom for “choking” her plants.

In Greece, we eat the amaranth alone, or with pieces of zucchini and potatoes, well-washed, and then all boiled for 30-40 minutes, and then strained. Then, we put some olive oil and lemon on them (treating them like a cooked salad), and we serve it with fried fish. They taste great! They’re much sweeter than the winter wild weeds (“άγρια χόρτα”) — even my husband noticed (when my mom served winter wild weeds to JBQ a few years ago, he hated them)! Even if amaranth is wild weed, its sweeter taste is such a very popular delicacy in Greece, that even fish restaurants there serve it to tourists. I’ve read a number of blogs with their writers wondering what kind of vegetable that was in their summer vacations (most of them thought that it was spinach or chard). Here are pictures of how it looks like cooked, and uncooked.

So I’m planning on growing it on two long pots, allowing me for harvesting it until the end of September, once about every 1-2 weeks. Since it’s a weed, it only needs 30 days from planting time to its first harvest; it grows really fast. In the south Bay Area climate should be good to allow harvest from April to October, and you can allow 1-2 roots to grow seeds for next year’s planting (seeds are also edible btw, but an even more rare delicacy). And I should not forget to mention that amaranth is very nutritional (the wild variety I’m interested in is more fiber-y than the tested variety linked, I’m sure).

Join me

If you have a patio/balcony I highly suggest you try planting something too. It’s really easy, it takes no time, and it will make you feel accomplished (much more than trying to beat a high score on a computer game). I can’t offer inside info yet as to how you would feel if a sickness kills your plants, since I’m new to this too, but that would be something to expect too. Regardless, it’s really worth the effort. Eating something you grew, gives you a new outlook about the food you consume, and the nature around you.

Update June 13th 2010: Original recipe blog post posted on Mar 28, 2007. My mom has informed me of the traditional method, so I’ve updated this blog post.

We are going to a BBQ party tonight and so that’s my contribution. They are an exceptionally good idea for buffet parties (guests can get some from a serving platter using toothpicks). My mother always makes some when we celebrate name days or birthdays.

Ingredients (for 2)
* 1/4 cup of bread crumbs (or the white part of old white bread).
* 250 gr ground beef
* 1 small onion
* 2 tbspoons fresh spearmint (important ingredient)
* 1 egg
* fresh (preferably Italian flatleaf) parsley
* 2 garlic cloves
* salt & pepper
* oregano
* olive oil
* canola or vegetable oil

Execution
1. Finely chop the parsley, spearmint, onion and garlic in very small pieces.
2. In a big bowl place the ground beef, the chopped ingredients above, salt, pepper, oregano, the egg, and 1 tbspoon olive oil. Then, add the bread crumbs on the mix. If you don’t have bread crumbs, you can use the white part of old bread after having wet it with some water.
3. Using your fists work the mix until it becomes one, and add bread crumbs as needed until the mix is not too loose or stiff, for 1-2 minutes (just like you would if you were making bread by hand). Using some clean wrap to protect it, put the mix to the refrigerator for an hour or so.
4. Later, move the mix on one of the sides of the bowl. Take small amounts of the mix and then using the palms of your hands, shape small balls. Place them on the other side of the bowl. Be patient, it can take a while.
5. In a large frying pan heat up some olive & canola oil. Meatballs need quite a bit of oil to get cooked through, so add up to half an inch of oil in the pan. When the oil is hot, place your meatballs in the pan, then reduce to medium fire, and cook them for about 8-10 minutes until brown. You will need to turn the meatballs 2-3 times during their cooking time, so they cook from all sides.
6. Remove the meatballs from heat (make sure you don’t take too much oil with it as you removing them from the pan). Serve hot with french fries. Alternatively, you can heat some pasta sauce in another pan and then put the meatballs in the sauce and cook together for 1-2 minutes. This variation can be served with either fries or pasta. Enjoy!

Note: For a more Italian taste, you can also try to add some basil in the mix.

For those who’ve read my blog all these years they know what a big supporter and fan of LOST I am. However, the ending was simply a big let down for me. I felt cheated. Scammed. Conned.

The writers chose a “character-based” solution for LOST, rather than a more sci-fi solution that would be full of answers about the island and the surrounding mythos.

