In my previous post, I offered to mail my HD-DVD player and my (small) library of HD-DVDs to the author of the best Haiku about the high-definition format wars, provided the recipient cover shipping costs. First, here are the Haikus that were submitted (some via comments, some via email, a couple I authored just because I like Haiku).

From my friend Carl Rosendahl:

HD-DVD

Takes a whole line of Haiku

Not so with Blu-Ray

From me:

Blu-Ray Victory

Good Bye HD-DVD

We hardly knew thee

Blu’s two syllables

Trump HD-DVD’s five

Simple always wins

From my brother-in-law Eric Budin:

Sony, lost Beta

Did not want the “Blus” again

So bribed Warner Bros

From reader Brian Hart:

Blu-Ray wins the war?

So long, region-free HD.

Pass me a Guinness…

HD-DVD:

Uses blue laser, as well.

Where’s the ‘e’ in Blu?

Given that Carl said he didn’t want the player and I don’t want to be accused of nepotism by giving the player to my brother-in-law, the award goes to Brian Hart, who also was the first to reply with a Haiku. And for the record, his second one is the one I happen to think is best too. Congrats Brian — send me your mailing address and I’ll get the player shipped out to you.

Technorati Tags: Blu-Ray, Format Wars, HD-DVD, Haiku

First came Netflix’s announcement, and now that Wal-Mart has announced they’ll be dropping HD-DVD in June, Blu-Ray can unequivocally be declared the winner of this most recent round of format wars, and perhaps the last physical media format war.

I actually own an HD-DVD player (some early Toshiba model) which I won as a prize for swiping my card somewhere on the floor of CES in 2007. I’ve got a lot of extra electronic junk taking up space in my house, so this player is on the way out. If anybody wants it, I’m willing to give it away free, along with the five or six HD-DVD titles that shipped with the box, including the excellent BBC Series, Planet Earth. Just pay for shipping and I’ll send this soon-to-be-relic to your door.

In the unlikely event that there is more than one taker, I will decide who gets it based on who can leave the best haiku about Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD in the comments of this post.

Technorati Tags: Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, Format Wars

After months of examining my own twitter use as well as the ways all my twitter friends use it, I’ve determined that by far the most common subject matter among the tweets I see is people bitching about their bad travel experiences. Therefore, I’ve decided that TWITTER is really an acronym that stands for:

“Travel Woes In Terse Text Endlessly Reported”.

Update: decided to improve the acronym by replacing Tiny with Terse. Much better.

Technorati Tags: Acronyms, Twitter

While I’ve never claimed to be a product naming or branding expert, I still wonder how this one got green-lighted by the folks at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters: a coffee named National Wildlife Blend? To me, this conjures up images of cute woodland creatures ground in with my coffee beans. Never mind hazelnut or chicory coffee blends when you can enjoy the lovely taste of squirrels, acorns and fox in your coffee. Yum!

Technorati Tags: Random

When I moved my blog to a new host a couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to spruce up the design a bit. Our IT guru Ross suggested I come up with a graphic for my header, which he just put in place for me yesterday. I believe my new header graphic is suitably nerdy to fit my personality — I’ve chosen a Penrose tiling as the pattern you see at the top of this page (assuming you are viewing this as a web page). Credit goes to Wikipedia for each of the images you see in this blog post.

Penrose tilings are cool because they are totally aperiodic over an infinite plane. I’m not sure I could understand the the mathematical proof of this at this point, but back when I was a Symbolic Systems major at Stanford taking the dreaded Logic 160 A&B Series, we had to once prove the four-color map theorem and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, and I would assume similar techniques would apply to proving the aperiodicity of the known Penrose tilings.