Here’s my problem with their route: the people who were watching LOST for the characters (mostly comprised by the “faith” people), left LOST mid-3rd season. The majority of viewers who stayed strong fans — like myself — were the “science” people. We stayed with the show because we were expecting what we were promised, a “science-based solution” — according to the writers. As the show progressed and became full blown sci-fi, we expected answers for these unnatural mysteries, in a way that was compatible with that sci-fi aura.

Instead, we got what we got with BSG’s ending: religious bullshit. And no real answers for any of the major mysteries like time-travel, pregnancies, the “rules”, the cures, agelessness, Walt’s/kids’ specialness, island Egyptian pre-history, what the island was really made of, etc etc etc. I should have known that the 6th season was just a patch-up the writers put together when I saw the Black Rock — a ship made out of wood — destroying the statue — that’s made out of stone. Right at that moment it was obvious that the writers would just quickly patch up as much as they could all the huge mysteries they were opening the previous 5 years without any clear direction. And of course, at the end, they failed to patch-up most of these mysteries anyway.

No, I’m not asking to answer every single mystery. Neither it’s possible to please everyone. But there’s a huge gap between taking a risk, and fucking up everything that was built-up previously.

Back in the 1st season, the most character-based season of all, the No 1 most popular theory was that the island was a purgatory. The writers many times said in the past few years that it’s not a purgatory, and that the ultimate show answer would be science-based. Instead, at the very end we were introduced to the flash-sideways, which actually WAS a purgatory! What a whole lot of hogwash.

The way LOST should have ended was about revealing what the island really was. And the only solution that would made sense for all these open mysteries would be that the island was an alien spaceship. Not a traditional spaceship, but one that uses exotic matter to move through wormholes (in fact, many real scientists theorized that as the ending of LOST, saying that it’s the only theory that makes sense). Millions of years ago it encountered a mechanical problem, and stayed put on Earth. Corals grew around it, and created the actual island (which is how many Pacific islands are formed anyway). But the core of the island, stayed operational. And the “computer” operating at the center, was the one that gave the powers to Jacob, cured Locke etc.

This way, the usage of the Dharma plots would actually be useful to the overall plot: it would show WHY the island needed to be protected from humans. Humans who would want to understand and use the island’s powers for their own selfish needs. Instead, even the Dharma episodes (5th season), were full of character crap (no, really, I don’t care who Kate will choose), instead of actually showing what Dharma was working on, which were their motives and how all that was tying to the overall plot (ultimately, the protection of the island from the different forces).

Instead, the way LOST finished, which was all about character resolution rather than the island, everything that happened on the island makes it feel IRRELEVANT. Dharma is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and the island itself is irrelevant too — since there are many other realities in the afterlife — as insinuated by the show. Everything that happened on the island for 6 seasons were just “stuff that happened”. We were fed time and again about how important the island is. In fact, it’s not. As also insinuated in the show, places like the island are to be found at many places on Earth. And put the afterlives on top of that, and there you go: the island is pretty much irrelevant, if only semi-special.

I don’t want to keep this opinion single-sided, so I’m linking to two reviews of the ending. One that seeks for answers and some scientific basis to the show, and one that’s taking the writer’s side (written by one of the ex-writers of LOST, apparently).

Finally, I want to say that having seen what the writers cooked up with LOST at the end, it was obvious that they were going blindly with the plot. They did not have a firm direction. Sure, they were better prepared than in other shows, but still not as good as such a show requires them to be. It’s true that more shows, and even book series, don’t have a known ending from the beginning, and most stuff are made-up as they go. But it is my opinion that shows like LOST do require a very clear vision from the very beginning, even on an episode by episode basis. It’s one of the things I liked with FlashForward, where its writers had pre-drafted all 3 seasons the show was supposed to last — even if FlashForward ended up being implemented in a way that was inferior to LOST.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that it can be done better. The fact that there was a huge uproar online about the lackster LOST ending, it shows that maybe in 5 or 10 or 15 years from now, a young writer somewhere will pen “a better LOST“. Just like LOST was a better show than Twin Peaks, its grand-daddy, I hope that someone will create a better such show during my lifetime. A show that’s as deep, as exciting, as geeky, as well-shot as LOST, but with a grand plan from the beginning that doesn’t CHEAT on its viewers at the very end.

I’ve been suggesting either Cineform or Avid DNxHD to transcode into for your dSLR/AVCHD slow footage, but Matrox just released this bug-fixed version of their intermediate codec, that is pretty good too. It’s free, and faster than DNxHD, but not as fast as the $100 Cineform. DNxHD works on a Mac too though. So if you’re PC-only, and you have no money for Cineform, this might be your best option.