While poking around the Wikipedia entry for Penrose tilings I not only found a photo of Penrose tiles covering the MCS building floor at the University of Western Australia, but I also discovered that Penrose actually licensed the Penrose tilings to Pentaplex Ltd, a company in Yorkshire, England controlled by Sir Roger Penrose. Pentaplex actually sued Kimberly-Clark for using Penrose tilings on quilted Kleenex toilet paper. Apparently some licensing agreement was reached. Who knew that arcane mathematics and toilet paper would intersect in the commercial marketplace? Given my partner Brad’s well-reported fondness for bathrooms, I’m sure he will find this fascinating.

Technorati Tags: Nerdy, Penrose Tiling, Toilet Paper

Last October, I attended the inaugural Lobby Conference in Hawaii. The conference was officially “off the record”, so I won’t divulge any salacious details, but one of the cool ideas behind the conference was to have every attendee make an introductory video about themselves. All the videos were then gathered onto iPod touches that were distributed to each of the conference-goers (at least those who submitted a video, anyway), who were able to watch all the video intros on the plane on the way over. Since I did put a couple hours into assembling my intro video (using iMovie for the first time), I thought I’d repurpose that video and share it here. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Lobby, Conference

I blogged about this long ago, but when ranked by self-similarity, fractality (is that a word?) or as an exemplar of logarithmic spirality in nature, Romanesco Broccoli is my favorite vegetable by far. I was at Boulette’s Larder at the Ferry Building Marketplace in San Francisco last week and they had this particularly fine specimen available.

If you are seeing this post, you have landed at the new home for McInblog, now hosted on the same box as the upcoming Foundry Group blog, Feld Thoughts, Ask The VC and Seth’s Blog, and it is now running on Moveable Type. Please let me know if you find anything amiss. Foundry’s own very capable Ross Carlson managed the transition from my TypePad account to the new location in a mere half day. He also updated the look and feel so it has a similar theme to the blogs belonging to my colleagues, and I think it looks great. Way to go, Ross!

Please pardon the dust — if you are a regular reader, you’ve probably noticed broken images, broken links, a broken feed and all sorts of craziness on McInblog. I’ll explain why later, but recent problems have convinced me to migrate my blog to a new location and with any luck, that will happen in the next 24 – 48 hours.

This week I made my annual pilgrimage to the NAMM show with my good friends Carl and Jason. For the uninitiated, NAMM stands for the International Music Products Association. Leave it to musicians to create an acronym that doesn’t match the formal name of the organization. How Spinal Tap can you get?

But at least it makes me smile every time I see the giant banner at the entrance to the Anaheim Convention Center loudly proclaiming, “NAMM – The International Music Products Association”. The NAMM Show website actually explains the history behind this failed acronym on their website.

As a lifelong musician, I love touring the floor at NAMM to drool over the latest musical instruments, recording gear and music-related software. It is like a candy store, toy store and Disneyland all rolled into one.

But what struck me this year was the number of Guitar Hero and Rock Band rigs that were setup in various vendors’ booths. We counted at least half a dozen, maybe closer to ten. They were staging competitions, selling guitar controllers (including the two pictured here built into real guitar bodies) and generally using the rigs to draw crowds to their booths. And it worked. Hal Leonard Publishing, which publishes sheet music for popular music even has a series of Guitar Hero books that provide full transcriptions of the music in the various Guitar Hero and Rock Band games.

All this in one year — there was not a single guitar hero rig at the 2007 NAMM. I am a huge fan of these games and they are absolutely fun to play, and they even give the non-musician a way to experience a taste of the thrill of playing live music in a band. And all of these are great things, though I still can’t decide whether Harmonix has loosed something on the world that will be net good or net bad for the the musical equipment industry and musicianship in general.

The optimist in me likes to believe these games are a boon, but ultimately, being the world’s greatest Guitar Hero player does absolutely nothing for your ability to play a real guitar, as was illustrated with characteristic genius in a recent episode of South Park. Whatever the case, Brad’s college buddies at Harmonix have had an unbelievable impact on popular culture, music and gaming over the past couple years, and it appears the snowballing will continue. Respect.

Technorati Tags: Guitar Hero, Harmonix, Rock Band