1. Install the Matrox codecs from here.

2. Install the latest 32bit Avisynth from here.

3. Install the latest DirectShowSource plugin, by manually placing it on Avisynth’s “plugins” folder (usually C:\Program Files\Avisynth 2.5\plugins\, or Program Files (x86)).

4. Install the latest full version of AC3Filter.

5. Install the MatroskaSplitter (aka Haali Media Splitter).

6. Install the 32bit version of VirtualDub. Do not use the 64bit version.

7. Install the latest ffdshow-tryouts version. Make sure that avisynth and virtualdub plugins are checked, and h.264 decoding is enabled too (it will ask you all that during installation). If you already have CoreAVC installed, you might either want to skip this step, or you can still install it (if you can’t get sound to work) but disable h.264 decoding.

8. Open Notepad and copy/paste the following in it:

@echo off
cls
set root=C:\Users\Eugenia\VideoFootageFolder
set input=%root%
for %%I in ("*.MOV") do @echo DirectShowSource("%input%\%%~nI.MOV") >> "%%~nI.avs"

In the code above, you will have to edit it, and change the video footage folder name, so it points to your own folder with footage. Also, I’d suggest that your folder path has no spaces, and no non-english characters. If your camera does not record in MOV format, change the two instances of the word MOV, with the suffix of your format (e.g. M2TS, MTS, MP4). Save that script file with the name of avs.bat on the same folder as your footage.

9. Open an MS-DOS Command Prompt, and navigate to your footage folder (it obviously requires that you know how to navigate folders using the command prompt, it’s basic MS-DOS usage). Once there, run the script by simply invoking its name: avs.bat

10. For every .mov file in your footage folder, an equivalent .avs file is now created. E.g. 001.MOV now has a very small 001.AVS companion file. Creation of these .avs files will be almost instantaneous.

11. Open VirtualDub (it’s important you follow the follow the steps in the order presented, or you might hit a bitrate-related bug). Select File, Queue Batch Operation, Batch Wizard. Click the litte [...] button, and select your footage folder, then click OK. Then, drag-n-drop in that Batch Wizard dialog all the created .avs files (make sure to only drag the .avs files, not the .mov ones). Click Filter Output Names, and type: “avs” (without the quotes) for the “Search for:” input box, and “avi” (without the quotes) on the “Replace with:” box. click Ok. Then click Add to Queue, and then select: Re-Save as AVI. Then, click OK.

12. Click Video, Full Processing Mode.

13. Click Video again, then Compression. From the long list, scroll down, and select the “Matrox MPEG-2 I-Frame HD” codec. Click Configure. In it, select the data rate you want (I’d suggest about 150 MB/sec), and the right frame rate (same frame rate you shot your footage at). Click OK, and OK again.

14. Click File, Job Control. All the .avs files you drag-n-dropped on step #10 will be listed there. Click “Start” to start encoding them. This will take a while.

15. When everything is done, close down VirtualDub, and load on your Vegas/Premiere/MovieMakerHD video editor the newly created .avi files (not the MOV or the AVS files, but the AVI ones). Edit as usual.

Note 1: If you shot some 720/60p or 1080/30p and you want to slow-motion that to 23.976 fps (e.g. music videos do that a lot), then you can do that during this transcoding (no need to do it through your video editor later). Select “Direct Stream Copy” instead of “Full Processing Mode” on step #12. And then click Video again, Frame Rate, and change the frame rate to 23.976 fps (type it). If you shot in 720/50p, type 25.00 in there instead. If you don’t care about the audio (since it won’t sound properly when the video is slowed-down) you can disable its transcoding by clicking in the main menu: Audio, No Audio. Then, continue with step 13 and beyond.

Note 2: Also, if you’re working with AVCHD or HDV footage instead of progressive dSLR footage, VirtualDub can de-interlace for you, or even remove pulldown, during this transcoding process. You just need to load the right internal filters: If you only want to deinterlace 50i/60i footage, just click Video, Filters, De-interlace, Add, and select “interpolate, yadif” from the list. The continue with step #13. If you want to remove pulldown instead (e.g. for PF24 footage), you can modify the MS-DOS script file above to also add TIVTC commands in the generated avisynth .avs scripts.

Note 3: If Vegas thinks that your progressive footage is interlaced, then use this trick to make it think otherwise.